Department of Xenogenesis Our Xenogenetic Gift Thinking Octavia Butler with Fred Moten

Thank you. Thank you.

So welcome everybody. I just want to begin by saying that on the Vimeo page there is a link there is on the link to the Vimeo page there's a live on the Vimeo page there's a live transcript for those who want a transcript and also just to say please enter your questions in the chat and we will receive them on this side. So I'm going to begin. Welcome everybody, Welcome everyone. Because the virtual world is large, I'm going to begin by saying to everyone,

good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you for joining us from wherever you might be in the world. My name is Anjali Saga and with me is Kojo Eshin who is also here and we are both the Otolith Group and also the Otolith Collective, upon which we are presenting today's gathering. Since 2002, the Otolith Collective has engaged in the conception and creation of platforms that make public the research that informs our artistic, theoretical and curatorial practice. By articulating the idea of the otolith with the idea of the collective, we hope to engender

a supernumerary form of life which alludes to the histories of collective practices invented by artists that theorize and curate and writers and filmmakers that practice art with and beyond the precincts of the United Kingdom. As a form of life which breaks with the idea of the individual singular artist and aligns itself with the crisis of authorship signalled by the advent of collective production. By shifting the decolonial form of the essayistic platform making that draws attention to the

urgency of the present in all of its provisional, prospective and planetary dimensions. It is the urgency of this differentiated now that animates our collective's desire to curate the work of artists and thinkers such as Chris Marker, Haroon Farocki, Anand Patbhwarden, Etel Adnan, the Chimarenga Library, Tony Cokes, Rania Stefan, Ayo Akinbade, Rehana Zaman, and Onyeka Igwe, Elaine Michener, Essie Eshin, and Dante Michaud, to name but a few, throughout and beyond the UK. The Department of Xenogenesis, or DXG for short, is the name of and for the projects that subtends

the meanings and methods entailed by Xenogenesis, the title of our international touring exhibition of works by the Otterlith Group, curated by Annie Fletcher in 2019, that will conclude at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in July later this year. Drawing from the title from the science fiction writer Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy of Dawn, Adulthood Rights and Imago, which were published in the late 1980s, allow us to think with Octavia Butler's science fictional plots and narratives as vehicles that can travel within, across, and between the scales of pitiless racial and sexist violence, the temporal, the spatial, the planetary, the human and the non-human.

Allowing for an engagement with the speculative thought of Octavia Butler unfolds her science fictions as inquiries into the present, into the denaturalization of the human, the extinction of the earth, the non-binary binds between the material and immaterial, the necropolitics of techno-fascism, and the becoming black of the human. With that said, we are delighted to present our xenogenetic gift and finally welcome our dear friend and fellow traveler, the poet and philosopher and sonic performance theorist Fred Moten, to help us think through some of these questions and initiate this series of sequences. Fred Moten needs no introduction, but we could also fill these hours citing his work and his

generous thinking, as his generous thinking and fortitude have been generative and transformative for intergenerational communities across the world. I do not think I am alone when I say that throughout the pandemic his travelling image, his voice, his vocality, the grain of his voice, have helped us all get through some terrifying times and dark moments, and continue to help us to think critically, think deeper, think through, and think together. His incredible diverse work has dissected colonialism and slavery and the living legacies of capitalism and racism across the scenes of contemporary cultural production. his passionate, poetic and steadfast voice and thinking, sensitively attuning itself to Black life, Black being and art,

and helping us undo the traps set for Blackness in the infrastructures and enclosures of the past, present and future. Before Kojo introduces our xenogenetic gift in more depth, I would like to extend our deep gratitude to Fred for making time today, and also to Professor Andrea Phillips, who leads the BXNU Institute, which is a platform for experimental artistic research and curatorial research and is a collaboration between Northumbria University and Baltic Centre of Contemporary contemporary art. Andrea will also be moderating the questions at the end of this talk. Thank you, Andrea, for supporting this event and deep gratitude. And finally to Lux and Ben Cook and Sionjoo Park for co-hosting.

I would also like to say that at 8.30pm next Sunday, 8.30pm, we will be live at Cafe Otto in Dalston with Rashida Phillips, who is joining us here in London for Octonionic Constellation, thinking Octavia Butler with Black Quantum Futurism. This will be a live and streamed event. You will be able to find booking information on Cafe Otto's website and on the Department of Xenogenesis website this week. Finally, as I've pointed to, we will definitely leave space for questions at the end. We might not be able to answer all of them given the volume of people here, so please feel free to enter them in the chat while we are presenting so we can respond in sections or groupings of questions as a coherent bundle.

Thank you. So over to you Kojo. Thank you Anjali. I hope everybody can hear me. So what animates this first series of conversations in DXG, which is what we call the Department of Xenogenesis, what animates this cycle of conversations, this cycle of events, is an ongoing engagement with the ways in which feminist thinkers have engaged with Obtame of Butler's novels, short stories, since the 1970s. So it's an engagement with ongoing histories of thought, an engagement that has been largely but by no means entirely led by black feminist thinkers.

When you read, when you engage with the ways in which generations of black feminists and white cyber feminists, black cyber feminists, white xenofeminists, brown xenofeminists, brown cyber feminist thinkers have turned towards Octavia Butler's fictions. You begin to sense the ways in which Octavia Butler's writings stand as a guide for a certain kind of feminist political imagination. A guide to a thought at the edge of semantic availability. availability. And DXG, which is now open, which we are convening, DXG situates itself

within this history of encounters. A history that includes, but is by no means exhausted by Hortense Spillers theorising, Nalo Hopkinson's readings, Nadi Okorafo's readings, We see Shaw's readings, Donna Haraway's theorizing, Sadie Plam's theorizing, Luciana Parisi's theorizing, Denise Ferreira de Silva's guide to the imagination of Black feminist poetics, Denise Ferreira de Silva and Paula Chakraborty's theorizing, Ruth Wilson Gilmore's reading of Octavia Butler in terms of a Black radical tradition, So Dear Hartman's reading of Kindred,

Black quantum futurism sonifying the entire body of work of Octavia Butler, Black Audio Film Collective's videography in which Octavia Butler appears talking about the Xeno's Genesis trilogy and the Last Angel of History, Adrienne Marie Brown's emerging strategizing around the parables of the sower and the talents, the leader in Mauritius editorializing the notion of social justice science fiction. Zakia Iman Jackson's theorizing around the ontological plasticity embodied in Octavia Butler's short story Blood Chant. Alice Eve Weinbaum's theorizing Nicole Mitchell's composition

and compositional acumen and epicness, Jotam Mbassa's reading, ACA Butler's podcasting. Last academic year, Professor Moten taught Octavia Butler texts in his MA seminars at New York University. And for the past five years, I've been teaching the writings of Octavia Butler in my theory fiction seminar at the CCC program at the School of Art and Design in Geneva in Switzerland. This year in the Psychogenesis seminar which was Octavia Butler's working title for Wildseed we are reading and working with Wildseed thinking with its eugenic

implotment of capitalism and slavery. So today's conversation emerges from a long-held desire to make some of this ongoing conversation public, to engage with the challenge of Octavia Butler's thought and writing by way of Fred Moten's thinking about Octavia Butler's writing. So we're concerned mostly, but by no means exclusively, with thinking around Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, specifically Dawn from 1987. That means we will depart from and return to moments in Fred Moten's writing via writing of Octavia Butler and the reverse.

So one way for us to proceed, one way to approach the forest of Octavia Butler's thinking, is by a sentence written by Fred Moten in his preface to his book, A Stolen Life, Consent Not to Be a Single Being, from 2018. it's a sentence that provides us with the title for today's event so um we're gonna have that sentence come up on the screen so some if you could bring up that sentence so that everybody can see it

thank you Okay, it's on, she says. And son, if you could also please record this, I realise that we should record this. So I'm just going to read out that sentence. Hopefully you've had a chance to look at it. And of course, looking and reading run on different timelines. So Fred Moten writes in the Preface to Stolen Life.

Octavia Butler might have called it the oncological difference. She sounds dispossession. as our xenogenetic gift. Migrating out from the outside. Always leaving without origin. And we're going to bring that sentence from Stolen Life into relation with some sentences from Dawn, from book one chapter five of octavia butler's dawn so son could you go to the octavia butler quote please

he wraps the many fingers of one hand around her arm can you hold your breath can you hold it by an act of will until you die hold my we are as committed to the trade as your body is to breathing we were overdue for it when we found and we were overdue for it when we found you now it will be done to the rebirth of your people and mine

Octavia Butler Dawn Xenogenesis 1 1987 thank you Okay, so we were going to proceed like this. We were going to break Fred Moten's sentence from the Preface to Stolen Life into four parts. And then each part of this sentence could provide us with a certain kind of protocol, you could say, or a certain kind of practice or a certain entry point into reading the passage from Dawn and into Dawn as a whole and into the Xenogenesis trilogy as a whole.

So instead of attempting to talk about all four parts of this single sentence, we thought we'd start by just selecting the first and second parts of the sentence to begin with so that we could spend a bit of time and we wouldn't have to rush through the sentence. Part of what we want to do is actually try and experiment in attending to these sentences. So we're going to talk about just that first opening brackets, the part that begins. Octavia Butler might have called it the oncological difference.

and I guess the first thing to say about that well the first of many things to say about it is that you know when you hear oncological difference it it rhymes at a distance with ontological difference. And so in classical science fiction criticism, this is what's called the novum, that which is new in the world that Octavia Butler is building. What What is new in this world is that the Owankali,

specifically the Uloi, the Uloi, they valorize Lilith's cancer. They valorize, they admire Lilith's capacity to grow cancer. The Uloi are fascinated with the plasticity of generativity and the beauty of the tumour that is fatal to the female line of humans from which Lilith descents. So part of what's going on is that the oncological difference is how how the Oankali see ontological difference

from their perspective, the external perspective of an alien technological intelligence. So from their perspective, ontology is oncology. And this alien perspective on the tendency towards cancer in Lilith as a young black woman, a young black human woman who effectively stands in for the human species from that perspective. What is important to the Oankali is neither her blackness nor even her humanity.

What is important is her human capacity to grow cancers. It's as if she is human insofar as she can grow a cancer which is fatal to her but which is entirely novel to the Uluwai. And so that's the kind of nova, that's the novelty that sets the world up. But when we switch to to Octavia Butler's writing style, when we attend to the way in which she writes that, then we have a kind of another insight into how she narrates the novum.

and Fred maybe you could switch on your camera and we could resume our conversation about sentence and plot we could just pick up from where we where we left off the other day Well, first of all, I just want to say how fun and great it is and how fun and great I know it's going to be to continue to talk with you both about these things which we've been interested in together for so long.

So in the conversation that we had the other day was, as you said, because of an extension of the conversation we had last year when y'all graciously visited my class. But the conversation goes way, way back. It's an infinite one. So it's cool to pick it up again. Well, it's interesting. I wonder if we can think about the conversation in terms of plots and sentences. Is this conversation to have a plot? Maybe it's plotless. Maybe it doesn't work like that. It doesn't work within the confines or construct of a normative narrative.

And it's a conversation which breaks sentences up, maybe undermines the hegemony of the sentence in a way that gives us, makes us have recourse to what they used to call the period. And I guess part of what we were talking about the other day was just that, I know that in my training as a literary critic, and particularly in those moments when I was trying to learn how to focus on novels, You know, it seemed like, you know, for all intents and purposes, the novel is, you know, is a genre that is composed of sentences and it is made out of the attempt that writers make to manipulate and to reconstruct sentences.

One of my teachers is a great, great literary critic named Ann Banfield, and her most important book is this extraordinary book called Unspeakable Sentences. And I think I learned, I don't know if I ever learned how to really understand what she was talking about in that book, but I certainly learned from her that on a certain level, sentences, the basic unit of understanding and meaning for the mode of literary criticism that she was engaged in. And maybe it's this sort of mistrust and sort of attempt to flee from the hegemony of the sentence and from the sententious, just in general, that is maybe

part of the reason why I guess I ended up gravitating so hard to poetry and to music. So here's the dilemma with Octavia Butler, because she definitely moves in her work by way of the sentence. But it seems to me that her work is also this extraordinary sort of challenge to the sentence and to the sententious and to the ways that we ordinarily want to think about how sentences are built up into narratives or into novelistic discourse. And another way to put it would be, you know, as we said yesterday as we talked the other day, I don't know that there

is any other literary artist in my experience who is a more profound and revolutionary artist of plot than Octavia Butler. I think that she foregrounds or privileges plot over the sentence. And because of that, she requires us to engage in a kind of new understanding of the grammar, you know, of our story and of our history. And, you know, it's been Frank Wilderson's work over the last 15 years that has kind of reinitialized the intensity with which we think about that word,

grammar. But if you kind of want to combine Wilderson's notion of grammar with maybe like maybe Chomsky's notion of grammar and then Anthony Braxton's notion of grammar, if we mix all those together we might begin to approach the intensity and complexity of this notion of grammar. This sort of plot driven reinitialization of the very idea of grammar and therefore of necessity of the very idea of a grammar of suffering in Butler's work. So I'm blathering on. Let me try to come to some very brief conclusion and bring this back to the question of the oncological. One way to think about cancer is that one word that we might use

to describe it is that it is a run-on condition. It is a condition of sort of radical refusal of completeness, okay? One way to think about cancer is that it is a condition of unchecked generativity. And the uncheckedness of the generativity is fatal to whatever system has been given, you know, has been structured, you know, along the principle of the control of that generativity. And one such system that is undermined would be the system of the individual body. Cancer disrupts the boundaries and the ordinary working operations of the individual body.

And it does so in this double operation because it is as if it makes the body overflow or overrun itself. Certain cellular structures have a generativity that disrupts the system through, again, this overrun or overflow or run on. And when I say run on, I'm trying to give the hint of a pun about the run on sentence, the sentence that exceeds itself in some ungrammatical, supposedly, or super grammatical way.

And then at the same time, because cancer creates this unchecked generativity, the way that we usually address it or attempt to cure it is through these radical, brutal forms of reduction and, you know, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. the answer to the run-on is brutal reduction, right? It's cutting things off. So the amazing sort of intensity of the oncali is that they have a fundamentally different relation to this notion of generativity, to this kind of generativity. They seek it out

and they have ways of working it and working with it and manipulating it. And the ways that they work and manipulate generativity are, have bear a utopian trace for those of us in this world whose generativity has been so brutally and constantly interdicted. At the same time, that utopian trace is introduced by way of of invasion and enslavement and coercion and carcerality. And invasion and coercion and carcerality are all given to us in the oncology through Butler's plot.

They are given to us in the guise of love, attraction, desire, care. So one way to think about it is that her very work is a kind of not just on a content level, but at the level of form and at the level of its plot. It's as if it is like infused with way too much more, a whole lot more than any of us who operate by way of the logic of the individual life can handle. of. She gives us more than we can take. And because she gives us more than we can take,

similarly, we are brought up short. We are cut off in some way. We are made to consider how each of us on the individual level are less than what we thought we were. That we need help to read Butler. We can't read her by ourselves. And for me, the perfect sort of, you know, and of course it's a happy occasion then to find other people to read her with. And when I first began to try to think through this notion of an oncological difference in Butler. It was with the help and the guidance of my colleague and mentor,

I would say if she would claim that with me, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote this sentence, and I'll just stop by reading this. She says, the Black radical tradition is after capitalism as well as before and during in multiple modalities always. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy is all about this, I think, using the scariest life substance, cancer, to reflect on expansive, constantly changing sociality. So what Gilmour is saying, just to repeat it, It's simply cancer becomes the mechanism through which Butler gives us new ways to think about this expansive, constantly changing sociality.

And how it is that expansive, constantly changing sociality is a disruption of the very idea of the individual body. Thank you. That's an amazingly generative way of opening up the question of oncological difference. the Uloi they don't they send a chemical command to Lilith so that her own body changes its relation to the cancer

and then they have a way of absorbing the cancer so that they can experiment with it within themselves, so that they are a kind of, they are a kind of xenolaboratory in themselves. And then Butler says that the Uluwai are continually chattering excitedly among themselves about the plasticity, the generativity the kinds of um like as if the cancer is an app with untold future possibilities and potentials maybe it can help them regenerate limbs maybe it can help them metamorphose so that

when they next when they meet their next species they can they can charm the species by by effectively looking more like them it's for them it's like nothing but possibilities and pleasure in other words they are like artists given given the prospect of a new palette which they themselves could only dream of so they're enraptured by cancer i mean they're just they're just riveted by it and um the challenge is to take the fatality of cancer and to think it in relation to its generativity and its plasticity um and what it requires is that

that external perspective so the oncological difference is it's like it's inviting us to take up that perspective towards it as if we too could for a moment we too could look at Lilith as the Aronkali do she says you're welcome to it you can have it you can have it like my family line my mother my grandmother they were all tormented by this tumor you're welcome to it you know um but in part of what you say it's as if yeah it's as if um Octavia Butler invites us almost almost challenging us to take up that perspective that xeno perspective in which

a cancer is is a program for pleasure and joy rather than a fatality to be to be destroyed rather than a life destroying substance it's a life affirming substance so what is fascinating there is that um it's part of in order to do that butler opens up the dimensions of of plot which have ramifying consequences you know so it's it's like the the cancer is working at the level of the gene the uloi work on the so-called organelles and they are kind of genetic experimenters at the

level of genes but the implications of it scale all the way up to the owen carly's future plans where they divide into three different tendencies one that stays on the ship one that goes to earth one that grows a new ship and then heads off to a new planet and so the that and so the cancer allows this like opening up of scale from the microgenetic to this kind of xeno evolutionary process which has been going on for centuries and which will go on for centuries and part of the plot is for the owankali to awaken lilith and tutor her in this plot or this plan

and then she's supposed to awaken the other humans and then tutor them in this plan to say we're already in it so we have to work out how to survive in this plan which we are now part of because the oankali have designs on us we are their design project and there is no way that we cannot be part of their plan and part of their prospect so our future and theirs are now they will never not be entangled. And the irreversible entanglement runs up at all scales.

I think part of, to kind of extend that from the oncological into the cryogenetic, in that the, into the planetary and into the utopic as a kind of colonising force that the ship itself, which is a breakdown of subject and object, which is a kind of entire spec in a kind of biome that absorbs everything from food that she throws peels of oranges, Uloi don't like it, down on their bit of space though, to the rectangular green plant boxes, kind of these rectangular jelly-ish kind of vehicles where humans can be kept alive for

centuries and woken up, you know. Also to the kind of rewilding of the earth with cassava and the fact that, you know, everybody's vegetarian, I mean they serve her vegetarian foods and yams and squashes and beans and a kind of mutated form of cheese. The ship is an entire body in itself, which is a kind of non-binary space of the material and immaterial. And so I just want to add that to the thinking around what you were saying earlier about the erasure of certain bodies within this idea of the utopic and the ship is this giant absorbing force,

which absorbs all the scales of existence for humans. I mean, the ship is an amazing chance to think. chance to think. And that's the, I just never, you know, it's just, I just don't know any writer who gives you more, more amazing chances to think. And I don't know any writer who produces chances to think that are more intensely this combination of generative and wounding than her. You have to

give something up. You get hurt reading Octavia. And, you know, and of course, that is precisely that very practice, that very movement is what she's always writing about. And it is this essential and irreducible violence in sociality that is her theme. And the violence is all the more intense because it so often operates by way of practices that we would want to associate with love and care.

and desire and pleasure. And it is, as Saidiya Hardman teaches us to know, it is violence, which is most of the time operating on the mundane rather than the spectacular level. And so the ship is, it seems to me, like an extraordinarily rich example of just that. So when Lilith is taken through this long multi-century process of her own personal awakening on the ship, that the stages of that awakening occur within not only those square sort of bio,

what would you call them, bio-coffin-like compartments that she's asked to live in, where the coffin-like quality of being wrapped, as it were, in a plant that sustains one, it still bears the trace of prison. It bears the trace of burial. But then she is released from those compartments into a larger compartment that we might come to call a room or a cell. I think it's cool to call it a cell, because then you can link it up to, I love those Renaissance paintings, portraits of Saint Jerome in his cell. It always makes it so that you have to recognize

that the cell is a place for study, but that locatable places for study are also carceral spaces. But so we have Lilith in her cell And what she confronts is this complicated condition in which she comes to learn that through a biochemical operation induced by touch, the onkali can make a table rise from the floor of the room, of the cell she's in. And then when that table rises from the floor, she wakes one moment and there are clothes on that table. And then once at a certain moment, she recognizes that food, as it were, has emerged on the table in a bowl.

And the bowl contains this soup or stew. I'm always imagining what those stews taste like. I always in my mind want to link Octavia Butler with Delaney. And I always want to, and in my mind, the stews that they eat, you know, on earth in the wake of the oncology invasion remind me of those sort of amazing double soups that Delaney talks about in the other great multi-volume, you know, Black speculative fiction masterpiece that we have, which is the Return to Navarion series, you know, or one of the others that we have.

We've got more now, you know, Jemison's work and so forth. But among a whole bunch of other things, Butler and Delaney are the greatest writers of soup in the history of English literature, right? Like you could taste the soup that they write about, you know. And but this, but what's amazing about the soup that Butler has in that moment early on in Dawn Michael Williams, Is that what you're confronting you know is a condition in which you realize that the easy distinctions that you might have made between the floor the table, the clothes that are on the table, the bowl that is on the table, the soup that is contained in the bowl are broken down and part of that breakdown occurs as a function, the fact that the bowl is edible to.

so that the thing that contains the food is also food. The table on which the food is placed is also food. Therefore, you are led to this inevitable conclusion. The clothes that you are wearing are also skin. So here's the sort of weird, amazing thing. the general atmosphere within which Xenogenesis operates, particularly on the ship, is an atmosphere in which the distinction between things has broken down. Now, that's a cool thing, right? The atmosphere is the breakdown of the distinction between

things so that we live within the breakdown of the distinction between things. That is the condition within which we operate here. Okay. And it is, and that condition, that generalized condition of the breakdown of the distinction between things, that's what I have begun to think about by way of the help of my really great friend, Arnel Pham-Lon, who's a physical chemist who is studying at Ohio State University. She the term she gave me to describe this or to talk to name this is the interfacial layer. And it's a cool term, because you can imagine that you could spell it

interfacial layer L L A Y E R, but you could also spell it L A I are. Right. So that our our home, our home, so to speak, our our our homeless home, you know, is this interfacial layer. Right. This this this space that is, as it were, not in between things. OK. And it's not in between things because, of course, the things that is supposed to separate are inseparable. inseparable, but it's also not in between things, because it is the general atmosphere within which things are held. So how can it be in between when it also surrounds? And this is the ultimately what Butler presents us with

is a social problem that's also a topographical problem or topological problem. You know? So. Maybe that's in your sentence from the preface, when you have this moment in your sentence where you talk about out from the outside. Because in Butlerian terms, there were many outsides. The main outside for Lilith is to go outside of her room so that she sees that she's been inside what she calls a pseudo tree you know it's like a tree it's not a tree but it resembles

something like a tree whose trunk is bigger than several buildings and she can't help but analogize it to a tree um and as she and the the the space outside with the ivory sky seems seems endless in fact there seems no out there seems no outside to that outside it seems endless and when the humans later wake they have great problems understanding that they are on a ship and that that ship is in space because all they see is is foliage you know all they see is like like landscape it's very difficult for them to understand that that

that um there's an inside that they are inside what seems to be an outside and that there is an outside of that outside so these are you know it put like that these uh like these appear to be philosophical terms but they're also a lot to do with them with questions of plot and you brought up this really fascinating um suggestion you said you know what if we thought about sylvia winter's notions of plot and plantation novel and history in relation to this so that that that kind of roll call of feminist thinkers that I gave at the beginning,

you suggested what if we see Sylvie Winter's 71 essay as a kind of prefigurative partner in that thinking of the relation between plot, because in winter, plot stands both for the interior of the novel and as the counter to the plantation. the plot has um uh um it has a social and economic and aesthetic and political meaning

which opens out onto each other so that the a formal reading of the plot of a novel entails all of its other capitalist meanings too and um and the way in which octavia butler implots the outside as this like series of folded outsides when you talk about out from the outside the topological difficulty of locating where that is like where is it to say you're out from the outside where are you when you're out from the

outside the difficulty of locating which would be to say um a kind of um a poetics of disorientation or a poetics of continual dislocation as Lilith tries to orient herself in a continual disorientating space part of the part of what you challenged us to do in that formulation of out from the outside is to say that Lilith's disorientation becomes ours too so it's not it's not just that we study Lilith as she tries to navigate this out from the outside it's that Octavia Butler somehow

draws us into it and implicates in that implicates us in that too and that's something um that's very challenging and it's also part of why um it's also part of what's so compelling i think about her narration of what it means because it's hard to know if there is an outside and what would be out from it? There's so much, because I'm so, I'm tempted, we're tempted, we can't help but be tempted to say something like,

oh, I know we're out from the outside. So on the one hand, I know my mom grew up in a town called Kingsland, Arkansas, which is the birthplace of Johnny Cash and more importantly of B. Bernice Jenkins, my mom. and Kingsland is a town. It always hit, you know, maybe 300 people. And my grandfather, my grandmother grew up in Kings, Kingsland. My grandfather grew up in a place called New Edinburgh, Arkansas. I guess we would say New Edinburgh, if we were being proper

Arkansas, which was about eight miles from Kingsland. And when people in Kingsland refer to New Edinburgh, they call it the country. So you've got this sort of totally anomalous condition in which people who are living in a town with 300 people call another town eight miles away from it, the country. And then there are people in New Edinburgh who used to say, who would say, who didn't live in New Edinburgh, who lived in their own sort of family settlements, okay, like the Broaden settlement or the Rainy settlement, and they were referred to as living out from New Edinburgh, okay. So that phrase, out from the outside, on the first level, for me,

comes from that experience, from hearing those moments of location. um when i think of out from the outside in relation to winter one might think about it in terms of someplace out on the outskirts of kingston halfway tree jamaica or portmore or above rocks these are towns you know that are outside um so imagine a space on the outskirts of colonial Kingston in a plantation. And then the plaque that she refers to is on the one hand in the out on the outskirts, on the outskirts of the periphery, right?

Out from, out from the British metropole. Okay. And in those outskirts, there's a plantation and held within the space of that plantation is a place that emerges as a place of renewal, of the renewal of a certain kind of humanness in the wake of the complex disruptions of humanness that the slave trade produce. the plot held within the plantation and produced as an engine of economic growth that helps to maintain, as it were, the infernal health of the plantation.

Eventually, Winter understands it as a cancerous disruption of the plantation, right, because it contains the seed, the generative seed, okay, of a kind of anti-slavery mobilization, right, that becomes the place where those who have been planted in Kingston as if they were a crop themselves, right, and Winter talks about this early on in the essay, become or become active in the process of, as she would put it, rehumanizing themselves. But not just rehumanizing themselves, but of an active disruption of the very idea of an already given idea of the human,

right, which has been reduced, you know, to the horrible moniker, you know, man. So it is this process and implotment of re-humanization, which seems to me to be very much akin to a kind of active xenogenetic mobilization, an active anti-colonial xenogenetic mobilization, which for winter, the enslaved are active in producing and reconstructing. Okay. And it's a complex problem, okay, because on the one hand, one becomes, as it were,

responsible for a disruptive renewal of the very idea of the human, recognizing that a certain brutal idea of the human is at the heart of one's own incarceration. We become responsible for this concept which has been imposed upon us, and we become responsible for the renewal and the disruption of this concept. And that's the complicated plot that Winter describes. And it's got tremendous political implications, which I think are in all these different ways anticipated. They anticipate Butler and then Butler in a sort of strange temporality,

she retrospectively anticipates winter, as it were. And so we're left with these problems that show up, especially in the rich and sort of incalculable discourse of Black Caribbean feminist thought. in Winter, in Ondaea, in Norbesi Philip, in Audre Lorde. It shows up, well Ondaea especially talks about this, and this is something that I've been thinking about under the tutelage of my friend and writing partner Stefano, Harney. It shows up under the rubric of betrayal. And it raises these ethical questions that we might ask about Lilla.

Lilla. Okay. There's this brilliant formulation that Andaya makes in a great essay on George Laming that's collected in her collected writings, which are called The Point is to Change the World, beautifully edited by great scholar Alyssa Trotz, in which Andaya talks by way of Laming and by way of Chinua Achebe, Andaya talks about this notion of what it means to be the betrayal that she describes as what it means to be nurtured and sacrificed into power. And isn't that a brilliant way of describing what happens to Lilla? But in Andaya's words, it's also a brilliant and tragic

way of describing Nkrumah or Michael Manley, which we might think about under the rubric of the sublime. And if we wanted to branch out into the ridiculous, it might not even be a way of describing Obama. But this thing of being nurtured and sacrificed into power, that's the, as it were, post-colonial plot that we're all working right now. And it's operating within this sort of horrible kind of declension that we are now actively working out. And Butler's work, I think,

is an extraordinary laboratory for this, which is, you know, how does anti-colonial practice, you know, through decolonial means, become responsible for the post-colonial administration of neocoloniality, right? That's, you know, that's a problem in India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka in Barbados, you know, and it's even a problem in the United States, you know. And this is also part of, this is also where Butler works, right? This is the plot of ground that she tills and that

she cultivates, you know, in ways that again, that Winter does, I think, anticipate. And it's beautiful because we have to think about it as independent of anybody's individual moral failure. Because again, Lilith is sacrificed and nurtured into the power that she has, which is a power of awakening, right? She is, as Joy James would put it, she's the quintessential figuration of the the captive maternal.

You're on mute. So thank you for that brilliant formulation and for bringing Andaya and Joy James into the conversation. Because the figuration of the captive maternal is critical to what is at stake in Lilith's thinking. and the ethical dilemmas that Lilith finds herself both enacting and continually entangling herself in. I think this is Butler's mode, so that when Lilith is continually attacked

as the judas continually scapegoated it's because all of the characters know very well that they are all also entangled in those same moral conundrums and in those same ethical dilemmas um and you said something brilliant you said in our conversation the other day sorry to keep harking back but it was compelling you said there is a way in which the efforts to narrate those conundrums can entangle you in them too so that you find yourself if you're not careful or especially if you are careful you find yourself caught up in the same

violence of conventionality that you want to avoid and you were speaking specifically in relation to kindred but it it bears just as much relevance to dawn but in kindred it's extremely acute right because of the relation relation between dana and rufus Before we go to Kindred, and maybe this is a way of sort of linking back to that, this incredible disorienting reality that Lilith finds herself awake in, this kind of extractive horror, really. You know, she expresses through a kind of sense of repulsion. She describes,

and I think this is generous of Butler to kind of foresee the all-extractive presence as it is now. The multi-scalar, interfacial, interscalar, multiple layers of enclosure that we have to deal with. This ability Butler has to kind of almost, I don't know, predict what's happening now and at the same time describe the repulsion, you know, species horror, species racism, species repulsion, anthro horror. This kind of inseparability,

you know, we awaken into it with her in a kind of, as a disorientation. And I think the disorient, I think what it calls for is to see this incarceration as horror, as the monster that faces us is one that is made of multiple scales of enclosure. But what I find interesting is the relationship to the senses and desire. Marx talks about senses and Veofunier talks about senses as theoreticians. The senses as vehicles, we think of the senses as vehicles, as portals into all time, into all of its presentness. In various forms of meditation practice coming

from South Asia, to lock the senses and go inward is to be able to reach this space of of unseparability and people who let's say can wake in dreams sometimes this has happened to me find themselves walking through walls or coming out of a dream still tasting the taste of plaster I had a dream 15 years ago where I was walking through walls and I woke up with the taste of the wall in my mouth whatever that might have been you know people who are interested in the spirit world talk about this kind of thickening of time. And so I'm interested in the aesthetics of the thickening of time, but also just to move on from Kojo, this kind of ability that,

just to add to what Kojo was saying, this ability that Butler has to link us to our master, to link the slave to the master, to link, to tether to the ship. You know, this this ability she has to move from repulsion to desire to tethering. Well, there's a, again, these are, it produces these sort of, I don't even know that spatial is the right word, and therefore I don't know that geographical is the right word, but I'm, But I think a word that maybe is a little more right is again topographical topological

problems or this radical entanglement of the topographical and the social where by topography we might mean, you know, the way we write or think or a discourse that is attuned to how space or maybe a better word is how surfaces are, how surfaces somehow maintain themselves under conditions of bending and folding and crumpling, you know, and maybe even tearing, you know which would then itself be a rupture in our normal conception of topology you know um okay so what am i saying what i'm what i'm trying to say is like um this this connects back up to

this question of out from the outside and we can think about it in a little more specific sort of way with regard to Butler, I think. And I feel like I'm very lucky and I have an advantage over certain over folks because I've had the chance y'all might have too to look at a couple of different books that are on Butler that are in still manuscript but are hopefully coming out very soon and one is Denise Galeela De Silva's extraordinary sort of book-length meditation on kindred and the other is a book by Chi Ming Yang who teaches at University of Pennsylvania and

who's written an extraordinary sort of biography of Butler that takes the form of an abicidarium And, you know, what Yang was able to do was to really, because she grew up in Pasadena, she actually had more than regular access, you know, even just on vacations and stuff like that, visiting family to Butler's papers at the Huntington Library, which are just outside of Pasadena. And what I learned from reading Yang's work, and I hope she doesn't mind me talking about it before it comes out, I should have asked permission, is the intensity of Butler's

relationship and her family's relationship to another out from the outside in the geography of California, which is the sort of high desert of southeastern California, that we would associate with towns like like like um you know barstow and victorville you know but out from those towns look if you ever find yourself on interstate 15 going from los angeles to las vegas you would which i have driven that road many many many times because i grew up in the high desert of las vegas nevada and that's that's my sort of that's another of my geographical homes right um Well, Butler's family was part of a sort of interesting group of Black folks who established

sort of all Black towns, even all Black resorts in these desert communities in the 30s and 40s, which have now mostly disappeared. Okay. And what it means is that even in the midst of reading the lushness, you know, the sort of the botanical lushness of the earth that Butler describes in, you know, in Xenogenesis, which is maybe a function of trips that she made, Yang argues to Peru, you know, when as a young writer, that geographical lushness is still bound up or somehow enfolded with the botanical sparseness of that high desert. Butler is a writer of the outskirts. Butler is a writer of the

outskirts that are encroached upon, outskirts that are held, it seems to me, outskirts that are subject to development and subject to a kind of geographical erasure and invasion. Those those outskirts that are incorporated. And that's, again, that's a huge, that's a part of her process. What does it mean to be figured as not only living within, but also embodying this radical outside, right? literally the outer darkness that then becomes the essence of what incorporates it.

Okay. That's, you know, that's our, you know, that's, that's part of our, our, our, our legacy and our portfolio, you know, as, as African people, as, as colonized people. And she writes that. Now, what spatial sense does one live or gain as a function of this, of this experience, which is a shared experience, which is a transgenerational experience. There's a transgenerational experience of displacement that we don't lose. That transgenerational experience of displacement is the plot that we act out. It is the historical trajectory that we're on

as well as in some complicated way, it's the ground we work and that we till. Okay. It is the ground where we ground, where we do our grounding, so to speak, as Walter Rodney would say. Now, it is a ground of disorientation. It's non-locatable. Okay. It doesn't operate within any kind of, it's off the Cartesian grid, even though it is the condition of possibility of the Cartesian grid. Right? And, and, and okay, so another word for plot, this double sense of plot, which is a spatial temporal dislocation. Okay, and arrhythmia, right, as Winter describes it. Another word, another actually it's not a word that for it is Norbessy Phillips word, displace.

but it's but it's dis space place right there's that great essay in um her book of essays called the genealogy of resistance an essay called this place uh the space between okay but that but that space between is also a space that surrounds right the space between is is the surround. Okay. Again, it is, it's the interfacial layer, it's the interfacial layer that is our surround. Okay. And it is, it is a field or a zone of dislocation and disorientation, which we experience, right, as in part, as we, we experience it as the violence and brutality of dislocation.

But at the same time, we also experience that dislocation and that disorientation as a tremendously fruitful and generative circumstance for thinking. And what we have to accept, the gift that we have to accept, which is also a wound, so it's that double, it's that pharmacon thing that Darida would talk about. It's a gift that is also a poison. It is a fatal gift. It is a wound that is also a blessing, which in French gives us a way of making that connection. But that's like Malibu talks about this in a certain way.

But this combination of gift and fatality, of wound and blessing, right is that you know we now why why is it is it because it it would only be a deep horrible existential trap if all we were given was a space with it which we continually have to think more and more creatively the history of our own displacement and degradation and depredation Okay. But it's more than that. Okay. Because it is actually the impossible platform, the impossible, disruptive, non-conceptual, non-scheme, okay, from which we think something else.

It is the place in which we get to imagine and draw a limit around this dimensionless point within which we are prisoners of this fucked up, narrow history. okay um we we we are in we are in a vestibular space as spillers would say okay and it is and that interfacial layer that vestibular zone okay that's what what butler's work is asking is both allowing us to understand it or to to to recognize it and and she also renews it

okay and she shows us how we are always actively renewing okay um and it's uh it's uncomfortable right like it's horrible it's fucking terrible okay to to be nowhere like we are right okay um the only thing that would be worse okay is to be normatively locatable okay like the master is, like the boss is. It's horrible to be nowhere, but it's better than to be there. And it's our only chance. And it's their only chance too, which is fucked up because we don't want to give a fuck about them, really. And we have every right not to, but still it doesn't

matter. It's outside of even that normative ethics of retribution, really. That's the other part of it. It's like Dana has to be Dana, independent of Rufus. Dana has to be Dana, which on the one hand, in a way that requires her absolute vigilance with regard to the terrible total brutality and viciousness of Rufus. And at the same time, she has to be herself. She has to be Dana as if Rufus weren't there.

She has to be absolutely vigilant with regard to Rufus's presence. And she has to be absolutely vigilant with regard to the moral and ethical imperative to practice Rufus's absence. And Butler knows that and she shows us that. it's tempting to always be calling her a genius, except it's a disruption of the metaphysical foundations of genius. She's over there, you know. Thank you for opening up that dimension of kindred.

Kindred. I didn't know Denise Ferro da Silva had a forthcoming work, which I guess is extending the moments in which she's already been writing on Kindred over the years. So I look forward to that very much. Just to maybe just to talk a bit more about Kindred, because it's such an important book, and I know many people, in a way, many people enter into Butler's thinking through Kindred. This point that the effort even to narrate

or summarize the plot of kindred seems to entangle you or inveigle you in a dismaying complicity with some of what's at stake in kindred if you're not careful you find yourself narrating if you're not careful you find yourself narrating the plot of Kindred as if as if you as if the effort to narrate the plot entails your compliance with the

structural violence at work or the structural asymmetry so you find yourself saying things like you know what does it mean that dana comes to feel protected you find yourself narrating it as a kind of romance a kind of forced asymmetry of romance and um that's an amazing and um terrifying prospect that Butler regularly draws you in. It's as if the moral conundrums that entangle the characters entangle the way you narrate the character's own existence. It's as if the field of entanglement absorbs you as well

and implicates you in it. And you feel it's the most peculiar feeling, which is at the edge of semantic availability because you feel so uncomfortable but you you can't really name why and it's it's because you're structurally positioned in the same structure of the same structural grammar of violence as they are like narrating it that's enough to draw you into it, which means that what Kindred is doing, it's the ongoingness of Kindred, you know, like when was Kindred? Like it seems to be, it seems to have a date and a time,

but considering the way in which Dana is abducted, there is a level of slippage out of time, which means that kindred is not entirely locatable in its time. You can't only situate it in the time of the bicentennial. Whenever you read it, it seems to implicate you in 2022, or in 2027, or in 2030, or in 2006 or in 2005, you seem to get drawn into it too. That's quite astonishing and actually hard to capture the effective field,

the power of the effective field at work in that work. if if i could if i could travel back in time i'd go to uh to monticello you know in 1811 you know and visit the evil child molesting predator you know slash genius thomas jefferson and I stand over him with a gun to his head and make him read Kendrick. I don't want to fuck up his sense of time too. But it's probably good that I can't do that. It's probably a waste of time.

There's much better things I should be doing with such a power. But this connects up, I think, to something that you were saying, Anjali about that I had to take a break and pause and blather for a while while I was still trying to process your dream, you know, or your retelling of your dream that you wake up with the taste of plaster. That's a Butlerian dream, right? Dana wakes up with her arm is in the wall, right? The last chapter of Denise's forthcoming book, which is called Unpayable Debt, she takes a phrase from Butler.

A cue from Butler, the chapter is about what happens when flesh meets the wall. This is something which Butler, again, continually replays throughout her body of work. And it's a specific link, I think, between Kindred and Xenogenesis. One, you know, Dana comes back to her present, but she's wounded. She is not intact. And at the same time, she has been scarred, where the scar, the wound is a lack. It's a reduction, but the healing of the wound produces more than what was there before.

And there's also the problem of the wall, right? The very architecture of the history has been augmented and at the same time disrupted. And Dana's arm, as it were, remains in that antebellum wall, what will they have done at that moment? What will Rufus have done with this arm that has now been left, right? That's a temporal anomaly that for us, you know, so, you know, Jefferson, the great architect, you know, building his masterpiece of an infernal house, literally out of the bones and flesh, okay, of the people he enslaved.

Okay. Monticello is not made of bricks and marble, okay. It's made of arms and legs, you know, and, you know, that's now at the same time, you know, this taste of plaster that you described, you know, Anjali is, is inseparable from this, this touch of plaster, this meeting of plaster and flesh that, you know, that, that Butler describes. And, and the, the, the amazing thing is, is this shows up again in Xenogenesis when in those biochemical reactions that turn the wall of the ship into a table or into food or into clothing. Okay. But also that turn the wall

of the body. Okay. Into, you know, new, new bodies, new, new, new, new entities. There's a, what do we do? How do we reformulate our ethics in a way that corresponds to this radical permeability, to this radical permeability of flesh, and to the entanglement of flesh and soil, the entanglement of flesh and earth, and to the new modalities of mobility that occur as a function of this entanglement of flesh and earth, which is literally the new ship that the and Kali are building. Right? This is, again, this sort of moral and ethical task

that she gives us. And how do we live with this entanglement of flesh and earth? You know, when Shakespeare in the figure of Prospero wants to most brutally scandalized the quintessential figure of colonial, you know, subjectivity, Caliban, the word he uses to describe him is thou earth. That's Prospero's biggest insult, Thou earth. So this interplay of earth and flesh is, again,

that's the interfacial layer. And that's where Butler operates. That's where she, again, that's the ground she works. you know um and uh you know it's it's it's it's uh it's like you said because it's an inexhaustible achievement because it it it disorients us not only as you spatially but also templately you know i there's a great uh old jazz standard that that betty that betty carter just obliterates you know called i didn't know what time it was and that's what that's what happens

you don't know what time it is when she's singing that song and you don't know what time it is when when you're reading butler um between the between the eye that sings and the eye that is sung and um so yeah maybe um butler's xenogenetic gift at that moment is um It's Butler's reworking of what Robert Meister would call inter-temporality. It's an inter-temporal gift. Thank you so much for that last set of comments to think about. Maybe we have to go to some questions now. I think we have a question.

Andrea has a question lined up. Hi, thanks so much everybody. My mind's buzzing. I'm sure everybody's is. I've got, I'm the relay, so I've got a great and interesting question from Scott and Cassandra, which actually really reminds me of where we've just left off, which is thinking about the spatiality and temporality and how we understand ourselves in relationship to it with Butler. And so Scott and Cassandra ask, you've discussed, and I don't know who that you is, it might be the Otolith Collective, or it might be the Otolith Collective and Fred, you've discussed the resistance to adapting Butler's work to film. Now I'm just going to interrupt the question for a minute there because I think that

those of us that are new and those that are old to Butler, that's one of the first questions we ever think, which is, gosh this is a film, but how on earth can it be a film at the same time? Sorry, I'm oversimplifying. They carry on, Scott and Cassandra, so they ask this question about, you know, this common question, the question of commonality about how it could be made into a film, and let's think specifically about the Xenogenesis trilogy here. They carry on, we are curious to know how you may or may not have incorporated this resistance, i.e. the resistance to the victorial or the unidimensional, unitemporal, or whatever. We are curious to know how you may or may not have incorporated this resistance into the development of xenogenesis

as an event, an institution, or a book. So I think that seems to me to be a quite profound question in a sense, which is, as far as I'm concerned, kind of at the heart of what I understand of the department of xenogenesis anyway. Maybe I can attempt to answer some of that and then Kojo and Fred can talk as well. It's a great question. I would say in our practice as artists what motivates us is both this tension between between being sick of being in this fucking place and being expected to produce an idea

of being black or brown for institutions or whatever. For us there is an aesthetics of resilience and it is this mixture of being sick of it and at the same time also knowing that that is the modern condition. is where we are in this city in London, which has been hundreds of years of multi-ethnic forms of rebellion. We've always been thinking about the aesthetics of how to think through these two questions and thereby often approach work as a series of questions. I would say

I just forgot the third point, Andrea, that they made in relation to the Department of Xenogestrian as a book. That's right. I haven't mentioned it to anybody. I was thinking about it earlier, but there is a plan to, an idea to kind of, yes, bring together all these sequences because each sequence will inform the other sequence and there is a plan to kind of bring together an anthology of all of this. In relation to thinking about how to image Octavia Butler, we in fact talked about this a little bit the other day because there are various films that are you know being planned, Kindred is

being planned and a couple of others I can't remember and I kind of dread it because I think personally what I'm interested in as an artist if I was going to approach this subject matter and actually in a work we did called Otolith 3 we the whole film is about the impossibility of describing the alien and the multiple attempts at it based on Satyajit Ray's unmade film The Alien which was later borrowed and turned into ET. This work is made quite a while ago but we question this idea of the representation of the alien but in terms of Octavia Butler I think

I'm more interested in the ability to produce a new atmosphere out of the structures of feeling that she explores. The science fiction genre is quite exhausted and I watch everything. and there are so many cliches so I think it's a question that you know can I mean the response can be you know yes a kind of popular film on kindred might be fun but you know might be interesting might not be who knows it might reach a younger generation you know I think for us that question is one that we keep returning to um as as the um thought i mean i'd like to see

i'd like to see hollywood try i'd like to see netflix try i'd like to see amazon try i'd like to see all these platforms you know try to evoke um what fred quoting sadir hartman mentioned as the irreducible violence in sociality. I'd like to see them take on Dawn. I'd like to see them handle the Paul Titus chapter. Because I think Octavia Butler's work would set certain dilemmas and conundrums, certain forms of... certain forms of alien intimacy

and the violence that is inseparable from that intimacy that we haven't yet seen anywhere. So I'd like to see them try. And the inevitable failure of that is nonetheless compelling to witness. Certainly these kinds of conversations that we're having now are designed to create a form of attention that we think is, that I've been missing myself, a form of close attention to specifically the kinds of conundrums

and dilemmas and irreversible entanglements that Octavia Butler continually ensnares us in, I always mention Arrival, which in a certain way is pretty much as good as a certain kind of Hollywood film will get in its notion of an encounter. And as you remember in Arrival, the linguist Amy Adams she continually confronts the heptapods behind this you know this um this giant partition where they live in the smoke and if you remember in Arrival there is one moment

when um Amy Adams has this uncomfortable proximity to a heptapod The heptapod is no longer behind the partition. You see a moment in which you see the texture of the heptapod's skin. You even see the heptapod inspiring and aspiring. That's to say you see the we see the the breathing we see the skin moving in and out just for a moment and then of course she wakes up it's only imaginable as a nightmare so at a starting point you would say that

that what arrival can only visualize for 10 20 30 seconds that's where the Xenogenesis trilogy begins. So you would have to imagine a film or a TV series that could begin where a rival finds its limit and then continue from there. Would they be able to do that? Well, we'll see, won't we? But also the aesthetics, I mean, beauty cannot function at the level of something that we know anymore either. I mean it has to open up this this inseparability you know you know the kind of monster or and the kind of the monster that is all the inset is the

inseparability that is the multiple enclosures layered upon enclosures these deadly layers have to be exposed so how you know. I'd just like to go towards I think you've answered the first half of Scott and Cassandra's question beautifully. And I just wanted to go to the second part, really, which is how have you incorporated this resistance? And I think you've just done the resistance, you've performed the resistance. How do you incorporate this resistance into the Department of Xenogenesis as an event, an institution, and a book? And I'm thinking particularly about the institution and conversations we have had about the Department of Xenogenesis also being a kind of pater-educational or pater-pedagogical format as well.

And this obviously brings in Fred's work on the undercommons as well and education. And so I wonder how you see it as a pedagogical platform that somehow resists this kind of incorporation that you've just described. well I mean I didn't think I was I wasn't really talking about incorporation I was talking about um Hollywood's self-imposed limits you know which are not mine it's theirs it's their problem not mine um DXG is a is a modest proposal it's a moving space-time which moves here and there

and draws in allies and I see I must admit I don't see the need to take on the limits of Hollywood's inability to capture or to evoke in any way the inseparability of attraction and repulsion, which is part of what animates Butler's project. That, you know, that to me is at the heart of Butler's work. But it's clear that Hollywood is phobic. you know that it cannot really tolerate level of complexity at work in

in in um butler's thinking and dxg is a space precisely to dwell in that complexity to invite people to open that complexity and to inhabit it. It's as modest as that. I would also say that I grew up as a kind of being able to both travel in the world and also do adult education courses, when there was a huge amount of many different courses that

one could join that existed outside of the university. I think that there were many different spaces once upon a time where one could think with others and one continues to do that in one's home or when we get the chance to talk about our work. I think it is important that not just us but everybody kind of opens up these spaces of learning for each other. I think that we have to be able to share our ideas outside of the

confines of institutions and educational institutions because knowledge is not about being, gaining knowledge is not about being wealthy, it's not about being able to afford to go to university, right? It's also about being, it's also not just about smartness, it's also about wisdom and I think I've always learnt a lot from being with people I don't expect to know and to learn from as such. Thank you. I've got another two questions here,

unless Fred you wanted to say anything in response to that or should I go on with the question? Oh no, just go on. Okay. Thank you. Okay so the next question comes from Irani Montero S. Forgive me Irani if I've pronounced that wrong. The question is could you speak on the disturbing symbiotic combination of love and coercion between the Oankali and humans? Well yeah, maybe Fred could answer, maybe Fred could respond a bit to that, although I feel Fred

has responded already to that and then we could add some more afterwards. Well, just, I mean, the only thing, you know, Butler was, seemed always to be pretty adamant about saying that she wasn't, that, at least with regard to the Xenogenesis trilogy, that these weren't books about slavery. And when we think about, and I think most readers, certainly myself, react to that formulation with various, in various states of resistance.

It's like, okay, well, if it's not, it might not be, they might not be, but they're not anything else either. They're not but nothing other than that. Nevertheless, my sense of it is that part of what's at stake in xenogenesis especially is that the particular modes of attraction and repulsion that are played out ought not be understood within a of the framework of something like what might be called interraciality.

What I think is at stake much more is, is that she's asking us to, to really think hard about the process of speciation. And, and again, I believe winter is really crucial and instructive for helping us to think with Butler on that. And it's got something to to do, I think, with how I'm trying to begin to understand how it is that Winter's work, and particularly her invocation of the human. And this is something that I learned from talking a lot with R.A. Judy, and also reading Katherine McKittrick.

but that Winter is attempting to do this amazing thing, which is to renew a certain notion of the human outside of the discourse of speciation. Winter's human is not a species. It's outside the conceptual framework produces speciation as something like a separate group. And it's a...anyway, my sense of it is so that when we think about attraction and repulsion in Butler in that way, you know, it should be, again, outside the fatal, horrible interplay

of of raciality and speciation right that that she's you know on the one hand she's entangled in a history that is determined by those processes but but she's not operating from those processes as if she's not writing as if those processes were her inevitable conceptual scheme She is in that displacement that those processes produce, and her practice is the redoubling of that displacement. And now what that allows is this really cool, but also at the same time horrible condition,

condition of wounding and that that occurs when we read Butler, and it's the condition where, you know, all of a sudden that interplay of attraction and repulsion turns out to be about you and all of your relationships. Right? Oh, you know, it's, it makes me think of so many things. That's all I'll say. Well, one in particular. My one time, I hope he doesn't hear me because he hates it when I talk about it, but our eldest son was having difficulty in school and it was horrible every day to see him go into this space of violence, you know. And I felt

like my job, you know, as a parent was to get him to talk about it, you know, that that was how it had to be processed. And, and, and I was, and he didn't want to talk about it. And he didn't even want to be touched. Right. And it made me realize that he experienced my love as violence, right? That my embrace was invasive, you know? And that's an ethical position that Butler is deeply concerned with, you know, that problem. How your love can be

violent. The beating, you know, violence is beating as physical brutality. It's not that she's not concerned with that too, but she's even more concerned with the violence of love care. And that produces a greater demand on us. Thank you. I think that's a wonderful and generous response to Irani's question. I have a question, if I could be so bold. just because it's something that you were clearly excited about

in a previous conversation, I want to know more about it, which is this idea of interfaciality. I wonder if you could expand a little bit more on it, both of you, I mean, both, all three of you, I mean, as in, when I say both of you, I mean both screens I'm looking at. So how can we understand, yeah, could you expand a little bit on interfaciality? it feels like a really potent tool for us to use, a kind of potent ratchet. I'm interested in it particularly in relationship to the other word that Kojo and Anjali have taken, Fred, from your preface of Stolen Life, and that is the idea of dispossession. And I know that in a way you've been talking

about dispossession throughout the past two hours, but it seems to me there's something very particular about the use of that term as well that I'd really love to hear a bit more about. So interfaciality and dispossession, if they're related in your view, which I've got an inkling they are. Yeah, I made a, I was able to make a friend over the last couple of years as a function of the impositions of COVID. A virtual friend. We've only been in the same place once for breakfast. But again, her name is Arnelle Phanlong.

She studies chemistry at Ohio State University in the US. And it was she who introduced me to the term interfacial layer. The particular area of chemistry that she works, or one of those areas, is the way she described it. I'm not going to describe it in the way that she described it, but I'm going to, so hopefully I'm not messing it up too much. She talked about, she's interested in mist. the chemistry of mist, which would be, for instance, what happens, what's the, how do we, how do we understand in chemical terms, what happens when water hits a seawall?

Okay. And, and in my mind, it just, my mind raced immediately when she began, when she said that, because I thought about the malacombe in Havana, you know, or I thought about, You know, or not even just, I thought about the seawall in Georgetown, Guyana, that one time in a correspondence, Alyssa Trotz talked to me about the house that she grew up in close to that seawall where they stood in the aftermath of Walter Rodney's assassination. I guess what I'm trying to say is, in my head, I suppose it became a Caribbean formulation

in a certain kind of way. This confluence of water and fluid and solid surface and the mist that is produced as a as an interplay of a process that we could talk about under the rubric of corrosion and collision. It's this interplay of corrosion and collision. So I'm in the middle of attempting to read a whole bunch of stuff, which I can't really read, that Arnel has sort of graciously sent me some links to some links to in trying to study this sort of chemistry

of interfaciality, which is another way to think about it is the chemistry of the interplay between states. OK, like say, for instance, between a water or fluid and a solid. And it makes me think that maybe mist, again, would be that condition in which the interfacial layer, the space that is supposedly in between, is, as it were, mystically transformed into that which surrounds. But if it's the space that surrounds us, it is also important that that space be understood as material, the materiality of the space that surrounds us.

Ultimately, I should probably shut up now. You know, before I this this is also about the interfacial layer between chemistry and physics. Okay. And then about the interfacial and facial layer between those in biology and and that that sort of multiple interface is also Butler's location as a writer. So So one way to think about it is a whole lot of the way that we would think about the relation between the oncology and humans on earth, especially Lilith, that it's a problematic of chemistry. Right? So that the metaphor of chemistry in terms of romantic relations is made terribly,

but also beautifully material and real in Butler's work. So that's some of what I was thinking about Andrea, but there's, but I obviously even in talking about it, I'm just beginning to realize the shortcomings because like I need to read for a while to really begin to try to understand some of the stuff that my friend Arnell is beginning to tutor me in. Thank you. Kojo, I was just going to say Kojo and Anjali, do you have anything on interfaciality? Fred characterised Octavia Butler as the great novelist of the interfacial layer.

um fred said i don't mind me quoting um he said uh that interfacial layer is is where repulsion and attraction as it were do not meet where they touch but do not meet where touch from the perspective of physical chemistry touch can be understood as repulsion like what we experience as touch is created as a function of the repulsion of two things

that come together. So that's, you know, so that's Fred's account of his thinking with Arnel Fonlon, and that's my transcription and transposition of Fred's account. This notion of a moment where repulsion and attraction touch but do not meet speaks directly to how what Lilith calls a true xenophobia becomes the vehicle for xenogenesis Lilith in those opening

chapters the first four five six the entire first book Womb Lilith is is fighting her what she calls her xenophobia she's fighting her bodily horror at proximity and intimacy and what I understood from Fred's brilliant account of those sections is that Lilith's painstaking description of her aversion to and repulsion to the Owankali's head tentacles can also be understood as an outcome of something she cannot take her eyes from.

The terms in which she describes her repulsion are inseparable from the terms in which she describes her longing and that the terms in which she describes her aversion cannot be separated from desire which cannot be separated from a certain kind of longing. Maybe what I would add to that is that in Butler's terms that wouldn't necessarily be a psychoanalytic reading. it would precisely be a chemical reading like where the psyche was there is chemistry

instead so that that that dynamic of the inseparability would have to be accounted for in chemical terms um fred's point which is something we will continue to think through is that vast amounts of science fiction tends to elevate physics as a problem of time travel or faster than light travel. And then on top of questions of physics, then biology and chemistry then emerge. First you have warp drive, as Fred put it, and then you have the

Klingons. But in a butless terms, what if what the primary animating drive is not the question of physics or warp speed or light speed, it's chemistry. Then those questions of the inseparability of attraction repulsion and longing are central and the questions of xenophobia and xenogenesis and the missing term of xenophilia they would then be central to her project and they would have to be understood chemically and that would be then something that that we are thinking through

I mean I'm I will just add by saying I'm thinking through the relationship between this idea and interfaciality and the interscalar vehicle um in terms of say moving through that question between the separable and the inseparable as a as a narrative um but I was also reminded of this film by John Carpenter from 1980 called The Fog um and it was in actually when I was in um California many many years ago Kodra and I were doing a residency in Headlands in San Francisco and I've never seen this before but

what was what suddenly it's very bright kind of, I know, illuminated and huge landscape with this kind of roaring, roaring ocean. And at one point, an atmosphere change happened and there was this fog in the air. But it wasn't like fog in a kind of British kind of Charles Dickens kind of Sherlock Holmes fog. It was like a thick. fog that almost looked like the air was like full of like the air was holding this thick dense material and it was very profound and I was just reminded of this film called The Fog directed by John Carpenter

where the ghosts of unvengeful mariners are hidden in the fog and come to claim their vengeance on the town So that's what I was, I'm still thinking through these, I'm still thinking through those, these ideas. Thanks everybody. Oh, sorry. No, I was just saying, I mean, I think what, that, those, that, the, the thing I would want to say would be, well how Kojo just described you and Anjali just described these things in ways that made it more clear to me you know um so I just wanted to repeat something that you said because it's so clear you

know just a aversion and attraction um whose relationship to one another is one of aversion and attraction, they become the terms of our entanglement. Another way to put it would be that they become, you know, in sort of Glyssantian terms, they are the terms of consent not to be a single being. But of course, consent not to be a single being can't be understood as something that occurs between single beings. Right? So what? So aversion and attraction becomes something like, you know, is the social practice, you know, of entanglement,

which then corresponds to its own, you know, sort of ethical dictates, which becomes, you know, our job. In other words, imagine that the ethical formulations that would emerge as a function of these terms of entanglement. And it's almost like every time one hears terms of entanglement, one wants also to hear the phrase terms of endearment. But the ethics that would correspond to these terms of entanglement are not the normative ethics of interpersonal relations. Okay. And, you know, and again, that's our project, you know, that's our project.

Thank you. Yes, thank you so much for that, Fred. And thank you, Andrea, for hosting and bringing those questions together and then I'd like to say thank you to Sun and to Ben for hosting and managing everything so smoothly and then most of all of course I'd like to thank Fred for joining us from New York and for gracing us with his thinking around Butler. It's rare, actually, to have the opportunity to talk in this way

about a writer who many people love, but the forms of attention required to do aesthetic justice to her work are actually quite scarce and quite rare. So this to me was a rare pleasure from start to finish. And you really, Fred, you truly honoured us with your presence and your thoughts. So thank you for joining us today. and um yeah this was um you know this is one conversation and there will be many each each

of these conversations will take on different forms which speak to the the guests the kind of encounter that is being staged. So the next event with Rashida Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism will be different again. It will speak to the Octonianic Constellations work from 2015 that Rashida and Kamei recorded. And it will speak to something we've been touching on continually, which is that notion of irreversible entanglements. So although Kamei will not be present,

that phrase irreversible entanglements from her great group will be there as a kind of silently loud partner in next week's event. It's a term that's continually played across our conversation along with the other figures of thought. So, yeah, so I'd like to say thank you to everybody for joining us on the Friday afternoon. Sunday. Sunday afternoon, excuse me. That's how much Octavia Butler scrambles my mind. Thank you to everybody for taking time to join us on a Sunday afternoon to think aloud

about the writings of Octavia Estelle Butler. Yes, and thank you. Thank you. I will just second that and say thank you, Fred, for joining us in this shared ongoing conversation, which is highly non-transactional. and you know and thank you Andrea so much for supporting this program with BXNU and I would also like to say that the and thank you Lux and I'd also like to say that these this event and others with everybody's permission will be available on the Department of Xenogenesis website if you want to if people want to go back and re-listen to things and thank you everybody for joining

and thank you the otolith collecting it was a pleasure from start to finish thank you thank you thank you everybody goodbye thank you thank you then