Radical Ontological Agilities (English)

To frame Aria Dean's lecture, media theorist Brigitte Weingart provided an introductory commentary situating Dean's artistic and theoretical approach. The audio recording of this introduction is available here and serves as a useful entry point to the article and Dean's practice.

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Blackness as »Real But Not Actual«

Dean positions Blackness within a tripartite ontological framework: the real, the virtual and the actual. Drawing on Massumi, she distinguishes between »the actual« (perceivable by physical senses) and »the virtual« (real but nonsensuous). Blackness, she argues, is »real but not actual«—it operates powerfully while resisting fixed materiality. This positions Blackness as having what Dean calls »radical ontological agility«, existing simultaneously across multiple planes of reality while transforming as it moves between contexts.

The Parallel Movements of Blackness, Memes, and Capital

Dean draws direct parallels between how Blackness circulates in culture, how memes spread online and how capital flows through markets. All three function as forms of »currency«—generating value through circulation rather than intrinsic worth. Just as monetary currency gains value through movement and exchange, Blackness operates as a cultural currency whose value is determined by circulation and uptake. »The way capital moves is how Blackness moves«, Dean observes. This circulation creates value through the absence of fixed ownership—a condition connected to slavery's legacy, where »what is Black is available to all«, rendering Blackness a form of cultural currency that anyone can spend but few can mint.

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Blackness as Operational Force

Dean's analysis draws significantly on Ulysses Jenkins' 1978 video »Mass of Images«, where Jenkins, surrounded by television sets, chants about media stereotypes before declaring »I don't and I won't relate« and smashing a television. For Dean, what's crucial about this work is not its critique of negative representation but Jenkins' wholesale rejection of the representational paradigm itself. His refusal to »relate« exemplifies Dean's claim that »Blackness is tethered to operational tools rather than the world of representation.«

When Dean asserts that »Blackness has function, not meaning«, she's highlighting how Black stereotypes in media aren't primarily intended to represent Black people at all but to perform specific operational work. These stereotypes exist as affective tools that generate emotional responses in viewers and circulate value through cultural systems. They're not designed for Black viewers to identify with but rather to operate on audiences, producing reactions that themselves generate value. This operational understanding of Blackness moves beyond questions of positive or negative representation to examine how Blackness functions as a mechanism within cultural economies.

Dean extends this to memes by distinguishing between their representational dimension (what they look like) and operational dimension (what they do). Memes, often featuring Black vernacular, generate value through circulation rather than ownership, carry affect across boundaries while detaching from origins and produce value that often benefits circulators rather than creators. These patterns reveal Blackness functioning as an »affective technology«—a system for producing and circulating emotion, generating cultural currency, and creating value through movement.

This framework of value relative to movement raises profound questions about digital ethics. »Where do we draw the line between watching and participating?« becomes crucial when studying online phenomena. Studying content often means participating in its circulation, creating ethical dilemmas for researchers and challenging traditional scholarly distance.

Aria Dean during her lecture, talking about »Mass of Images« by Ulysses Jenkins (1978) © Marvin Systermans

The Paradox of Resistance?

The artist Cameron Rowland explores the idea of strategic withholding, as in their work »Depreciation« (2018). Rowland here presents a conceptual land artwork in which the artist purchased a plot of land formerly part of a slave plantation, which was briefly given back to former slaves as an act of reparation and then taken from them again. Rowland legally restricted its transferability through a restrictive covenant, deliberately removing it from circulation as a direct challenge to capitalist value systems built on the historical commodification of both land and Black bodies.

Thus, while Dean identifies how Blackness operates within circulation systems similar to capital, this raises complex questions about resistance. If circulation generates value within capitalism, does restricting circulation become resistance? This tension raises a productive question: Can Blackness's operational force be redirected against capitalist extraction while maintaining its ontological agility?

Final Reflections . . .

Dean's methodological suggestion to »pay attention to where it comes from and where it is going« offers both analytical guidance and ethical orientation. By tracing these movements, we might identify interventions where value can be redirected toward creators rather than circulators. This attentiveness to circulation reveals how the »absence that sits at the center of modernity« continues to generate effects even as it eludes definition. Perhaps the most profound implication of Dean's framework is that resistance might not come through stabilizing Blackness into something »actual«, but rather through strategic engagements with its operational qualities—redirecting its movements, reconfiguring its circuits of value, and developing what we might call an ethics of circulation that acknowledges how we participate in these systems even as we analyze them. The radical ontological agility of Blackness thus becomes not just an analytical framework but a site of potential intervention in the very structures of digital capitalism that have learned to extract value from movement itself.

Reflexion on Aria Dean's lecture »Labor, Art, and the Vernacular Aesthetic Online« by Emily Kindermann