Denise Ferreira da Silva 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value
Here are some notes on Denise's text for those interested.
Central question:
What if blackness referred to rare and obsolete definitions of matter: respectively, “substance … of which something consists” and “substance without form”? How would this affect the question of value? What would become of the economic value of things if they were read as expressions of our modern grammar and its defining logic of obliteration? Would this expose how the object (of exchange, appreciation, and knowledge)—that is, the economic, the artistic, and the scientific thing—cannot be imagined without presupposing an ethical (self-determining) thing, which is its very condition of existence and the determination of value in general.
On Blackness as disruptive force:
activate blackness’s disruptive force, that is, its capacity to tear the veil of transparency (even if briefly) and disclose what lies at the limits of justice.
when deployed as method, blackness fractures the glassy walls of universality understood as formal determination.
blackness—precisely because of how, as an object of knowledge, it occludes these juridical modalities—has the capacity to unsettle the ethical program governed by determinacy, through exposing the violence that the latter refigures. [see racial and cultural difference below]
The Thing:
The Thing, which is the referent of blackness, or that which in it is exposed as the excess that justifies otherwise untenable racial violence.
When taken not as a category but as a referent of another mode of existing in the world, blackness returns The Thing at the limits of modern thought.
Value:
With the consolidation of the Kantian knowledge program starting in the nineteenth century, knowing and all other activities of the mind are reduced to determinacy: namely, the assignation of value that refers to a universal (scale or grid), while the object of knowledge becomes a unity of formal qualities (properties, variables, etc.), that is, an effect of judgements that produce it through measurement (degree) and classification (position).
That is, the assignation of value results from the operation of something which shares in the attributes that universal reason acquired in the late eighteenth century.
Let me briefly elaborate on this by situating blackness in the Kantian design of the modern ethical scene of value. Here, as we know, the guiding ethical entity is humanity, which Kant describes as the sole existing thing possessing dignity, that is, possessing intrinsic value. Among existing things, humanity is highest in the figuring of determinacy because it alone shares in the determining powers of universal reason, since it alone has free will, or self-determination.
Beyond Winter:
My critical move here is not about ideological unveiling (as in exposing how European Man “overrepresents” the human, thus disavowing all other modes of being human); nor does it attempt to delineate an outside space from which to expose that “other” side of the “color line” dividing white/European (human) from nonwhite/non-European (nonhuman). For I am not interested in a transcultural (transcendental or physiological or symbolic) human attribute that would be both the condition of possibility for what is activated in Western European being and all other modes of being, and that which has already been mapped by anthropology, cognitive science, or neurology.
Ethical Indifference:
I am interested in the ethical indifference with which racial violence is met—an indifference signaled by how the obvious question is never (to be) asked because everyone presumes to know why it can only have a negative answer.
Modern Thought [indifference as a moral stance]:
I move to expose how determinacy, which along with separability and sequentiality constitutes the triad sustaining modern thought, operates in the ethical syntax in which this indifference makes sense as a (common and public) moral stance.
as a tool of modern knowledge, the category of blackness figures the operation of efficient and formal causes (that is, anatomic forms and organic processes) in the production of a racial subject destined to obliteration.
determinacy as deployed in Kant’s knowledge (scientific) program remains the core of modern thought: it is presupposed in accounts of the juridical and ethical field of statements (such as the human-rights framework) which (a) presume a universal that operates as an a priori (formal) determining force (effectivity), and which (b) produce objects for which “Truth” refers to how they relate to something else—relationships mediated by abstract determinants (laws and rules) that can only be captured by the rational things’ (including the human mind/soul) “principles of disposition.”
In the modern Western imagination, blackness has no value; it is nothing.
Racial and Cultural Difference:
Both notions are manufactured in knowledge procedures that produce physical and social configurations as effects and causes of (explanations for) mental (moral and intellectual) differences. Further, these procedures deploy the European/white mind as the universal gauge, since it alone shares a key quality with universal reason (or with Hegel’s “Spirit”), namely, self-determination.
as a category of racial difference, blackness occludes the total violence necessary for this expropriation, a violence that was authorized by modern juridical forms—namely, colonial domination (conquest, displacement, and settlement) and property (enslavement).
For the work of blackness as a category of difference fits the Hegelian movement but has no emancipatory power because it functions as a signifier of violence which, when deployed successfully, justifies the otherwise unacceptable, such as the deaths of black persons due to state violence (in the US and in Europe) and capitalist expropriation (in Africa). That is, the category of blackness serves the ordered universe of determinacy and the violence and violations it authorizes.
Equation of Value:
Equation of Value: release[s] that which in blackness has the capacity to disclose another horizon of existence, with its attendant accounts of existence.
Using what I call the Equation of Value, I describe blackness’s capacity to unravel modern thought without reproducing the violence housed in knowledge and in the scene of value.
The crux of this exercise [equation of value] is to provide an account of opposition that figures nullification instead of contradiction.
guide to thinking, a method for study and unbounded sociality26—blackness as matter signals ∞, another world: namely, that which exists without time and out of space, in the plenum.
Central question:
What if blackness referred to rare and obsolete definitions of matter: respectively, “substance … of which something consists” and “substance without form”? How would this affect the question of value? What would become of the economic value of things if they were read as expressions of our modern grammar and its defining logic of obliteration? Would this expose how the object (of exchange, appreciation, and knowledge)—that is, the economic, the artistic, and the scientific thing—cannot be imagined without presupposing an ethical (self-determining) thing, which is its very condition of existence and the determination of value in general.
On Blackness as disruptive force:
activate blackness’s disruptive force, that is, its capacity to tear the veil of transparency (even if briefly) and disclose what lies at the limits of justice.
when deployed as method, blackness fractures the glassy walls of universality understood as formal determination.
blackness—precisely because of how, as an object of knowledge, it occludes these juridical modalities—has the capacity to unsettle the ethical program governed by determinacy, through exposing the violence that the latter refigures. [see racial and cultural difference below]
The Thing:
The Thing, which is the referent of blackness, or that which in it is exposed as the excess that justifies otherwise untenable racial violence.
When taken not as a category but as a referent of another mode of existing in the world, blackness returns The Thing at the limits of modern thought.
Value:
With the consolidation of the Kantian knowledge program starting in the nineteenth century, knowing and all other activities of the mind are reduced to determinacy: namely, the assignation of value that refers to a universal (scale or grid), while the object of knowledge becomes a unity of formal qualities (properties, variables, etc.), that is, an effect of judgements that produce it through measurement (degree) and classification (position).
That is, the assignation of value results from the operation of something which shares in the attributes that universal reason acquired in the late eighteenth century.
Let me briefly elaborate on this by situating blackness in the Kantian design of the modern ethical scene of value. Here, as we know, the guiding ethical entity is humanity, which Kant describes as the sole existing thing possessing dignity, that is, possessing intrinsic value. Among existing things, humanity is highest in the figuring of determinacy because it alone shares in the determining powers of universal reason, since it alone has free will, or self-determination.
Beyond Winter:
My critical move here is not about ideological unveiling (as in exposing how European Man “overrepresents” the human, thus disavowing all other modes of being human); nor does it attempt to delineate an outside space from which to expose that “other” side of the “color line” dividing white/European (human) from nonwhite/non-European (nonhuman). For I am not interested in a transcultural (transcendental or physiological or symbolic) human attribute that would be both the condition of possibility for what is activated in Western European being and all other modes of being, and that which has already been mapped by anthropology, cognitive science, or neurology.
Ethical Indifference:
I am interested in the ethical indifference with which racial violence is met—an indifference signaled by how the obvious question is never (to be) asked because everyone presumes to know why it can only have a negative answer.
Modern Thought [indifference as a moral stance]:
I move to expose how determinacy, which along with separability and sequentiality constitutes the triad sustaining modern thought, operates in the ethical syntax in which this indifference makes sense as a (common and public) moral stance.
as a tool of modern knowledge, the category of blackness figures the operation of efficient and formal causes (that is, anatomic forms and organic processes) in the production of a racial subject destined to obliteration.
determinacy as deployed in Kant’s knowledge (scientific) program remains the core of modern thought: it is presupposed in accounts of the juridical and ethical field of statements (such as the human-rights framework) which (a) presume a universal that operates as an a priori (formal) determining force (effectivity), and which (b) produce objects for which “Truth” refers to how they relate to something else—relationships mediated by abstract determinants (laws and rules) that can only be captured by the rational things’ (including the human mind/soul) “principles of disposition.”
In the modern Western imagination, blackness has no value; it is nothing.
Racial and Cultural Difference:
Both notions are manufactured in knowledge procedures that produce physical and social configurations as effects and causes of (explanations for) mental (moral and intellectual) differences. Further, these procedures deploy the European/white mind as the universal gauge, since it alone shares a key quality with universal reason (or with Hegel’s “Spirit”), namely, self-determination.
as a category of racial difference, blackness occludes the total violence necessary for this expropriation, a violence that was authorized by modern juridical forms—namely, colonial domination (conquest, displacement, and settlement) and property (enslavement).
For the work of blackness as a category of difference fits the Hegelian movement but has no emancipatory power because it functions as a signifier of violence which, when deployed successfully, justifies the otherwise unacceptable, such as the deaths of black persons due to state violence (in the US and in Europe) and capitalist expropriation (in Africa). That is, the category of blackness serves the ordered universe of determinacy and the violence and violations it authorizes.
Equation of Value:
Equation of Value: release[s] that which in blackness has the capacity to disclose another horizon of existence, with its attendant accounts of existence.
Using what I call the Equation of Value, I describe blackness’s capacity to unravel modern thought without reproducing the violence housed in knowledge and in the scene of value.
The crux of this exercise [equation of value] is to provide an account of opposition that figures nullification instead of contradiction.
a) 1 (life) + -1 (blackness) = 0
When simply combined with life, blackness brings about nullification (0); when added to the positive form of life, blackness obliterates it.
Put differently, in (d), life without value—that is, blackness (-1)—disappears with life, and in (e), blackness as a figuring of the absence of form (blackness = 0) disappears with the form (life = 1) and releases matter itself (0).
It is neither life nor nonlife; it is content without form, or materia prima—that which has no value because it exists (as ∞) without form.
In equating blackness with ∞ and capturing the rare (“of which something consists”) and the obsolete (“substance without form”) meanings of matter, I claim a radical praxis of refusal to contain blackness in the dialectical form.
guide to thinking, a method for study and unbounded sociality26—blackness as matter signals ∞, another world: namely, that which exists without time and out of space, in the plenum.
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