Care Syllabus team (CST): We’d like to start by asking you about some of the guiding thematics of this module: poethics, errantry, reproductive labor, touch and hapticality. 

Firstly, this module builds off of your scholarship’s engagement with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s black feminist poethics, and its commitment to dismantling the enlightenment aesthetic imaginary that enables the racial-colonial order to persist, intransigently and unintelligibly, into the present. Could you speak more about assembling a poethical imaginary in your own work: about some of the theoretical or artistic approaches to images, imagining, and the imagination that are important to you as a part of this reconfiguration of aesthetic experience? (In regards to this module, we’re thinking about the poethical implications/resonances in your discussion with Saidiya Hartman in LARB, about her choice to write text over a photograph of a young girl made by Thomas Eakins, producing what you describe as a “palimpsestic encounter” with the image).

Rizvana Bradley (RB): My first sustained theoretical engagement with poet(h)ics (Denise Ferreira da Silva’s black feminist modulation of Joan Retallack’s term) was in my 2016 response to Da Silva’s essay, “Fractal Thinking.”[1] My essay, “Poethics of the Open Boat,” as the title suggests, sought to bring Da Silva’s intervention into conversation with Glissantian poetics, and to draw out the aesthetic and political implications of this philosophical encounter for something like a history of the present. Some years ago I gave a talk at CASCO Art Institute in the Netherlands, where I elaborated on Retallack’s insights, specifically her contention that

“poetics can take you only so far without an h. If you’re to embrace complex life on earth, if you can no longer pretend that all things are fundamentally simple or elegant, a poetics thickened by an h launches an exploration of art’s significance as, not just about, a form of living in the real world. That as is not a simile; it’s an ethos. Hence the h. What I’m working on is quite explicitly a poethics of a complex realism. I suppose also that I want to suggest a “po”-ethos to replace the enervating “post”-ethos we’re stalled in at the moment. With the situation we find ourselves in—unprecedented, accelerating complexity, more and more porous borders—neither art nor theory can afford to remove itself from the new configurations of the contemporary.”[2]

Of course, Da Silva’s reworking of Retallack’s concept requires a radical rethinking of the contemporary and contemporaneity. In my work, I read Da Silva as directing our attention to the manner in which the catastrophic entanglement of the transatlantic slave trade, (settler) colonialism, and the global ascendency of capital render the principles of separability, determinacy, and sequentiality, upon which modernity’s organization of space and time is predicated, utterly untenable.[3] Da Silva’s essay had advanced a powerful critique of the defense of Eurocentrism and the global racial-colonial order by European left intellectuals such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, gesturing to the ways Europe’s so-called refugee crisis was in fact a defilement internal to the post-Enlightenment project, including its historical materialist iterations. In my response to Da Silva, and in my work more generally, I’ve endeavored to theorize the aesthetic dimensions of this displaced internality, which, in this instance, reveals the ongoing genocide in the Mediterranean Sea as bound to the fantasy of pure form. 

In contradistinction to this specious and brutalizing fantasy, I would argue that a black feminist poethics must necessarily be threaded through a “raw materialism” that attunes to the immanent impurities of form. Every image of poethical thought discloses the deformative as pure form’s condition of (im)possibility.  So, to return to the example you mentioned, that of Saidiya Hartman’s encounter with Thomas Eakins’s pornotropic photograph of a young black girl, I was interested in exploring with Hartman, the palimpsestic movement generated in the cut and interplay between text and image.[4] My current research continues to think through these material relations between blackness and aesthetic reproduction. As I’ve argued in a recent essay in “Picturing Catastrophe: The Visual Politics of Racial Reckoning,” the dynamics of aesthetic reproduction within the modern world cannot help but retain the logic of enclosure, even in their most subversive guises.[5]

CST: Another guiding thematic here is errantry, a term emerging out of Edouard Glissant’s work, Poetics of Relation, that tends to intentional, itinerant movement: to diasporic practices that are multiply rooted, spoken, performed, and embodied. Your work is attuned to the discrepant, sometimes overlapping scales of errant movement and political movement. What does holding these different scales together entail, feel like, and promise?

RB: I want to begin from your use of the word “intentional” to describe this itinerant movement, because I think it opens up an important set of questions and problems that are, at times, lost in some of the more romantic invocations of Glissant within the overlapping discourses of the art world and the academy. At a talk a few years ago at The Kitchen, I explored these same ideas with the artists, Aria Dean and Autumn Knight. There, I stressed that the black itinerancy that emerges from and as dispossession always already carries the trace of the abyss. 

When I wrote “Poethics of the Open Boat,” I wanted to convey that to be thrown into “the open boat” is to bear an existence which is unbearable, even if that existence is also invaluable. In many respects, contemporary political discourse requires black radicalism to either submit to the grammar of sovereignty or to engage in an affirmation of itineracy that would seek to expunge its horrors. In my view, neither of these choices are actually available to us. If errantry and itineracy promise anything, it is the overturning of everything. How to live within and as this vertiginous existence remains an open question. 

CST: The “Sweaty Concepts” exhibition at WCMA, which has served as one critical backdrop for this module, is inspired by Sara Ahmed’s concept of the same name: an attempt, in her words, to “generate new understandings by describing the difficulty of inhabiting a body that is not at home in a world.” How have you found Ahmed’s attempt to recognize, revalue, and differently narrate histories of labor and worldmaking important for a feminist scholarship? (For the material you’ve gathered together in this module, we’d be curious to hear more about this in relation to your analysis of Patsey’s fugitive labor in Twelve Years a Slave; and about your discussions with Saidiya Hartman about the history of the general strike.)

RB: Well, the first aspect that I feel conceptually resonates with my work is an approach to the materiality of thought, which as you’ve suggested, immediately brings us into proximity with questions of labor and (re)production, whether such labor is given, extracted, or withheld. The essay I wrote for Black Camera reflects an enduring interest in the movement of a surplus desire, given in this instance as Patsey’s fugitive labor, which is inextricable from the brutal imposition of reproducing the plantation and its morbid accumulations. 

In general, my work places pressure on the phenomenological body with which being-in-the-world is so thoroughly entwined, as well as the racial coalitionism this body implicitly serves to sustain, even within critical feminist scholarship. With respect to the general strike, insofar as we want to ask after its relation to a desire to embrace the materiality of thought — or at least to “try not to eliminate the signs of sweat,” as Ahmed puts it [6] — I think we need to recall Patsey’s example, which is to say Harriet Jacobs’s example, which fashions a fugitive giving and withholding in “the last place they thought of.” [7] What kind of sweat is generated by those who are not so much “not at home in a world,” but simultaneously interdicted from the world and conscripted into the labor of its reproduction? 

CST: In your essay, “The Vicissitudes of Touch” (2020), you explicate what Hortense Spillers has called the “twin possibility” of touch: on one the one hand, Spillers remarks, touch can provide “the most intimate experience and exchange of mutuality between subjects”; and on the other, touch is “the most terrifying personal and ontological feature of slavery’s regimes across the long ages.” Could you say more about your description of this twinning as “entwinement”? And, relatedly, could you share more about how your writing on the haptic as a mode of knowing and sensing has developed, from your guest-edited issue of the journal Women & Performance, “Other Sensualities” (2015), to this recent essay? 

RB: There are many things the earlier essay and the later essay published on boundary 2 online, share. The special issue for Women & Performance, gathered together scholarship from folks who were interested in interrogating the phenomenological valences of literal touch. I was and still am interested in modes of sensing that are not predicated on touch in this restrictive sense, and the more recent essay, I would say exhibits a tendency to think about touch — perhaps out of something akin to historical necessity — as a sensing without aim. I like to think of the boundary 2 piece not so much as a divergence from the original essay, but rather as an intervention into discourses around the haptic, sensuality, etc., that have since taken up, valorized, and circulated these concepts in ways that too often conflate touch with the discrete sense of tactility as it has been codified within modernity’s sensorium, and, furthermore, presume its essentially benevolent character. My original essay on the haptic was an attempt to think about the work of artist, Pope. L, as approaching or performing something like a deterritorialization of the senses. 

The boundary 2 essay argues that touch, taken as a capacity inherent to the human, betrays precisely the degree to which the phenomenological project, which fashions a certain relay between the body and the world as the precondition for what Spillers calls an “experience and exchange of mutuality between subjects,”[8] is predicated on the violent displacement and (to borrow a phrase from David Marriott) disfigurement of blackness.[9] In the boundary 2 piece, I was trying to think about the complex imbrications of these twin valences of touch Spillers speaks to, and their inescapable entanglement with respect to black life. As I see it, Spillers’s formulation places pressure on the historical contingencies that contour these different registers of touch. Such an interrogation of touch might also attune us to the current constraints and impositions upon minoritarian thought.  There is a relentless demand for writing that takes up black aesthetics in ways that are legible within and functional to a political grammar of exposure and resistance, which tends to preclude thinking through more complicated and fraught entanglements with the conceits of the European philosophical project, as well as forms of refusal that exhaust existing political vocabularies. These are question I’m exploring more deeply in my forthcoming book.

CST: In the work we’ve discussed so far, you deeply engage with, expand, and critique Afropessimism’s foundational claims about the singular nature of anti-black violence as constitutive of the human family. How do you understand Afropessimism to be a discourse of, and about, care? 

RB: The introduction to Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms is titled “Unspeakable Ethics.”[10] Those words convey something deep about the project of Afropessimism for me, because part of what this project does is endeavor to provide an analysis and way of talking about the severity and pervasiveness of (antiblack) violence that is so thoroughly embedded in the fabric of the social that it is impossible to render it comprehensible within the world as it is.  What I find to be so important about Wilderson is that he turns his analytic back on the grammar of the social itself, thereby avoiding the dead end of trying to articulate antiblack violence and black suffering as if they could be objects of recognition. 

So, for me, what Afropessimism does is to try to carve out some kind of discursive space for at least acknowledging, rather than pathologizing, the necessarily failed articulation of that violence. In my view, this aspect of Afropessimism’s gesture is a profound kind of care for black people. My current work is also thinking through the racially gendered implications of these questions. 

CST: One of CARE SYLLABUS’ guiding inquiries is “When is it better to care less?” As your work closely attends to genres and gestures of refusal (such as ethics of unforgiveness, performances of incapacity, and rejections of nationalism and patriotism, to name but a few examples), it also pressures normative definitions, imperatives, and interpretations of caring. How do you understand practices of refusal to be enjoined with practices of care? 

It is telling that, during the year that the wealthy world has come to understand as ‘the height of the pandemic,’ speaking at least from the US experience, discourses of care expanded beyond left, progressive, and radical circles and became rhetorically generalized within various institutional responses to the pandemic. This is striking, of course, because the generalization of discourses of care proceeded in tandem with a powerful extension and deepening of what Ruthie Gilmore calls “organized abandonment,” which has always been thoroughly racialized and gendered.[11]  The actual metabolics of care, and the labor, exposure, and exploitation that it is bound up with, cannot be ignored. There still are the people delivering groceries, working in the most dangerous hospitals, in the meat packing facilities, and so on, whose lives are perhaps worse off because of a regime that is all too happy to rhetorically valorize such work as care labor. And so what we saw happening was the magnification of this problem as it was scaled up to global value chains. 

We also saw the flipside: massive Black Lives Matter mobilizations that coincided with coalitional formations that would appear to be rhetorically posing a challenge to that kind of coincidence – of an increasing precarity of a disproportionately racially gendered workforce coupled to the generalization of rhetorics of care. But what gradually became apparent was the extent to which these coalitional ethics have in fact been predicated on precisely such a coincidence. That is, the presumed reciprocity of care proved to be a broken circle, and racial empathy is what stepped in to paper over that schism. If there had been a genuine actual challenge to the organization of the pandemic along lines of racial apartheid, would the massive coalitional mobilizations have taken place? To what extent is the fact that they did take place predicated on the fact that the structure of apartheid was never meaningfully disturbed? These are questions I’m still asking myself, but also questions that partially get addressed in my essay for the Yale Review. 

My point is that the question of caring or not caring has to begin from a very deep problematization of the concept and discourse of care, insofar as the discourse of care is a kind of discourse which coheres by way of racially gendered violence. I say this because, as we know, and as I have written, the abstract figure of the black feminine has always been conscripted as the caretaker of first and last resort. To refuse the conditions that secure the normative reproduction of the socius is to understand that the social world, in all of its iterations, is bound to an injunction to care (for) which is foisted upon the racially gendered and most vulnerable of us.

Notes

[1] Denise Ferreira da Silva, "Fractal Thinking", aCCeSsions, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Number 2 (2016). Joan Rettalack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

[2] Rettalack (2003), 26.

[3] See, also, Denise Ferreira da Silva, “In the Raw,” e-flux, Issue 93 (September 2018).

[4] Saidiya Hartman, “A Minor Figure,” in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019). See, also, Fred Moten, “Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis),” in Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

[5]“Picturing Catastrophe: The Visual Politics of Racial Reckoning,” The Yale Review, Volume 109, Number 2 (Summer 2021).

[6] Sara Ahmed, “Sweaty Concepts,” feministkilljoys blog (22 February 2014), available at: https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/02/22/sweaty-concepts/. See also Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

[7] Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987 [186I]).

[8] Hortense Spillers, “To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch,” There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude, Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy, 23 March 2018, keynote address.

[9] David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).

[10] Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

[11] See Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, “Organized Abandonment and Organized Violence: Devolution and the Police,” The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz (11 September 2015). Gilmore employs a modification of David Harvey’s phrase in The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 303.