I explore the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience With an eye toward West African Sufi practices, quantum mechanics, the lineage of “two-headed” Black woman spiritual leaders, and destructive plasticity (Catherine Malabou), I consider what becomes possible through disobedience:

+ when matter “misbehaves” (exotic matter and multiphase materials)

+ when words are non-compliant (non-traditional language practices)

+ when neurology does otherwise (my trinity of neurodivergence: ADHD, OCD, and Autism)

+ when bodies are “undisciplined” (questions of “ugliness” and physical disabilities)

+ when beliefs exceed their imposed limits (the birth of new spiritual movements).

Through intentional and accidental acts of disobedience, I am curious about the emergence of systems and methods that ask us to reconsider our relationship to plot, rationality, and stability. across written, spoken, and visual language.

I consider the radical possibilities I am curious about the threads of disobedience and noncompliance – a refusal of stable meaning – as a rehearsal for otherwise worlds. Rehearsal as an antecedent to the “event” – a space to troubleshoot, but also, rehearsal in the Motenian sense of collaborative and ongoing knowledge-building within community – to study “under the name of speculative practice.”

In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013), an interview with Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis is featured, in which Moten and Harney discuss their collaborative writing process. Shukaitis asks, “...when you pick up a text that’s finished, unless you’ve got some special texts that I don’t know of, you don’t get a sense of the playing or the living usually [...] which I would agree with you is the most important thing – somehow gets lost along the way. How do you negotiate that? Or is there a way to flag up, in a written text, ‘don’t take this too seriously, go out and play with it’?” Harney responds:

Well, one way that I do that is by revising how I say things. So, some people might call my style repetitive, partly because I’m rephrasing things all the time, but also because I’m trying to show that I’m playing with something rather than that it’s finished [...] it’s partly to say that we’re in rehearsal here [...] So, for me, it must be right there in the writing in some form. It’s not enough to signal it outside the writing, to send the piece out and to say, ‘oh, really this is still open for this or that.’ It has to be somehow in the writing itself that the thing hasn’t closed off. Part of that is that to write with another person is, in a sense, always to keep something open, because you always have the question of, “do they both think that way, who said that?” Instead of worrying about that, I think that’s nice. That means that the text is already open to more than one, in that sense.

of noise, unintelligibility, and discrepancy.

While [writing] serves as a point of departure in my work, it is not the purpose of this experiment. 

The embrace of nonsense and irrationality in the face of rationalized violence is not solely an aesthetic intervention; it is also a political gesture that, at the very least, exposes the violence of what has been sanctioned as coherent, logical, and natural.