2025-2026 Sarah Lewis-Cappellari's seminar: Unsettling Representation: On the Limits of Critique, Towards a Deciphering Practice

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year: Carlos Azeredo Mesquita, Nika Pecarina, Henriks Eliass Zegners, Eglè A. Benkunskytė, Sharon Romie, Nanna Stigsdatter Mathiassen, Billie Meiniche 

Seminar participants first year: Giuliana Beya Dridi, Anahi Saravia Herrera, Richard Xuanlei Liu, Dariya Trubina

Unsettling Representation: On the Limits of Critique, Towards a Deciphering Practice

INTRODUCTION:

“What does aesthetics do? What is its function in human life? What, specifically, is its function in our present ‘form of life’?”
— Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice

“The world, as totalizing onto-epistemology that is modernity’s genesis, limit, and horizon, is a thoroughly aesthetic conceit.”
— Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics”

“Genocide, now as before, is an aesthetic project.”
— Rizvana Bradley, “Four Theses on Aesthetics”

“Within modernity, the aesthetic is above all a racial regime of representation.”
— David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics

This seminar takes Sylvia Wynter’s interrogations of the coloniality of being into the realm of art, where aesthetics organizes whose lives are rendered ethically perceptible and whose fall outside what Helen Fein coins as the “universe of moral obligation.” For Wynter, aesthetics is not a secondary domain of culture but a central apparatus of modernity, regulating being, value, and intelligibility. At its core lies Homo Aestheticus, the figure defined by the capacity to discern taste(s). As Denise Ferreira da Silva elaborates, the Kantian grammar of “disinterested” taste universalizes a mode of detached judgment that naturalizes global asymmetries of value.

Considering the West’s aesthetic inheritances, Wynter guides us to ask: What if dominant forms of critique (particularly those aimed at systems of representation) remain entangled in the very frameworks they seek to undo? What if, rather than interrupting these systems, critique reanimates the hierarchies of value, visibility, and disposability that sustain racial/colonial violence? As Wynter argues, critique can inadvertently serve as a form of “structural reassurance,” reconstituting the very conditions that sustain stratifying regimes of being. Against the limits of critique, Wynter calls for decipherment: a disobedient aesthetic praxis attuned to what exceeds legibility. Rather than rejecting aesthetics, decipherment deepens our engagement with it, exposing its exclusions, contradictions, and unrealized possibilities, while demanding critical attention not to the (in)authenticity of representation(s) but to the conditions that make representations, and the systematic foreclosure of certain "forms of life,” possible.

Through close readings of texts, artworks, clips, and case studies, we will explore how decipherment might unsettle aesthetics as a racial regime of representation. We will examine how it governs the distribution of perceptibility and value, and consider how alternative practices—that rethink, re/de/compose, disrupt, decolonize, reorient, deaden—might unsettle such arrangements. The task is not merely to critique aesthetics, but to transmute the sensory habits that sustain racial and colonial violence, and to glimpse, however provisionally, other grammars of sensing, feeling, and imagining.

Bibliography

Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, 2018.

Arnold Berleant, “The Sensuous and the Sensual in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, no. 2 (1964): 185–192.

Arthur Jafa. Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, 2016.

Bob Marley & The Wailers, “Burnin’ and Lootin’.” On Burnin’. Island Records, 1973.

Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, and Saidiya Hartman, Looting. Edited by Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales, 2023.

Claire Bishop. “Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise.” Artforum, n.d. https://www.artforum.com/events/cercle-dart-des-travailleurs-de-plantation-congolaise-2-230139/.

David Marriott. “Corpsing; or, the Matter of Black Life.” Cultural Critique 94 (2016): 32–64. https://doi.org/10.5749/culturalcritique.94.2016.0032.

Denise Ferreira da Silva. “An End to ‘This’ World.” Interview by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier. Texte zur Kunst, April 19, 2019. https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/interview-ferreira-da-silva/.

———. “In the Raw.” e-flux journal 93 (September 2018). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw/.

Denise Ferreira da Silva and Rizvana Bradley. “Four Theses on Aesthetics.” e-flux journal 120 (2021). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416146/four-theses-on-aesthetics/.

Elvira Espejo Ayca. “YANAK UYWAÑA: The Mutual Nurturing of the Arts.” Translated by Pablo Lafuente. Edited by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz. Vienna: transversal texts, 2023. https://transversal.at/media/espejo-en.pdf.

Evan Calder Williams. “An Open Letter to Those Who Condemn Looting.” 2011. https://azinelibrary.org/approved/open-letter-those-who-condemn-looting-evan-calder-williams-1.pdf.

James Baldwin. Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. Directed by Terence Dixon, 1970.

Jay-Z. Moonlight. Directed by Alan Yang, 2018.

Kara Walker. A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: An Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014.

Ligia Lewis. A Plot/A Scandal. Performance, 2022.

Ligia Lewis and Moritz Freudenberg. Still Not Still (Scenes for Camera), 2021.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir of the Spirits, 2016.

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz. “Bolivia: A Debt to Beauty.” October 181 (2022): 89–106. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

1. NourbeSe Philip. Zong! Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Saidiya Hartman. “The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance.” BOMB Magazine, June 5, 2020. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2020/06/05/the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american-romance/.

Sara Ahmed. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 1–24. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Sarah Lewis-Cappellari and Ligia Lewis. “In Conversation for A Plot/A Scandal.” Walker Art Center Magazine, 2022. https://walkerart.org/magazine/sarah-lewis-cappellari-in-conversation-with-ligia-lewis/.

Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, “Racial Tasting: On the Performance of Sugar” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenshaften, Volume 1, Spring 2022.

Sondra Perry. Typhoon Coming On, 2018.

Spike Lee. Do the Right Thing, 1989.

Sylvia Wynter. “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1–17.

———. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” Savacou 5 (1971): 95–102.

1. E. B. Du Bois. “The Comet.” In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 253-273. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson. “Against Criticism: Notes on Decipherment and the Force of Things.” NHI (2019): 71–80.

———. “Sense of Things.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2 (2016): 1–48.

Suggested

Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Taste as Sense and as Sensibility.” Philosophical Topics, vol. 25, no.1,

1997, pp. 201–230.

Denise Ferreira da Silva. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 56–70.

Nicole R Fleetwood. Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Rizvana Bradley Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, 1–52. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2023.

Simon Gikandi. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. (Preface and Introduction, ix–29.)

Sylvia Wynter. “On the Coloniality of Being.” In The Caribbean Philosophical Association Reader, edited by Jane Gordon et al., 2006.

———. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice.” In Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, 1992, 237–79.

*Note: In this seminar, we will experiment with and collectively develop a methodology of diffractive writing, exploring what diffraction implies and what such a practice might render possible. As Karen Barad reminds us, diffraction attends to the patterns of difference that make a difference, how, in other words, phenomena intra-act rather than merely reflect or oppose. In conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of fractal thinking, which conceives each part as inseparable from the whole, we will consider how thought and matter, theory and art, are already entangled. Through this approach, writing becomes a site for tracing interference and resonance across the seminar’s texts, images, and gestures—an experiment in participating with, rather than representing, the worlds we seek to think and transform.