Rizvana Bradley

In contradistinction, Anteaesthetics explores the ways in which blackness in general, and black art in particular, are made to come before the aesthetic—the ways they are forcibly put to work in service of the very aesthetic regime to which they are brutally subject. The book contends that modernity’s aesthetic is an irrevocably antiblack formation, and that any meaningful effort to grapple with the stakes and experimentations of black art must contend with the deep critique of form it necessarily undertakes.

SH One of your book’s more bracing interventions is its insistence on viewing black art through the lens of “negativity without recuperation or redress”—that is to say, you resist the common impulse to make black art solve the problems of social and political life. What makes redress so alluring for viewers and critics, and why is it important to you to resist it? What is false about recuperation’s promise?

RB An important question, and you’re definitely right to say that the book refuses to acquiesce to the expectation that black art should function as a salve or suture for a lacerated social and political body. The allure of recuperation and redress is troubling. In thinking through this problem, there’s an important distinction that needs to be made between two specific, if often intimately knotted, expressions of the seductions and impositions of redress. Here the early work of Saidiya Hartman is an essential reference point. The first expression of this redressive drive is an entreaty and demand made on behalf of the very world that holds black people in a state of permanent and incalculable injury. As Hartman contends, this sort of “redressive action is about limiting or containing a breach.” In my TYR essay “Picturing Catastrophe,” which focused on the visual politics of black rebellion and solidarity during the so-called “summer of racial reckoning” in 2020, I wrote about the deplorable ways that black death is made to serve as “the very lifeblood of American democracy . . . [as] a catalyst for . . . ‘healing’” the body politic. In this instance, I’m pointing toward a specific problem: the ways in which black art, in the unconscious of civil society, assumes a morbid affinity with black death in that it is similarly taken as “a catalyst for ‘healing’”—wherein what is imagined and felt as “healing” in fact entails the revivification of the forms of personhood, subjectivity, relationality, and collectivity from which black people are foundationally interdicted.

The second expression of the redressive drive can’t be analogized with the first. This expression concerns the desire for a reparative orientation that is substantively equal to the violence and suffering that black people have endured, to the violence and suffering which persist unabated. The issue here, again echoing Hartman, is that the available means of redressive action are “desperately insufficient.” This insufficiency is due to “the magnitude of the breach” cleaved by and to an unfinished Middle Passage. Amidst the strictures of the world this passage produced and produces, within the confines of the given, such actions can only constitute “effort[s] to redress an irreparable condition.”

In short, the insistence upon redress and recuperation ultimately places black art in service of the existing grammar of the political, while displacing the antagonisms that subtend the political. Rather than acceding to forms of redress and recuperation that surreptitiously reinscribe the order of racial subjection, Anteaesthetics works to foreground the negativity of black art and to remain open to the indeterminacy that negativity refracts and extends. This priority emerges from a commitment to attuning to the minor refrains of black existence, to inventions which are, to borrow David Marriott’s phrasing, “radically unwritten.”

SH At the same time that you refuse any “idiom of resistance,” you also acknowledge that black art and thought are “never completely subsumed” by dominant “racially gendered orders of intelligibility and permissibility.” Something in black art exceeds or subverts the aesthetic regime that also curtails it. What is the nature of this subversion, and how can a critic do it justice without falling into undue optimism about art’s revolutionary potential?

RB Another great question, though I would stress that the book is definitely not arguing for the impossibility of resistance. But Anteaesthetics does insist that we need to pause and consider whether we’ve taken the abstract concept of resistance, as well as our capacity to identify its concrete manifestations, as self-evident. I would add that the importance of questioning the axiomatic character of resistance, as both an analytic and a demand, is hardly exclusive to those of us invested in thinking with black art but extends to everyone variously struggling to confront the ecocidal machinery of the modern world.

In the course of reflecting on what we may have taken for granted about resistance, we might also find ourselves considering why it is that a relatively uninterrogated notion of resistance serves as one of the principal interpretive frames through which contemporary discourse on black art unfolds. Theorizing the conditions of possibility and singular force of numerous works of art, my book contends that “the idiom of resistance risk[s] eclipsing” the negativity of black art. That is to say, if we reduce black art to an articulation of “resistance,” we eclipse the complex inhabitations of these artworks and their recursive deconstructions of aesthetic modernity’s predominant forms.

What black art bears is in fact something far more terrible and beautiful than what familiar lexicons would permit us to articulate. Rather than beginning from the presumption that the function of black art is to either resist or repair the world, Anteaesthetics traces a number of ulterior figurations: contamination, impurity, exorbitance, and ruination among them. These are figurations which implicate, deconstruct, and often existentially threaten commonsense political grammars, but they are certainly not figurations that can be reduced to or subsumed by these grammars.

SH Your writing moves thrillingly across many artworks, images, and contexts, which makes me curious about the relationship between idea and example or case in your work. How do you know when an artwork demands to be written about? Do you keep a mental store of images, to be deployed as needed in the service of an argument? Or does an encounter with an artwork propel (or compel) the writing?

RB Well, I’ve always tried to withdraw from a functional or teleological relationship to the work of art, in which art is rendered little more than an object to be placed in the service of an analytical framework. And there are of course idiosyncratic proclivities that play into which artworks I’ve found myself taken by or drawn into an encounter with. So, for instance, my early encounters with Glenn Ligon’s works were induced, at least in part, by my love for literature and the written word. But I would say that I’ve generally been compelled by artworks that are suffused with philosophical questions—questions that overturn, implode, and even infinitely recede from canonical philosophy’s organizations and valorizations of knowledge. Often this happens through the artwork’s descent into an irreducible materiality that troubles the categorical definitions and partitions of the sensorium that have been foisted upon us. Many of the artworks discussed in the book invite us into an encounter with the beauties and terrors of what I’ve variously theorized under the rubric of “the haptic.” Ligon’s work, for example, radically deconstructs normative articulations of the visual, the textual, and the phonic. Yet even this operation is deeper than it could first appear; I could return to Ligon’s work again and again and never exhaust its capacity to exhaust the conditions of its own emergence.

So, in this regard, I’ve certainly been most drawn to artworks which exhibit a certain rhizomatic movement between art and philosophy, or which, more precisely, reconceptualize the minor through an inhabitation of the negative underside of form. Still, I want to be careful not to overemphasize the element of choice in this encounter. To riff on Julie Beth Napolin’s words, the “resonance” of the encounter with the artwork “is there before I arrive.” The encounter with the artwork is one that precedes and exceeds my recognition of the encounter, and ultimately flies in the face of every way one might want or try to put an art object to work. What I have learned is that the artwork is a site of undoing, in which neither the pretense of sovereign spectatorship nor the fetishization of the work of art can be sustained.