“Memory believes before knowing remembers.” — William Faulkner, Light In August
I am stepping out of the car. Motion is suspended on the highway’s snaking black veins, the pause brought about by a congestion that has slowed the normal pulse of I-85 to this apparent freeze, only awaiting the slightest give to initiate the release that will send the array of steel carriages hurtling along again, cells waiting to mirror the internal rhythms of the living flesh within, rendered a motor itself in this moment. The person that drives on the road encounters this terrain as one in which it can only act upon its situation as a driver among so many others; the common being of the road, constructed as it is, existing only to receive and transmit a sense of ourselves to each other as such. This corridor in South Carolina has been under construction since I can remember, and it feels like I have only known this part of the road in its stasis.
The falling rain is gentler than it seems from my previous station behind the window glass. Asphalt tar surface wears in the day-in-day-out absorption-refraction heat flexing of the accumulated blows of striated rubber flowing along, holding these bullets first to their courses, as the rain too saturates its pores while draining off the slopes, until the sun’s re-emergence returns the water to the prior moment of its cycle, leaving behind it a widening scarification into these means of passage only to be relieved by the pouring of another layer without reflection; the abstract affirmation of the road.
I am sure enough of this gridlock to light a cigarette in the rain. A guard is lowered despite the collective inertia behind me, the impending force always implied by the emptiness of so many stretches of the interstate system. The daily operation of so many millions of personal combustion engines for travel, whether by caprice or compulsion, mixed as it is with the glut of commodity circulation, military transports, the arterial tissue of a nation, is made most apparent when it can be observed in its stillness, so distinct from how immersion in its regular tempo conditions a degree of attention that renders its constitution invisible. Sun Kil Moon’s *Benji* is playing in a counterpoint against the drops that my hand fails to guard my cigarette from, while I am myself in this moment performing a harmony of exhaust in the relief with which I release my breaths. I have been on the road all day, and I am heading from Northern Virginia to Atlanta for the sentencing hearing that will decide the duration of the next phase of this process, and I know not yet what awaits me, but I do know that I must and will go.
The beginning of the crawl is the signal to extinguish one ember and ignite the one that unites me in this common practice of transit, of which I cannot see or conceive of the beginning or the end of its flow in relation to my position, yet the coordinates of my own journey make up a definite path among others on this day. I am going to Georgia earlier than necessary, to spend some time with friends and loved ones before a decision is cast. Taking this drive is its own element in this departure, a choice to make of this distance that must be covered —an individual ceremony.
For others, in this immediate moment, it is but the waiting for my arrival, to hear of my safe arrival from those who saw me off, the hope of my sound actions from all those who I join, pass, and am passed by on that road, the vigilant expectation of a violation of some unbroken compliance by the patrols dotting these routes threading town and country. For myself, it is a drive I have taken many times in my life; its timeline could be punctuated by the establishment of all its past iterations, the memories of which I relieve as I stand outside them now in the only such instance of them that now exists, the one in whose shadow they will be remembered for some time.
Barricades narrowing this road into a single land focus the trajectory of a journey such that its path tubes on the sensation of a gravitational force. Cresting a hill, I see the endless line before me making its slow pilgrimage South, and in recognizing this scene apart from me I too engage my memories of this traveling through my self as the other. In this reduction and gradual resumption of travel’s velocity, the compression of distance is relieved of its typical sense of fatigue. This rhythmic re-orientation between points brings about a clarity of consciousness for what lies along and throughout this in-between.
The formation of this temporal experience is thrust into movement by the sight of this series of vehicles in their collective crawl, the accumulated actions of others united in this moment by the exigencies demanded by the matter around them, itself a remnant of some recent action by others, conditioning in me a maneuver inward of historiality, a reflection on the accumulated knowledge of this distance that can only be reasoned from the subtle differentiations of all other travels between these points.
In many ways this, really all those that appear to count the most, is the bulk of my traveling experience. Every place I have called home is situated within what we know as the American South, and upon my own recollection it is seldom that I have ever gone beyond its traditionally understood borders, and never for too long, for that matter. Yet it is also the case that I am not recognizably “Southern”: to many people, most of all to those of the region’s deepest recesses of its popularly-known characteristics — my speech is largely absent of any accent, only the slightest of a drawl or twang on certain words or phrases; I have little understanding of the intra-regional differentiations claimed throughout, and even less of their possible extent; the mannerisms of my class originals imbue me with a sense of placelessness, not quite the perpetual alien hostility of Yankeedom, yet in some sense an other.
Despite this, the South and its history is firmly situated as a condition for the intelligibility of my own life. Northern Virginia’s identification with and proximity to Washington D.C. tends to separate it from the suburbanizing sprawl that reaches out rapidly into its ruralities, and to go North of Maryland is to not be claimed either, for the cosmopolitan gravity of a global empire’s capital has done little to sway the inertia of its immediate surroundings. Virginia, of course, seceded from the Union in the Civil War, and many either forget or do not know of the strategic military necessity of Maryland’s occupation by Federal Troops, or that the first official blood of that conflict is sometimes claimed by Pratt St. in downtown Baltimore, as Union Troops put down a public demonstration of Confederate sympathizers on April 19, 1861.
A kind of knowledge of their conflict appears to be in operation throughout the background of any engagement with the South, an inheritance of impressions received, believed before experience sets knowing to work on meaning. The initial basis of memory is rendered into a transient passage by remembering’s active position onto fixed coordinates. My directly geographic experience of the South as an individual is dwarfed by the actual extent of what makes up its reaches; the bulk of my life is lived between Georgia and Virginia, down and up this highway, a passing sense of intimacy emerging and refining itself in the homogeneity of rests on its exists, centers for the base fulfillment of functions taking on a mash of indulgences in their corporate cornucopias, carves into the crust of the Earth.
It is the reflection that allows me to look upon the sum of these moments beyond myself, as I render the moment of remembering into its own temporality, and in so doing it becomes not the extent of my ground covered that is essential, but the intensity of what has been and is being lived within such constraints.
Growing up in the prevalent values of turn-of-the-century liberalism that characterized the NoVa of my youth, the greater unity they found in the War on Terror, my body still faced South, pulled towards the ties to trips to family in Athens, GA every year. Its own kind of liberal enclave, it is a place still articulated by the color of regional distinction, where one still feels the ways in which “the South'' only makes sense to itself in relation to what it stands against, in opposition to, at the same time that it violently repels the intrusions of this otherness. In this sense its reflections confront the necessity of experienced life’s priority to memory, the inertia of a history that is implied in my own individual temporalization as one amongst so many others that have preceded and will succeed me. Such as when the reconstruction of the narrative of a one demands the surrender of a moment of its particularity if it is to hold onto that knowing of itself. The antagonisms of a past is a juncture mediating generations in their own mutual presence.
There should always be a caution exercised before we render too exceptional certain qualities of what are sometimes known as our “closed societies,” vis-a-vis the assumed openness of what lies beyond. An identity obtains here between the concerns of their dialectical intelligibility, and the nature of their operations in historical complicity. This question of a relation to culpability is one that stalks the so-called outsider’s conscience as much as it is the openly litigated terms of discourse where it is at home. To discuss this struggle in the abstract terms of a geographical division is to leave obscure the way a structure is carried by its living executors across the boundaries of any specific territory, in the determinations struck by practical activity that form the possibility of a recognition across and through such spatial distinctions.
The interstate highway is its own unity of these layers of the State, the Federal project that is this system policed as it is by numerous state troopers and country patrol vehicles, united in the failing maintenance of its structural integrity by a dizzying array of endless contracting agencies and entities, a means of scattering work teams of fewer members farther between, as the weight of machines idle in sections that come to signify a perpetual work. This fabric extends beyond the journey South; it is the same series of bonds linking the space to the North I leave behind me. The traditional historical narrative of conflict between Federal authority’s inclusive imperatives and the regressive resistances of Southern oligarchy appears to be less essential to a region that is but one expression of a national project’s own tensions.
Even if we are to de-particularize the South of its peculiarities, there remains of course the question of the specificity of such inciting moments that cannot themselves be held up as general to all. We may, for example, not simply address racial chattel slavery, but advance our argument to the historiographic struggle over Reconstruction, its failure in the violent defeat wrought by the violence of race terror openly waged on the revolutionary project of bi-racial democracy. Just as the fantastic argument for “state’s rights” is its own poorly-hewn disguise, the historical re-telling of this defeat itself is not immune to the traps of mythologization. What is rendered speechless by the horror with which we behold tragedy is that function of language which knows what it signifies and why, as objectifications of our living thought in motion which, as it is made an exteriority before us, becomes openly a practical moment, as it is recognized to be a product of practice itself. The tongue that expresses its mourning still defies the sense-ability of those who do not know yet the extent of its grief.
Myth maintains the failure of this moment on the terms of an unchanging locality of antagonisms, but it is what this myth mediates is the gap between what cannot be enunciated for the depth of what is lost, and the continuity that renders this distance intelligible, that is the generative moment of myth, for despite the interests it serves, its territorialization of responsibility displaced into the region of extremity still appeals to a universal human that it itself fails in its own carefully maintained distance from obligation. Though this is no reason to accommodate the history of the South to its most sycophantic hagiographers. Tragedy is just as well an effective weapon in the hands of those who know loss as but that which they can no longer take from others. The allure of sympathy that we feel in the undeniable attraction of its culture is a maneuver all too often made out of our recognized impotence in the face of its meaning, a capitulation made under the weight of its scale of social repression.
The daily rationale of the Southern resident is always inflected with the exigencies of the accumulated moments of time and its courses made into the material remnants of their surroundings. To move in and through the region as a coherent and unified entity is to acquire traction by way of the contact with the violences that find stillness as the mortal remains of a historical content of which they are formed and is always implied in the recognition that they once had a beginning. The emotive range within which this acknowledgment occurs spans from glowing obfuscation to derisory rejection, yet behind the breadth of any such spectrum is the fear that what is guarded in a popular consciousness as a underdeveloped backwater is but the conceit of parochial affect concealing a global role.
If we are to take up “the South”: as an identity, it is only such insofar as it stands in its separation from other regions as distinct, but in this very distinction is contained a moment of the identical. There then comes a moment in which the whole of the US, in all its aspects of differentiation, is entirely shot through with traces of Southernness. For one can experience anywhere in this nation a kind of institutionally permitted spirit of rebellion that maintains a perpetual conflation of revolution with violent restorations of oligarchy, whether this result of social upheaval is desired (“Patriots are in control”) or feared (carpetbaggers, “dictators,” cabals, deep states). The horizons of transgressive political content are cut off at the point to which they are channeled into a desire for the isolated conditions of local rule, a pastoralist dream of autonomy.
The forces deployed to fasten us to the integrity of such localization and separation, however, are seldom interrogated, and likewise become their own symbols of an accepted limit on what we mean exactly by “freedom.” It is not uncommon to encounter a signifying chain of thin blue lines, the rebel flag of a Northern Virginian regiment adopted as the Confederacy’s stars and bars, a Gadsen flag, and military identifications all at once, a process of social recognition that proceeds by way of selective institutional allegiances to mark one’s “Americanness.” No matter its hostility to unification, it is permitted by the very fact of its national Union.
What initially appears contradictory is dissolved once we disabuse ourselves of the perception of the State power as a single, homogeneous institutional existence, for what we are now encountering is the productive force of institutionalized antagonism. The cohesion of Federal governance within and through the libertarian ethos of an economy of private proprietarians serves the end of the nation-state’s externalization in the positing of growth through the internal delegation of cultivating domestic labor as a diffuse responsibility across individuals. The particular classlessness, or rather class porosity, of this idyllic aspiration of the classic agrarian fiction, however, is a way of emptying a history of its social content; it is a memory of one who beholds himself to be a sleeveless master, and thus an impossibility. What is it that compels this eclipse within the memory of reaction, where pride, in its very forgetting of that which the other demands a redress, restates a shame in its own omission?
The individual’s temporalization as a necessary moment of what renders a space and its moments historical is not only reified in the social determination of that individual, but in turn the formations of that narrativity of the individual, in which its sociality is masked as so many separate histories. This tension within is expressed through others, and the disintegrating self latches on to the ill-fitting pieces of its sovereignty, including bricks of a common edifice. In this we see something of the violence of a social desire oriented towards a liberation of order from the social obligations implicit in their regulation by law. The internal dissonance of the national project is not an anomaly, for its continuity in reproduction is always unsettled by the very unity of its means and its ends. With every promise of freedom, the confrontation with its necessity demands that the force of need transcends its previous limits as every action erodes the conditions for retaining what came before.
A simple dichotomy tries to capture this tension in historical narrative: the struggle between a white class-collaborationist localism and Black appeals to Federal guarantees of rights and their protection in due process, a struggle of franchise and the substantive equality of political integration. The popular imagination is divided between a progressivist conservative tragedy of the individual failures in the face of foreign intrusions and predations that pilfered a flawed, yet human, society after the devastation of war. These are, however, both romances courting the same chivalric ideal of a national identity. All accounts of the South’s peculiarity are, of course, reflections on the US as a whole. Turning outward from the region, and thus finding what was outside within it, however, has brought us to a new border, just as we have transcended one. Locked in this frame, we appear condemned to an interminable debate, both sides perfectly permitted to claim the truth so long as the markets stay open and full. Is there not a common basis here that takes us beyond these limits from within their own bounds, on their own terms of engagement? If such a possibility is to be found, it arrives to us through the unrecognized common basis of these opposing romances of national mythologies — that is, the essential moment of the South’s intelligibility is as a site of ongoing historical liberation struggle.
In all such cases, it is the movement of labor that constitutes the terrain upon which this struggle is being waged, the living material of which the conjuring of competing national visions exorcize the politico-economic body of production’s movement from unrest to being. The degradation of human labor stands as the defining feature of the South’s institutional life, and one that it resents only insofar as it is chastised for it by its very beneficiaries elsewhere. In liberalism’s divided conscience is the permanent crisis of the free individual’s inherent good and the matter of the violence upon which this amputated subject stands alone. Where this separation, in its generality, becomes the basis for consciousness to recognize the unity upon which it is already acting, it must still structure commonality in the actual understanding that crosses not only the separation, but the condition of separating.
As such an ensemble of relations comes to know the extent of itself, we can speak of the South as not merely an American story, but the South in its global connotations as a mutable state of underdevelopment, where the geographic specificity of a particular history finds universal expression as language’s praxis takes up its cause in making concrete this identification. Colonialism’s production of a Global South gives direction to the stretches within which the hidden abode of production remains its most infernal, and this directional schema is at once a racial schema by which classes are affixed to a unified history in their opposition. To follow the tracks left behind by the American South is to find that its labor movement has walked a path beyond its Americanness in the movement of self-emancipation.
Though this is not always understood by labor itself, much less accepted even if recognized. The classic deformation of the US labor movement is this story of Black and white labor’s segregation within the institution of labor, as they navigated the past-war terrain of Reconstruction on the terms established by the labor market’s competition. In that moment, despite the debates and contested plans for types of unity, the American working class failed itself for a lack of being able to see itself beyond its national constitution, for the racial division of its own circumstance acted upon a world’s alliances. One truth of the capital-relation’s de-fetishization is the priority of the praxis of labor, that capital can only do what labor allows, whether the inhibiting factors of struggle push it to success or failure, the world is still in its hands. If there is a world to win, it is one that we can also lose. On this axis do our problems of historical interpretation turn, for the praxis of labor is that unification of history in the present as the positing of a common future, a trajectory given in the production process as the resurrection of dead labor by the living, where value is preserved in the object and reproduced, created, in the subject, and in this process its constitutive separation vanishes in its results.
So long as labor’s freedom of praxis must come to know itself through the negated form of its freedom in the property of a separate class, the struggle remains the same, though the continuity of this encounter tells us something of prior failures. Just as the American South’s history of depressing labor-power is one of a struggle that developed from the plantation unit of production into the modern Sunbelt migration of domestic manufacturing capacity, the world’s many Souths are everywhere embroiled in the competition of great powers for priority access to the mining of rare earth mineral deposits, all of which are promised to be the soil from which a green transition will spring. In this contemporary conjuncture, the ever-present necessity of labor to capital is finding itself in a slight reversal of negotiating position since the Pandemic accelerated the tensions of capital’s global subsumption against itself.
The advent of new Populisms is less a radical departure than it is a deformed and disavowed cousin of liberalism’s protectionist past, the capitalist State-form once again asserting its national articulations as the pressure of competition have exceeded the mediating capacities of firms, and the concentration of such an inertia of disordered accumulation must become the interest of which a class coheres itself, and to do this it turns once again to harness the potential of its working masses, a power typically hidden in their maintained disorder. Now, national identity seeks to unify what has previously been a source of productive power precisely through its intense differentiations, and these come again to a head as the appeal for reconciliation proceeds by way of paving over history a new path that directs the displacement of value’s differentiations onto another fragmentation of labor: the migrant worker as a constitutive exclusion of the nation, the refugee as an alien invasion of scarcity.
As capital is battering down the hatches by seeking domestic allies of whom it once made internal enemies of the national project, the new nationalism threatens a new continuity of labor’s self-mutilation in a cross-racial complicity in international super-exploitation. The world could be traded for the chance to cover this highway that I am looking out upon in my memory with electric vehicles, the suffocating heat death of the combustion regime relegated once again to distant corners out of sight, out of mind but for the periodic emergence of resource wars into the expanding conflict, passing penetrations into a daily headline. Reconciliation of history will proceed only insofar as money continues to change hands, the national horizon but a cheap, false compromise as the object of political struggle for a life of the mass that has long since extended beyond its limits. In the face of what its promise asks us to turn back upon, we must ask ourselves: is this all the leveling we deserve?
The resurgent, if ever receded, question of Southern history and Reconstruction’s significance acts not only to deflate the pretensions of national unity, but to identify in this diversion a demarcation not exclusive to any one nation, for to do so would open up to us the possibility of its unification on those terms once more. Indeed, the racial project of the South in its earliest stages was one that already knew itself as a global project, there is nothing truly interesting to say about the South without its mode of expression at the same tie being a piece of universally held experience, and if it is the site of any historical tragedy, it is that of a violence materialized in its inertia as the deferral of labor’s complete self-emancipation for capital’s continued triumph, slouching through the wastes it makes of social life. For even the provincial consciousness of planter reaction and its afterlives understands the worldly nature of its concerns in a way that all too often evades some segments of labor — Antebellum planters often sought expansion not only in Western territories, but to Caribbean islands, Nicaragua, and further conquest of other empires’ colonial holdings; within the US, Confederate identifications were across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Idaho, California, etc.
A knowledge of the South remains as its own reminder of capital’s universality as one of an impossibility of labor’s unification with its praxis as its own consciousness process, a presence that affirms the negated position of labor on a world stage as a banner that demands the permanence of class.
Turning to face the South is then always this confrontation with the residuum of labor’s praxis turned against itself, a state of division that seeks closure but struggles still to be led through the wound. There is perhaps no better example of the intensity of its impasse of spiritual freedom in that at the same moment that Emancipation sought to repair its broken world in the absolution of Jubilee, the violent onslaught against the humanity of its vision took upon itself the name of the “Redeemers.” In this moment, history’s oppressors sought to hijack Redemption, and in doing so they would continue to carry their conception of civilization throughout the rest of the world, and colonialism gained a new breath of life into the 20th century, expanding into the leviathan of modern Imperialism. This history reveals to us the truth of the engagement with the South as a distinct entity, that our action upon and within its terms in the present cannot escape a kicking up of the dust on its past, through which we come to know - its ghost as our own living praxis, a medium by which the dead communicate to us the necessity of winning the future.
The life of any interlocutor is unavoidably an intervening moment in this history, even if at first unconscious of the inertia surrounding them, a latency gathering momentum in its slow accumulation of contact. Passivity’s brutality is quelled in the recognition of the impossibility of complete indifference, let alone a lack of knowledge. Every instantiation of it, preserved and reproduced in the praxis of its constitution, will invoke some test of the truth of that moment that the real practical movement itself will in turn also verify. Among these is the ongoing presence of the impossibility of racism’s attempted truth, for even the degradation of enslaved labor through the construction of its relation as other than the humanity by which it was oppressed still do so by understanding this other as it would itself — if the master were in this position, would he not revolt?
The Southern plantocracy built its world upon a knowledge of the reasonableness of its own destruction. This is the consciousness behind the continuity of the South’s world-historical significance, a guilty conscience that is always reconciling itself to the falsity of what colonization made of social life. The connotation of agrarian society in these histories is but a pastoralist representation of racialization in a naturalist guise, the clearing of the land of the human being for the super-imposition of an anachronistic version of the modern factory, prefiguring the movement of universal divination of human species-being from which Nature now takes on its own semblance of a subjectivity of affected matter, reacting destructively back upon a metabolism of its perpetual negation.
I am no longer on the highway, but I am able to recall its many instances in my life, the road becoming an ever-stronger force as each sojourn cemented by place within a world lived with and among others I have come to love and be loved by. Despite my otherness to the South, an irreversibility had been operating through this reproduction of its practical field within my own actions, and the unification of this field in praxis is at once the search for its conditions of possibility, thus increasingly the responsibility of Southern history. For the South too is a passage beyond itself at all times, drawing in new elements as its own inexorable movement outward. Not satisfied with the limits of its singular world, its particularity becomes but a means of addressing and positing the redress of a haunt that lingers in its origin as a concept within our totalizing experiences. Everyone already is or becomes a Southerner when they come to know the pain of life made impossible, whether they choose to dress the wound or relish in its infection, for it is this pain that makes the South whole.