1. We begin this enquiry with BESTIARY OF CAPITAL - HORSE. A banknote, a branch, a horse.
2. Paulo had no biz pairing banknotes with branches of Australian brush cherry. He had no biz origami-folding a horse, letting it gallop on the surface of the money, money on the surface of the wood. (Isn’t it exciting? this tension between the suggested kinetic qualities of the horse and the money whose use, which is to say, ‘value’, is brought to an abrupt halt by way of deforming, a defacing of money? It is not a deforming that ends its form but proposes a reconfiguration of this form. It is not a defacement that grants it a new surface but elicits alternative readings or alternative ways of perceiving it.) “Something more complicated than inversion is going on” (Taussig, 1999:13).
3. As Michael Taussig would say, “it is now in a state of desecration” (1999:1).
4. We return to the Australian brush cherry; Syzygium paniculatum native to Australia’s New South Wales. This violently cut plant becomes an unwilling witness, dragged into this mess of defacement to the obvious chagrin of the sovereign state of Australia (According to cold facts by Taussig, we now know of the Crimes Currency Act of 1981, Commonwealth of Australia; we wonder if Australia gives a fuck whether non-Australian money is defaced or not, or if they care that Paulo has implicated them as witnesses to a crime against currencies?).
5. This is an enquiry into the relation between (the movement of) capital and the death of things.
6. “The Dead’s words have ethical force: everything for everyone. For if the flesh holds, as a mark/sign, colonial violence, the Dead’s rotting flesh returns this marking to the soil, and the Dead then remain in the very compositions of anything, yes, as matter, raw material, that nourishes the instruments of production, labor, and capital itself. That is how the dead slave/Native lives in/as capital.” (Silva, 2020:43)
7. We are thinking here of course of the dead-dying wood branch, but more generally the ecosystem of very dead-dying things (we wonder if nonlife can be read within the framework of ‘ecosystems’ or if such a move is simply wishful thinking) that includes the Dead’s flesh, not necessarily the ‘body’, but the flesh. “The ‘flesh’,” according to Hortense Spillers, is “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse” (1987:67). Of course, we take seriously the implications of any hierarchization between flesh and branch of wood; we, therefore, insist on reading the flesh (in relation to global capital) not only as preceding the wood but, following Silva’s “Poethical Reading”, as a substance that lives physically-genetically and conceptually in the wood, and as the wood.
8. Paulo’s wood suggests a life violently cut short; (i) a radical reduction of the actual physical properties of the wood into a fraction of a whole, (ii) a life-form of something that is no longer living matter; Dead. The structural analogy between the wood-cut-short and (rotting) flesh is striking.
9. In Paulo’s work, this work, the weight of the money (economy) is weighing heavy on the wood and waning life of the (rotting) flesh (waning because as life-matter of the flesh moves and mutates with/in the movement or flight of global capital, or as capital goes global, it is rapidly becoming indistinguishable or impossible to be pried apart from the wood, from capital). So as soon as capital assumes a global posture, the Dead’s flesh (in and as wood) goes spectral in/as capital.
10. BESTIARY OF CAPITAL. FROG. EAGLE. WATERBUCK. HORSE. DONKEY. BIRD. HUMMINGBIRD.
11.
Love,
asblackaspossible
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