Ben-Gvir's Conveyor Belt

I wrote elsewhere that I am suspicious of open doors, because they "leave the prison intact and uninterrogated". In this sense, I sidestepped the culturally obvious addiction to freedom, and wondered how freedom might actually be implied in captivity. I wondered if something stranger needed to happen to break the cycle. Perhaps, I wrote, one must "eat the prison", and not merely escape it.

I wrote:

"...one must eat and be eaten up by one's confinements so thoroughly that the bars that at first hold you back become your rib cage, helping you breathe, and the concrete floors and walls that feel forbidding at last become the bones that keep you sturdy."

I received a caring response, calling my writing "high-brow philosophizing" that obviated the experiences and urgent desires of Palestinian prisoners.

I offer further thinking to the cauldron of these terrible hours:

Recently, I watched an AI-generated video published (and later deleted) by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, depicting Palestinian prisoners processed on a conveyor belt in a facility that critics compared to a concentration camp. What I experienced while viewing these images was not only the shock of witnessing the sterilized cruelty of that gesture, but a piercing desire to circumvent the usual names, critiques, and attributions by which we make sense of these events.

I know "evil", "cruel" and "wicked" might do just fine for some people - but I cannot stop there. I wondered about the larger conveyor belt of meanings, gestures, materialities and movements that made that AI video possible - for it was not too long ago that Jews were also caught, tagged, archived, mapped, stolen, and placed on 'conveyor belts' of the concentration camps, the same "belts" that produced the walking skeletal frames of the Muselmänn.

What needed to have happened for the recipients of horrific acts to become promulgators of the same gesture?

This is the question that haunts me.

It would seem to me to be the case that somewhere along the pragmatic lines of urgency that won the war, stopped a madman, dismantled the Nazi camps, enacted the Trials, and necessitated the settled establishment of a nation-state for Jews in 1948, something churned that 'pragmatic interventionism' could not metabolize. You see, Jews didn't go to Israel per se: instead, the nation-state created its citizen-subjects, producing subjectivities, carrying the scars of the Westphalian order, burdened by the inheritances of an arrangement that violently locates us only in propertied relations with the world.

This is why I think that while we need to act today, acting has never happened in neutral space. In a sense, acting precedes actors, and produces them. The pragmatic call to action - seemingly innocent and forcefully obvious - may itself be a conveyor belt that sustains a specific kind of logic, one which may offer a balm today and unsheathe a bomb tomorrow.

I therefore need to interrogate freedom as the twinned production of captivity. I need to imagine that the right thing to do may not always be the wisest thing to do. I need to notice how action is stranger than the moral promises and goals that often recommend themselves to our consciences. I need to notice that leaving an institution can be the very dynamic by which an institution gains new frontiers. I need to interrogate how African independence movements reproduced colonial relations despite the epithet of freedom and the winked imposition of flagged sovereignty. I need to listen when Eshu, the Yoruba trickster, chuckles at the open door of the prison. Or when our elders suggest that the itinerant Orisha found his deepest calling in the confines of a slave ship bound for the so-called New World. I need to listen - with oblique ears - to Dr. King when he exhaustedly confessed to his buddies, a week before he was murdered, that he was worried about a freedom that brought the freed back to the fires they escaped.

I come from an under-world that has been sold the moral promise of modernity: individuality at last. Economic buoyancy at last. Netflix at last. Freedom at last. Save the day. Speak louder. Call your senator. Protest. Do the right thing. Show up.

By all means, we will keep doing these things. My queer hope is that in the doing we might learn to ask: what is this "doing" doing here? How are we being enlisted and produced in doings that are in excess of human agency? What if the problem is not that our goals and solutions aren't ambitious enough, but that they aren't strange enough? What might happen if we actually achieve all our objectives, only to find that we were oiling the conveyor belt? What sideways-leaning, flatfishing, crustacean-moving, fugitive-yearning, para-pragmatic, God-composting, slantwise gestures of the crack might open us out into elsewheres?

That's why I stutter. That's why I write. Because Ben-Gvir's conveyor belt is long and prestigious, and it often presents itself as an innocent companion to the righteously inflamed witness, to the caring activist, to the young person who wants to do something about a world that's sick with feverish flames - even if the medicine is arson.

Bayo Akomolafe

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