Abstract
“When I’m talking about the digital and what the digital makes possible, it becomes another world not unique to itself, not hermetically sealed off from some other modality, but in deep relation. The digital is another world through which we can practice thought with one another. Learning happens in digital space; argumentation happens in digital space; and pushback happens in digital space. Lots and lots of joking happens in digital space and a lot of people get angry about the joking that happens in digital space. Digital space is a place where thought happens. We can resist being sort of undone, we can resist being moved, we can resist being altered by the things that we are engaging in this other world of the digital. Or we can open ourselves up. We can be vulnerable. We can practice a certain kind of letting be of relation that allows us to be transformed by the zeros and the ones that constitute our capacity to be in relation with people globally with a certain kind of immediacy. How can we use that to cultivate a more just, equitable, and joyful world?”—Ashon Crawley
So this special issue is called “Interrogating Digital Blackness.” Coming from a Communication and Media Studies background, I’m familiar with people like Meredith Clark, André Brock, and Sarah J. Jackson who draw on critical race, Black feminist, and other interdisciplinary approaches in their work. In a sense, Communication has always been an interdisciplinary field, or a post-discipline as Silvio Waisbord argues, which is what drew me to it for graduate study. It’s exciting to talk to you as I get the sense that your interests are quite expansive and interdisciplinary as well. How do you situate yourself? What fields do you play with in your work?
Well, I teach in Religious Studies and African American and African Studies, though I have a PhD in English. I like to think of myself primarily as a person within Performance Studies actually. Mostly because I am interested in the practices, the rituals, and the repetitions that constitute our life worlds. This is what Diana Taylor and her book Archive and Repertoire called vital acts of transfer; performance is about producing knowledge. How knowledge is produced is a social practice, and how it is shared with other people is a social practice.
I like the framework that performance studies gives because it is about staging, it is about the context under which a certain sort of thing is said, a certain set of rituals or practices, a certain set of behaviors are engaged or disengaged. So, I can think about and think through the practices of spirituality, of religiosity, of gender and sexuality, I can think about the practices of race and raciality. I can think about the ways people inhabit the context of the political and economic system of racial capitalist exploitation. Performance studies gives me a certain kind of opening up into various disciplinary practices.
I’m interested primarily in why people do what they do and what shapes do the things that we do take in the thing that we call the public. Which I think is a totally insufficient name, the distinction between public and private is really unhelpful. It’s an imposition on the ways we inhabit multiple sorts of context. Performance and Performance Studies allows me to get at that complexity.
It allows me a certain kind of play and it allows me to really press against the concept of like a kind of disciplinary norm that one must inhabit. I do queer theory too, and I’m really antagonistic to the sort of compulsory manner in which norms are produced in disciplinary discourses. I’m really trying to think about how we can remain with the non-normative as a constantly unsettling practice. Performance and Performance studies allows me a kind of space to breathe in which I can think through those various modalities, without ever thinking that I can exhaust it all.
Referencing your book The Lonely Letters and the point you mentioned about the public, how do you “think with” the digital in your work?
“Thinking with” names for me the fact that there are people who make claims from a certain kind of authority that is predicated upon doing a certain amount of study, and thus can access a certain kind of practice of analytics. There is a normative modality presumed where one might say “I can study this as an object, but the object isn’t actually transforming me. I can remain dispassionate as a scholar and as a thinker. I can be objective, I can be neutral, and I can be unbiased.” And so, for me, I totally reject that idea and I think that anything that we study, anything that we engage, anything that we think about, is constantly actually producing what Performance Studies scholar Fred Moten would say, is a dispossessive force against the one who’s actually trying to engage the thing. So, we’re constantly being pressed upon, pushed back against, and having to transform ourselves. It’s like what Octavia Butler says about God being change where all that you change, changes you.
When I’m talking about the digital and what the digital makes possible, it becomes another world not unique to itself, not hermetically sealed off from some other modality, but in deep relation. The digital is another world through which we can practice thought with one another. Learning happens in digital space; argumentation happens in digital space; and pushback happens in digital space. Lots and lots of joking happens in digital space and a lot of people get angry about the joking that happens in digital space. Digital space is a place where thought happens. We can resist being sort of undone, we can resist being moved, we can resist being altered by the things that we are engaging in this other world of the digital. Or we can open ourselves up. We can be vulnerable. We can practice a certain kind of letting be of relation that allows us to be transformed by the zeros and the ones that constitute our capacity to be in relation with people globally with a certain kind of immediacy. How can we use that to cultivate a more just, equitable, and joyful world?
I find that I’m uncharacteristically, or surprisingly, optimistic compared to some of my peers in Communication and Media Studies and Internet Studies. Despite, or in spite of, all of the harassment, all of the toxicity, all of the racism and homophobia, the transphobia, and so on. And I think this is where some of André Brock’s work is actually really helpful in reminding us that there is also joy and pleasure to be found in what animates digital social life.
You know, I think that joy is not a feeling that one inhabits. Joy is a disposition. It is a kind of mood that one must work daily to affirm and attempt to inhabit. Growing up, I remember hearing a lot about joy in sorrow, which seems to be deeply contradictory. How could one have what we presume to be a simple feeling? I think that is an imprecision, it’s a misunderstanding of what I understand the saints to have meant and mean when they talk about having joy. Which is not primarily an ephemeral feeling that is fleeting and goes away. It is actually a kind fundamental recognition that the simplicity of our breath and our being and our becoming is itself celebratory. Joy as the desire to cultivate or to really attempt to be tender with our fragility as human creatures. Joy for me is the recognition of that complexity and the desire for a kind of posture that is about letting that complexity happen.
I think that academia, if we’re going to think about it as a kind of institution that has a set of practices, is deeply worried about joy and Black joy. Because it is a kind of force that recognizes the terribleness with which we exist, that the terribleness is not part of an existential dilemma, but it is a creation, and I know lots of my theologian friends would probably disagree with me on this point. I say it’s not an existential dilemma only insofar as the dread that we are supposed to feel—about being overtaken by police, for example, and violently acted upon, because we are trans or we are queer, or we are all of that and also Black—that the dread that we are supposed to feel is not actually the dread of the fact of your existence and breath. It is a dread that is produced, because of a political economic context, under which existence has to be negotiated.
I think that institutions become very wary of something called Black joy because within the context of this terribleness called anti-Black racism, that we still figure out a capacity for breath, being, and becoming that is really, really tender and loving and kind.
You don’t have to presume that you must escape your fragility and your vulnerability to live a human and joyful life. But I think that the rules of the political economy and the deep individuation process that so many attempt to go through means that we misrecognize what vulnerability and fragility actually is. You know Disability Studies is one of the places that helps us to stop thinking of weaknesses as thing that is like a problem that you must overcome. It’s just a call to be in relation. How can I be in relation to you, without giving up the thing that you think of me that causes me to be weak?
Yeah, there’s something you just said there. One time, I was talking with sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, and she said something to me that sort of changed my life. Which was that all Black people are social theorists. It came up because I told her that I decided not to pursue a PhD in Sociology, given the ways that the discipline is much rigid in terms of what “counts” compared to say Communication which is much more capacious. But that phrase always kind of stuck with me, and by extension I would say especially for Black queer people like us, Black transgender people, I think it speaks to your point about the capacity to imagine a world otherwise, to be in relation with each other, to foreground joy in a world that otherwise doesn’t want us to have it.
I’m actually thinking about Lil Nas X now, and sort of the ways that he just reacts to people trying to tear him down by spinning it into a joke or something cool. He’s just doing what many Black queer people have always done with what the world has given us. Especially in the context of Instagram, Twitter, and these other commercial social media platforms that ultimately are sort of inextricable from the racial capitalistic alienating structures that animate our world right now. I think that what people like Lil Nas X and many otherwise unnamed Black queer cultural producers do, and what we do, materializes joy as an approach, as a practice, and as a methodology.
As you know, I’ve written a little about him. You know I actually believe that we should abolish celebrity culture, I think it’s terrible for so many different kinds of reasons, the way that people really, really over identify with their favorite celebrities. It does so much damage because it ends up being a moral claim about the righteousness of individuals that disallows any kind of critical engagement. But I like thinking with Lil Nas X because of what he compels us and others to narrate. It goes back to this Fred Moten quote that I alluded to but didn’t state from In The Break. “The history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” He goes on to say that what goes unremarked is how an object exerts a dispossessive force on the one who is attempting to possess it. And it is for me really important, necessary, and urgent to think about the resistance of the dispossessive force that object actually produces.
So I think of Lil Nas X as an object, whereby I don’t think of objectifying conceptually as a negative thing, because I’m not using it that way. I’m talking about subject–object relations. Like you know I’m thinking about that terrible little rapper interviewed recently with The Breakfast Club, Boosie or whatever. All of these comments, every single time, all of these comments about Lil Nas X . . .
Let me guess, something about the Black family being destroyed and our children are being corrupted. I feel like that’s always what these people come up with.
Yeah, that’s what he said. And I don’t actually care about what the content of what he’s saying. What actually is interesting to me and intriguing to me is that it’s very clear that he is bothered. And I don’t just mean a kind of simplistic being bothered. For this person, I mean that his essential paradigm for what he thinks is possible is being undone. Lil Nas X isn’t the only one who does this to people, but he’s one of the most public ones. It’s evident that Lil Nas X challenges what he thinks is actually possible in the world.
To me the interesting thing about celebrity is that it serves as an example. You look at the comments, how all of these non-famous people agree with him, and you see how they’re all angry with this boy and the deep unsettling that is actually happening to them. All by virtue of this boy kissing another boy on TV.
I think as you said, thinking about Lil Nas X as an object, in a different sense, he also disturbs solidified notions of even queerness, queer community in the sense that you have all these queer people talking about “Oh Lil Nas is so hot” whereby they’re performing a response to something that Lil Nas X is provoking. Whether it’s their relation to Blackness, or being attracted to a Black gay man, which is troubling because underneath that is the idea that it is exceptional given that ordinarily this wouldn’t be the case.
Given this interview is about the digital sphere, paying attention to the way this conversation happens in the digital realm is really intriguing because there is such an intensity with which almost anything this particular person, Lil Nas X, does seems to be surveilled with a kind of scrutiny that isn’t about him. I think that people are unsettled.
One of the things that digital space actually makes more available is the ability to connect with, or to at least notice, that other people are making other kinds of choices constantly. And that those other kinds of choices can be registered a kind of immediacy. I think crises emerge when one finally recognizes that they have been making choices for the normative all the time. And that they want it to not be a choice, because if it’s a choice that you are now making, then you have to ask yourself well, what is the context in which this choice is happening?
This tension you’re pointing out about the digital is that it offers different representations of how the world could be. While being potentially productive for some people, we clearly see that it is also a sort of specter that haunts those who might realize that perhaps they wanted to make different choices had they been able or otherwise empowered.
Years ago when I first started reading the biblical texts, back when I was interested in that sort of thing. When I started reading them differently, things that are homophobic and so on, I remember talking someone and saying you know I don’t think of these things in the same way. You know they said to me, very clearly like “Please don’t tell me that. I don’t want to hear that.” And my question is why? It’s because they said, “If that’s wrong about that one thing, what else is wrong?” And they didn’t want to go down this rabbit hole of trying to literally change their life.
I think that is what so much pushback against people like Lil Nas X and these more capacious, open, and imaginative ways to live is about. Some people wonder where the end is. There’s some kind of comfort in the normative even though none of us can actually produce it. You can only aspire toward it, but there’s a certain kind of comfort in the on-going failure to produce it.
Whereas there’s something deeply unsettling about trying to disengage from that aspirational drive all together. In saying that I’m just going to do something else, you are left to a different kind of uncertainty. You don’t know if you’ll ever achieve that either. What must actually be relinquished is the desire to achieve something as an end goal, as opposed to remaining in the posture of living this fragile life with joy. You then realize it’s not about producing; it’s about experiencing.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
