The PMC And The Walls That Separate Us From Them... pt 2.
"Naturally gifted, naturally excluded" and "Walls, good, bad, necessary, and fucked"
This is part 2 of Bryce
’s piece in Underground Theory. You can read part 1 here.Naturally gifted, naturally excluded
We all know that, here in America, Black people are better at sports, and making music, and dancing, and being cool. Right? I mean, we can all agree that the coolest motherfuckers you know are black, and the lamest mother fuckers are all white.
Remember when Eminem came out and shocked the world by being a good white rapper (and not just good but truly great), rather than Rob van Winkle’s corny ass (and nevermind that Canadian rapper Snow did it a decade earlier and was better, more authentic, but society wasn’t ready to wholly embrace a white rapper)? Damn, that was crazy—white people finally got their own token cool guy. Eminem represented a collective “taking back” of popular culture for the whites, and made it okay for white people to be seen “acting black.” Rather than just another talented rapper, Eminem was a final victory of whiteness over the savage racial ethos of black Americans in the 1990s popular imagination.
If you don’t remember what it was like, well then, there you go. It felt cool, or at the very least okay, for a short while, to be a white person. But beyond all the other problems this brings to mind, I think it gets at something about what I’ve been saying about class and natural talent. You see, this essentializing of groups as naturally gifted also means that certain groups might be inherently worse, bad, or deserving of less.
When we entertain the notion that Black people are naturally better at things, we simultaneously welcome the notion that they are also naturally worse at other things—you can’t have essential traits without that pesky essentialism. I get why the essentialism and stereotyping creeps in and feels convincing: there sure do seem to be a lot more creative or athletic Black people than there are white. But maybe, just maybe, we are “naturalizing” something symptomatic of structural conditions. Think about it: when you live in an actual warzone and your future isn’t guaranteed unless you accomplish extraordinary feats, it would make sense that there would be a larger percentage of people who put in maximum effort. But we hate to think effort has much to do with it almost as much as we hate to think there are genuine socio-economic structural conditions underlying what we take for granted at the level of culture.
Deadpool is a satirical Marvel Comics comic book character. His whole shtick is pushing things past their limits, including the very medium in which he exists through his regular gimmick of breaking the fourth wall. One of his catchphrases is Maximum Effort. It’s funny because it takes a superhuman freak to do anything that resembles trying hard.
We denigrate and disavow the idea of effort. We hold people’s discipline and cultivated talent against them. We all want to believe in the naturally talented, but we say our prayers to bootstraps and work ethic every night before bed. We want our cake and to eat it too; we want to be good at things without having to try hard. Is there anything more American than expecting to get something for nothing, obsessing over apparent ease, creating an entire discordant culture based around both hard work and ease of effort? Black people are just naturally cool— nothing more to see here folks. We can only celebrate maximum effort when it comes from an already all-powerful satirical comic book character who constantly reminds us that maximum effort is only possible in a fictional world with his regular breaking of the fourth wall.
When you live in the lap of luxury and your entire life is one big fluffy pillow, you’re less likely to push yourself to accomplish things that are exceedingly difficult. Not only is it easier to coast, but you can enjoy watching those who put everything they have on the line. People of privilege have always loved to watch the lumpenproletariat dance, fight, or juggle. Celebrities are our idols of interpassive excellence. How do we justify the fact that, in this case, lack people are so cool and gifted? Of course it has nothing to do with their material conditions, no way, it’s natural. This idea naturalizes “their place” in the system while simultaneously naturalizing one’s own privileged status as well.
I get that it might be hard to take my word for any of this because I fit into certain categories, but I’m not trying to convince you of anything really. I’m just trying to share what I’ve been thinking about. I owe a lot of these ideas to the work of Dr. Adolph Reed Jr, as well as one of my favorite podcasters Pascal Robert. Those who have been convinced by essentialist thinking, who won’t listen to a white dude, will be relieved to know that Reed and Robert have Beautiful Black Bodies. Should it matter? They argue no, because what I’m calling “The Homeboy Fetish” is the flipside of Underclass Ideology. It depends upon the fundamental otherness of Blacks, which includes cultural and personal failings as well as mystical talents and inherent racial traits.
The point of all this is that the notion of natural talent and giftedness is used to essentialize people while hiding the fact that real effort goes into everything we take for granted. I think part of the reason we tend to believe in natural talent is based in our lack of timenergy. Excellence demands tremendous effort, yet because we have no timenergy, no amount of effort is going to make the difference. People have what McKerracher calls “timenergy fragility,” meaning we don’t like to be reminded of our own lack of large energy-infused and repeatable blocks of time.[i] It’s just easier to become invested in the popular mythology of natural excellence and just get back to work—don’t rock the boat.
Someone I’ve been thinking with this year is Karl Jaspers. I was one of the lucky few who got to participate in the first Theory Underground course, which was focused on Jaspers’s The Idea of the University. Though I have my criticisms of the ideology of hard work, I think he makes a good defense of why we still need to dedicate tremendous effort towards overcoming challenges:
Work is the basis of everything else… No one can fail to respect the sheer discipline and endurance of persistent effort. The student should start in on this work immediately as he has learned it in school. “The sooner we realize,” says Goethe, “that there is a systematic way, call it craft or call it art, of augmenting our natural endowments, the happier we are.”[ii]
Education ought to teach us that we are not born this way or that way, but that we can “augment” ourselves to become something else. I’ll say that again for the IQ idealogues in the back. Instead, schooling tends to naturalize peoples’ feelings of inferiority or superiority, feelings which maintain our faith in the justice of the walls that keep us locked out of privileged distance from toil.
Walls, good, bad, necessary, and fucked
Walls are things upon which one might scrawl a message for the sake of posterity, or create an illicit work of art with a political message (or wheat paste a giant advertisement for one’s clothing brand). Things upon which one can ride a skateboard, though only briefly. Things upon which one might stand and make grand proclamations, or maybe just climb up to get a better view of a passing spectacle. Things through which one might victoriously break. Walls are also concepts, or conceptual objects, that serve to maintain distinctions between other, seemingly discrete, concepts or objects.
Walls are all these things, and more. Any four walls, so to speak, may indeed become a prison. Yet walls can also offer security, privacy, or a dedicated space. Today there is a tendency to want all spaces to be the same, but walls create the possibility for turning meaningless space into purposeful places.
We all need a safe place to keep the objects we collect through the course of living our lives, as a safeguard against inertia and impermanence. Walls provide the framework upon which we hang all sorts of meaning, personal photographs or artwork. This is not “just aesthetic” but a necessary reminder that we are in fact here and that the moments in our lives actually occurred and matter, if only to ourselves. Purposeful places must be made intentionally, set aside from the rest of the world with signs and symbols imbued with significance that transcend our singular existence and connect us to others in real ways.
Let’s take a look at how walls relate to the university. There are no raiders who roam countrysides and pillage whatever they can get their hands on, for the most part. There are no hordes of invading foreign brutes to be kept out. There are no existential necessities for walls; nevertheless, the university cannot exist without them. Physical walls are not things that I am the biggest fan of, I’m one of those silly people who believes in freedom of movement and unfettered access to public property and all that. But I’m not actually talking about physical walls here. I’m talking about institutional walls.
I feel conflicted here because I don’t like the idea of force being used to keep people out of places, or locked in, but there has to be a way to maintain the integrity of institutions and the adherence to their principles without resorting to exclusion and expropriation. Universities, in theory, exist to serve the public at large, and I want to live in a world where that is true.
Universities are the reason we have the nice things we have in our society today, space rockets and The Internet and theories of evolution and gravity and history and art, and all the myriad things that make our modern lives possible and comfortable. We wouldn’t recognize life without universities as a life worth living, yet they have become a rude imitation of their idealized form that exists to serve, rather than the public and the furthering of the human experience, nothing more than ideology and the status quo and the all-powerful dollar. As Jaspers says,
The university owes its existence to society, which desires that somewhere within its confines pure, independent, unbiased research be carried on. Society wants the university because it feels that the pure service of truth somewhere within its orbit serves its own interests. No state intolerant of any restriction on its power for fear of the consequences of a pure search for truth, will ever allow a genuine university to exist.[iii]
But we have a tendency today to blame all of the failures of the university on “neoliberalization” as though all of its inherent contradictions and problems would vanish with enough public funding. Taking the side of the state against big business seems like an easy solution until we remember that universities in the Soviet Union lost their way as well. We can’t just say “Capitalism bad, anything opposed to it good,” because we have seen where that gets us. Under Soviet direction, universities became nothing more than outlets reproducing Stalinist dogma. They lost sight of their ostensible objectives and substituted the party line for that whole Truth thing. So yes, Capital gets in the way of the university’s pursuits, and we must do the work of building a new foundation upon which institutions may stand, but we must not forget the failures of those we might otherwise be inclined to mimic in our efforts to produce an ideal society.
If we treat the university and the human enrichment that it purports to offer as commodities, we’ll never get anything other than the reproduction of current conditions. That’s the exact opposite of what the university is supposed to do! The university is supposed to be the anteroom at the end of the universe, the vestibule that stands just outside Nirvana or Heaven or The Future of Humankind, but it has been turned into a kitschy cool kids’ club for pretentious Liberals, edgy Orthodox Bros, and Uncle-fucking-Moneybags!
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This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of Nance’s piee will be published over the next of the Theory Underground tour in Europe (photo below). If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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Bryce Nance’s Bio:
Nance would've been just another disgruntled denizen of the internet, were it not for the decade spent trying to take his education seriously in order to build himself into a subject with something to contribute to the conversations about The Situation; a decade that led him to the conclusion that a project such as Theory Underground was the only path forward for people such as himself. He has been, and is, many things in this life. From homeless teenage punk rocker to young father holding down multiple jobs while attending (and quickly leaving) university on an academic scholarship, to American soldier in Iraq, to corrections officer and eventually mental health care provider to incarcerated and adjudicated youth, to truck driver, to gig worker, and many things in between. Aside from being published alongside some of biggest names in contemporary theory, and the brightest stars in the underground theory scene, in Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You (and touring the world in support of the anthology’s release), and Nollie Dolphin Flips, Nance doesn’t have any accomplishments he feels like talking about, but he is immensely grateful for all of your attention!
[i] Timenergy, forthcoming by David McKerracher.
[ii] Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 41.
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