da Silva, F. (2017) 1(Life) - 0(blackness) =&
-& or &/&: On Matter Beyond the
Equation of Value. e-flux journal 79:
01--11.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value/
Dave Harris
[Starts witth obscure llist of dictionary
definitions, of 'matter' I think:
'a thing, affair, concern, that which constitutes
or forms the basis of thoughts… Substance…
(Contrasted with form) Philos…] With differences
in Aristotelian, scholastic and Kantian
philosophy, turning on things which have bare
existence but which require essential forms,
things which are the result of creation, substance
without forms, and elements of knowledge derived
from sensation]
[Unnecessarily obscure throughout -- blackness is
not just 'not-white'. She admits this is
Fanon really. More interesting on how the form of
things and their relations became important rather
than their substance in Kant and Hegel -- which
then is assumed to be the source of colonialism as
usual. No consideration of the prblems that would
recur if we turned again to substance, this time
of blackness -- essentialism? founationalism?]
What if blackness referred to matter — substance,
substance without form how would this affect its
value and what would become of the economic value
of things if they were an expression of grammar
especially if they followed the usual logic of
obliteration? The issue connects with Black Lives
Matter which has an underlying ethical syntax
relating to the liberal democratic states,
referring to a political subject emerging through
a sentence without self-determination and
therefore risking obliteration. However blackness
as a disruptive force can expose the limits of
justice and this can be shown by a thought
experiment 'the Equation of Value'. This will show
the [undiscussed] referent of blackness, some
excess which may sidestep racial violence,
something of the limits of modern thoughts,
something beyond universality, some other horizon
of existence.
In an early artistic installation [!] minerals
were arranged to 'glitter image colonial violence'
to depict a hole in a site of a German mining
operation in Namibia [image provided, page 2].
This made Da Silva think about blackness and its
creative capacity initially as a disruptive force,
through linkages between spaces of plenty, and
spaces of scarcity. However, this installation was
still inside a Western aesthetic culture, invoking
a disinterested subject, implying some public
domain, despite the artist's intention to invite
examinations of power '"through the notion of
shine"'. This makes it 'an item in the
anticolonial arsenal and a site of confrontation'
(3) [beats me]. This will puncture aesthetic
culture whose ethical framework depends on
universality just as does formalised syntax, which
she intends to address through her notion of the
equation of value, and ethical grammar.
She does not believe that racial subjugation
depends on hierarchical divisions of rational and
irrational, nor how European man dominates what is
human [she gets close to this though], nor on a
depiction of the outside which the other inhabits.
These matters have already been mapped. The artist
in this case has drawn attention to the connection
between what she calls shine and obscurity. That
points Da Silva to ethical indifference with which
racial violence is met, rooted in notions of
indeterminacy, and the implied separability and
sequentialtiy 'the triad sustaining modern
thought' (4) and its ethical syntax. In this
system indifference makes sense as a moral stance.
How does the subject without properties emerge? It
began with an earlier question about how human
minds can get to the truth without divine
revelation, usually starting with Bacon and
Descartes and their attempts to develop science
and causality, based on Aristotle's causes —
material, formal, final, and efficient. Efficient
causality in particular was emphasised because it
helped break with mediaeval scholasticism and its
reliance on authority and syllogism. In particular
Bacon suggested that secondary causes were
important, the way in which God's work occurs in
nature, how elements of nature actually carry the
force, the form imprinted upon them by God.
Descartes in turn showed that the mind itself was
a suitable ground for such formal thinking as a
thinking thing itself.
Thus formalisation is the most important
contribution, especially for Descartes, and
efficient causality is revealed in the very
movement of thoughts that moves between I think
and therefore I am. Descartes and others pursued
the argument into the investigation of nature as a
matter of the movement of bodies rather than
trying to uncover their forms, the effects of
efficient causes. The Cartesian cogito therefore
represented the subject without properties and it
was this notion that appeared in modern 'economic
juridical ethical and aesthetic scenes' (5).
Turning to ethics, Kant argued that at least
slaves brought Negroes into the world of value
which they had not attained in their own lands,
where they were mere things of no value, not even
realising that they were humans [via an actual
quote p.5] . This raises the question why black
lives do not matter, which can be traced back to
the Kantian notion that the universal and the
formal, determinacy as efficient causation lies
behind modern ethical and juridical formations. In
modern knowledge blackness shows the operation of
efficient and formal causes, anatomic forms and
organic processes in the production of 'a racial
subject destined to obliteration'. This is
[somehow] supported by Newton's natural
philosophy. It is no longer based on pure
intuition or categories of understanding, since,
for Kant, science is no longer interested in
essences, but knowledge can be established by the
movements of the senses, discovering what has
happened and how abstract action and reflection
can be established as a matter of material and
efficient causes [with a lot more spelling out of
this, although it still has to be connected
somehow to what he said about slavery for my
money]. [I think she means scientific or
pseduo-scientific racism]
Determinacy is the core of modern thoughts and
this presumes a universal disposition of
effectivity and the relation between objects
mediated by abstract determinants, laws and rules
that can be captured by rational things. Value
becomes universal, a matter of determinacy and
judgements produce qualities measurements and
classifications. This goes over into ethics where
again there are universal measurements and
classifications.
We can fit this to blackness. Kant thinks the
guiding ethical entity is humanity, 'the sole
existing thing possessing dignity… Intrinsic
value' (8) and humanity alone shares in the
determining powers of universal reason which gives
it free will or self-determination. It 'already
refers only to Europeans' [through default?] and
this is further extended by Hegel attempting to
explain human differences in world history as the
actualisation of universal reason ending with
Europe, thus racial and cultural difference.
Knowledge procedures are effects and causes of
mental, moral and intellectual differences and the
European mind is the universal gauge since 'it
alone shares a key quality with universal reason'.
It is easy to see that economic differences
arising from colonisation or enslavement confirmed
these differences and already assumed them [well
this is where we might differ]. The two were
occluded [we can agree on that]. It becomes
possible to see the social configurations produced
by colonisation as efficient causes, laws of
nature producing racial differences, and blackness
as [an explanation] a way of concealing the total
violence necessary authorised by colonial
domination including juridical forms.
Nevertheless blackness can still unsettle the
ethical and juridical programs governed by this
determinacy by exposing its violence. We must ask
again why Black lives do not matter. We can turn
to mathematical reason and develop a new
procedure, the equation of value. This will expose
a new disruptive and creative capacity.
Blackness has no value, is a negation not a
contradiction because it refers to matter,
something without form, a formless thing, a
nullification of the whole order. What instead if
it is contradiction? We have to first see black
life as part of a general form of life, life that
for some reason does not matter, but still life
[I think this is the basic argument lying beneath
the silly mathematical manipulations that follow,
where blackness is given the value -1, while
positive life is given the value 1. A simple
addition of the two leads to 0, but if we multiply
one by -1 or divide it, retaining the negative
expression, we can then keep this negative
expression as something that can multiply life —
it's bullshit and ends with the triumphant step
that since it is impossible to divide anything by
zero, you can end with content without form and
put blackness outside of the dialectical form.
Others have done this including Fanon and others
[it seems to me to be just like Irigaray refusing
to define women as just not men]. What we have
done is apply blackness as oppositional power to
matter not form, [beyond conventional form] and
thus to reject determinacy, and the easy notion of
blackness as a signifier of dissolution and
violence. 'Blackness as matter signals &,
another world, namely, that which exists without
time and out of space in the plenum' (10) [what a
long winded and pseudy way to put this. Will
simple arithmetic convince anyone that black lives
matter I wonder?]
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