In “Philosophie de la Relation,” Edouard Glissant warns us against fixing or locating the meaning of opacity. There can be opacity in the dark, and in the light. Opacity is a “clarté non-impérative” (Philosophie, p. 69), through which we can migrate from absolutist identities to Relational identities, where the transparency of what we consider as truth is always tested and transformed when it comes into confluence with experiences from different locations and times that it, in turn, influences, without dominating or invalidating them. So-called great civilizations have given way to a multitude of cultures that touch one another and enter into relation, but don’t define, in any conclusive, concerted, or methodical manner, the rules of the conventions of the beautiful, the laws of the appearance, and representation of the beautiful. In other words, in this inextricable, complex movement of world cultures, we are way more sensitive to the trembling, convulsion, and pulse of beauty rather than the conventional representations of the beautiful. For Glissant, the beautiful is not beauty. The beautiful is congealed beauty.
Opacity is a generator of diversity; Opacity can serve as a bridge between different identities, instead of constituting a wall between them.
I was influenced by this Glissantian poe-cept of beauty as a process, instead of a model, or an algorithm. I have tried, in this film, to explore and defend what Glissant calls our right and the right of others to Opacity, by putting the Ndeup (a possession ritual of healing among the Lebou people of Senegal) into a relationship with what is known today as AI (artificial intelligence). Opacity is a generator of diversity; Opacity can serve as a bridge between different identities, instead of constituting a wall between them. Facing the poem of Opacity, its images and sounds, we can finally begin to hear the voices of those that the universal applications of algorithms have silenced or rendered invisible; tremble with their trembling, and realize that we are never alone, even when we are by ourselves and know that we are always multiple and never single.
Manthia Diawara
