Race and Affectability (Online Event)

CHAPTERS

Introduction to Series & Speaker

Joshua Neves

Race and Affectability (Discussion)

Christine Goding-Doty

Media Example (Extension of Talk)

Christine Goding-Doty

Q&A 1
Topics: da Silva’s concept of Fractal Thinking and the tension with the Negative/Reserse Hallucination, the tension in forms of knowledge and what exists, how fractal thinking works against the takedown of post-enlightenment thought, turn to art practice video culture in a way to read or modality of thought.

Q&A 2
Topics: In terms of the difficulty of the text, is there an intentional comportment to have in mind when you attempt to read this text? Do you think that this philosophical framework, very tessellated and rich, can be connected to things in the social arena, like surplus populations and the prison industrial complex? What kinds of collectivities arise from this affectability, when we take the overriding assumption of reason out of the equation? (Addressed in reverse order)

Q&A 3
Topics: (Follow Up) The struggle to understand the way da Silva goes back to the Hegelian formulation of the relationship between the master and slave as a basic structure for the creation of the subject, classic Phenon example the road not taken, the recognition of not being seen by the white metropolitan subject. Do you see the radical expansion of connection in this way, is this a way to come back to that classical study or rather something to say let’s move on to something else entirely.

Q&A 4
Topics: The question of scale, how does scale factor into your method, does it factor into your methods of research in significant ways?

Q&A 5
Topics: The phrase “unleashing an ethical crisis”, how the global and the idea of the “transparent eye” has been so powerful as a political strategy in sidestepping the concept of “unleashing an ethical crisis”, how you see that in relation to your readings of these theories.

Q&A 6
Topics: On da Silva, black feminist poethics, the way she rights about escaping the grip of time. Time being the privileged frame of thinking and the subject. How do you get outside of time and apply these ideas or seek to amplify them? How do you channel your intellectual or social energy when your energized by these ideas?

Q&A 7
Topics: Day to day experiences in other countries, the ascension of culture, the threat of reverting race to the trajectory of convenience through the culture, rather than needing to discuss, mediate and negotiate race. Is there a need to err on the side of caution when discussing race in this way?

Q&A 8
Topics: Any advice on how to pick up da Silva and your ways of thinking in Film Studies? Are there ways to do that and avoid discussions of representation, without epidermalization?

Q&A 9
Topics: The argument that we drop the more capital “E” event from the discussion, that we emabrace the banality. Where “an event” is usually positioned as more the capital E version. To spin this out. 1, Elizabeth Povinelli’s “Economies of Abandonment”, the terror and killing in the world that never builds up into a crisis, it’s just slow and dull and cruddy, so she comes at event from the other side. What that understanding of race does, as a banal event, and how it relates to categories we already have, like practices and performativity? The idea that you have to semiotically reproduce something for it to exist. 2, talking about human and non human agents, and how you bring in imaginative but also highly physical aspects like buildings, extraction, etc. With the resurgence of people’s work like McLuhan, What happens if technology is an agent in this process of affectability? Pale blogs?

Q&A 10
Topics: The promise of cyberspace as a neutral subject, but that becomes coded through symbologic or algorithmic forms. The constance of interpolation, institutions “racing” a subject. So if we’re thinking about the concept of a digital subject, how do these concepts related to a neutral subject, being coded as white?

Outro

Christine Goding-Doty