So, I thought we could start with what we’ve spoken about previously which is about this anti-black evacuation that can happen in the encounter with your work as a form of accessibility or of making the work legible. I feel like there’s something about the work depending on a happening that then evacuates a lot of its material potential. I would also say that the erotic projections and fantasies you’ve listed before are another kind of availability of thought that does often feel like clarity, even as it is, as you’ve said in other texts, perverse. So, there's a perversion in Celia that brings me to another question about these objectifications that do become suppressions of the material in the case of Celia [an enslaved woman in Missouri, hanged in 1855 for killing the man who owned her and repeatedly raped her]: rape is turned into that same kind of happenstance that must be available evidentiarily in some visible strike of clarity.

And if it's not, then the duration, time, or moment of rape just dissolves into a question of her complicity or her guilt—which becomes metaphysical. So, I think there's something I want to throw back into the object, maybe thinking about somebody like Barbara Chase-Riboud whose work is also about objectification at this level and the material suppression that’s dependent on the event. How can we then throw this back into the material suppression concept so that we can see how this trickles down to, say, the case of Joan Little? What can we make of the availability of legal precedents? To see how they form a human framework under the law, or a feminine framework under the law, that can be violated.

First, thank you for speaking with me and for starting here; I think it’s the part about the work that deserves the most attention. The work (Celia, or the Misfortunes of Virtue), at first, invites you to make a prediction about which of the two identical rods is the more conductive one, the one that would most likely attract a strike of lightning. But because each rod is patinated—its surface materiality alchemized or suppressed, to borrow your term—one is seemingly invited to wait and see. But my hope is that, since this is an art object, we are discouraged from dwelling in a functionalism for too long and, implicitly, any kind of anticipation, however suggested. And that what we are left with, I hope, is this bare desire for a prediction, for a determination to be made. Such that the happening it depends on is also caught up in an economy of assumptions about what objects do when they are ‘at their best’ or their ‘worst’. Objects can supply a ‘strike of clarity’ or make something soluble in the sea of metaphysics—but which of these qualities is an object at its best or worst will depend on who you ask.

So, I think you are right to keep the operation of ‘material suppression’ underlined as the thing rehearsed over time in cases of Black women’s sexual violability. If I’m interpreting you right, material suppression—the historico-legal assumption that rape does not happen to Black women (as Saidiya Hartman and Patrice D. Douglass have elaborated)—is what I think persists in this desire for a prediction, which I think is symmetrical to the demand for something to be “available evidentiarily”. Prediction dreams of determinations based on the availability of previous determinations (like legal precedents), which reminds me of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who defines the law as “prophecies of what the courts will do”. If the law is composed of prophecies, it tends toward determinism, or comports with a general eagerness to arrive at the determination.

But there is then this dilemma of prophecies without subjects: what the court will do when there are “no humans involved”? It must be able to arrive at a determination without recourse to a “happening,” or an agential subject that something can happen to. Perversion, in a psychoanalytic sense, resolves this dilemma. It can invent evidence, like Celia’s complicity or Little’s premeditation, that enters discourse without needing to confirm if anything happened—their blackness (slaveness) already answers this. And this perversion includes the capacity to evacuate evidence of its truth-claims if one understands Celia as rendered incapable of testimony and Little radically reduced to testimony, since her case helped pioneer the science of jury selection. Just a final point, I do read this refinement of the infrastructure of law as actually what the acquittal demonstrated over and against something like a ‘recognition’ of anti-black violence. The very logic of determination gains incredible sophistication here.

So yeah, the question I really try to work immanently from is: if anti-black violence can be discredited in general, projected as a thing that does not happen, what, then, is there to corroborate its indisputable effects? Art, for me, becomes some strange divination work that, as you’re getting at, allows material suppression as such to be materialized.

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Right. I think that leads to the next question, which is about whether that legal framework also figures Celia and Little as ancestral or generational paradoxes. Cheryl Harris ends up talking about the property of whiteness as a kind of metaphysical bundle of rights, and then that bundle becomes this binding abstraction where the coherence it provides is a kind of violence that is always enlightening. Whiteness is almost supernatural. It’s spooky. But I think that I’m also thinking about how you are thinking about the potential or implied lightning with the figure or idea of enlightening.

But then I think that lightning can also be thought of in this way where there’s not a lightning strike per se, but that there are kind of ways to build legibility through possession. Joan Little kind of possesses the happening, like she possesses this kind of alchemy of these layered forms of legal resistance to objectification. I’m kind of interested in that and “Power to the Ice Pick” [the slogan used to campaign for Little’s acquittal]. Somehow, it’s still bound to a kind of coherence through violence, but there’s something interesting there. And then, to ask a more direct question on lightning and its metaphors, I think about the mercurial slip of Woodrow Wilson, saying that history is written in lightning after watching Birth of a Nation (1915), and then all the kinds of colonial phenomenologies that come along with lightning. And I think also about ‘the spark’ and all of the erotic, projected fantasies too that are like eureka, gold rush, etc.

Yeah, exactly. I think this bundling of rights or possessions reminds me of K-Sue Park’s essay on Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), which I see as a latent influence on me and this work. For Park, that work rediscovers an American logic of dividing property from first principles. She opens her essay by characterizing the work as a “hypothetical experience,” but for her, what is hypothetical, which is to say prophesied, is the use and exchange value of land within the complex of the US real estate system. I think she and I go in different directions here, but in a kind of as-above, so-below way. Because I am really inspired by what her question allows us to think: how does that artwork naturalize the way land is divided, indexed, and valued? Like Park, I think I’m trying to understand how potential naturalizes property logic but of another kind in the racial slave.

But, as you’re getting at, ‘knowledge as property’ is never far, nor are the grandiose literatures of ‘the idea’ that you’re pointing to. Regarding erotic fantasies, it makes me think of Jacques Lacan, who talks about jouissance (painful enjoyment) as “beginning with a tickle and end[ing] with blaze of petrol.” Jean-François Lyotard, going perhaps the other way, talks about the ‘incandescence’ of a ‘spinning bar’ that shines with undifferentiated affects. The realm of the social may want to keep the bar still and from glowing, such that political differences can be delimited by a stable bar. But Lyotard argues that the more this bar is forced into stasis, the more likely it is to begin spinning into its ‘white-hot’ state. So yeah, I’ve always been drawn to this way of thinking about the erotic life of concepts that depend so much on a resistance to becoming objects via an aesthetics of ‘white-hot’ indeterminacy. But, following your framing through Harris, the indeterminacy isn’t necessarily diffuse. You’re right that it can look like coherence, singularity, or possession. That it looks like anything at all means it crossed the threshold of legibility at some point. Or, in the case of Little, so many reductions or consolidations had to happen for her case to be legible. So maybe there’s something there about the way slavery (qua the ghost of Celia) has to be reduced so that blackness can come into view in the scientific modernity of Little’s acquittal.

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My other question is more about Joan Little and what can happen when the limits of thinking meet the edges of trans-subjective affective resistances. By that I mean we are in the wake of the flawed ways of thinking about intersectionality; we’re among all these trends of trans-subjective affective resistance.

Totally, we are. To the extent that, for blackness, it’s difficult to adopt this discourse without it really being a way of talking about all the things slavery can be and do.

And I wonder what that limit of thinking is that Joan Little also represents—maybe in that “lightning strike” of her and the science of her jury’s selection as another form of oppression that we are circling. This, I think, helps us understand a lot of evidence implied by the question, or, I guess, the very materials that you’re using. That is: evidence of a structure or evidence of an event. So, all of the violence of that is a bit rinsed and reimagined after this trial. So how to retrace where these ideas come from and where they ended up could help us see the reproductive tool that is Celia becomes the revolutionary potential tool or legal tool, even, that is Joan Little.

Precisely. Yeah. And I wanna say two things before I forget. One, I mean, just Joan Little’s ice pick as an object could be considered this historical sublimation of the lightning rod. And I was talking to my friend about Celia, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, and he reminded me that when lightning strikes, the image might suggest its energy hits an object and then dissipates into nothingness. But in fact, what’s happening is that, of course, it’s just being focused, and then it spreads. And so there is no real sense of the rod capturing anything and then releasing it. The force does not really disappear, I think, in the way that maybe we think it does. It continues and finds itself involved with other objects. So I’m thinking of what you're saying in terms of this alchemy of forms and this idea of the spread that decenters difference if only by making difference all.

Kind of like a McLuhan, in that it’s like a Northern European kind of meditation on the medium is the message. So it goes into all the kind of metaphors that human thinking holds, which goes into thinking about the capacity to then delay the present that we have by thinking through technology or anthropomorphizing it. That's also kind of an interesting thought about the spread of, then, conceptually, the spread of a kind of electrical energy. Then just thinking about Celia’s position with or against Justine’s. There’s a really hectic book—I don’t think you should even try to find this. I think he was a right-wing theologian from the '70s who wrote a book called Libido Dominandi.

Oh my God. Okay. I did try to dive into this book recently, but was so disappointed because at first I said, “Oh, this is a really interesting kind of position. Why is sexuality always on the side of freedom?” And then I watched more recent interviews, and I guess he’s just totally cooked.

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He’s burnt. Like the anti-woke warrior now. But I really fucked with what he said about de Sade. In the book, he goes city to city and follows where there was revolutionary potential and where sexual rights or sexual freedom was granted instead of civil rights. And he talks about de Sade being this fulcrum for a lot of that reasoning, where the popularity of de Sade produced a kind of frenzy for sexual freedom and sexual liberation that then very easily cloaked a lot of the colonial compliances and new forms of enslavement and on actual physical enslavement and sexual slavery. So it’s that libertine bullshit that starts there with this mass distribution of this kind of porn that posits this misfortune as these erotically charged sex-scapes.

Right. Yeah. I’ve been trying to think more and more in the past few years about what de Sade licenses conceptually. I think outside of Aline et Valcour (circa 1788), de Sade doesn’t make much use of Africa or the slave trade. Even within Aline, Africa doesn’t do anything singular compared to the figures and geographies that he explores in the manuscripts that follow Aline. But because de Sade seems to take a position opposite Rousseau, I think he is worth taking seriously on matters of slavery, property, and rights. Not because his eagerness to expose the libertinage of relation makes him easier to use as ‘evidence’ but because slavery is a given in his discourse. According to him, it would be redundant to push on its singularity when everything else is so essentially vile, and we are all always already to blame for the horrors of relation. But I think Rei Terada has been helpful for me on this point. In the imagination of 17th and 18th century philosophy, embracing complicity in the violence downstream of relationality is read as some radical or antidotal mode to a disavowed involvement. Sade, I think, if read as a free indirect discourse, will of course say that complicity in violence is not only natural but good for you because it is natural. So there becomes, on his reading, nothing special about slavery. Which I think is the call to engage him critically if his antidotal mode—or his way out of hierarchy or the ills of political relation—is actually to heighten all other crimes of the flesh to make slavery ordinary (if freedom and infinite use become equal in the law), slavery begins to split into infinite parcels until we lose track of it entirely. I think we are certainly living in Sade’s world, but it has the guise of Rousseau’s (to white people).

Yeah, there’s so much this is relevant to. Even now, I feel like we can see how Epstein is carried into all the weird incel culture. It makes sense in a weird way that Libido Dominandi becomes a kind of conservative mantra.

Yeah. And it helps contextualize this recrudescence of To Catch a Predator; with Primetime coming out, everybody wants to revisit this idea. I mean, it feels very post-Epstein, since now everyone’s like, “Wait, how does sexual perversion work? Is that actually what the world is predicated on?” And it’s like, yes.

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Yeah, and from P. Diddy, to Clive Davis, to the president, to Epstein. There are so many constant, visible reminders of the intensity of human trafficking structures, accomplices, and complicity that permitted and permits all of this. So that’s one Celia echo that’s real. Sexual objectification is weaponizable as micro forms of domination, interpersonal and in macro kinds of forms of domination, too. And the Black woman’s body is a site of all these mappings—from Condoleezza Rice to Megan Thee Stallion.

Yes, precisely. Yeah. This passage in Patrice Douglass’ Engendering Blackness has really been sitting with me. She says that “Reproduction extends beyond the function of organs into the terms of multiplication and conservation, where violation under slavery and in desires that meet the archive are sutured by an auto-erotic pleasure of engaging the obscene, demonstrating that the slave never dies but is a moving surface upon which objectification and violation persist. In short, reproduction here is not about the biological.” Which connects back to your point about the reproductive value of Celia becoming the potential of Little. That is what we mean by reproduction in the context of Black women’s sexual violability exceeds any enumerative event, of 1 becoming 2, etc. And to your language about maps and mapping, Douglass’ idea of the moving surface, I think, yeah, gets to this idea of a geography that is highly plastic, infinitely extendable.

And I think that is a lot of the slippage we see. Online we see coercion and domination in situationships take soft forms. Dominance can just be being silent or being compliant with violence that’s happening and therefore grooming and anticipation. So there are so many ways to read it, where I think if we get really granular about it from any Black feminist perspective, the violence has become so minute. That, again, they then become hyper-interpretable and then questioned and doubted.

They are endlessly reproduced or reproducible.

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Boz Deseo Garden (b. 1997, Monterey) is an artist and theorist working in Los Angeles.

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