Infinite, Fragmented Anguishes

Tess Pollok interviews Aria Dean about her collection “Bad Infinity,” Afropessimism, police brutality, and Black radical thought, on the one-year anniversary of the book’s release.

By Tess PollokAugust 15, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Cultural Studies

• Politics

BAD INFINITY (2023) arrived at what was and continues to be a neurotic and divided moment in American history, one in which glib references to fake news, culture wars, and crisis actors do little to capture the acute anguish of our increasingly fragmented collective psyche. Across 10 essays and works of criticism drawn from the past seven years, Los Angeles–born artist and writer Aria Dean processes the raw material of ideology, narrative, identity, and subjectivity into cohesive paradigms for understanding contemporary art, culture, and Black radical thought.

Bad Infinity is a spontaneous and exuberant probe into cognitive dissonance and its discontents. It’s also a testament to the myriad powers of form, interpolating love letters with conversations and personal essays with theoretical critiques in an attempt to make sense of the contradictions that riddle our understandings of race, gender, theory, and art. Dean calls on a diverse range of artists and thinkers—including Afropessimist writer Achille Mbembe, video artist Arthur Jafa, filmmaker and author Harun Farocki, and scholar R. A. Judy—to bolster critiques of American narratives ranging from the spectacle surrounding police violence to woke infighting among artistic elites.

In advance of the book’s first anniversary this August, Dean and I spoke over Zoom about the various reference points that inform both the book and her wider artistic practice.

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TESS POLLOK: What really surprised me about your book is the way you draw on history, art, sociology, and theory to support your ideas. To me, the multidisciplinary aspect was the most exciting thing about it: getting to see different schools of thought unexpectedly interacting with one another, like in the essay “Black Bataille,” when you commingle contemporary notions of Blackness with Bataille’s thinking on abjection. What made you think to craft essays around influential thinkers across different eras, different mediums?

ARIA DEAN: The book is a selection of my writing from 2016 to 2023, so, by nature, it reflects that my interests as an artist have always been very multidisciplinary. I think what’s most reflected in the collection is the difficulty inherent in having interests that range from art history to media theory to net.art to post-Marxist thought. It’s all coming from the liberal arts college mentality—it’s a grab bag, and there’s no clear sense of an orthodoxy. But I think a position comes through in the collection of the works together, and it’s clear to me when I look back on it now that I was working toward a singular framework of thought.

In the essays “Channel Zero” and “Trauma and Virtuality,” you offer different perspectives on the political and art-historical impact of the police brutality video. “Channel Zero” investigates acute instances of police violence and the judicial function of witnesses, while “Trauma and Virtuality” compares the video works of Jordan Wolfson and Arthur Jafa with respect to, well, trauma and virtuality. There’s a phrase you use— “the ethics of witnessing in a specifically American context.” What are the ethics of witnessing? Do you see notions of witness and violence changing in the United States?

“Channel Zero” involves a frenzy around police violence, thinking of it almost as a play or a site to negotiate the ethics of witnessing at large, whereas with “Trauma and Virtuality,” I was thinking more about what that means for viewers of these videos and the emotionally charged conversations we have around whether or not we should be watching police brutality videos. There are people who say, “I don’t watch these videos because it’s spectacle,” or “I don’t watch these videos because people are getting hurt,” and there are also people who say, “It’s necessary to watch these videos to understand the brutality of police violence.” That made me curious—what does it mean to see something like that on your social media feed? To what extent is violence real to you in that context? Jordan Wolfson and Arthur Jafa became these perfect examples of artists making work that actively asks what it means to witness violence in the virtual realm.

“Channel Zero” was written more recently, in response to the George Floyd protests. I was trying to write a structuralist critique of police brutality videos that avoided the affective, emotional runoff of them—in the beginning, I just wanted to talk about the structure of that kind of cinema. But then the subject matter became too intense, and it felt inappropriate to stop there. This is something I’m still trying to figure out with my writing: what do we actually do about all of this? I’m still not sure. I’m interested in what happens on a structural level when we interact with these types of media. These essays were my attempt to grapple with the idea of violence as an actual experience versus violence as a witnessed, mediated, and virtual experience.

“Channel Zero” is also about predictive policing. What do you think about the role of algorithms and data in policing?

The question of profiling has always been linked to the question of how we deploy identity politics. It’s linked to this assumption that if you are in this category of personhood, you can be predicted to see things this kind of way and make this kind of decision. The logic of that is interesting to me. There’s an increasing fixation on identity politics at the expense of all other issues. I think people feel that identity politics and representation have failed to save us in the way that they claimed they would. There’s less of an interest now in issues of surveillance and big data—in whether or not the police’s computer has access to your private history—than there is in identity politics.

There’s something self-absorbed about our national character, I think—or there’s something unique and almost violent about how personal our discussions of these issues become.

That seems true, from my experience. The thing about structures of race, gender, and religion is that they’re easily atomizable. Your impression of yourself as a Black woman or a white woman or an Asian woman—it’s all so specific, even down to the time period or the diaspora with which you identify yourself. The issue is that all you have to map the diversity of these identities is personal, emotional experience, and there’s no ability to confirm the collective truth of that material.

I’ve been rereading a lot of Marxist writing lately that has been emphasizing the importance of understanding class structure with respect to these issues. It’s a function of the Americanness of our whole situation that we’ve all invested so much time in interrogating our identities and wondering if our experiences are true or not. The thinking should emphasize what you should or can do, as opposed to who you feel like you are or should be.

“Channel Zero” also reminded me a lot of Avital Ronell’s “Television and the Fragility of Testimony,” which is her essay on the Rodney King riots. It’s interesting to hear you say that “Channel Zero” was written in response to the George Floyd protests because so much has changed between the two events—even our language, referencing one as a “riot” and one as a “protest.” In 1994, Ronell was starting to examine the use of video footage in the courtroom, and in 2023, you’re examining the use of VR footage, digital reconstructions, and 3D renderings in the courtroom. I especially liked your quote about “the gap between story and meaning” making police brutality videos difficult to interpret.

I’m interested in models and how hyperrepresentational they are. It makes them operate differently from the way true subjects would. I’m also fascinated by the idea that the model could usurp the video as admissible evidence and an index of the truth. I’m not interested in AI or deepfakes or any of the panic that comes with people going, “How will we know if a picture is real?!” That feels almost anterior to the problem of the model. I’m just interested in how people see things and what it feels like to see things.

In “America’s Bob Morris,” you agree with Lacan that subjectivity is “best defined by pure lack.” And in “Frank B. Wilderson III in Conversation with Aria Dean,” Wilderson says that “narrative is, generically, anti-Black. […] Narrative cannot accommodate an object of absence.” What are your thoughts on the relationship between subjectivity and Blackness?

I’ve been interested in subjectivity since I was in college because I did a lot of research into architecture and phenomenology, which led me to media studies. I’m fascinated by how the subject is formed, produced, reproduced, and recycled in the life cycle of the internet. The idea that the Black subject has a specific contour or shape to it—is that true or not? I’ve trained my focus on Blackness because of my interest in identity politics and how I see my own life. I see Aria the individual, Aria the Black woman, Aria the girl who grew up in Pasadena … Again, I still don’t have an answer as to which of these identity categories is definitive.

I also think a lot of my interest in Blackness stems from being dissatisfied with the white Western philosophy canon that I was exposed to in college. It talked about the Western subject as human and offered Blackness as another pole contrasting that. Thinking more critically about what Blackness is and does in relation to subjectivity could create a mode of thought that is more flexible and possibly more politically liberatory for people—not just Black people, but everyone interested in a free and radical subjectivity.

My thinking about a lot of these ideas has evolved considerably, even since 2021, 2022. I’ve written a lot about fragmenting and destabilizing the subject and different frameworks that make that possible, such as Afropessimism and posthumanism, but I’m not as sure as I once was that those are effective tools. They’re not as divorced from capitalism as they claim to be. It’s actually good for capital market tendencies for there to be these discrete and highly territorial identity groups—they’re just more vectors for buying and selling. At the end of the day, capital is indifferent to whether or not these thinkers form a coherent subject, because if you’re spending money, it doesn’t matter whether your ideologies contradict one another. Over the years, I’ve become more critical of collective identity as a concept. I wouldn’t say that I’m a rugged individualist now, but I do see some of the dangers of dissolving the individual into a collective.

“America’s Bob Morris” is a love letter to Robert Morris and his work on subjectivity, with specific emphasis on disentangling the individual and the collective. Why has he been so influential on your thinking?

I’ve always loved his work. While studying him, I stumbled across this text he wrote called “The Birthday Boy,” which was commissioned on the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo’s completion of the statue of David. He basically just talks about how art history is 500 years of white boys stomping around making art and, like, causing wars. I’ve always been interested in white male artists who don’t experience themselves as the neutral center of human experience, because their whiteness and their maleness is so nonspecific. They don’t acknowledge it or notice it as a way of being in the world or appearing to others in the world. One thing I’ve always loved about Robert Morris is that he plays characters in his video and performance works who are self-aware and interrogating themselves about the role of the white man.

A more simple reason I’ve always loved him is that he’s an artist who writes. He wrote so much during his life and was actively interested in philosophy. He read a lot of Marcuse, whom I love. I think of him as a security blanket and comfort because, throughout my career, I’ve felt frustrated by people’s expectations of me as an artist and writer. People look at my work in visual art and go, “Oh, well, you’re really a writer, and the art is just supplemental,” or people look at my writing and go, “Oh, well, you’re really an artist, and the writing is just supplemental.” I have so much to say with both of these tool kits, but I’m always being asked to choose one. It was great to have Robert Morris as a reference point, because he always excelled in both ways.

I also just deeply admire him as an artist because he never settled into a personal style. The look and the feel of his work were always developing. For him, it was okay to have an identity and to operate from that viewpoint, but he understood it was never real and that it was just a lens to examine your experience. That’s how I try to think about my own work. I understand that I have an identity point from which I examine things, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of what I’m doing. I may make work that relates to it, but fundamentally I know that it’s not real.

To circle back to our conversation about identity politics, “Black Bataille” is a reexamination of Bataille’s notion of base matter influenced by contemporary understandings of Blackness, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. How did you draw connections between these two points of thinking?

I was really interested in Bataille in college, but I found it difficult to understand his work. I didn’t really get into it until later; I’m in a reading group with my friends, and we read this Bataille text on fascist psychology that got me back into thinking about his world. I was rereading some of his work on base material and there was this bizarre throwaway line where he was, like, “Black communities do this, blah blah blah,” and it really struck me that there was this small, weird reference to Black people. I was wondering why he was thinking about that, given that he’s a philosopher with a vested interest in politics. I ended up focusing on that and reverse engineering his thinking to come up with the essay. It was deep in the COVID-19 lockdown during this time, so I had a lot of energy for reading, and I started comparing him to other things I was reading at the time (a lot of Rosalind Krauss on formlessness), and that ended up tying in in a big way. 

I was also getting frustrated, especially because this was during the George Floyd protests, with the sudden interest in Black artists and the instinct to be, like, “We have to put a painting by a Black painter on the cover of Vanity Fair.” There was no desire to find Black artworks that had a critique of value in them. It was just, like, here’s my Black object! But I know that beyond the corporate, commercialized impulse towards hoarding Blackness, there’s a rich body of work by Black artists that is self-reflective and reflexive. I wrote toward that frustration.

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Aria Dean (born 1993) is an American artist, critic, and curator. Until 2021, Dean served as the curator and editor of Rhizome. Her writings have appeared in various art publications, including Artforum, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Art in America, and Topical Cream. Dean has exhibited internationally at venues such as Greene Naftali, Foxy Production, and American Medium in New York; Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles; and Arcadia Missa in London. Dean also co-directs As It Stands LA, an artists’ project space that opened in 2015. Dean lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles.