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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:01.62)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Michael Sawyer, Professor of African American Literature and Culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. And we're here today to talk about his book, The Door of No Return, Being as Black. Dr. Sawyer, wonderful to have you on today.
Michael Sawyer (00:20.664)
Hey PJ, it's great to be back. really appreciate the time.
PJ Wehry (00:24.19)
Yeah, I really enjoyed our last conversation. looking forward to this one. And so just to get us started, why this book?
Michael Sawyer (00:31.768)
So this book is probably actually three, if not four books that I was thinking about. So first, I'd always wanted to write a book about Toni Morrison's philosophical position, right? That's expressed through her novel practice. So that was kind of one project I had that I had been working through through a series of essays and also teaching grad seminars on Morrison's work. Second book was one on the black aesthetic that, you know, obviously Morrison's part of that larger conversation.
to begin to understand the implications of black aesthetic practices as both philosophical and theoretical technologies. The third book was, and this happened as COVID started, right? I was like, I'm stuck in the house. I'm just gonna read Hegel again and try to understand why. Right, it kind of like, it was gonna get worse before it got worse, right? So I was stuck in the house. So I figured I'd just go back through the whole thing again, right? To kind of get a fix on.
the kind of almost omnipresence of Hegel's kind of dialectic in the middle of Africa thought, right? So I started writing the last book, the Hegel book and realized that, you know, I'm not by any stretch of imagination trying to get involved in the Hegel discussion at the level of, you know, the kind of Hegel experts, Pippin, you know, my colleague here, my colleagues here at Pitt, et cetera. But I had something to say in particular because what I was looking for was to understand
a very, very discreet argument, right? How Hegel's dialectic and Hegelian thinking broadly defined, outlined the parameters of what I understood as the world of anti-blackness, right? And so from that perspective, as I kind of wrote that section, I sent it around to a group of people whose opinions I really respect and I send my work in very early stages around the people. And the feedback I got is like,
What are you talking about? Do you really want to write a book on Hago? I'm like, not really. And that helped me kind of think through the way in which what I really wanted to do was figure out how these other systems of thinking, Black aesthetics and Toni Morrison in particular, related directly to or were in response in some ways to what Hago understood about the world into which he observed Black people operating or not operating from his perspective as non-historical actors. So I kind of went back around.
Michael Sawyer (02:55.758)
and was thinking very carefully with Morrison at that point and came across her essay in sources of self-regard where she talks about, where she takes on Du Bois kind of directly and Du Boisian dialectics, which I think are intimately related to Hegelian dialectics and says that kind of double consciousness is a strategy, a telos basically, right? And that there's another way to the world and that, and in doing that, there's a third world that exists.
PJ Wehry (03:19.261)
Mmm.
Michael Sawyer (03:25.41)
that is that in my reading of what Morrison proposes is a world that's non dialectically related to where blackness and whiteness are not dialectically related to each other. What I understand stood that to be is the notion of a self-authorizing sovereign blackness. So I started over again from that perspective and realized that what I really had believed for a long time and some of my other work had been gesturing at is that black aesthetic practices and aesthetics kind of generally
are themselves philosophical statements. don't necessarily need, they can certainly have a philosophical lens with which to look at them, but they can also stand on their own as philosophical statements. So I took Morrison's statement, juxtapose that against Du Bois's notion of what I call tripartite self-consciousness that runs through obviously the ideas that he exposes in Soul of Black Folk to kind of ride with what that third world would look at. So the book is a speculative.
philosophical theoretical text, it just wonders how do we get to the threshold of the world that Morrison proposes and in doing so what practices do we already have at our disposal to help us assemble them in a particular way in order to kind of reach that and whether we had seen, if we look differently with that mindset, if we've seen other thinkers already gesturing at this possibility. So that's the kind of impetus of the text.
PJ Wehry (04:52.829)
Yeah, thank you. And just as a brief kind of side note, you know, I have this podcast that's interdisciplinary, largely categorized as philosophy. But my first love is literature. And it was through my love of literature, I was like, this is saying true things. And then my English professor is like, no, you know, their theory was a little shaky. Like, literature never says true things. It's always, you know, it's always false. And I was like, no, I think, you know,
And so then getting into philosophy and being told that philosophy is about propositions, logical propositions. That's one way of thinking about it. One way is kind of these first person monologues. then, but, and it's interesting to see different philosophers respond to this, that when we see something like, obviously Tony Morrison, as you said, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Dostoyevsky, all these, it's like, this is...
This is heavyweight philosophy. It's in it's instantiated in a different way and it's but it's accomplishing something meaningful in its own medium Anyways, I That gets me excited. So one thank you. I'm excited about this Can you explain a little bit more about? The the three worlds and I am I right in I feel like there's some
crossover from your previous book on Africana temporality, right? Like there's a before, a middle, and an after in some ways. so, or before, beginning, middle, and end. I don't know where, anyways. So can you talk a little bit about what those three worlds are and how they exist? I mean, I wish we could put up the diagrams you have. I found that helpful, but I still have to hear it from you.
Michael Sawyer (06:22.926)
separate out.
Michael Sawyer (06:44.905)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. So for me, the diagram is really helpful for me because I'm kind of a mechanical thinker. My undergraduate work was in engineering, basically. So that kind of makes sense to me. And so, you know, for better or for worse, it helps me understand it. And some sometimes it becomes difficult for people in our field, you know, kind of literature. Humanity is broadly defined to kind of grapple with that. But for me, it's really helpful. So I'll try to walk through it. So the argument that I'm making is that
The middle passage basically serves as the point of entry to what we understand now as the anti-black world. That we can make that linear if we need to, but it's really not necessary. Just suppose that at that point, the world changes in a particular kind of way. Like there are new rules of how people interact, the globe changes. And the argument I made in the first book was that
that marginalized figures actually exist in kind of an altered temporal state because of that, right? Where death and life kind of overlap, which causes all kinds of difficulties with situating yourself as a subject. So to me, that naturally raises the question, is what was the world kind of before the Middle Passage, right? So, I'm saying in this argument what I propose in the book is that I call that kind of black world prime, which means that there was a world in which the notion of
Black people situate themselves dialectically against white people was not necessary because it was kind of internally coherent. You can go back to the ancients if you want. We can talk about ancient Egypt, know, Tahotep's arguments and his text, or we can even more recently, we can think about the Dogon, like conversations with Ogatamele, where they have a complete cosmology that's unrelated to the way we understand the world, right? From a Western perspective, or even a world that has encountered the Western perspective.
So that's seen obviously, right? So the third world comes in from a perspective what Morrison is proposing is that if we begin to non-dialectically relate ourselves to ourselves, then there's a new perception of how the world exists that picks up both the existence of what I understood as Black world prime, the kind of anti-Black world, and then is a place of crossing where Morrison proposes that we can exist in
PJ Wehry (08:43.431)
Yes. Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (09:12.27)
in a different fashion. mean, we kind of broadly, it doesn't exclude anyone from that perception. It just eliminates the necessity of kind of constant dialectical reasoning, right? And so those three worlds can exist in simultaneity, right? And part of, think one of the central arguments of the book is that I argue that blackness exists as an ontological state prior to its encounter with the Middle Passage, right? Because there's a way in which
kind of predominant discourse around black studies now situates blackness as a lack. I want to kind of push on that. I acknowledge that in the anti-black world, that certainly is true. But I'm arguing that that's not necessarily the truth over the course of known time and even obscured time. If we think about how the way in which the Middle Passage serves as kind of
point of obscurity that prevents looking backward and in this sense also prevents the kind of looking forward. So I'm trying to push past those two barriers at the same time.
PJ Wehry (10:17.578)
And when you're about Morrison, you're specifically referencing her essay.
Michael Sawyer (10:26.582)
It's in the book, it's in the text, source of self-regard. It's a text, yeah, it's a text, it's in that.
PJ Wehry (10:30.535)
The source of self-regard. I literally wrote it down and I said it wrong. Okay. The source of self-regard.
Michael Sawyer (10:36.43)
Right. Yeah, it's it's a it's variously. It's variously published as a European version that has a better title. It's Mouthful of Blood, I think was a way better title, but it didn't stand up and kind of American, you know, Western discourse from that perspective.
PJ Wehry (10:54.569)
So we have the...
PJ Wehry (11:04.521)
So this idea of passing through the three worlds, you also use the idea of liminality. And can you talk about how that shows up? And I think that particularly was helpful for me to think in terms of, if I understand correctly, and please, please correct me, that black people are often used as a boundary marker rather than as something.
as their own ontological state, if I understand you correctly.
Michael Sawyer (11:37.646)
Sure. I some of this comes directly, the book has several important preoccupations. Morrison's obviously one of them, Du Bois. Ellison is a central driver of the text in many ways. Meant to kind of push Ellison as a thinker along this route to pick up what you were saying about literature. So for me, and this is honest, I've always read Ellison, I've always read Invisible Man, beloved.
PJ Wehry (11:50.44)
cough
Michael Sawyer (12:08.248)
Hegel's Phenomenology and Moby Dick is basically the same book, right? Like talking about the same kind of questions, like with no separation between them. And so I was able to get away with that because, you know, I studied in a multidisciplinary department and, you know, I was able to kind of pull that off. So this book basically takes that system of thinking and uses it to kind of focus on just what you propose, right? So literature can't speak for itself.
You know, and oftentimes confused, right? It's like how this shows up in philosophy generally when, you you kind of start off with Plato and Socrates and they're doing nothing as far as I can tell them with telling stories. It seems literary to me. Like when I read the features, I read that as, know, literature all right. These dialogues are basically storytelling, right? So, you know, we can kind of put that to the side. But what Morrison, and this is the essay in the source of self-guard is called Race Matters, right? And
You know, I'll quote it just because it's useful, right? She says, uh, W. B. Du Bois' observation is a strategy, not a prophecy or a cure. She writes beyond the outside, inside double consciousness. This new space postulates the inwardness of the outside. Imagine safety without walls. We can conceive of a third of your part in expression world already made for me, both snug and wide open with a doorway never needing to be closed home. So she's talking about, uh, pushing. She's saying that Du Bois
PJ Wehry (13:08.382)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Sawyer (13:35.66)
And the way I read this, right, and I don't read it as, you know, there's a way kind of in my mind to kind of reductively view Morrison's critiquing Du Bois. I think what she's proposing is Du Bois gives an opening, right? He's giving us a series of thoughts that basically explain the way the world operates in the anti-black world. And Morrison, and this is where I think the benefit of fiction and pushing in some ways along with what your professor told you, is that fiction allows a different disciplinary.
a different technology allows you to imagine something, right? And what Morrison is doing is imagining this world and she has a particularly sharp instrument for doing so. She has a grounding in kind of classics. She has a grounding in obviously literature and she has a grounding in American social thought, right? In American societal order. And she's saying this can't be it, right? The kind of horizon of my imagination can't be limited by anti-blackness. And so that's a central preoccupation of the book.
PJ Wehry (14:26.889)
Mm.
Michael Sawyer (14:34.144)
is to say that a couple of things can be true at the same time. We can live in a world where there's something, what I like to call, of lack of a better term, negatively framed the blackness. And also blackness is a thing that survives across these points of transition, which gets to the liminal question that you're asking, right? Because in the book, I kind of think about this notion of the pre, the liminal, and the post liminal, right? So as you're approaching a point of transition,
things start to alter themselves, right? So the question is, what are the forces that are pulling the object towards the point of crossing and what are those forces that are pushing it to remain where it came from, right? And part of the middle passage serves as a particularly virulent gravitational force that draws all subjects across a kind of threshold and draws to the point where it appears there's nothing beyond that.
PJ Wehry (15:31.177)
Mm.
Michael Sawyer (15:34.254)
on either side of it. There's no way back and there's no way forward. I want to resist both of those notions and that's what I'm trying to get at with the question of the liminal in this text because part of that question is, and this is the math and notion of the limit function, is to give you an instantaneous value. Say, what is this thing worth right now? Not its average, not its, you know, because you know how this works. It's like that's what calculus is supposed to do for us. If I draw a
PJ Wehry (15:38.377)
Hmm.
Michael Sawyer (16:03.534)
50 miles an hour for two hours, I go 100 miles an hour. That doesn't tell me how fast I was going as soon as I took off. I didn't start off at 50 miles an hour. there's, know, what calculus allows you to do is to give you the exact pace at which an object is moving at an exact time. So what I'm trying to do is to note those exact places and times and think about all those kinds of forces that I'm describing. What I found most useful from my perspective is that
There's sonic practices and there are also literary practices that basically gesture at this. And the question is, how do you hold those in a state of what Ellison would call a node that pauses in that break of what Professor Moten calls a break in order to, and what Ellison says is take a look around, to linger in the break and look around, right?
What I'm trying to do in this is open up a series of these breaks and look around and then be able to plan what the next move is from that perspective.
PJ Wehry (17:15.529)
And this may be a dead-end question, so feel free to just ignore it This need for open horizons for this can't be it Do you think that's part of the reason I see authors like Octavia Butler and NK Jemisin? Writing sci-fi and fantasy. Do you think that's part of the reason that? There's that kind of that push into sci-fi and fantasy
Michael Sawyer (17:44.61)
Yeah, no doubt about it. I think Afrofuturism is basically the answer to that question. Afro, know, a series of different Afro surrealism, et cetera, right? Futurism, surrealism, whatever you choose is about that, is about trying to find, and I use technologies in a very particular way, Intellectual technologies in order to posit what that world looks like and then work backwards from that and then the job of, you know.
theorists, politicians, et cetera, is to, in my mind, is to take that information and see what we can do with it. And so I think you're right. think Jemison, I think Butler, Octavia Butler in this case, have gestured at that. And I think that, you know, I opened the book with Bob Marley's performance of War No More Trouble, right, from the 1970s. And I think he opens, he asks this question, right? He says, until, right, he's asking, he's asking very clearly, like, what does the world look like?
with no second class citizens, right? Until the color of her man skin is no more, is not important, is no more important to cover his eyes, right? And he's trying to posit what that world is. And he says, until that happens, there's nothing but war, right? Everywhere from, know, in the East, war in the West, that whole thing, right? He's saying we have to push against this, right? And that pushing, I think, in many ways, can't, I don't think that's a utopian question.
PJ Wehry (18:45.513)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (18:58.345)
Hmm. Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (19:11.566)
Because as a practical matter, the world that we live in now is a product of a type of negative imaginary. The manifest destiny was an imagined condition. They didn't know what they were talking about. Then they being the people who perpetrated that kind of ill on this continent basically fulfilled that imagination with real space. So I think more sense asking that same question is what if we...
sketch out the four corners of our imagination and then work to fill that with real space. What would that look like? So I think, and part of that project is to think about Octavia Butler, et cetera, authors like that who pushed on this question. I think, you know, this is not, I mean, I think, you know, Fahrenheit 451, all these texts, right? It's like, can't be, you know, I don't know a political scientist that has described our current moment better than Orwell did in 84. I haven't read it, though. It has done that.
PJ Wehry (20:08.521)
Mm.
Michael Sawyer (20:10.954)
I haven't seen anybody describe what was going on with respect to what currently is going on with respect to the erosion of juridical standards and the way that Kafka did in the trial. He's telling you what the possibilities are. That's fiction. But he's imagining the kind of end state of a particular type of dystopian politics. In order to get in front of that problematic, you have to push past what's obvious to us.
and not let that thinking be limited by just saying, that hasn't happened yet. I think that's a productive and worthwhile exercise. While at the same time, we can do all kinds of other stuff. think that preservation, to your point, I think preservation of certain traditions is super important, because otherwise, we don't know the four corners of the world, and we can't push beyond corners that we don't know exist. So I think that all those are valid propositions.
PJ Wehry (20:44.509)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (21:07.785)
And maybe to fill that out, are you familiar with the Brave New World by Huxley? As we talk about Orwell and we have the top down kind of Big Brother, but this idea of the complacency, even as we watch what's happening right now, some of this seems like Big Brother and then some of this seems like, well, I have, you know.
whatever your choice of dopamine is to allow you to ignore what's going on outside.
Michael Sawyer (21:41.902)
Yeah, I mean, think, you know, I'm a literature professor, not by, I don't know how to best describe it. I think it works best for me, right? Like I've always had a very close relationship with literature and never spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the dividing lines are between different disciplines, right? Didn't really matter to me in a lot of ways and that can be good or bad. But, you know, last year I was teaching a course on spy fiction and we were reading Le Coré's first novel, A Murder of Quality.
And he stages himself. He's a professor. His cover is he's a German Poetics professor in Berlin in the 1930s. And he says at one point that he wakes up in the morning and looks out how springtime is there. And he was surprised to see one of his Jewish students show up in class because he thought he would have been rounded up by now. It just goes on from there, right? And he's basically saying just how, you know.
That's where you look around, it's like, oh, people live down the street, and they must have gotten rounded up. He's basically saying, this is the world that he was living in, and he's there as a kind of insurgent from the West, but he's already complacent. He can't even really see it except to see it. And he's just describing. He's like, oh, I was surprised that the student was still in class, because everyone else had been sent away.
It's like, one day it should happen sooner rather than This goes about his business, right? Goes and gets some sense of whatever the case he's doing, right? It just moves on. So I think there are all kinds of, my point is that there's all kinds of evidence of different thinkers exploring this possibility. And from my perspective, for me it's not useful to avoid some of that work just because it doesn't fit into a particular disciplinary formation.
PJ Wehry (23:34.442)
Yeah. Uh, in some ways, answers are answers wherever you find them. Yeah. Uh, so I, the, I want to, I want to step back for just a second. Cause I do want to make sure to ask you, um, you have the door of no return and no is got the strike through, you know, like cross through it. Didn't know how to say it. I mentioned that beforehand and you said that you've been thinking about that.
Why is no crossed out? I have suspicions. But, how do you, what is your working way to mention the cross through?
Michael Sawyer (24:14.786)
Yeah, I'm really still just still learning about this book in a lot of different ways. And so, you know, part of my big marketing plan was to come up with a title that nobody can say. I wasn't thinking about that. I got away, you know, at some point I realized I'm like, you really can't say this because, you know, it doesn't it doesn't work for me to say the door of no with a no with a lie through it return being as black because that misses the point. Right. It's it's unyielding doesn't work visually. It works.
PJ Wehry (24:24.861)
Hahaha!
Michael Sawyer (24:44.354)
Like, you know, to me it works. But as a kind of hieroglyphic of what I'm trying to express, right, which is what I said about this three world possibility, where we recognize that there is a door of no return. That is a thing. A physical, both a physical and metaphysical barrier and point of entry that seems to only flow in one direction. So visually what I did by striking through the no,
PJ Wehry (24:53.96)
Yes.
Michael Sawyer (25:11.566)
is this negation of that negation to say that there's a way to go forward that acknowledges the existence of that door, right? And understanding that, and also acknowledges the possibility of keeping all that in front of us at the same time and being able to cross over to another place, right? So that visually works. So last week or so, I was going back through this book, getting ready for conversations like this and realizing that you really can't say the title. So I was reading it again and realized that there's a couple of places where I deal with this kind of.
negation and negation and one of them is I take up in order to think about black love practices I spent some time with August Wilson's book fences right and then that kind of first act this is kind of massively portrayed by Denzel Washington in the film right even James O Jones does a good job his son asks him how come you ain't never liked me right and ain't never is a double negative which means how come you how come you like me right
which is really what he's asking his father and really wants to say is how come you love me? But he can't say that because the world in which they exist doesn't allow that particular possibility, the kind of notion. And I get to this point through Morrison and in many places in the book, I put these things together productively for the way I think because in Beloved in particular, Paul details Satha that her love is too thick, that it's not appropriate for...
enslaved or formerly enslaved person to love so greatly because those bounds can be fractured anytime. So fast forward to the world that preoccupies August Wilson, like literally right here, like blocks from where I'm sitting right now in the Hill District in Pittsburgh. This person has had his life marginalized by the fact that he can't play professional baseball, There's the Negro leagues, et cetera. He can't play baseball. So he's building a fence around his residence.
in order to block out a particular world. can't quite do it. And his son is asking him, how come the conversation is about someone who to play football. He's like, don't bother with it. Just get up there and get a job at the grocery store. Right? And it says, how come you don't like me? His father runs through this whole thing. So I realized that the ain't never is exactly what that no of the strike through is. Right? As it's basically saying the door of ain't never return, which means the door of always being able to return. Right?
PJ Wehry (27:28.681)
Hmm.
Michael Sawyer (27:35.884)
So that's how I would say it if I'm forced to say it is that Thorpe ain't never return being his black, right? Because the language in which I grew up with on the South Side Chicago, we always used to kind of, ain't never, which is a double, your mother tells you that's a double negative, you know, that means you're actually gonna do it. I did mean to what I mean to, right? So it picks up both things at the same time. So I think that's probably the best way to kind of say it if you're impressed to visually represent.
PJ Wehry (28:01.022)
Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (28:04.503)
to verbally represent the visual, know what the strike is.
PJ Wehry (28:09.011)
Yes, I love that. And that even, I think it really gets at the core of your book too. It's almost like that's what a title's supposed to do. No, the, Yeah, that's an interesting thing, because my dad's a New Englander, my mom is Southern, and so I grew up.
Michael Sawyer (28:18.733)
Like peanut butter and jelly, that describes exactly what it is. You don't to ask anything else.
PJ Wehry (28:35.513)
never hearing ain't from one parent and hearing ain't all the time from the other parent and and then being told it's like well yeah it's bad grammar but we say it and like we don't say that it's just anyways it's such a which is exactly that kind of that space that's that's in between is like wait is this yeah anyways what are some examples of returning
Michael Sawyer (28:42.732)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (29:05.001)
where we don't recognize, like a kind of naive returning, and then what are examples of returning after the double negative?
Michael Sawyer (29:15.597)
Right, so I think, so and where the book starts with this performance of Bob Marley's, talk about that as being just that sort of thing, right? So if people wanna Google it, you can watch it on YouTube. There's a point where the I-3s keep saying, you know, war, war, war, right? And he's trying to move on, right? He wants to get to the, we don't need no more trouble, what we need is love, sweet love part. And there's a point where he just stops the performance, right?
PJ Wehry (29:24.616)
Yes.
Michael Sawyer (29:44.844)
and he's sitting there with his arm held up. It goes on for 12 seconds and the band is going forward. The I-3s are going forward. Then he starts the song all over again. He goes back to the very opening of Haile Selassie's speech right in front of the UN, right? And my point is that that was exactly that thing, right? He got to that point of crossing and hesitates, right? Because what's obvious is the war part is obvious, right? This is Fennad, right? Fennad is like, you know, we're gonna destroy revolutionary struggle.
This is the central problematic of the French Revolution, right? Where, you know, Ross Pierre gets asked, when is the revolution end? He says, never, right, never. That's not useful, right? It's like, what do we do with that information? It's like, we just keep doing this over and over again. like, yeah, basically, you know, it shakes itself apart, right? That's an example of the inability to kind of push past the crossing. And my argument is that that's a failure of not a practice, but of imagination, right? There was no preformed imagination to think beyond.
PJ Wehry (30:29.744)
Mmm. Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (30:44.875)
the parameters of the destruction of the societies we see it. And that destruction is probably more metaphysical than physical. And so what happens in that, in the text, and I'm using text broadly here, when I talk about the Marley, I'm saying that's an actual text, right? What happens in that text is that he goes back to the beginning, runs through the entire song again, then he's able to push past it and says, what we need is love, love.
Right? And everything changes at that point. Like he gives you the whole book in like that seven minute performance. Right? And I'm saying that is an exemplar of a philosophical position. Right? Like he takes Halle Selassie's speech in front of the United Nations, converts it into song, right? Then uses that kind of object that performs itself as he's trying to negotiate between.
What the band knows about the song, what the i3s are serving, it's like this kind metronomic pulse the entire time. And they're pushing and pulling on each other. So that's an example of how it's haunting. So that is how I opened the book as an exemplar of the entire process, how to get beyond it. And he tells you that it's love that's the necessary settlement of this. It's not war, it's love, which gets me back to what I was saying about...
August Wilson's text, right, where the ain't, how come you ain't never liked me? He's really asking his dad, does he love him? And his father can't say that because the world doesn't allow it for lots of different, you know, reasons of negative masculinity, et cetera, et cetera. And too thick, right? If I love you too much and you get taken from me, what do I do with that information? So those are exemplars of getting caught. Where I talk about the passage through and what I call the threshold of the door of no return. No, the threshold of the door ain't never returned.
to fix what I proposed, right? That threshold is, at the end of the book, is most ably exemplified by another kind of vocal performance of Aretha Franklin at the Baptist Church where she basically holds enthrall in an audience. And you can see this, right? This is the movie that got put out, documented a couple years ago where they put out the actual video that Mick Jagger had produced of that presentation, right?
Michael Sawyer (33:08.839)
And there's a point in the performance where she's singing the song Never Grow Old, where they try to stop her. Like Reverend Jane Cleveland throws a towel at her to interrupt it. She's in what I can only describe as kind of an ecstatic state. It's sublime in a particular way. She's pushed past the barrier. Clara Ward, at that point was one of preeminent gospel singers.
PJ Wehry (33:17.8)
Mm.
Michael Sawyer (33:38.606)
She literally tries to physically attack Aretha Franklin, right? Kind of stop what's going on. This performance is too strong, right? It's pushing past a particular barrier and these people can witness it and there's no telling what's gonna happen next. Aretha is just completely, she just doesn't even acknowledge any of it. She pushes past it and says that she's going forward, but she calls the beautiful home of the soul, right? That's what Morrison's describing when she says this place of home.
Right? So what I want to do is be able to put all these things together and say that we've seen this before. That's the imagined place. Our most imaginative, in some ways, right? Our most imaginative subjects are the people who give us beauty in that way, right? Whether it's dance, whether it's music, whether it's visual art, whether it's poetry, et cetera, right? Literature, all these kinds of physical performance, you know, athletes, et cetera, have oftentimes have transcendent performances. So.
What I'm trying to do, and this is where I said that the book, was a commentary on the black aesthetic at the same time, is to mash all those together and basically say, okay, this is the threshold of this place. We can glimpse, we can look across this threshold and see. And Morrison has told you that the world has no walls in that way, right? So then the question becomes, and this is what I'm trying to think through now, it's like, what are the foundations of a world built upon that moral imperative? Which I think is a moral imperative where we're able to...
Self-referential self referentially exists without having to oppose ourselves to others and I mean negatively oppose ourselves to others, right? So from a moral perspective, how do we frame a world and that that has all the things that we need with that and understanding the laws of motion and laws of physics and the way worlds operate. We gotta have rules, we gotta have, et cetera, cetera, but rules are basically systems of governance.
that have morality precede politics, where those things are not separate. Where politics basically mirrors, because we have, you know, this is a practical kind of question, where we have all kinds of moral questions that can only be solved politically, right? Like it doesn't seem to me to be a political question as to whether children should be at risk of being shot to death in school, right? That's not a political question. But we have to, we only have political answers to that moral question, right? The answer's no.
Michael Sawyer (36:06.669)
And so then we should just fix it rather than being like, no, but, you know, these people kind of say, and people literally said, well, you know, to have this political answer to the second amendment, basically there have to be, something bad has to happen periodically because of that. That to me seems like an unacceptable circumstance and is externally, is humanly imposed. It's not a law of motion. It's not like physics, like the way gravity works.
We've decided that that's the case, right? And that's an imagined position. So part of the speculative philosophical theoretical position of the book is to say, let's imagine differently, right? And to propose that we've seen a lot of this happen in our literature, in our art, visual art, in our sound practices, et cetera, and just take advantage of that.
PJ Wehry (37:06.909)
Thank you. That's a lot to digest. And I'm thinking particularly of the way that we have separated means and ends for political expediency. And it's interesting as our system degrades, why that happens. People have a lot of opinions about, but it's interesting how it's like, well, we work with whoever we need to work with regardless of.
their morality or like he's still our guy because regardless of his morality. And it's interesting that everyone's kind of okay with that. then
And I don't like to bring up contemporary, but it's like, we've just in the last like month received like very clear evidence of like heinous morale, immoral acts that are not necessarily that people are just getting away with. we're like, you know, maybe we don't, we don't want that at the, at the top. Right. It's like, it doesn't personally affect me, but I feel like that has to bleed out in some way into the system. Right.
Anyways, sorry, that's a little top of mind for me, so go ahead.
Michael Sawyer (38:13.589)
Yeah. I mean.
Yeah, I mean, it's talking about for everybody. think it speaks to, you know, even the subject, the title of your podcast speaks to this kind of question, right? What are the formations of our systems of governance? Right. And my argument is this is kind of Rousseau's fault, right? Like Rousseau in the social contract, he goes through all this kind of stuff and then all of a sudden the lawgiver appears, right? You read this, like, who is it? What is it? It's like, this is the moral actor where those kinds of questions that are beyond the realm of politics.
The lawgiver answers it. But there's no, we don't have that. So when, and I did a talk a couple of months ago, and I called it a Bull and Madison's China Shop. And what Madison tried to impose, know, so I'm just Madison, let's just have Madison stand in for the framers. They kind of understood the social contract, and they kind of saw the lawgiver thing, and were like, well, that's not really gonna work. We had this kind of Supreme Court.
But the Supreme Court's infected by political appointment, right? So their fix to this was custom. Everybody basically thought plus or minus, all the people that they thought would be in charge, men, land-owning men, slave-holding land-holding men, et cetera, no women, no indigestible people, no black people, et cetera, all basically think plus or minus 5 % the same thing. So basically customarily, you can argue, but at the end of the day, you're going to land on the same position, plus or minus.
What happens is when you have someone who doesn't respect custom, the entire system is at stake because what you need is the lawgiver to be like, this has got to stop right now. And what Madison thought the solution was was the electoral college. Because you read it in the Federalist, he's like, a notorious figure could arise, it's popular. The electoral college will basically say no. But the electoral college is infected with Madison's notion of how to privilege slaveholders.
Michael Sawyer (40:12.385)
the kind of very mechanism that he wanted to use is already compromised. So what this book is saying is that that is part of the internal mechanism of the anti-black world. All these things I just described are how that world operates. And that's why we keep getting the same result. And that's why some people, and it seems like there's no getting past this. Because these are solid impasse. But I think that Madison was just kind of making it up as he went along,
and it becomes real. Yeah, I mean, he's just, you a guy, guess. mean, you know, whatever, right? But he wouldn't recognize, there's a lot of things he would recognize, but one of them would be how the system failed him in that the very thing, the very, the very notion of the customary presence of a particular desire to hold onto power would be the very thing that basically begins to erode the entire.
as it shakes itself apart in front of us as we're sitting here watching it. And like we said before, you get a newer to it, like I was saying, in late Carré rights and in the murder quality. People just seem to be disappearing. You just go about your business and go get something to eat. wow. So no, think it's important. I think the contemporary question becomes very important because we're kind of seeing
And that's why I spent a lot of time in the book kind of thinking with things that seem common to me, right? Like music, popular things that are interesting that I have that I think have real philosophical import, not objects of philosophical study, but actually philosophy themselves, right? Like actually a philosophical position. I think to me, I think Morris and Ellison and Melville, to a great extent, are some of the most interesting.
PJ Wehry (41:52.115)
Hmm.
Michael Sawyer (42:08.833)
thinkers of the 20th and early 21st centuries, know, for Morrison kind of survived little bit past the 21st century, right? That their corpus of work basically gives us, sketches out the kind of world of possibility for us.
PJ Wehry (42:23.753)
And I think as you've talked about this you've called them you've mentioned kind of black aesthetic Practices, and you've also talked about you have a very specific use of the word technologies. Do you mind explaining your particular use of the word technologies?
Michael Sawyer (42:41.675)
Yeah, was just the other day, right? I'm teaching a grad seminar here at Pitt. We were reading Fanon, right? Black skin, white mask. And I was like, this is technology, right? He's giving you a system of thinking, right? He's telling you these are the things, these are the masks that exist. Language, know, sexuality in particular ways, engagement with Western philosophical thought. You know, this is the technology he has. He's applying that.
to the world in which he lives. He's giving this to you to take this technology and do something with it, right? So I'm saying that basically what Toni Morrison does in Beloved is she embeds it in a cognitive technology. She calls it Rememory, right? Where things never go away. And Rememory is trans-subjective and trans-generational. And the point about it is that's how Morrison gives you the technology to avoid the impasse of the mental passage.
She's saying you're gonna feel things that come across this barrier that are not supposed to be able to come across it. It happens all the time in the book, right? People go back and read it. There's a point in the book where the protagonist, Seth, in the book is telling you about things she can't possibly know. She's talking about antelope, right? Like African antelope. She lives in the American South East, you antelope. Even as we understand antelope in American subjects.
in American context, right? There none, she's never heard of one. But she says that she thinks it may have been from Africa proper. There's no evidence that she's ever been to Africa, right? So she's feeling information, data, right? So what Morrison gives you in this notion of remembering, she gives you the technology embedded in the book Beloved in order to understand the potentiality, the philosophical and theoretical potentiality of that cognitive technology, right?
And I think the same thing happens. think Ellison's doing the same thing as well. I think for practical purposes that I, you know, I couldn't write about everything, but Ellison Morrison and Ellison Morrison Du Bois and Melville are the kind of four writers and thinkers that I probably spend the most time with outside of the kind of preoccupation with Hegel, right? And they're each offering a particular type of technology that I want to assemble into where I started is with cognition, right? The cognitive technology.
Michael Sawyer (45:02.423)
that speaks to what Du Bois describes as second sight, which is his description of the technology of cognition inside the anti-black world. Next thing is what call consciousness, what Du Bois calls double consciousness, which is his description of the technology of how you're conscious of yourself internal to the anti-black world. And the final technology is what he calls two-ness, which I call being as black, which is to acknowledge that what he's saying is those two unrecognized.
Unreconcilable ways of existence inside the black body right the Negro and the American can't exist in the same space right Morrison says Okay, that's true, but that's a strategy not a not how the world works and so the final technology And what I'm proposing is the notion of being and what I call being is black Which is to say that self-referentially true and picks up all those things at the same time You can't have one without all the others and they actually happen kind of at the same time so
The book kind of moves in those kind of three movements that traces itself across what Du Bois describes as kind of three things, cognition, consciousness, and being. And also the three worlds that I'm describing, black world prime, the anti-black world, and Morrison's kind of third world. Basically where the anti-black, the black world prime is a system of cognition, way to understand the self vis-a-vis the self. The anti-black world is a system of consciousness that we live in right now.
And Morrison's third world is what I call being as black. So the kind of three things are kind of overlapping themselves at the same
PJ Wehry (46:38.877)
What does Being is Black look like on a day-to-day basis outside of novels and things like that? Obviously novels inform and shape us in important ways, so I don't want to deny that. there kind of, even as you're talking about antelope and rememory, we carry these things from childhood, all these little rituals, what does that look like? And maybe I'm just on the wrong track altogether. What does Being is Black look like on a day-to-day basis?
Michael Sawyer (47:09.229)
Yeah, kind of, being as black looks like a world where I never had to hear about Breonna Taylor. I got to say in the book, I wish I never heard of Breonna Taylor. I just wish Breonna Taylor had gone on with her life and just like I never heard of most everybody. I don't need to hear about it. And so it's a practical matter what that looks like is trying to stay alive doesn't get in the way of living.
and very practically, and I don't think that's a utopian viewpoint. And so what I do in the book, I'm thinking very carefully about the implication of Black death and police violence, is that becomes a kind of a canary in the coal mine, A world in which you don't expect, and again, we're in that kind of contemporary moment now, you don't expect to be shot to death in the street for no reason by authorities, right?
That's what it kind of, that's a practical matter. That's what a day-to-day world would look like. And it doesn't, you know, it's not flying machines or Jimmy Newtron, right? Lasers, know? The Jetsons, whatever the case, right? It looks very practically like Breonna Taylor goes on with her life and I never hear about her. She doesn't end up on the cover of Randy Ferrer magazine. She finishes whatever it is that she was studying. She...
PJ Wehry (48:13.347)
Yeah, right.
I was not prepared for the Jimmy Newchun reference. That's great. Yeah.
Michael Sawyer (48:33.599)
stays with her boyfriend, breaks up with somebody else, gets married, doesn't, whatever the case, never heard of her. Never heard of Trayvon Martin, never heard of George Floyd, never heard of Michael Brown, never heard of him, right? That'd be the best world that I can imagine to live in, right? Where I just don't have to, like every day, have to be treated to some kind of horror in that way, right? And I think that that is...
And that's what, that's literally what I believe that Marley's saying, right? It's like, until that world exists where that there's, have to keep, we have to keep fighting against this kind of, which you referenced back earlier, right? Being pulled back into that being just a comment and we just respond to it constantly, right? What's the next thing we do, right? Can we pass another law? Can we like punish somebody else? Can we like, you know, avoid it? Maybe if I carry these things with me, they won't bother me.
Maybe if I don't drive to this area of the city, maybe if I stay in my house for the next two years, right, until this blows over, hoping that the next election solves the problem, right? That's what I'm trying to say. And so being as black as the world, very simply, where we don't have to ever hear about Breonna Taylor.
PJ Wehry (49:41.93)
And maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but I want to make sure I'm tracking with you and you talk about police brutality as a Canadian, the coal mine. in some ways that's an answer to, because, you know, it's the kind of thing people say it's like, well, not that many people get shot. Right. And it's like, but they shouldn't be shot at all. Right. It's that it's that this is like, this is a sign that something is broken. This is kind of an ultimate sign.
Is that what, like, because it's not just about police brutality, it's about the entire system that is anti-black. Is that, am I tracking there?
Michael Sawyer (50:18.289)
Yeah, it's not even, and sometimes it's not even the fact of it happening, it's the possibility that it can happen. We can imagine that this makes sense, right? That we can sit here, like three weeks ago, if we'd done this, and I'd be like, you know, I imagine that, you know, some person's gonna drop their kids off from school and get shot in the face four times, like, by some person, and then there's not gonna be an investigation. We're like, come on, it's like, you know, could possibly happen, right? And then, you know, later on, you know, next week.
PJ Wehry (50:23.976)
right.
Michael Sawyer (50:45.997)
After that happens, some other person's gonna be trying to help somebody who gets shoved down with sprays in the face with bear spray and shot in the back 10 times by authorities and they just disappear into the ether. We don't even know who they are. We're like, wow, that's crazy. But yeah, that could happen. And so yeah, it's also the notion of, you hear this all the time. And this is exemplified by our contemporary moment. Remember when we used to hear, when you hear the unarmed person.
killed by the police, right? In this country, armed person is supposed to not supposed to be killed by the police, right? Even criminals aren't supposed to be killed by the police, right? It's like, there's no, right? And you hear people say things like, even when you talk about other people's country, they say they're gassing their own citizens. You're like, whoa, right? You can gas people, but you can't gas your own citizens, right? It's like, don't gas anybody. How about that, right? Let's just take that, let's not qualify those kinds of things. Like, and I say this, I've said this in other contexts, right? It's like, there's no reason to believe
or use the term criminal justice system. This would be a justice system, not a criminal justice system, just a holistic justice system that criminals, however you define them, are treated, not traded differently, but be able to participate in the system of justice that we have available to us, right? So all these kinds of qualifiers, I think, are exactly the point. And I think that's what's interesting and provocative about what you're proposing. It's like, yeah, I mean...
The fact that these things don't exist in some kind of far off imagination, where it's like, know, whoever thought of that, right? It's like, that's crazy. Right? It's like, nah, that's like something in fiction. We can very easily imagine these things, and that's the worst part, whether they happen or not. Right? I don't know how many school shootings happened today. probably been 10 since the last, in the last two weeks, probably. We just don't even have any frame of reference for it. It's become so quotidian, we don't even pay attention to it anymore. Right? Like, we're never surprised. And I think that's, that's,
the horror of it and that's what I think and I think your question is really useful and helped me clarify. It's exactly as simple as not knowing who Breonna Taylor is.
PJ Wehry (52:51.763)
Yeah, and thank you. I want to be respectful of your time, but if I could ask you one last question, and I mean, I feel like this has been practical all the way throughout, just looking at the side from broadening our imagination and opening our eyes, but besides buying and reading your excellent book, which I have in manuscript form here, so it's not as exciting to show, but, yes, yes, show us the, yes.
Michael Sawyer (53:15.723)
Got the actual, you the, you can see it. You can see how the nose is stricken. Yeah, they did a really good job with this. So they actually, showed up yesterday, fortunately, so.
PJ Wehry (53:22.663)
Yes. Yes.
PJ Wehry (53:29.399)
awesome. So besides buying and reading your excellent book, which everyone should do, what would you say to someone who's listened to us for the last hour? What would you, obviously as an ongoing thing, but for the next week, what is a particular practice or thing that they can meditate on in response to what we've talked about here today?
Michael Sawyer (53:50.162)
I mean, I think it's just.
like really being present in the world in which the observable things you have in front of you, right? The tools that you have, right? Like I have particular tools that I use, right? Like I have a particular command of fiction. I have a particular command of certain historical elements, know, certain things in philosophy, et cetera. Those are tools that I happen to have, right? If you're a musician, use those tools. If you're a poet, use those tools. If you're, you know, if you're the cleaners, use those tools, right? Whatever the case.
PJ Wehry (54:16.137)
Hmm.
Michael Sawyer (54:22.081)
we all have a role to play in being able to imagine differently, right? And some of that is just, and I, you know, I'm an optimistic, you know, we write about these things, we spend time on these kinds of things. I'm a like, supremely optimistic person, I think. And I always try to find, like, I'm, you know, it's a super, I think the book is positive in lots of different ways, right? The point is, there's gotta be beauty out there somewhere, we gotta find it. And it can be, it can be in service of describing something.
PJ Wehry (54:24.732)
Mm.
Michael Sawyer (54:49.261)
that's very difficult, but also hold on to that moment, right? And I think that, and to think in groups, to, one of the most powerful things we've seen recently is just the power of the group in order to be together in particular ways and come up with common ideas about what we wanna see the world look like. And I think that's what's most important about, know, things to think about. And what I hope the book opens, no, it's not, the book ends, it's an ellipsis, it's not a period, right? I don't know, you know, it's not meant to be like, oh, this is, know.
PJ Wehry (55:14.633)
Mm.
Michael Sawyer (55:16.805)
This is it, do this and everybody will be fine. It's meant to be a conversation opener. I would like to, my aspiration for it is that it serves as just that right away for people to gather and to talk about what they think the world should look like and use the tools that they have in combination and not be restrictive about allowing different disciplinary boundaries to restrict the information that we're able to use and to that end.
PJ Wehry (55:44.969)
to borrow your language from before, and I sense this in your work and the way that you talk, that to be transdisciplinary, trans-subjective, and trans-generational.
Michael Sawyer (55:57.643)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. Yeah, I tell people I'm undisciplined, right? both positive and negative kinds of ways, And it's worked for me. I don't know if it worked. tell grass, because I'm the director of grass-sizing news department, I'm like, this could go horribly wrong for you, right? I've got to you, don't use, like, you I'm the DGS of an English department. I don't have a DGS in English, right? It's like no one would have said.
PJ Wehry (56:04.873)
You
PJ Wehry (56:18.951)
Ha ha ha ha!
Michael Sawyer (56:27.469)
It's not possible, right? But I study literature, I can prove it. But the point is that I didn't let those kinds of barriers restrict what I wanted to spend my time studying. And it worked itself out in the end, right? And so that's, I think, is what's really important. And to your point, the kind of trans-subjective, trans-generational, trans-disciplinary part is...
Find scholars who you have respect for and pay attention to their work and draw and draw inspiration from that and also Push past it not you know, push them out of the way but uses points of departure, right? Like I think I think critique Positive critique is is useful like an easy thing in the world is to sit around talk about what you don't like about something Right, but I think is also those are openings to like expand the argument. So that's what I think is most important about, you
way kind of forwards expanding the argument.
PJ Wehry (57:28.445)
Dr. Sawyer, it's been an absolute joy talking to you. Thank you.
Michael Sawyer (57:31.533)
Well, PJ's been great again. Thanks again.