Goodman Gallery
24.11 - 14.01.2023
At every scale of nearly every genre of social meditation on value and its drama, the personal pronoun we assumes a fetishized and hypothesized value-form. Simply put, Humankind is taken as a given. Its reification as a rhetorical commodity goes something like this: Through symbolic interventions all people are capable, have the capacity, of transformation and recomposition. This change-power, this subjective transformation and recomposition, happens over time and across space. We, then, registers in cultural discourse, albeit superficially, as in we all have a language, we all have customs, we all can dream of home, we all have families, we all have a heritage, we all have a place of origin. The inspiration of we is a Humanizing inspiration. It welcomes all to the family of (wo)man except the Family Thanatos.
- Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S Antagonisms1Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S Antagonisms (Duke University Press: 2010), 262.
“Society as we know it is simply a collection of shared definitions,” writes Eloghosa Osunde in her essay & Other Stories. As subjects,2Osunde doesn’t use the term ‘subject/s’, I do. I read her use of the pronoun ‘we’ as an instance of misreading or taking for granted what is or constitutes civil society and consequently, who is granted access to it and who is barred. For a discussion of the concept of civil society, see Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2001). I am also thinking of the notion and formation of the subject through Lacanian psychoanalysis. For a rich reading of Lacan’s notion of the subject, see Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (2007). she argues, we are formed within what she calls “a giant dictionary.” We make sense of ourselves and the world around us as we make our involuntary entry into language by way of assuming social codes that govern our being in the world. According to Osunde, the subject is given two options at polar extremes: belonging or excommunication. You do what “you’re supposed to do” in order to be cushioned from punishment or suffering. Osunde draws these tight lines to make possible a third perspective, that of those who “are alive on the outskirts of definitions” (emphasis mine), who betray meanings and their conceptual integrity, which is to say their hold on the subject. (It is not too clear, even as Osunde insists that “it’s clear”, how and by what means they break from dominant language and mark this particular space as “outskirts”). This semantic disobedience, with all its supposed transgressive capacities, means, for Osunde, that “whatever was defined can be redefined.” It is through this opening (of a window of possibility) that she delineates a mode of questioning of what really makes society and who makes it. It is, in her parlance, a(n abstract) ‘We’ who “make it up,” because it is always up for remaking and redefinition, or “recomposition”, to borrow from the epigraph. There is an implicit dialectical tension in this text between those who define and those who redefine; Osunde believes all meanings have transformative capacity and, teleologically, all subjects, as a result, can transform meanings.
Installation view: A Different Now Is Close Enough To Exhale on You, Johannesburg, 2022. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery.
I contend that this argument, in my view, lacks rigour, and it is a conceptual blunder that Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung perpetuates, without complication, in his current group show at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town (and Joburg). For Ndikung, just like Osunde, art (making) is the very force or mechanism that can and does transform society. What neatly marries their arguments is a commitment to redefinition and the very possibility of otherwise-world-making, or “crafting our worlds”, as Ndikung puts it. (As Mkululi recently stated, “[o]therwise-worlds-making projects abound”!)
What we glean from both these writers and their texts is that through making certain (personal and political) choices, a subject breaks from the onto-epistemological order in which they are positioned and begins to not only redefine (civil) society’s entire semantic field (in which they exist as subjects), but radically structurally reposition themselves in fundamental ways. This, as Wilderson suggests in the opening passage, is a result of a careless assumption that “through symbolic interventions all people are capable, have the capacity, of transformation and recomposition.”3Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 262.
However, what is always left unattended by the proponents of these otherwise-world projects, like Ndikung and Osunde (and the general fields of contemporary art, Cultural studies, Black studies, performance, to name a few) is (1) the ontological ground upon which subjects are instituted, (2) the subject’s formation and entry into the Symbolic, which, loosely, constitutes entry into Law and language that precedes and exceeds the subject, and (3) an explanation of these new otherworlds’ relation to this World, this present unethical, parasitic and predatory onto-epistemological order in which we find and intuit ourselves in space and time. Can, for example, Black people, when they have discovered or made new otherwise worlds, claim a new symbolic form? Failure to attend to these deep complexities, I contend, has profound conceptual and methodological implications (which I seek to address below).4This I will do, in this decidedly selective procedure, by way of attending to the show’s conceptual framework rather than the actual works on the show. There’s a problem of space in this present text that would prevent me from sufficiently attending to most of the works on show, but I’m convinced that no works in this group show could rescue the shortcomings of this exhibition and particularly the bold claims made by Ndikung.
Furthermore, this present inquiry is less interested in whether possibility as such is possible or not; rather, it attends to the very concept and logic of possibility.5My approach here is similar and moves by way of Tiffany Lethabo King’s procedure in her essay, “Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro Family”, wherein she refuses to be sucked into discourses about alternative/otherwise Black filial strategies, but rather advances a generative critique that gestures towards what she calls “a distinctly abolitionist critique of the family”, which is to say, an “[interrogation of] the viability of the notion of the family itself.” King, “Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro Family,” in Theory & Event (2018), 69. Emphasis mine. What I seek to question is the concept of possibility as it pertains to art (making), freedom/liberation, Black suffering (and its disavowals), its relation to and function within the broader conceptual (that is, curatorial) framework of A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You (2022).
Installation view: A Different Now Is Close Enough To Exhale on You, Cape Town, 2022. Courtesy of Goodman Gallery.
Possible disavowals
Through a close reading of Ndikung’s accompanying text, epigraphed by passages from Osunde and Lemn Sissay, one is immediately struck by a conceptual undecidedness which manifests as what I’m calling a refusal to really name the antagonism. Placed next to Osunde’s short essay, from which Ndikung borrows the title of the show, this undecidedness makes perfect sense: it is never clear who Osunde is referring to by the consistent deployment of a slew of objective pronouns We and You. These pronouns function to obfuscate what we might call, by way of Wilderson, the “anxiety of antagonism.” If we do not know who this We is, or if it is never named, then it could be everyone; it is literally up for the taking. As for Ndikung, naming, if we can even call it that, doesn’t move past the usual suspects: “whiteness,” “colonial,” “postcolonial” – or what he terms “a certain kind of human” (taking this obfuscation up a notch).
In extending these obfuscating (non)naming strategies, Ndikung draws us into a conversation about “the precariousness of the past years” by way of reckless analogising; “the air we inhale is a potential stray bullet,” he writes, “and a handshake is a potential land mine,” as if these aren’t specifically racialised forms of dying, as if ‘stray bullet’ isn’t a code word for Black death. If anything, here we see Blackness betraying the conscious intentions of the curator/writer; Blackness is being weaponised without being attended to. Elsewhere, we learn that “every species, being and non-being could some time push beyond their boundaries, beyond their conditions of existence just to survive” (emphasis mine). One wonders if otherwise-world projects are simply the space where Blacks could go to just survive and “solidarize.” and we are simply asking too much of them. To put it crudely, this is simply another form of despite-ism, or inspite-ism, a way of thinking that simultaneously depends on and undermines Black suffering, particularly in its singularity and global dimension. These are claims, according to Jared Sexton, that “rely on phrases like “In spite of the terror” and “…nevertheless…”6Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery”, in Social Text (2010), 35. in their account of suffering and freedom/liberation/emancipation: in spite of all this horror & terror we are subjected to by non-Blacks, look at us!7Ndikung closes his curatorial statement with this even bolder stroke: “And despite all odds […] we are still here, smiling, more or less retaining our integrity [. . .] trying to work in the face of abuse, and it seems as if it is art that is the means by which we can, more or less, simply raise the roof when we feel close in that “Sackgasse”” (emphasis mine). I will briefly attend to this overvaluation of art below. These claims are so pervasive in South African contemporary art discourse and culture (from art writers in reviews and exhibition texts, curators and curatorial statements, academics in papers, conferences or teaching and research, artists in statements and walkabouts, activists on every public platform etc: Black and non-Black alike). They are reflexes of a wounded psyche and subjecthood,8Here I am referring strictly to Black (art/cultural) practitioners. what David Marriott recently called “the desire for an identity that would not be so torn.”9David Marriott, Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press: 2018), 297. As a kind of naive Hope-ism, they deny us an opportunity to sit and read rigorously our present time, its social arrangements and relations, as residue of the longue durée of racial slavery, or more precisely, “the tragic material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of post-emancipation societies throughout the Diaspora.”10Jared Sexton, Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word. Emphasis mine.
Ndikung inadvertently inherits Osunde’s conceptual errors because he is seduced by its emotive force that is delivered at the cost of systematic criticality. Part of this mystifying slippage has something to do with what Wilderson calls a sentimental “overvaluation of… art’s sociopolitical effectiveness” which operates by way of asserting a relation between the art we make and “the emancipation of the black people who produced and consumed it.”11Frank Wilderson, “Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits Of African Freedom”, in Theatre Survey (2009), 121. He further states:
This substitution of sentiment for analysis mystifies instead of clarifies the grammar and ghosts of Africa’s structural violence, a structural violence that is not analogous to that of Asians, working-class Europeans, or Latinos. Attention to it problematizes the articulation between [art] and emancipation.12Ibid. Emphasis mine.
In conclusion
If there’s any proposal that this paper is going to make, it is to echo Mkululi’s proposition that “one would imagine that we would reimagine our commitment to the concept of world-makings”13Mkululi, Notes. I think that would be a great place to start. and to take seriously the stakes of such an invitation. What this would open for us in South Africa14I hope this is not read as the author’s attempt to privilege South Africa in his analysis thus further perpetuating the privileged position of South Africa as a special case in African and global contemporary cultural discourse. – and, by extension, in the continent and everywhere else in the globe where you find Black people15This work is already happening in other parts of the ‘diaspora’ albeit at varying stages and speed. – is an opportunity to put to serious scrutiny all concepts and categories, plans and practices, systems and strategies, that have been handed down to us that are sinking us into unimaginable levels of mediocrity, intellectual sterility and dearth of any dangerous Black ideation16I have here in mind anything from critical theory, knowledge, art and cultural production, politics, research, pedagogy, curation etc. that could propose the very end of our present onto-epistemological order, and to do so from the perspective of Blackness, which, as I’ve theorised elsewhere, is nothing but a dead perspective, a perspective that has absolutely nothing to lose and that demands nothing, because it is nothing, and is animated by “a politics pursued without need of a base or margin of power [or an otherwise world], a struggle that radicalizes every struggle it touches, inside and out.”17Jared Sexton, Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.