Audibility and inaudibility belong in the realm of the perceived. And so, when we discuss audibility, it always refers to our experience of a sonic event. However, there exists a common belief that hears the inaudible as non-sounding. This misunderstanding was beautifully corrected by the Swiss sound theorist Salomé Voegelin in 2013, in a talk titled “Writing Phonography”. Voegelin explains that the inaudible does in fact sound, but “we do not hear it yet”, and the reason we do not hear it is because we don’t know the ways in which inaudible objects and being produce sounds. The overheard is a sonic notion of what is known in the visual world as the overlooked. It’s an ignored aspect of the sounding world. It is important to note that while the overheard is most often indeed not heard, it is not inaudible. Inaudibility, as defined before, is a result of a lack of familiarity. The overheard is a result of a lack of understanding. Thus, both the inaudible and the overheard are oppressed conditions of heard-ness.
In “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the Photograph”, Fred Moten is in search of a black meta-voice, and goes back to the “wordless moan” of Gospel. This notion communicates with Jacque Ranciére’s idea of “wordless victims”. In the essay “Politics In The Nihiistic Age”, Ranciére describes these victims as “the ultimate figure of the one excluded from the logos, armed only with a voice expressing a monotonous moan, the moan of naked suffering, which saturation has made inaudible.” But how did Ranciére get from saturation to inaudibility?
In “Back Futurity and the Echo of Premature Death”, Tina Campt discusses practices of refusal through image making:
Rather than fleeing or submitting to a future imposed upon them, they face down the image that would negate the complicated truth of the lives they have lived, in order to interrupt the narrative of their own demise that threatens to extinguish their capacity to claim a life lived in dignity and complexity. […] Their praxis of refusal consists of transforming mundane acts of image making into quotidian practices of fugitivity.
The “wordless victims” are bound to a framework of imposition that defined their identities as something that muted every other aspect of it. The imposed futures of the participants of the #If They Gunned Me Down movement is the saturation that led not to inaudibility as suggested by Ranciére, but to being overheard.
PART TWO I said before that overheard identities are a result of a lack of understanding. To think of understanding in sounding terms means to consider the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing implies the immediate sensation of experiencing a sound. In hearing there is no engagement, it is a very passive state in which my interaction with a sound is only refers to its appearance in my sounding reality. Listening, then, is an active engagement with a sonic event. In listening I engage with the sound I hear, I pay attention to its entire structure, character and subtleties. To understand a sound means to listen to its whole, go beyond its surface and to consider it in more ways than meet those who meet the ear.
In the chapter “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”, Fanon taps directly on the concept of overheard identities, and similarly to the groups described in Campt’s chapter, he also finds ways of practicing refusal. Fanon thinks in musical or sounding terminology through his chapter and insists on rhythm and shouting. It seems to me that this insistence is a refusal to speak softly, and an insistence on being heard. Fanon refuses the identification that was imposed on him by others, and “explodes” because others have exploded him. His tone in the chapter shows resemblance to Hannah Arendt’s 1943 text “We Refugees” in it’s being at once both confrontational and also comical and ironic. In “We Refugees” Arendt refuses her, as well as other Jewish immigrants of the Second World War’s identification as refugees. Arendt goes after claiming a lost sense of identity that she was deprived of both in Germany and in the US (in Germany, she was imposed with the identity of a Jew that muted her German identity, and in the US the imposition of a “refugee” muted the sound of her survival) while Fanon claims his muted Blackness and refuses to be overheard in two senses: once in spite of it, and once because of it.
Returning to the question, “what does visual frequency look like?” that was raised in our first meeting, it seems particularly pressing to parse what the visual realm might itself entail, and what visual manifestations, whether as media forms or ekphrastic strategies, might offer to an understanding of frequency. The Harvard Dictionary of Music’s definition, which we read last week, emphasizes perception (as does Lee’s fascinating post about the inaudible) as a defining function of frequency; we might extend this to thinking about black life in saying that it is attentiveness that renders being perceptible.
To this I wonder what role the visual might have to play in creating the conditions for perceptibility, whether vernacular image-making may resonate differently from the plastic arts, and why frequency as a specifically visual construction—as opposed to say, Senghor’s rhythm (Fanon 102)—may be useful. I believe clarifying these ideas further involves undoing established relationships between the visual and representation, the ocular and mimetic. This is perhaps why photography is so central to our concerns here; the photograph’s modern emergence has long linked it to a distinctly evidentiary paradigm, which in turn makes the task of demystifying its supposed claim to truth an even more urgent one.
This is also where I find Fred Moten’s piece to be incredibly lucid (as well as challenging). For Moten, as for writers like Barthes and Bazin, the photograph offers an ontological problem, an opportunity to reconsider life and death itself, and to ask “what looking might mean in general, what the aesthetics of the photograph might mean for politics and what those aesthetics might have meant for Mamie Bradley … ” (198). As I understand it, Moten proposes black mo’nin’ as the photograph’s negative form (perhaps both in the material and conceptual sense), one that points outside of the image, an “interstitial no-space” inhabiting an aesthetic, philosophical, political, and indeed sonic environment.
In light of this, I'd be interested in considering some further questions: What does the exterior of a photograph look—or sound—like? How does it bear upon Fanon’s statement of being “overdetermined from the outside”? In what ways can documentary images of the kind that Moten and Campt refer to, be non-mimetic (or “undialectic” in Barthes’s terminology)?
In “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Frantz Fanon begins and ends with the gaze, the interpellation or act of looking by which the Other fixes his blackness. “I am overdetermined from the outside,” he writes, and “I am a slave not to the “idea” others have of me, but to my appearance” (Fanon 95). For him, this visuality that structures and is structured through blackness not as ontology but as relation to whiteness leads in conclusion, quite notably, to the cinema: “I can’t go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself” (Fanon 119). We cannot equate cinema and photography, moving images and still, yet we cannot presuppose the “movies” here as fiction distinct from the claim to truth that “unary” photography makes. As such this leap from real to reel, from lived experience to cinematic, from quotidian to representational mirrors the vexed relationship between images and performance analyzed by Fred Moten. Put differently, it stages the encounter of black subjectivity with that which claims objectivity, or universality, as Moten discusses through Barthes. This encounter destabilizes the purported stability and textuality of images, moving or still, opening space for phonic reaction and thus resistance. Animating the photograph with phonic substance, a move that suggests if anything the cinema, reiterates generally the agency of spectatorship and stages the “breakdown of the opposition between live performance and mechanical reproduction” that irrupts as “material resistance” (Moten 198).
Nonetheless I wonder if this affective capacity of the spectator finds its limit when faced with the moving image, that moves against the quiet and quotidian ability to pause (it) and listen. More pointedly, what is the difference between a photograph of Emmett Till and videos of Eric Garner or Philando Castile widely disseminated, reproduced, and replayed across television and social media? In the contemporary mediascape that recapitulates black death, as part of what Christina Sharpe terms a “dysgraphia of disaster” that moves through the rapid and repetitive staging of disposability, what agency if any does the black subject have in combating the “banal” “universality” of death that Moten rejects in the photography of Barthes? When “death that prompts a mourning whose rehearsal is also a refusal” (Moten 199) repeats endlessly, it moves in temporal cycles that gesture to the “structural precarity” and “premature” nature of black death that Tina Campt discusses. It makes necessary the mediatized resistance of subjects who then stage “anterior practices of fugitivity” (109).
I’m interested in considering the idea of “falseness” in relation to this week’s readings, with particular grounding in Tina Campt’s “Coda: Black Futurity and the Echo of Premature Death.” In a White supremacist society, the memories of Black people carry a default assumption of falseness. I’m thinking here of the erasure and exclusion of Black oral histories, the dismissal of the testimonies of Black witnesses (Campt’s discussion of the murder of Trayvon Martin reminds of the subsequent interrogation and defamation not only of Martin, but also his friend and major witness in the George Zimmerman trial, Rachel Jeantel), as well as the everyday interpersonal rejection of Black individuals’ attempts to recount personal experiences with racism and violence. Speaking of “false” memories necessitates an interrogation of what it means for something to be “false.” This question of falseness takes me to Campt’s exploration of the #If They Gunned Me Down, Which Picture Would They Use? hashtag. I find the hashtag’s ambiguity towards the idea of a real photographic subject compelling. The juxtaposition of a “respectable” photo with a photo representing performance of “menacing stereotypes of black urban life” (Campt 109) calls into question the realness of both images. On their own each photograph remains purposefully incomplete, neither fully representing the multiplicities of their Black subjects. Can falseness be a performance of Black fugitivity?
I also want to consider the relevance and resonance of false memories and images to questions of futurity. How does remembering a past event that did not happen/did not happen in the way you remember provide a way of thinking about the “what will have had to happen” (Campt 114)? This is where I find connections to Moten’s piece. The #If They Gunned Me Down, Which Picture Would They Use? hashtag can be considered a kind of “aesthetic appropriation” (Moten 197) of the specter of extrajudicial violence as part of “the condition of the possibility of ending” (Moten 197) this violence. The premature imagining of death is a refusal of its inevitability. I would be interested in thinking more about the relation between falseness and Campt’s “grammar of the future real conditional” (114). Are the “what could have happened but (probably) didn’t” the “what might happen but might not” opposed to or aligned with the “what will have had to happen”?
Defining Frequency in Blackness and Black Emotions
Considering the definitions of frequency given on the syllabus, one way I would define the frequency of Black life is through the cycles of Black existence as seen through our resistance, subversive counter-responses, and revolutions. While these phases and sequences are insistent upon white supremacy and other examples of systemic oppressions, the recurring theme in Black life is the repetition of our revolutions and how to continue to survive, and thrive, in our everyday lives in spite of the challenges that exist. Though Black uprisings evolve and grow over time, they have historically dealt with the same issues spanning decades. I immediately think of Black student protests in my undergraduate university and how many of our demands strayed very little from the original protests in the 1960s. Black life, pain, and memory exist in these cycles, similar to how Dr. Campt draws parallels between the images of Terrance Johnson and Trayvon Martin (2017:106-107). Although their individual stories are different, contemporary instances of police murders have often been referred to as modern-day lynchings, only further emphasizing the cycles—and cyclical precarity—of Black life. There is a consistent reproduction of precarity that plagues Blackness and Black futures that lends itself well to discussing frequency.
In terms of how we see frequency in Black photography, Moten’s article sheds lights on the questions of Black ontology and the memory and consumption of Black pain. For instance, Mamie Till Bradley’s pain in her decision to leave her son’s casket open registered a reverberation for the value of Black life in America. Though a still image, photography of Black life holds a sensory reminder of the moment. Moten writes it as movement and sound, as “animated, resounds, broken, breaking song of, song for, something before,” (2003: 210), that is both because of the events leading to Emmett Till’s death, and the pain Till Bradley evoked in the process. Campt writes it as “seared into my memory…involuntarily and usually with visceral effects” (2017:103). The witnessing and holding of Black pain in a physical object leaves an impression on our memory that cyclically causes pain as well. It makes certain things visible, like Till Bradley’s response, or it registers fear in many, but it also can elicit invisible or invented responses. People can utter memories of time, place, and space in photography that are or possibly aren’t true and that is the work of frequency. The pain registered lives engrained within us and we start to draw parallels that sometimes do not exist. Aside from the issue of pain and memory in frequency, this process within photography also raises a number of questions for me: How do we translate memory from photography? How do images of Blackness and pain translate across the diaspora? How does social media complicate the temporality and placelessness of Black memory? I hope to continue problematizing these ideas throughout the course.
Mike Brown and I both graduated in green. He died in the end of the summer before my senior year, and in that August of 2014, the image that was inescapable for me was not the image of his body out on the street, but of him holding his high school diploma a few months before. I spent much of the year leading up to my graduation fixated on him, watching as his killer was not held responsible, listening to my white classmates deride and laugh about the rising Black Lives Matter protest, all the while thinking of how when the time came, I would also hook the top of a green robe closed and zip it up, would also pin bobby pins in my hair to keep the cap in place. Just beginning to heavily use social media, I would scroll through the images that Campt mentions in her piece, and wonder how good I would have to look to be sure the media used my graduation picture.
Campt argues that the performance of one’s future peril through the photograph is both a refusal and an affirmation, a creation of a “alternate line of flight” (Campt 113). But thinking of this in relation with her other descriptions of photographed black people, as well as Moten’s, I wonder if there isn’t a way in which the consumption of black life through the visual, particularly the photograph, demands that black people continually produce these lines of flight in order to survive. Could it be that the only way for black people to practice a survival is to perform a sort of refraction of the image of black death? And if so, how do we do it? How does one reshape the images that constantly haunt, like Emmett Till in his coffin, like Trayvon Martin in his hood? It seems that black death reiterates itself constantly through the visual in specific, and that black subjects are meant to register that reiteration. Thinking of how frequency in and of itself functions—as a movement that registers to the ear as unique because of the variations in its reiteration—could we think of these visuals as engendering frequencies within us as opposed to emitting frequencies on their own?
Describing the aftereffects of Till’s open casket, Moten writes that “Something real—in that it might have been otherwise—happened. So that you need to be interested in the complex, dissonant, polyphonic affectivity of the ghost,” (Moten 196). Perhaps frequency is something that happens to us, a registered dissonance between all of the images of black death and the lines of flight we have charted for ourselves, like two tuning forks that ring when struck. The affect of the ghost is a frequency/frequent polyphony that strikes the black subject, in moments like where we recognize we wear the same graduation gowns.
I spent a lot of time thinking about kinesis in this week’s readings, particularly mediating and attempting to work out the relational questions we were left with last week: What is frequency and how does it relate to black life? How do the definitions presented at the top of syllabus from the Harvard Dictionary of Music and the Oxford Dictionary of Physics connect elements of temporality, kinesis, haptic and sense? In offering these definitions, Professor Campt noted that vibrations and waves are movements of sound. With this in mind, I found Moten’s articulation of panic quite useful as a jumping off point (Moten 195).
Moten describes the effect of Emmett Till’s death akin to inertia in that it seemed to produce panic. Panic, then, functions as a productive tension that “marks” the crest and fall of a “haunted” movement (196). What’s interesting to me here is not simply the force of tragedy that marks or makes visible Emmett Till’s death, but the precarity of the movement, which he subsequently describes as: “Something real –in that it might have been otherwise—happened” (196). The precarity and, maybe conditional aura, of the line calls to mind moments in the text (200, 205) where otherwise collision gives way to black performance “out of death” (209). This movement elides an “extended trajectory where panic seems to always have been,” much like Campt’s “line of flight,” as an “escape [that is] always already a counterattack” (Campt 109). The “renunciation” of their black fugitivities is in the form of the “will have had to” (Campt 114) and “if” and “could be” (“which is what I am, which is what you are or could be if you can listen while you look”), existing “in and around the photograph –black mo’nin’” (Moten 200, 206).
The reverb of the past, present and future as collisions of possibility calls to my attention Dionne Brand’s “past; again” in “From Verso 4.” In conjuring the movement from the “all this” of the “yellow washed house” (Brand 8) that held “everything we loved in the world” (7), she creates something like a pull between the precipice of the end of the line that collides with temporal “past” and resonate “again,” though separated by the semicolon’s pause that is notably not a complete end. I was taken by the possibility of proximity and temporal collision that I at first did not recognize, instead focusing on the seeming visual transcendent perspective at “the top of the street” (1) “[looking] down” (12). I found uprightness and bodily arrangement were not driving the juxtaposed movement towards the past and into the future; rather, the “past; again” notates “all of this,” the weight or matter of “everything we loved in the world,” that at once reaches toward the past and carries the subject into the anticipatory present (13).
In continuing to think about kinetic movement and time and its comportment outside the occult of visuality, I am left with questions concerning the role of love (Moten 209), of which I am reminded of Audre Lorde’s call to “eros” as “the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony,” and of the productive tension between totality/ensemble and singularity (Moten 202, 207-208).
After looking and looking at the photos discussed in Tina Campt’s “Coda,” I still can’t decide what it is that I’m seeing.
When I look at the graduation cap and gowns, military uniforms, and medical scrubs, I find excellence, clarity of purpose, drive—but I also find an aesthetic gesture toward American belonging; I find my father who, after immigrating to the United States, would clutch his old mathematics textbook to his chest in order to stave off abuse, grimaces; and I find myself, sitting at a distinguished conference table, trying desperately to discipline myself into some acceptable version of humanity.
And the juxtaposed photos of those same people of color holding liquor, champagne, middle fingers up, solo cups? I imagine, to most of our eyes, it’s hard to find what’s menacing. And yet, it doesn’t take long to see that photograph’s drag into a possible future: one in which, an authoritative knock on the door startles the sitter out of their playful reverie, a uniform summoned to address the music, too loud and too late, and what is that smell, suspiciously like weed? It isn’t hard to imagine, to feel the chest tighten—I notice my impulse to look away.
Between these two images, staged side by side, I do hear Moten’s “polyphonic affectivity of the ghost” (Moten 196). Particularly in the first photo, depicting a man flanked by his professors and giving a graduation speech. I’ve circled the face of a white haired white man, hand in the air—possibly fisting his eye glasses, taken off from so much pleasure, amusement?—who is laughing or cheering unreservedly. From his open mouth churns Fanon’s words, I can’t help but hear it: “The black physician will never know how close he is to being discredited. I repeat, I was walled in: neither my refined manners nor my literary knowledge nor my understanding of the quantum theory could find favor” (Fanon 97).
I do not even need to see the second photo, the one of the same man enjoying himself dancing, in order to feel haunted by deaths that happen, already are happening, have happened in “a train of horrors” to that man in his graduation cap and to his professors, also black, proudly brimming beside him (Moten 196).
While I do perceive refusal in these photos, I’m struggling to understand how the sitters, “actively [anticipating] their own premature deaths,” create the conditions of fugitivity. The state of “active anticipation” calls to mind Fanon, who writes: “…if I had to define myself I would say I am in expectation: I am investigating my surroundings; I am interpreting everything on the basis of my findings. I have become a sensor” (Fanon 99).
According to OED, an (image) sensor is an electronic component of a camera system that converts light (or waves from another part of the electromagnetic spectrum) into electrical signals, which can in turn be processed to form an image. Might we consider how the sitters, in their anticipation, become living sensors who have been forced into the position of picking up social signals—of abjection, debasement, fear, fury, seduction, gluttony—with which their likeness is hopelessly intertwined?
Is the “anterior practice of fugitivity” found in the sitters authorship and framing of their own images? If so, what is at stake in maintaining a state of “active anticipation”? For me, I’m reminded of my own strung out nervous system, nights of noisy teeth grinding, and disassociating at the sight of a police officer caressing his holster.
On the other hand, I understand the necessity of anticipation if we are to learn the grammars of “the future real conditional, or that which will have had to happen” (Campt 114). To turn away from my capacity to “sense” would mean certain death, I’m sure. And yet, how can I self-determine and have the quiet to imagine possible futures with all that moaning of death and for the dying ringing perpetually, dragging at my ears?
Frantz Fanon begins “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” with two violating exclamations hurled at him, violently: these racialized hostilities and aggressions vocalized and weaponized against him on public transport. I was struck by this beginning in relation to the question of visual frequencies of black life because it occurred to me that the cacophony of an anti-Black and imperial world involves so many layers of vocalizations and vibrations (harmful and threatening in some cases as above, but also soothing and reverberating in others) and that we receive all of them constantly with greatly diverging affect. Tina Campt takes up the question of what cuts through this noise? Refusing to accept the conditions of premature death and police brutality that foreclose the lives of too many young Black men and women robbed of their futures, Campt intervenes in her analysis to consider how “a black feminist mapping of the grammar of black futurity—a grammar of anteriority” (114) might differently engage in the possibilities and undercurrents of Black fugitivity. The role of photography within this praxis is addressed also by Fred Moten who in “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the Photograph” considers what a political ontology of photography sounds like since “In the end… neither language nor photography nor performance can tolerate silence” (205). I was interested in how the temporal register of photography and performativity when brought together might transform our understandings of the fixedness of an image, moving across time and space and reaching us, even touching us, when this contact might otherwise not be possible. Might these modes of frequency when brought together and in turn their reception operate by way of producing seemingly imperceptible ruptures in the usual flow and repetition of frequencies that operate against Black life? The future real of the tumblr page #If They Gunned Me Down, Which Picture Would They Use? project as I understand it operates in this future anterior, not-yet, temporality of futurity in order to challenge the popular understanding or misunderstandings of Black life and of photography to show what has been as a fixed and inescapable event of violence. They show instead through this medium- and in the case of Mamie Till Bradley’s decision to show her son Emmet Till, brutalized under the conditions of a white supremacist world order - what should have never been by transforming this frequency.
As I think through the question of frequency and its relation to black life, the term most animates my work in relation to the “rhythmic seriality” (Campt 107) of violence and black death, and the quotidian practices of futurity in a “minor key” (invoking Hartman) through which we survive violence and death. I think of Dionne Brand’s “I am held, and held,” which indexes the hold of the continuing slave ship and the ways in which we hold one another. The repetition of held has a lingering effect, provoking me to sit with this holding as routine, past but not past. Frequency as repetition repeats across the readings for this week. “Such repetition being a constitutive element of what it means and is to be BLACK” (Moten 210). I hear Fanon’s “Look, a Negro!” as a continuous overdetermining from the outside. I see the routine of mourning, hear the frequency of black moaning and shouting.
Thinking about routine and mourning registers differently this week, following the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi. What does it mean to die engaging in “routine” life, particularly when that routine is a practice of escaping death? As my younger brother so brilliantly stated in a tweet: “Hoopers ain’t supposed to die…N****s hoop to escape death.” Before this moment, when I was on a cabin trip in the woods over the weekend, I made a note to think about what it means to escape even briefly. Where one can “take flight” to away from the routine. How breaks between the repetitions can be a source of healing and “holding”. How do we contend with death in the practice of escape? How do we make sense of the “seriality” of “premature mortality” for black life (Campt 107)? The routine of mourning, mo’nin, repeats.
Moten engages the rehearsal of black mo’nin to hear the phonic substance embedded within the photograph of Emmett Till’s body during his funeral. This photograph is doing something that exceeds the visual, it elicits an affective response which attends to the unspeakability of the moan. The sonics within the photograph provoke us to linger with it, to listen to it and experience the moment which it represents. I think about the phonic substances of the photograph as I see the repeated photos of basketball players with written tributes to Kobe and Gigi on their Kobe shoes in games. I try to hear the sounds of mourning as these photos repeat. I try to think of repetition not only as violence but a space for something else. I try to think of the possibility in collective black mo’nin.
Part 1 For Moten, looking at Emmet Till’s face opens onto “all it might be said to mean that I can look on this face.” I’ll rephrase the problematic for emphasis: What does it mean that one can look at this? Furthering this line of thought, Moten continues: “This is to say not only look at it but look at it in the context of an aesthetics, look at it as if it were to be looked at, as if it were to be thought, therefore, in terms of a kind of beauty… in the context of her demand that her [Mamie Bradley’s] son’s face be seen, be shown, that his death and her mourning be performed.” What does it mean that brutal and violent death can be looked at as if it were aesthetically beautiful? Perhaps the meaning of the looking lies in the resurrective and insurgent politics that looking in such a way conditions. I also want to point out that the “alchemizing” of death into an aesthetic figure hurts. For Moten, by way of Mackey, the blues are not worth the dues paid, because pain, torture, and abjection aren’t worth it; they are in excess of value, their value is their excess. The sublime paradox is that the yield, however slight, can end such “extortion.” Black performance is thus the excessiveness and proliferating tendency of its means, a means that isn’t worth its end, but precisely because of that must be worked with in order to exhaust the world. Another way to phrase this is that black performance exceeds that which can bear it, coming back to the question, What does it mean to look at or bear the exhaustive or the unbearable? This question might be what is staged in the visual acoustics of the performance.
Part 2 Frantz Fanon writes from the disorienting nausea of being triple, which is also being black within a white world, that is a world structured by the impositions of whiteness, ranging from the dictation of scientific racial discourse to the interpellation of the racialized body. This could be one of the reasons Moten proposes destroying the world in order to step on the earth. To repeat; for Fanon, a symptom of being black in a white world is existing in triple, in which the repeated bodies one has to account for confuses the reality of the original. Yet these bodies aren’t Fanon’s creation; they are interpellated into his imaginary by racism. This disorients and exhausts Fanon, leading to a proliferation of questions beginning with “Where,” ending in “I won’t go on because who can tell me what beauty is? Where should I put myself from now on?” I haven’t fully made the connection between this instance of beauty and the anxious/repetitive poetics of Fanon with Moten’s beauty and invocation of repetition, but I’d be curious to explore how they work together in the context of black performance.
This week’s readings left me thinking about frequency, rhythm, and sound in a new way. Beginning my engagement with Moten’s In the Break, I was intrigued by Mackey’s description of the “the dislocated African’s pursuit of a meta-voice”. I questioned what the distinct and collective rhythm to Blackness is that could be experienced not only aurally, but through the other senses as well as how that rhythm may be located and engaged when discussing or visualizing the Black aesthetic. Thinking on the authenticity and plausibility of a Black meta-voice, I considered the ways that frequencies born from Black life are viewed as secondary, subaltern vibrations and languages that do not harness their own origin but are always viewed as in response to whiteness or oppression. I also questioned the distinction between what is valued as sound and in contrast, that which is relegated to the margins as noise. Which and what kinds of Black frequencies are legible and what meaning can we fashion from the images that echo illegible or lawless moans, mumbles, groans, and grunts that we have yet to fully recognize?
I’m also interested in the idea of photography as an ongoing production/performance and as an interstitial non-space that somehow simultaneously represents the harmony of discordant elements and the dark matter that can’t be universalized. I see the “dislocated Africans’” meta-voice as a form of independent expression, that also serves in shifting gazes and narratives toward the development of an altogether different vision of Black life. We see this in Professor Campt’s discussion of the Tumblr photo archive, Al Green’s calling out in Black falsetto, Brand’s childhood “knowing” of the future, and Fanon’s reclamation of self. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, “I made myself the poet of the world” (129) and “I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am” (135). In these statements, Fanon expands his (and our) understanding of not only Black life, but of life itself in his assertion of the body and the Self as archive. Fanon centers the Black being as that which is constantly exposed to aesthetic judgment, subject to the arbitrary whims of public memory. Shalini Puri (2014) defines volcanic memory as a “sometimes involuntary, unstable, and unauthorized memory” as compared to her stone memory, described as “choreographed and commemorative”. I understand the Black meta-voice as an articulation of both volcanic and stone memory, volcanic in its inability to fully claim one’s time, history, and place in anti-Black spaces, but also stone in its promotion and declaration of the permanence of Black realities and existence. Like the Black aesthetic, the Black meta-voice captures intention and improvisation in the production and performance of Black experience, often straddling the in-between space of “Nothingness” and “Infinity” like the photograph.
PART ONE
ReplyDeleteThe Overheard
Audibility and inaudibility belong in the realm of the perceived. And so, when we discuss audibility, it always refers to our experience of a sonic event. However, there exists a common belief that hears the inaudible as non-sounding. This misunderstanding was beautifully corrected by the Swiss sound theorist Salomé Voegelin in 2013, in a talk titled “Writing Phonography”. Voegelin explains that the inaudible does in fact sound, but “we do not hear it yet”, and the reason we do not hear it is because we don’t know the ways in which inaudible objects and being produce sounds. The overheard is a sonic notion of what is known in the visual world as the overlooked. It’s an ignored aspect of the sounding world. It is important to note that while the overheard is most often indeed not heard, it is not inaudible. Inaudibility, as defined before, is a result of a lack of familiarity. The overheard is a result of a lack of understanding. Thus, both the inaudible and the overheard are oppressed conditions of heard-ness.
In “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the Photograph”, Fred Moten is in search of a black meta-voice, and goes back to the “wordless moan” of Gospel. This notion communicates with Jacque Ranciére’s idea of “wordless victims”. In the essay “Politics In The Nihiistic Age”, Ranciére describes these victims as “the ultimate figure of the one excluded from the logos, armed only with a voice expressing a monotonous moan, the moan of naked suffering, which saturation has made inaudible.” But how did Ranciére get from saturation to inaudibility?
In “Back Futurity and the Echo of Premature Death”, Tina Campt discusses practices of refusal through image making:
Rather than fleeing or submitting to a future imposed upon them, they face down the image that would negate the complicated truth of the lives they have lived, in order to interrupt the narrative of their own demise that threatens to extinguish their capacity to claim a life lived in dignity and complexity. […] Their praxis of refusal consists of transforming mundane acts of image making into quotidian practices of fugitivity.
The “wordless victims” are bound to a framework of imposition that defined their identities as something that muted every other aspect of it. The imposed futures of the participants of the #If They Gunned Me Down movement is the saturation that led not to inaudibility as suggested by Ranciére, but to being overheard.
PART TWO
DeleteI said before that overheard identities are a result of a lack of understanding. To think of understanding in sounding terms means to consider the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing implies the immediate sensation of experiencing a sound. In hearing there is no engagement, it is a very passive state in which my interaction with a sound is only refers to its appearance in my sounding reality. Listening, then, is an active engagement with a sonic event. In listening I engage with the sound I hear, I pay attention to its entire structure, character and subtleties. To understand a sound means to listen to its whole, go beyond its surface and to consider it in more ways than meet those who meet the ear.
In the chapter “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”, Fanon taps directly on the concept of overheard identities, and similarly to the groups described in Campt’s chapter, he also finds ways of practicing refusal. Fanon thinks in musical or sounding terminology through his chapter and insists on rhythm and shouting. It seems to me that this insistence is a refusal to speak softly, and an insistence on being heard. Fanon refuses the identification that was imposed on him by others, and “explodes” because others have exploded him. His tone in the chapter shows resemblance to Hannah Arendt’s 1943 text “We Refugees” in it’s being at once both confrontational and also comical and ironic. In “We Refugees” Arendt refuses her, as well as other Jewish immigrants of the Second World War’s identification as refugees. Arendt goes after claiming a lost sense of identity that she was deprived of both in Germany and in the US (in Germany, she was imposed with the identity of a Jew that muted her German identity, and in the US the imposition of a “refugee” muted the sound of her survival) while Fanon claims his muted Blackness and refuses to be overheard in two senses: once in spite of it, and once because of it.
Returning to the question, “what does visual frequency look like?” that was raised in our first meeting, it seems particularly pressing to parse what the visual realm might itself entail, and what visual manifestations, whether as media forms or ekphrastic strategies, might offer to an understanding of frequency. The Harvard Dictionary of Music’s definition, which we read last week, emphasizes perception (as does Lee’s fascinating post about the inaudible) as a defining function of frequency; we might extend this to thinking about black life in saying that it is attentiveness that renders being perceptible.
ReplyDeleteTo this I wonder what role the visual might have to play in creating the conditions for perceptibility, whether vernacular image-making may resonate differently from the plastic arts, and why frequency as a specifically visual construction—as opposed to say, Senghor’s rhythm (Fanon 102)—may be useful. I believe clarifying these ideas further involves undoing established relationships between the visual and representation, the ocular and mimetic. This is perhaps why photography is so central to our concerns here; the photograph’s modern emergence has long linked it to a distinctly evidentiary paradigm, which in turn makes the task of demystifying its supposed claim to truth an even more urgent one.
This is also where I find Fred Moten’s piece to be incredibly lucid (as well as challenging). For Moten, as for writers like Barthes and Bazin, the photograph offers an ontological problem, an opportunity to reconsider life and death itself, and to ask “what looking might mean in general, what the aesthetics of the photograph might mean for politics and what those aesthetics might have meant for Mamie Bradley … ” (198). As I understand it, Moten proposes black mo’nin’ as the photograph’s negative form (perhaps both in the material and conceptual sense), one that points outside of the image, an “interstitial no-space” inhabiting an aesthetic, philosophical, political, and indeed sonic environment.
In light of this, I'd be interested in considering some further questions: What does the exterior of a photograph look—or sound—like? How does it bear upon Fanon’s statement of being “overdetermined from the outside”? In what ways can documentary images of the kind that Moten and Campt refer to, be non-mimetic (or “undialectic” in Barthes’s terminology)?
In “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Frantz Fanon begins and ends with the gaze, the interpellation or act of looking by which the Other fixes his blackness. “I am overdetermined from the outside,” he writes, and “I am a slave not to the “idea” others have of me, but to my appearance” (Fanon 95). For him, this visuality that structures and is structured through blackness not as ontology but as relation to whiteness leads in conclusion, quite notably, to the cinema: “I can’t go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself” (Fanon 119). We cannot equate cinema and photography, moving images and still, yet we cannot presuppose the “movies” here as fiction distinct from the claim to truth that “unary” photography makes. As such this leap from real to reel, from lived experience to cinematic, from quotidian to representational mirrors the vexed relationship between images and performance analyzed by Fred Moten. Put differently, it stages the encounter of black subjectivity with that which claims objectivity, or universality, as Moten discusses through Barthes. This encounter destabilizes the purported stability and textuality of images, moving or still, opening space for phonic reaction and thus resistance. Animating the photograph with phonic substance, a move that suggests if anything the cinema, reiterates generally the agency of spectatorship and stages the “breakdown of the opposition between live performance and mechanical reproduction” that irrupts as “material resistance” (Moten 198).
ReplyDeleteNonetheless I wonder if this affective capacity of the spectator finds its limit when faced with the moving image, that moves against the quiet and quotidian ability to pause (it) and listen. More pointedly, what is the difference between a photograph of Emmett Till and videos of Eric Garner or Philando Castile widely disseminated, reproduced, and replayed across television and social media? In the contemporary mediascape that recapitulates black death, as part of what Christina Sharpe terms a “dysgraphia of disaster” that moves through the rapid and repetitive staging of disposability, what agency if any does the black subject have in combating the “banal” “universality” of death that Moten rejects in the photography of Barthes? When “death that prompts a mourning whose rehearsal is also a refusal” (Moten 199) repeats endlessly, it moves in temporal cycles that gesture to the “structural precarity” and “premature” nature of black death that Tina Campt discusses. It makes necessary the mediatized resistance of subjects who then stage “anterior practices of fugitivity” (109).
I’m interested in considering the idea of “falseness” in relation to this week’s readings, with particular grounding in Tina Campt’s “Coda: Black Futurity and the Echo of Premature Death.” In a White supremacist society, the memories of Black people carry a default assumption of falseness. I’m thinking here of the erasure and exclusion of Black oral histories, the dismissal of the testimonies of Black witnesses (Campt’s discussion of the murder of Trayvon Martin reminds of the subsequent interrogation and defamation not only of Martin, but also his friend and major witness in the George Zimmerman trial, Rachel Jeantel), as well as the everyday interpersonal rejection of Black individuals’ attempts to recount personal experiences with racism and violence. Speaking of “false” memories necessitates an interrogation of what it means for something to be “false.” This question of falseness takes me to Campt’s exploration of the #If They Gunned Me Down, Which Picture Would They Use? hashtag. I find the hashtag’s ambiguity towards the idea of a real photographic subject compelling. The juxtaposition of a “respectable” photo with a photo representing performance of “menacing stereotypes of black urban life” (Campt 109) calls into question the realness of both images. On their own each photograph remains purposefully incomplete, neither fully representing the multiplicities of their Black subjects. Can falseness be a performance of Black fugitivity?
ReplyDeleteI also want to consider the relevance and resonance of false memories and images to questions of futurity. How does remembering a past event that did not happen/did not happen in the way you remember provide a way of thinking about the “what will have had to happen” (Campt 114)? This is where I find connections to Moten’s piece. The #If They Gunned Me Down, Which Picture Would They Use? hashtag can be considered a kind of “aesthetic appropriation” (Moten 197) of the specter of extrajudicial violence as part of “the condition of the possibility of ending” (Moten 197) this violence. The premature imagining of death is a refusal of its inevitability. I would be interested in thinking more about the relation between falseness and Campt’s “grammar of the future real conditional” (114). Are the “what could have happened but (probably) didn’t” the “what might happen but might not” opposed to or aligned with the “what will have had to happen”?
Defining Frequency in Blackness and Black Emotions
ReplyDeleteConsidering the definitions of frequency given on the syllabus, one way I would define the frequency of Black life is through the cycles of Black existence as seen through our resistance, subversive counter-responses, and revolutions. While these phases and sequences are insistent upon white supremacy and other examples of systemic oppressions, the recurring theme in Black life is the repetition of our revolutions and how to continue to survive, and thrive, in our everyday lives in spite of the challenges that exist. Though Black uprisings evolve and grow over time, they have historically dealt with the same issues spanning decades. I immediately think of Black student protests in my undergraduate university and how many of our demands strayed very little from the original protests in the 1960s. Black life, pain, and memory exist in these cycles, similar to how Dr. Campt draws parallels between the images of Terrance Johnson and Trayvon Martin (2017:106-107). Although their individual stories are different, contemporary instances of police murders have often been referred to as modern-day lynchings, only further emphasizing the cycles—and cyclical precarity—of Black life. There is a consistent reproduction of precarity that plagues Blackness and Black futures that lends itself well to discussing frequency.
In terms of how we see frequency in Black photography, Moten’s article sheds lights on the questions of Black ontology and the memory and consumption of Black pain. For instance, Mamie Till Bradley’s pain in her decision to leave her son’s casket open registered a reverberation for the value of Black life in America. Though a still image, photography of Black life holds a sensory reminder of the moment. Moten writes it as movement and sound, as
“animated, resounds, broken, breaking song of, song for, something before,” (2003: 210),
that is both because of the events leading to Emmett Till’s death, and the pain Till Bradley evoked in the process. Campt writes it as “seared into my memory…involuntarily and usually with visceral effects” (2017:103). The witnessing and holding of Black pain in a physical object leaves an impression on our memory that cyclically causes pain as well. It makes certain things visible, like Till Bradley’s response, or it registers fear in many, but it also can elicit invisible or invented responses. People can utter memories of time, place, and space in photography that are or possibly aren’t true and that is the work of frequency. The pain registered lives engrained within us and we start to draw parallels that sometimes do not exist. Aside from the issue of pain and memory in frequency, this process within photography also raises a number of questions for me: How do we translate memory from photography? How do images of Blackness and pain translate across the diaspora? How does social media complicate the temporality and placelessness of Black memory? I hope to continue problematizing these ideas throughout the course.
Mike Brown and I both graduated in green. He died in the end of the summer before my senior year, and in that August of 2014, the image that was inescapable for me was not the image of his body out on the street, but of him holding his high school diploma a few months before. I spent much of the year leading up to my graduation fixated on him, watching as his killer was not held responsible, listening to my white classmates deride and laugh about the rising Black Lives Matter protest, all the while thinking of how when the time came, I would also hook the top of a green robe closed and zip it up, would also pin bobby pins in my hair to keep the cap in place. Just beginning to heavily use social media, I would scroll through the images that Campt mentions in her piece, and wonder how good I would have to look to be sure the media used my graduation picture.
ReplyDeleteCampt argues that the performance of one’s future peril through the photograph is both a refusal and an affirmation, a creation of a “alternate line of flight” (Campt 113). But thinking of this in relation with her other descriptions of photographed black people, as well as Moten’s, I wonder if there isn’t a way in which the consumption of black life through the visual, particularly the photograph, demands that black people continually produce these lines of flight in order to survive. Could it be that the only way for black people to practice a survival is to perform a sort of refraction of the image of black death? And if so, how do we do it? How does one reshape the images that constantly haunt, like Emmett Till in his coffin, like Trayvon Martin in his hood? It seems that black death reiterates itself constantly through the visual in specific, and that black subjects are meant to register that reiteration. Thinking of how frequency in and of itself functions—as a movement that registers to the ear as unique because of the variations in its reiteration—could we think of these visuals as engendering frequencies within us as opposed to emitting frequencies on their own?
Describing the aftereffects of Till’s open casket, Moten writes that “Something real—in that it might have been otherwise—happened. So that you need to be interested in the complex, dissonant, polyphonic affectivity of the ghost,” (Moten 196). Perhaps frequency is something that happens to us, a registered dissonance between all of the images of black death and the lines of flight we have charted for ourselves, like two tuning forks that ring when struck. The affect of the ghost is a frequency/frequent polyphony that strikes the black subject, in moments like where we recognize we wear the same graduation gowns.
I spent a lot of time thinking about kinesis in this week’s readings, particularly mediating and attempting to work out the relational questions we were left with last week: What is frequency and how does it relate to black life? How do the definitions presented at the top of syllabus from the Harvard Dictionary of Music and the Oxford Dictionary of Physics connect elements of temporality, kinesis, haptic and sense? In offering these definitions, Professor Campt noted that vibrations and waves are movements of sound. With this in mind, I found Moten’s articulation of panic quite useful as a jumping off point (Moten 195).
ReplyDeleteMoten describes the effect of Emmett Till’s death akin to inertia in that it seemed to produce panic. Panic, then, functions as a productive tension that “marks” the crest and fall of a “haunted” movement (196). What’s interesting to me here is not simply the force of tragedy that marks or makes visible Emmett Till’s death, but the precarity of the movement, which he subsequently describes as: “Something real –in that it might have been otherwise—happened” (196). The precarity and, maybe conditional aura, of the line calls to mind moments in the text (200, 205) where otherwise collision gives way to black performance “out of death” (209). This movement elides an “extended trajectory where panic seems to always have been,” much like Campt’s “line of flight,” as an “escape [that is] always already a counterattack” (Campt 109). The “renunciation” of their black fugitivities is in the form of the “will have had to” (Campt 114) and “if” and “could be” (“which is what I am, which is what you are or could be if you can listen while you look”), existing “in and around the photograph –black mo’nin’” (Moten 200, 206).
The reverb of the past, present and future as collisions of possibility calls to my attention Dionne Brand’s “past; again” in “From Verso 4.” In conjuring the movement from the “all this” of the “yellow washed house” (Brand 8) that held “everything we loved in the world” (7), she creates something like a pull between the precipice of the end of the line that collides with temporal “past” and resonate “again,” though separated by the semicolon’s pause that is notably not a complete end. I was taken by the possibility of proximity and temporal collision that I at first did not recognize, instead focusing on the seeming visual transcendent perspective at “the top of the street” (1) “[looking] down” (12). I found uprightness and bodily arrangement were not driving the juxtaposed movement towards the past and into the future; rather, the “past; again” notates “all of this,” the weight or matter of “everything we loved in the world,” that at once reaches toward the past and carries the subject into the anticipatory present (13).
In continuing to think about kinetic movement and time and its comportment outside the occult of visuality, I am left with questions concerning the role of love (Moten 209), of which I am reminded of Audre Lorde’s call to “eros” as “the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony,” and of the productive tension between totality/ensemble and singularity (Moten 202, 207-208).
After looking and looking at the photos discussed in Tina Campt’s “Coda,” I still can’t decide what it is that I’m seeing.
ReplyDeleteWhen I look at the graduation cap and gowns, military uniforms, and medical scrubs, I find excellence, clarity of purpose, drive—but I also find an aesthetic gesture toward American belonging; I find my father who, after immigrating to the United States, would clutch his old mathematics textbook to his chest in order to stave off abuse, grimaces; and I find myself, sitting at a distinguished conference table, trying desperately to discipline myself into some acceptable version of humanity.
And the juxtaposed photos of those same people of color holding liquor, champagne, middle fingers up, solo cups? I imagine, to most of our eyes, it’s hard to find what’s menacing. And yet, it doesn’t take long to see that photograph’s drag into a possible future: one in which, an authoritative knock on the door startles the sitter out of their playful reverie, a uniform summoned to address the music, too loud and too late, and what is that smell, suspiciously like weed? It isn’t hard to imagine, to feel the chest tighten—I notice my impulse to look away.
Between these two images, staged side by side, I do hear Moten’s “polyphonic affectivity of the ghost” (Moten 196). Particularly in the first photo, depicting a man flanked by his professors and giving a graduation speech. I’ve circled the face of a white haired white man, hand in the air—possibly fisting his eye glasses, taken off from so much pleasure, amusement?—who is laughing or cheering unreservedly. From his open mouth churns Fanon’s words, I can’t help but hear it: “The black physician will never know how close he is to being discredited. I repeat, I was walled in: neither my refined manners nor my literary knowledge nor my understanding of the quantum theory could find favor” (Fanon 97).
I do not even need to see the second photo, the one of the same man enjoying himself dancing, in order to feel haunted by deaths that happen, already are happening, have happened in “a train of horrors” to that man in his graduation cap and to his professors, also black, proudly brimming beside him (Moten 196).
While I do perceive refusal in these photos, I’m struggling to understand how the sitters, “actively [anticipating] their own premature deaths,” create the conditions of fugitivity. The state of “active anticipation” calls to mind Fanon, who writes: “…if I had to define myself I would say I am in expectation: I am investigating my surroundings; I am interpreting everything on the basis of my findings. I have become a sensor” (Fanon 99).
According to OED, an (image) sensor is an electronic component of a camera system that converts light (or waves from another part of the electromagnetic spectrum) into electrical signals, which can in turn be processed to form an image. Might we consider how the sitters, in their anticipation, become living sensors who have been forced into the position of picking up social signals—of abjection, debasement, fear, fury, seduction, gluttony—with which their likeness is hopelessly intertwined?
Is the “anterior practice of fugitivity” found in the sitters authorship and framing of their own images? If so, what is at stake in maintaining a state of “active anticipation”? For me, I’m reminded of my own strung out nervous system, nights of noisy teeth grinding, and disassociating at the sight of a police officer caressing his holster.
On the other hand, I understand the necessity of anticipation if we are to learn the grammars of “the future real conditional, or that which will have had to happen” (Campt 114). To turn away from my capacity to “sense” would mean certain death, I’m sure. And yet, how can I self-determine and have the quiet to imagine possible futures with all that moaning of death and for the dying ringing perpetually, dragging at my ears?
Frantz Fanon begins “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” with two violating exclamations hurled at him, violently: these racialized hostilities and aggressions vocalized and weaponized against him on public transport. I was struck by this beginning in relation to the question of visual frequencies of black life because it occurred to me that the cacophony of an anti-Black and imperial world involves so many layers of vocalizations and vibrations (harmful and threatening in some cases as above, but also soothing and reverberating in others) and that we receive all of them constantly with greatly diverging affect. Tina Campt takes up the question of what cuts through this noise?
ReplyDeleteRefusing to accept the conditions of premature death and police brutality that foreclose the lives of too many young Black men and women robbed of their futures, Campt intervenes in her analysis to consider how “a black feminist mapping of the grammar of black futurity—a grammar of anteriority” (114) might differently engage in the possibilities and undercurrents of Black fugitivity. The role of photography within this praxis is addressed also by Fred Moten who in “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the Photograph” considers what a political ontology of photography sounds like since “In the end… neither language nor photography nor performance can tolerate silence” (205). I was interested in how the temporal register of photography and performativity when brought together might transform our understandings of the fixedness of an image, moving across time and space and reaching us, even touching us, when this contact might otherwise not be possible. Might these modes of frequency when brought together and in turn their reception operate by way of producing seemingly imperceptible ruptures in the usual flow and repetition of frequencies that operate against Black life? The future real of the tumblr page #If They Gunned Me Down, Which Picture Would They Use? project as I understand it operates in this future anterior, not-yet, temporality of futurity in order to challenge the popular understanding or misunderstandings of Black life and of photography to show what has been as a fixed and inescapable event of violence. They show instead through this medium- and in the case of Mamie Till Bradley’s decision to show her son Emmet Till, brutalized under the conditions of a white supremacist world order - what should have never been by transforming this frequency.
As I think through the question of frequency and its relation to black life, the term most animates my work in relation to the “rhythmic seriality” (Campt 107) of violence and black death, and the quotidian practices of futurity in a “minor key” (invoking Hartman) through which we survive violence and death. I think of Dionne Brand’s “I am held, and held,” which indexes the hold of the continuing slave ship and the ways in which we hold one another. The repetition of held has a lingering effect, provoking me to sit with this holding as routine, past but not past. Frequency as repetition repeats across the readings for this week. “Such repetition being a constitutive element of what it means and is to be BLACK” (Moten 210). I hear Fanon’s “Look, a Negro!” as a continuous overdetermining from the outside. I see the routine of mourning, hear the frequency of black moaning and shouting.
ReplyDeleteThinking about routine and mourning registers differently this week, following the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi. What does it mean to die engaging in “routine” life, particularly when that routine is a practice of escaping death? As my younger brother so brilliantly stated in a tweet: “Hoopers ain’t supposed to die…N****s hoop to escape death.” Before this moment, when I was on a cabin trip in the woods over the weekend, I made a note to think about what it means to escape even briefly. Where one can “take flight” to away from the routine. How breaks between the repetitions can be a source of healing and “holding”. How do we contend with death in the practice of escape? How do we make sense of the “seriality” of “premature mortality” for black life (Campt 107)? The routine of mourning, mo’nin, repeats.
Moten engages the rehearsal of black mo’nin to hear the phonic substance embedded within the photograph of Emmett Till’s body during his funeral. This photograph is doing something that exceeds the visual, it elicits an affective response which attends to the unspeakability of the moan. The sonics within the photograph provoke us to linger with it, to listen to it and experience the moment which it represents. I think about the phonic substances of the photograph as I see the repeated photos of basketball players with written tributes to Kobe and Gigi on their Kobe shoes in games. I try to hear the sounds of mourning as these photos repeat. I try to think of repetition not only as violence but a space for something else. I try to think of the possibility in collective black mo’nin.
Part 1
ReplyDeleteFor Moten, looking at Emmet Till’s face opens onto “all it might be said to mean that I can look on this face.” I’ll rephrase the problematic for emphasis: What does it mean that one can look at this? Furthering this line of thought, Moten continues: “This is to say not only look at it but look at it in the context of an aesthetics, look at it as if it were to be looked at, as if it were
to be thought, therefore, in terms of a kind of beauty… in the context of her demand that her [Mamie Bradley’s] son’s face be seen, be shown, that his death and her mourning be performed.” What does it mean that brutal and violent death can be looked at as if it were aesthetically beautiful? Perhaps the meaning of the looking lies in the resurrective and insurgent politics that looking in such a way conditions. I also want to point out that the “alchemizing” of death into an aesthetic figure hurts. For Moten, by way of Mackey, the blues are not worth the dues paid, because pain, torture, and abjection aren’t worth it; they are in excess of value, their value is their excess. The sublime paradox is that the yield, however slight, can end such “extortion.” Black performance is thus the excessiveness and proliferating tendency of its means, a means that isn’t worth its end, but precisely because of that must be worked with in order to exhaust the world. Another way to phrase this is that black performance exceeds that which can bear it, coming back to the question, What does it mean to look at or bear the exhaustive or the unbearable? This question might be what is staged in the visual acoustics of the performance.
Part 2
Frantz Fanon writes from the disorienting nausea of being triple, which is also being black within a white world, that is a world structured by the impositions of whiteness, ranging from the dictation of scientific racial discourse to the interpellation of the racialized body. This could be one of the reasons Moten proposes destroying the world in order to step on the earth. To repeat; for Fanon, a symptom of being black in a white world is existing in triple, in which the repeated bodies one has to account for confuses the reality of the original. Yet these bodies aren’t Fanon’s creation; they are interpellated into his imaginary by racism. This disorients and exhausts Fanon, leading to a proliferation of questions beginning with “Where,” ending in “I won’t go on because who can tell me what beauty is? Where should I put myself from now on?” I haven’t fully made the connection between this instance of beauty and the anxious/repetitive poetics of Fanon with Moten’s beauty and invocation of repetition, but I’d be curious to explore how they work together in the context of black performance.
Dear all,
ReplyDeletesince I was embedding images in my response text, and blogger is unable to implement them, I have to send you the following link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQJseFNAzxTiFwsJF2jpjtd1x1kn-4AjBaspMuwnrjhdqmIztpZuzMphJaBPkZ4r3o8lgiky9jwp1WM/pub
Sorry for the inconvenience!
This week’s readings left me thinking about frequency, rhythm, and sound in a new way. Beginning my engagement with Moten’s In the Break, I was intrigued by Mackey’s description of the “the dislocated African’s pursuit of a meta-voice”. I questioned what the distinct and collective rhythm to Blackness is that could be experienced not only aurally, but through the other senses as well as how that rhythm may be located and engaged when discussing or visualizing the Black aesthetic. Thinking on the authenticity and plausibility of a Black meta-voice, I considered the ways that frequencies born from Black life are viewed as secondary, subaltern vibrations and languages that do not harness their own origin but are always viewed as in response to whiteness or oppression. I also questioned the distinction between what is valued as sound and in contrast, that which is relegated to the margins as noise. Which and what kinds of Black frequencies are legible and what meaning can we fashion from the images that echo illegible or lawless moans, mumbles, groans, and grunts that we have yet to fully recognize?
ReplyDeleteI’m also interested in the idea of photography as an ongoing production/performance and as an interstitial non-space that somehow simultaneously represents the harmony of discordant elements and the dark matter that can’t be universalized. I see the “dislocated Africans’” meta-voice as a form of independent expression, that also serves in shifting gazes and narratives toward the development of an altogether different vision of Black life. We see this in Professor Campt’s discussion of the Tumblr photo archive, Al Green’s calling out in Black falsetto, Brand’s childhood “knowing” of the future, and Fanon’s reclamation of self. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, “I made myself the poet of the world” (129) and “I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am” (135). In these statements, Fanon expands his (and our) understanding of not only Black life, but of life itself in his assertion of the body and the Self as archive. Fanon centers the Black being as that which is constantly exposed to aesthetic judgment, subject to the arbitrary whims of public memory. Shalini Puri (2014) defines volcanic memory as a “sometimes involuntary, unstable, and unauthorized memory” as compared to her stone memory, described as “choreographed and commemorative”. I understand the Black meta-voice as an articulation of both volcanic and stone memory, volcanic in its inability to fully claim one’s time, history, and place in anti-Black spaces, but also stone in its promotion and declaration of the permanence of Black realities and existence. Like the Black aesthetic, the Black meta-voice captures intention and improvisation in the production and performance of Black experience, often straddling the in-between space of “Nothingness” and “Infinity” like the photograph.