It would not be entirely unfair to suggest that the real topic of Cold World is the spontaneous disaffection of the privileged: a rage without a cause, or a rage that has yet to discover its cause. The dejection of Coleridge, the spiritual desolation of Hopkins, are in a sense accidental, arising from confused circumstances; the obscure imperative to revolt behind black metal and Baader-Meinhof was destined to attach itself to an obscure politics, ostensibly “leftist” in the latter case but no less elitist and adventurist for that. Cold World calls for a “politics of militant dysphoria”, but fails - symptomatically - to supply any meaningful conception of what this might entail: the examples it produces are negative, examples of how not to do it. The cold world, frozen in order that it might be shattered, is a world awaiting prophetic witness, the advent of justice.

Robert Beckford is a Black theologian, and the rage he addresses in God of the Rahtid is rooted in a specific conjuncture, the experience of Afro-Caribbean Black people in what he calls the “UKKK”. The formula Beckford gives to explain this coinage is as follows:

UK + KKK = Racist Britain

It is important to understand that this is not merely a “tasteless” or “excessive” pun, although there is an element of playful provocation about it. “KKK” here refers to the twin dimensions of racism in this country: on the one hand the brute force of “racial terror” (exemplified by the Brixton nail bombing and the murder of Stephen Lawrence), and on the other the structural inertia of what the Macpherson Report identified as “institutional racism”. The choice of “KKK” as a name for this toxic combination is inflammatory, but deliberately and purposefully so: in making this choice, Beckford is seeking to recover one of the spiritual gifts of the Black Pentecostal tradition, that of a voice of prophetic witness that expresses rage openly rather than “signifying” its way around it.

We might gloss “UK + KKK” as follows. “UK” names a space, the interior of the imaginary border which localizes the (ethnic, geographical, economic etc.) multiplicity of the British Isles. “+ KKK” names the determination of this space as racist Britain: the dialectic of force and inertia, law and exception, that makes racism a reality in Britain - or, better, that makes the reality of Britain a racist reality (one of the questions considered by the book is, indeed, “is God racist?” - must we accept a racist reality as so willed by a creator?). The UK is a space in which (and into and out of which) people live and move and have their being; Britain is a place that bears a predicate, “racist”. (Compare the palpably racist slogan “British jobs for British workers” with the anodyne alternative “UK jobs for UK workers”).

Beckford casts what he calls a “dread gaze” over this racist reality, a gaze that is “concerned with contesting contemporary social relationships and challenging power relationships both inside and outside of Christian communities” and that “seeks wholeness both inside and outside of the Black community”. The dread gaze is a witnessing gaze: it bears witness to justice, and to that which calls for justice. It witnesses from a particular standpoint, here that of “community” and “communities”, but the justice (or lack of justice) it discerns is that which brings “wholeness” by operating “both inside and outside” of that standpoint. The “dread gaze” is, like any view, ineluctably a view from “somewhere”. But its “challenge” issues from the fact that it is not subject to the final authority of the social reality it scans: it refuses to be kept in its assigned place.

In the book’s first chapter, “Doing theology in the UKKK”, Beckford identifies two factors in the public life of Black people in racist Britain that generate a “low-level rage” which simmers away in private life. The first he names “problematic inclusion”; the second, “pernicious exclusion”. It is again a question of placement, of how the various insides and outsides of social places are assigned and kept separate. As Beckford shows in an acute analysis of the media visibility of Afro-Caribbean mourners after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when public narratives are constructed that include Black people, and make use of aspects of Black cultural identity, they often do so in a backhanded sort of way, drawing opportunistically on stereotypes in order to support a White establishment’s moral fables about its own identity. Problematic inclusion answers a demand for recognition, for symbolic participation in the life of the nation, with an ideologically distorted reflection.

It’s tempting to decide that “problematic inclusion” just is “representation”: the particular torsion Beckford detects in the way Black people’s existence is registered in the official narratives of the state and the public media is difficult to distinguish from the constitutive torsion of the symbolic itself. Generic dysphoria is partly generated by this torsion, by an inability to recognise oneself as one appears in the gaze of the Other. This is why, for example, Xasthur’s All Reflections Drained, although ostensibly concerned with stripping away personal illusions to reveal the underlying wretchedness of existence, is also engaged in a kind of solipsistic social refusal: the illusions one has about oneself always come from the Other. The real object of this excoriation is a kind of minimal kernel of authentic (in-)existence, beyond the “loss and inner distortion” inflicted by insertion into the symbolic order.

It’s important to remember, however, that Beckford’s “problematic inclusion” takes place under conditions of “pernicious exclusion”: the “low-level rage” he discusses is not merely a generic dysphoria, but anger at specific and abiding injustices. There are specific operations of denigration and stereotyping that characterise “racialising” representation, which gnaw away at personhood precisely because personhood is a social projection sustained by mutual misrecognition. We continually give credit where it is not due, which is why the refusal of credit so sorely offends.

In the next post, I want to discuss Beckford’s concept of “redemptive vengeance”, and see how it resembles and differs from that of “militant dysphoria”…