(cont.) Specifically in “The Black Belt” DuBois provides a written description of the geography, history, social class and positioning, and culture heritage of Southern Black people of Georgia, particularly in Albany and Dougherty County. In this chapter, we can especially see both the visual and linguistic genius of Du Bois’ writing, which echoes of his second sight. Du Bois’ use of masterful visual grammar evinces Cadava’s assertion, “if photographic technology belongs to the physiognomy of historical thought means that there can be no thinking of history that is not at the same time a thinking of photography, then there cannot exist a contemplation of photography that is not also a consideration of black life” (Weheliye 36). The visual, the historical, and the word become one in Du Bois’ observations and detailing of the towns, the region, and the biographies of the people he sees/encounters. Like his infographics, he outlines and fills them with color, genealogies, occupations, facts, comparisons to the English, and imaginative fictions in order to make a case for the Black American life and position as a result of a specific form of colonization, socio-political and environmental factors, and not of the specter of Black cultural decline, Black pathology and Black laze as inherent facts of Blackness. I am interested in Du Bois’ role in forging a relationship between Black Americans and Black life to the concept of visual epiphenomena, that which arises from the gazes upon and visions of Blackness, the production of a visual grammar of Blackness as a byproduct of the racist institution and thought system and that which is formed through ones perception of their own Black self (both independently of and in collaboration with anti-Black eyes). With both visual and semantic design in mind, Du Bois paid special attention to borders, lines, and other forms of imprisonment in not only his graphs but also in his observations and writing, exemplified in mention of fences and stockades in “The Black Belt”. He writes, “I think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences”. I am interested in this idea of the Black person simultaneously “fenced” and “unfenced”, invisible and visible, and what this means for an understanding of Black aesthetics. It is here that I think of Du Bois’ double consciousness and how this was a critical component of the development and creation of his diagrams, (especially given that he was assisted in their formation by Black students at Atlanta University), and how without this unique form of scopic consciousness, his observations, understandings, visualizations, and data could not have been collected, interpreted, or presented as accurately, especially if attempted by the white and therefore, naked eye.
Is it possible to listen around, or perhaps before, Du Bois’ data portraits as we might with the photograph of Emmett Till that Moten proposes? As Weheliye articulates about “The Philadelphia Negro” (to which I’m extending to the diagrams for the Paris Exposition in Visualizing Black America), Du Bois creates a certain generative representation of the “indeterminate and determinate traces of force” that construct the color line, thus making visible the “physiognomic silhouette” that determines the schema and structures social registration to black frequency (Weheliye 39). He argues that the tense relationality of “diagramma” works to “dialectically [historicize] the materialization of the Negro in the modern urban milieu” (39). In other words, by invoking those “conceptual and methodological maxims,” Du Bois “at the same time [wills] that the color line will cease to appear as a universal law” (38). And yet, one question that continues to ring out for me concerns the organizing project of diagrams and data visualization, despite its “marking out” and “striking through” (39). To whom is this meant to register?
I hesitate to link data visualization solely with histories of organization, narrowing the scope of its possibilities; though, the description of Du Bois’ “historical microscope” (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 32) and likewise incorporation of Enlightenment “cartographic technologies” (“Historically, along with the creation of maps –critical tools in European colonial project –there emerged a cartographic gaze that cultivated a way of seeing the world… and new modes of representing a world no longer ruled by God and monsters but guided by reason and science”) gives pause (41). Are there ways of invoking this format that elides the creation of a necessary center (I’m thinking here of the choice to centralize, extrapolate and figure Georgia as the “Black Atlantic world” through certain evidentiary measures)? Can we read such refutation and “counter-argument” (43) outside of its call to witness and be witnessed? What are the connections or divergences between this refusal and that of Campt’s “black fugitivity”? Perhaps Weheliye’s opening remark concerning untethering the “real object” from the “object of knowledge” proves useful for sitting with (24). In thinking with these distinctions he gives, my question remains is it possible to situate Blackness as indeed the “object of knowledge” without necessarily incorporating the technologies that rendered this relation invisible? And how might we uncouple these distinctions of study without also dimming those quotidian effects of Blackness on black people? How do we give care to these experiences outside of the scopic?
While reading/looking at Du Bois’ Data Portraits, I was struck by a word that appears in the annotations for Plates 21 and 22. The annotation for Plate 21 describes “[a]n undulating black line” and for Plate 22 it describes “a pattern of tiny undulations that resemble waves.” I want to show two of the OED definitions for undulate (v) that relate to our discussion of frequency:
a. intransitive. To move in, or after the manner of, waves; to have a wave-like motion. b. transferred. Of sound, etc.
The description of the lines in Plate 21 signal waves, signal frequency, in a way that immediately draws the sonic out of (into) the visual. Here we see another place where Du Bois practices the art of mixing, as Weheliye finds in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois continues “to find the moment in which to combine the two channels and make sure that when the two channels meet […] they jive with each other” (“In the Mix” 547). Instead of mixing the sorrow songs with his own text, in Plate 21 Du Bois mixes the extrapolated property value information with the actual property values. This graph could simply communicate the known property value information without dipping into the unknown, but the refusal of the blank space would also omit the important “KU-KLUXISM” header that Du Bois and co. provide. As the annotation beside the plate points out, this “is one of the most overtly political charts in the Georgia study.” That politics is accomplished in the mix of the known and the extrapolated. Du Bois does not exactly fill in the gaps of the archive, but he does give those gaps an outline.
Weheliye further writes of Souls that “the musical fragments provide a mix of music and noise imploding the texts that frame them” (551). We see something like this in Plate 22. The “arrows” in the circle graph that are surrounded by the undulations could resemble this kind of implosion, with each additional layer of the circle graph imploding on what has come before. (They also do not look unlike the wake of a bullet). But Plate 21 depicts an explosion. The undulating solid line crests over the edge of the graph, not coincidentally at the same time that we are presented with the header “LYNCHING.”
There is a vitality to undulating, a vitality that, when linked to the acquisition of property by black peoples in Georgia, presents a problem to white supremacy. While looking at the dictionary definitions for “undulation,” I noticed that the textual examples given in the OED often invoke sea creatures: eels, snakes, whales, porpoises, etc. The eel and the snake seem especially important to me because these are creatures often used to invoke a sense of horror or disgust. As someone who enjoys horror fiction, I feel like “undulations” can serve the purpose of conferring vitality onto that which should not have it: the undulating tentacles of some cosmic, Lovecraftian horror. (And of course, Lovecraft’s tales in particular locate anxieties surrounding blackness and otherness that are transmitted into creatures of unimaginable horror with unpronounceable names.) When Georgian white supremacy reacted in horror to the undulating rise in the valuation of black property owners, they attempt to stamp it out. Du Bois, in the mix of the known and the extrapolated, seems to point towards a belief in undulation, in black vitalism, by ending the graph with an upward tick in the extrapolated data.
The paired plates of the “value of farming tools” across time and the “assessed value of household and kitchen furniture” across the same timeframe stage a conversation between the inside and the outside of the home. A bar graph is placed next to one of the many curving circles. The value of furniture curves in on itself as if the home is filling up with stuff. These circles produce their own inside space, a white jagged circle in the middle. The “critical” farm tools stretch out and contract in neat lines. There is an effort to chart out the domestic space as distinct, even structuring. However, at the very end of “The Black Belt,” DuBois records a conversation that adds yet another parallel (62). The dialogue – “’Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furniture –' ‘Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure by law.’ ‘Well, he took it just the same,” – closes out the chapter (62). It leaves us lingering on the image of stolen furniture, furniture that may be in the white void produced in the center of the chart meant to communicate only gain. The furniture is at once equated with, made “just the same” as, the farm stuff, the corn and mule, but also given a special designation as “exempt.” What would a graph that placed the farm tools and the furniture together, as both equally contracting and extending?
I consider visualizations themselves akin to the work of metaphor: experiences and feelings are shifted through language into something communicable. Aligned with Sontag and her critique of the metaphors that inscribe disease, these metaphors refuse to work on the body itself. Instead, they seem to work around it. Rather than the racialized body made visible through the explicit exhibition of the Paris convention, Alexander Weheliye argues that these graphs transform through visual language the structures, processes, and power of white supremacy into palpable objects (27). Rather than the body itself then, what forms around the body and exerts invisible pressures on it becomes visible. Perhaps, then rather than a taxonomized body, the invisible/visible space reveals a different apparatus, a different way of looking not at the body but around the body? To put it in terms of the graphs, what is or is not in the center of a circle, the negative space, mapped out by the stuff of domesticity?
To complicate these questions further, the visualization in plate 23, which represents property ownership in Savannah and Atlanta through a series of overlapping bars, produces a metaphoric relationship with women’s domestic labor. The editors evocatively call the graph “the woven bar chart.” The number of owners and the collective property value mutually impact each other, which is given visual meaning through the interweaving of the bars that represent those numbers. This chart also echoes the final scene in “The Black Belt” as DuBois draws attention in his painting of the scene to “the silent old black woman patching pantaloons and never saying a word” (62). She is unheard but she does the textual work, patching, mending, and weaving together. Weheliye notes that “black women’s domestic labor occupies a pivotal conceptual place in the rendering visible of the abstract physiognomies of power that racialize and conscript the black subject” (44). In this instance, the domestic work of the silent black woman provides the metaphoric model for the representation of black property ownership and its contingencies. However, the weave is formed by her but not necessarily around her. The exact motion of her hands, obscured in DuBois’s description, seem visible as the producer of the loose weave of the graph.
How might Du Bois’s sociological studies and data portraits afford a way to think through another definition of frequency, namely “the state or condition of being crowded; also (concrete) a numerous assembly, concourse, crowd”? (OED “frequency” def. 1) How would this definition of frequency correspond with, augment, or disrupt the other definitions of frequency (as repetition, rhythm, vibrations, intensities, etc.) we’ve begun to turn over in the seminar?
In his studies, Du Bois takes Georgia as the geographic, demographic, social, and epistemological epicenter of “the Negro Problems,” where the “race question has focused itself” (“The Negro…” 41). This thesis is visually represented in “The Georgia Negro: A Social Study” in the progression of the diagrams themselves, which lead the viewer to zoom in historically and geographically from the doubled globe of the Atlantic slave trade to more localized social dynamics of individual counties. In his writings, Du Bois specifically focuses his attention on Albany, within Dougherty County, as the “real capital,” the “center of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with the outer world” (42). Visual cues also set the data portraits in motion toward Georgia as a node of intense frequency: from the directional arrows of plate 8 to the way Du Bois plays with the norms of statistical graphics that frequently assigned darker colors to the “greater frequency of [a] phenomenon” as well as to more “unfavorable end of [a] scale” (Weheliye 39, quoting Funkhouser). Of course, colors (which only account for a fraction of electromagnetic radiation) have their own set yet oscillating frequencies within the visible light spectrum, all of which black absorbs or draws in (black is an achromatic color – which makes me wonder as well if - at a slant, through tonality - there is a non-diatonic sound here beyond musical chromatics). Du Bois echoes the converging motion involved in the achromatic color black’s absorption of visible light, then, when he visually “render[s] thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses” as they concentrate in Georgia after emancipation (Weheliye 38). The visual frequencies of Du Bois’s data portraits seem to palp (to recall Fanon’s antennae) what Sharpe calls a singularity, or “a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces…” (Sharpe 106). If slavery, as Sharpe argues, was a singularity within the weather of antiblackness, we might understand Du Bois’s project as making visible another singularity (or a repetition of the singularity by way of frequency in the same weather) that disarticulates the telos of abolition through the convergence of the Middle Passage (visualized as an abyss between two worlds in plate one) into the Black Belt after emancipation.
It seems that, rather than just probing something like a heart of darkness, Du Bois figures this infinitely dense gravitational pull as a protective “huddling”:“The Black Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling together for self-protection; a massing of the black population for mutual defense in order to secure the peace and tranquility necessary to economic advance” (Du Bois 49). Huddling takes place in the same weather (climatic conditions, antiblackness) experienced during slavery, yet it transpires as a strategy of defense and an effort to seek economic sufficiency. Since “to huddle” is “to put or keep out of sight; to conceal or hide, as among a crowd or under a heap… to crowd together,” we might read this “massing of the black population for mutual defense” as a frequency that Du Bois seeks and graphically represents through other visual frequencies (OED “huddle”).
(continued) Thinking of this huddling as a frequency that Du Bois’ diagrams attend to, I would like to consider how he characterizes this strategy of huddling as an “experiment”: “In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this experiment in huddling for protection” (Du Bois 49). I want to connect this word “experiment” in the context of huddling with what Weheliye understands as Du Bois’s visual improvisations, in part because I think both get at what Weheliye says when he writes about Du Bois’s “smudging” of laws of generality and chance of particularities (Weheliye 29, 43). Weheliye writes, “Since the discipline of statistics is so singularly concerned with rule, calculability, correlation, and the taming of chance, Du Bois’s improvisatory variation of the diagrammatic color, shape, size, and orientation break through into the ‘graphic regions of eccentric figurativeness,’ in Walter Benjamin’s words” (Weheliye 49). I might roughly (maybe wrongly and no less densely) recast Benjamin’s phrase “graphic regions of eccentric figurativeness” here as a diplopic vision (with echoes of Du Boisian “second sight”) of an incommensurable “rhythm of chance”(in Weheliye’s words). This diplopic vision, it seems to me, appears in Du Bois’s “graphic flow and style” as a way of not forgetting the “throbbing soul” that Du Bois says each unit of the mass represents (Weheilye 36, Du Bois 45). How might the visual frequencies of an improvisation that pushes into a diplopic vision of an incommensurable “rhythm of chance,” then, be attuned to the frequencies of experimental huddling? What is the threshold of frequency-as-crowding (maybe three’s a crowd, but Deleuze and Guattari also famously write, “Since each [i.e. both] of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” – A Thousand Plateaus, 3)? Why does Du Bois find “little beauty” in the “Land of the Unfenced” at the edge of Dougherty, rather than a diplopic vision of other experiments or frequencies of huddling? (“Souls…” 74-75).
How to turn visuality against its authoritative axis? This seemed to be the main question at the center of this week’s reading since, as argued by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, “the politics of visuality, and the very question of black visibility, were central to Du Bois’s thought” (2018, p.15). Building up from this argument, could we think of Du Bois’ work on data visualization in tandem with Campt’s conceptualization of a black visuality “that reappropriates the classifying, segregational aestheticism Mirzoeff identifies as authoritative complexes of visuality. Black visuality turns them on their head by refusing the very authority of visuality that functions to refuse blackness itself” (Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary)? I believe that this refusal is brought to stark relief in the way in which Du Bois employs a “scientific grammar” that was a crucial tool for eugenic projects, a proximity that is highlighted by Alexander G. Weheliye (2015, p.35) when he counterposes Du Bois’ photographs and plates to the ones produced by Louis Agassiz. According to the author, Du Bois's usage of this scientific visual language offers a critique of scientific racism not by disavowing a “scientific grammar”, but by using it against the grain. Thus, his use of “statistics, graphs, tables, and charts to diagrammatically desediment the Negro as a ‘natural’ phenomenon so as to recreate the Negro as a statistical figuration, one that is created by chance via the violently imposed effects of the color line.” (p.27).
Can we understand this reversal strategy, alongside the invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s novel, as fugitive strategies to turn a racializing visual language against itself? (And this image evokes the moment in The Invisible Man in which the narrator describes the fight of the yokel and the prizefighter, in which the latter is “swift and amazingly scientific” but he is eventually knocked out by a hit that knocks “science, speed, and footwork as cold as a well-digger's posterior”. To achieve this, the yokel needs to step “inside of his opponent's sense of time”, turning his opponent scientific and precise blows against himself).
Following Heather Lawrence's comment about this week’s reading, I would also like to ask if one has to eschew “pleasure” in these images. Would pleasure subdue this refusal to subscribe to the visual codes of scientific racism? Building on this question, I was intrigued by the way in which Weheliye excludes the photographic image from his arguments, arguing that “the portraits of individual black subjects, illustrate only what is already observable to the naked eye” (p.34), and that “due to the generic conventions of portrait photography, the images deployed by Du Bois and Sander cannot directly visualize processes and relations” (p.35). What about the non-visual frequencies of these photographs? By associating the photographic image exclusively to the gaze and confining it to what is perceived by the “naked eye”, the author precludes both the photography’s possible opacity as its haptic quality. As argued by Tina Campt (2017, p.65), portraits can be ways to enact fugitivity “through forms of self- fashioning that enunciate quiet but resonant claims to personhood and subjectivity in the face of dispossession.” Furthermore, his critique prompted me to wonder about the way in which the contemporary Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, previously mentioned by Susana Amaral, directly engage with scientific portraits of black men and women as a way to highlight processes of racialization, their connections to colonialism, natural history, and scientific racism, and the ongoing violence and eradication faced by these racialized bodies.
Alexander G. Weheliye in “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Graphic Modernities” suggests that the statistical graphs in Du Bois’s sociological work on Black life “transfigure nongraphic data into spatio-visual forms, constructing a diagrammatics that renders visible the political rather than the biological physiognomy of the Negro” (Weheliye 27). Du Bois, in visualizaing Black America, moves to abstract forms and representations via statistical renderings of Black life in what Weheliye argues as a refusal of the epidermal racial schema (via Fanon) normally imposed upon African Americans. In doing so, Du Bois’s data visualizations “unearth a rhythm of chance, the clashing, relational, horizontal facts, forces, and tendencies of the color line as detached from black and white bodies: the abstract physiognomy of modern racialized power.” (37). A question I am left with after this weeks readings is, when faced with this “diagrammatic dialectic” removed from the Black body, its representations, and histories of figuration, how do we differently perceive the “political physiognomy” (Weheliye) of the colour line?
On a bit of a tangent, I was struck by the title of the book on Du Bois’s drawings: data portraits. Portraits are a distinct form of representation. The history of portraiture would define this genre as one of innate individuality meant to show the brilliance, power, virtue, and even essence of the sitter, normally through their likeness. A data portrait perhaps does all of these things but relies on the multiplicity of the sitters as a collective. So what happens when the epidermal excess of racialized assemblages are removed from the portrait? The data portraits operate then subversively as a negative image of the colour line at the turn of the twentieth century. If we read the portraits backwards, rather than conveying solely (as the authors of the collection insist) the progress of Black Americans after emancipation the data portraits simultaneously, on two different frequencies, account for Black life in the wake of a “climate that is anti-black” (Sharpe 104).
Du Bois’s “Of the Black Belt” sonic epigraph opens with “I am black but comely.” I could not help but think about how this biblical reference that operates in Early Music, as evident in Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Nigra Sum, Sed Formosa (1584). How might we consider this phrase at the intersection of epigraph, polyphony, and sociohistoricized embodiment? A kind of pre-voice, in multiple voices, that seems to totalize our physical and discursive movement throughout America. This movement enlivens the fiction of the United States for the influence of the structural management of racialized spaces and bodies operates in a “silent scene” (Du Bois 75). Du Bois characterizes the sociological and historical encounter with blackness in the America as an ever-penetrative ring of impact. He writes, “you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the Negro problem, – the centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.” The heritage, too, is colored as “dark” perhaps suggesting that our encounter with Du Bois’s description of place, as it is congealed through history cannot be divorced from race. Weheliye takes this up later when he writes, “I refer to racialization as the political, economic, social, and cultural disciplining of the Homo sapiens species into assemblages of the human, not-quite human, and nonhuman that acquire their truth value through visual epiphenomena” (29-30). An epiphenomena that leaks out in the “but” between “black” and “comely” which exposes historicized structures of power inscribed in such a statement (where one would need to set up their experience between that of being “black” and being “comely”). I find it significant that this “but” serves at the entry point of Du Bois’s written reflection of his journey; a crevice emerges between a managed assertion of (racialized) self and some kind of respectability that cycles around ownership of one’s body. What happens to the record (as statistic but also as sonic recording) at this cut?
I wonder if, thinking about Weheliye’s interaction with Du Bois in particular, we could use the readings for this week to think through the multiple resonances/registers of the “sample”. Reading Weheliye’s “Diagrammatics” and “In the Mix” together with the Du Bois work, the three elements all depend on the throughline of a sample, either of the visual black subject or the black subject represented on the sonic level. If we think of Du Bois’ statistical work as an interaction with and mapping of the black sample, how does that enable Du Bois to perform an analysis of blackness that renders black people subjects rather than objects of study? Considering that, as Weheliye comments, “the optic illustration of [Du Bois’s] statistical data provides the channel through which to render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses,” (Weheliye 38) it would to be fair to say that the optic illustration of a sample of the black population acts as a way of rendering “the Negro” thinkable and perceptible—in that sense, sampling black populations acts as a way of communicating the object of blackness as it maps onto black American subjects. The assumption, then, is that the sample is capable of representing and subsequently communicating a repetition, operating as a kind of frequency. This frequency is interpreted by the researcher, and its existence allows us to seperate the frequency itself (sample/blackness) from that which emits the frequency (the black American subject.)
This, then, aligns well with the register of sample that would connect Du Bois’ projects with the kind of sampling referenced in Weheliye’s “In the Mix”— if the statistical sample operates as a kind of frequency that represents the numerics of black life to the researcher, how might the musical sample, through reiteration, represent sonic and qualitative aspects of black life. Chiefly, I want to think about the capacity that the sample gives the black subject to racially interpolate blackness on the sonic level, moving against the forceful racial interpolation that both Du Bois and Fanon discuss (Weheliye 541, 543). How does hip-hop’s practice of interpolating older black American and black diasporic music into new formulations create a kind of agentic racial interpolation? The example that Weheliye gives, for instance, is Grandmaster Flash’s song, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel”, contains not only samples of the two songs mentioned, but eight others, for an astonishing ten songs in total, all of which, from Blondie’s “Rapture” to Queen’s “Another Bites the Dust”, themselves rely on a black American musical tradition in order to exist in their original iterations.
Mixing these two registers together, we could begin to close read something like Da Brat’s platinum single, “Funkdafied” as an interpolation of the numerics and sonics of black life, proving them to be inseparable. Looking at the second verse, where Da Brat and Jermaine Dupri go back and forth, this integration becomes clear: Tear the roof off this mutha like Parliament I'm on a roll In Control like Janet, dammit Brat, you're the funk bandit and they can't handle it I know, that's why I keep hitting em with this grammar In order to create a black sonic frequency, there is necessarily an reiteration of previous content, expressed not as direct repetition, but reference. To hit them with grammar, Da Brat manipulates the rhythm of The Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets” to create new content, rapping over a beat to add another wavelength to the frequency associated with the Isley Brothers sample, which will actually come to be most famous on Biggie’s “Big Poppa”. How do these dynamics (and again, thinking of dynamics in all registers) contribute to a portrait that can be created of black life?
Hi everyone, here are some framing questions for tomorrow's discussion on behalf of myself, Justin, Julia, and Yu-Sen. Hope they're useful!
1. How does Du Bois’s methodology in the Data Portraits render frequency differently from what we’ve encountered thus far? What does sociological study provide in contrast to the literary-aesthetic practices considered in the last few weeks?
2. Are the epochal markings of time—that is, moving in large units across decades—in the portraits useful for us to think about the temporal register? What do they say about repetition, lag, and most significantly, the interval?
3. Weheliye argues that Du Bois’s deployment of a descriptive statistical model over an inferential one challenges the law of generality by refusing to assign a teleological conclusion to the information gathered. Can this method offer an alternative to the flattening tendencies of data? Or does it also run the risk of monolithizing the group it represents?
4. “It is hard for an individual mind to grasp and comprehend the real social condition of a mass of human beings without losing itself in details and forgetting that after all each unit studied is a throbbing soul.” (“The Negro as He Really Is,” 858) In the discipline of sociology, the individual as “exceptional case” is often measured against the grain of the “typical case” of the group. In the scale of visual, journalistic, novelistic, and ethnographic work of Du Bois, how does he figure dichotomies of the individual-social and private-public?
5. The edition of Souls ordered for this class omits the musical epigraphs preceding each chapter in the original (and most other publications). What effect do these notations have on our reading? Is there a relationship between the imagistic rendering of the notes, the implied sound, and the language of the text?
6. Weheliye argues that the photograph is limited in that it is “bound to a representational logic of depicting existent individuals, groups, or institutions” (34). He argues that they are unable to escape the visual encounter with the racial epidermal schema that renders blackness as “natural”, however the data portraits escape by visualizing abstract forces subverts of power. How does Weheliye’s argument trouble/how is it troubled by our thinking with Moten? Are photographs able to escape/subvert the visual logics of the racial epidermal schema? Placed alongside each other in the context of the Paris Exhibition, what do the data portraits do to the photographs in terms of what they are able to represent (view Plate 31)?
7. In both “Of the Black Belt” and “The Negro as He Really Is,” Du Bois describes Saturday Black gatherings in the town: “They insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the great town-world on Saturday” (858). How does this moment of Black sociality attend to the question of rhythm and the “form” of the interval raised last class?
8. How do we think through Du Bois’s engagement with geography, cartography, and landscape as expanding the category of the visual? Thinking the narrative accounts of geography in conversation with the maps within the data portraits, how does Du Bois represent kinesis and hapticity? What is made visible and/or foreclosed in visualizing abstract forces of power across each mode?
9. How Du Bois Data Portraits work in relation to the double consciousness and second sight that he uses to describe the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of another (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert’s essay, p.15).
10. How do the plates act as a visual representation of passages in the “Of the Black Belt” as landowning rates (Plates 19 and 56), black population growth in Georgia (Plates 4-7) and ratios of black and white occupations throughout the State (plate 27)?
11. How is the tonality of blackness interpreted in different ways from Du Bois texts? As a tonal range of skin tones as in Plate 13, to the musical or vocal sound with reference to black life?
12. DuBois’ photograph used in his Paris Exposition identification was taken by Paul Nadar (p.18), at the leading Paris photo studio. How does that add to the recognition of Du Bois in a certain intellectual status, reinforcing his research exhibited?
13. How do the aesthetics of the “color-lines” refer to colors present in artworks of artists from the African Diaspora?
14. Du Bois’ choices of what should be framed inside the rectangular frame of the plates are as important as the information that is left outside of the American Negro Exhibit. What could be the benefits and risks of his approach?
15. How does Du Bois’s choice of imagery for the “The Negro as He Really Is” differ from the imagery of black populations at that time?
16. What are the politics of the “chance” that Weheliye refers to in “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy”? How is chance obscured or made explicit by data visualization?
[The following is **Job Miller's post**- there were some technical difficulties with his invitation to blogger] Visibility/Visuality/The Naked Eye/the Curve
The introduction of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits articulates Du Bois’s investment not only in the “the politics of visuality” but in the “very question of black visibility.” (15) What is the difference between visuality and visibility? [OED Visuality “1. The state or quality of being visual or visible to the mind; mental visibility.”, Visibility “1. The condition, state, or fact of being visible; visible character or quality; capacity of being seen (in general, or under special conditions).”] What is the difference, if there is any, between being visual and being visible?
Du Bois investment in (black) visibility and/or/not visuality is articulated in the Weheliye piece in relation to the bringing of the racializing assemblages out from those hidden positions from which “the largely invisible forces of power that hierarchically determine who properly inhabits the space of the human and who does not” operates. (27, Weheliye) In order to arrest this force of power, which seems to be all the more empowered by its hidenness, there is a strategy of making visible. In the Weheliye piece it is toward the “naked eye” that these relations are not visible. But what is this naked eye? What does Sanford know in his calculation that he “‘paid out enough for fertilizers to have bought a farm,’ but the owner will not sell” but that he does not see? (18, “The Black Belt”) Or when Du Bois’s “my yellow gossip” says, speaking about an estate which is being wrongly claimed, “and them white folks will get it, too.” Do they see with a naked eye what it that which would seem to escape the naked eye? (14) I think I understand that it is not as simple as saying if a few understand some of the components of the forces of power—its anti-blackness—that its movements are rendered in full legibility and therefore are arrested, however I want to press a little more on the articulation of the “naked eye.”
Weheliye writes that, “Since the masses, just as races, are not visible to the “naked eye,” the optic illustration of the statistical data provides the channel through which to render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses” (38) which seems to orientate the purpose and operation of the data portraits in rendering thinkable and perceptible to the “naked eye.” The question which is hovering with me now is who’s eye? But before that I want to look at Weheliye’s footnote on the naked eye which he introduces in its third usage.This passage comes out of his thoughts on the differences between Du Bois’s photography and his data portraits. [Here is a link to The Health and Physique of the Negro American (Du Bois 1906) which is the text he is referencing https://archive.org/details/healthphysiqueof00dubo/page/4/mode/2up (Links to an external site.) It opens on a series of photographs. Here too is a link to some of Galton’s work against which Weheylie juxtaposed Du Bois's work https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2841021.pdf (Links to an external site.)] “To be sure, the photographs labor against the coupling of blackness and subhumanity that was also on display at the “ethnographic exhibits” or human zoos in Paris and elsewhere; nevertheless, the images are still bound to a representational logic of depicting existent individuals, groups, or institutions (Celik and Kinney 1990). In a similar fashion to Walter Benjamin’s description of August Sander’s portraits of the German people, the photographs compiled for the Paris World’s Fair, especially the portraits of individual black subjects, illustrate only what is already observable to the ‘naked eye.’”
(34) Here Weheliye sees the images as unable to do the work of the data portriats and who can argue they are not the same. But are the images still bound to the representational logic of depicting existent individuals, groups, or institutions? ...
[Job Miller Continued 2/4] Do they have a phonic substantiality which upsets the bond of representational logic? Weheliye expands upon what he means by “naked eye” in footnote 15 saying, “This[the naked eye] should not be taken to imply that the portraits correspond to an objectively constituted reality in any uncomplicated way but that they are more easily legible within the territorialized framework of the political ontologies of race and personhood at the turn of the twentieth century.” (52 W) (My goal here is not to pull apart Weheliye’s text but to emerge thoughtfully from it.) In the footnote a spectrum of legibility is introduced, where the photo or data portrait is more difficult or more easily legible. This disrupts the conception of visibility which proscribes a totality of its being fully in appearance. Weheliye’s other point is that this legibility is determined by the “territorilized framework of the political ontologies of race and personhood” which suggest that, when I asked “whose eye,” the answer was the eye which determines this territorialized framework. Do we find through this articulation that the “naked eye” belongs to a certain predetermined gaze? And again what is the phonic substance of the photos in The Health and Physique of the Negro American? Then perhaps after that, what is the phonic substance or lower frequency(are the two interchangeable?) of the data portraits—this is, I think, what Weheliye gets at in his concluding paragraphs(perhaps even all throughout his piece)?
As another mode of trying to attend to the data portraits I turn back toward the introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits. Battle-Baptiste and Rusert describe Du Bois’s work “In opposition to the deeply allegorical and intentionally convoluted language that Du Bois deployed in his writings to convey structures of oppression, alienation, and isolation under Jim Crow segregation—or what Du Bois termed “life within the Veil”—here Du Bois and his design team used clean lines, bright color, and sparse style to visually convey the America color line to European audience.” (16) I wonder if the visuality of the data portraits might be described as deeply allegorical and intentionally convoluted in relation toward his writing? I can’t help but come back to Plate 11(Here is a link to the image which has the top cut off https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/kRUgcgvTMszbPG9nk11cJmJLzkE=/800x600/filters:no_upscale():focal(1223x1116:1224x1117)/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/3b/22/3b22a3d0-0a6f-42fb-a1d6-58019a3d9312/11_33873a_city_and_rural_population_18901.png (Links to an external site.)) which, while getting after an articulation of the population of Georgia(even though the graph does not say[if you add the numbers from Plate 11 they equal to the number Plate 4’s articulation of 858,815 as the “Negro Population In Georgia” in 1890]) begins as a line only to descend into a spiral. There does seem to be something vaguely allegorical, even if I do not get the allegory, and it is at least in some respects intentionally convoluted. Plate 11 has a certain hypnotic pull, drawing one down into the spiral, but where is this circle and where does it point to? My first response is to tie the curves of the image to the language of “The Princess Steel'' which the introduction opens on. (Here is a link to the recently published version of the story https://www.mlajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.3.819 (Links to an external site.) and here is a link to the typed manuscript with handwritten edits https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b236-i001/#page/1/mode/1up (Links to an external site.)) Below is a long passage in which Du Bois articulates iterations of a curve through a character which is a black sociologist. I wonder if we might read it as a sort of meditation of the graphs presented a decade earlier. What is required, it seems, in the articulation of the complexity of a graph which could really contain what it is Du Bois’ character is after, pushes toward the unintelligible and comes out as a story.
[Job Miller Continued ¾] “A dot measured by height and breadth on a plane surface like this may measure a single human deed in two dimensions. Now place plane on plane, dot over dot and you have a history of these deeds in days and months and years; so far man has gone, though the Great Chronicle renders my work infinitely more accurate and extensive; but I go further: If now these planes be curved about one center and elected to and fro we get a curve of infinite curvings which is—”—he paused impressively—“which is the Law of Life.” I smiled at this but my wife looked interested; she had apparently forgotten his color. . . .“Look,” he said. We looked out the great window and there hanging before it we saw a vast solid crystal globe. I think I have never seen so perfect and beautiful a sphere. It was nearly fifty feet in diameter and seemed at first like a great ball of light, a scintillating captive star glistening in the morning sunlight. “this,” he said, “is the globe on which I plot my curves of life. You know in the Middle Age they used to use spheres like this—of course smaller and far less perfect—but that was mere playing with science just as their alchemy was but the play and folly of chemistry. Now my first series of experiments covering the last 20 years has been the plotting of the curves which will give me the Great Curve but—,” and here he came nearer and almost whispered, “but when I would cast the great lines of this Curve I was continually hampered by curious counter-curves and shadows and crossings— which all my calculations could not eliminate. Then suddenly a hypothesis occurred to me. Human life is not alone on earth—there is an Over-life—nay—nay I mean nothing metaphysical or theological—I mean a social Over- life—a life of Over-men, Super-men, not merely Captains of Industry but field marshalls of the Zeit-geist, who today are guiding the world events and dominating the lives of men. It is a Life so near ourselves that we think it is ourselves, and yet so vast that we vaguely identify it with the universe. I am now seeking these shadowing curves of the Overlife. But I go further: I will not merely know this Over-life. I will see it with my Soul. And I have seen it,” he cried triumphantly with burning eyes. ...
[Job Miller Continued 4/4] “… [Du Bois still] Then, feverishly: “I want today to show you one of the Over-men—his deeds, his world, his life, or rather Life of lives—I can do it,” he said and drew his chair nervously toward us and looked at us intently with his dark weak eyes. “I can do more than that,” he said. “You know we can see the great that is far by means of the telescope and the small that is near by the means of the microscope. We can see the Far Great and the Near Small but not the Great Near.” “Nor,” I added, finding my voice for the first in a vain effort to break the spell, “the Far Small.” He beamed—“Yes—yes, that’s it,” he said, “and that will come later— Now the Great Near! And that problem I have solved by the microscope megascope,”
(823-4) Plate 11 might also send us toward the articulations within “Of The Black Belt” as we follow the spiral toward “NEGROS LIVING IN THE COUNTRY AND VILLAGES” which is itself an interesting gesture in as much as those within the narrative would only make up a tiny sliver of that spiral.
This week’s readings have got me to think of representation and fragmentation. The idea of fragmentation lends itself nicely to our conversation about frequency, as frequency itself is a fragment in the grand scheme of a sound. A sound is comprised of frequency (“pitch”), timbre, and loudness; and so, by only considering frequency, we can never fully listen to a sound. Frequency is an attribute of a sonic identity, and it can be shared by many sounds; 440 Hz is the same frequency on the piano, the flute, a guitar and in the human voice. Frequency tells us about a certain capacity of a sonic event to sound in a certain range.
Reading Du Bois “The Negro as He Really Is”, I was struck by the way in which Du Bois strips most subjects of the text from their personal identities, and uses fragments of information in order to form a portrait of the black community in Black Belt. Du Bois thinks about the black subjects in numbers, statistics and visually encoded systems. What are we to make of this very specific way Du Bois uses the term portraiture? What can we understand about the black subject through such a perspective?
While criticized by Moten for his “unwillingness to discover a photograph” (Visible Music, 206), I believe that it is useful to consider Roland Barthes “air” or inner life from Camera Lucida when thinking of the ways Du bois understands portraiture. Barthes “air” is a reference to what the subject of the portrait is. The air is not necessarily present in the image itself, but is the aspects of subjecthood that become available to us by really looking at the image. Through this lens, the diagrammatical physiognomy that is found in Du Bois’ Data Portraits, or more specifically to my thinking about “The Negro as He Really Is”, could be seen as the air that Du Bois’ portraits were going after. My reading of the text understood Du Bois’ portraits as wide; Du Bois’ as interested in creating a portrait of the cultural black subject, a subject that is comprised of multiple singularities and brings forward a single whole.
I wonder though, does Du Bois’ project succeed in representing “The Negro as He Really is”? Can numbers and diagrams really represent a culture? A history? A life? What do we gain from such a pragmatic consideration of subjecthood, and what is missed by “just” looking at these facts instead of representing them through other forms?
Going back to our notion of frequency and a sonic engagement with the visuality of black life, I wonder what a sonification of the data portraits would sound like. I am thinking of the work of my friend and brilliant composer Yvette Janine Jackson, “Destination Freedom”: “a sonic experience that moves from the cargo hold of a ship transporting Africans to the Americas to a futuristic vessel searching for freedom.” (www.yvettejackson.com) (if this is interesting, listen to the part of the piece called Swan) Yvette uses music and sound design in order to portray a sonic interpretation (or representation?) Of migration, its outcomes and costs through time.
Surely, her work is not identical, and maybe not at all similar to Du Bois’ work, but I think there is something to be said here for the use of different mediums in order to create a portrait of a wide subject, and the ways in which we use data to represent such subjects.
Presentation Paper: Cartography and Wynter’s Genre of Man
The geographer Katherine McKittrick writes that “Black women’s geographies—produced in the margins, on auction blocks, in garrets, through literatures, and in ‘the last place they thought of’—indicate that traditional spatial hierarchies are simultaneously powerful and alterable. This simultaneity suggests that human geographies are unresolved and are being conceptualized beyond their present classificatory order” (122). Building on Wynter, McKittrick writes:
Wynter’s work and ideas demonstrate that the material and conceptual geographies of the black diaspora are not simply ‘marginal’ or ‘different’ or ‘unacknowledged.’ Rather, her interest in ‘new forms of life’ opens up philosophical configurations that posit a flesh-and-blood worldview implicit to the production of space. Wynter allows us, then, to imagine black women’s geographies not simply as descriptive areas of complex ‘differences.’ She also allows us to consider the ways in which space, place, and poetics are expressing and mapping an ongoing human geography story (122).
To which I ask, What are the geography stories being told in Du Bois’s diagrammatics?
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America gathers two sets of data visualizations called The Georgia Negro: A Social Study and A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now Resident in the United States of America. These visualizations were made at Atlanta University and showed at the American Negro Exhibition at the Paris Expo in 1900.
The latter features a set of maps depicting socio-economic statistics, such as the Black literary rate and Black employment rate in America, to draw parallels between enclaves of Black populations across the United States. The Georgia Negro focuses more narrowly on the southern state where Du Bois created a Sociology lab at Atlanta University. Battle-Baptiste and Rusert forward that Du Bois’s data portraits are one, if not the first example of data visualization in the Anglophone world, where data visualization is defined as “the rendering of information in a visual format to help communicate data while also generating new patterns and knowledge through the act of visualization itself” (8 Battle-Baptiste and Rusert).
In her essay “The Cartography of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Color Line,” Mabel Wilson explains, “These were bold black nationalist sentiments,” Mabel O. Wilson explains, “that black Americans could contemplate their past, present, and future connected with an emergent Pan-African solidarity” (42).
In “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy”, Alexander Weheliye argues that creating visualizations of white supremacy and Black suppression was a highly strategic choice. Only through abstraction of statistical data was the global color line made legible to white audiences. Photographs and other forms of artistic capture that were not abstracted or quantitative, in Weheliye’s argument, would reifiy the “Negro as a ‘natural’ phenomenon”, where recreating “the Negro as a statistical figuration” is to have a portrait “created by chance via the violently imposed effects of the color line” (27). Importantly, Du Bois’s visual data puts “under erasure its primary function, which is to create and maintain hierarchical caesuras between different groups of humans, especially between black and white subjects” (39). Du Bois knew his audience and how to instrumentalize their own tools (of sociology and geography, two disciplines of Empire) for his own agenda. In Aldon Morris’s description, “The exhibition violated white thoughts about black people… especially Americans only three decades removed from slavery” (34). To return to McKittrick’s provocation, “What are the human geography stories being told?”, I see Weheliye’s analysis of Figures 4 and 5 in “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy” as brilliant examples of telling an untold geography story. According to conventional cartographic principles, a darker shade (or tone) connotes “the unfavorable end of the scale regardless of whether it represented a greater concentration or the reverse” (39). And yet, in Fig. 4 both white and Black males are filled in with the same black ink, while white and Black females are the same light tone. This sleight of vision is underscored by the horizontal placement of the gender-distribution charts, in which Black males and females are placed above white.
As Wilson and the Editors mention, Du Bois’s visual portraits deploy a wealth of modular design elements that anticipate art movements in the European avant-garde, such as Italian futurism and the Bauhaus movement. Coupled with traditional cartographic portraits, these made for powerful visualizations of the socioeconomic conditions of Black people in America. Reflecting on Du Bois’s profound prescience, I am compelled to imagine how relationships between cartography and Blackness have evolved more than a century later. Though Du Bois was able to map inequalities between Black and white America, I wonder how the differences marked by hard lines, closed shapes, and contrasting colours created fixed differences in space and flatten power relations that are far more ‘geometric’ in a Masseyian sense (Massey 2002). Doreen Massey was a feminist human geographer who argued that places are made through geometries or power – not simply capital relations. Coupled with her notion of time-space, the idea that time and space cannot be conceptualised separately, a Masseyian sense of place forwards that geographical boundaries are social and spatial. These forces do not operate evenly across space.
Alternatively, what kinds of mappings can accommodate an understanding of urban change as slippery, out of control, and outside of the purview of administrators and formal actors? What kinds of cartographies can illustrate how people navigate a county or a city’s deepening divides in their everyday intimacies and socialized routines? Follow Wynter’s theorisation of the invention of Man as well as the genres of man, in which other modes of the human are being constituted and lived all the time, what kinds of geography stories and cartographic plots allow new genres of the human to be written?
Jen, Alex. “In paintings and ceramics, Theaster Gates salvages charged materials.” Hyperallergic, 2017. Retrieved from https://hyperallergic.com/356817/in-paintings-and-ceramics-theaster-gates-salvages-charged-materials/
Massey, Doreen. “Globalisation: What Does It Mean for Geography?” Geography, vol. 87, no. 4, 2002, pp. 293–296.
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2006.
Weheliye, Alexander G. "Diagrammatics as Physiognomy: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Graphic Modernities." CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 15 no. 2, 2015, p. 23-58.
Weheliye, Alexander. “In the Mix: Hearing the Souls of Black Folk.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, 2000, pp. 535–554.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, Eds. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018.
Reading and viewing this week’s materials, I was struck by the emergence in Du Bois’s work of the figural motif of the black masses. Du Bois recognizes that the masses can only ever be understood as an abstraction, noting that “it is hard for an individual mind to grasp and comprehend the real social condition of a mass of human beings with losing itself in details and forgetting that after all each unit studies is a throbbing soul” (“The Negro As He Really Is,” 858). Consequently, Du Bois treats the black masses as what Weheliye—drawing on Spillers—calls an “object of knowledge” rather than a “real object,” more a figure of sociological imagination and site of collective association than a transparent reflection of lived experience. At times Du Bois ascribes the black masses with a singular sense of social agency, such as when he writes that “like a snake the black population writhed upward” (The Souls of Black Folk, 70, Dover Thrift Edition). Interestingly, several of Du Bois’s “data portraits” for the Exposition Universelle call to mind the figure of a coiled snake, such as a graph illustrating the numbers of African American religious practitioners by denomination; the number of Protestants so far exceeds that of Catholics that the bar indicating the former population winds in a spiral (Plate 62). This design choice adds to the impression that the black masses evoked by these visualizations are continually in a state of flux, eluding the spatial and temporal capture of inferential, omniscient science. As Weheliye observes, “the optic illustration of the statistical data provides the channel through which to render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses” (38). In Du Bois’s visualizations, the black masses are figures that fluctuate and twist, expand and contract. Thus, as Mabel Wilson observes, these data portraits powerfully refuted anti-black arguments that black people were a static, undifferentiated body with no history; on the contrary, Du Bois situates heterogenous black populations at the center of world history. These visualizations may provide a key for understanding how Du Bois transitioned from calls for moral uplift and a “Talented Tenth” to his affirmation in Black Reconstruction of the political agency of the black masses in the form of a general strike. Once Du Bois was able to “render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses,” it is not surprising that his political thinking shifted to embrace this figure as revolutionary force.
My thoughts regarding this weeks readings concern:
-> difference between visualization (of data) and the visuality (of black life): -> “the politics of visuality, and the very question of black visibility” (Battle-Baptiste/Rusert) -> Visible for whose eyes? -> Or, with regards to Du Bois notion of “double consciousness” describing the experience of always seeing oneself through the eyes of another (psychic alienation / social isolation); for Du Bois also a kind of “second sight” (might be transformed from a curse into a “gift” that offered aunique and superior perspective on turn-of-the century race relations, sociability, and even existence itself)
-> “These charts, graphs, and maps visualize African Americans in ways that speak to but also diverge from the representational strategies used in black uplift photography at the turn of the twentieth century.” (Visualizing Black America, 15)
-> speaking in what language: cultural techniques of cartography, map-making, and the grid as an ability to write absence; an ability that was invented and performed by the colonial enterprise and an imperialism which inscribed the reason of its cause through the negation of what was at the places that were up for discovery, occupation, exploitation, plundering, and the eradication and annihilation of the cultures that were present there–the European’s elsewhere
-> between 16th-18th century “grid-shaped control” becomes the universal practice that constitutes the basis of modern disciplinary societies.
-> expansion of Western culture can be described as a totalitarianism of the grid (!)
B. Siegert: “(NOT) IN PLACE”
The ontological effect of the grid is the modern concept of place and being-in-one’s place based on the media-theoretical distinction between data and addresses. In other words, it presupposes the ability to write absence, that is, to deal equally efficiently with both occupied and empty spaces. This concept of place is thus inextricably tied to the notion of order. In return, it is impossible to conceive of this modern concept of order without the new understanding of place.
-> imaging technology also as an imagining technology: a re-appropriation of governmental knowledge
-> “genealogy of black design” (13) [ thinking of Peter Weibels notion: “Sein oder Design”—to be or to be designed, are two very different modes of being: one is also being absent, being abstracted into a language that is characterized by the invention of a taxis technique, capable of turning humans into retrievable objects, or simply data. ]
-> utilizing statistics and photography: deployment in the service of scientifically controverting putative biological inferiorities -> naked eye / ‘clothed’ eye (Latour, in: Weheliye, 29)
-> Weheliye: Du Bois’ diagrammatology as part of the Negro becoming intelligible as a pivotal character in Modernity’s “long running reality-show” -> photography and text alone cannot map the topography of the structures and discourses (i.e. the color-line) through which that happens
(cont.) Specifically in “The Black Belt” DuBois provides a written description of the geography, history, social class and positioning, and culture heritage of Southern Black people of Georgia, particularly in Albany and Dougherty County. In this chapter, we can especially see both the visual and linguistic genius of Du Bois’ writing, which echoes of his second sight. Du Bois’ use of masterful visual grammar evinces Cadava’s assertion, “if photographic technology belongs to the physiognomy of historical thought means that there can be no thinking of history that is not at the same time a thinking of photography, then there cannot exist a contemplation of photography that is not also a consideration of black life” (Weheliye 36). The visual, the historical, and the word become one in Du Bois’ observations and detailing of the towns, the region, and the biographies of the people he sees/encounters. Like his infographics, he outlines and fills them with color, genealogies, occupations, facts, comparisons to the English, and imaginative fictions in order to make a case for the Black American life and position as a result of a specific form of colonization, socio-political and environmental factors, and not of the specter of Black cultural decline, Black pathology and Black laze as inherent facts of Blackness. I am interested in Du Bois’ role in forging a relationship between Black Americans and Black life to the concept of visual epiphenomena, that which arises from the gazes upon and visions of Blackness, the production of a visual grammar of Blackness as a byproduct of the racist institution and thought system and that which is formed through ones perception of their own Black self (both independently of and in collaboration with anti-Black eyes).
ReplyDeleteWith both visual and semantic design in mind, Du Bois paid special attention to borders, lines, and other forms of imprisonment in not only his graphs but also in his observations and writing, exemplified in mention of fences and stockades in “The Black Belt”. He writes, “I think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences”. I am interested in this idea of the Black person simultaneously “fenced” and “unfenced”, invisible and visible, and what this means for an understanding of Black aesthetics. It is here that I think of Du Bois’ double consciousness and how this was a critical component of the development and creation of his diagrams, (especially given that he was assisted in their formation by Black students at Atlanta University), and how without this unique form of scopic consciousness, his observations, understandings, visualizations, and data could not have been collected, interpreted, or presented as accurately, especially if attempted by the white and therefore, naked eye.
Is it possible to listen around, or perhaps before, Du Bois’ data portraits as we might with the photograph of Emmett Till that Moten proposes? As Weheliye articulates about “The Philadelphia Negro” (to which I’m extending to the diagrams for the Paris Exposition in Visualizing Black America), Du Bois creates a certain generative representation of the “indeterminate and determinate traces of force” that construct the color line, thus making visible the “physiognomic silhouette” that determines the schema and structures social registration to black frequency (Weheliye 39). He argues that the tense relationality of “diagramma” works to “dialectically [historicize] the materialization of the Negro in the modern urban milieu” (39). In other words, by invoking those “conceptual and methodological maxims,” Du Bois “at the same time [wills] that the color line will cease to appear as a universal law” (38). And yet, one question that continues to ring out for me concerns the organizing project of diagrams and data visualization, despite its “marking out” and “striking through” (39). To whom is this meant to register?
ReplyDeleteI hesitate to link data visualization solely with histories of organization, narrowing the scope of its possibilities; though, the description of Du Bois’ “historical microscope” (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert 32) and likewise incorporation of Enlightenment “cartographic technologies” (“Historically, along with the creation of maps –critical tools in European colonial project –there emerged a cartographic gaze that cultivated a way of seeing the world… and new modes of representing a world no longer ruled by God and monsters but guided by reason and science”) gives pause (41). Are there ways of invoking this format that elides the creation of a necessary center (I’m thinking here of the choice to centralize, extrapolate and figure Georgia as the “Black Atlantic world” through certain evidentiary measures)? Can we read such refutation and “counter-argument” (43) outside of its call to witness and be witnessed? What are the connections or divergences between this refusal and that of Campt’s “black fugitivity”? Perhaps Weheliye’s opening remark concerning untethering the “real object” from the “object of knowledge” proves useful for sitting with (24). In thinking with these distinctions he gives, my question remains is it possible to situate Blackness as indeed the “object of knowledge” without necessarily incorporating the technologies that rendered this relation invisible? And how might we uncouple these distinctions of study without also dimming those quotidian effects of Blackness on black people? How do we give care to these experiences outside of the scopic?
While reading/looking at Du Bois’ Data Portraits, I was struck by a word that appears in the annotations for Plates 21 and 22. The annotation for Plate 21 describes “[a]n undulating black line” and for Plate 22 it describes “a pattern of tiny undulations that resemble waves.” I want to show two of the OED definitions for undulate (v) that relate to our discussion of frequency:
ReplyDeletea. intransitive. To move in, or after the manner of, waves; to have a wave-like motion.
b. transferred. Of sound, etc.
The description of the lines in Plate 21 signal waves, signal frequency, in a way that immediately draws the sonic out of (into) the visual. Here we see another place where Du Bois practices the art of mixing, as Weheliye finds in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois continues “to find the moment in which to combine the two channels and make sure that when the two channels meet […] they jive with each other” (“In the Mix” 547). Instead of mixing the sorrow songs with his own text, in Plate 21 Du Bois mixes the extrapolated property value information with the actual property values. This graph could simply communicate the known property value information without dipping into the unknown, but the refusal of the blank space would also omit the important “KU-KLUXISM” header that Du Bois and co. provide. As the annotation beside the plate points out, this “is one of the most overtly political charts in the Georgia study.” That politics is accomplished in the mix of the known and the extrapolated. Du Bois does not exactly fill in the gaps of the archive, but he does give those gaps an outline.
Weheliye further writes of Souls that “the musical fragments provide a mix of music and noise imploding the texts that frame them” (551). We see something like this in Plate 22. The “arrows” in the circle graph that are surrounded by the undulations could resemble this kind of implosion, with each additional layer of the circle graph imploding on what has come before. (They also do not look unlike the wake of a bullet). But Plate 21 depicts an explosion. The undulating solid line crests over the edge of the graph, not coincidentally at the same time that we are presented with the header “LYNCHING.”
There is a vitality to undulating, a vitality that, when linked to the acquisition of property by black peoples in Georgia, presents a problem to white supremacy. While looking at the dictionary definitions for “undulation,” I noticed that the textual examples given in the OED often invoke sea creatures: eels, snakes, whales, porpoises, etc. The eel and the snake seem especially important to me because these are creatures often used to invoke a sense of horror or disgust. As someone who enjoys horror fiction, I feel like “undulations” can serve the purpose of conferring vitality onto that which should not have it: the undulating tentacles of some cosmic, Lovecraftian horror. (And of course, Lovecraft’s tales in particular locate anxieties surrounding blackness and otherness that are transmitted into creatures of unimaginable horror with unpronounceable names.) When Georgian white supremacy reacted in horror to the undulating rise in the valuation of black property owners, they attempt to stamp it out. Du Bois, in the mix of the known and the extrapolated, seems to point towards a belief in undulation, in black vitalism, by ending the graph with an upward tick in the extrapolated data.
The paired plates of the “value of farming tools” across time and the “assessed value of household and kitchen furniture” across the same timeframe stage a conversation between the inside and the outside of the home. A bar graph is placed next to one of the many curving circles. The value of furniture curves in on itself as if the home is filling up with stuff. These circles produce their own inside space, a white jagged circle in the middle. The “critical” farm tools stretch out and contract in neat lines. There is an effort to chart out the domestic space as distinct, even structuring. However, at the very end of “The Black Belt,” DuBois records a conversation that adds yet another parallel (62). The dialogue – “’Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furniture –' ‘Furniture? But furniture is exempt from seizure by law.’ ‘Well, he took it just the same,” – closes out the chapter (62). It leaves us lingering on the image of stolen furniture, furniture that may be in the white void produced in the center of the chart meant to communicate only gain. The furniture is at once equated with, made “just the same” as, the farm stuff, the corn and mule, but also given a special designation as “exempt.” What would a graph that placed the farm tools and the furniture together, as both equally contracting and extending?
ReplyDeleteI consider visualizations themselves akin to the work of metaphor: experiences and feelings are shifted through language into something communicable. Aligned with Sontag and her critique of the metaphors that inscribe disease, these metaphors refuse to work on the body itself. Instead, they seem to work around it. Rather than the racialized body made visible through the explicit exhibition of the Paris convention, Alexander Weheliye argues that these graphs transform through visual language the structures, processes, and power of white supremacy into palpable objects (27). Rather than the body itself then, what forms around the body and exerts invisible pressures on it becomes visible. Perhaps, then rather than a taxonomized body, the invisible/visible space reveals a different apparatus, a different way of looking not at the body but around the body? To put it in terms of the graphs, what is or is not in the center of a circle, the negative space, mapped out by the stuff of domesticity?
To complicate these questions further, the visualization in plate 23, which represents property ownership in Savannah and Atlanta through a series of overlapping bars, produces a metaphoric relationship with women’s domestic labor. The editors evocatively call the graph “the woven bar chart.” The number of owners and the collective property value mutually impact each other, which is given visual meaning through the interweaving of the bars that represent those numbers. This chart also echoes the final scene in “The Black Belt” as DuBois draws attention in his painting of the scene to “the silent old black woman patching pantaloons and never saying a word” (62). She is unheard but she does the textual work, patching, mending, and weaving together. Weheliye notes that “black women’s domestic labor occupies a pivotal conceptual place in the rendering visible of the abstract physiognomies of power that racialize and conscript the black subject” (44). In this instance, the domestic work of the silent black woman provides the metaphoric model for the representation of black property ownership and its contingencies. However, the weave is formed by her but not necessarily around her. The exact motion of her hands, obscured in DuBois’s description, seem visible as the producer of the loose weave of the graph.
How might Du Bois’s sociological studies and data portraits afford a way to think through another definition of frequency, namely “the state or condition of being crowded; also (concrete) a numerous assembly, concourse, crowd”? (OED “frequency” def. 1) How would this definition of frequency correspond with, augment, or disrupt the other definitions of frequency (as repetition, rhythm, vibrations, intensities, etc.) we’ve begun to turn over in the seminar?
ReplyDeleteIn his studies, Du Bois takes Georgia as the geographic, demographic, social, and epistemological epicenter of “the Negro Problems,” where the “race question has focused itself” (“The Negro…” 41). This thesis is visually represented in “The Georgia Negro: A Social Study” in the progression of the diagrams themselves, which lead the viewer to zoom in historically and geographically from the doubled globe of the Atlantic slave trade to more localized social dynamics of individual counties. In his writings, Du Bois specifically focuses his attention on Albany, within Dougherty County, as the “real capital,” the “center of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with the outer world” (42). Visual cues also set the data portraits in motion toward Georgia as a node of intense frequency: from the directional arrows of plate 8 to the way Du Bois plays with the norms of statistical graphics that frequently assigned darker colors to the “greater frequency of [a] phenomenon” as well as to more “unfavorable end of [a] scale” (Weheliye 39, quoting Funkhouser). Of course, colors (which only account for a fraction of electromagnetic radiation) have their own set yet oscillating frequencies within the visible light spectrum, all of which black absorbs or draws in (black is an achromatic color – which makes me wonder as well if - at a slant, through tonality - there is a non-diatonic sound here beyond musical chromatics). Du Bois echoes the converging motion involved in the achromatic color black’s absorption of visible light, then, when he visually “render[s] thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses” as they concentrate in Georgia after emancipation (Weheliye 38). The visual frequencies of Du Bois’s data portraits seem to palp (to recall Fanon’s antennae) what Sharpe calls a singularity, or “a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces…” (Sharpe 106). If slavery, as Sharpe argues, was a singularity within the weather of antiblackness, we might understand Du Bois’s project as making visible another singularity (or a repetition of the singularity by way of frequency in the same weather) that disarticulates the telos of abolition through the convergence of the Middle Passage (visualized as an abyss between two worlds in plate one) into the Black Belt after emancipation.
It seems that, rather than just probing something like a heart of darkness, Du Bois figures this infinitely dense gravitational pull as a protective “huddling”:“The Black Belt was not, as many assumed, a movement toward fields of labor under more genial climatic conditions; it was primarily a huddling together for self-protection; a massing of the black population for mutual defense in order to secure the peace and tranquility necessary to economic advance” (Du Bois 49). Huddling takes place in the same weather (climatic conditions, antiblackness) experienced during slavery, yet it transpires as a strategy of defense and an effort to seek economic sufficiency. Since “to huddle” is “to put or keep out of sight; to conceal or hide, as among a crowd or under a heap… to crowd together,” we might read this “massing of the black population for mutual defense” as a frequency that Du Bois seeks and graphically represents through other visual frequencies (OED “huddle”).
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Delete(continued) Thinking of this huddling as a frequency that Du Bois’ diagrams attend to, I would like to consider how he characterizes this strategy of huddling as an “experiment”: “In Dougherty County, Georgia, one can see easily the results of this experiment in huddling for protection” (Du Bois 49). I want to connect this word “experiment” in the context of huddling with what Weheliye understands as Du Bois’s visual improvisations, in part because I think both get at what Weheliye says when he writes about Du Bois’s “smudging” of laws of generality and chance of particularities (Weheliye 29, 43). Weheliye writes, “Since the discipline of statistics is so singularly concerned with rule, calculability, correlation, and the taming of chance, Du Bois’s improvisatory variation of the diagrammatic color, shape, size, and orientation break through into the ‘graphic regions of eccentric figurativeness,’ in Walter Benjamin’s words” (Weheliye 49). I might roughly (maybe wrongly and no less densely) recast Benjamin’s phrase “graphic regions of eccentric figurativeness” here as a diplopic vision (with echoes of Du Boisian “second sight”) of an incommensurable “rhythm of chance”(in Weheliye’s words). This diplopic vision, it seems to me, appears in Du Bois’s “graphic flow and style” as a way of not forgetting the “throbbing soul” that Du Bois says each unit of the mass represents (Weheilye 36, Du Bois 45). How might the visual frequencies of an improvisation that pushes into a diplopic vision of an incommensurable “rhythm of chance,” then, be attuned to the frequencies of experimental huddling? What is the threshold of frequency-as-crowding (maybe three’s a crowd, but Deleuze and Guattari also famously write, “Since each [i.e. both] of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” – A Thousand Plateaus, 3)? Why does Du Bois find “little beauty” in the “Land of the Unfenced” at the edge of Dougherty, rather than a diplopic vision of other experiments or frequencies of huddling? (“Souls…” 74-75).
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ReplyDeleteHow to turn visuality against its authoritative axis? This seemed to be the main question at the center of this week’s reading since, as argued by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, “the politics of visuality, and the very question of black visibility, were central to Du Bois’s thought” (2018, p.15). Building up from this argument, could we think of Du Bois’ work on data visualization in tandem with Campt’s conceptualization of a black visuality “that reappropriates the classifying, segregational aestheticism Mirzoeff identifies as authoritative complexes of visuality. Black visuality turns them on their head by refusing the very authority of visuality that functions to refuse blackness itself” (Black Visual Frequency: A Glossary)? I believe that this refusal is brought to stark relief in the way in which Du Bois employs a “scientific grammar” that was a crucial tool for eugenic projects, a proximity that is highlighted by Alexander G. Weheliye (2015, p.35) when he counterposes Du Bois’ photographs and plates to the ones produced by Louis Agassiz. According to the author, Du Bois's usage of this scientific visual language offers a critique of scientific racism not by disavowing a “scientific grammar”, but by using it against the grain. Thus, his use of “statistics, graphs, tables, and charts to diagrammatically desediment the Negro as a ‘natural’ phenomenon so as to recreate the Negro as a statistical figuration, one that is created by chance via the violently imposed effects of the color line.” (p.27).
ReplyDeleteCan we understand this reversal strategy, alongside the invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s novel, as fugitive strategies to turn a racializing visual language against itself? (And this image evokes the moment in The Invisible Man in which the narrator describes the fight of the yokel and the prizefighter, in which the latter is “swift and amazingly scientific” but he is eventually knocked out by a hit that knocks “science, speed, and footwork as cold as a well-digger's posterior”. To achieve this, the yokel needs to step “inside of his opponent's sense of time”, turning his opponent scientific and precise blows against himself).
Following Heather Lawrence's comment about this week’s reading, I would also like to ask if one has to eschew “pleasure” in these images. Would pleasure subdue this refusal to subscribe to the visual codes of scientific racism? Building on this question, I was intrigued by the way in which Weheliye excludes the photographic image from his arguments, arguing that “the portraits of individual black subjects, illustrate only what is already observable to the naked eye” (p.34), and that “due to the generic conventions of portrait photography, the images deployed by Du Bois and Sander cannot directly visualize processes and relations” (p.35). What about the non-visual frequencies of these photographs? By associating the photographic image exclusively to the gaze and confining it to what is perceived by the “naked eye”, the author precludes both the photography’s possible opacity as its haptic quality. As argued by Tina Campt (2017, p.65), portraits can be ways to enact fugitivity “through forms of self- fashioning that enunciate quiet but resonant claims to personhood and subjectivity in the face of dispossession.” Furthermore, his critique prompted me to wonder about the way in which the contemporary Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, previously mentioned by Susana Amaral, directly engage with scientific portraits of black men and women as a way to highlight processes of racialization, their connections to colonialism, natural history, and scientific racism, and the ongoing violence and eradication faced by these racialized bodies.
ReplyDeleteAlexander G. Weheliye in “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Graphic Modernities” suggests that the statistical graphs in Du Bois’s sociological work on Black life “transfigure nongraphic data into spatio-visual forms, constructing a diagrammatics that renders visible the political rather than the biological physiognomy of the Negro” (Weheliye 27). Du Bois, in visualizaing Black America, moves to abstract forms and representations via statistical renderings of Black life in what Weheliye argues as a refusal of the epidermal racial schema (via Fanon) normally imposed upon African Americans. In doing so, Du Bois’s data visualizations “unearth a rhythm of chance, the clashing, relational, horizontal facts, forces, and tendencies of the color line as
detached from black and white bodies: the abstract physiognomy of modern
racialized power.” (37). A question I am left with after this weeks readings is, when faced with this “diagrammatic dialectic” removed from the Black body, its representations, and histories of figuration, how do we differently perceive the “political physiognomy” (Weheliye) of the colour line?
On a bit of a tangent, I was struck by the title of the book on Du Bois’s drawings: data portraits. Portraits are a distinct form of representation. The history of portraiture would define this genre as one of innate individuality meant to show the brilliance, power, virtue, and even essence of the sitter, normally through their likeness. A data portrait perhaps does all of these things but relies on the multiplicity of the sitters as a collective. So what happens when the epidermal excess of racialized assemblages are removed from the portrait? The data portraits operate then subversively as a negative image of the colour line at the turn of the twentieth century. If we read the portraits backwards, rather than conveying solely (as the authors of the collection insist) the progress of Black Americans after emancipation the data portraits simultaneously, on two different frequencies, account for Black life in the wake of a “climate that is anti-black” (Sharpe 104).
Du Bois’s “Of the Black Belt” sonic epigraph opens with “I am black but comely.” I could not help but think about how this biblical reference that operates in Early Music, as evident in Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Nigra Sum, Sed Formosa (1584). How might we consider this phrase at the intersection of epigraph, polyphony, and sociohistoricized embodiment? A kind of pre-voice, in multiple voices, that seems to totalize our physical and discursive movement throughout America. This movement enlivens the fiction of the United States for the influence of the structural management of racialized spaces and bodies operates in a “silent scene” (Du Bois 75). Du Bois characterizes the sociological and historical encounter with blackness in the America as an ever-penetrative ring of impact. He writes, “you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the Negro problem, – the centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.” The heritage, too, is colored as “dark” perhaps suggesting that our encounter with Du Bois’s description of place, as it is congealed through history cannot be divorced from race. Weheliye takes this up later when he writes, “I refer to racialization as the political, economic, social, and cultural disciplining of the Homo sapiens species into assemblages of the human, not-quite human, and nonhuman that acquire their truth value through visual epiphenomena” (29-30). An epiphenomena that leaks out in the “but” between “black” and “comely” which exposes historicized structures of power inscribed in such a statement (where one would need to set up their experience between that of being “black” and being “comely”). I find it significant that this “but” serves at the entry point of Du Bois’s written reflection of his journey; a crevice emerges between a managed assertion of (racialized) self and some kind of respectability that cycles around ownership of one’s body. What happens to the record (as statistic but also as sonic recording) at this cut?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if, thinking about Weheliye’s interaction with Du Bois in particular, we could use the readings for this week to think through the multiple resonances/registers of the “sample”. Reading Weheliye’s “Diagrammatics” and “In the Mix” together with the Du Bois work, the three elements all depend on the throughline of a sample, either of the visual black subject or the black subject represented on the sonic level. If we think of Du Bois’ statistical work as an interaction with and mapping of the black sample, how does that enable Du Bois to perform an analysis of blackness that renders black people subjects rather than objects of study? Considering that, as Weheliye comments, “the optic illustration of [Du Bois’s] statistical data provides the channel through which to render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses,” (Weheliye 38) it would to be fair to say that the optic illustration of a sample of the black population acts as a way of rendering “the Negro” thinkable and perceptible—in that sense, sampling black populations acts as a way of communicating the object of blackness as it maps onto black American subjects. The assumption, then, is that the sample is capable of representing and subsequently communicating a repetition, operating as a kind of frequency. This frequency is interpreted by the researcher, and its existence allows us to seperate the frequency itself (sample/blackness) from that which emits the frequency (the black American subject.)
ReplyDeleteThis, then, aligns well with the register of sample that would connect Du Bois’ projects with the kind of sampling referenced in Weheliye’s “In the Mix”— if the statistical sample operates as a kind of frequency that represents the numerics of black life to the researcher, how might the musical sample, through reiteration, represent sonic and qualitative aspects of black life. Chiefly, I want to think about the capacity that the sample gives the black subject to racially interpolate blackness on the sonic level, moving against the forceful racial interpolation that both Du Bois and Fanon discuss (Weheliye 541, 543). How does hip-hop’s practice of interpolating older black American and black diasporic music into new formulations create a kind of agentic racial interpolation? The example that Weheliye gives, for instance, is Grandmaster Flash’s song, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel”, contains not only samples of the two songs mentioned, but eight others, for an astonishing ten songs in total, all of which, from Blondie’s “Rapture” to Queen’s “Another Bites the Dust”, themselves rely on a black American musical tradition in order to exist in their original iterations.
Mixing these two registers together, we could begin to close read something like Da Brat’s platinum single, “Funkdafied” as an interpolation of the numerics and sonics of black life, proving them to be inseparable. Looking at the second verse, where Da Brat and Jermaine Dupri go back and forth, this integration becomes clear:
Tear the roof off this mutha like Parliament
I'm on a roll In Control like Janet, dammit
Brat, you're the funk bandit and they can't handle it
I know, that's why I keep hitting em with this grammar
In order to create a black sonic frequency, there is necessarily an reiteration of previous content, expressed not as direct repetition, but reference. To hit them with grammar, Da Brat manipulates the rhythm of The Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets” to create new content, rapping over a beat to add another wavelength to the frequency associated with the Isley Brothers sample, which will actually come to be most famous on Biggie’s “Big Poppa”. How do these dynamics (and again, thinking of dynamics in all registers) contribute to a portrait that can be created of black life?
Hi everyone, here are some framing questions for tomorrow's discussion on behalf of myself, Justin, Julia, and Yu-Sen. Hope they're useful!
ReplyDelete1. How does Du Bois’s methodology in the Data Portraits render frequency differently from what we’ve encountered thus far? What does sociological study provide in contrast to the literary-aesthetic practices considered in the last few weeks?
2. Are the epochal markings of time—that is, moving in large units across decades—in the portraits useful for us to think about the temporal register? What do they say about repetition, lag, and most significantly, the interval?
3. Weheliye argues that Du Bois’s deployment of a descriptive statistical model over an inferential one challenges the law of generality by refusing to assign a teleological conclusion to the information gathered. Can this method offer an alternative to the flattening tendencies of data? Or does it also run the risk of monolithizing the group it represents?
4. “It is hard for an individual mind to grasp and comprehend the real social condition of a mass of human beings without losing itself in details and forgetting that after all each unit studied is a throbbing soul.” (“The Negro as He Really Is,” 858)
In the discipline of sociology, the individual as “exceptional case” is often measured against the grain of the “typical case” of the group. In the scale of visual, journalistic, novelistic, and ethnographic work of Du Bois, how does he figure dichotomies of the individual-social and private-public?
5. The edition of Souls ordered for this class omits the musical epigraphs preceding each chapter in the original (and most other publications). What effect do these notations have on our reading? Is there a relationship between the imagistic rendering of the notes, the implied sound, and the language of the text?
6. Weheliye argues that the photograph is limited in that it is “bound to a representational logic of depicting existent individuals, groups, or institutions” (34). He argues that they are unable to escape the visual encounter with the racial epidermal schema that renders blackness as “natural”, however the data portraits escape by visualizing abstract forces subverts of power. How does Weheliye’s argument trouble/how is it troubled by our thinking with Moten? Are photographs able to escape/subvert the visual logics of the racial epidermal schema? Placed alongside each other in the context of the Paris Exhibition, what do the data portraits do to the photographs in terms of what they are able to represent (view Plate 31)?
7. In both “Of the Black Belt” and “The Negro as He Really Is,” Du Bois describes Saturday Black gatherings in the town: “They insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a glimpse at the great town-world on Saturday” (858). How does this moment of Black sociality attend to the question of rhythm and the “form” of the interval raised last class?
(cont.)
8. How do we think through Du Bois’s engagement with geography, cartography, and landscape as expanding the category of the visual? Thinking the narrative accounts of geography in conversation with the maps within the data portraits, how does Du Bois represent kinesis and hapticity? What is made visible and/or foreclosed in visualizing abstract forces of power across each mode?
Delete9. How Du Bois Data Portraits work in relation to the double consciousness and second sight that he uses to describe the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of another (Battle-Baptiste and Rusert’s essay, p.15).
10. How do the plates act as a visual representation of passages in the “Of the Black Belt” as landowning rates (Plates 19 and 56), black population growth in Georgia (Plates 4-7) and ratios of black and white occupations throughout the State (plate 27)?
11. How is the tonality of blackness interpreted in different ways from Du Bois texts? As a tonal range of skin tones as in Plate 13, to the musical or vocal sound with reference to black life?
12. DuBois’ photograph used in his Paris Exposition identification was taken by Paul Nadar (p.18), at the leading Paris photo studio. How does that add to the recognition of Du Bois in a certain intellectual status, reinforcing his research exhibited?
13. How do the aesthetics of the “color-lines” refer to colors present in artworks of artists from the African Diaspora?
14. Du Bois’ choices of what should be framed inside the rectangular frame of the plates are as important as the information that is left outside of the American Negro Exhibit. What could be the benefits and risks of his approach?
15. How does Du Bois’s choice of imagery for the “The Negro as He Really Is” differ from the imagery of black populations at that time?
16. What are the politics of the “chance” that Weheliye refers to in “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy”? How is chance obscured or made explicit by data visualization?
[The following is **Job Miller's post**- there were some technical difficulties with his invitation to blogger]
ReplyDeleteVisibility/Visuality/The Naked Eye/the Curve
The introduction of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits articulates Du Bois’s investment not only in the “the politics of visuality” but in the “very question of black visibility.” (15) What is the difference between visuality and visibility? [OED Visuality “1. The state or quality of being visual or visible to the mind; mental visibility.”, Visibility “1. The condition, state, or fact of being visible; visible character or quality; capacity of being seen (in general, or under special conditions).”] What is the difference, if there is any, between being visual and being visible?
Du Bois investment in (black) visibility and/or/not visuality is articulated in the Weheliye piece in relation to the bringing of the racializing assemblages out from those hidden positions from which “the largely invisible forces of power that hierarchically determine who properly inhabits the space of the human and who does not” operates. (27, Weheliye) In order to arrest this force of power, which seems to be all the more empowered by its hidenness, there is a strategy of making visible. In the Weheliye piece it is toward the “naked eye” that these relations are not visible. But what is this naked eye? What does Sanford know in his calculation that he “‘paid out enough for fertilizers to have bought a farm,’ but the owner will not sell” but that he does not see? (18, “The Black Belt”) Or when Du Bois’s “my yellow gossip” says, speaking about an estate which is being wrongly claimed, “and them white folks will get it, too.” Do they see with a naked eye what it that which would seem to escape the naked eye? (14) I think I understand that it is not as simple as saying if a few understand some of the components of the forces of power—its anti-blackness—that its movements are rendered in full legibility and therefore are arrested, however I want to press a little more on the articulation of the “naked eye.”
Weheliye writes that, “Since the masses, just as races, are not visible to the “naked eye,” the optic illustration of the statistical data provides the channel through which to render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses” (38) which seems to orientate the purpose and operation of the data portraits in rendering thinkable and perceptible to the “naked eye.” The question which is hovering with me now is who’s eye? But before that I want to look at Weheliye’s footnote on the naked eye which he introduces in its third usage.This passage comes out of his thoughts on the differences between Du Bois’s photography and his data portraits. [Here is a link to The Health and Physique of the Negro American (Du Bois 1906) which is the text he is referencing https://archive.org/details/healthphysiqueof00dubo/page/4/mode/2up (Links to an external site.) It opens on a series of photographs. Here too is a link to some of Galton’s work against which Weheylie juxtaposed Du Bois's work https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2841021.pdf (Links to an external site.)]
“To be sure, the photographs labor against the coupling of blackness and subhumanity that was also on display at the “ethnographic exhibits” or human zoos in Paris and elsewhere; nevertheless, the images are still bound to a representational logic of depicting existent individuals, groups, or institutions (Celik and Kinney 1990). In a similar fashion to Walter Benjamin’s description of August Sander’s portraits of the German people, the photographs compiled for the Paris World’s Fair, especially the portraits of individual black subjects, illustrate only what is already observable to the ‘naked eye.’”
(34) Here Weheliye sees the images as unable to do the work of the data portriats and who can argue they are not the same. But are the images still bound to the representational logic of depicting existent individuals, groups, or institutions?
...
[Job Miller Continued 2/4] Do they have a phonic substantiality which upsets the bond of representational logic? Weheliye expands upon what he means by “naked eye” in footnote 15 saying, “This[the naked eye] should not be taken to imply that the portraits correspond to an objectively constituted reality in any uncomplicated way but that they are more easily legible within the territorialized framework of the political ontologies of race and personhood at the turn of the twentieth century.” (52 W) (My goal here is not to pull apart Weheliye’s text but to emerge thoughtfully from it.) In the footnote a spectrum of legibility is introduced, where the photo or data portrait is more difficult or more easily legible. This disrupts the conception of visibility which proscribes a totality of its being fully in appearance. Weheliye’s other point is that this legibility is determined by the “territorilized framework of the political ontologies of race and personhood” which suggest that, when I asked “whose eye,” the answer was the eye which determines this territorialized framework. Do we find through this articulation that the “naked eye” belongs to a certain predetermined gaze? And again what is the phonic substance of the photos in The Health and Physique of the Negro American? Then perhaps after that, what is the phonic substance or lower frequency(are the two interchangeable?) of the data portraits—this is, I think, what Weheliye gets at in his concluding paragraphs(perhaps even all throughout his piece)?
DeleteAs another mode of trying to attend to the data portraits I turn back toward the introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits. Battle-Baptiste and Rusert describe Du Bois’s work “In opposition to the deeply allegorical and intentionally convoluted language that Du Bois deployed in his writings to convey structures of oppression, alienation, and isolation under Jim Crow segregation—or what Du Bois termed “life within the Veil”—here Du Bois and his design team used clean lines, bright color, and sparse style to visually convey the America color line to European audience.” (16) I wonder if the visuality of the data portraits might be described as deeply allegorical and intentionally convoluted in relation toward his writing? I can’t help but come back to Plate 11(Here is a link to the image which has the top cut off https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/kRUgcgvTMszbPG9nk11cJmJLzkE=/800x600/filters:no_upscale():focal(1223x1116:1224x1117)/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/3b/22/3b22a3d0-0a6f-42fb-a1d6-58019a3d9312/11_33873a_city_and_rural_population_18901.png (Links to an external site.)) which, while getting after an articulation of the population of Georgia(even though the graph does not say[if you add the numbers from Plate 11 they equal to the number Plate 4’s articulation of 858,815 as the “Negro Population In Georgia” in 1890]) begins as a line only to descend into a spiral. There does seem to be something vaguely allegorical, even if I do not get the allegory, and it is at least in some respects intentionally convoluted. Plate 11 has a certain hypnotic pull, drawing one down into the spiral, but where is this circle and where does it point to? My first response is to tie the curves of the image to the language of “The Princess Steel'' which the introduction opens on. (Here is a link to the recently published version of the story https://www.mlajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.3.819 (Links to an external site.) and here is a link to the typed manuscript with handwritten edits https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/pageturn/mums312-b236-i001/#page/1/mode/1up (Links to an external site.)) Below is a long passage in which Du Bois articulates iterations of a curve through a character which is a black sociologist. I wonder if we might read it as a sort of meditation of the graphs presented a decade earlier. What is required, it seems, in the articulation of the complexity of a graph which could really contain what it is Du Bois’ character is after, pushes toward the unintelligible and comes out as a story.
[Job Miller Continued ¾]
Delete“A dot measured by height and breadth on a plane surface like this may measure a single human deed in two dimensions. Now place plane on plane, dot over dot and you have a history of these deeds in days and months and years; so far man has gone, though the Great Chronicle renders my work infinitely more accurate and extensive; but I go further: If now these planes be curved about one center and elected to and fro we get a curve of infinite curvings which is—”—he paused impressively—“which is the Law of Life.” I smiled at this but my wife looked interested; she had apparently forgotten his color. . . .“Look,” he said. We looked out the great window and there hanging before it we saw a vast solid crystal globe. I think I have never seen so perfect and beautiful a sphere. It was nearly fifty feet in diameter and seemed at first like a great ball of light, a scintillating captive star glistening in the morning sunlight. “this,” he said, “is the globe on which I plot my curves of life. You know in the Middle Age they used to use spheres like this—of course smaller and far less perfect—but that was mere playing with science just as their alchemy was but the play and folly of chemistry. Now my first series of experiments covering the last 20 years has been the plotting of the curves which will give me the Great Curve but—,” and here he came nearer and almost whispered, “but when I would cast the great lines of this Curve I was continually hampered by curious counter-curves and shadows and crossings— which all my calculations could not eliminate. Then suddenly a hypothesis occurred to me. Human life is not alone on earth—there is an Over-life—nay—nay I mean nothing metaphysical or theological—I mean a social Over- life—a life of Over-men, Super-men, not merely Captains of Industry but field marshalls of the Zeit-geist, who today are guiding the world events and dominating the lives of men. It is a Life so near ourselves that we think it is ourselves, and yet so vast that we vaguely identify it with the universe. I am now seeking these shadowing curves of the Overlife. But I go further: I will not merely know this Over-life. I will see it with my Soul. And I have seen it,” he cried triumphantly with burning eyes.
...
[Job Miller Continued 4/4] “… [Du Bois still] Then, feverishly: “I want today to show you one of the Over-men—his deeds, his world, his life, or rather Life of lives—I can do it,” he said and drew his chair nervously toward us and looked at us intently with his dark weak eyes. “I can do more than that,” he said. “You know we can see the great that is far by means of the telescope and the small that is near by the means of the microscope. We can see the Far Great and the Near Small but not the Great Near.” “Nor,” I added, finding my voice for the first in a vain effort to break the spell, “the Far Small.” He beamed—“Yes—yes, that’s it,” he said, “and that will come later— Now the Great Near! And that problem I have solved by the microscope megascope,”
Delete(823-4) Plate 11 might also send us toward the articulations within “Of The Black Belt” as we follow the spiral toward “NEGROS LIVING IN THE COUNTRY AND VILLAGES” which is itself an interesting gesture in as much as those within the narrative would only make up a tiny sliver of that spiral.
This week’s readings have got me to think of representation and fragmentation.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of fragmentation lends itself nicely to our conversation about frequency, as frequency itself is a fragment in the grand scheme of a sound. A sound is comprised of frequency (“pitch”), timbre, and loudness; and so, by only considering frequency, we can never fully listen to a sound. Frequency is an attribute of a sonic identity, and it can be shared by many sounds; 440 Hz is the same frequency on the piano, the flute, a guitar and in the human voice. Frequency tells us about a certain capacity of a sonic event to sound in a certain range.
Reading Du Bois “The Negro as He Really Is”, I was struck by the way in which Du Bois strips most subjects of the text from their personal identities, and uses fragments of information in order to form a portrait of the black community in Black Belt. Du Bois thinks about the black subjects in numbers, statistics and visually encoded systems. What are we to make of this very specific way Du Bois uses the term portraiture? What can we understand about the black subject through such a perspective?
While criticized by Moten for his “unwillingness to discover a photograph” (Visible Music, 206), I believe that it is useful to consider Roland Barthes “air” or inner life from Camera Lucida when thinking of the ways Du bois understands portraiture. Barthes “air” is a reference to what the subject of the portrait is. The air is not necessarily present in the image itself, but is the aspects of subjecthood that become available to us by really looking at the image. Through this lens, the diagrammatical physiognomy that is found in Du Bois’ Data Portraits, or more specifically to my thinking about “The Negro as He Really Is”, could be seen as the air that Du Bois’ portraits were going after. My reading of the text understood Du Bois’ portraits as wide; Du Bois’ as interested in creating a portrait of the cultural black subject, a subject that is comprised of multiple singularities and brings forward a single whole.
I wonder though, does Du Bois’ project succeed in representing “The Negro as He Really is”? Can numbers and diagrams really represent a culture? A history? A life? What do we gain from such a pragmatic consideration of subjecthood, and what is missed by “just” looking at these facts instead of representing them through other forms?
Going back to our notion of frequency and a sonic engagement with the visuality of black life, I wonder what a sonification of the data portraits would sound like.
I am thinking of the work of my friend and brilliant composer Yvette Janine Jackson, “Destination Freedom”: “a sonic experience that moves from the cargo hold of a ship transporting Africans to the Americas to a futuristic vessel searching for freedom.” (www.yvettejackson.com) (if this is interesting, listen to the part of the piece called Swan) Yvette uses music and sound design in order to portray a sonic interpretation (or representation?) Of migration, its outcomes and costs through time.
Surely, her work is not identical, and maybe not at all similar to Du Bois’ work, but I think there is something to be said here for the use of different mediums in order to create a portrait of a wide subject, and the ways in which we use data to represent such subjects.
Presentation Paper: Cartography and Wynter’s Genre of Man
ReplyDeleteThe geographer Katherine McKittrick writes that “Black women’s geographies—produced in the margins, on auction blocks, in garrets, through literatures, and in ‘the last place they thought of’—indicate that traditional spatial hierarchies are simultaneously powerful and alterable. This simultaneity suggests that human geographies are unresolved and are being conceptualized beyond their present classificatory order” (122). Building on Wynter, McKittrick writes:
Wynter’s work and ideas demonstrate that the material and conceptual geographies of the black diaspora are not simply ‘marginal’ or ‘different’ or ‘unacknowledged.’ Rather, her interest in ‘new forms of life’ opens up philosophical configurations that posit a flesh-and-blood worldview implicit to the production of space. Wynter allows us, then, to imagine black women’s geographies not simply as descriptive areas of complex ‘differences.’ She also allows us to consider the ways in which space, place, and poetics are expressing and mapping an ongoing human geography story (122).
To which I ask, What are the geography stories being told in Du Bois’s diagrammatics?
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America gathers two sets of data visualizations called The Georgia Negro: A Social Study and A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now Resident in the United States of America. These visualizations were made at Atlanta University and showed at the American Negro Exhibition at the Paris Expo in 1900.
The latter features a set of maps depicting socio-economic statistics, such as the Black literary rate and Black employment rate in America, to draw parallels between enclaves of Black populations across the United States. The Georgia Negro focuses more narrowly on the southern state where Du Bois created a Sociology lab at Atlanta University. Battle-Baptiste and Rusert forward that Du Bois’s data portraits are one, if not the first example of data visualization in the Anglophone world, where data visualization is defined as “the rendering of information in a visual format to help communicate data while also generating new patterns and knowledge through the act of visualization itself” (8 Battle-Baptiste and Rusert).
In her essay “The Cartography of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Color Line,” Mabel Wilson explains, “These were bold black nationalist sentiments,” Mabel O. Wilson explains, “that black Americans could contemplate their past, present, and future connected with an emergent Pan-African solidarity” (42).
In “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy”, Alexander Weheliye argues that creating visualizations of white supremacy and Black suppression was a highly strategic choice. Only through abstraction of statistical data was the global color line made legible to white audiences. Photographs and other forms of artistic capture that were not abstracted or quantitative, in Weheliye’s argument, would reifiy the “Negro as a ‘natural’ phenomenon”, where recreating “the Negro as a statistical figuration” is to have a portrait “created by chance via the violently imposed effects of the color line” (27). Importantly, Du Bois’s visual data puts “under erasure its primary function, which is to create and maintain hierarchical caesuras between different groups of humans, especially between black and white subjects” (39). Du Bois knew his audience and how to instrumentalize their own tools (of sociology and geography, two disciplines of Empire) for his own agenda. In Aldon Morris’s description, “The exhibition violated white thoughts about black people… especially Americans only three decades removed from slavery” (34). To return to McKittrick’s provocation, “What are the human geography stories being told?”, I see Weheliye’s analysis of Figures 4 and 5 in “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy” as brilliant examples of telling an untold geography story. According to conventional cartographic principles, a darker shade (or tone) connotes “the unfavorable end of the scale regardless of whether it represented a greater concentration or the reverse” (39). And yet, in Fig. 4 both white and Black males are filled in with the same black ink, while white and Black females are the same light tone. This sleight of vision is underscored by the horizontal placement of the gender-distribution charts, in which Black males and females are placed above white.
DeleteAs Wilson and the Editors mention, Du Bois’s visual portraits deploy a wealth of modular design elements that anticipate art movements in the European avant-garde, such as Italian futurism and the Bauhaus movement. Coupled with traditional cartographic portraits, these made for powerful visualizations of the socioeconomic conditions of Black people in America. Reflecting on Du Bois’s profound prescience, I am compelled to imagine how relationships between cartography and Blackness have evolved more than a century later. Though Du Bois was able to map inequalities between Black and white America, I wonder how the differences marked by hard lines, closed shapes, and contrasting colours created fixed differences in space and flatten power relations that are far more ‘geometric’ in a Masseyian sense (Massey 2002). Doreen Massey was a feminist human geographer who argued that places are made through geometries or power – not simply capital relations. Coupled with her notion of time-space, the idea that time and space cannot be conceptualised separately, a Masseyian sense of place forwards that geographical boundaries are social and spatial. These forces do not operate evenly across space.
Alternatively, what kinds of mappings can accommodate an understanding of urban change as slippery, out of control, and outside of the purview of administrators and formal actors? What kinds of cartographies can illustrate how people navigate a county or a city’s deepening divides in their everyday intimacies and socialized routines? Follow Wynter’s theorisation of the invention of Man as well as the genres of man, in which other modes of the human are being constituted and lived all the time, what kinds of geography stories and cartographic plots allow new genres of the human to be written?
Bibliography
DeleteJen, Alex. “In paintings and ceramics, Theaster Gates salvages charged materials.”
Hyperallergic, 2017. Retrieved from https://hyperallergic.com/356817/in-paintings-and-ceramics-theaster-gates-salvages-charged-materials/
Massey, Doreen. “Globalisation: What Does It Mean for Geography?” Geography, vol. 87, no. 4,
2002, pp. 293–296.
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2006.
Weheliye, Alexander G. "Diagrammatics as Physiognomy: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Graphic
Modernities." CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 15 no. 2, 2015, p. 23-58.
Weheliye, Alexander. “In the Mix: Hearing the Souls of Black Folk.” Amerikastudien / American
Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, 2000, pp. 535–554.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, Eds. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing
Black America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018.
And for your general consideration, an exhibit by Theaster Gates, But To Be A Poor Race, which reimagines Du Bois's data portraits:
Deletehttp://www.regenprojects.com/exhibitions/theaster-gates
Reading and viewing this week’s materials, I was struck by the emergence in Du Bois’s work of the figural motif of the black masses. Du Bois recognizes that the masses can only ever be understood as an abstraction, noting that “it is hard for an individual mind to grasp and comprehend the real social condition of a mass of human beings with losing itself in details and forgetting that after all each unit studies is a throbbing soul” (“The Negro As He Really Is,” 858). Consequently, Du Bois treats the black masses as what Weheliye—drawing on Spillers—calls an “object of knowledge” rather than a “real object,” more a figure of sociological imagination and site of collective association than a transparent reflection of lived experience. At times Du Bois ascribes the black masses with a singular sense of social agency, such as when he writes that “like a snake the black population writhed upward” (The Souls of Black Folk, 70, Dover Thrift Edition). Interestingly, several of Du Bois’s “data portraits” for the Exposition Universelle call to mind the figure of a coiled snake, such as a graph illustrating the numbers of African American religious practitioners by denomination; the number of Protestants so far exceeds that of Catholics that the bar indicating the former population winds in a spiral (Plate 62). This design choice adds to the impression that the black masses evoked by these visualizations are continually in a state of flux, eluding the spatial and temporal capture of inferential, omniscient science. As Weheliye observes, “the optic illustration of the statistical data provides the channel through which to render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses” (38). In Du Bois’s visualizations, the black masses are figures that fluctuate and twist, expand and contract. Thus, as Mabel Wilson observes, these data portraits powerfully refuted anti-black arguments that black people were a static, undifferentiated body with no history; on the contrary, Du Bois situates heterogenous black populations at the center of world history. These visualizations may provide a key for understanding how Du Bois transitioned from calls for moral uplift and a “Talented Tenth” to his affirmation in Black Reconstruction of the political agency of the black masses in the form of a general strike. Once Du Bois was able to “render thinkable and perceptible the Negro qua masses,” it is not surprising that his political thinking shifted to embrace this figure as revolutionary force.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts regarding this weeks readings concern:
ReplyDelete-> difference between visualization (of data) and the visuality (of black life):
-> “the politics of visuality, and the very question of black visibility”
(Battle-Baptiste/Rusert)
-> Visible for whose eyes?
-> Or, with regards to Du Bois notion of “double consciousness” describing the experience of always seeing oneself through the eyes of another (psychic alienation / social isolation); for Du Bois also a kind of “second sight” (might be transformed from a curse into a “gift” that offered aunique and superior perspective on turn-of-the century race relations, sociability, and even existence itself)
-> “These charts, graphs, and maps visualize African Americans in ways that speak to but also diverge from the representational strategies used in black uplift photography at the turn of the twentieth century.” (Visualizing Black America, 15)
-> speaking in what language: cultural techniques of cartography, map-making, and the grid as an ability to write absence; an ability that was invented and performed by the colonial enterprise and an imperialism which inscribed the reason of its cause through the negation of what was at the places that were up for discovery, occupation, exploitation, plundering, and the eradication and annihilation of the cultures that were present there–the European’s elsewhere
-> between 16th-18th century “grid-shaped control” becomes the universal practice that constitutes the basis of modern disciplinary societies.
-> expansion of Western culture can be described as a totalitarianism of the grid (!)
B. Siegert: “(NOT) IN PLACE”
The ontological effect of the grid is the modern concept of place and being-in-one’s place based on the media-theoretical distinction between data and addresses. In other words, it presupposes the ability to write absence, that is, to deal equally efficiently with both occupied and empty spaces. This concept of place is thus inextricably tied to the notion of order. In return, it is impossible to conceive of this modern concept of order without the new understanding of place.
-> imaging technology also as an imagining technology: a re-appropriation of governmental knowledge
-> “genealogy of black design” (13) [ thinking of Peter Weibels notion: “Sein oder Design”—to be or to be designed, are two very different modes of being: one is also being absent, being abstracted into a language that is characterized by the invention of a taxis technique, capable of turning humans into retrievable objects, or simply data. ]
-> utilizing statistics and photography: deployment in the service of scientifically controverting putative biological inferiorities
-> naked eye / ‘clothed’ eye (Latour, in: Weheliye, 29)
-> Weheliye: Du Bois’ diagrammatology as part of the Negro becoming intelligible as a pivotal character in Modernity’s “long running reality-show”
-> photography and text alone cannot map the topography of the structures and discourses (i.e. the color-line) through which that happens
-> object of>knowledge contrast: statistical abstraction / photographic concretion