Department of Xenogenesis 3 Our Imaging of Political Existence Thinking Octavia Butler with Denise Ferreira da Silva

Thank you. Okay. Okay. I think we're live. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I think we're live, Kojo. We'll be there in a sec. Here we are. Welcome everybody to Department of Xenogenesis DXG3, our imaging of political existence, thinking Octavia Butler with Denise Ferreira de Silva, 13th of March, which is today. Thank you all for joining this Sunday evening. This time, sadly, we are virtual, but because

this event is live and we are going to be experiencing this event virtually, the last one was at Cafe Otto, and because this event is live streamed and the virtual world is what it is, I am going to begin by saying to everyone good morning, good afternoon, Good evening. Thank you for those joining us from wherever you might be in the world. My name is Anjali Saga and with Kojo Eshin, who is also there. We are both and together. We both and together form the Ocelith Group and also the Ocelith Collective upon which we are presenting today's gathering. I'm going to give you a little bit of background to those joining the Department of Xenogenesis events for the first time because and so for those who've been here with us for the last two on the

last two occasions excuse me for repeating myself over the last 20 years we have engaged in the conception and creation of platforms that make public that make make public the research that informs the work we do and manifests as temporal entanglement in our artistic political theoretical and curatorial practice. By articulating the idea of an otolith with the idea of the collective, we hope to animate 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

within and beyond the precincts of the United Kingdom. a form of being that 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 towards an idea of science fiction, conceived as a method for investigating the present, emerges a practice of platform making that draws attention to the urgency of the present in all its provisional, perspective and planetary dimensions. and planetary dimensions. It is the urgency of this differentiated now

that animates mine and Kojo's desire over the last 20 years to curate the work of artists and thinkers such as Chris Marker, Haroon Farocki, Anand Patwardhan, Atel Adnan, the late Mark Fisher, Chimarenga Library, Black Quantum Futurism, Fred Moten, Tony Cokes, Rania Stéphane, Rohana Zimane, Elaine Michener, Essie Eschen, and Dante Michaud, to name but a few throughout and beyond the UK. The Department of Xenogenesis, or DXG, is the name of and for the project that subtends the meanings and methods entailed by Xenogenesis. The title of our International Touring Exhibition

of the works by Kojo and I, the Otolith Group, curated by Annie Fletcher in 2019, that will conclude at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in July this year. Drawing the title from the science fiction writer Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy of Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago, which were published in the 1980s, late 1980s, allows us to think together with Octavia Butler's science fictional plots and narratives as vehicles that can travel within, across, and between scales. Scales of pitiless racial and sexist violence, on operations of occupation and home wrecking, temporal enclosures, urban collapse, eugenic

calculation, and the human and the non-human, to name but a few of the themes and space-times or time-spaces of Butler's oeuvre. Allowing for an engagement with the speculative thought of Octavia Butler, unfolds her science fictions as inquiries into the present, into the denaturalisation 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 world. And perhaps I may add to Ashilam Bembe's characterisation of the present with the becoming Dalit of the world in order to draw attention to the restructuring and dismantling of human rights

to link surveillance and social and financial credit together as determining factors in a new expanded organized global caste matrix. So with that said, we are delighted to present our imaging of political existence and finally welcome our dear friend and fellow traveler, Denise Ferreira de Silva, who is joining us from her home in Vancouver, where she is professor and director of the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. Welcome, Denise. Once again, we are grateful to you for being with us today and helping us think through some of these questions

and also initiating formally the third in the DXG series of sequences. Welcome. I'm just going to give a little bio. An academic and practising artist, Dr. Denise Ferreira de Silva's work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is author of A Global Idea of Race, University of Minnesota Press 2007, A de Vida in Pajavel, Oficina de Imaginación, Politica and Living Commons 2019, excuse my accent, and co-editor with Paula Chakravati of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime with John Hopkins University Press 2013.

Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals such as Social Text, Theory and Culture and Society, Social Identities, The Black Scholar, to name but a few. Her artistic works include the film Serpent Rain 2016 and Four Waters Deep Inplicancy 2018 in collaboration with Arjuna Newman and the Relational Art Practices Poetical Readings and Sensing Salon in collaboration with Valentina Desideri who I believe is here today with us. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris,

the Whitechapel Gallery in London, in Sao Paulo at the Guggenheim in New York, at MoMA in New York. She has also written for numerous publications such as for major art events such as the Liverpool Biennale in 2017, Sao Paulo Biennale in 2016, Venice Biennale 2017 and Documenta 14 and and publishes regularly in art journals such as Canadian Art, Texts of Kunst and E-Flux. Her forthcoming book, Unpayable Debt, examines the relationships between coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a Black feminist, poetical perspective.

by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 science fiction novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum sow to save her owner and sister. Unpayable debt relates the notion of value to coloniality, both economic and ethical, focusing on the philosophy behind value. Denise Ferreira de Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality, a symbol of coloniality, justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction. Can I hand over to Kodya now?

Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Denise, for joining us from Canada. Thanks to everybody for joining DSG number three on a Sunday evening here in Berlin, London, Canada, and all over the world. To think with Denise Ferrer-Da Silva about her thinking with Octavia Butler, about thinking with Octavia Butler and about Butler's thinking, we're gonna trace a path that sketches out how the evening's gonna proceed. It will take a minute or two,

but it's necessary to kind of set up Denise's interventions. interventions. So we're going to be departing from and returning to Denise's readings of Kindred. And this thinking emerges with the essay, Accumulation, Dispossession of Debt, The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism, written with Paola Chakravarti in 2012, as an addition to their co-edited special issue of the journal American Quarterly on the subprime mortgage crisis from the US. Denise's engagement then continues in 2014 with the publication of the landmark

essay towards Black feminist politics. The quest brackets question of Blackness towards the end of the world published in black scholar from which this particular edition of dxg takes its title dr de silva extends and elaborates her thinking with kindred in the subsequent essay unpayable debt reading scenes of value against the arrow time was published in 2017 and it's this essay, Unpayable Debt, which provides the point of departure for the brilliant, formidable and inspiring unpayable debt, Denise Freire de Silva's new book, which is forthcoming

on Sternberg this year. So we're going to be talking about the ways in which Octavia Butler's novel Kindred enables Denise Freire de Silva to image political existence. And this requires us to ask what happens when Ferreira de Silva thinks with Butler as a guide to imaging political existence. Imaging here should be understood in the sense proposed by Walter Benjamin when de Silva quotes Benjamin in the Arcadies project saying the image that is read which is to say the image in the now or its recognizability bears to the highest degree

the imprint of the perilous moment on which all reading is founded. And that's a good kind of alternative title for today's event, the imprint of the perilous moment. Perilous moment that that is gathering apace in Ukraine, in Ethiopia, in many parts in India, in many parts of the world as we speak. So, to draw specific attention to thinking about the figure of Dana Andrews as a figure

who draws together in the most specific and concrete and widest and general sense, the housing it would be great for us to go to the first quotation from kindred and in a way our conversation is going to circle around this quotation which comes from the ending of the rope which is the penultimate chapter in kindred so son can we have that first um quotation up i'm not sure if it's necessary to read it i always get a bit irritated when people doggedly read out a quotation that everybody can see but certainly we'll have it up on the screen

for everybody to look at um and we'll give people a bit of time to look at it sun says it's up online so everybody can see that So maybe we can just carry on while that stays up on the screen so that people understand that this is the kind of pivotal moment in Kindred that we will be circling around, returning to and departing from.

So while people read that or take an image of it and read it in their own time, or maybe some of you have already read Kindred, could we maybe begin with a kind of question to this quote and to your work on Kindred Denise, when we think of, could we say that the figure of Dana Inkindred, the 26-year-old African-American short story writer, offers you and Paola Chakravartya to pose a challenge to critical leftist thinking in the aftermath of subprime mortgage crisis, the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 in the US,

a challenge to rethink the crisis of housing in its multiple registers as a crisis of debt. And we're going to have another quote. Do we want to go to that right now, Kojo, or do you want to what? Yeah, let's go to the second quote. Okay, so let's go to the second quote. to kind of, and we'll carry on. So here the crisis is not that black and brown homeowners are failing to pay their mortgages, it is that they are failing to pay the notorious subprime loan. The crisis is that the banks that lent black and brown homeowners loans, whose interest

rates ensured that those borrowers would not be able to keep up repayments on those loans. The crisis is that banks as lenders knowingly repackaging this debt as profit could be secured by betting and spreading the risk of black and brown homeowners defaulting on their loans, spreading this risk globally against black and brown homeowners who are classified as high-risk borrowers and actually in the UK it's only like two percent of the whole country who are black and brown homeowners or something crazy like that the debt is owed by black and brown homeowners high risk borrowers is unpayable as high risk borrows is unpayable because it exceeds the

legitimacy of law as contract and morality as obligation um this is what you call unpayable debt. The idea of unpayable debt becomes a way of thinking of housing as property, as security and risk within the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. And you and Paola Chakravati, you situate this crisis of unpayable debt within what you call the racial crisis of global capitalism. And so maybe we could draw back into Dana and the predicament of Dana and how she provides a way in kindred for you to image the racial crisis of global capitalism then and now. Thank you Kojo and Anjali for inviting me to

to be part of the department of the DJX, right, and thank you for, you know, this conversation And I would like to say, to remind myself and everyone, that I am joining this conversation from the unceded ancestral lands of the Musqueam people. And I always like to highlight the fact that, or to repeat how appreciative I am for their hospitality as we inhabit these lands under condition of ongoing colonial racial subjugation, which we keep excavating, excavating. It has no end, this violence. And thank you for the way that you have organized this conversation.

It's very rare that we can talk about how we think with others and with each other. But it's usually the questions are always about how you think about it. and we forget that it's all always with, you know, we always read with previous readings. We always think with that which is what becomes possible because somebody else has actually, you know, provided us with something that allows for taking, for looking at things differently and taking ideas elsewhere. So if I'm going to answer both questions in a way, but basically commenting on what we did in, Paul and I did as we were writing the introduction

to the AQ special issue, but also as you know, what was in our minds as we were looking at the different papers and then decided which ones to bring into the special issue. But I mean, if I had to say it very quickly, I would say that very quick reference to Kindred in the introduction to the special issue, it allowed us to gather how the race and the colonial operating in all four moments of the political, or moments which are signaled by the image of the house as property, but they are not very explicit.

And if we think of the current global crisis, you know, Putin's invasion of the Ukraine, the house as home and shelter and protection is also giving us an image of these perilous moments as you nicely mentioned. So, you know, I think that's something else to continue to think. But now all those four moments of the political, the symbolic, judicial, economic, and ethical, they are at play in the construction of the 2007, 2008 global economic crisis. And as you said, you know, the construction of the crisis has been caused by unethical poor folks buying houses they couldn't afford. Well, the crisis was caused by folks

betting on the poor folks' economic and ethical shortcomings as bad payers. So that construction of African-American and Latinx working class folks as bad payers for us who are very much, you know, very much told us about what the crisis was all about, but also how global capital itself is structured. So yeah, so the bad payers were, you know, faced foreclosure, they were punished obviously, while those who bet on their lack of equity did not. And that was,

was and still is incomprehensible. You can say, you know, there are several explanations for why, but to us that was incomprehensible. And it is very much hard that those who lost the most paid for a crime is caused by those who speculated on their, you know, Black and Latinx, for a sense of lack of economic ability to buy a home. And that was, is as incomprehensible as Dana's, you know, being forced to travel back in time, trying to battle in Maryland to risk her life and limb, which in classical political philosophy and discourse is equated to liberty and property, right? So Dana risked losing life and limb

to save the life of a slave owner who, yes, turned out to be her ancestor. And that incomprehensibility was found, in that we found a key for considering, you know, how colonial racial subjugation operate in all aspects of what I'm calling the political architecture of the post-Enlightenment political architecture. So yes, we had an agenda. We were going after the political leftists, the Marxists, but also after post-colonial and racial critiques, right? That could not and cannot really engage with the ways in which colonial and racial subjugation

are part of capital as crucial to capital creation and accumulation. accumulation. So, so Kindred, so I read Kindred back in the early 90s. I was in grad school, and I took a directed reading course on Black feminist literature, and then I included Kindred and done in that. And so returning to that story, so I think what made me return to the book at that moment, because I don't think I taught it actually,

or maybe I did even, but anyway, I can't remember anymore. It feels like a long time. But that return was crucial because the story of that person, you know, that body and mind traveling without this location, without moving in space and traveling in no time. It helped us to ask some questions that addressed directly historical materialism and also the critics of colonial racial subjugation. So it allowed us to go at both at the same time, right, instead of following this division of the field of critique.

So the first question for us was addressed to Harvey and was, you know, was about, you know, the need, it was a question like, when does capital accumulation end, right? When is it that eventually the former colonies, the third world, or the global south will finally be seen as integral to the history of capital proper, right, as moments of production, of capitalist production, of capital reproduction, and not as a condition of possibility for the emergence of capital. And then think about that in case of Black and Latinx home buyer.

So the question is, how is it that for them, what is supposed to be proper shift to bring security becomes disaster, right? Becomes a death trap. But then also thinking of security in terms of shelter from the elements, but also protection in the sense of something that the state is supposed to provide, right? That the police is supposed to provide. So I think you can see, you know, that is, even though it was indirect, but there was, there's an attention to police brutality and the critique of the political that is already in there.

And then the other question we raised to David Graber, whose book, That, the First 5,000 Years of, the First 5,000 Years, it was published while we were gathering this special issue. So then, so if our question to Harvey was like juridic economic, our question to David Kramer was ethical economic. And, but it also allowed us to consider the role of racial difference in the production of the bad debitor, right? In the construction of the improper economic subject of African-Americans and Latinx people

as being, you know, lacking the proper moral attributes of the subject. And Kindred was central to our, you know, articulation of both questions because of, because then as incomprehensible charge kind of reminds us that primitive accumulation has already taken place, right? think start date 1992. So at this point, that point at which has been extracted on the colonial government is already and remains as living part of global capital. That's in regards to our addressing Harvey. So and then in regards to our addressing

David Grabber's argument, so Black and Latinx persons are not strangers, right? Because in his argument, he had this construction of the subprime debtors, subprime, quote, unquote, as strangers, as lacking a relationship. But actually there was no lack of relationship. There was a relationship. A relationship that is economic, juridic, and ethic, and the relationship that is as old as primitive accumulation. The relationship of juridic domination and economic expropriation, conquest, slavery, settler colonialism, which also as Dan's predicament shows us include familial ties, which are legal ones, whether they are legal through marriage or rape.

But the phrase, Ampebo, that has a longer story because it also refers to, was a phrase that we used in Brazil back in the 1980s when we were protesting the structural adjustment policies that the IMF was imposing on Brazil and other Latin American countries. So for instance, just to close it up, to connect to the racial logic of the global crisis, the second piece, the documental piece, essay from which the book is derived. When I was writing that, when I was invited to speak at the Parliament of the Bodies,

I just went back to this huge piece from the introduction that we didn't include in the introduction, but which was the basis for our introduction to the AQ. And I developed it into something that I thought would help me to speak to the situation of Greece back then, in a way, without kind of teaching, preaching to Greeks what was happening. And that was fantastic because actually after I finished the presentation, people were saying like, oh yeah, exactly the same thing that's happening here, you know, is that in your description of slavery? And to me, to me, that was telling. I'll stop here because I don't even know if I answer the questions, I hope, you know,

respond to the comment, I hope I did. Absolutely, thank you so much for that, Denise. I think it's, I think part of what emerges is the way in which you stay with this question of incomprehensibility of Dana as a key to thinking through what you call the post-Enlightenment political architecture and what you call the four pillars of that political architecture, the symbolic, the juridical, the economic and the ethical, and the particular, so that the particular predicament that Dana finds herself in is not resolved as a trope of science fiction or as a

science fiction's love of the so-called grandfather paradox. You don't really use that mode of argumentation. You hardly refer to science fiction per se, or speculative fiction per se. Instead, you take the predicament of Dana as seriously as she herself does, as she herself and her husband do. They cannot resolve it themselves. They never resolve it. They just suffer it. She suffers it and endures it, but she can never explicate it.

And you don't explicate it either. It's as if you bear it and magnify it, use it to bring pressure on different frames of reading. And that's part of what's so compelling about your reading. And it's part of what takes it so far from, you know, a traditional literary theoretical reading, which in a way would think of it at the level of the text or the letter, the sentence. But maybe one way to continue your line of thought, to continue the particular formulation of the unpayable debt

that you drew out of Dana's unending predicament that she finds herself in, the way, as Angie said, she's tethered to Rufus and by implication to Alice and to Hagar, and the plotments that all these figures find themselves in inside the Wainian plantation over there in 1812, 1815, Baltimore, Maryland. Maybe one way of taking that entire structure

that Butler lays out so pitilessly is to think with, is to return to your notion of unpayable debt which you alluded to just now. And so we have a quotation from your 2017 essay on unpayable debt which will give people who haven't had a chance to read that essay and they should because it's we believe it to be a vitally important essay. So Sun, if you could bring that essay up, or the quotation number three, and then people will be able to read it in their own time.

Thank you Sun. We'll leave it up because it bears careful reading. I mean maybe I could just talk a little bit about this quote in relation to let's see what kind of yeah surrounds her kind of the kind of ontology of her being I guess in terms of Dana's sort of being because in your thinking with Dana's experiences um you know she did she's a disruptor of time you know she uh her experiences of spatio-temporal dizziness spatio-temporal sickness spatio-temporal nausea spatio-temporal disorientation in kindred um almost acts as a

a tool that disrupts these levels of linear time, the arrow of time that you have described. And in your thinking with the six times that Dana finds herself temporarily abducted from her home in a new home in Altadena, outside Los Angeles, in the summer of June, 1976, the Wayland plantation in Baltimore and Maryland, starting in 1812 or 1813, you stress, as we've been discussing the incomprehensibility of what is happening to Dana from the perspective of linear time and efficient causality or cause and effect, in order to put pressures on structures of

linearity, temporality and efficient causation. And I guess instead of referring to the kind of well-known sort of let's say arrowed time construction formulation of science fiction time travel the hg well zian formulation as such as machine you you insist upon the problems that time travel makes for standard readings of linear time and standard readings of travel this means that you propose to think of dana as a figure that suffers time traversal rather than as a figure that embarks upon time travel. This means that you propose, I guess, to think of Dana as a figure that suffers time traversal, then as a figure that embarks on time travel.

And that thinking is with Dana as a figure that opens up a way of thinking outside of the norms and the laws of time and space. And I guess one of the other things I'd like to talk to you about, but maybe we could begin to introduce this, is the way you describe intuition as that form of waking up into this entanglement that she is in, which I would say is a kind of form of enlightenment. that is, I think, stressing itself upon the possibility and challenges of imaging. You know, and my question would be like, how is this intuition,

how does it provide a place from which to act in your kind of thinking around quantum time? So there's a lot there, but maybe we could... Koto, do you think we need to go to the next quote now, or what do you think? Yeah, I think... Just to have it there or not? Yes, yes. So, Sand, if we could go to quotation number four, in which Denise briefly opens out the question of time as traversal and then that question of time as traversal rather than time

as travel opens up and links to your question Anjali about intuition and so maybe you could invite Denise to open up this question of what it means to traverse rather than to travel, because it feels like it's a significant displacement of the inherited vocabulary of science fiction, which of course science fiction borrows from 19th century physics. So this notion of traversal is a way of intervening not only into science fiction, but into the structure of time that informs science fiction.

Even in science fiction's fantasies of disruption of 19th century time, it is in a way still, it still owes everything to the structure it transgresses. whereas the traversal is not a disruption of time. It's time unbound from certain kind of formal categories of space and time. Time, in a way, thought under the dimension of intuition. And so it's an example of, you know, it's how you think poetically with the figure of Dana. Well, thank you. I will try to bring it all in a way that makes sense.

Um, but it is, ah, I took a note, I took a note, now I lost it. Oh yes. Um, so one thing that stayed with me, uh, for a long time was this, uh, something that Octavia E. Butler said at the end of a, of an interview. and then she's talking about Kindred and then she says that she wrote the novel when she wrote the novel what she had in mind was the question of how a person from you know second half of the 1970s Los Angeles would feel if they feel if they had gone back right to Auntie Belle in Maryland or gone back in time and she didn't want to have to trace the experience

particular aspects. I mean, she doesn't say that, but then, you know, what I surmised from reading that answer is that it wasn't about particular things happening that would affect that person, but about the whole experience of slavery, of being enslaved. And I think when I was writing, when I was expanding the 2017 essay into the book, I kind of asked myself, right? And I tried to enact that. What if, right? I would experiencing that with Dana in that moment as a whole system and think through that what if, you know?

So I hadn't thought about that until you made that comment, but I think that's how, you know, whenever the folks read the book, they'll see what it means anyway. And in a way, but kind of, it will take a long time to make the connection now, but in a way, that is a lot, that speaks also to the comments, the comments question that both of you are raising now about the intuition and about uh traversality so i think in terms of in terms of in okay let me talk about traversal you know traversal of time space which um in in toward the black feminist poetics i i i i

I go back to those three female characters, right, Butler's characters, Dana, Anuvanu, and Lauren Olamina to highlight, you know, both, right, that the violations and the costs of the violations, and, but highlighting primarily the costs of the violation, but the gift, the gift is in that which brings about the pain that one suffers for the violation which is the excess right that the fact that each character whether as as a as an attribute in the case of Lauren's her empathy or in the case of a new her you know metamorphic capacity

is the possibility of exceeding the limits of space-time, the limits of linearity, and then being punished for it. And this is something that Butler allows us to think that conventional and we know they don't because science fiction never goes really too far away from the thinkable, right? The stories draw from or they're inspired by findings of in physics primarily whether theories, theoretical findings or experimental findings and what can be imagined from those findings.

So like even so the impossible like like vessels that travel faster than light, they will end up in a Newtonian imaginable place at the center of a galaxy, for instance. even so and then they also they also fly at a certain speed like you know million of miles a second so space time is that in the in the in the speed and then if you think in terms of velocity and then the center of the galaxy again comes back so that is a certain direction so that is you know space time like the cartesian grid is presumed in in this imagination it holds

hosts this imagination. So I think even like some of, you know, as Marvel, maybe even more so Philip K. Dick's novels, and this is another of my favorite. So even those which are set in the future, they invite us to contemplate a different kind of actuality and the actual being that which is in space time. And even if it is like, you know, virtual actuality of metaverse, which is something that you guys had mentioned, but Butler does something else.

And in particular, Dana is traversal. They allow us to think of that which exceeds the actual. And that which exceeds the actual, so in my thinking, I'm thinking, and then I'm thinking with Karen Barad and other quantum theorists, but here primarily with Karen Barad in that short little piece that I think is so beautiful. I love it. What's the measure of nothingness? It's a beautiful piece of theory and the virtual. So in toward the global feminist, toward the Black feminist politics, I, you know, I think of virtuality along those lines.

But the virtual is not something that it's out there or that is produced electronically, you know, but the virtual is actually about how we are constituted, right? because we like at the subatomic level bodies everything every existing actual thing is made of emptiness we are empty but we're not empty because this empty this void is actually it's a field it's a field with um those particles which aren't are not there no they are there they are not there but they're there uh they are indeterminate and there is this the excess so so the excess is precisely that undeterminable

that are the virtual particles which are constitutive of of the bodies and that excess allows you know you to imagine without space time and that and the and the and reading reading kindred and you know and the other books. That's what my imagination picks up, you know. An access that on the one hand is, you know, that becomes knowable through a violation of space-time in its, you know, in different kinds of inscription, but then at the same time allows us to imagine beyond without, I mean, not beyond

in the sense of in the future, but without space time. Now, that, I think, where the intuition comes, because that thinking, which cannot be about determinacy, cannot be about saying what something is or what something is not, the principle of identity difference cannot be applied to that which is virtual. that can yet be emerged when we turn to things, when we attend to things, asking different questions, asking questions that are about how they are present, they become present

to the mind because of because they you know in different ways in different moments they refigure something else that has been present to the mind or not or something else at some point and that's the kind of flash right that's what comes in the image and that that which that is what you you say aha and you know without without having information about it all the information about it right um and in that earlier quote from benjamin that's the that's the image in the in it is in the now of its recognizability because it is he that image here and now and how it it allows us to read here

and now, but that is an image that is also immemorial, thinking about the constellations now. Now I'm just going somewhere else. Okay, I will stop before I go somewhere else. No, please don't stop. No, thank you for that. But maybe to pick up on a moment in your thinking at that moment. So if we say that a figure such as Dana in Kindred or a figure such as Anyangwu in Wildseed or Lauren Olamina in the parables, that in each of these figures what Octavius Buckler

enables us to think is this excess that becomes noble through its violations. What is at stake in the fact that each of them pays such a terrible price for these violations? In other words, in Butler, there's a cost to virtuality. Dana pays a price for the capacity to traverse time, which of course is not something she wished for. It's something imposed upon her or something abducted.

I think of it almost as a temporal abduction, an abduction by time-space. So in your writing, you say that Dana pays a cost for breaching separability. She pays a cost on top of the bearing, the cost of living as a female slave. That in itself is, that's one cost that she bears. but it's as if the fact that her existence traverses linear time it's as if formal time

space takes its revenge upon her for her inadvertent transgressions so even when she had no desire to reach time space the fact that she does part of she ends up getting punished for it so um you say in the in a really brilliant passage you say um the fixities of formal space time take different shapes including the very wall where her arm gets stuck during her last return trip from the past after having stabbed her ancestor owner. So what is going on when formal time space in Butler's writing takes its revenge

for that violation? In relation to your term, the wounded captive in a state of subjugation? yeah I well I I have different ways um I think of um for going after that because that is in you know the critical legal theorist is still well and alive in my head in everything that I'm writing and thinking with. So the violations, what the violations in Butler's writing,

what the price paid, the fact that there is a price to be paid to me is telling of the ways in which the fixities of blackness as a category that emerges in a mode of thinking that is ruled by linearity, linearity as a linearity of space and the linearity of time. So that the violations remind us of that. And as such, they allow us to tell the story of colonial and racial subjugation, to tell the story of cis and the patriarchal violence. And they allow us to redraw the concept

of the political outside its limited, liberty, equality, principles, abstract individual, and actually literally flesh it out that subject of the political, right? because so the descendant of a black woman who was free, Alice was free and then slave owner who goes back in time to save the slave owner. She, when she goes back in time, she's a slave. And that has to do with, that tells us what blackness continue to do in the present as a signifier of, not of the condition of,

not, well, we can have an argument about it. Not only a signifier of the condition of the person that was black in that moment, but the skin fire of a whole economic system that was founded on the Negro. The Negro being both a thing and a human being and blackness as a reference of the person who has enslaved has helps us to draw some, you know, draw out some critical aspects in, you know, as a, as a reference to the violation, but, but there is a limit to what it allows us to do as, you know, Saidiya Hartman has written about it. But, but blackness as a reference of the Negro,

of the commodity that is a person raises questions that, you know, Marxists should be paying attention to instead of just reducing blackness with operation as a category, which is the ways in which it, you know, becomes about that. So I don't know what I'm, okay, going back to the wounded, So the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, which is a figure that I draw from my friends, people, I think with Hortense Spielers, Fred Moulton, and Saidiya Hartman. And that figure, what she, because she is there, but she is not.

Well, the way in which I try to assemble her, I assemble her as female flesh and gendered precisely because she's not comprehended in that societal patriarchal matrix. And then, you know, Hortense Spielers written so much about it. I don't need to elaborate on that. But because she's captive, but she's also a body, the particles of which are, you know, materialized in the cotton balls she collected, planted. then she's also opening up a different, something else that is, maybe I should say,

that access, right? She's also reminded of that access that remains under termed, but also available for thinking. So the particles, her particles might just be now there as virtual particles, never to be determined, never to be named, but just the possibility of thinking by taking that into account, then if it does, it may not allow for the construction of a theoretical edifice, whatever, who cares, don't care about that, but it allows for descriptions and statements and the raising of questions that do not merely reproduce,

yeah, the general political discourse or at least things that don't fit nicely in the current version of the political architecture. I think I just went somewhere else with this, but I think it's okay too. I wasn't expecting to. No, thank you. It's somewhere else. It's a, it makes total sense for us. And thank you for that, for the generous unfolding of this notion of an excess that is undetermined, while simultaneously reminding us that the violations endured and suffered by

father's characters remind us of the double nature of the negro as personhood and as property kind of split and doubled simultaneously. So subject to all the constraints of property and barred from all the benefits of personhood and how those play out endlessly. Maybe another compelling publication, which follows from that is And so it continues from this question of traversality, which is that it not only allows you to challenge the notion of time, but also to challenge the notion of travel.

So in Unpaying the Debt, which you graciously allowed us to look at parts of in preparation for this conversation, you posed the question of whether Dana actually travels at all. So you posed the question, you know, what if Dana, despite all appearances, despite in a way vocabulary itself which kind of encourages you to say time travel or time movement you say what if dana does not move what if she stays where she is um and clearly there's a way in which we can see that because it's why she's so determined to stay in her apartment because she's afraid that if she

goes to say the bank or she takes she drives a car to the bank and she gets kind of abducted while she's in the car she's afraid of where that will show up or when she's taking a shower she becomes paranoid that during the shower she might be like body snatched so there's and and And this is why she has to keep her bag with her, because effectively she has to be on guard against time and space. The kind of the capacity of time and space to abduct her from chronological time and abduct her into another time.

And the nightmarish suspicion that 1976 and 1815 are not separated times, but are continual with each other, and subtend each other in nightmarish ways. So that's one provocation, but the provocation that Dana is not travelling at all is like a whole other dimension. I think it opens up the question of how to think Dana from the perspective of of what you just touched on, which would be the elemental, when you talked about the cotton balls, maybe even touching on the questions of how to think Dana from the perspective

of DNA. So maybe you could share with us a bit of your thinking about what it means to think of Dana as a figure who is not traveling and who is not weaving, despite how we traditionally read kindred and how in fact kindred is celebrated. And I would say also to think, you know, this is elaborated by Octavia Butler in the way that the kind of object and the body, the body and the being is, you know, in the flesh being stuck in the plaster, is, it remains recorded and we don't know what's happening but in order for her to extract herself

from that new paradigm of existence is for me the challenge. I mean, the thing around, you know, we're going to after, I think just to say that after we elaborate some of these ideas it would be good if people could be thinking during this last phase of questions, because we'll move to questions after this, but I think a lot about these days about this kind of potential even in the midst of imminent kind of global war, that we, you know, I think a lot about this kind of absolutely this potential that we have now to think about and actually exist inside a a world where that flesh and plaster are impacting on our understanding of science fiction in the

present where we in a way can look through many different states of material historical realities and begin to unbind ourselves from the multiple scenes of crimes. So these are just some of the ideas that I was thinking a lot about this arm lodged in the wall as an imminent site of enlightenment in the present. Thank you both for that. And I just, I want Anjali to say more about enlightenment, what you mean by enlightenment. But we, okay, I'll just comment back and then I'd like to

say more, to elaborate. So yeah, so then I did not move at all. But think about, you know, how, yeah how we think of the travel itself so that is as you as you you had you had mentioned like you know HGOL's time travel that the the time machine doesn't go anywhere right so things change around it and the time machine doesn't move so that the possibility of not moving in and time it being the thing that changes is there in our already in our imagination. When I was a child, I there was this TV series that the title in Portuguese was the tunnel of time. I don't is

from the US. I don't know what was the title. But it was like the characters would go through a tunnel and come out somewhere else. But it was very quick, right? Like going through a wormhole kind of kind of thing. And then of course the image of actual dislocation we get from, I mean, not so much actual dislocation, but it indicates that like from back to the future, because the Deloria has to move to reach a certain speed and then it could just travel in time. So that is the speed element. But then, so she does not move like the switching.

So she switches and then only things that are connected to her body switch. So one of the trips, she takes a bag, right? And I have the image of her putting the bag across like this. And then, so then when she's in Maryland, she's you know she has that bag so so one could say that instead of moving one could say that she disappears right she deactualizes so as if she becomes virtual in Los Angeles to become actual in Maryland or one could wonder

if it is that she's virtual in Maryland when she's actually in Los Angeles. Because the only time we see her moving is, we have a sense of her moving is when her arm gets stuck. So maybe her whole house is virtual in Maryland. And yeah, and then And so basically, I think what I'm saying is that imagining that that disappearance as travel could be shifted into this imagining that everything exists virtually everywhere, anywhere. Not necessarily as being present or absent, but because, you know, because we are entangled, deeply implicated, and at the same time made by these renewable things.

that are the elementary particles. It is not so, and then we go back to the question of intuition that you raised before, Anjali, that what if the intuition is what gathers, does the gathering of that which is and remains virtual in the things that are actual? What, you know, we don't know because, because also doesn't matter as long as we can think with it I think anyway and I think that's what I mean by enlightenment is this intuition and this is absolutely brilliant way of thinking of the virtual and the actual and the intuition is linked we talk you talk about the senses

access by the senses but the senses and in relation to virtuality I think is very interesting in relation to enlightenment as the senses as passages through which we experience um in many spiritual um kind of uh think we experience in spiritual kind of ways of practices of um meditation or reiki or you know these readings of time that are unmoored from um determinants sort of determinancy um when time is unmoored we kind of experience time all at once and i think that sort of sense of um uh the the vastness of time is um is not necessary it is um something

which i'm thinking a lot about and so for me intuition and the idea of enlightenment sort of it opened up for me this idea of potential i guess but um yes so maybe we should take some questions now um and um i think the way it's going to work because everybody is on vim here that they would enter questions into the chat um and andrea is going to join us as our moderator thank you hi i'm here thanks very much that was an extraordinary conversation thank you so much um uh we have a comment we've just got started i know i know isn't it always the way

um but but let's see we can carry on having we can you can carry on having the conversations um that are maybe um uh intertwined with the conversation with with the the questions and actually uh we can carry on talking but i just wanted to say that i have seen um uh sun has just told me there was a comment so maybe while um sun's delivering that comment to me ah okay so we have a comment um and i'm just going to read it out directly thanks son um and it's it's a comment that um i'm just trying to read out marx refers to the african people enslaved on the cotton plantations as the speaking implement and black is coterminous with to slave says frank b wilderston

the third now um i know denise from having read your work and and and your your um rejoinder towards Marx in particular his commentary on slave and plantation economies, you might have something to say about that. So anyway, could anybody, I think that's really Denise to you, so what would you say about that idea of black being coterminous with slave? I know this is very contentious. Thanks, Andrea, for conveying Frank's comment, question, and thanks, Frank, for bringing it.

Yeah, one of the things I forced myself to do as I was expanding the essay into the book was to go back to all, well, at least to the volumes of Carto and look back at when slave, the terms slave and slave labor and black comes out. you know, when Marx brings those. And then in doing so, I got a bit frustrated because I could not find anything that helped me,

in all the reference that helped me to make a statement about the ways in which slavery is written out of, slave labor is written out of capital accumulation. I couldn't make a positive statement or come up with a positive reading that could sound like that I was at least attempting at describing how Marx placed the term, you know, the termed the slave out in the very description of the conditions of production of capital. the actual economic conditions, not the larger social ones, which is how I was able to do that.

So what going over these instances, including, you know, statements such as these that Frank is reminding us of, that is always what I always read was the slave has already always in relation to wage labor. But indicating that which slave labor is treated as if, but not as what it actually is, because the wage laborers are proper free human beings who sell their, freely sell their labor in the market.

So because I could only find the slave defined by wage labor as risking being that which slave labor was not, so I kind of abandoned in the writing of the chapter on historical materialism. I decided to look at then the kind of statement that Marx actually, in which he actually defines the wage labor, right, as against, you know, what is labor and also defines capitalist production as against, you know, slavery, even though slavery is never described as a proper,

slavery at that moment is not described as a proper mode of production. And then it is because I find that then the kind of statement Marx are not the term determinative statements. There are different kinds of statements. The limit is slave labor. I found that reading Blackness through Marx's statements on slavery doesn't go that far beyond what the category of blackness already does. And that category of blackness was constructed at the same time as Marx was writing his critique of capital. So I might as well look at the sociology of race relations, what I did

in toward the global idea of race. And then from there, I describe how blackness operates as a political category. Now, in the question, and I know that Frank is interested in that, but that's what I'm not answering in the question of the speaking commodity. And I'm not speaking to this question precisely because it can be read through as a point of departure for a discussion of Black subjectivity, which is something that I also spend a long time in this Unpayable Death book, saying why I'm not interested in doing so. But yeah, that's it.

I think you have an absolute right, Denise, to not name the things when you don't want to name them. I have a very simple question, I think, which I found, and I'm hoping it bridges both your work, Denise, and also the work of the Otolith Group's practice. And you've written an extraordinary article, article, essay in the Xenogenesis book that has just been published by Ima in time for the opening of the exhibition later this summer. um um but i'm very very kind of intrigued and excited by the way that you conceptualize this

idea of concept of separability and i think that separability is very interesting obviously you align it with two other terms you have a kind of triad of terms but separability is very interesting i think both in relationship to what we've just been talking about in terms of the virtual physical time travel questions around Dana in Kindred but also I'm thinking very much of the richness of the Otolith collective and group's work in terms of the separability or not of the image which is what you address in many ways in the essay that you write in the book and I wondered maybe if that's something that could bring us back to the work itself that could if you could maybe

open up that idea of separability and then we could come back to Kojo and Anjali. Okay, I'm not, thank you Andrea for the question. I'm not going to go to the article itself, I'll just speak about separability, which I, you know, it's nothing new really. I think we all, I mean, for a while there have been different statements and critiques of what I name underseparability. But I'm highlighting separability and the other two, determinacy and sequentiality, as, you know, as onto epistemological pillars.

And by that, it just means that they are holding kind of statements we make, even though they are not very, very explicit. And separability is crucial. And it comes first. And it's not in a sequence, but it comes first, I think, in the image, in our image of existence as figured by space and time. And in most of the times when I am bringing about the commentary, when I'm making a commentary on separability, I'm interested really in highlighting or opening up the possibility for thinking about two things.

on the one hand what we have been talking about as you you you noted and and we were talking about uh the inseparability between maryland 1830s 1800s and and los angeles 1970s through the virtual and the actual um on the one hand but then on the other hand um i'm also interested in i i I don't know how to name it now. I can. In that those things that are inseparable because they are deeply implicated or entangled in the language of quantum physics, they enter in the composition of everything.

So to me, that is, in that, that is also, it is also an invitation to think at things that exist in space-time, meaning actual things, in terms of how they are composed, in terms of their form, but not the form in the formal sense of form that we inherited in this content program, which is so crucial to our critical work, but in terms of the form of that which is put together in a particular way, but always thinking of that which is put together in a particular way as always already being recycled right as a video composition of something of something some things that weren't in them put together in in other ways

sorry just unmuting myself thank you very much Denise um I have two more questions or ideas that I'm going to read out and then I'll hand back to Denise and Anjali. So Squirrel Nations says, what is a version of the non-perilous moment and is it fleeting? How can it sustain? That's one question. Oh yeah, it's a question. And the next question comes from Ouna Parvan who says, thank you for sharing your beautiful conversation. Thinking beyond the idea of linearity and through the idea of quantum space time, how can we think about time before scenes of value?

So how can we think of time before scenes of value? Is there a relation between time before value and virtuality slash excess? Yes, I'm writing it off because my memory does not exist. I just repeat the very last bit of that question. Is there a relation between time before value and virtual slash excess? Time before value and virtual excess. Sorry, go on Denise. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. So, I mean, I just wanted to say in relation to Andrea's previous question,

maybe Kojo would also like to respond to that as well in relation to this last question as well. Just something to think about. I mean, in relation to the way kind of one might approach the virtual and the essay film, and I would say the kind of narrative you know in relation to moving through scales of time or moving through phases of time material and non-material time you know in order to think like you say Denise difference without separability you know I think a lot about animation as something which comes before scenes of value

that exists outside of scenes of value in order to give life to these scales, in order to bring life to entanglement, in order to think about narrative that is not plotted, that is opening questions, opening continuous questions of entanglement that bring forms of intuition to being as states of feeling or structures of feeling that we don't know yet, that kind of exists in the kind of... So I would say in this way, I kind of think about

if one is going to think about making a work, that for me is what the work has to... kind of be drawn from in a way, is this kind of entanglement. Kojo, do you want to respond or shall we go back to the questions? I mean, I'm thinking about the question from Squirrel Nation, or was it Squirrel Notion? this question of the non-perilous moment. Because for me, it's the peril that makes reading, that gives reading its purpose.

So I'm not sure what a version of a non-perilous moment would be. nor would I understand, you know, I'm not really, it's not clear to me what that is, because that which is imperiled gives, you know, it gives a raison d'etre to reading. Benjamin's point is that it's a fact it's foundational. Maybe Squirrel Ocean could say a bit more about why the non-perilous

moment matters, or what their version would be. Then that would help me to understand What is the statement of that? Denise, sorry, you were about to say something. I interrupted you. Yes, but I'm glad you did because, yes, I was going to comment on the questions and my comment to the non-parallelous moment. I mean, it is the moment that actually allows for the reading. the reading and I think to me and that but I would like to follow the motion to actually

they could say more but to me I think this is a gift of blackness. I don't know any place where we don't live in a perilous moment as you know we go about existence as black persons and and that's that's the gift you know going back to the to you know to to the access and the violations, right? It is being a thing that is a person and being a person who's, that's always referring to the extraction and expropriation, to the extraction of persons from the African continent should be sold as things. It is, it is this, I kind of write about it

to be announced, but it is, you know, the returning of that violence that both, you know, brings about the danger, but then at the same time is also dangerous for this world as it is. But yeah, it would be great to hear more. But let me just say something about the question of the time before the scenes of value. I really think that, well, for a long time I thought that was only time. I mean, time is obviously crucial to this mode of thinking. And even though it's always disappointing us, now that we look at the invasion of Ukraine, thinking about the invasion of Poland or the invasion of Ukraine in the past, like, oh, nothing's changed.

It's like, come on. Yes, of course. Like, let go of this notion of time as if things will change and improve, whatever. So I think so the call is for is really for thinking, gathering, assembling ways. Let's call them tools for thinking time critically and extracted from everything where it is presented in the figuring of progress and improvement as Fred and Stefano talk about in several works, but also in all incomplete. And the thinking without time and what it would be like if we imaged existence without time, what becomes thinkable

in that sense. And because time is the measure of value for Marx and then also in the assembly of the notion of humanity itself, right value, ethical and then economic value. That is no production of capital without social labor, in time, abstract labor, which is only possible through time. So, yeah, the thinking without time would be crucial for emerging existence without these justifications and mechanisms of extraction and expropriation that are always made justifiable and rendered good because of time in its ethical operations.

thank you denise um i have three more comments or questions here are you um happy for me to read them all out yeah okay okay right so the first one comes from marthio cruz um if we think of dana or dana dana dana dana dana if we think of dana as a medium on slash through which the world performs can we think of black film as a medium through which black life can also exist beyond and despite the timeness and the materiality of media that in a way is a very i mean that's also

also almost kind of follows on from where you were just now, Denise. So if we think of Donna as a medium on through which the world performs, can we think of black film as a medium through which black life can also exist beyond and despite the timeness and the materiality of media? Then the second comment I have is from Megs Morley, and she says, thinking with Wright's concept of epiphenomenal time where time sorry where time does not move in a linear trajectory but unfolds endlessly into ever deeper more complex and expansive networks of time that coexist echo and reverberate our existence so Megs is offering us a excuse me

a kind of an expansion of this concept of time I'll read it again thinking with Wright's concept of epiphenomenal time where time does not move in a linear trajectory but unfolds endlessly into ever deeper more complex and expansive networks of time that coexist echo and reverberate our existence and then finally from fred fred moton excuse me fred says this is a wonderful conversation thank you all i was wondering given the rich ways you have all talked about the relationships between the Xenogenesis trilogy, the Parables and Kindred, if you might say something about how you have been thinking of

and with Butler's short fiction, I'm thinking especially of Blood Child and Speech Sounds. So there, Fred Moten is expanding from our focus this evening on Kindred towards the Parables and the Xenogenesis trilogy, which was the subject of the conversation that Fred Moten and the Offlift group had previously. So thank you. I'm really happy to repeat any of that if you didn't pick him up. Over to you. I will take the black film and then we share each. respond to it. Yeah, I think

so the film as a black film as a medium for through black life persists. I think black life you know something that we called black life I'd rather borrow from Fred and I use sociology but existence Black life also exceeds the conditions of subjugation, because if we were to fall under the conditions of subjugation that blackness allow, if all that defines the existence of black folks, of black people, I would not be here talking to you, right?

I mean, just basically. So I also think more and more with that, which, you know, it's not reducible to the organic thing that I am, but it is also signaled by it. And that little thing, right, the actuality of existing Black persons, I think, is what plays back in the films and, you know, where Black life can be figured beyond the context. But, yeah, that's all.

Thank you. I'll take the Fred's question about Blood Child and Speech Sounds. I'll tell you about the short stories, both of which I'm fond of. I'm also very attached to a short story called Amnesty, which I think is also exceptional. I think in Blood Child, which my seminar group in Geneva spent a year analysing as slowly as we could. I think, Fred, a lot of the questions that you brought up in our conversation

reached a certain crescendo in Bloodchild. The inextricability of care from violence, the kind of structural intimacies of exposure to death and exposure to intimacy in the relation between the Tlick and the Terence, in the kinship structures of both the Tlicks and other Tlicks,

humans to Tlicks and humans to humans, that entire, to use your term for it, the entire emplotment of Blood Child draws out in its most acute most pitiless form, the inextricable and indistinguishable, the impossibility to have questions of intimacy, care attachment without simultaneously having questions of horror predation and death.

So in those short stories, especially in Bloodchild, the kinds of impotments that, the kinds of impotments, the kinds of predicaments and dilemmas that Butler elaborates over a novel is there compressed into a particular extraterritorial intensity which is which is is deeply compelling and terrifying. And clearly, a thinker like Zakia Imran Jackson,

in her close reading of Blood Child, and also Alice Eve Weinbaum, in her reading of Blood Child, I think these thinkers offer us what Denise would call very powerful reading tools for grasping part of what's at stake in Blood Child. I mean, I will just maybe answer and albeit basically this question of maybe black film and mediumship because I think it's important to kind of remain in the realm of like our sort of

friends and predecessors and people who are making films that maybe kind of talk to exposing the becoming black of the world or the becoming Dalit of the world. You know I think if we think of I don't think for example that all black films are great just because they're made by people who are black, for example, you know, Black Panther, how do you put Black Panther next to Killer of Sheep, or, you know, Dribble Diop Manbeti's work, or Osman Semben's work, or, you know, Twilight City by Black Audio Film Collective, which, or, you know, Anand Patthewaidan's

film Bombay Our City or Money Call's film Uski Roti, you know, or, you know, Haile Garima's work or, you know, many filmmakers within the LA rebellion who I would say operate and operated within a kind of underground of filmmaking that was in dialogue with other sites of anti-Blackness in the world. I think this kind of question of mediumship has to be put kind of grounded in in the political in relation to the choice of kind of aesthetic registers and relationships to experience. So the, you know, when we look at films like Underground Railroad or,

or, you know, I don't know, there's like a whole bunch of films now which will come back to me. I mean, some of those works are quite painful to watch. You watch them, you're kind of entertained, but then the image of, the fact of being entertained in itself feels absolutely kind of abject. So I just, you know, would like to just say that I would just like to stay with that kind of challenge, really. So let me just go back to Meg's question about a phenomenal time.

So when I read, Michelle writes this notion of what I heard now in the question of it's phenomenal time. The image I have in my head is of something full of stuff, of things that happened, of what's happened, what's happening or what's to happen. how that which shows in memories etc how you know we can then describe in such a way um when i'm talking about time i'm thinking more in in its you know i'll call it metaphysical operations

um which are consistently empty right abstract and then and bring us back to a line even time as duration is still got that thing that keeps going in a certain direction somehow or keeps going somehow right and then how it goes so yeah so the i think the phenomenal time is already social times already historical times already lived time um and it and i think it is good for thinking for unthinking time right for messing up um these metaphysical time that remains uh you as a substractum in our thinking and in our concepts and categories, and also in our media,

like the film, which is a thing where time just keeps, yeah, that forces time on you anyway. But that's all. Yeah, thank you for that, Denise. I'm thinking of of the moment in Killer in Chief in which Henry Sanders and Casey Moore are dancing to Diana Washington's This Bitter Earth. In those moments, one gains a sense of the way in which Charles Burnett of the way in which Charles Burnett has managed to,

has invented a way of structuring the way blackness can appear for film, which is not the same as how blackness appears on film or to film. In other words, it's as if the racialization of film from its inception in this moment is both revealed and staged and abolished.

And I would exchange most of 20th century cinema for that scene. Thank you. Thank you Kojo. That's a very beautiful rounding off. I have one more question and then I'm afraid we have to round things up. And this is this this question is rather epic. So I'm I'm hoping we don't I mean, I hope we can deal with it in the time that we have. And it's from Eleanor.

and Eleanor says I've been thinking about the humans move to Mars in xenogenesis and climate change discourse of the there is no planet B in inverted commas also with Elon Musk's desire to colonize Mars I told you it had an epic dimension I wonder Eleanor continues if you had any thoughts and comments on this entanglement of fiction our present and probable future has. Have either of you any comments or ideas to end our conversation tonight, our amazing conversation that might bring together the planetary and xenogenesis

and Elon Musk and our fictional futures. Sorry, Eleanor, I'm paraphrasing your question. Andrea, the reason I'm hesitating, because it's almost too obvious, right? fantasies of colonization and extraction of outer space, which then connects to these 1950s colonial, you know, Asimov and others, you know, also describing the future as, you know, colonization. So yeah, it's difficult because it's, and there is also Musk is also of a generation of this generation. One of many now that grew up with Star Trek

and now that's what they're doing. I can't, you know, I can't say anything intelligent about it because it's so preposterous and so obvious. And so, you know, not, you know, so separate from, I think what we, what becomes possible and thinkable when, you know, even the conversation, the conversation with Fred, that the previous conversation with Fred and the discussion of, you know, Lilith predicament, right? It's a different kind of predicament, but Lilith predicament, which in that study of colonization, totally shifts how one think about the encounter, you know, either the going to another planet

and even the violence that is attached to that move into going to another planet and taking it over and, you know, conquering it. We can't simply say that, you know, it's just like 1492, no. Butler provides us something else to think with. But Musk, you know, it is just that, like 1950s or, you know, Star Trek, not the next generation, because that was the multicultural one, but the cowboy one, the first one, first version of the series. So, yeah, I'll be quiet and let Kojo, I'm sure you have something amazing to say about this. Thank you. I think I wonder if Eleanor hasn't brought together

the parables and the trilogy. As far as I remember, it's the parables in which Mars plays the major role. In Xenogenesis trilogy it's always about the Owen Kali that will stay on the ship, the Owen Kali that will return to earth, and the Owen Kali that will head off other planets. So there's not a bifurcation but a trifurcation. The Owen Kali will split in three ways and they always already have. The Owen Kali that we meet are the outcomes of this three-way splitting. The process is already underway and it's the question of Mars, as I think is correct,

plays more of a role in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, in which Mars plays the role of this kind of um this vector that that pulls earth seed forward so that earth seed operates on the you know the desk you know earth's destiny among the stars has a martian vector but i think what's crucial for us is that um octavia butler worked on that third part um parable the trickster She wrote many versions of that and rejected them as too pessimistic, even for her. And what happens, what one can gather from different accounts of the many, many, many drafts and versions that Butler worked on

of Power of the Trickster was that the Earthseed colonists arrive on Mars and find Mars not just inhospitable, but actively anathema to all of their imaginations all of their imaginations of settlement and their imagination of the frontier. And in many different versions they are overcome and beset by trials, tribulations and tournaments that defeat them. And so I think of Power of the Trickster, this unpublished novel,

as Butler's confrontation with the limits of the frontier imagination. Butler continually foresaw the idealizations and the kind of the colonial structure of space exploration and it's as if in this volume that she, is it unfortunate that she didn't complete it? In a way, could this volume have been the volume that finally, or that finally

confronted the cruel optimism of the frontier imaginary? It's extraordinary to think of a text to a text whose antipathies and whose animosities and whose violences actually confronted Butler herself. It's as if it's a thought experiment that confronted her with the implications of all her other thought experiments. And so she withdrew it from publication, you know, and that's as and that's has has left us

to in a way complete the work because the I think part of the project is to demoralize and to to disenchant the kinds of frontier imagination and dreams of space settlement that platform fascists like Elon Musk regularly inflate and animate. And so I think a lot about Powerponga Trickster, that unpublished third volume and how it destroyed Elon Musk in advance, how it destroyed his fantasies before he had them.

Well, I think that's a fairly extraordinary place to end. um uh thank you uh Anjali Kojo Denise it's been an extraordinary conversation it's been extraordinary to listen to you um um and uh thank you Lux for hosting us so generously and um and yeah in such hospitable way as ever and thanks everybody for listening on a Sunday night although I should return to Anjali's introduction which is good morning good afternoon good evening or good night or whatever it is and thank you very much everybody if just to say if if you

have since that last question, if you put questions into Vimeo, we will collect them and we're very happy to distribute them to people, to the Otlif collective to take up. I'm saying that, I'm hoping that's okay with the Otlif collective, I'm looking at them on my screen here. it's fine it's fine it's fine so so just just to say that it you know if if if because of time if you haven't got a chance to ask your question or make your comment then of course we can pick them up um at another we can we can respond to them um in in a in a time when we have a bit more time what am i talking about undermining all your highly sophisticated understandings of temporality

here anyway thank you very much it's been extraordinary thanks for everybody attending and um it yeah you're extraordinary angeli did you want to say something yes i just wanted to say that um yes my crazy story about mars um had another point but we'll leave that for enough for a book i just wanted to say thank you denise for joining us in this kind of ongoing um conversation that we have um in our lives with our work with our mutual practices um i think you know we we're always grateful we always learn so much um and i also wanted to say that we are going to be hosting another dxg event um i think the next one is in um going to be with you andrea um as part of bxnu

It is going to be actually in the really existing place called Newcastle upon time. And we are also hoping to host another live event of DXG in May, which we will be organising soon. We're just waiting for a few more elements to come together and it will be on our website. We've created a website called the Department of Xenogenesis, where we are going to be putting all the recordings of the events up and we are going to be also publishing or putting together a list, a library of materials and more information about future events. So we're just

putting that all together right now and we'll let people know. Otholith Group website does have a mailing list so if you want to put your names down on that, people who are still here, you can. I just wanted to say thank you also to Andrea, a big thank you always, forever. Thank you to Lux, Seijun and Seijun and Ben. And Denise, I believe. Yes, I just want, I would like to say thank you. Thank you for putting the department together. Thank you for inviting me to come and talk to you. It's always like a pleasure for the imagination and the brain to have conversations with the two of you.

Thank you, Andrea, for moderating and for the Q&A everyone who came was was fun for a beginning of Sunday afternoon here on the west coast of Canada. Yeah so I'll second and or maybe I'll third, I'll third what everybody has said. So that's my my triple thanks to Lux for their patience and their brilliance at putting this all together and making it look easy. Thanks to Andrew BXNU for patience and patience beyond the call of duty. And most of all to Denise for her writing and inspirational thinking. And if you think this

was exciting wait until you read unpairable debt because it's beyond let me just i'll just i'll just i won't don't even get me started on how on how incredible that volume is so um yeah just wait till it appears that's all so thanks everybody um this was dxg number three and look forward to seeing you all for DXG number four. Thanks for sharing up and good night.