Here are links to Jafa films, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death and Apex. We are very grateful to the filmmaker for giving us access to this work and respecting this privilege, we ask that you DO NOT share this link with others. Password is: VFBL2020
This week's readings, focusing specifically on temporality, extend the questions of chronicle and narrative that have emerged through our engagements with representations of black life via heterogeneous media forms.
Picking up from Kahlil Joseph's ‘Flypaper,’ which offers sonic movement as an operation of montage, I found James A. Snead's notion of "the cut” to be particularly generative. Positioning the term in musical language, Snead defines the cut as an “abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series” (150). With the films of Joseph, and indeed Jafa, how might we formulate the cut as a sonic and visual practice? In ‘Apex’ for example, the literal cinematic cuts that move us from one frame to the next begin to phase in and out with the metronomic, arpeggiated synth. There are moments where image and sound pulse in almost perfect synchrony, propelling each other forward, and others where the lag between the two becomes apparent. The lower and higher registers themselves begin to part ways, creating a textural rupture that “draws attention to its own repetitions,” in Snead’s words (151). ‘Apex’ thus constructs the cut as a kind of sensorium into its very form, creating false trajectories of climax, similar to the orchestral score and frenetic jazz that bookend ‘Flypaper.’ ‘Love is the Message’ also weaves sound/soundtrack in and out of its diegetic frame. Snead’s observation that black culture dispels the hegemonic illusion of progress and control by intentionally building contingency “inside the system itself” thus reminded me of Weheliye’s conceptions of the “rhythm of chance” and “the mix” with relation to DuBois from a few weeks ago. How can the indeterminate be made rhythmic and therefore repetitive with an aesthetic intention? At what point do accidents cease to be accidents?
The Kara Keeling excerpts expand Snead’s cut, queering its temporality as an “interruption” of expectation through a future poetics, a notion of “futurity as both a promise and a wish” as well as unsettling the “assuredness that there is a future as such” (84). Interpolating Elizabeth Freeman’s own ideas of queerness, Keeling perhaps suggests that such interruptive, temporal displacements might incorporate chance into form in the same way that Snead’s built contingencies proffer. Her project is invested in how to make such temporal disjunctures visible, the realization of a Deleuzian time-image as “the purely optical and sound situation” (112). How do the cuts in the Jafa and Joseph works we’ve encountered render time as a spatial “situation”? Do their repetitive interruptions speak to or contradict Keeling’s “digitopia”?
I’m left with a lot more questions than conclusions with the theoretical propositions raised in this week’s texts. But I wanted to end—given that we just watched Garrett Bradley's 'America' last night—with an invitation to consider how the cuts seen between takes in ‘Lime Kiln Field Day' make visible moments of interruptive rupture and pause. Do these frames, slowed down and presented as a series of staccato images rather than moving film, approximate the time-image that Keeling argues for—"amplifying the incommensurate as both an opportunity for further modulations of control and a challenge to them"? (116)
“Itself a kind of cultural coverage, this magic of the “cut” attempts to confront accident and rupture not by covering them over, but by making room for them inside the system itself” (150 Snead).
I am weak with much giving. I am weak with the desire to give more. —Jean Toomer, “Prayer”
Even though James Snead only mentions Jean Toomer’s Cane briefly and in passing, I’d like to geek out very briefly here and dive a little deeper into Cane’s form. As Snead notes: “In Jean Toomer’s Cane…the repetitive forms of black language and rhetoric are prominent until one notices that gradually the entire plot of the novel itself has been all along trending towards the shape of return—the circle” (151 Snead). This circle that Snead refers to is not just one of language or plot, but is graphically marked at each juncture of Cane’s three parts. In other words, at the beginning of each new section, the symbol of a broken circle floats on an otherwise empty page as if waiting to be animated. It is this brokenness that I’d like to call our attention to and its relationship to what Snead calls “the cut.”
Just before posting his completed manuscript of Cane to Boni and Liveright in 1923, Toomer provided a detailed description of the work’s form and narrative design:
“From three angles, Cane’s design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex forms, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South to the North, and back into the South again. Or, From [sic] the North down into the South, and then a return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work…the curve really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha etc. swings upward into Theater and Box Seat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song.”
I consider the “pause” at Harvest Song a decisive rupture. One that makes room for the reader to switch tracks in the circle—and by “switching tracks” I mean: an opportunity to pick up at the beginning (where she started) as well as pick up at a different beginning, on a new angle of the circle.
What fascinates me about “the cut” or “going back” is that it symbolizes the futility of pursuing a whole, unified identity. An “accident” or rupture is built into the form, disrupting the circle from completing itself. Maybe, the rupturing is (in a sense) self-aware—for it is only by losing the project of unity that can “save” unity by maintaining its true ambiguity.
The project of the “cut” then investigates the dynamic and circular state of “becoming,” and its brokenness only further emphasizes the essentiality of effort and of beginning again. Maybe, wanting continuously is what brings one into the “immediate” now that Snead refers to: “Finally, he is ‘immediate’ and intimately tied to self-consciousness he is ‘immediate’—i.e., always there—in any given moment. Here we can see that, being there, the African is also always already there, or perhaps always there before, whereas the European is headed there or, better, not yet there” (148 Snead).
Perhaps I misunderstood the text, but I was struck by Keeling’s notion of the “autonomy of sound”. In the Interlude, “The Sonic Bartleby”, Keeling writes:
… Many works produced on digital media, including those on digital video such as HD Video or Digibeta tape, can by characterized by an autonomy of sound. According to Deleuze, this autonomy of sound “increasingly lends” sound “the state of image”… The electronic image, in other words, facilitates a set of relations between the sonic and the visual, not to establish hierarchy between them or render them to commensurate, but to push them toward their limits. (Keeling, 115)
How does a situation in which the state of the image is lent to sound means it has autonomy? The use of the word “lend” and the examples of the forms of media to which sound is attached alone (HD Video and Digibeta tapes) can speak to the problems I find in this passage. I believe that instead of autonomy, what this passage offers is an attempt at affirmative action for the consideration of sound as an equal of image: sound is welcome to the art form, sound is welcome to join the image, but it still serves as a secondary aspect for the image.
The text took me back to a different (yet similar) moment in “The Lived Experience of The Black Man”, where Fanon interacts with the white gaze: “…"Look how handsome that Negro is." The handsome Negro says, 'Fuck you,' madame."” (Fanon, 94) The comparison between this quote from Fanon and Keeling’s account of an ”autonomy” of sound raises questions about the ways we use contextualization in attempts of equality. Another example that rings in my head while writing this post is the treatment of the Arab citizens in Israel by the Israeli government led by Binyamin Netanyahu. While the Arab citizens of Israel have a representative party in the Knesset, and are eligible to vote, in the election of 2015 Netanyahu posted a Live Feed on his Facebook page where he called his supporters to go vote, because “the Arabs are flowing to the ballot boxes on busses”. Then, in the (3rd) election of the 2019-20 cycle, he tried to scare the supporters of his opponent, Benny Gantz, by saying that it’s going to be “Bibi or Tibi” (Referring to Ahmed Tibi, a Knesset member from the Joint List). Under what conditions are the Arab citizens considered equal and autonomous? Does the right to vote and to participate in political life automatically translate to equality? Could it be said that the Israeli government “increasingly lends” Arabs “the state of image”?
To conclude, I think that in Keeling’s understanding of the autonomy of sound, sound is not an autonomous being. The terminology used by filmmakers and other non-sonically affiliated artists for the incorporation of sound in their work is no different than the contextualization of “the handsome negro” by the madame. Often sound will be referred to as “a rug”, “ a flow” or “a blanket”“, artists will tell us how they “want something that will make it more immersive”, “I want something emotional”. These requests or roles that the sound assumes may seem to give it a significant ‘”autonomous” role in the production, but do they really?
I will begin by saying that I am fuzzy on the exact differences and different uses between technology, technics, and technē; however, I wonder, by moving away from strict linear time, digital film can exist beyond the constraints of that literal digital technology and instead be a way of approaching mechanisms of time. In other words, can Kara Keeling’s description of the digital function for other technological objects? As “movement” image, unlike “moving” image, suggests a series of patterns, rhythms, a wave of change, I wonder how modes of patterning or keeping time are attached and detached from particular technologies as part of a broader sense of the digital?
Swing!, which uses film and I watched on the digital media platform, YouTube, raises the question of constructed temporalities in its first moments. “Why did they invent alarm clocks?” Mandy asks as hers rings beside her. The noise marks the beginning of her day cooking for a white family. She covers herself again with blankets. She eventually gets up, saying it “ain’t the clock’s fault.” Mandy asserts the invented-ness of timekeeping, particularly time as a series of “alarms” to work and begin. The alarm clock specifically marks her own lack of control over time and the rhythms of her life; it marks the demands placed on her to work and, in this case, to perform domestic labor for white people and work for money that she never gets to see. She then detaches time from the literal object – it is not specifically the clock’s fault that she gets up – and, in doing so, acknowledges a space between the tools of time and its demands on her. Perhaps it is the vague “they” whose fault it is? Mandy’s waking creates a possible poetics. There is a “notion of futurity” in that she will get up; but she “unsettles the assuredness that there is a future as such,” unsettles whether such marks of moving forward needed to have been created in the first place (Keeling 84). What strike me here is how this moment seems to combine the points in both of the Keeling chapters: a complex poetics of time meets the very complex technologies of control.
I want to see Mandy as an adept utilizer of technologies. Quite literally, the movie marks Mandy as skilled at each technic she tries: she can cook, quickly picks up sewing, and picks up singing. Her own love affair – her feeling torn about her husband as “no-good” but “loves him anyways” – becomes mobilized towards her musical career and the kinds of money, attention, and care that she receives for engaging in it. The spoken turns into the moving and sung performance as her speech to Lena transforms into lyrics. The husband, at this point, hasn’t been seen since the movie left Birmingham. Mandy mobilizes his invisibility within the scope of the film’s visual frame to self-narrate their love story within the sounds of longing. She “brings forth” the music within her own life and then brings forth the show that seemed an impossibility at that point to everyone except Lena (Keeling 117). Further, I want to hazard that the moment where Cornell brings the hot water for Mandy’s feet might be a kind of digitopia since Mandy’s deployment of technology brings about the care denied to her beforehand.
Such digitopia is “incommensurable with the logics of violence of straight times operating today, moving now” (Keeling 137). “Moving now,” aligns with the “moving image,” and which “movement” seems to stop and shift. We might imagine that Mandy stops the clock and gets to relax as she does at the end of the film; however, Mandy gets her job as a singer, in part, because she is always on-time, unlike the always-late Cora/Eloise. The alarm clock is invisible but still present. Cora/Eloise represents a kind of excess – she has extravagant taste, drinks too much, desires too many men, has one too many names – but is punished for that excess and because she cannot manipulate such technologies of control such as time. Do technologies require adept users only? Since Mandy detaches blame from the alarm clock, where does the “fault” land?
In James Snead’s “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” locates the Snead quotes Hegel as writing that Africa has no history but rather “There is a succession of accidents and surprises” (148). At the same time however, Black culture’s alleged “historylessness” is what secures its survival (148). While Snead acknowledges that Black culture’s historylessness does not guarantee the survival of the individual, Snead does return to the Black individual to describe the Black subject position as unfixed in time: “Having no self-consciousness, he is ‘immediate’—i.e., always there—in any given moment. Here we can see that, being there, the African is also always already there, or perhaps always there before” (148).
I’m wondering what it means to think about the Oscar Micheaux films Ten Minutes To Live and Swing! as forms of storytelling that relay a “succession of accidents and surprises.” Ten Minutes in particular seems to exist entirely in the “always there” present moment; at times it impossible to tell who’s someone’s child and who’s someone’s mother or who is planning to murder who, and the film seems to continually introduce characters who are treated as if they were “always already there,” particularly Morvis and Charlotte. The only constant is the continual return to the site of the Libya club and stream of musical and dance performances there, which Snead locates as the most “characteristic shape” of repetition in Black culture (150). While Swing!’s narrative is more straightforwardly linear, it is this supposed linearity that allows for the film’s repetition and “historylessness” to be felt more strongly. It is a literal drunken accident that leads to Mandy being given the lead in the production at the last minute. While her sudden rise to stardom would seem to suggest a dramatic change in status, by the end of the film the social roles present at beginning have been reinstated: Mandy has reunited with her husband, apparently willing to disregard his past treatment of her, while Mandy’s new female friend disapproves but resolves to look out for her.
While Snead argues that repetition is being more and more embraced by White Western culture, particularly in art, I feel that repetition and historylessness largely continue to function as racist justifications for the failure of Black individuals and culture to succeed in a liberal individualist society that defines cycles by growth and progress. I’m thinking here of the statements made, by White intellectuals and laypeople alike, that Black people don’t save money because they don’t consider the long term, about poor Black mothers who continue to have children despite the fact that they can’t afford them, etc. I want to consider Swing!’s ending with Mandy reuniting with her “deadbeat” husband in the light of this stigmatized repetition. I also want to put forward the question historylessness and repetition as both a choice and a form of play. In Ten Minutes, one of the performances at the club is of a comedy duo who list famous American figures while comically getting the events they’re attributing to these figures ridiculously wrong. This humor of misattribution necessarily relies on both the speaker and the listener actually knowing the “correct” history in order both to make the joke and to recognize it as humorous. The “historylessness” of Hegel as described by Snead seems to take the stance that Black individuals and Black culture are “historyless” as a pre-existing state, but the comedy scene from Ten Minutes posits historylessness as a performance.
Snead contends that for blacks, history, music, and literature as with other cultural productions are cyclical. He positions progression and repetition as reflective processes that mirror the European and African/Oriental worldviews. Because repetition exists in every form of black expression, is Snead making a claim that black people are tied to rhythm in some spiritual/metaphysical sense? Here, Campt’s articulation of infrasound comes to mind. She states “infrasound is often only felt in the form of vibrations through contact with parts of the body. Yet all sound consists of more than what we hear. It is an inherently embodied modality constituted by vibration and contact”(7). She highlights that infrasound is an inherently or permanently embodied modality then moves to underscore the animals who possess this ability—animals “such as elephants, rhinoceroses, and whales”(7). How is Snead possibly implying that African descendants possess this infrasound? Where is there overlap in Snead’s argument around blacks and repetition and Campt’s infrasound? I feel like there is something there I am having a hard to time connecting.
Moreover, Snead discusses the “cut” and its use within black art forms. I see his definition of the cut—an "abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series” (150)—at work within both Arthur Jafa’s Apex and Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. Jafa sifts through an oasis of images with various messages always returning to the message of previous image whether it be pain, pleasure or creativity. However, in Jafa’s LMMD, a woman states that “mundane afro-futurist recognize that we’re not aliens”(1:38-1:43). It does not surprise that Jafa gives us the words “afro-futurist” out the mouth of a woman. Black futurism and feminism hover as a vital theme within the seminar. Therefore, I’m curious as to what end does afro-futurist use the cut across various mediums? How does Jafa use of the cut in LMMD differ from that of James Brown in music?
I’m intrigued by Keeling’s interpretation of Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death as an exercise in “algorithmic editing.” The idea that algorithmic protocols might be deployed as aesthetic resources for a “poetics of Relation” (in Glissant’s sense) is a provocative one, given the ubiquitous evidence of the prominent role that algorithms play in the control apparatus of advanced racial capitalism. In my view, however, Keeling’s conception of Jafa’s style as algorithmic is perceptive and generative, as it leads us to an enhanced appreciation of the powerful effects of Jafa’s recent films. To elaborate spatio-temporal connections and affective associations through an algorithmic grammar is to probe what Patricia Ticineto Clough would call the “technical substrate” of collective consciousness, demonstrating the extent to which the mobile archives of social Relation assume form through flesh-machine assemblages rather than discrete subjective interiors.
I could not watch Love is the Message without vividly recalling the moments in time when I encountered the various individual images assembled in the film. Many of these images, such as Obama’s singing of “Amazing Grace” or the shooting of Walter Scott, have been deeply imbricated— during and in the longer aftermath of their moments of appearance—within discourses about the possibilities and limitations of visibility for movements toward one or another form of justice. During the mid-2010s moment into which Jafa’s film intervenes, it was particularly common to hear questions such as: does the Obama presidency signal the viability or impossibility of a “post-racial” U.S. society? Can body cameras make police more accountable? My perspective on such conversations was inextricably bound up in my own position as a white person relative to the color line; for example, watching videos circulate on my Facebook feed of the Walter Scott shooting, I wondered whether it was a fluke or systemic failure that such images had ended up entering the media-ecological bubble of a user undoubtedly marked algorithmically as “white” and “middle-class,” or whether algorithmic protocols had in fact additionally identified me as a “liberal” user “sympathetic” to conversations about “racial justice” and “police reform” and therefore a consumer generating value through the circulation of such images. Such situations compel me to reflect on the particular shape and contour of the color line in an algorithmic era. In contrast to the value-generating circuits of social media, Jafa’s film undermines the logics of visibility and representation by juxtaposing images that do not fit within recognizable classificatory schemas and tags. If the ability of racial Capital to generate value vis-a-vis images of black art and black death depends upon separating the two, Jafa’s “algorithmic editing” refuses this division. As if deploying a kind of “Random Access Memory,” Jafa’s approach delves into the collective archives of popular culture without sorting out the horror from the beauty.
Reading Kara Keeling’s work on queerness and anti/relationality makes me reflect on the Otolith Group’s The Third Part of the Third Measure that we watched last Thursday and that a few of us saw again at Columbia the next night. I am curious as to how the anti/relational tension works in Eastman’s comments before the beginning of the Northwestern concert, which we heard recited and performed by Dante Micheaux and Elaine Mitchener. There is something about the version of these remarks recorded at Northwestern (Spotify link here: https://open.spotify.com/track/3pHGwKTgmIn6GFLSFOs7TP?si=Hzy95jwmQ7y2dQElyca-aA ) that may align with what Keeling, Muñoz, and Freeman identify as the antirelational turn in queer theory in Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. There is a sense of Eastman’s blackness and queerness acting “as a structuring antagonism” in these remarks, and I think we can hear that antagonism performed by the audience (Keeling 88). The sounds made by the audience are not-quite-covered coughs, the shifting of bodies in chairs, and the absolute lack of applause at the end, when we hear only the sound of Eastman’s motorcycle boots as he walks to one of the four grand pianos. As Kodwo Eshun mentioned at the Columbia screening of the film, this concert was performed during Eastman’s “leather man” phase, a style that does not easily or “properly” fit into the concert hall.
But, like Keeling, I do not feel that black queerness as antirelational can fully account for Eastman’s spoken introduction, particularly when it is reuttered and remixed by Micheaux and Mitchener. Keeling writes, “Referring to the capacity of ‘queer’ to function as a structuring antagonism within the social as ‘antirelational’ misses the way ‘queer’ is a product of social relation, a condition of possibility for sociality as we know it. It is a mode of relationality that generates surprising, pleasurable excess within the social precisely because it is structurally antagonistic to the properly social” (88 italics mine). It is the pleasurable excess in Eastman’s words that I am interested in here, and that pleasurable excess is something I never heard until viewing The Third Part of the Third Measure in Providence and hearing laughter in the audience.
I brought up this question of how the laugh might affect our experience of Eastman’s speech. Kodwo answered that he heard the laughter as nervous laughter, as the kind of laughter that you cannot help but utter during uncomfortable moments. I would be interested to hear what others thought of the laughter as we watched the film (as a side note, the audience at Columbia was completely silent during each version of the speech). During that first viewing, I heard the laughter differently, as a kind of “pleasurable excess” that came less from discomfort than a kind of (if not recognition than) agreement with Eastman and his thesis regarding the basis of the American Economic System. For me, the laughter ruptured the sonic event that is the “original” recording of the speech. I feel compelled to imagine an otherwise, not utopia, but a reception of Eastman’s performance that is not immediately hostile, though that in itself might be a kind of utopia, or at least an audiotopia as Josh Kun has theorized.
Watching Arthur Jafa’s striking films Apex and Love is the Message in dialogue with the differently cadenced vintage films by Oscar Micheaux, Ten Minutes to Live and Swing! resulted in saliently different responses from me. Lulled into the static charm, prolonged choreographic scenes, and melodramatic slowness of Micheaux I was struck by the abrupt shutter that intonates Jafa’s work in Apex and the temporal arrhythmia of Love is the Message. In both, Jafa seems to be putting to practice Sneader’s Black repetition, and in the latter especially appears to demonstrate what Keeling would call “a desire to look to the past for recognizable signs that might authorize the existence of particular collective sociopolitical formations in the present” (90-91). Jafa tethers these signs together with images of stark contrast: hyper-white bodies against all the gradations of Black and Brown skin, cartoon predators, seared flesh, joy, jouissance, capital, capitulation, figures of radical resistance and revolutionary love against mongers of fear, and terror. All of this against the undulating beep in Apex that speeds and staggers its pace against the images, and in Love is the Message the slightly slowed chorus of incantation that carries through Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam.
Kara Keeling, after Fanon warns us in “Yet Still” that “Insofar as colonial logics can be said to undergird present socioeconomic relations, Black people can become visible only through those logics, so danger, if not death, attends every Black’s appearance” (101). And yet, still, we attend to the visual frequencies of Black life, repeatedly. I wonder if this is because, as Sneader reminds us, with each repetition within culture there is the chance for a shift or a change to take place, not in the Hegelian sense of a progression of history, but in the sense that culture responds, reimagines, and reconfigures the world in ways that cannot be captured or contained by linearity. Thinking about Black repetition and the fungibility of this term in dialogue with the repetition marshalled by Jafa who repeats images, beats, and symbols throughout his work, I wonder how we can understand better Keeling’s notion of the “unequal calculus of visibility distribution” as it pertains to the risks, refusals, disappearances, and reemergences of Black appearance (101).
For the celestial ones cannot do Everything. Namely, it is the mortals who make it All the way to the abyss. So it turns, the echo With these ones. (Friedrich Hölderlin)
We on a ultralight beam, we on a ultralight beam, this is a god dream, this is a god dream, this is everything. (Kanye West)
Objection. This reading response revolves around a somehow critical reading of James A. Snead’s text, which I would like to bring in resonance with the rest of this week’s material, but especially Arthur Jafa’s films.
Starting with the simple historical fact that even though Hegel was, in thinking about the whole, writing all by himself, he was not alone; at least he was not living alone. Among his closest companions during his period of studying philosophy and theology in Tübingen were the later famous philosopher F.W.J. Schelling and the astonishing poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The three even shared a room in the student’s dorm between fall 1790 and summer 1793. There is also no doubt, that their story is one of annoyingly-patriarchal-white-male-bonding to the birth of hegemonic Western thought-systems; not to mention the later drama, when the friendships they had were breaking apart into bitter opposition between Hegel and Schelling, and, moreover, absolute indifference of both against Hölderlin, the marginalized poet. And yet, there is something uniquely striking in this constellation that speaks to some aspects of the readings.
Why is Hölderlin important then? Because of “poetry’s capacity to disrupt habitual ways of knowing and understanding the world,” as Kara Keeling mentions in respect of Aimé Césaire et al. It is not surprising that Hegel keeps coming back in several texts we read as the guarantor for the oppressing thought systems and ideologies of Western culture, and probably rightly so. The progressive and systematizing, subduing and violent nature of his philosophy is undisputed. Snead is setting up the cultural difference he wants to highlight in his text quite convincingly. However, in using Hegel, to now look at the somewhat blunt argument that “in European culture, the ‘goal’ is always clear: that which always is being worked towards. […] Such a culture is never ‘immediate,’ but ‘mediated’ and separated from the present tense by its own future-orientation,” (Snead, 150) misses the innumerable amounts of undertones and counter-voices to the Hegelian master narrative Snead is trying to stage in opposition to “a culture based on the idea of the ‘cut,’” which “will always suffer in a society whose dominant idea is material progress—" (150)
Hölderlin—“the most German of Germans,” according to Norbert von Hellingrath, declared himself in a letter to the canonical German poet Friedrich Schiller, dated September 4th, 1795, as null and void: “I thus belong—leastwise as res nullius—to you.” Hölderlin, who thereby ranks himself as a poet amongst the German poets, is willing to do so only as res nullius, a thing that legally is owned by and therefore also belongs to no one.
Hölderlin, the most German of Germans, according to his own words, is actually being German only insofar that he is not. In expressing a feeling of belonging to a certain culture only through a speech-act of negation, Hölderlin is cutting himself off of the culture he belongs to. He is becoming radically different not in the face of another culture, but in facing his very own culture. The ‘goal’ of this self-expression of belonging through a form of entangled self-alienation or -negation seems far from being clear. In my view, Hölderlin is striking a different note in the choral of cultural difference, in every sense of its literal meaning.
In reading Sneads truly fascinating sections on the “cut,” I could not stop thinking about Hölderlin, who became especially known for his notorious and unparalleled technique of creating fractures and caesuras in his poetry. Especially Hölderlin’s late poetry draws heavily on the virtuous usage of ‘parataxis’ – a concept I would like to bring into the discussion and think together with Arthur Jafa’s works Apex and Love is the Message, the Message is Death.
Parataxis? The lexicon says: placing words or phrases alongside one another without hypotaxis or syntaxis, i.e., without logical subordination or grammatical ordering. Parataxis may occur with or without conjunctions, i.e., either syndetically or asyndetically. Especially in the asyndetic form (‘‘They run, rescue themselves, flee’’), the impact of parataxis is such that each word or phrase is given equal force and weight. Parataxis is often used to indicate speed of motion or, paradoxically, the stillness that reflects the inner tension of a situation; in any case, it represents not a rationally articulated assertion but a passionate outburst.
Looking back at Jafa’s work now, a series of hard rhythmic jointures and joinings appears; sudden hiatuses, caesurae, and collisions of the terrible and the beautiful, which reappear in the continuous seriality of love and death that pervade the history of Black culture and experience of Black life. The artful paratactical disturbances that Jafa lets pass, frequently, in front of our eyes, at the same time inscribe a sublime afterimage of Black life into our memory, which is impossible to deny. Because parataxis evades the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax the twirking women at the very end of the film has the same impact and importance, the equal force and weight, as James Brown’s performance. Here, as in Beethoven’s late compositions, all interstitial tissue is cut away. The liberated rows of tones and images both flow smoothly and halt abruptly; they both glide and bump. In its seemingly endless variations, or repetitions of the same-same-different, Jafa’s kaleidoscopic terrible beauty of Black life—the untimely perpetual interval in-between dancing children and police killings—imposes a timeless weight onto its viewer, without ever giving up a forceful agency and haunting political contemporaneity. Jafa is able to project this version of a time out of time that is introduced in Sneads text as well— the non-time of Black culture:
Non-time imposes on time the tyranny of its spatiality: in every life there is a north and a south, and the orient and the occident. At the extreme limit or, at the least, at the crossroads, as one’s eyes fly over the seasons, there is the unequal struggle of life and death, of fervor and lucidity, albeit one of despair and collapse, the strength as well to face tomorrow. So goes every life.
This post looks after Keeling’s suggestion that “something remains ‘cinematic’ within the digital regime” even as the relations between “irrational cuts” and “sound-images” transform in a manner parallel to the shift from societies of discipline to societies of control (114). As Delueze formulates them, societies of control incessantly modify their regulatory and organizational functions by plugging into and affording a proliferation of channels through which incommensurable time-images circulate. The exteriorizing gesture of time-images, which make “time and thought [visually and sonically] perceptible” as affect, is thus folded into the constantly metamorphosing, Mobius-strip-like organizational apparatuses of the digital regime of control societies, allowing power to extend its territory and apprehensions even as it allows subjects more mobility – perhaps with the potential of inciting different possibilities for diffusing thought, perception, political action, and agency. In this situation, Keeling claims a new relation transpires “between incommensurable images, but not in a way that makes them commensurate. They can still be opaque, yet in relation” (111, 114). Indeed, the question of refusing particular modes of transparency (certain modes of political recognitions, demands to make visible that which and those who conceal themselves, frames of rendering meaning and value through equivalencies and fungibility) becomes one of the very dilemmas Keeling encounters and performs in her caution for “critical endeavors” to consider their own roles in making appear and attending to that which appears in the archives (101). Without claiming to resolve this problem, Keeling dwells with it. Similarly, according to Keeling, Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death offers a way of dwelling with and within modes of organizing and branding sound and image. Jafa’s particular practice is in part enacted through his “algorithmic editing,” which seems to be related to his performance/rehearsal of looking after that Keeling discusses with respect to Langston Hughes (allowing us to look back and after his looking-with and -through Roy DeCarava again too). Looking after, as in looking temporally after something transpires, or an un-accomplishable attempt to look after the totality of what has transpired as, in Glissant’s sense, a way of dwelling with “where the threatened beauty of the world resides” (quoted in Keeling 143). Yet also looking after in the sense of caring for, which involves, it seems, a sort of generative invagination of temporality as well. Looking after as caring for, Keeling suggests (with reference to M- ), transpires not by way of the question of “where is M- now?” (which reproduces frames of “looking for” that define surveillance and policing) but by way of the question “when is M-?” (102).
Released just prior to WW2, Oscar Micheaux’s Swing! (1938) might interrupt a time line that would locate shifts from movement-images to time-images in accordance with the trauma of the war itself, swinging time (swing also of course as music as well as non-monogamous sexual relations) itself and making these images more a matter of position toward them when looking after them. The film assembles rehearsals as performances. That is, as the film progresses, the accumulation of rehearsals in anticipation of a performance becomes much of the film itself, as we look again and again at performers auditioning for the show that transpires at the end. About half-way in the movie, a cut occurs, even though the frame remains the same, in the middle of a pep talk Mr. Gregory (designated “the man behind the show, he’s got his money in the show”) gives to his performers (which I have shown with a slash):
“You know and I know that while a colored show may be and is supposed to stay within a certain prescribed scope, we must, if we hope to get anywhere, deliver something within that scope that *the public will like and come to see*/ (cut around 21:53) that is entirely different from what an audience has become accustomed to seeing and hearing. That, my people, is what I’m hoping of giving them. So I want all of you to do your best, unbend, relax, give me all that’s in you, but don’t, oh please don’t begin thinking how good you are and all that. Just hope you’re fair, and try to get better with every rehearsal and give me a show that will get over and *the public will like and come to see*.”
The repetition of the phrase “the public will like and come to see” makes me wonder why the cut occurs where it does and what it does to the syntax of Mr. Gregory’s speech. Was the cut to add the dialogue that follows without removing the initial line of thought that dictated the first performance of the lines? The doubled “that” (“that the public…” “that is entirely different…”) seems to me two alternatives, one that specifically gears its attention to the public’s desires to see and another that is wholly removed from the expectations prescribed by the public’s desires. Between the repetition “the public will like and come to see,” there is an interval of possibility that has nothing to do with the public’s visual desires, even if this possibility is folded back into a speech that comes to acknowledge the need to “deliver something within that scope” defined by an anticipated gaze. This cut seems, in Snead’s words, a “seemingly unmotivated break… with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series” (69). Along the temporalities suggested along the axis of movement-images, time-images, and something like digital images, I am left asking (in an incommensurably related echo of Keeling’s reading of M-), when this cut might be. When this cut transpires (trans-spirare, through-breath, so trying to think when aspiration, in Sharpe’s sense, transpires) might have to do with unbending, relaxing, giving all that in, without “thinking how good you are,” as much as it has to do with “delivering something within that scope… that is entirely different from what an audience has become accustomed to seeing and hearing.”
Thinking of control societies, I can’t help but remark about the atypical situation of (Columbia students) gathering online now from our homes (assuming we have a home to be, an issue universities have failed to consider in the past couple days, asking students to leave campus and go home even though its not possible for many, whose home is the university) in the midst of this pandemic. Of course, much of this class repurposes technologies no doubt developed for surveillance and war/policing (Columbia students know too well the strange glowing eyes of a zoomorphic owl speaker that repositions its visual frame by locating sounds and selecting faces – which we would usually use if joined together in class, even if video calling Brown). This seminar seeks, it seems in part, to draw together in different relations or ways of receiving frequencies afforded yet conditioned by a control society’s visual apparatuses – apparatuses which, in Keelings words, seem to make use of the cinematic within digital regimes. Now, through Zoom (which will collect the data and locations of Columbia students even as we speak and look after the texts and films that help us look through these operations), the university makes itself adaptable to COVID19 in a way that we as individuals not immune and without a vaccine cannot, making use of the channels available through our personal computers (in a further spatial blurring of a “work-life balance” and the protocols of “social distancing”), in the name of continuing knowledge production even in the midst of a pandemic, exemplifying the modulations of the Deleuzian control society Keeling brings to the fore. I simply open this situation up since similar things must be on the minds of others and since it frames how this seminar will run before and after Columbia’s spring break. I don’t know what to make of this all, but I sense it relates to the many ways we are looking after these texts, films, as well as each other.
At a certain point in Oscar Micheaux’s Ten Minutes to Live (34’- 36’) we see a black woman in a train wagon reading a letter. As in many other parts of the film, the letter is shot in close-up, occupying the whole frame of the image. The black letters are hard to read due not only to the precarious conditions of the image but, more importantly, to how they are almost engulfed by the excessive white light that surrounds them. After this close-up, we see the woman once again – and then we can notice that she too is being engulfed by the excessive lightening. This brief scene made me think about Kara Keeling’s discussion about “the imbrication of Black film with questions of technology” and how “Akomfrah notes that none of the major film stocks were manufactured with a technical ability to bring out the richness and variety in black skin tone” (p.118-119). In this brief scene, this imbrication seems highlighted by the way it portrays a black body that is almost completely erased from the image by the whiteness that surrounds it. However, even if engaging with Akomfrah’s theories about this initial lack of materials to portray the rich plurality of blackness, Keeling criticizes his utopian digitopia, and argues that his film, The Last Angel of History, “portends neoliberal multiculturalism by seeking to redeem the Euro-American technoculture of the 1980s and 1990s from the logics that would deny its potential political force”. Thus, how can one engage with these images without resorting to this kind of teleological digital utopianism?
Grasping with this question, I once again thought about Khalil Joseph’s film Flypaper and Simone Leigh’s exhibition The Chorus, and the way these works dialogue with Arthur Jafa’s films by showcasing a certain plurality of image textures as a way to engage with the archive. By doing so, I believe that these works portray a much richer and complex view of black life by constructing this sort of tapestry of different images and sounds that do not seek to envision a teleological redemption narrative – either aesthetic or representational. These works, and here I am thinking especially in Jafa’s, do no eschew the images that would be erased within a narrative pursuing the idea of progress and pride, as argued by Keeling, “it brings forth a conceptualization of Black American existence over time that includes those who continue to be excluded from the promises and protections of full citizenship in the United States of America.” (p.144). Hence the importance of the idea of repetition for these films, as it functions as a different response to this teleological redemptive temporality. Simone Leigh’s The Chorus was a crucial piece for me to better understand how this aural repetition can work as a solvent to these teleological narratives by actively creating a temporal palimpsest (or spiral), eroding a mythological linear narrative of Western thought that has as its bedrock the Greeks. Like, Jafa’s works, it also intervenes in an account of a black redemption narrative that rescue ancient civilizations as a way to promote the idea of African progress. By being present in the Egyptian wing of the museum, Leigh’s sound installation refuses to subscribe to this narrative by evoking those who are erased from it. The oral recital of Hartman’s Manual for General Housework positions minor and subaltern experiences amidst archeological treasures, denying any teleological historicism that would erase these experiences in its search for redemption.
This week, I found myself struggling to work through, but extremely interested in, both the Jafa films and the readings. At the center of the material I will focus on for this short essay is the concept of repetition. Deeply related to frequency, my curiosity about repetition stems from its role in black life/joy/suffering/pleasure. Thinking of what Christina Sharpe refers to as the weather, I want to use these readings as an opportunity to reflect on the possibilities engendered by black culture’s reliance on repetition (Snead) to navigate the “weather”, or alternatively put, black quotidien life. Specifically, I propose a close examination of the moments in black quotidien life that as Arthur Jafa puts it, “worry the note” (Jafa 267). For Jafa, gospel singers’ tendency to sing runs and to hold notes for long periods of time, or to “worry the note”, treats the note as inherently sonically unstable, enacting a black refusal of the Western tradition that approaches music as a fixed quality. Extending that metaphor, how can we think of moments in black life that function to worry the note—to erode logics of the fixity of existence by both worrying that fixity, and then repeating the worrying? Central for Jafa, both in his theoretical and his creative work, is the black church. The black church, in its own language, is considered “shelter from the storm” from a religious perspective; in terms of Sharpe’s weather, the black church has also stood as (imperfect) shelter for centuries. But Jafa’s interest in the black church and its rhetorics is not only about its sheltering capacities, but its ability to articulate a “worrying of the note”, a liminal space where the black church, and its musical progeny, gospel, rest between the reality of suffering and the promise of a joy (not a pleasure) inexpressible and never-before-seen all while maintaining an incredible immediacy. James Snead comments that, “the black church must be placed at the center of the manifestations of repetitions in black culture, at the junction of music and language,” meaning that the black church rests in the interval between two formations of black culture that draw “attention to [their] own repetitions”, while simultaneously being a sacred space. I wonder if we can think of the placement of the black church in a space of interval as fundamental to its sacredness, a way that the black church that holds itself taut in a liminal space. How is the repeated enmeshment of music, language, and belief both a sacred practice and place, a melding that speaks to black culture’s attention to internal repetition?
I am compelled to think through the relationship between motion (rate of change over time) and movement (rate of change over space) as it relates to frequential contact and its resultant sound in black culture. An attention to interval, as patterned, cyclical, or returning, occasions a meeting between discourses on black culture and theories of sound and frequency. Frequency is necessarily about returning and about periodic utterance, as sonic frequency in particular measures “the number of complete vibrations or cycles occurring per unit of time in a vibrating system” (Harvard Dictionary of Music). As such, frequency and its subunits (motion and movement) correspond with black culture’s nonprogressive, circular continuance, otherwise considered repetition. Return, then, marks black culture’s divergence from the category of Western History, privileging “equilibrium” over “accumulation” as the practice of the “the cut,” a break from and return to the prior sequence (Snead 150). This is to say two related things: Black culture likewise diverges relationally and socially from the West, as this principle of repetitive organization disallows accumulative superiority of one element, say an individual “rhythmic or tonal climax ‘above the mass’” (150); and, in accordance, black culture is not necessarily ecstatic or itself not aspirationally transcendent. To the point of the latter, though much can be explored about blackness and the affectivity of Enlightenment reason, black culture ontologically does not seek to be outside itself. Moving beyond the metric of the linear and towards an awareness of the circulatory entanglement between motion and movement attends to the haptic performance of repetition in black cultural expression.
To think black culture ecstatically is to think movement away from, is to think progress. Rather, black cultural repetition occurs at the level of tone, which is against progressive ecstasy and along with relational hapticity, particularly if we envision the vibrational contact between sonic wave lengths (150). Arthur Jafa echoes this in “Black Visual Intonation” when introducing his cinematic intervention Black Visual Intonation (BVI) as a visual-sonic strategy to represent Black pleasure’s “nontempered” and unfixed tonality. He accords BVI with two functions “the use of irregular, nontempered (nonmetronomic) camera rates” and “frame replication” in efforts to “approximate Black visual intonation” (267). To Jafa, the irregularity of the nonmetronomic camera rates resembles the “tendency in Black music to ‘worry the note’ – to treat notes as indeterminate, inherently unstable sonic frequencies” (267), therefore attending to the frequential irregularity and repetition that founds black culture.
As we turn our attention to cinema, I have been thinking about Christina Sharpe and her notion of the “Weather”. For Sharpe, meteorology figures antiblackness as not just total climate, but as that which registers its violence “in the present and into the future” (21). Put differently, she describes the afterlives of slavery as contingency, as that which portends its repetition, and for her this (weather) system depends precisely on mediated representation. As we discussed, she thereby decries films such as 12 Years a Slave insofar as they normalize violence on the black body, on one hand, but more importantly on the other stage the rehearsal—my extrapolation—for subsequent brutality into the future. Kara Keeling may align insofar as she describes Love Is the Message, as the Message is Death by Arthur Jafa. Keeling writes: “Love Is the Message does not invite meaning so much as it makes Black existence resonate within a media ecology in which the accumulated meanings ascribed to and on Black flesh continue to render Black bodies fungible, hypervisible, and legible in ways that reproduce existing power relations” (142). She reminds the “unequal calculus of visibility distribution” (101) mandates that entry into the domain of visibility costs in effect the reproduction of power and the visual logics (dare we say the gaze) that prop up its regime. In that sense we might substitute her use of “ecology” with the “Weather” and vice versa. Keeling also echoes someone like Peggy Phelan who, in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, challenges the rightful but perhaps misguided calls for increased representation insofar as it would ascribe to an existing political or cinematic apparatus of visibility.
Yet for me, contingency definitionally implies the uncertainty as to not only the possibility of recurrence, but also whether iterability necessitates exact repetition or conversely inscribes the im/possibility of change, for representation (Phelan again) without reproduction (of anterior logic). While the latter potential may register as naive truism in some regard, it bears repeating as Keeling and Snead do in their work. As Keeling reads Looking for Langston or the Watermelon Woman, these films engage a “temporality in which the past is put in the service of the present” (95). In line with the “queer reproduction” of Grace Hong or “representation without reproduction” of Phelan, the films then reimagine a past that in the history of cinema has “been imbricated with racial epistemologies” (122), or put simply the visualized abjection of racialized subjects, and to this extent already inscribe the failure of “profilmic reality” to properly index the real upon which it bases its privileged status (122). In other words, the very terms of negotiation and capacity to re-imagine otherwise clearly/queerly become embedded within cinematographic language from the start. Keeling refers to Barad and Simondon—I have not read her chapter on Simondon but did just read his “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis”—to discuss this potentiality as “open and processual within a temporality whose future is open” (134). For Simondon, the idea of “becoming” exists as one of the dimensions of human “being,” which involves the ongoing process of individuation. He describes this as a “theater of individuation” in which the subject necessarily falls out of step with itself, that is, stipulates change, and resolves this fundamental incompatibility with its former pre-individualized state, crucially, in the group. In this way, might we posit that repetition not only invites revision, but demands it?
On movement and motion: “Motion is the general term in kinetics, the study of motion. It says nothing about the purpose of a motion, or its origin and destination. Something just happens to change place... However, movement includes some purpose, some origin and destination. A movement is a complete motion, from beginning to end. So movement would be preferred in the arts and social sciences and motion in the natural sciences... Physics studies motion. Transportation studies movement. They may both speak about something changing position but there is a different perspective….A movement is an entity, a thing, not just a change as a motion is. A motion can be studied abstractly but a movement is not fully abstract because it is an entity.” From: https://www.isoul.org/motion-vs-movement/
Rhythm definition: a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound a regularly recurring sequence of events, actions, or processes. "the twice daily rhythms of the tides" ART a harmonious sequence or correlation of colors or elements. --From google definitions
This week I am thinking a lot about the importance and possibility of black dance as it emerges in Jafa's Love is the Message, The Message is Death. For me black dance is deeply linked to James Snead's notion that black culture, which often emerges as "rhythm in music and dance and language." (Snead, 150) Snead's piece also offers a way of thinking about the entanglements of black frequency and black culture's embrace and celebration of return. We see this manifest in the desires of Jafa's Love as well as Black Studies return to Africa, home, or a space of belonging, and/ or safety through the figure of the maternal. I want to think about how black dance is a site through which black bodies are able to access different spatial and temporal planes through affect. That is, black dance (for me) sits at the nexus of two entanglements: black motion & black movement and the affective & the bodily.
To my mind, black motion and black movement are entangled with the oxymoron of black ontology and the assumed position of “the Black” as ontological nothing, fixed, and beside “the Human.” Thinking with definitions of motion that physicists use, I push us to think about black motion through the vector of blackness: what trans* scholar Marquis Bey calls a primordial, anoriginal force. Black scholars such as Achille Mbembe and Calvin Warren place the figure of the “Black” beside, or marginal to that of their white counterpart: “the Human,” therefore reconscipting that fixity they despise onto black bodies. Mbembe, however, makes one important distinction about the figure of the black’s vexed ontological “presence” by separating race or the figure of “the Black” from the black body when he cautions readers to consider race as “both beside and beyond being. It is an operation of the imagination, the site of an encounter with the shadows and hidden zones of the unconscious.” Although Mbembe does not name it, he gestures towards blackness through his conceptions of race. Bey articulates blackness and trans*ness as anoriginal, primordial, poetic forces that are, yes, “indexed imperfectly by bodies said to be black or trans* and thus can succumb to logics of white supremacy and cis sexism.” Blackness as a force lives outside of the enclosed logics of subject formations and positions. It is unfixed, unbound, and beyond the ontological realm which the spatiotemporal enclosure of the Human tells us to imagine. Black motion, then, signifies a change, without purpose, origin, or destination.
Movement, unlike motion, focuses on the object. Therefore, in the context of black movement, I want to focus on the black body as the object of black movement. Black bodies are difficult to define (and that is something I am thinking about in my work), but here I was to think about the relationship between the discursive properties of black flesh, which have come to define how we think about black bodies moving. Black flesh, as we know, has been stretched to hold and harbor a plethora of meanings in its social, historic formation as a means of producing what we sometimes think of as blackness. But, here, I want to think about how black bodies and those individuals who bear the weight of black flesh and all its meaning, "symbolic substitutions" (Spillers), and woundings bends and weird flesh for reasons outside of violence done unto their flesh. Therefore, we have to think not only about the surface of the flesh, but also the lining and interior of the flesh. The interior, exteriority of the black flesh gives it a permeability and an elasticity that is part and parcel with our inability to catch blackness as a force. I believe that black movement (dance, gesture, etc.) allows the black body to catch blackness in motion. The moments we see the eruption of Lebron's dunk, black people slow winin', jukin', and gettin' light and turning inward in circles, towards one another intimately, or turning in on and harnessing blackness, we are seeing black bodies catch and touch what Chance the Rapper calls "the spirit coming in braile." Black trans* theorist C Riley Snorton writes this about the relationship between blackness and trans*ness: "Although the perception that “race” and “gender” are fixed and knowable terms is the dominant logic of identity, in this book “trans” is more about a movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival, and “blackness” signifies upon an enveloping environment and condition of possibility. Here, trans—in each of its permutations—finds expression and continuous circulation within blackness, and blackness is transected by embodied procedures that fall under the sign of gender." (Snorton, 2) This is important, because in many ways the flow of movement that Snorton emphasizes as a key constituent of trans*ness as a force allows blackness to move. Therefore, what we see when we think gender in black performance is perhaps catching something we cannot yet name.
Although we are not focusing on Joseph's Sweet Flypaper, I feel that two dance sequences continue to stand out in my mind as two prime examples of the relationship between black dance, black motion, and black movement. The moment I want to focus on is when the football player jukes (a football terms for moving around) a plethora of football players (some fall as they attempt to grab his ankles and they fail to touch him as he touches blackness and moves to touch the touch down). This stutter stutter stutter, bah, bah, bah, bada, bah of the juke like other forms of dance that use the same word is about the haptic and touching the frequency of blackness. The Joseph film discusses how the football player, the next day, returns to sports through basketball. This return, for me, is not about the tensions of black male upward mobility and sports, but about his desire to return to blackness and his way of catching blackness is through the embodied performance of sports.
Therefore, I am thinking about how black bodies, black people come to access the trans*ness of blackness (or the movement of blackness) through embodied practice. This catching, this touching, to me, signals the meeting between entities that desire the other: blackness and black bodies. This ability/possibility/movement to catch/ touch blackness in the rhythm of repeated desire to return "someplace I can feel safe"--or someplace we can only strive for some when-- is what I see as black dance's possibility.
Here are links to Jafa films, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death and Apex. We are very grateful to the filmmaker for giving us access to this work and respecting this privilege, we ask that you DO NOT share this link with others. Password is: VFBL2020
ReplyDeletehttps://www.dropbox.com/s/kqlxwofudqp7min/LMMD_GBE_final%20version.mp4?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/g2ky7ixbkg80ah2/APEX_Basel2_small.mp4?dl=0
This week's readings, focusing specifically on temporality, extend the questions of chronicle and narrative that have emerged through our engagements with representations of black life via heterogeneous media forms.
ReplyDeletePicking up from Kahlil Joseph's ‘Flypaper,’ which offers sonic movement as an operation of montage, I found James A. Snead's notion of "the cut” to be particularly generative. Positioning the term in musical language, Snead defines the cut as an “abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series” (150). With the films of Joseph, and indeed Jafa, how might we formulate the cut as a sonic and visual practice? In ‘Apex’ for example, the literal cinematic cuts that move us from one frame to the next begin to phase in and out with the metronomic, arpeggiated synth. There are moments where image and sound pulse in almost perfect synchrony, propelling each other forward, and others where the lag between the two becomes apparent. The lower and higher registers themselves begin to part ways, creating a textural rupture that “draws attention to its own repetitions,” in Snead’s words (151). ‘Apex’ thus constructs the cut as a kind of sensorium into its very form, creating false trajectories of climax, similar to the orchestral score and frenetic jazz that bookend ‘Flypaper.’ ‘Love is the Message’ also weaves sound/soundtrack in and out of its diegetic frame. Snead’s observation that black culture dispels the hegemonic illusion of progress and control by intentionally building contingency “inside the system itself” thus reminded me of Weheliye’s conceptions of the “rhythm of chance” and “the mix” with relation to DuBois from a few weeks ago. How can the indeterminate be made rhythmic and therefore repetitive with an aesthetic intention? At what point do accidents cease to be accidents?
The Kara Keeling excerpts expand Snead’s cut, queering its temporality as an “interruption” of expectation through a future poetics, a notion of “futurity as both a promise and a wish” as well as unsettling the “assuredness that there is a future as such” (84). Interpolating Elizabeth Freeman’s own ideas of queerness, Keeling perhaps suggests that such interruptive, temporal displacements might incorporate chance into form in the same way that Snead’s built contingencies proffer. Her project is invested in how to make such temporal disjunctures visible, the realization of a Deleuzian time-image as “the purely optical and sound situation” (112). How do the cuts in the Jafa and Joseph works we’ve encountered render time as a spatial “situation”? Do their repetitive interruptions speak to or contradict Keeling’s “digitopia”?
I’m left with a lot more questions than conclusions with the theoretical propositions raised in this week’s texts. But I wanted to end—given that we just watched Garrett Bradley's 'America' last night—with an invitation to consider how the cuts seen between takes in ‘Lime Kiln Field Day' make visible moments of interruptive rupture and pause. Do these frames, slowed down and presented as a series of staccato images rather than moving film, approximate the time-image that Keeling argues for—"amplifying the incommensurate as both an opportunity for further modulations of control and a challenge to them"? (116)
“Itself a kind of cultural coverage, this magic of the “cut” attempts to confront accident and rupture not by covering them over, but by making room for them inside the system itself” (150 Snead).
ReplyDeleteI am weak with much giving.
I am weak with the desire to give more.
—Jean Toomer, “Prayer”
Even though James Snead only mentions Jean Toomer’s Cane briefly and in passing, I’d like to geek out very briefly here and dive a little deeper into Cane’s form. As Snead notes: “In Jean Toomer’s Cane…the repetitive forms of black language and rhetoric are prominent until one notices that gradually the entire plot of the novel itself has been all along trending towards the shape of return—the circle” (151 Snead). This circle that Snead refers to is not just one of language or plot, but is graphically marked at each juncture of Cane’s three parts. In other words, at the beginning of each new section, the symbol of a broken circle floats on an otherwise empty page as if waiting to be animated. It is this brokenness that I’d like to call our attention to and its relationship to what Snead calls “the cut.”
Just before posting his completed manuscript of Cane to Boni and Liveright in 1923, Toomer provided a detailed description of the work’s form and narrative design:
“From three angles, Cane’s design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex forms, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South to the North, and back into the South again. Or, From [sic] the North down into the South, and then a return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work…the curve really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha etc. swings upward into Theater and Box Seat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song.”
I consider the “pause” at Harvest Song a decisive rupture. One that makes room for the reader to switch tracks in the circle—and by “switching tracks” I mean: an opportunity to pick up at the beginning (where she started) as well as pick up at a different beginning, on a new angle of the circle.
What fascinates me about “the cut” or “going back” is that it symbolizes the futility of pursuing a whole, unified identity. An “accident” or rupture is built into the form, disrupting the circle from completing itself. Maybe, the rupturing is (in a sense) self-aware—for it is only by losing the project of unity that can “save” unity by maintaining its true ambiguity.
The project of the “cut” then investigates the dynamic and circular state of “becoming,” and its brokenness only further emphasizes the essentiality of effort and of beginning again. Maybe, wanting continuously is what brings one into the “immediate” now that Snead refers to: “Finally, he is ‘immediate’ and intimately tied to self-consciousness he is ‘immediate’—i.e., always there—in any given moment. Here we can see that, being there, the African is also always already there, or perhaps always there before, whereas the European is headed there or, better, not yet there” (148 Snead).
Autonomy?
ReplyDeletePerhaps I misunderstood the text, but I was struck by Keeling’s notion of the “autonomy of sound”. In the Interlude, “The Sonic Bartleby”, Keeling writes:
… Many works produced on digital media, including those on digital video such as HD Video or Digibeta tape, can by characterized by an autonomy of sound. According to Deleuze, this autonomy of sound “increasingly lends” sound “the state of image”… The electronic image, in other words, facilitates a set of relations between the sonic and the visual, not to establish hierarchy between them or render them to commensurate, but to push them toward their limits. (Keeling, 115)
How does a situation in which the state of the image is lent to sound means it has autonomy? The use of the word “lend” and the examples of the forms of media to which sound is attached alone (HD Video and Digibeta tapes) can speak to the problems I find in this passage. I believe that instead of autonomy, what this passage offers is an attempt at affirmative action for the consideration of sound as an equal of image: sound is welcome to the art form, sound is welcome to join the image, but it still serves as a secondary aspect for the image.
The text took me back to a different (yet similar) moment in “The Lived Experience of The Black Man”, where Fanon interacts with the white gaze: “…"Look how handsome that Negro is." The handsome Negro says, 'Fuck you,' madame."” (Fanon, 94) The comparison between this quote from Fanon and Keeling’s account of an ”autonomy” of sound raises questions about the ways we use contextualization in attempts of equality.
Another example that rings in my head while writing this post is the treatment of the Arab citizens in Israel by the Israeli government led by Binyamin Netanyahu. While the Arab citizens of Israel have a representative party in the Knesset, and are eligible to vote, in the election of 2015 Netanyahu posted a Live Feed on his Facebook page where he called his supporters to go vote, because “the Arabs are flowing to the ballot boxes on busses”. Then, in the (3rd) election of the 2019-20 cycle, he tried to scare the supporters of his opponent, Benny Gantz, by saying that it’s going to be “Bibi or Tibi” (Referring to Ahmed Tibi, a Knesset member from the Joint List). Under what conditions are the Arab citizens considered equal and autonomous? Does the right to vote and to participate in political life automatically translate to equality? Could it be said that the Israeli government “increasingly lends” Arabs “the state of image”?
To conclude, I think that in Keeling’s understanding of the autonomy of sound, sound is not an autonomous being. The terminology used by filmmakers and other non-sonically affiliated artists for the incorporation of sound in their work is no different than the contextualization of “the handsome negro” by the madame. Often sound will be referred to as “a rug”, “ a flow” or “a blanket”“, artists will tell us how they “want something that will make it more immersive”, “I want something emotional”. These requests or roles that the sound assumes may seem to give it a significant ‘”autonomous” role in the production, but do they really?
I will begin by saying that I am fuzzy on the exact differences and different uses between technology, technics, and technē; however, I wonder, by moving away from strict linear time, digital film can exist beyond the constraints of that literal digital technology and instead be a way of approaching mechanisms of time. In other words, can Kara Keeling’s description of the digital function for other technological objects? As “movement” image, unlike “moving” image, suggests a series of patterns, rhythms, a wave of change, I wonder how modes of patterning or keeping time are attached and detached from particular technologies as part of a broader sense of the digital?
ReplyDeleteSwing!, which uses film and I watched on the digital media platform, YouTube, raises the question of constructed temporalities in its first moments. “Why did they invent alarm clocks?” Mandy asks as hers rings beside her. The noise marks the beginning of her day cooking for a white family. She covers herself again with blankets. She eventually gets up, saying it “ain’t the clock’s fault.” Mandy asserts the invented-ness of timekeeping, particularly time as a series of “alarms” to work and begin. The alarm clock specifically marks her own lack of control over time and the rhythms of her life; it marks the demands placed on her to work and, in this case, to perform domestic labor for white people and work for money that she never gets to see. She then detaches time from the literal object – it is not specifically the clock’s fault that she gets up – and, in doing so, acknowledges a space between the tools of time and its demands on her. Perhaps it is the vague “they” whose fault it is? Mandy’s waking creates a possible poetics. There is a “notion of futurity” in that she will get up; but she “unsettles the assuredness that there is a future as such,” unsettles whether such marks of moving forward needed to have been created in the first place (Keeling 84). What strike me here is how this moment seems to combine the points in both of the Keeling chapters: a complex poetics of time meets the very complex technologies of control.
I want to see Mandy as an adept utilizer of technologies. Quite literally, the movie marks Mandy as skilled at each technic she tries: she can cook, quickly picks up sewing, and picks up singing. Her own love affair – her feeling torn about her husband as “no-good” but “loves him anyways” – becomes mobilized towards her musical career and the kinds of money, attention, and care that she receives for engaging in it. The spoken turns into the moving and sung performance as her speech to Lena transforms into lyrics. The husband, at this point, hasn’t been seen since the movie left Birmingham. Mandy mobilizes his invisibility within the scope of the film’s visual frame to self-narrate their love story within the sounds of longing. She “brings forth” the music within her own life and then brings forth the show that seemed an impossibility at that point to everyone except Lena (Keeling 117). Further, I want to hazard that the moment where Cornell brings the hot water for Mandy’s feet might be a kind of digitopia since Mandy’s deployment of technology brings about the care denied to her beforehand.
Such digitopia is “incommensurable with the logics of violence of straight times operating today, moving now” (Keeling 137). “Moving now,” aligns with the “moving image,” and which “movement” seems to stop and shift. We might imagine that Mandy stops the clock and gets to relax as she does at the end of the film; however, Mandy gets her job as a singer, in part, because she is always on-time, unlike the always-late Cora/Eloise. The alarm clock is invisible but still present. Cora/Eloise represents a kind of excess – she has extravagant taste, drinks too much, desires too many men, has one too many names – but is punished for that excess and because she cannot manipulate such technologies of control such as time. Do technologies require adept users only? Since Mandy detaches blame from the alarm clock, where does the “fault” land?
In James Snead’s “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” locates the Snead quotes Hegel as writing that Africa has no history but rather “There is a succession of accidents and surprises” (148). At the same time however, Black culture’s alleged “historylessness” is what secures its survival (148). While Snead acknowledges that Black culture’s historylessness does not guarantee the survival of the individual, Snead does return to the Black individual to describe the Black subject position as unfixed in time: “Having no self-consciousness, he is ‘immediate’—i.e., always there—in any given moment. Here we can see that, being there, the African is also always already there, or perhaps always there before” (148).
ReplyDeleteI’m wondering what it means to think about the Oscar Micheaux films Ten Minutes To Live and Swing! as forms of storytelling that relay a “succession of accidents and surprises.” Ten Minutes in particular seems to exist entirely in the “always there” present moment; at times it impossible to tell who’s someone’s child and who’s someone’s mother or who is planning to murder who, and the film seems to continually introduce characters who are treated as if they were “always already there,” particularly Morvis and Charlotte. The only constant is the continual return to the site of the Libya club and stream of musical and dance performances there, which Snead locates as the most “characteristic shape” of repetition in Black culture (150). While Swing!’s narrative is more straightforwardly linear, it is this supposed linearity that allows for the film’s repetition and “historylessness” to be felt more strongly. It is a literal drunken accident that leads to Mandy being given the lead in the production at the last minute. While her sudden rise to stardom would seem to suggest a dramatic change in status, by the end of the film the social roles present at beginning have been reinstated: Mandy has reunited with her husband, apparently willing to disregard his past treatment of her, while Mandy’s new female friend disapproves but resolves to look out for her.
While Snead argues that repetition is being more and more embraced by White Western culture, particularly in art, I feel that repetition and historylessness largely continue to function as racist justifications for the failure of Black individuals and culture to succeed in a liberal individualist society that defines cycles by growth and progress. I’m thinking here of the statements made, by White intellectuals and laypeople alike, that Black people don’t save money because they don’t consider the long term, about poor Black mothers who continue to have children despite the fact that they can’t afford them, etc. I want to consider Swing!’s ending with Mandy reuniting with her “deadbeat” husband in the light of this stigmatized repetition. I also want to put forward the question historylessness and repetition as both a choice and a form of play. In Ten Minutes, one of the performances at the club is of a comedy duo who list famous American figures while comically getting the events they’re attributing to these figures ridiculously wrong. This humor of misattribution necessarily relies on both the speaker and the listener actually knowing the “correct” history in order both to make the joke and to recognize it as humorous. The “historylessness” of Hegel as described by Snead seems to take the stance that Black individuals and Black culture are “historyless” as a pre-existing state, but the comedy scene from Ten Minutes posits historylessness as a performance.
ReplyDeleteSnead contends that for blacks, history, music, and literature as with other cultural productions are cyclical. He positions progression and repetition as reflective processes that mirror the European and African/Oriental worldviews. Because repetition exists in every form of black expression, is Snead making a claim that black people are tied to rhythm in some spiritual/metaphysical sense? Here, Campt’s articulation of infrasound comes to mind. She states “infrasound is often only felt in the form of vibrations through contact with parts of the body. Yet all sound consists of more than what we hear. It is an inherently embodied modality constituted by vibration and contact”(7). She highlights that infrasound is an inherently or permanently embodied modality then moves to underscore the animals who possess this ability—animals “such as elephants, rhinoceroses, and whales”(7). How is Snead possibly implying that African descendants possess this infrasound? Where is there overlap in Snead’s argument around blacks and repetition and Campt’s infrasound? I feel like there is something there I am having a hard to time connecting.
Moreover, Snead discusses the “cut” and its use within black art forms. I see his definition of the cut—an "abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series” (150)—at work within both Arthur Jafa’s Apex and Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. Jafa sifts through an oasis of images with various messages always returning to the message of previous image whether it be pain, pleasure or creativity. However, in Jafa’s LMMD, a woman states that “mundane afro-futurist recognize that we’re not aliens”(1:38-1:43). It does not surprise that Jafa gives us the words “afro-futurist” out the mouth of a woman. Black futurism and feminism hover as a vital theme within the seminar. Therefore, I’m curious as to what end does afro-futurist use the cut across various mediums? How does Jafa use of the cut in LMMD differ from that of James Brown in music?
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ReplyDeleteI’m intrigued by Keeling’s interpretation of Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death as an exercise in “algorithmic editing.” The idea that algorithmic protocols might be deployed as aesthetic resources for a “poetics of Relation” (in Glissant’s sense) is a provocative one, given the ubiquitous evidence of the prominent role that algorithms play in the control apparatus of advanced racial capitalism. In my view, however, Keeling’s conception of Jafa’s style as algorithmic is perceptive and generative, as it leads us to an enhanced appreciation of the powerful effects of Jafa’s recent films. To elaborate spatio-temporal connections and affective associations through an algorithmic grammar is to probe what Patricia Ticineto Clough would call the “technical substrate” of collective consciousness, demonstrating the extent to which the mobile archives of social Relation assume form through flesh-machine assemblages rather than discrete subjective interiors.
ReplyDeleteI could not watch Love is the Message without vividly recalling the moments in time when I encountered the various individual images assembled in the film. Many of these images, such as Obama’s singing of “Amazing Grace” or the shooting of Walter Scott, have been deeply imbricated— during and in the longer aftermath of their moments of appearance—within discourses about the possibilities and limitations of visibility for movements toward one or another form of justice. During the mid-2010s moment into which Jafa’s film intervenes, it was particularly common to hear questions such as: does the Obama presidency signal the viability or impossibility of a “post-racial” U.S. society? Can body cameras make police more accountable? My perspective on such conversations was inextricably bound up in my own position as a white person relative to the color line; for example, watching videos circulate on my Facebook feed of the Walter Scott shooting, I wondered whether it was a fluke or systemic failure that such images had ended up entering the media-ecological bubble of a user undoubtedly marked algorithmically as “white” and “middle-class,” or whether algorithmic protocols had in fact additionally identified me as a “liberal” user “sympathetic” to conversations about “racial justice” and “police reform” and therefore a consumer generating value through the circulation of such images. Such situations compel me to reflect on the particular shape and contour of the color line in an algorithmic era. In contrast to the value-generating circuits of social media, Jafa’s film undermines the logics of visibility and representation by juxtaposing images that do not fit within recognizable classificatory schemas and tags. If the ability of racial Capital to generate value vis-a-vis images of black art and black death depends upon separating the two, Jafa’s “algorithmic editing” refuses this division. As if deploying a kind of “Random Access Memory,” Jafa’s approach delves into the collective archives of popular culture without sorting out the horror from the beauty.
Reading Kara Keeling’s work on queerness and anti/relationality makes me reflect on the Otolith Group’s The Third Part of the Third Measure that we watched last Thursday and that a few of us saw again at Columbia the next night. I am curious as to how the anti/relational tension works in Eastman’s comments before the beginning of the Northwestern concert, which we heard recited and performed by Dante Micheaux and Elaine Mitchener. There is something about the version of these remarks recorded at Northwestern (Spotify link here: https://open.spotify.com/track/3pHGwKTgmIn6GFLSFOs7TP?si=Hzy95jwmQ7y2dQElyca-aA ) that may align with what Keeling, Muñoz, and Freeman identify as the antirelational turn in queer theory in Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. There is a sense of Eastman’s blackness and queerness acting “as a structuring antagonism” in these remarks, and I think we can hear that antagonism performed by the audience (Keeling 88). The sounds made by the audience are not-quite-covered coughs, the shifting of bodies in chairs, and the absolute lack of applause at the end, when we hear only the sound of Eastman’s motorcycle boots as he walks to one of the four grand pianos. As Kodwo Eshun mentioned at the Columbia screening of the film, this concert was performed during Eastman’s “leather man” phase, a style that does not easily or “properly” fit into the concert hall.
ReplyDeleteBut, like Keeling, I do not feel that black queerness as antirelational can fully account for Eastman’s spoken introduction, particularly when it is reuttered and remixed by Micheaux and Mitchener. Keeling writes, “Referring to the capacity of ‘queer’ to function as a structuring antagonism within the social as ‘antirelational’ misses the way ‘queer’ is a product of social relation, a condition of possibility for sociality as we know it. It is a mode of relationality that generates surprising, pleasurable excess within the social precisely because it is structurally antagonistic to the properly social” (88 italics mine). It is the pleasurable excess in Eastman’s words that I am interested in here, and that pleasurable excess is something I never heard until viewing The Third Part of the Third Measure in Providence and hearing laughter in the audience.
I brought up this question of how the laugh might affect our experience of Eastman’s speech. Kodwo answered that he heard the laughter as nervous laughter, as the kind of laughter that you cannot help but utter during uncomfortable moments. I would be interested to hear what others thought of the laughter as we watched the film (as a side note, the audience at Columbia was completely silent during each version of the speech). During that first viewing, I heard the laughter differently, as a kind of “pleasurable excess” that came less from discomfort than a kind of (if not recognition than) agreement with Eastman and his thesis regarding the basis of the American Economic System. For me, the laughter ruptured the sonic event that is the “original” recording of the speech. I feel compelled to imagine an otherwise, not utopia, but a reception of Eastman’s performance that is not immediately hostile, though that in itself might be a kind of utopia, or at least an audiotopia as Josh Kun has theorized.
Watching Arthur Jafa’s striking films Apex and Love is the Message in dialogue with the differently cadenced vintage films by Oscar Micheaux, Ten Minutes to Live and Swing! resulted in saliently different responses from me. Lulled into the static charm, prolonged choreographic scenes, and melodramatic slowness of Micheaux I was struck by the abrupt shutter that intonates Jafa’s work in Apex and the temporal arrhythmia of Love is the Message. In both, Jafa seems to be putting to practice Sneader’s Black repetition, and in the latter especially appears to demonstrate what Keeling would call “a desire to look to the past for recognizable signs that might authorize the existence of particular collective sociopolitical formations in the present” (90-91). Jafa tethers these signs together with images of stark contrast: hyper-white bodies against all the gradations of Black and Brown skin, cartoon predators, seared flesh, joy, jouissance, capital, capitulation, figures of radical resistance and revolutionary love against mongers of fear, and terror. All of this against the undulating beep in Apex that speeds and staggers its pace against the images, and in Love is the Message the slightly slowed chorus of incantation that carries through Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam.
ReplyDeleteKara Keeling, after Fanon warns us in “Yet Still” that “Insofar as colonial logics can be said to undergird present socioeconomic relations, Black people can become visible only through those logics, so danger, if not death, attends every Black’s appearance” (101). And yet, still, we attend to the visual frequencies of Black life, repeatedly. I wonder if this is because, as Sneader reminds us, with each repetition within culture there is the chance for a shift or a change to take place, not in the Hegelian sense of a progression of history, but in the sense that culture responds, reimagines, and reconfigures the world in ways that cannot be captured or contained by linearity. Thinking about Black repetition and the fungibility of this term in dialogue with the repetition marshalled by Jafa who repeats images, beats, and symbols throughout his work, I wonder how we can understand better Keeling’s notion of the “unequal calculus of visibility distribution” as it pertains to the risks, refusals, disappearances, and reemergences of Black appearance (101).
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ReplyDeleteFor the celestial ones cannot do
DeleteEverything. Namely, it is the mortals who make it
All the way to the abyss. So it turns, the echo
With these ones.
(Friedrich Hölderlin)
We on a ultralight beam, we on a ultralight beam, this is a god dream, this is a god dream, this is everything.
(Kanye West)
Objection.
This reading response revolves around a somehow critical reading of James A. Snead’s text, which I would like to bring in resonance with the rest of this week’s material, but especially Arthur Jafa’s films.
Starting with the simple historical fact that even though Hegel was, in thinking about the whole, writing all by himself, he was not alone; at least he was not living alone. Among his closest companions during his period of studying philosophy and theology in Tübingen were the later famous philosopher F.W.J. Schelling and the astonishing poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The three even shared a room in the student’s dorm between fall 1790 and summer 1793. There is also no doubt, that their story is one of annoyingly-patriarchal-white-male-bonding to the birth of hegemonic Western thought-systems; not to mention the later drama, when the friendships they had were breaking apart into bitter opposition between Hegel and Schelling, and, moreover, absolute indifference of both against Hölderlin, the marginalized poet. And yet, there is something uniquely striking in this constellation that speaks to some aspects of the readings.
Why is Hölderlin important then? Because of “poetry’s capacity to disrupt habitual ways of knowing and understanding the world,” as Kara Keeling mentions in respect of Aimé Césaire et al. It is not surprising that Hegel keeps coming back in several texts we read as the guarantor for the oppressing thought systems and ideologies of Western culture, and probably rightly so. The progressive and systematizing, subduing and violent nature of his philosophy is undisputed. Snead is setting up the cultural difference he wants to highlight in his text quite convincingly. However, in using Hegel, to now look at the somewhat blunt argument that “in European culture, the ‘goal’ is always clear: that which always is being worked towards. […] Such a culture is never ‘immediate,’ but ‘mediated’ and separated from the present tense by its own future-orientation,” (Snead, 150) misses the innumerable amounts of undertones and counter-voices to the Hegelian master narrative Snead is trying to stage in opposition to “a culture based on the idea of the ‘cut,’” which “will always suffer in a society whose dominant idea is material progress—" (150)
Hölderlin—“the most German of Germans,” according to Norbert von Hellingrath, declared himself in a letter to the canonical German poet Friedrich Schiller, dated September 4th, 1795, as null and void: “I thus belong—leastwise as res nullius—to you.” Hölderlin, who thereby ranks himself as a poet amongst the German poets, is willing to do so only as res nullius, a thing that legally is owned by and therefore also belongs to no one.
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DeleteHölderlin, the most German of Germans, according to his own words, is actually being German only insofar that he is not. In expressing a feeling of belonging to a certain culture only through a speech-act of negation, Hölderlin is cutting himself off of the culture he belongs to. He is becoming radically different not in the face of another culture, but in facing his very own culture. The ‘goal’ of this self-expression of belonging through a form of entangled self-alienation or -negation seems far from being clear. In my view, Hölderlin is striking a different note in the choral of cultural difference, in every sense of its literal meaning.
DeleteIn reading Sneads truly fascinating sections on the “cut,” I could not stop thinking about Hölderlin, who became especially known for his notorious and unparalleled technique of creating fractures and caesuras in his poetry. Especially Hölderlin’s late poetry draws heavily on the virtuous usage of ‘parataxis’ – a concept I would like to bring into the discussion and think together with Arthur Jafa’s works Apex and Love is the Message, the Message is Death.
Parataxis? The lexicon says: placing words or phrases alongside one another without hypotaxis or syntaxis, i.e., without logical subordination or grammatical ordering. Parataxis may occur with or without conjunctions, i.e., either syndetically or asyndetically. Especially in the asyndetic form (‘‘They run, rescue themselves, flee’’), the impact of parataxis is such that each word or phrase is given equal force and weight. Parataxis is often used to indicate speed of motion or, paradoxically, the stillness that reflects the inner tension of a situation; in any case, it represents not a rationally articulated assertion but a passionate outburst.
Looking back at Jafa’s work now, a series of hard rhythmic jointures and joinings appears; sudden hiatuses, caesurae, and collisions of the terrible and the beautiful, which reappear in the continuous seriality of love and death that pervade the history of Black culture and experience of Black life. The artful paratactical disturbances that Jafa lets pass, frequently, in front of our eyes, at the same time inscribe a sublime afterimage of Black life into our memory, which is impossible to deny. Because parataxis evades the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax the twirking women at the very end of the film has the same impact and importance, the equal force and weight, as James Brown’s performance. Here, as in Beethoven’s late compositions, all interstitial tissue is cut away. The liberated rows of tones and images both flow smoothly and halt abruptly; they both glide and bump. In its seemingly endless variations, or repetitions of the same-same-different, Jafa’s kaleidoscopic terrible beauty of Black life—the untimely perpetual interval in-between dancing children and police killings—imposes a timeless weight onto its viewer, without ever giving up a forceful agency and haunting political contemporaneity. Jafa is able to project this version of a time out of time that is introduced in Sneads text as well— the non-time of Black culture:
Non-time imposes on time the tyranny of its spatiality: in every life there is a north and a south, and the orient and the occident. At the extreme limit or, at the least, at the crossroads, as one’s eyes fly over the seasons, there is the unequal struggle of life and death, of fervor and lucidity, albeit one of despair and collapse, the strength as well to face tomorrow. So goes every life.
(Aimé Césaire)
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ReplyDeleteThis post looks after Keeling’s suggestion that “something remains ‘cinematic’ within the digital regime” even as the relations between “irrational cuts” and “sound-images” transform in a manner parallel to the shift from societies of discipline to societies of control (114). As Delueze formulates them, societies of control incessantly modify their regulatory and organizational functions by plugging into and affording a proliferation of channels through which incommensurable time-images circulate. The exteriorizing gesture of time-images, which make “time and thought [visually and sonically] perceptible” as affect, is thus folded into the constantly metamorphosing, Mobius-strip-like organizational apparatuses of the digital regime of control societies, allowing power to extend its territory and apprehensions even as it allows subjects more mobility – perhaps with the potential of inciting different possibilities for diffusing thought, perception, political action, and agency. In this situation, Keeling claims a new relation transpires “between incommensurable images, but not in a way that makes them commensurate. They can still be opaque, yet in relation” (111, 114). Indeed, the question of refusing particular modes of transparency (certain modes of political recognitions, demands to make visible that which and those who conceal themselves, frames of rendering meaning and value through equivalencies and fungibility) becomes one of the very dilemmas Keeling encounters and performs in her caution for “critical endeavors” to consider their own roles in making appear and attending to that which appears in the archives (101). Without claiming to resolve this problem, Keeling dwells with it. Similarly, according to Keeling, Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death offers a way of dwelling with and within modes of organizing and branding sound and image. Jafa’s particular practice is in part enacted through his “algorithmic editing,” which seems to be related to his performance/rehearsal of looking after that Keeling discusses with respect to Langston Hughes (allowing us to look back and after his looking-with and -through Roy DeCarava again too). Looking after, as in looking temporally after something transpires, or an un-accomplishable attempt to look after the totality of what has transpired as, in Glissant’s sense, a way of dwelling with “where the threatened beauty of the world resides” (quoted in Keeling 143). Yet also looking after in the sense of caring for, which involves, it seems, a sort of generative invagination of temporality as well. Looking after as caring for, Keeling suggests (with reference to M- ), transpires not by way of the question of “where is M- now?” (which reproduces frames of “looking for” that define surveillance and policing) but by way of the question “when is M-?” (102).
ReplyDeleteWhen (here?)? Is? a cut?
DeleteReleased just prior to WW2, Oscar Micheaux’s Swing! (1938) might interrupt a time line that would locate shifts from movement-images to time-images in accordance with the trauma of the war itself, swinging time (swing also of course as music as well as non-monogamous sexual relations) itself and making these images more a matter of position toward them when looking after them. The film assembles rehearsals as performances. That is, as the film progresses, the accumulation of rehearsals in anticipation of a performance becomes much of the film itself, as we look again and again at performers auditioning for the show that transpires at the end. About half-way in the movie, a cut occurs, even though the frame remains the same, in the middle of a pep talk Mr. Gregory (designated “the man behind the show, he’s got his money in the show”) gives to his performers (which I have shown with a slash):
“You know and I know that while a colored show may be and is supposed to stay within a certain prescribed scope, we must, if we hope to get anywhere, deliver something within that scope that *the public will like and come to see*/ (cut around 21:53) that is entirely different from what an audience has become accustomed to seeing and hearing. That, my people, is what I’m hoping of giving them. So I want all of you to do your best, unbend, relax, give me all that’s in you, but don’t, oh please don’t begin thinking how good you are and all that. Just hope you’re fair, and try to get better with every rehearsal and give me a show that will get over and *the public will like and come to see*.”
The repetition of the phrase “the public will like and come to see” makes me wonder why the cut occurs where it does and what it does to the syntax of Mr. Gregory’s speech. Was the cut to add the dialogue that follows without removing the initial line of thought that dictated the first performance of the lines? The doubled “that” (“that the public…” “that is entirely different…”) seems to me two alternatives, one that specifically gears its attention to the public’s desires to see and another that is wholly removed from the expectations prescribed by the public’s desires. Between the repetition “the public will like and come to see,” there is an interval of possibility that has nothing to do with the public’s visual desires, even if this possibility is folded back into a speech that comes to acknowledge the need to “deliver something within that scope” defined by an anticipated gaze. This cut seems, in Snead’s words, a “seemingly unmotivated break… with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series” (69). Along the temporalities suggested along the axis of movement-images, time-images, and something like digital images, I am left asking (in an incommensurably related echo of Keeling’s reading of M-), when this cut might be. When this cut transpires (trans-spirare, through-breath, so trying to think when aspiration, in Sharpe’s sense, transpires) might have to do with unbending, relaxing, giving all that in, without “thinking how good you are,” as much as it has to do with “delivering something within that scope… that is entirely different from what an audience has become accustomed to seeing and hearing.”
When (here?)? Is? a cut?
DeleteThinking of control societies, I can’t help but remark about the atypical situation of (Columbia students) gathering online now from our homes (assuming we have a home to be, an issue universities have failed to consider in the past couple days, asking students to leave campus and go home even though its not possible for many, whose home is the university) in the midst of this pandemic. Of course, much of this class repurposes technologies no doubt developed for surveillance and war/policing (Columbia students know too well the strange glowing eyes of a zoomorphic owl speaker that repositions its visual frame by locating sounds and selecting faces – which we would usually use if joined together in class, even if video calling Brown). This seminar seeks, it seems in part, to draw together in different relations or ways of receiving frequencies afforded yet conditioned by a control society’s visual apparatuses – apparatuses which, in Keelings words, seem to make use of the cinematic within digital regimes. Now, through Zoom (which will collect the data and locations of Columbia students even as we speak and look after the texts and films that help us look through these operations), the university makes itself adaptable to COVID19 in a way that we as individuals not immune and without a vaccine cannot, making use of the channels available through our personal computers (in a further spatial blurring of a “work-life balance” and the protocols of “social distancing”), in the name of continuing knowledge production even in the midst of a pandemic, exemplifying the modulations of the Deleuzian control society Keeling brings to the fore. I simply open this situation up since similar things must be on the minds of others and since it frames how this seminar will run before and after Columbia’s spring break. I don’t know what to make of this all, but I sense it relates to the many ways we are looking after these texts, films, as well as each other.
At a certain point in Oscar Micheaux’s Ten Minutes to Live (34’- 36’) we see a black woman in a train wagon reading a letter. As in many other parts of the film, the letter is shot in close-up, occupying the whole frame of the image. The black letters are hard to read due not only to the precarious conditions of the image but, more importantly, to how they are almost engulfed by the excessive white light that surrounds them. After this close-up, we see the woman once again – and then we can notice that she too is being engulfed by the excessive lightening. This brief scene made me think about Kara Keeling’s discussion about “the imbrication of Black film with questions of technology” and how “Akomfrah notes that none of the major film stocks were manufactured with a technical ability to bring out the richness and variety in black skin tone” (p.118-119). In this brief scene, this imbrication seems highlighted by the way it portrays a black body that is almost completely erased from the image by the whiteness that surrounds it. However, even if engaging with Akomfrah’s theories about this initial lack of materials to portray the rich plurality of blackness, Keeling criticizes his utopian digitopia, and argues that his film, The Last Angel of History, “portends neoliberal multiculturalism by seeking to redeem the Euro-American technoculture of the 1980s and 1990s from the logics that would deny its potential political force”. Thus, how can one engage with these images without resorting to this kind of teleological digital utopianism?
ReplyDeleteGrasping with this question, I once again thought about Khalil Joseph’s film Flypaper and Simone Leigh’s exhibition The Chorus, and the way these works dialogue with Arthur Jafa’s films by showcasing a certain plurality of image textures as a way to engage with the archive. By doing so, I believe that these works portray a much richer and complex view of black life by constructing this sort of tapestry of different images and sounds that do not seek to envision a teleological redemption narrative – either aesthetic or representational. These works, and here I am thinking especially in Jafa’s, do no eschew the images that would be erased within a narrative pursuing the idea of progress and pride, as argued by Keeling, “it brings forth a conceptualization of Black American existence over time that includes those who continue to be excluded from the promises and protections of full citizenship in the United States of America.” (p.144). Hence the importance of the idea of repetition for these films, as it functions as a different response to this teleological redemptive temporality. Simone Leigh’s The Chorus was a crucial piece for me to better understand how this aural repetition can work as a solvent to these teleological narratives by actively creating a temporal palimpsest (or spiral), eroding a mythological linear narrative of Western thought that has as its bedrock the Greeks. Like, Jafa’s works, it also intervenes in an account of a black redemption narrative that rescue ancient civilizations as a way to promote the idea of African progress. By being present in the Egyptian wing of the museum, Leigh’s sound installation refuses to subscribe to this narrative by evoking those who are erased from it. The oral recital of Hartman’s Manual for General Housework positions minor and subaltern experiences amidst archeological treasures, denying any teleological historicism that would erase these experiences in its search for redemption.
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ReplyDeleteThis week, I found myself struggling to work through, but extremely interested in, both the Jafa films and the readings. At the center of the material I will focus on for this short essay is the concept of repetition. Deeply related to frequency, my curiosity about repetition stems from its role in black life/joy/suffering/pleasure. Thinking of what Christina Sharpe refers to as the weather, I want to use these readings as an opportunity to reflect on the possibilities engendered by black culture’s reliance on repetition (Snead) to navigate the “weather”, or alternatively put, black quotidien life. Specifically, I propose a close examination of the moments in black quotidien life that as Arthur Jafa puts it, “worry the note” (Jafa 267). For Jafa, gospel singers’ tendency to sing runs and to hold notes for long periods of time, or to “worry the note”, treats the note as inherently sonically unstable, enacting a black refusal of the Western tradition that approaches music as a fixed quality.
ReplyDeleteExtending that metaphor, how can we think of moments in black life that function to worry the note—to erode logics of the fixity of existence by both worrying that fixity, and then repeating the worrying? Central for Jafa, both in his theoretical and his creative work, is the black church. The black church, in its own language, is considered “shelter from the storm” from a religious perspective; in terms of Sharpe’s weather, the black church has also stood as (imperfect) shelter for centuries. But Jafa’s interest in the black church and its rhetorics is not only about its sheltering capacities, but its ability to articulate a “worrying of the note”, a liminal space where the black church, and its musical progeny, gospel, rest between the reality of suffering and the promise of a joy (not a pleasure) inexpressible and never-before-seen all while maintaining an incredible immediacy.
James Snead comments that, “the black church must be placed at the center of the manifestations of repetitions in black culture, at the junction of music and language,” meaning that the black church rests in the interval between two formations of black culture that draw “attention to [their] own repetitions”, while simultaneously being a sacred space. I wonder if we can think of the placement of the black church in a space of interval as fundamental to its sacredness, a way that the black church that holds itself taut in a liminal space. How is the repeated enmeshment of music, language, and belief both a sacred practice and place, a melding that speaks to black culture’s attention to internal repetition?
I am compelled to think through the relationship between motion (rate of change over time) and movement (rate of change over space) as it relates to frequential contact and its resultant sound in black culture. An attention to interval, as patterned, cyclical, or returning, occasions a meeting between discourses on black culture and theories of sound and frequency. Frequency is necessarily about returning and about periodic utterance, as sonic frequency in particular measures “the number of complete vibrations or cycles occurring per unit of time in a vibrating system” (Harvard Dictionary of Music). As such, frequency and its subunits (motion and movement) correspond with black culture’s nonprogressive, circular continuance, otherwise considered repetition. Return, then, marks black culture’s divergence from the category of Western History, privileging “equilibrium” over “accumulation” as the practice of the “the cut,” a break from and return to the prior sequence (Snead 150). This is to say two related things: Black culture likewise diverges relationally and socially from the West, as this principle of repetitive organization disallows accumulative superiority of one element, say an individual “rhythmic or tonal climax ‘above the mass’” (150); and, in accordance, black culture is not necessarily ecstatic or itself not aspirationally transcendent. To the point of the latter, though much can be explored about blackness and the affectivity of Enlightenment reason, black culture ontologically does not seek to be outside itself. Moving beyond the metric of the linear and towards an awareness of the circulatory entanglement between motion and movement attends to the haptic performance of repetition in black cultural expression.
ReplyDeleteTo think black culture ecstatically is to think movement away from, is to think progress. Rather, black cultural repetition occurs at the level of tone, which is against progressive ecstasy and along with relational hapticity, particularly if we envision the vibrational contact between sonic wave lengths (150). Arthur Jafa echoes this in “Black Visual Intonation” when introducing his cinematic intervention Black Visual Intonation (BVI) as a visual-sonic strategy to represent Black pleasure’s “nontempered” and unfixed tonality. He accords BVI with two functions “the use of irregular, nontempered (nonmetronomic) camera rates” and “frame replication” in efforts to “approximate Black visual intonation” (267). To Jafa, the irregularity of the nonmetronomic camera rates resembles the “tendency in Black music to ‘worry the note’ – to treat notes as indeterminate, inherently unstable sonic frequencies” (267), therefore attending to the frequential irregularity and repetition that founds black culture.
As we turn our attention to cinema, I have been thinking about Christina Sharpe and her notion of the “Weather”. For Sharpe, meteorology figures antiblackness as not just total climate, but as that which registers its violence “in the present and into the future” (21). Put differently, she describes the afterlives of slavery as contingency, as that which portends its repetition, and for her this (weather) system depends precisely on mediated representation. As we discussed, she thereby decries films such as 12 Years a Slave insofar as they normalize violence on the black body, on one hand, but more importantly on the other stage the rehearsal—my extrapolation—for subsequent brutality into the future. Kara Keeling may align insofar as she describes Love Is the Message, as the Message is Death by Arthur Jafa. Keeling writes: “Love Is the Message does not invite meaning so much as it makes Black existence resonate within a media ecology in which the accumulated meanings ascribed to and on Black flesh continue to render Black bodies fungible, hypervisible, and legible in ways that reproduce existing power relations” (142). She reminds the “unequal calculus of visibility distribution” (101) mandates that entry into the domain of visibility costs in effect the reproduction of power and the visual logics (dare we say the gaze) that prop up its regime. In that sense we might substitute her use of “ecology” with the “Weather” and vice versa. Keeling also echoes someone like Peggy Phelan who, in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, challenges the rightful but perhaps misguided calls for increased representation insofar as it would ascribe to an existing political or cinematic apparatus of visibility.
ReplyDeleteYet for me, contingency definitionally implies the uncertainty as to not only the possibility of recurrence, but also whether iterability necessitates exact repetition or conversely inscribes the im/possibility of change, for representation (Phelan again) without reproduction (of anterior logic). While the latter potential may register as naive truism in some regard, it bears repeating as Keeling and Snead do in their work. As Keeling reads Looking for Langston or the Watermelon Woman, these films engage a “temporality in which the past is put in the service of the present” (95). In line with the “queer reproduction” of Grace Hong or “representation without reproduction” of Phelan, the films then reimagine a past that in the history of cinema has “been imbricated with racial epistemologies” (122), or put simply the visualized abjection of racialized subjects, and to this extent already inscribe the failure of “profilmic reality” to properly index the real upon which it bases its privileged status (122). In other words, the very terms of negotiation and capacity to re-imagine otherwise clearly/queerly become embedded within cinematographic language from the start. Keeling refers to Barad and Simondon—I have not read her chapter on Simondon but did just read his “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis”—to discuss this potentiality as “open and processual within a temporality whose future is open” (134). For Simondon, the idea of “becoming” exists as one of the dimensions of human “being,” which involves the ongoing process of individuation. He describes this as a “theater of individuation” in which the subject necessarily falls out of step with itself, that is, stipulates change, and resolves this fundamental incompatibility with its former pre-individualized state, crucially, in the group. In this way, might we posit that repetition not only invites revision, but demands it?
From Imani! (½)
ReplyDeleteOn movement and motion: “Motion is the general term in kinetics, the study of motion. It says nothing about the purpose of a motion, or its origin and destination. Something just happens to change place... However, movement includes some purpose, some origin and destination. A movement is a complete motion, from beginning to end. So movement would be preferred in the arts and social sciences and motion in the natural sciences... Physics studies motion. Transportation studies movement. They may both speak about something changing position but there is a different perspective….A movement is an entity, a thing, not just a change as a motion is. A motion can be studied abstractly but a movement is not fully abstract because it is an entity.” From: https://www.isoul.org/motion-vs-movement/
Rhythm definition:
a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound
a regularly recurring sequence of events, actions, or processes.
"the twice daily rhythms of the tides"
ART
a harmonious sequence or correlation of colors or elements.
--From google definitions
This week I am thinking a lot about the importance and possibility of black dance as it emerges in Jafa's Love is the Message, The Message is Death. For me black dance is deeply linked to James Snead's notion that black culture, which often emerges as "rhythm in music and dance and language." (Snead, 150) Snead's piece also offers a way of thinking about the entanglements of black frequency and black culture's embrace and celebration of return. We see this manifest in the desires of Jafa's Love as well as Black Studies return to Africa, home, or a space of belonging, and/ or safety through the figure of the maternal. I want to think about how black dance is a site through which black bodies are able to access different spatial and temporal planes through affect. That is, black dance (for me) sits at the nexus of two entanglements: black motion & black movement and the affective & the bodily.
To my mind, black motion and black movement are entangled with the oxymoron of black ontology and the assumed position of “the Black” as ontological nothing, fixed, and beside “the Human.” Thinking with definitions of motion that physicists use, I push us to think about black motion through the vector of blackness: what trans* scholar Marquis Bey calls a primordial, anoriginal force. Black scholars such as Achille Mbembe and Calvin Warren place the figure of the “Black” beside, or marginal to that of their white counterpart: “the Human,” therefore reconscipting that fixity they despise onto black bodies. Mbembe, however, makes one important distinction about the figure of the black’s vexed ontological “presence” by separating race or the figure of “the Black” from the black body when he cautions readers to consider race as “both beside and beyond being. It is an operation of the imagination, the site of an encounter with the shadows and hidden zones of the unconscious.” Although Mbembe does not name it, he gestures towards blackness through his conceptions of race. Bey articulates blackness and trans*ness as anoriginal, primordial, poetic forces that are, yes, “indexed imperfectly by bodies said to be black or trans* and thus can succumb to logics of white supremacy and cis sexism.” Blackness as a force lives outside of the enclosed logics of subject formations and positions. It is unfixed, unbound, and beyond the ontological realm which the spatiotemporal enclosure of the Human tells us to imagine. Black motion, then, signifies a change, without purpose, origin, or destination.
From Imani (2/2)
DeleteMovement, unlike motion, focuses on the object. Therefore, in the context of black movement, I want to focus on the black body as the object of black movement. Black bodies are difficult to define (and that is something I am thinking about in my work), but here I was to think about the relationship between the discursive properties of black flesh, which have come to define how we think about black bodies moving. Black flesh, as we know, has been stretched to hold and harbor a plethora of meanings in its social, historic formation as a means of producing what we sometimes think of as blackness. But, here, I want to think about how black bodies and those individuals who bear the weight of black flesh and all its meaning, "symbolic substitutions" (Spillers), and woundings bends and weird flesh for reasons outside of violence done unto their flesh. Therefore, we have to think not only about the surface of the flesh, but also the lining and interior of the flesh. The interior, exteriority of the black flesh gives it a permeability and an elasticity that is part and parcel with our inability to catch blackness as a force. I believe that black movement (dance, gesture, etc.) allows the black body to catch blackness in motion. The moments we see the eruption of Lebron's dunk, black people slow winin', jukin', and gettin' light and turning inward in circles, towards one another intimately, or turning in on and harnessing blackness, we are seeing black bodies catch and touch what Chance the Rapper calls "the spirit coming in braile." Black trans* theorist C Riley Snorton writes this about the relationship between blackness and trans*ness: "Although the perception that “race” and “gender” are fixed and knowable terms is the dominant logic of identity, in this book “trans” is more about a movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival, and “blackness” signifies upon an enveloping environment and condition of possibility. Here, trans—in each of its permutations—finds expression and continuous circulation within blackness, and blackness is transected by embodied procedures that fall under the sign of gender." (Snorton, 2) This is important, because in many ways the flow of movement that Snorton emphasizes as a key constituent of trans*ness as a force allows blackness to move. Therefore, what we see when we think gender in black performance is perhaps catching something we cannot yet name.
Although we are not focusing on Joseph's Sweet Flypaper, I feel that two dance sequences continue to stand out in my mind as two prime examples of the relationship between black dance, black motion, and black movement. The moment I want to focus on is when the football player jukes (a football terms for moving around) a plethora of football players (some fall as they attempt to grab his ankles and they fail to touch him as he touches blackness and moves to touch the touch down). This stutter stutter stutter, bah, bah, bah, bada, bah of the juke like other forms of dance that use the same word is about the haptic and touching the frequency of blackness. The Joseph film discusses how the football player, the next day, returns to sports through basketball. This return, for me, is not about the tensions of black male upward mobility and sports, but about his desire to return to blackness and his way of catching blackness is through the embodied performance of sports.
Therefore, I am thinking about how black bodies, black people come to access the trans*ness of blackness (or the movement of blackness) through embodied practice. This catching, this touching, to me, signals the meeting between entities that desire the other: blackness and black bodies. This ability/possibility/movement to catch/ touch blackness in the rhythm of repeated desire to return "someplace I can feel safe"--or someplace we can only strive for some when-- is what I see as black dance's possibility.
Imani