Shattered: afterword for defining race, a joint symposium of the Albany Law Review and the Albany Journal of Science and Technology.

• Author: Farley, Anthony Paul
• Position: Symposium: Defining Race

INTRODUCTION: THE OTHER SCENE

What happened shattered whatever it was that we once were. Slavery happened. We are the fragments of that happening. And it is still happening. We the fragments are citizens of the undiscovered country. We the fragments, striving for a lost union, continually burst apart.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations makes no mention of what happened. (1) We will not find the flag of our undiscovered country within its binding, or on any pages written within capital's long spell. Smith wrote of previously acquired capital. The origin of this previously acquired capital is made a mystery, a foundational mystery. This previously acquired capital is the navel of the modern world. Karl Marx, writing at the time of the 13th Amendment's novelty, described what happened at our beginning as "primitive accumulation": I will call it the original accumulation (2), and I will call portraits of its repetitions primal scenes of accumulation (3):

The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation and entombment in the mines of the indigenous populations...The beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India... and the conversion of Africa into commercial hunting grounds for the capture of black skins. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. (4) Defining Race has been a symposium of definitions. I will begin the end of Defining Race with a definition of race that is itself intended to bring race to an end: Race is the mode of repetition by which we refuse memories of the original accumulation. In what follows, I will show the place of all the essays of Defining Race within this definition of race.

The world that is modern was made so by millions upon millions of murders. Lives and ways of living, forms of life, were shattered. Blood became money. Money became capital. Capital became nation. Nation is the perfect disguise for people, as in "We the people ..." (5) People, in other words, became white, or they failed to become anything at all. We who are not people, we who are in material fact less than nothing at all, we colors of those millions of murders merely ripen and fall and cease, season after unforgiving season, like falling leaves, with the original accumulation as the rhyme and the rhythm and the repressed reason.

Reader, take note that what I have just offered is an order of things, but not a temporal order. Time ceases with the original accumulation. Life, at that point, call it the navel of the dream, becomes a commodity, a thing like any other thing, a thing to be bought or sold, and the logic that describes the commodity made out of the space for human development is the logic of capital. As promised above, what Marx called primitive accumulation I will designate with two terms, original accumulation and primal scene of accumulation. I will use the term original accumulation to discuss the traumatic moment that seems always to have occurred just before the curtains of history were raised, and I will use the term primal scene of accumulation to designate the always-tentative nature of our attempts to reconstruct that time-before-time.

When a form of life is shattered the fragments come together in the form of the shattering force itself, not the form of life that was shattered. It is as if the fragments, each feeling in itself the lack of a former, albeit unrecognized, unity, are drawn to each other, but only in a way that preserves a certain lack. The lack is the shattering force itself. And the shattering is a certainty. The lack becomes the free-floating principle of reunification, and thus all attempts at reunification fail, in perpetuity.

The lack about which I write is not a simple one. The lack is in fact the world-destroying force, the missing piece of all our reconstructions. The lack is the missing piece and world-destroying force that we are. It is always what we are becoming. Because we are that world-shattering force, the force of the original accumulation, whatever institutional film we wrap around that which we mistake for ourselves is doomed by the deadly contents that we ourselves are, both in ourselves and for ourselves, albeit without conscious awareness. Time, vanquished by the original accumulation, now reappears as a never-ending puzzle we feel compelled to complete.

Our puzzle cannot be completed, for what it depicts is the end of the world that has already ended. The puzzle that we feel mysteriously compelled to put back together is not whatever was before the original accumulation, it is instead the world-shattering force of that original accumulation. If it ever seems as if we have found the final piece of the institutional puzzle that is the achievement of social, industrial and perpetual peace, and it often seems so, then we can be as sure as the original accumulation, as certain as the grave we are already in, that the seemingly final piece will shatter everything; and it will do so with all the eternity of the Middle Passage, the Black Atlantic, the undiscovered country, our source and final resting place, the navel of our contemplations.

The repetitions are not repetitions of a form of life, they are repetitions of the force that opposed and shattered that form of life; they are repetitions of the original accumulation, of the total extinction event at the beginning of what is modern. The fragments come together in the form of the force that shattered the unity of their former life. That shattering force was the force of the original accumulation, and it shatters them again. Thus it is that we never cross the event-horizon of the original accumulation.

The invisible hand of the market and the shattering force of racemaking genocide were and are one and the same. The market is the ghostly return of genocide. The world of the market, of capitalism, looks like life, "idyllic," but it is not, not for the have-nots whose not-having is the secret source of all capital accumulation. Capitalism is the repetition and intensification of the racial genocide of its origin. Repetition and intensification of the great death event of the world is not life; it is death, only death, and that continually. She comes in colors, like November.

Today, 14 November 2008, we have charted, with great accuracy, several of the various terrains of the original accumulation's repetition. We are the unfed. (6) We are the executed. (7) We are the banished. (8) We are the unrepresented. (9) We are the speculum (10) in which the other rainbow appears (11); the rainbow of the other scene (12), the rainbow that promises nothing but the eternal duration of the death we are unable to acknowledge having died. (13) We are the despised. (14) The colorline, the border of the undiscovered country, runs through our bodies. We even chase each other, connecting the dots like children, if children had the unseeing eyes of corpses, (15) and we do this to ourselves, for them. We connect the stigmata, our stigmata, policing these bodies that are not ours, for them, for they know not what they do, and neither do we. (16)

The undiscovered country is the only one we can call ours. And it is a nation we must leave. There is a fear we dare not name, and so we misname it "race" and misunderstand its cruelties with ever more frenetic misnomers. Like so many scattered leaves, it means nothing, or so the scattering makes it seem. What is to be done? Repetition is a refusal of memory. Refused memories cannot be worked through, and without that working through we cannot leave the undiscovered country.

This joint symposium of the Albany Law Review and the Albany Law School Journal of Science and Technology has been a moment of clarity, of civic courage (the sort that does not exile the political from the civil), of solidarity, of what was once called the unstoppable power of the people. It takes a lot of courage to remember and work-through what happened. Before working through these essays, let us remember to thank those whose efforts created this autonomous zone. The idea of Defining Race came to the law review from somewhere, perhaps from the same place that enabled Senator Barack Obama to become President Barack Obama. When Maria Grahn-Farley got word of it from the editors of both publications, she immediately suggested Neil Gotanda, one of the nation's leading legal theorists. I repeated her suggestion. When asked in October to secure additional speakers, I invited Bridgette Baldwin, Phyllis Goldfarb, Peter Halewood, Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez, Hope Lewis, Bekah Mandell, Janai S. Nelson, Reginald Oh, Christian Sundquist, Deborah W. Post, Deleso Alford Washington, and Donna E. Young. And, per my promise to editors Brian Borie, Daniel Bressler, William Lowe, and Rebecca Solomon, all speakers confirmed within a few hours of my call.

Acting Dean Connie Mayer was helpful, as was the grant from the Albany Law School Faculty Enrichment Fund. None of this would have been possible without the organizing skills and hard work of Theresa Colbert, Legal Assistant to the Faculty. Theresa Colbert took care of all the tasks, large and small, that had to be taken care of in order to make this symposium a reality.

DEFINITION, REPETITION AND WORKING THROUGH

Brown v. Board, Bridgette Baldwin reminds us in Colorblind Diversity: The Changing Significance of "Race" in the Post-Bakke Era, was fifty-pius years after Plessy v. Ferguson. (17) Defining Race will make it to print fifty-pius years after Brown v. Board. The temporal mirror image, fifty some years before and fifty some years after, reveals a fault, a basic fault that I discussed earlier, which runs through and ultimately predicts the shattering of all our attempts to reconstruct the fragments. The original accumulation continues to the present and thus brings into question our supposed progress from then till now. There has been no progress, only repetition and intensification of the original accumulation...