The Machete Must Not Go

Disarming Political Affect after Plantations

Abstract

Trauma is increasingly representationally overworked but conceptually undertheorized. This paper intervenes by arguing that the post-traumatic trigger is best understood as a diagram rather than a representation, not a symbol of trauma but a material component of it. Two ethnographic vignettes ground a speculative examination: in 2023, cane machetes were removed from a New Orleans gallery exhibition, and my third-grade son in Baton Rouge was censured for asking why his school sold chocolate made by enslaved labor during Black History Month. Across both, institutions manage political affect (the capacity to affect and be affected) as if the machete were a symbol whose danger follows from what it means and could therefore be contained by subtraction. I name this operation representational foreclosure: the preemptive withdrawal of an object from relation. The movement performs as protective care, but like the ongoing absence of a National Museum of Slavery, which Sharpe (2016) argues is itself epistemic, this withdrawal does not shield the wounded; it only redacts violence. The operation also does not map to its stated object. The trigger operates diagrammatically, by threatening to re-enact the force-assemblage of which the machete was a material part, not by signifying. The plantation assemblage persists without the machete present; foreclosure manages the symbolic register while leaving untouched the diagrammatic capacity it cannot reach. The vignettes foreground a political technology in which institutions operationalize a representational model of trauma to foreclose on the conditions of their own disassembly.