- Abolition
- The term abolition is engaged with in both its grassroot forms and in the context of the expansive discourse of feminist abolition.
The following definitions, expressions and thoughts on abolition are just some of the ways we can consider and understand abolition.
“Abolition is a movement to end systemic violence including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going. In
other words, the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and
life over death.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore
(see: Ruth Wilson Gilmore “Foreword: Same Boat” in The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movement in the United States, by Dan Berger,
(Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing and Distribution, 2014), p. viii.)
“What if abolition is something that grows? What if abolishing the prison industrial complex is the fruit of our diligent gardening, building and
deepening of a movement to respond to the violence of the state and the violence of our communities with sustainable, transformative love?” — Alexis Pauline Gumbs
(see: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Freedom Seeds: Growing Abolition in Durham, North Carolina”, in Abolition Now!, by The CR10 Publications Collective, (Oakland: AK Press,
2008), pp. 145-155.)
“[Abolition] is about creating the conditions that would render […] imprisoning systems obsolete and unnecessary in the future. It is about trying
to imagine and trying to actualise a world that is safe for trans self-determination and sex worker autonomy and Black motherhood and
transformative justice and all of these other ways of understanding land and rematriating land and restoring indigenous stewardship. […] It is
this continuous into-the-future, into forever, this ongoing praxis of care and destruction that takes time, and necessarily occurs in the plurality of
time and spaces and in places, because the praxis has to be so particular and specific to the context.” — Zoé Samudzi.
(see: Akwugo Emejulu and others, ‘The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House: Abolitionist Feminist Futures’, Silver Press, 19 August 2020.)
- As
- presupposition
Erica Hunt's “as if”, which is the impulse of art.
(see: Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, ed. Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, (Tucson: KORE press, 2018), p. 15.)
Read by Rizvana Bradley as the “restless temporality of the future anterior.”
(see: Rizvana Bradley, ‘A Gathering of Aporetic form’, e-flux Journal, No. 105, 2019, p. 5.)
- A Tend
- From A Tending. Different from attending.
To enact radical care.
As the poet Aracelis Girmay illuminates, the work of art is realised in and through the work of “A Tending”.
(see: Aracelis Girmay, ‘A Tending’, Artsblog, November 18, 2014.)
- Determinacy
- noun
As enunciated by Denise Ferreira Da Silva:
“[T]he view that knowledge results from the Understanding's ability to produce formal constructs, which it can use to determine (i.e. decide) the
true nature of the sense impression gathered by the forms of intuition.”
(see: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability,” in Incerteza Viva: 32a Biennial of São Paulo, eds. Jochen Voz and Julia Rebouças, exhibition catalogue,
(MAMBO, 2017), p. 60.)
A limiting force.
That which encloses.
That which disrupts the communication of coming into being.
- Diffraction
- noun
Defined by Karen Barad as:
a) a “synecdoche of entangled phenomenon.”
b) a methodology: “reading texts intra-actively through one another, enacting new patterns of entanglement, attending to how exclusions
matter.” (see: Karen Barad, ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,’
Derrida Today, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2010, p. 243.)
c) That which attends to the “relational nature of difference”
(see: Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p.
72.)
For Donna Haraway diffraction is: “a narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual and political technology for making consequential meanings.”
(see: Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan© Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 243.)
- Encounter
- A conversation or convergence.
An invitation to think with/in/through and further.
An approximation, that is, an “ethical engagement with the imperfection of human knowledge”.
(see: Kameelah Janan Rasheed, "Conversation: Kameelah Janan Rasheed with Jessica Lynne,” in No New Theories, (New York: Printed Matter Inc., 2019).)
- Epistemological
- adjective (PHILOSOPHY)
Relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope.
- Kineticism
- noun
Energetic movement.
For Jessica Lynne it is:“[A] movement that refuses legibility at times.”
(see: Kameelah Janan Rasheed, "Conversation: Kameelah Janan Rasheed with Jessica Lynne,” in No New Theories, (New York: Printed Matter Inc., 2019).)
A connectivity. Perhaps even a connectivity to the right to opacity.
- Leakiness
- A radical spilling out from, a fluidity and a movement that defies legibility.
A liberatory technology.
That which cannot be made solid, but with each touch is made anew.
An interdisciplinarity or a porousness between boundaries.
Leakiness is both action and process, necessity and curiosity.
An endlessly generative space that revels in a particular kind of flux that is perennial immanence.
- Linearity
- noun
the “fact” of involving a series of events or thoughts in which one follows another directly.
From sequentiality: a descriptor of “Spirit as movement in time, a process of self-development, and describes History as the trajectory of Spirit.”
(see: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability”, in Incerteza Viva: 32a Biennial of São Paulo, eds. Jochen Voz and Julia Rebouças, exhibition catalogue,
(MAMBO, 2017), p. 60.)
To exist and become in a straight line.
That which feeds the myth of progression.
To be calculable or predictable.
- Matter
- Denise Ferreira da Silva refers to matter in its rare and obsolete definitions:
(rare) “Substance… of which something consists.”
(obsolete) “Substance without form.”
For Denise Ferreira da Silva, “blackness as matter signals ∞, another world: namely, that which exists without time and out of space, in the
plenum.”
(see: Ferreira da Silva, Denise, ‘1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value,’ e-flux Journal, No. 79, 2017, p. 1-11.)
As defined by Karen Barad:
“[M]atter is not a fixed essence; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming — not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency.”
(see: Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 183-4.)
- Ontological
- adjective
Relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
The thought structures and theories that determine how we come into being.
- Onto-epistemology
- adjective (PHILOSOPHY)
The inter-relatedness between what we know and how we come into being.
As described by Karan Barad:
“The study of practices of knowing in being.”
For Barad, “practices of knowing and being are not insolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the
world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming.”
(see: Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 185.)
- Opacity
- noun
To be “obscure” in meaning.
To engage opacity is to be alive in many ways.
It is to attend to a livingness that is not possible under the conditions of comprehensiveness.
A refusal to coalesce to the seduction of closure.
To work against particular standards of legibility.
The texture of presence, a right.
Perennial immanence.
- Poethics
- An aesthetic-artistic practice that disrupts the modern political order of racial subjectivation.
An ethical positioning and a descriptor for existence that is a radical negation of universalism.
A “[T]hickening [of] poetics with an h.”
(see: Joan Retallack and Quinta Slef, “The Poethical Wager”, in The Poethical Wager, (Berkley: University of California
Press: 2003).)
For Denise Ferreira da Silva, a Black feminist poethics is:
the “disruptive capacity of blackness [as] a quest(ion) toward the end of the world.” Which is to say, it is to “announce a whole range of
possibilities for knowing, doing and existing.”
(see: Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward The End of The World’, The Black Scholar, Vol. 44, No.2, 2014, pp.
81-97. Italics own.)
- Post-Enlightenment Thought
- The tools of nineteenth century scientific projects of knowledge that have foreground our onto-epistemological context.
In short, post-enlightenment thought consolidated the determining powers of reason, making it the sovereign ruler of science and history, and
thus the sole determinant of truth and freedom. The subject that actualises reason and freedom, the transparent “I” was situated entirely within
the spatial and temporal borders of Europe. Thus the universalism and the self-determinism of post-Enlightenment thought became the axiom of
power for the White man, leading to notions of the racial that permeates our ethical scene to this day.
- Separability
- adjective
As enunciated by Denise Ferreira da Silva:
“[T]he view that all that can be known about the things of the world is what is gathered by the forms (space and time) of the intuition and the
categories of the Understanding (quantity, quality, relation, modality) — everything else about them remains inaccessible and irrelevant to
knowledge.”
(see: Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability”, in Incerteza Viva: 32a Biennial of São Paulo, eds. Jochen Voz and Julia Rebouças, exhibition catalogue,
(MAMBO, 2017), p. 60.)
- Stasis
- As defined by Tina M. Campt:
1. tensions produced by holding a complex set of forces in suspension.
2. unvisible motion held in tense suspension or temporary equilibrium; e.g., vibration
(see: Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 51.)
- The End of The World
- Which is to say, the end of the world as we know it.
The end of the world as decolonisation, which is “the return of the total value expropriated from conquered lands and enslaved bodies.”
(see: Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘In the Raw’, e-flux Journal, No. 93, 2018, p. 1.)
The end of the world as intimately tied to the project of feminist abolitionists.