Why rethink aesthetics now, when

catastrophe has become the watchword of

the day, and when all but the most
restrictive pragmatism could easily be
construed as little more than bourgeois

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frivolity? Is this not, after all, the age of
Antonio GramsciÕs Òmorbid symptoms,Ó in
which the many heads of fascism are
rearing across the globe? Yet the fascism
which liberal modernity and civil society
have always required has never abided by
this orderÕs mendacious separation of the
political from the aesthetic. Genocide, now
as before, is an aesthetic project. The
Rizvana Bradley and Denise question, then, should not be why rethink
Ferreira da Silva aesthetics now, but rather how do we
survive the aesthetic regime that carves
and encloses the very shape of our
Four Theses on question? ÒThe quest(ion) of blackness,Ó to
draw my accomplice Denise Ferreira da
Aesthetics SilvaÕs words from my own mouth, can only
be enunciated through losing oneÕs voice, or
rather through yielding to the polyvocality
that is always already the condition of
e-flux journal #120 Ñ september 2021 Ê Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva

possibility of speech. Thus, in writing

together, Da Silva and I have not so much
pursued a theoretical synthesis as a
reticulation, a raveling of the threads of our
thoughts, which already twisted and frayed
in one anotherÕs text(ilic)s. Four theses,
another declension from the Hegelian triad.
Our open proposition.
Ð Rizvana Bradley

A conversation can and usually is taken as

an encounter, a convergence, but one that
might just be Ð and the best conversations
(which are also another name for
collaborations) are Ð nothing more than
that which takes place there, in that
moment, under those circumstances,
Four Theses on Aesthetics

towards those particular ends. This

conversation, our convergence, is not so
much an offering as it is an invitation to the
reader to join in and further it.
Ð Denise Ferreira da Silva

Infinity
The world, as the totalizing onto-epistemology
that is modernityÕs genesis, limit, and horizon, is
a thoroughly aesthetic conceit. To toil within or
rail against the field of representation is already
to be enmeshed in the aesthetic, for it is by way
of the aesthetic that the ontological ground on
which we are said to stand becomes experience.
In this register, Man Ð the transparent I, the
universal subject who would make the world, if

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 02/06

Arjuna Neuman andÊDenise Ferreira da Silva,ÊBlacklight,Ê4Waters-Deep Implicancy, 2018 (left).ÊThe Otolith Group,ÊZone ll,Ê2020 (right).

10.20.21 / 11:50:49 EDT

not just as he pleases Ð appears, apropos Sylvia
Wynter, as none other than homo aestheticus. Re/De/composition
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ Thinking the artwork as poethical, as Òa
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThis is the ontological figure consolidated in composition which is always already a
post-Enlightenment European thought, whose recomposition and a decomposition of prior and
presupposed capacity for self-determination and posterior compositions,Ó requires being poised

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self-development is both indistinguishable from for the advent of becoming as matter, and its
the expropriative displacement of ecological immanent interrogation of the temporality of
entanglement that animates (bio)history, and, forms.1 In contradistinction to understandings of
further, tantamount to the capacity for aesthetic the artwork as an autonomous totality, or those
experience and judgement. that would consign the artwork to some iteration
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ of KantÕs forma finalis Ð that is, the reductive
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe SubjectÕs sensus communis, of course, ascription of a formal purposiveness to the
only emerges through the constitutive object Ð a poethical reading stresses the
excommunication of the Savage (THE provisional ground where questions of form,
CONQUERED), the Negro (THE COMMODITY), the formlessness, and abstraction collide. The
Primitive (THE OTHER), and the Traditional (THE artwork, a singular composite, need not simply
underdeveloped) Ð figures who nevertheless anticipate or reiterate questions which presume
come to haunt Man as the bearers of an the formal principles of external causation
ontological dissonance, an immanent (causa efficalis), interior determination (causa
declension, we might call blackness. finalis), or abstract perception (causa formalis).
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ For these senses, calcified as the only tools for
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhat else can be said about the conquered, comprehending nature (the realm of objectivity)
the commodity, the other, and the and world (the kingdom of subjectivity), have
underdeveloped, besides the fact that they apply sustained the tautology of modern thinking
e-flux journal #120 Ñ september 2021 Ê Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva

to all who do not fall within the spatiotemporal precisely through being rendered axiomatic.
borders of the post-Enlightenment figure of Man, Once released from the anticipation of order and
that is, the transparent I? Not much, would be the presumption of meaning, the artwork
the appropriate answer, if all that is taken into becomes liberated from its representational
account is what is offered by way of the obligations to nature and world. As a poethical
constraints of dichotomist thinking. That is, if piece, the artwork extends the question(ing)s of
the question were not raised about the causa materialis, the undeterminable of
conditions under which the universal protective contemplation. (Re)turning in and as form(s), a
force held by the ethical would be extended to poethical descriptor for existence presumes
some humans (whether that force is bequeathed neither linearity nor its predicates, separability
by the divine ruler or author, in their mastery of and determinacy. The reorientation poethical art
the transcendental form that is reason). If the invites expresses the infinite re/de/compositions
question were not raised, that is, about why that normative spacetime would foreclose.
blackness is so ÒnaturallyÓ visited by total and ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ
symbolic violence. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe axial intensities of verticality and
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ horizontality, the strict linearity, the primary
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhen the categorial force of blackness is coloring, that signal abstractionÕs formal legacy,
confronted with the total violence that its do not so much indicate a restrictive geometry or
Four Theses on Aesthetics

historical trajectory cannot but recall, it cannot truncated chromaticity as an open set, where, for
but refract and fracture the transparent shoal instance, even the fidelity of a line or the vertices
(the threshold of transparency) that protects the of a square may be exacted with improvisatory
SubjectÕs onto-epistemology across his scientific emphasis. The poethical work deforms the
and aesthetic moments. The total exposure of teleological imperative of purposiveness, and the
blackness both enables and extinguishes the racial demarcation of the (in)capacity for
force of the modern ethical program, insofar as aesthetic judgement this imperative necessarily
the disruptive capacity of blackness is a (re)inscribes. The poethical work tends toward
quest(ion) toward the end of the world. the revelation that such an effort to reduce,
Blackness is a threat to sense, a radical discipline, and contain the unwieldy materiality
questioning of what comes to be brought under of the world is always already an exercise in
the (terms of the) Òcommon.Ó If the ordered world futility. We might think both of seriality and
secures meaning because it is supposed to be deformation not as formal deviations from the
knowable, and only by Man, if that world is all the major paradigms of modernist art, but as
common can comprehend, then blackness aesthetic practices which enact the
(re)turns existence to the expanse: in the decomposition of the art historical canon, and of
wreckage of spacetime, corpus infinitum. canonicity as such. Such decomposition is

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achieved not by a method of subversion, but by rejection of modernismÕs gridded dispossession,
the accumulation of surreptitious (re)turns, for instance, which is also a cartography of
which gather ruinously beneath the sign of the disposability, disregard, abusive violation,
authoritative artwork. The serial proliferation of cultural erasure, and social death. However, the
returns exposes the autonomous artwork as very fact that these performances are both
itself nothing more than a re/de/composition, a denied to and refused by blackness throws into

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contaminated assemblage of citations and sharp relief the radical disjuncture between
de/formations. these respective modalities and traditions of
artistic labor. Black artistic labor, which takes
Seriality the fabric and substance of social existence as
The perennial failure of homo aestheticus an alternative means of production, refracts the
requires the perpetual renewal of the aesthetic, conceptual legacies of the autonomous totality
an operation which, irrespective of its beauties of the artwork, and wonders about the image left
or horrors, cannot help but be the renewal of on the retina. Rather than thinking blackness as
catastrophe. But this history of aesthetic difference notwithstanding worldly violence, we
revitalization is preceded and exceeded by regard the serial recomposition and
another kind of innovation, which we may call decomposition of blackness as incitation to an
aesthetic, even as the aesthetic can never utterly divergent gestic imagination. Our critical
account for it. What, then, might open and be attentiveness to these incitements remains
opened by an inquiry into black practices of attuned to a gestural difference that is
seriality? What takes form, or is deformed, in irreducible, both to the serial violence of the
Òthe diffusion of terror and the violence racial regime of representation and to the so-
perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, called ÒpoliticsÓ that clamors for recognition
paternalism, and property,Ó as Saidiya Hartman within it.5
proffers?2 How to come to terms with such serial
e-flux journal #120 Ñ september 2021 Ê Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva

self-fashioning without recourse to an idea of Generativity

the open in which boundlessness becomes only If the poethical artwork is no longer preoccupied
another name for frontier, which is to say an with the perils of departing from the onto-
enclosure, an expropriation, a clearing?3 For the epistemology of modernity, and its rendering of
interminable historicity and impossible history of existence through the certainties of being, then
blackness has always come before the how might aesthetic considerations start from
horizonality of ManÕs freedom, as its effaced and stay with the ÒobjectÓ Ð which is at the same
footing and ineluctable limit. How do we regard time ÒthingÓ as well as ÒcommodityÓ and ÒotherÓ
the insistent and ongoing re/de/composition of Ð without returning to Man or the Subject, the
the (black) figure, in the midst of contemporary Human or Humanity, the Ego or Subjectivity. If
artÕs simultaneous exaltation and reduction or our aesthetic thought begins with the ÒotherÓ as
relegation of the figural to the scene of racial commodity, as Hortense Spillers recalls, does it
representation? How do we comprehend such unavoidably (re)confront the violence that is
figurations as part of a suite of interventions Ð modernityÕs condition of possibility, devastating
an epigraphic seriality, as Fred Moten might put any solace that might be found through the
it Ð which denotes not the refusal of serially figurations of the colonial, racial, and cis-
imposed violence as political end, but rather the heteropatriarchal matrix?6 Does such a thought
reanimate means through which any aesthetic inevitably reinscribe subjugation as origin and
Four Theses on Aesthetics

inquiry into the social life of form must pass?4 horizon? Or does the aesthetic, as thematized in
We insist that, even as such means bear the and as black existence, as a radically disruptive
terrible burden of diffusive terror and the terror ethical orientation, stage a devastating
of diffusion, black seriality cannot be thought of confrontation with modern philosophy that
as reducible to separability, sequentiality, or the ultimately targets its aesthetic, theoretical, and
determinacy of individuated forms and objects. ethical ground? What happens when blackness
In other words, our aesthetic thinking refuses to guides considerations of the aesthetic, the
presume black seriality as wholly coterminous ethical, and the theoretical? Here are two
and coextensive with the serial imposition of propositions: (a) Black Study recalls the sonic
antiblack violence that constitutes the modern and mobilizes it against the discursive closure of
field of representation and the history of form, as blackness in pathology, and (b) in doing so,
if the violent enumeration of black bodies were disarranges the post-Enlightenment onto-
truly a ledger of or accounting for injury. epistemological field. Blackness (as object)
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ unsettles the (aesthetic) ground upon which the
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊHere, black art finds an anticipatory rapport transparent I emerges. For this reason, the
with avant-garde art movements and their analysis and poiesis of Black Existence
respective performances of refusal Ð the challenges the tenets of Social Theory and

10.20.21 / 11:50:49 EDT

Aesthetic Theory alike precisely because, as a
referent to total violence, it breaks through the Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and
Media at UC Berkeley. Her scholarship and writing on
enclosure that is discourse and exposes the contemporary art, film, and media has been published
limitations of both post-Enlightenment versions inÊDiscourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media
of modern ontology, the philosophical and the and Culture,ÊBlack Camera: An International Film
sociological. Journal,ÊFilm Quarterly, TDR: The Drama Review, and is

05/06
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ forthcoming inÊDiacritics: A Review of Contemporary
Criticism. Her writing has also appeared inÊThe Yale
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊBlack Study reorients the conversation in
Review,ÊArt in America,Êe-flux journal, andÊParkett.
the contemporary international art scene, as it BradleyÕs first book manuscript is a recipient of a
introduces to the critical tools of contemporary Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers
philosophy a set of concepts, formulations, and Grant, and offers a critical examination of the black
questions that bypass, without ignoring, what body across a range of experimental artistic practices
that integrate film and other media.
would have otherwise remained the latterÕs
undisturbed Eurocentric core. Black Aesthetics Ð Denise Ferreira da SilvaÊis a Professor and Director of
that is, that which fosters, facilitates, and The Social Justice Institute-GRSJ at the University of
modulates Òblack enunciationÓ Ð signals an British Columbia. Her academic writings include the
other site for the analysis of artistic creation, books Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minnessota,
2007), Race, Empire, and Crisis of the Subprime (Johns
collective existence, and political practice. As
Hopkins, 2013, with Paula Chakravartty), and
such, it provides the basis for a project that Unpayable Debt (MIT and Sternberg 2021). Her
militates against and serially undermines the collaborative art practice includes Poethical Readings
modern liberal political architecture, in its and The Sensing Salon, with Valentina Desideri; the
violent post-Enlightenment configuration and play Return of the Vanishing Peasant, with Ros Martin;
operations, as well as the fascistic doubles that the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep
Implicancy (2018), and Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum
liberalism at once requires, solicits, and half- (2021), with Arjuna Neuman; and the musical Opera
heartedly decries. Black Aesthetics is an Infinita (2021), with Jota Momba•a and Anti Ribeiro.
e-flux journal #120 Ñ september 2021 Ê Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva

utterance that, in its immanent derangement of She is a member of the collective EhChO.org.
modernityÕs grammar, marks and is marked by
the art of passage without coordinates or arrival,
the art of life in departure.
ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ×
Four Theses on Aesthetics

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ÊÊÊÊÊÊ1
Denise Ferreira da Silva, ÒIn the
Raw,Ó e-flux journal, no. 93
(September 2018)
https://www.e-flux.com/journ
al/93/215795/in-the-raw/.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ2
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of

06/06
Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and
Self-Making in Nineteenth-
Century America (Oxford
University Press, 1997), 4.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ3
Cf. Tiffany Jeannette (Lethabo)
King, ÒIn the Clearing: Black
Female Bodies, Space and
Settler Colonial LandscapesÓ
(PhD diss., University of
Maryland, College Park, 2013).

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ4
Fred Moten, The Universal
Machine (Duke University Press,
2018), 230.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ5
David Lloyd, Under
Representation: The Racial
Regime of Aesthetics (Fordham
University Press, 2018).

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ6
Hortense J. Spillers, ÒMamaÕs
Baby, PapaÕs Maybe: An
American Grammar Book,Ó
Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer
1987): 64Ð81.
e-flux journal #120 Ñ september 2021 Ê Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva
Four Theses on Aesthetics

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