Elemental: Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Raw Materialist Justice

Abstract

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s recent work, Unpayable Debt, makes a provocative intervention into current debates over and struggles for global justice in the wake of colonialism and in view of contemporary neo-colonial forces of extractive violence. Ferreira da Silva argues that only the return of the total value of the land and labor of the formerly enslaved and colonized would suffice to repay the debt owed to them by the global economy. Yet, such a debt is both unlimited in space and unrestricted in time, since that stolen land and expropriated labor are the very materiality of the global economy, past and present. For Ferreira da Silva, only a truly “raw materialist” apprehension of the scope of this debt, one which appreciates its elemental and cosmic composition, can enable decolonial justice to be conceived or achieved. In this paper, after outlining the arguments of Unpayable Debt, I elaborate Ferreira da Silva’s sense of the elemental stakes of global justice, extending and elaborating her thought through a reading of the recent afro-futurist film Neptune Frost (2021).

1. Belonging Without Counting

For philosopher and conceptual artist Denise Ferreira da Silva, the struggle for global justice begins with decolonization (Ferreira da Silva 2022b). Decolonization, for Ferreira da Silva, is defined as the return of the total value of the land and labor extracted1 from the colonized. Why would such a gesture mark only the beginning of justice?

In her recent book, Unpayable Debt, Ferreira da Silva invites us to consider the question: can the debt of the imperialist core to the formerly enslaved and colonized periphery be counted, let alone repaid (Ferreira da Silva 2022e)? Even within a critical perspective on capitalism, one which seeks to demystify value creation, the question is difficult to settle. As Ferreira da Silva points out, even in Capital, Marx defines the value generated by enslaved peoples and stolen lands as “non-capitalist” forms of value (Marx 1992). While acknowledging that labor power violently extracted from the colonies was indispensable to production (of the means of production as well as of commodities), Marx’s theory of value renders this input, strictly speaking, unquantifiable.

Value in capitalism is defined, according to Marx, not as use value but exchange value. Exchange value has nothing to do with uses inherent to commodities or desired by consumers but, rather, represents socially necessary labor time: the average time an unskilled worker in a particular technological and social milieu would take to produce a given commodity. Capitalists seek always to remunerate workers as minimally as possible for this time while selling the commodity for as high a price as possible on the market, keeping the difference in price for themselves as “surplus value” to be either re-invested or hoarded as wealth. Exploitation is the name Marx gives this social relation.

Even though they account for a massive, perhaps even the largest portion of the wealth hoarded by capitalist classes, non-waged modes of expropriation such as violent theft and enslavement cannot be accounted for in terms of exploitation. Relations of exploitation are based on the supposedly free agreement a laborer makes to sell their time to capital. The time of the enslaved, however, does not belong to them to freely contract. Their inputs are “priceless” in the most ironic sense of the term. Since, legally speaking, they are non-persons, slaves cannot express agency or consent in any legal sense that would be in any way contractually binding. Thus, enslaved labor (as well as contemporary unwaged labor, such as unpaid domestic labor or care work) has a use value but not an exchange value. The time of unwaged labor is treated as if a “natural resource”, somewhat like resources are considered so-called “free gifts of nature.” Expropriated value is a sort of surplus use-value: that which is expropriated is part of the surplus value hoarded by capitalists, but without a measurable value.2 Unwaged labor, along with the “value” of other so-called natural resources, belongs to the accumulation of value without counting as value. If there is literally no accounting for such violent (and ongoing) expropriation, what would it mean to restore or make reparations, to return the “total value”, as Ferreira da Silva insists we must?

While noting Marx’s incendiary comments on the irrational brutality of “so-called primitive accumulation”, Ferreira da Silva argues that Marx’s formula of value leaves us no way forward: that is, no way not only to repay the debt owed to those subjected to colonization and enslavement, but no way even to think it. Throughout Unpayable Debt, Ferreira da Silva emphasizes the fact that the labor, indeed the existence of the enslaved, has neither separability in space nor sequentiality in time that can be clearly distinguished from the master/owner. Like enclosed or expropriated land treated as a “natural” resource, and more pointedly like a cotton boil or iron ore itself (represented by bourgeois ideology as aspects of a “timeless” Nature separable from the World of history), the enslaved have no time of their own to be exploited, and, thus, their input to capital, like that of raw materials, has no measurable value. Land, minerals, and water have no price prior to their appropriation as “produced means of production”. This is because the cost of appropriation—of converting nature into capital—is not measurable in socially necessary labor time. It is measured only by relations of brute force: relations of desire and ability between those seeking to enclose, colonize, or enslave, whether through warfare, kidnapping, plunder, rape, or other means of domination.

Ferreira da Silva’s intervention in Marxist thought is twofold. First, as we have just seen, she closely identifies the unquantifiable labor of those subject to “total violence” (that is, enslaved and/or colonized labor) with the uncounted value of the “natural” resources they have supplied to capital formation. Just as enslaved labor has gone into the cotton or the iron ore, but has thereby disappeared from accounting, so also has the iron disappeared into a spindle or the cotton boil into yarn (Ferreira da Silva 2022d). All that is counted, all that can be or should be compensated, from the point of view of capital, is what happens after expropriation renders cotton as yarn, and this process of production occurs as if the value of the (enslaved) labor yielding the raw cotton does not count.3 Secondly, Ferreira da Silva argues that the limitation of Marx’s formula has to do with formal and semiotic limitations that are germane to all of modern discourse (Ferreira da Silva 2022d). That is, Marx’s formula does not so much reveal what he does not know or is unwilling to know about (which Gayatri Spivak had already argued were non-European lifeways, revealing Marx’s Eurocentrism) but reveals what Marx cannot even conceive (Spivak 1999).

By “modern discourse”, Ferreira da Silva refers to the conditions and limits of coherence set forth by Kant, taking Kant as the basic source of the post-Enlightenment discursive regime that is with us to this day in law, ethics, public policy, and jurisprudence (Ferreira da Silva 2022d).4 What cannot be counted in Marx’s formula of the accumulation of value is something that cannot be represented in the terms of the modern conceptual scheme, as such (Ferreira da Silva 2022d). This is due, primarily, for Ferreira da Siva, to the fact that post-Enlightenment discursivity stipulates that the coherence and validity of claims (economic, ethical, or juridical) depend on the separability and sequentiality of the terms involved. For example, under these discursive conditions, a statement such as “x owes reparations to y”, can only be clearly understood, let alone acted upon, if x and y (perpetrator and victim) are separable in space, and only if the reparations made in the present take place after the harm done is over. Even if we sense—which Ferreira da Silva insists we do—that past harms have intergenerational and epochal effects, with us still, the requirement of separable terms prohibits representing what we nevertheless apprehend, to say nothing of acting on the basis of such feeling.

Although formal, Ferreira da Silva’s point is not abstract. She is addressing a concrete problem faced by organizers and activists everywhere: those subjected to total violence, to past and present coloniality and/or enslavement, were and are experiencing an ongoing harm that cannot be coherently articulated as the harm it actually was and remains. The presumption of separability and sequentiality for sense-making distorts the fact that, at a physical, material level, the same elements involved in past harms are still present, transformed (through changes of state such as heat or pressure) into other states of matter. In a strictly material sense, the present moment is part of a continuously extended material reality, with each singular node of existence implicated with and effected by all others. This is why Ferreira da Silva insists the labor subjected to total violence in the past remains part of an unpayable debt we owe to those enslaved or colonized. The debt is unpayable, or cannot be discharged, because the harm is not over but lives on, in and as the very materiality of the present.

To make reparations to the formerly enslaved and colonized, we might at least attempt to calculate what wages could or should have been paid to those from whom it was stolen, were it freely contracted. Surely, such reparations might conceivably be a necessary starting point for justice.5 But it would be radically insufficient. To begin with, that which was taken from those dominated (their labor, land, and resources) was never considered by them to be merely raw material for commodification, mere components of the means of production. This means that those subjected to total violence might have rejected a wage contract, even if it had been proposed to them. In most societies not organized in terms of production and consumption, such as many cultures indigenous to the non-European world (and arguably those indigenous to Europe before the 14th century), there is generally no clear separation but only what Ferreira da Silva calls “difference without separability” (Ferreira da Silva 2022d) between individual lives and the life of the community, between human and non-human forms of life, between living and deceased or yet-to-be-born community members, and between the organic and non-organic world. Reparations as remuneration could never sufficiently address the destruction of these non-commodifiable lifeways, even if a monetized contribution to their endurance might be a welcome starting point.

Ferreira da Silva takes this point for granted, however, and is trying to articulate why it is so hard to articulate this kind of loss, let alone conceive its remediation. The wealth that is created out of enslaved or colonized labor, like the “value” that comes from cotton boils or from iron ore, cannot be consigned to the value of a labor completed in the past. This is because that labor and those material elements remain without being countable in and as the very elements of which the modern world is still composed, elements which the modern world de- and re-composes as various means of production and commodities. In Ferreira da Silva’s words,

[enslaved] labor might as well be that which [the enslaved person] is laboring on, that which her body becomes when it is applied in the effort to un/make, re/de/compose, enters into the constitution of that other thing, the cotton boils, the stewed collard greens, the clean undergarments, the shack where she lives, or the houses her descendants may or may not be able to afford to own. That labor, her body in the cotton boils, Marx tells us, does not count. It does not explain or create capital. It does transform, transfer, convert itself to what she is handling, touching, moving around. But because it is not graspable as a manifestation of her “will” or an effect of her “desire” or “drive”, whatever she makes, whatever contains a piece of her is not to be counted as wealth. And yet she is right there. In that cotton boil, in that factory in London’s East End, a child or a young woman uses up her body, moving the spindle, separating the threads, and both of them together—the captive body in the scene of subjugation and living labor—come together in the yarn. It is not only that her labor—the expenditure of her body—creates something that is then separated from her as an object of use and brought to the market to become a commodity. No, she is always there, within it, and never alone. That piece of fabric is also a singular composite that gathers the labor and the calor of everything found in the expropriated Native lands where the iron ore or gold was extracted or the cotton grown. From this tangible transduction alone, and not through the abstract translations operated by labor as a conceptum, in particular its translation as time that renders it measurable—it is possible to consider her person to matter both ethically and economically.

(Ferreira da Silva 2022d, p. 259)

Because value can only be measured in terms of time, and exchange value only includes the time of those considered to have time qua separable subjects, we cannot even see the economic—let alone ethical—value of the lifeways and the persons subjected to total violence (including the lifeways of non-humans or of inorganic matter). And yet, these unthinkable quanta form a part, perhaps the greater part, of that wealth called “capital”. Ferreira da Silva insists this formal problem is also the eminently practical problem faced by anti-colonial organizers and militants. We are still haunted by the presence, in our production and consumption, of labors and lives, rivers and lakes, mountains and valleys that were taken without ever counting. We live with the remains, in what remains, of what never was and of what was foreclosed. What would it mean to address this debt?6

To make the point concrete, an example Ferreira da Silva frequently uses is water (Ferreira da Silva 2022a). Water taken from a lake near a Mayan village in Guatemala to be commodified for use in mines or other production processes is not just water. It is also the life of the people, understood as the element into which villagers pass, upon death, and from which they are reborn into the community. There is no way to “restore” or make reparations for this lost “value” of water, because it was never truly lost, but only transformed. The lives of the Mayans, their life force as calor and heat, has passed on into other materialities. Ferreira da Silva invites us to see this perspective not as some kind of spiritualization of matter but from a strictly “raw” materialist perspective. The water that sustained the village has not disappeared. It still persists in everything that the water has subsequently become, from the steam into which it was transformed in factories to the air pollution generated by power plants. It does not make much difference whether the Mayans say, “our ancestors are in that money you’ve now made off our water”, or “our water is still in that money you’re making”. Even without a religion of ancestor veneration or a cosmology of metempsychosis, elemental persistence is a real and uncounted aspect of economy, revealing the persistence of labor as that which disappears yet remains in all that remains.

This is where Ferreira da Silva begins to suggest what decolonial justice might really look like. To continue with the example above, to share in the material benefits accruing to the heiress of a steel manufacturer by, say, receiving a portion of the steel company’s profits, would be to implicate the Mayan peoples in an unpayable debt to their ancestors (and, of course, do nothing to restore their non-commodifiable lifeways). To merely accept reparation payments for “past” harms done would entail that, in some sense, contemporary Mayans would now agree to live off their own ancestors’ stolen land, labor, and life, retroactively implicating them in their ancestors’ subjection to total violence. Ferreira da Silva argues, in Unpayable Debt, that only our “common refusal” of this situation—presumably a radical, global refusal—can be the basis for global justice.7 But to refuse to inherit the legacy of total violence is impossible, unless by means of a complete break with the world such as it is, the world organized by the total violence required for capital accumulation.

I would argue, and I think Ferreira da Silva would concur, that such a refusal must lead into something like radically global governance. Contemporary Mayans, among all others, must be able to participate in the delegation, distribution and especially the (re)definition of wealth, now, in the present. That is, only if the Mayans might speak and act from the point of view of their ancestors, now, to build a different future for themselves and for others, would global justice move on from its mere beginnings in reparations. In this way, contemporary Mayans might carry rather than cancel their unpayable debt into a different future. As far as I can tell, that is what decolonial justice, for Ferreira da Silva, and the return of the “total value” of that which was extracted might look like: active participation (including leadership) by those subjected to total violence (including, in still-difficult-to-articulate ways, the participation of non-human organic and inorganic worlds) in the deliberative and legislative project of making a future for all planetary life that is non-imperialist, non-colonizing, non-racializing, non-extractive, and so on.

To summarize Ferreira da Silva’s intervention, an apparently formal abstract, formal problem with modern discursivity turns out to be painfully concrete. The economic (let alone the ethico-political) claim of the formerly enslaved, colonized, and those subject to neo-colonial practices is impossible to fully address in terms of any discourse that presumes separability and sequentiality as conditions for sense-making or meaning-making. Such strictures, while being part of the formal, ideal, abstract (conceptual) identification of subjects considered to have legal status or moral worth, obscures both what has been taken and given as labor, labor’s elemental persistence, as well as the persistence of the elements themselves (in the shape of raw materials, means of production, and so on). The return of the “total value” produced by those subjected to expropriation (colonization, enslavement) would involve something infinite, immeasurable, unthinkable from the point of view of capital’s notion of value or of its Marxian critique. What must be addressed is the elemental continuum, something Ferreira da Silva suggests we think of cosmically, as a corpus infinitum that will have been both the past and the future, not only that the colonized and enslaved were but that we all, now and in the future, also are, in the most strictly material sense (Ferreira da Silva 2022d). The difficulty is that what must be carried forward is, paradoxically, that which was not, never allowed to be, could have been but has not yet been, life otherwise than as subject to total violence.

2. The Sense of Unpayable Debt

The argument for da Silva is not that that reparations should not be made, or that wealth should not be more equitably distributed on the planet. The point is that any attempt to merely repay the debt owed to their ancestors (those subjected to total violence) to the descendants implicates the survivors in the same violence that destroyed the lives of their ancestors. Any mere acceptance of reparations by those living in the present makes them the beneficiaries of the very same enslaved and colonized labor performed by their own ancestors. Any present return of merely monetary wealth (or mere inclusion in so-called development) to the inheritors of those formerly subjected to domination is itself a product of that domination.8

For Ferreira da Silva, however, this limit to payability is a site not only of perplexity but of potential militancy for a different global future. She calls unpayable debt a “black feminist reading tool” that casts “black light” on the modern global order of accumulation (Ferreira da Silva 2022a). By black light, she is referring of course to ultraviolet radiation, which has the power both to expose what is otherwise invisible in ordinary light as well as to break down or decompose (through radiation) that which it exposes. Here, Ferreira da Silva draws particular inspiration from the work of Hortense Spillers, who proposed the notion of “flesh” or “subjugated female flesh in the scene of domination” as a way of naming a lived reality that could not be named either as an experience or referred to a person within post-Enlightenment discourse (Ferreira da Silva 2022d).9 Since the enslaved were property, their personhood or what of them could be named, was subsumed under that of the owner/master. And, since enslaved females were denied any legal right to their own offspring, they were “ungendered”, their wombs being mere appendages of the fecundity of their owners (Spillers 1987). This means that even their experience of rape, pregnancy, childbirth, and so on (to say nothing of torture, exhaustion, premature death) was not their own, because not located in a definite or definable person.

Ferreira da Silva understands by coloniality a juridical–ethical–economic mode of total violence—to colonize is to subject to total violence, the clearest image of which is Spiller’s notion, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, how female human persons were rendered mere “flesh” (Spillers 1987). Ferreira da Silva argues that Spillers’ image of the racialized “female flesh ungendered” in the scene of total subjugation casts “black light” on the unaccounted and uncountable value stolen from colonized and enslaved peoples. Through the image of female flesh, ungendered in the scene of subjugation, we feel what cannot be expressed under the terms of modern discursive regimes. Mere flesh cannot be represented as having spatial or temporal existence of its own. Yet, flesh persists—such as in human beings endured, persisted, lived on, bonded, celebrated, struggled, created. They are here to this day.10

Taking inspiration from quantum field theory, as well as from Spillers’s notion of flesh, Ferreira da Silva challenges us to think of the “deep implicature” of each existent—human and non-human, organic and inorganic—in every other one (Ferreira da Silva 2024). A favored example in recent presentations is the fact that the potassium in a banana, today, is the mineral remains of exploding stars, thousands of years ago. Despite the distance in time, there is a kind of deep identity or co-existence in space, at the level of materiality itself, among all existence. This is why, as a conceptual artist, Ferreira da Silva spends so much time thinking about the elements (earth, air, fire, water) and about how matter transitions and transmutes from state to state while persisting through time (Ferreira da Silva and Neuman 2024). What kinds of openings arise to articulate our obligations to one another when we conceive of ourselves from the point of cosmic continuities rather than temporal discontinuities?

Here, Ferreira da Silva takes inspiration from speculative science fiction.11 If the task is to think of a transtemporal and translocal body, one that is subject to differences without separability, perhaps a genre that often invites us to imagine the as-yet unthinkable (time travel, alien encounters, alternate universes) can come to our aid. In Unpayable Debt, Ferreira da Silva offers an extended reading of Octavia Butler’s (1979) novel Kindred. In this novel, the main character, Dana, lives an unwanted double life. On the one hand, Dana lives in Los Angeles in 1976, in a house she has recently purchased. On the other hand, dwelling in this house keeps transporting Dana back in time to the ante-bellum South (Maryland in the 1830s). Through a series of harrowing episodes, Dana eventually realizes she is visiting her own past, the past of her ancestry, namely that of her great-grandmother, Alice. Dana also comes to understand that she has a mission: she must keep alive the very man, Rufus, whose sexual assault of Alice will lead to Dana’s own birth. Dana succeeds in keeping Rufus alive until he can perform the terrible deed, and then Dana can finally kill him—but only at great cost to herself. When Dana returns to the present, having discharged her duty to the past, a part of her arm remains lodged in the wall of the house, and she cannot free herself from the house (or from the past) without tearing apart her own arm.

Thus, Dana is figured by Octavia Butler as being somehow responsible for guaranteeing her own survival by ensuring that an oppressive situation of domination continues to obtain for her ancestors. Dana’s very existence is an image of unpayable debt. To maintain her ancestor’s subjugation to total violence is somehow a debt Dana owes them and must pay or else consign herself to oblivion. The immorality (invalidity, unpayability) of such a debt is visualized as the impossibility (in normal space-time) of someone going back and guaranteeing their own future existence. The contradiction this involves, preserving her existence by preserving her ancestor’s subjugation, manifests as unknowingly inflicted self-harm: Dana pays the unpayable debt, only at great cost to herself. And this cost, for those descended from enslaved life, is no mere metaphor. Ferreira da Silva writes,

What is Dana’s inheritance? What does it mean to have Rufus and Alice [who was enslaved] as ancestors? What have they left her? What does she (owe) to them? Rufus left her the impossibility of ignoring the prospect of poverty. Alice left her the certainty that the surrounding wealth, including the house she had just moved into, had been possible because of the labor beaten out of Slaves then/there. What else? Is it possible to exist in the world without always being reminded of this double inheritance—the one that took everything away and the one that remains in everything that was taken?

However these questions are answered, regardless of how they are formulated, Dana, like all other descendants of Slaves, knows them all too well, perhaps because she is never allowed to forget that this double inheritance is not a paradox. It is not nonsense. Having everything taken away and yet remaining in everything that has been taken is a long way of saying that it is an unpayable debt. “Slave labor” is the flesh and blood of capital because labor is nothing more than the transference of that which composes flesh and blood, the elemental components of everything, any and each possible and actual existent. Until our descriptions of existence take this as the point of departure, critical descriptions of the global political architecture will presume that everything that matters originated in and reflects post-Enlightenment white Europe. Since anything can be traced back there, these descriptions will be unable to account for how much that which matters only does so because it is the materialization of what has been extracted from everywhere else.

(Ferreira da Silva 2022d, pp. 168–69)

The literal substance of the present world, its elemental composition, just is what cannot be counted, since the present is a transformation of elemental reality (including the lived reality of labor) that is mistakenly identified, by post-Enlightenment terms of e/valuation, as a different or separate reality from that of the past. Even where the beneficiaries of racialization, colonization, and enslavement (the global north, the imperialist core) acknowledge that they should make reparations for the violence that created their wealth, the oppressed (formerly subjected to total violence) cannot receive reparations without in some sense inheriting an unpayable debt, a profit not only expropriated “from” but literally constituted, materially, by those harms. This is why Ferreira da Silva insists that the return of the “total” value expropriated from those subjected to total violence is impossible. She turns to Kindred because, as only fiction can do, this scenario dramatizes what is viscerally felt yet rationally inconceivable: how our present is inseparable from, in fact is the ongoingness of, a horrific, nightmarish past that is never past. That past, like Dana’s wound, is lived by the descendants of those subjected to total violence as an entirely negative relation to the present, what Ferreira da Silva calls “negativation,” a loss of something never had. This realization might lead to despair, but can also become the driving force of our “common refusal” of the racialized global order. Ferreira da Silva writes,

Enacting how our ongoing present retains that which can only be met with common refusal, the wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation’s movement is one of traversion. Not the expected itinerary, the unfolding, the progress that is the substratum of historical and biographical accounts, hers is the negativating work needed to render comprehensible Dana’s fulfillment of her charge, for it to be seen for what it could have been had not linearity prevailed in the modern image of existence. Turning attention away from the objects and relations that both explain and reinstitute racial subjugation enables the defying gesture—that is, common refusal.

(Ferreira da Silva 2022d, pp. 60–61)

Ferreira da Silva should not be understood as claiming that global justice, decolonial justice, is impossible in the sense that it should not be attempted. Rather, justice is “impossible” in a sense similar to the one argued for by Jacques Derrida, in the sense that its impossibility would be its condition of possibility (Derrida 1993). Since justice can never be limited to something like quantified or measured equity (or, for that matter, diversity or inclusion), it is radically, or, as Derrida would say, “messianically” open-ended. Justice can continue to be done so long as we never imagine it has been completely done. Decolonized life, whatever form its liberation or fullness may take, will always have been life once colonized (Ferreira da Silva 2022d, p. 265). But this condition can be rendered a positive starting point: there is no compensation for a past of oppression for some that is not bound up with the creation of a future without oppression for everyone everywhere. This struggle begins with a radically common refusal of the hellscape of the present. But it continues, and is grounded in, a conception of human existence, as implicated in an elemental materiality that traverses time and space, past and present, and places different demands on justice than those that can be met with the insufficient, even if necessary, discourses of law and public policy that presume separable harms, sequential subjects, and finite modes of reparation.

3. Elemental Justice

For Ferreira da Siva, knowing that justice has been or is being done in and with such a cosmic, non-local, transtemporal scale would have to be a matter of felt appropriateness, an issue of sense and not of measure. She is not claiming that our modern phenomenological framework, or our linguistic signification of discrete moments in history or separable organic lives, is somehow false. Rather, the modern discursive framework is unable to articulate what we all feel but never feel distinctly. Ferreira da Silva is insisting we have a singular and collective awareness that cannot be easily rendered tractable. In Kantian terms, what is at stake here is not so much a critique of reason but, rather, an exploration of how something like the imagination might have another power than the one recognized by Kant in its “legitimate” role of supplying the understanding with a sensory manifold. This would be a power to construct, to fabulate, or fictively figure difference without separability. For Ferreira da Silva that power would be to apprehend the “deep implicancy” (at quantum and cosmic levels) of all that has come to be and is yet to come in spatio-temporal existence. This is why fictive scenarios like Dana’s are critical, since they can imagine or fabulate what we are (or also are) from the point of view of the otherwise unthinkable corpus infinitum.

To appreciate the role of such fabulations might require, however, a break with the Kantian conception of the imagination and of the aesthetic in general. In Kantian terms, an aesthetic judgment is one that, while subjective, can make a valid (putatively universal) appeal to other sensibilities (Kant 2001). Kant argued that aesthetic judgements find their objective validity in a contingently universal appeal: aesthetic judgments are valid for all those in the relevant community of minds (sensus communis). That community is formed by those capable of being “disinterested” or allowing their faculties a “free play” with respect to an object (such as a work of art). Aesthetic judgments must not be motivated by, say, the pursuit of prestige or power, but as long as such judgments are not self-contradictory or nonsensical, they can make valid appeals to other relevant sensibilities—other similarly situated (disinterested) minds. Following Hume, Kant agrees that to expand (or limit) an aesthetic sense is not a matter of rational argumentation. One can articulate why one sees or hears a certain way, but one does not argue others into taste; the development of certain tastes, dispositions, and modes of feeling is presupposed by aesthetic judgment (Kant 2001).12

But Ferreira da Silva is interested in something like the inverse of Kant’s concern. The issue is a radically felt, shared sense of the elemental, something that no one can articulate as an individual experience, yet is something we all cannot but feel. Her interest in the imagination (the realm of the sensible) is not in how to coherently articulate an experience that may or may not be shared by others, but how to deal with an experience that we all seem to feel but cannot, in principle, clearly articulate. In other words, Ferreira da Silva is interested in is something like a sense without sensation, a “sensorial body without sensation” (Ferreira da Silva 2024). This sensorial body registers but cannot clearly discuss what is felt, since this event defies the categories of Newtonian space and time and causal relations, the presumption of separability, sequentiality, and so on.13

A raw materialist approach … would open the possibility for at least two sets of considerations: on the one hand, the one that focuses on the marked flesh and reads in it total violence deployed in order to extract total value; and, on the other hand, the one that focuses on the total value extracted, on its components (pars), and on what they have transduced or re/de/composed (into commodities, profit, capital, and more capital). For both to be thinkable two moves would be necessary: first the “things of the world”, emancipated from time and the categories of understanding, would no longer be addressed as phenomena. Second, they would be considered without space at the level of the elementa that have existed since the unfolding of spacetime and also entering to the composition of all that has existed, does exist, and will exist. In short, existents and events considered not as separate entities but as deeply implicated pars, as elementa, as singular compositions, would regain their orientation toward the infinitum … this image of existence would allow the Human to be released into the world to dissolve in/into/as everything with which it is already deeply implicated—everything in its deep implicancy with/in the expanse of spacetime and perhaps beyond. Not only will Dana’s charge make sense (without postulating apprehension or seeking comprehension), but the demand it recalls will be the only acceptable “meaning” for justice … once all are aware that the world, this world, is a composite of so much of what never came to be and what never will be, Dana’s unpayable debt becomes everybody’s.

(Ferreira da Silva 2022d, pp. 264–65)

Ferreira da Silva is particularly interested in touch, from this point of view. Every existent in the corpus infinitum is capable of touch. In touching anything, we are in contact, through heat and energy transfer, with everything else in the universe. We are having a sensation that cannot be limited to a finite, subjective experience, even if we usually speak this way. But, for Ferreira da Silva, as she outlines in the quotation above, our ethical and political future, our “poethical” (poetic-ethical) future, depends on a concord or at least a recognition of a co-belonging to one another (indeed, a planetary and even cosmic belonging) that is directly grounded on (and indeed remains within) experiences like touching. In a recent talk, she described “tenderness” as a possible cipher of such a poethical belonging, since to feel tender is to swell, to experience a swelling toward or with another (Ferreira da Silva and Neuman 2024). Tenderness is, thus, something that can be conceived as a potential inherent to materiality as such, since swelling, like heat and pressure, is germane to both organic and inorganic existence. As with the ungendered female flesh in the scene of subjugation, there is something being felt without “someone” that can in any way be logically (let alone legally or morally identified) as a person. If female flesh ungendered in the scene of subjugation is the black light by which we can see the nature of capital’s relation to the corpus infinitum; then, for decoloniality to proceed beyond mere remuneration, what we have to conceive is a felt or lived experience a resonance that can be shared, not because of the universal form its articulation can take but because that sense has the “quantum” character of being both singularly located in a body without being separable from any and every other body. For Ferreira da Silva, only the imagination—now in a sense perhaps wholly foreign to Kant—can render such feelings palpable, tractable.

What we need, according to Ferreira da Silva, is something like an “elemental” imagination. “Elemental” is not a metaphor, here. For example, what we must think is the effects of mining upon air—the becoming gaseous of the solid state of minerals (Ferreira da Silva 2022c). If atmospheric pollution is partly an effect of the gaseous state of carbons produced through the processing of ore by enslaved labor in Minas Gerais, then responsibility for contemporary air quality (or lack thereof) must lie with those who owned and operated the mines. This is why Ferreira da Silva closely identifies all labor directly with elements subjected to transformation by the heat and pressure of industry. The bodily energy, the life force, of labor cannot be compensated in terms of socially necessary labor time, even when it is waged. No labor (waged or unwaged) can be truly compensated, because human labor, like the carbon elements transformed from iron ore into carbon dioxide in the air, is not truly separable from the wealth that it has produced, the future in which it persists, transduced.

I find this reconceptualization of value on Ferreira da Silva’s part radical and compelling. Human labor, under the heat and pressure of total violence, passes into materialities that remain. These remains are diffuse, dispersed, global, and, thus, immeasurable. The vacation a suburbanite takes just is the transduction of iron ore into profits then spent on vacations, and the vacation is also the bodies of those subjected to total violence. We literally are living lives that are phases of (all) other lives, and all lives are phases of the same elements (of which we are all ultimately) composed. Elemental aesthetics is about being able to sense the virtual potencies of one phase (of life, matter, social structure) as present in an actual or given phase, a phase which partially reveals and partially occludes other phases. Attention to these phase shifts (differences) in an inseparable global experience is the sense, the political sense, of an elemental aesthetics of justice. And the demands of this justice may involve confronting something like the horror Dana must face: she cannot escape, cannot live without, the terrible cost of her own existence. In some sense, we must embrace, painful as it is, the intolerable nature not so much of past violence, as such, but of a present that does not exist without what remains as having been foreclosed by that violence. Then, we might join the radically common refusal of accumulation as a form of life requiring total violence.

The call for an expanded aesthetics, or an elemental sense of justice, is not a way to sidestep the necessity of legislation or jurisprudence, nor is it to gainsay the necessity of activism, civil disobedience, and militant organizing to speak the language of law and policy and economic value. Rather, an elemental sense of justice is meant to support movements by reminding them (and enabling them to imagine how) the potentialities they are striving to realize are, in a very real sense, already here, even if in the shape of all that did not and could never happen. The felt sense—the sense that we are still touching and touched by what has always been denied or refused—motivates something other than balancing the scales of equity internal to the global capitalist order. It demands the refusal of that order, entirely, in any viable future.

4. Mining as Music: Afro-Futurist Belonging in Neptune Frost (2021)

Speculative fiction, while imagining other worlds or alternative futures, is also a kind of attunement to potentialities in the present that, while felt, are suppressed or thwarted—warded off by the status quo.14 As we have seen in the case of Butler’s Kindred, speculative fiction, in particular, allows us to figure what is happening trans-temporally, inter-spatially, beyond normal requirements for coherence as well as (by being set in “other worlds”) beyond the supposedly inexorable necessities of any present historical conjuncture. Taking my cue from Ferreira da Silva, I will conclude this essay by turning to another work of speculative fiction, this time centering the sense of hearing. While we have noted the sense of touch as potentiating tenderness as a possible post-humanist, radically “raw” materialist ethos, I will turn here to the sense of hearing, and particularly how hearing music also grounds a poetic ethos of that supersede ordinary powers of articulation and redress, yet may be essential to a future we might want.15

In Neptune Frost (2021), the recent afro-futurist film by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, music plays a crucial role in the utopian transfiguration of an extractive zone. The film is set in Rwanda, in a near-future of technological hyper-development. It is a world of militarized surveillance, control and forced labor, but also one whose margins harbor a dissident, fugitive sociality where one finds companionship, healing arts, story, and, above all, music: drumming, singing, and dancing. The drama begins when Tekno, a worker in the coltan mines, is killed by an armed supervisor who catches Tekno “dreaming”: holding up a piece of coltan in reverence, eyes closed. “Back to work, dreamer”, says the guard, as he brutally crushes Tekno’s skull with a rifle butt (Williams and Uzeyman 2021). The murder sends Tekno’s brother Matalusa into grief-stricken exile, a pilgrimage to ponder how such a terrible thing could have come to pass. Simultaneously, the film’s titular character, Neptune Frost,16 is driven into exile after violently resisting the sexual assault of a Christian minister, a pastor who had just officiated the burial of Neptune’s aunt, to whom Neptune was very close. Like Tekno, Neptune is driven by grief, this time double: not only family bereavement but gender-based violence.

The wanderers encounter one another in Digitaria, a fugitive community on the margins of the world of the Authority.17 Various allegorical characters have found their way to Digitaria—among them, Memory, Psychology, and Innocent. Everyone seems to have discovered this refuge through pain: “pain is the portal” (Williams and Uzeyman 2021). On their first night in Digitaria, Neptune dreams that their body (specifically their body in love with Matalusa, with whom it seems Neptune may have a child) can somehow be a source of energy as important and powerful as coltan. The power of love Neptune dreams of becomes materialized. Soon after Matalusa arrives in Digitaria, power mysteriously returns to what had otherwise been useless piles of junk. Celebrating with an all-night dance party, the denizens of Digitaria begin to speculate. Could the love between Mata and Neptune, and the love between them all, be a revolutionary source of power, enabling them to defy, or at least do without, the Authority? They name the newly powered network of formerly junk devices “I-fi”, ingeniously reflecting a trans-human technofuture, not of subsumption of the human into the machine but vice versa. The unexpected power of love (the Neptune–Mata polarity, “binary stars”) portends and seems, at least momentarily, to realize a differently powered future.

This utopian intimation is not something felt only by the characters in the film. Viewers of the film, and hearers of the film, sense the presence both of what has been foreclosed by the Authority and yet persists, fugitive, in and as music. Through truly brilliant song, dance, and poetry (as well as through sublime costumes repurposing electrical waste and industrial trash as talismanic beauty), another future, an otherwise future, is heard in and as music, as well as in the poetic heights to which the newly emergent collective aspire. “Unanimous Goldmine”, the fugitives say to one another, affirming a future of abundance, awe, pleasure, and mutual support (Williams and Uzeyman 2021). Such a future, virtually present in and as music, also appears as a series of evocative if cryptic enunciations:18 “mining is music”; “it’s not what I see but what I see through”; “they use our blood and sweat to communicate with each other but have never heard our voice”; “the same black bodies mined and mining”; “greater and greater harmonies” (Williams and Uzeyman 2021).

A different future appears as a possible phase shift or transduction of the present. This transduction, in some sense, just is the music. The music (including the poetry and dance) is not literally that different future but is a continuation of music begun elsewhere that will continue elsewhere. The continuity of music (even inaudible music, in the case of sub-bass and super-high frequencies) exemplifies and instantiates belonging (here, belonging both to a different world, a different future) in a way similar to the tenderness Ferreira da Silva attributes to touch. Although the revolution is infiltrated and Digitaria is destroyed by the Authority, the film concludes with Neptune and a cadre of drummers still mysteriously haunting the coltan mines. Humans costumed to look like spirits play drums behind Neptune, while Neptune seems to contemplate all that has been and all that could be: “this is an observation deck” (Williams and Uzeyman 2021).

In this enigmatic scene, we are in the mines, but it appears that no one is mining. It is as if the mines are now, or could become, something other than a scene of total subjugation, total violence. Perhaps what Neptune observes is both a memory (of Digitaria) and a future possibility (mining differently, mining as music), at once. Even though Digitaria may have been destroyed, Neptune herself remains, like music itself, somehow within and against the violence. Even if all that remains is music, whatever is left of the uprising is in the music, as sounds literally inaudible but nevertheless felt. The persistence of music—literally its extension in time—stages the belonging of the past, indeed its elemental, constitutive role, in whatever remains.19

The film does not stage the end or abolition of mining but shows what else mining might be and, in some sense, already is: music. The miners were already singing as they pounded out the ore. Could they not one day mine for the sake of rhythm, turning resource gathering into an aspect of making music, rather than forcing music to make the intolerable horrors of extraction tolerable?20 This possibility leads to further speuculatio on on what really happened. Did Tekno and Matalusa really find one another in Digitaria? Or was Digitaria just the (collective) dream of the miners, the dream of a more musical mining, of mining as music? Certainly, mining could be done differently, with much more caution, more reverence, even more playfully. Mining could be done, perhaps should be done—as many indigenous cultures demand the taking of animal and plant life should be—in a sacred way, attended by ritual, prayer, even sacrifice (gift, offering).21 In any case, if there is a future of mining—perhaps the most obviously extractive process on earth—can we not imagine it being done otherwise?22 How hard is it, really, to imagine that what are now considered the most onerous yet “essential” forms of labor—mining, waste management, elder care, and food preparation—might then be understood by all as what they are often felt to be, in any case: profound expressions of love, done with tenderness and a bid for belonging, belonging even to the elements and minerals with which we are composed as much as with which we compose? An insistence on elemental love, a love of the elements that compose us and with which we compose, would militate against a merely androcentric sense of value and introduce a cosmic dimension of belonging and obligation that would trouble the corporate advertising that presents itself as meeting unquestionable, even sacred, human needs through extraction.

Music in Neptune Frost functions both as the site and cipher of how to pass from the world of the Authority into the fugitive space of Digitaria. To belong is, in a very real sense, to resonate, to vibrate with, what is no longer or not yet here.23 Although there is no guarantee that the future we want will come directly from fugitive moments of concord and co-existence, it is undeniable that, in music, we sense we are connected, belong to both what is gone and what is not yet here. Belonging in music is belonging as music, just as tenderness is touch reminding us that it is (in) our power to shape power because we are power, as much if not more than the power of coltan or any other elemental node.24 Perhaps we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against any ideology that pretends we are only separable selves and not also always together as corpus infinitum.25 The past must not be dealt with as past but as present still—not only as what was foreclosed but as what yet may be transformed, otherwise than under conditions of total violence.26