Extra session: Building resonance for the minor
Sensoria. Whiteness. Syncopation.
Dread: sense that the world is shrinking.
Becoming claustrophobic. The war is everywhere.
We are invited to a space of deep hesitation. Be still, pray together without words. With guttural sounds, with a language that exceeds the grammar of intelligibility. Language gets in the way.
There are often cases where speaking to the issue reifies the issue. Remember the noise emancipates.
The systems of intelligibility leaves us incarcerated within the worlds we are trying to emancipate from. I don’t know what the solution is, I am suspicious of my intelligence. I don’t know how to ask the right questions most of the time, and I am sure we are all going through it together. It’s hard to live through this, it’s difficult, it’s cosmic, it’s molecular, it’s more than human. And sometimes the only to respond is to just cry together, to move from side to side, to hum, to laugh, to feel, to hold, to embrace and to not know together.
You ought to apologize for your privilege, says politics, a metaphysics of dots. Liberalism. We are autonomous discrete entities. We are dots. Reduce everything to those dots. Reduce accountability to individuality. Categorize it, archive it. measure it. The world is too unwieldy to resolve into into the grammatical affixations to ownership.
We are energetic fields of co-becoming. Privilege might have us. We do not have the spatiousness to do that.
We are cultivating fields of resonance. We are seeking just in the same way we we are being sought May this seeking be are be our sanctuary, may we find each other anew, may the tensions of this moment give way to something else, something fugitive, crack-like, beyond the economy and the logic of our reasoning. Asé.
If we are correct we are alone. If we are wrong we are together the minor.
Presuppositions
- We live in a processual, relational, open-ended co-becoming of things.
- We never act alone, but always act together-with, we are co-substantiated within intra-active immanent fields.
- It is not left to us to save the day, we are not the heroes of this unfolding epic saga of becoming.
Humility
To touch the contours of an animist framework, through which trace new imaginations
Humus is earth, the aeration of worms, the loamy soil, it’s how things meet each other.
- a way of knowing that refuses to privilege the knower over the known.
- a multi-species arrangement. Knowing is the fragile trafficking of edges and seeming determined borders.
- the immanent becomingness of things in relation. The awkwardness of the new. New isn’t proud, bold or courageous. New is awkward.
- black geophilosophy. Ontofugitivity. Paraontology of identity.
- we are not entitled to change. Humility reframes knowing, not as a matter of discovery and deficits, but performative excess in a world that is promiscuous, surprising and intelligent.
We don’t know.
Consider Leviathan.
The story of Job.
Everything was taken from Job as a game between god and satan. God doesn’t answer Job’s question about why. Maybe god was doing a post humanist sermon. Consider Leviathan to shift our gaze from the linearities we’ve committed to. Decenter human anxieties
More than an answer, bewilderment.
Consider the Rove Beetle.
Discovered in Australia in november. Grows a termite puppet on its back to fool real termites into feeding it.
If I sprouted a white man in my back it would be easier to go through airports.
What does authenticity mean to this duplicitous trickster. Authenticity is a modern value. The world is participating constantly in new rituals of sacred inauthenticity.
How did it know to do this?
How does the universe know to paint butterfly wings?
Sensorium
Not isolated senses. Sense-making, turning with/in together, shaped by desire and possibility. Entrainment. A nature.
Capitalism is a sensorium. It brings journeys to the moon and whatsapp. It struggles to teach how to listen to your ancestors.
Omelas
Ursula K. Le Guin.
A city that has arrived, activisms are not necessary. A good place. People enjoy long fulfilling lives.
Under the city there is a child locked, suffering, begging to to be let out. Everybody knows about the child, but at the moment somebody offers a smile, hope, or some kind of relief, everything will crumble.
The child subsidizes the happiness of everybody else. This is not sci-fi.
Selah, where the sensorium mutinies, emits fine signals, tensions, intensities, which often crystallize as cracks, monstrous forms. It’s where sensoria interact with each other. The world is not stable, it’s meta- stable.
How sensoria reinforce themselves
Naming the enemy enlists the namer in hybrid relations of pathology. Critique is creation, continuity, reification.
Capitalism, racism or patriarchy are not fully known, already there, fixed and stable. Insisting in equity when the pie is poisoned. Notice risks, and limitations and shadows, and then navigating appropriately in a different way.
In the sensorium creativity and permutations are always possible in the co-shopping of meanings and bodies. In-formation.
The major and the minor
It is impossible to prefigure the ways transformation might occur.
Disabilities offer orifices in sensoria, allowing new gestures of cartographical removal.
Privilege is not owned, it’s something territorial.
I don’t have a seat at your table, I don’t have access, but there are ways that I am alive in the world, and my people have been alive in the world that may not constitute privilege, it’s a different exploration.
They know how to sing, how to be sung to, how to dance with ancestal voices, how to listen to plants, how to heal each other.
White syncopation
Whiteness is how white people are made. White people are manufactured, not born. The moment you reduce whiteness to people, you are doing exactly what whiteness would have you do. We are speaking about world-engineering paradigms.
The ways we are trained to think, to see, go to school, get a job, earn some money, die, this neurotypical progression of things that reasserts itself over and over again in the major key. The dominant downstroke.
Exploring whiteness is not centralizing it. It is vulnerable to flows, just like olis rigs are vulnerable to poetry and can become coral reefs. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. But the master’s tools don’t stay faithful to the master for too long. The master’s tools will become something else.
We are reframing whiteness, we’re noticing how we’re imbricated in it because whiteness is a sensorium. We’re noticing the language we use to navigate it. You can have diversity within a slave ship.
Healing and reparations are important. These very felt localized and deeply needed interventions are riskily imbricated in the familiar.
Trans-raciality. If you start with the individual in your conceptualizations of racialization, you still end up with colonizing categories. If you start with the movement, the thing that precedes the “I” that moves, the racist isn’t the person. The racist is the assemblage.
White syncopation refers to the destabilizing forces and events that disrupt the dominant ontology of whiteness, of the citizen, of liberalism and anthropocentrism.
It names the moments of rupture where the stability and presumed universality of whiteness is troubled by syncopated rhythms of emergent relationality, solidarity, indeterminacy and errancy which open possibilities for ontological fugitivity, sensorial apostasy.
It traces the generative, radical potential in the cracks and fissures produced through the failures of whiteness to indefinitely sustain its myth of the coherent individualized Man through infallible reason and progress.
It gestures toward sensorial, ethical, political and ontological modes of mutiny, apostasy, and refusal which proliferate in the intervals of hegemonic rupture.
It expresses in many ways:
- Psychical, in experiences that expose porous egos and hybrid subjectivities (trauma, hallucinations, intense affects)
- Eco-corporeal, in body transformations that trouble coherence in autonomy of the human form (prosthetics, implants, life extension)
- Political, in movements that demand rights or recognition of the excluded (queer, indigenous, disabled, neurodiverse)
- Mythopoeic, in narratives that foreground relationality and complicate colonial ideologies (afro futurism, ecofiction, solarpunk)
- Sexual, in desires, orientations, and modes of relation that open possibilities beyond reproduction of the nuclear family structure upheld by whiteness.
White syncopation destabilizes assumed continuity of the autonomous self and anthropocentric stability
In the gaps and fissures, there is potential for ontological and sensorial apostasy. It enables epistemological mutiny dominant modes of thought and being. Rather than reform or inclusion, it enables epistemological mutiny against dominant modes of thought and being.
Rather than reform or inclusion, it allows for radical hybridity and boundary transgression.
This break from continuity engenders new relational ties, unexpected solidarities, lines of flight.
It opens possibilities for posthuman embodiment and subjectivity outside the grammar of Man. The promise is not rational progress or resolution, but unpredictable becomings.