Perhaps the most significant aspect of this assertion is the fact that it does not demand a response for questions such as: “Why do black women create?” or “For whom do black women create?” As important as they have been, as generative as they became in the moment when the project was one of articulating black or women (or any subaltern) subjectivity, these questions seem to be caught in the ungodly task of responding to a negation. For this reason, because the question of “how” is not a reaction to a questioning but an invitation to comment, to share, it suggests that the conversation about black women’s creativity (broadly defined) is to be undertaken without being preoccupied by the demand to prove its very possibility.
The significance of this shift regarding the task is that, instead of being caught in the presupposed formula Black Women ≠ White Women (how many times do we have to state what has from the beginning been the construction that has sustained capital’s expropriative enterprise?), the assertion that black women do/create and the invitation to comment on how leaves undetermined whatever is then named a creation by black women. Meaning, this is not a formula, but an altogether different statement, Black Women are non-white Women, one that does not need a solution, that is, proof. I formally present her as \X => -Y + 0 – in “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminist and Refusal beyond the Limits of Critique,” philoSOPHIA 8, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 19-41. This figuring of black women is inspired by Hortense Spillers’s “female flesh ungendered” as presented in her classic article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987).
Expectedly, this shift also releases considerations of black women and creativity from the endless task modern thought imposes on itself: to deal with the question of Being while at the same time disavowing any gesturing to metaphysics. That is, precisely because blackness is a tool of racial knowledge, a political-symbolic construct that has been inscribed in the global context, as a presupposition and a product of its juridic, economic, and ethic architectures, it is possible to rewrite the infinite judgement as an existential, instead of an ontological, proposition: Black Women exist as non-white Women.
Released from ontology (and, consequently, from phenomenology, which is but a way to solve modern philosophy’s qualms with metaphysics), black women’s creations become something other than objects to be (or not to be) appreciated, critiqued, or consumed. Note that I am not saying that they will/should not be appreciated, critiqued, or consumed. What I am proposing is that the creations always already placed outside the scenes of (economic and ethic) value host more than a different version of these scenes; they also gift a whole different context.
What distinguishes black women’s creations is precisely how they refigure the creative itself. Instead of actualizations or effects of a separate and self-determined entity who draws from a given (presented as particular or universal) interior (essential) or exterior (causal) condition, they can (and perhaps should) be approached as everything else that is of the world; that is, as re/de/compositions of the elementary constituents of all that happens and exists. Put differently, they are approached as singular expressions of the world imaged as the play of infinity and not conceived of as a universe of the theater of determinacy. Different versions of this proposition appear in recent texts, including my essay “In the Raw,” e-flux journal, no. 93 (September 2018) →.
Spelling out how this breaks away from modern “metaphysics”—with the theme of the transcendental—is beyond the scope of this commentary. Let me just elaborate on the distinction between sensibility and subjectivity. The target here is, obviously, Immanuel Kant’s move, one which happens very early in his Critique of the Pure Judgment, but which is also already announced in Critique of Pure Reason. The move can be described as the distinction between sensibility and subjectivity; on the one hand, sensibility refers to the moment of engagement with the things of the world, which affect the human in the moment of knowledge, as appearances, that is, as already apprehended by the pure (transcendental) intuitions of time and space. On the other hand, subjectivity refers to the moment of engagement with impressions or representations of the things of the world (including the human itself), but here through the most fundamental mediation, which is that of the pure intuition of time—as the determinant of the inner sense and of the unification of appearances and their representations under concepts—which supports the Kantian statement that knowing is but determinacy. Undermining this distinction, that is, both the terms and the separation of sensibility and subjectivity, is, in my view, a crucial move towards dissipating the effects of the power of raciality and the juridic, economic, and ethical architectures it supports.
An important step in this task, I find, is to retrieve existence from its phenomenological and sociological apprehensions, to release her from the grid of the archives of slavery—where Saidiya Hartman finds her seemingly only available for appropriation or occupation and the grips of the mind and its scientific tools—and release it back to the world where it cannot but support accounts of the human as being part of it along with everything else. Saidiya Harman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14. Now, this is not just a call for replacing the prevailing image of the world with another. Modern thought’s ambition of “discovering” the secondary causes of the things of the world has been effective in terms of enabling the building of a world that operates through and generates violence, both total and symbolic. Any creation that refers to existence in this world, insofar as it is not intended as a celebration of it, is also hopelessly a commentary on its architectures, processes, and procedures of violence.
When considering a sensibility that attends to the world as it has become while at the same time imaging the world without the grip of the subject of transcendental reason, I am not proposing that there is a choice—either sensibility or subjectivity—but rather that the latter be subsumed and collapsed in the former. For when the figuration of interiority is rendered another re/composition of the “matter” that constitutes the world, the critical task itself becomes open to refashioning, to other procedures, tools, terms.
Among other things, I find that this collapsing of subjectivity in/as sensibility allows for considerations of the artistic or the creative in general that take the Kantian lexicon as an object of critical analysis rather than a (usually unacknowledged) point of departure. Such a self-critical exercise in/of contemporary art is, given the current situation of the planet—which is another effect of the “discovery” motif in modern thought and the scientific projects it has promoted—already a belated gesture.
If the critical self-engagement seems to be lagging (mostly but not only because the available tools for critique share in the image of the world that needs to come to an end), contemporary art institutions seem (probably because they cannot help it; because it is a survival strategy) to remain open to invitations and opportunities to respond/attend to whatever captures the imagination at a given global juncture.
What would it take for a critical self-engagement to emerge that does not merely reproduce—even if under racial names (black, white, Asian, Latinx)—the formal figuring of subjectivity that organizes the Kantian program for aesthetics?
This would have to be a shift at the level of the imagination, rather than the mining of the understanding for old or renewed concepts that describe the world anew without violating the rules of modern signification. Meaning, to do so without rendering nonsense (and outright unacceptable) those things which we take for granted as they have been and will always be. Put differently, it would take nothing less than a crisis of sense (not one of meaning, which might still hold on to the theme of the transcendental) in all its moments—physical, emotional, intellectual, and metaphysical.
For it is not only a matter of rethinking using the same procedures and tools for knowing. What is urgently needed is a new approach to thinking itself, one that begins by dissolving the dichotomies (the separations) modern thought has produced to support itself. For this reason, as mentioned before, in addition to new procedures for thinking and their descriptors, movements, and propositions, thinking itself should become and beckon existing, in all its instances.
A thinking that is not set above existing is thinking in, with, and about complexity. As such, it must operate with generalities that do not presuppose or presume either identity or equality. Thinking before infinity, without a ground or a horizon, requires, among other things, a close and committed attention to what happens and exists in all that is actual and virtual, possible and potential in it.
Regarding the outline of the kind of critical self-engagement that must unfold in parallel and in pace with this shift of thinking, I can think of two crucial contributions to postcolonial theory that deal directly with the Kantian rendering of aesthetics: Gayatri C. Spivak’s “misreading” of modern philosophy, in which she locates the figure of the subaltern in the folds of the Kantian (but also the Hegelian and Marxian) program, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press, 1999), and David Lloyd’s analysis of the Kantian subject of representation as a racial figuring and the conditions of possibility for the modern political subject itself, in Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (Fordham University Press, 2018). By locating the colonial and the racial in descriptions of the supposedly all-encompassing (universal realm), Spivak’s and Lloyd’s texts are helpful guides and resources for assembling the program for critique that addresses the world as it exists, that is, a global context in which state/capital’s programs for extraction and expropriation are facilitated by the colonial (juridic) and racial (symbolic) architectures of violence.
Thinking beyond the limits of the understanding and in aid of (not against) the imagination does not require a flight as far away from the world as possible—something akin to Kant’s solution to Hume’s questioning of the universal. Instead, it demands the opposite move: an attention to the world, to its existents and their elementary constituents. For after all, they are also the basic constituents of everything that is known to exist from here/now to the outer edges of the cosmos, that is, since its inception.
Michelle Gustafson’s photograph of Simone Leigh appears in Robin Pogrebin and Hilarie M. Sheets, “An Artist Ascendant: Simone Leigh Moves into the Mainstream,” New York Times, August 29, 2018 →.