e-flux Journal issue #79

02/17

You could build a world out of need or you could hold

everything black and see.
—Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

I will take as axiomatic the following premise, expressed in

the editorial to the current issue: “It is evident that
#BlackLivesMatter and the organizations that coalesce
the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) represent the most
important and promising developments in the theory and
practice of abolition.” Important and promising to this
conjuncture, to be sure, as the eupraxia of black
millennials refashions the linkage between the singular
claim for freedom—the slave’s cause—and the whole
range of leftist efforts for dignity, justice, and equality.1 But
this is also true within a larger, structural view, since the
longue durée of black strivings in this twilight civilization,
which continually give rise to the collective aspirations of
black activists in any given moment, encompass and
Jared Sexton inflect the whole range of leftist efforts—from the
reformist to the revolutionary—on a global scale. To my

All Black Everything mind, abolition, as it has been unevenly developed within
the internationalist black radical tradition over several
centuries now, “is the interminable radicalization of every
radical movement,” most especially its own.2 It is that
which radicalizes all others because it radicalizes itself as
its most essential activity. The slave’s cause is the cause
of another world in and on the ruins of this one, in the end
of its ends.

The discourse of black lives distinguishes mattering and

movement from any reductive concepts of legal right or
standing, even if it remains entangled with and against the
violent dynamics of lawmaking and law enforcement. One
crucial aspect of the abolitionist imagination highlighted
by this discourse on that score involves resistance to the
aestheticization of politics and advocacy of a renewed
politicization of aesthetics, including myriad
representations of blackness in art, entertainment, and
news media. If, as the editors suggest, the mass media
“has hostilely presented M4BL in general and BLM in
particular in ways that simplify its ideas, downplay its
organizational capacity, shade over its intersectional
potency, and demonize the young black bodies whose
availability to unaccountable state violence is the oldest
and most consistent American reality since the European
invasion,” that simplification, shading, and demonization
has been contested by the independent generation of a
vast digital image archive, a prolific online social-media
commentary, and a rich analog protest culture involving
political signage, graffiti, fashion, and dance, among other
things. All of which is, of course, shaped by the diverse
theoretical formulations drawn from and contributed to

01
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

Photo documentation of the lecture "What is Contemporary? Black Lives Matter: Patrisse Cullors and Tanya Lucia Bernard in Conversation" with artists
Patrisse Cullors and Tanya Lucia Bernard (2016). Photo: Casey Winkleman. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

the interdisciplinary field of black studies, most notably asymmetrical ways and means of artistic production, the
regarding currents of black feminist and queer theory; all contradictory role of financial backers and institutional
of which is, of course, shaped by the diverse philosophies, brokers, the political economy of the culture industry, and
practical wisdom, and good sense characteristic of black the perennially troubled ethical vocation of the artist.
thought in the most general sense. These questions condense with great force at the point
where blackness, blacks, and the color black come into
Black art and black artists have been critical to this focus, whether black people are agent, object, or audience
development from the beginning. It is not insignificant that of the work. It is hoped that the comments below might
one of the founders of BLM, Patrisse Cullors, is a facilitate a thought and practice of art and activism, their
practicing artist, and that BLM has an Art + Culture mutual organization or disorganization, as they traffic
director, Tanya Lucia Bernard.3 The art world has, as a between the material and symbolic terms of blackness
result, witnessed a fairly steady stream of initiatives in whose spacetime presents itself in paradoxical display.
recent years related to the movement for black lives,
exploring its many dimensions and situating it within the Tom Vanderbilt, a design, science, and technology writer,
broadest historical, geopolitical, and even spatiotemporal suggests in his essay “Darkness Visible” for Cabinet
contexts. We can note events spanning, for instance, from magazine: “There is perhaps no color freighted with as
Erin Christovale and Amir George’s Black Radical much meaning as black; what makes this significant, as art
Imagination film and video series at REDCAT in Los students will remember, is that black is not a color at all,
Angeles, to Simone Leigh’s Black Women Artists for Black merely the absence of wavelengths of visible light. To truly
Lives Matter (BWA for BLM) launch at the New Museum in see black would require the loss of any visible light,
New York.4 But the present engagement is not only of meaning in fact that all would be black.”5 Black, notes
urgent topical interest. It also revisits deeply entrenched Vanderbilt, is not a color at all by some accounts. But what
questions about aesthetics and art history, the a curious way to refer to the color freighted with the
02
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

greatest meaning. As if the meaning becomes so La Farge loses track of the distinction between freedom
excessive or extreme that the color, as such, disappears and a negative condition of possibility and then reduces
into itself, or into everything else that is not itself. In fact, the former to the latter. Even so, we can hold onto the
Vanderbilt glosses several discrepant understandings of fundamental association he draws between black, or
black. On the one hand, we find descriptions of black as a blackness, and freedom.
force of incorporation, swallowing up all light and color, all
meaning and desire and fantasy, even all existence, so Since at least the time of Malevich’s Black Square (1915),
much so that “our lives consist of those things that we white artists have, for this very reason, been drawn to
draw away from the black.” In this sense, black is best working with black, and none more so than the
seen not at all, as noncolor and as nonseeing, the failure or mid-century abstract expressionists. But few, it appears,
impossibility or limit of seeing. Like an astrophysical have affirmed all they have found in its precincts. Poet and
singularity, we agree to the undeniable importance of the theorist Fred Moten is interested in this thwarted interest,
effects of black without being so sure as to the nature of especially as it is found in the example of Ad Reinhardt,
its existence. On the other hand, we have meditations, one of the towering figures of the movement and the
running from the ancient period to the present, about moment of abstract expressionism. In “The Case of
black as the color of sight itself, as what sight cannot see Blackness,” Moten pursues an extended criticism of
about its own seeing. “To truly see black would require the Reinhardt’s attempts to contain, to quarantine, blackness
loss of any visible light, meaning in fact that all would be and blacks from the color black in order to pursue his
black.” One sees black and black alone, or one sees creative practice as formal purification: “art-as-art.”8
everything else without it, we might even say against it. Reinhardt is not indifferent to the world and his is not
To see black at all is to see all black everything.6 conservatism in either the social or the political sense.
Quite the contrary, he is at war with the conventions of the
Black, then, begins and ends as a paradox or a problem of art world and its stifling historical inertia and he is, at the
definition; it may even be the paradox or problem of time, a critic of the imperialism of US foreign policy in
definition itself, which is to say the paradox or problem of Southeast Asia and its domestic policy of Jim Crow legal
beginning and ending, being and nothingness. We might segregation. His problem lies elsewhere, in an inability to
try to approach black by way of its relation to other colors, see how his desire for mobilizing the critical force of
by way of a kind of originary difference, such that black, abstraction—what he calls “concept”—need not sacrifice
the presence of noncolor, is black only in relation to what he saw as the distracting messiness of lived
white, the color of absence. Or, given that black entails experience—what he calls “symbol.”
the self-cancelling presence of all color and colors
combined, we might learn something about its qualities On this score, Moten thinks backward through Reinhardt
when compared to other colors comprised of mixture as en route to another, earlier white abstract artist, Piet
such, colors like brown or gray, for instance. Novelist Paul Mondrian, whose quest for the universal by way of form
La Farge writes the following in his own contribution to the and color passed through and, unlike Reinhardt, carried
Cabinet issue on the color black: along the world from which it was drawn. Artist Michael
Sciam writes at great length about Victory Boogie Woogie
(1944) and its predecessor piece, Broadway Boogie
We “see” in total darkness because sight itself Woogie (1943), in his own book on the Dutch painter,
has a color, Aristotle suggests, and that color is touching on some of the most compelling aspects of the
black: the feedback hum that lets us know the work:
machine is still on. The contemporary philosopher
Giorgio Agamben, following Aristotle, remarks that the
fact that we see darkness means that our eyes have While the space [of Victory Boogie Woogie] is
not only the potential to see, but also the potential nevertheless very dynamic (not least because of the
not to see. (If we had only the potential to see, we lozenge format), its dynamism is the result of a
would never have the experience of not-seeing.) This virtually unlimited number of planes interacting with
twofold potential, to do and not to do, is not only a one another. While the finite dimension of the planes
feature of our sight, Agamben argues; it is the essence appears to predominate now, their enormous number
of our humanity: “The greatness—and also the and variety tend to evoke an infinite space. The infinite
abyss—of human potentiality is that it is first of all space of the lines is now expressed through the finite
potential not to act, potential for darkness.” space of the planes. Everything varies in this painting,
Because we are capable of inaction, we know that we as it does in Broadway Boogie Woogie, but we no
have the ability to act, and also the choice of whether longer see any process leading to a unitary synthesis.
to act or not. Black, the color of not seeing, not It is multiplicity that predominates here. Victory
doing, is in that sense the color of freedom.7 Boogie Woogie appears to present an endless
sequence of possible syntheses of yellow, red, and
blue manifested in constantly varying forms. In actual
fact, this is precisely what Broadway Boogie

03
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

endless sequence of possible syntheses of yellow, red,

and blue manifested in constantly varying forms” are, in a
way, the infinite shades of blackness that Moten has in
mind when he claims that Mondrian’s “great, final picture,
Victory Boogie Woogie, is all black, is all of what had been
absorbed in black, is the explication of a dissonant,
chromatic saturation, the inhabitation of a break or border,
the disruption embedded in the grid’s boundaries.”11

In the wake of Moten’s analysis, we are struck anew by

Reinhardt’s statement at the 1967 artscanada
teleconference, the so-called “black conversation,”
between Toronto and New York to address the color black
in light of the emergent protocols and priorities of the
Black Power and Black Arts movements. Joining him at
this gathering of artists were Aldo Tambellini, Michael
Snow, Cecil Taylor, Arnold Rockman, Stu Broomer, and
Harvey Cowan. Reinhardt’s statement, published later as
“Black as Symbol and Concept,” opens like this:

I started with black as a symbol, black as color, and the

connotations of black in our culture where our whole
system is imposed on us in terms of darkness,
lightness, blackness, whiteness. Goodness and
badness are associated with black. As an artist and
painter, I would eliminate the symbolic pretty much,
for black is interesting not as a color, but as a noncolor
Ad Reinhardt poses in front of one of his paintings, date unknown. and the absence of color.12

Woogie tells us: unitary synthesis opens up again

to multiplicity. We encounter a great many instances Reinhardt would liberate black from its connotation, which
of partial unity (including white) in Victory Boogie is to say from its color, whereas Taylor, Reinhardt’s
Woogie, but not one that holds for the counterpart and critical interlocutor, “speaks not only out
composition as a whole. All the planes are in a state of of but also of the lived experience of the black,” in other
reciprocal motion. They are all relative and there is not words, the enriching and enabling experience of the
one that establishes itself as a synthesis of all the symbolic dimension of black.13
others.9
When we read about black art by black artists, they seem
always to refer, however indirectly, to black lives (and
deaths), and to living (and dying), in relation to their black
What Sciam describes as the painting’s construction of art. So, even if they pivot away from figuration and toward
“infinite space” and “an endless sequence of possible greater abstraction, black life (and death) and lives (and
syntheses” is, ultimately, about its ability to evoke a sense deaths) still enter the frame and the conversation. This is
that “unitary synthesis opens up again to multiplicity.” That perhaps why, as Moten notes, “Taylor interrupts himself
is the key. For Moten, too, unitary synthesis opens up and the conversation he joins” at this historic event “by
again to multiplicity, but not just any synthesis can raising the question of black dignity in a discourse on
accomplish such an opening. It is blackness that enjoys a black art. He moves differently to Reinhardt, whose
certain pride of place in that respect, as the singular opening of the discussion is followed and carried forth in a
unitary synthesis of all colors, the monochrome that is kind of uninterrupted seriality by other participants in the
actually the combination of the whole range of conversation … before Taylor leaps, or breaks, in.”14 Black
monochromes: “the related nonexcluded, nonexclusive artists making black art move differently with and through
understanding of mixture, of color, as constitutive of the color black. At the outset of “The Case of Blackness,”
blackness and of blackness or black as a constitutive Moten declaims: “The cultural and political discourse on
social, political, and aesthetic power.”10 Mixture as power: black pathology has been so pervasive that it could be said
but how? Black is what you get when all the primary to constitute the background against which all
colors are present equally in the mix. It is what you get representations of blacks, blackness, or (the color) black
when there is equality among colors. In other words, “the take place.”15 It is, in part, this discourse of pathology that

04
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

prompts Reinhardt to displace and diminish the symbolic witnessed firsthand by fellow artists like Norman Lewis,
in the name of art-as-art. A work of art, for him, to say Romare Bearden, and Ad Reinhardt himself. For Morris, it
nothing of an artist, cannot be black in the symbolic sense has been vital to undermine “the whole idea that black is
and attain its true nature. Reinhardt believes this and he supposed to be something macabre, negative, dirty, filthy,”
doesn’t believe this; he is of two minds, let’s say, a white and to challenge the “racial stereotypes in there as well,
mind and a black mind. “Reinhardt reads blackness at and the whole thing about it being funereal.” His black
sight,” Moten observes, “as held merely within the play of monochromes would thus serve “to refute all negative
absence and presence. He is blind to the articulated cultural mythologies about the color, and ultimately to
combination of absence and presence in black that is in create work that innately expresses the all-encompassing
his face, as his work, his own production.”16 In order to spirituality of life.”18
recover the negativeness of black, Reinhardt attempts to
shuck its negativity.17 He is trapped in his own ostensibly Alex Baker, director of the Fleishman/Ollman Gallery in
nonsymbolic conception of concept and symbol, unable Philadelphia, describes Morris’s use of black as an
to see or to acknowledge the mixture, the “articulated “oblique reflection on racism … subtly critiquing the
combination,” of absence and presence, concept and dominant white culture’s history of racism.” And yet this
symbol, of color and noncolor in blackness and black. engagement with the symbolic dimension of black does
not in any respect distract from or diminish his exploration
and experimentation with its formal qualities, its
conceptual aspect. As Heidi Becker, co-owner of Larry
Becker Contemporary Art, remarked: Morris’s work is
“immersive. The artist and viewer become consumed by it
… There are no perceptual tricks or [high-tech]
performances … Quentin uses black to distill everything to
its essence.”19 Put slightly differently, the symbol, when
addressed with care, is a conduit rather than an obstacle
to the concept; the concrete, in its infinite depth, leads us
toward rather than away from the universal and its infinite
breadth. This is why Morris can eventually see no
difference between his figurative and monochrome works.
The border between the two, so central to the debate
exercising the minds of the American Abstract Artists, had
dissolved in articulated combination. Black, to repeat, is
the singular unitary synthesis of all colors, the
monochrome that is actually the articulated combination
of the whole range of monochromes; a multichromatic
monochrome; it is the color that is also all color and colors,
including itself; it is, to use a mathematical phrasing, the
universal set, the set of all sets, the logical paradox
discovered by Bertrand Russell at the turn of the twentieth
century: Russell’s paradox, black’s paradox. Black is
inclusive of all color and colors without failing to be itself.
It is inclusive insofar as it is itself. Black lacks for nothing.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921. Oil on Do we not see a similar technique at work in this younger
canvas Photo:Wikimedia Commons generation of black artists working in and with black and
blackness? One might think in this vein of Chicago-based
artist Rashid Johnson’s 2015 piece Cosmic Slop “Bitter”.
It is precisely this willingness to work with, through, and The work is, according to the Guggenheim Museum,
against such negativity that has propelled the career of “created from a concoction of wax mixed with a black
someone like Quentin Morris, a Philadelphia-based black West African soap that is often used for the treatment of
artist who abandoned the figurative work he was trained to sensitive skin. Inscribed with the artist’s dense
create as a scholarship student at the Pennsylvania mark-making, this work merges the modernist tradition of
Academy of Fine Arts. In 1963, at the height of the US Civil the black monochrome with the cultural resonances of its
Rights movement, Morris decided to begin working on unconventional materials.” These “cultural resonances”
“monochromatic painting … exclusively using black in a not only situate the artist within a transnational and
myriad of tonalities and textures to present black’s diasporic community of African descent, but also, by
intrinsically enigmatic beauty and infinite depth.” Morris raising the problem of sensitive black skin, within a history
was, of course, relating in some way to the charged of the body in which such skin has been rendered
political atmosphere that year surrounding the pivotal sensitive—to physical irritants, to physical assault, to
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an event denigration, and to celebration as well. This is, after all,
05
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

An installation view Quentin Morris's Untitled Show at Blum & Poe, New York (2016). Photo: Christian Defonte

black soap, not white, soothing and cleansing dark skin work “serves as an homage to their souls.” Created using
with darkness. The mark-making indicates the traditional a Sumi ink wash and black acrylic on treated rice paper,
customs of decorative scarification in the region, in which Absence of Subjection draws from a centuries-old East
practitioners “place superficial incisions on their skin, Asian painting style whose goal “is not simply to
using stones, glass or knives, amounting to permanent reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture
body decoration that communicates a myriad of cultural its spirit” as well. The use of this style alludes to a much
expressions.”20 As well, we cannot help but recall the larger temporal frame than the several centuries of African
disfiguring scars of the slaver’s whip and chain in the American history, relativizing and destabilizing the
historic instance, and the systemic sexual violation it seeming permanence of slavery, segregation, policing,
implies. The latter point is underscored by the title, and mass imprisonment. It also marshals what is
borrowed from the hit 1973 song of the same name by historically an elite form to honor the lives and deaths of
Parliament Funkadelic. “Cosmic Slop” is a lament and a the most common and lowly. The mesh wire, twine, sand,
tribute to a poor black woman, and mother of five, coerced and stone that lend density, structure, and granularity to
into sex work by the combined effects of race, class, and the folds of delicate paper—like the sturdy bones hidden
gender domination. The soap may soothe and cleanse, but beneath vulnerable skin or the thick curly hair growing
its taste, like the slop it washes away, is bitter. And all of from its scalp—also cite the history and present of
this conveyed through the formal manipulation of tone and confinement behind iron or steel bars and the lethal ropes
texture in the abstraction of black monochrome. used to bind hands or feet and strangle or break necks.
Travel is, then, a deliberately imprecise term here; it
Finally, consider Kimberly Becoat’s 2013 Absence of frustrates the idea of volition or will; it renders problematic
Subjection, “a work that addresses remnants of past notions like origin and destination; it suggests movements
travels by Black Americans—either on their escapes to both passive (like displacements or abductions) and active
freedom or in their migrations from south to north, or in (like escapes or migrations). Which is also to say it refers
their displacement at present.” In the artist’s view, this to the struggle of actual living, the striving of a people, of
06
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Slop "Bitter", 2015. Black soap, wax. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Martin Parsekian

the people.21 we could love black, if we could dwell in blackness, the

space of refusal and imagination. Blackening the world
The stunning ambiguity, and perhaps irony, of “absence” thus might begin by reframing the issues of greatest
designated in the title relates to both the absences ethical concern with respect to those most blackened by
produced by subjection—the devastation and destruction their effects; it begins in curiosity about these effects. To
of these epoch-making “high crimes against the flesh”22 think the terms of political analysis and mobilization, to say
—and the (real or imagined) absence of subjection itself, nothing of aesthetic practice and judgment, through a
what is present before, after, beneath, and in excess of black or blackened lens is to think from the point of
that subjection along the way. We are brought into constitutive exclusion from those very terms, which is to
being—as potentiality—by the same processes by which say freedom from those very terms insofar as that
we are subordinated by power.23 In other words, we are or exclusion is affirmed.25 Black is generous and generative,
could be or become blacks if only we could affirm “our inclusive and encompassing. Black is color, noncolor, and
fundamental dependency on a [color] we never chose but all colors. All colors are initially, eventually black, but they
that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency”24; if
07
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

Jared Sexton teaches African American Studies and Film

and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes:
Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) as
well as various articles and essays on contemporary
political and popular culture.

Kimberly M. Becoat, Absence of Subjection, 2013. Rice paper, stones,

mesh, acrylic and twine on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

cannot give or give back unless and until they see

themselves and others as such. Black is and is not (only)
itself. To see or not to see is the question of blackness
itself: “You could build a world out of need or you could
hold / everything black and see.”

Portions of this essay were first delivered as a lecture to

Professor Randy Cutler's Chroma seminar at the Emily
Carr University of Art + Design in 2016. My thanks to EJ for
inspiration, direction, and collaboration in the ongoing
project; to Professor Cutler for the generous invitation and
hospitality; and to the many students and faculty in
attendance for very engaging, critical feedback. Any
limitations or errors are, of course, my own.

08
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

1 5 respectively, Barbara Rose, Art as 15

For an introduction to the political Tom Vanderbilt, “Darkness Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Ibid., 177.
orientation of the Movement for Visible,” Cabinet 12 (2003) http:// Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of
Black Lives, see “A Vision for www.cabinetmagazine.org/issue California Press, 1991) and 16
Black Lives: Policy Demands for s/12/vanderbilt.php . Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Ibid., 190.
Black Power, Freedom and Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian
Justice” (2016) https://m4bl.org/ 6 Painting (New Haven: Yale 17
policy-platforms/ . For a critical There is a conversation to be had University Press, 2007). For more “For Reinhardt, the multiplicity of
analysis of #BlackLivesMatter, between what I am trying to on Reinhardt, see Michael Corris, symbolic meanings that have
see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, formulate (with the help of many Ad Reinhardt (New York: been attached to the color
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black others thinking in the wake of Reaktion Books, 2008). black—sinfulness, evil, femininity,
Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket afro-pessimism), François maternity, formlessness, and the
Books, 2016). For an account of Laruelle’s thoughts on “the black 9 ‘yearning for whiteness in the
abolitionism’s historical role as universe” (as an aspect of his Michael Sciam, Piet Mondrian: An West that counters and
source of inspiration and larger non-philosophy), and the Explanation of the Work , trans. accompanies these
instruction for progressive and critical interpretations of his unknown (Bormio: Associazione meanings’—are and must be
radical movements more interlocutors. Andrew Culp nuova culturale, 2006), 137. Also detachable from the absence (of
generally, see Manisha Sinha, recently attempted such a available online http://www.pietm difference) that defines and is
The Slave’s Cause: A History of theoretical encounter but, ondrian.info/an-explanation/an-e internal to the color black. This
Abolition (New Haven: Yale unfortunately, the engagement xplanation-of-the-work-bis.html detachment is in the interest of
University Press, 2016). with afro-pessimism in particular For more, see Inside Out Victory ‘the negativeness of black’, which
and black studies more generally Boogie Woogie: A Material interests Reinhardt” (Ibid., 191).
2 is so glib and impatient that the History of Mondrian’s
See Jared Sexton, “The Vel of statement fails to be anything Masterpiece , eds. Maarten Van 18
Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the except a rather presumptuous Bommel, Hans Janssen and Ron Stan Mir, “And Then There Is
Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology, and, I have to say, obscurely Spronk (Berkeley: University of Using Whatever Happens:
vol. 42, no. 4–5 (2016): 583–597, motivated chastisement. And the California Press, 2012). Quentin Morris’ ‘Untitled’,”
593. I argue there that abolition is treatments of Laruelle and Hyperallergic , May 21, 2016 http:
not only the historical movement company, though more 10 //hyperallergic.com/300498/and
to end the racial domination of affirmative, are no more precise. Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” -then-there-is-using-whatever-ha
chattel slavery and its varied Basic exposition and some sense 193. ppens-quentin-morriss-untitled/ .
permutations. It is also, by of rationale, prior to any Morris's statements here may
definition and of necessity, a attempted analysis, let alone 11 seem to accord with Reinhardt,
movement to abolish the critique, would go a long way Ibid., 189. insofar as both profess a desire to
coloniality of power in the fullest toward promoting genuine engage the color black against or
sense, driven by a radical will that intellectual engagement. As such, 12 apart from its "negative cultural
is antiracist, feminist, queer, and it does little to advance any of the Rose, Art as Art, 86. mythologies," but it would be a
socialist at least. It is the projects evoked. Culp, in a sense, mistake to conflate their
movement that encompasses—in repeats Ad Reinhardt’s error 13 respective approaches. Reinhardt
the dual sense of causing and (discussed below) in reverse: Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” takes the contest over black's
including—the whole range of left instead of imposing the false 192. Taylor, of course, is no folk symbolic dimension, offering
movements in their most radical dichotomy of concept/symbol, he artist and he is no stranger to either affirmation or refutation of
form and function. It is, or could assumes it can be bypassed in abstraction. He is a paragon of its negative cultural mythologies,
become, the true movement of advance. See Andrew Culp, abstraction, in fact, a pioneer of to be a barrier to the expression
movements. “Afro-Pessimism as Aesthetic the free jazz movement, and for of its conceptual power. So, while
Blackness? Putting the this reason maybe the most Reinhardt does not seek to
3 Pessimism in Afro-Pessimism,” central source of guidance for redeem black with the production
Cullors and Bernard were in NON , January 8 (2016) http://non Moten, who considers Taylor to of positive images, say, he
public conversation on related .copyriot.com/afro-pessimism-as- be a uniquely brilliant artist and neutralizes his work as a symbolic
topics at the Museum of aesthetic-blackness-putting-the-p theorist as well as a intervention per se. And, of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles essimism-in-afro-pessimism/ ; representative of the unparalleled course, there is no way to remain
last summer. See Jessica Roy, Eugene Thacker et al., Dark power of the black musical neutral on a moving train, as the
“MOCA’s Black Lives Matter Nights of the Universe (Miami: tradition more broadly. Taylor’s people's historian Howard Zinn
Event Turns Into Community (NAME) Publications, 2013). 1966 magnum opus, Unit often reminded us. Morris,
Forum,” Los Angeles Times, July Structures , is something like a however, frames what Moten
8, 2016 http://www.latimes.com/l 7 musical Mondrian or vice versa. calls "the cultural and political
ocal/lanow/la-me-ln-black-lives- Paul La Farge, “Colors / Black,” For more on Taylor’s life and discourse of black pathology" as a
matter-moca-grief-20160707-sna Cabinet 36 (2009–10) http://ww work, see Howard Mandel, Miles, structuring antagonism, one that
p-story.html . A podcast of the w.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3 Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz can be challenged and
event is available online http://w 6/lafarge.php . (New York: Routledge, 2008) and re-signified, perhaps, but not
ww.moca.org/program/what-is-c A. B. Spellman, Four Jazz Lives resolved, much less eschewed or
ontemporary-black-lives-matter-p 8 (Ann Arbor: University of evaded. Moreover, that critical
atrisse-cullors-and-tanya-lucia-be Fred Moten, “The Case of Michigan Press, 2004) as well as engagement with the antagonism
rnard-in-conversation . Blackness,” Criticism, vol. 50, no. Moten’s own engagement in his of anti-blackness is, for Morris,
2 (2008): 177–218. Reinhardt’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the very means by which the
4 “art-as-art” is not to be confused the Black Radical Tradition conceptual power of black is
For an overview of events, see with the Romantic notion of “art (Minneapolis: University of activated, the untranscendable
“How Are Artists Supporting for art’s sake” (e.g., Theophile Minnesota Press, 2003), horizon of its creative power.
Black Lives Matter?” The Chart, Gautier’s l’art pour l’art). The especially Chapter 1. Consider that, despite and across
vol. 1, no. 8 (2016) http://thechart. former is an aesthetic strategy the myriad transformations in
me/black-lives-matter-reading-list for isolating elements of 14 contemporary art, Morris has
/. appearance, the latter an Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” continued to work in black
aesthetic philosophy for isolating 191. monochrome for well over fifty
art from an acknowledged years!
political function. See,
09
e-flux Journal issue #79
02/17

19 Spillers’ most famous and captivity, as such? I hope to

A. M. Weaver, “Artist Quentin interventions. See Michel de take up this and related questions
Morris Explores the Color Black,” Certeau, “Tools for Body-Writing,” elsewhere.
Philadelphia Inquirer , May 19, Intervention 21/22 (1988): 7-11
2016 http://www.philly.com/phill and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The 23
y/entertainment/arts/20160519_ Visible and the Invisible See, for instance, Judith Butler,
Artist_Quentin_Morris_explores_t (Evanston: Northwestern The Psychic Life of Power:
he_color_black.html . University Press, 1968). The flesh, Theories in Subjection (Stanford:
for de Certeau, is a sort of carnal Stanford University Press, 1997).
20 raw material that is inscribed or Saidiya Hartman’s
Katherine Brooks, “This Is The textualized into legible contemporaneous Scenes of
Last Generation of Scarification in embodiment by the range of Subjection: Slavery, Terror and
Africa,” Huffington Post, economic, legal, political, social Self-Making in
September 23, 2014 http://www. practices. The practices that Nineteenth-Century America
huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/23/ produce legible embodiment can (New York: Oxford University
scarification_n_5850882.html . also, by that same token, render Press, 1997) elaborates on points
the body as illegible and formless, found in Butler but also, due to
21 i.e., as flesh. The flesh, for her stronger psychoanalytic
Becoat’s body of work to date Merleau-Ponty, is neither a inflections and closer attention to
seems as much an adventure in pre-cultural state of nature nor a conditions of political economic
form, color, and texture as an degraded (natural) status to and socio-legal extremity,
extended meditation on what it which the (cultural) body could be diverges in her further
means to inhabit conditions of reduced (though he had much to complication of notions of
unrelenting racial domination, in say about the latter potential), but agency, resistance, and
its gendered and sexual rather a term for something like transformation.
dimensions. See, for instance, her the fundamental ontological
entire “urban hottentot series” as connection of all that exists (and 24
well as her pieces on racial not only all life) across the Butler, The Psychic Life of Power,
residential segregation ( divisions of nature/culture, 2.
blink—‘gentrification’ , self/other, mind/body and so on.
blink—gentrification #2 ) and High crimes against the flesh 25
scientific exploitation ( soon perpetrated by the regime of This piece was written before I
henrietta come hela , blackness racial slavery might, then, be read had the opportunity to read
all inside ) http://kimberlymbecoa in at least two ways: 1) as a crime Zakiyyah Jackson’s recent article
t.squarespace.com/ . committed against no-body and “Losing Manhood,” qui parle, vol.
thus no legible subject of law 25, no. 1–2 (2016): 95–136. I take
22 and/or 2) as a crime committed to heart her central point that
Hortense Spillers, Black, White against that undivided primordial blackness is not simply excluded
and In Color: Essays on American being which is neither (yet or still) from the principle terms of
Literature and Culture (Chicago: subject nor (yet or still) object. modern human being from the
University of Chicago Press, Depending on the inflection, then, dominant vantage, but rather
2003), 206. Space does not allow differentiation or undifferentiation forcibly included as the
for an elaboration of the several is the problem. And, moreover, permanently degraded form of
concepts converging in this the high crimes allegation would human animality, i.e., a racist
oft-cited phrase. This includes seem rather fitting here because (de)humanization. And so
Spillers’ recourse to the notion of enslavement in this sense suggesting that exclusion might
“high crimes”—a political charge represents not simply a violent be a negative condition of
brought peculiarly against transgression against another, possibility for freedom is, bearing
government officials or others in however severe and permanent, this in mind, no mean feat and so
positions of great authority for but also a fundamental political may need to be rethought
dereliction of duty and, in the US irresponsibility toward fleshly altogether. I hope to take up some
context, leading to embodiment and/or an absolute of the illuminating arguments and
impeachment—and Spillers’ ethical disregard for the flesh of provocative questions posed
enigmatic notion of “the flesh,” the world. I note, in this vein, the there in future work.
particularly as it is distinguished recurrent use of the term
from the body as a figure of “lifeworld” in Spillers’ writing
corporeal integrity and finitude. (from Husserl to Habermas and
Much has been debated of late beyond), suggesting a broader
regarding the flesh/body and more sustained critical
distinction and the exchanges engagement with the
have often generated more heat phenomenological tradition on
than light. But aside from the her part that has yet to be
evident theological reference and addressed fully in the secondary
resonance involved in any literature. One has only to recall
conception of flesh (e.g., the flesh this note from Merleau-Ponty to
viz. the spirit and the word), we suspect the richness of the
would need to think as well on exploration: “Do a psychoanalysis
this count about Spillers’ of Nature: it is the flesh, the
re-articulation of certain mother” (267). How might that
arguments from de Certeau, who psychoanalysis unfold once it is
Spillers cites directly on various admitted that these most basic
occasions, and from terms—nature, flesh,
Merleau-Ponty, whose “indirect mother—are the very ways and
ontology” provides, I think, a means for the production of racial
background interlocution with difference, and hence freedom
10