William Clark

Listening thru Walls: Sonic Reinscription and the Masquerade in True Detective

William Clark

In the third installment of his Cage quintology, the late James Incandenza, whose head was consecrated in and, as we later reconstructed, crumped in a microwave oven, and who was dead, on account of the microwave or Wild Turkey or, surely not but maybe, something of the immaterial, at the age of fifty-four in the Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar, and buried in Québec’s L’Islet County along with the Clipperton suicide footage gives the viewer this: The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent, the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs (Wallace 988). 1

I should like to consider this vignette as an instance of phantasmagoria, 2 not as a critique of scopophilia, but as a structure of thrown image and as a threshold to the kind of séance I am interested in, first here and then in (the voodoo of) southern Louisiana. I go to these places first in interest, but, then, also as they are explicit (and profane) occasions for witnessing the ongoing redistribution of the riches of

1 This brief description of the late Incandenza’s film is included in the 24th endnote of David Foster Wallace’s brilliant and moving Infinite Jest. The endnote documents Incandenza’s impressive filmography. Heath and Heaven were oft used actors in Incandenza films.

2 I am using this term after Walter Benjamin, as in his unfinished Arcade’s Project. We will understand it variously here, but first as an opening or cut that one enters as “in order to be distracted.” Thinking with southern Louisiana is to think in Creolized language (See Éduoard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation). I mean to think about the English (false) cognate of the French “to ask” or “demander,” whereby “as in order to be distracted” is compounded with “as [an] order to be distracted.” We will regard this assertion of “the distraction” or “periphery” later. It should be necessary from this, the start, to understand the phantasmagoria as diverse and poststructural, as a deployment multiply directed by the narrators thru their narrative, “now a landscape, now a room.” See the opening chapter (page seven is cited here) of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Pr. of Harvard U Pr., 2003. human life that have been strangely altered in ways intimately bound up with capital and, inescapably and categorically, race. The phantasmagorical, here the carnivalesque, in its multiply effective critique, is at work at once to conjure the damned to undam the reservoirs of life and then to afford them theaters in which to speak about the ways in which those two-way witnessing waters have been redirected or stilled in the discursive efforts of American white supremacy.

These effort are latent in looking (spectator sport) and are effaced in speculative finance. It is unavoidable for us here to invoke Emerson and his infamous eyeball which should be understood after the Incandenza film as grotesque, maximally bloated, gorged on vision, wrong vision: Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God (Emerson).

This transcendental vision of the transcendentalist par excellence organizes wrong vision rightly around occulted sumptuary laws governing illusory relations in which one can look or consume the sight of others 3 without being infected by the look, which is, for us, an infection not of a penetrating “look of the Other,” but of an invaginating sonic engagement, what Du Bois has already called “second sight” (Du Bois 3). Therefore, what Emerson describes at once as a “transparent” eyeball is revealed in fact to have always been “colored” or, indeed, “black” in real ways. Pace Emerson, I would describe transparency as the spectator’s technique of visual, racial oppression that imagines black people, black

3 Compounding “sight” and “site,” I should like to understand, elsewhere perhaps, imperialism, imperial impulse, or what Glissant (again in his Poetics of Relation) refers to as an arrowlike nomadism as inextricable from the kind of ocularcentrism that I am interested in here.

entertainers or entertainment as see-thru. 4 This technical event and feat (which requires the forging of a great blind spot), this spectator’s “look” produces spectral sound, which reinscribes itself upon the bloated eye, not as transparent film but as blackened lens—call them sunglasses, so one can really see what one is doing (in the glare).

I should like to concern myself here with the brilliant first season of the limited television series True Detective, but before I conduct or disclose an open reading of the objective text, we must, as Marty Hart (one of True Detective’s protagonists), move thru, lens this reading thru a series of stills, vignettes, or photographs that pre-curse our concerned and concerning text. But worry not, for “these aren’t as bad if you don’t know what you’re looking at,” even as you look still (E5). We can account for this insufficient “badness” by the kind of look, the insufficient kindness of the irresponsible look, the kindly effaced look, the kind of thrown look specific to the enthroned. This look is also a business look, a busied look, caught up not in taking a look around, 5 but in a complicated and programmatic economy of looking— ostensible business, the pretense of late capital—devoutly to be unwished, the authentic investments of which must be disavowed. But we would do well to first take those thrown looks, as they may be coming at us as a useful approximation or appropriation of speculation and usefulness itself—in other words, as politically essential, as an obeying and entertaining performance or masquerade (masking recalcitrant subterfuge). As authentic, this kind of obsession to understand and control thru narrative (reconstruction) is overseeing unto oversight. But as post-equivalent, this entertainment to which I refer, this spectacle, this explicit phantasmagoria is the masked rendering of the sociological (and very real) haunting that weighs as a heavy summons upon the living both in its spectacular drama and thru its thinking and thought condensation within the living as

4 Think of how intelligible the absolutely unintelligible world of Julius (and by extension that of slavery) is imagined to be by John and Annie in Charles Chesnutt’s “Uncle Julius Tales,” which will appear again in a moment. I am referring to both the ideology and praxis of a criminal justice in which one touches the body “as little as possible, and then only to reach something other than the body itself,” which is also the paradoxical nature of Nature, which looks to identify “the natural” even as it is mobilized in and thru imagined “transcendence.” This is to say that the sacredly transcendent comes to be profaned at once by its (bodily) wants and then by the reinscription of the wants of the other, the suppressed or violated body. See Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1975.

5 I take this language from the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I take it as a look of exploration and not explanation, without foresight, which is also, as Fred Moten notes, precisely foresight, a looking ahead with a certain torque to shape what is being looked at. spectral. 6 This entertainment, this captivating (un)seen takes captive the captors in its appropriated employment, which is the function (captivation) of the occult in True Detective—a phantasmal aberration in the topology of white supremacy and in the narrative (both thereof (white supremacy) and of our detectives) by which, in the reconstruction of a realistic and probable narrative of the case with which the show is concerned, narrative itself is subverted, complicated, knotted, doubled, bleeding, and breaking. The very instance of reconstruction, of looking again, is an occasion of a returning look, or, more specifically, a returning sound, “second-sight,” an echo, a reinscription scarring the source or dominant narrative, revealing what was already implicit there (the veil as whiteness itself), extant in equal part, but only as a post-equivalent phantasm (conjuring phantoms). The transparent eyeball is made opaque by sound; the transcendent(al) is rematerialized by blackness. I should like to understand this issuance of significant sound as it come outs of a confused and opaque nexus of incessant aggravations and displacements that “evade every natal occasion” or narrative origin that has to be understood in the language of the police and of detection and how, as attempts to make good sense of impossible narrative lengthen, as (pre)determinacy is enforced and policed, the narrative becomes all the more opaque and colored (Moten quoting Mackey 68).

What I want to do with this essay is to, in part, begin to understand the ways in which after slavery’s abolition the slave master is displaced and becomes one of so many poor and rural white laborers, and, in the process, finds ways to hijack his reduced position, that of the consumer, enthroning in his stead “signs of the time,” fixed fashions which are unbound to corporal bodies as to maintain transcendent (or transparent) mastery as such. I would suggest that these signs act out of reciprocal obligation and economy between “classes” (which act at once to dedifferentiate race and, then, to undo that work, separating disenfranchised whites from black (coerced) labor), and are, therefore, anything but arbitrary. The arbitrary sign is apt to link instead two progenies (disenfranchised white<—>coerced black) in an unbreakable reciprocity, such that the father (signifier), in jealousy, throws his weight back towards the disenchanted world of the signified (which is always illusory and with which there is no mutual obligation). The means towards patricide are then here fratricide. But just as the techniques of social death work to transcend the illegality of slavery in America, so does black recalcitrance work to transgress every boundary, those lines and techniques of social death. This, in True Detective, is the work of two black men, Maynard

6 I am thinking here of Avery Gordon’s crucial and moving Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997. We will later depart from her formulation of the haunting as a “mediation” in understanding the haunting voice of black interrogation in True Detective as an instance of mediation thru the specific technique that is control that, after Kung Fu Kenny’s verse on “Control,” acts with all due, returning force, “like Vietnam on this shit.”

Gilbough and Thomas Papania, who have integrated themselves within the specific hegemonic institution of police, of criminal justice. They are responsible for mediating the reconstruction of the murder of Dora Lange as it is told by our (white) protagonists, Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, but who, crucially, reconstruct it on their terms. In other words, these two men, these two interrogators, effectively hijack the show, making game-pieces out of every character and an arcaded board out of the topology of the narrative which, as the detectives reconstruct their story, is shown not to be a romantic reconstruction but a biting, realistic, and re-racializing critique. No longer is that recording lens in the interrogation room (“REC”) transparent film; it is opaque, darkened, colored, blackened. The voice of the black men scars every image of the case. We can now understand the mirrored act of spectacle in the Incandenza film as the reaffirmation of a tradition by which the very idea of tradition is reimbursed in the next generation, in which an unseeing look (always imagined not to be returned) is invested. There is in this transparent mirror, however, an alluvium deposited by the many excluded generations that is indistinct and unexplored but issues significantly, issues oral, musical, euphonic, altogether sonic signs that are denied and insulted but are also inexplicable and dangerous. In their silent suppression and indeterminate affect, they inform the narrative as a punctum which puts to test the juridico-legal punctuations of that suppression, that maladroit rearguard mission. 7 I wish to understand the techniques of the interrogators as necessarily improvisational—necessarily so, because they are retrospective and reconstructive but also never “present,” as it were, because they are improvisational, without foresight/site. This is a paradoxical improvisation, then, as, too, it is the historical, political work of the radical black tradition. It is, in this way, an occasion also of a foresound and foresounding, amplifier and amplifying, but not programmatic. The interrogators must at once improvise while also looking ahead with a certain and necessary torque or vocal force to shape what is being looked at as the interrogated two (whose experience is resounding and being resounded (remastered)) don’t know what that is, what their experience was. The interrogation is here a doubly-voiced force of questioning (that is not a line of questioning) that operates in weird (wayward, occulted) temporalities, “twisted epoché[s],” “redoubled turn[s]” prescribing and extemporaneously forming and reforming rules (Moten 63). These rules are themselves, we must note, out-of-bounds and operate beyond (and towards) the home territory of the interrogated—low blows coming from the lower frequencies. This structure (of interrogation), which is un-programmed

7 We can imagine a dark, back-grounded figure approaching the staged, mirrored image, a dark shape in a poorly lit room—one-way answering and talking at submitted to reverse-way interrogation, the questioning of the back-grounded voices, voices from behind the veil, voices from within the walls, if it were that “these walls could talk,” laments Kung Fu Kenny. and un-programmatic but also structural and coded—that is to say not but nothing other than improvisational—, is the work of skilled technicians, designed to extort and coerce, thru super-legal, racial means, admission (of the latent slavery (in (the) Hart and Cohle/soul) of police hegemony, displaced whites, and continuing plantation politics). The technicians employ and are employed by their invaluable technique, which is what I shall henceforth call the masquerade and which is the necessary means to and always in the service of the real political work and literary critique in which Papania and Gilbough are interested.

To construct their terms and narrative of criticism, it is necessary that they assume that those realms of white supremacy which they are interested in destroying “are sufficiently exotic [and, here, dangerous] as to require a disguise, a journey, and an ‘experiment’ and that such difference can be effectively assimilated through sartorial means alone” (Schocket). They assume the power of the police, 8 that very institution responsible for so much violence unto black people (for this reason, the choice is specific). But this assumption is mediated by the masquerade. This “experiment,” as Schocket describes, echoes, as it is scripted by the interrogation and interrogators, in Cohle. For him, it is the great scientific experiment of true detection but also his involvement in undercover work, “deep narco,” and sustained drug abuse. Beyond the clothing and undercover, for Papania, Gilbough, and Cohle, there is something essentially same which can be understood. This notion of sameness is taken very seriously by the black interrogators, taken for granted by Cohle, and not taken at all by many of his (Cohle’s) ilk, who only have the need of casually positing sameness to further liken at or concede towards discrimination. It is the truly egalitarian position, the active theorization of egalitarianism, then, that allows the detectives to “manipulate vestments during strategic moments of entry” 9 —“entry” here understood to be the moments in which their desired course of narrative (the apparent distraction or punctum) is flirted with but also the rampant penetration of those same, frenzied moments. Cohle’s “journey ‘down’ [into the depths of the Lange archive and the case] ultimately serves to echo and circumvent other journeys ‘up,’ reducing [his] mobility to a mere play of cultural signs” (Schocket). The power of the police is contained and suspended thru its embodiment (rematerialization) by the two black men who are fundamentally exogamous

8 In their masquerade or “put-on,” that is to say, as in vetement, they make the investment of a radical history in that institution and bank on its force.

9 This language is also and overtly that of penetration, but a sneaky one by a sneaky tower: imagine the Washington Monument (rather, the Bill Clinton Monument) slowly blackening as it is infected by the angry botched of the Mississippi Delta. The interrogative coercion begins as a gentle coaxing (moves thru a threshold), acts respectfully, even obediently, as in order to later strike, penetrate. “Let me put the head in / Ooh, I don’t want more than that,” Kung Fu Kenny assures in “Lust,” promising “just a touch.”

to it, is possessed by the raging ghosts of black bodies it has systemically and systematically eterminated (and continues to experminate). Too, attending to this movement up 10 —the ever increasing implication of the ruling classes in the occulted madness of the poor and rural white, we might understand that Papania and Gilbough are working, thru Hart and Cohle, upwards thru the hegemonic structure of police, theorizing blackness against it, initiating an “upstart vertigo pursuing an intransitive ‘crust’—abject, indomitable, ‘beauty’ endowed with aspects of camouflage,” initiating, to wit, an emergent understanding of interior blackness (egalitarianism) even within the most hating, even as they are to the manipulating black theorist the most “abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,” ghosts David Walker (not himself abject but a brilliant theorist of abjection) here (Mackey 115). The black interrogators work against these, the abject Hart and Cohle, but also against the aims of “empirical,” “rational” detection (that which leads to (always ends with) the prosecution and incarceration of young black men or obscurely justified violence unto black bodies) and its very language (detective language). The total, evaluable world (of detection) is shown to be a false creation (empirical dagger of the mind), a speculative toute-monde that will be rent into a chaos-monde by échos-monde (to borrow a formulation by Édouard Glissant), interrogating voice, the returning and repetitive sound, the inexplicable, signifying sounds that are ignored in (the) reconstruction (of the Civil Rights movement) and that are redressed in the interrogation, sonically reinscribed. The interrogation is an aggressive compromise, a lexcio-syntactical reformation, a will to the deformation of the dominant narrative and its ideological/linguistic architecture. It argues against the look. This second sight, this event in which the detectives are seen, questioned, spoken at, is the site of argumentum adversus oculos, the debarred and debarring look, and, as it is being recorded, the detectives are liable to make mistakes, expose (themselves by) their bad reconstruction. “REC”: the inscription on the lens of the camera, the subject of the first shot of the show. Marty Hart is the camera’s subject. The camera witnesses his interrogation. The second scene plays out in much the same way, this time with Cohle being questioned by the men. It is in the third scene that the narrative reaches its first temporal switchback to that which is being recounted by Hart and Cohle: the gruesome rape and murder of Dora Lange. This show will actively switch between the two worlds of the murder case and the reconstruction thereof. Thus, Hart and Cohle should be understood as figures of signification actively determined by their black interrogators, between these two worlds. In other words, Hart and Cohle are actively being manipulated

10 I am thinking, of course, of Curtis Mayfield’s banger “Move On Up.” My argument would seem to you later like this, as locatable in a tradition of Black Optimism but that is also a post-equivalent, violent Black Operation more like the work of Tyler the Creator and another essay. by a black interrogation which acts with an unanswerable torque against the terms of the interrogated. Any unscripted operations performed by the two detectives should then be understood as another improvisation within historical contexts that have already been mapped. 11 The murder of the young white woman Dora Lange is shocking, yes, but is it so different from or so much worse than the too-many-to-list, documented accounts of unpunished rape and murder done unto so many black women throughout and after institutional slavery? This working and reworking of the Dora Lange case can be understood then as motility in and thru “the actual multiplicity of distinct and overlapping public discourses, public spheres, and scenes of evaluation that already exist” (Derrida 120). This territory, then, this topology, this physiognomy of Dora Lange, is the turf upon which the variously constituted violence of continuing slavery have already been exacted—this metonymy is unavoidable. Their course already mapped, it is impossible for Hart and Cohle to move freely here. The “protagonists” become characters following, are characterized to have always followed the hidden transcriptof Papania and Gilbough. 12

What becomes increasingly obvious for Cohle is that something is awry in, accidental to the investigation. This bad euphony, this silent scream is the result of the detectives’ continuing reconstruction of the case, their (literary) dedication to clarity that has to overgeneralize and omit. This dedication is also the pleasurable benediction of (the) empirically dead body, the study of murdered flesh. This pleasure is not for the continuance of rationality but for pleasure taken in the gratuitous, studied violence done unto the (black)

11 We can call it unscripted on account of this improvisational mode to which I refer in which nothing future is previously known. Not unlike a literary cannon built upon an absent text, the “historical context” or map thereof does not exist, because (indeed, nothing is previously known and) the (cognitive) map is unthinkable outside of the categorical terms of blackness. Pace Jameson’s formulation of “cognitive mapping,” I should like to consider this topology with which we are here concerned not as a spatialized mentality (or as a “Ville Mentality,” after J. Cole) but as a physiognomy, or, better still, as a spatialized mentality that is rematerialized by a body, a mind rematerialized by a black somebody who displaces the primacy of heart with his/her/their body (to be paired with soul). I am thinking here, of course, about “Body and Soul,” but also about Kung Fu Kenny’s assertion (in “The Blacker the Berry”) that he is “as black as the heart of a fuckin’ Aryan.”

12 I am thinking here about James C. Scott’s formulation of the “hidden transcript” that is both the secret discourse of the powerless and the private dialogue of the empowered. See Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, 1990. I would like to understand this movement and this following as it is parallel to that of the illusory play The King in Yellow thru the literary constitutions of the Carcosa mythos, the occulture and literary cannon from which comes the supernatural allusions of the show.

body. 13 This scientific manipulation, the creation of a coherent, concise, and consecutive narrative, and this concordant predestination to be clear does not stand up to interrogation. The language of detection, as it is employed by Hart and Cohle, confines them to a false transparency that they can irresponsibly and inconsequentially apply (with police force) to the world, a world which they (or their fathers or grandfathers and so on) used to run—think of them as the descendants of plantation masters. 14 Under interrogation, Hart and Cohle appear to us this way, as wretched creatures still trying to find their form in a strange land, and, as they speak their case, reconstruct the narrative in its transparency they find it already (pre-)conceived in opacity, the voice of interrogation having colored it before its conception. 15 The accidental note, then, for the sake of the various pleasure taken in transparency, cannot be placed, is willingly ignored, because the pleasure is dependent upon its power of (the) absolute exclusion (of so-called bad notes). This exogamous presence of the dissonant, this unseating presence is superimposed by a black interrogation, which forces upon Hart and Cohle (and their transparent narrative) a penetration—the penetrable and penetrating opacity of a world in which one agrees to live amongst other (black) people, a world which is a great deal more complicated and contradictory and incoherent than their detective language would have it, one which subjects itself to two-way witness.

By and by the interrogating detectives assert and reassert the presence of the seemingly trivial, moving such trivialities from the periphery to the center of attention. This movement is what I have called “sonic reinscription,” here, the rewriting of a suppressed history back into the dominant narrative from which it was excluded. The affect of this, as it is transcribed thru black voice, interrogating voice, is euphonic, such that the dominant narrative becomes intoned or sonorously possessed by the infecting narrative, such as in a chord inversion, giving the heterogeneous narrative offspring (or hideous progeny) “a bit more bite, an element of taunt conducive to curvature as well as interiority”

13 But that Dora Lange was white suggests that she is in fact auxiliary to this “pleasure.” That is to say, that Cohle revels in any narrative casualty (including his own, hence his continuing interest in suicide and self-sacrifice) as all characters are narrated by, are in the narrative of black narrators. All gratuitous violence is interested in, concordant with, and concomitant to violence unto black bodies.

14 Or we could say, more obviously, that the two detectives work for a criminal justice system and a government in the Mississippi Delta region that is generally intent on the legal protection and continuance of the dominant plantation bloc while simultaneously “silencing the century-old African American vision of human development.” See the first page of the opening chapter of Clyde Woods’ Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. New York: Verso, 1998.

15 In other words, as they think their categorical science, the detection already sounded untrue, unhappy, by that category with which it was unconcerned. Categorical detection is made, forced to concern itself with the category of the black (interrogators). (Mackey 115). This new narrative is capable of handling, that is to say, the “repressed” problems of the interior that Hart and Cohle face, remediates them successfully. Indeed, these crucially altered scenes upon which dominant narrative is superimposed upon peripheral narrative, once these scenes are revisited, are some of the most loaded and guttural articulations the show proffers. The technique of forcing the observation, we can say, forcing the eyes towards the issue of what the interrogators want dealt with, is enacted with an incessant assertion of what we would be right to call here, after Barthes, the punctum 16 and, more generally, a remapping of the narrative which is drawn “not only in terms of the objects of attention, but equally in terms of what is not perceived, or only dimly perceived, of the distractions, the fringes and peripheries that are excluded or shut out of a perceptual field” (Crary 40). This excluded periphery—that of the black narrative—returns, reinscribes, rematerializes, haunts, shades, darkens, and makes opaque the dominant narrative. 17

I should like to posit a second periphery—this one of the valence of the larger show’s text—as it is inhabited by the outcast subjects of the rural white people we have referred to already as displaced, many of whom are pathologically and physically damaged. 18 A theoretical annotation to this pathology: once this state of displacement and flattening is rent and understood, the terror of the occult is turned inside out and is felt dearly enough (these rapes and murders are real) to duly precipitate the monstrously and monstrously recalcitrant awareness, the magical realization, the animated incorporation of what could-have-been an emancipatory eschatology (the end of (black) social death) but was poorly reconstructed. The knowledge of this renders wretchedness, pathology, and inarticulacy. And so we see the uncle of Marie Fontenot—the disappearance of whom Cohle believes to be linked with the Dora Lange murder—catatonic under Cohle’s interrogation. Why, we could—practically enough—ask, in this geography of displaced, rural white

16 Roland Barthes refers to the punctum of an image as that which disturbs or upsets the staged photograph or the stadium (that which follows the photographer’s intention, what the photographer wants seen). The punctum is the accident that “pricks” the attention of s/he or they who beholds the photograph but also “bruises,” is “poignant.” See pages 26-27 of Barthes’ Camera Lucidia. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. I am interested here in the “accident”al quality of the punctum, the strange note that is not in the key, not keyed to a dominant, does not recite or reinforce or center, but actively speaks back, works against the rearguard, decenters, transgresses.

17 We can consider a different, peripheral (excluded) narrative, the domestic (feminine and feminized) narrative, that, following thru the language of haunting, possesses the hyper-masculinity of (especially Hart’s) police work. That story we all just heard of home rules.

18 The interrogation opens multiple lines of recourse to mystical, erotic, religious, and social understandings of multiplicity, here multiple pathologies—“All the gathered / ache of our / severed selves”—, gathered-up pathologies, which were all at once Cohle. See Mackey, Nathaniel. “Grisgris Dancer.” Iowa City: The Iowa Review, 1980.

people is there no proletarian impulse towards rebellion? We should have to conclude that there is some kind of contentment, or opiate, or, barring that, a hope, a belief that this, a “wrong life,” can be revived, lived “rightly,” (Adorno 35). It is this bad logic of undifferentiated race, the understanding that the category of the black is not differentiated from the category and class of these poor white people that would ensure that the social death of black people, as this killing would be understood as the sacrifice of parts-of-awhole and not as the aggression of a specific and privileged part unto another—a sacrifice that could then be understood to cure the pathologies of the whole society. To put it another way, to imprison “criminals” who are necessarily black but allegedly not-because-they-are-black would be to work to cure the society at large. This is the work of the hegemony of criminal justice and the police, both with which Cohle is categorically involved and is therefore infected by (the wretchedness, rendered inarticulate). This explicitly counters his assertion that he “can do terrible things to people with impunity,” because he’s police (E2). Because his character is (this time properly) reconstructed in and thru black interrogation, is motivated by and by a narrative of black interrogation or blackness or the narrative of two black people, his work, his policing has been revealed as monstrous in the same ways the people with whom Cohle is charged with interrogating are monstrously engaged in the subtle suppression of black people. 19

An explicit instance in which the critique of the black interrogators is made manifest thru the occult occurs at the site where the dream of empirical reconstruction thru scientific detection is proven to be a lie, or more specifically, when it is apparent that the detectives have been lying to the black interrogators for the past three hours of text, where the dominant narrative is broken by the force of interrogation. 20 Take then the fourth episode, whither the two temporalities of the show hinge, whither the reconstructed narrative now seventeen years past is reopened in the show’s narrative present, whither the wrong of a reconstructed past is arraigned to live out rightly in the present. Let me break it down, and let it be broke: this ostensibly “white”

19 I am speaking here of the difference between a productive monstrousness that is of culture meeting the problematic monstrousness that is of occulture. At this crossroad, a precautioned culture (which is a monstrosity that oversteps significant ground, transforming significant difference into signifying homogeneity) is infected by an occulture (which is ostensibly “imagined”); this latter bears (upon the first) un-isolatable, in-transmittable, un-interning/intern-able, altogether present reality that slips away (with) the surface beneath the former’s feet, moves the conversation elsewhere, moves the sight to new sites, demaps.

20 “Don’t tell a lie on me / I won’t tell the truth ‘bout you,” says Kung Fu Kenny in “The Heart Part IV.” The interrogators know already (in advance) the authorial intention of Hart and Cohle, know already the detectives will have to lie to support it, and can play in advance. To reconstruct a true detection would mean for Hart and Cohle to reconstruct an entire (oc)culture that imposes and polices social death, in other words, to first deconstruct. This they cannot do, and having told a lie on the interrogators, about the detectives is told the truth. text has been hijacked by the black interrogators. It is their ghost, the ghost of the radical black tradition that haunts the scientific machine of detection, which is now subject to the three-way witness of reconstructed detection, interrogation, and excluded and returning, re-racializing history. What silences the proletarian promise in this dedifferentiated class of white people and the value of their occulted cultural critique is that their position was a conscious choice which situates class against race. That is to say, that the plantation bloc “sold” poor whites this situation with the promise of the continued social death of black people. What forces then the representation of this class of white people thru occulted agencies is, ultimately, that hidden transcript which conjures (black) marxian and (satirical) occulted spirit in the first place. It is the black voice that at once unseats and then puts into place.

The occasion then for the breakdown of the dominant narrative is that which also brings the detectives closest to closing the case, the slaughter of Reggie Ledoux, who is wrongly believed to be the murderer and rapist of Dora Lange. For seventeen years, it “was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person,” unburdened by the kind of critical interrogation that now Hart and Cohle are accountable to (E3). For seventeen years, they understood the case to have ended with a “monster at the end of it,” but now, under black scrutiny, the “monster” is not something that can be killed and with which narrative reconstruction ends but a problem of thought (E3). Hart and Cohle recount their romantic takedown of Ledoux, wherein, as they approach his house, Hart says, “Blam! Bullets cut through right near Rust’s head. We dove opposite ways into the high growth. But they’d already spotted us, and they had something high-velocity. Boom! Blew apart this tree between us. I mean, it was on.” And, then, Cohle: “Hmm. Heavy shit. Fucking ferns and whatnot bursting all around us, bark flying off of trees. I mean, we were in a fucking shitstorm” (E5). threateningly of “black stars” (E8). This commentary under interrogation is superimposed upon the video of Hart and Cohle approaching the house and capturing Ledoux, dressed only in a towel, posing no physical danger but speaking (or being spoken thru) threateningly of “black stars” that are to rise. He speaks of a dream very different from the detectives’ illusory clean-up of the case, a dream of further complication and of Cohle’s further implication “in Carcosa” (E5). When closest to closing the case, the political work of the interrogation intercedes, speaking thru Ledoux of the rise of “black stars.” 21 Ledoux (as an agent of the interrogation) moves the reconstructed narrative from “fucking shitstorm” to something more fun

21 It should be unavoidable to think here of “Every Nigger is a Star,” and, more especially, its sampling in the opening track of Kung Fu Kenny’s To Pimp a Butterfly, “Wesley’s Theory,” another instance of theorizing, thinking black against and thru the police power that captured Wesley Snipes. We should also attend carefully to Du Bois’s likening of black men to falling stars, if it is that here they are said to be again on the rise.

damental, reposits the narrative in a very different kind of storm. Thru Ledoux, then, the occult, or, more specifically, the demented, levels a fun-demental attack on the dementia of a criminal justice system that unceasingly raises a flag of dementia over its lugubrious chateau. Hart and Cohle, lest we, too, forget, are the heirs to the (legal) enforcement of Jim Crow, the inheritors of that law. The strategies of the interrogation are shown to be intimately bound up with (class) occulture, but its ends are, however latently, racial.

We need to then understand the occult in the show in its work to actively rework a past, to imitate dead styles, as it is necessarily and categorically (a) black (performance). This occulture of the “Yellow King” (which is also the occulture the American deep south) taken at its effaced value, is already a swamped and desperate search for the father. The Du Boisian sonorous e/affect then, the second, occulted sight, this infiltration of the cultural with a periodized and periodizing occulture, the working infiltration of black theory makes this occulture (still a search for the father) a moving (both sad and motile) reconstruction on account of and accounting for something of lost time, and the “search” (for the father) is for nefarious purpose. This sadness, this white melancholia, this self-loathing, this failed search—these things are diffuse, diffused, and archived, and they are attended to by, curated by the archivists—unhappy scientists with tight tautological masks effacing metaphysical pinheads—in the museum of white (oc)culture. They are singularly ocular. They are how the society turns itself into its own and finest spectacle, mines itself of its finest, properly measured up, rightly gauged resources. They are the very systems of domination— the structures of the church, the police, the state as feeling—that can operate in and with righteous impunity. Their terms of self-endearment, however, their made-virtues of sorrow are ceaselessly arraigned by questions that white people do not want asked, by forbidden questions. Nathaniel Mackey has called already the asking of them “liturgical ambush” (95). This is one technique against the observer, and it is how white domination can be momentarily hijacked by black people, imbued with history, and remobilized, sent on its merry way.

It is not until Cohle finally meets with the occulted agencies that he has been hunting that his masking is, can be undone. This is the moment when the ends of detection thru scientific rationalism and the ends of the occult are the same, when Cohle and Errol Childress, the hunted monster and center of the web of the occulted agencies responsible for Lange and countless other bodies, meet, and it is revealed that the work of detection was in some sense a training process or a test to become an acolyte for that occulted way of sub-hegemonic speaking: childress: Come with me, little man. Come in here with me. [flies buzzing] Rust? Come on inside, little priest. To your right, little priest. Take the bride’s path. This is Carcosa. You know what they did to me?

Hmm? What I will do to all the sons and daughters of man. You blessed Reggie…Dewall. Acolytes. Witnesses to my journey. Lovers. I am not ashamed. Come die with me, little priest. [exhales sharply] Rust? Rust! [footsteps] [rustling sound] [rumbling] Now, take off your mask (E8).

The work of detection was never, after all, opposed to the occult that was so much a part of it all along. It is only thru the processes of detection that the occult is, more than known, consecrated (“You blessed Reggie…Dewall.”). It is in this moment that things (can) end, and it becomes rather unimportant what determined the speech that startles Cohle into his encounter with Childress, the words being, as it were, spoken without intention—the occult dissolved by the dark of the night sky. As many stars as there are, there is all the more blackness, all the more of those at-once-occulted, now-de-occulted (decollated) black stars. There is an egalitarian move after this unmasking—made quite explicit in the physical struggle between Cohle and Childress in which Cohle is forced, hands barring Childress’ knife, to head-butt his other, compounding facial graft with fatal transference.

I’ll end here on the very same terms as that of our remarkable object of study, True Detective, going to that place where, too, this final confrontation or eschaton is wrought. This is Fort Macomb, which is also the very house (refuge) of the homeless monster (Childress) and is itself monstrous and ruinous, a sepulcher barring the barricade’s spectral chief (he who at once gave himself to the ruling classes, now left to his own mutations). The fort is the severed plot of a politico-logical trauma, as it were for Childress, as the body of Dora Lange is for Cohle, his (both of them now), their topology of mourning, which is also their field of science/ séance. But this is a most melancholic science, this one devoid of all normative and normalizing functions, de-policed, if you will, recalcitrant to itself as science, without reliable limit. By the time they meet upon the heath, the place has been swamped by the momentous present coming to pass/ past in the body of the manifestation, made manifest there. It is about that time and high tide. It is only at the site of two American wars—Macomb is haunted by both the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War—and the site of the re-imagination of both, that Childress can affectively harden himself monstrously in the cadaverous rigor of his readymade critique, ultimately as a marxian political agent and a Sadean cultural critic. The fort is our hideaway where a plan (written by the interrogators and thru Childress) is reconstituted. It is the fort that is prematurely sieged by Cohle, where that plan has to be prematurely deployed. The specter acts against itself. We should understand then, deconstructively, that Cohle’s pessimism is an echo of the frustration of his interrogators (his authors) over the assurance that what happens here is what will (always be what will) have happened at the border of the interrogation (the narrative): another failed racial reconstruction. This new reconstruction, in its redoubling recalcitrance, reaffirms the other. How clever is all of this fight and how insufficient. To leave this

way, then: insufficient. But so, too, wrong life… cohle: I tell you, Marty, I’ve been up in that room looking out those windows every night here and just thinking: it’s just one story. The oldest. hart: What’s that? cohle: Light versus dark. hart: Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory. cohle: Yeah. You’re right about that…You know, you’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing. hart: How is that? cohle: Well, once, there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning (E8).

The Aryan force here is total—on earth and in sky. Blackness, here coded darkness, has to be exorcised, indeed hunted into the labyrinthine recesses, coaxed out even as it is coaxed by its apposite, and, ultimately, put to use. This is a mandate executed by a plurality of programs, a panoply of the techniques of hegemonic criminal justice. But just so, too, as that mandate is a programmatic condition of the ruling classes en masse, generic hegemony, we must understand the necessity of the exorcism as subject to execution thru a different and equally various panoply of images, a “fantastic panoply” which is the spectral theory that acts upon and against the evolution of the specter, or at least has so far. In this second execution—call it a (policed) second death—the various techniques of oppression are given over to a singular (even as it is variously constituted) involvement in the mobility of a highly differentiated strategic context, one that is constant, of constancy, and consistent in its campaign of social death, which is also the campaign of war. This context, the need for social death, that is to say of food (bad Eucharist) is constructed in “discursive layers” whose variousness and “stratification allows [for] long sequences to remain subjacent to ephemeral formations (Derrida 121). That is to say, we can speak of the taxing power of a hidden transcript upon a dominant narrative and understand dominance as a logic constituted only in relation to “blackness,” but we cannot ignore that categorical blackness is born always into a history of violence and that the hidden, obscured, occulted transcript remains subjacent to that other “ephemeral” logic that is the subtext to dominance: the body of the supernumerary meets the raw force of inexplicable hatred. We cannot say, in this, the show closing, that the performance was lived out rightly, even as it was rightly lived.

But so, too, we should not have expected it to have been. This endgame, narrative end, the ends of the narrative, were already to have failed, but not for naught. What is reaffirmed by Cohle in this final scene is that even as this theoretical work, this thinking (of) blackness has been done, there is a real problem of praxis remaining, still an anatomy of police power, still thousands of young black men behind bars, still the gratuitous violence unto black bodies. The return look, the return sound, sonic reinscription, this objective transformation of a rural white society into an occulted phantasm and spectacle, the blackening of the topology (an entire forest of ham, a world in which everyone that looks is seen)—all of this is crucial, but it does not undo the practical structure of the policed and policing world (police hegemony, security state). This theoretical work does, however, think of an active and persistent, shall we say, reconstructed slavery in terms that are more real, more bloated than ever, and it allows the practitioner, the revolutionary to measure up its actual power. A note on this ending: Cohle’s final assurance that the “light’s winning” is spoken with so little clarity that it took the release of the transcript for viewers to be sure of what he had said.

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