Los Angeles Freeway Project
August 26th - August 27th, 2023
Excerpt from an unpublished correspondence between Boz Garden and Zach McLane on Every Inch of this Wor(l)d is a Plantation
August 30th, 2023
Hi Zach,
I think over the course of these projects, Cimiteria as well, I have been advocating for what Samo Tomšič terms the “real consequences” of language and its constituent negativity insofar as he proffers that “language is a material and effective inexistence.” (The Capitalist Unconscious, p. 19) As an Afropessimist (and a young psychoanalytic thinker) the (re)production or location of the negative maintains an urgency in my framework. The parenthetical gesture of the banner’s message becomes important if we are invested in (departing from) what may be a preoccupation with spatiality, empiricism, and/or referentiality. The (L) poses, at first (or 3rd) glance an invitation to abandon referentiality and submit to what it might mean for the plantation to be present in the very ink of the text. That is, to abandon a preoccupation with marking not only what a thing is but where it might be found. So to rephrase, I pose a critique of an investment in the desire to know something like: where in the world is the word? Or another way, where is the thing which the word means to describe and what ethics might we accrete around the concretization of experience?
To clarify, my suspicion (or total repudiation) of a concern with what something is follows in David Marriott’s lead as he reminds us that to speak of blackness is to “describe this experience of non-being, this echoing which turns ontology on its head, as a voice speaking without authorship, without origin, and as though a voice overheard, is to know that blackness cannot be uttered without at once being echoed by a voice that is not: n’est pas.”
Across my investigations with burial ground radar imaging, waste incineration, police dog training, and, more recently, Christological reasoning, I am interested in the particularly anti-economic relation of language insofar as speech/signification invests in the tempest of the libidinal with the hopes that its return is not only meaning but meaning sanctioned by the Other. However, an essential component of this process is that its sanctioning demands discordance or an incurable rupture between the signifier and that which it wishes to signify (forgive the semiotics 101, I promise I’m leading to something). As Nestor Braunstein writes,
The transaction is never acceptable or willingly accepted. One does not know if the price paid corresponds to the value of what has been received in return, and must resign oneself to the loss implied in surrendering something real for symbolic compensation, a quantum of jouissance in exchange for the inconsistent glow of images, precarious certainties attached to words of love, or misleading signs that come from the Other...
In other words, the legal tender of language (that is, of symbolic law which demands perpetual debt in meaning) only comes in the form of ce qui n’est pas (what is not). In this sense, the ash, the training, the grave, and, in the case of a theology of salvation, the Word itself all behave as rather convenient (for analysis) instances which are (re)productions of/investments into ‘what is not’ par excellence.
So to return to the parenthetical mark, you are right to say that it expresses an indistinction. An indistinction, which you’ve helped me articulate as productive of the particularly unbearable bargain of discourse which I believe to be the anatomy of the plantation: one cannot speak a word without involving the totality of the world which gives it meaning. In this way, your note on the demand/need to read and reread the message perhaps insinuates this inescapable exigency to continually work within (the pleasure of) debt. The world is indeed a chain which we are all required to yank with every sentence. Everyone must speak with or through the negative (of the Slave). The wor(l)d is a chain linked by Derridean différance. As he consolidates perfectly in Cinders:
I understand that the cinder is nothing that can be in the world, nothing that remains as an entity [étant]. It is the being [l’être], rather, that there is - this is a name of the being that there is but which, giving itself (es gibt ashes), is nothing, remains beyond everything that is (konis epekeina tes ousias), remains unpronounceable in order to make saying it possible although it is nothing.The nowness (of the is) is therefore articulated as an aporia, or what I want to think of as an accord (or contract) at the precise moment where the is meets or conspires with the not or what Sexton might say is “the affirmation of nothing”. On this point of collusion, I take Sexton’s formulation on the Slave’s captivity to dialecticity to be formative here when he writes that the Slave is expelled from the “dialectics of loss and recovery and [is instead made captive to] the loss of dialectics of loss and recovery as such” (Sexton & Barber, 2017). What I think is radical about this move is that Sexton appropriates a kind of Derridean attitude to difference qua différance to the extent that difference is a more intensified form of loss or absence than negativity. By this light, slavery is not the condition of oscillating between any two points of a conceptual split (Human/Animal, Alive/Dead, etc.) but rather is the abyssal and vestibular link, or Bradley's 'abyssal cut' which any given opposing properties structurally agree to figure/Hold/exclude as such. I come back to Marriott's articulation of Blackness as an 'interminable falling' without destination; so we might say something else like Slavery is endured as a captive falling between the is and the not which provides their dialecticity with its time(s) and its place(ment). In the language of the contract, we might say the Slave 'drops' only after the signatures are exchanged. A period of suffering is not required for a contract to be drafted and signed but it is required to maintain it. This is how I understand the conditional tense of being for the captor. And so, this fallen-ness is, as you beautifully put, the "rupture and simultaneous suture of word and world".
On the note of exactitude and totality of measurement, there is a certain haecceity I push against or attempt to pervert in the banner's phrase. The uniqueness of 'every inch' gives way to an assimilating (parasitic) totality which must, at the same time, sacrifice and concede to the demand for exactitude. In that it is hopeless to measure the whole of it and yet the whole of it demands measurement (a la market predictions, property appraisal/speculation, carbon dating, oceanic surface vs. deepwater temperatures etc. etc.) Which is to your brilliant observation that the work is an "insistence on...banality and excess". So you are also right to read that this is precisely where the parenthetical intervenes: where the haecceity of the Word must give way to the haecceity of the World; discourse must, as a condition or effect of its instantiation, give way to slavery. So yes, I'd say the structuring logic of the plantation is the repudiation of where (exactitude) and what (totality) that is, at the same time, a making-the-Slave-captive-to a where and a what (qua form's imposition).
The (L) is an exigency, a demand, a symptom, an immanence, or an ultimatum: speak now or end the World. Or, translated for our particular itinerary: speak now or lose your Slave. A particularly harrowing version perhaps exists for the Slave, too: speak now or lose your chains...
If Marriott writes, "We have yet to understand the being that is not” then I suggest the Slave does not know what it is to be what is not. This is perhaps why I find myself coming back to certain lines in World of Warcraft spoken by the game's Undead cultures: “what are we if not slaves to this torment?” And if the answer is in fact Nothing then perhaps this is why we are or I am caught in the throws of an art practice which inevitably must circle back to form, it must locate a case study, reference something that (allegedly) is. It is the incessant return of/seduction by World's (so-called) materiality (or is-ness) in an attempt to situate one's project entirely in and with Word (the is-not-ness). So perhaps another way of putting this is, I do not know what a practice is without the torment of form's imposition upon an insistence of/with negativity and I may not yet be ready to find out (and this, too, goes for its unspoken and horrific analogue). I suspect there is still work to be done, so we endure.
Until the End,
Boz
Every Inch of This World(l)d is a Plantation
2023
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