The
Universe of The Immeasurable Want of Light Explained:
An Inadequate Primer
We
are flung, at the outset of The Immeasurable Want of Light,
into a spindle-armed, dark matter galaxy where a kaleidoscopic whirl
of human history and fantasy circles around us against an infinite
field of Blackness. This cultural cosmos is at once brilliant and
blinding. Just as references, characters, and actions seem to be
building into a cogent statement about existence, race, or
civilization, an unpredictable transformation of form or function
baffles our attempts at clear meaning making or interpretation.
The purposefully
dense entanglements of cultural, historical, geographic, cosmological
and scientific allusions that buttress The Immeasurable Want of
Light make the identification
and isolation of such facets, in order to better understand the play,
a self-defeating exercise. The pervasive injection of cultural
allusions alongside original creative inventions calls into question
the legitimacy of the former's vaunted position by displaying their
commonalities and exposing the permeability of the boundary between
them; reconstituting the canon is a means to freeing it from the
capitalistic, oppressive clutches of artistic origination. When John
Cage's 4'33” of
silence is filtered through the black body rather than a piano and
orchestra, it is not to propel an acute argument about the
avant-garde in music history but rather, when presented with a
multitude of other examples that stretch across time and philosophy
and aesthetics, is meant to refresh and re-frame our ideas about the
scope and reach and visibility of Blackness and that black body.
But
amid this tumultuous swirl of cultural ephemera, there are a few
concrete, definable pillars—ideas, historical figures, considered
paradigms—upon which the play's meaning might be caught resting, if
only for a moment.
Scaffolding
the universe of the play much like it does our own, dark matter, and
the changes in scientific thinking that were necessary to
conceptualize it, provides a physical analogy to the ontology of
Blackness and the processes by which Blackness has been defined by
negation and the fundamental paradigm shifts in culture necessary to
render the invisible black lived-in body visible.
Dark
matter, one of the key components to current cosmological models, is
a form of mass characterized by its unique relationship to light,
namely that the two do not directly interact, rendering it invisible
to ordinary means of observation. As finding something that can only
be observed indirectly is unlikely, dark matter was not discovered
until its existence was necessitated by Einstein's famous Theory of
Relativity. Very basically, Einstein's theory explained how light,
mass, and gravity interact, describing how the path of light is bent
towards mass by gravity. But, while Einstein's theory accurately
described the behaviors of light and gravity for the most part, it
couldn't account for two things. First, the expansion of the universe
outward from the Big Bang should gradually be slowing due to diffuse
gravitational forces. In fact, observations have shown that the
expansion of the universe is not behaving uniformly and is in fact
speeding. Second, when light is observed to bend as it passes through
the cosmos, it is bending more than the mass we can observe would
suggest. To account for these discrepancies, scientists postulated a
number of theories but none has taken hold more than the existence of
dark energy and dark matter.
Dark
energy is the repellent force that provides the means for our
universe to be expanding at an increasing rate rather than slowing or
contracting. The staggering amount of energy required to do so means
that the current cosmological model predicts around 68% of our
universe to be nothing but dark energy. There are many theories as to
what this dark energy actually is—an inherent property of empty
space and the result of more empty space spontaneously coming into
existence, the result of virtual particles that flicker in and out of
existence, or some pervasive dynamic energy fluid or field—but
there is no clear consensus in the scientific community as to which
explanation is most correct if any.
The
remainder of the universe is made up of ordinary matter and dark
matter. Again, according to the same cosmological models, we find
that ordinary matter can only constitute around 5% of the observable
universe, meaning that nearly 27% of the entire universe is dark
matter, or utterly invisible and mostly undetectable to us. Through
the use of equipment like the Hubble Space Telescope, the effect of
this invisible mass on light in our galaxy and galaxies far beyond
can be observed. This has revealed some of dark matter's mysteries,
like that it is unevenly distributed across galaxies, but much
remains totally unknown about it other than the necessity of its
existence, unless the cosmological model is fundamentally flawed.
It
is in this effort to manifest the previously invisible visible, in
definition through negation, in the the great amount of time and
energy it cost to to develop new paradigms that could discover what
was already there, that we find the essential analogy to Blackness
and the lived-in black body. Specifically, The Immeasurable
Want of Light presents a
kaleidoscopic view of human history and cultural momentum and asks us
to see an ever present Blackness that is often ill-defined by a
negative opposition to Whiteness but here is unbounded by any
prevailing definition. As with dark matter, assumed paradigms
relegated the black body's contributions to the cosmos as marginal,
invisible, until progress demanded a more full accounting and
determined those marginal effects to be in fact essential and
ubiquitous.
The
other major structural element upon which expounding may offer some
measurably better understanding of the play is the use and reuse of
notable figures Fred Moten, Hilton Als, and Nell Painter. All three
of them are serious artists, academics, and writers whose works plumb
the philosophical conditions and existential quandaries of black
identity, queerness, and history—as personal self-study and as a
construction set against or apart from an assumed white society.
Fred
Moten's voluminous body of writings spans from poetry and essays on
Jazz and Glenn Gould to serious discussions of Frantz Fanon and the
western canon of philosophers. His writing is extremely dense both
in its allusive quality and discursive terminology,often centering
around his identification of and rejection of the notion that
blackness is a set of impositions on the body and lived experience
from the outside,
One way to investigate the lived
experience of the black is to consider what it is to be
dangerous—because one is, because we are (Who? We? Who is this we?
Who volunteers for this already given imposition? Who elects this
imposed affinity? The one who is homelessly, hopefully less and
more?) the constitutive—supplement. What is it to be an irreducibly
disordering, deformational force while at the same time being
absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form? This is
not the same as, though it does probably follow from, the troubled
realization that one is an object in the midst of other objects, as
Fanon would have it (Fred Moten, The Case of Blackness
180).
Thematically, his inclusion in The
Immeasurable Want of Light follows
from this observed paradox, that blackness by definition threatens to
disrupt society's foundations while also being a necessary condition
for those norms to exist in the first place, the dark matter of
civilization.
Hilton
Als is best known for his popular essays, theater and arts criticism,
and position among the New York literati. He is known for his grand
sociopolitical theorizing but also his capability to translate those
proclamations into personal terms,
Americans
live, still, in an atmosphere of phantasmagorical genocide—we kill
each other with looks, judgments, the fantasies that white is better
than black and that blackness is bestial while being somehow more
“humane”—read mentally inferior—than whiteness (Hilton Als
“The Sugar Sphinx” Vogue, 2014).
While
he is not shy about discussing race, his writing often bristles with
a tension that strains against the constraint that he, as a black
man, must discuss race. The desire to move past that reflexive
expectation of blackness, to be free from the endless hamster wheel
of black-white discourse, to arrive where there can be no
expectations of blackness, is a perfect encapsulation of the
expansion and diffusion of personal, social, and historical
consciousness presented by The
Immeasurable Want of Light.
Like
our other two figures, Nell Painter's inclusion in the play is in
large part based off the essence of her work. As a historian, much of
her work charts the rise of race and race theories in American
society, offering clear insights into their artificiality, the
intentions behind their implementation, and most hopefully their
impermanence,
Today
we think of race as a matter of biology, but a second thought reminds
us that the meanings of race quickly spill out of merely physical
categories. Even in so circumscribed a place as one book, the
meanings of white race reach into concepts of labor, gender, and
class and images of personal beauty that seldom appear in analyses of
race. Work plays a central part in race talk, because the people who
do the work are likely to be figures as inherently deserving the toil
and poverty of laboring status. It is still assumed, wrongly, that
slavery anywhere in the world must rest on a foundation of racial
difference. Time and again, the better classes have concluded that
those people deserve their lot: it must be something withing them
that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind
of reasoning as it relates to the black race, but in other times the
same logic was applied to people who were white; especially when they
were impoverished immigrants seeking work (Nell Painter, The
History of White People xi)
Blackness
is often defined in opposition to whiteness. How that whiteness came
to be and what it actually comprises is often not discussed. Here
Painter chips away at the idea that whiteness is itself an assumable
totality of the things that are not black while simultaneously
exposing that neither identity is biologically or materially
inevitable.
The
text of the play reveals none of these parallels directly by
foregoing any mentions of their prolific careers, but like dark
matter, the indirect effects of these philosophies can be found
infused throughout The
Immeasurable Want of Light.
The irreverent decoupling of these great thinkers from identifiable
signifiers of their works and achievements is yet another means by
which the play explodes the definitions and visibility of blackness.
By freeing these characters from the often dehumanizing
monumentalizing—a burden brought on by a history of oppression and
repression—that accompanies black notoriety, the solemnity that we
might expect from them is absent, replaced by a steady stream of
banal bickering, sly flirtations, and practiced drinking.
These
few markers could not encompass some total explanation of the The
Immeasurable Want of Light.
The depth and breadth of form and substance that the play engages
with makes a comprehensive dissection unachievable, like dark matter
it can only be arrived at indirectly. But to help on that roundabout
journey, look for the philosophical signposts left by these major
structural and thematic elements and that may point you back in the
right direction should you find yourself lost in the cosmic sea.
