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“Play Yo’ Part”: A Note on Poēisis in Black

2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.60.1.0006

1528-4212

Bedour Alagraa,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

Following the lead of R. A. Judy’s virtuoso display of “thinking in disorder,” this essay will also wander, and take on the posture of being-in-flight-beside1 the massive intellectual offering that Judy has presented to us in Sentient Flesh. There is a profound intertextuality between content and form in Sentient Flesh, which Judy has organized into “sets” (think jazz or blues) he has staged in order to betray the centrality of “Black performance” as Moten calls it,2 while also offering performance itself—these “sets”—as the pathway to such a thing. Para-semiosis, and its enactment—poēisis in black—is in full flight in Sentient Flesh, both in content and Judy’s method-theoretical display. My aim is to underscore some important mediations in Sentient Flesh, as they pertain to broader catechisms that are preoccupied with how Black people enact poēisis in black to assert a being-in-flight and a being-beside that eschews and exceeds normative conceptualizations of consciousness, ontology, political economy, and semiolinguistics. In the first set in particular, Judy has “killed the father” so to speak; by aiming his arrow directly at the sedimented philosophical and philological traditions—as elaborated by Aristotle, Plato, Lacan, Heiddeger, and others—he is able to jettison these same traditions, without hesitation, in the sets that follow.Judy’s adroit considerations of ontology, consciousness, poiēsis, and para-semiosis, stage an invitation into the “time of drinking and thinking in disorder.”3 I read, in Judy’s call for thinking in disorder, a latent response to Sylvia Wynter’s declaration that “THERE HAS TO BE A WAR AGAINST CONSCIOUSNESS,” against what Larry Neal called “white thing within us.”4 In the reflection that follows, I will not move through Judy’s offerings in a linear fashion, but rather, I will weave in and out, and pause at the crucial intercepts—what Judy calls “being-at-the-crossroads” (xvii), “perpetually recombinant” (21), or what others might call the kafou, the clearing, and so on.Judy is clear in stating the principal argument of Sentient Flesh:Here, Judy is, in his own words, extending and correcting for Frantz Fanon’s proposal to abolish metaphysics. I pause here, insofar as I recognize in Judy’s work(s), an arresting extension of and “riffing” on—rather than corrective to—Fanon’s declaration (upon theorizing then weeping from inside the “zone of nonbeing” in Black Skin, White Masks) that, “I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it.”5 Fanon arrives, at the end of Black Skin, White Masks, at a point where metaphysics is neither abolished nor redeemed, and, instead, he absconds entirely. Sentient Flesh picks up on the note that Fanon left off, carrying us into another set.The title of this text, Sentient Flesh, warrants its own lengthy meditation, most of which I cannot perform in the confines of this essay. The title is Judy’s extrapolation from a Works Progress Administration quotation from Thomas Windham, who declared, “I think we should have our liberty cause us ain’t hogs or horses—us is human flesh” (1). Upon reading this, I was catapulted back to my first encounter with Toni Morrison’s Beloved:Judy goes further to state that “Windham’s ‘aint’ articulates a taxonomy of sentient flesh, which interpolates zoology and anthropology” (2). We are reminded of Sethe’s insistence that nobody would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper, and reminded that “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps.”7 Flesh that weeps, flesh that lives, “by discrepant taxonomy” (169)—sentient flesh.Judy’s ruminations on flesh, materiality, political economy, and metaphysics—all running alongside one another—is, in my estimation, a companion paradigm to Wynter’s assertion that we are indeed “words, alchemically made flesh”8—para-semiosis teaches us that these two ways of considering the same predicament can dance together without descending into analogy or synthesis. It is a stunning intertextuality between method and material that characterizes Sentient Flesh. The “para” of Judy’s para-semiosis is not just woven into his masterful theoretical display, but also given as an offering to the reader for how to develop a reading practice in which Hortense Spillers, Wynter, Judy, and Windham are running alongside one another, rather than colliding in their attempts to occupy the center.There is also the matter of the second half of the title—Thinking in Disorder. Judy offers us a showing and telling of what this means, and how thinking-in-disorder is propagated by what he calls a para-semiosis, “denoti[ng] the dynamic of differentiation operating in multiple multiplicities of semiosis that converge without synthesis” (391). In the first set, we are offered a journey into this theoretical move via Du Bois. We are plunged into the vexed intellectual preoccupations with Du Bois’s double consciousness, then thrown into crisis by Judy’s insistence that if we follow the line of theorization that posits double consciousness as a “disorder,” we can then recognize that second sight does not flow from double consciousness or vice versa, but rather, that the two are coeval, operating alongside one another, mirroring one another.What is even more transfixing about this text is Judy’s highlighting of the presence of an asymptotic mechanism in Du Bois’s thought (for example), which displays a para-semiosis of consciousness, a thinking that is both “system” and “sign” (104), a “thinking-in-disorder” which is analogous to the asymptotic dimensions of a hyperbola—approaching, as closely as possible, the limit of the metric (88). Judy reveals how, embedded in the ontological conundrum of how it might “feel to be a problem,” is a response that eschews ontology and instead approaches the limit, the incalculable, to reveal that “the Negro cannot be counted” (114). In a beautiful theoretical display, Judy is articulating how this asymptotic thinking that approaches the incalculable—the unthinkable—reveals to us that ontology, and a host of other concepts, are simply enclosures that fall flat when the Negro enters the frame, be it in the lens of political economy, jurisprudence, consciousness, and so on. Betraying the limit (i.e., identifying the limit) is the only manner in which we can betray the limit (i.e., turn against it). The Negro is that categorical excess that is produced at the moment we attempt to fix any concept or category; it is the plasma that surrounds a concept (be it ontology, consciousness, etc.): we reach for it constantly, knowing that the frame we inhabit cannot account for it. Judy’s articulation of the Negro via a disarticulation of our typical categorical metrics approaches this limit. In this way, the reader and the text share a secret: Judy’s own asymptotic thought is what signals a recognition of the same in Du Bois. The bassline that holds the ensemble of the first set together. A beautiful riff. If “para” is taken as its root meaning, besides, then Judy’s para-semiosis is what permits the reader to render coherent the para-semiosis of Du Bois’s asymptotic thought regarding consciousness. Judy has offered us a blue note: a detour from the scale, an exceeding of the scale made possible by the scale’s limitations. It is impossible to measure how and when that detour occurs, to measure the exact distance between the pentatonic scale and the blue note. The only way to know and conceive of a blue note is to play it—which leads us to Judy’s nomenclature for the practices that are, as he calls it, “instantiations” (xvii) of such para-semiosis—poiēsis in black.What Judy has identified as a classical Aristotelian view of “poiēsis”—“saying possibility” (14)—ought not to be read as conceding to an Aristotelian bedrock for thinking possibility. Instead, Judy is offering “poiēsis in black” as the thinking and practices of possibility. Where Aristotle distinguishes between poiēsis and mimesis, Sentient Flesh collapses any such distinction. In instantiations of poiēsis in black (akin to Alejo Carpentier’s marvelous real [11]), the distinction between the possibility/imagining and the “real” is more apparent than real. The practices— poiēsis in black—that emerge and are imbricated in such thought (para-semiosis) are explored in Judy’s text via deeply sensitive and profound readings of Nabile Farès’s encounter with James Baldwin in his novel Un passager de l’occident, and in aṭ-Ṭāhir-Wāṭṭar’s writings.Sentient Flesh is a wellspring from which I can drink, in my attempts to fashion an intellectual tapestry of my own making. What para-semiosis offers is a way for me to thread together the many attempts at a similar frame, that enact such a project but take it for granted as such.9 Sentient Flesh takes nothing for granted. Embracing para-semiosis, opening my vision onto poiēsis in black, has demonstrated to me that it is indeed possible to bottle lightning, to do the seemingly impossible—holding many theoretical lines together without reducing them to one, large, indistinguishable bloc. I now read para-semiotically and identify a para-semiosis, simultaneously, in Fanon’s assertion that we “attempt to touch the other,”10 without attempting to consume or collapse into the other. I read a para-semiosis in Édouard Glissant’s declaration that we trade with one another without losing oneself, that we reject our epistemic propensity toward “enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy.”11 I read a para-semiosis in Aimé Césaire’s insistence on only a universalism that is a collection of particularities. And yet, these thinkers in the Francophone tradition(s) in particular have an almost Sorbonnist tendency to redeem the universal even in their refusal of it. This is not what Judy is offering in Sentient Flesh. Rather, he has demonstrated that if we can identify something that threads Black life together, it is that of poiēsis in black, made possible by a being-in-flight beside (321); paraontology and ontology fall away as conceptual scaffolding for this being-in-flight-beside. What is required is para-semiosis so that, as Wynter reminds us, our “inner eyes with which [we] look with [our] physical eyes upon reality” might recognize and see this thinking-in-disorder, poiēsis in black.12I am reminded in this moment of another of Wynter’s invitations for “thinking in disorder.” In her interview with Greg Thomas, Wynter described such thinking-in-disorder the following way:I will now take a slightly inelegant detour to thread Sentient Flesh into Judy’s broader meta-theoretical preoccupation with movement and motion. Judy, in a recent interview with Anthony Bogues, offered the following:The residue—carried in the middle passage, expressed in the blues, jazz, funk, and hip-hop—is still in motion. They are “fleeting epiphanies” that appear again and again, on their own clock, in their own sense of time. Judy has offered us para-semiosis as a way to think more clearly about what he calls “subjectivity that is wholly semiotic, and in that way ethical” (xv)15 Thinking in disorder, poiēsis in black, is running alongside the blue note, the second line, the flow—where each player is in flight beside one another. Poiēsis in black tells us to “get in where you fit in.”16 Or, in the words of rapper Big Boi, poiēsis in black is an invitation to “play yo’ part / play yo’ part . . .”17 Here is my part, my response to Judy’s generous invitation to a ‘time of thinking and drinking in disorder’ (457).