Rizvana Bradley,Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

As Alexander Galloway (2022: 211) has recently pointed out, contemporary critique is living through a ‘Golden Age’ of heavy investment in ‘sensation, materiality, experience, affect, ethics, and aesthetics’. This Golden Age is frequently marked as generative and productive for the modern subject, enabling the modern subject to world itself in new ways: sensing, feeling out, and affectively attuning to the world and the Other. But what of this Other, violently forged through colonialism and modernity? Whilst the aesthetic realm has become a lure for the modern subject, capable of reading itself as a subject in the world, what does aesthetics mean for Fanon’s Black who, famously, cannot read itself as a subject in the world?

The focus of this review essay is Rizvana Bradley’s (2023) powerful Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. Moving against the grain of contemporary debate by working with the negative, Bradley convincingly attunes us to aesthetics as an absolutely dispossessive field, a racial regime, and a constitutive force of the ongoing violent legacies of modernity.

Opening with an illustration of the lived experience of the Fanonian Black, Anteaesthetics begins with Nina Simone at the Montreal Jazz festival (1976), ‘forced to wait for herself to appear, without avail’ (p. 8).

After being presented with flowers by her hosts, Simone promptly takes her seat at the piano, in accordance with the choreographic expectations of her hosts, audience, and documentarians. Yet no sooner than this dance commences, it is broken. ‘I’m quite aware that I have left you hanging [laughter from the audience] . . . but I am tired. You don’t know what I mean, so I think I will sing.’ Interrupting herself multiple times and drifting through a series of apparently disconnected digressions, Simone holds her audience in an abeyance which signifies upon her own suspension in a set of ‘orchestrated amusements,’ the aesthetic dimensions of which her own reinventions of soul have been made to catalyze and mediate. (p. 5, emphasis in original)

The theme of suspension is also central to one of the most influential texts to have been published in recent years concerned with embodied affects, Lauren Berlant’s (2011) Cruel Optimism, with its key focus upon impasse as characteristic of the contemporary modern condition. As Bradley says:

For Lauren Berlant, the term impasse designates not simply ‘a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot more forward’ but ‘a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic,’ wading through ‘processes that have not yet found their genre or event.’ (p. 21, emphasis in original)

To clarify the stakes of Anteaesthetics, Bradley underscores that the impasse which Nina Simone confronts is not Berlant’s ‘shared historical present’ (p. 21) but is rather marked ‘by overdetermination’ (p. 21). What does Bradley mean by overdetermination? We have already seen that Simone’s performance dramatizes how, ‘for the black, every appearance before the racial regime of aesthetics is an instance of violence, at once a conscription and a concealment’ (p. 8). For Bradley, the nature of that conscription and concealment marks a crucial hermeneutical conundrum. Quoting David Marriott’s (2018) Whither Fanon? (p. 15, emphasis in original), Bradley (p. 21) says Simone’s performance is ‘marked by a kind of intimacy that remains radically alien to the subject, a sort of self-interrupting that within in which the subject cannot reflect itself as a subject’. The hermeneutical conundrum then is how ‘that within’ can only mark the presence of an absence violently forged through the modern world-making project: Fanon’s overdetermined Black, lacking ontological and phenomenological security, unable to read itself as a subject in the world. This impasse, constitutive of the world, this ‘impossible structural relation’ (p. 21) which Bradley says Simone inhabits, is both reflected in and substantiated through Simone’s paradoxical kind of (non)performance.

The originally of Bradley’s book, then, is that it focuses upon aesthetics as an absolutely dispossessive field. As Bradley (pp. 44–5) underscores in uncompromising terms, ‘the world itself is an aesthetic form, a paradigm defined by the chiasmatic worldmaking of form and form-making world’. But against the grain of much debate in critical Black Studies, Anteaesthetics does not seek to carve out or enrol a generative aesthetic of Blackness as an alternative, productive, force in the world. Rather, Anteaesthetics is concerned with Blackness as the ‘bearing of the unbearable’ (p. 2). Incisively demonstrating how aesthetics is a violent racial regime of modernity throughout this impressive text, Bradley’s interest is experiments in Black art which are not ‘worlding but an illimitable descent made to come before the world’ (p. 17).

As the initial focus upon Nina Simone illustrates, the Black feminine is central throughout Anteaesthetics, which includes extremely rich chapters on 19th-century paintings, cinema, texts, video installations, and digital art. For the Black feminine not only reproduces Blackness as the threshold of aesthetics as a racial regime. It also reproduces Blackness as the dehiscence, after Jared Sexton, which modernity must constantly work to establish. Thus, as Simone’s (non)performance illustrates, ‘[b]efore the world, black femininity has no name but must be relentlessly named, cannot appear but is constantly made to appear, cannot be but must exist’ (p. 51).

Before turning to the details of the chapters in Anteaesthetics, it is necessary to further unpack the framing of the book by thinking with its key framing of ‘black aesthesis’. Bradley understands black aesthesis as emerging in ‘the vertiginous cut between black existence and black nonbeing, [which] demands thinking with or toward the unthought’ (p. 2); that is, after Hortense Spillers, ‘between the violent dissimulation of the “black body” and a black enfleshment that has always been both more and less than the phenomenological body’ (p. 29). Black aesthesis has four components admirably illustrated in the different chapters of Anteaesthetics. First, it attunes us to what is both a prerequisite of, and radically incommensurate with, aesthetic form. That is, ‘[t]he irreducible corporality of black aesthesis is a function of the modern body’s displacements and compels us to assiduously descend into the impossible, yet necessary distinction between bodily dissimulation and enfleshed existence, to take seriously the question of what happens in the absence of a body’ (p. 31). Second, as already intimated, Black aesthesis is not the same as dialectical or new materialist hermeneutics but rather, Bradley says, is closer to what David Marriott calls ‘black materialism’, the ‘dark luminosity of an ultimate and absolute experience . . . that is equally incapable of being exposed to the light of philosophy or of being duped by its aesthetic formalism’ (Marriott, 2024, quoted by Bradley, p. 31). Thus, Black aesthesis requires thinking toward the unthought without recourse to idioms of resolution. Third, because Black aesthesis is a function of a racial regime structuring the sensorium of the world, it can only exist ‘as a dehiscence, a deformation, an irruption that can never claim the status of an event’ (p. 31). In this way, Black aesthesis is not a ‘political challenge’ (p. 32), but ‘rather representation’s dehiscent anterior’ (p. 32), ‘an emergence without home or horizon, an abyssal plane without terminus’ (p. 32). Finally, therefore, the (un)thought which Black aesthesis extends ‘cannot generate a new sensus communis’ (p. 31), and this precisely because ‘blackness is the constitutive interdiction of the social field as of the sensorium which binds it’ (p. 31). As I have been saying, through its focus upon Black aesthesis, Anteaesthetics registers an insurmountable, ‘paradoxical emergence’ (p. 34) that works differently from the register of more prevalent discourses on fugitivity in critical Black Studies. The focus is the ‘negative underside, rather than a positive outside or even outward movement’ (pp. 34–5). The art experiments in anteaesthetics Bradley engages that I now turn to are less ‘an elective practice’ than, as in the case of Simone, ‘an unavoidable consequence of their sustained encounter with the intractable problematic of black femininity’ (p. 35). And precisely because this problematic is intractable in the world, Bradley’s ‘wager is that anteaesthetics as a heuristic device pertains to every relationship between blackness and the aesthetic across variegated times and spaces of modernity’ (p. 19).

Chapter 1 of Anteaesthetics engages Arthur Jafa’s 2013 film Dreams Are Colder than Death, drawing out how, because Blackness is just as unavailable to phenomenology as it is ontology, every representation of Blackness mediated through the racialized aesthetic realm (in this chapter, of film) is a dissimulation. For Bradley, then, Black art and film become sites of experimentation for dramatizing this dissimulation. Chapter 2, examining the descendant figure of masculine heroism, and Chapter 3, the ascendance of the female nude, carry over such concerns into an exploration of the Black body. Here, tethered to the structural calibrations of aesthetics, Bradley focuses largely upon 19th century artworks, wherein the structuring ‘corporeal order at once conscripts and expels the black, who becomes the negative vestibule for the spacetime of the (proper) body and its others’ (p. 46). Something I found particularly useful here is how Bradley foregrounds touch as an important register for discerning the boundary between those who can – and who cannot –claim presence within the corporeal division of the world. Chapter 4, focusing upon the medium, engages the work of artist Glenn Ligon. Bradley argues that Ligon’s visual, textual, and sonic dramatizations of the colour line expose an opacity which preceeds a racial hypervisibility that overdetermines the field of representation. To be clear then, maintaining the central line of Anteaesthetics, Bradley’s focus is attunement to Blackness as the abyssal threshold of the world substantiated by a double bind. This is crucial to understand. Whilst the ‘ante’ of anteaesthetics refers to Blackness before or proceeding modernity, because the experiments in Black art the book impressively engages emerge from a Black existence that lacks phenomenology or ontology, without hope or remedy, it’s impossible to positivize. In this way, Bradley’s theorization of opacity which draws upon the art of Glenn Ligon signals an irreducible materiality that is the condition of possibility for signification, yet cannot signify itself. The final chapter, focusing upon the relationship between architecture, aesthetics, and Blackness as an antephenomenal condition, continues to build up Bradley’s central line of critique by turning to Sonia Perry’s artworks Typhoon Coming On (2018) and Flesh Wall (2016–20) – the specific purpose of which is to draw out the relation between the metaphysical architecture of worlding, the phenomenological body-subject of worldly inhabitation, and their aesthetic reproduction through the logic of value which substantiates the antephenomenal existence of Blackness.

In bringing this review essay to a conclusion, it is useful to briefly stand back from Anteaesthetics and reflect upon how it can be positioned within wider debates in both Black Studies and aesthetics. First, turning to Black Studies, this has become increasingly interested in rejecting the incorporation of Blackness into modern regimes of liberal resistance and repair. With the significant revival of interest in Fanon, there is intensive interest in how the modern project violently rendered the world into Being and non-Being, and much contemporary scholarship engages Blackness as ontological lack. The two major schematic divisions within this development are well rehearsed. On the one hand, for many, working under the heading of what has come to be known as ‘Black Optimism’, Blackness is a fugitive force, suspending the cuts and delineations of ontological capture (notably Moten, 2003). In this development there is a subtraction from the coherence of ontology, but an adding in of an aesthetic awareness of Blackness, the non-ontological, as a generative, alternative, literal force in the world. On the other hand, others, falling under the heading ‘Afropessimism’ (notably Wilderson, 2020), understand such approaches as remaining all too enamoured with the generative potentialities of the ontic realm, while the foundational ontological violence of the world remains intact. For Afropessimists, the only task is to end a world which is intractable from the ontological violence which carved it out.

Whilst it is fair to say that within academic disciplines, such as my own of Geography, Blackness is still frequently approached as a graspable identity (Bledsoe, 2021), or as a generatively, alternately worlding force (Noxolo, 2024), others still engage Blackness through the lens of a more negative inhabitation, a fungibility always already instrumentalizable in the world (Chipato and Chandler, 2024; Pugh, 2024; Pugh and Chandler, 2023). Such a stance suggests the need for alternative approaches to critical inquiry, centred upon analyses of the mechanisms through which the project of modernity continues to salvage and redeem the purchase of the modern subject and the world (as Bradley does with aesthetics).

Secondly, turning to aesthetics, it is important to underscore just how much Anteaesthetics works against the grain of contemporary debate, both explicitly and implicitly. As noted at the beginning of this review essay, a prolific trend in critical thought has come to think with aesthetics as productive for the subject capable of reading itself as in the world (that is, Fanon’s modern subject). In the Golden Age of aesthetics, the aesthetic realm is there, available for the expansion of the limits of ‘thinkability’ of the modern subject, enabling it to world itself in new ways. Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that much of Western academia is today being built through its engagements with the Golden Age of aesthetics. Contemporary developments are prolifically marked by aesthetic tropes of sensing, affectively attuning to, and feeling out, as pathways to caring for the more-than-human and the Other. It is, of course, precisely in this way that Fanon’s foundational ontological violence of the world remains intact: decolonializing methodologies continue to colonialize, positionality statements in academic projects continue to appropriate, and so forth. Returning to Nina Simone, Anteaesthetics extends such concerns through a meditation upon the meaning of empathy in an antiblack world, where

although empathy is frequently elaborated in the name of solidarity with black liberation, more often than not, such instances of empathetic identification serve as the mechanisms for the (non-black) liberal subject’s renewal of their subjectivity in and through the projective objectifications of empathy [. . .] And yet, Simone’s nonperformative withholding not only refuses the subsumption of antiblackness under the generalized problematic of empathy but insists upon the antiblack structuring of the very political world order that coerces and compels her performance. To contemplate one’s vestibularity to and expulsion from that world order is to foreground an irrecuperable challenge to every legible grammar of ethics, aesthetics, and politics. It marks an inchoate commitment to understanding the ethical, aesthetical, and political means by which the racially gendered labors of blackness come to be continually instrumentalized in the reproduction of the very world order that would serially inscribe the metaphysical expropriation and annihilation of blackness. (pp. 26–7)

One wager of Anteaesthetics, then, is that it is only by tracing the descent of Black aesthesis, without recourse to remedy or rectification, that we might learn anew our attunement to such concerns. Forcing us to encounter the horror, beauty, and racially gendered dimensions of the negative inhabitations of aesthetics, Anteaesthetics is powerfully original, meticulous in its task to attune us to Blackness as the abyssal threshold of the modern world-making project; a limit always already constituted through the absolutely dispossessive field of worlding aesthetic refrains. As Bradley admirably demonstrates, ‘the aesthetic is in fact constitutive of and indispensable to the modern world, in all its brutality and depravation [. . .] aesthetics is foundational to the antiblack world, to carving its essential antagonisms and to suturing its metaphysical fissures’ (pp. 8–9).