Thus Charles Barkley is reappropriated as an affective force, utilizing a trope of affirmation to intensify our perception of performance. Yet somehow we sense a dubious undercurrent, a longing for a post–World War II bliss, an incinerated Hiroshima, Nagasaki (or Japan for that matter, no more Mitsubishi, no more Lexus, no more Sony, etc.), a past-tense Godzilla; and imagine owing all of this to King Kong! Furthermore, as per bell hooks's discussion of her book, entitled Black Looks: 

"There's a suggestion that white supremacist imperialism is more elastic these days, that it can actually open up to multiculturalism. But in many ways that's a power move. There's a little change, enough to appear like a progression, but not enough to institutionalize systems of liberatory social and sexual justice." ⁹  

In Edward Said's essay, "Reflections on Exile," he finds that "Much of the contemporary interest in exile can be traced to the somewhat pallid notion that non-exiles can share in the benefits of exile as a redemptive motif. There is, admittedly, a certain plausibility and truth to this idea."¹⁰  However, the drabness of this notion stems from a hollow deployment of the picturesque. The romance of self-inflicted exile from the herd desire of the "mainstream" is similar to the romantic landscape gardens of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, designed to commodify synthetic portrayals of brutally colonized places as an experience of exile to be had in one's own backyard or on the wall of one's own living room. Here, the nature of the trope is that of a vial, a package containing the very space one has supposedly chosen exile from. 

Thus, a project embracing the motif of the picturesque does so by the authority of an authentic type; in an absolute sense (as in a definition), this relegation to the "authority" of a type or typology constitutes a framework of legitimacy. As such, an affective force emerges in support and clarification of the canon. And for the utmost clarity, the canon as a typological absolute becomes an element to which all other elements are relegated, in an equally absolute sense. That which is subsumed by the canon becomes the formal; that which resists finds its locus on the periphery. Meanwhile, the search for authenticity intensifies, enfolds, and deviates. 

Still, the notion of a voluntary exile contains the draw of solitude, an experience of blackness beyond the group, and the draw of a self-inflicted state of deprivation felt at not being among the community, the collective. One may ask what the positive aspects of this paranormal state are.  And how does one subvert this mode of blackness beyond the previous set of affiliations? One must first decide if this operation is even for real, for such claims to exile, voluntary or otherwise, are often crafted to wear on one's sleeve. While providing an attractive brooch, the exile maintains the same set of affiliations and loyalties and sustains an additional "loss—of critical perspective, of intellectual reserve, of moral courage." ¹¹ 

One may find the solitude of exile and the commune of nationalism to be two conflicting varieties of "paranoia." However, the notion of exile adds inertia and momentum to a nationalistic tendency to find subterranean context as guise for thinking beyond. Although immobility is at times crucial to the human condition, "[Simone] Weil also saw that most remedies for uprootedness in this era of world wars, deportations and mass exterminations are almost as dangerous as what they purportedly remedy."¹² 

Thus the draw of the "underground" emerges from the romance of possessing a free space, or free zone, in which one is able to operate without limits, with uninhibited creativity, where one could discover and pursue projects of unknown origin and outcome, where one could run through virtual jungles, barefoot and naked. And still, this subterranean space would allow one to remain aligned by casting notions of a formalized freedom as a realm of operation with degrees of predictability and ranges of expectation. And the desire for uprootedness is reconciled with the security of knowing where one has supposedly been, where one is going, and how one is to go about getting there. 

Although a linguistic element is able to range at will, it is still bound to the confines of predictability; its limited ability to transform through a distribution of states manifests infinite discoveries of mere typological entrenchment. Such operations are nationalistic in character and serve to stratify as an infliction of discipline. Additionally, "These rhetorics authorize and legitimate, in different ways, the privileged status of intellectuals, which not only reproduce ideological division between intellectual and manual labor but also reinforce disciplinary mechanisms of subjection and subjugation."¹³  

Furthermore, these constitutional inflictions of "truth" serve as the substrata, providing textures and landscapes from which to build, and viscous, liquid mediums within which to swim. In prevention of  suicidal destratification, and in avoidance of chaos, there is a "lock back into strata," becoming ever more rigid still, "losing degrees of diversity, differentiation, and mobility."¹⁴  At this realm of existence is essentially a planet at the center of its universe. And here recall the official Catholic opposition to Copernicanism: As the seventeenth-century model of hegemony, even the church performed in prevention of destratification. The divorce of science from religion was such that realigning natural philosophy with the findings of scientific thinkers (recall Galileo and his telescope) was more difficult than a conversion to the Blackness of Copernicanism. 

Yet to think, shift, and deterritorialize beyond some mysterious boundary condition, one must avoid the trope of going beyond, only to divert critique away from the space of the canon, as well as the formation of the canonical space itself. Here projects initiate as a veritable inner-tube check, claiming to push the boundaries of what is known, not to gaze out of the holes in its discursive atmosphere, but to patch up those holes in an act of stabilization. And although the paradox is here, within, as subtext, one can sense the liquid movement of nebulous boundary conditions, recombining and reassessing a politic of closure. 

But given the fate of Galileo at the hands of an appropriated, organized religion, a range of paralysis emerges from projects that portend to be transcendental, only to edify and resist closure of intellectual space by speaking beyond it. To be in awe of the fact that one is surprised is such an operation. A politic of closure depends, exponentially, on multiple points of resistance, and upon the allosomorphic capabilities that emerge within bodies; as lines of tension develop, these allosomorphic bodies become alphabetical, transforming into an array of customary orders and relational ciphers that redeploy (interweave) in rendering stable systems of meaning; mobile elements of "strata" thicken and transform from and into differing tangibles (abstract liquids to perceptible solids). And independent of any evolutionary scales, we find these entities with infinite degrees of diversity, differentiation, and mobility. Although defining a moment of these "boundary conditions" is similar to the measuring of a coastline: the closer one measures, the more one must take into account the circumference of a grain of sand (the boundary tends to depart as infinity approaches). Yet somehow, boundaries are discernible, as there seem to be coastlines and atmospheres, as there seem to be racelines, genderlines, and statuspheres:  

"Nor in regard to any part of the Museum, should the great purpose of instruction be lost sight of in the multitudinous gathering of materials. A mere miscellaneous collection of objects, however vast, has little power to instruct, or even to incite to inquiry. The practical teaching and the real suggestiveness of a Museum is almost wholly dependent on the clear and rational arrangement of its parts, and the leading ideas which rule in their classification."¹⁵

Yet the act of readjustment can be a brutal and compelling affective force.  Ask Kunta Kinte; with half of his foot readjusted, it seemed he had no desire to go anywhere. Ask George Jefferson; with his role of the classic, tall, forceful male patriarch (à la Ward Cleaver) readjusted to that of a short, narrow-minded, bombastic fool, it didn't seem that he was going anywhere either. No need to ask J. J., though we knew his fate was sealed the moment he opened his mouth. But look at the air about the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and the Rodney King incident; black females, black males, pulsating organs, superhuman strength, all in the context of a "family values" campaign. Thomas (as if his hands were not dirty) did sustain a "high-tech lynching," but as far down-river as his ass, there is no black solidarity here. King, however, sustained an old-fashioned beating, and if not for the video, his brutal arrest would have been readjusted to a local King-Kong-on-drugs scenario. Meanwhile, the "family values" campaign marches on, readjusting our national and international problems to that of intrafamilial placement: The mighty patriarch, the woman, the children, the dog, cat, bird, et cetera.  

Here, a nominal archive and "sudden reconstruction" both remain tangent to and divergent from reason. Yet there is need of an iron will to remain. And note Eliot's sense of urgency when he says that "sudden reconstruction is impossible in our high places of education," as if current constructions were grounded on some undeniably authentic archetype, where any rival inquiries fly in the face of an authentic, archival authority. Mr. Eliot actually inducts himself into the archive by exposing a singular significance in a world of difference. He forms a sudden archaic shift, becoming one with the very ground he stood on during his inaugural address. Furthermore, he spoke to stratify a range of paralyzing institutional practices, with material and ideological affects, that are strategically exempted from critique. As Michel Foucault argued, "All these negative elements, defenses, censorships, denials, which the repressive hypothesis groups together in one great central mechanism destined to say no, are doubtless only component parts that have a local and tactile role in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former."¹⁷