TINA KANTE, Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to wherever you are, to everyone, joining us from your various locations all over the globe, which is what I know usually happens for our convenings. My name is Tina Kant and I wear a number of different hats on and off of this Zoom screen. I am professor of humanities at the Cogut Institute for Humanities here at Brown as well as a professor of modern culture and media and I lead the Black Visualities Initiative here at Brown. I'm also one of the conveners of the Practicing Refusal Collective and on behalf of my fellow
collective members I am delighted to welcome everyone to this seventh virtual installment of the Sojourner Project. As I've explained in each of the previous activations in this series, the Practicing Refusal Collective is a forum that is dedicated itself to fostering new dialogues on Blackness, anti-Black violence, and Black futurity in the 21st century. The collective initiated the Sojourner Project in 2019 as part of an effort to de-center the United States in our discussions and to learn from the insights and perspectives of African and African diasporic communities beyond the U.S. And over the past year, which has gone very, very rapidly in the face of the
pandemic, we have partnered with the Visual Identities and Art and Design Center in Johannesburg, at the University of Johannesburg, and Art for Humanity in Durban, and as well as Yale University for this series of events. And for this particular episode, we are delighted to be joined by a new partner, the recently formed Center for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at the University of Johannesburg. And you will be able, you will see in the chat connections, links to be able to follow some of our partners. Should you want to continue to be involved in our work and in their work you will also find a link to thesojournerproject.org, our website,
where you will find information on all of the previous events in the series. Before I get started, I have to acknowledge the work of some of the people who made this transatlantic collaboration possible. On the South African end, we thank James McDonald, Victoria Colis-Butilesi, Ismail Farouk, sorry, and Russell Halongwane. And on the US end, we thank Tavia Noango, Amanda Anderson, Damien Mahit, Traude Kassner, and Lewis and Kyle, our wonderful, wonderful tech folks, as well as Lisa Noble. We thank you all for assembling so many moving parts into what feels like a seamless whole. And now, without further delay, we're going to move on to the main event.
Today's activation is, like all of our sessions, intended as an invitation. An invitation to both think and rethink our selected keyword, aesthetics. It is the brainchild of our fellow collective members, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Rizvana Bradley. Today's activation is also an invitation to enter into an ongoing dialogue that extends all the way back and potentially before 2019 to a convening called the loophole of retreat which took place on the occasion of Simone Lee's Hugo Boss Prize exhibition of the same name. It is an invitation as well to take up what Denise and Rizvana call an open proposition,
which they published last month in the online journal EFLUX entitled Four Theses on Aesthetics. And you will also find a link to that publication in the chat. Denise and Rizvana's four challenging theses will serve as a kind of armature for today's activation. And I'm very delighted right now to introduce my fellow collective members, Denise and Rizvana, their talented crew of interlocutors. And I'm going to be going to be introducing them with what I will apologize in advance for as very abbreviated, abbreviated bios for a really illustrious group of thinkers. So to begin with, Rizvana Bradley is an assistant
professor of film and media at UC Berkeley. Her scholarship and writing on contemporary art, film, and media has been published in numerous outlets, including Discourse, Black Camera, Film Quarterly, Art in America, and EFLUX. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events in the British Film Institute, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Stedelijk Museum of Art in Amsterdam. Denise Ferrer da Silva is a professor and director of the Social Justice Institute, GRSJ, at the University of British Columbia. Her academic writings include the books toward a global idea of race, empire, race, race,
empire, and crisis of the sublime with Paula Chakravarti and unpayable debt. She has a vibrant collaborative art practice that includes films, plays, operas, and publications with Valentina Dizideri, Ross Martin, Arjuna Newman, Jota Mombaka, and Antti Ribeiro. She is a member of the collective ECHO.org. Gabi Nkobo is an artist, curator, and educator living in Johannesburg, South Africa, engaged in collaborative artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and internationally. Nkobo is a founding member of the Johannesburg-based collective platform's NGO, Nothing Gets Organized,
and Center for Historical Reenactments. In 2018, she curated the 10th Berlin Biennale entitled We Don't Need Another Hero and was one of the curators of the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennale. In May 2021, Nkoba was appointed curatorial director at the Javit Arts Center at the University of Pretoria. Joto Mombaja is a non-binary bicha born and raised in the Northeast of Brazil who writes, performs and investigates the relations between monstrosity and humanity, queer studies, decolonial turns, political intersectionality, anti-colonial justice, redistribution of violence, visionary fictions,
the end of the world and tensions about ethics, aesthetics, art and politics in the knowledge productions of the global south of the south. The Autolith Group was founded in London in 2002 by artists and theorists Angelika Segar and Kojo Eshun. The Autolith Group operates as a platform for research and dialogue while challenging the vertical divisions between the real and the imagined history and fiction inspired by traditions of collective filmmaking, Sagar and Eshin integrate moving image with audio image, text, installation, and curation to convey imagination of futures engendered by the histories and presences of global African and Asian diasporas.
The Autolith Group was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2010 and has been featured in solo exhibitions quite literally across the entire planet. And just to put two identities into the Autolith group, Angelika Segar studied social anthropology at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. Segar works as a curator, moderator, essayist, film director, video maker, and photographer. And last but not least, Kojo Eshin is a filmmaker, theorist, and artist based in London. He is lecturer in contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths College and professor of visual arts at Hôté Côles d'Art et Design in Geneva. Eschen is author of numerous essays and collections,
including More Brilliant Than the Sun and the Ghosts of Songs, the Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, 1982 to 1998. The way in which we're gonna try and work this is that we're going to first have, I'm gonna invite Rizvana onto the stage, And there are going to be an alternating set of conversations that I will allow Rizvana to share with you now. So without further delay, welcome and take it away, Rizvana. Thank you very much, Tina, for that introduction, and to everyone at the Kogut Center at Brown for making this event possible. Infinity, the world as the totalizing onto epistemology
that is modernity's genesis, limit, and horizon is a thoroughly aesthetic conceit. To toil within or rail against the field of representation is already to be enmeshed in the aesthetic, for it is by way of the aesthetic that the ontological ground on which we are said to stand becomes experience. In this register, man, the transparent eye, the universal subject who would make the world if not just as he pleases, appears apropos Sylvia Winter as none other than homo aestheticus. This is the ontological figure consolidated in post-Enlightenment European thought, whose presupposed capacity for self-determination
and self-development is both indistinguishable from the expropriative displacement of ecological entanglement that animates bio history and further tantamount to the capacity for aesthetic experience and judgment. The subject's census communis, of course, only emerges through the constitutive excommunication of the savage, the conquered, the Negro, the commodity, the primitive, the other, and the traditional, the underdeveloped, figures who nevertheless come to haunt man as the bearers of an ontological dissonance, an imminent declension we might call Blackness. What else can be said about the conquered, the commodity,
the other, and the underdeveloped, besides the fact that they apply to all who do not fall within the spatio-temporal borders of the post-enlightenment figure of man. That is the transparent eye. Not much would be the appropriate answer if all that is taken into account is what is offered by way of the constraints of dichotomous thinking. That is, if the question were not raised about the conditions under which the universal protective force held by the ethical would be extended to some humans, whether that force bequeathed by the divine ruler or author in their mastery of the transcendental form that is reason. If the question were not raised, that is about why blackness is so naturally visited
by total and symbolic violence. When the categorical force of blackness is confronted with the total violence that its historical trajectory cannot but recall, it cannot but refract and fracture the transparent shawl, the threshold of transparency that protects the subjects onto epistemology across his scientific and aesthetic moments. The total exposure of Blackness both enables and extinguishes the force of the modern ethical program, insofar as the disruptive capacity of Blackness is a question toward the end of the world. Blackness is a threat to sense, a radical questioning of what comes to be brought under the terms of the common.
If the ordered world secures meaning because it is supposed to be knowable and only by man, if that world is all the common can comprehend, then Blackness returns existence to the expanse in the wreckage of space-time corpus infinitum. The Autolith Group's 2019 film Infinity Minus infinity takes up different images of the entanglement of space and time through racial and colonial genealogies and their bearing on the planetary catastrophe that continues to unfold. How do we think about the concept of infinity in relation to the maps of history onto which modern progress is plotted? Okay, thanks very much Rizvana. Thanks to Tina, Rizvana for the invitation. Thanks to all the team
working hard behind the scenes to make this happen. We prepared a response, we haven't timed it might be 11-12 minutes so let's begin it's called Parenthetical Blackness from Quest to Question a note on Vizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva's first thesis on infinity how does social scientific knowledge justify the murder of people of colour My reply is, how does its arsenal explain it? Denise Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race, 2007 The inexhaustible, if still ruthlessly exhausting, question of how black life does and does not come to matter
draws us towards the coil, chasm and threshold of life and death, their modern dispensation through and against black being. Rizvana Bradley, The Weathering of Form, Jennifer Packer's Abstract Figures, 2021. This black hamlet, and his name was Otterlith, meaning a kind of minute calcerous body that makes it possible for a fish to be conscious of its position in space. Under the influence of gravity, oscillists will press downwards. As the position of the body moves, they will come into contact with sensory hairs in the ampullae,
thus causing impulse to be transmitted to the brain by the auditory nerve. Because of the arrangement of the three canals in the three planes of space, from the dorsal part of the vestibule to the utriculus, provision is made for sensation of movements in all directions. D'Ambuzzo Maraschera, The Black Insider, 1992 To read the four theses on aesthetics is to encounter the ontological turn in Black studies, as elaborated by Denise Ferreira de Silva from Towards a Global Idea on Race, published in 2007 and onwards into the present. It is to turn towards what Rizvana Bradley calls the racial metaphysics that creates the conditions for what appears in her recent essay, Picturing Catastrophe.
It is to return to what Bradley analyses as the war unfolding beneath the facade of the visual that requires us to reflect upon representation as constituted by more than what is presumed to comprise an image. It is to turn towards Dambutso Maraschera's unnamed disreputable antagonist as he almost collides with Otelis, the disillusioned, transfigured, damned black hamlet that walks along a corridor of a ruined, deserted university faculty building in a war zone in the near future, dressed in black Elizabethan clothing.
clothing. It is to turn towards an unrequited collision which stages a dissonant meeting between differing but not necessarily oppositional ways of navigating space, managing scale and processing time. In the glancing friction of Marichère's proleptic encounter can be read as an allegory for the processes, the project and the practice of that which goes by the name of the otolith group. For the otolith group the morphological figure of the otolith operates as a kind of black box for withholding intention, gauging impact,
measuring expectation and calculating discrepancy. A sensorial compass for orienting traps, solicited as invitations, camouflaged as participation, dissimulated as encouragement and framed as shareable. A flight recorder for updating the coordinates required for a speculation upon matters of gravity and questions of grace. Gradient, devotion. Illumination, numinicity. Force, mass. Measure, motion. Stasis, stance. Style, rest. Pose, posture. For a martyr, cesura.
Duress, duration. Increment, interiority, introspection. It is to attend to what De Silva calls the production of race as a constitutive human attribute. The regulation of race as the globally regional differentiation of attributes of the human. by the 19th century sciences of the human and the 19th century sciences of the social as the ontological solution to the unresolved ontological problem that the white mythologies of European philosophy posed itself the problem that animated white philosophy from the 17th
century onwards. The problem of how to protect the human in its ontological essence from the constraints of universal reason. It is to attend to the role played by the racial in the manufacturing of man. It is to engage with science, the human sciences, the physical sciences, the social sciences, as what De Silva calls the proper domain for the production of the truth of man. the domain in which the sciences manufacture man as a soul and self-determined being. What De Silva calls Homo Modernus, what Bradley and De Silva call Homo Aestheticus.
This turn towards race as an ontologically relevant attribute is a challenge to British critical thought that proceeds from the assumption that race has been discredited as a scientific concept. That race is ontologically irrelevant. That racial subjection, racial domination, racial oppression, historically and in the present, operate through socio-historical processes of exclusion. That exclude from universality those who are subject and subjected to racial subjection by banishing them from the universal. That racial emancipation comes about when those that are racialized are juridically and economically included or enfranchised,
when their voices, their cultural representation, their historical representation are finally realized as universal. The problem with these presumptions for De Silva is not the desire to overcome racial subjugation or racial subjection. It is the assumption that to be racially subjected is to be excluded from the universal. The assumption that the ambition, the aim and the aspiration of the racial subject as a historical subject subjected to historical processes is to become finally a self-determining subject. to become what de Silva calls a transparent eye that finally realizes themselves as a universal
subject, recognizes themselves as universal subject, stakes its claim on and as universal humanity. This goal for de Silva entails the racial subject reproducing the powers of the subject. De Silva's project, by contrast, is to displace the powers of the subject, its self-determination, its self-development. To work on and in and for the means and methods for refusing to return to man or the subject. A refusal to turn towards the universality of the human or humanity, the ego or subject.
in favor of an aesthetic consideration of the object which is nothing anything other than the ontological dissonance of the savage the inharmonious mixed ontology that is the negro the ontological incongruity of the primitive the inconsistent ontology of the traditional This requires accounting for the racial as an inherently modern, post-enlightenment strategy of power, rather than as an excessive ideological vice imposed by the dominant class upon the exploited class. class. In the four theses, Homo modernus can be understood as Homo aestheticus. To say that man
is human insofar as he is aesthetic is to say that aesthetics is that which renders the ground of being human, experientiable as experience. It is to say that the fundamental anthropology of man is aesthetic. It is to say that aesthetics is that racial science within the human and social sciences of the 19th century that renders the being of the human experiential as human. What role does aesthetics play in the racial manufacture of man as a globally regional entity in the second decade of the 21st century. What role does it play in the extension
and regulation of the modern program of the ethical? Its role is in producing the census communis that stands for the aesthetic ground of universality in Kant's operating system. The sensus communis, the common sense, is that which is latent in all beings, but is yet to be developed in that which Kant typifies as the savage. The construction of the aesthetic ground of universality is the racial construction of ex-sensus. It is the simultaneous production of those figures that stand differentially before universality. those figures that are vestibular to the human in the words of hortense spillers
that are excommunicated from what comes to be brought under the terms of the common those ontological figures of the savage the primitive the negro the traditional figures that are banished from that world that is all that the common can comprehend Figures that are anathema to the ordering of that world, that secures its meaning of its existence because it is supposed to be knowable as such. Figures that bear an imminent declension that might be nominated as what Bradley and De Silva call blackness in lower case. Declension, a bending from something, a bending aside, a turning away from something,
an avoiding, to lower, to avoid, to deviate, to deflect. Imminent, indwelling, remaining within. Inherent, to dwell in, to remain in. To dwell in deviation, an indwelling avoidance, a turning, remaining away from something. Some things do their own thing. Other things go their own way. Some ways have their own ways of doing what they do. If blackness is parenthetical in its separated ongoing movement from a quest to a quest-tion,
from a turn to a return, then one question for Bradley and De Silva might be to expand upon that final figure of expanse. The figure of a world without determination. A figure between form and formal and the formless. A figure for that which is undeterminable. The corpus as the body. Infinitum as infinity. Limitless, eternal, that which is great in number. Limitless as a guide to the imagination of the end of a world. that's world that ordered world that's world order thank you thank you and um yes i'd like to thank tina and the folks at brown for um bringing bringing us
together in this in this conversation and i also thank the otolith uh gabby and jota for joining us And I'm talking about the thesis on read the composition and the Otoliffe intervention just kind of, you know, embodied it. So let me just continue with the read the composition. Thinking that our artwork is poethical as a composition which is always already a composition and a decomposition of prior and posterior compositions. requires being poised for the advent of becoming as matter and its imminent interrogation of the temporality of forms.
In contradistinction to understandings of the artwork as autonomous totality, or those that would consign the artwork to some iteration of Kant's forma finalis, that is, the reductive ascription of a formal purposiveness to the object, a poetical reading stresses the provisional ground where questions of form, formlessness, and abstraction collide. The artwork as a singular composite need not simply anticipate or reiterate questions which which presume the formal principles of external causation, cause effici-eficalis, interior determination, causa finalis, or abstract perception, causa formalis.
For these senses, calcified as the only tools for comprehending nature, the realm of objectivity, and world, the kingdom of subjectivity, have sustained that autology of modern thinking precisely through being rendered axiomatic. Once released from the anticipation of order and the presumption of meaning, the artwork becomes liberated from its representational obligations to nature and world. As a poetical piece, the artwork expands the questionings of causa materialis, the undeterminable of contemplation.
Returning in as form forms a poetical descriptor for existence presumes neither linearity nor its predicates, separability, and determinacy. The reorientation Poethical Art invites expresses the infinite read decompositions that normative space-time would foreclose. The axial intensities of verticality and horizontality, the strict linearity, the primary coloring that signal abstraction's formal legacy, do not so much indicate a restrictive geometry or truncated chromaticity as an open set where, for instance,
even the fidelity of a line or the vertices of a square may be exacted with improvisatory emphasis. The poetical work deformed the teleological imperative of purposiveness and the racial demarcation of the incapacity for aesthetic judgment this imperative necessarily reinscribes. The poetical work tends towards the revelation that such an effort to reduce discipline and contain the unwieldy materiality of the world is always already an exercise in futility.
We might think both of seriality and the formation not as formal deviations from the major paradigms of modernist art, but as aesthetic practices which enact the decomposition of the art historical canon and of canonicity as such. Such decomposition is achieved not by a method of subversion, but by the accumulation of subvertitious returns, which gather venusly beneath the sign of the authoritative artwork.
The serial proliferation of returns exposes the autonomous artwork as itself, nothing more than a re-decomposition, a contaminated assemblage of citations and deformations. And I'd like to invite my friend Jota Mombasa. So thank you so much for having me here. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you to everyone that's joining this this uh talk to all the participants then easy with vana the outlet group tina gabin nobu and everyone doing it in the background i'll be cutting off my camera just during my reading
i decided to share some sort of a letter or an intended conversation with a poem a poet who is already dead, Bob Kaufman. So I'll be cutting my camera so we can connect sonically throughout the reading. I promise not to take very long. So dad, when I'm gone, I shall be in the air. Someone said that you woke up that day as you knew, as if you knew you were about to exit. You washed your mouth, you cleaned up your bedroom, you watered the plants, you baited yourself,
you dressed in white and left a glass of water in your bedside table. You died. I light a candle for calling you. I pray using your words, hear me now. Hear me now, always hear somehow. I am thinking about you while I try to make sense of death as transmutation, while I try to tune myself for the heat of that candle. The fact that the world is burning enters the room where I live. I wake up to the pervasiveness of fire, surrounded by its flames and ashes, by its endangered species and displaced communities.
The death it unfolds takes hold of the words. It crosses the narrative, burning ground, filling every silence and every voice with its muscles, overwhelming and determinacy. It is not a dream. I cannot simply escape fire towards reality, for reality itself is burning. I call you again without saying your name. I want to sit opposite to you, to look at your fingers dancing. Where do your words transit? How do they cross? The sound of your voice responds from a distance. I can already feel your presence manifested somewhere in the depths, but you are not here yet.
So I read you. White tiger, I hear you all hum on the drone, flowing on beds of fresh snow on springs, flowing back to the nether source. The truth is an empty bowl of rice. Those cat-hold men who cage you shall melt in the summer sun, for they are ugly bars who echo the sting of unrolly heavers in their dried, cracked bed. I read myself. I watched a video of you dancing. I tried to follow your hands. My attention goes from your fingers to the things they point to, somewhere outside the frame.
In the description of the video on YouTube, someone says, this is one of the few hair footage of you existing. It was your birthday. I wonder how old you were. I wonder how long you live. I watch you stumbling and for a second, I have the sensation that your instability announces an entirely other form of steadiness. Then you enter the room wearing your sailor hat and bring in a tiny red rose in your pocket. The fire spreads out of the candle and my first reaction is to yell, let the sun in. And so I read you again.
I am the eternity that was held by the ostrich egg. The magnificent December is now no longer hidden. The sun, I am alone, is present forever. I get back to myself. You are that eternity that was held by the poem. So you, like the sun, is present forever. even when forgotten, even when erased, even when they need to call you black humble in order to acknowledge you. You vanish right in front of their eyes and yet you never ceases to be there. I read you. Someone who I am is no one. Something I have done is nothing. Some place I have been
is nowhere. I am not me. What of the answers I must find questions for? All these strange cities I must find cities for? I read myself. I have never lived anywhere near home. I feel tired of most things. I just want to lay down and wait. I just want to invite my way. I just want to stop this right now. May this intense repetition twist into a form of multiplication and nutrition, if instead of being held by the negative, one could channel negativity as a thunder that cuts the cage of the tiger and mine and yours truly. To be what is no one, as to do what is nothing,
as to go what is nowhere as in being what is not a being maybe the affirmation of nothing is a constitutive gesture of black possibility and evasion of both objectives The poem, which is the off-pitch bag that contains the signs that calls eternity, is the continent of such extrapolation. The poem is most likely the extrapolation itself. I read you. in a universe of cells who is not in jail jailers in a world of hospitals who is not sick
doctors a golden sardine is swimming in my head oh we know some things man about some things like jazz and jails and god saturday is a good day to go to jail and so i read myself I wanted to burn the language I was taught. This language in which every world is scheming for the reproduction of our unintelligibility. We are simultaneously made as an incognito and driven towards language. In Odette and Dune's play, I read a sentence about who we have in the language that applicates our inter-existence. It was written in the wall with the language that applicates our inter-existence. There is a scene in my head and I'm scared.
in the last three days i've been trapped in a negative spiral pessimist is just as toxic as the belief in the truth in the future and in the group if we at least knew how to hack the effects of society towards other directions how to learn with it but one grows sick and then feel disposable we are always in the threshold or at the corner of anything as an homage to concesion evarisco us agreed not to die we would also need them to agree not just not to kill us i know they are just outside didn't notice when they settled but i can feel them moving right at the spine of all my traumas they are the ones who died us in spite of hotels have agreed in the meantime my ex-therapy is close somewhere you are bigger than your trauma
my ex-lover in the day i was harassed by an old portuguese lady on the street she called the police and i said mr policeman i am bigger than you i am bigger than all the portuguese old ladies who have learned to treat my body as a trash i am bigger than economic situations that messed up migration and i am bigger than my collapsed more the feel that i owe something is so recurring even if it's no longer stopping me to tell them them again that i own property that the death is their heritage i wrote with blood and they invaders promenade you owe us my prophecy says that just like us our ghosts are coming to collect
they are already on their way to write the sentence on the skin of the country does not guarantee that they struggle against the few that i am the one who all something will see it's just a form of cutting the world and the world is my trauma am i bigger than my trauma because if the world which is my trauma never stops doing its work then being bigger than the word is my counter wall sometimes i feel that the void that swallows me every morning and every night the constitution of the void in my bank account i feel that the self-destructive rush that consumes me from now to the evening is inversely proportional to the assassin's call
i am bigger than this mathematics once he said that i could get in there as an ox in the porcelain shop yesterday after the scene he said the bishop said that sadness will always occur to the vicious bombas the price you pay for destroying the whole shit that you up to know is too late that the explosion also leads to your destruction i was pushed to the extreme and i was still there as the bishop said we are exterminated exterminators life's short fatally we are alone with the pain of our position and if i take a second and put my hand outside of this
spiral in which i'm drawn i get to an immediate conversation or i stop or it stops me I read you. Painter, paint me a crazy jail, mad watercolor cells. Poet, how old is suffering? Write it in yellow lead. God, make me a sky on my glass ceiling. I need stars now. to lead through this atmosphere of shrieks and private house entrances and exits in out up down
the civic seesaw hear me now hear me now always here somehow paint paint me a crazy jail mad water color cells poet how old is suffering write it in yellow lead god make me a sky on my glass ceiling i need stars now to lead through this atmosphere of streets and private house entrances and exits in out up down the civic seesaw hear me now hear me now always hear somehow
Hear me now. Hear me now. Always hear somehow. Always hear somehow. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. I will read from the thesis titled Seriality. The perennial failure of Homo aestheticus requires the perpetual renewal of the aesthetic, an operation which, irrespective of its beauties or horrors, cannot help but be the renewal of catastrophe. But this history of aesthetic revitalization is preceded and exceeded by another kind of innovation, which we may call aesthetic, even as the aesthetic can never account for it.
What then might open and be opened by an inquiry into Black practices of seriality? What takes form or is deformed in the diffusion of terror and violence perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism and property, as Saidiya Hartman prefers? How to come to terms with such serial self-fashioning without recourse to an idea of the open in in which boundlessness becomes only another name for frontier, which is to say an enclosure, an expropriation, a clearing. For the interminable historicity and impossible history of Blackness has always come before the horizonality of man's freedom, as it's a faced footing and
ineluctable limit. How do we regard the insistent and ongoing re-decomposition of the Black figure in the midst of contemporary arts simultaneous exaltation and reduction or relegation of the figural to the scene of racial representation. How do we comprehend such figurations as part of a suite of interventions in epigraphic seriality, as Fred Moten might put it, which denotes not the refusal of serially imposed violence as political end, but rather the reanimate means through which any aesthetic inquiry into the social life of forms must pass. We insist that even as such means bear the terrible burden of diffusive terror and the terror of diffusion. Black seriality cannot
be thought of as reducible to separability, sequentiality, or the determinacy of individuated forms and objects. In other words, our aesthetic thinking refuses to presume Black seriality as wholly coterminous and coextensive with the serial imposition of anti-Black violence that constitutes the modern field of representation and the history of form, as if the violent enumeration of Black bodies were truly a ledger of or accounting for injury. Here, Black art finds an anticipatory rapport with avant-garde art movements and their respective performances of refusal, the rejection of modernism's gritted dispossession, for instance, which is also a cartography of
disposability, disregard, abusive violation, cultural erasure, and social death. However, the very fact that these performances are both denied to and refused by Blackness throws into sharp relief the radical disjuncture between these respective modalities and traditions of artistic labor. Black artistic labor, which takes the fabric and substance of social existence as an alternative means of production, refracts the conceptual legacies of the autonomous totality of the artwork and wonders about the image left on the retina. Rather than thinking Blackness as difference notwithstanding worldly violence, we regard the serial
recomposition and decomposition of Blackness as incitation to an utterly divergent jestic imagination. Our critical attentiveness to these incitements remains attuned to a gestural difference that is irreducible both to the serial violence of the racial regime of representation and to the so-called politics that clamors for recognition within it. Now I'd like to invite Gabby and Kobo. Thank you very much. And thank you to everyone who made this gathering possible. And everyone who's here attending. In a text that is titled Destruction Styles, Black Aesthetics and Rapture and Capture,
The text is titled Destruction Styles, Black Aesthetics of Rapture and Capture. The artist Tsulile Kameze reflects on the seemingly unified resolve of Cecil John Rhodes, or a resolve that is symbolized by the spectacular mechanical airlifting of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the grounds. of the University of Cape Town, and how this photo op moment in turn boosted the image of the African University, and whilst obliterating a movement embodying
what she describes as improvised, if strategic instances of chaotic disruption, directed by radically critical readings of the South African status quo. Gamete and many others preferred the image to be one of explosion, corrosion, or even a beheading. The unified resolve or cosmetic removal following the glorious informed chaos of the movement reflects a conflict in the field of aesthetics and what many Black artists have historically have had to endure, resist, and refuse.
The protest movements known, the protest movement comprising of young people who became known as the fullest, occupied the present, which is 2015 and 2016, in order to simultaneously address history's failure and send messages to the not yet, to a future unknown. But history is often violently resistant when recalled, and attempts made to reorder it are regarded as treasonous. To quote Dume Mohorosi, the subject's encounter with historical accumulation produces a predetermined playground with rules and regulations coupled with the necessary tenets of discipline and punishment.
what I often refer to as white listing or being white listed. Black artists working in the 70s and 80s, a period usually regarded as one of the most politically volatile, tend to abstract forms at the precise moment they began creating their own spaces and experiencing the freedom of working away from the gaze of white historians. In this moment, representation became unreachable, exposing aesthetics limited view of the other as an extension of ways of seeing the world. And here I'm quoting Dumi Mohorosi again. The book I'm quoting from is The Aesthetic, writing with and from the Black Sonic by artist and jazz percussionist and scholar Mohorosi.
who coins the term de-aesthetic with the world aesthetic struck through. For Black artists, dancing with abstraction came to be seen as making a claim to their right to opacity and intervention into the language of protest in order to make differently visible the unfreedom of Black people in South Africa. Beyond the language that had been established for our transitioning or becoming. Abstraction was a direct refusal to white art historical terms such as township art or township artist and or at worst transitional art or artist.
The late artist, writer, curator, and co-founder of the Tupello workshop, David Golwane often say, Our major issue at the time was the labeling of black artists work. The work baggage is a direct critique of this art historical mode. Goloane created a collage that includes packages, envelopes, exhibition invitation cards, magazines from the USA and South Africa, magazine pages that revealed an easy problematic of framing Black artists, mostly within events framed on the Black History Month or treating Africa in a homogenizing case.
In art historical self-correcting, in an art historical self-correcting essay from 1988, Anitra Nelteltine of Wetz University wrote, and I quote, in adhering to the notion of the transitional, we were adhering to a notion of development, which itself carried connotations of a movement from less to more sophisticated, from non-art to art, or more accurately from unconscious to conscious art. Also adherence to this idea bestowed the objects classified
as transitional a value and legitimacy that in in heard in their supposed traditional base particularly on those transitional works which were mass produced to claim abstraction therefore continues to be a way of rearranging narratives of messing shit up as a way of taking care of one's own identity because we have seen how cosmetically bringing things down allows a space for them to rise in a different form like a letter addressed to an unknown known power to time occupied from one pandemic to another to another mutating remixing cycling returning
the changing scene. Thank you. Thank you, Gabi. Generativity. If the poetical artwork is no longer preoccupied with the perils of departing from the onto epistemology of modernity and its rendering of existence through the certainties of being, then how might aesthetic considerations start from and stay with the object, which is at the same time thing as well as commodity and other, without returning to man or the subject, the human or humanity, the ego or subjectivity?
If our aesthetic thought begins with the other as commodity, as Hortense Spillers recalls, does it unavoidably reconfront the violence that is modernity's condition of possibility, devastating any solace that might be found through the figurations of the colonial, racial, racial and cis-heteropatriarchal matrix? Does such a thought inevitably re-inscribe subjugation as origin and horizon? Or does the static as thematized in and as Black existence as a radically disruptive ethical orientation stage a devastating confrontation with modern
philosophy that ultimately targets its aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical ground. What happens when blackness guides considerations of the static, the ethical, and the theoretical? Here are two propositions. A, black study recalls the sonic and mobilizes it against the discursive closure of blackness in pathology and b in doing so disarranges the post-enlightenment onto epistemological field. Blackness is object and settles the static ground upon which the transparent eye emerges. For this reason the analysis and poesis of black existence challenges
the tenets of social theory and aesthetic theory alike, precisely because as a reference to total violence, it breaks through the enclosure that is discourse and exposes the limitations of both post-enlightenment versions of modern anthology, the philosophical and the sociological. Black study re-orients the conversation in the contemporary international art scene as it introduces to the critical tools of contemporary philosophy a set of concepts, formulations, and questions that bypass without ignoring what would have otherwise remained the latter's undisturbed Eurocentric core.
Black aesthetics, that is, that which fosters, facilitates, and modulates Black Annunciation, signals an other side for the analysis of artistic creation, collective existence, and political practice. As such, it provides the basis for a project that militates against and severely undermines the modern liberal political architecture in its violent post-enlightenment configuration and operations, as well as the fascistic doubles that liberalism at once requires, solicitous, and half-heartedly decries.
Black aesthetics is an uterance that in its imminent derangement of modernity's grammar marks and is marked by the art of passage without coordinates or arrival, the art of life in departure. Thank you. Thank you to everyone. Thank you, Denise. Thank you, Jyota. Thank you, Rizwana, Gabi, Otulith, Anjali, and Kojo. I want to first begin by inviting folks to put your questions in the Q&A box. I guess we call it a box now. And I have the challenging task of beginning our conversation. And I guess I want to begin our
conversation by simply sort of marking what I'm hearing, listening, seeing in the conversation between the six of you. And moving from the question that you pose, the question that you you pose as an open proposition of why rethink aesthetics now into what you ask us to do in order to rethink it, which is to engage in the work of poethics, right? Or to engage the poetical artwork, right?
And then moving from there to rethinking aesthetics relationship to blackness to arrive at something that might be black aesthetics as poethics. And so that's the journey that I feel like you're taking us on through each of the keywords that you're enunciating. And at the same time to be able to do that, to stage that poethical work through through three poetical interventions. One by way of voice, cacophony, dissonance. Another by way of a speech act performance. Another by way of an engagement with artwork
that uses movement to mess shit up, as Gabi would say. So I guess the question that I wanna pose is, given that that chain or that chain of interactions um i'd love each of you to think about or to to to think out loud about what is the stakes of this reclamation of aesthetics even through the lens of of poetical work. Because it's not about whether or not, to me, Black aesthetics is something we can think with, or something that can be utterly disruptive. It's the question that
I always encounter in my work about, okay, and particularly for Denise and for Rizvana, who in your previous work have also had a critical relationship to aesthetics. I want to understand more about the stakes of making the move, of making the provocation that you're making. And what does it mean to also be working with that for the artist, curator, thinkers that we have just actually made that kind of poetical utterance. So I'm going to open it up to you to just respond to that big sort of framing question and then see where we go from there.
I think I can. Yeah, I will get started. And then thank you, Tina, for the question and comment. It's also a nice and provocative comment. And I will reply very quickly to two things. I think the two main statements that you made in the form of questions. So the poetical, which in my reading of what we are saying together, in this thesis, it is a reference to blackness's capacity, which are among others, but fundamentally refusal, confrontation, and the challenging
of modern thinking that calls for its dissolution. That's a practice. So that being the case, then the reclamation of aesthetics that it's there, I think it's more of a reclamation of the sensible and of the imagination from modern thinking. But that reclamation, in my view, it's not an assertion of what aesthetics should be, but just a dissolution of what it has been and an opening that I think Blackness has the capacity to perform, it does all the time. Thank you for that opening question, Tina.
And I've really appreciated everyone's provocations. I'm already thinking about polyvocality in relation to the theses. I think, at least for me, there are two sort of prominent historical tendencies within the present conjuncture that could lead one to think that aesthetics is a fierce concern that no longer speaks to the most urgent dimensions of the present. And the first being the ways in which the politics of representation, especially in the wake of the summer of the so-called summer of racial reckoning, have become increasingly ubiquitous and exhausted. And you can turn on any sort of streaming service and see Black Lives Matter and Black Stories sections on there.
You know, and then on the other hand, there is a moment in which the sort of fashions, fascisms that have always been, at least for me, the other side of the coin of liberal modernity, and I think I tried to address this in my sort of prefacing comments to the theses, have been, you know, have become ascendant across the globe from Brazil to India, to the United States and so forth. You know, and because of that, we, it would be easy to assume that critical thinking about the question of aesthetics and the stakes of the work of art are frivolous, perhaps, or even, you know, as I think, picturing catastrophe, the essay I think that Autolith you quoted from makes the case that, you know, sometimes forms of image making become complicit
in a kind of global revengeism. But what I think we wanted to suggest with the theses is that the racial regime of aesthetics or what David Lloyd sort of calls the racial regime of aesthetics has always been essential to the operations of the racial colonial order. And that I think is what I'm most interested in thinking about in my sort of current writing. And also, right, this sort of racial regime of aesthetics has also been, you know, essential to, you know, the operations of the anti-Black, you know, foundation of the world. And, you know, in fact, every part of what is integrated into the theses
is this idea that, you know, in fact, every brutal instantiation of this violent world order is an aesthetic operation. But, you know, at the same time, we've both, and I'll sort of stop here, we've both been interested in, you know, the kind of myriad forms of Black artistic experimentation that, while perhaps are hardly autonomous from this violent normative aesthetic regime, cannot be explained or valued by way of the protocols of, you know, sort of Kantian protocols of aesthetic judgment that these regimes demand. And so I think that was, like, in large part, the motivation to write the theses. And, you know, I probably would want to say something about
Denise and my attempt to sort of deconstruct the Hegelian triad, right, in insisting upon naming the theses four, which really, I think, was, you know, something that Denise and I had gone back and forth about quite a bit. But the figure four, and that different sort of nomination or valuation was very, very important to us. And so. Does anyone else want to respond or have a comment? There's a couple of, go ahead, go ahead Anjali. Thank you, Rizvana. Thank you, Tina. Thank you, Denise. Thank you, Jota and Gabby for this event. And thank you for the, all so far.
I just wanted to, and thank you Tina for your question. I mean, I think it's a big question, but I just wanted to maybe kind of circle back to the beginning. In relation to the practice of the essayistic in the kind of let's say the inauguration of Otelith. and I think one thing struck me many things there was a convergence of many things that led to the beginning of the creation of Otterle but one was Chris Marker and at the beginning of the film there is an image of some Icelandic children and then there's black leader and then there's an image of a um an airplane a bomber going into the bowels of a submarine and uh he says um he said
that for him it was the image of happiness he's talking about the children on the road in iceland in 1965 and also that he tried several times to link it to other images but it never worked he wrote me one day i'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of the film with a long piece of black leader, if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black. And I think that for us, it was about trying to create a structure of feeling in the black, in the juxtaposition of various different histories and let's say citation, the practice of citation in relation to say putting a non-alignment next to experiments in zero gravity
were for us a way to produce non-aligned images and sounds in order to think with at the time how to disassemble the modern the modernity's grammar as such. It was the practice of how you when you put things together they produce a third space of feeling they continue to produce multiple different sites and feelings that are both familiar and unfamiliar but are a cartography actually of a history let's say of attempts at disassembling modernity's grammar in their own way, be they perhaps a section of music or perhaps, you know, a song from Tagore
or, you know, it can be a number of different things. All of these materials, I would say, in the tantric sense, you know, are feminine. I mean, this is tantra's point. It's like tantra is that everything material is feminine. It's not that feminine is limited to a human idea of the feminine, or a limited idea of the feminine, but it's that it is both maternal and disruptive. And tan means to root, and it's something that's related to the ground. So it's about kind of the relation of the aesthetics of history from below. And insurgency, the aesthetics of revolution. So, you know, part of another project for me is to,
is for us, is to take back, let's say, the kind of history of, let's say, South Asia's relationship to spirituality which was uh i can say sort of which was um let's say uh obsessed over by um the west and you know kind of turned into mindfulness as a way to um kind of become better at being a good good capitalists or whatever to rest it away from that and think more of the relationship to non-violence and you know taking non-violence as a practice of the non-binary a non-binary philosophy of living and of making work and that doesn't mean one doesn't explore violence because
of course as Denise talks about the disrupts the disruption you know these but these are for me like Kojo and I talk a lot about Raymond Williams and the structures of feeling and in the essayistic and in the making of the work, there is definitely a point at which it becomes alien for all of us. I think the idea to, as in quantum physics, is that you only witness the experiment because you see it. I think this is also linked to something to do with the yogic-tantric relationship to binding. And I'm interested in how we all see the illusion, or how we all see together the axis between illusion and reality.
And in this way, I think for me, the questions that Denise has raised, and Rizdhana and Denise raises, firmly puts me into this space and furthers a lot of the thinking that we have been involved with. I think following on from that, I think under conditions of what Du Bois calls democratic despotism and what Langston Hughes called ordinary fascism, I think there is a great desire for art to provide forms of certainty, to be a kind of narrative vehicle or a sensory vehicle for certainty.
And certainly in the UK, that's very strong, a very strong turn. There was a page that didn't make it into this brief response, which was about, in the UK, the very strong turn towards the historiographical and the intergenerational, that a lot of work, a lot of powerful work is being done to contest histories, to contest the historiographical, to work on kind of intergenerational processes of reconstitution. um you know clearly the success of steamer queen speaks to that on a on a mainstream level so um
the challenge of the four theses is the the the resolutely ontological level at which the theses propose themselves that's extremely challenging to to um people formed within the british matrix of insurgent historiography or history from below. And what I find extremely compelling is that I think Denise and Rizvana have an unparalleled capacity to make the Kantian apparatus of aesthetics, which goes far beyond artworks as such. They have a, you know, it's a question of an anthropology of the human.
They have the capacity to make the Kantian schema feel absolutely urgent, absolutely necessary. I describe the thinking of the thesis and Denise's thought in general and Rizvana's thought as treating philosophy like an unexploded bomb, a device with many intricate moving parts, which you have to disassemble with extreme caution and extreme care as you move through all the moving parts. So the disassembly of the ethical force of the communist census, this extremely careful work, which pays off not at the level of sensation or immediacy, but pays off at this fundamental level of ontology.
it's extremely challenging and it's really um it's really compelling to work through and um it really pushes um the the scale at which you think of art making beyond the sensory as such even beyond the visible to something like the fundamental architectures that support and sustain the visible uh and that's a very very compelling and challenging um um demand that it makes on us and i i you know it's thrilling to read the theses because the theses of the
combination of urgency and seriousness and rigor who just requires from you something far beyond a traditional aesthetic response. The notion of the aesthetic is being reconfigured as this as this kind of like a kind of trans-historical weapon sent from Königsberg in Germany by Kant and it's still unexploded and it's still threatening now and we are all working on an unexploded bomb called aesthetics and that's very compelling. I love that, I love that. I want to, because we're, we're, we've got a few questions
that kind of enter right in there. So I want to pose two of them that seem related. One is from Rodrigo Cardoso. The thesis proposed a relationship between Black poetics and avant-garde art in its refusal of the totality of the work of art and an affirmation of seriality. The avant-garde project of an attack on the institution of art and its separability from social life is regarded as failed by some authors. How can Black poethics critique of separability and totality resist an incorporation by the capitalist art establishment? And then a question that I think is adjacent to it from Marcio Cruz.
Sonic or the musical affordances of Blackness expression has been appointed as a leeway from modernity towards a poetical work in in parentheses Black art. A similar claim has been made before by the futurists while trying to move away from modernity while smearing themselves into jazz and ragtime. It has reappeared in experimental film as well in Cinema Novo and in the most recent claims of an emergence of a black essay film. My question is, how can we free ourselves from aesthetics towards Denise's and Rizvana's proposition for an aesthetics in filmmaking, if not the sonic, the frequencies, if not frequencies, the non-discursive at large, if not the non-discursive, the chant and enchantment. At the level of the materiality
of filmmaking, are we forever invicted from the quest for Blackness? So something to chew on? Well, I, you know, I think one of the things, at least for me in, I'll try to speak sort of fast, you know, well, you know, probably be belabored, but anyway, you know, part of what I found so sort of generative in working with Denise is learning from her sort of perpetually about re-decomposition, right? And I think the thesis that tends to re-decomposition as a kind of simultaneous movement of the artwork really does sort of speak to the first question, how can Black
poethics critique of separability and totality resist an incorporation by the capitalist art establishment? I think what Denise and I are really trying to think about together, I would say, is the sort of tendency of artworks on the one hand to reify form, right? To reify form is that which coheres through the sort of onto epistemological pillars of separability, linearity, and determinacy, for instance. And then the tendency of artworks on the other hand to refuse the injunction to assume a form. And so both of those movements are going on simultaneously. that's sort of what I've learned from Denise's work
and that these simultaneous tendencies of the artwork are not necessarily discrete or consecutive operations. Then, there's also a kind of sub comment I have if I can sort of go really quickly, with respect to the second half of the question, you know, the artwork's tendency to become reincorporated by a capitalist art establishment. I think in the thesis on seriality, part of what I was getting at, and, you know, I kind of want to invite someone else to sort of say something about this. I know, you know, the Kojo and Anjali, we were talking a bit about this earlier this week, but this idea, right, that I think really
what the thesis on seriality is sort of thinking about is, you know, the, I, when I was, when I was kind of composing that, I was thinking about this sort of political call or demand to quote unquote, say their names, right, to say, to say the names of those, you know, whose, whose lives have been lost or violated. And the problem with either celebrating or refusing that demand. And, you know, the how, you know, withholding, you know, it's not like assigning names to those figures provides a kind of repair through genuine recognition, but neither does withholding their names get one out of the problem of violent nomination.
So, you know, I think part of what I was thinking about with respect to, you know, the politics of representation, how they become entangled with assessments of, you know, black art and valuations of black art, right? I was thinking about that as a problem of the sort of serial impositions of repair within this larger context of, you know, sort of anti-black violence. In any case. I wanted to hear from Gabi and Jota actually about, particularly about this question about the art world's capacity to incorporate, right?
From your perspective, curatorial and artistic perspectives, I mean, Jota, specifically in relationship to the sonic and to the frequency, right? A lot of what you were doing was exactly that. But Gabi, you know, your work in Berlin, your work in Sao Paulo, you know, you're in the belly of the beast. So I kind of wanted to also get your responses as well to the deformational, reformational in both of your respective areas? Yeah, I was actually thinking on something in relation to what this reclaim of aesthetics,
if we think it as Denise was proposing as an unmaking of modern colonial So aesthetic propositions, if that could eventually allow for a form of non-catastrophic disappearance or a form of disappearance, which is not already inscribed by the regimes of total violence in which we are somehow to reach in which we need to we need to somehow negotiate our existence. So I think that also because of, and thinking about what Gabi brings as the abstraction or as this movement towards abstraction, as a movement that might also allow for a form
of expression that is not immediately recognized as representing something or has been captured by the representation of our racial positions and of our positions within the world as you know it. So I was thinking about that and also about the sonic, the vibrational and the non-visuality of it. Because as I've learned working with Denise in the Opa Infinita, the sound has its... Of course, it comes from a long tradition of discourse and sound. the sound is haptic, it necessarily touches you quite directly because it produces vibration. So it's not immediately rendered as a representation of something.
It doesn't have to be immediately comprehended or understood in order to make its way in the relation. So thinking on all of this, I really don't know how to answer the question on how a Black poetics can resist an incorporation by the capitalist establishment. But I'm somehow interested in the ways it might allow us to escape an incorporation to which we were already subjected beforehand. Because actually we are all somehow in the belly of the beast, if we think the word as we know it, as the beast.
and the fact that all like compresses us within these forms of naming and these categorizations that basically operate as vessels for the confinement of life, of black life specifically. So how could we think of this like non-catastrophic disappearances or the possibility of disappearing into abstraction, of hiding oneself? I remember once I wrote like in a journal, if you try to buy me, I'll hide in abstraction, which was of course a commentary about like being getting closer to a moment in which I think it's somehow happened to a moment in which my work starts to negotiate with the logics of value and the logics of incorporation that are related with the practice of like,
with the artistic practice within the contemporary art system. So there's a certain attempt to make something that cannot operate, cannot function as what it is expected. And then I'm just, I'm finishing, I'm just remembering a moment in 2017 when Gabi has invited me to do a performance at the Berlimian Alley in an event named I'm Not Who Think I'm Not. So that's this double refusal that I'm quite interested in, which is also the refusal of not being there
and the refusal of being there at the same time. So I really think that there's something that is being generated with some passages within the systems that is not necessarily resistant to it, but it is somehow escaping it in order to uh habilitate other forms of imaginaries sensitivities and like um modes of of of creating and generating uncontained life because i don't think it's like the artwork that escapes the art the art establishment what escape what might eventually escape the art established it's it's the uncontained life itself, not the artwork, which is a moment that is sometimes
always already captured by it. And I'm like, okay. Yeah, I mean, in a way, I think, yes, I'm, I think we're all like Jota said, we're all in the middle of this battle, or we are soldiers of this battle. And for me, it's a battle always of where we speak from and who we speak to. So it is the idea of aesthetics as a question of a vocabulary
or of a grammar. always kind of searching for maybe like a missing font. Because I think when we work, often we find these new fonts that have been hidden to us, from us. But there's always a font missing, which is why we kind of exist in order to uncover these other ways of speaking and in the works that I chose to speak, I don't know, speak through, speak around. It's because I'm always thinking about this idea, this question of language, which always
would become redundant at some point. And then we have to, you know, find a new way to be differently clear. We're saying always the same thing, but to be differently visible, but also to code switch, a language to code switch, because at the same time, as much as we want to reveal things, we don't want to reveal everything. Because I think within what we don't reveal maybe lies the answer of where we want to go, maybe even secretly.
So I think for me constantly, the curatorial is this idea of searching for this language, knowing that I'm speaking to certain people and I'm not interested anymore in speaking to certain people. There's a couple of comments and another question. comments. Sorry, Fred Moten said in his lecture in this lecture, hesitant sociology, quote, Immanuel Kant is universally acknowledged to be a genius. But in actuality, he is quite stupid, not because of how he looks, but of how he looks,
how he looks. I recently saw people sharing pictures of the Kantian paradigm on social media platforms, capitalism, of Stingel's monumental re-oratized images, exhibited in the Bourse de Commerce, the private collection of the French billionaire Francois Pinot. All of this Kantian looking is completely abstracted from its onto-epistemological conditions of existence. fact that the transatlantic slave trade is the supply chain of its existence and continued entropy um and then there was another con uh comment question that i think basically uh it's under under underscored what you were just saying jota um how might these help push beyond ocular
centric notions of racial difference toward a consideration of aesthetics beyond the visual and I think that that's definitely what you're engaged in. In other words, what is accomplished by thinking the aesthetics, thinking of the aesthetics of touch, smell, taste, and sound. I'm inspired here by Giotto's beautiful use of sound and noise in their poem, as well as the ways in which Gabi's images invoke haptics or touch through the portrayal of rough walls, soft fabric, dripping paint, and dirt soaked and soiled pieces of damage. And that one is from Amber Henry. And so here a question. Oh God, now we're getting started. I'm curious to hear whether you think this tensioning of the aesthetic or the recognition of the aesthetic as a precondition to
modernity produces any tension or might deform in any way the writing of theory. What other forms of writing of theory may take, what other forms might the writing of theory take when invested in this kind of question or questions or quest posed towards aesthetic practice. Okay, and then one more. This is directed to Denise and everyone. How to use racial dialectics as an anthropological tool. How to analyze radical, you know, racial indicators, markers to understand how and why total violence affects so many Black lives
throughout the global territory. I love bundling questions, not simply because it makes me talk a lot, but because it makes everybody think more. Denise, did you wanna respond? Yes, I will start with this again. To Miros, Miros question. Yeah, the question about theory, it may be that the questions or propositions we advanced, maybe, okay, to me, they are about opening up the possibility for thinking differently,
right? So if by theory you mean thinking or the stuff with which we think, then I think they open up everything, right? Like just clearing the space for us to even ask the question about thinking differently. So my answer to your question is yes. Yes, for thinking. It may not be theory, called theory, but, you know, but then again, we don't know. And then to the question of the racial dialectics and total violence. So when I call the existing, the prevailing explanation for racial subjugation, the racial dialectics,
what I'm trying to highlight is precisely how it occludes total violence by explaining the anticipated catastrophes as Jota was saying, explaining them as always already originated in the black body as a consequence of blackness and something that is increased and inspired requires the thinking in the thesis is precisely this move to break apart the racial biolaptics, which obviously has to go through and begin, maybe not temporarily, but analytically,
it would start with aesthetics. Even if it is to go after this stupid opening of critique of pure reason, which reduce thinking precisely to this transcendentally given, you know, mediation of space and time. Yeah, because the problem is that this stupidity is precisely what explains away the catastrophes or explain them as being caused by those who are they affect right um yeah so that's all i want to say i think one thing i did want to add in response to Miro's question um was i appreciate the emphasis
on um different ways of writing theory um and that i think that the enactments that we have seen i I mean, beginning from the need, desire, necessity of writing collaboratively, right, which is the practice of your theses, which is also, you know, the practice of the Speech Act and the collaboration of Autolith, right? that that is the kind of necessity that thinking aesthetics in this way produces as an alternative formation of writing and thinking right that the thought itself is not proprietary and its utterance can also not be proprietary and individualistic and so I just wanted to add
that to the to the conversation go ahead Rizvana yeah I mean you know I think again going back to I had sort of gestured at earlier, the importance of thinking with and against the Hegelian triad. I think what we were trying to do was to engage with the kind of thinking and feeling that emerges from the figure that Hegel says has no history, right? And Blackness is the foundational interdiction that sets history in motion, as somebody like, you know, Lyndon Barrett would maybe say, but also I think what our thesis stress is that this idea, I think that Autolith also sort of phrased so beautifully, disassembling modernity's grammar, right? Really, behind that
is the kind of recognition that, and Denise's work has spoken to this explicitly, but the tools of the Enlightenment are not going to tell us much about these forms, the conquered, right, the Negro, the commodity, the underdeveloped. They're not going to tell us anything about their existence except, you know, to re-exalt them in contradistinction from, you know, Western man. So, you know, I think what we are also trying to do in terms of recalibrating theoretical inquiry and, you know, in the spirit of working collaboratively is trying to
break open a sort of, you know, new language and, you know, new, you know, forms of writing that begin from the idea that we can't begin our inquiry into Black existence or art for that matter, right, with the ontological, epistemological, and ethical, as Denise and I sort of say in this thesis or these theses, right, we cannot begin from those presumptions, right, that are that are foundational to modern thought. So that's what I would say about the the to Miro, which is such a great question. Thank you. Maybe I can add to that. I think what's challenging about the text is the kind of
of ontological theatre or ontological drama. In my very literal imagination when I hear the word figure, as in ontological figure, I imagine a personification on a kind of trans-historical and I see figures that are not literal but ontological like the the commodity these challenging and confrontational and kind of offensively abstract terms I envision them personified i imagine an ontological theater in which these personifications move across a
stage of history a kind of drama of thought and in fact um that's you know that's kind of the ambition of infinity minus infinity because once you have chroma key once you have green screen once you have access to computer-aided design and digital animation, that kind of ontological theatre, that kind of trans-historical moment in which these non-local figures emerge, a kind of between the trans-historical and the inter-temporal, that kind of imagination becomes very vivid
and becomes very possible. And that's very much the ambition of infinity minus infinity. And it's also why this very vivid figure of corpus infinitum, it's why it stays with me so much. It's why we try to work on the declension of that term, corpus infinitum you know going on to etymology online looking up the etymology of corpus the etymology of infinitum and permutating the different um etymological um uh genealogies of those terms um because you know i i'm already envisioning it as a kind of uh
trans-temporal staging you know so um i think that's that's kind of how how the presentation that anjali and i delivered ended so maybe i could put a question to rizvana to you and to denise to talk a bit more about um the that that idea of the expanse and idea of corpus infinitum, body, body infinity, bodily infinity, body without limits, a limitless body, an infinite body, just all of those, just all of the associations, the way in which that acts as a guide to the imagination. It would be great to hear you say a bit about that.
And I'd just like to add, because it's part of my research at the moment, maybe it's been part of of my research for my whole life because things have kind of arched and folded back constantly which is this um census communis and um you know the uh practice of uh um yoga which i want to rest back from its kind of uh artificial capitalist capture is the idea to bind the binaries and doing so you close and lock the senses into a state where you can basically commune with the infinite and that infinite is when you do experience it you
you understand it as an energy of a collectivity of the whole universe of all of time all of history all of matter all of love but it is an experience um and it does take a practice so when um i'm thinking about i was talking about about non-violence what you when you get to get to this state you have to you have to deal with violence you have to deal with the violence on your own body in your organs, the trauma in your bones, but it is not to self-develop, it is to understand other people's pain, it is to understand non-violence as a collective experience and through empathy. And I think this is where I'm interested in also just adding to what Kojo
was saying, what is an ethics? How does an ethics of practice, what could that be in the spirit of these times? Yeah, I mean, speaking back to Kojo's sort of prompt to think corpus infinitum, I mean, we know infinitum being without end or limit and corpus referring to the body, not only in life, but in death as well. And I think, Anjali, what you've been saying about a kind of yogic recalibration of a kind of yogic imagination, right, around the idea of corpus finitum, makes me think about corpus infinitum as evoking, as the evocation of a sensorial figure that does
not correspond to the modern cartography of the body, right? And that's something that gets at life and death as entangled and perhaps in the spirit of Denise's other work, right, indiscreet. So what I'm interested in corpus infinitum and the expanse, when I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about sort of where the hermeneutic shifts from the static and stasis to a process or movement. And I'd be really interested as an aside to hear about this in relation to Jota's work because I was interested in your Daughters of the Dryest Rain actually, and thinking about the way that you're sort of challenging the metaphysical boundary
between life and death for the subject in that work or in some of your other performances. But that sort of would be my answer, Kojo. Kojo-Kojo Okay, so beginning with, that is a, okay, linearity is the underlying theme in there. So beginning with infinity, it is, it is, you know, a guide, an invitation to the imagination to, or to a kind of contemplation without linearity, contemplation of existence without linearity. So the linearity given by space, the linearity that says, allows you to say that this
is and that is and that is and I am right, the separation and the linearity of time, the line right, the line along which. So the body, for the body, the corpus infinitum is a body without space which is a contradiction because you know body is defined by extension as opposed to the mind And there is also the body without time, so without that linearity of thinking. And in relation to the thesis, then the opening with the corpus infinitum is signaling this, you know, I said the reclamation of the sensible, but it's a reclamation of the sensible,
but which is also of existence beyond experience. So it's existence that is also not reduced to what's sensible, right? In that, because what's in infinity, it's not, you know, what's beyond in this space is not sensible, but at the same time, so it's an invitation to have it in mind, literally in mind without experience, which is one of the, I know that would, now I'm gonna expand the answer too much, but that demand for existence to be thought locally, limited, linearly limited in space is what's at the core of all of that.
So corpus infinitum is just signaling that, that it's possible to think without. That's great. Oh yeah. Thank you for that. Jota, do you want to wrap up? I mean, we're right around two hours and would you like to have the final word? I'm not considering it. I just had a small comment to make, but I'll try to be brief because I was also listening to all that and thinking in terms of transition and transmutation
as fundamental categories to think this experience with the corpus infinitum as something that might touch these things we were discussing. And then of course it connects with this attempt, with this obsession with death, precisely as a moment of transmutation and how it also connects not by means, not by sociological means, by poetically and in a certain way philosophically with the experience of transition that is confined within the world as we know it to the question of gender, but that might actually also signify a possibility
of moving beyond the human and moving beyond the limitations of what we understand as the body throughout processes of transitions and transmutations, like aesthetical processes of like, not properly intentional, but processes through which we can engage with collectively. And I think that speaks about the Daughters of the Dryest Rain and the moment of the Birth of Friulano, which is like the transition of the character towards the earth and becoming it, true on hormonal, let's say, experimentation. is also as a moment of like transmutation
as consenting to be more than human or consenting to abandon humanity as the paradigm of existence. So I just wanted to add that. I don't know if it's a good final word. So someone please like wrap it up properly. I think it's a lovely final word. Denise, did you want to add to the finality of the words? I'd like to hear from Gabby, maybe. Gabby, you've been put on the spotlight. Yeah, this is a spotlight. I thought Jota did a good job in proposing beyond humanness.
So I don't know what to do. You don't have to do anything if you don't want to. We are not about coercing people on Zoom. Yeah, I'd like to propose Jota's final word as the final word. Well, I will accept on behalf of Jota, the final word being the final word. And I will, and I have the great pleasure of thanking all of you, Denise and Rizwana, for the thesis and the provocation, Jota, Autolith, Anjali, Kodjo, and Gabi for your responses to all of our partners in South Africa and in the United States for making this possible.
We did retweet, retweet, rechat the links to be in touch with our partners and follow their work as well as to be able to keep track of the Sojourner Project online at sojournerproject.org. Thank you everyone for joining us in the middle of the afternoon or in the evening. It's always a pleasure and look forward to seeing you all again. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you so much. See you all. See you all soon. See you. Bye.