#base materialism

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Another way of putting this: the Black body enacts and represents to all of culture an ongoing failure in maintaining a separation between the material and the symbolic and between form and content. As Frank Wilderson stated in our interview in November last year, “it mars both of these categories . . . the slave corrupts the Symbolic Order.” He went on:

Blackness mars all that constitutes symbolic beings, precisely because symbolic beings glean their representational capacity from sucking our blood. There are no Blacks in the world, but there is no world without Blacks.

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This essay doesn’t suggest that all Black art holds l’informe and other Bataillean concepts closely. It’s a bit depressing to have to admit that, because on the other side of that doorway lies the hard truth that many Black artistic practices either consciously or unconsciously participate in the project of liberal humanism that will always, always, always “suck their blood,” to use Wilderson’s phrase and leave them bleeding out. This is no one’s fault, and in a way, I hope that wedging this Bataille thing into Black art discourse, and into general art theory anew, might inspire other Black artists and scholars to reassess our practices–—and everyone else to pursue an absolutely counter-modernism and all its hypothetical counter-legacies from a true and decisive limit point—to find, draw out, and magnify those lurking base materialistic elements in order to extend and strengthen a notion of Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness.

Greathumour - Sisters Absurd Dreaming

Base Materialism

[….] returning to Bataille’s own naming of “Black practice” as crucial to the revolutionary activity he’s after—in art and in politics. Going against the grain of modernism requires broadening the scope of analysis. Specifically, its scope must consider aesthetic modernism’s origin—I believe it is safe to say that aesthetic modernism could not and would not have taken shape as it did were it not for Europe’s encounter with Africa.

Bataille’s “Black practice.” If such activity is crucial, we must first ask what exactly this “black practice” is. We find answers—and, in the process can solve for Bataille’s problematic decoupling of practice and thought—in turning to the work of R.A. Judy, another Afropessimism-associated thinker. In his book Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poesis in Black, Judy introduces the concept of “thinking-in-action,” a riff on Du Bois’ “intellect-in-action.” For Judy, “The poiēsis of blackness . . . is process and object. It’s doing what it’s talking about.”

Base Materialism 3