1. The World as Police

Just over a decade after Stephen Lawrence’s murder, Azelle Rodney was shot dead in a 2005 London Met police operation. Three police cars were used to block and ram the car in which Rodney was traveling before its tires were shot out. A police officer later identified as Anthony Long then shot Azelle eight times from fewer than two meters away. His body was left on the pavement for longer than sixteen hours while police-media mobilized a discourse of self-defense against a dangerous “gangster.” Only after the family pushed for an inquiry were the police forced to admit that Rodney was unarmed. Witness testimony and incident data records showed that Rodney had not moved in the ways that Long had supposedly misconstrued as reaching for a gun. Footage of Rodney’s murder was later released, in which officers can be heard saying “sweet as, sweet as” as he is executed.

With Wilderson, we might consider the vicious pleasures of Black deaths like Azelle’s through the framework of gratuitous violence. This is a violence the irrational or libidinal excesses of which are considered fundamental to the cohering of civil society and the normative world.1 Contrasted with forms of prejudice and exploitation as comprehensible and contingent forms of violence that might be assuaged through police reforms and equality, gratuitous violence is both incoherent and necessary to the functioning of the world.2

Drawing attention to Wilderson’s relegation of exploitation and material conditions in this explanation, his critics also claim ignorance of the disparate forms of racialization in colonial contexts.3 But, in what follows, I show how the Barbados slave codes attempted to enforce a distinction between violence toward whites prompted by transgressions against prohibitions and law and violence toward Black slaves as gratuitous and without constraint.4 In contrast with slaves, white servants were subject to law and contract through which relative freedoms could be gained and violence mediated. Moreover, the solidification of this distinction and the discharging of the enactment of gratuitous violence to all whites allowed for white civil society to coalesce.

In what follows, by staging a relationship between plantation Barbados and Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment, I suggest that the transformation from European frontier to established world required subjugating violence to be everywhere made pervasive and entrenched. Tiffany Lethabo King writes of how this gratuitous violence consolidated practices established prior even to the Columbian crossing.5 She draws on Wynter’s account of how genocide and enslavement of the Indigenous in the Americas was preceded by African enslavement, sugar plantation structures, deracination, and slaughter. For example, in 1452, African slaves were used to work plantations on colonies like Madeira off the northwestern coast of Africa. These and later plantations on São Tomé provided a blueprint for the emergence and incubation of the plantation–slave complex that would later traverse the globe.6

Wynter suggests that the establishment of Black slavery prior to the Columbian crossing also rendered slavery a code that was embedded into the functioning of the world to which it gave rise.7 Black slavery was significant for both setting in motion plantation economies that formed infrastructures of colonial capitalism but also symbolically consolidating African people as legitimately enslavable.8 Africa and Africans become defined as void and absence: without laws, property, or reason, as “incapable of civilization,” as Kant would later write.9 Both materially and symbolically, African people became Black through violence and terror.10 The “blackness produced through the worlding of 1492,” as Keguro Macharia puts it, determined distinctions in violence made synonymous with the enslavement of Africans.11

I turn to Kant, together with how the slave codes were operationalized in constituting white society, because both are concerned with how a world can be constructed and sutured against a supposed frontier that threatens imminent destabilization.12 The key to both was policing made irreducible to the institutions of political violence and criminalization because it was embedded into the nascent form of the world.13 Where Wilderson insists that this violence is necessary for the world’s coherence, the emphasis in what follows is also on how the necessary inclusion of Blackness in colonial modernity reveals that Blackness is produced primarily through a protective system for white civil society whose ultimate coherence is thereby rendered impossible. White civil society is held together through the pervasive drive to police as an attempt to suture a world that is reliant on that which it sets out to annihilate.

The transatlantic slave trade, colony, and plantation formed the coordinates for the consolidation of colonial modernity. In the process, the Caribbean basin became the engine of wealth for European shifts from mercantilism to industry.14 Though white indentured servants had been transported to the island since English settlement in 1627, Barbados’s sugar mills and plantations were worked primarily by Black African slaves.

Growing and producing sugar was arduous and intensive. Forced to fertilize the land with excrement and urine, in conditions of starvation and grueling work that destroyed their hands, slaves were subject to painful work and early death. Tasks were monotonous, often using gang systems dividing and apportioning labor to maintain discipline. Slaves were whipped, tortured, and killed or worked to death. From underground incarceration in West African forts to the hold and the plantation, these were the sites of absolute subjugation and annihilation: around half of Barbados slaves required replacement every eight years.15

From within this furnace, the 1661 act later known as the slave codes legislated distinctions between servants and slave, with servants’ rights codified and expanded. This made explicit in law distinctions between freemen, servants, and slaves that were already practiced. Rather than thinking of law as an edifice that makes explicit and codifies, I want to consider both what the codes implicitly express and rely on and the material and concrete capacities that are afforded through their abstractions, systems, and institutions.

Violence against indentured servants was mediated by law and tied to punishment, refusal to work, and rebellion. Working in continuity with and development of English labor and legal systems, the indentured had certain rights and could even take their masters to court. So, although the legal system was stacked against them in favor of the plantocracy, servants were subjects of contracts under English law. English indentured servants and convicts on average served fewer than seven years. Though treated severely, they were seen as workers whose bondage to work via contract could enable them to develop rationality and engage in civil order. In other words, underpinning the relationship between white servitude and legal community was a violence that was contingent on transgression and mediated by law and legal officers.

However, Black people stood outside of the law, while their control became the task of all whites.16 That is to say, in contrast with the servant, Black slaves were positioned as object rather than subject of law and without the possibility of gaining freedom through work. Their relationship to violence was not mediated by contract—their existence was knitted together under direct force.17

The codes also explicitly consolidated slaves as Black, using Negro interchangeably with slave. Black people were described as a “heathenish brutish and an uncertain dangerous pride of people,” setting up an attempted equivalency between violence, the Black person, and the slave. This confirms the breach in which, through transatlantic slavery, Black African people were, not figured in terms of complex relationship and difference, but written into the structure of this nascent world as a permanent state of nature: as waste, plague, and threat—as absolute evil, as Fanon wrote.18

Kant, whose work is so often seen as the pinnacle of modernity, provides the coordinates for thinking how the violence and alterity produced through the breach could be brought under a lawlike system.19 A principal problem for colonial modernity lay in its desire to control the relation with alterity such that its dependence on the violent inclusion of non-Europeans would not be destabilizing. Kant pointed to a solution that assumed coherence between the European subject and the world insofar as the world is limited to that which can be dominated and enclosed by that subject.

Though Kant (and the Enlightenment project) emphasize the novelty of alterity, this relationship with alterity must be managed to ensure that the subject of knowledge cannot be destabilized. In arguing for the synthetic a priori, he argues against both rationalism and empiricism that, though input from the world is necessary for the subject to develop new knowledge, that relationship must be mediated through an organizational framework. This framework delimits and conditions experience such that what can be known is limited by a transcendental structure of knowledge—a matrix of possible experience that is necessary for experience as such.20 So, Kant writes that “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.”21 We experience the world as meaningfully ordered, as objects with persistence and in relation, because of an infrastructure of rules that determine the possibility of all objects of experience. Any new information is processed through this field of relations within which all empirical objects must be instantiated such that they can be known at all.

It is not that knowledge is predetermined by reason’s laws (because we also require the addition of experience) but rather that the structuring boundaries of knowledge preshape the way that experience is processed. The idea is that we know the world through this framework, which domesticates alterity while the world is recursively defined through that domestication. We need alterity for that new knowledge to be “new,” but the alterity of the new must be filtered through this framework so that there is no direct contact with the other’s “otherness.”22 This world with which the subject has no contact then appears as delimited and organized insofar as it is constituted by the thinking subject themselves.23 The assumption that the world must correlate to the subject is a process of synthesis in which the other is reduced to legibility with the European frame.

We thereby see the attempt to end contact with alterity apart from within the system produced under Europe. If the world Kant hopes for is “an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits,”24 then, as Quill Kukla suggests, its orderliness is guarantee because our ordering faculties produce the island in the first place—“this island has no outside of the sort that could ever permeate or interrupt it.”25 This defined a chasm between alterity as it is inscribed within the matrix of possible experience and alterity that is rendered absolute—as unknowable and beyond the limits of possible assimilation.

Ashon Crawley writes of how the attempt to legislate on novelty is thus grounded on an impenetrable opacity, with Enlightenment thought dependent on the continued displacement of alterity to make possible a world of seeming coherence, calculability, and rationality.26 As the slave is required for accumulation and transactions in which she are barred from involvement, so the “other” provides the conditions under which synthesis can produce a field of experience upon which it cannot impinge. The violence of the breach was both repudiated and filtered through a limiting process in which a calculable and quarantined “other” can appear as legible within the regime of colonial modernity.27 The legislative architecture of experience is not the exclusion of difference but the attempt to preemptively annihilate and police the alterity upon which the system is dependent. In other words, the drive toward a unified world in correlation with thought is also the continued attempt to engineer a domain that is sutured against the alterity on which it depends.

Consider this movement constitutive of Kant’s domesticated and quarantined alterity in conversation with plantation Barbados. Barbados indexes the attempt to establish a world through the suture of the breach. The transformation from European frontier to established world would write slaves into legible form through white enrichment.

In the interiorization of violence within law, reason, and the attempted knitting together of social order, a world made in common would be made in the congealing of whiteness through and as policing. From a context in which white servants often worked alongside slaves, the collective subjection of slaves was the process through which whiteness cohered—deputizing white servants to capture runaway slaves and work as part of an emerging police force. Attempted marronage of slaves was common in the early seventeenth century. Richard Ligon’s 1657 map of the island shows a European on horseback chasing two escapees in the same year that a “general hunting” day was called against fugitives. This unofficial vigilantism was in effect legislated for through the slave codes, becoming re-formed and reshaped as slave hunting in the form of white police.

Ratifying a collective responsibility for whites to control and capture slaves, patrols were formed to search slave quarters, chase runaways, and watch over gatherings like markets or ceremonies.28 The codes proposed that surveillance systems be put in place, with a registry of plantation slaves and runaways. A ticketing system was used for slaves who were sent off-plantation, with those failing to provide them whipped and their masters fined. Servants who had completed their contracts were often employed by plantation owners to catch runaway slaves. Captured slaves could be lawfully whipped, have their noses slit or faces branded, or be executed, and if a master killed an African slave in the context of punishment, then no crime was committed. Punishments for indentured servants found off-plantation were significantly reduced, while the fee for capturing an African slave was increased, with any servant capturing a runaway granted relief from all future service.

The 1661 codes incentivized the murder of runaway slaves by their masters, because if a runaway slave was punished with death, the master would collect an indemnity against their loss of value. The laws did not warrant recompense for capture of the indentured, whereas capture of runaway slaves was rewarded with ten pounds of sugar for each mile the slave was escorted back to their master.29 The later 1688 Act for the Governing of Negroes clarified this expansive form of policing in the suture of white order through the visceral presence of anti-Black violence: “if any poor small free-holder or other person kill a Negro or other Slave by Night, out of the Road or Common Path, and stealing, or attempting to steal his Provision, Swine, or other Goods, he shall not be accountable for it.”30

It is clear here that the law preserved in the slave codes did not represent a coherent or rational world but rather a fraught and anxious transformation of brutish violence into a consolidated order oriented toward limit and proscription as rights and rule. Law- and police- making were central to the closure of the world around the continuation and redaction of abject violence. The slave codes entrenched civil society as a fraught system of threat, risk management, and viciousness.

The conscription of all white people to uphold authority over Black people, whether they owned slaves or not, was also the condition under which whites became subject to law in the possibility of transgression against it.31 The consolidation of the plantocracy on Barbados allowed for violence to be remitted against servants and those who had completed their contracts (apart from legal transgressions against the plantation system). A nascent proletarianized class began to emerge insofar as the social whole was charged with enacting violence against Black people without cause or legal respite. Whiteness allowed access to land and resources through contract and completion of indenture but also through the collective policing of slaves. That is to say, the process of clarifying the rights of the indentured under the law was one and the same process through which anti-Black violence was made not only permissible for all whites but actively prescribed.

The legal and social practices that consolidated a regime of violence against the slave (with no status within the world under creation) simultaneously functioned to enable the accumulation of rights and capacities for all whites. The codes wrote in to law a group not only protected under its rights but, in the same process, deputized to police all others. As Wilderson suggests, we see here that civil society coalesced around violence against Black people.32 The violence of contact with Black people figured as state of nature was the vehicle through which normativity—of legitimated violence, law, civility, the European—became possible.33 This follows Tea Troutman’s assertion that “it is the slave which precedes the colony/nation-state, and not the colonial order that produces the slave.”34

All whites were to enforce the codes through surveillance and coercion, being required to live on or enter plantations and search quarters, as well as inflicting punishment and martial law on suspected runaway slaves and those found without passes. The consolidation of colonial order as white community was the creation of a collective police force. A world in common had congealed as if a skein had been pulled over abject violence in an attempt to suture and ground.

The world produced is not contingently one of anti-Black containment. Rather, consolidating a world as suture of the breach is necessarily dependent on subjugating violence everywhere made pervasive and entrenched. This world’s seeming stability was produced through incessant work against threat, fractious and vulnerable. If Black people became Black insofar as they were subject to gratuitous violence, then white people became white through the knotted tensions of desire to be the police, to be beyond the police, and to be policed.

I want to think about the implications of the embedding and universalization of this white collective mastery in the constitution of freedom. Many Enlightenment accounts invoke the image of the slave as negative infraction of liberty, with freedom defined as self-possession.35 Kant (following Rousseau) is primarily concerned to think of autonomy as mastery over the state of nature such that it cannot possibly bleed into the realm of law, reason, and order. As such, he requires that autonomy have no source other than universalized reason: “it is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another.”36 For Kant, we are autonomous reasoning beings insofar as we are bound to rules of our own making.

But, while reason’s prerequisite is the absolute disconnection between the space of reasons and the space of causes, it turns out that this disconnection must be unendingly policed. In brief, ensuring that such rules are universally valid relies on “the subjection of inclination to the rule of reason and its demand for universalizability.”37 The autonomy of reason is thus set against corruption by the particular, contingent, and subjective. For Kant, it is possible to escape the metaphorical slavery of inclination and external intrusion on our actions by nurturing and enforcing rationality and decreasing the power of that which lies outside it, which is to say, the state of nature. If freedom is sutured to order and ordering as the condition of being in the world, then one becomes free only under submission to law and limit and in vigilance against the insurgency of nature and desire. The frontier is at once universalized and internalized.

Because, for Kant, anybody existing outside of a (European) nation-state embodies the state of nature, they represent a threat to order. As he writes, “[somebody] in the state of nature deprives me of this security; even if he doesn’t do anything to me—by the mere fact that he isn’t subject to any law and is therefore a constant threat to me.”38 Forever in the state of nature, Black people are positioned not simply as antithesis to the lawful subject whose freedom would be guaranteed under a social order thought to be produced through lawfulness. In other words, Black and Indigenous people—slaves and colonized—were a perpetual threat.39 The threat is not limited to political sovereignty but, as disordering alterity, could open out thought and law—destabilizing both—and so also undoing freedom.40

In this sense, the Kantian policing of reason is also a war against that which lies outside of seeming rational control.41 Our relationship with the “other,” for Kant, is supposedly set up as an a priori disconnection from that alterity that could sway the subject from law and norm. But, in fact, this relationship is required to be one of perpetual suspicion, policing, defense, and disavowal. This requires an endless struggle against that which is disordering and pathological and which is ensconced in those “lawless savages” who, for Kant, have a fundamental incapacity to think.42 The space of representation (the world) and the freedoms available within it, while supposedly produced as and through a rule-like matrix, thus results from incessant policing. What emerges as the space of reasons and freedom, to follow Anthony Farley, is the form of repressed desire and violence.43 Rather than accepting the absence of law in violence, and the absence of violence in law, policing is fundamental to the operations of law and norm and its attempted repression.

Superficially, this line of thought parallels Foucault’s. For example, Foucault similarly accepts that freedom is interwoven with policing, where policing is the form that the social world takes. Moreover, law as the expression of sovereign power is submerged and internalized within modernity’s “code of normalization.”44 This dispersal of policing through normalization and channeling of behavior operates as an ordering function that works as a kind of historicized version of Kant’s transcendental, rather than as a kind of repression of disorder (i.e., a thin blue line).45

However, not only does the Foucauldian reduction threaten to detooth our understanding of policing so that it cannot adequately deal with abject violence and state murders like Azelle Rodney’s but, as Alexander Weheliye details, this reading of modernity is sanitized from colonial domination and violence.46 This leads Foucault to assume an ontology of the social across which hierarchy is distributed, rather than to acknowledge how Blackness was produced through violence as its necessarily incommensurable exterior. Hence Foucault is concerned with a European subject confronted with power, subject to social force, and compelled toward self-policing, while simultaneously “naturalizing racial difference by placing ‘other’ races outside Europe.”47

For example, Black people were legible to colonial modernity as naturalized and permanent slave: “Americans and negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus are good only as slaves.”48 Black people, according to Kant, “have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous,” and so, without “capacity to act in accordance with concepts and principles,” they are by nature not just unfree but beyond even the possibility of freedom.49 Here, as Ronald Judy argues, Kant makes an illegitimate appeal to a transcendental account of Blackness, so operating as a necessary condition of thought itself.50 In disavowing this condition of Kant’s modernity, Foucault repeats the Kantian disavowal of the exterior on which the space of reason (or the space of norms) relies.

As a result, Foucault follows Kant in suggesting that there is no “outside” to the space of power, which is exercised “only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free,” so disavowing the possibility of a radical exterior to the social realm.51 In the suggestion that the social is carceral, then, Foucault repeats the Kantian exclusion of that which is required for the social to exist, while dissolving collective social and state domination and abjection into circulations of power. As Joy James writes,

in Discipline and Punish Foucault remains mute about the incarcerated person’s vulnerability to police beatings, rape, shock treatments, and death row. Penal incarceration and executions are the state’s procedures for discarding the unassimilable into an external inferno of nonexistence.52

Where Foucault considers how policing coalesces into norms that form webs of meaning and control, we see here that this normative structure is possible only through the ongoing reproduction and disavowal of a prophylactic blockage of an exterior that is its prerequisite. The normative world shaped by policing has, as its requirement, a violence to protect its boundaries while those boundaries are simultaneously held together and obscured by that violence. Foucault’s “dark Kantianism” cannot see, therefore, how the structure of the world relies on and reproduces a normalized social field whose stabilization results from an endless requirement of violence.

The presupposition and naturalization of Black people as slaves in Kant’s work allow for the continuation of violence under collective and legal formations of the kind exemplified earlier, while that violence is made unthinkable as violence because it is prerequisite for rational autonomy. As Farley suggests, “reason, then, has a politics that looks like lawlessness, chaos, havoc, a war of all against all.”53 The supposed impurities of subjective inclination, desire, and concrete particularity index an insecurity in the structure of autonomy that always must be staved off: the fantasies and material realities of anti-Black violence are both inscribed and redacted from within the structures of reason itself.54

With freedom set against a metaphorical slavery, the violences of slavery were disavowed in the same moment as collective subjection was consolidated. As such, the mass manumission of slaves cohered toward what Guyora Binder terms the “slavery of emancipation.”55 For instance, Barbados did not have enough land for emancipated Black people to work anywhere other than on the plantations where they had been enslaved. Practically all its 166 square miles were organized into sugar estates. After emancipation, the “free” were required to endure arduous labor without recompense and to remain on the sites of the plantations while under contract of apprenticeships. Perhaps predictably, then, as Caree Banton describes, apprentices were subject to constant surveillance, control, and heavily conditional freedoms.56 Black people were faced with a barrage of laws restricting movement that were supposed to help them “realize” that they would be best simply living and working on their former plantations.57

Across emancipation, as I discuss in chapter 3, there remained a core requirement for whites to keep control over Black people. Widespread but relatively low-level strikes had taken place in 1838, with workers refusing contracts and working conditions. One result was the 1840 Contract Law, which effectively bound laborers to plantations, transforming the supposedly “free wage worker into a ‘located’ plantation tenant.”58 The law attempted to keep laborers working on plantations and allowed that they could be imprisoned or made homeless from the tied “chattel houses” if they were found to be insubordinate or not to be working in accord with the planter’s desires. With the prospect of earning higher wages on nearby colonies, at the end of apprenticeship, Black people did begin to emigrate. This immediately prompted calls to save the island from desertion and eventually led to the 1836 Emigration Act of Barbados.59 In writing the act, Barbadian planters, in conjunction with the British, barred recruitment by potential employers and endeavored to imprison former slaves on the island.60

The island’s boundaries were traversed with an expansive apparatus of surveillance and control.61 Plantation and prison frequently became practically one and the same, with people often ending up working in the same spaces from which they had been removed. With approximately 501 apprentices per square mile, emancipation ensured the perpetuation of Barbados itself as “an island prison.”62 Postslave society saw the expansion of policing and laws restricting the movement of Black people. As such, Walcott considers that emancipation did not allow formerly enslaved people to move from their surroundings; they were instead faced with laws against idleness, vagrancy, and movement, all of which extended their enclosure.63

This governance of Black people reads as distinct from slavery only if we also accept that emancipation recapitulated the supposed colonial movement from state of nature to civil society. Instead, with policing the form of civil society, this inscription of violence into the production of normativity and social life became etched into the desires and pleasures of whiteness and recoded under law and reason. As slave society was transformed into postslavery colony, the equivalency set up in law of Black person with slave and chattel was definitively extended to the “criminal.” The extension was already implicit in the codes, becoming consolidated insofar as criminalization became the condition of possibility of Black movement and antagonism toward collective property regimes. To be a little more precise, that Black people were equivalent with “criminal” was palpable wherever they attempted to exercise freedoms going beyond the condition of the slave.

With formal abolition and emancipation, the criminal became a central technology through which the functional relation of the slave could be preserved in Barbados. The translation of brutish violence under law, as Saidiya Hartman describes, had invalidated enslaved people’s agency in the same moment that agency was recognized only insofar as it took the form of criminality.64 The criminalization of slave resistance was written into being both as pervasive atmosphere of potential disorder and as contingent eruptions of rebellion. It is within this hovering tension and threat that the criminal emerged not only as an omnipresent threat of disorder and chaos but primarily as a way of making legible the functional position of the slave in a domesticated, imperialist environment.

The role of a nascent formalized criminal justice system was to create substantive linkages between Black people and plantation labor. This rested on the idea of ingrained criminality without possibility of redemption: the emancipated were effectively made criminal, with the embodiment of criminality evident insofar as they attempted to operate in any role other than that of the slave. To follow Farley, Black criminality becomes part of the means through which slavery is perfected—that is to say, transformed, embedded, and disavowed—within civil society:

The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery.65

The alleged antinomy I discussed at the start of this book resonates wherever attention is drawn to how so-called liberal democracies are ceaselessly violent. Many writers have sought to consider whether Kant’s purported universalism unravels under the weight of partiality given his statements regarding Black and Indigenous people. The Enlightenment project is then charged either with a radical anticolonial cosmopolitanism or the imposition of universalizing hegemony across Europe’s colonial expansion.66

Instead, I have shown that the so-called freedoms of colonial modernity not only depended on the unfreedoms of others but produced a world in which others’ freedoms cannot even be figured. This reading is at odds with any criticism of Kant as excluding non-Europeans from a universalizing account of reason and civility. Because the violences of the state of nature exist prior to the supposed order of freedom and law, Kant is, instead, driven by the desire to show that Europeans are exempted from that violence such that reason and law may be secured for them. This shifts focus toward how alterity was both produced as infinite threat and domesticated as a function that continues to stabilize colonial order as policing.

In Kant and Barbados, the problem of the frontier is resolved through preemptive immunity from contingency and disorder.67 If the idea of the thin blue line depends on the manufacture and protection from a remainder of violent alterity inscribed along frontiers, here that frontier would be internalized such that the breach is sutured a priori. But as we’ve seen, any redemption from disorder required to preemptively sever colonial modernity from absolute alterity is recovered only through the incessant limiting of the world against a supposedly inherent and immovable evil whose impossible absorption is the true ground of reason. This allowed reason to seem to be its own progenitor and legislator by determining boundaries that are internalized to ensure that danger, threat, and chaos are voided, because no thing can lie outside the world as relational totality.

In staging a relationship between Barbados and Kant’s Enlightenment, we have seen the prefiguration of the distribution of violent relationships between master and slave, conquistador-settler and Indigenous, becoming embedded into the structure of civil society.68 The supposed absorption of the slave into legal frameworks was the precondition for its continuation and afterlives, while the naturalization of slavery as equivalent with Black people made them unthinkable as part of social relations.69 This is to say, the attempted universalization of mastery remains an unthinkable presupposition of an imagined social order whose brutish violence could thereby be analytically known and affectively felt as rational and lawful.

As David Marriott describes, Blackness is “both excluded and imperiously demanded by Western reason.”70 Attending to the Barbadian context centers how intimate tensions of dependency and annihilation confirm that any attempted suture of slave society also indexes not just the possibility but also the impossibility of that social order. A white world of order and rule is not possibly completable in the presence of Blackness that cannot be eliminated. Blackness does not operate as “other” in antithesis to this world but as ever-present crisis. Colonial modernity is reliant on violent inclusion within a global order whose completion is thereby made impossible—the alterity on which Kant’s entire project relies is that which it must preemptively annihilate. If there is no place in the world for those upon whom the world depends, then these relationships of dependency are a fragile setup that simultaneously requires the annihilation and the multiplication of enslaved people.71

The preservation of whiteness—of what is considered civility, rationality, freedom—requires the interminable production and policing of Blackness. Tyrone Palmer, drawing on Césaire, elucidates this tension:

Blackness functions as the raw material of the World, as what makes the World possible even as it is denied a place or ground within it. . . . the World, as a metonym for colonial modernity, is in a very material sense built on the expropriation of Black labor (in the material and psychic senses), while also being marked by Blackness more broadly as its constitutive outside. . . . Europe’s domination of and through the World depends on Blackness occupying its underside.72

What resulted was the formation of a collective order on a foundational aporia—the violence of this staving off of genocide, an endless protraction of what Fanon points to as a perpetual yet necessarily “incomplete death.”73

Consider the mechanisms through which this protracted genocide can persist—of deracination, hyperexploitation, dispossession, extinction—while naturalized, redacted, and forged into the stability of a supposedly liberal world order. In protracted genocide, this world is required to continually relate to that which is constitutively destabilizing. Here proximities and segregations are enfolded under the incessant displacement of violent relation by filtering the terms of that relation through absolute control (domestication) and absolute alterity (generative disorder). The breach continues to provide purpose in filtration, regulation, and limitation to produce a world whose incapacity to process contingency, alterity, and plenitude is its supposed advantage.74

The resulting staving off of genocide produces a species of violence and vehemence against those whose spectral presence haunts the Kantian thought–world relationship.75 The world is produced not only as horizon of possibility but as cage. As such, this self-imposed incarceration, as Kukla puts it, indexes not only the mastery of a specific and secure domain but also a drive toward imperial re-creation as global subjugation.76 This had set in motion a containment strategy as program of domination: colonial modernity required that police have no determinable limit across our carceral island world.

We learn from Barbados that the slave functioned to knit together whiteness through the relation of supposedly absolute submission and discretionary violence from all whites. Where the rights of whiteness were conferred in distributed and collective subjection, Blackness was positioned as everywhere a negation and threat to whiteness. Barbados clarifies how the violence productive of a white community as police became legible by redacting the violence through which the slave was made perpetually outside of the domain of civil society. The collective subjection engendering “the submission of the slave to all whites”77 was the means through which “whites” as collective order would be crafted.

However, while considering, with Wilderson, how that violence has been necessary to the world’s coherence, I have also emphasized how this world becomes meaningful only insofar as it is unable to confront its own inevitable negation. The coherence of meaning itself comes undone through the very conditions supposed to provide that coherence. The insecurity at the core of the regulative world undoes the assertion of the categorical world from the ground up.78 While the supposed limits of thought are folded back onto a world thus supposedly given integrity, this resultantly unsuturable form is saturated with failure. What is required, therefore, is a constant distraction by “symbolic fears and punishments,” as David Marriott puts it.79 And so, as Marriott suggests, whiteness acts as “safeguard against any confusion or panic and precisely because it is irredeemably exposed to both at the level of need and desire.”80 This is not to reify whiteness but rather to note that its aporetic convolutions intertwine to produce fractious panic and insecurity as conditions of an unachievable security.

Insofar as whiteness is incapable of forming a world (because Kant’s island is a mirage), the matrix productive of experience is then neither a metaphysical nor a transcendental structure—it is an arrangement of life whose form is police. The security of meaning and law, progress and reason, is a fantasy whose possibility and impossibility is violence. Born through a preemptive retreat, white-security-as-worlding is incorrigibly grounded in the Blackness it ceaselessly produces and abjures. The desires of whiteness are thus arranged in the form of anti-Blackness such that incessant policing is mistaken for privilege and pleasure.

Despite Kant’s pretensions, we see that this world and its worlding—however it appears—is not a coherent, stable, and civil order: it is held together as police. Because the literal blood and sand of the colonized continue to be the grounds of white life, the continuation and consolidation of violence and terror form productive conditions of our world and white kinship within it. This has required the omnipresence of police built into the formation of society and the world itself.

We have been forced to partake in worlds of subjection—a modernity dream in which freedoms index collective mastery, justice indexes depravity, and reason indexes the fractious indexing of thought to a myopic world. Policing reaches into the ways subjectivities have been formed in control, scrutiny, and limit. What results is a situation in which we cannot practically experience or even imagine worlds free from policing. Within this world, freedom is a cage.