Entanglement

By Che Gossett

 

Entanglement:

“the articulation of a theory is gathering place, sometimes a point of rest as the process rushes on, insisting that you follow” Barbara Christian
Entanglement is theory’s condition of possibility

Entangled flesh subtends personhood

Personhood, the Human and individuation are all scenes of subjection

Abolitionist entanglement
Blackness as the underside of entanglement

What is throwing shade but a black queer refusal of the Enwhitenment? shade as critical darkness

 

After the end of the world:

Star Wars is all about immanence — being one with the force — and entanglement and transindividuation and artificial intelligences

 

Pinocchio is actually a story about artificial intelligence Get Out as a critique of the posthuman afterlife of slavery

 

Don’t you love how answer to end of our anti-black, anti-queer/trans, settler colonial & capitalist world is Elon Musk giving it an afterlife on Mars?

 

White technofuturism ain’t new. know who was a white technofuturist? Christopher Columbus!

 

White guy in Manhattan walking around with an “Occupy Mars” shirt = peak gentrification as colonization

 

Now that Elon Musk is on Trump’s advisory team does that mean we get to send the White nationalist House to Mars? Bye technofascism!

 

Apparently the human “technosphere” — i.e. the built environment — is 30 trillion tons. towards abolitionist infrastructure.

 

“we have to live out the human if we are to move on to our own future” Samuel Delany — the Einstein Intersection, the original title of which was A Fabulous, Formless Darkness

 

Stealing away from the World

 

Comics pose the question how do the inHuman (as supernatural/mutant) relate to the Human, and yet this is already a question posed by black thought to the world

 

Following Coltrane, how to move & think “out of this world”?

 

The blackness of dystopia and utopia:

“I would hope for a place where we could confront the enigma of blackness” Frank Wilderson
the time of blackness is a queer temporality

in an open relationship with Afropessimism

Afropessimism: can’t live with it and can’t live without it LOL. #doublebind

 

Blackness as Trans/Gender Trouble:

“If we look closely we also see that gender itself cannot be reconciled with a slave’s genealogical isolation” Frank Wilderson

“We have to show the world that we are numerous.” Sylvia Rivera, a grammar of the trans multitude.

Trans as gender in ruins, let’s all be ruined together. What happens when we are ruined together?

Trans is/as blur

Growing a goatee after 8 or so years of not having one

Lipstick ? pics to follow

Hearts afire for hairy femme-spirations like Prince

Shaved goatee: it was too much gender trouble

 

Chromapolitics:

black love and black thought are both never enough in and always too much for this world — make space for black rage

the hope of Afropessimism

 

Animality:

 

Escaped Cow Rampages Through Long Island Streets, Takes out Police Car

 

It was the animal(s) that allowed the human to take “one small step….” into space

 

“But who, we?” Derrida. = question for category of “femme” category of “human” category of “animal” and beat goes on

 

octopolitics

 

“For an octopus, its arms are partly self – they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain’s perspective they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own.” Peter Godfrey-Smith

 

blackness is “companion species” trouble

 

maybe decolonial animal studies would mean an end to “animal studies” as a disciplinary formation?

 

Animal rights in the West is haunted by the figure of the slave

 

Tfw you discover that Husserl wrote about jellyfish subjectivity & Merleau-Ponty about animal & human horizons of being as intertwining

 

the projection of sex/gender binary onto animals by humans reinforces it for humanity

Decolonization is an interspecies affair

Abolition is an interspecies affair

 

blackness is a way to re-think “the animal” beyond the human (as a refusal of it), through “invisible agency” (Frederick Douglass) & fugitivity

 

What of the animal after the end of the World?

What will entanglement be after end of World?

What of the animal in the undercommons? Undercommons ecology

Cosmopolitics of blackness:

 

matter is social, a gathering

 

“It’s after the end of the world: don’t you know that yet?” Sun Ra.

“No, blackness is not the pathogen in afro-pessimism, the world is. Not the earth, but the world, and maybe even the whole possibility of and desire for a world.” Jared Sexton

 

Reading:

Books are a companion species.

reading done generously and receptively and promiscuously, reading as submission, reading as non-monogamy and resisting the notion that we must be married to any particular thought style/theory/philosophy

reading as polyamory: haven’t we all had so many lovers and don’t we continue to yearn for more???

reading as insatiable desire, as taking in more than one, reading as being more than one

reading as scission, reading as torsion, reading as suture

reading as lust

reading as tactile, as fingering the pages with pleasure and anticipation, reading as eroticopolitics

reading as showing the fiction of the subject/object distinction and their relation of interplay

reading as entanglement, as ontology, as being with, as becoming, as world(s)ing, as dividual, as beyond the threshold(s), as touching feeling

reading as play and exchange, reading as willing, reading as vulnerability, reading as opening and stretching, reading as anality, reading as hole because there’s no Whole, reading as non-sovereign, reading as virality, as contagion reading as transmission, reading as transference, as being both analyst and analysand, as projection and introjection

reading as being a bossy bottom: pleasure of text indeed

 

---

Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a PhD candidate in trans/gender studies at Rutgers.  They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University and the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York, and the 2014 Martin Duberman Research Scholar Award from the New York Public Library. Most recently, they received a Palestinian American Research Committee grant and are currently serving as a 2017-2018 Queer Arts Mentor. They are working on a book project titled Blackness, the Beast and the Non Sovereign.