I have been very moved by the comments from folks who admit to not understanding, not knowing (or "being in the know") - be it in the context of Denise's text and talk, or in the context of the moving accounts of the "classe d'acceuil." It takes courage to admit that we don't know, but I'm pretty sure that it is exactly there, in the not knowing, that listening begins.
We spoke about the logic of transmission at the heart of so many of our educational models. That model teaches us several things: 1) it teaches us to carry "knowing" postures (these postures are always easiest for those who are already recognized to "hold" knowledge - so White Man will always come up on top in this category), 2) it teaches us to skim and be able to say something "intelligent" based on very little (this gesture is taught to us throughout school when we learn to have to "prove" our listening by "participating" [which usually means talking, not listening], 3) it teaches us to assume that there "is" something to know (rather than a complexity to be navigated), 4) and of course it teaches us to feel "less-than" (i.e., unknowing).
I hope this class will allow us to be in the unknowing together.
In the spirit of that, here are some attempts to connect to my own unknowing in relation to Denise Ferreira da Silva's text "Toward a Black Poethics," a text, as I mentioned, that I had to read several times despite my quite extensive knowledge of the philosophers at the heart of her argument. So if you didn't "get" it (what does that even mean!?) it is because it is a world, not simply a line on a page. Below, I will try to do the same with Wynter. I would love it if you wanted to take the time to respond to this thread with your own knowings/unknowings.
Denise's project, as she speaks of it, is to think Blackness as category: "From without the World as we know it, where the Category of Blackness exists in/as thought - always already a referent of commodity, an object, and the other, as fact beyond evidence - a Poethics of Blackness would announce a whole range of possibilities for knowing, doing, and existing." (81) > "creating another figuring of existence" (82).
As she framed it for me, thinking Blackness as category allows her to ask different kinds of questions than, say Fred Moten, who has a concept of black life that is ontological (a mode of being). Something to keep in mind when we read Fred (this in no way suggests their practices are not complementary, which I believe they are).
In that quote above, we also get a sense of the stakes: can we think Blackness beyond commodity, object, other? A Poethics of Blackness would be one way to do that work.
Speaking of commodities and objects, Denise then moves into the register of capital to ask how Blackness registers there. Speaking across the juridic, the economic and the symbolic she writes: "I make a case for the acknowledgement that the total value produced by slave labour continues to sustain global capital" (82).
This allows us to know two things: that value is at stake in her argument (a relationship between total value and total violence), and that time will also be important (because slavery *continues* to sustain global capital).
On time, value and blackness: "because racial knowledge transubstantiates (shifts them from the living to the formal register) what emerges in political relations into effects of efficient (scientific reason's) causality, its critical tools fail to register how the total (past, present, and future) value expropriated is in the very structures (in blood and flesh) of global capital. For such an understanding of total value requires a suspension of the view that all there is is in Time and Space, as appropriated in by the tools of universal (scientific) reason., the radical force of Blackness lies at the turn of thought - that is, Blackness knowing and studying announces the end of the World as we know it" (83-84).
There are no existing tools (within the philosophical grids of spacetime and the human as we know it), Denise is arguing, for the valuing of Blackness. These tools don't exist because Blackness's ways of knowing fall outside the temporal and spatial grids that would make it legible. Those grids (understood here in Hegelian and Kantian terms) cannot contain the excess that Blackness (as category) activates. This is why Blackness "lies at the turn of thought" and must always announce the end of the World as we know it (for those of you doing extra research or who have read more widely, this will connect to many of the strands of thought in Afropessimism. Denise doesn't necessarily see herself as an Afropessimist, but they definitely would like to adopt her! See Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton).
The "Black Feminist poet peers beyond the horizon of thought" because she is creating (not re-creating) a World (84).
This means that what is sought is not reparations: "By reconstruction, I should emphasize, I do not mean reparation or a restitution of monetary sum that corresponds to that which mercantile and industrial capital have acquired through colonial expropriation since the 16th century. Decolonization requires the setting up of juridic-economic architecture of redress.... we need another account of racial subjugation, for the one we have cannot comprehend a demand for decolonization, that is the unknowing and undoing of the World that reaches its core" (85).
What is sought is the upheaval, the abolishing of structures that are carried by the grid of timespace as it operates (this grid is at the heart of the problem of transmission above where the stakes are always set up in advance). We need a World that is valuing outside of preexisting categories. A World that creates an emergent force of valuation. That doesn't "fit" people into an existing grid. But even more importantly, we need to recognize that some people were never even on that grid (this is the place where black life and neurodiversity meet more intensely).
We discussed the Plenum during the class, a figure that comes from Leibniz's thinking. The Plenum is the unformed, the unorganized, the unthought (86). The Plenum is a figure that allows for the unknowing to begin to find its own modes of valuation.
For Denise, "Time remains the privileged dimension of knowledge and being" (87). Time is here understood as the grid, as the existing metric through which experience is gauged.
Denise prefers to shift the focus from "the Formalization of Time" to the "temporization of Forms" (88) putting time into experience (rather than having time as a preexisting template for experience).
"Ending the grip of Time restores the World anew, from the position Blackness registers - that is, the halted temporality that preempts recognition and opens the World as Plenum, becomes a Canvas Infinita, where the Subject figures without Time, stuck in the endless play of expression, with the rest of us" (91).
What happens where recognition is in the event, in the (lived) occasion of experience? What is born of that encounter?
"A Black Feminist Poethics becomes here in a World imaged as endless Poethics: that is, existence toward and the beyond of space-time, where The Thing resists dissolving any attempt to reduce what exists - anyone and everything - to the register of the object, the other, and the commodity" (91).
Everything matters: this is the Poethics. Here, where spacetime is not a preexisting grid, times and spaces (temporalization of forms) are invented, and with them comes new modes of existence that cannot be reduced to the object, the other, the commodity.
***On Sylvia Wynter (a few important directions) On Being Human as Praxis
>concern with the ways in which the figure of the human is tied to epistemological histories that presently value a genre of the human that reified Western bourgeois tenets (McKittrick 9).
>allows us to dwell on our we might give humanness a future (McKittrick 9)
"The larger issue is, then, the incorporation of all forms of human being into a single homogenized descriptive statement that is based on the figure of the West's liberal mono humanist Man" (23). > Being human must be a praxis! (23)
"How can we come to know/think/feel/behave and subjectively experience ourselves - doing so for the first time in our human history consciously now - in quite different terms? How do we be, in Fanonian terms, hybridly human?" (45).
We spoke about the logic of transmission at the heart of so many of our educational models. That model teaches us several things: 1) it teaches us to carry "knowing" postures (these postures are always easiest for those who are already recognized to "hold" knowledge - so White Man will always come up on top in this category), 2) it teaches us to skim and be able to say something "intelligent" based on very little (this gesture is taught to us throughout school when we learn to have to "prove" our listening by "participating" [which usually means talking, not listening], 3) it teaches us to assume that there "is" something to know (rather than a complexity to be navigated), 4) and of course it teaches us to feel "less-than" (i.e., unknowing).
I hope this class will allow us to be in the unknowing together.
In the spirit of that, here are some attempts to connect to my own unknowing in relation to Denise Ferreira da Silva's text "Toward a Black Poethics," a text, as I mentioned, that I had to read several times despite my quite extensive knowledge of the philosophers at the heart of her argument. So if you didn't "get" it (what does that even mean!?) it is because it is a world, not simply a line on a page. Below, I will try to do the same with Wynter. I would love it if you wanted to take the time to respond to this thread with your own knowings/unknowings.
Denise's project, as she speaks of it, is to think Blackness as category: "From without the World as we know it, where the Category of Blackness exists in/as thought - always already a referent of commodity, an object, and the other, as fact beyond evidence - a Poethics of Blackness would announce a whole range of possibilities for knowing, doing, and existing." (81) > "creating another figuring of existence" (82).
As she framed it for me, thinking Blackness as category allows her to ask different kinds of questions than, say Fred Moten, who has a concept of black life that is ontological (a mode of being). Something to keep in mind when we read Fred (this in no way suggests their practices are not complementary, which I believe they are).
In that quote above, we also get a sense of the stakes: can we think Blackness beyond commodity, object, other? A Poethics of Blackness would be one way to do that work.
Speaking of commodities and objects, Denise then moves into the register of capital to ask how Blackness registers there. Speaking across the juridic, the economic and the symbolic she writes: "I make a case for the acknowledgement that the total value produced by slave labour continues to sustain global capital" (82).
This allows us to know two things: that value is at stake in her argument (a relationship between total value and total violence), and that time will also be important (because slavery *continues* to sustain global capital).
On time, value and blackness: "because racial knowledge transubstantiates (shifts them from the living to the formal register) what emerges in political relations into effects of efficient (scientific reason's) causality, its critical tools fail to register how the total (past, present, and future) value expropriated is in the very structures (in blood and flesh) of global capital. For such an understanding of total value requires a suspension of the view that all there is is in Time and Space, as appropriated in by the tools of universal (scientific) reason., the radical force of Blackness lies at the turn of thought - that is, Blackness knowing and studying announces the end of the World as we know it" (83-84).
There are no existing tools (within the philosophical grids of spacetime and the human as we know it), Denise is arguing, for the valuing of Blackness. These tools don't exist because Blackness's ways of knowing fall outside the temporal and spatial grids that would make it legible. Those grids (understood here in Hegelian and Kantian terms) cannot contain the excess that Blackness (as category) activates. This is why Blackness "lies at the turn of thought" and must always announce the end of the World as we know it (for those of you doing extra research or who have read more widely, this will connect to many of the strands of thought in Afropessimism. Denise doesn't necessarily see herself as an Afropessimist, but they definitely would like to adopt her! See Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton).
The "Black Feminist poet peers beyond the horizon of thought" because she is creating (not re-creating) a World (84).
This means that what is sought is not reparations: "By reconstruction, I should emphasize, I do not mean reparation or a restitution of monetary sum that corresponds to that which mercantile and industrial capital have acquired through colonial expropriation since the 16th century. Decolonization requires the setting up of juridic-economic architecture of redress.... we need another account of racial subjugation, for the one we have cannot comprehend a demand for decolonization, that is the unknowing and undoing of the World that reaches its core" (85).
What is sought is the upheaval, the abolishing of structures that are carried by the grid of timespace as it operates (this grid is at the heart of the problem of transmission above where the stakes are always set up in advance). We need a World that is valuing outside of preexisting categories. A World that creates an emergent force of valuation. That doesn't "fit" people into an existing grid. But even more importantly, we need to recognize that some people were never even on that grid (this is the place where black life and neurodiversity meet more intensely).
We discussed the Plenum during the class, a figure that comes from Leibniz's thinking. The Plenum is the unformed, the unorganized, the unthought (86). The Plenum is a figure that allows for the unknowing to begin to find its own modes of valuation.
For Denise, "Time remains the privileged dimension of knowledge and being" (87). Time is here understood as the grid, as the existing metric through which experience is gauged.
Denise prefers to shift the focus from "the Formalization of Time" to the "temporization of Forms" (88) putting time into experience (rather than having time as a preexisting template for experience).
"Ending the grip of Time restores the World anew, from the position Blackness registers - that is, the halted temporality that preempts recognition and opens the World as Plenum, becomes a Canvas Infinita, where the Subject figures without Time, stuck in the endless play of expression, with the rest of us" (91).
What happens where recognition is in the event, in the (lived) occasion of experience? What is born of that encounter?
"A Black Feminist Poethics becomes here in a World imaged as endless Poethics: that is, existence toward and the beyond of space-time, where The Thing resists dissolving any attempt to reduce what exists - anyone and everything - to the register of the object, the other, and the commodity" (91).
Everything matters: this is the Poethics. Here, where spacetime is not a preexisting grid, times and spaces (temporalization of forms) are invented, and with them comes new modes of existence that cannot be reduced to the object, the other, the commodity.
***On Sylvia Wynter (a few important directions) On Being Human as Praxis
>concern with the ways in which the figure of the human is tied to epistemological histories that presently value a genre of the human that reified Western bourgeois tenets (McKittrick 9).
>allows us to dwell on our we might give humanness a future (McKittrick 9)
"The larger issue is, then, the incorporation of all forms of human being into a single homogenized descriptive statement that is based on the figure of the West's liberal mono humanist Man" (23). > Being human must be a praxis! (23)
"How can we come to know/think/feel/behave and subjectively experience ourselves - doing so for the first time in our human history consciously now - in quite different terms? How do we be, in Fanonian terms, hybridly human?" (45).
I enjoyed this a lot. I feel like once the forced linearity and performance of traditonal classrooms is flattened, my brain seems to jump around in all directions, making connections that would usually be stifled by the intense effort required to follow a one-sided lecture that has clearly been recited a dozen times before.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the reasons I have stayed quiet- I am enjoying the chance to float in and out of the discussion while it activates all kinds of memories and new thoughts, instead of feeling expected to interject and perform knowledge. It's nice to feel more comfortable with unknowing, and to just let the process develop organically as opposed to forcing it.
Just spent an hour responding here, and as I pressed publish it got deleted somehow - more to come....
ReplyDeleteI was at a Contact Improv Jam a few months ago and I experienced an epiphany. We were warming up with a small dance, which is an exercise created by Steve Paxton, the founder of contact improv. The small dance is a conversation with gravity and the vertical body, to do it you stand in one place and observe and allow gravity to act upon your body, which manifests in a micro swaying like a bowling pin does when it gets brushed up against. I chose to stand looking out a window, and so as I was getting in touch with the subtle rhythms in my own body I was also looking out at the world happening. There were two people passing a soccer ball, someone riding their bike, another walking, a garbage can stood still, a plastic bag blew in the wind. Somehow, in this moment my being was struck with the understanding of time being encapsulated within matter and vice versa - I saw rhythms existing on their own (of course also in relation to each other), in what I perceived as indifferent to clock time, to time with a capital T. I really believe that its a distinguishable phenomenon to understand something theoretically, and to understand it viscerally. (( On a tangental note, I find it strange to wonder about thoughts living in certain places in the body, travelling, dispersing, condensing. Its a very complex thing to undue Cartesian mind body dualism on a visceral level. )) This visceral understanding that I had landed on is a key into realizing that there are an infinite number of rhythms that we can attune with that aren’t clock time. It is also about time not being separate from matter - that time isn’t something that is acting upon matter but that it is entangled with and within it.
ReplyDeleteI am speaking of this memory because I am wondering about Denise Da Silva’s sentiment of ending the world as we know it and if this type of relationality could be an entry point. As I attend to the diversity of rhythm that exists in the world, I realise that I am listening for multiplicities of intelligences, ways, opportunities for structuring or unstructuring truths. Somehow when we are not all living parallel to clock Time related to industrialisation related to commodification related to linear thinking, it softens the unsustainable heirarchical ideals of importance that can only be held up by continuous ritual. And so I wonder, what are rituals that we can practice to end the world as we know it? I see dance as one way - sensing multiplicity in environment and body. Reading, listening, thinking and discussing Denise and others has definitely been aiding my transformation. And I can feel it - molecule by molecule - conversation by conversation - undoing my bias’s of western, white, patriarchal culture.