This essay seeks to review the edges of Eric Lott's Black Mirror. But to approach the inner and outer edges of “a black mirror” is to sense the threat that they could become two sides of the same coin. In chapter 1, “Black Mirror: State Fantasy and Symbolic Surplus Value,” Lott writes, “we should explore the dimensions and especially the consequences of the fantasy race is – consequences that suffuse the consciousness of class, sexuality, gender, and other lines of force. Live there a while, in thought as in life. That is what this book tries to do.”Footnote ² To take up this invitation is therefore to first locate that space which readers are asked to live in for a while. However, to near that territory is not to enter the fantasy of race, if only to critique it, for we are already there. Nor is it accessed by abandoning the value of race, Lott contends, especially while the economy of whiteness continues profiting from “black symbolic capital.” Here we encounter the daunting scope of a “black mirror,” where horizon lines become Fata Morganas: an area that covers “the mechanics, dispositions, and effects of the dominant culture's looking at itself always through a fantasized black Other” (xvii). The dimensions of that mirror prove wider still, as any race, gender or class is shown capable of reflecting itself in it. More specifically, Black Mirror questions how signs of racial difference might possibly divest from the dominant symbolic economies in which they are exchanged, except Black Mirror largely does so by demonstrating their reinvestment. When analyzing the fantasies, angles and contradictions of a “black mirror,” readers are compelled to seek its outer edges, a market with real use-value, spaces where gifts are exchanged, or a beyond alluded to as “occupying the tain of the mirror – the mirror's tin backing that allows it to reflect at all” (20).

The borders of such a mirror may appear more rigidly defined in Lott's previous Love and Theft. For while the depths of Love and Theft found even black performers blacking themselves up as white men in blackface, to enter the profitable stage of white mis-recognition (see Master Juba), the dominant subject throughout Love and Theft was well outlined: the (northern) white working class, and its self-mirroring through blackface minstrelsy during the nineteenth century.Footnote ³ The lacking subject within that framework was of course real blackness, longing to be seen. It hardly appeared in Love and Theft because what was desired was a symbol of such – the phallus. And as Lacan stressed and Lott illustrated, the phallus is sought but never acquired; it is only ever missing. Nonetheless, on this symbolic level, the presence of blackness more noticeably egressed as the lack within the structural building of a (socio)graphically identifiable white America.

In Black Mirror, however, there is an additional methodological exigency blurring the mirror's borders; a methodology not unrelated to its subject matter: that of late twentieth-century American capitalism (with its interwoven postmodernist and post-structuralist lenses). For among the book's featured reevaluations of how blackness is reproduced by white America – from Hollywood's film noir and Jewishness, to icons like Sinatra, Streisand, Joni Mitchell, Elvis and Bob Dylan – there are now extended portions of Black Mirror dedicated to critiquing mirroring performances by colored performers, however disparate. Black Mirror opens with Langston Hughes attending the dinner party at “Park Avenue at eight” (xi). Later, a black Elvis impersonator (Clearance Giddens) and a “Cherokee/African American” Elvis impersonator (D. J. Charlton) are analyzed. Upon conclusion, Aretha Franklin sings “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” to Obama (a song cowritten by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, with notes from Jerry Wexler). But above all it is Obama himself who introduces the politics of Black Mirror. Chapter 1 unpacks Obama's own mirroring, as when Obama played Daniel Day-Lewis playing Obama, in Spielberg's skit Obama. The chapter then revisits Obama's invocation of Black Orpheus when consciously redeploying signs of either “childlike blacks” or the “dark savage”Footnote ⁴ – being neither himself – for the purpose, Lott writes, of displacing “the legitimate state violence he wielded onto his movement's enemies – wearing his shackles, you might say, on his sleeve” (17). Lott differentiates state fantasy from racial fantasy here, but only in highlighting their linkages within a totalizing yet unpredictable economy of colored sign exchange, one governed by the symbolic surplus value in America's black mirroring. In other words, there are signposts that the scope of Black Mirror is engulfing.

In Black Mirror, “symbolic surplus value” results from reproducing symbols of blackness that no longer represent use-value, or “the scene and moment of their creation and actualization in local contexts or use” (24). Instead, symbolic surplus value represents the exchange-value of such symbols, between sellers and buyers, as “the customary exchange of black cultural labour has managed to earn dominant cultural workers a world of bling,” writes Lott, “an expression I use advisedly to underscore the effortless transfer of African American symbolic forms (here, slang terms of art) into mainstream usage” (23). And although Marx underpins much of Black Mirror, Lott's introductory citation of Baudrillard's For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign is telling (22). Baudrillard did not only contrast the bygone modes of production in Marx's nineteenth century with the developments of the late twentieth century, but he argued that, within this new era, it was not so much exploited labor power or the reproduction of signs that should be the subject of critique, but rather the monopolizing economy of sign consumption (sumptuary value). Sumptuary value was, for Baudrillard, now the form of social labor driving production, exchange surplus value, the different hierarchical systems and institutions, and the segregation of class.Footnote ⁵ Thus the political economy of sign consumption is another imperious dimension above and beyond the performative reproductions of blackness at center stage in Black Mirror.

As Baudrillard explained, a symbol or symbolic object represents a thing with cultural value, while a sign takes its value merely from its difference from another sign. The sign is that much more detached from a moment of creation, and that much more manipulated by exchange-value. Such distinctions may inform the reproduction and consumption of “racial difference” in Black Mirror. Unlike psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference, where the (masculine) symbolic order attempts to appropriate a feminine lack that the symbolic definitively excludes, racial difference and cultural difference in Black Mirror are capable of appearing symbolically, if only for reappropriation. Yet racial difference in Black Mirror tends to function more like signs (like gender), where a relationality is established through different sign colorations being performed: a relationality also undone when cohabiting different signed positions. I'm reminded of Harryette Mullen, whose racial signifying in Trimmings (1991) reconstructed black femininity from Gertrude Stein's representations of black women (e.g. Melanctha, 1909): “Of course if I regard gender as a set of arbitrary signs,” Mullen adds, “I also think of race – as far as it is difference that is meaningful – as a set of signs.”Footnote ⁶ Black Mirror, on the other hand, foregrounds the exchange-value of such signs. Both the difficulty and power of a “black mirror” lie in its ability to blur and economize symbolic value, sexual difference, and signs of racial difference, all in fantastical demand.

For example, the sexual, gendered and racial differences involved in America's black mirroring are wonderfully depicted in Lott's chapter on Joni Mitchell. Lott gives Mitchell her due credit, but not because of her interracial signifying (or affair with jazz musician Don Alias), and not for Mitchell's infamous role-playing in blackface as “Claude” the male pimp, but because, in albums like Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), Mitchell “ventured self-conscious explorations of racial difference, blackness, and her own privileged whiteness,” even considering herself one of the industry's profiting “thieves” in “Furry Sings the Blues” (147–48). Lott writes, “Traversing gender, racial and class binaries, looking at them from both sides of the street, cruising between them as it were, Mitchell hits on the difference, or is it the sameness, of ‘being’ and ‘having’ the phallus, as Lacan's writings elaborate” (154). Acting as if she has (black) masculinity, while also being the (feminine) symbol of lack, Mitchell is cast by Lott as a shifty, “hardly defensible” performer who nearly resists the appropriating arm of (white, masculine) America. At once fogging the mirror and buying into it, the market's twists follow Lott into his one-paragraph anecdote about Joni's tact, in the concluding note, “Coda: For the Roses.” The coda recollects the time they met and chatted; when Joni handed Lott the flowers sent by the record company, “Joni had turned a company man's obligation into a gift” (156). This gift (the flowers) has a somewhat unconnected relation to the narrative, as if without cultural symbolic value or use-value. I find the manner of this discarded curio rather secretive, and suggestive of a moment likened only to the book's second, concluding “Coda” on Aretha Franklin (which I'll also conclude with). More directly, the Mitchell anecdote indirectly persuades us that Mitchell's general manufacturing of (black) symbolic value was productively aimed at capital, except the lines Mitchell is seen crossing find her holding herself up in a black mirror.

The almost-but-not-quite catch of Black Mirror is caught by what appears to be the book's more defiant example: Beyoncé’s 2013 Super Bowl halftime performance. Appearing with the two other members of Destiny's Child, the show's explicit but “light Charlie's Angels thematic not only supplanted white versions of this ass-kicking pop crime-fighting unit but raised the question: in whose service was this troupe operating? … One had to wonder whether Spielberg's Obama, our man in the mirror, was ready, in the words of the song, for that jelly” (20). Beyoncé’s re-signing of racial difference (in a Charlie's Angels theme) emerges as a refusal to capitalize on the symbolic surplus value behind state fantasy, as Beyoncé proffered what Lott describes as a “counter-memory to Obama's parlous state apparatus” (20). Indeed, Beyoncé’s production of blackness seemed at odds with the Pepsi-sponsored halftime show, and yet it presaged what she identified as “a black Bill Gates in the making” in her 2016 halftime show,Footnote ⁷ since Beyoncé signed a $50 million-dollar deal with Pepsi in 2012, to be the future face of Pepsi. The president of PepsiCo's global beverage group would summarize the deal this way: “Consumers are seeking a much greater authenticity in marketing from the brands they love.”Footnote ⁸

The background economy of Black Mirror hits a nerve which is not too far from one brushed over in a scene from Paul Beatty's The Sellout. When the protagonist's father – a social scientist, or liberation psychologist, of the black community – attempts to rehearse Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's studies of color consciousness in black children, he displays two sets of dolls before his ten-year-old son. The first dollscape consists of Malibu Barbie and Ken; the second, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Harriet Tubman. But when dad asks, “With whom, with what socio-cultural subtext are you down with, son?” the boy cannot help but notice that Tubman is the white Barbie painted black. “I wanted to maintain the beauty threshold,” dad replied, “Establish a baseline of cuteness so that you couldn't say one doll was prettier than the other.”Footnote ⁹ The real kicker, I believe, is imagining the father's black radicalism running out to purchase not one but two Barbie sets, blackfacing one, for a baseline of identified sex appeal, passed off as cuteness, when selling the symbolic value of real blackness.

A problem raised by the black aesthetic was not merely that buying into white America was often a selling out, but that signs of doing neither, while feared, would reproduce signs more subject to the erotica of mainstream fashion. I recall Julian Mayfield's essay “You Touch My Black Aesthetic and I'll Touch Yours” (1971), where Mayfield knows that while “there is a Black Aesthetic that cannot be stolen from us,” somewhere in “racial memory,” it cannot appear as signs, since signs lend themselves to America's (white) consumption: “This is a great nation. It can absorb almost anything,” and “superficial appurtenances such as music, language, dress, and slogans, and other ‘Black is Beautiful’ fads can so easily be chewed up, digested, and spat out by this vigorous, if sick, society, that no aesthetic is safe within its grinding teeth.”Footnote ¹⁰ Hoyt W. Fuller, in an accompanying essay, saw “the black aesthetic” as a place beyond the net of America's white consumerism, but “the road to that place – if it exists at all – cannot, by definition, lead through the literary mainstreams,” which is why it would be “cleaner and more decisive than the noisier and more dramatic break between the black militants and the traditional political and institutional structures.”Footnote ¹¹

Between the symbolic economies of what Fuller calls “that place” and what Lott calls “the mirror's tin backing” there exist the dimensions of a “black mirror.” That “place” for Fuller was not a place where race could exist outside symbolic or cultural construction, but a winding road where signs of racial difference might shake the surplus value ascribed by white America. The reason why roads through traditional political and institutional structures were and are less viable, along with artistic mainstreams, is because the “modern state apparatus,” Lott also observes, “puts beyond the mirror's field of reflection any action uncompromised by force and social dominance,” since “the mechanics of representation – of representative government, of discursive framing and access, laws of genre, revolutions per minute – open themselves to no outside” (20). On the other hand, it is this negative sense of there being an “outside,” assuring us of this inside, that is cause for speculation.

Regardless of whether “that place” or that “outside” remain beyond the pale, there are nevertheless signs that a roadmap towards or from externality orients Black Mirror. There may be no outside for race, but there is a nagging space of critical, physical or artistic resistance alluded to more or less apophatically. For instance, a black mirror is not as deconstructive as the Derridean mirror also invoked in Black Mirror. In Derrida's Dissemination, if the presence of the sign's value is traced back to the “mirror's tain,” then that metal backing ends up being the very mercury the pen is using for the mirror's reflective ink. “No statement,” Derrida wrote,

In Black Mirror, part of the value in ink or signs is racial difference, where blackness is commodified. But the reason why a black mirror is ostensibly irreducible to Derrida's is because Lott's symbolic surplus value seems extracted from a presence identified as actual symbolic value: African American symbolic forms of art, as found in the scenes and moments creating and actualizing local contexts and use (24).

Outside the mirror, so implied, lie cultural sites of production, “black cultural labor.” For it is “black cultural forms” which “white cultural producers and institutions” traffic in and appropriate as “blackness”: “a siphoning off of value, in black cultural circulation, no matter how much black cultural producers themselves happen to be remunerated” (22–23). This negative framework, around black cultural productions of symbolic value or use-value, again renders Lott's citation of Baudrillard, within this same passage, problematic and suggestive. In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard's premise was that the real illusion of today's mirroring rests within producing symbolic value. Especially within late twentieth-century capitalism, Baudrillard claimed, the production of symbolic value already involves producing an imaginary object – a symbol, a value – that is beyond the real object. More alarmingly, this mirroring of nature, within the mirror of production, is rather the production of an ego as object misrecognizing itself through the specular image of the mirror. Meanwhile, the value being crafted for each object within the imaginary must relate, in one way or another, to the existing model or code, the dominant system of sign exchange. It is the code that reinscribes, re-presents, and reifies the subject's (ideal-)ego and the self's relation to the mirrored image of symbolic value, within or as the labor of production. As Baudrillard writes,

This splitting off from the object, into the imaginary work of (re)producing the subjection of or as the primal spectral scene, is embedded, for example, in Fred Moten's questioning of the “psychoanalytic break”: “What are the politics of this unavoidably reproducible and reproductive performance?”Footnote ¹⁴ This line of argument (or line of production) looms over the suspiciously undeveloped convocation of black cultural production in Black Mirror, but it is also this line that underscores why the occasional allusions to, or elusions of, real use-value in Black Mirror appear by way of yet other examples of black mirroring.

The demand of sign consumption and the mirror of production magnify the Lacanian lens and the fantasy of a black mirror. According to Lacan, the subject is born into the preexisting system of signs (the code) when confronting or addressing the Other. Yet the subject's expression to the specular image of an Other, and thus their relation, are based upon the subject's own ideal-ego, which is formed by the signs in turn when addressing the specular image of the Other. To bear the resulting alienation and distress, of having to reconcile the disjuncture between an ideal-ego, the misrecognized image, and the discorded experience of the organism's split reality, the subject must seek security. Security is obtained by positioning an ego-ideal within the structure of a fantasy. The structured economy of fantasy revolves around a symbol of what is lacking in the chain of signs. “This is why human desire is fixed, attached, and coapted,” said Lacan, “not to an object, but always essentially to a fantasy.”Footnote ¹⁵ Black Mirror introduces its own framework by quoting from “The Mirror Stage”:

But what is it that transforms Lacan's mirror into a black mirror? There are given preliminaries: race as such is taken as fantasy; sign systems contain codes of racial difference; and signs of racial difference can become black symbolic capital in reproducing an (ideal-)ego identified with whiteness. But there are two specific alterations made to Lacan's mirror that are not entirely unfamiliar: misrecognition is “always through a fantasized black Other,” and the symbol of lack is “(b)lack.”

Before distinguishing these two items further, there are two examples in Black Mirror worth revisiting, briefly – Rachel Dolezal and John Howard Griffin, as they fantasize a black Other and black lack. For despite Dolezal identifying with her adoptive black siblings, black friends and mentors, first at home, then at Howard University, and finally as head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, Lott envisions Dolezal incrementally “passing” because she identifies blackness (traditionally so) as a body of sensual pleasure and enjoyment, while whiteness (as descending from white Christianity) putatively renunciates such exhibitions (125). Dolezal had been “[o]rganizing her enjoyment and self-definition through the Other whose identity she herself assumed,” through a “mixed erotic economy of American whiteness” (125). In this case, Dolezal was “disavowing with fervor her appropriation even while enacting it,” continues Lott, since she related to a black Other while incorporating the symbol of lack as the black body. In comparison, when Griffin physically changed his skin color, by taking doses of methoxsalen and spending up to fifteen hours a day under ultraviolet lamps, to experiment with passing in the South, as recorded in Black Like Me, his intention, to relate experiences of segregation, predictably reinforces a white self by (mis)recognizing his black Other in fetishized black skin. There is, of course, that scene where Griffin faces just this when in front of a literal mirror: “Griffin's disorientation is true to Lacan's account of the mirror stage,” Lott writes; “his response reveals the (b)lack upon which whiteness depends” (133).

I gloss over these two examples of a black Other and black symbol of lack to subsequently interrogate the ambiguity of these still general terms. For in Lacan, there are two general definitions for each of the two terms, the Other and the phallus.

What Lacan calls the big Other [A] may initially appear as the (M)Other, the body, yet it is more becoming of the Unconscious. Lott alludes to the unconscious as Other with regard to Griffin's push to realize his fantasy: “Griffin's text can be read as a story of what happens when this sexualized racial unconscious of American whiteness is not kept suppressed or partitioned” (131). The “racial unconscious of American whiteness” implies the gaze of a black Other for an egoic American whiteness. Yet the Unconscious itself does not appear as an image, but it may be reflected as a specular image, body-image, or imaginary other [i(a)]. Since Lacan proposed that the unconscious is as much inside as outside, the optical slip from the Other [A] to perceiving the Other's gaze as a reflected body-image is theorized as an interplay between the Other of psychoanalysis and the Other of phenomenology (or Sartre). Fanon, of course, mastered this spectral convergence: “the Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self,” as “the real Other … is and will continue to be the black man.”Footnote ¹⁶ It is this mirroring illusion of an objectified image, this imago, that gets posited into the economy of a fantasy. That fantasy assumes a specific narrative when the imago is “black” – as it assumes, and depends on, stereotype. As David Marriott recapitulated, regarding Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, “the imago of the black is the ‘predestined depository’ of cultural aggression. Why predestined? Because it is as a stereotype that the black is hated. He is hated insofar as he is misrecognized for the fantasized projection to which the internalized, ‘natural’ determination of race gives rise.”Footnote ¹⁷ The stereotype's demarcation of hatred is traced in its violent colonial effects and, as in America's black mirroring, in the included eroticization or prurience. And it is the mirrored Other as imago or body-image that is stereotyped by fantasy. The stereotyped black body-image can then therefore prefigure a black phallus. Except there are two types of phalli in Lacan.

There is the imaginary phallus (φ) and the symbolic (Φ). Like the Unconscious, the symbolic phallus does not itself appear. The symbolic phallus is the lack in the entire signifying chain, driving its symbolic economy, while only ever being absent. The symbol itself is always missing. However, fantasy requires the symbolic phallus to take form, as an imaginary object, in order for it to be incorporated into the psychical economy. Throughout Black Mirror, once the imago or imaginary other is black, and the phallus is imagined as black skin, a black body, or blackness, the symbolic lack operates as such an imaginary phallus. This is where racial or racist fetishization is at play. The fetish memorializes what is lost behind its masking. When able, Lott is clear that self-(mis)recognition through epidermalization is not the only clear indicator, but that the stereotype-fetishization of the black body as lack is a hallmark of black mirroring. It can therefore seem more tangible to see why a black (imaginary) phallus is a particular fantasy trait, and why it is different from the related discourse of “black” being itself (symbolic) lack.

Because the fetishization of a black imaginary phallus and black lack are such productive sites of oppression and appropriation, they are also sites of resistance. Marriott argues that white fetishization of the black body-image was the psychopolitical lynchpin for Fanon. Because of its real hold, particularly on white-identified blacks, it is not a mere fantasy detached from the real, and thus capable of revealing a real, but the fetish is the real fantasy through which blacks can awaken and strike back.

Going further still, that reversal of the black Other is linked to symbolic black lack. Since colonial logic (e.g. Hegelian and Sartrean) had, for Fanon, represented black consciousness as a pure positivity or density, lacking the negativity or lack necessary for self-consciousness (a lack of lack), Fanon reclaimed black as lack: “My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as lack. It is” (135). This digression into Fanon here is a way of traveling back into the dark hole at the center of a black mirror. Fanon's lack does not just touch on pathways leading back up to the contemporary Afro-pessimism of Frank B. Wilderson, for example, or Moten and Harney's “Fantasy in the Hold,”Footnote ¹⁸ but it helps surveying the parameters of a black mirror.

Hortense Spillers acknowledged that while Fanon considered that which was black in Algeria to be black everywhere, American culture adds its own complexities, due to relations underwritten by capitalist economies: “In the U.S. field of social relations, African American culture is open, by definition, if by that we mean a constant commerce in real and symbolic capital among struggling intersubjectivities.”Footnote ¹⁹ Or, in the words of Lott in Black Mirror, “Just as there's probably no racially unmixed instance of American culture, so there's no mixed instance not marked in some way or other by inequalities of power” (200). After all, Black Mirror is not reduced to a black lack or black Other, but a whole chain of effects. It is an endless chain of racial difference, driven by a lack, that exponentially reproduces white America from black symbolic capital. This essay confronted the space of a black mirror with an adjoined interest in how production, exchange and consumption might work at its edges. This is a question shared by Spillers, who concluded her essay with a nod to “the ludic and the ludicrous” language of Charles Mingus, and one asked by Lott, whose concluding passages in Black Mirror point towards a direction invariably beyond the book's scope.

Recalling Aretha Franklin's performance of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center in 2015, directed at Obama in balcony seating, Lott appeals to the affectivity of Aretha's moving presence, as “her presidential address summoned a deep emotional undercommons with no postracial illusions, a struggle for happiness in the democratic dark” (211). Uncharacteristically downplaying the song's cowritten history and production, Lott unexpectedly accedes to the compromised value of its signs and symbols. Citing Fred Moten a page earlier, Lott submits Aretha's address as a Motenian “deep emotional undercommons.” In lieu of producing symbolic value, Moten, in A Poetics of the Undercommons, proffers a form of making, poiesis, that is not altogether unlike what Baudrillard proposed when closing A Critique. Whereas Baudrillard surmised that the circuit of exchange-value might “break” when sharing an object as res nulla, which “has absolutely no use value, it is good for nothing” (212), Moten himself would write,

As much might be expressed in part of Moten's intimate and open dedicatory note for The Service Porch (2016):