Communautés d’interprétation (interruption, politique de refus et médiation sorcière)

In his work Treatise on the Whole-World (Traité du Tout-Monde, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1997), the Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant further develops his notion of the right to opacity. By this expression, Glissant imagines a conditional form of relation. The condition of this relation is the possibility—the right—for the protagonists of a cultural exchange to refuse complete transparency, whether with regard to the meaning and form of what is being shared, or even to language itself. By establishing this condition, Glissant anticipates the risks of a homogenizing logic of encounter and opposes to it the irreducible dimension of cultural differences. Something cannot be completely absorbed; something resists. One may read in this addition to the author’s poetics of relation a precautionary measure intended to counter the reproduction, by other means, of colonial predation. What we might call, in contemporary terms, a refusal of innocence, cultural appropriation, and relational extractivism. But can we prevent a Western cultural or artistic production engaging with the practices and epistemologies of the Global South, or with the popular cultures of the Global North, from inevitably falling within this logic of extraction and exploitation, beyond the good intentions of an artist, a writer, or a researcher? The right to opacity cannot, in practice, be reduced to a simple recipe, a magic formula that would resolve the structural asymmetries and power relations at work in a globalized world in which art has become a formidable instrument of accumulation and commodification. This right to opacity must be transformed into concrete practices.
It is therefore necessary to examine the conditions under which spaces can exist in which non-proprietary forms of knowledge can be collectively (re)produced, emerging from the temporary or enduring entanglement of the thoughts, gestures, words, and narratives of a given group. Forms of knowledge that could not be extracted and exploited by an individual outside this group, circle, or community, because accessing them would entail, in return, a responsibility to maintain the space in which they were produced—and from which they could never be entirely autonomous.
Situated forms of knowledge whose displacement and reappropriation would require specific spaces of negotiation, which we call communities of interpretation.
These communities of interpretation take shape beyond individual moral inclinations, bad conscience, or anyone’s innocence. They are solidaristic infrastructures that require contracts to be formulated, commitments to be made tangible, and all the implicit rules governing an artistic production framework to be made explicit. They require a shared narrative and also make it possible to question art institutions, their relationship to their social, geographical, ecological, and economic environments, and the ways in which they contribute either to interrupting or reproducing an autonomous cultural society. Who, then, speaks, and on whose behalf? Who produces what, under what conditions, and in the service of which project, which community?
By examining the emergence of these communities of interpretation in different contexts, while also studying the creative potential of minoritarian gestures of refusal, we will explore possible ways of instituting spaces of trust beyond logics of affinity.
Taking the form of reading, writing, and performance workshops, the seminar will provide an opportunity to speculate on the place of artistic production within a future society governed by decolonial cultural rights. In this context, we will introduce the notion of witch mediation as a potential tool for non-extractive forms of conversation within a constellation of communities of interpretation.