AESTHETICS: RECUPERATE, REBALANCE, RUPTURE

JAMES TRAFFORD

Aesthetics as praxis

I want to draw this conversation together with Sylvia Wynter’s approach to politics and aesthetics –particularly in the context of what Derek Gregory terms the ‘colonial present’, and the question of history more generally.

In Rethinking Aesthetics, Sylvia Wynter considers aesthetics beyond disciplinary frameworks to ask instead:

What does aesthetics do? What is its function in human life? What, specifically, is its function in our present “form of life”? What correlation does it bear with the “social effectivities” of our present order, including that into which the real-life citizens and “captive populations” of the U.S. inner cities and the Third World shantytown archipelagos are locked?1

These questions are carefully positioned within an approach that situates aesthetics in the context of the broader training of sensory experience and also to account for the relationship between that sensory experience and the normative form of the social. Aesthetics, for Wynter, engages with “points of power” where sensory experience is intertwined with discursive codes–suggesting that “each mode of the aesthetic is isomorphic with a specific mode of human behaviour or ‘form of life’”.2 She uses this slightly differently to Wittgenstein to mean a system of agreed-upon meanings but also a state of representation/experience, and how these are embedded within socio-political and economic contexts.

Thinking with Anthony Farley’s work, we may also say that where Wynter points to governing rules of “forms of life,” those rules do not themselves fix collective meanings, but rather “only training and desire fix the rules in any particular direction or meaning.”3 For Farley, “forms of life” are just the crystallization of repressed desire and training, producing patterns of behaviors that become normative through reinforcing feedback loops of sanction and support.

What we might call governing rules of “forms of life” are entrenched norms that interweave economic, political, and material infrastructures as much as “cultural personality” (to use Amilcar Cabral’s phrase).

Aesthetics and invention

Wynter suggests that aesthetics is a sociopolitical practice that so often involves securing social cohesion and producing a unitary system of meanings. Where aesthetics may function to reproduce forms of life, critique reifies its underlying metaphysics and hierarchy in performative autonomy and supposed distance from the codes through which critique is produced.

To decipher–rather than critique–is Wynter’s methodological approach that aims to reveal the systems and codes through which forms of life function. Decipherment helps us to see how the subject is instituted within the “replication of our present form of life.”4 The suggestion is that the normative epistemic and affective world does not index a reality of the social universe, but rather that which is formed under condition of the world’s existence–how that social order should be felt in order to consider how its structuring processes are dynamically induced and replicated. This is also to see how so much of aesthetic discourse intervenes to recuperate and rebalance to ensure the ongoing autopoiesis of the world of the colonial present.

Consider, for example, the spectacle of police violence–whether located in the mediation of report and state discourse or in the circulation of images of police brutality. Liberal critique points to how that spectacle indexes a reality requiring reform and even defunding. But this, to follow Sexton and Martinot, emphasizes how “spectacle is a form of camouflage. It does not conceal anything; it simply renders it unrecognizable. One looks at it and does not see it. It appears in disguise.”5

Instead with Wynter we might instead suggest that those spectacles signify a deeper set of codes that generate and fortify antiblack violence. The editorial collective of (de)cypher: black notes on culture and criticism–taking their cue from Wynter’s work–say that “deciphering is an embodied practice seeking to intervene in the process of anti-black autopoiesis.”6

So, importantly, what we understand as the codes and rules of world-making are not simply things that could be re-engineered out of existence. This coheres with Wynter’s development of Fanon’s sociogenic principle to indicate how universals that are particular to specific genres of the human cannot be understood as mere fictions (e.g. as the imperial imposition of a European particular) that could be sloughed off, but rather are intertwined at every layer of existence. These codes may be written so deeply into the structure of thinking and experience that they suture representation and understanding to the constitution of the world. That which is entrenched therefore also productive of modes of life – of ways of being within the world–whose actions recursively constitute that world (as autopoietic structure).

But, Wynter’s move towards sociogeny (rejecting the ontocentric human) makes way for the alterability of these most entrenched codes. Where spectacle and its critique operates as structural reassurance to anti-black autopoiesis, decipherment, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson puts it, “is a praxis that Wynter avers catalyzes a transmutation of Man as a speaking/knowing/ feeling being.”7 Taking up Fanon’s suggestion “to reimagine the human in the terms of a new history,”8 Wynter poses aesthetic invention as that which may be inscribed into new codes of the human–and as rupture within history itself.

Overcoded novelty and rupture

These thoughts prompt a number of questions. If politics and aesthetics are ways of doing and being that intervene our forms of life -and I agree that the chasm between both aeshetics and politics and doing and being should perhaps be dismantled-then how can we understand their interaction such that they are not collapsible into one another? How should we understand the ways that both overcode and overdetermine so often in order to give succour to antiblack autopoiesis? Antiblack autopoesis here signifies not an ontology that could be negated or undone by appeal to blackness, but rather the impossibility of attempts to suture ontology through capture, control, and pre-emptive annihilation. Anti-Blackness, as David Marriott writes, is both the condition of the world and also what ‘puts it into crisis’.9

Interwoven with these questions is how we may understand politics and aesthetics as potentially operational beyond or without that recuperative gesture, and through which forms of life might be punctured with the new. The structure of the novelty is relevant to how the colonial present operates not as a program of historical progress, but as a dialectical stutter that attempts to lock history within the movements of progress and falters. On this question, Marriott wonders whether Wynter’s reading of Fanon’s invention cannot then be one of rupture, but is more a kind of re-engineering of the human, since it requires that new codes must be graspable within the continuity of history.10

Perhaps, though, the position that Bogues suggests–of praxis that punctures–has the capacity to interweave rupture with ordinary lived experience. As such, rather than the new requiring coherence into contemporary codes, perhaps there are more mundane practices that are yet unknowable and therefore incoherent from within the form of life of the colonial present. That is to say, the new may appear to take the form of alterity, but only insofar as the form of life–which is an ever-shifting autopoietic system–is experienced as sutured rather than held together by force. Instead, and even in the everyday, we must ask what are these ways of doing and being that make life possible.

Endnotes

1 Wynter, Sylvia. “Rethinking ‘aesthetics’: Notes towards a deciphering practice.” Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean cinema 245 (1992), p.241.

2 ibid. p.253.

3 Anthony P. Farley, Accumulation, 11 Mich. J. Race & L. 51 (2005), p.60.

4 Wynter, Rethinking, p.263.

5 Martinot, Steve, and Jared Sexton. “The avant-garde of white supremacy.” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 169-181.

6 https://decypherednotes.com

7 Jackson, Zakiyyah. “Against Criticism: Notes on Decipherment and the Force of Things”. November, 30 (2021).

8 Scott D and Wynter S (2000) The re-enchantment of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe 8(2): 119–207.

9 Marriott, David (2021). Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.138.

10 Marriott, David. “Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and” the Damned”.” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (2011): 45-89.