Meaning-making to Question Social Reality
A Reading of Citizen: An American Lyric
by L.D.
The spectre of race is deeply tied to American memory and identity. The history of the Black experience in America is characterized by racial violence: police brutality and the shooting of Trayvon Martin, public lynchings attended to by white audiences, dehumanization in sports courts, and racism in everyday life. Such histories of racial violence are explored by Claudia Rankine in her multimedia book Citizen: An American Lyric. I will focus on a five-line passage from Citizen in particular, as this unit of text instantiates the critical interpretive engagement engendered by Rankine’s writing, textual interplay with multi-media art, and theoretical commentary. In this five-line passage, Rankine develops a fundamental paradox of meaning-making and social existence: first, a necessary subject (“‘I’”) makes absence into something present, calling things into being by designating the thing definition; by speaking the thing, the subject requires an addressee (“you”) for communication; under the social condition, the designated thing becomes unobservable and cannot be understood by the addressee. Throughout my reading, I transition between three adjacent codes of interpretation (I “transcode”) to further understand this dynamic: first using linguistics with indexicality and its insistence of a referent’s realness; then semiotics with the signifier and signified; and finally phenomenology with the body and embodiment.¹ Ultimately, I argue that Rankine’s meaning-making paradox challenges language, race, and deviance to subvert social reality, thus opening to hints of utopian imagination.
The opening of the passage introduces an immediate sense of language, one developing to an understanding of language that destabilizes ontological indexicality — that of an object’s realness and determined referent, or the object’s condition of being real. On page 71 of Citizen, Claudia Rankine writes,
Sometimes “I” is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it. / This makes the first person a symbol for something. / The pronoun barely holding the person together. / Someone claimed we should use our skin as wallpaper knowing we couldn’t win. / You said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane.
Immediately, language is crystallized as an erroneous method of communication and understanding of the world. Rankine writes, “Sometimes ‘I’ is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it.” Emphasis is drawn through the visible appearance of the words with the quotations around “I” and the italicizing of “what is.” Nowhere else in this section of the text, except for the last use of “I,” are the words stylized. In American English (the most plausible English language of the text), the single-quotations around “I” grammatically designate when a speaker quotes something inside an existing quotation, as we see in the final line. However, in the first line of this passage, the double-quotation marks around “I” do not have a specific speaker, instead spoken by the ambiguated narrator and second-person. Rankine’s use of the double-quotation mark destabilizes the notion of a specific, definite speaker and a definite quote, implicitly denying the certainty of linguistic realness and ambiguating the connection between the referent and its object. It is possible to say that the narrator is specified by the pagination and the pages’ empty space to delineate a quote or independent section of text, but it is likewise reasonable to say that the whole book (instead of this five-line section or a page) is a quotation by a narrator. The ambiguity of the speaker leaves multiple possibilities available. It could either specify Rankine as the speaker or it could render the “I” and “you” ambiguous, referring to any two linguistic participants. Further, the quotation marks around “I” emphasize the pronoun’s designated linguistic function as something which contains meaning: “to hold what is not there until it is.” In fact, this concept of the first-person pronoun as a container of meaning is in itself destabilized by the quotation marks and the language of “sometimes” and “supposed to,” imbuing the text, the “I,” and the reader with a sense of questioning.
The uncertainty of the first-person pronoun raises the stakes of uncertainty to the point of destabilizing indexicality. The first-person pronoun “‘I’” is the primary requirement for linguistic communication in normative social reality. “‘I’” self-asserts. Linguistic communication requires the participation between a subject and another––either, rhetorically, to themselves (with their self figuring as the object recipient of their own communication) or to another individual (“‘I’”-“you”). Fundamentally, the “‘I’” is centered around sociality: speaking into existence the singularity of the first-person recognizes one’s self-hood and underlines another’s radical alterity. The designation of “you” is an act of othering, particularly since the first-person plural (“we”) is available even in the basic form between two subjects. Thus, in any situation with two subjects, the separation of the singular first-person from the second-person establishes an ontological border that is existentially impossible to overcome as the function of “I” can never fully be substituted by the mutual “we”. The theoretical difference between the first-person and the third-person is effectively the primary, radical act of individuation, that denotes one’s confrontation with another and the self-consciousness that reflexively grasps this difference. In a phantasmic a priori, the I-we could have been un-differentiated and, as such, the individual did not exist. The use of “I” is a recognition of such an incommensurable separation of the individual from the collective: “I” is singular. Thus, “I”is in fact the primary linguistic recognition of self-independence.
In social relation, “‘I’” posits the realness of one’s self, the self-assertion of self-independence: individuality, independent subjectivity, is made real by the definition of a radical other, predicating a loss of intersubjectivity that is existential to the realness of an individual. This analysis opens into the uncertainty of indexicality, an ontological understanding of an object’s realness and the determination of a referent. In this situation of singularity, the “‘I’” self-asserts realness, and thereby epitomizes indexicality. The function of the “‘I’” is not only to assign realness of a singular subjectivity but the realness of alterity, or the radical independence discussed above. The indexical is not a thing in itself but a division of complete mutuality for two “real,” antinomic subjects, each with a real self-understanding that competes with the other’s: the subject-object relation is inverted as each “you” can assert their own subjectivity, developing an antinomy in the realness of indexicality. In other words, the ambiguity of the linguistic self opposes the determinacy of realness, thus indexicality is destabilized. By this analysis, I can extend the above reading of self-consciousness’s radical individuation, the reflexive purchase of the “I” onto the self and the subject (opposed to the other, the object, the “you”), from the instability of the first-person pronoun to an instability of subject realness, of indexicality.
To resume this reading, the ambiguity of realness in Rankine’s concept of “what is” further challenges indexicality, both by emphasis on its italic form and the drawn dialectic with its negative form, “what is not:” language is alienating. Narratively, “what is not” is held in place by “‘I’” until “it is” “what is,” which then falls apart upon proximity to a second-person, a social participant. In the dialectic relationality of “what is”-“what is not,” “I” is a supposed mediator: by the subject’s designation of meaning, the external viewer (the “you”) grows closer, accesses, and steps into the presence of the “I,” the thing that turns “what is not” to “what is.” However, “what is” cannot be fully understood by the observer, as Rankine expresses that “what is” collapses under close examination, whether visual, auditory, or in the other senses. “What is” is instead a dialectical form accessed by linguistic mediation (“‘I’”) from its primary, negative––importantly, “what is” escapes from the observational, meaning-seeking, definition-giving second-person. The linguistic subject’s realness presupposes not only the radical alterity of another but the othering of all other objects; for “you” (the relative subject) to experience, recognizing “what is” requires a definition of “what is” by othering. Indexicality is universal in observation and is resisted by “what is.” “What is” lies beyond language, the “‘I,’” and indexicality: it is incommunicatable, beyond your/our sense, and (by its resistance to being understood and made real) almost imaginative. In this way, language can be understood as a primary form of alienation within the immediate communicative process, a reifying process incompatible with a true essence. With the above, I transcoded the meaning-making paradox to the paradox of indexicality: the realness of one subject-object is made unreal by the process of assigning realness––attempted particularity that is paradoxically universal by language’s social condition.
To add to this understanding of indexicality as reifying alienation, I draw two frameworks: first, a phenomenological allegory to understand closure; second, a semiotic translation of “what is not” and “what is” into the sign and the signifier, elevating the previously described dynamic from alienation to two incommensurables. Rankine brings us closer to the second-person observer by stating, “what is comes apart the closer you are to it.” The proximity of “what is,” like I explained above, is mediated by the “‘I,’” to allow “you” to draw closure. The stability and definitude of closure is disrupted by the collapse of “what is” in its form. The bodiliness of Rankine’s language––“hold,” “comes apart,” and closeness––evoke a sense of phenomenological experience: observation of and interaction with “what is” develops, primarily, by human perception, senses like sight, touch, hearing, etc. Importantly, without human perception (the “you”), the “‘I’” would not function as an alienating vessel to “hold what is not” into its dialectical opposite, a responsibility attributed to “‘I’” through the use of “supposed to.” The entire dialectical transformation, and, more precisely, the collapse of the “what is,” is predicated on human experience existentially requiring a social and mutual (first-person with second-person) relation. Implicitly, this allows for a phenomenological reading which broadly understands the world and the sense of self as emerging phenomena in a process of perpetually becoming: “‘I’” become the vessel––you become closer and “what is not” becomes “what is.” The collapse of “what is” raises the possibility of iterative processes of never-yet-possible closure by the repetition of a coming apart, a repeated transformation of “what is not” to “what is” with the “‘I,’” and a fated collapse. To this effect, the empiricism of observation—a tenet of realness—is destabilized by the phenomenological centering of experience and becoming: the lifeworld is a state of, both intersubjective and subjective, experience belied by a universal, dialectical logic of incommensurability. The resonance of phenomenology in these two opening lines will be strengthened in a later discussion of embodiment and the primacy of the body.
From the opening line, I make one final transcoding to understand “what is not” and “what is” as the signifier and signified, further generalizing the leap from indexicality in social relation to universal meaning-making. This transcoding is useful not only to understand the relationship, but also to develop terms to the relationship: subject-object, self-other, and other relationship names not as readily available as the signifier-signified for “what is not”-“what is.” This transcoding to semiotics is justified because a word can function metonymically as a linguistic sign and because language remains the primary medium through signs’circulation. By definition, a semiotic signifier is the arbitrary form while the signified is the “thing itself,” making the signifier a material-form (false-form, double-form, an image) of the signified; the “what is not” is in fact the signifier whose meaning is made by the “‘I,’” an allegory for linguistic sign association, and, by this signification, the observer can become tangentially close to the signified, the “thing itself.” Additionally, semiotic analysis is justified in this text by Rankine’s writing in the third line, “This makes the first person a symbol for something.” The use of “symbol” immediately draws a connection to semiotics as signs, where symbols are often metonymic. Interestingly, Rankine identifies the “‘I’” as a signifier for something (more accurately, someone), recognizing the mediation of sign exchange by signs. By this reflexivity of signification, signs are universalized based on the basic meaning-making (signification) process. For example, reflexive recognition of meaning-making is a practice of semiotic signification, such as Rankine’s deliberate use of italics around “what is” and double-quotations around “‘I’” as well as this essay’s criticality and analysis of Rankine’s text. Instead of operating solely within the dimension of linguistic social relations or phenomenological closure, signification asserts universality as long as meaning-making exists. Here, I understand that the impossibility of closure between signifier and signified is universally inescapable: this is the signification paradox.
Rankine literalizes the meaning-making paradox in a single line, a fulcrum from a paradox on linguistic representation to a challenge of normative social reality: “The pronoun barely holding the person together.” In strict grammatical terms, the phrase is a sentence fragment in the present continuous tense as it is missing the simple present conjugation of the verb “to be” before the present participle of hold, the main verb. Interestingly, Rankine uses the period punctuation to endow the sentence fragment with the realness of a sentence, the singularity of an independent clause (the most basic sentence form); the period punctuates a break between two independent units of thought (sentences), thus asserting that the sentence fragment is independent. This intentional punctuation––the make-pretend of a sentence––underlines the presentation of realness for the sentence fragment. In this five-line section of text, Rankine uses the period to conclude each line. In fact, for all other lines except this fragment, Rankine properly punctuates the end of the sentence (though there are arguable minor missing commas, the punctuation broadly follows the standard). The uniqueness of this choice—to make a sentence fragment seem like a sentence––points to the problem of self-asserting realness. This entire paragraph is more than a reading of a singular choice of punctuation: the pretense of the sentence allows Rankine to allegorize the meaning-making paradox and underline the impossibility of completion, closure, and realness.
To elaborate on the line’s significance, I turn to the sentence fragment and its following line, reading them as a challenge to race in social reality. The fragment “The pronoun barely holding the person together” again destabilizes signification and indexicality. The phrase describes how the pronoun gives the person form and boundaries (the previously discussed definition of self) and that, without such holding together, the person would be in flux as a non-object, self-ambiguating and resisting definition. Ambiguity threatens the realness of the pronoun as seen from the word “barely” which states a risk of collapse: “barely” is, by definition, synonymous with “scarcely,” “only just,” “almost not,” phrases that are tentative. To be barely real is to be almost un-real. In further equivocation, Rankine writes this sentence fragment in the present continuous tense which expresses a present action that may continue into the future. It is uncertain if the barely-real will stay real, nor if the barely-real becomes totally real (comes to a close), nor if the barely-real collapses into the un-real. The collapse from signified to signifier continues as a possibility in this moment: is it a fatalistic doom of the signified (the pronoun-body), or will the signified barely prevail (the person beyond form)? The linguistic form of the fragment supports uncertainty, yet the signification paradox demands fixity. The signified is momentary and transitory, yet signification is iterative as meaning-making is attempted after each collapse of meaning. The paradox of signification is not a determinant, conclusive dialectic: each collapse of signifier into signified is recursive––signifier, signified, signifier, signified––repeated indefinitely, perhaps inexhaustibly. The futurity of the barely-signified is, in this way, uncertain: the immediate fate is a collapse, yet this act of determination opens into a re-signification. The signifier’s attempt to escape collapse into the signified (barely holding together) is only a moment within the signification paradox.
In the following sentence, the signification paradox and attempt to escape it are given a racial context and history in social reality. Rankine writes, “Someone claimed we should use our skin as wallpaper knowing we couldn’t win.” Immediately, the sentence draws out indexicality as previously discussed: a claim to truth requires a specific subject and an assertion of realness.The subordinate clause (“we should use our skin as wallpaper…”) elaborates on the realness of the human subject assigned with the pronoun “we.” By using the metaphor of “skin as wallpaper” to invoke the skin as a measure of realness, the skin performs the same function of indexicality as the “I” does. The act of specifying an ambiguous self by a container of meaning is now allegorized through the human body’s skin as a container of the flesh. In the way the signified is released from the collapse of the signifier form, one’s blood, flesh, and physicality are released from the loss of skin––the leakage of signified from signifier is now the leakage of blood and physicality from the skin, the organ that gives the body form. Foremost, the skin allegorizes the indexicality of “‘I’” as it is the immediate barrier separating one’s internal physical self with the exterior world. From here, a transition to continue the previous phenomenological analysis can be briefly noted: the skin allows the perceptive sense of touch, one of the primary ways to test the realness of reality. Touch has an immediate significance as an intimate sense, particular yet pervasive in form––touch is available at each moment, grounding us with the world and the other, even when other senses are obscured. As such, the centrality of touch is the fulcrum to enter into a more phenomenological discourse on the role of embodiment and the primacy of the body in the emergent self’s becoming.
I interpret Rankine’s text as a demand for an engagement with race as a form of indexicality and sign in social reality, especially as she recasts an art-work incorporated in her book to this line by the metaphor of the skin as wallpaper. Throughout Citizen, Rankine incorporates images of art pieces that open the discursive commentary of racism and alterity in the everyday to different apparatuses of life, such as sports and the Wozniak Photograph of Serena Williams’s competitor (Dane Caroline Wozniak) who mocked and sexualized Williams’s body. On page 52-53 (figure 1), Rankine adds a two-page spread of two images, each covering one page: on the left side, “I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL COLORED” repeated down the page; on the right side, “I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND” repeated throughout. The spread is littered with inconsistent ink, with the ink marks increasingly blurring across the bottom of the page until the last lines are barely legible. Against the sharp white pages, the black letters and ink blurs develop a chromaticism with the lower half, coalescing into an almost-black background against the black letters and white page.
Figure 1.
This imagery is evidently about race: it echoes the cover’s image of a disembodied, hanging black hood in taxidermic display against the white background––in fact, the American image of Trayvon Martin’s hood (figure 2). Citizen: An American Lyric Poem, entirely foregrounded by race, is pulling on this social element of reality implicitly: to “NOT ALWAYS FEEL COLORED” and then “FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN … THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND” allegorizes the previous discussion of the indexicality of “‘I’” in race. The singularity of selfhood is drawn in comparison with ontological otherness on the basis of race: colored skin. Returning directly to the subordinate clause, “we should use our skin as wallpaper” requests Blackness to be the comparative index for whiteness: Blackness is real against whiteness, and whiteness against Blackness. This reading is substantiated by how Claudia Rankine has positioned the first-person perspective throughout Citizen from the perspective of a Black individual––the reader is taken through scenes of a Black person experiencing racism with their therapist, at the pharmacy, at sporting games (tennis, football), and in everyday life. While the book’s philosophical threads allow connections with broader discourses (such as a phenomenological one about experience), the particularity of the self is tied to racial alterity: Black as the signifier.
Figure 2.
Elaborating on my reading of the racial self, the signification paradox extends in racial signs to destabilize and challenge the social reality. The signs of white and Black are sites of contestation against racial signification. The last clause of the sentence, “knowing we couldn’t win,” allows an ambiguous translation into moments of the signification paradox, with various readings leading to various iterative moments. Perhaps the racial “we” resisted signification––that is, racialization––and “couldn’t win” so they were incorporated as a signifier, settling for using their Blackness to foreground whiteness (a signifier foregrounding the otherness of another signifier). Alternatively, a reading can contextualize the moment as an attempt of the “barely”-signified to escape collapse into the signified––“couldn’t win” is the state of failed attempt and yet alludes to a sort of future planning. In the text, there is a fundamental antagonism that focuses on the racial sign as a dimension of social life. To further elaborate on uncertainty, Rankine’s language of “Someone claimed we should” allows a reading of internal dispute between people in the group or an external speaker talking at the group. These tensions of interpretation are centered on the question of how Black people should (racially) exist in the social world. Perhaps it is Black defeatism or white condescension that proposes assimilation into the system of racial signs. A further reading of this context is resisted by the poem’s ambiguity. Thus, to a question of assimilation to social reality, Rankine doubly returns to resistance by destabilizing certainty: first in meaning-making, then in racial signification, and finally in assimilation into the sign order of race.
In the final line, an association of resistance to the racial sign order is constructed through the resistance of the linguistic and psychological social order. For this fifth line, Rankine joins two sentences with, “You said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane.” Immediately, the power of “‘I’” draws on the realness of indexicality and the function of signs as previously discussed; the double-quotations in the original text around the “I” specify that the second-person “You” is not commenting on the power one person holds, but rather the power of linguistic singularity. In this clause, criticality is understood to have a social condition: one needs another subject who can recognize the othering performed by their singularity. This critical observation is an allegory for the engagement with signs and the reflexivity of racial understanding; to “FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN … THROWN AGAINST A WHITE BACKGROUND” requires degrees of reflexivity that is maintained by the critical distance of individual subjectivity. Through the criticality of an individual against another (the Black sign against the white sign), group intersubjectivity is formed: the “we” are individuals forming collectivity based on their racial sign. By transcoding intersubjectivity with semiotic exchange, Rankine destabilizes both the linguistic order and the racial order.
In the final clause, a psychological dimension of social order is destabilized and uncertainty in the signification paradox is affirmed, subverting social reality. Rankine ends this passage with three words: “It’s insane.” This line opens two readings: first, it introduces the social designation of sanity; second, it subverts the social reality. Sanity is a designation for appropriate psychological state and associated behavior by the social order: it socializes individuals into a society by designating acceptable and unacceptable behavior, language, or thought on the basis of mental psychology. With the function of othering the “insane” and the reassignment of insane to other spaces, sanity is a pervasive form of social regulation, from adapting one’s minor behavior or the psychiatric institutionalization of other-ed individuals. This practice of social regulation has historically had racialized and hegemonic functions, such as the association of deviance with racial alterity. Given this history and the historical threads in Citizen, I have attempted to demonstrate how “It’s insane” can be read as an inversion of the typical social order of sanity and, with its linguistic and racial connections, a statement of resistance and questioning of language and race.
Rankine’s questioning of the social order on the linguistic, racial, and psychological dimensions becomes a form of subversion. In this passage, subversion of the psycho-social order appears by the allusion to utopia as an alternative, imagined social organization that is opened by Rankine’s language of uncertainty. The first word of this passage is a condition of possibility: “sometimes.” It alludes to a possibility of another moment when the “‘I’” does not hold its power, when the signification paradox is something else. A form where “it” (ambiguously the first-person pronoun or the social order) is sane is thus an alternative, radically other social form. Rankine writes against the social reality by an imagination of another order. This kind of imagination is not given material, tangible tenets, but serves instead as a lingering possibility that echoes where uncertainty of signification is. Imaginative possibility of an other order undermines the claim to realness of the established order and subverts social reality itself. Insofar as this passage goes, there is no call to revolution nor action, as there is little form given to the object of imagination. Instead, the imagined form’s ambiguity connects it to utopian desire. In the unspecified possibilities of imagination, utopia ontologically exists: it stands existentially beyond the social order, and the general imagination of other orders will draw into play utopia. Subverting the social order by critique of race, language, and deviance, Rankine allows imagination to simply be a lingering presence that opens a possibility of un-reality, of utopia.
Rankine fundamentally sees uncertainty and instability in meaning-making, a problem that allows her to question language, race, and deviance in the social order. By questioning the social order, Rankine uses imagination and thus introduces utopian desire. By transcoding between three codes of linguistic representation, I investigated various understandings of meaning-making through indexicality (an object’s realness), signification, and embodiment. While these codes of understanding are useful to generate insights to Rankine’s text, I see one final commentary by Rankine on meaning-making. To state simply, Rankine makes meaning by writing text: her investigation of meaning-making as problematic is way of meaning-making. In response to the singularity of the social order, Rankine’s answer is not to be ambiguous but to confront the social reality with critical meaning-making. In spite of everything, or rather to spite everything, Rankine makes meaning that asks us to question meaning.
Notes
¹For clarity, I refer to this process as transcoding in the following pages. To go between codes is a literal way of transcoding; most simply, it is a translation between linguistic codes. It is not precisely metonymic as I can transcode without needing full substitution but sufficient adjacency on a mutual basis. This transcoding and movement across registers of meaning produce generative ideas and complexity, with discourses being much like interlocutors.
Bibliography
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.
