The idea of documentation has been with us since the start of the seminar, from Fred Moten’s discussions of truth in Emmett Till’s photograph to last week’s thinking around telling stories from and against the archive in “Venus in Two Acts” and ‘America.’ I take as a point of entry three definitions, all from Merriam-Webster:
Documentation: The act or an instance of furnishing or authenticating with documents; the provisions of documents in substantiation, also: the conformity to historical or objective facts or the provision of footnotes, appendices, or addenda referring to or containing documentary evidence. [etymology: Late Latin ‘documentum’ official paper, from Latin, lesson, proof, from ‘docēre,’ to teach]
Document: Something (such as a photograph or recording) that serves as evidence or proof; a writing conveying information; to construct or produce (something, such as a movie or novel) with authentic situations or events [transitive verb]
Documentary: Being or consisting of documents; employing documentation
There are two primary arcs through which I want to consider these definitions, and documentation in the context of a frequential theorization of black life. The first is the necessary engagement with evidence, or the attempt to make an authentic claim to truth with the provision of material information. According to the first definition, the presentation of footnotes, for example, is a way to verify historical reality as a matter of record. If writing is the dominant mode through which the evidentiary is framed, a visualization through language, then what might constitute a “counter-writing”? For Christina Sharpe, this may be where black annotation and redaction come in—the very space of the margin or addenda that materializes the gaps between documents, or the silences of the archive (as in “Venus in Two Acts”). In the visual texts of Richard Wright, Hughes/DeCarava, and particularly DuBois’s Data Portraits, documentation is distributed across text and image, and claims are made in different ways. For Wright, the FSA photographs serve as illustrative for the collective claims of '12 Million Black Voices,' whereas for Wright and DeCarava, the images are evocative of a social soundscape that eludes evidentiary capacities as typically imagined. DuBois’s Data Portraits, grounded in apparently empirical parameters, simultaneously represent the fictions of race itself, as Alexander Weheliye posits in his theory of diagrammatic physiognomy. These are just a handful of examples that might lead us to ask how evidentiality may be troubled.
The second way into documentation is through the notion of action or the encounter as drawn out in the latter two definitions. That is, documentation as a verb, utterance, and an enactment of the process of turning reality into a document. In other words, this is a mode of practice, a process of becoming and encountering the written word, the image, or sonic text through a kind of making. This is perhaps the critical fabulation taking place in Bradley’s ‘America’ and Kahlil Joseph’s ‘Flypaper,’ where we bear witness to sound and image being put into intervallic conversation with each other, documenting not the archive it represents but the methodology through which that representation takes shape. Seen in this way, documentation becomes the recording of that process of mediation itself, which the cinematic form in particular itself to. Erika Balsom, imagining a community that reclaims (in part) enlightenment principles of reality in our post-truth moment, writes specifically about this relaying quality of film:
"With a frequency not found in other forms of nonfiction image-making, documentary reflects on its relationship to truth. And unlike the written word, it partakes of an indexical bond to the real, offering a mediated encounter with physical reality … "
For the sake of brevity, I’ll end here, pondering how the forms of nonfiction image-making we’ve come across differ from the documentary, and how the two concepts might inform each other as well as the fictional mode. While these questions of evidence may seem overstated at times, I believe the implications of documentation as a material form (noun) as well as a process of making (verb) are central to our discussions around what constitutes narrative.
In addition to the references for writing our glossaries that have already been named, I’d also like to put forward Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting.” It's available to read on Eve Tuck's website. I will be thinking about it in my response post for this week as well as in my glossary and hope others find it interesting as well.
Repetition
My keyword for this week is repetition. We’ve previously discussed at length the relationship between repetition and the cut. However, rereading Tuck & Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting” has also inspired me to think of repetition in relation to forms of haunting. Tuck & Ree associate the figure of haunting with the “relentless remembering and reminding” of the violence of the settler colonial past and present (642). Haunting is the echoes of the shrieks, cries, and screams of history’s victims into the present, it represents the always-happening temporal collapse of the present and the future. Evoking Snead’s analysis of Hegel, Tuck & Ree contrast narratives of haunting and history in American and Japanese horror movies. American horror movies often end with a kind of “problem solving” (641) that ends the haunting and returns the protagonist to their no longer disrupted present. However, in the J-horror movies they describe—Ringu (1998) and Dark Water (2002)—hauntings are not so easily reconciled, and instead require the protagonist to become complicit in the haunting, thereby enabling their repetition. Progress is not possible, only further enmeshment in the temporal frequencies of violence and trauma. Thinking of repetition as haunting means acknowledging that the repetition is always ongoing and, if it can be stopped, it is only temporary, with the re-starting itself forming another cycle of repetition. We’ve asked in previous classes what it would mean to stay with the repetition; thinking of repetition as haunting means we have no other choice but to learn.
Some initial notes on "refrain": (v). to stop oneself from doing something, to abstain, to hold back (n). A repeated line or number of lines in a poem or song
Beginning with the solidity of the noun form of the word: refrains help poems and songs stick in our memories. In a sense, refrains are variations on repetition. The refrain is only ever a few lines and it often comes attached to another stanza. It seems to disguise its repetition by attaching itself to others. These lines occasionally come out of the poem as we remember them well. However, the refrain does not only help us remember the poem or song when it isn’t in front of us; it also helps us remember the poem as we read it and hear it aloud.
I am still remembering the white cloth and the rotating bodies of Garret Bradley’s America. In an effort towards re-crafting a history (and national-mythical history seems always present in the word America), the film creates a history within itself. As Heather so eloquently put it last week, the white flag was once part of a KKK costume. The repetition of the object, in this case, the repetition of a literal clothesline gathers a memory of its uses, its attachments to a particular stanza of history, as it moves through the film. I’ve begun extracting this memorable bit in order to notice the white cloth around me: my dishtowels, summer clothes, my newly-purchased face mask.
Memory is activated into America’s past and into America (2019)’s past. The repetition of the found archival object, Lime Kiln Film Day, makes it seem like a memory, something familiar amid the every-changing vignettes. Within the formal and conceptual project of the film, which aims to imagine a history of black film that could-have-been if Lime Kiln had been released, these images as a refrain create an active memory of the film as seen before. The refrain perhaps takes something out of the subjunctive; it has happened before, if only within the frame of the artwork.
The refrain is a line or two: one cloth floating through the air, two rotating figures. The refrain does not have the full force of the chorus, the resonance and the harmonies of many voices. It seems to live naturally within the stanza it inhabits.
The trickier noun form: refraining asks us to stop ourselves. The repetition invites a pause or, perhaps, even a moment of silence.
In America, a large industrial fan sits alone and inactive for several moments. Then, the camera pans to moving machinery. The quiet remains as the industrial noise, like the would-be whir of the fan, has been turned off in the favor of soft bell noises. We hear the whir of the fan elsewhere: hidden underneath the radio, alongside the brush of grass, or in the rush of air flying past Bessie Coleman. The blades' spinning motion, while halted in the shot, seems to inform the camera’s circular movement. To pause somewhere, to hold back the cool air of the fan at one point, cannot stop the refrain’s reappearance. Bradley ends the film on a still shot of Lime Kiln. The refrained object, the bits of lines. The repetition itself perhaps eventually needs to be held back for the memory to sink in. Does the refrain ask us to then stay in that memory? To be haunted by it?
As we consider the range of possible aesthetic interventions into the conditions of ordinary black life, we might enlist abstraction as an anti-humanist tactic, allowing us to overturn expectations of fidelity to a putative sociological or subjective authenticity. We need not, however, oppose the abstract to the concrete. We may recognize the usefulness of abstraction for traversing scalar thresholds and expressing modes of aggregation, without ignoring the situated and the singular. Form and formlessness are mutually constitutive. Figuration, then, is crucial to our understanding of abstraction, to an extent that is obscured by the traditional division between abstract and figurative visual art. We may be equally wary of figurative language, to the extent that metaphor privileges commensuration and comparability over difference-without-separability (Ferreira da Silva). We might understand figuration as a way of proposing a relation between matter and sense, without fixing a set of correspondences between the “real” and the “imagined.” For inspiration, we might look to Du Bois’s statistical portraits of black life, which “facilitate the proximate visualization of abstract forces of power rather than the representation of individuals or groups” (Weheliye, “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy,” 26). By rethinking the relationship between abstraction and figuration, we may expand the tools and resources available to us for miming the creative energy of black sociality.
From Merriam-Webster: (as adjective) 1. fastened by or as if by a band : CONFINED 2. very likely : SURE 3. placed under legal or moral restraint or obligation 4. of a book : secured to the covers by cords, tapes, or glue 5. intending to go : GOING
(as noun) 1. LEAP, JUMP the action of rebounding 2. (plural bounds) a limiting line : BOUNDARY something that limits or restrains
(as verb) 1. to move by leaping 2. to form a separating line or the boundary of : ENCLOSE
My interest in this term comes out of a discussion in Bob O’Meally’s Harlem Renaissance class earlier today on August Wilson’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. We discussed the prominence of being bound and binding in the play, particularly through the characters of Bynum (the conjure man) and Selig (the people finder, descended from the operators of slave ships and slave catchers). I am thinking about the frequential rate of the word bound, in its oscillation through a myriad of meanings, from the confining to the freeing: to be bound to a place as opposed to being bound for somewhere; to be bound to an institution (the plantation, the tenement, the prison) as opposed to being able to bound over a boundary. “Bound” is permanently caught between the imperative to stillness and the imperative to movement. This caught in the between resonates with a hum:
(again from MW) Noun (1) and Verb (1) Middle French bond, from bondir to leap, from Vulgar Latin *bombitire to hum, from Latin bombus deep hollow sound – more at BOMB entry 1
The etymological connection between “bound” and “bomb” recalls Langston Hughes’ question of what happens to a dream deferred. The deep hollow sound takes on the register of black noise as the will to movement strives against the force of confinement.
respite (noun) an interval of rest or relief ; a short break or escape from something difficult or unpleasant (synonym) breathing space
This term has been persistently tugging at my thought throughout the semester and is animating much of my work at this moment. From the very first blog post, I have been thinking about frequency in terms of the “rhythmic seriality” (Campt 107) of antiblack violence and black death. Frequency as the repetition of state interventions in the ability of black life to simply be. Frequency as the incessant requirement to respond to these interventions. Frequency as seriality, as repetition is both temporal and spatial in nature. Respite is a way of desiring time and space of and for relief. However, if “the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack,” where, spatially, can one go to escape (Sharpe 104)? Here is why I see respite, in conversation with the multiple registers of frequency, as a key term. Respite as indexing a temporality acknowledges the inability of complete escape. However, thinking with our discussions around “the interval,” respite is a way of thinking through a temporary, momentary, short break from this climate. I have been thinking about respite in conversation with other similar terms: relief, rest, retreat, refuge, recovery. None of these terms are able to index both temporality and spatiality as does respite (a term that is close is reprieve). The temporariness of respite is key. My questions then become: where can we go (spatially) for relief, to remove ourselves, even if just for a moment? How do we extend those moments (here I’m thinking of our discussion on Jafa and the extending of the interval)? How do we maintain “sites of privacy that allow black people to experiment with undisciplined and undocumented emancipatory practices” (Abdul-Rahman 2018:352)? How do we “produce out of the weather [our] own ecologies” (Sharpe 106)? What new modes of relation and practices can we employ that otherwise “becom[e] impossible when we engage in contest[ing the state] as the primary mode of Black politics” (Shange 2019:3)? I see respite as a temporary refusal to engage in order to commune, strategize, and create on different terms. Sharpe’s invocation of ecology is key for thinking through the spatiality of respite. For my longer piece, I will turn to Du Bois’s “Of the Black Belt,” “The Negro as He Really Is,” and Data Portraits to engage the way he narrates and visualizes huddling, sound, and movement in the Black ecology of the Black Belt to think through the multiple frequencies of respite. I will then think Du Bois’s ecology alongside my own interests of exploring the possibilities of respite in and through the ecology of “the woods.”
Sound[ing] The intangibility of sound exposes its beautiful fragility. Even when a sound is loud, demanding and persistent, it is still a vibration that almost always happens in passing. And yet, sound is an inevitable part of our lives. The most immediate proof of that inevitability is the fact that we can never “turn off” our ears, and so we hear all the time. Additionally, our spatial orientation of the world happens through hearing, and our expression of self manifests itself sonically through our voices and speech. Even if we were to consider only these three factors, it comes clear that sound assumes a very active role in our lives. However, I always find it a bit curious that while sound is significant to us, there is still a lot about sound that we don’t know, and don’t fully understand. In the seminal essay “The Grain of the Voice”, Roland Barthes asks how does language interpret music, and whether or not it does it well? His answer is a good place to start a discussion about sound: Alas, it seems, very badly. If one looks at the normal practice of music criticism (or, which is often the same thing, of conversations ‘on’ music), it can readily be seen that a work (or its’ performance) is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective.
I chose to begin my attempt to define sound with Barthes’ critique of the discourse ‘on’ music for two reasons: first, to ground a basic understanding that sound and music are not one and the same (in fact, the two are vastly different), and second is to further elaborate the issue Barthes presents: the use of the adjective in order to describe music or sound. Up until the rise of OOO (Object Oriented Ontology) and the discourse on the agency of things, the consideration of sound solely as an attribute of a tangible object was very dominant. Sound was (and in some cases it is still) thought of as an adjective; an afterthought or a result of an action. Theories of music and sound studies began emphasizing the significance of sound back in the 1940s with the emergence of Musique Concréte; a genre of music that aimed to emancipate sound from its oppressed condition as an attribute, and to consider all sounds, regardless of their sources, as objects in and of themselves. Recognized with the French tradition of electroacoustic music and namely with the composer Pierre Schaeffer, Musique Concréte attempted to encourage listeners to hear everyday sounds with the same attentiveness they would allocate to more common forms of musical sounds. While some would argue that Musique Concréte met the goal it set out to achieve within the field of music, the tradition has failed to carry the notion of the sound object, and the type of listening it calls for, to other sonic realms outside of music. Several decades later, sound studies are still focused on finding new ways to emancipate sounds from their producing sources along Schaefferian lines. In a book from 2018, theorist Christoph Cox proposes to think of the sonic as a flux or a stream. Cox defines objects as things that can maintain their identity through the passing of time, whereas their attributes cannot. He considers sound as an object because it happens (and therefore is able to change) through the passing of time: Sounds appear to be much more akin to independently existing objects, since they survive changes to their properties. A sound that begins as a low rumble may become a high-pitched whine, while remaining a single sonic stream. […] Sounds have sources, of course, and these are often relatively durable objects. Yet we can identify distinct sonic streams that come from a common source. We can also (and generally do) experience sounds without experiencing their sources; and we can experience those sources without any sounds. So while sources generate or cause sounds, sounds are not bound to their sources as qualities. Rather, they are distinct individuals.
This passage allows for the possibility of an independent sound. Cox does not cancel the fact that sounds emanate from a source, but he does call for an understanding that sound is not an attribute of an object or a doing. Rather, this definition of sound allows us to consider the sound itself as a doing. The doing of sound, then, should be called sounding. My notion of sound as a verb, as a doing, is informed by J.L. Austin’s proposal of the performative utterance and speaks directly to the intangibility of sound that I opened this definition with. Austin proposes to consider language itself as a thing that does ,rather than as a signifier of an action. To put it differently: It seems clear that to utter the sentence (if, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.
Thus, sounding as an the action itself, and not as an adjective or an attribute of a tangible object, acknowledges and accounts for the intangibility of the sonic, because it invites a listening that hears the sounding action as independent from the source that caused it. As such, it sets the foundation through which we can listen to other sounding elements we encounter in the social aspects of our lives.
I have been trying to consider “re/vision” as a mode of looking with and from nowhere that could attend to the future conditional and subjunctive temporalities examined in this seminar. In this mobilization of “revision,” I would want to inflect the possibilities available in “vision” with the repetition given in the prefix “re,” just as much as I would want to keep in mind everyday practices of revision, with its attendant processes of cutting and editing.
“Vision” on its own helps us move toward a way of looking with, through, and after “something which is apparently seen otherwise than by ordinary sight” (to borrow one of the definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary). Already, in taking up the OED’s definition, we would have to offer a revision of what we would take as “ordinary sight.”
On the one hand, “ordinary sight” could refer to the gaze(s) and grammar(s) that daily enclose(s) black life in what Sharpe calls the “Weather” or “total climate” of anti-blackness. In this case, then, “vision” as seeing “something otherwise” could direct us to methods of re/visioning (perhaps distinct from revising, perhaps not) the given. These methods would include, for instance, Moten’s refusal to “neutralize the phonic substance of the photograph,” Sharpe’s process of annotation and redaction in the wake, Campt’s “grammatical practice of futurity,” and Hartman’s critical fabulation of the archives.
At the same time, each of these methods could lead us to revise the OED’s definition of vision to mean “something which is seen otherwise precisely by way of ordinary sight,” with “ordinary sight” instead describing an attentiveness to the quotidian frequencies of black life within the context of social death. To take one instance, Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes conjure visions in the sense of “seeing otherwise by way of ordinary sight” when they look through, with and after those whom Ellison would say are looking from nowhere. “Vision” from nowhere thus imagines otherwise with reference to futurity.
“Re/vision,” then, would emphasize the repetition and return that is already involved or assumed in these methods of generating visions or “seeing otherwise.” The problem with vision by itself is that it could suggest that one is trying to impose a teleological image onto futurity. The problem with revision by itself is that it could suggest a trajectory that is only bent on reconstructing historical events of a past that one assumes unfolds according to a linear temporality. “Re/vision” keeps the cut of repetition and its excess of signification, its phonic substance, within but not of its frame, as a way of anticipating and dwelling otherwise. “Re/vision” looks back and forth as it tries to stay with Hartman’s effort to “jeopardize the status of the event” and attempts to follow Campt’s grammar of the future real conditional. “Re/vision” returns to whatever is held as irreversible and whatever is cast as probable or inevitable to “rewrite the time of the photograph” (Moten), to rewrite whatever was cut from/into time in a flash of light from the huddling of nowhere (Du Bois, Ellison). “Re/vision” stays and looks with, through, and after impressions, scintillations, and frequencies that exceed apprehension because they never were and never could be settled in the first place.
*“quotidian frequencies of *black lives looking out (for each other, here and there, through opaqueness as well as windows)* within the context of social death”
*"Ellison would say are looking from/as nowhere. 'Vision' from nowhere --- imagines otherwise ----."
*“to rewrite whatever was cut from/into time in a flash of light, *cut from/into* the huddling of nowhere”
*Also, the back-slash itself marks a cut that is here kept within re/vision [re(+/-)/(+/-)vision]
I have been thinking a lot about representation and/as repetition (of the past). Snead contrasts repetition in black culture with a Freudian pathology of repetition compulsion, wherein, against "normal" memory and even morality, the "patient re-stages the past." He thus raises a question of trauma, the conceptual basis of which not just emerges from a Western notion of and treatment against repetition, as he details, but in effect seems to disregard that which endures beyond catastrophic occurrence, that is, the violent maintenance of racist and colonial oppression. Put differently, how do we account for trauma whose basis stems not from the shock of an isolated event (an accident or war, Freud theorizes), but from the scene of subjection whose ongoing repetition in or as the afterlives of slavery renders it utterly quotidian?
In "Fly Paper," Kahlil Joseph offers the story of a man who has lost not his memory (there are plenty of those stories, he says), but who "has lost his forgetting." This seems to introduce a paradox at the heart of repetition qua black culture. Insofar as trauma implies the breakdown of a "normal" memory function, that is, that which normally forgets and misremembers, does Joseph then tell the story of a man who endures a traumatic past on repeat and without the mediation that is forgetting? This would appear to diagnose the man with a pathology of repetition compulsion. To what extent does this diagnosis recall Christina Sharpe, whose critique of films like "12 Years a Slave" implies therein a repeated normalization of past (and thus future) anti-black violence? This paradox, Snead offers, unravels in the "cut," in the accidents and unpredictability of repetition that demands variation, that in black culture becomes improvisation through performance. He reads this specifically within musical terms, yet how might this idea also call instead, against the rehearsal of subjection, for the visual representation of black social life as we see in "America" or "Lime Kiln Field Day"?
Posting for Michael Paninski: intention — purpose, aim, willful action, or according to the ‘Merriam-Webster,’ 1a : what one intends to do or bring about (…) 2 : a determination to act in a certain way. Another common usage of the expression reaches over into the practice of literary or art criticism, where “intention” delineates the aim or design which a critic detects in a writer’s or artists work. This corresponds largely with what roman languages depict only since the 18th century as ‘intent,’ in the sense of the aim of an action which is initiated or led by willfulness. The original Latin word or phrase is a translation of diverse Greek words, all derivatives of τείνειν (‘teinein’), to tighten, tense or stretch. The term ‘intentio’ was an old effort of Scholasticism to render the Stoics’ term τόνος (‘tonos’), which was also used in the context of medicine (some of us might have experienced this in the form of neck tension due to the writers sitting posture) and in music (like the ‘tritone,’ which is defined as a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones). Throughout the Middle Ages the term ‘intentio’ was not yet related to desire and will, but to the act of perceiving; to the vigor or mental tension that is necessary for recognition and perception. “Due to their sloppy Latin”, Fritz Mauthner writes, “the Scholastics still heard the original meaning of ‘intentio’: namely the metaphor of the drawing of the bow and aiming of the arrow. Therefore, ‘intentio’ designated attentiveness or the awareness of an object which was already or is yet to be perceived.” One could ask then, why is this stretch into the philological layers of the term ‘intention’ useful? In rereading my blog posts and the notes I took in preparation for this contribution to a glossary for our class, I was reminded of Arthur Jafa focusing on “Black Visual Intonation” and the idea to replicate the tendency of Black music to “worry the note” (Jafa, 207) for a coming Black cinema. In conversation with Jafa, I am listening to Ralph Ellison, and how he discovered his form through the “lyrical sound” of Louis Armstrong, who, in bending his musical instrument in unusual ways, “made poetry out of being invisible.” (Ellison, 8) With utmost precision and commitment to play not just fixed notes, but striking the notes of different pitches and intervals, Armstrong’s music introduced Ellison to “a new analytical way of listening.” We could also think about John Coltrane’s »clusters«: the attempt to use as many notes as possible on his Saxophone to make one sound. I was also thinking about the distorted and convulsive muscle movements of Storyboard P in Khalil Joseph’s videos. But, furthermore, and in coming back closer to the term at hand, I was thinking about resonance and receptivity and how they are necessarily linked with the question of frequency. How is the frequency of Black life related to listening? How are the layers of tension and attention related to listening opening up the ethical dimension of alterity and otherness? And in particular the question of how I relate to and write academically about the discourse of Black life. And suddenly, I am facing my own positionality and the role of intentionality in reading Fanon, confronting me, his white reader: “Disoriented, incapable of confronting the other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from my self, and gave myself up as an object. […] Yet this reconsideration of myself, this thematization, was not my idea.” (92)
Due to the incapability of confronting his other, Fanon had to face himself as other, as the object for this very other. This thematization of himself originates not from within himself, but from an outsider’s perspective that overdetermines and fixes him as “BLACK MAN” (95). In echo with the complex grid of dispossession Fanon is charting here, I am very much interested in the dimension of non-intentionality and the question of receptive thinking-writing that is attuned to the auditive qualities of photography. The concept of intentionality outlined above helps me to mobilize a certain language as an abstract socializing system, based on a means-to-an-end logic, with a special emphasis on the idea of sound and frequency related to an embodied, sensual experiential encounter with the other that rests on attentiveness and withholding. This very relationship reminded me of Emmanuel Levinas, who said that “it [intentionality] is attention to speech or welcome of the face, ‘hospitality’ and not thematization.” It is often repeated that a main difference between seeing and listening is connected to the ability to close one’s eyes in order not to see; something which is impossible for hearing. In regards to this I am interested in the possibility of approaching thinking and writing, not as a forceful act of making images speak, but opening oneself up to the “affective register” (Campt) the Visual Frequency of Black Life intonates in photographs and films. For it is precisely here that darkness and light find to each other—irrespective if one has his eyes closed or open.
I’m craving to define morning, mourning, moaning, and mo’nin’ as if they can't be understood without one another’s compliment, or echo.
Morning (the start of a new day, light, reprieve, sight, sense, clarity, justice) is met by Mourning (the ongoing, timeless, illogic, irreversible, opaque) and is undone by it. Mourning renders Morning powerless to replenish. Or, put differently, Mourning haunts Morning—dapples its light with the kind of suffering that does not heed the calendar or the clock.
And Moaning further dismantles Mourning by rendering it wordless. Moaning (the unbearable, unspecific, abundant, violent in its repetition) is testimony of phonic meaning without the baubles of language. Moaning transgresses language, is in excess of language, and illuminates language’s lack. Moaning opens a wound that Mo’nin’ marks with an indelible double time. Mo’nin’ creates music from Moaning, creates rhythm, marks time, marks the coming of the Morning.
All four are linked in a cycle of destruction and production. It is “the ongoing destruction of the ongoing production of (a) (black) performance, which is what I am, which is what you are or could be if you can listen while you look” (Moten 200).
Do all four, tethered to one another in anticipation and loss and regeneration, create the fundaments of black performance?
I am interested in thinking about remembering as an active recollection of pasts rendered present and as a re-membering of bodies, lives, and practices dispersed by imperial ruptures of time and space. I am compelled by how Linda Tuhiwai Smith mobilizes remembering as an Indigenous anticolonail strategy of repair in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples:
“The remembering of a people relates not so much to a remembering of a golden past but more specifically to the remembering of a painful past, re-membering in the terms of connecting bodies with place and experience, and, importantly, people’s responses to that pain…Both healing and transformation, after what is referred to as historical trauma, become crucial strategies in any approach that asks a community to remember what they may have decided unconsciously or consciously to forget” (Smith 147).
Re/membering could help us to think about the embodied ways in which we can re-inhabit the world amongst others in ways which value and validate communities ostensibly destroyed by the violent upheaval of displacement, enslavement, and exploitation which have shaped the present conditions of life under global racial capitalism. Re/membering is not a nostalgia for an idealized past, but rather a collective action that gestures at relinquishing the destructive imperial propulsion that promises but never delivers “historical progress.” Borrowing terminology from Snead, remembering is a coming to terms with the past through reparative and collective gestures that embrace rather than negate the “repetition compulsion” of the cut.
I am thinking of clock in the queer of color vernacular sense. To clock someone’s look, as in their outfit, or clock someone’s “mug,” as in their face, is an effort to critique someone’s presentation. It plays with the normative mechanisms that constrain black queer life: pathology, the mug shot, etc. But it is mainly tongue in cheek; we know we are both on the outside so let us see who is able to perform the interior better. And, especially in our difficult collective times, it brings a bit of humor into seemingly impossible social situations. I am, of course, thinking after “Paris is Burning” and “Looking for Langston,” but also after Marlon Riggs’s “Tongues United.” Riggs talks about the “Snap!” as an action that queers of color can use to signal emotions, judgements, and connections—and they all seem along the lines of the clock. What I find particularly fascinating about the clock is the latent meanings nestled in each clock-gesture: time, ethics, sonic critique, and play. Shangela has this great line: “now punch the clock it’s time to werq”—even in all of this constraint and play we all have to get to work in the world that constrains us. I am interested in the space of the clock, as opposed to that of the gaze or the look, because the action is contingent on an audience. Both people will be clocked at some point in their lives, and that is acceptable because it is a part of life on the margins. I would like to explore ways in which performance (the performance of the clock, the laughter of the group, etc.) offers alternative ethics for encountering the outside/inside distinction.
(verb) 1. come so close to (an object) as to be or come into contact with it, 2. handle in order to manipulate, alter, or otherwise affect, especially in an adverse way to move to sympathetic feeling or to affect 3. to put in the hands or mouth, idiomatically “he didn’t touch a drop of alcohol that night” 4. to become involved with “I wouldn’t touch it” 5. to speak of in passing “to touch on a subject”
(noun) 1. an act of touching someone or something. 2. a small amount; a trace.
I was surprised to see so many oxymorons in these definitions for “touch” from Merriam Webster online, especially the negative connotations. In my mind, I associate touch with words such as tender, social, and soothe. I found it generative to work through these contradictions: surface/interior, healing/wounding, therapeutic/controlling, fleeting/permanent, aesthetic/literal, and affective/cognitive. To be touched by something can be to be moved by an aesthetic or emotional experience or to be wounded by it. To have something or someone touch you is to be in the realm of surfaces, of flesh and exterior, but also to be interiorally moved, even “to put in the hands or mouth”. Similarly I am reminded by one of our early discussions on the sonic and haptic frequencies of Black life on when sound surrounds/brushes in contact versus when it enters/penetrates. This and/or aspect to touch has also brought up questions for me surrounding a sort of peri-hapticality of being touched and being untouched at the same time. Can there be something saving in peri-hapticality if we take that intersubjectivity is impossible?
From google Put·ty noun /ˈpədē/ noun: putty; plural noun: putties a: a soft, malleable, grayish-yellow paste, made from whiting and raw linseed oil, that hardens after a few hours and is used chiefly for sealing glass panes in wooden window frames. any of a number of malleable substances similar to putty used inside and outside buildings, e.g., plumber's putty, or used for modeling or casting. noun: plumber's putty; noun: lime putty; noun: epoxy putty a: a polishing powder, usually made from tin oxide, used in jewelry work. verb verb: putty; 3rd person present: putties; past tense: puttied; past participle: puttied; gerund or present participle: puttying seal or cover (something) with putty.
Phrases be putty in someone's hands — be easily manipulated or dominated by someone.
mid 17th century: from French potée, literally ‘potful’, from pot ‘pot’.
From Merriam Websters putty noun put·ty | \ ˈpə-tē \ plural putties Definition of putty (Entry 1 of 2) a: a doughlike material typically made of whiting and linseed oil that is used especially to fasten glass in window frames and to fill crevices in woodwork b: any of various substances resembling putty in appearance, consistency, or use a: light brownish-gray to light grayish-brown color a: one who is easily manipulated is putty in her hands putty verb puttied; puttying Definition of putty (Entry 2 of 2) transitive verb a: to use putty on or apply putty to
I have been aesthetically interested in putty as a concept and material since I was a junior in undergrad. I first came to putty aesthetically and intellectually in the context of using aztec clay as a face mask to care for my skin. I soon started to experiment with it. It took me some time to realize that the malleability, neither liquid nor solid, and always in between/ liminal, state of putty resonated with conceptions of blackness and black flesh as both material and ontological plasticity (via Uri McMillan, Tiffany Lethabo King, & Zakkiyah Iman Jackson). Putty seems to get at the material and metaphoric poesis of blackness and its fungibility--in the way it exists, is exchanged, refashioned, is haptically/affectively experienced as coming into being/expressed/felt through liminality, immaterial materiality. Also, the way in which blackness as (non) substance (or the gesture of rubbing the thumb back and forth across the tips of our other phalanges) is deeply entangled with black flesh/black bodies (their fungibility) and its putty-like plasticity, crafted and made through its refashioning through not only modes of violence, but aesthetic modalities of adornment (which are perhaps forms of black annotation). Materially, putty--made from an aztec clay and apple cider vinegar (or water) mixture, for instance,--is in a constant state of liminality, but if made like the mixture I mention it is in a state of almost always drying and hardening, and to remain liminal one must add to it energetically (by molding, kneading, with the hands) and materially (by adding more clay).
I was initially interested in bound because I believe there is something to be said for the way in which its definitions consolidate, holds, and is a discursive space for the entanglement of enclosure and fugitivities such as leaping, or bomb as Alex noted. More, the boundedness of blackness to the violence of slavery and its aftermath creates a plethora of entanglements that reemerge in black studies to be understood and pored over (violence/desire is one). Putty, however, is already unbound and boundless in its form, intelligibility, and existence--always in a state of transience, transition, and ephemerality. Thus, its materiality as neither solid nor liquid gets at the entanglements of the boundedness and boundlessness of blackness’ fungibility as site of enclosure and site of possibility. Putty does something similar in its non-state of matter, its limilaty and unfinishness. Because of this it also grasps the slippage and non normative temporal logics of black life/ blackness/ black flesh (as a material metaphor with a historicity and “embodied referents”) because it has no intervals, but sits at a kind of frequential spiral and long duree that is based on repetition. This repetition creates a vacuum of space that putty materializes as it sits in a state of illogical, illegible is-ness and not necessarily being bounded as something we can consolidate into the imperfect, enclosed language we have to articulate such a force as blackness.
Here is a vimeo link to The Savages: https://vimeo.com/397264869
ReplyDeletePW: campt
Posting for Arnav, who Blogger seems not to like!
ReplyDelete—Documentation—
The idea of documentation has been with us since the start of the seminar, from Fred Moten’s discussions of truth in Emmett Till’s photograph to last week’s thinking around telling stories from and against the archive in “Venus in Two Acts” and ‘America.’ I take as a point of entry three definitions, all from Merriam-Webster:
Documentation: The act or an instance of furnishing or authenticating with documents; the provisions of documents in substantiation, also: the conformity to historical or objective facts or the provision of footnotes, appendices, or addenda referring to or containing documentary evidence. [etymology: Late Latin ‘documentum’ official paper, from Latin, lesson, proof, from ‘docēre,’ to teach]
Document: Something (such as a photograph or recording) that serves as evidence or proof; a writing conveying information; to construct or produce (something, such as a movie or novel) with authentic situations or events [transitive verb]
Documentary: Being or consisting of documents; employing documentation
There are two primary arcs through which I want to consider these definitions, and documentation in the context of a frequential theorization of black life. The first is the necessary engagement with evidence, or the attempt to make an authentic claim to truth with the provision of material information. According to the first definition, the presentation of footnotes, for example, is a way to verify historical reality as a matter of record. If writing is the dominant mode through which the evidentiary is framed, a visualization through language, then what might constitute a “counter-writing”? For Christina Sharpe, this may be where black annotation and redaction come in—the very space of the margin or addenda that materializes the gaps between documents, or the silences of the archive (as in “Venus in Two Acts”). In the visual texts of Richard Wright, Hughes/DeCarava, and particularly DuBois’s Data Portraits, documentation is distributed across text and image, and claims are made in different ways. For Wright, the FSA photographs serve as illustrative for the collective claims of '12 Million Black Voices,' whereas for Wright and DeCarava, the images are evocative of a social soundscape that eludes evidentiary capacities as typically imagined. DuBois’s Data Portraits, grounded in apparently empirical parameters, simultaneously represent the fictions of race itself, as Alexander Weheliye posits in his theory of diagrammatic physiognomy. These are just a handful of examples that might lead us to ask how evidentiality may be troubled.
Part 2:
DeleteThe second way into documentation is through the notion of action or the encounter as drawn out in the latter two definitions. That is, documentation as a verb, utterance, and an enactment of the process of turning reality into a document. In other words, this is a mode of practice, a process of becoming and encountering the written word, the image, or sonic text through a kind of making. This is perhaps the critical fabulation taking place in Bradley’s ‘America’ and Kahlil Joseph’s ‘Flypaper,’ where we bear witness to sound and image being put into intervallic conversation with each other, documenting not the archive it represents but the methodology through which that representation takes shape. Seen in this way, documentation becomes the recording of that process of mediation itself, which the cinematic form in particular itself to. Erika Balsom, imagining a community that reclaims (in part) enlightenment principles of reality in our post-truth moment, writes specifically about this relaying quality of film:
"With a frequency not found in other forms of nonfiction image-making, documentary reflects on its relationship to truth. And unlike the written word, it partakes of an indexical bond to the real, offering a mediated encounter with physical reality … "
For the sake of brevity, I’ll end here, pondering how the forms of nonfiction image-making we’ve come across differ from the documentary, and how the two concepts might inform each other as well as the fictional mode. While these questions of evidence may seem overstated at times, I believe the implications of documentation as a material form (noun) as well as a process of making (verb) are central to our discussions around what constitutes narrative.
In addition to the references for writing our glossaries that have already been named, I’d also like to put forward Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting.” It's available to read on Eve Tuck's website. I will be thinking about it in my response post for this week as well as in my glossary and hope others find it interesting as well.
ReplyDeleteRepetition
My keyword for this week is repetition. We’ve previously discussed at length the relationship between repetition and the cut. However, rereading Tuck & Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting” has also inspired me to think of repetition in relation to forms of haunting. Tuck & Ree associate the figure of haunting with the “relentless remembering and reminding” of the violence of the settler colonial past and present (642). Haunting is the echoes of the shrieks, cries, and screams of history’s victims into the present, it represents the always-happening temporal collapse of the present and the future. Evoking Snead’s analysis of Hegel, Tuck & Ree contrast narratives of haunting and history in American and Japanese horror movies. American horror movies often end with a kind of “problem solving” (641) that ends the haunting and returns the protagonist to their no longer disrupted present. However, in the J-horror movies they describe—Ringu (1998) and Dark Water (2002)—hauntings are not so easily reconciled, and instead require the protagonist to become complicit in the haunting, thereby enabling their repetition. Progress is not possible, only further enmeshment in the temporal frequencies of violence and trauma. Thinking of repetition as haunting means acknowledging that the repetition is always ongoing and, if it can be stopped, it is only temporary, with the re-starting itself forming another cycle of repetition. We’ve asked in previous classes what it would mean to stay with the repetition; thinking of repetition as haunting means we have no other choice but to learn.
Some initial notes on "refrain":
ReplyDelete(v). to stop oneself from doing something, to abstain, to hold back
(n). A repeated line or number of lines in a poem or song
Beginning with the solidity of the noun form of the word: refrains help poems and songs stick in our memories. In a sense, refrains are variations on repetition. The refrain is only ever a few lines and it often comes attached to another stanza. It seems to disguise its repetition by attaching itself to others. These lines occasionally come out of the poem as we remember them well. However, the refrain does not only help us remember the poem or song when it isn’t in front of us; it also helps us remember the poem as we read it and hear it aloud.
I am still remembering the white cloth and the rotating bodies of Garret Bradley’s America. In an effort towards re-crafting a history (and national-mythical history seems always present in the word America), the film creates a history within itself. As Heather so eloquently put it last week, the white flag was once part of a KKK costume. The repetition of the object, in this case, the repetition of a literal clothesline gathers a memory of its uses, its attachments to a particular stanza of history, as it moves through the film. I’ve begun extracting this memorable bit in order to notice the white cloth around me: my dishtowels, summer clothes, my newly-purchased face mask.
Memory is activated into America’s past and into America (2019)’s past. The repetition of the found archival object, Lime Kiln Film Day, makes it seem like a memory, something familiar amid the every-changing vignettes. Within the formal and conceptual project of the film, which aims to imagine a history of black film that could-have-been if Lime Kiln had been released, these images as a refrain create an active memory of the film as seen before. The refrain perhaps takes something out of the subjunctive; it has happened before, if only within the frame of the artwork.
The refrain is a line or two: one cloth floating through the air, two rotating figures. The refrain does not have the full force of the chorus, the resonance and the harmonies of many voices. It seems to live naturally within the stanza it inhabits.
The trickier noun form: refraining asks us to stop ourselves. The repetition invites a pause or, perhaps, even a moment of silence.
In America, a large industrial fan sits alone and inactive for several moments. Then, the camera pans to moving machinery. The quiet remains as the industrial noise, like the would-be whir of the fan, has been turned off in the favor of soft bell noises. We hear the whir of the fan elsewhere: hidden underneath the radio, alongside the brush of grass, or in the rush of air flying past Bessie Coleman. The blades' spinning motion, while halted in the shot, seems to inform the camera’s circular movement. To pause somewhere, to hold back the cool air of the fan at one point, cannot stop the refrain’s reappearance. Bradley ends the film on a still shot of Lime Kiln. The refrained object, the bits of lines. The repetition itself perhaps eventually needs to be held back for the memory to sink in. Does the refrain ask us to then stay in that memory? To be haunted by it?
Abstraction/figuration
ReplyDeleteAs we consider the range of possible aesthetic interventions into the conditions of ordinary black life, we might enlist abstraction as an anti-humanist tactic, allowing us to overturn expectations of fidelity to a putative sociological or subjective authenticity. We need not, however, oppose the abstract to the concrete. We may recognize the usefulness of abstraction for traversing scalar thresholds and expressing modes of aggregation, without ignoring the situated and the singular. Form and formlessness are mutually constitutive. Figuration, then, is crucial to our understanding of abstraction, to an extent that is obscured by the traditional division between abstract and figurative visual art. We may be equally wary of figurative language, to the extent that metaphor privileges commensuration and comparability over difference-without-separability (Ferreira da Silva). We might understand figuration as a way of proposing a relation between matter and sense, without fixing a set of correspondences between the “real” and the “imagined.” For inspiration, we might look to Du Bois’s statistical portraits of black life, which “facilitate the proximate visualization of abstract forces of power rather than the representation of individuals or groups” (Weheliye, “Diagrammatics as Physiognomy,” 26). By rethinking the relationship between abstraction and figuration, we may expand the tools and resources available to us for miming the creative energy of black sociality.
Some notes on bound
ReplyDeleteFrom Merriam-Webster:
(as adjective)
1. fastened by or as if by a band : CONFINED
2. very likely : SURE
3. placed under legal or moral restraint or obligation
4. of a book : secured to the covers by cords, tapes, or glue
5. intending to go : GOING
(as noun)
1. LEAP, JUMP
the action of rebounding
2. (plural bounds) a limiting line : BOUNDARY
something that limits or restrains
(as verb)
1. to move by leaping
2. to form a separating line or the boundary of : ENCLOSE
My interest in this term comes out of a discussion in Bob O’Meally’s Harlem Renaissance class earlier today on August Wilson’s play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. We discussed the prominence of being bound and binding in the play, particularly through the characters of Bynum (the conjure man) and Selig (the people finder, descended from the operators of slave ships and slave catchers). I am thinking about the frequential rate of the word bound, in its oscillation through a myriad of meanings, from the confining to the freeing: to be bound to a place as opposed to being bound for somewhere; to be bound to an institution (the plantation, the tenement, the prison) as opposed to being able to bound over a boundary. “Bound” is permanently caught between the imperative to stillness and the imperative to movement. This caught in the between resonates with a hum:
(again from MW)
Noun (1) and Verb (1)
Middle French bond, from bondir to leap, from Vulgar Latin *bombitire to hum, from Latin bombus deep hollow sound – more at BOMB entry 1
The etymological connection between “bound” and “bomb” recalls Langston Hughes’ question of what happens to a dream deferred. The deep hollow sound takes on the register of black noise as the will to movement strives against the force of confinement.
respite
ReplyDelete(noun) an interval of rest or relief ; a short break or escape from something difficult or unpleasant
(synonym) breathing space
This term has been persistently tugging at my thought throughout the semester and is animating much of my work at this moment. From the very first blog post, I have been thinking about frequency in terms of the “rhythmic seriality” (Campt 107) of antiblack violence and black death. Frequency as the repetition of state interventions in the ability of black life to simply be. Frequency as the incessant requirement to respond to these interventions. Frequency as seriality, as repetition is both temporal and spatial in nature. Respite is a way of desiring time and space of and for relief. However, if “the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack,” where, spatially, can one go to escape (Sharpe 104)? Here is why I see respite, in conversation with the multiple registers of frequency, as a key term. Respite as indexing a temporality acknowledges the inability of complete escape. However, thinking with our discussions around “the interval,” respite is a way of thinking through a temporary, momentary, short break from this climate. I have been thinking about respite in conversation with other similar terms: relief, rest, retreat, refuge, recovery. None of these terms are able to index both temporality and spatiality as does respite (a term that is close is reprieve). The temporariness of respite is key. My questions then become: where can we go (spatially) for relief, to remove ourselves, even if just for a moment? How do we extend those moments (here I’m thinking of our discussion on Jafa and the extending of the interval)? How do we maintain “sites of privacy that allow black people to experiment with undisciplined and undocumented emancipatory practices” (Abdul-Rahman 2018:352)? How do we “produce out of the weather [our] own ecologies” (Sharpe 106)? What new modes of relation and practices can we employ that otherwise “becom[e] impossible when we engage in contest[ing the state] as the primary mode of Black politics” (Shange 2019:3)? I see respite as a temporary refusal to engage in order to commune, strategize, and create on different terms. Sharpe’s invocation of ecology is key for thinking through the spatiality of respite. For my longer piece, I will turn to Du Bois’s “Of the Black Belt,” “The Negro as He Really Is,” and Data Portraits to engage the way he narrates and visualizes huddling, sound, and movement in the Black ecology of the Black Belt to think through the multiple frequencies of respite. I will then think Du Bois’s ecology alongside my own interests of exploring the possibilities of respite in and through the ecology of “the woods.”
Sound[ing]
ReplyDeleteThe intangibility of sound exposes its beautiful fragility. Even when a sound is loud, demanding and persistent, it is still a vibration that almost always happens in passing. And yet, sound is an inevitable part of our lives. The most immediate proof of that inevitability is the fact that we can never “turn off” our ears, and so we hear all the time. Additionally, our spatial orientation of the world happens through hearing, and our expression of self manifests itself sonically through our voices and speech. Even if we were to consider only these three factors, it comes clear that sound assumes a very active role in our lives. However, I always find it a bit curious that while sound is significant to us, there is still a lot about sound that we don’t know, and don’t fully understand.
In the seminal essay “The Grain of the Voice”, Roland Barthes asks how does language interpret music, and whether or not it does it well? His answer is a good place to start a discussion about sound:
Alas, it seems, very badly. If one looks at the normal practice of music criticism (or, which is often the same thing, of conversations ‘on’ music), it can readily be seen that a work (or its’ performance) is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective.
I chose to begin my attempt to define sound with Barthes’ critique of the discourse ‘on’ music for two reasons: first, to ground a basic understanding that sound and music are not one and the same (in fact, the two are vastly different), and second is to further elaborate the issue Barthes presents: the use of the adjective in order to describe music or sound.
Up until the rise of OOO (Object Oriented Ontology) and the discourse on the agency of things, the consideration of sound solely as an attribute of a tangible object was very dominant. Sound was (and in some cases it is still) thought of as an adjective; an afterthought or a result of an action. Theories of music and sound studies began emphasizing the significance of sound back in the 1940s with the emergence of Musique Concréte; a genre of music that aimed to emancipate sound from its oppressed condition as an attribute, and to consider all sounds, regardless of their sources, as objects in and of themselves. Recognized with the French tradition of electroacoustic music and namely with the composer Pierre Schaeffer, Musique Concréte attempted to encourage listeners to hear everyday sounds with the same attentiveness they would allocate to more common forms of musical sounds. While some would argue that Musique Concréte met the goal it set out to achieve within the field of music, the tradition has failed to carry the notion of the sound object, and the type of listening it calls for, to other sonic realms outside of music. Several decades later, sound studies are still focused on finding new ways to emancipate sounds from their producing sources along Schaefferian lines.
In a book from 2018, theorist Christoph Cox proposes to think of the sonic as a flux or a stream. Cox defines objects as things that can maintain their identity through the passing of time, whereas their attributes cannot. He considers sound as an object because it happens (and therefore is able to change) through the passing of time:
Sounds appear to be much more akin to independently existing objects, since they survive changes to their properties. A sound that begins as a low rumble may become a high-pitched whine, while remaining a single sonic stream. […] Sounds have sources, of course, and these are often relatively durable objects. Yet we can identify distinct sonic streams that come from a common source. We can also (and generally do) experience sounds without experiencing their sources; and we can experience those sources without any sounds. So while sources generate or cause sounds, sounds are not bound to their sources as qualities. Rather, they are distinct individuals.
This passage allows for the possibility of an independent sound. Cox does not cancel the fact that sounds emanate from a source, but he does call for an understanding that sound is not an attribute of an object or a doing. Rather, this definition of sound allows us to consider the sound itself as a doing. The doing of sound, then, should be called sounding.
ReplyDeleteMy notion of sound as a verb, as a doing, is informed by J.L. Austin’s proposal of the performative utterance and speaks directly to the intangibility of sound that I opened this definition with. Austin proposes to consider language itself as a thing that does ,rather than as a signifier of an action. To put it differently:
It seems clear that to utter the sentence (if, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.
Thus, sounding as an the action itself, and not as an adjective or an attribute of a tangible object, acknowledges and accounts for the intangibility of the sonic, because it invites a listening that hears the sounding action as independent from the source that caused it. As such, it sets the foundation through which we can listen to other sounding elements we encounter in the social aspects of our lives.
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ReplyDeleteRe/vision
ReplyDeleteI have been trying to consider “re/vision” as a mode of looking with and from nowhere that could attend to the future conditional and subjunctive temporalities examined in this seminar. In this mobilization of “revision,” I would want to inflect the possibilities available in “vision” with the repetition given in the prefix “re,” just as much as I would want to keep in mind everyday practices of revision, with its attendant processes of cutting and editing.
“Vision” on its own helps us move toward a way of looking with, through, and after “something which is apparently seen otherwise than by ordinary sight” (to borrow one of the definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary). Already, in taking up the OED’s definition, we would have to offer a revision of what we would take as “ordinary sight.”
On the one hand, “ordinary sight” could refer to the gaze(s) and grammar(s) that daily enclose(s) black life in what Sharpe calls the “Weather” or “total climate” of anti-blackness. In this case, then, “vision” as seeing “something otherwise” could direct us to methods of re/visioning (perhaps distinct from revising, perhaps not) the given. These methods would include, for instance, Moten’s refusal to “neutralize the phonic substance of the photograph,” Sharpe’s process of annotation and redaction in the wake, Campt’s “grammatical practice of futurity,” and Hartman’s critical fabulation of the archives.
At the same time, each of these methods could lead us to revise the OED’s definition of vision to mean “something which is seen otherwise precisely by way of ordinary sight,” with “ordinary sight” instead describing an attentiveness to the quotidian frequencies of black life within the context of social death. To take one instance, Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes conjure visions in the sense of “seeing otherwise by way of ordinary sight” when they look through, with and after those whom Ellison would say are looking from nowhere. “Vision” from nowhere thus imagines otherwise with reference to futurity.
“Re/vision,” then, would emphasize the repetition and return that is already involved or assumed in these methods of generating visions or “seeing otherwise.” The problem with vision by itself is that it could suggest that one is trying to impose a teleological image onto futurity. The problem with revision by itself is that it could suggest a trajectory that is only bent on reconstructing historical events of a past that one assumes unfolds according to a linear temporality. “Re/vision” keeps the cut of repetition and its excess of signification, its phonic substance, within but not of its frame, as a way of anticipating and dwelling otherwise. “Re/vision” looks back and forth as it tries to stay with Hartman’s effort to “jeopardize the status of the event” and attempts to follow Campt’s grammar of the future real conditional. “Re/vision” returns to whatever is held as irreversible and whatever is cast as probable or inevitable to “rewrite the time of the photograph” (Moten), to rewrite whatever was cut from/into time in a flash of light from the huddling of nowhere (Du Bois, Ellison). “Re/vision” stays and looks with, through, and after impressions, scintillations, and frequencies that exceed apprehension because they never were and never could be settled in the first place.
Quick, initial revisions:
Delete*“quotidian frequencies of *black lives looking out (for each other, here and there, through opaqueness as well as windows)* within the context of social death”
*"Ellison would say are looking from/as nowhere. 'Vision' from nowhere --- imagines otherwise ----."
*“to rewrite whatever was cut from/into time in a flash of light, *cut from/into* the huddling of nowhere”
*Also, the back-slash itself marks a cut that is here kept within re/vision [re(+/-)/(+/-)vision]
Repetition:
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking a lot about representation and/as repetition (of the past). Snead contrasts repetition in black culture with a Freudian pathology of repetition compulsion, wherein, against "normal" memory and even morality, the "patient re-stages the past." He thus raises a question of trauma, the conceptual basis of which not just emerges from a Western notion of and treatment against repetition, as he details, but in effect seems to disregard that which endures beyond catastrophic occurrence, that is, the violent maintenance of racist and colonial oppression. Put differently, how do we account for trauma whose basis stems not from the shock of an isolated event (an accident or war, Freud theorizes), but from the scene of subjection whose ongoing repetition in or as the afterlives of slavery renders it utterly quotidian?
In "Fly Paper," Kahlil Joseph offers the story of a man who has lost not his memory (there are plenty of those stories, he says), but who "has lost his forgetting." This seems to introduce a paradox at the heart of repetition qua black culture. Insofar as trauma implies the breakdown of a "normal" memory function, that is, that which normally forgets and misremembers, does Joseph then tell the story of a man who endures a traumatic past on repeat and without the mediation that is forgetting? This would appear to diagnose the man with a pathology of repetition compulsion. To what extent does this diagnosis recall Christina Sharpe, whose critique of films like "12 Years a Slave" implies therein a repeated normalization of past (and thus future) anti-black violence? This paradox, Snead offers, unravels in the "cut," in the accidents and unpredictability of repetition that demands variation, that in black culture becomes improvisation through performance. He reads this specifically within musical terms, yet how might this idea also call instead, against the rehearsal of subjection, for the visual representation of black social life as we see in "America" or "Lime Kiln Field Day"?
Posting for Michael Paninski:
ReplyDeleteintention
— purpose, aim, willful action, or according to the ‘Merriam-Webster,’ 1a : what one intends to do or bring about (…) 2 : a determination to act in a certain way. Another common usage of the expression reaches over into the practice of literary or art criticism, where “intention” delineates the aim or design which a critic detects in a writer’s or artists work. This corresponds largely with what roman languages depict only since the 18th century as ‘intent,’ in the sense of the aim of an action which is initiated or led by willfulness.
The original Latin word or phrase is a translation of diverse Greek words, all derivatives of τείνειν (‘teinein’), to tighten, tense or stretch. The term ‘intentio’ was an old effort of Scholasticism to render the Stoics’ term τόνος (‘tonos’), which was also used in the context of medicine (some of us might have experienced this in the form of neck tension due to the writers sitting posture) and in music (like the ‘tritone,’ which is defined as a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones). Throughout the Middle Ages the term ‘intentio’ was not yet related to desire and will, but to the act of perceiving; to the vigor or mental tension that is necessary for recognition and perception. “Due to their sloppy Latin”, Fritz Mauthner writes, “the Scholastics still heard the original meaning of ‘intentio’: namely the metaphor of the drawing of the bow and aiming of the arrow. Therefore, ‘intentio’ designated attentiveness or the awareness of an object which was already or is yet to be perceived.”
One could ask then, why is this stretch into the philological layers of the term ‘intention’ useful? In rereading my blog posts and the notes I took in preparation for this contribution to a glossary for our class, I was reminded of Arthur Jafa focusing on “Black Visual Intonation” and the idea to replicate the tendency of Black music to “worry the note” (Jafa, 207) for a coming Black cinema. In conversation with Jafa, I am listening to Ralph Ellison, and how he discovered his form through the “lyrical sound” of Louis Armstrong, who, in bending his musical instrument in unusual ways, “made poetry out of being invisible.” (Ellison, 8) With utmost precision and commitment to play not just fixed notes, but striking the notes of different pitches and intervals, Armstrong’s music introduced Ellison to “a new analytical way of listening.” We could also think about John Coltrane’s »clusters«: the attempt to use as many notes as possible on his Saxophone to make one sound. I was also thinking about the distorted and convulsive muscle movements of Storyboard P in Khalil Joseph’s videos.
But, furthermore, and in coming back closer to the term at hand, I was thinking about resonance and receptivity and how they are necessarily linked with the question of frequency. How is the frequency of Black life related to listening? How are the layers of tension and attention related to listening opening up the ethical dimension of alterity and otherness? And in particular the question of how I relate to and write academically about the discourse of Black life. And suddenly, I am facing my own positionality and the role of intentionality in reading Fanon, confronting me, his white reader:
“Disoriented, incapable of confronting the other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from my self, and gave myself up as an object. […] Yet this reconsideration of myself, this thematization, was not my idea.” (92)
Due to the incapability of confronting his other, Fanon had to face himself as other, as the object for this very other. This thematization of himself originates not from within himself, but from an outsider’s perspective that overdetermines and fixes him as “BLACK MAN” (95). In echo with the complex grid of dispossession Fanon is charting here, I am very much interested in the dimension of non-intentionality and the question of receptive thinking-writing that is attuned to the auditive qualities of photography. The concept of intentionality outlined above helps me to mobilize a certain language as an abstract socializing system, based on a means-to-an-end logic, with a special emphasis on the idea of sound and frequency related to an embodied, sensual experiential encounter with the other that rests on attentiveness and withholding. This very relationship reminded me of Emmanuel Levinas, who said that “it [intentionality] is attention to speech or welcome of the face, ‘hospitality’ and not thematization.”
ReplyDeleteIt is often repeated that a main difference between seeing and listening is connected to the ability to close one’s eyes in order not to see; something which is impossible for hearing. In regards to this I am interested in the possibility of approaching thinking and writing, not as a forceful act of making images speak, but opening oneself up to the “affective register” (Campt) the Visual Frequency of Black Life intonates in photographs and films. For it is precisely here that darkness and light find to each other—irrespective if one has his eyes closed or open.
morning : mourning : moaning : mo’nin’
ReplyDeleteI’m craving to define morning, mourning, moaning, and mo’nin’ as if they can't be understood without one another’s compliment, or echo.
Morning (the start of a new day, light, reprieve, sight, sense, clarity, justice) is met by Mourning (the ongoing, timeless, illogic, irreversible, opaque) and is undone by it. Mourning renders Morning powerless to replenish. Or, put differently, Mourning haunts Morning—dapples its light with the kind of suffering that does not heed the calendar or the clock.
And Moaning further dismantles Mourning by rendering it wordless. Moaning (the unbearable, unspecific, abundant, violent in its repetition) is testimony of phonic meaning without the baubles of language. Moaning transgresses language, is in excess of language, and illuminates language’s lack. Moaning opens a wound that Mo’nin’ marks with an indelible double time. Mo’nin’ creates music from Moaning, creates rhythm, marks time, marks the coming of the Morning.
All four are linked in a cycle of destruction and production. It is “the ongoing destruction of the ongoing production of (a) (black) performance, which is what I am, which is what you are or could be if you can listen while you look” (Moten 200).
Do all four, tethered to one another in anticipation and loss and regeneration, create the fundaments of black performance?
Re/membering
ReplyDeleteI am interested in thinking about remembering as an active recollection of pasts rendered present and as a re-membering of bodies, lives, and practices dispersed by imperial ruptures of time and space. I am compelled by how Linda Tuhiwai Smith mobilizes remembering as an Indigenous anticolonail strategy of repair in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples:
“The remembering of a people relates not so much to a remembering of a golden past but more specifically to the remembering of a painful past, re-membering in the terms of connecting bodies with place and experience, and, importantly, people’s responses to that pain…Both healing and transformation, after what is referred to as historical trauma, become crucial strategies in any approach that asks a community to remember what they may have decided unconsciously or consciously to forget” (Smith 147).
Re/membering could help us to think about the embodied ways in which we can re-inhabit the world amongst others in ways which value and validate communities ostensibly destroyed by the violent upheaval of displacement, enslavement, and exploitation which have shaped the present conditions of life under global racial capitalism. Re/membering is not a nostalgia for an idealized past, but rather a collective action that gestures at relinquishing the destructive imperial propulsion that promises but never delivers “historical progress.” Borrowing terminology from Snead, remembering is a coming to terms with the past through reparative and collective gestures that embrace rather than negate the “repetition compulsion” of the cut.
Clock
ReplyDeleteI am thinking of clock in the queer of color vernacular sense. To clock someone’s look, as in their outfit, or clock someone’s “mug,” as in their face, is an effort to critique someone’s presentation. It plays with the normative mechanisms that constrain black queer life: pathology, the mug shot, etc. But it is mainly tongue in cheek; we know we are both on the outside so let us see who is able to perform the interior better. And, especially in our difficult collective times, it brings a bit of humor into seemingly impossible social situations. I am, of course, thinking after “Paris is Burning” and “Looking for Langston,” but also after Marlon Riggs’s “Tongues United.” Riggs talks about the “Snap!” as an action that queers of color can use to signal emotions, judgements, and connections—and they all seem along the lines of the clock. What I find particularly fascinating about the clock is the latent meanings nestled in each clock-gesture: time, ethics, sonic critique, and play. Shangela has this great line: “now punch the clock it’s time to werq”—even in all of this constraint and play we all have to get to work in the world that constrains us. I am interested in the space of the clock, as opposed to that of the gaze or the look, because the action is contingent on an audience. Both people will be clocked at some point in their lives, and that is acceptable because it is a part of life on the margins. I would like to explore ways in which performance (the performance of the clock, the laughter of the group, etc.) offers alternative ethics for encountering the outside/inside distinction.
TOUCH
ReplyDelete(verb)
1. come so close to (an object) as to be or come into contact with it,
2. handle in order to manipulate, alter, or otherwise affect, especially in an adverse way
to move to sympathetic feeling or to affect
3. to put in the hands or mouth, idiomatically “he didn’t touch a drop of alcohol that night”
4. to become involved with “I wouldn’t touch it”
5. to speak of in passing “to touch on a subject”
(noun)
1. an act of touching someone or something.
2. a small amount; a trace.
I was surprised to see so many oxymorons in these definitions for “touch” from Merriam Webster online, especially the negative connotations. In my mind, I associate touch with words such as tender, social, and soothe. I found it generative to work through these contradictions: surface/interior, healing/wounding, therapeutic/controlling, fleeting/permanent, aesthetic/literal, and affective/cognitive. To be touched by something can be to be moved by an aesthetic or emotional experience or to be wounded by it. To have something or someone touch you is to be in the realm of surfaces, of flesh and exterior, but also to be interiorally moved, even “to put in the hands or mouth”. Similarly I am reminded by one of our early discussions on the sonic and haptic frequencies of Black life on when sound surrounds/brushes in contact versus when it enters/penetrates. This and/or aspect to touch has also brought up questions for me surrounding a sort of peri-hapticality of being touched and being untouched at the same time. Can there be something saving in peri-hapticality if we take that intersubjectivity is impossible?
*Imani's post*
ReplyDeleteFrom google
Put·ty noun
/ˈpədē/
noun: putty; plural noun: putties
a: a soft, malleable, grayish-yellow paste, made from whiting and raw linseed oil, that hardens after a few hours and is used chiefly for sealing glass panes in wooden window frames.
any of a number of malleable substances similar to putty used inside and outside buildings, e.g., plumber's putty, or used for modeling or casting.
noun: plumber's putty; noun: lime putty; noun: epoxy putty
a: a polishing powder, usually made from tin oxide, used in jewelry work.
verb
verb: putty; 3rd person present: putties; past tense: puttied; past participle: puttied; gerund or present participle: puttying
seal or cover (something) with putty.
Phrases
be putty in someone's hands — be easily manipulated or dominated by someone.
mid 17th century: from French potée, literally ‘potful’, from pot ‘pot’.
From Merriam Websters
putty noun
put·ty | \ ˈpə-tē \
plural putties
Definition of putty (Entry 1 of 2)
a: a doughlike material typically made of whiting and linseed oil that is used especially to fasten glass in window frames and to fill crevices in woodwork
b: any of various substances resembling putty in appearance, consistency, or use
a: light brownish-gray to light grayish-brown color
a: one who is easily manipulated
is putty in her hands
putty verb
puttied; puttying
Definition of putty (Entry 2 of 2) transitive verb
a: to use putty on or apply putty to
*From Imani, cont'd*
DeleteI have been aesthetically interested in putty as a concept and material since I was a junior in undergrad. I first came to putty aesthetically and intellectually in the context of using aztec clay as a face mask to care for my skin. I soon started to experiment with it. It took me some time to realize that the malleability, neither liquid nor solid, and always in between/ liminal, state of putty resonated with conceptions of blackness and black flesh as both material and ontological plasticity (via Uri McMillan, Tiffany Lethabo King, & Zakkiyah Iman Jackson). Putty seems to get at the material and metaphoric poesis of blackness and its fungibility--in the way it exists, is exchanged, refashioned, is haptically/affectively experienced as coming into being/expressed/felt through liminality, immaterial materiality. Also, the way in which blackness as (non) substance (or the gesture of rubbing the thumb back and forth across the tips of our other phalanges) is deeply entangled with black flesh/black bodies (their fungibility) and its putty-like plasticity, crafted and made through its refashioning through not only modes of violence, but aesthetic modalities of adornment (which are perhaps forms of black annotation). Materially, putty--made from an aztec clay and apple cider vinegar (or water) mixture, for instance,--is in a constant state of liminality, but if made like the mixture I mention it is in a state of almost always drying and hardening, and to remain liminal one must add to it energetically (by molding, kneading, with the hands) and materially (by adding more clay).
I was initially interested in bound because I believe there is something to be said for the way in which its definitions consolidate, holds, and is a discursive space for the entanglement of enclosure and fugitivities such as leaping, or bomb as Alex noted. More, the boundedness of blackness to the violence of slavery and its aftermath creates a plethora of entanglements that reemerge in black studies to be understood and pored over (violence/desire is one). Putty, however, is already unbound and boundless in its form, intelligibility, and existence--always in a state of transience, transition, and ephemerality. Thus, its materiality as neither solid nor liquid gets at the entanglements of the boundedness and boundlessness of blackness’ fungibility as site of enclosure and site of possibility. Putty does something similar in its non-state of matter, its limilaty and unfinishness. Because of this it also grasps the slippage and non normative temporal logics of black life/ blackness/ black flesh (as a material metaphor with a historicity and “embodied referents”) because it has no intervals, but sits at a kind of frequential spiral and long duree that is based on repetition. This repetition creates a vacuum of space that putty materializes as it sits in a state of illogical, illegible is-ness and not necessarily being bounded as something we can consolidate into the imperfect, enclosed language we have to articulate such a force as blackness.