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Rizvana Bradley, "Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form" (Stanford UP, 2023)
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- [00:00]
Rizvana Bradley
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- [01:31]
Rizvana Bradley
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Jesse Cohen
Hi, welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Jesse Cohen and I'm your host. Today we're talking to Rizvana Bradley. Rizvana is Associate professor of Film and Media and affiliated faculty in the History of Art and the center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship examines modern and contemporary art, film gifts, digital media, and literature. Today we're discussing her book, Black Aesthetics and the Critique of Form, published by Stanford University Press in 2023. Hi Rizwana, welcome to the show. First, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to this project?
- [02:13]
Rizvana Bradley
Certainly. I first became interested in the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and in particular, the politics of visuality. When I was an undergraduate at Williams College, I read a lot of theory, continental philosophy, and art criticism. Going to lectures at the Clark Art Institute and being exposed to critical theory and the practice of close reading in small seminars was really where I began to cultivate an interest in thinking about the entwinement of art theory and politics. Williams was really where my curiosity about politics and aesthetics that would eventually lead me to my current work took hold. These early political theory courses prepared the ground for me to begin to understand the stakes of interpretation within various discourses. And the art history courses really stress the importance of formal analysis. My PhD work at Duke Literature deepened these lines of inquiry in profound ways. Duke lit was an exceptional department in many ways, one that gathered a unique collection of misfits, to use one lit faculty member's word, and really encouraged study that was at once extremely rigorous and often highly interdisciplinary or even anti disciplinary. Being able to take seminars on Marx and on modernism with the late Frederick Jameson, or the seminar on the secular and the sacred with the late Srinivas, our Avamudon was a real privilege. It was a wonderful place for interdisciplinary study. Between taking courses with Kate Hales, Ian Baucombe and Fred Moten, or listening to lectures by amazing visiting scholars in residence at the Franklin Humanities center, where I worked for a time, actually. Not to mention attending the Duke Feminist Theory Workshops in the spring. All of which is to say it was a great environment for many of my varied intellectual interests to take deeper roots. My time at Duke was complemented by my time as a critical studies fellow at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, or the Whitney ISP for short, that provided an opportunity to be exposed to a really incredible range of scholars, artists and curators who were thinking about the relationship between politics and aesthetics. We were fortunate enough to have seminars led by thinkers such as David Harvey, Stuart Hall, Chantal Mouff, Hal Foster and even the late Oakley Enweser, the first non European curator of Documenta and the first African born director of the Venice Biennale. I felt very lucky being able to once again inhabit a small cohort of aspiring artists, curators and critics Emilieux that really pushed me to think beyond the categorical and the predetermined. This impetus to press up against the limits of established formalisms would become especially important for my training in thinking about the kinds of philosophical interventions black art was making in the world, in interventions that increasingly struck me as very much in excess of representationalist discourses and representationalist logics. It goes without saying that Duke literature's pedagogical emphasis on thinking at the nexus of aesthetic theory, philosophy and political theory has left an indelible mark on my scholarship. All of these experiences were crucial for me in many ways and would come to be implicitly threaded through my scholarly work and eventually the writing of Anti Aesthetics. In the book, I stress that all my preceding scholarship is not just the product of academic research and exchanges. It's a book that has also been deeply influenced by many years of conversations with practicing artists. And I feel very fortunate to have been able to think with and learn from the questions many of them are working through in their practices. Questions that are germane to the institutional politics of the art world, broadly speaking, and. And which continue to speak to the representationalist constraints that continue to plague black artistry. In the book, I try to explain that instead of regarding the problematics black artists are forced to wrestle with only as limitations, perversely, these variously imposed constraints often serve as the very conditions of possibility, not only for the work of black artistry, but for powerful philosophical reflections on blackness as that which poses singular metaphysical challenges for aesthetic logic and theory. Now, I should say that as important as all of my early formative intellectual experiences were, for the most part, in all these rich, theoretically sophisticated engagements with the relationship between politics and aesthetics, the question of blackness, if addressed at all, was never really raised to the level of a conceptual problem. So my scholarly work really developed in something like a transdisciplinary lacuna. And this kind of requisite disciplinary homelessness, so to speak, helped to spark my desire to extend a different methodological orientation to the question of blackness. It was that desire that really prompted me not only to transgress various disciplinary boundaries, but also to develop a parallel curatorial practice of sorts. Having curated art's academic symposia internationally in places like the British Film Institute, the Serpentine Galleries in London, the Stidlich Museum of Art in Amsterdam, and I feel really grateful to have been able to grapple with the question of blackness, politics and aesthetics in transducers, disciplinary, experimental art settings with incredible artists and scholars alike over the years. A key conceit of the book is that artists are themselves brilliant theoreticians and that their theoretical contributions are imminent to their artistic practices.
- [07:53]
Jesse Cohen
Can you share how you situate this project and yourself as a scholar within Black studies? You know, this book seems committed to the negative and operates, you know, differently from a lot of the debates that listeners might be familiar with.
- [08:07]
Rizvana Bradley
Well, in terms of how I situate this book and myself within Black studies, or with respect to the often charged debates within the field around questions of negativity, optimism, pessimism, and so forth, I would say this Black Studies, in its formalized capacity, emerged through a political rebellion against the racial exclusions of university curricula and admittances, really against all the complex ways the university is complicit in black oppression. And this rebellion was a means of advanc Cedric Robinson called the black radical tradition within spaces from which it had been previously barred. The tradition of black study, however, is as old as the Black Diaspora. And no matter how diverse its articulations, it has always been a tradition of thought that radically unsettles established architectures of knowledge, value, politics, and aesthetics. So I would say this negativity is imminent to the Black diaspora. It's part of our inheritance. We can't help but make and unmake the anti black world from which we are interdicted. This contention is foundational to the book. As for negativity, this is a great question. Understandably, many of us are disquieted by the specter of the negative. We want something to hold on to, but negativity is something we bear, whether or not we acknowledge it. Black Studies at its best is committed to thinking with this unthinkability. For those who have not read the book, Anti Aesthetics opens with a call to attune to and stay with what I call the negativity of black art. The book argues that black artistry advances a thought of negativity without recuperation or address. Rather than acceding to the presumption that black art should advance a reparative politics, Black artistry's negative power lies and perhaps always has resided in its incisive critique of the social order that is, Black art challenges predominant political grammars by disclosing and unsettling their very foundations. I'd like to take a moment and acknowledge the racialized field of discourse in which the philosophical study of aesthetics as well as the discipline of art history unfold. Actually, I wanted to read a brief excerpt of something.
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Jesse Cohen
Sure. Please go ahead.
- [10:28]
Rizvana Bradley
Okay. I'll reveal what the text is after I read the excerpt. My book's focus is not cynical. Rather, it stems from my belief in the paradoxical yet sage statement once made by the poet Fanny Howe, that the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn't. This focus does allied, however unforgivably, perhaps for some works whose principal goal it is to impugn the causes or agents of the cruelties at hand. For this reason, anyone looking for a book that champions art whose main point is either an outraged never again should this terribly cruel thing be allowed to occur, or conversely, a resigned ah, isn't life always and inevitably this way? Should probably put this one down for what I'm calling Art of cruelty is specifically not art that expressly aims to protest, ameliorate, make meaningful, cast blame, or intervene in instances of brutality. To the contrary, much of the art considered here could be fairly charged with adding more cruelties, both real and represented, to an already contemptible heap. Sometimes, as we shall see, the cruelty stays within the confines of the page or the gallery wall, which makes it slightly easier to talk about or defend. Other times, the cruelty seeps out to the viewer more directly, further troubling the ethical waters. This book diagrams a wide range of such charged instances in recent art and cult and takes a new look at what is found there. It does not offer what to my mind can only be false or moralistic solutions to intractable ethical and aesthetic problems. End quote. What I've just read is an excerpt from Maggie Nelson's celebrated the Art of Cruelty, a reckoning which the Los Angeles Times called criticism at its best and which has been lauded by other mainstream media sources such as the New York Times, npr, the Boston Globe, and many others. So the obvious question that emerges emerges is why it is that Nelson's refusal to offer, in her words, quote, what can only be false or moralistic solutions to intractable ethical and aesthetic problems end quote elicits showers of praise from the literary establishment, whereas black critical interventions that emphasize negativity or which refuse forms of affirmation or amelioration that in fact function to conceal and perpetuate our ongoing captivity, are instead met with anxiety, apprehension, or uncertainty at best and outright dismissal, denunciation at worst. This is, of course, a rhetorical question, since we already know the answer. As I elaborate in the book, it has to do with the singular ways that black critical thought is subject to the racial regime of aesthetics and to the psychic architecture of a civil society that is fundamentally anti black. And crucially, it has to do with the aesthetic labor blackness is expected to do on behalf of the world in service of the very anti black order to which it is subjected.
- [13:33]
Jesse Cohen
Yeah, I think this tension that you're discussing. We'll come back to that in a moment. But first, how did you decide on the art and the other works you analyze in this book? And can you also share a little bit of your thoughts on the relationship between black art and philosophy?
- [13:50]
Rizvana Bradley
Yes, thanks so much for this important question. As I keep saying, because it needs to be repeated, the book is an effort to think philosophically with black art, with the philosophical invention black art undertakes by necessity, to answer you in a more direct way, Black art is doing the philosophical work of reflecting upon and exposing its own conditions of possibility and impossibility. Black art is reflecting upon the conditions that necessitate blackness's interdiction from the racial regime of aesthetics. My interest in all of these works is in the way they recursively deconstruct the very aesthetic forms that condition their appearance, including the form that is the artistic medium itself. What these artworks ultimately do is disclose black art's imminent defilement of the purities of medium and form, the purity of medium as form. These are philosophical operations that are essential to these artworks, but which sadly remain untheorized. Importantly, the project that Anti aesthetics advances begins by critiquing the prevailing discourses on black artistry, which so often seem to land on a series of familiar propositions regarding identity and resistance. To put it somewhat flippantly, these discourses tell us, black art is black. Black is beautiful, black is sorrowful, Blackness resists, blackness heals, blackness saves the world from itself. Certainly this reductive gesture has been critiqued at length by a number of art historians and artists themselves, and I see the book as continuous with these interventions. One thing the book insists upon is that we must try to understand black artistic interventions as far from simply representationalist. In other words, we need methods for interpreting black art that do not clamor for entry into an aesthetic history within which blackness has always been negated. Art criticism often problematically tethers identity, whatever that word is supposed to mean, to resistance or repair. At least when it comes to discussing work made by black artists.
- [15:54]
Jesse Cohen
You write, quote, black art enunciates in an unspeakable tongue and finds ringing in the ears of those who would listen. What does listening to black art mean.
- [16:04]
Rizvana Bradley
To you when I say that black art enunciates in an unspeakable tongue and finds ringing in the ears of those who would listen? This marks an attempt to speak of a black art that, as Ralph Ellison would say, resounds on the lower frequencies beneath the din of conventional political grammars. What anti aesthetics emphasizes is that black art is not a complement or supplement to common sense political grammars. The artworks I discuss trace figurations which implicate, deconstruct, and often existentially threaten these political grammars. But they are certainly not artistic figurations that can be reduced to or subsumed by existing ways of thinking, speaking, and practicing politics. All of the artworks I discuss interrogate the general principles specifically of communicability, a privileged analytic within art history, media theory, and which we might say undergirds the discursive architecture of civil Society at large. Chapter 4's discussion of Ligon notes that his work evokes a complex polyvocality that places profound pressure on the very notion of univocal speech, among other things. Now, in terms of the conditional, black art enunciates in an unspeakable tongue and finds ringing in the ears of those who would listen. This is actually quite a complicated proposition, because to listen in this sense is also to descend into utter nonsense. Such listening denotes a willing descent into the obliteration of established notions of subjectivity, kinship and community, politics and aesthetics, physics and metaphysics, because it is precisely through the abjection and expropriation of blackness that such categories cohere. Listening in this sense is at once an act of yielding and refusal, rebellion and betrayal.
- [17:51]
Jesse Cohen
And building on that, what is the danger of compensation, repair and recuperation? And maybe we can come back to this tension that you discussed in part a moment ago, and that I think is really the heart of this book, which is that the current ways we interpret and understand art are missing something about black art and at the same time trying to make it legible through anti black formulations. So can you just talk through this for us a little bit more?
- [18:21]
Rizvana Bradley
Yes, you are alluding to a problem which was perhaps the primary impetus for writing the book. The book is insistent that what black art bears is in fact something far more terrible and beautiful than what familiar lexicons would permit us to articulate. As I've said, a common frame for thinking about black art and artistry is that it is, or should be, reparative and resistive in some way. The book opens with a discussion of Nina Simone's performative gestures, which I insist should be read as neither reparative nor utopian. The questions that emerge on the other side of such an approach are for me far more profound than simply subsuming the difficulty and unwieldiness of her performance. Under the heading of resistance, Simone directs us to the ways in which blackness and black feminine labor especially, is given to both the necessity and impossibility of resistance. In the case of Simone, how are we to interpret the fact that the very aesthetic forms which have been made possible through Simone's inventiveness, not least the Freedom Song, ultimately become the very instruments of her subjection, not only for her immediate audiences we witness in the archives of her performances in the United States or in Europe, but also for audiences who are sure to consume future projections of her image and Persona in an ongoing attempt to suture the field of political antagonisms. So to simplify, why is Nina Simone the soundtrack to both car commercials and ostensibly radical political protests? What material and psychic labor is Simone doing in each of these contexts? I think it's important to note the problematic ways in which resistance as an idea tends to over determine so much of how the practice of black artistry gets interpreted as well as critics, we need to pause and consider whether we've taken the abstract concepts of identity, resistance or repair, as well as our capacity to recognize their concrete manifestations as self evident. And where such a consideration ought to lead us, I think, is to a critical interrogation of why it is that a relatively uninterrogated notion of each serves as one of the principal interpretive frames through which contemporary discourse on black art unfolds. Now, for many listeners, it may be counterintuitive to think about aesthetics as a site of violence. I think that's probably not only because the aesthetic is often invoked as a scene of pleasure, of beauty, of wonder, sublimity, and so forth, but more pointedly because we've been living through a period in which black art has increasingly become the subject subject of both popular and critical discourse. And overwhelmingly, with the discursive emphasis falling on the artwork's reparative or resistive potential, the aesthetic has progressively being been taken up as a privileged terrain for thinking about blackness and, to reprise a familiar phrase from Du Bois, the problem of the color line. Yet the relationship between blackness and the aesthetic itself has rarely been taken up as a serious problematic in its own right. So far. Too often, both popular and critical discourses have tended to either assume that the aesthetic has little to do with issues of real political import, like the politics of police violence or mass incarceration. Or the aesthetic has been immediately assumed to offer a unique terrain of refuge, healing, or even emancipation from the violence of the anti black world. At the heart of the book are the questions, what if the life and death of black art are in fact given through a predicament that is far more terrible and beautiful, far more complex and confounding than the concept of black aesthetics can possibly hold? How might our interpretive frames, our methods and lexicons, have to be revised in order to think with what black art already does, already bears and endures? These are the sorts of questions that anti aesthetics really tries to stay with, recognizing that they are questions that are in fact imminent to the practices and and experimentations of the black diaspora?
- [22:25]
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- [23:13]
Rizvana Bradley
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Rizvana Bradley
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- [24:12]
Jesse Cohen
Yeah, thank you. And you know, in this book you strongly argue for the centrality of aesthetics for, quote, the ontology of the world. You say anti aesthetics is an inquiry that proceeds from a radically divergent premise than the idea that the aesthetic is separate from the political, neither autonomous nor innocent, neither peripheral nor unfettered. The aesthetic is, in fact constitutive of and indispensable to the modern world in all its brutality and degradation. Can you clarify for our listeners what is aesthetic? How do aesthetics differ from aesthetics and how aesthetics is racialized?
- [24:52]
Rizvana Bradley
These are all crucial questions, and I'll be the first to admit that this is not an easy book to step into. It's a difficult book, but I think that's a reflection of the difficulty of the intellectual questions with which it's trying to wrestle. In fact, I would say that this difficulty is inherent in the black radical tradition, as Du Bois surely knew when he asked, in response to an unasked and unanswerable question, how does it feel to be a problem? As I've noted, Anti Aesthetics is a book that emerged from my sense that we are desperately in need of new methods and vocabularies, both for thinking with black art and artistry and for confronting the complicated relationships between blackness, Anti Blackness, and the aesthetic. Even the title of the book foregrounds the sense that we need a new language, that our existing interpretive grammars and vocabularies are increasingly exhausted when it comes to these questions. In this respect, even though Anti Aesthetics is an academic book, it remains driven by the commitment to and I hope exhibits the sort of experimentation that characterizes the art writing and criticism I admire. But returning to your specific question, how does aesthetics differ from aesthesis? Let's start with the matter of ontology and aesthetics, and with clarifying the distinction I draw between aesthetics and black aesthetics. First, what is the aesthetic? This is a complicated question, and one to which an enormous and diverse scholarly literature is dedicated to trying to answer. Perhaps it's best to start with clarifying what the aesthetic is not. Despite the foundational partitioning of the political and the aesthetic that was established in the modern period, the aesthetic is anything but some peripheral esoteric realm reserved for philosophers, connoisseurs, and dilettantes. It's not the exclusive purview of the museum or the gallery either. It's rather that which mediates experience as such, that which, for example, enables a human subject gazing out upon a vast expanse of so called natural wilderness to experience something called the sublime. But the aesthetic equally mediates, let's say, the accumulations of dirt, debris, trash, and other organic matter in the subway tunnels of Manhattan as signs of the ugly or, for a committed New Yorker, of the gritty and the authentic. In other words, the aesthetic is an essential mediation of the rapprochement between subject and object. The aesthetic proves to be so powerful precisely in its relative invisibility. As the Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton puts it, the aesthetic is a name for the political unconscious. It is simply the way social harmony registers itself on our senses, imprints itself on our sensibilities within the modern world. That is, the world which has developed over the past half millennia, which was forged in the constitutive entanglements of racial capitalism, colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. The aesthetic assumes an essential racial character. David Lloyd calls this the racial regime of aesthetics. This regime differentiates for example, between the so called savage or primitive, the Negro or black, and those subjects deemed fully human, fully sovereign, fully possessed of social and historical agency. Think back to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. What are the stakes and pitfalls of this assertion? To whom is it addressed? What forms is its address compelled to take? Anti Aesthetics insists that these are all aesthetic questions. By reconsidering the fraught and difficult meeting ground between blackness and the history of Western aesthetics more broadly, the book demonstrates that blackness both representationally and conceptually has been violently disfigured by or displaced within not only the Western art historical canon and scheme as a formalist interpretation, but the modern aesthetic regime itself. The book's contention is that modernity's aesthetic is an irrevocably anti black formation and that any meaningful effort to grapple with the stakes and experimentations of black art must contend with the deep critique of form it necessarily undertakes. Now onto the matter of black aesthesis. I want to say that Anti aesthetics marks a distinctive difference within the theoretical turn in black studies, specifically with respect to Afro pessimism, where Afro pessimism emphasizes the foundational interdiction of blackness from ontology in its theorizations of the problem of black non being. Anti Aesthetics takes such ontological critiques and assertions concerning blackness and non being seriously. But in order to embark upon an inquiry into the cut between black existence and black non being, this cut, or what the book conceptualizes as black aesthesis, has remained largely untheorized with respect to the ontological debates within black studies. So my concept of black as thesis resonates with and radically departs from Jacques Ranciere's proposition in his book titled Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. For Ranciere, the difficult beauty that marks the incompletion of the artwork titled the Belvedere Torso is an expression of an aesthesis that introduces a new thinking into the aesthetic regime, in Rantier's words, a thinking that modifies what is thinkable by welcoming what was unthinkable. For him, the Belvedere torso is a symbol of the assimilation of that which had hitherto been unassimilable within the regime scheme of art. Insofar as my book is trying to think about blackness's singularly fraught relationship to the aesthetic black aesthesis, as I theorize it, is subject to the racial regime of aesthetics. For example, Jericho's signaling African, a figure that appears in his famous Raft of the Medusa painting, in which I discuss at length in the book's second chapter, and which is featured on the COVID of the book, exemplifies a black aesthesis or disfigurement that may compel modulations in the operations of this aesthetic regime, but cannot be assimilated by nor effectuate any foundational metamorphoses of this regime. Unlike Rancier's Belvedere Torso.
- [31:19]
Jesse Cohen
Can you discuss the ante in the title and how it relates to interiority? Anterior question 7. Again, can you discuss the anti in the title and how it relates to anteriority? And also can you share a little bit about anti ante versus anti?
- [31:39]
Rizvana Bradley
I'm happy to speak to the anti and anti aesthetics and how this gets conceptualized in relation to anteriority. It's important to note that the aesthetic isn't simply that which lends legitimacy to, or works to contest various hierarchical orders of exploitation and exclusion. The aesthetic also shapes a wide array of forms that we easily take for granted the body, the artistic medium, even the world itself. Anti Aesthetics is trying to take seriously not only what these aesthetic forms are, but how they are produced and reproduced, with particular attention paid to the racially gendered dimensions of this labor. Here's where the anti in anti Aesthetics comes into play. Anti aesthetics as a project explores the ways in which blackness in general and black art in particular are made to come before for the aesthetic, the ways they are forcibly put to work in service of the very aesthetic regime to which they are brutally subject. So it's a profoundly recursive logic with respect to, as you put it, the sonic or homophonic slippage between the anti spelled a n t I and the ant spelled a n t e. The brilliant art critic and art historian Hal Foster famously drew attention to the anti aesthetic as a defining dimension of contemporary art and criticism. The anti aesthetic in this sense, as Foster puts it, is a critique which destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them. My concept of the anti aesthetic, again with the prefix ante a n t e, purposively stages a homonymic slippage in an effort to accentuate both the commonalities and crucial distinctions between our respective concepts. My modification of the word aesthetic with the prefix anti, which means before in front of previous, existing beforehand, introductory to, signals black aesthesis as that which paradoxically precedes and exceeds aesthetics as such. Because blackest thesis emerges from a paradoxical condition, it emerges from a black existence that can only be apprehended by the anti black world in terms of non being, while the before signals the forced anteriority of blackness to the racial metaphysics of the modern world. It's important to note that because these coerced labors emerge from an existence without ontology or phenomenology, it's impossible to positivize this anteriority. It's impossible, in other words, to locate this anteriority in time and space or to give this anteriority some kind of definitive, essential character.
- [34:22]
Jesse Cohen
Throughout the book you centralize black femininity and draw on black feminist critique. You write, quote, if the ontology of the anti black world emerges through the constitutive negation of the black, whose incarnation of metaphysical nothingness under the signs of absolute affectability, primitivity and dereliction furnishes the coherence of mercury, modernity's spatiotemporal coordination, coordinations, then black femininity bears this terrible emergence in and through the flesh. Can you explain on what the bearings of black femininity are and how the modern body arises from the construction of black femininity? And quote racially gendered reproductive reproductivity of of blackness. And quote racially gendered reproductivity of blackness.
- [35:22]
Rizvana Bradley
Across all the chapters, I emphasize that it is the racially gendered labor borne by the black feminine that bears the trace of blackness's vestibularity and subjection to the racial regime of aesthetics. Black feminine flesh prefigures just as it is disfigured by the Western art historical canon. Part of what's at stake in the book as a whole is the racially gendered critique of the concept of fugitivity. The concept of fugitivity has been engaged frequently as a privileged analytic within black studies and adjacent fields. Anti Aesthetics is trying to think about the racially gendered anteriority that is constitutive of black femininity. The book argues that this racially gendered anteriority can only be fully apprehended through an exposition of what I term the double bind of reproduction. The double blind of reproduction, as I theorize it, moves through the concept of reproduction from its classic articulation in Marxist feminism to its expanded theorization within black feminism. My claim is that black femininity is conscripted not only in the reproduction of the world, but also its fugitive ulteriors. This critique of the racially gendered valences of reproduction is elaborated upon throughout the book. To put it more simply, my book is trying to theorize first, the racially gendered labor conscripted in the reproduction of the anti black world, and second, the racially gendered labor that enables fugitivity from the anti black world. Furthermore, the racially gendered valences of reproduction elucidate an anti aesthetic critique of form. What the book asks its readers to consider is that the womb of the Black feminine is not one form of abjection among many. Rather, in taking up the work of Saidi Artman, Francoise Verges, Jennifer Morgan, and many others, the book insists that the womb of the Black feminine is the vestibule through which all aesthetic forms must pass. As I put it in the book, not least where form appears shorn of the traces of passage, black femininity bears the modern world of forms. In the form of the modern world. For example, in chapter four, we see how the Black feminine emerges within early cinema as an anti phenomenological specter. That is, the Black feminine haunts the cinema. The Black Feminine is the impossible figure the technology of early cinema at once needs and abhors. I say anti phenomenological because again, what the book is doing is trying to point to the racially gendered labor that threatens but also makes possible the phenomenological conceits and operations of the cinema. In this case, anti aesthetics is an inquiry into that which is anterior to formalization. Once again, it inaugurates a new method for interpretation and anti formalism and asks its readers to think about what has been forcibly made and what remains anterior to form. The racially gendered labors of black femininity are crucial in this respect because an analysis of Black feminine labor makes it possible to think with this anteriority and furthermore, what it means to inhabit this anteriority. The book is in part an extended meditation on the question, how do we think about those inhabitative modes open up by a work of art? Inhabitative modes that emerge from and which bear the traces of a black existence that lacks a proper name, an existence that the world would like to subsume under the sign of non being. This episode is brought to you by Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. It's best enjoyed over ice or in your coffee. Rumchata delivering vacation vibes anyway, or anywhere you drink it. Find out more more@rumchata.com Drink responsibly Caribbean rum with real dairy cream, natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Powaukee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved. Hello friends. Guess who? That's right, it is I, the replacer. Once again I've been called on. So you can play their new Call of Duty Black Ops 7 with three expansive modes, 18 multiplayer maps, and the tastiest zombie gameplay you've ever freaking seen. Call of Duty Black Ops 7 available now. Rated M for Mature.
- [40:06]
Podcast Host / Advertiser
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- [40:32]
Jesse Cohen
So in this book you give a lot of attention to visual art. There's Arthur Java's video pieces, Micklay Thomas multimedia video installations, Son Jer Perry's installations, Glenn Lydon's text based paintings, and the work to put down on the COVID is, sorry if I pronounced this incorrectly, Theodore Garricko's paintings.
- [40:54]
Rizvana Bradley
Yes. One thing I do want to speak to very quickly is why the book engages the particular artworks it does, and I want to say a bit about why the visual examples discussed insist, perhaps intensely, as you put it upon, a very specific kind of formal analysis. The specific artists and artworks I focus on in this book should be particularly helpful for readers as they quite explicitly undertake critical deconstructions of forms, formalisms, and mediums that have played crucial roles in the development of the modern world, its corporeal order and its aesthetic regime. We can see these deconstructive practices at work in Mickalene Thomas's engagement with the 19th century female nude, Glenn Ligon's engagement with 19th century sentimentalist literature, or the emergence of cinema at the turn of the century, or Sandra Perry's references to JMW Turner and her engagement with 19th century abolitionism and Romantic painting, and so on. So yes, this is a book that theorizes Black art in a serious way. However, it does not undertake this theorization by focusing exclusively on black art. In fact, one of the central arguments of the book is that in order to make sense of what Black art does and to understand something about black black existence and its dissimulative appearances, we have to develop an analysis of the racial regime of aesthetics and the singular ways in which blackness is materially and discursively put to work in service of that regime. For that reason, there are also a number of canonical pieces of European and American art and cinema and literature that are focused upon in the book. To be clear, there is no conflation of Jerico or Edwin S. Porter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Ingres with black art. These are readings which are about understanding the nature of the fraught relationship between blackness and the aesthetic with which every work of black art has to contend. This is part of the reason why Anti Aesthetic should not be construed as a book of art history in the normative sense of the discipline. A big part of what Anti aesthetics is drawing attention to, and I think this is especially pronounced in the final chapter on Sandra Perry, is that black art constitutes nothing less than a riotous eruption of the metaphysical order that has secured the racial regime of aesthetics. And as I've said elsewhere, this riotous eruption we call black art is doing far more than it is or can be given credit for, I think certainly far more than the predominant idioms of representationalism, abstraction, or fetishized materiality can encompass. Each chapter insists upon a different methodological approach to the object because I want to refuse modes of interpretation that are ultimately aimed at at putting the art object to work. It has always seemed to me that putting the art object to work generally functions to recuperate the existing structuration of being, knowledge, and relationality that we can refer to in shorthand as the anti black world.
- [43:42]
Jesse Cohen
How are you thinking about blackness? The quote black body, and who are you in conversation with when you're thinking through these concepts?
- [43:51]
Rizvana Bradley
I need to begin by stressing that blackness, as I'm theorizing it, has nothing to do with identity in the conventional sense. Blackness, as I'm theorizing it needs to be distinguished from its myriad appearances and representations, which I understand to be little more than phenomenological feints. To be clear, blackness is the constitutive negation of being and its worldly cartography of inhabitation and becoming. Blackness is made the bearer of nothingness, of the abyssal limits of modernity's racial metaphysics that lends the normative subject, the human, its coherence. And as such, blackness cannot be phenomenalized or positivized. As David Marriott would say, blackness is nespa, a rupture or void in the subject. In this respect, the critique of phenomenology is crucial to the book's analysis of the artworks discussed in the way they are deconstructing the axiomatics of the black body. The book opens with a different kind of analysis of the distinction Hortense Spillers famously draws between body and flesh. In her 1987 essay titled Mama's Baby, Papa's maybe An American Grammar Book, Spillers is trying to think there through the historical and indeed metaphysical significance of the Middle Passage, which tore enslaved Africans from their established modes of kinship and affiliation, registering them as little more than quantities of cargo to be profited from. For Spillers, body and flesh become complicated demarcations of the foremost distinction between, in her words, captive and liberated subject positions in the modern world. In many ways, the distinction I'm making in the book between black existence and non being can be mapped onto the distinction Spillers famously draws. Anti aesthetics honors Spillers distinction in order to delve deeper into these demarcations of body and flesh, the book is refusing positivist representations of the black body. Reading Spillers, the argument I make is that the body is a dissimulation of that which cannot appear within modernity's racial aesthetic regime. That is, what appears within phenomenology as the black body or the black figure is in fact a dissimulation. The phenomenological appearance of blackness within the anti black world is necessarily dissimulative. This is because black existence is something which is outside or before worldly ontology and thinking. Of Spillers, flesh is a way of understanding the exorbitant materiality of that existence. The body is a dissimulation of the flesh which cannot appear as anything other than a reflection of black non being within the world or within the world's ontology.
- [46:31]
Jesse Cohen
Can you also then clarify what you call the quote, corporeal division of the world?
- [46:36]
Rizvana Bradley
Well, my theorization of the dissimulation of the black body plays a key part in the fabrication of what I call the corporeal division of the world. The phrase the corporeal division of the world is meant to underscore the racialized hierarchies of corporeality under modernity. My discussion of Gericault's Montauban study appears in chapter two of the book, which is titled the Corporeal Division of the World. In this chapter I argue that the body becomes central to the historical mapping of the modern world. The aesthetic form that is the body, or what the philosopher Jean Le Qunancy refers to as the proper body, depends upon a racial division of corporeality for which blackness is the absent center. Blackness, in other words, both constitutes and makes possible the very thing Nansi refers to as the proper body of modernity at the same time that it is excluded from the proper body and its order of meaning.
- [47:35]
Jesse Cohen
You analyze art forms that engage senses like touch and hearing in addition to visual arts. Can you discuss the senses in relation to black art, especially your interest in the visual and its relation to blackness, as well as how some art, some black art, turns away from the privileging of sight. I was especially interested in your discussion of touch and haptics.
- [47:56]
Rizvana Bradley
Well, first, black artistic traditions mobilize sensorial repertoires that certainly can't be reduced to the visual. But we should note that the visual holds a privileged place within the aesthetic modernity wrought by capitalism, slavery, and colonialism. The modern subject is an embodied subject, a subject whose historical agency and phenomenological experience is predicated upon a particular claim upon the body. This is my body, a body that can be mapped in space and time, a body that, whether individuated or intersubjective, is endowed with capacities. And one of the crucial aesthetic means through which this body is realized is vision is sight. The Privileging of Sight the ocular centric logic that characterizes aesthetic modernity is bound up with the privileging of the proper body. Because the proper body of modernity is one that seeks to discipline and displace the exorbitance of flesh, the book understands flesh as the unwieldy corporeal entanglements that threaten any positive articulation of individuated subjectivity. Now visuality becomes a crucial terrain for asserting both self possession and the possessive claim upon the earth. To illustrate this contention, let's take the relationship between ocular centrism and the way ocular centric logic engineers a particular phenomenological regime of looking and perceiving within the racial regime of aesthetics. We know that the various ocular centrisms that proliferate throughout aesthetic modernity are thoroughly racialized. Ocular centric visuality is in fact one of the privileged signs of an exclusive capacity for aesthetic judgment. What the book examines across its various chapters is an ocular centric ordering of sensoria that is once again gendered and racialized, an ocular centric orientation that displaces the other sensorial possibilities in order to privilege vision. In so doing, aesthetic modernity's oculocentric orientation facilitates a hierarchical ordering between, for instance, the bestialized African and the embodied capacity for aesthetic judgment of the European. This particular case is explored in the book by way of Sartie Baartman in chapter three. For another example of the function of ocular centrism, let's take the relationship between ocular centrism and specifically the racial regime of literacy, which I discuss in the fourth chapter of Anti Aesthetics. This chapter looks at the artist Glenn Ligon's work, which is often read through the conceptual grammar of hyperinvisibility in the chapter I Deprivilege Hyperinvisibility as an Analytic and instead turn to Ligon's transposition of Ralph Ellison to differently theorize opacity. The opacity I'm interested in is perhaps less palatable than the notion of opacity in which much of the art world currently traffics. In the contemporary art world, opacity is often invoked as a willful, self determined refusal of transparent, of the transparency of visibility, particularly under conditions of surveillance. In this vein, opacity becomes a trope that is easy to throw at all sorts of minoritarian artists in the name of celebration. My theorization of opacity, however, on the other hand, signals an irreducible materiality that I suggest is the condition of possibility for signification within the visual field, a materiality that importantly cannot itself signify. Ligon's paintings work with and from this opacity, or what I call an obdurate materiality. This is ultimately what I refer to as the black residuum that marks and is marked by the failures of inocular centric logic that excises materiality from the visual field. So what Ligon extends to us is not a simple representation or even a simple refusal to represent something called black experience. Rather, he gives us a complex deconstruction of the racially gendered foundations of language and visuality as such, forcing us to confront what remains in and in spite of those ocular and semiotic reductions.
- [52:04]
Jesse Cohen
How do you think of your critique of aesthetic in relation to the rise in humanities of affect and the resulting understanding of ascetic?
- [52:13]
Rizvana Bradley
In recent years there have been black and postcolonial critiques of affect theory and affect studies, particularly as those humanistic subfields have developed lines of inquiry that consistently and perhaps unconsciously couple affect and affirmation, or which conceive of affect as affirmation? A black critique of this principle conceit within affect theory is certainly present in the book, for instance, in the argument I make in chapters two and three with respect to the discussion of the racially gendered dimensions of 19th century French caricature as it pertained to the cultivation of sensible affectability and the operations of touch. Following the lines of argument laid out across those chapters. In order to present black affect as affirmation, we may conclude that a dissimulative operation is required, that is, is to introduce affect as a positive phenomenological presence or ontological essence would in fact be to eclipse and displace the sensorial existence from which it emerges. In many ways, the work of attunement that I tried to engage in. The essay on Charles Burnett's 1977 film Killer of Sheep, published in the Second Affect Theory Reader, marked an attempt to attune to the irreducible negativity of black affect. But I want to be explicitly clear on this point. What I'm advocating for is not merely an effort to add the word black to the universalizable word affect. In other words, I'm not trying to pinpoint blackness as ethnographic locale within a generalized theory of affect. What I'm talking about methodologically would require a different angle of approach to a shared problematic. Once again, as in Anti aesthetics, the difference in the angle of the approach in this particular instance has to do with the interest in the racially gendered dimensions of the aesthetic, which undergird not only the affective dimensions of blackness but the universalistic pretensions of affect as such. Similarly, the Killer Sheep essay is trying to identify a set of racially gendered intramural problematics for affect theory, Intramural, of course, being a concept we arrive at by way of Hortense Spillers. These racially gendered problematics don't simply expose affect theory's residual humanism. They also open up the possibility of thinking with under theorized racially gendered declensions and transfigurations within registers of feeling marked by terms such as slowness, exhaustion, bitterness, and perseverance. These are racially gendered declensions, and these racially gendered declensions point to an indeterminate genre of feeling, one that emerges precisely through blackness's imminent exposure to and its subjection before an anti black world that demands but cannot abide its intelligibility.
- [54:53]
Jesse Cohen
You end the book discussing the concept of unworlding. Can you discuss the meaning and significance of worlding and unworlding?
- [55:01]
Rizvana Bradley
Well, we have to start by trying to understand what the world is in a philosophical sense and moreover, why, from the perspective of black critical thought, the world is itself an ontology. First, it's important to remember that insofar as blackness is recognized or rather misrecognized by worldly ontology, it is strictly as non being. Blackness is non being. Nevertheless, blackness exists. Blackness marks the fleshly life of an existence without ontology. It marks an existence ceaselessly conscripted into the making and remaking of a world that blackness itself may never comfortably dwell within. Some background information is necessary here for listeners who may not have read the book. The concept of unworlding emerges most explicitly in the final chapter of the book, where I discuss the work of the artist Sandra Perry. The key work discussed concerns the new immersive soundscape Perry exhibited in 2018 at the Serpentine Galleries to accompany an adapted version of her piece titled Wet and Wavy Typhoon Coming on, which was inspired by J.M.W. turner's famous 1840 painting Slave Ship. Originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard, the Dead and Typhoon Coming On, Perry's work was created using the open source animation software Blender. For those who may be unfamiliar with Perry's interventions, her work draws attention to the necessity of reckoning with transatlantic slavery and the corporeal order of the world it fashioned in an effort to highlight, critique, and refuse the ecocidal drive of global capitalism. My discussion of Perry's work is concerned with, first, an interrogation of the origins of the logic of value rooted in transatlantic slavery in terms of its economic dimension second, the capitalist logic of value and its role in fashioning a proper human subject of politics and history third, the relationship between value computation and raciality and lastly, the capitalist logic of value and its projection of the kind of world that is worth living in and that must be lived in. In Parry's revision of Turner, the abstraction of value is immediately tethered to the reduction of African persons to non human commodities who are assigned a quantitative value just as readily as a bushel of wheat, an operation Turner's original painting attempts to conceal but can't help but reference. What is alluded to in her work is not just the operation of creating a new kind of economic value, exchange value as a means to capturing surplus value, but rather an operation of producing a new conception of what it means to be human that is inextricably tied to the logic of value and valuation. What I stress in the analysis is the role of the logic of value in driving the directives and limitations of human life. The last chapter underscores that in circumscribing the value of human life as such, the logic of value entails an implicit conception of worlding. What's really interesting about Perry's work as it was displayed in the Serpentine Galleries is the way the work exists in tension with the architecture of the gallery. The installation Typhoon coming on along the perimeter of the gallery, architecturally speaking mimetically, functions to enwrap or enclose the space in a way that echoes the totalizing ambitions of the world. Reading with and against the conditions that enable the work's display, I underscore the way Perry's work develops a critique of the metaphysical architecture of capitalist worlding, the phenomenological body subject who inhabits the world, and the aesthetic reproduction of both in and through the logic of values. What's important here is that Perry directs us to the monstrous genealogy of value itself and to value's indissolubility from modernity's ongoing imperative to cleave bodies from flesh and world from earth. The point is that it's by developing an anti aesthetic approach to Perry's work that we begin to recognize what I'm calling unworlding as the displaced anterior of every worlding. Every worlding, in other words, requires the conscription of blackness toward the renewal of an anti black metaphysics. Unworlding is born in and by the exorbitance of black flesh and is therefore the rupture that is anterior to every suture. The final coda to anti aesthetics reads Ed Roberson's poem To See the Earth before the End of the World, noting that the poem insists upon a poetic distinction between the figuration we call the world and the figuration we call the earth. The point of reading Roberson alongside Parry in the Final Instance is to understand blackness and its imminent relationship to the earth and the earthly and the eclipsing of these by the dominant figuration of world. This argument must be underscored in A Map to the Door of no Return. The poet Dion Brand reminds us that racial slavery opens and extends a tear in the world. There's no getting around this through some transcendent operation. Blackness remains the dehiscence that tears the world. Lastly, what I want to say is that unworlding cannot be understood through an explicitly volitional register, as a call for a coalitional politics anchored in a commitment to dismantling this world. Unworlding, as I understand it, it as an anti aesthetic orientation, does not mark worldly alienation, nor does it mark a kind of poetic dissociation from the world. As I write in the book, unworlding is the racially gendered anterior to the metaphysical project of worlding. Blackness marks the unworlding of the world before the world. Again, unworlding is not elective, is not volitional. Unworlding is the product of a coerced anteriority that has its origins in the abyss. As Perry's work shows, unworlding is made possible by a brutal calculus, by an abyssal anorigination that blackness is made to bear in and through flesh.
- [61:23]
Jesse Cohen
Throughout the book, you describe this book as a beginning for your work and for others. Have you decided if you will continue with this book and its ideas, or do you have other future projects coming up that you want to share with our listeners and just tell us a little bit more about what you'll be working on?
- [61:40]
Rizvana Bradley
Well, before we close, I wanted to be sure to thank you for your careful and precise reading of the book. Truly, I realize that it is a difficult book, but I think again, what the book is endeavoring to do requires moving our analysis with respect to Black art in particular to a higher level of abstraction, as Frank Wilderson has put it. In terms of what I'm working on, I'll at least say this. I'm drawn more and more to styles of writing that theorize in and through the form they take. What I've called anti aesthetic writing stresses a method of attunement that descends with the artwork that isn't afraid to confront the abyss the artwork opens and opens onto. Anti aesthetic writing is willing to embrace the artwork's inability to solve problems or to be a salve. So I would say that I'm currently hoping to see where this kind of descendant inscription might take me beyond the modes of writing dictated by academic convention. But writing is certainly in the works. We'll just have to see where it takes me.
- [62:36]
Jesse Cohen
I'm really excited to see more of your work in the future and see where all of this takes you. Thank you for coming on the show today. Thank you for listening to my interview with Rizwana Bradley. Today we discussed her book Black Aesthetis and the Critique of Form, published by Stanford University Press in 2023. Thank you for listening to the New Books Network.