Tending-toward-Blackness* - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Tending-toward-Blackness*

HUEY COPELAND

It comes as no surprise that the heterogeneous humanistic and social-scientific
writings often lumped together under the heading “new materialisms” have been
embraced by a wide swath of Euro-American academics, artists, critics, and curators.
In their focus on the internal and external entanglements of matter with both seen
and unseen forces, agents, and atmospheres, these supposed theoretical innovations
not only echo the preoccupations and procedures of aesthetic inquiry but also sug-
gest the relevance of art-historical methods for producing interdisciplinary accounts
of the world’s continual unfolding and reconfiguring.1 Yet this affinity also pertains
to the potential blind spots of the two discourses, cual, in the name of universal val-
ues and transcendent theoretical schemas, again risk abetting “the social reproduc-
tion of white supremacy” through the elision of marginalized perspectives, especial-
ly—in the words of Cedric Robinson—that “accretion over generations of collective
intelligence” stemming from black cultural traditions.2

*
Because of an editorial oversight, the above text was omitted from “A Question on
Materialisms” in October 155 (Invierno 2016). The editors sincerely regret the error and are grateful to
the author for the opportunity to present it here. The questionnaire prompt (pag. 3) asked respondents
to comment from the perspective of their own work about a decentering of the human in theoretical
and historical writing across the humanities:

Is it possible, or desirable, to decenter the human in discourse on art in particular? Qué
is gained in the attempt, and what—or who—disappears from view? Is human differ-
ence—gender, carrera, power of all kinds—elided? What are the risks in assigning agency to
objects; does it absolve us of responsibility, or offer a new platform for politics? . . . Which,
if any, are the productive materialisms for making and thinking about art today?

1.
My language here, which aims to frame the ambitions of new-materialist discourse at its
best, relies upon that of Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pag. 136. For an approach
more typical of aestheticized protocols for engaging the phenomenal world, see Jane Bennett, "El
Force of Things,” in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), páginas. 1–20.

I quote, respectivamente, from Huey Copeland, “Unfinished Business as Usual: African
2.
American Artists, New York Museums, and the 1990s,” in Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, ed.
Alexandra Schwartz (berkeley: University of California Press and Montclair Art Museum, 2014), pag. 32;
and Cedric J. robinson, “Preface to the 2000 Edition,” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pag. xxx. For a related critique, ver

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142

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Llevar, Por ejemplo, the following lines from the introduction to one of the
more visible of the new materialist anthologies: “Material dimensions have recent-
ly been marginalized by fashionable constructivist approaches and identity politics.
Por supuesto, the latter have a good deal to say about the body and its imbrication in
relationships of power, but we are not convinced that they pay sufficient attention
to the material efficacy of bodies or have the theoretical resources to do so.”3 As
easily as that, knowledges aimed precisely at holistic understandings of material
being-together and being-in-the-world are collapsed, caricatured, and dismissed
with nary a footnote and more than a whiff of an age-old logic that would limit the
thinking of the other to the impositions on her body, sin, por supuesto, reflecting
upon the white liberal biases that inform such a statement or the volume’s stated
interests in ontologies, biopolitics, and political economy.

In her contribution to the anthology, Sara Ahmed rightly pushes against
such perverse amnesia, situating her own work as a “renewed” materialism that is
deeply indebted to feminist scholarship produced during the “cultural turn.”4 Yet
her essay—focused on the table as a multifaceted site of gendered material and
phenomenological encounter—is also a corrective: In it, Ahmed revises one of her
previous texts in light of its failure to acknowledge either that engagements with
the domestic sphere are also raced and classed or that one of her clinching exam-
ples, the Kitchen Table Press, “was about generating a space for woman [sic] de
color within feminism.”5 Ahmed’s emendations to her table talk might be further
extended to transform her discussion of Karl Marx’s famous disquisition on the
production of value within capitalist economies, a passage that also begins by con-
sidering the ontological status of a wooden table and that ultimately leads to the
seemingly counterfactual proposition “If commodities could speak. . . . ”6 As Fred
Moten has brilliantly shown, certain commodities—in particular, enslaved
women—did in fact speak, and sigh, and shriek: “The sound—the inspirited mate-
riality—of that speech constitutes a kind of temporal warp that disrupts and aug-
ments not only Marx but the mode of subjectivity that the ultimate object of his
critique, capital, both allows and disallows.”7

Jessica L. Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New
Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” Third Text (2013), páginas. 17–28.

3.
Ontology, Agencia, and Politics, ed. Coole and Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pag. 19.

Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms:

Sara Ahmed, “Orientations Matter,” in New Materialisms, pag. 234.

5.
ahmed, “Orientations Matter,” p. 253; the author returns to Sara Ahmed, “Orientations
Toward Objects,” in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006), páginas. 25–63.

6.
Economy, Volume I (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (Londres: Penguin Books, 1990), páginas. 163, 176.

Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” in Capital: A Critique of Political

7.
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Mineápolis: Universidad
of Minnesota Press, 2003), pag. 11. In a certain sense, Moten’s reading answers the call for a rethinking of
fetishism within black studies articulated in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Conciencia (Cambridge, MAMÁ: Prensa de la Universidad de Harvard, 1993), pag. 9.

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Tending-toward-Blackness

143

Moten’s writing instances a critical orientation toward the sensible rooted in
the historical production of black flesh—suspended between sexes and genders, años-
mate and inanimate, person and thing, animal and machine, agent and material—
that underlines the porousness of ontological categories as well as the brittleness of
Western culture’s epistemological foundations, which time and again place the
black body as limit and exemplar, whether captives in the slave-ship hold, specimens
on the examining table, or magnetized targets of state violence in the streets.8 This
acercarse, what I have called a “tending-toward-blackness—a leaning into and car-
ing for,” animates a range of artistic, social, political, and theoretical practices
aimed at establishing an ethical posture toward black subjects and those related
forms of being that have been positioned at the margins of thought and percep-
tion yet are necessarily co-constitutive of them.9 If, in the words of the latest rally-
ing cry, “black lives matter,” then we must recalibrate our modes of reading, think-
En g, and acting in order to pay heed to the political ontology of race and to the
mattering of blackness itself.10

Among scholars embraced within the framework of new materialism, karen
Barad has productively taken these lessons to heart in staging transdisciplinary
encounters between performative, postcolonial, and poststructuralist theories and
the philosophy-physics of Niels Bohr, cual, in its way, also undoes distinctions
between the discursive and the material, the temporal and the spatial, the epistemo-
logical and the ontological: Our apparatuses for engaging the world of which we are

In addition to Moten’s work, these lines are intended to conjure a range of raced materi-
8.
alisms and racialized material practices from the advent of transatlantic slavery to the present: Sobre el
flesh and the undoing of gender, see Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, No. 2 (Verano 1987), páginas. 65–81; on hierarchies of animation, see Mel Y.
Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); en
the vexed relation between persons and things, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror,
Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Nueva York: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1997); sobre el
human in and as the machine, see Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Ciencia, Tecnología,
and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (Nueva York: Routledge, 2003), páginas. 5–45; en
being in the slave-ship hold, see Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer
Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ 14, nos. 2–3 (2008), páginas. 191–215; on the black female body as
a site of scientific production, see Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Nueva York:
Broadway Paperbacks, 2010); and on the black body’s vulnerability to state violence, see Steve Martinot
and Jared Sexton, “The Avant-garde of White Supremacy,” Social Identities 9, No. 2 (2003), páginas. 169–81,
as well as John Marquez, “The Black Mohicans: Representations of Everyday Violence in Postracial
Urban America,” American Studies Quarterly 64, No. 3 (2012), páginas. 625–51.

9.
“Tending-toward-blackness” is “meant to rhyme with Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-
toward-death’—the subject’s existential ownership of his own demise—particularly as recast in light
of the dynamics of slavery in Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s
Archaeology of Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 15.” See Huey Copeland, Bound to
Appear: Arte, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (chicago: University of Chicago
Prensa, 2013), páginas. 92; 218 norte. 88.

10.
For a most trenchant account of how the positionality of the slave disrupts questions of poli-
tics and ontology, see Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, Blanco & Negro: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

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always already a part, Bohr teaches us, not only determine what we “know” but also
what at any given moment can be said to be. So grounded, Barad’s capacious theo-
rization of how matter matters is oriented to the performative reconfiguring of
being on a cosmic scale, enabling us to reckon with the limits of the visual, to think
together black bodies and black holes, and to freshly confront the constitution of
our objects and their entanglements by putting pressure on the mechanisms
through which we continue to reproduce constitutive exclusions both discursive-
ly and methodologically.11 Just imagine what might be possible if, instead of
rushing to the new, we tended toward blackness—in all of its sensuous and
imperceptible unfolding—that phantom site whose traces everywhere mark the
construction of the material world and provide a different horizon from which
to take our bearings.12

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11.
(Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, No. 4 (Caer 2013), páginas. 737–80.

Barad; for a complementary account, see Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness

12.
For an extended meditation on what this might mean for art history in practice, see my
Bound to Appear, as well as Huey Copeland, “Flow and Arrest,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform of Criticism
48 (Noviembre 2015), páginas. 205–24.
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