Fred Moten, A Defense of Two-Dimensionality

TBA - “A DEFENSE OF TWO-DIMENSIONALITY”, BY FRED MOTEN Good afternoon, welcome to the TBA Zoom room. We are delighted to host Fred Moten, with a conference titled “A Defence of Two-Dimensionality”. This conference is part of a larger and exciting project, organised by Paula Caspão and hosted by TBA, the “Expanded Practices All Over” cycle, a space for a collective reflexion around expanded practices and it was supposed to have taken place April last year, following a workshop. The conference was postponed to 7th of July 2021, today, and it was supposed to happen live, in presence. Well, hopefully next year we will be able to welcome Fred Moten in presence, together with Stefano Harney, for a new conference and workshop organised by Paula Caspão, still, and thus continuing a conversation with two authors who we hope we have time to read and get to know better throughout the years. Fred Moten teaches Black Studies, Critical Theory, Performance Studies, and Poetics in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU (New York University). He is the author of a three volume collection of essays whose general title is “Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)”, from 2017, “The Service Porch” (2016), “The Little Edges” (2015), “The Feel Trio” (2014), “B. Jenkins” (2010), “Hughson’s Tavern” (2009), and “In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition” (2003). Moten is also co-author with Stefano Harney of “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study”, from 2013, and “A Poetics of the Undercommons”, from 2016, and, with Wu Tsang, “Who Touched Me?”. I would also like to call your attention to the fact that this conference in English is being recorded and broadcasted in streaming, that’s why I asked you all to wait five minutes. So, this conference is being recorded and broadcasted in streaming being available live on our Facebook page and at . We kindly ask everyone to turn off their microphones and cameras if they don’t want to show up. We will open for voice and written questions here in the Zoom chat, on Facebook, and YouTube comments at the end. Thank you. I will now give the floor to Paula Caspão whom I thank for organising this event. Paula. Thank you so much, Ana, for opening this today and for all the support and sparkle and friendship throughout this long process of organising and rescheduling this encounter with Fred in Lisbon, or almost in Lisbon. First of all, I want to thank the people who are here, that I can see. I see a lot of people that I know, and although my heart is pounding, because I’m really excited and nervous, as I always get in these situations, I’m really touched. I also want to thank Francisco Frazão, artistic director of TBA, for having hosted the “Expanded Practices” cycles in September 2019, in partnership with the Centre for Theatre Studies of University of Lisbon, and I also want to thank the Centre for Theatre Studies itself, in particular the colleagues and students with whom I have been discussing and experimenting collective studies practices throughout these last years and who make my life beautiful in so many ways. I also absolutely want to thank everyone in the production and communication teams at TBA and the Centre for Theatre Studies. So, now I need to share my screen. Let me start by saying to Fred that I don’t know how to show my gratitude to you for having accepted this invitation, but more widely for the infinite ways in which your writing, feel-think-says, all this in one word – feel-think-says in the comprehension that Adrian Heathfied came up with to introduce your work before your lecture on “Blackness and Nonperformance” at the Afterlives conference, back in 2015. And also, picking from a vast number of reasons to thank you, may I mention the beautifully and intriguingly laughs which you sometimes complete what you’re saying. I fantasize about compiling the laughs from the lectures that are available online, but this would be a bit of an exhaustive thing, to make a song out of it. I want to apologise for having a very bad relationship with formal introductions, partly because I truly suck at doing them, so this thing that I’m trying, by way of obliquity, comes as an attempt to install a conversational atmosphere, or at least a sense of the moves implicated in textuality as social space with a lot of different stuff, rubbing off one another. And this is where I also need to thank the friends with whom I’ve been reading fragments of your works this last month, Fred. And the friends are Alix Eynaudi, Quim Pujol, Valentina Desideri e Joachim Hamou. By the way, the experimental reading we have been doing, has been some kind of prelude to your workshop last year in April, had it really happened. What’s on the screen is an excerpt of a long-term process, a very partial materialisation of it, that I edited two weeks ago, and this is to be continued in many different ways. It’s called “Mute Poem for Entangled Reading”, and it took shape in the folds and interstices of multiple partial readings, re-readings, news readings of beloved texts and images as they played their ways hanging out with us. The texts are by Anne Boyer, Giulia Palladini, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Avery Gordon, Kathleen Stewart, Lauren Berlant, Eloghosa Osunde, Jason Pine, Susan Lepselter, Tina Campt, Françoise Vergès, Saidiya Hartmann, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney. As Valentina said when I finished the editing, it kind of feels like a celebration of all of you, by way of… I also need to thank Vit]oria Auer, Francisco Silva and Nuno Cerqueira, who translated the poems Fred sent us for the program, one with the title “Tiling, lining notes”, translated as “Notas de Ladrilhar, de Forrar”, and two, “Tiling, Limning Notes”, translated as “Notas de Ladrilhar, de Calcificar”, of which I feel like trying a little bit of something: «Tile, or fleck, as if Ladrilho, ou borrão, como se «Daub or stroke, but a cut Manchado ou pincelado, mas um corte «Of blue, flesh cut a glance of De azul, carne cortada um vislumbre de «Blue for trane «In the general murder No homicídio geral «All but mute for Amadou Diallo «You have to get Tens de chegar «So close to see the glance and shine Tão perto para ver o reflexo e o brilho «You get too close Chegas demasiado perto «To see the glint in flames, read Para ver o clarão em chamar, ler «The braille of trembling O braille de tremor «Through the sea of inflection, éclat et clinger Por entre o mar de entoação (…)» I don’t know how to read poetry. I am delighted to announce that Vitória and Francisco are the founders of Maio Maio, a new independent publishing house that decided to start its activity by editing a Portuguese translation of “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study” and “A Poetics of the Undercommons”. The “Mute Poem” has some soundtracks today, very wild ones. Fred, you have the floor, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Paula, and also Frederico and Ana, and all the people who are responsible for me being able to be with you all here today. I very wish it were in person, but I’m sure that will happen soon, maybe next summer, I hope, and I’ll be glad to meet and embrace you all when I can in real life, so to speak. I think what I have today… I’m just going to get started with a couple preparatory remarks. One is that, unfortunately, I’m talking with you today about music and painting, in a way that actually brings to mind an old essay by Adorno called “On Some Relationships between Music and Painting”. I don’t know that I’m talking about relationships between music and painting, but I am talking about music and painting, and, unfortunately, what that means is that I’m reducing to words what you ought to experience as sound and image. But because of sort of technical difficulties of presenting to you from where I am, it seemed it made the most sense to proceed without trying to give sounds and images, without trying to play some of the music that I’m thinking of, and trying to think with, as well as the images, particularly of the work of the great Afro-American painter, Jack Whitten, who I think is maybe the key-figure in the talk that I’m going to give. So, I apologize for that but I also want to encourage all of you – and it won’t take very long – not only to find instances of Whitten’s work, but also of the music that I mention, particularly John Coltrane, but some others as well, also Milford Graves, a great percussionist. The reason why I don’t feel completely bad about not showing the images from Whitten is because images on screen or even in a book just simply don’t do justice on any level to the turbulence and the sort of topographical complexity of his work, which is precisely what it is that I’m hoping to talk about today. That’s the main preparatory remark. And there’s another, which is that what I am going to offer you today is in three parts in, or on, three measures, They reflect ongoing projects and obsessions and you might consider these remarks a kind of ongoing song and dance of prose and verse in criticism. The movement from prose to verse is part of where I'm going today. Anyway, here's the first part: An overview of three parts, of the three themes, the three measure of the talk. One: The problem/chance of two-dimensionality, which I approach by way of the physicist Leonard Susskind. He provides a way of thinking about the character of physical reality; he gives a way of showing how physical reality might illuminate the very idea of (fictional) character/s. At stake is the unethical brutality of the reduction of certain persons to two-dimensionality and the ethical chance of refusing the fantasy of three-dimensionality, which bears so much of the history of vicious raciality, sexuation and class formation in the name of, and in the very idea of, the human. I think, since I gave you the title, which is “A Defense of Two Dimensionality”, and since renewing my still very small and inadequate knowledge of geometry, I am interested not so much in a defense of two-dimensionality as in an advocacy for what I now want to call (p)andimensionality. I want the prefix (p)an to indicate a rich intra-action between all and nothing and I also want it to bear a certain celebratory aura, too. So that if you hear in the prefix (p)an the name of the god Pan, or, even better, if you hear the specific kind of carnival music that emerges from Trinidad when Trinidadians discovered the sonic qualities that could be induced from old oil drums, then I would be glad for you to hear that too. Oh, and one thing before I continue. The other key-figure besides Susskind, who I’m thinking of, although here it’s almost implicitly, is a great literary critic named Martha Figlerowicz, who writes in a very cool way about the notion of dimensionality in literary characters and fictional characters and in novels, especially. Anyway, the second part is already implied in the first, and has to do with my attempt to raise this question. What if our ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics were understood to derive not from Euclidean geometry and Netwonian mechanics but, rather, from Riemannian geometry and quantum or, more specifically, Bohrian mechanics? For me, this question is tied to the general and para-ontological – or, perhaps more precisely, because severely, non-ontological or anthological – question concerning blackness. At stake is a disruption of the ways metaphysics might be said to follow from physics; this is to say, what I'm interested in with regard to quantum mechanics – and, more specifically, the notion of indeterminacy that is a given there – is the resistance or refusal of metaphysics that it bears, as opposed to the ways that the Euclid (Aristotle) Newton line seems of necessity to culminate in, or constitute a prolegomena to, Kant’s metaphysics, which moves by way of and refines the structures of raciality, sexuation and class formation that his work codifies. In this regard, the refusal of ontology is more precisely understood as a refusal of the political-economy of properly three-dimensional human individuation. It is a refusal, in other words, of proper onto-political economy. Blackness, or (p)andimensionality, are another words for that refusal. In order to get at this improper and illegitimate (but still, I think, necessary and true) way of thinking about physics and geometry I try to approach and learn from the work of physicist Karen Barad and implicitly but everywhere mathematician Fernando Zalamea, sociologist Denice Ferreira da Silva and the rest of my friends at the Institute for Physical Sociality. Third Measure: Where investigation of “the aesthetic sociality of blackness”, as Laura Harris puts it, comes in in the sections on the painter Jack Whitten. I’m interested in how his practice activates (p)andimensionality against and through the grain of the history of painting, especially as that history is understood to oscillate between the valorization of flatness and the imperative not simply to represent but also to invent three-dimensionality. For me, Whitten doesn't so much exemplify but studiously and devotedly practices (p)an-dimensionality, which I also like to call “surfacing”, in the dynamic attention to the dynamics of surface (a key-term for Euclidean geometry whose meaning Riemannian geometry and “the topological turn” radically alters). Whitten offers in his careful, preformative/afformative intra-facial refusal of the opposition of pigment and surface just this practice. For me, this is about what might be called the phonic substance and hapticality as much as what might be called the visually insubstantial out-of-touchness of Whitten's paintings. This is not meant to imply some blanket refusal of the visual, say, on the grounds of its inherent anti-blackness – it is, rather, about how the visual folds into the general sensual field. If visuality is anti-black it is so only in isolation, and only within the constrained, partnered oscillation between determination and uncertainty. I don't know if there will be time, or if this is the place, but this would be the way that one might approach a fruitful distinction between contingency and chance (i.e., between the imposition of precarity and the openness of, and openness to, the alternative). The question of sound/music brings us back to the question of gravity, where we begin by way of Susskind, because of this interesting musicological tendency over the past century to speak of tonality as if it bore the assumed natural facticity of gravity in the way that Newton understands it. (P)andimensionality, in this regard, has a relation to the (p)antonality, which we might think of as connected to the fugitivity (and not so much the emancipation) of dissonance. So that’s the first part. The second part is an elaboration of that. So, consider the mystery of applying pigment to surface through the interfacial layer of a medium. Let such consideration be intensified when the medium, always already infused with the pigment it bears is made surface, too, by way of traversal exertions after the paint has been applied. The visual and the aural are epiphenomena of touch. The irreducible tactility that is foregiven in sight and sound. There’s this continual displacement of the interfacial layer, or of interfaciality, which portraiture can’t capture. Consider, also, that nothing is no more the absence of matter than silence is the absence of sound. Nothing is not the same as nothingness, which is a concept, an effect of conceptual distancing, the mark that implies an overview. Nothing implies a kind of involvement, an active, or enacted, entanglement in dislocation. Is that what Karen Barad calls agential realism? Are we tangled up in nothing, as if it were blue, blue being all but black, as Bob Dylan + Glenn Ligon might say? Is this confusion, which is a word that knows itself to be so beautiful that it jumps back to kiss itself, what Barad calls, “a jubilation of emptiness”? Jubilation is cool. Especially when we think about it in relation to debt, it’s forgiving or forgiveness of debt. Because when we think about it that way there is also in Barad’s work a sense of a jubilant “foregivenness”, a precedence in and through the given, that disorganizes life and death, settlement and debt, uncertainty and particle. Foregivenness, absolution, is unforgiveable, unpayable and indeterminate. Consider, finally, that measure is not measurement – that measure, that the dance of song and dance, comes somehow before the determination of matter into separable, measurable things? Es gibt, a foregivenness; an ab-solution. Is the real in agential realism Lacanian? What if the symbolic is just a nasty little gated anti-community in the real? Or a sitcom produced by the real? Or a spa or a haunted house in the Orange County desert of the real? What if our “questions” of the real are not measurement but movement in measure, like a dancer, in violative and constant contact improvisation? Barad says, “Ontological indeterminacy is a dynamism, not a state. “Matter is nothingness. 99 %, and arguably 100%.” At stake, she says, is “a troubling not only of nothingness but of beingness.” It is foregiven in the particles’ constant coming into and out of existence, or that constant, directionless, an-attitudinal, non-altitudinally surfacing flight, an existential coming and going, which we almost understand, and brutally misunderstand, when we speak of the particle’s coming into and out of being. With absolute gentleness and absolute intensity, Barad excavates the incoherence of the Copenhagen interpretation, revealing it to be pastiche that is continually given in the gap between Bohr and Heisenberg. For Bohr, there is no determinate state outside of a particular measurement. The measurement constitutes “the thing measured.” Heisenberg says you can’t know position and momentum at the same time. But he says it as if the thing were there, independent of its measurement. The difference between indeterminacy and uncertainty ruptures the Copenhagen interpretation. Barad shows that, “In the vacuum, there’s an infinite set of possibilities but not everything is possible.” She works, therefore, “to undermine the concepts while staying within the physics.” So, can we speak of an existential, rather than an ontological indeterminacy? Is existence unheld and not-in-between being and non-being, life and death? If so, it will have been a black matter for the king in his exalted derivation from the particle. These remarks are an informal progress report on an investigation into what might be called a physical turn away from certain metaphysical assumptions that both undergird and undermine black and queer insurgency. These remarks move by way of an attempt to join and inhabit, say, the sliding “crowdedness” of John Coltrane's music or the turbulence of Jack Whitten’s paintings, in certain moments when unison gives way to dense proximity; and they want to consider the problematic affinities between the ideas of unity and separability and the ideal of three-dimensionality. Remember that the particles give way to nothing. What if it’s not that it’s not real until it is observed but rather that it’s not real until it’s not observed? Now, what does observation mean? “The particle is just a wave of probability,” a field, or smoke, of this or that. Look for you today and here you come yesterday is the difference between evident rhythm — the causal, the statistically observable, the measured — and incalculable rhythm — all that beautifully spooky, entangled incompleteness of immeasurable measure. Leonard Susskind intimates that in the holographic universe there is only the illusion of three-dimensionality, which we might also call particularity and its networks. And if we follow Barad’s intimation that there is no particle, no object, independent of our observation, which is also to say our positing, our position in “the empirical attitude,” then we have some severe, erotic disruption to offer the intimacies of which Susskind tells. When he writes, “The holographic principle states that the entropy of ordinary mass “(not just black holes) “is also proportional to surface area and not volume; “that volume itself is illusory and the universe is really a hologram “which is isomorphic to the information ‘inscribed’ on the surface of its boundary. Then we might ask, why assume that information, which can’t be lost, comes in discrete units? Why continually accede to the idea of the discrete unit? It’s as if what Susskind calls the -1st law of physics, that information can’t be lost, assumes a metaphysical law of accounting, namely, that what is comes in discrete units. Such discretion keeps coming back, like a bad penny, or like my son who likes to dance through the living room whenever I get on Zoom, no matter how physics keeps exceeding it. And physics won’t stop breaking metaphysical law, as if what it’s trying to teach us is how not to accede to the denial of this anticipatorily disunifying excess. Isn’t entanglement a refusal, and not a fusion, of such discretion? Is there a practice, is there a field of practicality, of indiscretion? If we begin to speak of something like a field of the accretion of discretion, and then, all up underneath that, if we begin to think of something like a field of indiscrete accretion, then maybe that’s something like what pleroma (that overflown fullness that is foregiven in the very toroidal cup of trembling) is: the cooperative antagonism between indiscretion and the illusion of discretion against which it is defined. This is how even the assumption of a generative, anoriginal excess still accedes to the very idea of a discrete unit. If we want to study where accretion troubles discretion, where we accede to anoriginal excess, we have to look so closely with the mountain that it moves. The difference between area and volume. The particles insistently rub up on each other rubbing each other out on the surface, never going into the assumed, proposed interior. It is as if the theory of the black hole offers us the origins of perspective. You shine light on the hologram and the image emerges, as three-dimensional information. You shine the right mathematical light, use the right code, like a Dutch Master. The surface of the black hole, that scramble of bits, just ain’t got the right light on it, according to physics’ Dutch Massas. The white register will have been the numerical light that lets the particle emerge and seem to stay; against the grain of this phantasmatic object permanence, the black hologram, what Tendayi Sithole calls the black register, releases disorder. Entropy, disorder, is the refusal of the transfer of energy into mechanical work. Is this disorder, this hidden energy, this little all but general strike, completely calculable as a set of definable variables that then we call degrees of freedom? What if the problem is the assumed calculability of those degrees? For Susskind, the degrees of freedom “carry” the entropy — little bits or loops of string animated by the residual information they bear: black hole fuzz, or buzz, or blur, or sun. Is the problem with freedom, in its degrees, that it feels like one? Entropy is the revolt of the cockroach people, which is swarm, not solo, and all that pl(ural)aroma. Bobby, I don’t know; but whatsonever I play, it’s got to be funky (on the mic) like an old batch of collard greens, or some smothered steak, or some mobile gumbo or some mumbo jumbo. You come up with an experiment to prove something can’t happen and the experiment makes it happen. The difference between observation and representation breaks down where what doesn’t get lost just disappears. Susskind asks, “What is the proper dimension of a world “that is bigger than our cosmic horizon? “Is our cosmic horizon just a two-dimensional scrambled hologram “of all that lies beyond it?” Black registers the scramble (the hot bit soup that ain’t got no bits, the muck, the territory, the realistic spot, the surreal presence neither here nor there nor now, the whatsonever, hownever, “Nevéryon”). The black register is the two-dimensional scramble: white registers the white, endlessly self-absorptively; the white register wants to register its own three-dimensional emergence as if it were a flourishing rather than a reduction. Ain’t no world bigger than our cosmic horizon. Pleroma is in the surface of our two-dimensional entanglement rather than the proper emergence of a three-dimensional in/dividual. The constantly incompletely more than fullness is the displacement we ain’t quite at, our anautochthonous, non-local indigeneity, Whitten and Trane, sharing nonperformance. Yes, I guess I'm just still enthralled by the mysteries of the application of paint – the blur of pigment, medium and platform. I can't muster the velocity that will have allowed me to escape this black hole called the art world if the art world is where I keep falling in love – as, say, with Whitten's absolutely beautiful embrace of outpouring and cutting, his flooding and then tilling and then tiling of the canvas, which requires and allows us to consider the difference between flatness and two-dimensionality. This difference is deep, for Whitten. It allows him to enact the immeasurable depth of surfacing. Investigation of the depth of surfacing is divinatory. It allows us to consider, in turn, the difference between sign and surfacing. Something is released in the way Whitten gets behind, the application of pigment coming from all sides, as an effect of the surround. Three miracles are in play: that the two-dimensional is given in the surround, in embrace, in abduction and adduction; the general miracle of the application of pigment, the dynamic generality of the intrafacial layer, which is given in/as embrace and approach; the general dynamism of surfacing, which is given in that the surface is not just a medium for the sign, or for representation, but that it is moving, that it is surfacing. The dynamism of fabric awaits the one who styles it, the one who wears it. And yet that styling and that wearing augments the dynamism. It is an augmentation that one might well think of under the rubric of approaching, or of arrivance in the absence of arrival. And this gets to the difference between object and way as we wait upon the supernatural sciences. The gravity of Whitten’s paintings makes one think – or makes me think – of Milford Graves, whose rhythm turns to turbulence. Rhythm bears a spatiotemporal allegory to which it cannot be reduced. A track is planted, some long lonesome seed of a song that joined up with the rest of them and grows, at the end of the world, at the end of the word. I guess I used to think of this as Milespace, moving at Milespace, as in that undoing of “The Buzzard Song” from inside out that drives through the riff’s – or rift’s – confinement, so that we are (so ancient that we are) young again. I guess there’s a point-to-point navigation that would-be subjects have to want, or want to want. You can’t be somebody if you can’t be someplace. But pointless feel, in its nonlocal transintensities, braids this inability to think or describe, or even hear, the music within the framework of the purely aural into the blur or distant nearness or interfacial layer or lair not in between the music and our rhetoric, which is where the music is as our rhetoric’s surround, as the embrace of some imperative to sway held in the sweetness of this bitter crop. That’s where talk of one track, on and in its plot, makes sense. But when I hear that I am hearing the solo as solo, spatiotemporally, envisioning the air’s escape as if the air could hold escape as its own in some imaginary struggle between itself and grounding, I had to let that go so I could let myself go in the eccentric internal dynamics of the ensemble, which is not one. Now, where that is is nowhere – nowhere being some of neverywhere, nevérÿon, in percussive dislocation, the repercussions of which are terribly beautiful, yes, yes, I know. That’s what our graves say. That’s what Milford Graves says. Nowhere is where more and less be subconceptually scheming. Here, there, as in Graves’ Grand Unification’s field of dispersive gathering (some unsolo’d, unsilo’d, long, unlonesome sowing of the self in unsung self-accompaniment), what I want to say I hear Graves say is that it’s not about some shift from bop policing to defunded freedom. Such a history so lacks the capacity to nourish that it shows how historicizing needs supplement. So that what I really want to say is that what Graves keeps saying, giving, is how the drummer keeps not giving us sum, in giving us not all that and then some, as if in some impossibly anticipatory evacuation of return and arrival. Insofar as there’s no getting there, there’s no going back on this escape, no getting out of it, no getting anything out of this brutal history of everything but all being extracted, of all being viciously gotten out of us, in prosecutorial theft of how we (want to) defy the distinction between the tangible and the intangible. In refusal of the murderous derivative, driven rhythm is our design. Graves says, the word “computer” refers to the people who make long, complex computations for, say, actuarial or navigational charts. They say, the actuarial and the navigational are not arbitrarily related – so much of the business of insurance has to do with shipping, with the calculation of risk to financial investment that accrues to the transfer of goods or wares or values or speculative capacities on a global scale. This is our share, our shard, our common wind shear, the common sheer we see through, the rhythm of the shipped, they say, with their hands, sounding like NourbeSe Philip’n’em singing Zong! Then, certain tracks emerge in their intra-action, the inside-outlying laying down and haptic dub and phonic rub of real-to-reel’s fantastic palimpsest. Hard drive and software in passage. Computational cotton picking. Cane-holed data entry. Difference engineered financial instrument. 808’s zero degree. Graves say, the phrase “drum machine” refers to the people who make long, complex accompaniments to various rearrangements of air. They say, they generate numerical relations, equations, thought experiments, and proofs in an economy of disproof and approval, conjecture and refutation, abandon and apprehension. The drum machine feels, they say, with a propensity for the absorption and diffusion of biological knowledge, which is offered in vibratory code born of frustrate touch, where hand – or stick – on skin, in recoil and repeat, reminds us that the heartbeats of the beaten to death can’t be unheard in the music. They say, the drum machine is a middle bypass whose animechanical caress, given in the abductive throwing of hands, shows breath and pulse in the general plain. Such showing is miraculously animaterial, divine and funky xenogenetic capacity blurring botany and architecture, advancing Epicurean gardening but in atomism’s refusal, since tentacular massage, comprising flavored listening, releases generative historical substance bearing the phantom weight of the extraction of the labor of extracting blooms or caramel from endless rows of stalks or vines, or units of movement from static lines of carceral assembly. Having overheard certain secrets of spacetime only in order to let them go in anaprehensile largesse, Graves whispers imaginary numbers in presents of goosebumps, tentacular message laid down and out on untrapped sets in untrackable open diaries. Piloerective stress; percaressive duress; cardiopulmonary resuscitation; a chorologue of heart and hand. Existence is the blur of life and death in asymmetry, in sembalance, in presencing continually falling through equilibrium’s flatline. Graves say, Graves says. Hear? Where? Here? Nowhere. Everywhere, a way to think about turbulence is that it is a profound and palpable consciousness of weight. There is the surface turbulence of Whitten’s paintings, and how that turbulence corresponds to a topological complexity that flatness cannot describe. The paintings are weighted, at service, in surfacing. Flecks, one wants to say tiles, as if tile were equivalent to (the effect of) daub or stroke of blue. But, of course, it’s cut. A cut of blue, not like a cut of meat, though it is an effect of cutting – rather the cut of an eye, a glance. A glance of blue or red in the totems for Trane and Kenny Dorham, almost fully muted in the one for Amadou Diallo. You have to get up so close to see the glance and shine that you get too close to see the glance and shine so that you have to see with glance and shine – “éclat et cligner”. What if gravity is a gathering of matter, a matter of gathering, as Dawn Lundy Martin says? This is a Jack Whitten Question for the physicist Edward Witten, and it’s all about building out of outpouring and cutting, a violent working in which the work is made of unmaking. That’s part of it! And maybe it’s about Bill Frank Whitten, too. Bill frank Whitten is the painter Jack Whitten’s brother and even if you’ve never heard of him you totally have heard of him or you’ve seen his work, and in seeing his work you probably get the clearest indication of something essential to Jack Whitten’s work. So, Bill Frank Whitten was a fashion designer and his most famous was the glove, that sequin glove that Michael Jackson used to wear. So, if you can get an image in your mind of that sequin glove, you get a little bit of a sense of what Jack Whitten’s paintings look like sometimes. Maybe there’s a certain affinity for the sequin, Whitten’s rolled fabric in which matter is gathered, warp and weft but without weaving, into an intermittence of shine. Both brothers worked with fabric that had been distressed by decorative weight. They work with fabric the way folks work at foundrys, which turn out to be quilting circles, in Gee’s Bend, or Bessemer, Alabama, which is, as Amiri Baraka says in Trane’s hearing, a beautiful word in and out of the terrible world. And aside, the cut, and even the rolling of his scarred and tumor’d canvases, make you want to say that cinema can’t be made separate either, by way of but also through cubism’s smooth two-dimensionality. It’s just that Whitten’s sculpturality need not be understood as seeking after three-dimensionality. Rather, this tilled, tiled surfacing injures and abjures the smooth and flat, dis(respect)ing or dis(tress)ing (our) orientation. This tilling and limning in Whitten is a kind of Hellenistic Pan-Africanism. This, at least, is what I imagine Emily Greenwood might say of the precise irregularities of his anamosaic gestures. His totems let you see through to the shadowed wall. More depth, then. And how in The Mingo Altarpiece, the tain of the piece gives a blue hint or haze. Cinematic insofar as they are “built” by cutting, the paintings are fabric/ated, found, but also sown, as if in Bill Frank’s sewing, fo’ shew, fo’ show, fo’ sho’: built up from the canvas and then cut to the quick, the rough edge, or hedge, of these hieroglyphs, along with their being supple enough to furl, bring scrolls to mind. But the cuts and grooves invoke a piano roll, as well. What ingenious mechanical device might allow us, one afternoon, not to break Whitten’s code but, rather, to differ in and with his elegiac, n(o)ncarrownic or anacarrownic or the end(s) of mancarrownic or pancarrownic practice? For criticism is grounded, cryptographic differing; and deciphering is separation’s cryptologic overview. It ain’t got to be either or if refusant inhabitation of crisis is how we roll, in something kinda like linen’s pinned freefall and leapt aeration. In an essay called “Equal, that is, to the real, Itself,” which Is on Herman Melville and the criticism of Melville, Charles Olson writes: “The prior and less “but more characteristically Riemannian observation, “that the metrical structure of the world is so intimately connected “to the inertial structure “that the metrical field (art is measure) “will of necessity become flexible “(what we are finding out these days in writing “and music and painting…” Olson makes me want to say that Whitten’s paintings are Riemann surfaces – that they are the pages of an open book. They give us a way of retaining information, of retaining differences. When Susskind speaks of horizon, or edge, is that the effect or injection of a Euclidean prejudice regarding the line-edged depthlessness of surface? What if we began to speak of the indeterminacy, or the indeterminate reality, of the surface, as “opposed” to the determinate but uncertain unreality of the point (and line)? What if to speak of the depth of surface is not, automatically, to speak of a third dimension? What if, instead, such speaking, which couldn’t help but be singing in dancing, sounds a deep investigation of the surface(s) of the world or, more precisely, of turbulent surfacing through the (very idea of) world? The composer Julius Eastman speaks, in the filmmaking and installation artist Otolith Group’s hearing, of a basicness, a fundamentalness, the ground, as opposed to the superficial, or the elegant. The Otolith, in a film called “The Third Part of the Third Measure”, their film of and with Eastman, show how looking makes possible 4ourhandedness and “Vorhandenheit”. Is there a presence (to hand, and of hand and feet) that cuts here and now? It would involve ways for information to remain in difference, in differential basicness, which we might also think of as a kind of realness, where realness implies refusal of mastery of what Eastman called the field nigger, who is also the feel nigger in her anti-phenomenological attitude, her low-class conspiratorial altitude, which doesn’t seek to stand against or over, where the putatively virtuous relationality of the horizontal is strained and tainted by virulent verticality. This is a problem regarding regard, and regarding the dimensional attitude of the angel of history, that zero degree of social conceptualization, as Hortense Spillers might refer to her, flying in having fallen backwards, in swarm and ground. If this really were a talk, it’s full title would be “The Angle of History: A Defense of (Preformative, Predemonstrative, Panafrican) pandimensionality.” It would ask after our dimensional attitude towards the angel and her angle. Do we look down on them in looking across from them, interrogatively, from some 3rd or 90th degree, in which the distinction between verticality and horizontality doesn’t really signify? The problem she (ab)solves is distance, separation. Her sharp, caressive doublefourhandedness, intimated in the pianistic picking of cotton and the percussive cutting of cane, abductively and adductively disavows the separable entity of herself as subject or as object. Her militant preservation of all the information, even in its deliberate winnowing or burning, even as its blown back all triangular, all laid back and sidereally and surreally off to the side in laterally anagential obliquity, is given in the inclination to decline, to say, Naw, motherfucker, that’s alright in a preferential option for that thing which is fundamental: performance. To attain to, to reach for, the ground, in matrical limbo. That coordination of hand, foot and eye. To retain, and attain, without grasping; for an ante-metaphysics of presencing, of leveling, of grounding. All that is held and released in Whitten’s painting. The history of my eye is such that looking at these paintings folds into looking with them, entrance by way of blur or swirl, for which embrace is mistaken. What mode of divination is that? The extraordinary compression of palimpsest in these paintings is accompanied somehow by their vastness as atmosphere. I think this is a function of the entanglement of pour and cut. But what’s the analog of atmosphere that corresponds to curve and surface rather than globe? It’s the vastness of a little patch of ground, of grounding, patching, tilling, limning. In spite of being collected, and of being for collection, the paintings hold and bear the uncollectible. Can they release the scoring from the score? How would Braxton or Wadada play these paintings? An album is announced in something like yarn and loom, against looming, for lingering. The tactilic, textilic thing that keeps fading in and out in these paintings. Their harping and scuff, or gouge. The georgeous explosion pattern of their etymologies. The non-Euclidean natural disaster of their language in the name of beauty in blemish, these burnished incompletions of the grid. There’s something to write with, for distressed syllables, in what William Parker might play or Jeanne Lee might say: the chordal painting as stringed instrument, vocal cord and greeting card. From different angles erasure becomes its own recessive shade or shadow, the graphic loss and echo of esoteric lesson, secret hidden in exposure, which is not a cryptographic thing but a sociographic thing, as Wynter would say, against deciphering’s grain, cipher remaining, engrained, and blown. You could call it, again, after but off to the side of Baraka, the heterotopic and heterophonic gravitational field and feel that is foregiven in and disruptive of every homotopic and homophonic instant; you could call it the changing same, where dissonance isn’t emancipated but fugitive. There’s an image of a kind of homotopy which I have in mind. It shows the way in which a curved line can somehow maintain itself even in its deformation. And this image, which is a kind of movement, and a kind of gesture, contains a kind of wildness. The containment would have taken place by way of attitude, or altitude, or amplitude. Actually, this is the one image I kind of feel like, if it’s possible, I would share, so I’m going to share it, and hope that you can see it. Can you see it? Yes. Okay, alright. So, I’ll stop sharing the… The containment will have taken place by way of attitude, or altitude, or amplitude. The line (which is to say the points that anchor it; which is to say, a relation of mutual location) remains intact by way of liftoff. But when the line is grounded it fades and the points blur, so that there is no breadthless length. If line and point fade in surfacing, then this little moving picture, this little melodrama of aspect dawning, is meant to save them, to stave off surfacing with momentary verticality. In this regard, solo flight is a kind of misnomer. What will have been going on here, is, rather, the dualistic monogamy of romantic comedy, complete with the necessary asymmetry. The brutal dream, here, is of controlled falling. You can only get from 0 to 1 by way of 2; the one’s derivation in, or from, relation – that viciousness of passage in point-to-point navigation – is omnicide, which is given in nothing’s disavowal, which we disavow in surfacing. In Henry Geldzahler’s essay in Jack Whitten’s catalogue from an exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Geldzahler quotes Whitten talking about seeing/hearing Trane, and talking with Trane a little bit, at Club Coronet in Brooklyn in 65 (but it must have been 64 because he mentions Dolphy, too, who was gone by 65). Witten talks about Trane talking about sheets, Trane maybe having taken or taken back the “sheets of sound” metaphor from the critic Ira Gitler. Having taken it back or taken it out past metaphor, so that we can think of waves of paint, outpourings of it that Whiten, as he later says, cuts, freezes, boils, and laminates. Whitten writes, “…the sound you hear in his music comes at you in waves… “He catches it when it comes by, and he’ll grab at as much of it “as he needs, or can grasp. “I think that, in plastic terms, translating from sound, “I was sensing sheets, waves of light. “A sheet of light passing, that’s how I was seeing light. “That’s why I refer to these paintings as energy fields…” Making a way in and out of Trane’s way. Sheets of paint in the non-space not in between painting and sculpture. Not-in-between the sheets as the Isleys don’t quite say. Whitten illuminates Trane’s use of the musical material. It makes me wanna go back and reread Adorno, “On some relationships between painting and music” only so that I can forget it again. If you go back and look at Whitten’s “Annunciation XIV” from 1979, having hung out a little with his “Totem 2000 VI Annunciation, from 2000”, (though I can’t go back and look, can’t really see the texture, can’t really feel or walk around in its flatness) it feels like you’re also seeing Whitten hearing and feeling Trane, a twenty-year cross section of a long meditation on annunciation, perhaps by way of going bone-deep, or having fallen into and in love with “Ascension”. This whole question of vibratory surface. Of flesh. Of what it means to feel, dig, knead; to need there, not being there. The materiality of what it is to be “a compressionist”, which Is what Whitten sometimes called himself. Compression, surfacing, hapticality, enfleshment. On 6 April 2000, Whitten wrote of his painting “The Second Annunciation”, “the shit vibrates!” What’s not-in-between vibration and compression? To sacralize surface, or to sense its sacredness? Sacralization, I think, because surface, as instrument, or as the refusal of the distinction between instrument and material, is played. It’s not that Trane wasn’t playing the sax; it’s that in playing the sax he was really playing sound, in sacralizing arrangement of the musical material, which Whitten then approaches, in painting. This is the monasticism of the woodshed and its always cœnobitic, always intrafacial, lair. Long before, on 12 February 1979, Whitten announces his freedom from art history; two months later he declares a breakthrough in or breakaway from art history’s “gravitational field.” Whitten’s field theories, his feel theory, his playing of string theory convinces us that Whitten’s sonic proximity to Witten is a transcendental clue! I don’t know if Edward Witten is a painter, but Jack Whitten is certainly a physicist. A physicist of the feel, in whose announcement of incarnation an animation of flesh will have occurred: a vibration of surface, approaching surfacing. That’s the second measure. The third measure is short and you’ve already seen it, it’s just the two poems that Paula referred to and I’ll read them now in English and then I’ll be done. “tiling, lining notes” “A river is studio agitation through one window, “aloft in rock bottom’s soft support and “rumble, a room, a cell alight in the way the “walls walk off in juba’d pat and tiling, “the pattern on the river floor all absolute “and indiscernible unless you walk it, in the “river, as the river, as all this rotary soar of “the dammed and held, sous vide in second “linearity, parading in this tuba’d lining “out of the basic line all and against itself “in black and blue switchback and beatrice’s “smiling on seeing all our little differences “together in the venereal collection area’s “serial eddying of how we taste and feel, “inseparably. There’s just so many ways to “keep going along the way. The miraculous “influence is delta’d in floridian branch or “mangrove double silt, coahoma co. moaning “or swung oklahoming — a gap band or a gap in “nature kinda sounding, drowning, burning, this “continually caribbean being on fire of the “river, from river to river on canal and torn “to another bleeding place we from in our “lenape shift, our delaware gap band, sending “geography through a sycoractic horn chart “of the natural city in and out of its broken “window, cadence still cruising mobile studio. “Unnamed, and making waves, and making ways “is what it sounds like: lining, tiling, moaning, “smiling, drowning, bleeding, burning, seeing, “sending, sounding just like joseph daley, “thurman barker, dave holland, and sam rivers.” “tilling, limning notes” “tile, or fleck, as if “daub or stroke, but a cut “of blue, flesh cut a glance of “blue for trane, “in the general murder, “all but mute for “amadou diallo. “you have to get “so close to see the glance and shine “you get too close “to see the glint in flames, read “the braille of trembling “through the sea of inflection, “éclat et clinger”, “and cling to the firmness “of our wave function, a clarity “of sweep in black as dawn “dawns on us with “such gravity, a gathering “of matter/a matter “of gathering jack whitten’s “rose corona, working violently “with outpouring, work “made of unmaking “a monastic love of sequence “in sequins, in solemn, intermittent “spacetime sewn with the “decorative weight of edward witten and “bill frank whitten. “this scroll of cut, outbroken canvas “looks like looking with a movie. injured, lined out “surface adores flatness with thick “character acting, mapping distressed by aerial “grounding, scuffed ornament, microtonal “abrasion all over again. the textural slur “of tilling and limning, emma and emily “whispering, the precise irregularity “of anamosaic gesture, is a habitat “of schools in a bessemer tree, a reef chorale “and blue hint shadow, graphic “soft enough to tess and more “and wreathe. a totem is “a haunted keyboard, and this ingenious “mechanical device is so we “can differ in elegiac practice – “for criticism is grounded “differing and deciphering is “separation’s scale.” That’s it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, it was really rich and dense and beautiful and poetic. If you want to ask questions please ask them in the chat box or you can also raise hand. We will collect the questions either on YouTube, Facebook, and here on the chat, so, please… I would also like to give the ground to Vitória and Francisco and the people from Maio Maio Editions, who have translated this poem and who made a beautiful job, if they want to talk as well, and Paula, thank you. Thank you so much, Fred. It’s so dense… For now, what we see as questions in the chat is “thank you for ever”, “huge thanks”, “immense and incredible, moving and timely”. I was wondering all through, how you managed to… It’s like a marathon, it’s so physically dense how you are with what you’re saying. Well, it’s kind of… This is not a question. I’m so sorry, I’m so slow, and I can formulate some questions, not good questions for sure. I would need to stay in the text for I don’t know how many months, because there is so much vocabulary. Paula, if you want there’s a question in the chat. I will help you, Paula. Do you want me to read it? Go ahead, you read it. “I liked the idea of the symbolic Orange County in the desert of the real. “If you want to say more about dimensionality “with regard to Lacan’s domains I would love to hear it. “Thanks.” I think what I have to say is pretty simple, maybe even simplistic, which is to say that the domain, so to speak, of Lacan’s work that I find the most intriguing is the one that maybe he gives the least attention and it’s the one in a certain doctrinal level he can only give a scant attention to, and that’s the Real, which in a way, I suppose, I associate in some ways with, maybe, the notion of “the semiotic” that Kristeva gives, that goes back a long way to being in school, where it was the kind of the semiotic, the maternal, the Real, whatever, the Dark Continent, all of that empirical richness, the swarm, all of the empirical richness that the main western philosophy wants both to disregard and at the same time own or grasp in its disregard. That’s the stuff that I’m interest in, because I suppose that’s where I’m trying to come from. When I say I’m trying to come from there, I mean that’s where I come from, but I’m still trying to come from there, too. It’s the Real or even the surreal in Lacan which perks up my interest the most, and I think one way to think about Whitten’s paintings or Milford Graves’ drumming is that they contain audio-visual information regarding the Real, and my sense of it is that the Real truly does have something to do with the holographic universe that Susskind sort of posits. We have some more questions, Paula, if you want to… go ahead. Sound, Paula. Thank you and apologies. A question about this idea of using quantum physics as a model from thinking rather than Newtonian laws and what that means for metaphysics. Is it a way of bypassing the idea that there are appearances and being, with the obvious hierarchy that it implies? I think it certainly does try to move not only against that old metaphysical distinction, maybe most emphatically given in Plato, that distinction between appearance and being. I do believe that there’s a way that maybe quantum mechanics allows us to dispense with some of the metaphysical assumptions that produce that discourse, and certainly that discourse is so cognate with the brutality of the last 500 years that it just strikes me that it goes without saying that one needs an alternative to it, and I think that I’m not alone in this, obviously, because so many other folks that I work with and admire are also turning to the discoveries in physics over the last 100 years as a way to break down that Kantian consensus that is sort of the ideological consensus that we have had to survive. Because that Kantian consensus is so fundamentally grounded, I think, in Newtonian mechanics, so I’m just following in the path of folks like Karen Barad, Denice Ferreira da Silva, and a lot of other folks too, the great poets like Samiya Bashir, Michelle Wright. There’s a lot of folks like me who found ourselves, for whatever reason, needing to try to learn about physics even if we weren’t necessarily equipped to do so. On the one hand, one laments the lack of equipment, but, on the other hand, one has to take advantage of the kinds of interventions that can emerge as function from that lack of equipment. I just feel like there’s a real affinity between Black Studies and these new challenges to metaphysics that quantum mechanics makes possible and that affinity really goes back to W.E.B. Du Bois. It’s as if he was already anticipating all of this work that we are trying to do and giving us a kind of model for how to do it, in his great essay of his called “Sociology Hesitant”, which was published in 1905, and to my mind it has to be read alongside the great papers that Einstein published in 1905. You can’t make sense of what he’s doing without reading the Einstein, but you can’t make sense of the Einstein without reading Du Bois. It was written in 1905, I should say, but it wasn’t published for another 100 years, but that’s another story, which is told by two great scholars through whom I’ve learn a lot from: R. A. Judy e Nahum Chandler. Anyway, I’ll stop blabbering on that question and I’ll blabber on the next one. That’s a good plan. A question by someone “who would love to hear you talk a bit about metaphor “and the crossing of sense/sensation. “Very good talk, “there was a moment where you talked about, I think, “vision and sound as epiphenomena of touch “and later there was a reflexion on the movement of the sheets of sound, “metaphor used to describe the music by Coltrane. “I’m thinking as well of Whitten’s use of wood [inaudible]. “Is there something particular about Whitten’s practice “that gets you thinking about cross sensory experience “or is there something more general in physics [inaudible] “which might be said to activate [inaudible].” The thing about the physics, particularly Susskind’s work, is that if you take one logical step forward, it kind of begins to connect, to be connected, in a certain way to various interventions in late 20th century philosophy that, again, are beginning to try to militate against that conscient Kantian consensus. One way to think about the Kantian consensus, the way I think that maybe Husserl thinks about it, is that it’s a consensus that operates in, let’s say, the movement between what Husserl calls the “empirical attitude” and what he then calls the “phenomenological attitude”. In both cases, that’s a movement that somebody like Donald Davidson does in his great essay called “On the Very Idea of Conceptual Scheme”, or what I think Derrida’s doing all the time, or what I think the person who does it in the most emphatic, beautiful, brilliant way in the 60s and 70s: James Baldwin. What they’re doing is, I think, is that this idea that the way we see and the way we know is predicated on separation has to be called into question. So, the knowledge that emerges from inseparability is what it is that is at stake and, of course, that knowledge that emerges from inseparability is one in which the sensual determinants are so entangled, so bound up with one another that there’s no way to think about it as anything other than a kind of holo-sensual or synesthetic field, or feel. And that’s where I’m trying to get at when I’m saying that it’s not just that sound and vision are epiphenomena of touch but that touch is itself an epiphenomena of sound and vision, and this is something that is given really deeply and emphatically in Whitten’s paintings, which seem to me paintings that you can’t see unless you hear them and you can’t see or hear them unless you can touch them. And, of course, that’s the huge dilemma because you can’t just walk up to a gallery or a museum and touch the paintings. Which is why I say that on some fundamental level, my writing about Whitten, maybe everybody’s writing about Whitten, is a writing that is necessarily incomplete insofar not just that we can’t touch the painting but that maybe on a physical level we haven’t figured out yet how to enter those paintings, right? But what’s cool about Whitten is that he produces all these apertures and topographical fissures and gouches and non-enclosures that at least make it possible to imagine something like an entrance into those paintings. But yeah, I feel like the challenge of Whitten, as it stands right now, within the political economic structure within which we operate, the challenge of Whitten would be how to somehow get the feel, as it were, of touch from seeing them, how to get the sense of sound, so to speak, from seeing them, and when this political economic moment is over, which I hope it will be, we will be able to touch those paintings and the final genuine sort of victory of those paintings will have been when, in our constant touch of them, they necessarily disappear. They weren’t meant to last forever. They were meant to suffer under our erosive caressive touch, it seems to me. Thank you, Fred. There are many more questions. A comment to start with. “Wonderful, thank you so much for this. “In your presentation, “I’m putting in mind M. NourbeSe Philip, who you mentioned, “and also Canisia Lubrin, “who wrote an ecstatic refusal to the structures of grammar “and who invented endless neologisms [inaudible]. “I wonder whether you might say a word about your relations to the language “in which you offered this presentation “and how language relates to your life and work.” I would like to believe that, if I could figure out a way to ask nicely enough and with enough humility that Philip and Lubrin and, beyond them and before them, in a certain way, one might say, Bratheway, would allow me to a least try to be part of a kind of a greater Caribbean poetic intervention that they certainly instantiate with absolute beauty and, within that framework, you get not only the intensity of Lubrin’s, as you say, ecstatic refusal of grammar. I think she takes up the term “anagrammatical” in a way that both follows from, but also extends, the way that Christina Sharpe uses that term and before her the way Saussure uses that term. There’s really something about the way poetry challenges grammar, not so much by refusing the idea of grammar, but by multiplying it, by finding grammar everywhere, by this constant making and then also breaking of grammatical law, and obviously Lubrin does it really beautifully in her work, and Philip does it with kind of absolute authority in her work, and so does Brathewaite. It’s funny because I’m thinking now that I’ve been learning from my partner Laura, who just finished his great essay on Brathwaite in which he talks about his use of the word “landuage”, not language with 2 “g’s” but language with a “d”, “landuage”, which I think is something that he wants to get at in a way that approaches more generally this notion of “nation language” that he has, and of course his “landuage” is completely bound up with Philip’s “languish”, that intensity of the anguish which the imposition of the English tongue puts on us, at least those who live this sort of anglophone world. Basically, black folks in the New World, in the Old World too, we have had to learn how to do things not only with words but how to do things to words, and that’s the condition of possibility of us having something to say. There’s a comment. “Dear Fred, “I do not have so much a question, as a short quotation “that I would like to share. It’s from William Burroughs “and it goes like this: “‘Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive’. “This is in relation to (p)andimensionality, the god Pan, the word “panic”, “which logically derives from the god Pan. “Panic as perhaps the word for (p)andimensionality.” Thank you, man, I got to go back and read Burroughs some more, it’s been a long time, but I’m glad that he is still there waiting for me. Yeah, panic and pandemonium too. It’s like William Burroughs on the one hand and John Milton on the other. All of that stuff is there. That’s what I was trying to get at at one point with regard to Whitten talking about this sort of explosion pattern of his etymologies, I think I said. I think he’s a painter that makes you want to make look words up. Right now, I’m trying to work on something with regard to these paintings in a sort of middle period of his career in which he did all this stuff with the Greek alphabet. That’s something to draw out too, but, yeah, thank you, I hadn’t thought about panic, but now I’ll push the panic button and see what happens with that. In regard to the things that you’ve been doing with words, I like very much this notion of etymologies, that has a certain centralisation, historically speaking; putting together and transforming of the use of words, it’s beautiful. I like this idea that for some words we read we cannot find anything or we have to invent, along with what we find, for example, when you transform names, persons in verbs and there’s some kind of gliding into something else, something happens there that of course you can go and check the relations that situate those names and syllables, but there’s also this thing that you have to go with it and do something with it yourself. Especially in this presentation, it’s like going into a new land, that’s why I was talking about staying, living here for a lot of time. I don’t think its exclusively of so-called New World phenomena, but certainly part of what the Middle Passage implied for us and imposed upon us is the loss of native tongues or mother tongues or so forth, and there’s a sense in which the various colonial languages just wouldn’t leave us alone and so our response has been to not leave them alone either. To not leave them unscaved, to not leave those languages unbroken. As Derrida used to say, it’s a scandal and a chance, it’s a chance that we have to take, it’s a condition that befalls us. There’s nothing I can do about English except destroy it. There are some more questions. Not that many. Oh, there’s a question about Fanon. OK, you see them as well. I wrote him in a direct message but, Anjali Sagar’s a great artist and she’s one of the two members of the Otolith Group that I mentioned in the talk along with Kodwo Eshun. I’m totally immersed in their thinking, when it comes to try to think about Whitten and what they’ve done in giving us with their engagement, not only with Julius Eastman, but also with Codona, with Don Cherry, Collin Walcott, and other folks too, that for me is totally a way, it gives me a way, if I can figure it out, if I can work through what they’ve done, that I can work with, given the richness and complexity of what they’ve done. That does open up a way of thinking about Whitten’s work, that basicness and fundamentalness that they really emphasize in Eastman’s work and in their work on Eastman. And just to put it in the terms of the question asked, it’s very much part of an ongoing attempt to read Fanon, which is a kind of an endless task. You just keep starting over and over again, and for me it’s always like pulling back, as if I never read it before, because it’s just new every time you look at it, but some of what remains is that crucial distinction that I think he makes between existence and being, let’s say, or between the existential and the ontological, in that chapter in “Black Skin, White Masks”, which is variously translated. But as he says, there are questions that emerge when ontology leaves existence by the wayside, and I’m like “yeah, I’m staying by the wayside, “I’ll get off the road too.” There’s a great book by the wonderful anthropologist Jacqueline Stewart called “A Space by the Side of the Road”, and there’s also a beautiful book by the great poet Cecily Nicholson called “Wayside Sang”, and I feel that both of those texts are giving and illuminating something that is sort of given as a kind of possibility, as well as a problem, in Fanon, which is simply to say “What happens when you linger in that space by the side of the road? “What happens when you linger, when you stay with existence?” In all of those ways in which it gets off of the ontological track, so to speak. I said Jacqueline Stewart, I don’t know, there’s a great film critic named Jacqueline Stewart, I guess I sometimes get mixed up, but yeah, Kathleen Stewart. Ah, it’s Kathleen! Yeah, I’m getting long in the tooth, I mix up names. You’ll have to forgive me. Welcome to the club. Well, for me, who have been trying to refuse ontology for years and bumping against it time and again, but there all these formulations that appear all throughout your presentation, not only of nothingness but also of beingness [inaudible]. These are good toys to go further. Also, I’m thinking of something that I read, I don’t know where anymore, but it was something about the episteme related to this positionality, the three dimensionality, the distance, the separation, to be able to know. It was something like “the problem is not only that the episteme colonises, “but it’s the episteme itself”. Then you to go even back. It’s all the logic… But also it’s in relation with things that I had been pursuing, like relationality, and this was already something about which you positioned yourself, but that is still predicated upon separation, and then the separate units get into a relation [inaudible]. This is basically just what I’ve been obsessing over years and it’s given so emphatically already in the idea of “the poetics of relation”. Édourad Glissant is already aware of the separation that relation implies, and trying to work through that, and trying to think through that, and in the same way that I think Wynter is aware of the separation that conceptuality implies, and recognizes that there might not be a way of extracting conceptuality from coloniality, of extracting the epistemic from coloniality. These are folks who… Basically, this set of questions has been, I think, the fundamental sort of purview. Black Studies, and I don’t know if it’s exclusive to Black Studies, but certainly within the context of my own life and field, it’s in Black Studies and in related fields, Indigenous Studies, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, that we are under an injunction to consider these questions, and these are literary life and death questions for us and they are life and death questions for the world. They sure are. They are very violent, they exert violence in everyone that goes to school or that socialises. It takes time to realise that. I have to pay attention to the questions, I’m sorry that I got a bit lost. We stopped on the Fanon question? I apologize that you didn’t read it. I’m saying this for the future, but now we have a bunch of more questions here already. Maybe the last one? He’s asking me to speak a bit about the term “animateriality” which sometimes I use. Some of it just has to do with the etymology of the term or the sort of folded etymologies that are held in the term. First of all, the root of materiality in “mater”. There’s this etymological and ideational connection between the material and the maternal that I’m always invested in and that goes back to the first question regarding the Real, which I think also can’t be thought about, at least within psychoanalytic framework, outside of its connections to the maternal. Also “anima”, which is “breath”, “soul”, “spirit”. I’m interested, therefore, in a certain notion of animated materiality, a refusal of a distinction between spirit and flesh, which, again, for me, at least, is a kind of imperative for Black Studies and, more specifically, a Hortense Spiller’s imperative, which is to say, it’s an imperative precisely in that way that Black Studies, that any Black Studies that’s worthy of the name is Black Feminist Studies, it seems to me. And I also have to say that I have a really great friend going back to graduate school, a great film studies scholar, film critic and film theorist, named Akira Mizuta Lippit, who wrote a great book called “Electric Animal”, which is the first of a series of books that he’s written on Japanese cinema and experimental cinema, and in “Electric Animal” he coins the phrase “anametaphor”, and I’m always, whenever I say “animateriality”, I’m kind of thinking about the notion of “anametaphorical” in Lippit’s work. In terms of whether or not he evokes a kind of anti-productivity… I guess I probably want to say that I would rather think of it as an ante-productivity, like a kind of forgiveness of productivity. I don’t mean it to be something that is in some stark opposition even to productivity or reproductivity, but what’s at stake in the “animaterial” is, to use Derridean terms, a kind of a general economy of generativity, or an unrestricted economy of generativity and differentiation, and that’s what “animateriality” implies to me. If it’s connected, I wouldn’t connect to maybe void but I could connect it to nothingness, to what one might call the realness of no-thingness, the realness, the reality in the surreality of inseparability, that we could talk about under the rubric of nothing, without raising it to a kind of conceptual level by attaching “-ness” to it, so to speak. And it does connect up with this possession insofar as this is all that which refuses grasp, which is to say both the possessive grasp within the context of our already exiting political economy, but also epistemological or conceptual grasp, which doesn’t mean that it is anti-intellectual or that one doesn’t think with it. But that’s the whole point, this is something to be thought with, not thought about. And even deeper, it is to be thought with and not thought at within the context of the history which we know thinking is something that you do at stuff, in the same way that you point a gun at somebody. Within the history of enslavement that we live, thoughts are weapons, or have been used as a weapon. It’s really thinking with rather than thinking about, thinking with rather than thinking at, and “animateriality” is, for me, playing itself out in those ways and at those levels. And I think, finally, just to wrap it all up and hopefully in a certain kind of way, that the physics and the mathematics that I was gesturing towards, is able to gesture towards the animaterial precisely in that way, that the attitude and the altitude of topography and the attitude and the altitude of the quantum mechanical interpretation of the universe as holograph implies with, rather than at or about. I have this question: what do we do with performance because there is this appearance here, this pre-formative. I’m trying to think in relation to practices of refusal. We have to get rid of the vocabulary of performativity because we are living so condensedly in a society, – relation, performance, knowledge –, and there’s a lot of other perverse things about it. There have been some thoughts around the “Undercommons”, not performance, and also about your notion of “non-performance”, and now I see here “pre-formative”, “A Defense of Pre-Formative, Pre-Demonstrative, Pan-African, “Pre-Dimensionality.” Pan- or Pre-Dimensionality. What is this pre-formative? To what can I relate it? It definitely follows the thinking that’s in “Blackness and Non-Performance”, which was totally influenced by the work of my friend Sora Han, who wrote a brilliant essay called “Slavery as Contract”, in which she talks about the non-performance of contract, and I started thinking about this relation between blackness and non-performance by way of her work and eventually another great moment… Again, I want to say, she reminded me of something in a text that I already read, that it really and truly was as if I never read it, but a great friend of mine, who’s also part of the Institute for Physical Sociality, named Marielle Pelissero. I’ll write you down her name (she always forgives me for my horrible French), but Marielle reminded me not just of Benjamin’s work, in “The Critique of Violence” but also the great critic Werner Hamacher’s exegetical work with regard to that essay “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’”, and one way to think about it is that between this sort of critical legal discourses of Hamacher, Benjamin and Sora Han, and as well as Robert [inaudible], and ultimately as Saidiya Hartman, that ensemble sort of creates the possibility of kind of the way of thinking about, of a critique of performance, so to speak, that recognizes, that moves by way of a kind of recognition and at the same time of something one might call the necessity of doing, a necessity of enactment. So, if you think about “animateriality” as being all bound up to non-restricted economy of generativity, the way that I’m thinking about, I began to think that rather than have to erase the term performance, I can just switch around the “r” and the “e” in the prefix. So, first of all, it understands performance as prefatory, as anticipatory. That’s what’s interesting about performance: it’s not its own coming into existence but always what performance prefaces. So, this means that performance doesn’t just come into its own and its disappearance, but performance also comes into its own in the reappearance of what had disappeared, so, it’s an augmentation of the really profound sort of ontological discourse on performing that Peggy Phelan offered in her book “Unmarked: The Politics of Performance” in the early 90s, but this notion of “performance”, this prefatory generative generativity that, as it were, predates performance and always anticipates it and at the same time immediately follows it, it’s like that coming and going of the particle, so to speak, that shift from particle to wave and to probability and to chance and to indeterminacy. So, that’s what the “pre-” does. And then there’s this beautiful poem by a great French poet, Francis Ponge called “Le Pré”, called “The Meadow”, so there’s even a kind of sense of generativity of the meadow. And even if you want to get really nasty, the generativity of the clearing in the way that Heidegger sometimes thinks about it. So, that’s what the “pre-” is supposed to be doing. I don’t know if it does all that work, but… It does, something… Already in the “per” of performance it’s supposed to mean already that, but the thing is: who does that? Well, I don’t know, it’s fun to have a chance to think about all of this with you all. Like I said, next year, if I’m able to be there in person, “person” is spelled “p-r-e-s-o-n”… If I’ll be able to be there in person we can talk about and really listen to the music and look this stuff together, but I know it’s time for you all to eat dinner, and it’s time for me to watch some football, to see who Italy gets to beat this weekend. Anyway… but thank you all so much, thank you, Paula, especially, I appreciated it. In Lisbon, in a bar. Thank you so much and let’s meet next year in Lisbon. I will leave you with the last few lines of your translated poem. I was just scrolling down and I found it. It’s interesting. I can put it here so that people can go back and look again at it. and wreathe. a totem is a haunted keyboard, and this ingenious mechanical device is so we can differ in elegiac practice – for criticism is grounded differing and deciphering is separation’s scale. Good night, thank you all. Hope we can meet next year in person. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.