[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness and Materiality / blockbusting

[Johannes Birringer]

dear Ken

thanks to all for this week's postings –  very provocative commentaries that have made me wonder how i've fallen behind also on
understanding or even getting into contact with references some of you made to OOO  or objects,  new materialisms, etc.  
Ken, in your comment below you speak of not wanting to let liquid blackness "sink into the bog of object-orientation (which I mostly find to be a grievous form of apolitical materialism)"
Is there room here to explain to us what object orientation means here?  and what would the sinking mean? 

(Cameron, for example, argued that "the materiality of digital image manipulation quite literally renders Kanye West into a visual generation of something that.. is happening in many ways across lots of artistic productions" -
again I am not sure I can follow, what does this mean>? not sure I would think arguing for digital materiality is a matter without contention?, and you speak in our post of the problematic notion of "abstraction of blackness"  (has there
not been considerable contentiousness about the figural vs the abstract in black art, and that abstraction (was it Kara Walker who upset folks? I forget) was a problem?). Sorry for being inarticulate.

Yet I have not worried about the "new materialism" much, however noted with surprise that it's apparently now also reached academic performance studies (a recent issue of The Drama Review was dedicated to
materials, objects and plasticitities, which hardly seemed new or has been without relevance to embodied performance and scenography of course for the longest time), and the editors mention joyfully that  Jean Bennett's "Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things" (2010) is all the rage in town.   Is it?  i guess depends on the town. 

Ken your comments on oil and L.A. & blockbusting are fascinating! I am sending your post to my friends in Houston.

regards
Johannes Birringer


[Ken schreibt]

>>So this might be an example of what I meant when I said how blackness as technology of domination (redlining and blockbusting) can become an agent of radical transformation.
..
I think it is a promising idea to refine the figure of black liquidity along the “diagnostic and the expansive” poles as types of available action performed by the term itself. This prevents liquid blackness from sinking into the bog of object-orientation (which I mostly find to be a grievous form of apolitical materialism), and begins from that most basic political question, “what is to be done?"
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