The Pleasure of Blackness qua Statelessness
State, in the political sense, refers to organization of power. State, in this sense, refers to the institutions that hold power, and possess the capacity to respond to claims by the polity. In many senses, the modern state possesses the power over life and death, and this power is exercised through both law (the legislature and courts) and order (the military and police).
State, in a second sense, refers to all the stored information within a computer system or digital circuit, at a particular moment in time. The machine’s state is a result of its inputs and outputs. States hold a special place in modern programming and networking, because it provides a neat abstraction to model all the information in a current system. In other words, state allows us to describe all the components of a system at a particular time, and later recall that configuration.
Statelessness possesses a double meaning, in my current thinking. Stateless refers both to the status of being unrecognized by a nation, either legally or by tradition. A exiled woman is stateless, precisely because she cannot return home. Similarly, a repressed population can be described as stateless because they do not possess access to the state and its institutions. Statelessness, in the secondary sense, allows us to think through what it means to exists without stasis, without a particular objective position than can be recalled or reconfigured. Statelessness gestures towards existence in constant flux, and without proper markers of ex-istence, or proper configuration.
Blackness functions as a position of dispossession within the political realm. The recent events in America send a clear signal that blacks do not possess access to the state and its institutions (the police, especially). From W.E.B. Du Bois to Fred Moten, this thread of American history tethers itself to black though.
However, I am interested in thinking through blackness, as a generalized condition of statelessness, that is not the possession of just black people. Statelessness allows us to think through the benefits of dispossession; the pleasure of being relegated to the margins of society, with(out) access to the state or politics-proper. Statelessness allows us to understand existence in flux, which gestures toward existence amongst the un(der)common(s).
