Reverend Charles Adams

Yesterday, Channel 7 (ABC in Detroit) broadcast the funeral services for Rosa Parks, civil rights icon whose protests inaugurated a struggle for equal recognition under the law still on going in our society. What was amazing about it, besides the fact that there were no commercial interruptions for a period of nine hours, was the particular affective response I had to the proceedings. I am religious, and much to the chagrin of some of my materialist comrades, professional acquaintances, and instructors, I also believe in god. Now, I am of a particular kind of religion, sort of Jewish in that I am angry with god and contend against it—as Israel means originally “he who contends with god”—and sort of Christian, in that I believe also in an impossible forgiveness—impossible to fully achieve in this life—that serves as a universal model. So where I was totally unresponsive to folks like Bill Clinton and his tale of sitting in the back of the bus, as if it counts when you’re in the power class, I was blown away by the preaching of Reverend Charles Adams: balling like a little baby, really, just shuddering and inconsolable, except by the thought that I could possibly cry/laugh a little more should Adams stick around.

Adams was thanking god for Rosa, but also for the experience of Rosa, for her affective eruptions in himself, and also thanking god for all of us too, that we got something out of Rosa Park’s life as well. And as Adams went through all the different languages in which someone could be thanked (“If I was Japanese, I’d say, domo arigato; if I was Spanish I’d say, muchos gracias; if I was German I’d say, Danke Shane; if I was Portuguese I’d say, obligato; if I was French I’d say, merce bou coup; if I was Italian I’d say, grazi”) his level of animation rose, and he entered a state known in the vernacular as testifying: the delivery was pitched such, and his gesticulations and tempo matched so perfectly what he had to say, amplifying it but also translating it to a bodily experience, that I was very much imbricated in a contact loop, feeding back from him, but also feeding forward, immersing me in a temporalized and spatialized experience where I was concerned with what Adams was concerned with—despite my intellectual position, my Jewish position, that I should and could be angry with and blaming god for allowing the world to persist in racism and bigotry—and that I was thankful in a way that Adams was. this reached a fever pitch when Adams said, "if I was deaf, I'd say [flaps his arms and does the sign for thank you in American Sign Language]," to which the crowd just exploded, and to which I shuddered and nearly collapsed in joyous tears, both laughing andf crying. "But since I'm here where I am now, and speak the way I do today, I'll simply say, thank you, thank you, thank you."

Now, I resist the notion that I was awash in false consciousness, though that’s a lefty answer hardly anyone buys today, even the lefties; but I also resist the notion that my weeping was some catharsis in which I narrate my psychosis with Adams’s parallel narrative of thankful remembrance in a process of sublimation, or that I was projecting my own sadness—no matter the cause—on to Adams’s narrative for the purpose of avoiding it, that I cried at Adams’s testimony to avoid confronting my own psycho maladies. And this leaves me in an interesting place apropos this class: what is the cause of my intense affective response to Adams’s testimony if not psychoanalytic identification? Following after Leibniz, Brian Massumi suggests that the stakes of recognizing a continuum of affective responses, each with a provisional subjectivity—however fully formed or not—are high, because not only is he suggesting that the subject and the object mutually inform each other, an old idea, but that the subject may not have the attributes we propose it has should we only invest in one of the poles of a continuum between nature and culture. Splitting subjectivity into subject and incipient subject (under construction, or in Massumi’s terms, emergent), the incipient subject is called “self-,” a sort of provisional self where the relationality of subjectivity is put to fore. Relatrionality as in the relation to other positions on the continuum, but also in the sense that time and space form a parallel continuum, on which rest a range of positions from an ontogenetic space-time where positions are impossible to differentiate, to a position where one can tell space from time, or that constructs the possibility of their being disentangled.

This helps to explain my affective response to Adams. For if I were to be reminded of Adams’s struggles, and could relate to them, that’s one thing, but if his appeal were so strong that it awoke in me a memory before the characters that determine that memory, if his appeal ranged over my experience of time, and ranged past it, and took me with it, or dissolved my ability to distinguish between myself and the self of Adams, my time and my associations and struggles and the time of Adams’s struggles and association with Parks, then that’s something different, something where my feedback with Adams has destabilized temporality and subjectivity so much that it can feed forward, allowing the world to relate to itself, even if only (and perhaps only) in an emergent way. so much so that the where Adams was at, and the time that he was in, was also my time and place, and those distinctions disolved into the heterogeneity in which they always were--distinct but entangled. And so I wept, not at god, or with it, not at Adams, nor with him, but in a way that through my weeping, the world could relate to itself, and I was only a stunned witness to it all, barely formed, and quaking.