4. The Impossibility of White Worlding

In 2020, a fifteen-year-old Black schoolgirl from Hackney in London was strip-searched by Metropolitan police officers while menstruating. They had been called by teachers who had wrongly suspected her of carrying cannabis. As she put it, “I was held responsible for a smell, but I’m just a child.”1 For decades, this phantom aroma has enveloped Black people within the grip of stop-and-search. The violences that conspired in the traces of sillage—the olfactory signature of anti-Blackness—expose the insidiousness of policing Black working-class people in the mundane movement through the world.

We note how quickly anger at this treatment coalesced into counterinsurgency. Calling attention to law returns civil society to policing without excess, for fairness, neutrality, equality, to reify that schools are normatively safe—a space of security and care, as mayor of Hackney Philip Glanville suggested.2 Security is born through policing, not only of police in schools, but of teaching staff conscripted into suspicion and report, of schooling as reproduction of discipline and hierarchy. The violences did not begin in that hostile room guarded by teachers as she was stripped and searched; those violences are originary, rooted not in transgression but in the structuring order of the world.

Abolition that targets only the institution of the police risks focusing on police brutality in the spectacularization of the mundane brutality of policing across the social world. For example, embedded within a police–citizen compact, eruptions of violence become periodically explicit through race riots, police brutality, “extrajuridical” killing, targeted and discriminatory criminalization. Where police violence oversteps this line, liberal critique attempts to suture law and police through a program of reforms that realign police and citizen along the lines of legitimate violence. The institution of the police operates at the cutting edge of policing as form of the world—operative at the threshold of its endless suture.3

June 2020 saw a street party in Brixton, London, invaded by police attempts to shut down and disperse the gathering. Instead, the community forced the police out of the estate, with local residents elatedly remarking that “the police are getting run out of here.”4 Police were chased away while people shouted, “Don’t come round here, bro!” In the process, at least twenty-two police officers were injured, having to abandon a police car that was then broken up. Afterward, the Metropolitan Police Federation bemoaned being “met with hostility from the off.” The anticipation of passivity was ingrained in the impunity of stating that “no-one expects this level of violence and hostility to just erupt at the speed it does towards police. It’s horrendous. . . . It’s not nice to have to go somewhere where someone wants to try and kill you.”5

There is such joy in this hostility—in rendering this space intimidating and unapproachable for the “army of the ends,” as London youth leader Yolanda Lear highlighted.6 In these contexts, we see explicitly how actions like setting a police car alight are understood as violence against property. Instructively, property destruction counts as violence insofar as it is an assault on social relations, which is to say a direct assault on police not only as institution but as social relation.

We see here that in the call to disestablish the police is also the desire to foster forms of community and relation that are not overcoded by policing—that begin to articulate ways of life that destabilize the structures that are prerequisite for property regimes, dispossession, and looting community wealth. While abolition requires at the very least the disestablishment of the police, abolitionism necessarily involves also the annihilation of the colonizer, the overseer, the prison guard, border control—as structure of relation. Because of this, abolition cannot be prefigured and positioned as political project or movement for social inclusion; rather, abolitionism requires a perpetual insurgency against the “army of the ends,” against property, against civil society.

In Louisiana in 2021, a group of Black fathers gathered in the form of “dads on duty” in an attempt to preempt and prevent increasing violence among their children at a local high school. Activist and writer Harsha Walia hailed this as an example of abolition in practice.7 However, the case is instructive in foregrounding the limitations of police abolition insofar as resistance to police can be sutured into the continuation of policing. For example, we might consider how abolition contends with violences that are pernicious and pervasive—that ensure continuing exploitation, precariousness, subsidy, and that seep into our desires and practices of community and care. How could the “dads on duty” exemplify abolition when communities are required to perform care work that does not have the capacity to undo the violences to which they are subjected? How much of this harm reduction is counterinsurgency—especially given that so much of community work is already co-opted into policing? What of the policing that comprises patriarchal and cis-heteronormative modes of interaction and control?

So, for example, where Mariame Kaba argues that “the only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police,” we also need to foreground the necessary operation that constantly founds publics as police. The schools in Louisiana and in Hackney are spaces of extrajudicial captivity prior to the police being called. It is through this perverse proliferation of policing everywhere and without determinable limit that we are enmeshed in worlds of subjection, security, and scrutiny. If we are not only all responsible for policing but policing is the form of the human world as a permanent state of siege, then we should consider how abolitionism might not only evade the structural reassurance of white order but ensure that it is endlessly undone—to focus on how abolition might already embody the impossibility of life in this imperial world.

I want to close by considering how we might situate Fanon’s consideration of invention in the context of abolitionism:

I am not a prisoner of History. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.8

To think with Fanon, let me stay with Doreen Lawrence’s phrase “future remain the same,” together with Marriott’s analysis of this passage, which suggests that Fanon cannot be recruited into a mode of opposition or resistance to history. Developing this argument, Axelle Karera points to how Fanon’s work cannot be understood through frameworks of restitution, restoration, and regeneration.9 If abolition is indexed to the political (as project, or worlding), it is therefore always already overcoded in suturing to an impossible progress. This is to say that any political project of abolition necessarily becomes oriented toward the impossible consolidation of an order even as it attempts to overcome itself. We need to undo not only order but the possibility of ordering—the horizon of possibility that is “the world.” Otherwise, as discussed in the previous chapter, fatal/ism then becomes the only possible register of resistance within the domain of the political—the idea that “future remain the same” becomes enmeshed with the injunction that progress has already been made. This means that we seek, not an end to a unitary world, but an end to worlding itself—of the impossible horizon of a unitary world.10

Where the idea of a world is suggestive of a unity in social totality, I have instead foregrounded the unremitting policing of multiple and intersecting relationships and interactions as its ongoing condition. This world in which everything is police is unlivable by design—it is sustained by expropriation of Black lives, land, and labor and maintained by policing embedded into its very foundation. The world cannot be sutured as world. If it is in the impossible constitution of the world through which categories of human, property, and freedom are constructed, any project through which they would be restored is necessarily a practice of reassurance of that world (which is to say, its policing).

The infinite postponement of anti-Black genocide effectuates everywhere more vicious and yet more petrified violences. As this plantation world tends toward annihilation and antagonism, life support systems operate at the tip of a balancing act between an unlivable world and the machinery of earth’s ruin. If incomplete death is the ongoing condition of possibility for white life, then the violence productive of Blackness is necessarily perpetual. The white world that incomplete death makes possible cannot be fully realized. This foundational dependence both undermines and underpins the drive toward a coherent white social order. With Fanon and Doreen Lawrence, the supposed closure of colonial modernity against those “outside” is its ongoing yet impossible condition.

Though the legislative architecture of colonial order preemptively attempts to dissolve alterity, it was born of contact with the ungraspable, the unorderable, the unspeakable, as that which must be policed as threat to it. Against the impossible suture of the world, I have foregrounded policing across that which is both within and without. This antinomy points toward the realization that the world is impossible—which is to say that capture, control, preemptive annihilation, are not completable projects but require the continued operations of breach and suture. The necessary inclusion of Blackness into colonial modernity reveals that Blackness is produced primarily as protective system for the modern human (i.e., whiteness) whose realization is thereby rendered impossible. (Anti)Blackness is both the condition of the world and also what puts it in crisis.11

I have suggested that the matrix productive of experience is 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, that is anchored in the endless gathering of property as plantation—this lies in the activity of policing that is simultaneously the voiding of play and relation and difference. It is not only that our interactions are corralled and proscribed into a specific mode of access to the world in which dependence on alterity is preemptively renounced. The seemingly “harmonious” nature of much social interaction should be understood to be an effect of the laminated sedimentation of crystallized policing. The impossible “world” of colonial modernity is barely cohesive.

This suggests that while we draw attention to the limitations of political projects and harm reduction, we should also draw attention to the obsession with absolute novelty that plagues structural reassurance as much as reformism. The structure of novelty is dependent on an impossibility that sutures temporality to a dialectical stutter between fatalism and stasis. Valorizing the “radically” new is thus born of a desire to both reify and deny the conditions through which the world itself requires continual founding and refounding.

In this sense, Fanonian invention should not be anticipated as rupture from without. Colonial modernity’s processing of alterity renders otherness impossibly absolute, but difference is mundane and pervasive. This thought points toward the practical, psychic, and social reliance of history’s attempted suturing on the incessant policing of alterity. Fanon’s understanding of invention as rupture in history, as Marriott suggests, is not therefore a rupture within an overcoded and calculable structure of time. Invention cannot merely be that which escapes the calculable, because history itself is everywhere fraught with crisis and rupture.

The previous chapter discussed how the endless perpetuation of emancipation is supposed to read as progress insofar as it indexes the movement across the boundary between slavery and freedom. However, as Binder considers, emancipation might also require the elimination of the boundary itself—so that both slavery and freedom are abolished.12 Expanding through this, abolitionism may be conceived as the elimination of the boundaries and poles produced through a breach sewn into the world as police: that order and disorder, slave and master, colonizer and colonized, law and nature, may be eradicated alike.

Abolitionism therefore necessarily exceeds and divests from teleologies and dialectical resolution.13 In line with the preceding discussion of Fanon, abolitionism, Jared Sexton suggests, could then “never finally be a politics of resurgence, recovery, or recuperation. It could only ever begin with degeneration, decline, or dissolution.”14 Not possible new worlds but rather the beyond, the impossible, abolitionism imagines the yet-to-come that is already present: the after-the-political that occurs also before.15 The drive toward worlding through police cannot suture, cannot shut down the inventions of care that are necessarily always elsewhere—that cannot be delimited because they are there before, after, elsewhere than the violence of police and property. This alterity of futurity that cannot be fully sutured and bound under colonial modernity does not require that we accept the codes of history as unilinear and calculable. Rather, history is born of frenetic violence, but as such, it is fundamentally incapable of accessing or precluding invention.

Nothing less than the endless abolition of worlds—

abolitionism without end/s