Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

by Rizvana Bradley

In Anteaesthetics , Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation―an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.

Genres: Art, Theory, Philosophy

406 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 2023

Reviews

[Manuel Abreu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult, audacious Afropessimist reading of Spillers' notions of flesh and vestibule to articulate "anteaesthetics," an analytic formulation that Bradley says is somewhere between or in the orbit of Wynter's "decipherment" (this from her 90s essay, Rethinking Aesthetics) and Da Silva's "poethical reading," with which Bradley traces a Black project of intervention into the cogency of form and the violence on which it is configured, that is, the violation, exclusion, and expropriation of anterior Black flesh— but also the (in her verbiage) exorbitant 'black residuum' which ineluctably remains, both as conscripted origin of hegemonic worlding projects (world as aesthetic form at a very high scale) and horizon of their ruination.

Black feminine flesh bears (reproduces, allows navigation, undergoes) both the reproduction of the metaphysics of worlding and also the fugitive impulses of Black aesthesis which interrogate the encounter between enfleshed existence without ontology and the dissimulated 'black body' borne and executed in the founding of metaphysics. Hence there is close attention also to notions of reproduction, in a variety of polyvalent registers which ground themselves in Black feminist thought and the central notion that Blackness is medial, meaning inherently intermedial, the form of medium insofar as it is the medium through which form elaborates its cogency, but also the very foundation of both the possibility and destruction of the distinction between medium and content, matter and meaning (drawing on Barad), figure and ground, etc. This thread runs throughout, but Black mediality and dark media especially come to the fore in the final two chapters. (I'm not sure if anything I just typed made any sense, it's an attempt to condense my impression of hundreds of pages of extremely complex analysis and difficult verbiage.)

While I'm ambivalent with respect to the inevitability of an Afropessimist reading of flesh, the results here are compelling, both as a philosophical intervention into the foundations of form and forms, and as a set of aesthetic analyses of classical and contemporary art. She looks with a fair bit of attention at works by Arthur Jafa, Mickalene Thomas, Théodore Géricault, Ingres, Sondra Perry, Glenn Ligon, and possibly others I'm forgetting. She also mentions in passing many artworks by others such as Velásquez, Manet, etc. She's careful not to foreclose the work or yoke it too severely to either her interpretation or the scope of her intervention, which is important. In each case she explores the ways these works articulate and disarticulate the anteriority of black flesh. Along the way she works with and against disciplinary formations and idioms of inquiry like Black studies, media studies, phenomenology, continental strains of thought more broadly, feminism, art history, and, as I mentioned, Afropessimism.

The Afropessimist notion of Blackness as perennial antagonism seems central to the formulation here. Aesthetics is correctly framed here as an important component of worlding (hence the nod to Wynter's decipherment). The keen attention to the long nineteenth century and the development of modernity was compelling. For example she notes how, in the context of the rise of the feminine nude, indexed to modernity and human self-fashioning, Cuvier's anatomical seeing was foundational for the distortion aesthetics of an Ingres, in which white femininity can yoke together deformity and grace only by means of the dissimulation of a 'black body.' She threads this into a reading of the necropolitical aesthetics of Cuvier chopping up Saartjie Baartman's cadaver with a close reading of his own strange and violent words. I'm oversimplifying here, but I'm trying to get across my impression of the different lines of thought the analysis pursues in tandem.

There are satisfying disjunctions like this though the sequence of argumentation, like the periodic return to video art, with which chapter one opens (Jafa) and to which we return with Mickalene Thomas (ch.3 I believe), Glenn Ligon (ch4) and Sondra Perry (ch5). Chapter 2 meanwhile presents an analysis of two Gericault works, his famous Raft of Medusa and the Mountauban study of the Black man facing away from us who is the apex of the Raft painting. She works the relation into the grounds for staging her theory of the black bodily fragment. Bradley situates us in the intro with an analysis of a Nina Simone performance and her spectral refusal of its forced conscription into certain liberatory or recuperativw ideals; and in chapter 1 we get a very clear image of disjunction with attention to Jafa's manipulation of frame rates to generate a dissimulated synchronization of a woman looking at the camera that films her and a clip of Hortense Spillers speaking about flesh (the work is called Dreams are Colder Than Death, iirc).

There's a lot more to unpack, as the book is quite dense and articulates its claims and their stakes to a painstaking degree, but I'll leave this review as is for now. I read this to prepare a lecture for a class and will need to re-read on my own time to really grasp the breadth and depth of the analysis.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Seems clear to me this will become Field-(re)Defining. God willing, at least. Really excellent across Spillers "The Idea of Black Culture"

[D Santee · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there is a more recent text that distills the ongoing modulation of subjectivity w/in inhabiting the anteriority of blackness. Overall, this may be her. I say that in part because of the brevity in which she’s able to discourse racial epiderminization, aesthetics within personhood as well as the functioning of asymmetric power within scientific and biopolitical forms. In uncovering these branches of her research - I was looking to measure the strides w/in her ability to demonstrate what she posits, that black feminism is anterior to the 19th century’s refashioning of race science and the overall revolutionizing of comparative anatomy with which the modulations of raciality were inextricably entwined. Over the course of my time spent with her texts, I find her hermeneutical and philosophical research and tonality as the more emerging and profound of the passage. Because while the text is riddled with Art historical and ontological references that are deeply enlightening, academic and spaciotemperal - the author’s actual voice peers through when she’s seated within her very own soul. Or maybe perhaps the vestiges of her own experience w/in the inescapable anti black “worlding” to which we are all subject.

To the author and her committee of collaborators, this texts (for me) was a bridge over troubling waters. I missed the election coverage reading this one. The dedication to semiotic research particular to black art and the cross examination with the form’s contemporaries is an exceptional effort that I am infinitely proud to share with friends, family and strangers alike. Bravo🌹

[aerialxav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduction. Absolutely floored by this book. I don't agree with its Afro-pessimist premise yet I'm still so compelled by it. So so good.