Black lives matter, police violence, and the Kenosha murders: Materializing race in “Law-and-Order” assemblages

Abstract

We use the 2020 incident of the police shooting of Jacob Blake followed by Black Lives Matter protests and the subsequent murder of several activists by Kyle Rittenhouse as a case study to update the Althusserian theory of interpellation using Deleuzian concepts and the idea of “identitarian articulations.” Specifically, we aim to think more about the capacity to accept or reject an interpellation, and who has those capacities, and why. Here, the “who” above is not the individual ontological subject, but the immanent Deleuzian subject emerging in articulation. We will show, for example, that subordinated subjects will often have less access to the capacity to resist interpellation. This is, in part, because it is difficult for some people to “add” or “subtract” identifications or capacities from their identitarian articulations because of the overdetermining power of hegemonic discourses, such as white supremacy. We will also show that different objects, technologies, and emotions when affecting an identitarian articulation, actualize different capacities, or different intensities of the same capacity, in a given encounter. Most importantly, for the purposes of this article, will be the capacity to manifest an emotion like “fear” or “threatened.” We show that an object like a gun may not appear threatening in particular encounters and in association with certain identitarian articulations even while another object, such as a cell phone, will be imbued with the capacity to induce “fear” or “threat” in another. As we show, unavoidably, in the United States, these capacities are deeply entangled with the racialization of the subject holding the object.