Abstract:

The article forges the principle of escape to think of the poetics of the body disappearance that encounter, in what the author calls fugitive performance, a way of making alive the modes of existence, which would be destined, by the reproductive futurism of the esthetical norm, to disappear and, consequently, to die. In a dialogue with Black Studies, anti-colonial criticism and my own thought on the sensitive field, the article traces the threads that expose the programs of re-theorization, representation, abstraction and performance underlying the traffic of the becoming-black in the arts.

Keywords:
Art; Escape; Performance; Black; Sensible

Resumo:

O artigo forja o princípio da fuga para pensar as poéticas do desaparecimento do corpo que encontram, no que o autor denomina de performance fugitiva, uma maneira de tornar vivos os modos de existência, os quais seriam destinados, pelo futurismo reprodutivo da normalização estética, ao desaparecimento e, consequentemente, à morte. Em diálogo com os Black Studies, a crítica anticolonial e um pensamento próprio sobre o campo sensível, o artigo trama os fios que expõem os programas de reteorização, representação, abstração e performance sob o tráfego do devir-negro das artes.

Palavras-chave:
Arte; Fuga; Performance; Negro; Sensível

Résumé:

L’article décrit le principe d’évasion pour réfléchir à la poésie qui se manifeste dans la disparition du corps qui trouve, dans ce que l’auteur appelle performance fugitive, une manière de rendre vivants les modes d’existence qui seraient destinés, par le futurisme reproductif de la norme esthétique, à la disparition (donc à la mort). Dans un dialogue avec les Black Studies, la critique anticoloniale et la réflexion sur le domaine sensible, l’article retrace les filières qui exposent les programmes de re-théorisation, de représentation, d’abstraction et de performance sous le trafic des arts noirs.

Mots-clés:
Arts; Fuite; Performance; Noir; Sensible

The Retheorization of the White Essence

I begin this article with what I call the reproductive future in the arts to proceed in the understanding of the arts’ becoming-black. It turns out that Art History, as a Eurocentric narrative about aesthetic production, even when thought through the relativistic perspective of the variety of stories they would understand by art - as it was the case with historiographies on the aesthetic production of different societies - has always been a White record of the sensible difference. This History with capital H is not just about a discipline, but about a sequentiality of a particular way of feeling the worlds, a way projected precisely on the others. It configured the artistic Other to be correlated again with a Self, through which the modern notion of art would be born and with which correlation would be allowed. Hence came the definitions of indigenous art, black art, Eastern art, Western art, European art, American art, etc. There have even been studies that proposed to be freed from the registers of aesthetics, that is, to detach from the Euro philosophical registers of form, matter and, above all, of the sensation in favor of new possibilities of non-hierarchy and non-exoticism of the poetic productions of the worlds.

This was a noticeable mark in the art studies that Alfred Gell (1998GELL, Alfred. Art and agency: anthropological theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.) attempted to address in his controversial Art and Agency, in which the author discredited the possibility of any possible understanding of the production of objects from particular cultures through anthropological and philosophical theories that take the notion of ‘aesthetics’ as a parameter for correlations. More than that, in Alfred Gell’s theory (1998), the proposed concept of agency already pointed to the impossibility of the correlation itself. It would be the agential power of things, that is, the agency that would allow to correlate the forces of one world with those of another, so that the artistic world could only be thought of, in another society, inasmuch as that art allows to make way for some correlation with the agential forces of other worlds.

Thus, regardless of the concept of aesthetics and all that it would recover and update, the correlation remained in the agential perspective. The cultural relativism of ancient art studies was abandoned in favor of an ontological turn in which the being of perception and action, decentralized from the human, stands out as the quintessential field for the approximation of sensible forces. Bodies, images and artifacts are now regarded as endowed with agency. But the correlation brought the ghost of the human to the proximity of worlds, since the life of things is presented by the perception of vitality by having that human subject as its own reference. The push back of the human subject as the sole sensible agent was not accompanied by further critique of the idea of ​​the sensible, now transferred to the world of things and from which these things would be correlated with. Thus, the sensible remained in the field of a similar experience with the world - the modern Western experience - from which the different experiences of other worlds continued to be thought.

The process of keeping the sensible within a presumptuously posthuman perspective, but still infatuated with the human ways of feeling the worlds from a single world - the White World -, lays the idea of ​​vitality in the agency of things because to act and to produce thoughts and feelings would be the ability of humans to be kept alive by the world as we know it. Tim Ingold’s (1996INGOLD, Tim. Aesthetics is a cross-cultural category? In: INGOLD, Tim (Org.). Key debates in anthropology. London: Routledge, 1996. P. 249-293.; 2002INGOLD, Tim. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London: Routledge , 2002.) anthropology of things fits in that perspective while anticolonial thinking evades when informed that such anthropology would be innovative for thinking in the arts. Anticolonial perspectives have always been asserting, in their own way, that the poetics of colonized people, such as the Amerindians and nonwhites, almost never severely separate life and death, nor do they perceive things and so-called objects as dead elements or which would have their respective capacities to act in the world by correlating with other ways of acting, those of the beings always regarded as the truly alive in power to produce thought, i.e., the humans. Anthropology, which has now realized that the world of things has always been a world of living things, is secularly backward compared to the knowledge of its nonwhite natives.

However, the problem is even more profound, because the key idea of ​​new theories of living things does not question their power of death, an already old power and with a well-demarcated color, the White. The whitened regimes of the arts come to regard those worlds, which they termed as those of primitive art, now as worlds also complex in poetic perception and action, provided these actions and perceptions allow themselves to correlate with that first world. Thus, the sequentiality of a single story of the sensible remains, this time disguised as plural by the invisible mantle of agency. What is left out and what marks non-Euro-American arts is precisely the breaking ability of non-white minority¹¹ 1 I call minorities all the collectives and the non-supremacist forces that are on the other side and beyond the Norm that creates the fantasy of a world as being the World. poetics to the poetics of the Norm, which has name and color, poetics of the Western White Subject. An anticolonial art is only possible by cutting with the art of White, which represents the World Norm or simply the Norm. Poetic anticolonialism comes from breaking with the poetic itself. If the White World thought of poetics as a technique that is done with the world, the black world, as a cosmos destined by racism to disappearance, has its poetics as the undoing of all technique. The techniques were designed for those subjects who may exist without the ghost of disappearance, whose ultimate example is the techniques of the self, thought by Michel Foucault (2013FOUCAULT, Michel. História da sexualidade 3: o cuidado de si. Rio de Janeiro: Edições Graal, 2013.) based on the Greek civilization and its aesthetics of life, accessible only to non-barbarian peoples.

The reproductive future of the arts is one that always places in a new facet the continuity of art as an authorization of the creation and recreation of life. The problem is that this future has already chosen the life it wants to keep alive, while all other existences become lives serving the first, that is, living existences to die again. This future consumes the new imaginations, highlighting them by the ever-complacent ways of welcoming the “diverse” as long as this “diverse” remains the other face of the same world. “The diverse needs the presence of the peoples, no longer as an object to sublimate, but as a project to be related” (Glissant, 1981GLISSANT, Edouard. O mesmo e o diverso. In: GLISSANT, Edouard. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuils, 1981. P. 190-201. Disponível em: <Disponível em: http://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/glissant/glissant.pdf >. Acesso em: 12 fev. 2018.
http://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/glissant/gliss... , p. 190). And the “becoming-black of the world,” as Achille Mbembe (2014aMBEMBE, Achille. Crítica da razão negra. Lisboa: Antígona, 2014a., p. 14) defines, corresponds exactly to this facet of exploring other lives moved toward a single race. If it is possible to think of a black technique, it is due to impromptu games between dying and living in the field of this futurism.

Next, I discuss the impossibility of confronting and overcoming the dominant forces (White and Western World) living/using the same system and weapons created by them. For this White World (the Same, or the Greater, of Norm) is organized in such a way that any movement within it only seems to favor its own. Thus, the actions of the other minority people in power, which rely solely on the tools and logic of this system, tend only to reflect something of the same gear. The only way to escape this centripetal force is to subvert it by using marginal tools outside this system not legitimized by the Norm.

The Representation of Black Aesthetics

The Black, this character forged in the sensible of the White as its reflecting mirror of a certain difference, is represented in the arts as the difference in itself of the White World, which is also a world we may call the World of the White, or simply the Norm. If black artists make the difference, it is no more fitting that their arts speak of racism and anything exotic to the White World: this is how the aesthetic representation of the Black works. Racism, being a violence that informs the condition of racial difference of black people vis-à-vis the world that violate them, and exoticism, like everything outside the grammars of White, report that non-white worlds could only be strange, unconventional, abnormal. This makes racism the fact that the world was not made for nonwhite subjects. And when black people dare to make any language out of racism and exoticism, either they would be totally mystified by White’s desire for belonging to a future they will never belong to, or these people finally dared to dream out of mystification - and then the black technique is between living a world of art that is whitened and not dying for accepting the condition of difference imposed upon it. In its becoming-black, futurism consumes blackness¹² 2 I use the term blackness in this article to affirm the lives read as black, detaching them from the racist imaginary responsible for the creation of the character The Black. dreams as elements for white dreams, but there is also the possibility of an aesthetic subcommand, because the point has never been to abandon the aesthetic concept, but to make it say no to the essentialization of White as sensible normalization.

The representation of a black art will be to never represent the Black at all. And this is only possible by not working for the whitened sensible, responsible for feeling everything that differs from White or that causes it dread as being Black. Thus, an anticolonization of the sensible constitutes the first step in the production of art not mystified by the old mirror game. The problem with the “becoming-black of the world” (Mbembe, 2014aMBEMBE, Achille. Crítica da razão negra. Lisboa: Antígona, 2014a., p. 14) is that the reflection of the mirror never stays the same, so that the Black is represented in various ways, according to the new ancient aesthetic demands of the White World. A current example of new mirror confrontation comes under the auspices of the end of the human and, consequently, to the anthropocentric subjects, the end of the earth. Who is afraid of the devastated land? Now, only the privileged people of the planet or those mystified by these privileges fear the devastation of the earth as it is often presented in some theories. Minorities are already aware that the first devastated land consists of their respective bodies, their sensitive fields par excellence and the prime targets of racial, gender, sexual, religious and other exterminations. Salvationist, presumptuously political and poetically problematic discourses, Come, women!, Come, Amerindians!, Come, gays!, Come, transvestites!, Come, war refugees! - because the great war, which always had many names, being the most current The Revenge of Gaia (Lovelock, 1991LOVELOCK, James. As Eras de Gaia. Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1991.; 2006aLOVELOCK, James. Gaia: cura para um planeta doente. São Paulo: Cultrix, 2006a.; 2006bLOVELOCK, James. A vingança de Gaia. Rio de Janeiro: Intrínseca, 2006b.) -, says that we would need to save the world (which world?), that we would need to create a common sensible future for all people, while in fact all this discourse of salvation forgets or pretends to forget that this shared common has died and the end is over again.

Minority Abstraction

The World of the Same proposes only one future, so the future of the black is always white¹³ 3 This temporality in the disappearance of a race is described by Frantz Fanon (2008) when he no longer perceives himself as the Black and finds himself unable to have the recognition from the White: “While I, in the paroxysm of the lived and the fury, proclaim this, Sartre reminds me that my blackness is only a weak time. Actually, I tell you, my shoulders have dodged the structure of the world, my feet no longer feel the caress of the ground. Without black past, without black future, it was impossible to live my blackness. Even without being white, no longer black, I was a condemned man” (Fanon, 2008, p. 124). , the future of the trans¹⁴ 4 Cisgender people are those who identify with the sex and gender with which they were designated at birth. On the other hand, transgender people are those who identify themselves as transsexuals, transvestites or simply transgender people. and other non-cisgender people is always cisgender, the future of non-heterosexual people is always heterosexual ... And so, the World of the Same goes on with the segregation, exploitation and extermination of the existences that are insolent to it. This all goes beyond capitalist subjugation. Here I do not perceive the problems only from the capitalist machine, I refer to other machines affiliated to it by a kinship of extractivism, segregation and death, constantly aimed at the fugitive¹⁵ 5 In this article, I use the concept of fugitive and fugitivity in reference to the capacities of people, collectives and forces, even being consumed by the World, to maintain a reserve of life that escapes this consumption, so that the fugitive lives have, each in their own way, specific ways of being and not being in the World. The fugitive subjects are commonly the black subjects, according to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013), and it is in this example that my text moves. However, escape is not a stable category, since the fugitives are always plotting how to continue running away from a world that does not stop chasing them. worlds of a given order: colonial machine, cis-heteronormative machine, racial machine (one that does not stop grinding black and other non-white bodies), etc. However, we cannot define the worlds in a cosmoguerrilla with fronts already fully demarcated once and for all, since all worlds move and change, which makes any idea of ​​self-centered revanchism naive and perfectly targeted. The margin is at the center of the world’s problems. The margin is the dramatic zone of a world that insists on marginalizing others. The margin indicates an always open wound.

As macro and micropolitics of the Norm which make a world the World, the supremacies indicate maps of the sensible that cannot be mapped by difference, since the difference has already been set by the normative map in their right place. As a sensitive experiment, cartography turns out an experiment of death if it does not reckon who is the subject who can deterritorialize by going back and forth between worlds, losing and rescuing forms, and who are those subjects who have always been destined for fluidity, minority, instability and, of course, a certain idea of ​​abnormality. There is always a woman, a homosexual, a Jew, and a child as patterns of becoming, but the White, Cisgender, and Heterosexual Man is always the stable, the representation of the Norm, and, as such, they might be privileged to deterritorialize and reterritorialize over minor subjects, updating the old colonial and racist fantasies of expansion, conquest and extractivism of the White West. Unsurprisingly, current anticolonial studies and the so-called Black Studies comprise the most fruitful area of ​​criticism of the limits of the philosophy of difference. In order to confirm that, one should just read works by Achille Mbembe (2014aMBEMBE, Achille. Crítica da razão negra. Lisboa: Antígona, 2014a.; 2014bMBEMBE, Achille. Sair da grande noite: ensaio sobre a África descolonizada. Luanda: Edições Mulemba; Mangualde: Edições Pedago, 2014b.; 2016MBEMBE, Achille. Necropolítica. Artes & Ensaio, Rio de Janeiro, n. 32, p. 123-151, 2016.), Jasbir Puar (2007PUAR, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer time. Londres: Duke University Press, 2007.; 2013PUAR, Jasbir. “Prefiro ser um ciborgue a ser uma deusa”: interseccionalidade, agenciamento e política afetiva. Revista Meritum, Belo Horizonte, v. 8, n. 2, p. 343-370, jul./dez. 2013. ), Rey Chow (2006CHOW, Rey. The age of the world target. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.) and many others. Supremacist subjects are always those who see themselves as the World, so even when they are willing to deal with the difference, they end up symptomatizing with how it was felt and formulated via the mirror of a single world, the world of supremacism. Actually, the minorities of the planet are many worlds, never holistic, never completely identified; they form fugitive worlds, secret worlds, not because they are hidden, but because they carry their secrets where everyone knows that we exist, and do not see us, do not hear us, and consequently do not reach us. They only see us on the run when such worlds are hindering the supposed balance of the World of the Same. It was thus with Antonin Artaud’s body without organs - which, despite Man and White, was designated as the body of a minor subject, the madman. Upon the becoming-mad, what was a poetic experiment on the artist’s body, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceptualized it as a disruptive body of social organisms¹⁶ 6 On the appropriation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari from Antonin Artaud's poetics, see Deleuze and Guattari (1996). . This is that old White way of viewing what it does not achieve as abnormality, disease, anger, criminology, etc.; a craze, or even a drive, that even finds alliances between the oppressed subjects who are still mystified for the extermination of the autonomy of difference. And those who operate in the field of performance via mutilations, scarifications, perforations know exactly how normalizing forces, often instituted by collectives purportedly in favor of art, are always willing to frame what art and disease, pathology and poetics would be. By such tactics of silencing and segregation, a whole unfortunate field of subjects attests their supremacism, or at the very least, their mystification by the ideas of the Norm as they are all subjects who hinder those experiments that have fled the Western White Eye of the arts.

Back to Philosophy, perhaps this all about the minor was not an unresolvable error in the philosophy of difference, but its limit. There is escape by the uncorrelation of those worlds designated as minor. There is the ability to flight without being ahead, above, below or beside the Norm. In her imaginative sociology, Avery Gordon (2008GORDON, Avery. Gosthly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.) has termed it the blind spot of escape that happens when what can no longer be mapped by the Norm appears as a ghost within a world that exterminates the others, the later owning their power represented by the haunting of certain ghosts. However, I also believe, and mainly, in what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013MOTEN, Fred; HARNEY, Stefano. The under commons: Fugitive planning and black study. Wivenhoe; New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.) define as the fugitive, i.e., that world or subject that breaks all the ability to correlate. A fugitive is always unmappable, their cartography consists of their own escape route and becomes accessible only to another fugitive. The point of all this logic of escape is to keep alive any world that is exploited and which will not cease to be, even with all exploitation. By “keeping alive” it is meant to find a “life reserve” (Mbembe, 2014aMBEMBE, Achille. Crítica da razão negra. Lisboa: Antígona, 2014a., p. 300) and not to be consumed by the holding. Thus, the fugitives such as the black worlds are in dilemma with the locations of the Norm. Our first current escape route is like taking one’s own thinking out of the logic of a global system, knowing quite well that it will not cease to exist.

Global systems are power fictions of the World of the Same, even though this world will question its own system ideas. They have already tried to convince us that it is networks what really make up the world - their real always there - rather than an organicist conception of system; other voices use the scientific category of agency to tell us that there are no more systems in the world under the exclusive command of humans, as the organicists and functionalists of culture and society once believed to exist. For the scientific voices of the posthuman agency, neither culture nor society would escape being undone, to find in them only agencies of matter, objects, animals, forces, and so on. Everything there goes through the epistemological plane of the Same, never a plane of the other worlds; after all, other worlds have their respective cultures only understandable in correlation with the Norm, as the cultural relativism from the World of the Same has already made evident. In addition, at all times, the project continues to keep people scavenged, properly identified and correlated by network technologies and agencies that insist that they do not exist without their connections or ways of acting with them, where, even for such people to disconnect from something, they would have to resort to correlation with the forces of the World.

Once again them, the subjects of the Same defining the future of all people. They created tracking devices over all people, targeting their lives on the Same plan. If there are networks, who has autonomy to travel on them, who is made and undone by them and with them? If there is an agency, who are the subjects who can act to reiterate, recreate, or even subvert their commands when there is only one specific type of agent as a model for the agency of all other agency commands? It turns out that these agents of other agencies are merely recipients, since their respective capacities to act in the world are only perceived by the capacities of acting of certain agents of the Same and only agency of the world. Would the agency thought under such rationality of the World of the Same be reasonable for anything from other peoples on the planet? I assure that it is not the people of the worlds who defy the orbit of the World, who benefit from so much rationality about normality and deviance. These latter worlds, constantly placed in the south of things, a south that sometimes echoes geopolitics, sometimes causes geopolitics to stutter, do not fit within the history of the tools of scientific reason, which explain human difference in a very particular way.

Western scientific reason, this seductive face of the Norm, continually insinuates itself as a predicative for the common sense of minorities if they want to escape the violence of the World. For instance, in times of apocalyptic theories, it is very easy for minorities to return a critique of the world by asking how to survive it by keeping it alive. Doubts arise such as: How to survive pesticides, if most of the population cannot consume food? How can we be saddened by global warming if we are already saddened daily because we die even before the knowledge of the planet’s climate issues is accessed? And when some minority has access to this knowledge, how would they want to save a planet whose future was not thought of for them (black people, Amerindians, and other minorities)? The great concern about the mystification of subversion is how to think about the futures on this planet even by the agenda set by the same, by the self-interested and old reason of the World.

We should not forget that suicides and murders that victimize minorities are constant and their causes are not usually for fear of the end of the Anthropocene. But there is something in the critical and cynical theater of Anthropocene subjects that departs from a great truth, namely the anthropos in the Anthropocene turns out to be the figure of the old imperialist, the White Man, so that the Anthropocene is no longer a geological era, but rather a White Supremacy scene (Mirzoeff, 2018MIRZOEFF, Nicholas. It’s Not The Anthropocene, It’s The White Supremacy Scene, Or, The Geological Color Line. In: GRUSIN, Richard (Ed.). After Extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press , 2018. P. 123-150. ). Purposefully, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2018) stems from the provocation as to what kind of man is implied when we speak of the Anthropocene, to the point where the actual dividing line would be sedimented in color. Given such a racial divide, we have already inferred that nonwhite subjects are not part of this mankind, and when we are on other dividing lines with supremacist subjects that more than White Men are Cisgender Men, possibly Heterosexuals, we know we are left. further behind this Humanity, which so preoccupies the Anthropocene theories. So whatever the divisions, we notice, above all, that it is the end of nonwhite, non-cisgender, nonheterosexual people which has been given as the imminent end since the Anthropocene subjects, even before calling themselves so, made a point to classify, segregate and ultimately extinguish.

It is the ever-imminent end of minorities that haunt them and that most critical Anthropocene projects seem to overlook. Of all this, the minorities have been feeling for a long time, so as not to waste their time being included in the concerns of those who have only now felt their crypt shake. They are already in the apocalypse since the world does not want them alive or just wants them to continue the projects that devastate the planet. Highlight: the first devastated land is the body.

The body consists of the dimension of mediation between all axes of power (in the sense of the affection of asymmetries and not of consensus, neither of hybridism). Therefore, I warn you that in speaking of southern worlds, I do so in reference to subalternized worlds, and not necessarily to geographically located worlds in the southern hemisphere of the planet. The south I invoke is in the opposite direction to Hegemony: therefore, the south corresponds to the worlds that the World tries to worse, which does not mean that the south is necessarily precarious. For the World of the Same precise geography is also unknown, although Western Europe is its greatest exponent, followed by the United States of America (USA). The Same is also the Norm that exists within societies considered highly modern and civilized, as are the societies of Western Europe and the USA, but which does not compose these locations. Supremacism and subalternization, center and margin, privileges and precariousness can cohabit the same spaces and times, the body being the dimension of mediation. Everything is infected, not merely connected. Therefore, every counterplan to set yourself apart from the Norm is a healing exercise.

There are multiple southern worlds in the south and South. And trying to save a planet for a few bodies says a lot about the ways we deal with gender, race, sex, and sexuality, among other social marks that hardly appear in the so-called end-of-the-century literature about beings from the Earth, or simply from Terrans. As a minority, even if any of us feel called upon to elucidate this criticism, it is necessary to shun being the intellectual prisoner, the one who can only think in direct relation to what oppresses oneself, and to be among the intellectuals and artists who think in the frame of dominant thinking, making everything return to the Order of Things, both entering into marriage with the Same. The counter plane also requires knowing how to flee the forces of this World. Therefore, I am not bringing solutions to this World; I am not proposing some manifest or study of the shortcomings in the analyzes of the Anthropocene, because who believed in it, even to criticize it, should solves it. Moreover, the manifestos are always in the dramatic line of some supposed crisis, forgetting that the idea of ​​crisis reiterates the normality that never existed in this World. Accounting for crisis or to produce with the imagined crisis is nothing more than to fantasize about the Norm, with a violence to be sustained by what the Norm faces. Making clear to the planet’s critical projects that there are other futures in order to show that the time to erase worlds from theories is over is commendable when one knows how to get out of the crypt of the Same, when the denunciation of other worlds about their non-participation in narratives of the end of world is detached from the maintenance of the ethical account, an account which mystified minorities easily ask to participate in, rather than destroy it.

According to Denise Ferreira da Silva (2017), since Hegel, an ethical account plunge into a transformation of the World History into a developmental scene, a self-realization of universal reason, which culminates in the mental, social, legal, economic and symbolic configurations found in post-Enlightenment Europe. In her provocative article, she draws attention to how the scientific and ethical configurations of determinism entered the nineteenth-century scientific accounts of human difference, which produced the notions of racial and cultural difference. “Both notions are manufactured in knowledge procedures that produce physical and social configurations as effects and causes of (explanations for) mental (moral and intellectual) differences” (Ferreira da Silva, 2017FERREIRA DA SILVA, Denise. On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value. Journal e-flux, [on line], n. 79, 2017. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value >. Acesso em: 05 maio 2018.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/... ). The White European mentality would act as a mediator of these procedures, since it would share a key quality with the Hegelian spirit of universal reason, namely man’s self-determination in the world, which would be, from this anthropocentric point of view, a self-determination of the world itself, that is, the validation of the sameness.

Ferreira da Silva (2017FERREIRA DA SILVA, Denise. On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value. Journal e-flux, [on line], n. 79, 2017. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value >. Acesso em: 05 maio 2018.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/... ) also realizes that this earlier moment of racial knowledge produced indices of human differentiation - that is, the naming of racial collectives such as the Black, Caucasian, Eastern and Australian - that transformed the economic distinctions resulting from conquest, colonization and enslavement in presentations of the Universal Reason, which the author points out as the avatar of the self-fulfilling philosophical spirit thought by Hegel. There they identify spatial, temporal and, above all, bodily configurations, which in turn produced the intellectual and moral forms that caused the differences in social configurations found on the European continent and its colonies. From Ferreira da Silva’s perspective (2017), the most interesting is the escape from those views that affirm a core of racial subjugation, based on the hierarchical division between rational and irrational (and I add human and inhuman, sense and sensible), and the bet on other ways of understanding existences¹⁷ 7 “I do not engage with what Sylvia Wynter claims to be the core of racial subjugation, namely, the hierarchical division of the human between rational/irrational, or ‘selected/dysselected’. My critical move here is not about ideological unveiling (as in exposing how European Man ‘overrepresents’ the human, thus disavowing all other modes of being human); nor does it attempt to delineate an outside space from which to expose that ‘other’ side of the ‘color line’ dividing white/European (human) from nonwhite/non-European (nonhuman). For I am not interested in a transcultural (transcendental or physiological or symbolic) human attribute that would be both the condition of possibility for what is activated in Western European being and all other modes of being, and that which has already been mapped by anthropology, cognitive science, or neurology” (Ferreira da Silva, 2017, n. p.). . We can conjure up a counterplan with this World and its ethical account via other worlds in order to draw an analytic against the World of the Same, other than through its end-litany, especially beyond the Anthropocene’s end of the human view.

The performance

The appeal to performance as a difference is itself a governance performance. The fugitive program is what deprograms the Norm by the disappearance of Black’s intrinsic difference from all performance of blackness. “The dismissal of any possible claim regarding the essence or even the being of blackness (in its irreducible performativity) becomes, itself, the dismissal of blackness” (Moten; Harney, 2015, p. 48). According to them, when we appeal to an internal difference as a means of abstracting the oppressive referent - in this case, the White World - the abstraction of the referent or its part is comparable to the inexistence of that referent (Moten; Harney, 2013). Yet the referent exists and produced the Black, so that every claim for the authenticity of blackness or its inherent unity becomes the refutation of blackness itself. The ethical account of racism wants racialized groups to claim their essential difference, and the more these groups claim their intrinsic difference, the more they will nurture racism, whose appetite is for the fiction of an essentialized difference always in the other, which becomes the Other of the World and which, in contrast to the color of the World - the white color - must be permanently erased.

The affirmation of blackness must be that of its escape route, that of escaping the commands of the World. Thus, fugitiveness does not align with the typical ethical accounts of minority participations that animate the ideologies of ascension and end up instrumentalizing the fugitive world. “Such instrumentality can very quickly turn sour or get turned out in the interest of empire (artists against art in the interest of gold, prefabricated knockoffs - with readymade provenances - of a certain New York intellectuality” (Moten; Harney, 2013MOTEN, Fred; HARNEY, Stefano. The under commons: Fugitive planning and black study. Wivenhoe; New York: Minor Compositions, 2013., p. 49). On that point, the authors referred to the projects of the inclusive difference of a priori fugitive poetics, but which eventually diverted their route to the subversion and vanguard scenarios of the arts. In fact, by questioning the arts and their languages in order to inaugurate the new, the vanguard discourse often resembles a great farce, as I warned you later:

Who are we talking about when we say we need to innovate or when we simply affirm that something new and subversive has emerged, or when we inform this is an experimental work/proposal? Of those who have always been there to be seen and who need to extend the new intellect of art to the long extra-genetic line of the poetic obligation of disturbing intelligence and dodging it. The absent subjects continue to be so. It so happens that the rich of the new is not made by paying attention to the logic of the vanguard, but to the logic of governance. “The new general intellect is rich. And the new regulation wants to give you back what you got, publicly, which is to say partly, what can only be owed. This regulation is called governance” (Moten; Harney, 2013MOTEN, Fred; HARNEY, Stefano. The under commons: Fugitive planning and black study. Wivenhoe; New York: Minor Compositions, 2013., p. 52). This differs from talking about governability, biopolitics and the whole series of variations and derivations of a macropolitics, which would act through some micropolitics. Neither the government of the collectives of the planet, nor the government of the self so preferred by the postmodernist and post-structuralist menu. Governance inscribes the difference by the very violence of differentiations, duplicating both the forces of identification and those of deidentification.

The performance of blackness becomes a black performance when, accumulating the work of White in defining Black and the work of Black in refuting the work of White, leaving all objectification involved there, making the differences do not matter for the order and vice versa. As long as both movements of importance are traced, the fugitives’ escape will be boycotted by the intelligence of the transfers of responsibility. “The invitation to governmentality is made by way of transfer of responsibility, and immaterial labor is distinguished from the vitality of life, from its vessel, by the taking up of responsibility, and life is now distinguished by its overt irresponsibility” (Moten; Harney, 2013MOTEN, Fred; HARNEY, Stefano. The under commons: Fugitive planning and black study. Wivenhoe; New York: Minor Compositions, 2013., p. 54). What in fact would be a sensitive materiality of works of art can only be achieved by means of perforation, in an onslaught that, as a consequence, neither the capital, nor the State, knows more about where to find the immaterial work that produces life. It is not a question of denying economic and social investments in the arts, but the more one invests in the work of artists, the more the artists will place themselves in a layer below the needle of sensitive drainage effected by the machines of the World. The poetic refinery may even know or desire the pre-fuel of life, but this one, already worth a lot in the market, will never be reached by it. Let’s perform the Blacks or with the Blacks, and the Blacks there running away while playing racism back as a problem created by the Whites. Look at a subaltern installation and the subaltern subjects in their new subalternity, always returning the violence of subalternization through a new layer. Bring the black to the white cube of the arts, and the more blacks there are, the less blacks we see there, or exactly the black that we are trying to erase becomes visible. Even so, it is not the Black we find, but the amazement of the figurine of the Black, the ghost of racism that returns to haunt the white spaces of art. The occupation of a fugitive is always White’s worst nightmare.

Politicizing performance is the work of state-politics. Blackness has to be made non-mappable by such a policy, when present with its poetics in white spaces. Therefore, the flight is not the absence of the fugitive, but the denunciation of the absence of worlds, the return of a non-presence that acts there, of a ghost to haunt the World that insists on killing other worlds. In the case of blackness, sensitive materiality is the life of a matter that cannot be reached, a matter-life that escapes all movement of this policy-state, which is a death policy directed at black people.

The Being: our little ontological terror

We begin by understanding the Being as a sensitive force that attributes senses, although it has been wrapped in human definitions of the individual and the subject. If we operate in a logic exclusively in favor of the sensitive, without paying attention to the fabrication of the senses, we would be, among several evils, exchanging the subject of representation for a subject as reduced and impossible as the subject of sensation. Now, one of the proposals of an anticolonial thought with the sensitive consists exactly in conceiving that what we call agency is not limited to the experience of the subject. This operates on two levels, that one of representation and that one of sensation, in addition to other possible levels, and all this will only be possible by an experience that does not take some people as the Other of some stable Self. Then, I argue for bringing the plane of the sensations of matter without subordinating it to the plane of representation and of all cognizant signifier of a specific humanity, even though we are in a state of attention to the ways in which the two planes interact - a crucial state for research in arts, because, in the case of human societies, there is the impossibility of the existence of such a separation between the sensitive and the representative. All this says a lot about a knowledge that, by no longer believing in the figure of the human as the only agent capable of experiencing the sensitive and fabricate senses with the world, moves towards the enlargement of the very concept of subjectivity.

Though thought by poststructuralism as different from individual experience, the notion of subjectivity defines only how the forms of the world act in what is conventionally called the human individual and subject him to some force field that the individual himself would be able to transform. (I point out that the conception of the individual is problematic to be transferred to non-modern worlds). Therefore, subjectivity concerns how some of the forces of the world act on us, but it cannot be taken as the only way out of how these forces are acting in the world and with other worlds. There is something that acts with us and simultaneously beyond and below us in what we believe to be our unique sensible experience. And the biggest problem of the sensible is right there, for the sensible experience is usually thought almost exclusively from the point of view of the modern western subject.

I agree with Suely Rolnik (2015ROLNIK, Suely. A hora da micropolítica: entrevista. Goethe Institut [on line], 2015. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.goethe.de/ins/br/pt/kul/fok/rul/20790860.html >. Acesso em: 04 ago. 2017.
https://www.goethe.de/ins/br/pt/kul/fok/... ) when the psychoanalyst warns that, in our western tradition, “[...] ‘subjectivity’ is confused with ‘subject’, because in this policy of subjectivation, it is only this capacity that tends to be activated” (Rolnik, 2015, n. p.). This confusion has not come about for nothing, it triggers the whole story of how the White West produced human agency as the center of all things in which the human is the White. “However, subjectivity’s experience of the world is potentially much broader, multiple and complex” (Rolnik, 2015). What do we lack then? We need to recognize that this complexity comes especially from the agency of subjectivity with other collective forces of varying degrees of complexity and multiplicity, in which issues of racialization are present. Thus, it was important for us to give up the idea of ​​the holistic subject in favor of a porous and vibrating subject (Rolnik, 2006ROLNIK, Suely. Cartografia sentimental: transformações contemporâneas do desejo. São Paulo: Edições Liberdade, 2006.); we were promising to take off the subjectivity of the subject’s individuality. Today, we are at the moment of releasing the post structural concept of subjectivity to understand the forces of worlds by a concept idea that not only tells how their humans experience some worlds, but also reiterates the idea that those humans would be the center of such an experimentation.

It has already been promising for us to understand life by our lines of subjectivation under the lens of the subject, based on the experience of the modern subject, who is a subject forged to exist, unlike the existence of non-modern subjects, who are destined to disappear. However, through such lines we also need to achieve what is cosmic in the worlds whose existence does not depend (I doubt that one day it has depended) on the powers of some specific human subject. If, as Suely Rolnik (2015ROLNIK, Suely. A hora da micropolítica: entrevista. Goethe Institut [on line], 2015. Disponível em: <Disponível em: https://www.goethe.de/ins/br/pt/kul/fok/rul/20790860.html >. Acesso em: 04 ago. 2017.
https://www.goethe.de/ins/br/pt/kul/fok/... ) states, subjectivity concerns about how we humans interact with the world in multiple and complex ways, we should be aware that this occurs through agencies that are no longer only subjective, but also cosmic. Given that, the cosmic knowledge - that knowledge of forms, materials, sensations and senses with the forces of the worlds on symmetrical planes -, although not univocal, consists of the history of all knowledge of those peoples designated as Black. And, if we erase this fact from our analyses, it is due to the institutional racism¹⁸ 8 Grada Kilomba (2010) defines institutional racism as the way in which structural racism - racism historically rooted in society in order to structure it as a society of racialized people that constantly generates racism - is authorized via institutions through mechanisms not only social and cultural, but also psychic and commonly unconscious order. of knowledge, which I will not review here.

Although it is through the experience of subjectivation that we somehow perceive life, this life exists beyond any of our abilities to exist. The current post-ontological turn may have its compass pointed to the world-without-us, but we already know that this inbuilt us does not include all the peoples of the planet. We need to experience new conceptions of the subject and of the world in which we can inhabit them. What worlds do we, people of the south and of the South, experience and how do we experience them? And which worlds are we capable of creating? If barbarism is to come, as Isabelle Stengers (2015STENGERS, Isabelle. No Tempo das Catástrofes. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2015.) desperately proclaims, the so-called necropolitics is already a reality in the countries that were colonized, in the war zones and where the most contemporary apartheids appear, as in the occupation of Palestine by the state of Israel (Mbembe, 2016MBEMBE, Achille. Necropolítica. Artes & Ensaio, Rio de Janeiro, n. 32, p. 123-151, 2016.). I emphasize that the colonizing dimension does not close in some disembodied spatial geopolitics. Colonization sight towards the material dimension of the body, regardless of where the bodies are located on the planet.

However, we must keep in mind that certain ontological despairs are not ours, no matter how much the people suffer situations of oppression and extermination almost always imposed by universal subjects, avatars of hegemonic policies, that insist on being inside everything, inside our ideas, our writings, our bodies, our desires... They have planted an unhappiness in us that is not our debt to any Norm. Let us kill the colonization in us! The future, as the World itself teaches us, always belongs to the plane of History of those who set themselves up as the only Humanity against all their others.

Conclusion

The sensible Black only exists as an escape zone from the whitened mapping, as a wonder of a world thrown to another that thinks the World. The reproductivism of the arts as a poetic reproduction of the World of the Same needs to be broken and, for this, we need to pay more attention to the fact that the so-called processes of subjectivation are processes of how we work the experience of subjectivity for an experience that subordinates us, that indicates some world colonized by others. This cannot be summarized to the incontestable fact that each subjective experience always starts from a certain location of the subject. All lives have their respective speech positionality, as Djamila Ribeiro (2017RIBEIRO, Djamila. O que é local de fala? Belo Horizonte: Letramento; Justificando, 2017.)¹⁹ 9 “In a society such as the Brazilian, with a slavary heritage, black people will experience racism from the place where they are the object of this oppression, the place that restricts opportunities because of this system of oppression. White people will experience the place of those who benefit from this same oppression. Therefore, both groups can and should discuss these issues, but will talk about different places” (Ribeiro, 2017, p. 86). warns us. The point at stake refers to how a single position of subject and subjectivity has served to speak for all others.

This is also in line with Rey Chow’s (2006CHOW, Rey. The age of the world target. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.) critique of the issue of difference, how difference was thought of by French post-structuralism in return with the notion of identity. According to the author, the post-structuralist theories imprisoned the difference under a supposed multiplicity of the subject (Chow, 2006). In that critique, the denunciation of the figure of the man of enlightenment, now replaced by the porous subject of post-structuralism, speaks of himself as a non-universal subject, as a human assailed to various normalizations, as well as a subject of resistance to them. In this logic, the complex process of subjectivation would account for both facets, that of accommodation and that of resistance. It happens that the thought of Rey Chow (2006) ends up diagnosing that the difference maintains a difference in favor of the Same, in which universality ends up returning. This maintenance would come by the fact that the difference invoked always produces new subjects, who, by multiplying themselves through their complex game of appropriations, reappropriations and subversions of the norm, would make the difference itself precede the identity, which would no longer be the ontology of the subject. Currently, the ontology of the subject would be his unlimited capacity to differentiate himself by producing new identities or simply launching himself into some kind of becoming always susceptible to the new (re)territorialization.

The problem lies in knowing who the subject to deterritorialize to new identities would always be, because the difference, preceding the identity, erases the place of speech of who experiences the becomings. On the other hand, the becomings would always be named. The appointments would always be those of minorities (woman, child, homosexual, Jew, transvestite, etc.). It is not a matter of returning to the illusions of originality, but of demarcating a political field of identity and difference that is hidden in this theory of the post-structural subject, also known as the nomadic subject. From that point on, many criticisms have become possible. For instance, Jasbir Puar (2013PUAR, Jasbir. “Prefiro ser um ciborgue a ser uma deusa”: interseccionalidade, agenciamento e política afetiva. Revista Meritum, Belo Horizonte, v. 8, n. 2, p. 343-370, jul./dez. 2013. ) saw Rey Chow’s theory as denouncing that there would be a constant process of inclusion of multiplicity to the processes of exclusion that the diverse would supposedly denounce, not making it very clear that the identity would not only be preceded by the difference, but defined by the former: “The ‘difference’ produces new subjects of investigation that, thus, infinitely multiply the exclusion to promote inclusion. The difference now precedes and defines the identity” (Puar, 2013, p. 352).

The difference that I propose to be thought of from this article operates in another perspective, which enables an honest opening with different sensible worlds. I understand the difference as a kind of invisible wisdom, manifested by the knowledge of the body that crosses the marked and unmarked bodies, placing itself in a field of forces traceable only by the sensory. I am dealing with a non-rational objectivity. I propose a sensible objectivity, whose rationality is only possible from other spheres of thought-action with the worlds. This objectivity is invisible, because it is not allowed to be seen even by the visions of the one who does not see himself as singular - the universal hegemonic world -, nor by the eye of that cosmos that can no longer exercise the capacity of escape. Invisible objectivity is also an embodied objectivity²⁰ 10 In Haraway’s terms: “Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the word “objectivity” to feminist ears in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies, that is, here, in the belly of the monster, in the United States in the late 1980s. I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1988, p. 581). , but in a greater sense than that conferred by Donna Haraway (1995HARAWAY, Donna. Saberes localizados: a questão da ciência para o feminismo e o privilegio da perspectiva parcial. Cadernos Pagu, Campinas, v. 5, p. 07-41, 1995.) to her concept of objectivity embodied in her feminist proposal in the late 1980s. If Haraway (1995) insisted on maintaining the metaphor of vision, in which knowledge has a soil of already existing historical and social relations, in which conflicts occur and where possible solutions to problems would be tied to these relations, I, in turn, radicalize the project of corporate objectivity through a power that does not allow itself to be seen only by the territory of social relations marked by the same. I bet on a knowledge that is effective in the dimension of the body towards other worlds that can no longer be seen in relation to the previous worlds, even if certain spaces and times coexist with them. Corporate objectivity, as I propose, is the performance of an effective escape, the maintenance of a reserve on the part of the map, making the body a guerrilla.

“I felt steel blades born in me” (Fanon, 2008FANON, Frantz. Pele negra, máscaras brancas. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2008., p. 110).

Referências

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