In William Pope.

L’s book, Hole Theory, the artist writes: 

What I mean by having
Something is the fantasy
That having is possessing [and]*
That possessing is knowing

Therefore this sort of theorizing/[deodorizing]

Could only come from someone
Who believes in having things
As a political condition

Conversely, this theory

Could only come from someone
Who lacks something
As a political condition

Hole Theory engages lack

Across economic and cultural
And political boundaries
[Lack is where it’s AT]

1. Between having and not having things as a fantasy of

possession, Pope.L cleaves lack as a cultural, political, and
economic condition (of possibility). Theory (seeing, knowing)
becomes founded on lack; theorization risks “deodorization”–
desensitization and senselessness. 

2. For Pope.L, how could one work otherwise as an African-

American artist working out of the multiculturalism of the 80s?
Via abjection (for instance, uses of waste materials, perishables,
excrement in some cases) and ironic performance (crawling
Manhattan sidewalks in a Superman costume, ‘wearing’ a 5 ft.
long PVC pipe from his groin while strolling around Harlem)
Pope.L attacks any easy affirmation of (African-American)
identity.
3. One could say that he “deconstructs“ it; perhaps it is better to
say that he is drawing on negative characterization in ways that
draw-out both white-centric mis/understandings and fears of
Blackness, as well as Black fears of being understood (for fear
of re/possession?). 

4. Pope.L also draws upon the association of African-American

Blackness with homelessness, drug addiction, and insanity (the
fate of many of the artist’s family members).

5. Perhaps, a la Fred Moten’s brilliant book In the Break, it

could be said of Pope.L that he is drawing upon a radical Black
aesthetic of “combativeness,” where to antagonize (or in Adrian
Piper’s term “cataylze”) engages lack, negativity, and antimony
as the starting point for theorization. 
6. Central to the production of Blackness (as Moten also points
out), is that which is irreducible to African-American history
alone, though particularized by African diasporic cultures (is
Blackness not then the condition of all struggle, insurrection,
contestation in lieu of domination, persecution, genocide? The
singular case substituting for the universal?). 

7. That aesthetic expression makes visible contradiction—being

opposed, being against—lacking belonging, lacking home or a
being ‘at home’ from which overcoming or transcendence
might be accomplished. 

8. Hole Theory affirms what Tyrone Williams in his poem “I

Am Not Proud to be Black” calls “sublime despair,” and what
Theodor Adorno idealizes as a “methexis of the tenebrous” (the
catastrophe of thought/theorization that potentializes art for the
utopian—abandoned futures, futures not imagined or
unimaginable). 
9. When Adorno writes in his table of contents to Aesthetic
Theory the heading “Black as Ideal,” I want to take Black both
as hue and in terms of a social condition which embraces
shadiness to produce the catastrophe of thinking which art
should affirm in order for it to overturn the order of the current
world/to affirm other worlds. 
10. The idealization of Black affirms one’s participation in the
shady, the opaque, absurd, incomprehensible. Through it this
world flickers with an other/other ones. 

11. Cross-outs of language under erasure—holding in

suspension both language’s necessity and inadequacy—become
more like venetian blinds, or the aperture of a camera rapidly
opening and closing, albeit soundlessly (senseless in the best
possible sense). 

*The above quotation is taken from a facsimile of Pope.L’s

book, Hole Theory, reproduced in William Pope. L: the
Friendliest Black Artist in America (MIT Press, 2002). Brackets
indicate language that has been hand-written into and at times
over the type-set text. 
Originally Published: April 30th, 2010
Thom Donovan lives in New York City where he edits Wild Horses of
Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) and coedits ON Contemporary
Practice with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger. He is a participant
in the Nonsite Collective and a curator for the SEGUE reading series
(NYC). He holds a Ph.D. in English...