PROUD FLESH:
So we can make the connection between what you call poesis, the breaking down of the status-quo order of “Man” and something like dub poetry, for example.
SYLVIA WYNTER:
Exactly! The whole world is organized about this aesthetics of rhythm, you know? It’s sweeping everywhere. I’m amazed at the young people of the world, they live in music. They carry these “Walkmen.” They’re sharing the same stars, the extraordinary knowledge that they have about this music. What we are trying to do is something that’s happening. You could call it the new autopoetics of cognition–when a Billie Holiday sings; the dub poets or the rappers, and its not only their songs but their style which is all over the world and everybody is living that kind of way. Obviously this is a question of what it is to be a good man or woman of your kind in different ways. There is the orthodox way, which is to think economically, and then there’s the thing of, “How do we live our lives?” And I can’t help feeling that the role of Black music has been to bring the spiritual into the secular. The whole idea of “Soul.” In Fanon’s concept, the belief in “spirit” or “soul” is a scientific concept; there is this other thing (consciousness, spirit, soul, even mind) that the body makes possible but which is not a property of the body itself. This is happening in the music; and the paradox is that capitalism is carrying it! All over the world! By means of its market-driven, invented technologies.
PROUD FLESH:
[Laughter] Okay, finally, for the record, what’s your theoretical relationship to Aretha Franklin!?! Once, you said, maybe paraphrasing, slightly, “When I write, I want to sound in theory the way Aretha Franklin sounds in song.”
SYLVIA WYNTER:
Yes, I think, I WOULD LIKE TO FEEL THAT EVERYTHING I SAID HAD A LIBERATING AND EMANCIPATORY DIMENSION. That’s what she has. Black singing, at its best, it has this–like Gospel. That I wanted. But also I was always aware that it wasn’t that I was thinking anything linearly. It never came linearly. It tends to come the way a flower blooms. It comes unexpectedly; and it has nothing to do with “genius.” It has to do with this beginning to question your own “consciousness.” It’s the idea of poesis, again; there is also a poesis of thought; a new poesis of being human. These concepts don’t come in a linear fashion. They build up. They build up, you know? So as you’re talking they build up and they build up the way music builds up and up and up until you get that sudden …
Sylvia Wynter, Greg Thomas inter/views Sylvia Wynter for ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics and Consciousness. Nr. 4. 2006. (via endlessandrea)
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