In Otobong Nkanga, Luster and Lucre. Eds. Clare Molloy, Philippe Pirotte and Fabian Schöneich.

Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016 Blacklight

What figuring of the scene of economic value can reach to the deepest
layers of existence, where Otobong Nkanga’s “spaces of shine” and
“places of obscurity” are always already implicated? Looking at images
of her installation In Pursuit of Bling (2014), and her comments on the
ubiquity of green domes in European cities, I recalled that the same
copper used in them is found, hidden from view, in the tiny wires in my
laptop and the plumbing in my kitchen. Today’s most popular commodi-
ty, copper, nourishes global capital as it siphons labor power expended in
its production through juridical and economic architectures of colonial
and racial violence—namely practices and methods of governance effect-
ing displacement, dispossession, and death. Now, if, as Marx postulates,
it is the very “nature” of the commodity to hide the social relations under
which it emerges, I take Nkanga’s reflections as an invitation to explore
visibility’s work, to attend to what it does both in regard to what shines/
has value and to that which does not, in what (like Africans/“Negroes,”
for Hegel) is just a thing, or an “object of no value.”

I. Everyone knows, whether or not they have actually danced to Donna

Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, on dance floors too small for disco’s
most expansive moves, that without blacklight the scene would lose
eighty percent of its glamour. Though invisible to the human eye, ultra-
violet radiation turns opaque things into luminous ones. In other words,
blacklight does not illuminate: it makes things emanate or shine. For this
reason, it is perfect for the task of imaging a reading procedure which,
instead of relying on transparency, moves to dissolve it: a compositional
practice designed to decompose the abstract forms (the concept and
categories) of the understanding and reflection which both presuppose
and rehearse the occlusion of colonial violence and indifference to racial
violence. Here I activate blacklight as a poethical tool, a black feminist
device for tracing correspondences that can expose how the juridical
and economic architectures of colonial/racial violence enter into the
very construction of the analytical tools available to critiques of global
capital. Focusing blacklight on the already known, I hope to clear the
grounds for a recomposition of the ethical scene of value, thereby open-

244 Preparatory drawing for The Weight of Scars, 2015 245 Blacklight Denise Ferreira da Silva

ing the way for a thinking that exposes the deeper implication of the
“spaces of shine” and “places of obscurity” which Otobong Nkanga ex-
poses in her work. In this experiment, instead of offering an alternative
descriptor of the scene of value, blacklight transudes historical materi-
alist concepts and categories and reaches the depths of Marx’s account
of value. In doing so, it allows me to dive in, as it makes shine the ob-
scurations that maintain transparency as the proper descriptor of modern
onto-epistemological devices (concepts and categories), ethical grammar
(principles and procedures), and juridic-economic architectures (practic-
es and methods).
II. Let me begin by reading Marx’s presentation of his theory of value in
Chapter 7 of the first volume of Capital, where he describes “labor pro-
cess,” “production as creation of value,” and “capitalist production”: 1
1 Parenthetical references are
to Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I:
The Process of Production of By the general law of value, if the value of 40 lbs. of yarn = the value of 40
Capital, trans. Samuel Moore lbs. of cotton + the value of a whole spindle, i.e., if the same working-time is
and Edward Aveling, ed. required to produce the commodities on either side of this equation, then 10
Frederick Engels (London:
lbs. of yarn are an equivalent for 10 lbs. of cotton, together with one-fourth of
Lawrence & Wishart, 1996).
a spindle. In the case we are considering the same working-time is materialized
in the 10 lbs. of yarn on the one hand, and in the 10 lbs. of cotton and the frac-
tion of a spindle on the other. (197)
Evidently, this example already presupposes Marx’s discussion of the
“labor process” – that is, “human action with a view to the production of
use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements,”
which is the same regardless “of the social conditions under which it is
taking place, whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the anxious
eye of the capitalist.” (194) Now “production as creation of value,” he
argues, relies on the figuring of labor as a general activity, which materi-
alizes itself in/as time:
While the laborer is at work, his labor constantly undergoes a transformation:
[…] from being the laborer working, it becomes the thing produced. At the end
of one hour’s spinning, that act is represented by a definite quantity of yarn; in
other words, a definite quantity of labor, namely that of one hour, has become
embodied in the cotton. We say labor, i.e., the expenditure of his vital force
by the spinner, and not spinning labor, because the special work of spinning
246 Blacklight Denise Ferreira da Silva
counts here, only so far as it is the expenditure of labor-power in general, and
not in so far as it is the specific work of the spinner. (199)
Easily noticed in Marx’s account is how self-determination guides his
theory, beginning with his postulate that the human worker alone (not
the spider, nor the bee) is capable of anticipating, therefore of deciding
and designing the outcome of his/her action. Nevertheless, to better
appreciate how it manifests and is manifested as an effect of transparency,
let me turn to the visible elements (with analytical import) in his theory.
Of central importance is time, the category that allows Marx to design
concepts and categories that do not violate transparency. In the account
of value, it takes two forms: (a) as an ethical descriptor—the actual time
living labor uses to (create values) transform raw material (cotton) into
the yarn (use value) and (b) as a quantity (a concept and abstract mea-
sure), the social labor which Marx chooses as determining commodity
exchange value. Though they enter into the value of the yarn, in the
example above, the past [dead] labor expended in the production of
raw material (cotton-planting and cotton-picking) does not count in
the creation of the value of the commodity (yarn), because the cotton
becomes “an absorbent of a definite quantity of labor.” (200)
After establishing that living labor creates value, in other words,
something that it is more than the “sum of values” of the instruments and
raw material that enter in its production (198), Marx moves to explain
“capitalist production,” through the category of surplus value. (204)
Here the equation changes because time and labor are equivalent to an-
other abstract entity, namely money:
But the sum of the values of the commodities that entered into the process
amounts to 27 shillings. The value of the yarn is 30 shillings. Therefore the
value of the product is 1/9 greater than the value advanced for its produc-
tion; 27 shillings have been transformed into 30 shillings; a surplus-value of
3 shillings has been created. The trick has at last succeeded; money has been
converted into capital. (205)
For profit—money that is always already capital—is nothing more than the
difference between the value created by living labor (exchange value), the
value of raw material and instruments, and the value of labor (use-value).
Exploitation, the appropriation of part of the value created by labor, also
247 Blacklight Denise Ferreira da Silva
specifies the social ( juridical) conditions for “capitalist production”: the
capitalist appropriates a value created that is above the wage the worker
receives, as established in the contract of the sale of his/her labor power.
The decomposition of Marx’s account of value identified the many
terms that enter in the account of value, both those that explain it (social
labor, value, exchange value, use-value, surplus-value, capital) and those that
do not (raw material and instrument of production). At this juncture,
the critical racial or postcolonial analyst would move on to demonstrate
what these concepts and categories do and do not capture about the ju-
ridic-economic and ethical operations (conditions for creation and appro-
priation of value) of colonial/ racial power.
III. Focusing blacklight on these terms de-emphasizes the already
bright, transparent (italicized) concepts and categories; they lose
analytical privilege while raw material, for instance, becomes luminous.
Once that happens, it is possible to return to Marx’s theory of value, and
trace the trajectory of cotton beyond the confines of Chapter 7.
What can cotton show us about capitalist production? Labor process, the
“expenditure of vital force,” remains the same, regardless “of the social
conditions under which it is taking place,” Marx noticed, “whether un-
der the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the anxious eye of the capitalist.”
Nevertheless, slave “labor process” does not enter in the value of the
commodity, hence has no importance to capital accumulation. Not only
because the labor process expended in the creation of cotton “vanishes”
in the production of the yarn. More importantly, slave labor does not
even count as “past [dead] labor” because, while it is a “process of cre-
ation of value,” its juridical conditions do not allow for the appropriation
of surplus-value—for the owner, all the value the slave creates in the
labor process is profit, which was already anticipated in the price
s/he paid for the slave.
Let’s figure this in terms of modes of appropriation of the value of
a commodity, namely exploitation (of surplus value) and expropriation
(of total value). To draw out the distinction, attention must be given to
deeper layers of connection, which are not spatio-temporal, but elemen-
tal, that is to say, which attend to links involving extra- and intra-textual
basic components. Extra-textually, a distinction between exploitation and
248 Blacklight Denise Ferreira da Silva
expropriation becomes evident if one recalls that all the cotton used in
British factories at the time Marx was writing was produced in colonies,
such as India and the Southern United States. Intra-textually, Marx sig-
nals when bringing colonial referents—colonial lands, slave labor, etc.—
into his argument, in other sections, chapters, and volumes of Capital,
such as his recurring comparisons between wage labor and slave labor.
Appropriation of surplus value, he teaches us, happens under conditions
of equality and liberty:
He and the owner of money meet in the market, and deal with each other as on
the basis of equal rights, with this difference alone, that one is buyer, the other
seller; both, therefore, equal in the eyes of the law. The continuance of this re-
lation demands that the owner of the labor-power should sell it only for a defi-
nite period, for if he were to sell it rump and stump, once for all, he would be
selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner
of a commodity into a commodity. He must constantly look upon his
labor-power as his own property, his own commodity, and this he can only do
by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily, for a definite period of
time. By this means alone can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership
over it. (178)
Exploitation, then, refers to the social ( juridical) conditions for capital
accumulation, which include the form of contract, in which the worker
consents to receive a certain amount of money (wage) for laboring a num-
ber of hours of her day, which is less than the value she creates during
these hours. Expropriation (in my use here) refers to social ( juridical)
conditions—colonial domination—marked by violence. Under the “slave
owner’s brutal lash,” slave workers in Virginia’s plantations applied their
vital force (planting and picking the cotton grown) on native lands (ex-
propriated at gun point) to create the cotton used in the production of
the yarn by English living labor. However, even though her labor creates
cotton, a commodity, it does not count in the calculation of profit—the
money which is converted into more capital. Instead, Marx describes the
price of slave laborer as a loss:
The price paid for a slave is nothing but the anticipated and capitalized sur-
plus-value or profit, which is to be ground out of him. But the capital paid for
the purchase of a slave does not belong to the capital, by which profit, surplus
249 Blacklight Denise Ferreira da Silva

2 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.
III: The Process of Capitalist
Production as a Whole, trans.
Samuel Moore and Edward
Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels
(London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1998), 795.
labor, is extracted from him. On the contrary. It is capital, which the slave
holder gives away, it is a deduction from capital, which he has available for
actual production. […] The best proof of this is the fact, that it does not come
back into existence for the slave holder or land owner, until he sells the slave
or the land once more. 2
Because the juridical form of title mediates the master-slave relation, the
master owns the slave’s labor, that is, she appropriates the total value
created by his vital force. Since there is no difference between value
created and the price paid for labor time, slave labor does not count
even as dead labor—materialization of labor from which surplus value
has already been appropriated. The slave labor expended in planting
and harvesting cotton seems to to count only as raw material—a thing
(natural subject of labor) which has “been filtered by previous labor”—
which under capitalist production becomes “an absorbent of a definite
quantity of [living] labor.” (200) Precisely because the slave’s owner
did expropriate the total value yielded by her labor on expropriated native
lands, the ethical principle of liberty—which equally encompasses worker
and capitalist in the juridical form of contract—explains why slave labor
does not count in capital accumulation. Further, the native lands where
the cotton was grown enter the value of commodity as “the universal
subject of labor,” which provides “things labor merely separate from the
environment,” without juridical mediation. In Marx’s rendering of his
theory of value in Chapter 7 of Volume 1 of Capital, then, the total value
yielded by the creative capacity of American natives’ lands and Afri-
cans’ enslaved bodies—both expropriated through the violent methods and
practices characteristic of colonial juridical architectures—vanishes into/
as raw material.
IV. A black feminist reading device, blacklight focuses on the elusive,
the unclear, the uncertain, in order to look for deeper correspondences,
precisely the ones that modern philosophers, from Descartes to Kant,
have disavowed. By illuminating cotton’s links to colony, it makes it pos-
sible to read, through raw material, the colonial as a moment of creation
of capital. It shows how expropriation authorized by the juridical form of
title, which also functions as an ethical signifier (bondage), renders con-
ceptually irrelevant to capital accumulation the labor that produces the
250 Blacklight Denise Ferreira da Silva
bloody commodities that enter production as raw material. When black-
light guides the gathering and shuffling of the elements of historical ma-
terialism, the juridic-economic architectures of colonial/racial violence
come into the light. What blacklight makes visible in the already known
are the obscurations that are condition of possibility for global capital.
It does so by showing that commodities, such as cotton in the colonial
past (and copper in its global present), are not a specimen of other (alien
or old) social relations or modes of production—which capital must sub-
sume, articulate, or replace. For these commodities transited between
Europe and its colonies through modern juridical devices, such as title
and terra nullius, that made possible the expropriation of the total value
yielded by native lands and slave labor, and through the juridical devic-
es, enclosure and contract, that made possible the exploitation of factory
workers in English textile factories.
Returning to Otobong Nkanga’s work it is not difficult to imagine
what would become illuminated in today’s global scene of economic
value. For blacklight targets the concepts, theories, and discourses that
both presume and reproduce the obscuring of the deep entanglement of
“places of obscurity” and “spaces of shine.” How deeply entangled this
text already is with those who live and die in Southwest DRC, even
before I speculate about Katanga Mining Ltd and its 2015 revenue of
US$597.2 million from its copper mines in the DRC, 3 possibly in part
due to my purchase of the shiny MacBook I am using to write this piece:
3 Katanga Mining Limited,
profit derived from the expropriation of labor and copper facilitated
Annual Information Form
by a 20-year old war, which has displaced 2.7 million people and sent 2015, March 30, 2016,
450,000 seeking refugee in other countries, including Canada where 7, Katanga Mining Limit-
ed website, http://www.
I live now. A bloody colonial conflict, the latest in the timeline of colo-
katangamining.com/~/me-
nial violence installed by King Leopold of Belgium when in 1885 he dia/Files/K/Katanga-min-
was given ownership of the land he named Congo Free State. ing-v2/investor_relations/
annual-info-forms/aif-2015/
Perhaps blacklight can never become more than a trick, an analytical
aif-2015.pdf, accessed
ruse. It does not need to be much more: it is just one possible response November 15, 2016.
to Ng ũ gĩ wa Thiong'o’s advocacy of the decolonization of the mind.
Blacklight muddles the scene of transparency, thus releasing the imagi-
nation to infiltrate metaphysics of principles and expose the effects of
its attendant reliance on necessity (in logic and mathematics). Since it
dissolves the pillars of categorical thinking, blacklight prepares the
251 Blacklight Denise Ferreira da Silva

4 For a discussion of separa-
bility, see Denise Ferreira da
Silva, “On Difference With-
out Separability,” in 32nd
Bienal de São Paulo – Incer-
teza Viva, edited by Jochen
Volz and Júlia Rebouças (São
Paulo: Fundação Bienal de
São Paulo, 2016).
ground for a metaphysics of elements and related modalities of reading
and for an imaging the world and its existents in which reflection gives
in to the imagination, and thinking finally realizes the shallowness of
separability 4 —something the science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler de-
scribes in her novel Kindred—and attends to implicated existence, there
at the deepest, darkest depths of the matter that always composes and
connects everything, anywhere, everywhere, immediately and instanta-
neously.
252 Blacklight Denise Ferreira da Silva
Schwarzlicht
Welch eine Anordnung des ökonomischen Werts kann bis zu den tiefsten
Schichten der Existenz reichen, auf die durch Otobong Nkangas „spaces of
shine“ und „places of obscurity“ („Glanzräume“ und „Dunkelräume„“) bereits
hingewiesen wird? Nachdem ich die Bilder ihrer Installation In Pursuit of Bling
(2014) im Kontext ihrer Gedanken zu der Allgegenwärtigkeit grüner Dome
in europäischen Städten betrachtet hatte, fiel mir erneut ein, dass das ihnen
elementare Kupfer ebenso die dem Blick entzogene Grundlage der winzigen
Drähte in meinem Laptop und der Rohre meiner Küche bildet. Das Kupfer ist die
heutzutage verbreitetste Ware, sie nährt das globale Kapital, indem sie die in
ihrer Produktion aufgebrachte Arbeitskraft mittels einer rechtlich und wirtschaft-
lich gesicherten Systemarchitektur kolonialer und rassistischer Gewalt absaugt,
das heißt durch eine Regierungs- und Regulierungspraxis und Methodik, die
Verdrängung, Enteignung und Tod nach sich zieht. Wenn es nun, wie es Marx
postuliert, in der „Natur“ der Ware selber angelegt ist, die gesellschaftlichen
Bedingungen ihrer Entwicklung zu verbergen, so begreife ich Nkangas Reflexi-
onen als eine willkommene Aufforderung, die Arbeit der Sichtbarkeit zu erfor-
schen, was sie aus dem macht, was glänzt und Wert besitzt und dem, was nicht
glänzt, das (wie Afrikaner/„Neger“ laut Hegel) nur ein Ding ist, mithin ein
„wertloses Objekt.“
I. Nicht jeder hat schon einmal zu Donna Summers Love to Love You Baby auf
zu kleinen Tanzflächen getanzt, die das Repertoire der Tanzfiguren des Disko
beschränken. Aber man weiß trotzdem, dass es ohne Schwarzlichtbeleuchtung
achtzig Prozent seines Zauberglanzes verlieren würde. Obwohl das Licht im
ultravioletten Spektrum dem menschlichen Auge unsichtbar ist, macht es aus
dunklen Gegenständen leuchtende. Anders gesagt: Schwarzlicht beleuchtet
nicht, sondern es bringt Dinge zum Strahlen oder zum Leuchten. Aus diesem
Grund stellt es eine ideale Vorstellungsbedingung einer Lesart dar, die nicht
auf dem Gedanken einer Transparenz beruht, sondern diese aufzulösen sucht:
als gestalterische Praxis; durch sie werden die abstrakten Formen (der Begriff
1 Anmerkung des Über-
und die Kategorien) abgebaut, die als Grundlage jener Denkformen und setzers: poethical im Original,
Reflexionen dienen, koloniale Gewalt und Gleichgültigkeit gegenüber ein Portmanteau aus poetic
rassistischer Gewalt immer wieder zu erneuern und zu verbergen. und ethical – poetisch und
Ich bringe das Schwarzlicht in diesem Zusammenhang als ein poethisches1 ethisch. Siehe Denise Ferrei-
Mittel zum Einsatz, als ein schwarz-feministisches Mittel, mit dessen Hilfe eine ra Da Silva, „Toward a Black
Feminist Poethics — The
Erörterung gelingen kann, wie die rechtliche und ökonomische Systemarchitek-
Quest(ion) of Blackness To-
tur kolonialer/rassistischer Gewalt sich sogar bei der Entwicklung den globalen ward the End of the World“,
Kapitalismus kritisierender, analytischer Mittel einschreibt. Durch das Wenden in: The Black Scholar Bd. 44,
des Schwarzlichts auf bereits Bekanntes erhoffe ich mir einen Freiraum zu Nr. 2, 2014, S. 81–97.
253 Schwarzlicht Denise Ferreira da Silva