Blackness

Blackness is enthusiastic social vision, given in (non)performance, as the surrealization of space and time, the inseparability of gravity and matter, fabric’s fabrication, field’s feel, rub’s rub, plain’s chant, an endlessly ante-­inaugural endlessness of means, an empillowed, haptically ham-­boned coinstrumentality of care, in caressive sound and anachoreographic sounding. Anticipating originary correction with self-­defensive division and (re)collection, it goes way back, long before the violent norm, as an impure informality to come. Its open and initiatory counterpleasures reveal the internal, public resource of our common sense/s, where flavorful touch is all bound up with falling into the general antagonistic embrace. That autonomous song and dance is our intellectual descent; it neither opposes nor follows from dissent but, rather, gives it a chance. Consent to that submergence is terrible and beautiful. Moreover, the apparent (racial) exclusivity of the (under)privilege of claiming this dis/ability serially impairs—­though it can never foreclose—­the discovery that the priority of sovereign regulation is false. In order to get the plain sense of this, you have to use your imagination against the world, since in the world—­that dream, that nightmare of dominion, overview, and oversight—­blackness comes sharply into relief against its negation. On the ground, in the field, in the plain, it doesn’t come into relief at all, really, but as a mode of sensuous theoretical practice, it celebrates against predatory and incorporative worldliness, whose primary weapon is the imposition of the desire for worldliness. Blackness, lived both as the denial of and the incapacity for worldliness, is properly understood as constraint when constraint is improperly understood as undesirable, as a radical undesirability in the face of the belligerent fantasy of the freedom of, or of freedom in, the world. Blackness, in and as a kind of fleeting, prior persistence, resists these bad thoughts. It’s the good trip before the bad trip that good trips can induce. Blackness is midnight blue as midnight comes again.