So it's been a year since we lost Mark and I know I speak for everyone in the department and I'm pretty sure everyone here and watching this, but I say the pain is still very sharp, you know we miss mark every day in fact this impacts more actually each day that has had such an impact on us as a department you know well beyond Goldsmith well it's testified by the response to this event and the amount of people that have been interested and as I say there's two lecture theaters as well as this one there's still people coming so the memorial lecture it's
It's going to be an annual event. It's a way for us in the department to both remember Mark and to continue the work he did, to reflect on it and indeed extend it. So each time we're going to invite a speaker to engage with the themes and ideas in Mark's writing and as our poster says, maybe even to take the ideas and themes elsewhere as Mark would have wanted. And so I'm absolutely delighted to introduce our first speaker for the first annual lecture. It's Kojo Esham. And when it came to discussing who we wanted to have as a department for the first lecture, it was Kojo's name immediately. Not only was he closest to Mark in the department, more than anyone else, I think,
but also that friendship, that shared history, the ongoing conversation. it seems to me he was a fellow traveller. I mean, in many ways we all were, but particularly Kojo. He was pursuing some of the same ideas as Mark and certainly interested in the same themes. So Kojo Eshin, he's a thinker, writer, teacher, he's a colleague in visual cultures at Goldsmiths, and he's an artist. He's the author of what, to my mind, is one of the most original works of cultural theory in the last 30 years, or conceptual engineering, as he called it, More Brilliant Than The Sun which I know is soon to be republished as well as other incredibly influential writings on Afrofuturism He's also written a fantastic book on Dan Graham
which I rocked my religion which I recommend you all have a look at Kojo's also part of the Otolith Group an art collaboration with Angelica Saga who's here as well and others, and again he's broken new ground with that group in developing the film essay and more generally in a kind of science fictioning of the archive. So the Othlith group, as you know, have exhibited incredibly widely and internationally and they were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010. Okay, so that's enough biographical information, but what I wanted to say is what marks Kojo out, as well as his intelligence and his breadth of knowledge, is his passion and his enthusiasm and single-minded dedication to the ideas and practices that he's involved in. With Kojo, he's always up for getting straight into it, straight in the deep end, discussing
ideas and concepts. Every conversation is like an education. And this dedication and enthusiasm is contagious, I think. It's also something that he brings to his teachings, and I know a lot of his students in the audience here. And that's as evidenced by the highest steam in which his students hold him. In fact, in all this, he reminds me of Mark, actually. there's something that resonates between the two of them something that resonates affectively and I mean that as well as the shared interest in music, film, science fiction and theory, again they're fellow travellers and so it's only appropriate and it's with a great deal of excitement that I want to present to you co-direction to deliver the first of the annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lectures
applause applause applause applause Can everybody hear me? Okay, I'm going to try and speak up. Thanks to everybody for coming along to this first memorial lecture from Mark Fisher. Of course, I'd like to thank my colleagues, Henrietta, Simon, Lynn, Andy Fisher, and all my colleagues here in the Department of Visual Cultures for arranging this and for inviting me to be the first speaker.
So I'm going to talk in three sections, and the sections have a relation to each other, so I'm going to begin right away. I think the talk is between, I'm not sure, between eight and nine thousand words. Something like that. Okay, let's begin. For those of us that are here today, for those of us that cannot be here, for the friends and the loved ones that are listening to or watching this livestream in Geneva, in Berlin,
Cape Town, in London, in New York, in Brussels. What matters today and in the future, at this moment, just over one year after the irrevocable rupture of Mark's death, in his mortal, unending struggle with depression. What matters for those of us alive now on January 19th, 2018 is to work out the ways and the means and the methods for continuing to work in and
with and away from and by way of Mark's writing and his thinking. A thinking which is inseparable from his enthusiasms, from his impassioned thought, from the polemical determination that he brought with him. This is a work that many of us have already embarked upon a work that has already begun, a work that is ongoing, a necessary work, a life-affirming work of thinking and rethinking and thinking otherwise, with the ideas formulated and reconfigured
and exemplified in Mark's writings, his criticism, his blog posts, his mixes, his essays, his audio essays, his interviews. From within this grief, which has not so much ebbed nor subsided as much as it has remade us, We marked us, marked us permanently from within. The useful uselessness of the despair at the loss of a dear friend who was loved as a colleague, as a father, as a theorist, as a critic, as a blogger.
Mark, it seems to me, lived in and loved the self-authorising work of forming groups. The permanent persuasion of gathering people into gatherings. The self-sustaining work of sustaining scenes. He loved when he was able to, to mobilise what we could call, inexactly, the craft of making what we imprecisely call movements, the art of building scenes, the design of sustaining subcultures. He loved to empower and to incubate. He made it seem
easy. Joined together the writers for the Conference on Accelerationism here at Goldsmiths in 2011, for the conference on HP Lovecraft here at Goldsmiths 2012, for an event on The Shining here in this hall 2015, to name just a few, just three, from these small conferences, sometimes just a handful of people, emerged scenes composed of people, scenes that were and that are constituted by people that gather round the interpretation of what a group has listened to or is listening to or is not listening to
or has written or is writing is not writing or has watched or is watching or is reading or has not read an interpretive community that gathers itself that comes into existence in and through the participation and the metabolisation of the possibility spaces opened by concepts, which are charged by beliefs, whose leverage and whose traction emerges from the specificity of each intervention. what feels ever more necessary is to continue in whatever way is possible
what has already been happening in the absence of Mark the mobilisation around the ideas metabolised by Mark and his collaborators to metabolise the egresses required by the changing needs of our present required to work on the time crisis that works on us in order to intervene in the futures whose object we are so as to operate within and to play our parts in destroying the drastically advanced regression that works in and on and through us. What Mark did, it seems to me,
was to consistently and continuously support the building of arguments, the architecture of neologisms, the manufacturing of vocabularies, affirmations through negations, distinctions and differentiations, and stances that entailed submitting everything to the discipline of present realities so as to understand the forces that are really shaping and changing our world, forming positions that sustained the effort to attend violently to things as they are,
without illusions, without false hope. In the introduction to the unpublished manuscript for Acid Communism, Mark wrote this. The claim of this book is that the last 40 years have been about the exorcising of, and here he quotes Marcuse, the spectre of a world which could be free. Adopting the perspective of such a world allows us to reverse the emphasis of much recent left-wing struggle. Instead of seeking to overcome capital, we should focus on what capital must always obstruct,
the collective capacity to produce, to care and to enjoy. We on the left have had it wrong now, for a while It is not that we are anti-capitalist It is that capitalism with all its visored cops Its tear gas And all the theological niceties of its economics Is set up to block the emergence of this red plenty The overcoming of capital has to be fundamentally based on the simple insight that, far from being about wealth creation, capital necessarily and always blocks the production of common wealth.
How to metabolise this idea of the collective capacity to produce, to care and to enjoy. The idea of Red Plenty. of Commonwealth that becomes a position that is lived, an attitude that is shared by those that wanted, by those that wished, by those of us that harbour a yearning to commit themselves, to commit ourselves to the project of building a group position, a position that instituted the nucleus of a collective subject, of a great union. Such a project attracts now students,
and not only students, and not only students here, but all of those, all of us, that align themselves with, but find themselves at odd with their subject. Those of us that find themselves, that is, ourselves, in a struggle with their, that is, our discipline. Those of us who are unable to reconcile themselves to their existence, those of us whose dissatisfaction and disaffection, whose discontent and whose anger and whose despair overwhelms them and exceeds them, and who find themselves seeking means and methods for nominating themselves,
for electing themselves to become parts of movements and scenes that exist somewhere between seminars and subcultures, study groups and hangouts, reading groups drawn together by the impulse to fashion a vocabulary, by a target, by a yearning, by an imperative to consent. In the words of Fred Moten, quoting the words of Edouard Glissant, to consent not to be a single being. As Fred Moten says in a recent discussion with Robin Kelly, the practice of joy is at the same time all about the mobilisation of joy
in the interests of its own self-protection. The only way to protect joy is by practicing it. A joy that is practiced in the interests of its own self-protection. A joy that is practiced by the differentiated positions and the antagonistic alliances and the factional forces of the cyber-goths that move through the calendrical systems of templexity. The cyber-feminists that situate themselves in the time's dreams of patriarchy. The Afrofuturists that hack the systems of chronopower and chronography.
The speculative realists that dismantle the barriers to the great outside. the hauntologist that diagnosed the slow cancellation of the future in order to dismantle its enforced depression the eliminativists that dismantle the coordinates for experience the accelerationists that aspire to decode flows the left accelerationists that seek to build the stack whose platform logics generate our entrenchment the right accelerationists that summon the basilisk the unconditional accelerationists that seek to decouple themselves from the left and from the right the students of black study who argue that quote being black is a thing that you can only do
with others i don't know that it's possible to be black by oneself insofar as being black or black being is a necessarily irreducibly social thing that is general and that is ongoing. The alt-work that write our amorality is not a bankruptcy of ethics so much as it is an emotional discipline in response to global existential threats. A learned stoicism and pragmatism is crucial to hashtag alt-work. the mundane afrofuturists that claim we are not aliens
the near reactionists engaged in promoting highly advanced drastic regression the xenofeminists that announced that xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X and a mobile map this X does not mark a destination it is the insertion of a topological keyframe for the formation of a new logic the black feminist poeticists that know that studying blackness announces the end of the world as we know it the Prometheans that quote
consider revolution not as a passionate attachment to some flash of negation but as a process of undoing the abstract social forms that constrain and humiliate human capacities along with the political agencies that enforce those constraints and those humiliations. The forensic architects that, quote, invert the direction of the forensic gaze that seek to designate a field of action in which individuals and independent organisations can confront abuses of power by states and corporations in situations that have a bearing upon political struggle, violent conflict and climate change.
The inhumanists that argue that the universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand that inhumanism is a vector of revision that relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposedly self-evident characteristics while preserving certain invariances. The Afrofuturists 2.0 that assert the social physics of blackness. The Afro-pessimists that assert that, quote, the slave's cause is the cause of another world in and on the ruins of this one, in the end of its ends.
The black quantum futurists that work on the temporal dynamics of retrocurrences, of backwards happenings, an event whose influence or effect is not discrete and time-bound, but extends in all possible directions and encompasses all possible time modes. The black accelerationists that argue that, quote, Binding Blackness and Accelerationism to one another proposes that accelerationism always already exists in the territory of blackness, whether it knows it or not, and conversely, that blackness is always already accelerationist. the gulf futurists that emerge from quote the isolation of individuals via technology and wealth
and reactionary islam the corrosive elements of consumerism on the soul and industry on the earth the erasure of history from our memories and our surroundings and finally our dizzying collective arrival in a future that no one was ready for. The Sino-futurists that argue that quote Sino-futurism is an invisible movement, a spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals. Each of these neologisms are actually forms of life. Each
of them is the names of and for aesthetico-political positions that operate by disagreements and differentiations, that make claims that must be argued. Each of these is not so much a term as a war of and over interpretation, a stance that aims to intervene in cultural politics, that fashions itself to articulate a discontent, to focus despair and depression into theories that live, theories to live by, theories that are embodied, theories that live in us and through us and with us and on us. To put it another way, Mark Fisher was a midwife. His
His role in many of these movements was not only to write or to polemicise, but to incubate, to nurture, to cajole, to chibi, to mother, to support, to sustain, to care, to practice the collective capacity to care, to produce, to enjoy. And what gives these capacities their force is the extent to which they intervene in a country, this one, and a culture, this one, in which the project of nurturing a culture, the project of mobilizing a term, of libidinizing ideas, of living a theory as an adventure
of thought among our lives is discouraged and disdained by the majority of mainstream culture. Mark identified the widespread antipathy towards the emotional attachments engendered by theory as a permanent component of the class system of the UK. He clarified the hostility towards the sorority of studying together and their camaraderie of thinking theory as a class reflex aimed at demoralising the ongoing work of collective subjectivation. The movements that Mark midwifed were and are not a matter of what critics dismissively characterise
as international art speak. they were, they are a matter of inventivism inventivism that is anathema a nemesis to the world of television and radio and newspapers and blogs and tweets that surrounds us and that ignores us marks joyful, gleeful insistent insistence upon the nomination and the formation of theoretical group subjects offended the empirical ear of national popular Britishness. Neither Mark nor his friends, nor his collaborators,
nor the movements he held to midwife could be seen on television or heard on radio or read in the London View of Books or the New Statesman or the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books or Art Forum or Art Review or N plus one or Hyperallergic or Cabinet. We have to grasp the way in which the value of theory or study has always and already existed in British culture in negative, so to speak. Part of the value of theory as it was, as it is lived and loved and studied comes from the antipathy and the indifference
and the hostility and the incomprehension that it excites, engenders and provokes. This hostility pays an inverse compliment to a group whose presence exceeds its numbers. that's to say Mark tapped into the social anti-sociality and the anti-social sociality of theory thinking with this point between smallness and scale between how Mark empowered small groups of people to achieve projects that scaled far in excess of their number leads me to the next point in this lecture
The unrealised projects discussed by Mark and myself Projects left unfinished, incomplete A book on Jerry Cornelius The gender-swapping dandy of the future from the 1970s Moving through Labrador Grove with his needle gun invented in the 1970s as an open source science fiction by the science fiction writer Michael Moorcock Kanye Theory, a book on Kanye West to be edited with Mark and myself and Aisha Hamid a book on John Comfort's The Unfinished Conversations
a publishing imprint called Redshift named after the novel by Alan Garner It is not that these projects will not happen, it is that these projects have to happen otherwise. From Berlin I emailed the artist and the cinematographer Arthur Jaffer, AJ, to his friends. I wrote AJ. Dear AJ, I will be presenting a memorial lecture on the critic Mark Fisher next week at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I lecture. Mark was a good friend for many years.
I have been thinking about how to approach this lecture. I realised that Mark and I had a number of projects that we were discussing that we left incomplete. We talked about editing a book on Kanye, about co-writing an essay on John Acumpha's The Unfinished Conversation, about setting up an imprint called Redshift. And after a while, what I realised was that I would like to give a lecture that picked up the thread of these projects, but did so by other means and other routes, not exactly by returning to these projects, nor exactly by completing them nor by talking in or from the name of Mark Fisher but by mobilising concepts
that would be asymptotic to Mark's thoughts. This could, this might be one way to tend to the needs of the living a way of turning the time and the task of commemoration towards the present and the future, turning the persistence of melancholia towards the insistence of mourning, a way of turning one's face violently towards the present. I don't know where AJ was when he replied, but he did. He wrote, yes, of course, to everything. I'll put you in touch with GBE. in the meantime, link to LMMD and a work in progress.
Okay, so I'd like to play the link that AJ sent. So could we turn the lights down for some of these? Is that possible? you will allow me to read the conclusion of the email that I sent what I would love to do would be to talk about love is the message the message is there for the memorial lecture not about Kanye West's track, Alter Like Beam, which as you said, was integrated into Love is the Message, the message is death, which was already conceived, envisioned and assembled 80% before Kanye
West emerged. No, it would be a way, one way of thinking of Love is the Message, the message is death as an intensification of effective proximity, to use the words of John O'Cumfer. In fact, this term, effective proximity, could link back to the Unfinished Project on the Unfinished Conversation, and forward to thinking about effective proximity as an engendering of what Laura Harris calls the aesthetic sociality of blackness, of what Frederick Charles Moten calls social music. And from there, it would be a matter of thinking with vectors, as you put it in your talk with Tina Kant, of thinking with love with the message.
The message is there as a vectorial cinema, a cinema of postural kinematics, to quote from Nathaniel Mackey. It is a Sunday evening. It's the middle of 2016. Mark, Aisha and I sit in the front room. I arrange the loudspeakers and we listen to the Kanye West album The Life of Pavlo instead of returning towards the specific details of that specific conversation what if we pivot with and around ultralight beam via love is the message the message is there in an interview with Vicente Gutierrez of Hirey Magazine Mark refers to
Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreaks from 2008, and he said this. I think that Drake and Kanye West are the two most important artists of the 21st century, because they highlight that even if you're rich, things are terrible. Both Kanye and Drake, perhaps Drake even more than Kanye, point out that no matter how wealthy each of them has become, there is still this deep, ineradicable sadness. In Ghosts of My Life, from 2010, Mark elaborated upon this ineradicable sadness. He called it a secret sadness that lurks behind the 21st century's forced smile.
The sadness concerns hedonism itself, and it's no surprise that it is in hip-hop, a genre that has become increasingly aligned with consumerist pleasure over the past 20-odd years, that this melancholy has registered most deeply. Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism, no longer motivated by hip-hop's drive to conspicuously consume. After all, they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted Drake and West instead dissolutely cycle Through easily available pleasures Feeling a combination of frustration, anger and self-disgust
Aware that something is missing but unsure exactly what it is This hedonist sadness A sadness as widespread as it is disavowed was nowhere better captured than in the doleful way that Drake sings We Threw a Party, yeah, We Threw a Party, on the track Marvin's Room from his album Take Care. Part of the project then would be to move with this secret sadness, the sadness that concerns hedonism itself. But in the eight years between 808s and Heartbreak and Life of Pablo, the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent hedonism has become transduced.
And what is at stake now is a work that aims at thinking the relation between hedonism and anhedonism through a black cinema that transduces what Arthur Jaffer calls the power, the beauty and the alienation of black music. and for us the reverse is the case. How to think with and to analyse the implications of the present for a black music that seeks to attain the power and the beauty in the alienation of a black cinema. That is to say the thinking of cinema in and through and by way of the capacity for alienation that is carried by a thinking with the alienating capacities of black music.
It is the cinematographer Arthur Jaffer who, since the 90s, has persistently theorised and practised the constituent elements of a cinematic blackness that escapes from cinema, escapes from television, flees from the gallery, and escapes online only to run from the net. It is a cinema that theorises itself, an image that theorises itself. Love is the message, the message of death is not just or not only what people call a supercut or a compilation film or a video essay. It is a visual study.
A visual study as formulated by Nicole Brennaz is a test of what an image can do. It is a proposition of what an image can do and therefore a test of what a music can do. Nicole Berners' theory of visual study argues that visual study is the study of an image by an image itself and this study of the image by the image itself calls into question the capacities of an image Can it question? Can it doubt? Can it argue? Can it reason? Can it speak?
Such an image is a problematisation of image, a problematisation of cinematography in the present. It is a problematisation that not only implies the invention of a fugitive image, but a fugitive from cinema a cine-marinage an image on the run an image that is capable of eluding the nomos of cinema an image that escapes from the birth of a cinema that keeps up with it a monstrous birth that it holds tight to itself as it flees from a cinema that embraces it it is an image of blackness as a prehistory of a post-cinema as Cedric Robinson writes
from the 1890s into the early 20th century Thomas Edison and his contemporary filmmakers constructed what some have called relatively benign anthropological short films and while it is true that Thomas Edison's racial vignettes had titles such as A West Indian Woman Bathing a Baby 1895 Coloured Troops Disembarking 1898 The Ninth Negro Cavalry Watering Horses 1898 Many more of them bore titles such as Buck Dance 1898 Watermelon Contest
1899 The Edison Minstrels Minstrels Battling in a Room Sambo and Aunt Jemima, comedians all of which were produced between 1897 and 1900 that is to say the invention of cinema adopts and adapts the pre-existing industrial manufacture of the racialising assemblage of the Negro a circulating medium known as the blackface minstrel in David Walk Griffith's The Birth of the Nation in 1915, of which we saw at least three clips at least three sequences in AJ's film, we can see that the Negro is the problem
and the promise of the founding of a cinema without whom there would be no Hollywood no blockbuster, no spectacle the term Negro then stands in as a paleonym as a founding term of and for anti-blackness that operates in and through a system of predicates that supports the conceptualisation of the formation of cinema whose existence, whose reasons for its existence supports itself through its continuing reinvention of the Negro. We can say that digital cinematography inherits the racial regimes of the multiple births of cinema.
It inherits the multiple regimes of pleasure and property that are promised by the racial births of cinema. It's in this context of a cinema that escapes from Hollywood. A cinema that escapes from counter-cinema. an image that escapes from a cinema that is uneasy with the gallery, even as it avails itself of an exhibition. An image that escapes from a cinema that avails itself of the meme, even as it escapes from the mimetic. It's in this context that we can analyse the convergence of Kanye West with the praxis of Arthur Jaffer. Jaffer's recent exhibition can be read as an inquiry into what might be constituted as a
black aesthetic, as an aesthetic that is a retort to the politics of race in America, as a quote celebration of black culture in the material form of the performing body and the political character of being turned into an object by others. so in order to think with this transaction let's return to the very opening moments of Love is the Message the message is there if you remember there are two moments the very beginning of the video there are two moments from an interview that actually lasts 3 minutes 13 seconds an interview that takes place in the afternoon of May 5th 2013
on News 5 television from Cleveland, Ohio. Crowded by eager faces, an overweight white WEWS reporter interviews local hero Charles Ramsey about the morning's dramatic events. Ramsey hears a female voice shouting from next door. He pulls the young woman from the door. She asks him to call the police. She is Amanda Berry, one of three young women abducted and held in a basement in Seymour Avenue, Cleveland, for 10 years by a man named Ariel Castro. And what the film does is reframe the news clip by masking the reporter
and cutting in at 43 seconds into the news clip. And at that point, Ramsey says, and she says, Call 911. My name is Amanda Berry. And then the film cuts to 2 minutes 26 seconds. The journalist has just asked Charles Ramsey a question. He has asked him the following. What are the reactions on the girls' faces? I can't imagine what it must be like to see the sunlight, to be around people. In other words, he asks a question, then he starts to answer it himself. And then Charles Ramsey interrupts the answer to the question. and brings his own answer.
And he says this, Bro, he says to the reporter, I knew something was wrong. And here he rears back and he locks eyes with the white reporter. I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms. Something is wrong here. He tilts his head. He describes a new detail or the rescue. The white reporter strives to keep his face neutral, but he can't refrain from shaking his head. He begins to prepare his verbal exit from the interview, while simultaneously maintaining the microphone in front of Ramsey, who makes a face. He draws down the sides of his mouth like a minstrel,
as if to say, you know what I'm talking about, don't you? and Ramsey's dead giveaway Ramsey's question dead giveaway or rather his answer what he says next is what he says next after something is wrong here is dead giveaway and he repeats it three times dead giveaway dead giveaway dead giveaway and this dead giveaway travels across the mobile phone image that travels from right to left across the crowd across the basketball players in blue, across the opposing team in red, across the opposing audience, following and tracking the gesture of the swag surf that travels across the Howard University basketball game team.
Entitled on YouTube, Best Swag Surf at HCBU, understood as a black variation on the wave, a dance craze, A dance sociality that sways and dips and crests and rides. The soft synthesizer surges. An exquisite track triplet of swag surfing. The one-hit wonder by the Fast Life Youngsters, FLY, from 2009. And as the crooning voice of Kanye begins to sing, I'm trying to keep my faith. The horizontal pan that keeps track with the swag surf for three seconds is cut by the figure of a woman. A woman visibly pregnant.
In a patterned dress. She is walking, trailed by police. The white wall painted lower half white, the upper half brown. It's 5th December, 1969. Deborah Johnson of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party for self-defense is walking down a corridor, a courthouse or a police station. It is the morning after the Chicago police have burst into her bedroom and shot 92 bullets into her room, killing her fiancé, 21-year-old Fred Hampton, chairman of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party. The Chicago police have arrested and charged Deborah Johnson with two counts of attempted murder and aggravated assault.
In three sections then, we have travelled not only across time, but time itself has undergone a reorganisation in which it becomes a frequency that we listen to. It is not only the short span of time in which we actually have contact with each of these images, nor is it only about the listening to the choreography of bodies and violence in music, nor the relation of bodies and movement in violence to bodies in motion through a dance, which is not always choreography. nor is it only the relation of bodies in motion through athleticism nor about the critical distinctions between motion and movement rhythm and measure
and the visual and the pictorial what is at stake is something that Aria Dean calls a black circulationism she says, she writes in poor meme, rich meme. It may seem trite in times like this to focus on objects whose banality is without comparison. However, I think that it also has never been more useful. As black people, we are constantly grappling with this question of collectivity. Where do you end and the next person begins? Faced with the immense pain of watching other black people die on camera.
Our sense of autonomy is thrown. When we speak of we need, we grieve, we hope, we demand, and so forth, we speak of something beyond a collection of individuals and something beyond a community. the history of western thought denies this sort of organisation of bodies and subjectivities instead figuring us all as static even proposing that we all aspire to this static individuation and this is just and all of this notion of a collective body which challenges collectivity
All of this is summoned in Charles Ramsey's statement, dead giveaway. He shakes his head, he repeats the phrase, dead giveaway. The two young white men beside him begin to laugh. He shakes his head a third time and repeats the phrase, savouring it, dead giveaway. He shakes his head and says, either she's homeless or she's got problems. that's the only reason she will run to a black man. What do the dead give away? And what gives when the dead give way? And what gives itself away in death? And in what ways does giving give itself away? And what are the ways that death gives way?
And what is evident to us is that it is not self-evident that black lives matter. is it not a matter of saying that black lives matter goes without saying that what matters now, more than ever is that black lives are seen to matter to state that black lives matter is to presuppose a time in which black lives did not a time when the border between the lives that mattered and the lives that did not mattered to those trying to dissolve the border by crossing from the latter to the former and those seeking to maintain the border by moving with it as they tracked and logged and accounted.
And when was this time? This time was now. In this time when what matters does not yet matter. Is it not a question of matter out of place? is the matter of seeing in which ways black lives are seen to matter. Not a matter of seeing in which precise ways and with what methods and from what perspectives and with what frames and with what words and with what musics and what figures and what scenes of black lives and scenes from black lives and lives of black scenes can be made to matter.
Does it not go without saying that seeing scenes from black lives is a matter of inventing ways of hearing in which ways precisely cinematters continue to matter? An encounter with the unresolved capacity to compose images and sounds that interfere with events, that modify reality. Is it not a question of listening to the ways in which these images listen to its scenes of subjection? I'll end there.
Thank you. Thank you, Koto. It's difficult to talk right now. I think I just want to sit like you all now and contemplate what you said. It's been an incredibly rich talk, a radical one, but
also incredibly caring. So I think exactly what we need on a day like this, basically. We asked Coach before whether he wants questions afterwards and he actually invited questions, thoughts, exactly, sharing ideas. I will share it but not take the opportunity to start with the questions. I will open it up immediately to the audience.