{"id":19122,"date":"2024-12-12T19:07:33","date_gmt":"2024-12-12T19:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=19122"},"modified":"2024-12-12T19:07:36","modified_gmt":"2024-12-12T19:07:36","slug":"fugitive-utterances-in-modernitys-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=19122","title":{"rendered":"Fugitive Utterances in Modernity\u2019s Song"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This review first appeared in Art Journal<\/em> vol. 83, no. 3 (Fall 2024)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rizvana Bradley,\u00a0Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthetics and the Critique of Form.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 406 pp.; 19 color ills.; 14 b\/w. Cloth $30<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rizvana Bradley\u2019s Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthetics and the Critique of Form<\/em> seeks to radically challenge our understanding of the aesthetic, arguing that it is neither universal nor neutral. Instead, as Bradley boldly argues, the aesthetic is a racial regime of Western modernity undergirded by the Black feminine. In her words, the latter\u2019s labor \u201csubtends and sustains the ontology of the world, the modern aesthetic order\u201d (67). Later, she reiterates this: \u201cblack feminine vestibularity is endlessly instrumentalized in the making and remaking of (aesthetic) forms\u201d (226). Bradley\u2019s counterintuitive thesis, in other words, that Blackness is a precondition of Western aesthetic discourse, its seemingly invisible support, even as it is not fully representative within that same regime, structures her ambitious and multivalent book-length exegesis. She writes from this condition of impossibility, attending to that which emerges in the gap (or \u201cthe abyssal cut\u201d to use her evocative language) between Black existence and Black nonbeing, a recurring argument in Anteaesthetics.<\/em> The recurrence of antiblackness and its attendant structural violence is neither a contemporary phenomenon nor a strictly political one, Bradley emphasizes, but inherent in the conditions that structure the aesthetic. In short, she suggests, antiblackness is \u201cconstitutive of aesthetic forms and representations\u201d (29). Full stop. Thus, attending to the \u201cminor refrains\u201d (39) of Blackness within the aesthetic requires us, Bradley notes, to question the apparent coherency and cohesion of Western aesthetics and recognize it as a nefarious racial order rather than simply the distribution of the sensible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In doing so, one of the major gripes of\u00a0Anteaesthetics<\/em>\u00a0is the constant reduction of Black art to the merely representational\u2014(cue Kobena Mercer\u2019s critique of the \u201cburden of representation\u201d in\u00a0Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies<\/em>\u00a0and Jennifer Doyle\u2019s discussion of \u201cfeeling overdetermined\u201d in\u00a0Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art<\/em>)\u2014or simply to matters of medium specificity at the expense of its larger aims.1<\/a><\/sup> As a result, Bradley gathers a set of artists in her text whose work not only degrades neat categories and tacit understandings but also speaks to the very conditions of its unwieldy existence. After all, \u201ceven the most radical forms of black artistic expression are always already made to come before the representational violence of the racial regime of aesthetics,\u201d Bradley cautions us (19). Take, for instance, Nina Simone, the first artist in the book\u2019s roster, specifically her live performance of a medley of \u201cStars\/Feelings\u201d at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. Simone\u2019s act of \u201cnon-performance,\u201d as Bradley terms it, is contained within and exceeds the bounds of the aesthetic; her \u201cgestures strain against and recede from the aesthetic\u201d even as they are \u201calso violently marshaled to reproduce it\u201d (22). For Bradley, the fraught aesthetic apparatuses structuring Simone\u2019s belabored performance are paradigmatic of the more extensive set of concerns that animate\u00a0Anteaesthetics<\/em>, especially the vexed dilemma of Blackness being made to appear within an aesthetic regime that cannot fully represent it and yet insists on its presence. It \u201ccannot be but must exist\u201d (51). This line of argumentation is woven across\u00a0Anteaesthetics<\/em>, such as her contemplation of\u00a0The Death of Tom<\/em>, a 2008 video installation by Glenn Ligon.2<\/a><\/sup> Ligon\u2019s 16\u2009mm black-and-white film initially attempted to re-render the last scene of the 1903 film\u00a0Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, in which Tom becomes fully sainted in death, but instead came out as a series of shadowy glitches. Ligon opted to retain and exhibit\u00a0The Death of Tom<\/em>, the ruined film abstractly rendering the \u201cserial nonevent of Tom\u2019s death\u201d (269). Again, Bradley illuminates how Ligon\u2019s installation exceeds the representational; rather, it elucidates how the emergence of film as a medium is itself predicated on racial terror: \u201cBlackness is anterior to the cinematic\u201d (266). Thus, Bradley\u2019s impetus in her text is thinking alongside Black art because it continually enunciates the constitutive tethering between the aesthetic and the anti-Black worlding that is intrinsic to its structure. In short, Bradley offers a sharp and tightly constructed treatise on seeing Western aesthetic discourse anew by foregrounding its Black(ened) supports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anteaesthetics<\/em> is the inaugural text of the book series Inventions: Black Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics<\/em>, edited by the scholar David Marriott\u2014his recent work on Blackness and nonbeing is the second text in the series; this imprint is dedicated to preventing the absorption of Blackness into discourses of philosophy, politics, or aesthetics without radically questioning the epistemological foundations of those fields of knowledge. Marriott and Bradley\u2019s shared raison d\u2019\u00eatre can perhaps be glimpsed most explicitly in the theoretical scaffolding Bradley deploys in this text. Bradley draws on and firmly situates her text within a rich Black philosophical tradition. In addition to the indelible influence of Fred Moten, Bradley generously cites peers working within the generative bounds of Afropessimism\u2014be it Frank B. Wilderson III and Calvin L. Warren or art historians Huey Copeland and Sampada Aranke\u2019s discussion of Afropessimist aesthetics. And yet, Anteaesthetics<\/em> is a \u201cphilosophical performance\u201d (23) that firmly grounds itself in the terra firma of Black feminist thought. For instance, Bradley\u2019s concept of anteaesthetics is in taut dialogue with Hortense Spillers\u2019s foundational and vital essay \u201cMama\u2019s Baby, Papa\u2019s Maybe.\u201d In doing so, Bradley not only alludes to the prefix \u201cante\u201d to signal a temporal marking (a \u201cprior to\u201d or \u201cbefore\u201d) but also to Spillers\u2019s notion of the body that precedes the flesh and the spatial metaphor of the vestibular\u2014or the waiting room of the anti-Black world. Spiller\u2019s urtext is augmented in Bradley\u2019s monograph by a robust cohort of like-minded Black feminist philosophers; these include, most prominently, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Joy James, Katherine McKittrick, Jessica Marie Johnson, Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya V. Hartman. However, in Anteaesthetics<\/em>, Bradley also illuminates how visual artists, writers, and performers like Zora Neale Hurston, Dionne Brand, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry are similarly engaged in imagining and theorizing a new world order while distilling the contours of Blackness. In particular, Bradley\u2019s attention to Hurston as an understudied philosopher is striking, an impulse shared by recently published texts in performance studies and aesthetics, most notably Alexandra T. Vazquez\u2019s The Florida Room<\/em> and Tina Post\u2019s Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression<\/em>, while her framing of Nina Simone contributes to an increasing body of work on the musician by scholars such as Daphne A. Brooks, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, Julius B. Fleming. Jr., and Danielle Heard. Bradley displays a dazzling and often vertiginous command of disparate academic fields in these pages, a methodological errancy that runs the gamut from queer and feminist theory, art history, and literary theory to cinema studies, affect theory, and Black diaspora studies. In doing so, she engages with, and often refashions, disciplinary conceptions of spectatorship, the audio-visual medium, objecthood, touch, mediality, and embodiment, to name a few. Anteaesthetics<\/em> presents a trenchant and equally impressive grappling with the heavyweights of continental philosophy (such as Immanuel Kant, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, G. W. F. Hegel, and Michel Foucault), and its anti-Black origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bradley wields a set of provocative and recurring concepts in\u00a0Anteaesthetics<\/em>\u00a0to highlight the intertwined relationship between the aesthetic and an anti-Black worlding\u2014such as \u201cblack aesthesis\u201d to delimit that which emerges in \u201cthe cut between black existence and black nonbeing\u201d (23). This term is crucial for the text since, as she notes, \u201cblack aesthesis is at once the condition of possibility for and radically incommensurate with aesthetic form\u2014an emergence still unaccounted for in the scholarly canons of art history and continental philosophy\u201d (31). Likewise, Bradley continually utilizes the botany term \u201cdehiscence,\u201d often used to denote the reopening of a surgical incision or wound, to speak to the violent rupturing of Black flesh that is a structuring possibility of modernity. Even here, she takes pains to distinguish her use of the term as derived from Brand\u2019s theorization of chattel slavery as a \u201ctear in the world\u201d rather than Jacques Lacan or Merleau-Ponty\u2019s respective employments of the term in a more psychoanalytic or phenomenological sense. Moreover, her use of spatial terms such as the \u201cthreshold\u201d is instructive in its emphasis on the contours of this worlding and what it means, she suggests, to occupy the \u201cnegative underside\u201d of this world order (17). Again, the Black feminine resurfaces as the \u201cvestibule through which all forms must pass \u2026 Black femininity bears the modern world of forms and the form of the modern world\u201d (65). One cannot help thinking of another spatial metaphor when reading this: Hartman\u2019s discussion of the hallway as an overlooked site of Black assembly in\u00a0Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval<\/em>.3<\/a><\/sup> In addition, Bradley conceives of others, such as the black residuum, anteformalism, and black mediality, that correspond to discussions within the chapters. And yet, stylistically, the most salient staging of the book\u2019s argument is its form. Bradley argues, via Wilderson, that\u00a0Anteaesthetics<\/em>\u00a0must reach a \u201chigher level of abstraction\u201d (29). Indeed, Bradley\u2019s dense prose seems designed to partially obscure the visually apparent and demystify that which appears opaque. While Bradley\u2019s recursive writing style, where sentences often fold and loop in on each other or stretch themselves out across elastic lengths to hammer home a point, may prove frustrating initially for some readers, this language seems to be a purposeful decision on Bradley\u2019s part: we perceive\u00a0glimpses<\/em>\u00a0of the larger whole and the structural supports underneath it. The reader is forced to wander through its enigmatic structure, piecing together a worldview. Again, the text itself is a durational performance, suggestive of the sustained labor Blackness must enact within the racial regime of the aesthetic. This textual elusiveness may be perceived as a refusal, not unlike Nina Simone\u2019s in the scene of performance:\u00a0Anteaesthetics<\/em>\u00a0situates itself within the bounds of the form while simultaneously being unwilling to accede to its understood terms of operation fully. As a result, Bradley defamiliarizes Western aesthetic discourse while not fully revealing the mystery of the Black artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bradley\u2019s\u00a0Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthetics and the Critique of Form<\/em>\u00a0is a monumental text, as theoretically agile as it is utterly majestic in its scope. It shakes the foundations of aesthetics while also challenging the fields of art history and cinema studies to reckon with its unseemly alliance with antiblackness. Moreover,\u00a0Anteaesthetics<\/em>\u00a0persuasively showcases how dominant idealizations of the aesthetic as benevolent and universally applicable are inherently flawed. Instead, a very different and dissenting view emerges in Bradley\u2019s text, one in which the worlding apparatus of the aesthetic both requires and negates Blackness as a necessary spoke in its sleek machinery. She aims to reveal the cartography of the modern world, one where Blackness has been operationalized to function as its \u201cabsent center\u201d (105). Bradley suggests that we must turn to the experimentation deployed in the realm of the Black aesthetic, not because it will offer any recourse to this fundamental impossibility, but rather because it pushes us to sit with its lasting effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Uri McMillan<\/a><\/strong> is an associate professor of English and gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of\u00a0Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance<\/em>\u00a0(2015, NYU Press).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Kobena Mercer,\u00a0Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Routledge, 1994); Jennifer Doyle,\u00a0Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art<\/em>\u00a0(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Glenn Ligon,\u00a0The Death of Tom<\/a><\/em>, 2008, 16\u2009mm black-and-white film\/video transfer, 23\u2009min.<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. For Hartman, overlooked spaces such as these function as lingering spaces of Black assembly and sites of waywardness for early twentieth-century Black women. Waywardness signals an \u201congoing exploration of\u00a0what might be<\/em>\u201d and the \u201cuntiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.\u201d See Saidiya V. Hartman, 2019,\u00a0Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiment: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval<\/em>\u00a0(New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 228. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Uri McMillan on challenging the prevailing understanding of a universal aesthetic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":19126,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1650,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-from-art-journal","category-uncategorized",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}