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Bad Infinity: Selected Writings
The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean.
Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles) mount a trenchant critique of representational systems. A visual artist and filmmaker, Dean has also emerged as one of the leading critical voices of her generation through a body of writing that maps the forces of aesthetic theory, image regimes, and visibility onto questions of race and power. Dean’s work across media has long been defined by what she calls a “fixation on the subject and its borders,” and the texts collected here filter that inquiry through digital networks, art history, and Black radical thought. Equally at home discussing artists who embrace difficulty—from Robert Morris to David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Ulysses Jenkins—and conceptual frameworks such as Afropessimism, Dean often contends with how theoretical positions brush against the grain of lived how the Structuralism handed down from the academy, for instance, can be commingled with critiques of structural racism, or how Georges Bataille’s notion of base matter transforms through an encounter with Blackness.
Dean’s thinking embraces a definition of “Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness,” as she writes in this volume, which works to elucidate “Blackness’s proclivity for making and unmaking its own rules as it produces objects” of cultural necessity. Originally published in November —of which Dean is a founding editor—as well as in Texte zur Kunst , e-flux journal , and in exhibition contexts, the essays compiled in Bad Infinity were written over a six-year span that charts our rapidly evolving forms of subjectivity and sociality.
Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles) mount a trenchant critique of representational systems. A visual artist and filmmaker, Dean has also emerged as one of the leading critical voices of her generation through a body of writing that maps the forces of aesthetic theory, image regimes, and visibility onto questions of race and power. Dean’s work across media has long been defined by what she calls a “fixation on the subject and its borders,” and the texts collected here filter that inquiry through digital networks, art history, and Black radical thought. Equally at home discussing artists who embrace difficulty—from Robert Morris to David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Ulysses Jenkins—and conceptual frameworks such as Afropessimism, Dean often contends with how theoretical positions brush against the grain of lived how the Structuralism handed down from the academy, for instance, can be commingled with critiques of structural racism, or how Georges Bataille’s notion of base matter transforms through an encounter with Blackness.
Dean’s thinking embraces a definition of “Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness,” as she writes in this volume, which works to elucidate “Blackness’s proclivity for making and unmaking its own rules as it produces objects” of cultural necessity. Originally published in November —of which Dean is a founding editor—as well as in Texte zur Kunst , e-flux journal , and in exhibition contexts, the essays compiled in Bad Infinity were written over a six-year span that charts our rapidly evolving forms of subjectivity and sociality.
200 pages, Paperback
Published August 15, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 20, 2026
*4.5 as much as I loved the references pulled and how much the author worked through her sources, I would have loved more in-depth exploration of her own thoughts.
Some quotes:
“In the age of Blue Lives Matter, to view a scene from the perspective of a police officer is to view it from a peculiar—yet fully explicated—form of parasubjectivity. Such parasubjectivity is not unique in our age, as it coincides with other mutations of the subject brought on by our total imbrication, materially and conceptually, in the operations of speculative capitalism, in our entanglement with digital networks, and in a new awareness of our bodily unsovereignty gained courtesy of COVID-19. At all levels, we are a machine for living, killing, and dying. The police, specifically, are, as Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton write, ‘a machine for killing and incarcerating.’ Through an appropriation of the blank-lives-matter formula, Blue Lives Matter marks but one expression of a near-totalizing binding together of life, identity, the state, and—in the twenty-first century—the machine. At the same time, as they do this killing and incarcerating, the police are intended to appear neutral; to follow Nico Baumbach's framing, their business can only be carried out effectively if we—and they—normalize it. It is for this reason that the transition of Blue Life to a viable concept is so intriguing. Through it, the police become a paradox—a spectacular and identitarian neutrality.”
“In Ferreira da Silva's calculation, when Blackness (-1) figures into any equation where the other term is life (1), the result is zero. And so Blackness in general cannot make an appeal to ethics, to retributive justice, because it is figured as a form of nonlife: no humans are involved. If this is so, then Blackness certainly cannot make a successful ethical appeal in the context of video or cinema—where the signifying order is a cornerstone for producing meaning. If semiotics cannot do Blackness, then film/video, so grounded in this humanistic interpretive exegesis, sputters as it encounters the police brutality clip and cannot make it do meaningful work in the service of evidence, or justice, or expression. Structurally focused works such as 2015 and Liberty City begin to uncover the way that ‘power in postmodern society works as a process of production, rather than as a drama of representation.’”
“If politics is ‘the contestation over the meaning of appearance,’ as Baumbach writes, then the police brutality clip and its before and after—surveillance and uprising, respectively—cannot be approached at the level of the political. It is clear that in the public sphere no consensus will be reached over the meaning of the appearance of state violence and its aftermath; the content may continue to galvanize the willing, but otherwise it merely retraces a schism. And anyway, structurally and theoretically, the scenario might be void, modeling an empty equation where nonlife confronts nonlife, making a death with no narrative drama. But counterintuitively, perhaps in being emptied, being a set of nothing, the clip may be a non-narrative object around which narrative can and does produce itself—in the multitude of objects made and circulated by a variety of actors, a multiplicity of stories whose very problem is that none of them are ghosts.”
“I guess, first, I wanted to ask you whether you believe anything is true.
People say art is true, or something, but as a way of saying that it is a good thing. And I'm not certain whether saying it is true means that it is real. Maybe what I want to ask you is whether you believe anything to be real.”
“The best American Westerns do not venture to simply relay or demystify a myth of America's founding, but are instead about the production of such myths. They structure a relation between the cinematic object and the facts of history that is not
‘immediate and direct, but dialectic.’ Though the Western is usually preoccupied with the anarchic, the brutal, and the Real, this genre does not pose that underneath it all there is anything real to speak of here in America, instead fretting about the possibility of building a nation around this absence. Myths and illusions all the way down, it's a nation with nothing to bind itself together conceptually or politically, a place with no actual qualities to speak of. The Western, at its best, stares down the gaping lack at the center of America's self-narration.”
“But no, this obsession with unity, and singularity. Even later in dandy discourse, we find John Kelsey defining the dandy in Artforum in 2005, talking about Michael Krebber—his dandy is ‘static’ and ‘detached.’ It's all a bit leaden for you. Though at the same time, his description finds you again, Bob: ‘[The dandy's] endless decentering of his own identity is the means by which he makes the world around him start to lose its grip.’ I guess—and I'm spitballing here—with the whole dandy thing, there's this ongoing tension between the term simply structurally describing men who can see themselves, and maybe those who go a step further and mobilize that capacity toward crafting an artificial proxy for themselves. That is to say: men who understand themselves to be illusions. Like you. I think.”
“This methodological insufficiency can be solved by returning to Bataille's own naming of ‘Black practice’ as crucial to the revolutionary activity he's after—in art and in politics. Going against the grain of modernism requires broadening the scope of analysis. Specifically, its scope must consider aesthetic modernism's origin, and I believe it is safe to say that aesthetic modernism could not and would not have taken shape as it did were it not for Europe's encounter with Africa. This includes the initial encounter and the birth of the slave trade, the broader nineteenth- and twentieth-century European encounter with African artifacts, and Europe's exposure to jazz music within the West. Considering these encounters as the pivot point on which history teeters recasts the entire modernist project as one of heterological negotiation of the active base matter of Blackness.”
“R. A. Judy offers that ‘there is no moment in which flesh is not already entailed in some sort of semiosis, that it isn't written upon or written into some order of signification.’ This is a strange bind. To elucidate, for those who have not read Judy or the Afropessimists before him, specifically Hortense Spillers, ‘flesh’ names the register at which the human body is engaged that marks Black existence—‘before the “body” there is “flesh”, that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.’ The flesh precedes the body; only when it becomes ‘body’ can it be narrative, become subject properly, or—to be Lacanian about it—enter into language. The Black subject, as flesh, struggles both to enter the scene as ‘body’ and to maintain any form of autonomy as uninscribed flesh-as-material, let's say. To return to Judy, it is always already written-upon or written-into.”
“[Frank B. Wilderson III]: Again, the violence that positions Blackness in a paradigm cannot be analogized with the violence that positions other oppressed peoples in a paradigm. A large portion of the schematization is drawn (or perhaps ‘hijacked’) from Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death, in which he argues that the violence of any Human paradigm of subjection (such as capitalism) has a prehistory. It takes an ocean of violence to transpose serfs into workers. It takes an ocean of violence several hundred years to discipline them to the point where they imagine their lives within new constraints: urbanization, mechanization, and certain types of labor practices. Patterson calls this the ‘prehistory’ of the paradigm's violence. Once the constraints are internalized and naturalized in the collective unconscious of this new and emerging position called the working class, the violence recedes and goes into remission, and only comes back at times when capitalism needs to regenerate itself or when the workers transgress the rules and push back (when they withdraw their consent). Afropessimists call this contingent violence: violence triggered by transgression.”
“[Frank B. Wilderson III]: We have to ask ourselves why is it that the more that violence against Black people is visually recorded and transmitted, the more the violence occurs? The visual distribution of these images accompanies an increase in their occurrences, not vice versa. These films may get someone prosecuted (though the track record on this is abysmal); in that way they are important. But essentially they are rituals of pleasure and psychic renewal for the Human race. They secure subjectivity for non-Blacks, because non-Blacks can look at them and say (albeit if only unconsciously), ‘Aha, if that were to happen to me that would be because I committed a transgression, there would be something justifying that treatment.’ It would not be gratuitous; it would be contingent violence. Afropessimism helps us understand that anti-Black violence is not a form of discrimination; anti-Black violence is a health tonic for global civil society. Anti-Black violence is an ensemble of necessary rituals that are performed so that the Human race can know itself as Human and not as a slave, meaning not as Black.”
“[Frank B. Wilderson III]: People used to say to me, ‘Art will be the way forward,’ and in a certain way it works because art does keep the affect of the slave going, even if the narrative and the appropriation of it jettisons the slave. But the deal is that you're gonna need your art and your gun.
The key hope, if there's hope, is an intramural Black hope. Such conversations can help us help each other so that we don't feel ashamed of hating the country. We don't feel ashamed of hating people around us, and our jobs, and we don't talk to Black youth about positive ways of expressing their rage. If we can do just that small amount of work, of saying, ‘It's ridiculous. No Jew in Nazi Germany would be scolded for wanting the Reichstag to fall,’ I really think that that's a way forward—though it's not programmatic. But Black people constantly want each other to think about joy, love, togetherness, and community. And I say, ‘Okay! Fine, fine, fine, fine; but now can we think about murder and killing and burning? Can we be excited about that too? Can't there be space for that in our imaginations?’”
“Art is sometimes discussed as the product of a campaign against death—usually as an individual's narcissistic desire for immortality—but perhaps, just as often, it is a grappling with the harsh reality of exemption's closing horizon. This art, if properly approached, might tell us a different story: one of constitution less than articulation, of the struggle to maintain the coherence of subjectivity while it's being invaded and dissolved at every turn, to perform the magic of turning unsovereignty into sovereignty, or at least its aspiration.
Articulating the artist-subject as wholly unsovereign to begin with shifts the terms of engagement (à la Bergson); the artists may still fail their works and their audiences, but the discourse may be richer.”
“If Land's accelerationism proposes a schematic without a subject at its center, Srnicek and Williams's attempt to reinsert or relocate the subject sheds much of what makes them accelerationist in the first place. Their commitment to retaining a properly human—and in this case recognizably proletarian—subject at the center of their politics, instead of centering capital itself, makes a vintage mistake. Rather than ask how capital secretes the idea of the human as a way of covering its tracks, they've put the mask back on the villain and crossed their fingers. Now accelerationism confronts an apparently unresolvable conceptual fissure. On the right, Land continues to loom large, racing gleefully toward destruction, waving an anti-humanist flag and tweeting endlessly. The left trudges slowly behind, clutching an admirable politic, but one with a tenuous relationship to accelerationism. At the bottom of this gulf lies the question of the human.”
“Racial capitalism revises the received Marxist history of capital, which ‘assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy.’ Any history of capital that reduces its structuring relations to exploitation, alienation, and wage labor cannot account for the position of the slave in class struggle. As elaborated by Wilderson, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and others, racial capitalism proposes that there is an unthought position beyond the worker—that of the slave—that is crucial to the construction of civil society, and to ‘the drama of value,’ in the first place. Any analysis of capital that does not begin here makes a fatal mistake.”
“However quickly capital might be moving now, accelerationism is always already out of gas to the extent that it fails to recognize what started it rolling in the first place. While the American instantiation of racial capitalism has a particular intimacy with chattel slavery, the concepts this history has generated—like the concept of the human—posture as universal, and it is precisely these concepts which begin to disintegrate as they approach the Black. Nevertheless, tracing the inextricable relationship between slavery and capital opens new territories for accelerationist thinking. First, beginning to think racial capitalism alongside accelerationism provides an account of capitalism and value that is ‘outside of alienation,’ as Williams calls it. Second, it insists on the non-allegorical existence of an inhuman subject: ‘the Black.’
Thinking racial capitalism provides a view of capitalism whose structuring antagonism is necessarily beyond alienation, laying the groundwork for a theory of value that performs as Williams hoped, avoiding ‘a [predication] upon this original suffering [of alienation], the voodoo process of soul-theft at the core of the alienation of labour in the commodity form.’ In ‘Gramsci's Black Marx,’ Wilderson describes the exclusion of the slave from any transaction of value, having no ‘symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange.’”
“The twentieth century taught us that one of our rights is a right to representation, not only politically but personally—that we have a right to be represented as we are, for our images to hold true. But what if one says to hell with that? Blackness, as poor image, as meme, is a copy without an original. There is no articulable ontology of Blackness, no essential Blackness, because Blackness's only home is in its circulating representations: a network that includes all the bodies that bear its markers, the words produced by such bodies, the words made to appear to have been produced by such bodies, the flat images that purport to document them, and so forth.
The meme as poor image, as Black, operates against the rich image: the full-bodied high-res representation for which identity politics and visual theory taught us to strive. The meme is always writing and rewriting itself, operating, as Steyerl writes, ‘against the fetish value of high resolution.’ In taking up this stance, it resists the co-conspirators of surveillance and neoliberalism in the ordering of bodies and desires. Perhaps we can render ourselves opaque, through our own serial, iterative excess.”
“As Black people, we are constantly grappling with this question of collectivity. Where do you end? Where does the next person begin? Faced with the immense pain of watching other Black people die on camera, our sense of autonomy is thrown. When we speak of ‘we need,’ ‘we grieve,’ ‘we hope,’ ‘we demand,’ and so forth, we speak of something beyond a collection of individuals and something beyond a community. The history of Western thought denies this sort of organization of bodies and subjectivities, instead figuring us all as static, even proposing that we all aspire to this static individuation. As the world crumbles around us, all of us—and this would seem dramatic were it not for the fact that many have taken to counting down the days since the last tragedy, and it's rarely a number in the double digits—it is worth questioning some of the things that we have been told we desire. In America, as we—Black people—find ourselves toe to toe with the state, challenges to selfhood become useful not only in understanding our heartsickness and grief, but also in stirring the collective body toward political action.”
Some quotes:
“In the age of Blue Lives Matter, to view a scene from the perspective of a police officer is to view it from a peculiar—yet fully explicated—form of parasubjectivity. Such parasubjectivity is not unique in our age, as it coincides with other mutations of the subject brought on by our total imbrication, materially and conceptually, in the operations of speculative capitalism, in our entanglement with digital networks, and in a new awareness of our bodily unsovereignty gained courtesy of COVID-19. At all levels, we are a machine for living, killing, and dying. The police, specifically, are, as Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton write, ‘a machine for killing and incarcerating.’ Through an appropriation of the blank-lives-matter formula, Blue Lives Matter marks but one expression of a near-totalizing binding together of life, identity, the state, and—in the twenty-first century—the machine. At the same time, as they do this killing and incarcerating, the police are intended to appear neutral; to follow Nico Baumbach's framing, their business can only be carried out effectively if we—and they—normalize it. It is for this reason that the transition of Blue Life to a viable concept is so intriguing. Through it, the police become a paradox—a spectacular and identitarian neutrality.”
“In Ferreira da Silva's calculation, when Blackness (-1) figures into any equation where the other term is life (1), the result is zero. And so Blackness in general cannot make an appeal to ethics, to retributive justice, because it is figured as a form of nonlife: no humans are involved. If this is so, then Blackness certainly cannot make a successful ethical appeal in the context of video or cinema—where the signifying order is a cornerstone for producing meaning. If semiotics cannot do Blackness, then film/video, so grounded in this humanistic interpretive exegesis, sputters as it encounters the police brutality clip and cannot make it do meaningful work in the service of evidence, or justice, or expression. Structurally focused works such as 2015 and Liberty City begin to uncover the way that ‘power in postmodern society works as a process of production, rather than as a drama of representation.’”
“If politics is ‘the contestation over the meaning of appearance,’ as Baumbach writes, then the police brutality clip and its before and after—surveillance and uprising, respectively—cannot be approached at the level of the political. It is clear that in the public sphere no consensus will be reached over the meaning of the appearance of state violence and its aftermath; the content may continue to galvanize the willing, but otherwise it merely retraces a schism. And anyway, structurally and theoretically, the scenario might be void, modeling an empty equation where nonlife confronts nonlife, making a death with no narrative drama. But counterintuitively, perhaps in being emptied, being a set of nothing, the clip may be a non-narrative object around which narrative can and does produce itself—in the multitude of objects made and circulated by a variety of actors, a multiplicity of stories whose very problem is that none of them are ghosts.”
“I guess, first, I wanted to ask you whether you believe anything is true.
People say art is true, or something, but as a way of saying that it is a good thing. And I'm not certain whether saying it is true means that it is real. Maybe what I want to ask you is whether you believe anything to be real.”
“The best American Westerns do not venture to simply relay or demystify a myth of America's founding, but are instead about the production of such myths. They structure a relation between the cinematic object and the facts of history that is not
‘immediate and direct, but dialectic.’ Though the Western is usually preoccupied with the anarchic, the brutal, and the Real, this genre does not pose that underneath it all there is anything real to speak of here in America, instead fretting about the possibility of building a nation around this absence. Myths and illusions all the way down, it's a nation with nothing to bind itself together conceptually or politically, a place with no actual qualities to speak of. The Western, at its best, stares down the gaping lack at the center of America's self-narration.”
“But no, this obsession with unity, and singularity. Even later in dandy discourse, we find John Kelsey defining the dandy in Artforum in 2005, talking about Michael Krebber—his dandy is ‘static’ and ‘detached.’ It's all a bit leaden for you. Though at the same time, his description finds you again, Bob: ‘[The dandy's] endless decentering of his own identity is the means by which he makes the world around him start to lose its grip.’ I guess—and I'm spitballing here—with the whole dandy thing, there's this ongoing tension between the term simply structurally describing men who can see themselves, and maybe those who go a step further and mobilize that capacity toward crafting an artificial proxy for themselves. That is to say: men who understand themselves to be illusions. Like you. I think.”
“This methodological insufficiency can be solved by returning to Bataille's own naming of ‘Black practice’ as crucial to the revolutionary activity he's after—in art and in politics. Going against the grain of modernism requires broadening the scope of analysis. Specifically, its scope must consider aesthetic modernism's origin, and I believe it is safe to say that aesthetic modernism could not and would not have taken shape as it did were it not for Europe's encounter with Africa. This includes the initial encounter and the birth of the slave trade, the broader nineteenth- and twentieth-century European encounter with African artifacts, and Europe's exposure to jazz music within the West. Considering these encounters as the pivot point on which history teeters recasts the entire modernist project as one of heterological negotiation of the active base matter of Blackness.”
“R. A. Judy offers that ‘there is no moment in which flesh is not already entailed in some sort of semiosis, that it isn't written upon or written into some order of signification.’ This is a strange bind. To elucidate, for those who have not read Judy or the Afropessimists before him, specifically Hortense Spillers, ‘flesh’ names the register at which the human body is engaged that marks Black existence—‘before the “body” there is “flesh”, that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.’ The flesh precedes the body; only when it becomes ‘body’ can it be narrative, become subject properly, or—to be Lacanian about it—enter into language. The Black subject, as flesh, struggles both to enter the scene as ‘body’ and to maintain any form of autonomy as uninscribed flesh-as-material, let's say. To return to Judy, it is always already written-upon or written-into.”
“[Frank B. Wilderson III]: Again, the violence that positions Blackness in a paradigm cannot be analogized with the violence that positions other oppressed peoples in a paradigm. A large portion of the schematization is drawn (or perhaps ‘hijacked’) from Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death, in which he argues that the violence of any Human paradigm of subjection (such as capitalism) has a prehistory. It takes an ocean of violence to transpose serfs into workers. It takes an ocean of violence several hundred years to discipline them to the point where they imagine their lives within new constraints: urbanization, mechanization, and certain types of labor practices. Patterson calls this the ‘prehistory’ of the paradigm's violence. Once the constraints are internalized and naturalized in the collective unconscious of this new and emerging position called the working class, the violence recedes and goes into remission, and only comes back at times when capitalism needs to regenerate itself or when the workers transgress the rules and push back (when they withdraw their consent). Afropessimists call this contingent violence: violence triggered by transgression.”
“[Frank B. Wilderson III]: We have to ask ourselves why is it that the more that violence against Black people is visually recorded and transmitted, the more the violence occurs? The visual distribution of these images accompanies an increase in their occurrences, not vice versa. These films may get someone prosecuted (though the track record on this is abysmal); in that way they are important. But essentially they are rituals of pleasure and psychic renewal for the Human race. They secure subjectivity for non-Blacks, because non-Blacks can look at them and say (albeit if only unconsciously), ‘Aha, if that were to happen to me that would be because I committed a transgression, there would be something justifying that treatment.’ It would not be gratuitous; it would be contingent violence. Afropessimism helps us understand that anti-Black violence is not a form of discrimination; anti-Black violence is a health tonic for global civil society. Anti-Black violence is an ensemble of necessary rituals that are performed so that the Human race can know itself as Human and not as a slave, meaning not as Black.”
“[Frank B. Wilderson III]: People used to say to me, ‘Art will be the way forward,’ and in a certain way it works because art does keep the affect of the slave going, even if the narrative and the appropriation of it jettisons the slave. But the deal is that you're gonna need your art and your gun.
The key hope, if there's hope, is an intramural Black hope. Such conversations can help us help each other so that we don't feel ashamed of hating the country. We don't feel ashamed of hating people around us, and our jobs, and we don't talk to Black youth about positive ways of expressing their rage. If we can do just that small amount of work, of saying, ‘It's ridiculous. No Jew in Nazi Germany would be scolded for wanting the Reichstag to fall,’ I really think that that's a way forward—though it's not programmatic. But Black people constantly want each other to think about joy, love, togetherness, and community. And I say, ‘Okay! Fine, fine, fine, fine; but now can we think about murder and killing and burning? Can we be excited about that too? Can't there be space for that in our imaginations?’”
“Art is sometimes discussed as the product of a campaign against death—usually as an individual's narcissistic desire for immortality—but perhaps, just as often, it is a grappling with the harsh reality of exemption's closing horizon. This art, if properly approached, might tell us a different story: one of constitution less than articulation, of the struggle to maintain the coherence of subjectivity while it's being invaded and dissolved at every turn, to perform the magic of turning unsovereignty into sovereignty, or at least its aspiration.
Articulating the artist-subject as wholly unsovereign to begin with shifts the terms of engagement (à la Bergson); the artists may still fail their works and their audiences, but the discourse may be richer.”
“If Land's accelerationism proposes a schematic without a subject at its center, Srnicek and Williams's attempt to reinsert or relocate the subject sheds much of what makes them accelerationist in the first place. Their commitment to retaining a properly human—and in this case recognizably proletarian—subject at the center of their politics, instead of centering capital itself, makes a vintage mistake. Rather than ask how capital secretes the idea of the human as a way of covering its tracks, they've put the mask back on the villain and crossed their fingers. Now accelerationism confronts an apparently unresolvable conceptual fissure. On the right, Land continues to loom large, racing gleefully toward destruction, waving an anti-humanist flag and tweeting endlessly. The left trudges slowly behind, clutching an admirable politic, but one with a tenuous relationship to accelerationism. At the bottom of this gulf lies the question of the human.”
“Racial capitalism revises the received Marxist history of capital, which ‘assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy.’ Any history of capital that reduces its structuring relations to exploitation, alienation, and wage labor cannot account for the position of the slave in class struggle. As elaborated by Wilderson, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and others, racial capitalism proposes that there is an unthought position beyond the worker—that of the slave—that is crucial to the construction of civil society, and to ‘the drama of value,’ in the first place. Any analysis of capital that does not begin here makes a fatal mistake.”
“However quickly capital might be moving now, accelerationism is always already out of gas to the extent that it fails to recognize what started it rolling in the first place. While the American instantiation of racial capitalism has a particular intimacy with chattel slavery, the concepts this history has generated—like the concept of the human—posture as universal, and it is precisely these concepts which begin to disintegrate as they approach the Black. Nevertheless, tracing the inextricable relationship between slavery and capital opens new territories for accelerationist thinking. First, beginning to think racial capitalism alongside accelerationism provides an account of capitalism and value that is ‘outside of alienation,’ as Williams calls it. Second, it insists on the non-allegorical existence of an inhuman subject: ‘the Black.’
Thinking racial capitalism provides a view of capitalism whose structuring antagonism is necessarily beyond alienation, laying the groundwork for a theory of value that performs as Williams hoped, avoiding ‘a [predication] upon this original suffering [of alienation], the voodoo process of soul-theft at the core of the alienation of labour in the commodity form.’ In ‘Gramsci's Black Marx,’ Wilderson describes the exclusion of the slave from any transaction of value, having no ‘symbolic currency or material labor power to exchange.’”
“The twentieth century taught us that one of our rights is a right to representation, not only politically but personally—that we have a right to be represented as we are, for our images to hold true. But what if one says to hell with that? Blackness, as poor image, as meme, is a copy without an original. There is no articulable ontology of Blackness, no essential Blackness, because Blackness's only home is in its circulating representations: a network that includes all the bodies that bear its markers, the words produced by such bodies, the words made to appear to have been produced by such bodies, the flat images that purport to document them, and so forth.
The meme as poor image, as Black, operates against the rich image: the full-bodied high-res representation for which identity politics and visual theory taught us to strive. The meme is always writing and rewriting itself, operating, as Steyerl writes, ‘against the fetish value of high resolution.’ In taking up this stance, it resists the co-conspirators of surveillance and neoliberalism in the ordering of bodies and desires. Perhaps we can render ourselves opaque, through our own serial, iterative excess.”
“As Black people, we are constantly grappling with this question of collectivity. Where do you end? Where does the next person begin? Faced with the immense pain of watching other Black people die on camera, our sense of autonomy is thrown. When we speak of ‘we need,’ ‘we grieve,’ ‘we hope,’ ‘we demand,’ and so forth, we speak of something beyond a collection of individuals and something beyond a community. The history of Western thought denies this sort of organization of bodies and subjectivities, instead figuring us all as static, even proposing that we all aspire to this static individuation. As the world crumbles around us, all of us—and this would seem dramatic were it not for the fact that many have taken to counting down the days since the last tragedy, and it's rarely a number in the double digits—it is worth questioning some of the things that we have been told we desire. In America, as we—Black people—find ourselves toe to toe with the state, challenges to selfhood become useful not only in understanding our heartsickness and grief, but also in stirring the collective body toward political action.”
September 3, 2024
very interesting essay collection on Afropessimism and art, though it was really dense at times.
April 10, 2024
A mighty collection of dense but clear essays, as well as an exciting primer on Afropessimism.
Read
November 19, 2025ok absolute legend
May 16, 2026
I like this throughline of "always, already."
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews