Only in the eighteenth century, when colonial powers began to conjure states into nations, did the imagination become a creative faculty and aesthetics emerge as a technique of individuation. Fantasies of the People is a new series of texts moving across different provincial histories, calling upon disputes in anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry to interrogate the notion of fantasy as one that radically challenges what is real. Emerging from a conference convened by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier at Princeton University in 2025, the series takes as its starting point radical thinkers of the early twentieth century, such as Marxist feminist Lu Märten and the anarchist art critic Carl Einstein, who deemed fantasy a communal sense against the hermetic cognition of imagination. Calling upon a wide range of contemporary artists, writers, and researchers for discussion, the series proposes fantasy as a collective material practice, rather than treating it as a private or irrational faculty, exploring the media of communal sense, past and present, that have been sidelined by individuation, privatization, and colonial violence.
This iteration brings Fumi Okiji and Anselm Franke into conversation. Building on Okiji’s last book, Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy, and a Nonsensuous Standard (2025), which reconsiders Yoruba praxis as one starting point of contemporary cultural practices, and Franke’s multiple inquiries into the colonial narratives of foreclosure, this exchange leads us into the histories of secular and non-secular lives, rituals, and senses. Okiji’s practice as a singer, and Franke’s work as a curator and organizer, emerge as necessary elements of this approach.
Their conversation takes up Fore and Stakemeieier’s proposition that genreless fantasy unfolds as a deindividuating exposure to origins, a gateway for unaccounted pasts, and a counterforce to those forms of imagination that have been inscribed into European intellectual history as an individual capacity to project change within the given. While all four authors would agree that each particular present invariably sets in motion its own origination, Okiji and Franke’s conversation takes this insight much further, making the “fantasies of the people” vital for any attempt to undo the destitute modernity we are inhabiting—and originating again and again—in our own historical moment.
Okiji and Franke argue that a “crisis of origination” is omnipresent as a theme and underpinning of all parts of contemporary life. They insist on the need to break out of the imaginaries of perpetual autopoeitic self-assertion and to reject the narrative of heroic self-fashioning through ontological rupture. Only when these vitalist narratives are undone and inceptions are understood as endings as much as beginnings—only when heroic origins are understood as themselves unoriginal—does it become possible to break open the genocidal foreclosure that we see everywhere today.
—Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier, series coeditors
***
Anselm Franke (AF): Perhaps many readers think of fantasy in terms of the dominant genres in the culture industry. Fantasy is always about (re)imagining origins, and the current markers of “fantasy” are merely signs of a disavowal, like: I don’t know the forces that brought me about, my own genesis, or the forms of reproduction or regeneration that I perform. The dominant version of “fantasy” is a symptomology, a theater of horrors and of false dreams of the historical experiences differentiated within this (violent) division of labor. Seeking a grounding in this horror is the quest of those Lord of the Rings fantasies that dominate and terrorize white politics. I like to call these fantasies a symptom of a crisis of origination. It begins with the disavowal and denial of an originary violence. The pathos of those symptoms is truly pathetic. But what passes as fantasy in that industry is not what you propose, and I wonder what it means for you to take the fantastic seriously and differently, as you propose in Billie’s Bent Elbow, which reads the orisha Èṣù’s aporetic bearing and Yoruba aesthetics as something closer to technique than to origin.
For me, fantasy and the fantastic are attractive because we need to think this symbolic origination as perpetual practice, one that is in excess of the known principles of causation: following neither the modern postulate of natural causality, nor the causality of capitalist time. Origination occurs and is “always-already.” And yet it is coined, minted; it happens in frameworks of pattern and invention, of repetition and difference. At best, musical rhythm captures it. The idea is to step out of history as a determining machine, and into a different present, in which the line between the actual and the fantastic stands gaping.
The two of us have spoken about Sylvia Wynter as a theorist of origination, a theorist of the performative power of origin stories, the “cosmogonies” of material-symbolic worlds.1 Wynter however does not truly account for how every origin is fantasy in the strict sense: a performative fiction that produces the ground it claims to describe. She uses Varela and Maturana’s concept of autopoesis, which she describes as the “rhetorico-symbolic” autopoeisis that enables human cognitive auto-institution through “self-troping” origin stories.2 And I remember that you and I spoke about how Wynter’s notion of autopoeisis cannot necessarily be distinguished from more “heroic” forms of origination because it is fundamentally still “self-creation.” Such accounts of genesis tend to be premised on erasure, on myths of absolute beginnings, on the objective to reach blank slates. They are creationist, in the sense of extracting order from chaos.
Fumi Okiji (FO): As a somewhat provisional answer concerning the significance of fantasy to the project of black study to which Billie’s Bent Elbow contributes, I would remind us of Richard Iton referring to the “black fantastic” as
the minor-key sensibilities generated from the experiences of the underground, the vagabond, and those constituencies marked as deviant … The black in black fantastic, in this context, signifies both a generic category of underdeveloped possibilities and the particular “always there” interpretations of … visions and practices generated by subaltern populations.3
The “always there,” or always-already-there, quality of the fantastic (which allows us to draw a sharp distinction between it and its more utopian cousins) is important. So too is this gloss of the fantastic as “underdeveloped possibilities”—or, to tune it to my own language, irreal possibilities. Not the possibilities that push against actuality from within it, not the latent potentials the “self-perpetuating actuality” admits (denying there could be anything it had not already brought into view), not the “blocked possibilities” it thwarts. The fantastic belongs, rather, to what “transcends the ruling society” and its “laws of historical movement.” It is the irreal, or the surreal presence of “material spirit.”4 It is an understanding of the fantastic that would also encompass an oversubscription of possibilities, a holding of contradiction, a harnessing of exorbitance, and of the under-determination that comes with it.
As you pointed out, Anselm, the orisha Èṣù (“The short and tall one / Whose head is barely visible when [they] walk through a peanut farm / Thanks to the fact that [they are] very tall”) is an important figure here, being an emblem of a cosmotheological outlook and an associated way to world and thought that is able to accommodate both monotheistic exclusivity and an open-ended, promiscuous pantheon.5 Much of Billie’s Bent Elbow is an exploration of the various modalities of this allogical logic, and of the particular affordances that this “maintenance of ambivalence” or “abeyance of closure” (to borrow some language from Nahum D. Chandler and Hortense J. Spillers, respectively) makes available.6 I want to find a way to narrate the peculiar experience of walking through the (European) world in a body that must make-believe a certain coherence, and whose virtuosity in doing so is facilitated by an episteme (or historical being, if speaking with Chandler) whose most available tools have to do with a certain ease with (and at times revelry in) a nonsensical performance of legible subjectivity.
But Èṣù, and the more conventional exposition they facilitated, was only one half of the emblematic diptych of Billie’s Bent Elbow. The other was the titular bent elbow of Billie Holiday, a gathering-work that emerged (for me) from a 1959 studio performance: grainy black and white, Holiday’s arm bent at her breast—an image whose frame I’ve cropped and spliced into a continuous loop that still finds its way into even my most recent writing and talks.7 It perhaps became a standard in Cecil Taylor’s 1966 poem-essay “Sound Structure of Subculture Becoming Major Breath / Naked Fire Gesture,” which served as liner notes for the album Unit Structures, on which he writes the line, “Billie’s right arm bent at breast moving as light touch.”8 The final chapter of Billie’s Bent Elbow is devoted to an exploration (an experimentation) of a method tending to this gesture:
Billie gives a diasporic wave, I say, with a cupped, wine-stained palm. Making a conspiratorial swoosh and Borromean sweeps, an “economy of known material / songs of the mother hand,” indicating the expanse of our field. She stirs and casts the spell while nursing the pint, hazy, ungloved, and sends fascinations, corresponding our feelings on the way to feeling, on the way to relationship. We convene around shared preoccupations—how to make the changes, how to interpret the lyrics, how to get together, how to stay alive.9
It is around this constellatory gathering, this aesthetico-ethical gesture of Billie’s undulating arm (rather than Èṣù’s irritable, insolent, agitating moves, which actually retain quite conventionally dialectical maneuvers), that I feel most able to respond to your question, and to the ever-generative swirl of provocations that Kerstin and Devin’s Fantasies of the People has left us.
As a way back into this gesture that Holiday’s arm helps name, I’d like to share a 1977 performance of Betty Carter singing “What’s New?”10 At the very start, you’ll hear Carter sing a quarter-note pickup to a whole note at the top of the form. It is the root note of the tonic, held over an entire slow bar. The root over the tonic often signals resolution. Here, though, suspended octaves above the bass, it arrives at the (supposed) start, superimposed onto what seems to be the first breath: a cadential “‘post-expectant’ arrival” marked by the pickup.11 So we have this tonic over root, a sort of beginning-ending, but I’m most interested in how exposed the second, bar-long melody note is, and what this exposure lays bare about jazz vocal interpretation and its errant tendencies. In that space we get a clear read of Carter’s exploration of the spectral landscape of tone, her path through the inharmonic life of the note: flat, then sharpening, wooly with breath, its decay thickening sonic density, then blown bubble-gum thin so it pops and snaps back; swooping and looping through its own vacillation between equal and unequal temperaments; the earthly series of tone, just, tempered, untempered.
For me, there is something deeply fantastic about all this that I’m attempting to find a way of sharing without betraying its hermeneutic obscurity. To borrow from Devin’s gloss of Lu Märten, Carter’s sonic gesture might not call for understanding.12 My engagement with it wants to dwell on its surface, partaking of its repertoire of movement. What I think I can safely venture, though, using the language I have, is that Carter shines a light on the scripturality of the music—on the centrality of gesture, its billowing elbow. And this—as much as the “maintenance of ditches and craters” and the feats of spontaneous engineering that characterize improvisation, as much as what Yoruba oríkì practice deploys by way of disjunction, parataxis, intimacy, and fragile assemblage, and what Kerstin, with Märten, would understand as fantasy’s “combination and organization,” which “is its invention,” not its “discovery”—amounts to a devalorization of the faculty of the imagination in favor of a pointedly material fantastic: worked, somatic, of the senses.13
What I struggle with is in wanting to say something like “the unfurling phrase, the spectral play, is a transcription of her listening—a sort of primal hearing of a shared, passing moment.” I am wondering whether I might borrow from Devin’s account of work-based gestures, and the trace that he locates in the choreography of the hand, to help think through this fantasy as a trawl of a drawl: a scripturality carried in the decaying tone’s intimacy with the passing moment.14 While I’m keen to keep in view the irrepressible materiality of the surface, displaying its articulations of spectral movement, I’m as committed to uncovering a language with which to do justice to the sort of sober intoxication that this practice of the vanishing line enacts. We might say that, where Märten’s fantasy is combinatory, building (a faculty that has much to offer our understanding of the folkic, open-ended collaboration the standard facilitates), Carter’s line perishes, with and as the earthly. Hers is the transcription, the shape, of a certain earthly passing. But this sort of mystic writing-pad nomenclature is no less fantastic.
To move the conversation in another direction you were taking us: You speak of the “heroic origin” as premised on erasure—Wynter, despite herself maybe, wanting to extract order from chaos, to found the threshold of thresholds. This is the seduction of autopoiesis, of a self-troping that secures its own ground and keeps re-securing it. It is hard to think one’s way out of, because that founding is so seductive. It keeps origination an accomplishment, and even the alternatives we reach for (the performative fiction) become vehicles for the satisfaction of that compulsion. Are these tabulae rasae, these “myths of absolute beginnings” with their creative, imaginative charge, paradigmatic of the understanding of fantasy we are working with? Or are these cosmogonies what fantasy, in its promiscuity, would inadvertently undo?
AF: Should we then not understand such forms of origination not as alternative, but precisely as persistent and exceeding, and reenvision fields like critical theory or art according to such “arts of origination”? And develop cultural techniques that resist being molded into what Kerstin and Devin so adequately call “deadly isolations”? Alternative forms of origination may be under some pressure here from how myths of “absolute beginnings” are the stuff of fantasy already.
Your riff on “What’s New?” is so rich. “What’s New?” speaks to all our questions: nothing new, every reproduction cycle, every moment. In very general terms, life is always already improvised, as fundamental assumptions of an always-unstable, living ground and groundlessness. Given your take on the “‘post-expectant’ arrival” (with Mackey) in the cadence and calling of the “beginning-ending,” I wonder whether, when playing with fantasy as a “communal sense,” aren’t we playing with comunitas as origination?
There is a German word, verglühen, “to burn up,” that is not adequately translatable because the overtone is lost, the shooting-star quality of the “the always-already dying phrase.” I am interested to hear whether you would make the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin into a theologian of jazz? It’s a very honest question concerning what is universal in the rendering of black experience, and how it sits within a conception of history, of memory, of fantasy as collective sense. It is well established (yet hardly recognized) that key elements of global popular culture derive from the cosmological and social grammar of Yoruba culture, so this particular set of cultural techniques, their mediality and indeterminacy, their “beginnings-endings,” have become, so to speak, universalized as a global standard throughout the past century.15 In this sense we can speak of two unreconciled universalizations. There is Achille Mbembe’s, which he calls the “becoming-Black of the world”—displaceability and extraction, the condition of the plantation generalized as the working grammar of contemporary capital: universalization as enclosure. And there is the other one, running counter—the worldwide diffusion of the techniques to survive that very condition. Orisha devotion is now counted among the so-called world’s great religions, resurfacing as the working grammar, or shall we say, the pathos formula, of global pop culture that secures non-identitarian protocols of living together: universalization as regeneration from catastrophe, from apocalypse. I wonder about how the relation between the particular and universal may reflect what you have done with the field of critical theory, because a reorigination of its institutions, just as in art, if I understand you right, is certainly without alternative.
FO: Verglühen! Thank you for the term and the image. The scene of the shooting star, burning up in its descent, helps me keep something in view that I worry is at times bled from our thinking on fantasy: the intoxicating and wondrous. I look forward to spending time with the word, the image, and their implications, because I suspect verglühen carries a more finely graded sense of the tempo of going-under than Untergang does (the term Benjamin uses in “Theological-Political Fragment” for the downfall the earthly seeks in its happiness).16 The steady burning of a star; the flash of the shooting star; the saturnine death of a sun.
I would love to hear you say more about the fantastical nature of “myths of absolute beginnings.” I worry that we are asking this one word, “fantasy,” to name two distinct things, each of which stand in quite different relations to it. In my previous response I was working my way toward the framework Devin and Kerstin establish, particularly the distinction they draw between imagination and fantasy. Namely, imagination as the intentional, form-giving faculty that enacts a “blockade of the outside world” and secures the autonomy of the bourgeois subject; fantasy as the contagious, de-forming, materially entangled thing that the modern era demoted to mere “fancy.”17 Imagination is recruited to help police the borders between subjective and objective, interior and exterior. Fantasy, in my understanding, is what cannot help but undermine this sovereignty. They tell us that it is a fantasy that is “both outside and inside,” that is somatic occurrence, “an ours that isn’t mine.”18 It’s a fantasy that is active, performed, and that for me unfolds in what, echoing Denise Ferreira da Silva, we might call a zone of exteriority and affectability, that unfolds as the outer, susceptible realm to which her transparent, self-determining “I” thinks it is condemning its others.19 That which I have taken to calling the earthly.
As for your comment concerning myths of absolute beginnings, I am wondering whether the “in the beginning,” the blank slate, the founded ground, belongs to fantasy at all? This is not to say fantasy is foreclosed to the imagination (although I would say that its contagion would certainly be unacceptable to certain modalities of the interior “I”; and I would also say that an irruption of fantastic performance may be exactly what undermines the imagination from within). But the ideal your question suggests, the desire to enact or discover the threshold of thresholds, that notion of an absolute beginning, seems at odds both with Devin and Kerstin’s insistence on the materiality and performance of the fantastic, and with what I am most invested in tracing through the musical standard. My sense is that fantasy (in its earth-boundedness, its material, somatic, bodily, earthly innervations, its soulful affectability, its “ours which is not mine”) is tendentially at odds with the philosophically (and, in its Freudian, not so much its Laplanchean, register, psychoanalytically) sanctioned imagination of the interior subject. It is simply too impure, too entangled for the absolute beginning. The blank slate is “the blockade of the outside world,” as Devin quotes Bloch. It is the squeaky-clean interior the imagination posits by holding the messy earth at a distance. Which is to say, I think that “heroic origination” tends toward imagination, as opposed to fantasy. But I would love to hear more about this relationship between fantasy and origination as you understand it.
Having spent all this time claiming the fantastic for the earthly, I find I don’t much want to plant a flag in it! Which is perhaps as it should be. Let me instead say where this current preoccupation with the musical standard is tending by way of Betty Carter’s line, her being of the “oracular earth.” In recent thinking I’ve been working with the term ìtàn, often translated as “history,” but much better understood as a genre of narrativity that gathers by way of displacement, dissemination, instituted uncertainty. It is the narration of what Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ calls ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀, the occurrence that answers to no subject, indifferent to whether the grammar holds.20 Because the event it tends has no author, ìtàn has nothing to found. It is a narration of a passing, not an establishment. I think this makes it something of a third term, distinct from both the heroic founding and the reorigination we have been circling. Heroic origination founds; it establishes and clears the ground. And I think it fair to characterize fantasy, for Devin and Kerstin, as that which might reoriginate, remake, build in common. Ìtàn does neither. It narrates the going-under from within, its narration approximating the earthly emanation of which it is itself part. So neither a founding nor a building in common, but an “ours which is not mine”—an ours that is not the sum of its mines, tending to what is passing; tending its going-under from within, a mode of narration that, as Adéẹ̀kọ́ puts it, approximates earthly emanation as it goes. So what I am after is not an art of origination but something like an art of ìtàn: a narration that snuggles the happening in its unfolding, never standing apart from it. It seems to me that ìtàn cannot, structurally, produce a myth of absolute beginnings. It does not stand before its event but comes to it belatedly and from within, disseminative, uncertain; it begins in the middle, in the muck, in the fall, the Untergang or verglühen of the earthly. It cannot narrate an absolute beginning; it is always ending.
I’m tickled by your question about whether I make the German-Jewish writer Benjamin into a theologian of jazz, in part because I do tend to consider him as contributory to a black methodology. But I must say that I don’t really understand Benjamin as a theologian at all (and I know you mean the term loosely, with a little literary license). The “Theological-Political Fragment” I’ve been living with these past few years is pointedly opposed to the theocratic compulsions of historiography, and to the tenacious hold that redemption still has on even the most seemingly pessimistic or negativist corners of the theoretical humanities. Benjamin seems to me after something else. I would characterize it as a narration that is material, bodily, of the earth, profane, and invested in exactly this setting, decaying, burning-up, going-under rhythmic performance. And yet, insofar as there is a (faint) messianic note in this Glück in Untergang, I will accept the characterization of my Benjamin as a theologian, but a theologian of the profane, of the soulful earthly.
And onto your central point: I would put the collaboration the other way around. I wonder whether the jazz vocalist (Betty Carter, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, et al.) is in fact the historical materialist we’ve been awaiting. I would say it is she who is at the forefront of the study, the advance guard of a politics Benjamin names (and also sings—as if primal hearing could be anything but a song). When I call Carter’s phrasing, her exploration and play with shape and color, a genre of Spektralanalyse, I am repurposing a Benjaminian term for her practice, not explaining her practice by his. The fragment, and Benjamin elsewhere, reads to me as a belated and partial transcription, in another idiom, of what she is doing along the slopes of the standard. Her singing is a listening to the churning ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀ that she and her line at once are and narrate: the material and its materialist. So, Betty Carter is the theorist, and Benjamin, I would say, is one of her better readers/listeners.
AF: Thank you, Fumi, for this particular vision of a different hinge, a different, indeed fantastic, ground for historical materialism. Also for asking for definitional precision. It is true that when I insist that myths of absolute beginnings are the stuff of fantasy too, I am stretching the term, perhaps too far. I wanted to invoke the psychoanalytic notion of reality resting on phantasm, extended to the mediated primacy of all cosmological symbolization. Which means that the kingdom of the modern imagination is not grounded on a stable fundament, but on the kind of causality that invokes and projects a cause and origin after the effect (perhaps another definition of magic) and needs to cover this up with constant denial and disavowal. Above all, the systemic debris that we inhabit, the institutional divisions of labor, also our critical grammar, are founded through categorical divisions originating, and reoriginating as it were, other divisions whose differences become thresholds and borders that are being farmed and policed. The life of entire institutions and disciplines is often little but the permanent reproduction of these.
You bring up Denise Ferreira da Silva, and I agree that her frame that posits the racializing divide between exteriority and interiority, between self-determination and alleged outer-determination subjected to laws of nature, is useful and necessary. The originary modern divide that institutes the discourse of the colonial-modern, then, will be a divide between unfree matter and the subject of freedom, an imaginary threshold to be farmed and a border to be policed. The division between fantasy and imagination, along the lines you sum up so accurately, occurs downstream of that origination, folding in on the fantasy and reproducing the originary divide upstream. The problem of definitional precision in emancipatory or abolitionist discourse is so often that, in attempting to undo the hierarchy established by the divide, the demotion, the markedness, the ontological death sentence, one remains within the grammar and (il)legibility established by the divide itself, within what the division produces. That’s why I can’t let go of origination: You have to think below, beyond, and before the division to challenge its grounds, its matter-of-factness. Denise’s “difference without separability” remains a methodological guide here.21 But this is also where I locate the fantastic: at the zero-point before the division. The groundless ground and the high noon of mediality.
I want to absolutely depart from “heroic cosmogony,” but I want to insist that this requires its provincialization as a type, even if a historically powerful type. Perhaps for clarification, Jan Assmann begins his influential 1996 essay “The Mosaic Distinction”—which is about the history of the fateful distinction between “true” and “false” religion, a notion that is originary to monotheism—by quoting these lines: “Draw a distinction … Call it the first distinction. Call the space in which it is drawn the space severed or cloven by the distinction.” And what does he do with these lines, which are basically from a mathematical treaty on form? “It seems as if George Spencer Brown’s ‘First Law of Construction’ does not apply solely to the logical and mathematical construction for which it is meant. It also applies strangely well to the space of cultural constructions and distinctions and to the spaces that are severed or cloven by such distinctions.”22 And I do think that applies to the categories of thought as well, such as poetry—the kind of language that touches a space that is before the distinctions upon which all meaning will ultimately come to rest. It is a language of origination—the zero-point beyond the division, the work of provincializing heroic origination as a type among others.
You brought up the “saturnine” early in last your response, which first evoked Dürer’s Melancholia in my mind, the riddled and foreclosed origination of the modern world, of colonial apocalypse already-occurred, the gaze at what is verglüht. But that scaled up quickly, and I was reminded of the conversation Kerstin and I did with you, examining your provisional notion of a “black folkic,” for our Illiberal Arts publication.23 I cannot help but see a web of correspondences emerging, confronting the imperative to cease the reproduction of this world, of its fundaments in heroically hypostasized myths of genesis. In this, the exteriority of affect reframes the ecstasy found by Aby Warburg in his pathos formulas, perhaps as the connecting thread of Ariadne in search of a foreclosure that he could not name but whose Saturnian insanity he could feel all too well. It got to him, with the force of a foreclosed reality: the reality of capitalism’s exteriority. To me, his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne from 1929 is a cosmology in shards, a patchwork collage, a broken reconstruction of a bourgeois origination seeking its own foundation and categorically missing it, disavowing it, seeking its own ground in an idealized antiquity—a “dream of reason that produces monsters,” in Goya’s etching that is often compared to Dürer’s.
This makes me interested in where Warburg and Wynter converge, this search for symbolic origination and reorigination—Warburg in images, Wynter in narratives. I am interested, broadly speaking, in the ungrounding project of Black Studies as a quest for reorigination, one that speaks from what the edifice of Western origination itself forecloses. The point of non-division, that necessary fantastic vantage, is what allows us to sound out other correspondences. Can we hear the echoes of jazz in the repetition and difference-cadence of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne? The bourgeois world, its claims to reason, had just undergone its own apocalypse in the industrial slaughter of WWI, and it is the time of the jazz craze, literally carrying the post-apocalypse generative work of African-American code and social protocol: a society out of the fragment of destroyed cosmologies, collage-like, re-cohering severed memories, severed worlds, in the aftermath and persistence of violence and catastrophe.24
When Warburg speaks of the pagan, he speaks on the one hand of something rather specific in the mythological corpus—not, say, “folk” in general—but sometimes he explicitly seeks out a universal dimension, an anthropological constant of symbolic origination, perhaps best summed up as “indestructible heathendom.” We could say he shares with Wynter a cosmological reproductive imperative, and I see Wynter very much as a theorist of this. This is “pagan” only if and insofar as the notion is stripped of the demotion inherent in its colloquial use, as what has been overcome, and insofar it names precisely what you called earlier the mimetic or folkic episteme innervating musical expression in general. This is where Adéẹ̀kọ́’s “linguistic turn”—the insistence that the Yoruba vernacular is already a site of second-order thinking, not raw material awaiting theorization from outside—meets Robert Farris Thompson, the analyst of the most globally successful Yoruba pathos formula, the cool, from the other end of the same refusal: His elicited vocabulary of ìtutu, àṣẹ, jijora was already an argument that “folk” names theory in another idiom, not its absence.
Ralph Ellison sharply articulated the consequence of that refusal in his essay “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”: the folk, the folkic, the “pagan” is received back to the culture that produced it only after being stigmatized as superstition—precisely so that its technical sophistication, and the sovereignty it withholds from whoever would call it primitive, can be disavowed.25 I find this relevant because the reproductive imperative inherent in symbolic worlds, and for systems of repression and extraction the sacrificial calculus (dead bodies, licensed killings) on which their reproduction is premised, the affective registers invoked by apocalyptic discourse and the “pagan,” are currently in the grip of the worst kind of identitarian right-wing politics, just like the genre of mainstream “fantasy.” I also like to think of what you’re doing with ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀ as a politics to reverse that—fundamentally, to change the joke and whom the joke is directed toward.
FO: It’s good to return to “Change the Joke,” which Ellison spends in refusal of Stanley Edgar Hyman’s archetype-hunting, and of any identitarian or ontological understanding of the folk, in favor of the folk as practice—what Ọlábíyìí B. Yáì would render as àṣà, often translated as “tradition” but closer to the technique or style by which “metonymic selections and bits” are “reconstituted from dispersed parts of other aggregations” (ẹ̀yà).26 It is a practice of gathering and arranging, a gathering in arranging: something like an ornamental practice.27 Àṣà in this sense leans less toward proprietary or identitarian inheritance than toward a tradition taken up—and taking it up is itself a gathering and arranging, a reconstitution rather than a bequest. Which is one way of talking about what black creative music does. It is part of why àṣà has been such a resource for my thinking about it.
Another thing: I appreciate you drawing us downstream to the political. I’ve been thinking for some time about the significance for radical thought and politics of intoxication and the fantastic, and I’m really glad you hear ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀ as an extension of that work.28
Listen to these lines of oríkì for ilẹ̀, the earth: “Ká fun ká fun, is the coughing of the goat / the ant moves, rolling stylishly.”29 I’m extending the earth to the earthly here—das Irdische, all that is earthly, which the verse’s motley of practices invites; it coughs, it rolls, it moves stylishly, it spreads and gathers by its own cadence, ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀ surfacing. And we find that the ant’s “stylish” roll is not far from the singer’s line, from the historical materialist in and as the happening. I imagine this is some of what Fred Moten hears as volatility in “Soul Looks Back” when he writes of “earth’s ongoing geologic presencing” and what he hears through Layli Long Soldier as the mountain “in and out of place in rising, sharing in approaching, not extracting.”30 And it is also what Bessie Smith’s golden hour vigils observe. Do you know “St. Louis Blues”?31 In it the singer returns each night to watch the sun go down. The sunset here is not an event that ends and recurs. You might say that it never finishes setting, that what goes under here is rising-to-fall elsewhere, always somewhere underway on a turning earth. So she does not come back to a completed thing. She sings that she feels tomorrow as she feels today: not so much (or only) a return, but an ever-passing. She is always on the last go-round. Her nightly return is not the recurrence of an event but a going-under she never left. It’s something of an electrocardiogram of ceaseless setting.
What has this to do with political action? For me, this analytic (one that isn’t about survival, or loss, or redemption, or salvation) is a way to stay answerable to the pain and shame of political inertia without succumbing to the redemption compulsion or its twin, fatalism.32 Claudia Rankine’s Triage has arrived right on time for me:
The world is quibbling about whom to grieve, while Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, the undocumented, gay rights, women’s rights, trans people, choice, and so on have been and are under attack … What does it mean to do something when the rule of law, voting rights, checks and balances, decency, the democratic laundry lists mean less and less? What if, in the midst of climate change, dismantling of the CDC, an ineffective Supreme Court, with the anticipated scarcity of resources, our government intends for us to die?33
I want to be careful here. We’re (as are Rankine’s collapsing academics) rightly trained on abolition, on the address of ongoing licensed slaughter, the genocides underway, the deaths administered as the price of a world’s self-preservation. And in that righteous light, a politics pitched to the earthly’s passing, to going-under, to burning up, might easily be misheard as a quietism. But that is not what the earthly’s dwelling in its Untergang is. It is, rather, an agitated ease in ever-ending, an abiding in the rhythm of decline, in distinction from the individual’s striving to preserve itself against it. To go under in that rhythm, in the earthly’s own cadence, is a politics, of sorts. It is one that cannot be made an instrument, that does not reach toward the chef d’oeuvre that both progress and its dialectical shadow cannot do without, each in its own messianic pretension. The earthly’s ease in passing is not resignation, nor is it nihilism as ordinarily understood, nor a death wish. And if it has anything legible as a politics at all, that politics is simply a wanting the world to allow us to pass. A wanting the world not to kill us. A wanting to pass.
But there is something else here that this order of demand does not quite reach, and I think it speaks more directly to your concern about the capture of the pagan, the fantastic, the intoxicating by the identitarian right. Theirs is a possessive, counterfeit fantastic: a “fantasy” of possession, the possessive individual returned in collective form. Isn’t blood and soil self-possession scaled to a people? Isn’t this ground zero of identity? An origin to be owned and defended? The heroic founding we spoke of earlier (that myth of absolute beginning, the threshold of thresholds) is an instrument forged from murderous frenzy, an organization of feverish rage into a weapon, not the ungovernable volatility of ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀. This something else may not belong to the political order, even as it might cause havoc for it. It might be understood as a movement—or more precisely, movement. The fantastic practices I’m interested in could be understood as a harkening of that movement, a going with and as it, which is radically dispossessive. The same spreading and gathering I heard in those lines is a gathering of flesh, a formation prior to anyone who could count it, defend it, or be made to die for it. This fantastic founds nothing. It cannot originate heroically, cannot narrate an absolute beginning, it is always ending. To attend it, to go under with it, is a sober intoxication that cannot be had. So, not a counter-founding but a practice, which is just where you and Kerstin and Devin have been taking us. Fantasy as a collective material practice, inherently technical, a Werkfähigkeit, a doing. If yours is a practice of reorigination (fantasy at the point of origin, an improvisation of genres of origination), mine is a technique of going-under.34 I would say that it’s the same worked, material, folkic practice, tending not to new origins but to the earthly’s always-ending. Practices of passing. Fantasy as dispossession. An intoxication of all that is earthly, that “ours which is not mine.”
AF: For now, we have only begun to discern the outlines of an art history liberated from the deadly isolation that is “art”—a process in which I see your work as essential. Grounded on the exteriority outlined by Denise Ferreira da Silva, I believe this can be guided by the necessary fantasy of a “before the division,” perhaps a flickering light, perhaps nothing short of the shooting star of abolition. It treats the bourgeois property-based violent naturalizations of the inside-outside divide as the historical variable upon which history returns to us in reverse. I look to Warburg because his relentless attempt to ground art history in an account of cosmological symbolization without stable ground or ontology has a deep affinity with Wynter’s calling, with Fanon and Césaire, for a “human ecumene” on which a different universalist—or perhaps better: anti-essentialist—politics can be based. But I also look to Warburg because there is a relation in his work to the technique or style by which “metonymic selections and bits” are “reconstituted from other and various aggregations,” like Yáì’s àṣà addressing the beyond of history: “invention.” Here is a vantage point for rendering the apocalypse of the bourgeois world, the colonial world, into an epic similar to Leslie Marmon Silko’s genesis-in-reverse novel Almanac of the Dead. I imagine pressing this spiraling descent close to the notion of passing, of letting pass, that you suggest.
Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool University Press, 2015). The question of “invention” versus “history” in Wynter’s reading of Fanon is beautifully unpacked in David Marriott, “Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and ‘the Damned,’” New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (Winter 2011).
Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2 12/13, no. 3/1 (Spring–Fall 1984).
Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press, 2008), 16.
Iain Macdonald, What Would Be Different: Figures of Possibility in Adorno (Stanford University Press, 2019), 127; Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso, 2005), 151; Fred Moten, “Note on Surrender,” Brooklyn Rail, November 2020 →.
Babatunde Lawal, “Àwòrán: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 3 (2001): 502.
Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought,” Criticism 50, no. 3 (2008): 352; Hortense J. Spillers, “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 262.
Billie Holiday, Granada TV Chelsea at Nine broadcast, London, filmed February 23, 1959, aired March 1959.
Cecil Taylor, “Sound Structure of Subculture Becoming Major Breath / Naked Fire Gesture,” liner notes to Cecil Taylor, Unit Structures, Blue Note Records BST 84237, 1966, LP.
Fumi Okiji, Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy, and a Nonsensuous Standard (Stanford University Press, 2025), 76.
Betty Carter, “What’s New?,” live performance, Italy, 1977 →.
Nathaniel Mackey, Atet AD 3 (City Lights Books, 2001).
Devin Fore, “Fantasies at Work: An Introduction to Fantasies of the People,” e-flux journal, no. 161 (2026).
Lu Märten quoted in Kerstin Stakemeier, “Epic Fantasies: An Introduction to Fantasies of the People,” e-flux journal, no 161 (2026).
Fore, “Fantasies at Work.”
Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” African Arts 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 40–43, 64–67, 89–91, and Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (Random House, 1983); Òrìṣà Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture, ed. Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Thompson closes “An Aesthetic of the Cool” (89) by citing Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Random House, 1952), 497: “We were older than they, in the sense of what it took to live in the world with others.” It is the essay’s final word on the antiquity of the cool.
Walter Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment,” in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Harvard University Press, 2002), 305.
Ernst Bloch quoted in Fore, “Fantasies at Work.”
Günther K. Lehmann quoted in Stakemeier, “Epic Fantasies”; Jean Laplanche quoted in Stakemeier, “Epic Fantasies”; Stakemeier, “Epic Fantasies.”
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, “Lẹ́yìn Kété Nibi Ń Ṣẹlẹ̀: Disaster, Event, and Ideophone,” in Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations, ed. Mantra Mukim and Derek Attridge (Routledge, 2021).
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,” in 32nd Bienal de São Paulo: Incerteza Viva / Live Uncertainty, ed. Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças (Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2016).
Jan Assmann, “The Mosaic Distinction: Israel, Egypt, and the Invention of Paganism,” Representations, no. 56 (Autumn 1996).
Fumi Okiji, in conversation with Anselm Franke and Kerstin Stakemeier, in Illiberal Arts, ed. Franke and Stakemeier (Haus der Kulturen der Welt / b_books, 2021), 363.
Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Beacon Press, 1992). (Originally An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past, 1976.)
Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Partisan Review 25, no. 2 (Spring 1958); reprinted in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (Modern Library, 1995).
Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ̀, “Decolonization Without a Linguistic Turn Is like Drinking Sugar Without Tea: Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì,” Journal of the African Literature Association 15, no. 2 (2021).
Here I am taken to Zora Neale Hurston’s “decorating a decoration,” and the ornamental. Hurston, “Characteristics of Negroexpression” (1934), in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Gene Andrew Jarrett (Princeton University Press, 2008), 357; I’m interested in how this gathering and arrangement might manifest in nonfigurative, abstract, and conceptual work. “Nomenclature for the Time Being,” the recent exhibition curated by Imani Mason Jordan, has much to offer here →.
Fumi Okiji, “Ornamentality, or the Perfected Art of Empathy,” Portable Gray 8, no. 2 (2025).
Akinmayowa Akin-Otiko, “Beyond Presumption: Proof of Olódùmarè’s Existence Using Afẹ́fẹ́ (Air), Ilẹ̀ (Soil) and Omi (Water) Among the Yoruba,” Nsukka Journal of Religion and Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2024): 57.
Fred Moten, “Soul Looks Back,” in Nathaniel Mackey, Destination Out: Essays on His Work, ed. Jeanne Heuving (University of Iowa Press, 2021), 210.
Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong and Fred Longshaw, “St. Louis Blues,” Columbia, 1925.
Fatalism is a resignation; my position is an agitated ease within an incomplete(able) story.
Claudia Rankine, Triage (Graywolf Press, 2026), 110, emphasis in original.
Stakemeier, “Epic Fantasies.”