#base materialism

[chepooka]

[anarkittyy]

R.A. Judy offers that “there is no moment in which flesh is not already entailed in some sort of semiosis, that it isn’t written upon or written into some order of signification.” 18 This is a strange bind. To elucidate, for those who have not read Judy or the Afropessimists before him, specifically Hortense Spillers, “flesh,” names the register at which the human body is engaged that marks Black existence—”before the “body” there is “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” 19 The flesh precedes the body; only when it becomes “body” can it be narrative, become subject properly, or—to be Lacanian about it—enter into language. The Black subject, as flesh, struggles both to enter the scene as “body,” as well as to maintain any form of autonomy as uninscribed flesh-as-material, let's say. To return to Judy, it is always-already “written-upon or written-into.”

~

Another way of putting this: the Black body enacts and represents to all of culture an ongoing failure in maintaining a separation between the material and the symbolic and between form and content. As Frank Wilderson stated in our interview in November last year, “it mars both of these categories . . . the slave corrupts the Symbolic Order.” He went on:

Blackness mars all that constitutes symbolic beings, precisely because symbolic beings glean their representational capacity from sucking our blood. There are no Blacks in the world, but there is no world without Blacks.

~

This essay doesn’t suggest that all Black art holds l’informe and other Bataillean concepts closely. It’s a bit depressing to have to admit that, because on the other side of that doorway lies the hard truth that many Black artistic practices either consciously or unconsciously participate in the project of liberal humanism that will always, always, always “suck their blood,” to use Wilderson’s phrase and leave them bleeding out. This is no one’s fault, and in a way, I hope that wedging this Bataille thing into Black art discourse, and into general art theory anew, might inspire other Black artists and scholars to reassess our practices–—and everyone else to pursue an absolutely counter-modernism and all its hypothetical counter-legacies from a true and decisive limit point—to find, draw out, and magnify those lurking base materialistic elements in order to extend and strengthen a notion of Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness.

excerpts from, Black Bataille , Aria Dean.

[musicmakesyousmart]

Greathumour - Sisters Absurd Dreaming

Base Materialism

2020

[alephskoteinos]

The concept and theory of base materialism would have been a greater benefit to modern Satanism than any recourse to the concept of natural law, and if Satanists by LaVey's time (perhaps even including LaVey himself) had been willing to abandon natural law, they would be so much the better for it.

[alephskoteinos]

While I was still researching and writing for "Nick Land and the Right Hand Path" I ended up getting a lot of ideas for other things to write about, so consider this a bonus article.

Nick Land’s God(s) (The Destroyer and the Aeon)

Know the Self always to be everywhere, one and undivded. Avadhuta Gita, Verse 1:12 Ever since I saw Andrew Culp bring it up at the end of hi

Speculation on how Land's presentation of God (or, perhaps, "an atheistic God").

[alephskoteinos]

Very brief ramble about snakes and base materialism

Serpents of base matter

I originally wanted to write this article in September last year, as one of two articles that I would write after being inspired by Happy Ho

[boid0ll]

In “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Bataille defined base materialism as a framework dependent upon an “active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilizes all foundations.” 6 The concept is foremost a critique of existing materialisms, which, for Bataille, reinstate hierarchies of value and form by privileging the material dimension. Base materialism, instead, maps a third term, which cannot be recuperated into the high/low structure. This concept interlocks with those other Bataillean notions such as abjection, heterology, and l’informe all of which, in different ways, venture to describe the contours of, broadly put, that which is outside but makes the inside, acting as “the origin of the high and remain[ing] to torment the high and bring it back down into the low.” 7

[….] returning to Bataille’s own naming of “Black practice” as crucial to the revolutionary activity he’s after—in art and in politics. Going against the grain of modernism requires broadening the scope of analysis. Specifically, its scope must consider aesthetic modernism’s origin—I believe it is safe to say that aesthetic modernism could not and would not have taken shape as it did were it not for Europe’s encounter with Africa.

Bataille’s “Black practice.” If such activity is crucial, we must first ask what exactly this “black practice” is. We find answers—and, in the process can solve for Bataille’s problematic decoupling of practice and thought—in turning to the work of R.A. Judy, another Afropessimism-associated thinker. In his book Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poesis in Black, Judy introduces the concept of “thinking-in-action,” a riff on Du Bois’ “intellect-in-action.” For Judy, “The poiēsis of blackness . . . is process and object. It’s doing what it’s talking about.”

— excerpts from, Black Bataille , Aria Dean.

[seanlarramendi]

Base Materialism 3

For the last piece i wanted to fill the umbrella stand as intended. I coiled all 25 lbs of clay into a tube that could fit in. Obviously it doesn’t react the same way to the object as an actual umbrella would given the softness of the material.