And

And

Joint for sequence, for addition, for interjection, for relation. This word—and—marks connection. Then, as such, there is a mysticism of the and, the word is the announcement of a mystical tradition that has protected itself by carrying itself as social practice and performance. Mysticism because and necessarily compels a search for occasion, for context, for questioning—a questioning that is also a questing—towards. Towards what?

How

Because the word and the concept and exists, the question and quest for how things—whatever those things might be—are in relation to each other is staged through a kind of hint and hinge, the joint and elbow and bend of and. The word and is irreducibly plural and otherwise than itself insofar as it marks its own relation to contemplative practice, to contemplative spirit, the question and quest for how. And marks a leaning-towards something otherwise than itself through the fact that its ground of conceptual being is the very possibility of connection, togetherness, inhabitation, sociality, relation.

And if leaning-towards, it grounds the fact of plurality, of otherwise possibility, as the vibration from which life emerges. And if asking how, then and also posits what. Because to ask the question that and posits, to go on the search and compels—how are these things in relation—is to also ask, what are these things in their separability? It is to ask what are these things that they can be in relation? Such that the very question of and quest for and is itself the marking of a contemplation of multiplicity, a kind of centering of gravity that also is propulsive, a kind of mass object that is only insofar as it marks connection.

I begin with and, how, what, because Carter Mathes's moving text Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights stages the question of and questing for connection continually. His documenting of the Black Arts Movement and its experimental practices are the question of and quest for connection against the ongoing practices of racial categorization and the violence that attends such western thought-theological, thought-philosophical, thought-historical. The various artists Mathes writes about—even in their variegated methods and conflictual thoughts and practices—occasion the consideration of the relation between experimentation, sound, and the possibility for liberation of black life from the strictures of white supremacist violence. I begin with and, how, what, because Mathes's text compelled in me a thinking and searching and journey asking: what is the relation of black social life and its necessarily experimental form to what is considered the mystical?

With and is marked a relation that is momentary and ephemeral, and has the capacity to be a stop-time to and queering of normative linear Newtonian spacetime. Momentary and ephemeral like song, like sound. And this because the and marks relation that compels the search, called how and what, in order to think and imagine and produce the very occasion for relation. And as a search for connection, it is a search for a mysticism that is not singular nor individual but is an outpouring of and unfolding into absolute, and absolutely impure, possibility, a mysticism that is not a renunciation of the social but a gathering unto itself of absolute, and absolutely impure, possibility of sociality. Why impure?

Between the absolute poles of fixity and fluidity lies a constitutive impurity whose sign shifts from motleyness to blackness and back again. This impurity is a site to be mined and a force to be regulated. It is the source of the collective, creative force that is the object of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's analytic attention, but in tracing it back to an originating imposition, they lose sight of its priority, presence, and futurity. While they are right to assert that the motley crew is prior to modern racialization, they are unable to see how modern racialization prepares and provides its refuge (Harris 2012, 53).

Refuge

What the artists—visual, sonic—Mathes documents are each pursuing is a kind of refuge, an inwardness that is not categorically distinct from but suffused with...