Abstract
We use the 2020 incident of the police shooting of Jacob Blake followed by Black Lives Matter protests and the subsequent murder of several activists by Kyle Rittenhouse as a case study to update the Althusserian theory of interpellation using Deleuzian concepts and the idea of “identitarian articulations.” Specifically, we aim to think more about the capacity to accept or reject an interpellation, and who has those capacities, and why. Here, the “who” above is not the individual ontological subject, but the immanent Deleuzian subject emerging in articulation. We will show, for example, that subordinated subjects will often have less access to the capacity to resist interpellation. This is, in part, because it is difficult for some people to “add” or “subtract” identifications or capacities from their identitarian articulations because of the overdetermining power of hegemonic discourses, such as white supremacy. We will also show that different objects, technologies, and emotions when affecting an identitarian articulation, actualize different capacities, or different intensities of the same capacity, in a given encounter. Most importantly, for the purposes of this article, will be the capacity to manifest an emotion like “fear” or “threatened.” We show that an object like a gun may not appear threatening in particular encounters and in association with certain identitarian articulations even while another object, such as a cell phone, will be imbued with the capacity to induce “fear” or “threat” in another. As we show, unavoidably, in the United States, these capacities are deeply entangled with the racialization of the subject holding the object.
Keywords
Introduction
In recent articles (Vila and Avery-Natale, 2018, 2020; Vila et al., 2021), we have been working to show how the affective turn and the Deleuzian concept of the assemblage, developed in myriad ways by different authors, can assist us in better understanding identification processes. In doing so, we are accepting the challenge posed by Thomas (2014) to construct a new paradigm for the understanding of race and racism, that is, an affective program. Specifically, we have been proposing the idea of identitarian articulations, detailed more later. This concept allows us to maintain some of the advantages of previous schools of thought about processes of identification—such as narrativity, performativity, and discourse—while incorporating the benefits of the Deleuzian approach. 1
Ultimately, identitarian articulations actualize capacities in an encounter in interaction with flows of power that are related to how discourses, objects, and technologies affect and are affected, in that specific encounter. In this article, we aim to think more about the capacity to accept or reject an interpellation, and who has those capacities, and why. Here, the “who” above is not the individual ontological subject, but the immanent Deleuzian subject emerging in articulation. And the assemblage we will be focusing on is a “Law-and-Order” assemblage, that is, a particular arrangement of bodies, objects, technologies, emotions, and discourses that come together to address the desire for a strict criminal justice system, especially in relation to violent and property crime.
Importantly, it must be stressed that, in the United States when the events being analyzed occurred, the concept of “law-and-order” was (and at the time of this writing, remains) highly politicized. Although law-and-order politics and their associated right-wing articulation can be identified, at the latest, as coming from Presidents Nixon and then Reagan and Clinton, it was Donald Trump who, in recent years, weaponized the language to quasi-fascist effect. The outcome of this included the villainization of Black Lives Matter and other protest activities—somehow articulated by the Trump White House and its supporters in the right-wing media as complicit with imagined communist plots and outlandish conspiracy theories. This led to a willingness among a large portion of the American population to support police actions (sometimes even violence) against unarmed and innocent Black people and those of any race who dared to protest in support of Black Lives Matter. In other words, the murders that occurred in Kenosha, which are detailed more later, were not the actions of a “fringe” actor. On the contrary, this micro-event must be understood in the context of the larger, molar assemblage of the American political system. While this article will focus on the Kenosha murders and the interpersonal interpellation that occurred there, the reader is encouraged to keep this situatedness in mind.
To understand this “Law-and-Order” assemblage and its associated importance for recent events, it is necessary that we also account for the importance of assemblages broadly speaking. When considering police violence, too often there are two distinct explanations offered: the “individual” approach in which the problem is that the police who committed the violence are just racist (which they might be, some individuals surely are, but that fails to explain the large-scale repetitions of these occurrences); and the structural/systemic approach to racism in policing (which is ultimately accurate but does not do much to tell us how any given instance of violence occurs and does less to explain violence that is not officially state sanctioned, such as the murders in Kenosha or, earlier, the murder of Treyvon Martin). The assemblage approach, on the other hand, moves beyond the binary of agency and structure, instead emphasizing the relationship between agency and structure. The question we seek to answer here is not what racialized police violence is, but what it does. In doing so, the capacity to murder Black people without repercussions is one “doing” of the “Law-and-Order” assemblage and, while this may more readily apply to police, it does not only apply to official state actors, as we have seen all too often in recent years. Thus, we will show that sets of relations are behind the exercise of racialized police violence, that is, those that characterize “Law-and-Order” assemblages: relations among bodies, objects, technologies, discourses, and emotions, and that these produce agentic capacities for racialized violence.
But why is this violence more readily enacted against some subjects than others? We will show that subordinated subjects often have less access to the capacity to resist interpellation when they irrupt in “Law-and-Order” assemblages, or if they decide to do so, they rapidly realize that the Ideological State Apparatus that tried to interpellate them is being rapidly transformed into a Repressive State Apparatus, both integral parts of the “Law-and-Order” assemblage. However, the role of interpellation in these tragedies is also worth emphasizing. The concept of interpellation was developed by Althusser to address how individuals are transformed into “subjects.” According to Althusser, ideologies “hail” people and offer them particular identifications, which, most of the time, they accept as “natural” or “obvious.” Thus, Althusser’s central thesis is that “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject” (Althusser, 2008: 47). He exemplifies how the interpellative move works with his example of the police officer and the individual on the street: I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by the very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace every day police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” (Althusser, 2008: 48).
However, there are instances in which some people decide not to turn to the hailing voice, that is, not to accept the identification offered by ideology. Martin, for example, was hailed by Zimmerman (not a cop but a neighborhood watch vigilante) and chose not to “turn” toward him. Martin’s attempt at enacting the power to resist interpellation was unsuccessful as Zimmerman attacked and murdered Martin as the “Black criminal” in spite of Martin’s innocence.
What made this violence possible? And how does this relate to subjectification? Or, to ask a similar question, “Who is killable?” Not in a literal sense, in which we are all killable, all mortal, but in the biopolitical sense of who may be killed or harmed with relative impunity? Here, we might look to the work of Giorgio Agamben, especially in Homo Sacer (1998). It is Agamben’s claim that homo sacer—they who may be killed without it being considered murder but cannot be sacrificed; those who are excluded from the judico-political legal order—is at the heart of the civilizational order. Further, Agamben claims that homo sacer, as manifested in the camp, is essential to modern totalitarianism and fascism, but that it is also pivotal to all modern systems, including democratic ones. We might say, then, that (especially poor) Black Americans are homo sacer in modern America, and the streets, surveilled by police and organized by a “Law-and-Order” assemblage, are a camp.
However, this is not enough. As has been pointed out elsewhere (Lemke, 2011), Agamben treats all of the modern world as if it is equally “camp-like” and fails to account for the contingent diversity of camps and of who can be killed. In short, Agamben could not account for why police sometimes are held accountable. Adding assemblages and identitarian articulations to this approach helps us to answer this question. While Agamben may be right, we have to ask when and why “killability” or “the ability to commit murder with relative impunity” is a capacity actualized by an assemblage, why the subject homo sacer emerges in one assemblage and not another. Taking a full accounting of the assemblage, asking what it was that the assemblage could do in a particular setting and why, gives us the tools to address this.
For the purposes of this article, we are showing that a part of why “killability” emerges as a capacity, why homo sacer irrupts in some scenes and not others, is in part because it is difficult for some people to “add” or “subtract” identifications or capacities from their identitarian articulations because of the overdetermining power of hegemonic discourses, such as white supremacy. We will also show that different objects, technologies, and emotions when affecting an identitarian articulation actualize different capacities, or different intensities of the same capacity in a given encounter. Most importantly, for the purposes of this article, will be the capacity to manifest an emotion like “fear” or “threatened.” We will show that an object like a gun may not appear threatening in particular encounters and in association with certain identitarian articulations even while another object, such as a cell phone, will be imbued with the capacity to induce “fear” or “threat” in other scenarios. As we will show, unavoidably, in the United States, these capacities are deeply entangled with the racialization of the subject holding the object: a Black man’s cell phone “becomes” a gun, and the man is killed; a white man’s automatic weapon, although still a gun, is not seen as a threat and he walks away, even after committing murder. 2 Perhaps the most obvious example of this distinction is the murder of Tamir Rice, killed while holding a toy gun by a white police officer who fired almost immediately after encountering Rice even though the caller who had contacted the police reported that the gun was likely fake.
Ultimately, we will show that assemblages work in such a way that they actually “expect” certain bodies, objects, technologies, and emotions to appear in certain encounters. For example, when Ahmed Arbery was murdered, the “White Racist Vigilante Assemblage” or the “White Neighborhood Watch Assemblage” already anticipated the appearance of someone like Arbery—an innocent Black man mistaken for a criminal—and thus, as his body irrupted into the assemblage, various identifications and capacities were ascribed to it in the assemblage (see Vila et al., 2021). Beyond, or in addition to, people and human bodies, an assemblage can also “expect” objects, such as the gun; and emotions, such as “threat,” and this will play an important role in how any given encounter occurs. Finally, desire will play a pivotal role when discussing assemblages as, “a formulation of desire that needs to be understood in terms of the things it is capable of creating, and not… as a drive toward objects it can never obtain” (Buchanan, 2020: 38). Desire “selects materials and gives them the properties that they have in the assemblage. This is because desire itself is productive” (Buchanan, 2020: 56); desire is a productive force and “Desire creates by creating assemblages” (Buchanan, 2020: 38). In arguing this, we will use the term “assemblage” as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) intended it: not as a “thing” in the world, but as a verb describing a process, as the French agencement indicates.
It should be noted that this approach to assemblages is not at odds with agency—quite the opposite, in fact. The workings of assemblages do open up and close off possibilities, but in doing so the subject of an assemblage and their associated identitarian articulations obtain particular capacities to act. Additionally, in assemblage theory agency is a “distributed agency” (see, for instance, Latour, 1988, 1994, 2005), that is, it does not only belong to humans, but to any of the assemblages’ other elements such as objects, technologies, discourses, and emotions, elements that, in principle, have the same capacity as human bodies to affect and be affected.
Assemblages and identitarian articulations
From a Deleuzian perspective, identifications (and what we will call identitarian articulations) are the “doings” of an assemblage. Assemblages take raw materials(bodies, technologies, objects, emotions, and discourses) and immanently bring forth, among other things, identifications such as race, gender, and so on. This bringing forth is never done in isolation from each other, but in a constant process of articulation among them. Using our terminology, we would say that what is usually called an “identity” is actually an “identitarian articulation,” a doing of an assemblage in which different components of a particular arrangement inter- and intra-act with each other and bring forth a version of a particular identitarian articulation, and not some other version.
We can see that identities are actually identitarian articulations when Deleuze says, “The process of articulation does not depend on a unifiable or unifying form or a meter, cadence, or any regular or irregular measure, but on the action of certain molecular couples released through different layers and different rhythmic layers” (2007: 157–158). Here, we see that, for Deleuze, the subject cannot be the unified Enlightenment subject which precedes sociality. Instead, the subject is the doing of an assemblage that brings “certain molecular couples” (for us, the different elements of the assemblage) into articulation, the outcome of which is a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, that is, an assemblage being more than the sum of the elements it arranges together; and an identitarian articulation being more than the sum of the different identifications that constitute it. 3
Applying assemblages and identitarian articulations to racialization processes, we follow the lead of Swanton (2010: 2339) and are “concerned … with race as something that bodies do in interaction through the relations they form with other bodies, things, and spaces, rather than race as something that bodies possess, or something written onto the body.” Additionally, we are attentive to “… the very different intensities and modalities through which race surfaces in interaction” (Swanton, 2010: 2343). Further, assemblages are compositions that work with a pre-existing set of entities and gives it a different order (Buchanan, 2017: 458), bringing forth particular capacities in relation to intensive affectivities. Returning to race and racialization then, differentially raced bodies being immanently racialized by the workings of the assemblage do not “come with” race as an ontological truth about the body or the subject. Instead, race becomes a question of capacities—what can the racialized body do and why?
If this is so, then in any given encounter, potential affective states (fear, happiness, threat, feelings of innocence) will intermingle with the various elements of the event (both discursive and non-discursive) resulting in a particular immanent racialization such that a given intensity of racialization will occur, producing a body, such as a Black or white body, irrupting (or not) as an idiosyncratic version of the race in question. We mean that race affects and is affected in particular ways, and with particular intensities and capacities, as a result of the instantiation of the assemblage it is irrupting in relation to and from (Saldanha, 2006). In other words, race materializes differently in relation to particular assemblages, depending on the specific elements of such an assemblage, where different combinations would produce different materializations of race (or any other identification). Further still, this racialization process will bring with it particular capacities to act—to affect and be affected—which are themselves variable and contingent components of the assemblage.
Our claim is that a person’s race actualizes through the circulation of affects that occur within a particular assemblage, that is, by how other people, artifacts, technologies, affective atmospheres, discourses, and emotions affect the materiality of bodies. Some of those affects can be linked to the performative and enunciatory or expressive character of discourses. Other affects, although, can be attributed to the powers and capacities of objects and technologies, or of affective atmospheres. Our approach is in line with M’Charek (2013: 424) who claims, “To say that different relational configurations make different versions of race is radically different from saying that race might assume different meanings in different contexts.” What we are stressing here is not how race acquires meaning differently in different situations—which implies the pre-existent nature of race and the racialized body—but how race materializes differently, if at all, and has the capacity of producing different effects while surfacing with distinct intensities from different assemblages. 4
We add to this analysis, the idea of “identitarian articulations” that we have been developing in earlier articles. In this approach, we show that affects in general, and emotions in particular, are instrumental in the way a particular identitarian articulation ends up being materialized, enacted, and performed in assemblages and what capacities the identitarian articulation is, or is not, imbued with. We argue that any given identification is always articulated with other identifications (such as gender, sexuality, and age, for instance), and obtains capacities in relation to how they are related to the other elements of any assemblage, that is, bodies, objects, technologies, discourses, and emotions. In doing this, we are joining those who are adding to the growing complexity of the pathbreaking “intersectional” concept. Therefore, when we talk about “identitarian articulations,” we join a growing group of people who still recognize the productivity of the concept, but want to add complexity to the idea of “intersectionality.” As Elisabeth Grosz points out, Bodies are always irreducibly sexually specific, necessarily inter-locked with racial, cultural, and class particularities. This interlocking, though, cannot occur by way of intersection (the gridlike model presumed by structural analysis, in which the axes of class, race, and sex are conceived as autonomous structures which then require external connections with the other structures) but by way of mutual constitution [emphasis ours]. (Grosz, 1994: 19–20; see also Puar, 2012, 2014; Weheliye, 2014; Hames-Garcia, 2011).
We show that identifications need not be related only in terms of their strict correspondence to a particular location in socio-cultural space. There is always a certain degree of overlap between peoples’ various identifications in different situations. This overlapping, though, does not imply that these identifications simply “come together,” as the intersectional metaphor implies, forming some new whole. 5 Instead, the conscious cognitive elements of the identifications that exist prior to their performance in any given encounter, the non-conscious dispositions or habits linked to those identifications (all of them emotionally laden), along with the physical, symbolic, spatial, technological, etc., aspects of the assemblage, co-inform and co-develop one another, contingently and temporarily, immanently, at the moment of action, through the enactment of some of their different capacities.
Threats and objects
The Black Lives Matter Movement began with the murder of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. Martin, young and unarmed, was perceived by Zimmerman, operating within a “neighborhood watch” and “vigilante” assemblage, as a threat; the same happened in the case of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, indicating that the aforementioned assemblage type is likely to produce Black deaths. Central to this perception of the threat was Martin’s hoodie; others have emphasized that he merely carried Skittles, a popular candy. In other words, from the outset, the way in which objects become “threats,” the way in which capacities are not inherent to an object but immanent to an assemblage, has been central to BLM’s critical stance. We see something similar in countless other instances of Black death elaborated on later.
However, the role of interpellation in these tragedies is also worth emphasizing. Martin, for example, was hailed by Zimmerman (not a cop but a neighborhood watch vigilante) and chose not to “turn” toward him. Martin’s attempt at enacting the power to resist interpellation was unsuccessful, as Zimmerman attacked and murdered Martin as the “Black criminal” in spite of Martin’s innocence. We could apply a similar lens to countless police murders of Blacks in America. Most importantly for the purposes of this article, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jacob Blake was, in front of his children, shot in the back seven times by a white police officer. Quite literally, the cop hailed Blake as a suspect, like in Althusser’s example and Blake, again, very literally, refused to turn, instead walking away, much like Martin from Zimmerman; Blake attempted to resist the force of interpellation in his refusal to turn. 6 We see here an all too real example of hailing and resistance. Blake’s and Martin’s attempted resistances to interpellation resulted in deadly (Trayvon Martin) or nearly deadly (Jacob Blake) acts. 7
What we see is that Black people in America may attempt to enact the capacity to resist interpellation, but the actual power to do so may be denied to them by the workings of the many different elements (bodies, objects, technologies, discourses, emotions) of the assemblage at hand. This may be contrasted to many white Americans. 8 In response to the shooting of Blake, protests erupted in Kenosha. During these protests, a 17-year-old white male, Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with a semiautomatic weapon, murdered two people. According to the Washington Post, Rittenhouse had been seen associating with the police throughout the day and prior to the incident had participated in cadet programs with the Grayslake Police Department (Armus et al., 2020). After committing two murders, Rittenhouse approached the arriving police with his hands up, and a gun slung over him. The police moved past him, ignoring him. Even in a possible surrender pose, this young, armed white male was not hailed as a possible suspect of a crime; interpellation did not occur even though the objects present, such as a gun, would contribute to the possibility of a successful interpellation in other assemblages and almost surely would have resulted in such an interpellation if an armed Black protester had approached police.
Something similar occurred in Ahmaud Arbery’s case. When the police arrived at the scene of the crime, instead of seeing if they could help Arbery, who was bleeding on the pavement, they went to console the person who killed him, Travis McMichael, as if he was the victim and not the perpetrator. 9 And when his father asked the police if they were going to handcuff his son (standard police practice in cases like this), the police were surprised by the question and, according to the video, answered: “No. Why would he be in cuffs?” This practice can be understood as a part of the role of policing as such. Describing interpellation as a “Biopolitical State Apparatus” (BSA), Bargu (2019: 313) claims policing’s purpose is “neither simply to interpellate nor to repress but rather to discriminate—that is, to mark, separate, and distribute subjects through surveillance, to differentiate subjects according to the main lines of antagonism that emerge from an existing field of social differences within and based on the power relations in a specific context, and, further, to use these differentials for the subjects’ selective treatment and administration.”
Thus, here we ask: when does a weapon become a threat? When does a gun become innocent? When does a hoodie imbue guilt? Or, more accurately, how do the inter- and intra-relations of the different elements working in an assemblage (bodies, objects, technologies, emotions, and discourses) grant or deny these objects’ particular capacities? We argue that objects affect assemblages but also that the other elements working in the assemblage affect the nature and emotional valence of objects. In the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, the working of the assemblage resulted in his gun, which had just been used to commit two murders, not having the capacity to produce the perception of “threat” by the police who obviously saw the gun itself but did not fear it. We argue that this is so because the “Law-and-Order” assemblage, in relation to the white supremacist assemblage from which US American policing derives, did not assign a menacing role to such a weapon, which the police suspected was not going to be used against them. In other words, this type of assemblage “expects” Black violence or the violence of Black allies such as the supposed violence of ANTIFA, expects that a bleeding black body in the street is the possible suspect of a crime, while the white male with a gun is not. 10 With this expectation, non-violent objects like Skittles or cell phones obtain the capacity to “threaten.” On the other hand, the same assemblage “expects” whites with guns but expects them as non-threats to police in Rittenhouse’s case, or a self-defense instrument, in the case of Arbery, and thus, the gun and its wielder are not interpellated in the same way and the object ceases to manifest as a threat, or to signal guilt. 11
As Buchanan (2020) shows, “…material is not, on this view of things, merely a condition of possibility…rather it is anything which can be interpellated and accommodated by the expressive sphere. Material must always be produced; it does not simply exist… [We must] ask the more properly transcendental-empiricist question: How and under what conditions does matter become material?” (131). We are then asking when the matter and technology that makes up the gun as a potentially deadly weapon materializes with the capacity to be a “threat” in the eyes of police and vigilantes. Further, we are asking when people do and do not have the capacity to resist interpellation, whether they have a weapon or not. Ultimately, identifications emerge as particular types of identifications (always working in articulation with other identifications, never in isolation) in relation to times and places as well as objects, technologies, discourses, and emotions present. Any identitarian articulation will not only emerge differently but will in meaningful ways be a different immanent “thing” from encounter to encounter, from assemblage to assemblage. However, as we will show, this possibility for identitarian flux does not eliminate the “ongoingness” of identifications, especially those that are intensively impacted by hegemonic discourses, such as white supremacy, in which a particular assemblage of enunciation exercises more power than other elements of the assemblage. We are therefore not claiming that identifications emerge as totally new “things” in a given encounter, made up spontaneously anew in the moment. Instead, identifications materialize from assemblages in different ways, with different capacities and intensities, in particular identitarian articulations and in relation to how particular affects and emotions circulate in those encounters. Thus, identifications do not materialize coincidentally or randomly, but also not in a way that is strictly predetermined by some ontological identity category such as “race.” Instead, they appear in relation to the existing discourses, habits, objects, technologies, emotions, identitarian articulations, and more that are present in given diagrams of assemblages (for a very interesting discussion on how the concept of habit brings about a natural/cultural way to understand how the past shapes, but does not predetermine the working of assemblages, see Massumi, 2002: 11). We ask, then, when an object and/or a person become(s) a “threat” and when they do not. In doing so, we are addressing the question of when someone is interpellated as a “threat” or a “suspected criminal” and when one is not.
The Kenosha incident
As described earlier, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jacob Blake was shot in the back in front of his children seven times by a white police officer. Quite literally, the cop hailed Blake as a suspect, like in Althusser’s example and Blake, again, very literally, refused to turn, refused to recognize that he was the suspect of some kind of criminal activity, instead walking away. Blake resisted the force of interpellation by refusing to turn, and the police apparatus (which, as any Apparatus of the State, combines, to different degrees, an Ideological role and a Repressive one) ended any further attempt to interpellate him and directly exercised the “legitimate” violence of the State against him. Blake’s resistance to the interpellative power of the state actor resulted in being shot seven times and possibly disabled for life.
The result of this violence was described above, ending with Rittenhouse committing murder. Even under those conditions, Rittenhouse was never interpellated as a possible suspect. How can we understand the failure to interpellate Rittenhouse who was seemingly in surrender while, in contrast, Blake, unarmed, was interpellated while making efforts to resist interpellation? How do we understand the failure of the gun to be a threat even when other objects, like cell phones and Skittles candy, are perceived of as a threat? We claim that the various elements of an assemblage contribute to the deployment of certain identitarian articulations—criminal; innocent white person with a gun—and not others. The emotions, identifications, narratives, and so on that do emerge in the assemblage do so with differing intensity dependent upon the workings of the assemblage in play—what objects and technologies are present, the lighting, the place, the people, recent happenings, and so on. Further still, the workings of an assemblage propel objects to have differing meanings—the gun as threatening or not. Finally, some bodies (when articulated to other identification markers, such as gender, age, and ability status), such as Black bodies living under American white supremacy, are “centered and fixed” in the assemblage, and these bodies will play a particular role in the assemblage that is very hard to change—Blake calmly walking back to his car was not enough to alter the effect of [anti-]Blackness in American racism; Rittenhouse’s gun and criminal activity were not enough to alter the effect of whiteness. While all the elements of an assemblage play a role in its outcome, some elements have more capacities and work with more intensity (i.e., have more power) than others, such as is the case of the discourse of white supremacy in American “Law-and-Order assemblages.”
It is worth noting that, not only do objects affect assemblages, but also that the assemblage affects the nature of those objects. In the case of Rittenhouse, the working of the assemblage resulted in his gun, which had just been used to commit two murders, not being seen as a threat. We could argue that in Rittenhouse’s case, the gun could not be seen by the police as a dangerous weapon at all, at least not dangerous to the police. And yet in other cases, assemblages determine that objects are seen as weapons even when no such danger exists. For example, Stephon Clark was murdered by police officers, who shot him 20 times while he stood in the backyard of his grandmother’s home because the officer’s interpreted Clark’s cellphone as a handgun. No such gun was present (Winton et al., 2018).
The cases of Blake and Rittenhouse also show that the individual does not have strict control over the way in which the interpellation will affect him or her. In the Althusserian example, the individual must turn toward the hail; that is, Althusser does not offer any other possibility than the subject turning to the hail of power, and if he or she does not do it, the “Law-and-Order” assemblage activates its repressive side and apprehends him or her. Butler (1997a) has shown that this is not necessarily the case and some people can refuse to turn. Additionally, we have shown above that the turning or not turning is, actually, the outcome of the working of an assemblage, not the sole decision of the person’s involvement with power; and that such a turning is not done by a “subject” but, instead, by a particular identitarian articulation (a Black young adult can accept the hail while a Black female in her teens decides not to). The “subject” is not a centered and unified actor, but always the product of a particular articulation of several identifications. In other words, assemblages work to produce an outcome—interpellation or not—dependent upon the identitarian articulation under consideration. One of the capacities that may or may not manifest for the actant that emerges through the identitarian articulation is that of resistance, which is one of Judith Butler’s most important theorizations in relation to the topic.
In Althusser’s interpellative theory, because the turn toward the hail seems to be necessary and in response to a sovereign power, there is little room for resistance to subjectification; the subject seems to “always show up on time,” as it were. Butler (1997b) updates Althusser by introducing more space for resistance. While the turn toward the authority subjectivates the subject, it also grants the subject power through the performative. This is ultimately a Foucauldian move in which power brings with it its own resistance. However, in Butler, there is a second step which we will refer to as “the gap.” Agency, for Butler, is not unlimited: the subject is subjected by a subjectivating authority and this power relationship has real consequences for the subject. However, the performative always operates imperfectly. The performative speech act (or for our purposes, whatever else may interpellate, because objects, technologies and emotions also interpellate—see Vila et al., 2021) references an idealized form, such as gender, but this idealized form can never actually be perfectly achieved. Instead, between the idealized referent of the performative and the actual performance there is a gap. In one’s repetition of the act, one is both recognized and misrecognized because one cannot achieve the idealized form. “Since virtually everyone fails to recognize themselves in this ideal, multiple interpellating agents work together to ensure subjects recognize an intelligible, if not perfectly unified self, through a set of ideals which they strive to live up to (i.e., worker, daughter, feminist, and so on)” (Bunch, 2013: 43).
In other words, the subject will be recognizable as a subject, but will never be the idealized form of the subject. It is in this gap between the recognized and the idealized that resistance may occur and agency is possible. One is always already a subject, but “one is also always already something other than the subject one is supposed to be” (Bunch, 2013: 50). Resistance to the law can be found in this space, as Butler shows. We contend, though, that this resistance is not always successful, and, more importantly, does not depend solely on the performance of the “imperfect” performative, especially when a particular assemblage (like the “Law-and-Order” or the “Vigilante” ones) partially determines that a particular body will always-already play a particular character. Thus, the “gap” for resistance is smaller for some bodies than others. Blake attempted to resist interpellation while, instead of turning toward the law, he literally turned away from the law. He decided to perform “the usual Black suspect” character that the diagram of the “Law-and-Order” assemblage assigned to him in a way that was different from what the assemblage “expected.” But a very powerful element of the “Law-and-Order” assemblage, that is, the American white supremacy discourse, had enough capacity and intensity within the assemblage to override his attempt to claim that he was misrepresented by the interpellation. Ultimately, no matter his resistance, his turning away and not accepting the interpellation from the hailing had the same effect as running away from the law, that is, the factual acceptance of his being not only a suspect, but an actual perpetrator: he was shot as if he were escaping, not as if he was only refusing to be addressed as a suspect. His resistance could not succeed in avoiding the power of the Police Repressive Apparatus, that is, the use of violence to control those who do not comply with the requirements of the Ideological State Apparatuses.
In contrast, we have the 17-year-old Rittenhouse, armed and having just committed two murders, walking toward the police with his hands in the air. No matter how guilty he may have been, the “Law-and-Order” assemblage, of which the white supremacy discourse is a vital part, made it impossible for him to be interpellated as “suspect,” “murderer,” and so on, due to the fact that he was a known, young, white, and male associate of the police (the identitarian articulation that spared him from arrest on the spot). He had literally already turned toward the police, even without the police having hailed him, but the “Law-and-Order” assemblage of which Rittenhouse’s whiteness is an integral part resulted in the unimaginable possibility of the police “hailing” him at all and thus (at least at first), even in his turn, he was not interpellated as a criminal. 12
What we see is that the way in which Black bodies in articulation with gender, age, ableness and the like are interpellated in America results, not only in difficulty enacting the capacity of resistance, but also far fewer abilities to affect whether or not they will be interpellated as subjects, usually “suspect” subjects. Tragically, this minimization of power to affect the assemblage, this reduction in capacities afforded to Black bodies in certain articulations, can be deadly for young, Black, male, able Americans. This is in contrast to what happens with white Americans like Rittenhouse and countless other heavily armed white Americans: because of their particular articulation of race, age, gender and ableness, their cases become the antipodes of what occurs with Blacks and their identitarian articulations. In the latter cases, different identifications entering the articulation make a difference in the outcome of the assemblage, that is, being or not being interpellated as a suspect (a three-year-old Black, disabled girl would have been dealt with quite differently by the Kenosha police). We are thinking here of those white Americans who engaged in protests against COVID restrictions, some of whom in Michigan even entered the State House with guns and threatened lawmakers (BBC, 2020). Those white people with guns are often not hailed as suspects of a crime, are not interpellated as such, and can avoid subjectivation, their whiteness overriding the possible effect of other identifications (such as gender, age, ableness, and the like) entering the identitarian choreography in such a way to transform them into “suspects” and being interpellated as such by the police. In other words, some bodies (in articulation with particular identifications in terms of age, gender and ability status) are “centered and fixed” negatively—as criminals—and others positively—as innocent; and racialization processes in the assemblage (i.e., how different identifications enter into an articulation with “race,” while in processes of inter and intra-action with objects, technologies, and emotions) play a pivotal role in how these bodies will be produced as such.
The objects in the assemblages, entangled with the discourses and practices of white supremacy, both affect, and are affected by the other elements of the assemblage, bodies included. In the cases above, guns could not be seen as threats and white people could not be interpellated as suspects; and yet Black bodies with sneakers, or candy and a hoodie in the case of Treyvon Martin, or when simply walking away, are commonly interpellated as suspected subjects in encounters where resistance could not be successful because the diagram of the “Law-and-Order” assemblage predetermines that particular identitarian articulations (generally Black, male, young, and able-bodied) are “suspects” in advance.
We are, then, asking when and how a particular identitarian articulation in accordance with what desires and in a particular assemblage, produces a threatening potential. For example, a Black male body with a gun is more threatening than a white male body with a gun. A Black female body is less threatening than a Black male body, due to the stereotypical assumptions of criminality that come along with the combination of Blackness and maleness in America. 13 An elderly Black man with a gun will be even less threatening, but more threatening than an elderly white man with a gun. If situated at certain protests, the scenario playing its role, whites with guns are rarely seen as a threat. However, Blacks without guns commonly are.
But what about the gun itself? Like any other object, it has no particular meaning or capacity outside of its workings in an assemblage. The gun is, most of the time, perceived of as a threat (or not) dependent upon its relationship to the identitarian articulation at hand, of which the perceived body of the carrier of the gun is one part, with the body’s race, gender, class, and the like entering into articulation with the time of day or night at which the body is in action, the location of this activity, and more. In the case of Rittenhouse, the workings of the assemblage resulted in his gun, which had just been used to commit two murders, not being seen as a threat to those who the police were concerned about (themselves or other white vigilantes in the space); the police obviously saw it but did not fear it. We argue that this is so because the militia assemblage when intersecting with the police assemblage did not assign a menacing role to such a weapon, which the militia members and the police knew was not going to be used against cops.
And yet in other cases, particular assemblages determine that objects materialize as weapons and these are feared even when no such thing exists. As we mentioned above, Stephon Clark was murdered by police officers, who shot him 20 times while he stood in the backyard of his grandmother’s home because the officer interpreted Clark’s cellphone as a handgun. No such gun existed (Winton et al., 2018). The number of similar examples to this one is now so long that to list them all would be painfully redundant. In just one American city, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, “The U.S. Department of Justice analyzed shootings by Philadelphia police officers between 2007 and 2013 and found that 15% of victims were unarmed. In half of these cases, an officer reportedly misidentified ‘a nonthreatening object (e.g., a cell phone) or movement (e.g., tugging at the waistband)’ as a weapon” (Barrett, 2018: 76). As Barrett goes on to say, “The human brain is wired for this sort of delusion, in part because moment-to-moment interoception infuses us with affect, which we then use as evidence about the world” (76).
Conclusion
We have shown here that bodies and objects materialize immanently in an assemblage dependent upon particular identitarian articulations and with particular capacities, such as the capacity to threaten. The material is not merely a condition of possibility. Instead, material must always be produced; it does not simply exist (Buchanan, 2020: 131). Further, “It is not the items or elements in the assemblage that is decisive; it is the underlying principles of selection and arrangement that matter” (Buchanan, 2020: 117). In other words, what object and bodies “mean” is determined by the assemblages at hand, and a given person’s identitarian articulations may be “overdetermined” by one of its component identifications by the workings of the different elements of the assemblage (in our example, for instance, by the white supremacy discourse). This means that some people will have an easier time adding or subtracting various identifications from an identitarian articulation.
In the USA, commonly, the racial articulation with gender, age and ableness overdetermines the meaning of one’s body, as was the case with Blake. Similarly, age has been shown to shift with race such that police officers often perceive of Black boys as young as 10 as being older, guiltier, and more likely to enact violence than are white boys of the same age. This results in a higher probability of those officers using potentially deadly force (Goff and Jackson, 2014). In other words, race can overdetermine other elements of the articulation, such as age. According to Deleuze and Guattari, in any given strata, there is a determining feature in which, once chosen, the organization of the particles partially determines what particles will come next. “This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say something becomes machinic. It has taken on a logic of its own, one that emerges with the selections themselves but then becomes autonomous” (Buchanan, 2020: 44). We are showing that race has such a capacity in “Law-and-Order” assemblages.
This machinic nature plays an important part in understanding the role of white supremacy in partially determining outcomes like those analyzed here. Hegemonic discourses, such as white supremacy, take on a logic of their own, resulting in an assemblage overdetermining and already anticipating the meaning and presence of a body—to determine how the Black CEO will be identified by the taxi driver; or how the white shooter will be identified by the police. Buchanan says, “If one wanted to give a name to the complicated set of interlocking ‘reasons’ why one ‘cannot’ do something, then in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms it would be the abstract machine. It is a machine because it ‘works’—meaning it influences our behavior—and it is abstract because it has no material or tangible form” (46). What we find, then, is what has been obvious for many centuries: that Black people in America are less free than white people. The abstract machines of many assemblages (the “Law-and-Order” assemblage at the forefront) determine that Black bodies have fewer capacities for action—they cannot, for example, walk toward police with guns (or often even without them, or with a simple cell phone) or storm The Capitol Building; Black bodies cannot walk away from police without being shot seven times in the back. However, those same machines also increase the capacities of white bodies to do more with fewer consequences.
Further, Deleuze and Guattari ask the question, “whatever could have happened for things to come to this?” The assumption is that one’s own actions did not directly cause the situation in which one finds oneself, or if they did, there was no intention to cause what happened…but nonetheless they happen because of what one does and because one does not do anything to prevent them from happening (Buchanan, 2020: 47). People “irrupting” into assemblages that are not of their own making is a good example of this. Thus, we might ask what “reason” there is that Black bodies in America find themselves in such dire circumstances, but we must also recognize that it is not the Black person who “caused” the effect, created the situation, Instead, we must ask, “What brought things to this?” and we must recognize the role of the subject or their body in that bringing-to-this without blaming the subject because, again, as Buchanan said earlier, “one’s own actions did not directly cause the situation in which one finds oneself.”
How might we imagine this changing for the better? We can, firstly, imagine a number of different identifications entering into the identitarian articulation, increasing or decreasing the likelihood of being perceived as “threatening.” Importantly, we must remember that the “threat” does not come from the gun nor from the human body, but from their interactions as an outcome of the assemblage.
Ultimately, for change to occur, the capacities of Black bodies to affect an assemblage must increase, the “gap” in which resistance can occur must be widened, that is, Black bodies must have the same possibility as white bodies to “equivocate” the performance, to act in a way that is different from that expected by the diagram of the many assemblages they participate in, and to do so safely. Changing the diagrams would be a good first step in this regard. 14 This would be in contrast to how Black bodies are able to operate currently: no matter how they “equivocate” the performance, in most of the assemblages they participate in (above all “Law-and-Order” ones), those “equivocations” are not recognized and are re-signified as “more of the same Black body performance.” And, of course, for this increase in power to happen it must be the case that Black Lives are made to Matter in the myriad and diverse identitarian articulations Black bodies participate in. In other words, Black bodies need the capacity to dislodge race from age, gender and ableness in the same way white bodies do. As we showed above, while explaining that Rittenhouse was able to dislodge his manliness, age, and physical fitness—all while showing his weapon—from his white identity; articulations that, if he were Black would have meant him being killed by the police. White bodies, in contrast to Black, are free to show up “differently” than expected, even with a negative difference. For example, the mostly white bodies that stormed The Capitol Building in DC showed up prepared to commit violence in contrast to what the police (but not journalists and other people paying attention to right-wing discourse) expected. This difference between the expectation (non-violence) and the reality (violence) did not reduce the ability for the white terrorists to act; in fact, a case could be made that it only increased their capacity to act. In contrast, Black bodies (or Muslims for that matter) would have likely been killed.
We are therefore arguing that a better, more anti-racist world will increase the capacity for Black people to act freely; it will allow for the multiple identifications they have to appear independently, or (more often than not) in identitarian articulations in which racial identifications do not play a central role, without those identifications being overdetermined by their race. 15 Simultaneously, white bodies must be forced to not rely on their racial identification as a way to overdetermine their other identifications or their identitarian articulatios. White bodies must be related to (and be accountable, as non-whites usually are) in terms of their identitarian articulations in which race is only one component, not the central one that, at least in “Law-and-Order” assemblages, seems to exculpate them of any possible harm, allowing them to walk away from a murder or into The Capitol Building. In “Law-and-Order” assemblages, Black bodies are surveilled and eventually punished by the articulation of their race, age, gender, and ableness. White bodies, on the other hand, are not held to account for their race, giving them greater capacities to “equivocate” the performance and exercise their agency more than Black bodies. New ways of understanding how processes of identifications work, as we have been developing here, help us understand how this inequity operates. Althusser, according to Bargu (2019) did not question whether some subjects are systematically “taken in” by the police, identified as not potentially but perpetually “suspect,” deemed as “threats” to the existing order. What we have developed here allows us to go further and to answer some of the questions Althusser and others left open.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Pablo Vila wants to thanks Temple University for a Summer Research Grant that supported this research.
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.
