For : Towards World-Building: Sciences at the End of the World
Panel at Refiguring the Future, NYC
Eyebeam x Refresh.Art
February 9th, 2019
CLICK HERE TO WATCH PANEL LIVESTREAM FOOTAGE
Exploring the settler ontologies that govern technoscientific inquiry, this panel will engage technology towards a liberatory, world-building politic.
w/ Rasheedah Phillips, Artist and Co-Creator of Black Quantum Futurism
Alexander G. Weheliye, Professor, Northwestern University
Maandeeq Mohamed, Writer (moderator)
_
I.
“I seek through pain, to achieve a higher level of consciousness, which is a Pleasure beyond the physical nature of mere pain. Through my infliction of pain on others, I assist in their liberation as I am also liberated. My connection with my partner under such circumstances is deeper and more totally real than any other experience two people can share. “
— From “Reflections on Sadomasochism and Race by “The Real Don Perry.”
Black Leather In Color. Volume 1, Number 3. Fall 1994.
BL FEMME ROPE BOTTOM PUP 4 NB/BW/L/WOC. 26. NYC.
LF other weird and busy girls to walk me. likes : consent, your dirty underwear, restriction. will bite at : time wasters and scaredy cats. needs regular discipline and rigorous training. play only.
ROPE TOP BW 4 ROPE BOTTOM BW. SERIOUS ONLY. 35. NYC.
What we’re not gonna do is front : LF series of conversations that don’t lead to dates or drinks. Seeking sub 4 discipline and denial. Must love order. Must text back. No sex (not ever.)
“It’s a match.”
II.
“Think of it as a labour which gives birth to a joint consciousness and connects two lives at the intersection of their spirits. This is a realness of feeling and emotion that approaches true ecstasy. This is the whole aim of SM, to enable mere mortal flesh to touch God. To create an authenticity of feeling and emotion that allows one to feel the living Spirit which resides in all things. The instruments of torture used to achieve this state are merely tools of a higher master.”
What aspect of fantasy isn’t a technology? In celebration of a blind faith in the inexplicable human desire to discover utopic connective methodologies, fantasy allows us access to a “poetic in-between;” a worship-like manifestation of a self-sensing copresence, unique to an individual, who, with themselves in solitude or tandem, experience a range of realtime emotions triggered by voluntary ritual performance or reading. These rituals then grant the individual(s) agency to feel a deep sense of proximity between body and spirit, making way for transformation and reflection with an very otherworldly copresence. The activation of this routine highlights the relationship between the emotional and sensing, uniting it with its physical container beyond the reach of any retelling. The feeling connection and its relationship with itself must be allowed to play and stretch within its container, to be celebrated, and to evolve through its unique performativity— to be given full access, read “liberation,” to the space of genuine euphoria. This is where it connects with its intellectual counterpart, the privilege of actively knowing knowing. It must be worked for. Once unlocked, it erects a layer of new privacies, freedoms, knowledges, and pleasures, dangers, and dogma to be meticulously organized. A continued harnessing of that access comes through rigorous rearranging of resources like time or heartspace and encourages a creativity through the call for the necessity to manufacture situations that maximize the occurrence of growth through structured recreation.
This fantastic mechanism allows us to live in folds of shared reality nestled in a private space sequestered for the control over the automation of euphoria. Here we find agency over self through interiority. Through inquiry and recreation, users of this technologies reject definitive systems of pleasure, healing, time, and embodiment. Especially important for the black, queer, and disabled identified, fantasy (read: worship) provides a route towards privacies and agencies that resist taxonomies historically organized by anglocentric educational, and medical (read :carceral) cultures, making room for the construction of interdependent ecologies that are able to better support their needs..
III.
“We are truly prisoners of the flesh, and in liberating ourselves of this imprisonment we find ourselves at One with the universe. Yet permanently leaving the earthly coil is not realistic. One path can achieve a similar state of grace via certain paths, under the tutelage of a knowledgeable Master, and realize the closest thing to Nirvana that mere mortals will ever achieve [...] These are not new fetishes somehow learned from white men. These practices have nothing to do with vestigial slave mentalities or low self-esteem. [...] If today I am a dominant top, it is because at one point in the past, I learned what it is like to be a bottom, and now I can pass on the lessons on life and strength of character, principals, moral values and sensitivity which define a whole noble lineage of [those] that began before my time and will end long after theirs.”
I was greeted first by the altars in her house, scattered, taking up space in all of its corners. Bags of candy, booze, beads, and candles lined each arrangement, placed with care alongside stacks of paper with words scrawled across them in languages I didn’t recognize.
“You can’t be naked in front of that one,” she said, as she touched my arm with one hand, making sure I heard her the first time, and pointed with the other.
She let go, replacing my arm in her hands with the handles of my bags and began making the four foot walk through the kitchen into the living area and disappeared. I caught my breath. I struggling to take my shoes off.
“We’ll do it in here.”
“Can I sit down?” I yelled through the curtain separating the two spaces.
“No.”
I waited there for a moment looking, wondering what it would be like to cross over in home where crossing over clearly had so many different meanings. How much openness was I willing to allow in a space of such unfamiliar worship?
I joined her in the next room; hanging on the walls were ropes and knives, artworks and calendars.
“Don’t sit anywhere,” she repeated, ”don’t talk, and don’t fuck with your underwear. Take everything else off and leave it on the floor next to you.”
I dropped my purse first. We really were here only to do what we had agreed now that all the words were out of the way.
I watched her silently from my place to the left of her bed, as she shuffled around covering some of the other alters with blankets. Finished, she grabbed the first rope off the wall and turned toward me. Pulling one string, the bundle collapsed; its length falling to the floor with a dull dry thud. She stood directly in front of me watching.
“What else do you need to be ready?” She asked.
I told her I was cold and then stumbled over the word water. Her hand grabbed the back of my neck and lead me to our starting position leaving the unbound hemp length heavy on my neck.
“Down, Girl. Stay.”
From my position on knees, I waited for her to return, wondering if this work would feel any different under a roof where these unfamiliar Gods lived. I had never met one. Could they see us? I closed my eyes and prepared to journey into a divine space of my own amidst the overwhelming evidence of the other. Slipping off into subspace, I lost my sense of being a biped and saw my own light.