For an introduction to the political orientation of the Movement for Black Lives, see “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice” (2016) →. For a critical analysis of #BlackLivesMatter, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). For an account of abolitionism’s historical role as source of inspiration and instruction for progressive and radical movements more generally, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
See Jared Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology, vol. 42, no. 4–5 (2016): 583–597, 593. I argue there that abolition is not only the historical movement to end the racial domination of chattel slavery and its varied permutations. It is also, by definition and of necessity, a movement to abolish the coloniality of power in the fullest sense, driven by a radical will that is antiracist, feminist, queer, and socialist at least. It is the movement that encompasses—in the dual sense of causing and including—the whole range of left movements in their most radical form and function. It is, or could become, the true movement of movements.
For an overview of events, see “How Are Artists Supporting Black Lives Matter?” The Chart, vol. 1, no. 8 (2016) →.
Tom Vanderbilt, “Darkness Visible,” Cabinet 12 (2003) →.
There is a conversation to be had between what I am trying to formulate (with the help of many others thinking in the wake of afro-pessimism), François Laruelle’s thoughts on “the black universe” (as an aspect of his larger non-philosophy), and the critical interpretations of his interlocutors. Andrew Culp recently attempted such a theoretical encounter but, unfortunately, the engagement with afro-pessimism in particular and black studies more generally is so glib and impatient that the statement fails to be anything except a rather presumptuous and, I have to say, obscurely motivated chastisement. And the treatments of Laruelle and company, though more affirmative, are no more precise. Basic exposition and some sense of rationale, prior to any attempted analysis, let alone critique, would go a long way toward promoting genuine intellectual engagement. As such, it does little to advance any of the projects evoked. Culp, in a sense, repeats Ad Reinhardt’s error (discussed below) in reverse: instead of imposing the false dichotomy of concept/symbol, he assumes it can be bypassed in advance. See Andrew Culp, “Afro-Pessimism as Aesthetic Blackness? Putting the Pessimism in Afro-Pessimism,” NON, January 8 (2016) →; Eugene Thacker et al., Dark Nights of the Universe (Miami: (NAME) Publications, 2013).
Paul La Farge, “Colors / Black,” Cabinet 36 (2009–10) →.
Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, vol. 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218. Reinhardt’s “art-as-art” is not to be confused with the Romantic notion of “art for art’s sake” (e.g., Theophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art). The former is an aesthetic strategy for isolating elements of appearance, the latter an aesthetic philosophy for isolating art from an acknowledged political function. See, respectively, Barbara Rose, Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). For more on Reinhardt, see Michael Corris, Ad Reinhardt (New York: Reaktion Books, 2008).
Michael Sciam, Piet Mondrian: An Explanation of the Work, trans. unknown (Bormio: Associazione nuova culturale, 2006), 137. Also available online →. For more, see Inside Out Victory Boogie Woogie: A Material History of Mondrian’s Masterpiece, eds. Maarten Van Bommel, Hans Janssen and Ron Spronk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 193.
Ibid., 189.
Rose, Art as Art, 86.
Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 192. Taylor, of course, is no folk artist and he is no stranger to abstraction. He is a paragon of abstraction, in fact, a pioneer of the free jazz movement, and for this reason maybe the most central source of guidance for Moten, who considers Taylor to be a uniquely brilliant artist and theorist as well as a representative of the unparalleled power of the black musical tradition more broadly. Taylor’s 1966 magnum opus, Unit Structures, is something like a musical Mondrian or vice versa. For more on Taylor’s life and work, see Howard Mandel, Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz (New York: Routledge, 2008) and A. B. Spellman, Four Jazz Lives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) as well as Moten’s own engagement in his In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), especially Chapter 1.
Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 191.
Ibid., 177.
Ibid., 190.
“For Reinhardt, the multiplicity of symbolic meanings that have been attached to the color black—sinfulness, evil, femininity, maternity, formlessness, and the ‘yearning for whiteness in the West that counters and accompanies these meanings’—are and must be detachable from the absence (of difference) that defines and is internal to the color black. This detachment is in the interest of ‘the negativeness of black’, which interests Reinhardt” (Ibid., 191).
Stan Mir, “And Then There Is Using Whatever Happens: Quentin Morris’ ‘Untitled’,” Hyperallergic, May 21, 2016 →. Morris's statements here may seem to accord with Reinhardt, insofar as both profess a desire to engage the color black against or apart from its "negative cultural mythologies," but it would be a mistake to conflate their respective approaches. Reinhardt takes the contest over black's symbolic dimension, offering either affirmation or refutation of its negative cultural mythologies, to be a barrier to the expression of its conceptual power. So, while Reinhardt does not seek to redeem black with the production of positive images, say, he neutralizes his work as a symbolic intervention per se. And, of course, there is no way to remain neutral on a moving train, as the people's historian Howard Zinn often reminded us. Morris, however, frames what Moten calls "the cultural and political discourse of black pathology" as a structuring antagonism, one that can be challenged and re-signified, perhaps, but not resolved, much less eschewed or evaded. Moreover, that critical engagement with the antagonism of anti-blackness is, for Morris, the very means by which the conceptual power of black is activated, the untranscendable horizon of its creative power. Consider that, despite and across the myriad transformations in contemporary art, Morris has continued to work in black monochrome for well over fifty years!
A. M. Weaver, “Artist Quentin Morris Explores the Color Black,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 19, 2016 →.
Katherine Brooks, “This Is The Last Generation of Scarification in Africa,” Huffington Post, September 23, 2014 →.
Becoat’s body of work to date seems as much an adventure in form, color, and texture as an extended meditation on what it means to inhabit conditions of unrelenting racial domination, in its gendered and sexual dimensions. See, for instance, her entire “urban hottentot series” as well as her pieces on racial residential segregation (blink—‘gentrification’, blink—gentrification #2) and scientific exploitation (soon henrietta come hela, blackness all inside) →.
Hortense Spillers, Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 206. Space does not allow for an elaboration of the several concepts converging in this oft-cited phrase. This includes Spillers’ recourse to the notion of “high crimes”—a political charge brought peculiarly against government officials or others in positions of great authority for dereliction of duty and, in the US context, leading to impeachment—and Spillers’ enigmatic notion of “the flesh,” particularly as it is distinguished from the body as a figure of corporeal integrity and finitude. Much has been debated of late regarding the flesh/body distinction and the exchanges have often generated more heat than light. But aside from the evident theological reference and resonance involved in any conception of flesh (e.g., the flesh viz. the spirit and the word), we would need to think as well on this count about Spillers’ re-articulation of certain arguments from de Certeau, who Spillers cites directly on various occasions, and from Merleau-Ponty, whose “indirect ontology” provides, I think, a background interlocution with Spillers’ most famous interventions. See Michel de Certeau, “Tools for Body-Writing,” Intervention 21/22 (1988): 7-11 and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). The flesh, for de Certeau, is a sort of carnal raw material that is inscribed or textualized into legible embodiment by the range of economic, legal, political, social practices. The practices that produce legible embodiment can also, by that same token, render the body as illegible and formless, i.e., as flesh. The flesh, for Merleau-Ponty, is neither a pre-cultural state of nature nor a degraded (natural) status to which the (cultural) body could be reduced (though he had much to say about the latter potential), but rather a term for something like the fundamental ontological connection of all that exists (and not only all life) across the divisions of nature/culture, self/other, mind/body and so on. High crimes against the flesh perpetrated by the regime of racial slavery might, then, be read in at least two ways: 1) as a crime committed against no-body and thus no legible subject of law and/or 2) as a crime committed against that undivided primordial being which is neither (yet or still) subject nor (yet or still) object. Depending on the inflection, then, differentiation or undifferentiation is the problem. And, moreover, the high crimes allegation would seem rather fitting here because enslavement in this sense represents not simply a violent transgression against another, however severe and permanent, but also a fundamental political irresponsibility toward fleshly embodiment and/or an absolute ethical disregard for the flesh of the world. I note, in this vein, the recurrent use of the term “lifeworld” in Spillers’ writing (from Husserl to Habermas and beyond), suggesting a broader and more sustained critical engagement with the phenomenological tradition on her part that has yet to be addressed fully in the secondary literature. One has only to recall this note from Merleau-Ponty to suspect the richness of the exploration: “Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother” (267). How might that psychoanalysis unfold once it is admitted that these most basic terms—nature, flesh, mother—are the very ways and means for the production of racial difference, and hence freedom and captivity, as such? I hope to take up this and related questions elsewhere.
See, for instance, Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Saidiya Hartman’s contemporaneous Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) elaborates on points found in Butler but also, due to her stronger psychoanalytic inflections and closer attention to conditions of political economic and socio-legal extremity, diverges in her further complication of notions of agency, resistance, and transformation.
Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 2.
This piece was written before I had the opportunity to read Zakiyyah Jackson’s recent article “Losing Manhood,” qui parle, vol. 25, no. 1–2 (2016): 95–136. I take to heart her central point that blackness is not simply excluded from the principle terms of modern human being from the dominant vantage, but rather forcibly included as the permanently degraded form of human animality, i.e., a racist (de)humanization. And so suggesting that exclusion might be a negative condition of possibility for freedom is, bearing this in mind, no mean feat and so may need to be rethought altogether. I hope to take up some of the illuminating arguments and provocative questions posed there in future work.
Portions of this essay were first delivered as a lecture to Professor Randy Cutler's Chroma seminar at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2016. My thanks to EJ for inspiration, direction, and collaboration in the ongoing project; to Professor Cutler for the generous invitation and hospitality; and to the many students and faculty in attendance for very engaging, critical feedback. Any limitations or errors are, of course, my own.