Put Some Red on It: Maoist Brooding and Communist Laughter

“Try to ensure that everything in life has a consequence.” This is without doubt one of the most detestable of maxims, one that you would not expect to run across in Goethe. It is the imperative of progress in its most dubious form. It is not the case that the consequence leads to what is fruitful in right action, and even less that the consequence is its fruit. On the contrary, bearing fruit is the mark of evil acts. The acts of good people have no “consequence” that could be ascribed (or ascribed exclusively) to them. The fruits of an act are, as is right and proper, internal to it. To enter into the interior of a mode of action is the way to test its fruitfulness. But how to do this? (Benjamin, “Try”)

And what we succeed at is worth the pain, what we fail at is worth the understanding if we can understand. What the next step is.

We are studying with all our minds and hearts and souls’ determination to understand how to slay the serpent. (Baraka, “Fashion This” 196)

Deng Xiaoping, dead dogs dangle from lamppost

Long tongues

Win or lose, the Maoists is still glum. (Woods, “Fever Grass”)

What follows is one possible answer to Amiri Baraka’s open-ended query repeated throughout his works: “What are they laughing about?” The inside back cover of Unity and Struggle/RAZOR’s 2003 pamphlet titled Negroes Older features Baraka’s xeroxed-overlay collage, displaying truncated announcements of a keynote for Bob Moses (SNCC secretary in Mississippi from 1962 to 1967), a retrospective from the filmmaker Regge Life, and a millennia-spanning group lecture titled “The Black Presence in Asia.” All are framed in the left margin by the iconic picture in south central China (March 1959) of Mao Tse-tung and W. E. B. Du Bois enjoying a laugh together at Mao’s villa (fig. 1). It is captioned: “Unite the Many to Defeat the Few.” RAZOR as a visual moniker is both a rallying cry, acronym and sounded-out shorthand signifying “Revolutionary Art for Cultural Revolution.”¹

Fig. 1. W. E. B. Du Bois with Mao Tse-tung in a garden, Lake Country, Central China, March 1959. From the library of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-i0741).

“Win or lose, the Maoists is still glum” is Billy Woods’s surgically astute aphoristic retort, recalling a grisly episode in the history of the 1980 Peruvian guerilla formation Partido Comunista del Perú (whose nom de guerre was Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path), in which dead stray dogs were hung from lampposts wearing caustic paper signs chastising Deng Xiaoping for his “revisionism”: “Teng Siao Ping hijo de perra!” (“Deng Xiaoping son of a bitch!”). A quick digression proposing some reading procedures vis-à-vis Woods’s brilliant and studied palimpsestic allusions is appropriate here. Instead of trying to deduce intent or win the prize for succinct, singular, and correct interpretation (ossifying a work in motion), Woods’s juxtapositions encourage proliferating speculative use. Woods posits the juxtaposition and sets the scene for multiplicative red reading: How does glum despondency relate to a sequence of armed guerilla struggle in Peru, related to Deng’s opening China up to capital markets, related to the semiotics of a bonkers act of spectacular animal cruelty, related to (perhaps) the Peruvian guerilla leader Abimael Guzmán’s philosophical and scholarly work on German Idealism—particularly, Kant? Another example, Woods’s “Cuito Cuanavale,” asserts, “I rep my era, bridge the gap between Marechera and Sweatshirt, paperback Secret Sharer, admittedly it ain’t his best work” (00:01:06–15). Juxtapositions here are an engine for ongoing speculative interpretation. “Cuito Cuanavale” asks impossible interlinking questions, yet rightly insists on them all the same: What are the conceptual linkages between the famous 1987–88 battle in which the People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (joined by Cuba) faced off against Apartheid South Africa and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, a criteria evaluating the fiction of Joseph Conrad, and an overarching theory of periodization that can bridge Damubuzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger with the rapper Earl Sweatshirt? Woods’s red-read proliferations model a radically generative crisis of and for interpretation. Comparable to the structural role of women as revolutionary agents of ideological demystification positioned against insistent interpreters in Shakespeare (as theorized by Terry Eagleton), Woods’s palimpsestic readings encourage interpretation “both partial and interminable” (Eagleton 65). Alternatively, insistent interpretation teases listeners to embark on a “pathological obsession with hunting down hidden knowledge,” as crystallized for Eagleton by Othello’s paranoiac overreading of a handkerchief (65).

The photograph of Du Bois and Chairman Mao’s laughter—an example of Walter Benjamin’s “Dialektik im Stillstand” (“dialectics at a standstill”)²—encourages anew a speculative reading of Woods’s glum Maoist despondency in dialectical interdependence with two comrades and their laughter. Du Bois and Mao’s affective consistency in the face of both wins and losses resonates with the stance of the Lord’s servant in the book of Job (Book of Job 1.8), discussed in Politically Red in relation to the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and an art installation speaking to police terrorism (Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 227–28). It is a grand refusal of the transactional logic of measure, a politically inflected strategic theoretical savvy, fruit of a radically contingent, critical mass-reading praxis, decoupling action from result.

Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió’s Politically Red beautifully decants the parenthetically noted “race” from Fredric Jameson’s magisterial The Benjamin Files (2020) as an answer to Werner Sombart’s 1906 question: “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?”³ Cadava and Nadal-Melsió open up Jameson’s parenthetical, accessing all its readerly and Communist force. Politically Red adroitly actualizes Bertolt Brecht and Maxim Gorki’s proletarian-militant pedagogic maxim in The Mother (1931): “Reading is class struggle” (qtd. in Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 29). The authors build upon the centrality of reading as Communist praxis famously qualified by Louis Althusser and others in Reading Capital (1965): “Only since Marx have we begun to suspect what, in theory at least, reading and hence writing means” (Althusser 29). Recall that a fundamental characteristic of two major Marxist-inflected twentieth-century revolutions (the Russian-Soviet and Chinese) is how reading and writing—seemingly in real time—announced, retroactively sorted, and made sense of almost every aspect of their respective unfolding sequences. Reading here is a set of anticapitalist protocols, an attendant insistence on the imperative of literary and aesthetic form (often honed in on the level of the sentence), the spiral swerve of the pen, massification as citation and method—in other words, a red-read Black Radical Communist improvisational procedure aspiring to cognize totality.

Politically Red expertly refashions the scholastic chore that is the book review as a flurry of episodic collation involving art history, philosophically inflected cultural critique, speculative etymology, literary criticism, and radical reasoning. Such a task proceeds by means of the book’s “process of opening, unfolding, and expanding” (23)—both clarifying Benjamin’s revolutionary commitments on their own terms and placing such commitments in dialogue with political theology and with Black Radical, anti-imperialist, and Communist praxis. Cadava and Nadal-Melsió’s reading amplifies and adds onto Jameson’s internationalist project and cultural-revolution analogical method for tackling organizational and aesthetic problems of mediation.⁴ Their inquiries include Marx and Engels’s references to Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) in their unfolding critiques; careful attention to a handwritten page of the “Feuerbach” section of The German Ideology (1846) in which the right column of the page is populated by frantic, errant, ever-proliferating doodling of faces read as a “reading mass” (11); and Du Bois’s insurgent labor inquiries into the American Civil War period as supplements to Marx’s writings on abolitionist and Black Radical struggles—just to name a few. Politically Red declares its first principles with compact precision: “all readings are mediated” and “reading and writing are themselves labors of multiplication,” as always “collaborative” potentialities of both “means of massification” and “matter of amplification” (9). Reading attains its anamnesis as it re-remembers its collective insurgent labor and patient discipline. The authors write thoughtful meditations on Benjamin’s antifascism, his theory of mechanical reproduction, destruction as Benjaminian gestus, his delineation of law-positing and law-preserving violence, his insistence on thinking through various mediations make visible what was always already there: a Communist pedagogy propelling Benjamin’s praxis and oeuvre and Black Radical critique as, rather than supplementary to, Communist struggle. Cadava and Nadal-Melsió invite readers to mirror their study’s stated compulsion “to catch up to our own improvisations—by reading more” (23).

The introduction to Politically Red is framed by the aphoristic formulation, “The red what reading did re adding reproducing revolution” (27), from Amiri Baraka’s 1991 essay “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture,” signaling “the homonymic play between ‘red’ and ‘read’” (26). Note the purposeful flurry of gerunds, the grammatical-temporal play and emphasis on process over product: reading did, re adding, reproducing. Such homophonic exegesis in both Baraka and Sun Ra is beautifully theorized by Brent Hayes Edwards in his Epistrophies. This includes Baraka’s Raise Race Rays Raze, Wise WHY’s Y’s, and the clarion call “who/hoo” in “Somebody Blew Up America.” Benjamin’s critique of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s maxim (quoted at the beginning of this essay) is motivated by Goethe’s woefully transactional and insufficiently dialectical theory of causality. Goethe syncs benevolent and malevolent actions with their matching consequences. This is not chastisement as much as it is an expression of entangled disappointment. For Benjamin, Goethe comes up so short because he is so revered. Benjamin wages war against transactional evocations of measure and easy correlatives between cause and effect, reaching toward a method on how to “enter the interiority of an action” (“Try”). Benjamin concludes his meditation open-endedly by posing a question: “But how to do this?” Such a challenge conjures future protocols of reading at odds with Goethe’s symmetry of reward and benefit, transgression and punishment. Baraka’s interpretive improvisations on the converging Blues-Black aesthetic as red reading, history, and radical politics model one possible answer to Benjamin’s query.

Beginning with a caveat and an insistence on constituting the “Blues Aesthetic” as cultural process and structure of feeling “useful only if it is not [a] depoliticization of reference,” Baraka’s essay scorns an academic tendency that delinks the Blues from the “national and international source, the lives of the African, Pan-African, and specifically Afro-American people” (“‘Blues Aesthetic’” 101). As both memory register and transformative tactical repertoire, the Blues corresponds with the “mass mainstream [political] ideology” that is “Stay and Fight” (101). The challenge of entering the interior Blues mode of action as “one vector expressing the material and psychological source” (101) is met by way of Baraka’s committed insistence on thinking culturally at the level of the all, the whole, the “everything is everything” that is totality (103): “The Blues as a verse and musical form is one thing, but what needs to be gotten to here is the whole, the aesthetic overview, the cultural matrix that the Blues is but one expression of” (102). Friedrich Nietzsche’s Athenian Attic “Apollonian aesthetic mode” as “formalism and restraint” garners its significance “only in contradiction to the older, once world-dominating ‘Dionysian’ (expressionist, emotion-characterized humanistic) philosophical and aesthetic mode” (103). It is the dialectical contrast here that is paramount—the one dividing into two. Repurposing the “African Aesthetic” as first “expression of the Animist world of our earliest ancestors” corresponds to an analytical and political ambition to think totality as all: “It is not ‘One God,’ as opposed to many, the qualification for savagery—but that every thing is one—All is All—everything is everything! Allah means literally All-everything is part of the same thing” (103).⁵ It provides a key to what Baraka identifies as the “historically traceable Cosmopolitanism of the African people,” evoking Cheikh Anta Diop’s assertion of “the essentially non-African essence of Nationalism. Again, the recognition of all as All—everything is everything” (105). Prioritization of the all is a conceptual royal road of sorts connecting to the political and intellectual project that is Black Radical Internationalism.

Baraka maps a materialist historical process of national becoming—“by the nineteenth century the diverse Africans had become African Americans”—mediated through his analytic parsing of musical “verse,” “form,” and “whole” (102). Historical periodization here is prefixed and punctured by a “post” that signifies an aspirational goal of political struggle rather than a severance from an earlier historical sequence: “So the Blues itself must express the human revelation of life outside, or ‘post’ the plantation, though I guess we ain’t got very much ‘post’ that bad boy yet!” (102). Baraka flags his earlier name as the author of Blues People (1963) alongside a genealogy of thinkers forming a “single yet endlessly diverse African cultural matrix”: “Equiano, Du Bois, Douglass, Diop, Robert Thompson, and LeRoi Jones” (102). Such a weaving clears expository room for Baraka to end on a self-critical addendum. This is, among other things, a Marxian and Mao-inflected protocol.

In an April 1999 talk at the Collège International de Philosophie, Alain Badiou affirms “the century is a figure of the nondialectical juxtaposition of the Two and the One” (“One” 59). This is a mathematically inflected distillation, indexing a key contentious theoretical debate in Chinese Cultural Revolutionary history.⁶ In the light of Politically Red’s luminous analytic and insistence on reading as massification-multiplication two-step, Badiou’s account resounds:

In China, particularly during 1966 and 1967, and in the midst of unimaginable fury and confusion, the Cultural Revolution pits the partisans of these two versions of the dialectical schema against one other. When it comes down to it, there are those who follow Mao—at the time practically in a minority among the Party leadership—and think that the socialist state must not be the policed and police-like end of mass politics, but, on the contrary, that it must act as a stimulus for the unleashing of politics, under the banner of the march towards real communism. And then there are those who, following Liu Shaoqi but especially Deng Xiaoping, think that—since economic management is the principal aspect of things—popular mobilizations are more nefarious than necessary. The educated youth will spearhead the Maoist line. The Party cadres and a great number of intellectual cadres will put up a more or less overt opposition. The peasants will cautiously bid their time. Last but not least, the workers, the decisive force, will be so torn between rival organizations that in the end, from 1967-8 onward, with the State at risk of being swept away in the whirlwind, the Army will be forced to intervene. What ensues is a long period of extremely violent and complex bureaucratic confrontations, not without a number of popular irruptions, right up to the death of Mao (1976), which is swiftly followed by the Thermidorian coup that brings Deng to power. (61)

Baraka echoes variations on these lessons, proliferating by way of a protracted reading praxis. First is the parenthetical mash-up of Marx and the Maestro: “(‘Two is One’ says Monk and Marx)…Dialectical character of what is, negation of the negation, the unity of opposites. The religion must have the music, since ‘The spirit could not descend without song’” (“‘Blues Aesthetic’” 104; ellipsis in original). Second is a materialist mystical analogic riff of speculative play and creative etymological license linking Lenin, Kamite, and Hamite:

The flatted thirds and fifths, the slurs or bending of notes of singer or instrumentalist, is from the antiquity of Kamite cultural character and summation of reality. KAM or HAM means change (the changes, the chemistry—the Chemists or Kamists); Hamites were the first chemists. The change from one quality or element to another. The dialectic of life itself. One is two, as Lenin said, explaining the dialectic in The Philosophical Notebooks. Everything is itself and something else at the same time, i.e., what it is becoming.… One is two. One breaks into Two. (106)

Third is an implied sorting of Blues scholarship and Blues ideology into two warring ideological camps: a more conservative reconciliation of Blues Aesthetic with American pluralism as limit and litmus for bourgeois democracy. Tacit but implied are the writer-thinkers Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Ralph Ellison (despite Ellison’s unique characteristic complexity),⁷ and both Baraka and Brecht slightly modify the Hegelian stages of perception from Phenomenology of Spirit as a form of perception, rationale, and use. The Blues and Black Aesthetic refracts, reflects, and adds onto the “Marxist theory of knowledge” as such a form of perception, rationale, and use:

The Blues is the first come from Black—Red, the last, going to re-come. The cycle the circle. The Red what reading did re-adding reproducing revolution, red, old going out into black and coming black through blue Mood Indigo.… Being and Changes Coming and Going Happy and Sad. It is life’s feeling, and the rising restay of revelation, evolution, raise on up, rah rah rah we say to our sol above and first cheer leader Rah Rah Rah alive is holy the consciousness which ultimately combines KNOW & HOW is Conscience (raised consciousness) perception, rationale, use, as Mao laid out explicating the Marxist theory of knowledge. (107)

In the spirit of Politically Red’s triumvirate protocols for reading—“massification,” “multiplication,” “amplification” (Cadava and Nadal-Melsió 9)—Baraka’s text models mediation by entering the converging Blues-Black Aesthetic. Such a mass expository procedure-process unfolds through a typographic, etymological, literary-cultural-forensic, and poetic-linguistic fever dream: Rising, restay, revolution, raise, rah, Rah. Such consonant groundworks are the discursive and methodological building blocks that anticipate a model of reading “as Mao laid out,” a preamble to the following self-critical addendum:

Actually, in deepening an understanding of American culture (really Pan-American culture), Bruce Franklin’s observation that “African-American culture is central to American culture not peripheral to it” is a key element. When I talked (in Blues People) about surviving Africanisms in Afro-American culture, I did not take into consideration that American culture itself is historically partially constructed of continuing and thematic Africanisms! (Baraka, “‘Blues Aesthetic’” 109)⁸

Baraka’s readings amass in the form a self-criticism directing readers both to his own incomplete reading and to the reading of others—it is a permanent genealogical assembling, splitting, and reassembling of tradition and culture, inheritance and errant departure, center and periphery. It models reading as permanent revolution.

“The life of dialectics is the continuous movement toward opposites,” according to Chairman Mao Talks to the People (212). And as Du Bois writes, “What the Negro did was to wait, look and listen and try to see where his interest lay. There was no use in seeking refuge in any army which was not an army of freedom; and there was no sense in revolting against armed masters who were conquering the world” (Black Reconstruction 57): cultural revolution as revolution incorporates rigid partisan criteria in order to foster improvisational experiment. It zigs and zags, regresses and progresses, attacks and retreats. Cultural revolution unmoors a bourgeois causal calculus that syncs action with consequence. And sometimes, it laughs. Laughter, as Richard Halpern and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue, affectively unbinds. Halpern in his forcefully brilliant Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy reminds readers that “[l]aughter, for Hegel, dissolves, specifically, it dissolves ethical binding into free self-consciousness” (217). And Adorno and Horkheimer (hilariously) theorize how laughter mitigates to the point of dissolution Poseidon’s anger, allowing Odysseus to resume his sequence of returning home.⁹ For Antonio Negri’s Job, God’s laughter “adds a decisive element” to the structure of the book of Job—Job’s juridical appeal pertaining to the questionably just nature of his extreme suffering coupled with God’s laughter impacts the reading (57). It adds a characterological element to the juridical-philosophical-theological dialogue modifying the interpretive stakes.

In furtherance of developing a Hegelian-Lacanian Communist philosophical project, Slavoj Žižek recently expanded on his ongoing readings in the field of physics: “Quantum mechanics defines a hologram as an image of an object which catches not only its actual state but also its interference pattern with other possibilities that were lost when the final state is actualized” (29). This is in the service of proposing what Žižek calls a “quantum-holographic history” in which “retroactivity is rendered visible, and all superpositions that were erased through their collapse become apparent once again” (33). Perhaps Du Bois and Mao’s laughter might be read as a mediated affectivity, an expressive-emotive bridge between the elation of wins and the glum despondency of loss, an “interference pattern” in a revolutionary sequence; whereas wins and losses perpetually in motion fight against being retroactively quantified and tallied. A red-read coupling of Benjaminian “dialectics at a standstill” and “quantum-holographic history”: in its sequence of errant revolutionary unfolding, wins constitute a new set of contradictions and often recalibrate as losses. Losses are multiplicative pedagogic insights, readings informing permanent struggle. The biding of time is a militant strategy and a dynamism propelling a people’s patient refusal to buy or sell their time. Amid the sartorial splendor of overcoats, homburgs, and page boy hats, Du Bois and Chairman Mao affectively form a bond—dialectical reversal is hilarious.¹⁰