In 'Four Theses on Aesthetics' (2021), an essay by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Rizvana Bradley, the two theorists rethink aesthetics through blackness. In doing so, they propose other approaches to key concepts like infinity, composition, seriality and generativity. Some general points are outlined below.
The ‘aesthetic’ was a term innovated in German philosophy in the late 18th century from an Ancient Greek term aesthesis meaning ‘perception via the senses.’
The “aesthetic” as it is used by Ferreira da Silva and Bradley, refers to the order of the senses and the sensible (the understanding of what can be perceived by the senses) that came about with this German theoretical innovation.
The invention of 'aesthetic' theory in German philosophy came about at a time of great political tensions within European empires, including, but not limited to, the French and Haitian Revolutions under the French Empire and the American Revolution under the British Empire.
Within this context, as scholar David Lloyd has explained, the aesthetic was not just concerned with refining taste but with making human beings into civil subjects against the notion of an undeveloped racial other.
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Blacklight, 4Waters-Deep Implicancy, 2018 (left). The Otolith Group, Zone ll, 2020 (right).
Racial Logic & Formalism
As such, the aesthetic -- how the senses are ordered and the value they are given -- came into being through a racial logic of anti-blackness.
The aesthetic, as it is now commonly understood through its original German conceptualization, privileges form. In other words, it judges objects by focusing on their shape, structure and internal arrangement.
As a result, da Silva and Bradley question formalism in the analysis of artistic creation. Formalism is the practice of describing the shape, structure and arrangement of an object in order to come to a judgement about it.
The issue with formalism is not just that it has discriminated by asserting that, for example, some shapes and colors of human beings are more beautiful than others, and in doing so, established an aesthetic ideology of white supremacy. More simply put, the issue with formalism is not just that it has been used to promote racial thinking.
The issue with formalism is that it also follows a racial logic. Therefore, no matter what the object of scrutiny, the way that it comes to any judgement about any object is informed by a fundamental anti-blackness in its very structure of thought.
This racial logic is the model for what is presently called Machine Learning. It is the "intelligence" that is referred to in the phrase "Artificial Intelligence" as it is currently used.
