The Unbearable Immaterial: Non-Being and Performances of Negativity

This paper analyazes Berlin-based choreographer Ligia Lewis’ performance titled minor matter, a transatlantic collaboration between dancers from the U.S. and South Africa but based in various European countries. I am interested in how minor matter problematizes intercorporeal contact and relationality by foregrounding what aesthetic theorist Sianne Ngai describes as minor and unprestigious affects, as well as through an emphasis on choreographic qualities such as slipperiness, collision, and falling. What kind of sociality can be speculated in this embrace of negative affect, negative philosophy, and negative kin-aesthesia? In Lewis’ performance, negative kin-aesthesia has anti-cathartic qualities which trouble idiopathic empathy, while also staying with the trouble of wounded kinship between African and African-derived persons. We are invited to confront these questions: How does affect/sensation/intensity “move” between dead things (and Humans)? In minor matter, do we discern a “community of experience” endowed with political plentitude, or does the performance direct attention to the number of ways in which blackness continues to exist in an intimate relationship with death globally? While the study of Black art and performance often orbits around celebration, utopia, agency, and the overcoming of violence; this paper follows a negative line of inquiry as a way to underscore how transcendental argumentation buttresses the anti-blackness it seeks to move beyond. I argue that by remaining ambivalent to the “tyranny of positivity” which drives the major-ity of contemporary Black art and its theorization, minor matter punctures and punctuates a space for questioning the agential and relational gravitas often bestowed upon representationalist frameworks.