In thinking about this week’s readings, I found myself returning to questions of repetition, scale, and vectors. I believe it was Semilore who raised the question about why the photograph provides the axis against which we are considering the multivalent frequencies of black life, and Stephen who brought cinema into our discussion via the closing of Fanon’s chapter. This collision of photography and film generates an endless set of theoretical as well as material problems for us in the context of frequency—the central one being time, or the temporal register.
If we are to think of visuality as it has been conceived as an evidentiary basis for a belief system (like in the case of Fanon’s epidermalization), how might the moving image and still photograph problematize verity? What truths do ethnographic portraiture attempt to convey as opposed to, say, documentary film? How is the inexorable linear duration of cinema (in that it moves from a start to an end point) different from the echoes of a photograph? These temporal questions are considered and theorized in various forms across the texts for this week, but what I’d like to focus on is the relationship of disjointed time to the visual and sonic. In Ellison’s thrilling descriptions of listening to Louis Armstrong in Invisible Man, he writes,
Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind, Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. (8)
Ellison here brings visibility into direct correlation with the time of sound, proposing a kind of jazz logic of life lived outside and in between “straight” time—uneven, sporadic, yet repetitively “epistrophic,” as the scholar Brent Edwards might propose via Thelonius Monk. How can the visible reproduce sonic characteristics as part of its inherent form? How do we feel in an image—as Tina Campt quotes a student on Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison—“each other through the timing (or falling out of time)”?
I found Arthur Jafa’s technical manifesto on Black visual intonation to be immensely helpful here. Through works like Apex, he wants to reject the linear motion ascribed to cinema and offer instead a rich and “polyvential” visual idiom that moves less like Hollywood and more like jazz, “worrying” the note. Like the Invisible Man’s reflections on Louis, Jafa sees the possibilities of the moving image as lying in its very propensity for movement through “irregular, nontempered (nonmetronomic) camera rates and frame replication” that might approximate black voices and black life. The aim of such work is thus to convey what Campt refers to in the glossary of the Still-Moving-Image as “arrhythmia”: an experience of asynchrony and unification, of discernible individual sounds and coalescing environments.
To these delineations of the visual and sonic I would like to add one more term that may be useful to our discussions: montage. How does montage, typically imagined as the cinematic sequencing of still images or the photographic production of a composite, play into questions of time? Does montage bridge the still and moving image, and can it have aural manifestations?
"An image is powerful not necessarily because of anything specific it offers the viewer, but because of everything it apparently also takes away from the viewer." --Trinh T. Minh-ha * In order to think not just about the possibility to analyze “Black film,” but actually to find new ways of making it, Arthur Jafa, turns to the founders of the neoformalist method in film theory, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. Jafa points out the motivation for this turn to materiality and form as follows:
“I’ve heard people talk about issues of representation and the content of culture. But I’m trying to figure out how to make Black films that have the power to allow the enunciative desires of people of African descent to manifest themselves. […] How can we interrogate the medium to find a way Black movement in itself could carry, for example, the weight of sheer tonality in Black song?”
Jafar’s focus on form brings him closer to the question of 'how,' rather than 'what' is supposed to sound through “Black visual intonation.” In exceeding a logic of binary opposition, the envisaged shape of a Black cinema that has yet to come, is not just an alternative or counter-movement to Hollywood cinema with its highly formalized narrative strategies, but an active use of distortion and the production of instabilities and irregularities in its concrete expressions and manifestations. In an orchestrated consonance with “the tendency in Black music,” as Jafar concludes, “to “worry the note”—to treat notes as indeterminate, inherently unstable sonic frequencies rather than the standard Western treatment of notes as fixed phenomena,” what Jafar is looking for is the production of dissonant musical effects on film.
Ralph Ellison strikes a similar note, when he describes the importance of light, not just in order to confirm his reality, but as a way to “give birth to my form. […] Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.” (6/7) What helped Elliott to discover his form was, amongst other things, the “lyrical sound” of Louis Armstrong, who, in bending his musical instrument, “made poetry out of being invisible.” (8) With utmost precision and commitment to play not just fixed notes, but striking the notes of different pitches and intervals, Armstrong’s music introduced Ellison to “a new analytical way of listening.” But, and Arnav already quoted the same passage and highlighted the importance of temporality and timing, the “unheard sounds” that were so important to perceive Ellison's own invisibility, sound in a “different sense of time.” The difference is the perception of a time, that is out of time; an ‘untimely’ presence of time, in which something can occur, transpire, eventuate, which interrupts the ‘natural,’ ‘normal’ or ‘normative’ course of time. — CUT —
“I am thinking here, ushering here, into the gap,” Christina Sharpe writes. (115)
The resonances generated by this week’s readings point me to the question of the interval, and what very different notes these notions of a formless form strike for our discussion on Visual Frequency. How can we think the sonic substance of the image, when we think the image itself as an interval—as already something that exceeds its own form, since it has none.
What could it mean, with regards to Sharpe’s text, to be confronted with the difficult task to deal with a form, or to listen to a frequency, which is not determined by “the number of complete vibrations or cycles occurring per unit of time…such as a column of air,” but by the interjacent form of the interval? Especially in such critical moments when the breathing stops and syncopation and suffocation suspend the vital necessity of airflow—
I’d like to return to Tara’s brief discussion of Black pleasure. Not joy, as Jafa corrects, but pleasure. (What do we make of that distinction?)
I’m drawn back into Fred Moten’s unwieldy and unwinding definition of Black Art, “which is to say Black Life, which is to say Black (Life Against) Death, which is to say Black Eros, is the ongoing production of a performance, the ongoing production of a performance: rupture and collision, augmented toward singularity, motherless child, childless mother, heartrending shriek, levee camp moan, grieving lean and head turn, fall, Stabat matter, turn a step, loose booty funk brush stroke down my cheek, yellow dog, blue train, black drive” (Moten 210).
Black (Life Against) Death is augmented toward singularity. I’m trying to wrap my head around this—Black Life moves, it moves “a little before the beat, a little behind the beat,” toward, or in constant collision with the “singularity of antiblackness” (Jafa 267) (Sharpe 106). Black Life is augmented, as in, it increases in size, in number, in tones, as Jafa suggests. It meets the antiblack singularity with “Polyventiality.” The two collide.
To me, Jafa’s “Polyventiality” is a multiplicity of moves that occur contemporaneously. I do not need to choose between grief or grind—I loose booty funk brush stroke and levee camp moan and turn a step all at the same time. Black metaphysical movement is not untethered from Man’s “swift and imperceptible flowing of time,” but rather emerges from an awareness of its percussion (Ellison 8).
In other words, there is a beat, the unceasing repetition of brutality, that keeps Man in step, in time, in progression. For Sharpe, the beat is born from the door of no return that led to the ship called Zorgue (Care) and the ship called Zong (Song). In their wake is the ditto ditto ditto of the archive, “the migrant and refugee ship, the container ship, and the medical ship,” continuing the pattern that reaffirms Man’s account of Universal time (Sharpe 120).
But within “the pattern of certainties” lives chaos, i.e. a different kind of Care and Song, one that cracks linear time wide open. Inside the breaks we find Zong! (for example), which is tethered to the ship, but not exclusively. The exclamation gives us excess space to move and to emerge, to converge past and present, grief and grind.
I wonder whether this, our “tragic magic,” is by definition illegible (Jafa 267). Like the word Care written over and over and over, on top of itself, and whether that illegibility is what delivers relief and even pleasure. Why is it that Zabou, with her long indigo train, is the only woman who faces no reprisal for her song?
I’ll end with James Baldwin: “What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here, almost 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years. You always told me ‘It takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?”
This week's readings have me thinking a lot about Black pleasure and self-care. I’m not entirely confident that they can be thought of as synonyms, but in my mind the two terms keep coming together. How do we find Black pleasure and/or self-care in the wake? This question must be considered in reference to the two modes of care that Sharpe presents in her chapter: “care as force; ‘the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something” (Sharpe 123, emphasis added) and “an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness” (Sharpe 131, emphasis added).
Sharpe’s definition of care as force, and its associations with the state, made me think of the phenomenon of self-care and mindfulness as a regime. Of the continuous drive to optimize ourselves as workers and consumers, to be always aiming for something even during our brief periods of leisure. As a Black woman who enjoys yoga and has tried to commit to a handful of meditation apps, Sharpe’s discussion of the breath—the guiding principle of most yoga and meditative practices I’ve tried—and the “connection between the lungs and the weather: the supposedly transformative properties of breathing free air” (112) struck me as an intrinsic part of the contemporary system of care as force. To quote Sharpe, “We, now, are living in the wake of such pseudoscience” (112): we are told to study our breath, to manage our bodies, to ignore the weather and focus on “inner” stillness and emotional modulation, in order to be better workers. How do we reclaim the terms of Black self-care and pleasure when the very act of breathing has been appropriated by the dehumanizing model of management, optimization, and productivity?
I wonder if we can see a model for Black pleasure and/or self-care in the wake in Ellison. I am thinking of the image of Ellison’s protagonist covering his space in the basement floor-to-ceiling in lightbulbs, powered by energy stolen from Monopolated Light & Power. This siphoning, this re-appropriation of energy previously stolen from the protagonist, allows himself to “feel my vital aliveness” (Ellison 7), an act of resistance that is both about pleasure and a necessity for his being “I love light…Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form” (Ellison 6). There may be an important distinction between Black pleasure and joy (Jafa 267), but spaces (or “holes” to use Ellison’s term) must be made/found/stolen for Black pleasure and self-care “as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness” in the wake.
Of the concepts in this week’s readings, I’m most drawn to the idea of the “way-making tool”, which Sharpe brings into thought by posing, “What are the words and forms for the ways we must continue to think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations in the hold, in multiple Black everydays of the wake?” (113). Sharpe’s selected form, aspiration, can be described through the methods of Black annotation and redaction, which I understand not as an intervention in dominant storytelling but in the development of representations of Self at the discretion of the Black being and the (nonhierarchical) power within their experiences. In this we also meet with the notions of restorative intimacy, “care”, and the Black anagrammatical in representation, which I find especially compelling because of the possibilities they present for the practice and experiment of Black expression and culture, for “wake work”, and for imagining otherwise. The Black anagrammatical is Sharpe’s framing of what Fanon describes as the Black person’s inhabitation of the liminal space between “nothing and infinity” and all that can be produced from the singularity despite its challenges; this is related to Professor Campt’s insistence on the value of registers that exceed merely what we see (or hear, or say, etc.) and the importance of acknowledging these synesthetic experiences. Out of the residential commons of Blackness steps care, a “shared risk between and among the Black trans* asterisk” (131) and the different forms of Black sociality, realized through the sonic, vibrations, rhythms, and haptics of the quotidian. Professor Campt’s description of the arrhythmatic, of the “off timeliness” of Black rhythms, which I took as suggesting a sense of different time and order of Black life, a shared understanding of the Black condition and experience, and a specific culture that arises from certain Black frequential values, “blurring the lines between stillness, movement, and motion” (See “slow-walking). This introduction to the Black arrhythmatic was interesting to me because of a running joke I’m familiar with that dictated that “white people are always off-beat, out of tune, out of touch”, specifically referring to song, dance, and rhythm, and to think of Blackness and Black people as those who are able to step in and step out of, to be removed from, and to remove themselves from time and space(s) makes Ellison’s Invisible Man even more relevant in thinking about taking care, and that which is able to be created in the shadows, in hibernation, in the wake. That “tragic magic” is the blessing and curse of irregularity in anti-Black weather, which makes polyventiality not so much a preoccupation as an inevitability in Black life. I question in what ways polyventiality, hapticity, the Black anagrammatical, and care work can be linked to communal “generative open-ended thinking” for the creation of other way-making tools that serve to shift current sonic and optic understandings and bring to lift Black cultural production we may overlook. In this instance, Black American trap, the rowdy stepchild of hip-hop music comes to mind. I’m thinking about the link between trap and pleasure and how its arrhythmatic tendencies in sound and anagrammatical lyrical forms present a different modality of Black presentation, sociality, and potential of restorative intimacy by way of its language, which arguably is accessible or remains inaccessible to particular audiences on the basis of its form of care through shared risk. What images, imaginings, and visuals are produced from Black experimentation, open thought left unfinished, that may not be solely focused on form but on pleasure and the sonic experience and what do/will future forms look like?
Frequency, as the Harvard Dictionary of Music taught us, has to work both in and with time in order to exist. Hence, time is a precondition to any understanding of frequency. The time required to complete a cycle that allows for frequency is extremely short. The bottom of the human hearing threshold is 20Hz. That is 20 cycles per second, which is considered slow. What would happen if we stretch the time measurement from a second to a decade or a century? What sort of a frequency will we get then? I want to think of what happens within this time -in the space in-between its beginning and end- that allows for a frequency. If we were to listen to this supposedly non-sounding space in-between the cycles, we will find a multitude of frequencies that can create a different sound altogether.
I believe that an assemblage of unheard sounds can construct a continuous frequency -a multitude of voices- that together will be able to make audible unheard aspects of a narrative of black life. This frequency is a result of what Jaffa termed as "polytentiality”; Jaffa explains that polytentiality is: “multiple tones, multiple rhythms, multiple perspectives, multiple meanings, multiplicity.” (Jaffa, 267) This multiplicity can manifest itself in a temporal manner as well. If we were to consider a possibility of augmented time along with multiple temporalities, it will be possible to account for frequencies or moments that were (or are) deemed unheard.
Throughout Campt’s glossary, the notion that frequency is an in-between space was raised multiple times. This notion breaks the temporal cycle and allows for unheard frequencies to become audible; a temporality of an in-between considers other timelines and therefore other cycles through which frequencies can occur: “The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said it’s piece, and waited for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well.”(Ellison, 8) The unheard voices that stood clearly from all the rest in Ellison’s listening experience were sounds that ran across a different temporality: the time they took to complete a cycle is different, and perhaps way slower, than the time of the audible ones. Their temporality is a polytentiality in the sense that it allows for multiple temporalities to exist.
This polytential understanding of temporality aligns with Sharpe’s proposal of annotation and redaction. Sharpe suggests that the work of redaction and annotation is “another effort to try to look, to try to really see.” (Sharpe, 117) A visual frequency of an image could be found through this attempt to “really see”, which to me means to really listen. In this listening we are asked to go beyond what is present and beyond what is deemed “heard” or of importance in the image. It is an attempt to hear those unheard voices that Ellison found , those whose temporalities were different, and thus could not complete their cycle at the moment they were captured.
In elaborating what she terms the “orthography of the wake,” Christina Sharpe questions the ethics behind visual representation of black suffering, the totality of which contrarily diminishes the purported call to action that often motivates circulation of such images. She questions the ethics behind the film 12 Years a Slave (2013), in which Steve McQueen—to recall Sethe and her refusal—“reanimates the place and spaces of slavery” as “memory and…more than memory” that “circulates, like weather” (Sharpe 105). It normalizes violence on the black body, violence whose co-production across narrative and documentary instances, “fictional” and real, situates the latter mode as not only normative representation or Althusserian hail that secures the location of whiteness, but also, I would add, stages in effect a rehearsal for further, actualized brutality.
For Sharpe, the long take employed by McQueen compounds the violence in 12 Years a Slave. The director in fact makes repeated use of duration in his oeuvre, from this film to Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011). What is it about the notion of suffering in his narratives that demands or requires the insistence of time, the documentary impulse, and the pretense of liveness? Does the long take mimic and reproduce the “retinal detachment that, then, reproduces the hold as location and destination” (Sharpe 124), or the “authority of visuality” in which some have the “right to look” and take pleasure where others have no choice but to exercise the “right to look away”? And yet if a practice of care in Black-image making strives for “an account counter to the violence of abstraction” (Sharpe 131), is the long take appropriate or ethically responsible in visualizing trauma (repetition, re-memory, “more than memory”) when juxtaposed with recent work such as Queen & Slim (2019), which lived up to its designation as the “black Bonnie and Clyde” in the rapid and repetitive cuts that attended the final shootout sequence and termination of black fugitivity?
Suspended between the continuity of time and the filmic continuities that abstract it, black visuality may look instead toward what Arthur Jafa and Tina Campt describe respectively as “polyventiality” or “still-moving-images.” How might the possibility inherent to multiple rhythms, “nonmetronomic” rhythms, and works that blur the “presumed distinction between still and moving images” (Campt) deliver us from the impasse of ethical visualization practices?
One idea that stuck out to me in this week’s readings is the act of refusal in Black visuality. In Dr. Campt’s definition of refusal, she writes it as “– a refusal to be silenced or to accept the status of black disposability” (2018). The work of Black artists we see in Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being follows this tradition, not only by their refusal to conform to anti-Black optics, but also, in the case of Roy DeCarava’s photography, refusing to allow “images of Black people be used to frame someone else’s not seeing” (133). I was particularly struck by Campt’s points of Diamond Reynolds’ numerous refusals, in terms of Black women’s subjectivity. How do we reckon Black women’s silences in art and in their everyday existence? How do we rewrite the stereotypes of Black womanhood as ‘loud’ and ‘angry’ to subvert politics of silence and enact refusal to challenge Black ontology?
In terms of refusal, I question how we honor and prescribe virtue to these sometimes subversive acts of resistance. In ways Black art and film create an archive, the politics of refusal is also an archive from which we can assess Black visuality. How one chooses to be remembered, whether silenced or vocal, embraced or subdued, and the ways we as scholars choose to envision this refusal are all examples of created agency on the behalf of the subject. Black visuality is the “right to look” and “right to look away,” according to Campt, but also the right to illustrate how we choose to be remembered. In this case, I think of Marissa Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive and how she contests the methodology of history and the field’s urge to fill in the gaps where rather, in her work, she focuses on how enslaved women’s existence be best remembered, not by filling in the gaps but using refusal to illustrate whom Black people trust, even in the afterlife, how they would want to be seen and who they want to see their innermost being. Arthur Jafa also questions this in terms of how Black people interrogate mediums (267).
Sharpe continues these questions as a scholar when she writes, “By considering that relationship between imaging and imagining in the registers of Black annotation and Black redaction, I want to think about what these images call forth” (116), I too hope to analyze the issues of refusal and redaction in Afro-Jamaican women’s politics and sound as a visual to their highly ignored but ever-present images in Jamaican history.
This week, I was taken by the question in Professor Campt’s blog post on “Slow Walking,” where she writes: “How do you ‘feel’ another when no one is touching?” To return to thinking with movement and motion as it relates the haptic and kinetic components of frequency, I find the notion of “haptic labor” compelling, particularly as it relates to the connotations of labor as energy or force, but also it relates to the other critical term Professor Campt deploys: relation. For my own self, I think of relation akin to movement, a locational/navigational understanding of one’s position relative to space; though, I also find relation to be co-constitutive of another person or thing, as my position is relative to another. In essence, I find relation to be interactive and dependent on someone or something; it’s a form of sociality. Force, or perhaps energy, and relative space constitute parts of “feeling another” without “touching.” Continuing with this line of thinking, I want to call-in the closing reflection where Professor Campt describes leaving the slow-walking exhibit and, as she approaches the exit, the “movement of air” from someone’s movement and motion (“movement animated by his long arms moving slowly and eventually more dramatically up and down”) creates a touching sensation. In this way, the kinetic and haptic frequencies of another re-arranged her relation to space. It’s this rearrangement of relation (as I understand it as one’s understanding of their position relative to another) that draws connection with Sharpe’s chapter “The Weather.”
Honing in on this moment of quasi touch through the movement and motion of another and subsequent rearrangement of relation, how might we consider this an act of friction, rubbing, or impression of spatiality (and across temporality if we are to consider the “slow walking/moving” that is simultaneously occurring and producing an embodied tempo)? To push this thought further, I am thinking of the connections between this friction/impression and what Sharpe calls “singularity,” a “weather event or phenomenon likely to occur around a particular time, or date, or set of circumstances,” or a “point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces” (Sharpe 106). The “region of infinite mass density” that Sharpe describes is the site of an interruption between space and time. What possibilities follow if we engage this interruption with that of the haptic labor of relation exemplified by Professor Campt’s experience of being brushed by another through him “moving [her] air.” Considering all of this, which is admittedly a lot and a little unfinished, I re-arrived at the question of “feeling another” without “touching,” where the interruption (“singularity”) is an altering movement (“force”) that produces a new ecology (“the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings; the political movement that seeks to protect the environment, especially from pollution”) (Sharpe 106); it is, or perhaps could be, a relational rearrangement of space that reconfigures the distinctions between you and I, or me and another.
(Sorry for the deleted above; there was a formatting issue).
Pleasure, n.
From the Oxford Dictionary: The condition or sensation induced by the experience or anticipation of what is felt to be good or desirable; a feeling of happy satisfaction or enjoyment; delight, gratification. Opposed to pain.
From Arthur Jafa: distinct from joy. A geography to be neither explored nor charted, but felt, playing with rupture and repair, found in how Aretha sings the song (Jafa 267). If we investigated how black music can speak to pleasure as distinct from joy, to understand black pleasure as something that accesses these multiple tonalities, or in the terms of the class, frequencies, what terrain would lay in wait for us? Jafa suggests that we might make black images vibrate in accordance with black musics—to extend that logic, black pleasure operates as a register through which multiple mediums of blackness coexist and co-communicate. Black pleasure is not always a joy, but satiates something—allows something within the black person and the literal black body to “manifest” (267).
From Ralph Ellison: an aliveness generated by five overlapping phonographs playing Louis Armstrong. Black pleasure as a geography, when considered through the lens of music, doesn’t spread out but instead falls in, burrowing itself deeper and deeper. At the bottom of this black burrow—created out of the affective pleasure of listening to Armstrong sing not about his joy but about his sorrow—lies a sermon and a preacher and an increasing tempo. And at the bottom of the pleasure lies the adage that “‘Black will make you . . .’ ‘Black . . .’ ‘. . . or black will un-make you’,” (Ellison, 8). Blackness and pleasure together operate as dual forces (or to reference Simon Gikandi, non-identical twins) to define the modern subject—blackness as an invisible force, sublimated in the mind of the Western world, yet essential to its operation, and pleasure as a marker of Western success and, when experienced by white people, evidence of the deservedness of said success. But black pleasure, then, might trouble this concept—a pleasure that exists in concert with sorrow and pain rather than being opposed to it, operating in speech happening on the “lower frequencies” (Ellison, 312).
From (my interpretation of) Christina Sharpe: the product of aspiration. The product of the reimagining and transformation of spaces under a ethnics of being and seeing (Sharpe 131), a product borne out of the chemical reaction of between black people and the singularity of what Sharpe calls the weather. When performed in a physical sense, aspiration is both the process of drawing breath into and expanding the lungs as well as the production of a sound with the release of that breath. Pleasure is that sound.
From all mentioned: the echo of silence heard in the moments before Aretha starts singing, or Armstrong starts playing, or a singer opens their mouth to take in air deep into their lower abdomen. An anticipatory moment capable of stretching out infinitely. And (of course) a frequency.
Thinking with the past two weeks’ readings in conversation, I have been meditating deeply on Black music, specifically a brand of trap music that some might refer to as a type of “hood gospel.” I’m referring to a type of sound that juxtaposes minor chords of a piano or guitar that evoke a type of sadness and solemnness with a singing-rapping intonation that evokes a sense of joy or catharsis. The lyrics in this particular genre often contend with dead homies, contact with the state, and other forms of Black being in the wake. Intelligible lyrics are interrupted by unintelligible mo’nin and shouts that “worry the note” (Jafa 267) and “have an affective power that exceeds words” (Campt, Glossary). Provoked by Moten, NourbeSe Philip, and Professor Campt, I am interested in thinking through these sonics as a “rupture within the moment of absolute terror,” an activation of something beyond death in the face of routine violence (Fuentes 2016:).
Last week I was preoccupied with thinking through frequency as the routine, incessant precarity of Black life. Engaging Jafa provokes me to further sit with the possibility of mo’nin within Black music as space “in the break” where something else occurs. Sharpe proposes Black annotation and Black redaction as viewing, reading, and listening practices to allow us to see the excess beyond repetitions of violence. I wonder if we can think through this genre of “hood gospel” as a type of aspiration, a way “of seeing and imagining responses to the terror visited on Black life and the ways we inhabit it, are inhabited by it, and refuse it” (Sharpe 116). I think of my younger brother who makes this genre as a way of contending with the loss of his best friend while imagining futures. I think of the continuities between the sounds of police brutality and the autotune-inflected shout. I think of the “sonic Black sociality” and hapticity of communal singing of lyrics. And the catharsis when the album moves from the mo’nin track to the turn up. Responding to Jafa’s question: “Why do we find these particular things [referring to Black music and cultural practices] pleasurable?” I posit that it is the possibility of these practices to simultaneously contend with Black death and create conditions for Black social life that evokes a sense of pleasure. “Hood gospel” reminds us that “we are not only known to ourselves and each other by that force,” and provides space for working out a type of affective kinship (Sharpe 134).
The question of form and the right to look away – a glossary, a blog post, the last traces of a tradition of plantation solidarity songs, an invisible man, a film made of still-moving images broken into the pulses of arrhythmatic juxtapositions.
I was struck by the variety of forms the frequencies of Black visuality took in this week’s readings and how in distinct ways they all practice modalities of refusal whether it is a refusal to speak, to show, to look, to look away, to define, to succumb, to perform, to dis/appear, to make spectacle, to be spectacle, to reduce, or to be reduced. All of these negations, of course, generating the conditions for “the creation of possibility” or for an otherwise to be demonstrated or imagined.
I was particularly struck by the portrait of Diamond Reynolds; Autoportrait a “silent portrait” made by Luke Willis Reynolds who in collaboration with Reynolds after the murder of her husband Philando Castile by Jeronimo Yanez captures her in a still-moving image that generates a “devastating critique through a resounding frequency of quiet” (Campt). This “portrait of refusal” received backlash for its “silencing” effects, which I understand and empathize with, but also think does not address an ethical question of the violating effects of asking or expecting Diamond Reynolds to recount the catastrophe of her experience of the day Philando Castile was killed in front of her. This portrait form does not ask of her to recount the unbearable violence of her loss, of the theft of her husband’s life sanctioned by the very fibers of an imperial and foundationally anti-Black police state. (Akin to Hartman’s concern and hesitation to simply reproduce violence by addressing its vestiges in imperial archives.) As Campt argues, this “portrait of refusal… is amplified by the refusal to accept words or speech as either adequate or commensurate to the gravity of her loss” (Campt). Thinking about the form of this portrait which not only transgresses the parameters of motion usually imposed on portrait photographs (is this a photograph? Is it a film? Or is it simply a portrait and these other distinctions fail to see the point?) it also navigates beautifully and eloquently what Christina Sharpe theorizes as Black Redaction, an alternative orthography of weathering the wake.
This past fall I witnessed Lauren Woods’s American Monument at the opening of her exhibition at the Beall Centre for Art at UC Irvine. I find this work generative to think about in dialogue with the Autoportrait of Reynolds because whereas this quiet portrait of refusal challenges the imperial right to transparency, to demand answers, to make speak, Lauren Woods’ approach to showing the deleterious effects of police violence against Black bodies refuses to show, to reproduce, or to make visual spectacle of Black suffering and death. Instead, Woods act of Black Redaction is to invite visitors into a gallery space with no images at all, which I think I am understanding is not the same thing as not showing Black visuality. Rather, Woods has worked in collaboration with others to bring together an immersive archive of witness testimony, body and dash cam recordings, 911 calls, and videos (sound only), represented by records that can be activated by viewers in the space that in turn release the recording somewhere else unknown. Each recording represents one police murder and in a separate, very specifically designed room, each of these murders has a name: Gregory Gunn, Alston Sterling, Philando Castile, Terence Crutcher, Jordan Edwards, Patrick Harm…and selected documents that Woods collected through a rigorous request process via the Freedom of Information Act. After this weeks readings I thought of this work engaging the autonomy of the right to look away without leaving the room, or the wake.
In thinking about this week’s readings, I found myself returning to questions of repetition, scale, and vectors. I believe it was Semilore who raised the question about why the photograph provides the axis against which we are considering the multivalent frequencies of black life, and Stephen who brought cinema into our discussion via the closing of Fanon’s chapter. This collision of photography and film generates an endless set of theoretical as well as material problems for us in the context of frequency—the central one being time, or the temporal register.
ReplyDeleteIf we are to think of visuality as it has been conceived as an evidentiary basis for a belief system (like in the case of Fanon’s epidermalization), how might the moving image and still photograph problematize verity? What truths do ethnographic portraiture attempt to convey as opposed to, say, documentary film? How is the inexorable linear duration of cinema (in that it moves from a start to an end point) different from the echoes of a photograph? These temporal questions are considered and theorized in various forms across the texts for this week, but what I’d like to focus on is the relationship of disjointed time to the visual and sonic. In Ellison’s thrilling descriptions of listening to Louis Armstrong in Invisible Man, he writes,
Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind, Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. (8)
Ellison here brings visibility into direct correlation with the time of sound, proposing a kind of jazz logic of life lived outside and in between “straight” time—uneven, sporadic, yet repetitively “epistrophic,” as the scholar Brent Edwards might propose via Thelonius Monk. How can the visible reproduce sonic characteristics as part of its inherent form? How do we feel in an image—as Tina Campt quotes a student on Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison—“each other through the timing (or falling out of time)”?
I found Arthur Jafa’s technical manifesto on Black visual intonation to be immensely helpful here. Through works like Apex, he wants to reject the linear motion ascribed to cinema and offer instead a rich and “polyvential” visual idiom that moves less like Hollywood and more like jazz, “worrying” the note. Like the Invisible Man’s reflections on Louis, Jafa sees the possibilities of the moving image as lying in its very propensity for movement through “irregular, nontempered (nonmetronomic) camera rates and frame replication” that might approximate black voices and black life. The aim of such work is thus to convey what Campt refers to in the glossary of the Still-Moving-Image as “arrhythmia”: an experience of asynchrony and unification, of discernible individual sounds and coalescing environments.
To these delineations of the visual and sonic I would like to add one more term that may be useful to our discussions: montage. How does montage, typically imagined as the cinematic sequencing of still images or the photographic production of a composite, play into questions of time? Does montage bridge the still and moving image, and can it have aural manifestations?
"An image is powerful not necessarily because of anything specific it offers the viewer, but because of everything it apparently also takes away from the viewer."
ReplyDelete--Trinh T. Minh-ha
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In order to think not just about the possibility to analyze “Black film,” but actually to find new ways of making it, Arthur Jafa, turns to the founders of the neoformalist method in film theory, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. Jafa points out the motivation for this turn to materiality and form as follows:
“I’ve heard people talk about issues of representation and the content of culture. But I’m trying to figure out how to make Black films that have the power to allow the enunciative desires of people of African descent to manifest themselves. […] How can we interrogate the medium to find a way Black movement in itself could carry, for example, the weight of sheer tonality in Black song?”
Jafar’s focus on form brings him closer to the question of 'how,' rather than 'what' is supposed to sound through “Black visual intonation.” In exceeding a logic of binary opposition, the envisaged shape of a Black cinema that has yet to come, is not just an alternative or counter-movement to Hollywood cinema with its highly formalized narrative strategies, but an active use of distortion and the production of instabilities and irregularities in its concrete expressions and manifestations. In an orchestrated consonance with “the tendency in Black music,” as Jafar concludes, “to “worry the note”—to treat notes as indeterminate, inherently unstable sonic frequencies rather than the standard Western treatment of notes as fixed phenomena,” what Jafar is looking for is the production of dissonant musical effects on film.
Ralph Ellison strikes a similar note, when he describes the importance of light, not just in order to confirm his reality, but as a way to “give birth to my form. […] Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.” (6/7) What helped Elliott to discover his form was, amongst other things, the “lyrical sound” of Louis Armstrong, who, in bending his musical instrument, “made poetry out of being invisible.” (8) With utmost precision and commitment to play not just fixed notes, but striking the notes of different pitches and intervals, Armstrong’s music introduced Ellison to “a new analytical way of listening.” But, and Arnav already quoted the same passage and highlighted the importance of temporality and timing, the “unheard sounds” that were so important to perceive Ellison's own invisibility, sound in a “different sense of time.” The difference is the perception of a time, that is out of time; an ‘untimely’ presence of time, in which something can occur, transpire, eventuate, which interrupts the ‘natural,’ ‘normal’ or ‘normative’ course of time. — CUT —
“I am thinking here, ushering here, into the gap,” Christina Sharpe writes. (115)
The resonances generated by this week’s readings point me to the question of the interval, and what very different notes these notions of a formless form strike for our discussion on Visual Frequency. How can we think the sonic substance of the image, when we think the image itself as an interval—as already something that exceeds its own form, since it has none.
What could it mean, with regards to Sharpe’s text, to be confronted with the difficult task to deal with a form, or to listen to a frequency, which is not determined by “the number of complete vibrations or cycles occurring per unit of time…such as a column of air,” but by the interjacent form of the interval? Especially in such critical moments when the breathing stops and syncopation and suffocation suspend the vital necessity of airflow—
Black Pleasure & Tragic Magic:
ReplyDeleteI’d like to return to Tara’s brief discussion of Black pleasure. Not joy, as Jafa corrects, but pleasure. (What do we make of that distinction?)
I’m drawn back into Fred Moten’s unwieldy and unwinding definition of Black Art, “which is to say Black Life, which is to say Black (Life Against) Death, which is to say Black Eros, is the ongoing production of a performance, the ongoing production of a performance: rupture and collision, augmented toward singularity, motherless child, childless mother, heartrending shriek, levee camp moan, grieving lean and head turn, fall, Stabat matter, turn a step, loose booty funk brush stroke down my cheek, yellow dog, blue train, black drive” (Moten 210).
Black (Life Against) Death is augmented toward singularity. I’m trying to wrap my head around this—Black Life moves, it moves “a little before the beat, a little behind the beat,” toward, or in constant collision with the “singularity of antiblackness” (Jafa 267) (Sharpe 106). Black Life is augmented, as in, it increases in size, in number, in tones, as Jafa suggests. It meets the antiblack singularity with “Polyventiality.” The two collide.
To me, Jafa’s “Polyventiality” is a multiplicity of moves that occur contemporaneously. I do not need to choose between grief or grind—I loose booty funk brush stroke and levee camp moan and turn a step all at the same time. Black metaphysical movement is not untethered from Man’s “swift and imperceptible flowing of time,” but rather emerges from an awareness of its percussion (Ellison 8).
In other words, there is a beat, the unceasing repetition of brutality, that keeps Man in step, in time, in progression. For Sharpe, the beat is born from the door of no return that led to the ship called Zorgue (Care) and the ship called Zong (Song). In their wake is the ditto ditto ditto of the archive, “the migrant and refugee ship, the container ship, and the medical ship,” continuing the pattern that reaffirms Man’s account of Universal time (Sharpe 120).
But within “the pattern of certainties” lives chaos, i.e. a different kind of Care and Song, one that cracks linear time wide open. Inside the breaks we find Zong! (for example), which is tethered to the ship, but not exclusively. The exclamation gives us excess space to move and to emerge, to converge past and present, grief and grind.
I wonder whether this, our “tragic magic,” is by definition illegible (Jafa 267). Like the word Care written over and over and over, on top of itself, and whether that illegibility is what delivers relief and even pleasure. Why is it that Zabou, with her long indigo train, is the only woman who faces no reprisal for her song?
I’ll end with James Baldwin: “What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here, almost 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years. You always told me ‘It takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time. How much time do you want for your progress?”
This week's readings have me thinking a lot about Black pleasure and self-care. I’m not entirely confident that they can be thought of as synonyms, but in my mind the two terms keep coming together. How do we find Black pleasure and/or self-care in the wake? This question must be considered in reference to the two modes of care that Sharpe presents in her chapter: “care as force; ‘the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something” (Sharpe 123, emphasis added) and “an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness” (Sharpe 131, emphasis added).
ReplyDeleteSharpe’s definition of care as force, and its associations with the state, made me think of the phenomenon of self-care and mindfulness as a regime. Of the continuous drive to optimize ourselves as workers and consumers, to be always aiming for something even during our brief periods of leisure. As a Black woman who enjoys yoga and has tried to commit to a handful of meditation apps, Sharpe’s discussion of the breath—the guiding principle of most yoga and meditative practices I’ve tried—and the “connection between the lungs and the weather: the supposedly transformative properties of breathing free air” (112) struck me as an intrinsic part of the contemporary system of care as force. To quote Sharpe, “We, now, are living in the wake of such pseudoscience” (112): we are told to study our breath, to manage our bodies, to ignore the weather and focus on “inner” stillness and emotional modulation, in order to be better workers. How do we reclaim the terms of Black self-care and pleasure when the very act of breathing has been appropriated by the dehumanizing model of management, optimization, and productivity?
I wonder if we can see a model for Black pleasure and/or self-care in the wake in Ellison. I am thinking of the image of Ellison’s protagonist covering his space in the basement floor-to-ceiling in lightbulbs, powered by energy stolen from Monopolated Light & Power. This siphoning, this re-appropriation of energy previously stolen from the protagonist, allows himself to “feel my vital aliveness” (Ellison 7), an act of resistance that is both about pleasure and a necessity for his being “I love light…Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form” (Ellison 6). There may be an important distinction between Black pleasure and joy (Jafa 267), but spaces (or “holes” to use Ellison’s term) must be made/found/stolen for Black pleasure and self-care “as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness” in the wake.
Of the concepts in this week’s readings, I’m most drawn to the idea of the “way-making tool”, which Sharpe brings into thought by posing, “What are the words and forms for the ways we must continue to think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations in the hold, in multiple Black everydays of the wake?” (113). Sharpe’s selected form, aspiration, can be described through the methods of Black annotation and redaction, which I understand not as an intervention in dominant storytelling but in the development of representations of Self at the discretion of the Black being and the (nonhierarchical) power within their experiences. In this we also meet with the notions of restorative intimacy, “care”, and the Black anagrammatical in representation, which I find especially compelling because of the possibilities they present for the practice and experiment of Black expression and culture, for “wake work”, and for imagining otherwise. The Black anagrammatical is Sharpe’s framing of what Fanon describes as the Black person’s inhabitation of the liminal space between “nothing and infinity” and all that can be produced from the singularity despite its challenges; this is related to Professor Campt’s insistence on the value of registers that exceed merely what we see (or hear, or say, etc.) and the importance of acknowledging these synesthetic experiences. Out of the residential commons of Blackness steps care, a “shared risk between and among the Black trans* asterisk” (131) and the different forms of Black sociality, realized through the sonic, vibrations, rhythms, and haptics of the quotidian. Professor Campt’s description of the arrhythmatic, of the “off timeliness” of Black rhythms, which I took as suggesting a sense of different time and order of Black life, a shared understanding of the Black condition and experience, and a specific culture that arises from certain Black frequential values, “blurring the lines between stillness, movement, and motion” (See “slow-walking). This introduction to the Black arrhythmatic was interesting to me because of a running joke I’m familiar with that dictated that “white people are always off-beat, out of tune, out of touch”, specifically referring to song, dance, and rhythm, and to think of Blackness and Black people as those who are able to step in and step out of, to be removed from, and to remove themselves from time and space(s) makes Ellison’s Invisible Man even more relevant in thinking about taking care, and that which is able to be created in the shadows, in hibernation, in the wake. That “tragic magic” is the blessing and curse of irregularity in anti-Black weather, which makes polyventiality not so much a preoccupation as an inevitability in Black life. I question in what ways polyventiality, hapticity, the Black anagrammatical, and care work can be linked to communal “generative open-ended thinking” for the creation of other way-making tools that serve to shift current sonic and optic understandings and bring to lift Black cultural production we may overlook. In this instance, Black American trap, the rowdy stepchild of hip-hop music comes to mind. I’m thinking about the link between trap and pleasure and how its arrhythmatic tendencies in sound and anagrammatical lyrical forms present a different modality of Black presentation, sociality, and potential of restorative intimacy by way of its language, which arguably is accessible or remains inaccessible to particular audiences on the basis of its form of care through shared risk. What images, imaginings, and visuals are produced from Black experimentation, open thought left unfinished, that may not be solely focused on form but on pleasure and the sonic experience and what do/will future forms look like?
ReplyDeleteTemporalities (of an) In-Between
ReplyDeleteFrequency, as the Harvard Dictionary of Music taught us, has to work both in and with time in order to exist. Hence, time is a precondition to any understanding of frequency. The time required to complete a cycle that allows for frequency is extremely short. The bottom of the human hearing threshold is 20Hz. That is 20 cycles per second, which is considered slow. What would happen if we stretch the time measurement from a second to a decade or a century? What sort of a frequency will we get then? I want to think of what happens within this time -in the space in-between its beginning and end- that allows for a frequency. If we were to listen to this supposedly non-sounding space in-between the cycles, we will find a multitude of frequencies that can create a different sound altogether.
I believe that an assemblage of unheard sounds can construct a continuous frequency -a multitude of voices- that together will be able to make audible unheard aspects of a narrative of black life. This frequency is a result of what Jaffa termed as "polytentiality”; Jaffa explains that polytentiality is: “multiple tones, multiple rhythms, multiple perspectives, multiple meanings, multiplicity.” (Jaffa, 267) This multiplicity can manifest itself in a temporal manner as well. If we were to consider a possibility of augmented time along with multiple temporalities, it will be possible to account for frequencies or moments that were (or are) deemed unheard.
Throughout Campt’s glossary, the notion that frequency is an in-between space was raised multiple times. This notion breaks the temporal cycle and allows for unheard frequencies to become audible; a temporality of an in-between considers other timelines and therefore other cycles through which frequencies can occur:
“The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said it’s piece, and waited for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well.”(Ellison, 8) The unheard voices that stood clearly from all the rest in Ellison’s listening experience were sounds that ran across a different temporality: the time they took to complete a cycle is different, and perhaps way slower, than the time of the audible ones. Their temporality is a polytentiality in the sense that it allows for multiple temporalities to exist.
This polytential understanding of temporality aligns with Sharpe’s proposal of annotation and redaction. Sharpe suggests that the work of redaction and annotation is “another effort to try to look, to try to really see.” (Sharpe, 117) A visual frequency of an image could be found through this attempt to “really see”, which to me means to really listen. In this listening we are asked to go beyond what is present and beyond what is deemed “heard” or of importance in the image. It is an attempt to hear those unheard voices that Ellison found , those whose temporalities were different, and thus could not complete their cycle at the moment they were captured.
In elaborating what she terms the “orthography of the wake,” Christina Sharpe questions the ethics behind visual representation of black suffering, the totality of which contrarily diminishes the purported call to action that often motivates circulation of such images. She questions the ethics behind the film 12 Years a Slave (2013), in which Steve McQueen—to recall Sethe and her refusal—“reanimates the place and spaces of slavery” as “memory and…more than memory” that “circulates, like weather” (Sharpe 105). It normalizes violence on the black body, violence whose co-production across narrative and documentary instances, “fictional” and real, situates the latter mode as not only normative representation or Althusserian hail that secures the location of whiteness, but also, I would add, stages in effect a rehearsal for further, actualized brutality.
ReplyDeleteFor Sharpe, the long take employed by McQueen compounds the violence in 12 Years a Slave. The director in fact makes repeated use of duration in his oeuvre, from this film to Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011). What is it about the notion of suffering in his narratives that demands or requires the insistence of time, the documentary impulse, and the pretense of liveness? Does the long take mimic and reproduce the “retinal detachment that, then, reproduces the hold as location and destination” (Sharpe 124), or the “authority of visuality” in which some have the “right to look” and take pleasure where others have no choice but to exercise the “right to look away”? And yet if a practice of care in Black-image making strives for “an account counter to the violence of abstraction” (Sharpe 131), is the long take appropriate or ethically responsible in visualizing trauma (repetition, re-memory, “more than memory”) when juxtaposed with recent work such as Queen & Slim (2019), which lived up to its designation as the “black Bonnie and Clyde” in the rapid and repetitive cuts that attended the final shootout sequence and termination of black fugitivity?
Suspended between the continuity of time and the filmic continuities that abstract it, black visuality may look instead toward what Arthur Jafa and Tina Campt describe respectively as “polyventiality” or “still-moving-images.” How might the possibility inherent to multiple rhythms, “nonmetronomic” rhythms, and works that blur the “presumed distinction between still and moving images” (Campt) deliver us from the impasse of ethical visualization practices?
Refusal and Black visuality
ReplyDeleteOne idea that stuck out to me in this week’s readings is the act of refusal in Black visuality. In Dr. Campt’s definition of refusal, she writes it as “– a refusal to be silenced or to accept the status of black disposability” (2018). The work of Black artists we see in Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being follows this tradition, not only by their refusal to conform to anti-Black optics, but also, in the case of Roy DeCarava’s photography, refusing to allow “images of Black people be used to frame someone else’s not seeing” (133). I was particularly struck by Campt’s points of Diamond Reynolds’ numerous refusals, in terms of Black women’s subjectivity. How do we reckon Black women’s silences in art and in their everyday existence? How do we rewrite the stereotypes of Black womanhood as ‘loud’ and ‘angry’ to subvert politics of silence and enact refusal to challenge Black ontology?
In terms of refusal, I question how we honor and prescribe virtue to these sometimes subversive acts of resistance. In ways Black art and film create an archive, the politics of refusal is also an archive from which we can assess Black visuality. How one chooses to be remembered, whether silenced or vocal, embraced or subdued, and the ways we as scholars choose to envision this refusal are all examples of created agency on the behalf of the subject. Black visuality is the “right to look” and “right to look away,” according to Campt, but also the right to illustrate how we choose to be remembered. In this case, I think of Marissa Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive and how she contests the methodology of history and the field’s urge to fill in the gaps where rather, in her work, she focuses on how enslaved women’s existence be best remembered, not by filling in the gaps but using refusal to illustrate whom Black people trust, even in the afterlife, how they would want to be seen and who they want to see their innermost being. Arthur Jafa also questions this in terms of how Black people interrogate mediums (267).
Sharpe continues these questions as a scholar when she writes, “By considering that relationship between imaging and imagining in the registers of Black annotation and Black redaction, I want to think about what these images call forth” (116), I too hope to analyze the issues of refusal and redaction in Afro-Jamaican women’s politics and sound as a visual to their highly ignored but ever-present images in Jamaican history.
This week, I was taken by the question in Professor Campt’s blog post on “Slow Walking,” where she writes: “How do you ‘feel’ another when no one is touching?” To return to thinking with movement and motion as it relates the haptic and kinetic components of frequency, I find the notion of “haptic labor” compelling, particularly as it relates to the connotations of labor as energy or force, but also it relates to the other critical term Professor Campt deploys: relation. For my own self, I think of relation akin to movement, a locational/navigational understanding of one’s position relative to space; though, I also find relation to be co-constitutive of another person or thing, as my position is relative to another. In essence, I find relation to be interactive and dependent on someone or something; it’s a form of sociality. Force, or perhaps energy, and relative space constitute parts of “feeling another” without “touching.” Continuing with this line of thinking, I want to call-in the closing reflection where Professor Campt describes leaving the slow-walking exhibit and, as she approaches the exit, the “movement of air” from someone’s movement and motion (“movement animated by his long arms moving slowly and eventually more dramatically up and down”) creates a touching sensation. In this way, the kinetic and haptic frequencies of another re-arranged her relation to space. It’s this rearrangement of relation (as I understand it as one’s understanding of their position relative to another) that draws connection with Sharpe’s chapter “The Weather.”
ReplyDeleteHoning in on this moment of quasi touch through the movement and motion of another and subsequent rearrangement of relation, how might we consider this an act of friction, rubbing, or impression of spatiality (and across temporality if we are to consider the “slow walking/moving” that is simultaneously occurring and producing an embodied tempo)? To push this thought further, I am thinking of the connections between this friction/impression and what Sharpe calls “singularity,” a “weather event or phenomenon likely to occur around a particular time, or date, or set of circumstances,” or a “point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces” (Sharpe 106). The “region of infinite mass density” that Sharpe describes is the site of an interruption between space and time. What possibilities follow if we engage this interruption with that of the haptic labor of relation exemplified by Professor Campt’s experience of being brushed by another through him “moving [her] air.” Considering all of this, which is admittedly a lot and a little unfinished, I re-arrived at the question of “feeling another” without “touching,” where the interruption (“singularity”) is an altering movement (“force”) that produces a new ecology (“the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings; the political movement that seeks to protect the environment, especially from pollution”) (Sharpe 106); it is, or perhaps could be, a relational rearrangement of space that reconfigures the distinctions between you and I, or me and another.
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ReplyDelete(Sorry for the deleted above; there was a formatting issue).
ReplyDeletePleasure, n.
From the Oxford Dictionary: The condition or sensation induced by the experience or anticipation of what is felt to be good or desirable; a feeling of happy satisfaction or enjoyment; delight, gratification. Opposed to pain.
From Arthur Jafa: distinct from joy. A geography to be neither explored nor charted, but felt, playing with rupture and repair, found in how Aretha sings the song (Jafa 267). If we investigated how black music can speak to pleasure as distinct from joy, to understand black pleasure as something that accesses these multiple tonalities, or in the terms of the class, frequencies, what terrain would lay in wait for us? Jafa suggests that we might make black images vibrate in accordance with black musics—to extend that logic, black pleasure operates as a register through which multiple mediums of blackness coexist and co-communicate. Black pleasure is not always a joy, but satiates something—allows something within the black person and the literal black body to “manifest” (267).
From Ralph Ellison: an aliveness generated by five overlapping phonographs playing Louis Armstrong. Black pleasure as a geography, when considered through the lens of music, doesn’t spread out but instead falls in, burrowing itself deeper and deeper. At the bottom of this black burrow—created out of the affective pleasure of listening to Armstrong sing not about his joy but about his sorrow—lies a sermon and a preacher and an increasing tempo. And at the bottom of the pleasure lies the adage that “‘Black will make you . . .’ ‘Black . . .’ ‘. . . or black will un-make you’,” (Ellison, 8). Blackness and pleasure together operate as dual forces (or to reference Simon Gikandi, non-identical twins) to define the modern subject—blackness as an invisible force, sublimated in the mind of the Western world, yet essential to its operation, and pleasure as a marker of Western success and, when experienced by white people, evidence of the deservedness of said success. But black pleasure, then, might trouble this concept—a pleasure that exists in concert with sorrow and pain rather than being opposed to it, operating in speech happening on the “lower frequencies” (Ellison, 312).
From (my interpretation of) Christina Sharpe: the product of aspiration. The product of the reimagining and transformation of spaces under a ethnics of being and seeing (Sharpe 131), a product borne out of the chemical reaction of between black people and the singularity of what Sharpe calls the weather. When performed in a physical sense, aspiration is both the process of drawing breath into and expanding the lungs as well as the production of a sound with the release of that breath. Pleasure is that sound.
From all mentioned: the echo of silence heard in the moments before Aretha starts singing, or Armstrong starts playing, or a singer opens their mouth to take in air deep into their lower abdomen. An anticipatory moment capable of stretching out infinitely. And (of course) a frequency.
Thinking with the past two weeks’ readings in conversation, I have been meditating deeply on Black music, specifically a brand of trap music that some might refer to as a type of “hood gospel.” I’m referring to a type of sound that juxtaposes minor chords of a piano or guitar that evoke a type of sadness and solemnness with a singing-rapping intonation that evokes a sense of joy or catharsis. The lyrics in this particular genre often contend with dead homies, contact with the state, and other forms of Black being in the wake. Intelligible lyrics are interrupted by unintelligible mo’nin and shouts that “worry the note” (Jafa 267) and “have an affective power that exceeds words” (Campt, Glossary). Provoked by Moten, NourbeSe Philip, and Professor Campt, I am interested in thinking through these sonics as a “rupture within the moment of absolute terror,” an activation of something beyond death in the face of routine violence (Fuentes 2016:).
ReplyDeleteLast week I was preoccupied with thinking through frequency as the routine, incessant precarity of Black life. Engaging Jafa provokes me to further sit with the possibility of mo’nin within Black music as space “in the break” where something else occurs. Sharpe proposes Black annotation and Black redaction as viewing, reading, and listening practices to allow us to see the excess beyond repetitions of violence. I wonder if we can think through this genre of “hood gospel” as a type of aspiration, a way “of seeing and imagining responses to the terror visited on Black life and the ways we inhabit it, are inhabited by it, and refuse it” (Sharpe 116). I think of my younger brother who makes this genre as a way of contending with the loss of his best friend while imagining futures. I think of the continuities between the sounds of police brutality and the autotune-inflected shout. I think of the “sonic Black sociality” and hapticity of communal singing of lyrics. And the catharsis when the album moves from the mo’nin track to the turn up. Responding to Jafa’s question: “Why do we find these particular things [referring to Black music and cultural practices] pleasurable?” I posit that it is the possibility of these practices to simultaneously contend with Black death and create conditions for Black social life that evokes a sense of pleasure. “Hood gospel” reminds us that “we are not only known to ourselves and each other by that force,” and provides space for working out a type of affective kinship (Sharpe 134).
ReplyDeleteThe question of form and the right to look away – a glossary, a blog post, the last traces of a tradition of plantation solidarity songs, an invisible man, a film made of still-moving images broken into the pulses of arrhythmatic juxtapositions.
I was struck by the variety of forms the frequencies of Black visuality took in this week’s readings and how in distinct ways they all practice modalities of refusal whether it is a refusal to speak, to show, to look, to look away, to define, to succumb, to perform, to dis/appear, to make spectacle, to be spectacle, to reduce, or to be reduced. All of these negations, of course, generating the conditions for “the creation of possibility” or for an otherwise to be demonstrated or imagined.
I was particularly struck by the portrait of Diamond Reynolds; Autoportrait a “silent portrait” made by Luke Willis Reynolds who in collaboration with Reynolds after the murder of her husband Philando Castile by Jeronimo Yanez captures her in a still-moving image that generates a “devastating critique through a resounding frequency of quiet” (Campt). This “portrait of refusal” received backlash for its “silencing” effects, which I understand and empathize with, but also think does not address an ethical question of the violating effects of asking or expecting Diamond Reynolds to recount the catastrophe of her experience of the day Philando Castile was killed in front of her. This portrait form does not ask of her to recount the unbearable violence of her loss, of the theft of her husband’s life sanctioned by the very fibers of an imperial and foundationally anti-Black police state. (Akin to Hartman’s concern and hesitation to simply reproduce violence by addressing its vestiges in imperial archives.) As Campt argues, this “portrait of refusal… is amplified by the refusal to accept words or speech as either adequate or commensurate to the gravity of her loss” (Campt). Thinking about the form of this portrait which not only transgresses the parameters of motion usually imposed on portrait photographs (is this a photograph? Is it a film? Or is it simply a portrait and these other distinctions fail to see the point?) it also navigates beautifully and eloquently what Christina Sharpe theorizes as Black Redaction, an alternative orthography of weathering the wake.
This past fall I witnessed Lauren Woods’s American Monument at the opening of her exhibition at the Beall Centre for Art at UC Irvine. I find this work generative to think about in dialogue with the Autoportrait of Reynolds because whereas this quiet portrait of refusal challenges the imperial right to transparency, to demand answers, to make speak, Lauren Woods’ approach to showing the deleterious effects of police violence against Black bodies refuses to show, to reproduce, or to make visual spectacle of Black suffering and death. Instead, Woods act of Black Redaction is to invite visitors into a gallery space with no images at all, which I think I am understanding is not the same thing as not showing Black visuality. Rather, Woods has worked in collaboration with others to bring together an immersive archive of witness testimony, body and dash cam recordings, 911 calls, and videos (sound only), represented by records that can be activated by viewers in the space that in turn release the recording somewhere else unknown. Each recording represents one police murder and in a separate, very specifically designed room, each of these murders has a name: Gregory Gunn, Alston Sterling, Philando Castile, Terence Crutcher, Jordan Edwards, Patrick Harm…and selected documents that Woods collected through a rigorous request process via the Freedom of Information Act. After this weeks readings I thought of this work engaging the autonomy of the right to look away without leaving the room, or the wake.