If, for Hegel, African history is little more than a “series of accidents and surprises,” for James A. Snead, European culture merely maintains the illusion of accretion and growth. Rather than rejecting Hegel outright, Snead usefully re-reads him as being unable to recognize the failures of material progress as dominant markers of civilization. In his view, the “cut” or interruption in black cultural production is vital to its very constitution, a form of making space within the system for the manifestations of chance and building the unexpected into the cultural sphere. This is where jazz idioms dwell alongside black vocalization and polyrhythm. The operation of chance is thus articulated in the sonic realm, where a practice of listening might offer an insightful way into contingent occurrences.
This is true also for Alexander Weheliye, who modifies the operation of the unexpected in the work of DuBois as playing out “the rhythm of chance”: a relational force that continually contextualizes the particular black subject as statistical figure against the white population, while making room for imagining alternative futurities. This conception returns us to thinking about the sociological method as being tied to the “law and chance” discourse, and the discipline’s obsession with outcome, determination, and probability. What, exactly though, lends chance the quality of rhythm? Can the Data Portraits, for example, visualize this form of contingency? While Weheliye would argue that they do, I might suggest the aural sphere that he offers in “In the Mix” is a more generative space for this—specifically through the notion of lag.
Lag is both an off-kilter drag off-time, or, as drummers might attest to, a calculated act of informing rhythm, a way of accentuating what is absent, an impulse projecting where the beat might fall by its very refusal to arrive on time. Lag is liberating, in that it allows the space for an opening, interval, or an accident to occur—it creates the conditions for possibility. Weheliye posits this lag in the context of modernity, in the way that Snead perhaps harnesses it against Hegel: it is an opportunity to think against progress and highlight interruptive disjunctures.The lag is where chance emerges, like in the section of Louis Armstrong that Ellison describes in ‘Invisible Man.’ Lag is perhaps inability—against material and social conditions—as well as choice. Similarly, chance might represent the unexpected and the accident, but also offers the opportunity for refusal.
(n) a fine cord composed of the fibers of cotton, wool, silk, etc. twisted together (v) to pass one end through the eye of a needle (n) a single element interwoven with others in any composite fabric, mental, moral, social, political or the like
Roland Barthes gives us the image of the stocking to describe literature and its criticism. In "Image, Music, Text," he describes how “everything is to be disentangled” through the metaphor of a “run,” which is “like the thread of a stocking,” that as it is pulled out reveals that “there is nothing beneath” (147). The work of the critic is to pull out the thread of a text and, by doing so, unravel. Threading seems the opposite – it re-entangles the fibers by spinning them together or it re-loops the string to its sewing device, the needle. I have been searching for a different but metaphor for reading for multiplicity that seem less intent on undressing its subjects, particular when reading texts where such subjects are figures who so often are forcibly undressed by a white gaze. The thread, “a single element” and “twisted together” perhaps also captures a sense of individuality and the inextricability of an individual from a certain mesh.
Cloth is a reoccurring motif in the films we've seen so far: Bradley’s ever-shifting white cloth, the lace curtains that cover Odessa Grey’s window in "Lime Kiln Field Day," the black cloth underneath Bert William’s clothes, the curtains that float over the mother and child in Joseph’s "Flypaper." What might it mean to see/hear/notice the image, music, and text of threading behind these images? Occasionally, we've glimpsed visible threads. During Suzanna’s presentation two weeks ago, she drew our attention to the sutures that connected one part of an archival image to another part in Rosana Paulino's "Assentamento." These loose stitches maintain some of the disconnection, keep the wound open. Stitches appear in this archival fabulation and stitches appear in the archive itself; Toni Morrison’s "Black Book" includes multiple patchwork quilts in full color.
I want to suggest something more than seeing clothing as art. Instead, threading and its accompanying sewing is itself formulating a particular kind of frequency: fastening together, attaching, making a seam by passing a needle through cloth, carrying a thread. Threading suggests a kind of Black annotation, as Christina Sharpe describes it, by yoking together one object and something else. The stitch is a kind of asterisk that marks what is in excess of the finished product: the work put in, perhaps the in-progress versions that lead up, the hands of the creators. The repetition of the stitches marks a repetition of a motion through time. There is something “beyond a visuality” as Sharpe describes it, a motion at the complete thread that is nevertheless invisible from only one side of the seam. To elaborate on one of Sharpe’s examples, indigo, meant to dye clothing, on the hands of the characters in Julie Dash’s "Daughters of the Dust,” create a “long” thread between enslavement and its afterlives (126). Along with mending, threading implies a minding of the line through the eye of the needle, a ferrying through the thread up and down, through the pattern.
Noise: 1. a sound, especially one that is loud or unpleasant or that causes a disturbance. "making a noise like a pig in a trough" 2. TECHNICAL irregular fluctuations that accompany a transmitted electrical signal but are not part of it and tend to obscure it.
I have been thinking about noise and its importance when discussing our central idea of black frequencies. As argued by Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2014), the “the history of the rise of the modern since the sixteenth century has been associated with the emergence of vision as the privileged sense for perception and ideas about the subject and its relation to knowledge and the world in the West.” (p.12). Ochoa, alongside other authors such as Nicholas Mirzoeff, highlights how modern ocularcentrism is deeply enmeshed with colonialism and slavery since “the deployment of visuality and visual technologies as a Western social technique for ordering was decisively shaped by the experience of plantation slavery in the Americas” (Mirzoeff, 48). It is under this theoretical framework that Ochoa discussed a text by Humboldt in which the aural is linked to the excesses of the primitive, and thus “scientific observation, the means of making sense of radical difference in an intensely heterogeneous context, was drastically unsettled by an ‘acoustic release’… sonic perception is spread on corporeal difference, scientific explanation, and the narration of uncontainable, bodily produced noises” (Ochoa, 32). After seeing the definition of noise on Google I was impressed by how its definition also employ negative adjectives to define it while it also evokes a sense of excessiveness the interrupts the “order of things”, positioning noise as a surplus that irrupts and erodes clarity and “proper” communication. Moreover, by employing the figure of the animal in its example for the first definition, it also seeks to distance it from the human.
“Noise is unwanted sound” concludes the website of Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department, that which is not rendered as pleasurable and which must be silenced. Noise it is also crucial for Rancière’s discussions around the “partition of the sensible” and politics since the author argues that one “in order to deny the political quality of a category - workers, women and so on - all that was required was to assert that they belonged to a 'domestic' space that was separated from public life, one from which only groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger or anger could emerge, but not actual speech … It consists in making what was unseen visible; in making what was audible as mere noise” (p.38). However, by arguing for a swift that “make what was deemed to be the mere noise of suffering bodies heard as a discourse” (p.139), his proposed counter-response to this dismissal of noise perpetuates the negation of the noise based on its supposed incongruency and excess. For Rancière, the utterances that are perceived as noise must pass by a transfiguration to be understood as worthy discourse, in a movement that never questions the initial political and social interdiction of what is perceived as noise. Can we think of and engage with noise as a way to dismantle these humanist borders? Not the search of a redemptive discourse but being open to a surplus noise that extends beyond human voice, an aurality that encompasses other sounds. I am thinking here firstly on the way Glissant posits sound and noise as central to the experience of the “Caribbean man [sic]”, to whom “the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech”. Glissant argues that “meaning, and pitch went together for the uprooted individual, in the unrelenting silence of the world of slavery. lt was the intensity of the sound that dictated meaning: the pitch of the sound conferred significance… Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. No one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.” (123-124). And secondly, on Saidiya Hartman’s essay The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner and how it perceives noise as a “sonic revolt” (p.481) enacted by the arrested women in the New York State Reformatory for Women to question the terrible living conditions and the threats and mental and physical abuses faced by them. As argued by Hartman, “their utterances were marked by the long history of black radical sound — whoops and hollers, shrieks, and squawks, sorrow songs, and blues. It was the soundtrack to a history that hurt. The chants and cries escaped the confines of the prison, even if their bodies did not”. Radically departing from the way Rancière proposes the transfiguration of excessive noise into coherent discourse as a counter-response to oppression, a movement that stills subscribes to a colonialist valorization of the latter as the one that can lead to true communication and knowledge, Glissant and Hartman showcase ways in which we can think of noise as communication in itself, one that draws from different sounds and extends beyond the singular of the one that speaks, a frequency that evades the enclosures which one cannot.
References: Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier. Aurality Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia Édouard Glissant. Caribbean Discourse. Jácques Rancière. DISSENSUS: On Politics and Aesthetics Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Right to Look. Saidiya Hartman. The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.
The starting point of anything that is heard is its ability to sound, and not the other way around. In other words, the heardness of a sounding being is not defined by the ability of others to hear it, but rather heardness is a form of agency that a sounding being can assume. In “An Account of Oneself”, Judith Butler considers human beings as narrate-able subjects. Butler understands the ability to narrate as a precondition to one’s ability to account for herself: The narrative does not emerge after the fact of casual agency but constitutes the prerequisite condition for any account of moral agency we might give. In this sense, narrative capacity constitutes a precondition for giving an account of oneself. (Butler, 12)
Butler’s understanding of narrative capacities resonates with the relationship between sounding and heardness; just as the capacity to narrate is a precondition for the agency to account for oneself, the ability to be heard is an agency that a sounding being can assume. Hence, the ability to sound is a precondition for the ability to be heard. I would like to think of heardness as a place of reflexive agency, in which refusal and repair can take place simultaneously. Refusal in the sense that an unheard or inaudible sounding being can resist misconceptions of heardness that constituted it as non sounding, and repair in the sense of a listener’s ability to acknowledge the sounding capacities of different beings to whom she listens, through a willingness to expand her notions of what does and doesn’t sound. Sound theorist Salomé Voegelin’s writing about the critical agency of the Avatar-I echoes my consideration of heardness as a place of reflexive agency: The conceptualization of the avatar-I provides a means and location to hear the world beyond that which is mirrored in the actuality of the perceived real and its language, where its plural and less audible possibility sounds; and it illuminates the ‘I’ not for itself, but for its agency to illuminate these less audible and even inaudible subjectivities and things and its sensitivity to the articulation of the overlooked and the ignored. (Voegelin, 132)
Through refusal and repair, heardness offers us a way of being in the world that can account for the unheard, and opens the possibility of other forms of listening: namely a listening that hears beyond the heard. This type of listening takes us back to Cox’s sonic stream; the sonic properties of this stream may be inaudible at times, however this inaudibility does not mean that the sound ceased sounding. Rather, the silence of this sonic stream should be heard as a no less sounding segment of this stream. Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus In Two Acts” is a good example of a listening that hears beyond the heard. While Hartman’s text does not speak from a sound studies perspective, I am struck time and again by the ways in which it listens to the unheard, and refuses to hear Venus solely through the conditions of heardness that constituted her remembrance: […] How does one tell impossible stories? Stories about girls bearing names that deface and disfigure, about the words exchanged between shipmates that never acquired any standing in the law and that failed to be recorded in the archive, about the appeals, prayers and secrets never uttered because no one was there to receive them? (Hartman, 10)
Hartman’s attempt to tell another story about the life of Venus, a story that the archive does not allow for, account for the unsaid because it understands that while she was not able to hear Venus’s words and to account for her life, it does not mean that this life didn’t take place. In doing so, Hartman goes beyond the conditions of heardness that the archive allows for, and listens to Venus’s unheard voice.
(n) 1. a smear or stain that obscures 2. something vaguely or indistinctly perceived especially : something moving or occurring too quickly to be clearly seen
(v) 1. to obscure or blemish by smearing 2. SULLY 3. to make dim, indistinct, or vague in outline or character 4. to make cloudy or confused
Page 11 of Hughes and DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life features a photo that blurs at the edges of the two people pictured: perhaps, a couple, perhaps dancing. I introduce these two qualifiers to reproduce the uncertainty of both Hughes’ text beneath the image (“Sometimes maybe they dance”) and the uncertainty of the blur (11). As the definition of “blur” from Merriam-Webster above reminds us, blur is frequently applied to that which is “occurring too quickly to be clearly seen;” the possibly-dancing, possibly-couple escapes being clearly captured by the camera.
One might consider the blurry photograph to be a sullied photograph, to begin looking at the verb form of “blur.” (And here I see a connection to definition of noise as unpleasant that Ricardo points to in his post; blur and noise might operate on the same frequency). In the blur we see evidence of photographic technology failing to perform the language of capture, of enclosure within the frame. The verb form of “blur” carries a gesture toward sousveillance, of obscuring the camera lens in the attempt to resist the surveillance of black life. Blur, in this way, operates against the (white, patriarchal, capitalist) Gaze.
But DeCarava’s blurred photograph seems to invoke the second definition of the noun form. Here I am returning to our question of whether there can be a black gaze, and want to pose that blur might be a way of approaching (if not arriving at) a visual logic that operates outside of the Gaze. It is a mode of looking at an image without capturing it, a mode of looking that, to borrow Arnav’s language, lags behind the thing being looked at.
After our discussion regarding trauma and repetition last week, I am thinking about the issue of anticipation. What does it mean to anticipate the recurrence of anti-black violence both physically, that is, as the "rhythmic seriality" of "premature mortality" (Campt 107), and socially, in terms of representation? And what does this anticipation have to do with visual media specifically? I recall Fanon, whose chapter "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" meditates on the visual schematization of blackness, and as such concludes with thoughts on moviegoing: “I can’t go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself. Those in front of me look at me, spy on me, wait for me. A black bellhop is going to appear” (Fanon 119). His following two paragraphs liken this experience not only to amputation but—in the abstraction that would attend this disembodiment—death at that. If Fanon chronicles the anticipation of misrepresentation in cinema, Christina Sharpe—in her formulation of anti-blackness as "Weather"—then structures this feeling of expectation as that which stems from and thereby demands repetition, that is, as that which ties representation to futurity. Put differently, representation of violence both physical or social not only normalizes injury upon the black body and secures the ontological location of whiteness, but also stages in effect a rehearsal of future violence, that is, its ongoing repetition.
In "Ten Minutes to Live," the character Letha receives a note that she has ten minutes left to live before hitmen for "The Killer" Morvis take her life. For me, this film narrativizes precisely the dread of anticipation surrounding premature mortality, of a trauma that for Letha is not her own but to which she must nonetheless answer, calculated as it is by chance ("statistical probability" [Campt 107]) and to the minute. I wonder if this allegorizes, moreover, the work that Micheaux takes up both in this film and his oeuvre generally to counter white portrayal of black life, the injurious kind that Fanon continues to encounter. I wonder if it thereby "anticipates" work—from "Lime Kiln Field Day" to "America" and the call Sharpe makes against the recapitulation of anti-blackness—that ventures to imagine a history, a traumatic history, instead through the lens of black intramural and social life. I wonder if it "anticipates" refusal, such as those who anticipate their death in #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and "redeploy this predictive anterior probability by way of a photographic enactment of death" (Campt 113). Can we anticipate anticipation, and open, through repetition as Snead understands it, the production of a difference against death?
Amplification (n) (related to: amplitude, receiving, withholding, staying, making room, ways, intensity, volume, space, apex, diffusion, excess, etc.)
In Venus in Two Acts, Saidiya Hartman describes the doubled aim of her practice of critical fabulation: “I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling” (11). Critical fabulation does and doesn’t do the impossible: it renders possibilities from the impossible at the same time that it feels out so as to feel more acutely the impossibility of that rendering. Given this double vision of the impossible, which keeps moving and keeps giving possibilities, what is the role of amplification in attending to the frequencies of black life? What is involved and at stake in amplification and how does it relate to the amplitude of a frequency? For Hartman, amplification of the impossibility of telling impossible stories involves “narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure… the imperative to respect black noise” (12). In other words, amplification can transpire by way of receiving, withholding, and staying (in the double sense of suspending/delaying and of what Fred Moten might call “resid[ing] without settling”). These ways of amplifying the impossible seem to be ways of making room for what can’t be grasped; perhaps they involve something like extending the grace of unconditional hospitality. The sense of amplification as enlarging or extending in space or capacity (which the Oxford English Dictionary says is an obsolete definition of "amplify”) could be at play here and could point toward amplification as a way of describing social and spatial intensities.
These social and spatial dimensions of amplification seem to be at play, for instance, in Kahlil Joseph’s Flypaper as a sound installation. As the speakers amplify the soundscape by increasing its volume (with soundscape and volume proving to be more than just metaphorically related to space), they make more room(s) in the room they’re placed in even as they make us aware of our temporary stay in that room. This multiplication of place and space echoes Ellison and amplifies the descending levels of a cave and the rooms upstairs that open in the narrator’s “new analytic way of listening” within his “hole.” We stay for a while in the spaces where amplification holds us back. Sometimes this stay feels like the loud low frequencies of bass, which become so amplified in Flypaper that even the image of the doppelgängers dancing in the stairwell registers and ripples with sonic amplitudes. By amplitude, I mean the crests and troughs of a wavelength, the apex and base (here also bass) of the waves that amplification takes us to and from. This rippling of the image also could remind us of Moten’s discussion of how the phonic substance cuts and augments (both of which transpire simultaneously in the double movement of invagination) the time of the photograph of the dead (Moten 200-201). Indeed, we should remember the augmentation (in its adjacency to both amplification and diffusion) that might be involved in every cut as well as in the relation of the cut to repetition and making room (Snead says the cut “mak[es] room” for “attempts to confront accident and rupture”).
To return to the apex of amplitude, sometimes (if not all of the time, depending on how one might step in and out of time) amplification is too much to bear, too much to contain, too much like being (if not actually being) held captive in a relentless, excessive, unfathomable apex beyond measure. Maybe part of the captivating experience of Arthur Jafa’s Apex is that it relentlessly amplifies the impact of a wave’s flow, its apex. Perhaps this amplification transpires through the way the film forces the viewer to find ways to diffuse (if not defuse) the images within their constant stream without recourse to settling, apprehending, or fully remembering these images (and what they exceed and what exceeds them). In this way, we could think about the relation between amplification and diffusion in the wake as related to the possibilities and impossibilities of respite (to borrow Justin’s term) from (which involves finding a place to stay for a bit) the enveloping Weather (Sharpe). Another OED definition of amplify is “to enlarge (a story or statement) by telling it more diffusely or fully, or by adding fresh details, illustration or reflections” (and this loops us back to Hartman’s effort to amplify the impossible telling of an impossible story). Amplification could be thought of as diffusion again in the sense of making room and even carrying volume over or through walls into other rooms. Consider Joseph’s sound installation, which frequently has us hearing the muffled sounds of music, television, and conversations from other rooms, as well as the moans and laughter from upstairs in Ellison. Though the wall’s muffling could be called a “deadening” of sound from one standing, sound is still amplified from that placeless place Ellison calls nowhere, and from the possibilities of nowhere’s everywhereness where black life stays.
Finally, to amplify can be to “make too much of.” It seems attention to excessiveness, what exceeds a certain grammar that measures and regulates what it considers to be “too much,” can be linked to other examples of writers we’ve encountered this semester who amplify overtones and undertones of images and their framing. When Richard Wright and Langston Hughes listened to how different photographs, looking through different angles, framed quotidian black life, both writers amplified some dimension of the phonic substance they received to tell something like impossible stories. Du Bois similarly plays with abstraction to amplify the lives, deaths, and chances that data points otherwise obscure. Amplification, to take one instance from his data portraits, makes room for visualizing the huddling of those “Negroes” who stayed in the country and villages even as others concentrated in cities. Carrie Mae Weems amplifies what a room can be, what it can receive, and shows precisely how one makes room for multiple rooms around a kitchen table. Again, amplification comes by way of receptivity, and both are matters of making room. Indeed, part of what impossible stories and their impossible telling amplify is a kind of receptivity to the forces that not only shape social dynamics but also might make room to stay, imagine, and live otherwise.
—Scream— I was thinking about belting earlier, that is to say, how one belts a note, particularly in gospel. Gospel’s uniqueness when it comes to the belt—in other words, when a singer chooses to use more of their “chest voice” than their “head voice” in hitting high notes— is not only that gospel popularized the belt, the fact that these belts tend to be unusually high, often going past the musical theater standard of an E5 to F5, G5, or in exceptional cases, the A. It is a difficult thing to execute, requiring an enormous amount of control of both the breath and of the tongue, where the singer’s lungs expand to take in as much air as possible and the tongue lifts to the back of the mouth.
The reason I mention all of this is because the closest feeling to a high belt that an untrained singer (like myself) can accomplish is a scream. We have spent a lot of time attending to the moan, but part of me is wonders about its counterpart. Just like the first thing most people emit when attempting to belt (which, for context, is often the material execution of what Jafa refers to as worrying the note) is a scream, I wonder if perhaps the scream precedes the moan, if the scream what happens in the moment before mourning.
Moten discusses the black mo’nin’ associated with Emmett and Mamie Till, but part of me wants to sit with the thing that comes before the moan; the sound emitted before Mamie could mourn in the moment where she received the news that Emmett was dead. A sound that does not define black life per se, but strains it and reveals its fragility. The scream, to me, is more personal than the moan. It is a moment in which suffering cannot be generalized to a black public, a moment in which one becomes intimately aware of all of the strange and individual aspects of their own life, and struggles with the capaciousness of something like “race” to encapsulate the life/suffering/joy/death/existence of oneself or a loved one, only to conclude that the capaciousness of blackness doesn’t matter because white supremacy has not given us a choice anyway.
The second reason I was thinking of the scream was my discussions with friends today of Jeremy Harris’ Slave Play. While there are numerous things that I find deeply disturbing about that piece of work, one of the most stark to me is the absence of the scream. Everything is in the abstract except for the characters present in the play; there is no mention or sense of how in a bedroom, there was a real person who emitted a scream because of being assaulted by an overseer or a mistress or an indentured servant. As much as these issues are part and parcel of the institution of slavery, their ability to be institutionalized is a function of their individual suffering.
Moving forward, this pushes me to think about how the scream/ the moment of the scream can articulate this tension between the move from the specific/individual to the general. Could a scream, for example, be the sample that is then abstracted, as Weheliye talks about in Diagrammatics? Most of all, how can the scream help to creating spaces for holding individuals and their specificity while talking about race in the abstract?
Atmosphere/Aspiration atmosphere, n. 1. a. The spheroidal gaseous envelope surrounding any of the heavenly bodies. b. esp. The mass of aeriform fluid surrounding the earth; the whole body of terrestrial air. 2. transferred. A gaseous envelope surrounding any substance. (OED Online)
This week I wanted to consider the term “atmosphere” as referenced by Christina Sharpe, not so much in reference to her concept of “weather,” but to her exploration of breath and what she calls “aspiration.”
Sharpe defines aspiration as “keeping and keeping and putting breath back in the Black body in hostile weather” and describes it as both “violent and life-saving” (113). I’m interested in Sharpe’s reflections on air and breath and their relationship to both saving life and dealing violence, particularly on the idea of “free air”: “There is, too, a connection between the lungs and the weather: the supposedly transformative properties of breathing free of air…and the transformative properties of being ‘free’ to breathe fresh air…But who has access to freedom? Who can breathe free?” (112). Sharpe further complicates the idea of free air by calling upon the reader to remember that captive Africans on slave ships were also brought out of the hold to breath fresh air to maintain the value of the cargo. In this way, Sharpe draws a connection between aspiration and a form of biopolitics, of reducing Black life to commodities that must be maintained in order to produce profit. Borrowing here from a discussion post I made at the beginning of the semester, aspiration both stands for “care as force; ‘the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something” (123) and an “an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness” (131).
My mind goes immediately our current atmosphere of global pandemic. I’m reminded of news stories about the national shortage of ventilators and how, to ration the current supplies, multiple states have adopted policies directing hospitals to deny ventilators to patients with intellectual disabilities. This is not to mention the new politics of space that has come to rule or day to day lives: who has access to fresh air outside their potentially cramped living spaces? Who can access these spaces without being stopped or questioned for their use of them? I’m reminded again of Sharpe’s question: “Who can breathe free?” Our current atmosphere provides a new complication to aspiration as ethics of care and aspiration as care as force.
Thinking with The Sweet Flypaper of Life and The Kitchen Table Series, I see deep blackness as a mode of Black imaging attended to the quiet and quotidian, to Black interiority in ways that refuse the “evidentiary thrust” of photography. Exceeding demands of evidencing Black capabilities of participation in the American project, these photo-texts draw on knowledge “from and of the everyday” (Sharpe) to do a method of fabulation with and beyond what is visually represented in the photographs. The use of Black annotation (through narrative) and Black redaction (through focusing and shadow) allows the photo-texts to represent the abstraction that is Black interior life.
In response to last week’s discussion around the notion of echo, and specifically in regards to the last question Max raised, of how we think and position our own critical and creative practice, when we are facing the fact that thinking about frequency exceeds the language of a particular media; I would like to draw some attention to the sonar, also called sonic depth finder, or echolocation. This is related to the actual outline of my glossary, which circles around the question of responsiveness and responsibility; in particular with regards to the question of using a cross-disciplinary vocabulary and producing our own critical literature with it.
How can we have then an account of something, or, put differently, how can we try to read and understand the encounter we have with the visuality, the sonic, or the hapticality of black life without reducing them to certain textualities? In spanning an arc from the (non)intentionality of 'intention'; the gaze, not so much as a tool to fix, command and subjugate something other, but as a moment of affect, relationality, and transformation; now coming to 'sonar' and the idea of sounding out the present/past, then will follow 'empathy', 'interval', 'syncope'; my glossary is trying to explore and expand the cognitive tools and sets we use to create different, or alternative epistemologies. (I am in conversation here with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies from the South)
Sonar (acronym of sound navigation and range) according to the O.E.D.: a. A method or system for detecting or locating underwater objects using sound, in which pulses of audible or higher-frequency sound are emitted, and any sound waves reflected by an object are detected to reveal the object's presence, or measured to determine its nature, position, or speed. Also: a similar system which passively detects sounds emitted by other objects but does not emit sound pulses itself.
b. A natural method or facility whereby certain animals (esp. dolphins, toothed whales, and many bats) navigate, locate objects, and identify food items by emitting sounds and registering the returning echoes; echolocation.
c. Medicine. A diagnostic technique which uses echoes of ultrasonic pulses to delineate structures within the body; = ultrasonography n. I note “sonar”: method, detecting or locating, depths, the usage of sound, pulse, audibility, frequency, reflections, reveal presence, measure, determination, passively detect objects.
In reviewing my course-notes and in going through the readings again, I stumbled on the term “physionotrace,” and how photography gives way to this trace, in Alexander G. Wehelye’s text on ‘Diagrammatics as Physiognomy.’ In referencing Eduardo Cadava and Walter Benjamin, the term links photographic technology and the physiognomy of historical thought, “means, Cadava writes, “that there can be no thinking of history that is not at the same time a thinking of photography,” and Wehelye adds to that: “then there cannot exist a contemplation of photography that is not also a consideration of black life.” (Wehelye, 36) Coming back to our class, I would like to think of the possibility of sonotraces, or the writing of the history of black life as sonography.
I would like to explore the idea of the historian as someone sinking his/her sonar into the depths if history in order to sono-trace the (visual) frequencies of black life and therewith sounding out past and present. Acknowledging the mentioned exceeding of the boundaries of the language of particular media, I was thinking of Fred Moten’s notion of an “aural aesthetics” and the possibility to “listen while you look,” as well as to listen while you read or study, in the general sense of the intervention Moten and Harney introduce in their Undercommons project.
“You have to keep looking at this so you can listen to it.” (Moten, 210)
Dionne Brand spoke in a wonderful lecture on the “Shape of Language” about the prevalent modes of speech and on “the importance of sounding out a present, a today because our lived today is cluttered in frequencies of oppression, and responses to repression.” In proposing a radical indictment of narrative, Brand introduces poetry’s “diacritical” ability to overwrite and displace the meaning of what Christina Sharpe has called the “dysgraphia of disaster,” produced by the resonating historical tragedy of slavery, and of Black people in the Americas.
“Poetry,” Brand says, “perhaps, with its capacity to deport and unearth plural meanings, and with its refusal of a particular interrogative gaze, might cut out a space; to a description of being in the diaspora.” In thinking back now to the question of how to ‘read’ and understand the several encounters we encountered throughout the semester, all the different mediatized texts and languages of black life, the notion of sounding out the aural qualities and the poetical dimensions of history, photography, theory, music . . . and on and on and on; I am very much drawn to the idea to rethink the narrative through poetry, as Brand suggests: while “the reader interrogates the narrative, poetry interrogates the reader.” This reversal of intentionality opens up the crucial point in which, in sounding out the possibility of black life, I am being interrogated in the first place (…)
Density (Gravity, n: "weight, influence, authority") density, n. 1. The quality or condition of being dense; thickness; closeness of texture or consistence. 2. Physics. The degree of consistence of a body or substance, measured by the ratio of the mass to the volume, or by the quantity of matter in a unit of bulk.
This week, I'm thinking about what it means to be moved by the collective weight of some energy, say affect, feeling, frequency, if you will. I am thinking specifically of Christina Sharpe's offering of the weather, of the possibility of ecology in the midst of a singularity, a "weather event or phenomenon likely to occur around a particular time, or date, or set of circumstances,” or a “point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces” (Sharpe 106). To the latter, I am inclined to join it with a provocative description from Wright's 12 Million Black Voices: "The island whose confines we live, is anchored in the feelings of millions of people...its rocky boundaries have remained unyielding to the waves of our hope that dash against it" (30). What Wright notions is the constituting force, or gravity rather, of this collectivized feeling, a kind of contrapuntal movement, to borrow from Simone Gikandi. Both Sharpe and Wright's system do not replicate the humanist affective economy that Tyrone Palmer critiques in "What Feels More than Feeling," an economy that endows those considered Subjects with an "interiority that is recognized as such, and a capacity for feeling that has socio-poltical value" (Palmer 47). Instead, they imagine something like density -- which we might understand as an expression of surplus/excess matter (weight) as a result of the organization of internal space.
To return and slightly amend my earlier question, what does it means to be constitutive of this weather or atmosphere and, yet, still be moved? This echoes Professor Campt’s blog post on “Slow Walking,” where she writes “How do you ‘feel’ another when no one is touching?” What does it mean to be a part of this "region of infinite mass density" (Sharpe 106), necessarily “anchoring” and distorting force of this climate of anti-blackness (Wright 30)? What does it mean to be amidst this "weather event," as s/place, to call on Katherine McKittrick via M. Nourbese Philip? And, to echo Campt, what does it mean to be “’feel’ another when no one is touching”?
sur·viv·al /sərˈvīvəl/ noun noun: survival the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances. "the animal's chances of survival were pretty low" an object or practice that has continued to exist from an earlier time. plural noun: survivals "his shorts were a survival from his army days"
I have been thinking a lot about this word in relation to black life. Both for my personal work and in my personal life since covid. Transition into a new place, new mode of being, etc. has not been easy, yet I have felt I fared better than some others even though I had the virus myself. As I have begun contemplating what it would look like to bring the other things I love and need in my academic practice (my art practice, my meditation practice, and poetry) back into my life, I realized that I was operating in a mode of survival. Everyday I give myself the things I need and--for the most part-- do the things I need to do, yet I have not focused as much on the erotic, joyful, umph-like, aspect of my day to day tasks. I have my partner and, together, our life experiences have made us well equipped to kick into survival mode. Now we both yearn to spiritually and psychically re-immerse ourselves in our lives. I specifically want to reimagine life in the state of covid in a more intentional way. Why/ how is this desire and the possible fulfillment of fullness different than my previous way of handling our new normal? How did me and my partner’s conditioning as black people who have inherited certain tools of survival change how we internalized and psychically experienced covid?
How does continuing to breathe, live, and exist in the midst of chaos, “accident,” “ordeal,” presume that those living are okay, well, and “built” to weather the storm? Everyday we are learning that in America Black and Latinx communities, those on the front lines, are the most affected by this virus. Some of my family members are (were) on the front lines, some of my friends’ family members are in the hospital. What is black life under these reifying conditions of devastation and catastrophe? My family and I gather via zoom to a party and throw our April birthday parties and my partner’s little sister updates us on the recent tik tok trends. Is it still finding joy, ecstasis, feeling in the midst of it all? And after Diddy’s Easter Sunday on instagram, might we say/ask, whether blackness as metaphor operates with a different force and magnitude during the age of social media?
Trouble (n). difficulty or problems. the malfunction of something such as a machine or a part of the body. effort or exertion made to do something, especially when inconvenient. public unrest or disorder.
(v). cause distress or anxiety to. cause (someone) pain or inconvenience
Now is a state of trouble, of agitation, of feeling troubled, of being in trouble. I am thinking about trouble in relation to these definitions (as an action and a thing) and in relation to Lauren Berlant's essay, "The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times", which I have been thinking about continuously the last 3 years.
I've also been struggling with thinking of trouble together with attachment: the trouble of attachment that we discussed last week re: Hartman's Venus in Two Acts and Berlant in this essay: How do we as students/scholars derive our social theory from such scenes of ambivalence, “which is to say, the scenes of attachment that are intimate, defined by desire, and overwhelming” (Berlant, 2016: 395)? As John Keene quotes Lyn Hejinian in Annotations, "What memory is not a 'gripping' thought"?
Here is also an excerpt from Berlant's essay that I have been revisiting often: "What remains for our pedagogy of unlearning is to build affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire as the work of an aspirational ambivalence. What remains is the potential we have to common infrastructures that absorb the blows of our aggressive need for the world to accommodate us and our resistance to adaptation and that, at the same time, hold out the prospect of a world worth attaching to that’s something other than an old hope’s bitter echo. A failed episode is not evidence that the project was in error."
(n) a curved flat piece of wood that can be thrown so as to return to the thrower, traditionally used by Australian Aborigines as a hunting weapon.
(v) (of a plan or action) return to the originator, often with negative consequences.
Since our reading of Invisible Man earlier in the semester, and especially after our conversation about repetition and the changing same last week, I’ve been thinking about his use of the word “boomeranging.” Ellison writes: “the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang…I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness” (6). How might one be boomeranged by the world? Cast and brought back? Over and over again? What impact might that pattern have on a life lived? What does it allow you to see, do, know or hear? How does boomeranging relate to the changing same?
Visually, (thanks Instagram) I see “boomeranging” as a series of sharp repetitive movements. Alongside movement, there’s also fixity – one is not able to move beyond the established frame. Except, unlike Instagram, for Ellison, the whipping movement is not bound to specific measures of time. This creates for an irregularity in the sonic beat – it isn’t constant, isn’t steady, even. Instead, there’s a syncopation. As Ellison writes a few pages later – “sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes you’re behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes…and you slip into the breaks and look around” (8). And what is in those breaks? For the man, as he listens to Louis Armstrong’s music, he descends into different scenes and tempos, a series of histories. There’s a slow tempo and a woman singing a spiritual, there’s a girl being sold into enslavement, and a woman speaking on freedom. I’m wondering how we might use boomeranging as a visual and sonic pattern? If we imagine life as series of boomerangs, moving and amassing in a cluster, with histories in the breaks, how might one live within the cluster?
The key term that I am interested in exploring is the “blues” given that it is a vehicle for depicting the frequency of black experience—but I am particularly interested in how the blues manifests in America through black leisure, movement, and various refrains such as “America”—which I interpret as “blues-tempered echoes.” I am also thinking about the frequency of “blues-tempered echoes” as depicted through the sound, the movement, the images, the facial expressions, the rhythms , the dance, memory, the archive, wounding, looking, and lyricism in of the works that we have engaged this semester. I am especially interested in the relationship between the “blues tempered echoes,” Jafa’s notion of “worrying the note,” and Snead’s notion of repetition as defined by an interval moment.
blues /blo͞oz/ noun noun: melancholic music of black American folk origin, typically in a twelve-bar sequence. It developed in the rural southern US toward the end of the 19th century, finding a wider audience in the 1940s, as blacks migrated to the cities. This urban blues gave rise to rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
I have also been meditating on Ralph Ellison’s interpretation of the blues from the essay “Richard Wright’s Blues.”
Here are a few excerpts:
“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (Ellison 62).
“Let us close with one final word about the blues: Their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self. Nowhere in America today is there social or political action based upon the solid realities of Negro life depicted in Black Boy; perhaps that is why, with its refusal to offer solutions, it is like the blues” (Ellison 73-4).
“Thus along with the themes, equivalent descriptions of milieu, and the perspectives to be found in Joyce, Nehru, Dostoyevsky, George Moore, and Rousseau, Black Boy is filled with blues-tempered echoes of railroad trains, the names of southern towns and cities, estrangements, fights and flights, deaths and disappointments, charged with physical and spiritual hungers and pain. And like a blues sung by such an artist as Bessie Smith, its lyrical prose evokes the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singing lustily as he probes his own grievous wound” (Ellison 264-5).
I am working on a glossary entry for “attunement” and have preliminary notes about the term below:
When frequencies collide in meaningful ways.
The rhythmic shift of phonic substance to respond to the pace, pitch and tone of another across striated landscapes of time and space.
Attunement is a concept that comes to mind when watching Garret Bradley’s America and witnessing the seamless blend of scenes from Lime Kiln Field Day fold into Bradley’s counterarchive of Black social life. The white cotton fabric blowing on the clothes line overlays on images of young rambunctious boys chasing, leaping, and bouncing off of one another; the white fabric wanes and the image of the Lime Kiln mother with white lace curtains framing her figure appears in the window chastising them through the imagined temporal bounds that otherwise would have them untethered. Bradley weaves together these fragments of Black social life that exceed the limited frame of the imperial archive and demonstrates the resilient rhythms that extend beyond the regimented logic of linear histories of progression. Bradley attunes her film to what exceeds it.
Borrowing from Tina Campt’s concept of adjacency as “the reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability; the labour of positioning oneself in relation to another in ways that revalue and redress complex histories of dispossession” attunement also addresses the ways in which the visual frequency of Black life reverberates amongst others in the global struggle for liberation. How can we attend to the transit of this frequency from Ferguson to Gaza? What is difference without separability, to borrow from Denise Ferreira da Silva? The phonic substance and visual iconography of civil rights movement transcend the borders of America. What does it mean for Palestinians living in the highly segregated city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) in the occupied West Bank to protest President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel by desegregating the streets wearing t-shirst that read I have a dream and “Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom” playing over a megaphone. The protestors were attacked by Israeli settlers and 9 Palestinians were detained by the occupation soldiers. The visual frequency of Black life is irreducible; it carries multitudes of opacities but nonetheless reverberates throughout the world.
In many ways, Arthur Jaffa’s Apex demonstrates the impossibility of attunement, as soon as we feel we can recognize and place an image it disappears. The reverberating pulse of the electronic beat propels us through the beautiful, the terrible, and the unbearable images of the weather of anti-blackness and the resilient refusals of Black life which exceed it without pause. The fixed quality attributed to photographs, the defining feature of the discovery of the medium, is violated as Jaffa moves us through what Tina Campt has defined as “still-moving images.” Attunement almost sounds like atonement, it gestures at repair through a common rhythmic alignment, but it also plays at the tension between between I hear you and I listen to you.
Posting for Arnav again!
ReplyDelete—Chance—
If, for Hegel, African history is little more than a “series of accidents and surprises,” for James A. Snead, European culture merely maintains the illusion of accretion and growth. Rather than rejecting Hegel outright, Snead usefully re-reads him as being unable to recognize the failures of material progress as dominant markers of civilization. In his view, the “cut” or interruption in black cultural production is vital to its very constitution, a form of making space within the system for the manifestations of chance and building the unexpected into the cultural sphere. This is where jazz idioms dwell alongside black vocalization and polyrhythm. The operation of chance is thus articulated in the sonic realm, where a practice of listening might offer an insightful way into contingent occurrences.
This is true also for Alexander Weheliye, who modifies the operation of the unexpected in the work of DuBois as playing out “the rhythm of chance”: a relational force that continually contextualizes the particular black subject as statistical figure against the white population, while making room for imagining alternative futurities. This conception returns us to thinking about the sociological method as being tied to the “law and chance” discourse, and the discipline’s obsession with outcome, determination, and probability. What, exactly though, lends chance the quality of rhythm? Can the Data Portraits, for example, visualize this form of contingency? While Weheliye would argue that they do, I might suggest the aural sphere that he offers in “In the Mix” is a more generative space for this—specifically through the notion of lag.
Lag is both an off-kilter drag off-time, or, as drummers might attest to, a calculated act of informing rhythm, a way of accentuating what is absent, an impulse projecting where the beat might fall by its very refusal to arrive on time. Lag is liberating, in that it allows the space for an opening, interval, or an accident to occur—it creates the conditions for possibility. Weheliye posits this lag in the context of modernity, in the way that Snead perhaps harnesses it against Hegel: it is an opportunity to think against progress and highlight interruptive disjunctures.The lag is where chance emerges, like in the section of Louis Armstrong that Ellison describes in ‘Invisible Man.’ Lag is perhaps inability—against material and social conditions—as well as choice. Similarly, chance might represent the unexpected and the accident, but also offers the opportunity for refusal.
Some initial notes on thread/s/ing
ReplyDelete(n) a fine cord composed of the fibers of cotton, wool, silk, etc. twisted together
(v) to pass one end through the eye of a needle
(n) a single element interwoven with others in any composite fabric, mental, moral, social, political or the like
Roland Barthes gives us the image of the stocking to describe literature and its criticism. In "Image, Music, Text," he describes how “everything is to be disentangled” through the metaphor of a “run,” which is “like the thread of a stocking,” that as it is pulled out reveals that “there is nothing beneath” (147). The work of the critic is to pull out the thread of a text and, by doing so, unravel. Threading seems the opposite – it re-entangles the fibers by spinning them together or it re-loops the string to its sewing device, the needle. I have been searching for a different but metaphor for reading for multiplicity that seem less intent on undressing its subjects, particular when reading texts where such subjects are figures who so often are forcibly undressed by a white gaze. The thread, “a single element” and “twisted together” perhaps also captures a sense of individuality and the inextricability of an individual from a certain mesh.
Cloth is a reoccurring motif in the films we've seen so far: Bradley’s ever-shifting white cloth, the lace curtains that cover Odessa Grey’s window in "Lime Kiln Field Day," the black cloth underneath Bert William’s clothes, the curtains that float over the mother and child in Joseph’s "Flypaper." What might it mean to see/hear/notice the image, music, and text of threading behind these images? Occasionally, we've glimpsed visible threads. During Suzanna’s presentation two weeks ago, she drew our attention to the sutures that connected one part of an archival image to another part in Rosana Paulino's "Assentamento." These loose stitches maintain some of the disconnection, keep the wound open. Stitches appear in this archival fabulation and stitches appear in the archive itself; Toni Morrison’s "Black Book" includes multiple patchwork quilts in full color.
I want to suggest something more than seeing clothing as art. Instead, threading and its accompanying sewing is itself formulating a particular kind of frequency: fastening together, attaching, making a seam by passing a needle through cloth, carrying a thread. Threading suggests a kind of Black annotation, as Christina Sharpe describes it, by yoking together one object and something else. The stitch is a kind of asterisk that marks what is in excess of the finished product: the work put in, perhaps the in-progress versions that lead up, the hands of the creators. The repetition of the stitches marks a repetition of a motion through time. There is something “beyond a visuality” as Sharpe describes it, a motion at the complete thread that is nevertheless invisible from only one side of the seam. To elaborate on one of Sharpe’s examples, indigo, meant to dye clothing, on the hands of the characters in Julie Dash’s "Daughters of the Dust,” create a “long” thread between enslavement and its afterlives (126). Along with mending, threading implies a minding of the line through the eye of the needle, a ferrying through the thread up and down, through the pattern.
Noise:
ReplyDelete1. a sound, especially one that is loud or unpleasant or that causes a disturbance. "making a noise like a pig in a trough" 2. TECHNICAL irregular fluctuations that accompany a transmitted electrical signal but are not part of it and tend to obscure it.
I have been thinking about noise and its importance when discussing our central idea of black frequencies. As argued by Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2014), the “the history of the rise of the modern since the sixteenth century has been associated with the emergence of vision as the privileged sense for perception and ideas about the subject and its relation to knowledge and the world in the West.” (p.12). Ochoa, alongside other authors such as Nicholas Mirzoeff, highlights how modern ocularcentrism is deeply enmeshed with colonialism and slavery since “the deployment of visuality and visual technologies as a Western social technique for ordering was decisively shaped by the experience of plantation slavery in the Americas” (Mirzoeff, 48). It is under this theoretical framework that Ochoa discussed a text by Humboldt in which the aural is linked to the excesses of the primitive, and thus “scientific observation, the means of making sense of radical difference in an intensely heterogeneous context, was drastically unsettled by an ‘acoustic release’… sonic perception is spread on corporeal difference, scientific explanation, and the narration of uncontainable, bodily produced noises” (Ochoa, 32). After seeing the definition of noise on Google I was impressed by how its definition also employ negative adjectives to define it while it also evokes a sense of excessiveness the interrupts the “order of things”, positioning noise as a surplus that irrupts and erodes clarity and “proper” communication. Moreover, by employing the figure of the animal in its example for the first definition, it also seeks to distance it from the human.
Continuation:
Delete“Noise is unwanted sound” concludes the website of Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department, that which is not rendered as pleasurable and which must be silenced. Noise it is also crucial for Rancière’s discussions around the “partition of the sensible” and politics since the author argues that one “in order to deny the political quality of a category - workers, women and so on - all that was required was to assert that they belonged to a 'domestic' space that was separated from public life, one from which only groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger or anger could emerge, but not actual speech … It consists in making what was unseen visible; in making what was audible as mere noise” (p.38). However, by arguing for a swift that “make what was deemed to be the mere noise of suffering bodies heard as a discourse” (p.139), his proposed counter-response to this dismissal of noise perpetuates the negation of the noise based on its supposed incongruency and excess. For Rancière, the utterances that are perceived as noise must pass by a transfiguration to be understood as worthy discourse, in a movement that never questions the initial political and social interdiction of what is perceived as noise. Can we think of and engage with noise as a way to dismantle these humanist borders? Not the search of a redemptive discourse but being open to a surplus noise that extends beyond human voice, an aurality that encompasses other sounds. I am thinking here firstly on the way Glissant posits sound and noise as central to the experience of the “Caribbean man [sic]”, to whom “the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech”. Glissant argues that “meaning, and pitch went together for the uprooted individual, in the unrelenting silence of the world of slavery. lt was the intensity of the sound that dictated meaning: the pitch of the sound conferred significance… Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. No one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.” (123-124). And secondly, on Saidiya Hartman’s essay The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner and how it perceives noise as a “sonic revolt” (p.481) enacted by the arrested women in the New York State Reformatory for Women to question the terrible living conditions and the threats and mental and physical abuses faced by them. As argued by Hartman, “their utterances were marked by the long history of black radical sound — whoops and hollers, shrieks, and squawks, sorrow songs, and blues. It was the soundtrack to a history that hurt. The chants and cries escaped the confines of the prison, even if their bodies did not”. Radically departing from the way Rancière proposes the transfiguration of excessive noise into coherent discourse as a counter-response to oppression, a movement that stills subscribes to a colonialist valorization of the latter as the one that can lead to true communication and knowledge, Glissant and Hartman showcase ways in which we can think of noise as communication in itself, one that draws from different sounds and extends beyond the singular of the one that speaks, a frequency that evades the enclosures which one cannot.
References:
Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier. Aurality Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia
Édouard Glissant. Caribbean Discourse.
Jácques Rancière. DISSENSUS: On Politics and Aesthetics
Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Right to Look.
Saidiya Hartman. The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.
Heardness
ReplyDeleteThe starting point of anything that is heard is its ability to sound, and not the other way around. In other words, the heardness of a sounding being is not defined by the ability of others to hear it, but rather heardness is a form of agency that a sounding being can assume. In “An Account of Oneself”, Judith Butler considers human beings as narrate-able subjects. Butler understands the ability to narrate as a precondition to one’s ability to account for herself:
The narrative does not emerge after the fact of casual agency but constitutes the prerequisite condition for any account of moral agency we might give. In this sense, narrative capacity constitutes a precondition for giving an account of oneself. (Butler, 12)
Butler’s understanding of narrative capacities resonates with the relationship between sounding and heardness; just as the capacity to narrate is a precondition for the agency to account for oneself, the ability to be heard is an agency that a sounding being can assume. Hence, the ability to sound is a precondition for the ability to be heard.
I would like to think of heardness as a place of reflexive agency, in which refusal and repair can take place simultaneously. Refusal in the sense that an unheard or inaudible sounding being can resist misconceptions of heardness that constituted it as non sounding, and repair in the sense of a listener’s ability to acknowledge the sounding capacities of different beings to whom she listens, through a willingness to expand her notions of what does and doesn’t sound. Sound theorist Salomé Voegelin’s writing about the critical agency of the Avatar-I echoes my consideration of heardness as a place of reflexive agency:
The conceptualization of the avatar-I provides a means and location to hear the world beyond that which is mirrored in the actuality of the perceived real and its language, where its plural and less audible possibility sounds; and it illuminates the ‘I’ not for itself, but for its agency to illuminate these less audible and even inaudible subjectivities and things and its sensitivity to the articulation of the overlooked and the ignored. (Voegelin, 132)
Through refusal and repair, heardness offers us a way of being in the world that can account for the unheard, and opens the possibility of other forms of listening: namely a listening that hears beyond the heard. This type of listening takes us back to Cox’s sonic stream; the sonic properties of this stream may be inaudible at times, however this inaudibility does not mean that the sound ceased sounding. Rather, the silence of this sonic stream should be heard as a no less sounding segment of this stream.
Saidiya Hartman’s essay “Venus In Two Acts” is a good example of a listening that hears beyond the heard. While Hartman’s text does not speak from a sound studies perspective, I am struck time and again by the ways in which it listens to the unheard, and refuses to hear Venus solely through the conditions of heardness that constituted her remembrance:
[…] How does one tell impossible stories? Stories about girls bearing names that deface and disfigure, about the words exchanged between shipmates that never acquired any standing in the law and that failed to be recorded in the archive, about the appeals, prayers and secrets never uttered because no one was there to receive them? (Hartman, 10)
Hartman’s attempt to tell another story about the life of Venus, a story that the archive does not allow for, account for the unsaid because it understands that while she was not able to hear Venus’s words and to account for her life, it does not mean that this life didn’t take place. In doing so, Hartman goes beyond the conditions of heardness that the archive allows for, and listens to Venus’s unheard voice.
Blur
ReplyDelete(n)
1. a smear or stain that obscures
2. something vaguely or indistinctly perceived
especially : something moving or occurring too quickly to be clearly seen
(v)
1. to obscure or blemish by smearing
2. SULLY
3. to make dim, indistinct, or vague in outline or character
4. to make cloudy or confused
Page 11 of Hughes and DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life features a photo that blurs at the edges of the two people pictured: perhaps, a couple, perhaps dancing. I introduce these two qualifiers to reproduce the uncertainty of both Hughes’ text beneath the image (“Sometimes maybe they dance”) and the uncertainty of the blur (11). As the definition of “blur” from Merriam-Webster above reminds us, blur is frequently applied to that which is “occurring too quickly to be clearly seen;” the possibly-dancing, possibly-couple escapes being clearly captured by the camera.
One might consider the blurry photograph to be a sullied photograph, to begin looking at the verb form of “blur.” (And here I see a connection to definition of noise as unpleasant that Ricardo points to in his post; blur and noise might operate on the same frequency). In the blur we see evidence of photographic technology failing to perform the language of capture, of enclosure within the frame. The verb form of “blur” carries a gesture toward sousveillance, of obscuring the camera lens in the attempt to resist the surveillance of black life. Blur, in this way, operates against the (white, patriarchal, capitalist) Gaze.
But DeCarava’s blurred photograph seems to invoke the second definition of the noun form. Here I am returning to our question of whether there can be a black gaze, and want to pose that blur might be a way of approaching (if not arriving at) a visual logic that operates outside of the Gaze. It is a mode of looking at an image without capturing it, a mode of looking that, to borrow Arnav’s language, lags behind the thing being looked at.
Anticipation:
ReplyDeleteAfter our discussion regarding trauma and repetition last week, I am thinking about the issue of anticipation. What does it mean to anticipate the recurrence of anti-black violence both physically, that is, as the "rhythmic seriality" of "premature mortality" (Campt 107), and socially, in terms of representation? And what does this anticipation have to do with visual media specifically? I recall Fanon, whose chapter "The Lived Experience of the Black Man" meditates on the visual schematization of blackness, and as such concludes with thoughts on moviegoing: “I can’t go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts, I wait for myself. Those in front of me look at me, spy on me, wait for me. A black bellhop is going to appear” (Fanon 119). His following two paragraphs liken this experience not only to amputation but—in the abstraction that would attend this disembodiment—death at that. If Fanon chronicles the anticipation of misrepresentation in cinema, Christina Sharpe—in her formulation of anti-blackness as "Weather"—then structures this feeling of expectation as that which stems from and thereby demands repetition, that is, as that which ties representation to futurity. Put differently, representation of violence both physical or social not only normalizes injury upon the black body and secures the ontological location of whiteness, but also stages in effect a rehearsal of future violence, that is, its ongoing repetition.
In "Ten Minutes to Live," the character Letha receives a note that she has ten minutes left to live before hitmen for "The Killer" Morvis take her life. For me, this film narrativizes precisely the dread of anticipation surrounding premature mortality, of a trauma that for Letha is not her own but to which she must nonetheless answer, calculated as it is by chance ("statistical probability" [Campt 107]) and to the minute. I wonder if this allegorizes, moreover, the work that Micheaux takes up both in this film and his oeuvre generally to counter white portrayal of black life, the injurious kind that Fanon continues to encounter. I wonder if it thereby "anticipates" work—from "Lime Kiln Field Day" to "America" and the call Sharpe makes against the recapitulation of anti-blackness—that ventures to imagine a history, a traumatic history, instead through the lens of black intramural and social life. I wonder if it "anticipates" refusal, such as those who anticipate their death in #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and "redeploy this predictive anterior probability by way of a photographic enactment of death" (Campt 113). Can we anticipate anticipation, and open, through repetition as Snead understands it, the production of a difference against death?
Amplification (n)
ReplyDelete(related to: amplitude, receiving, withholding, staying, making room, ways, intensity, volume, space, apex, diffusion, excess, etc.)
In Venus in Two Acts, Saidiya Hartman describes the doubled aim of her practice of critical fabulation: “I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling” (11). Critical fabulation does and doesn’t do the impossible: it renders possibilities from the impossible at the same time that it feels out so as to feel more acutely the impossibility of that rendering. Given this double vision of the impossible, which keeps moving and keeps giving possibilities, what is the role of amplification in attending to the frequencies of black life? What is involved and at stake in amplification and how does it relate to the amplitude of a frequency? For Hartman, amplification of the impossibility of telling impossible stories involves “narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure… the imperative to respect black noise” (12). In other words, amplification can transpire by way of receiving, withholding, and staying (in the double sense of suspending/delaying and of what Fred Moten might call “resid[ing] without settling”). These ways of amplifying the impossible seem to be ways of making room for what can’t be grasped; perhaps they involve something like extending the grace of unconditional hospitality. The sense of amplification as enlarging or extending in space or capacity (which the Oxford English Dictionary says is an obsolete definition of "amplify”) could be at play here and could point toward amplification as a way of describing social and spatial intensities.
These social and spatial dimensions of amplification seem to be at play, for instance, in Kahlil Joseph’s Flypaper as a sound installation. As the speakers amplify the soundscape by increasing its volume (with soundscape and volume proving to be more than just metaphorically related to space), they make more room(s) in the room they’re placed in even as they make us aware of our temporary stay in that room. This multiplication of place and space echoes Ellison and amplifies the descending levels of a cave and the rooms upstairs that open in the narrator’s “new analytic way of listening” within his “hole.” We stay for a while in the spaces where amplification holds us back. Sometimes this stay feels like the loud low frequencies of bass, which become so amplified in Flypaper that even the image of the doppelgängers dancing in the stairwell registers and ripples with sonic amplitudes. By amplitude, I mean the crests and troughs of a wavelength, the apex and base (here also bass) of the waves that amplification takes us to and from. This rippling of the image also could remind us of Moten’s discussion of how the phonic substance cuts and augments (both of which transpire simultaneously in the double movement of invagination) the time of the photograph of the dead (Moten 200-201). Indeed, we should remember the augmentation (in its adjacency to both amplification and diffusion) that might be involved in every cut as well as in the relation of the cut to repetition and making room (Snead says the cut “mak[es] room” for “attempts to confront accident and rupture”).
To return to the apex of amplitude, sometimes (if not all of the time, depending on how one might step in and out of time) amplification is too much to bear, too much to contain, too much like being (if not actually being) held captive in a relentless, excessive, unfathomable apex beyond measure. Maybe part of the captivating experience of Arthur Jafa’s Apex is that it relentlessly amplifies the impact of a wave’s flow, its apex. Perhaps this amplification transpires through the way the film forces the viewer to find ways to diffuse (if not defuse) the images within their constant stream without recourse to settling, apprehending, or fully remembering these images (and what they exceed and what exceeds them). In this way, we could think about the relation between amplification and diffusion in the wake as related to the possibilities and impossibilities of respite (to borrow Justin’s term) from (which involves finding a place to stay for a bit) the enveloping Weather (Sharpe). Another OED definition of amplify is “to enlarge (a story or statement) by telling it more diffusely or fully, or by adding fresh details, illustration or reflections” (and this loops us back to Hartman’s effort to amplify the impossible telling of an impossible story). Amplification could be thought of as diffusion again in the sense of making room and even carrying volume over or through walls into other rooms. Consider Joseph’s sound installation, which frequently has us hearing the muffled sounds of music, television, and conversations from other rooms, as well as the moans and laughter from upstairs in Ellison. Though the wall’s muffling could be called a “deadening” of sound from one standing, sound is still amplified from that placeless place Ellison calls nowhere, and from the possibilities of nowhere’s everywhereness where black life stays.
DeleteFinally, to amplify can be to “make too much of.” It seems attention to excessiveness, what exceeds a certain grammar that measures and regulates what it considers to be “too much,” can be linked to other examples of writers we’ve encountered this semester who amplify overtones and undertones of images and their framing. When Richard Wright and Langston Hughes listened to how different photographs, looking through different angles, framed quotidian black life, both writers amplified some dimension of the phonic substance they received to tell something like impossible stories. Du Bois similarly plays with abstraction to amplify the lives, deaths, and chances that data points otherwise obscure. Amplification, to take one instance from his data portraits, makes room for visualizing the huddling of those “Negroes” who stayed in the country and villages even as others concentrated in cities. Carrie Mae Weems amplifies what a room can be, what it can receive, and shows precisely how one makes room for multiple rooms around a kitchen table. Again, amplification comes by way of receptivity, and both are matters of making room. Indeed, part of what impossible stories and their impossible telling amplify is a kind of receptivity to the forces that not only shape social dynamics but also might make room to stay, imagine, and live otherwise.
ReplyDelete—Scream—
I was thinking about belting earlier, that is to say, how one belts a note, particularly in gospel. Gospel’s uniqueness when it comes to the belt—in other words, when a singer chooses to use more of their “chest voice” than their “head voice” in hitting high notes— is not only that gospel popularized the belt, the fact that these belts tend to be unusually high, often going past the musical theater standard of an E5 to F5, G5, or in exceptional cases, the A. It is a difficult thing to execute, requiring an enormous amount of control of both the breath and of the tongue, where the singer’s lungs expand to take in as much air as possible and the tongue lifts to the back of the mouth.
The reason I mention all of this is because the closest feeling to a high belt that an untrained singer (like myself) can accomplish is a scream. We have spent a lot of time attending to the moan, but part of me is wonders about its counterpart. Just like the first thing most people emit when attempting to belt (which, for context, is often the material execution of what Jafa refers to as worrying the note) is a scream, I wonder if perhaps the scream precedes the moan, if the scream what happens in the moment before mourning.
Moten discusses the black mo’nin’ associated with Emmett and Mamie Till, but part of me wants to sit with the thing that comes before the moan; the sound emitted before Mamie could mourn in the moment where she received the news that Emmett was dead. A sound that does not define black life per se, but strains it and reveals its fragility. The scream, to me, is more personal than the moan. It is a moment in which suffering cannot be generalized to a black public, a moment in which one becomes intimately aware of all of the strange and individual aspects of their own life, and struggles with the capaciousness of something like “race” to encapsulate the life/suffering/joy/death/existence of oneself or a loved one, only to conclude that the capaciousness of blackness doesn’t matter because white supremacy has not given us a choice anyway.
The second reason I was thinking of the scream was my discussions with friends today of Jeremy Harris’ Slave Play. While there are numerous things that I find deeply disturbing about that piece of work, one of the most stark to me is the absence of the scream. Everything is in the abstract except for the characters present in the play; there is no mention or sense of how in a bedroom, there was a real person who emitted a scream because of being assaulted by an overseer or a mistress or an indentured servant. As much as these issues are part and parcel of the institution of slavery, their ability to be institutionalized is a function of their individual suffering.
Moving forward, this pushes me to think about how the scream/ the moment of the scream can articulate this tension between the move from the specific/individual to the general. Could a scream, for example, be the sample that is then abstracted, as Weheliye talks about in Diagrammatics? Most of all, how can the scream help to creating spaces for holding individuals and their specificity while talking about race in the abstract?
Atmosphere/Aspiration
ReplyDeleteatmosphere, n.
1. a. The spheroidal gaseous envelope surrounding any of the heavenly bodies.
b. esp. The mass of aeriform fluid surrounding the earth; the whole body of terrestrial air.
2. transferred. A gaseous envelope surrounding any substance.
(OED Online)
This week I wanted to consider the term “atmosphere” as referenced by Christina Sharpe, not so much in reference to her concept of “weather,” but to her exploration of breath and what she calls “aspiration.”
Sharpe defines aspiration as “keeping and keeping and putting breath back in the Black body in hostile weather” and describes it as both “violent and life-saving” (113). I’m interested in Sharpe’s reflections on air and breath and their relationship to both saving life and dealing violence, particularly on the idea of “free air”: “There is, too, a connection between the lungs and the weather: the supposedly transformative properties of breathing free of air…and the transformative properties of being ‘free’ to breathe fresh air…But who has access to freedom? Who can breathe free?” (112). Sharpe further complicates the idea of free air by calling upon the reader to remember that captive Africans on slave ships were also brought out of the hold to breath fresh air to maintain the value of the cargo. In this way, Sharpe draws a connection between aspiration and a form of biopolitics, of reducing Black life to commodities that must be maintained in order to produce profit. Borrowing here from a discussion post I made at the beginning of the semester, aspiration both stands for “care as force; ‘the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something” (123) and an “an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness” (131).
My mind goes immediately our current atmosphere of global pandemic. I’m reminded of news stories about the national shortage of ventilators and how, to ration the current supplies, multiple states have adopted policies directing hospitals to deny ventilators to patients with intellectual disabilities. This is not to mention the new politics of space that has come to rule or day to day lives: who has access to fresh air outside their potentially cramped living spaces? Who can access these spaces without being stopped or questioned for their use of them? I’m reminded again of Sharpe’s question: “Who can breathe free?” Our current atmosphere provides a new complication to aspiration as ethics of care and aspiration as care as force.
deep blackness
ReplyDeleteThinking with The Sweet Flypaper of Life and The Kitchen Table Series, I see deep blackness as a mode of Black imaging attended to the quiet and quotidian, to Black interiority in ways that refuse the “evidentiary thrust” of photography. Exceeding demands of evidencing Black capabilities of participation in the American project, these photo-texts draw on knowledge “from and of the everyday” (Sharpe) to do a method of fabulation with and beyond what is visually represented in the photographs. The use of Black annotation (through narrative) and Black redaction (through focusing and shadow) allows the photo-texts to represent the abstraction that is Black interior life.
In response to last week’s discussion around the notion of echo, and specifically in regards to the last question Max raised, of how we think and position our own critical and creative practice, when we are facing the fact that thinking about frequency exceeds the language of a particular media; I would like to draw some attention to the sonar, also called sonic depth finder, or echolocation. This is related to the actual outline of my glossary, which circles around the question of responsiveness and responsibility; in particular with regards to the question of using a cross-disciplinary vocabulary and producing our own critical literature with it.
ReplyDeleteHow can we have then an account of something, or, put differently, how can we try to read and understand the encounter we have with the visuality, the sonic, or the hapticality of black life without reducing them to certain textualities? In spanning an arc from the (non)intentionality of 'intention'; the gaze, not so much as a tool to fix, command and subjugate something other, but as a moment of affect, relationality, and transformation; now coming to 'sonar' and the idea of sounding out the present/past, then will follow 'empathy', 'interval', 'syncope'; my glossary is trying to explore and expand the cognitive tools and sets we use to create different, or alternative epistemologies. (I am in conversation here with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ The End of the Cognitive Empire. The Coming of Age of Epistemologies from the South)
Sonar (acronym of sound navigation and range) according to the O.E.D.:
a. A method or system for detecting or locating underwater objects using sound, in which pulses of audible or higher-frequency sound are emitted, and any sound waves reflected by an object are detected to reveal the object's presence, or measured to determine its nature, position, or speed. Also: a similar system which passively detects sounds emitted by other objects but does not emit sound pulses itself.
b. A natural method or facility whereby certain animals (esp. dolphins, toothed whales, and many bats) navigate, locate objects, and identify food items by emitting sounds and registering the returning echoes; echolocation.
c. Medicine. A diagnostic technique which uses echoes of ultrasonic pulses to delineate structures within the body; = ultrasonography n.
I note “sonar”: method, detecting or locating, depths, the usage of sound, pulse, audibility, frequency, reflections, reveal presence, measure, determination, passively detect objects.
In reviewing my course-notes and in going through the readings again, I stumbled on the term “physionotrace,” and how photography gives way to this trace, in Alexander G. Wehelye’s text on ‘Diagrammatics as Physiognomy.’ In referencing Eduardo Cadava and Walter Benjamin, the term links photographic technology and the physiognomy of historical thought, “means, Cadava writes, “that there can be no thinking of history that is not at the same time a thinking of photography,” and Wehelye adds to that: “then there cannot exist a contemplation of photography that is not also a consideration of black life.” (Wehelye, 36) Coming back to our class, I would like to think of the possibility of sonotraces, or the writing of the history of black life as sonography.
I would like to explore the idea of the historian as someone sinking his/her sonar into the depths if history in order to sono-trace the (visual) frequencies of black life and therewith sounding out past and present. Acknowledging the mentioned exceeding of the boundaries of the language of particular media, I was thinking of Fred Moten’s notion of an “aural aesthetics” and the possibility to “listen while you look,” as well as to listen while you read or study, in the general sense of the intervention Moten and Harney introduce in their Undercommons project.
ReplyDelete“You have to keep looking at this so you can listen to it.” (Moten, 210)
Dionne Brand spoke in a wonderful lecture on the “Shape of Language” about the prevalent modes of speech and on “the importance of sounding out a present, a today because our lived today is cluttered in frequencies of oppression, and responses to repression.” In proposing a radical indictment of narrative, Brand introduces poetry’s “diacritical” ability to overwrite and displace the meaning of what Christina Sharpe has called the “dysgraphia of disaster,” produced by the resonating historical tragedy of slavery, and of Black people in the Americas.
“Poetry,” Brand says, “perhaps, with its capacity to deport and unearth plural meanings, and with its refusal of a particular interrogative gaze, might cut out a space; to a description of being in the diaspora.” In thinking back now to the question of how to ‘read’ and understand the several encounters we encountered throughout the semester, all the different mediatized texts and languages of black life, the notion of sounding out the aural qualities and the poetical dimensions of history, photography, theory, music . . . and on and on and on; I am very much drawn to the idea to rethink the narrative through poetry, as Brand suggests: while “the reader interrogates the narrative, poetry interrogates the reader.” This reversal of intentionality opens up the crucial point in which, in sounding out the possibility of black life, I am being interrogated in the first place (…)
Density (Gravity, n: "weight, influence, authority")
ReplyDeletedensity, n.
1. The quality or condition of being dense; thickness; closeness of texture or consistence.
2. Physics. The degree of consistence of a body or substance, measured by the ratio of the mass to the volume, or by the quantity of matter in a unit of bulk.
This week, I'm thinking about what it means to be moved by the collective weight of some energy, say affect, feeling, frequency, if you will. I am thinking specifically of Christina Sharpe's offering of the weather, of the possibility of ecology in the midst of a singularity, a "weather event or phenomenon likely to occur around a particular time, or date, or set of circumstances,” or a “point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces” (Sharpe 106). To the latter, I am inclined to join it with a provocative description from Wright's 12 Million Black Voices: "The island whose confines we live, is anchored in the feelings of millions of people...its rocky boundaries have remained unyielding to the waves of our hope that dash against it" (30). What Wright notions is the constituting force, or gravity rather, of this collectivized feeling, a kind of contrapuntal movement, to borrow from Simone Gikandi. Both Sharpe and Wright's system do not replicate the humanist affective economy that Tyrone Palmer critiques in "What Feels More than Feeling," an economy that endows those considered Subjects with an "interiority that is recognized as such, and a capacity for feeling that has socio-poltical value" (Palmer 47). Instead, they imagine something like density -- which we might understand as an expression of surplus/excess matter (weight) as a result of the organization of internal space.
To return and slightly amend my earlier question, what does it means to be constitutive of this weather or atmosphere and, yet, still be moved? This echoes Professor Campt’s blog post on “Slow Walking,” where she writes “How do you ‘feel’ another when no one is touching?” What does it mean to be a part of this "region of infinite mass density" (Sharpe 106), necessarily “anchoring” and distorting force of this climate of anti-blackness (Wright 30)? What does it mean to be amidst this "weather event," as s/place, to call on Katherine McKittrick via M. Nourbese Philip? And, to echo Campt, what does it mean to be “’feel’ another when no one is touching”?
From Imani
ReplyDeletesur·viv·al
/sərˈvīvəl/
noun
noun: survival
the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances.
"the animal's chances of survival were pretty low"
an object or practice that has continued to exist from an earlier time.
plural noun: survivals
"his shorts were a survival from his army days"
I have been thinking a lot about this word in relation to black life. Both for my personal work and in my personal life since covid. Transition into a new place, new mode of being, etc. has not been easy, yet I have felt I fared better than some others even though I had the virus myself. As I have begun contemplating what it would look like to bring the other things I love and need in my academic practice (my art practice, my meditation practice, and poetry) back into my life, I realized that I was operating in a mode of survival. Everyday I give myself the things I need and--for the most part-- do the things I need to do, yet I have not focused as much on the erotic, joyful, umph-like, aspect of my day to day tasks. I have my partner and, together, our life experiences have made us well equipped to kick into survival mode. Now we both yearn to spiritually and psychically re-immerse ourselves in our lives. I specifically want to reimagine life in the state of covid in a more intentional way. Why/ how is this desire and the possible fulfillment of fullness different than my previous way of handling our new normal? How did me and my partner’s conditioning as black people who have inherited certain tools of survival change how we internalized and psychically experienced covid?
How does continuing to breathe, live, and exist in the midst of chaos, “accident,” “ordeal,” presume that those living are okay, well, and “built” to weather the storm? Everyday we are learning that in America Black and Latinx communities, those on the front lines, are the most affected by this virus. Some of my family members are (were) on the front lines, some of my friends’ family members are in the hospital. What is black life under these reifying conditions of devastation and catastrophe? My family and I gather via zoom to a party and throw our April birthday parties and my partner’s little sister updates us on the recent tik tok trends. Is it still finding joy, ecstasis, feeling in the midst of it all? And after Diddy’s Easter Sunday on instagram, might we say/ask, whether blackness as metaphor operates with a different force and magnitude during the age of social media?
Trouble
ReplyDelete(n). difficulty or problems.
the malfunction of something such as a machine or a part of the body.
effort or exertion made to do something, especially when inconvenient.
public unrest or disorder.
(v). cause distress or anxiety to.
cause (someone) pain or inconvenience
Now is a state of trouble, of agitation, of feeling troubled, of being in trouble. I am thinking about trouble in relation to these definitions (as an action and a thing) and in relation to Lauren Berlant's essay, "The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times", which I have been thinking about continuously the last 3 years.
I've also been struggling with thinking of trouble together with attachment: the trouble of attachment that we discussed last week re: Hartman's Venus in Two Acts and Berlant in this essay: How do we as students/scholars derive our social theory from such scenes of ambivalence, “which is to say, the scenes of attachment that are intimate, defined by desire, and overwhelming” (Berlant, 2016: 395)? As John Keene quotes Lyn Hejinian in Annotations, "What memory is not a 'gripping' thought"?
Here is also an excerpt from Berlant's essay that I have been revisiting often:
"What remains for our pedagogy of unlearning is to build affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire as the work of an aspirational ambivalence. What remains is the potential we have to common infrastructures that absorb the blows of our aggressive need for the world to accommodate us and our resistance to adaptation and that, at the same time, hold out the prospect of a world worth attaching to that’s something other than an old hope’s bitter echo. A failed episode is not evidence that the project was in error."
Bommeranging
ReplyDelete(n) a curved flat piece of wood that can be thrown so as to return to the thrower, traditionally used by Australian Aborigines as a hunting weapon.
(v) (of a plan or action) return to the originator, often with negative consequences.
Since our reading of Invisible Man earlier in the semester, and especially after our conversation about repetition and the changing same last week, I’ve been thinking about his use of the word “boomeranging.” Ellison writes: “the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang…I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness” (6). How might one be boomeranged by the world? Cast and brought back? Over and over again? What impact might that pattern have on a life lived? What does it allow you to see, do, know or hear? How does boomeranging relate to the changing same?
Visually, (thanks Instagram) I see “boomeranging” as a series of sharp repetitive movements. Alongside movement, there’s also fixity – one is not able to move beyond the established frame. Except, unlike Instagram, for Ellison, the whipping movement is not bound to specific measures of time. This creates for an irregularity in the sonic beat – it isn’t constant, isn’t steady, even. Instead, there’s a syncopation. As Ellison writes a few pages later – “sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes you’re behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes…and you slip into the breaks and look around” (8). And what is in those breaks? For the man, as he listens to Louis Armstrong’s music, he descends into different scenes and tempos, a series of histories. There’s a slow tempo and a woman singing a spiritual, there’s a girl being sold into enslavement, and a woman speaking on freedom. I’m wondering how we might use boomeranging as a visual and sonic pattern? If we imagine life as series of boomerangs, moving and amassing in a cluster, with histories in the breaks, how might one live within the cluster?
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ReplyDeleteBlues
ReplyDeleteThe key term that I am interested in exploring is the “blues” given that it is a vehicle for depicting the frequency of black experience—but I am particularly interested in how the blues manifests in America through black leisure, movement, and various refrains such as “America”—which I interpret as “blues-tempered echoes.” I am also thinking about the frequency of “blues-tempered echoes” as depicted through the sound, the movement, the images, the facial expressions, the rhythms , the dance, memory, the archive, wounding, looking, and lyricism in of the works that we have engaged this semester. I am especially interested in the relationship between the “blues tempered echoes,” Jafa’s notion of “worrying the note,” and Snead’s notion of repetition as defined by an interval moment.
blues
/blo͞oz/
noun
noun: melancholic music of black American folk origin, typically in a twelve-bar sequence. It developed in the rural southern US toward the end of the 19th century, finding a wider audience in the 1940s, as blacks migrated to the cities. This urban blues gave rise to rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
I have also been meditating on Ralph Ellison’s interpretation of the blues from the essay “Richard Wright’s Blues.”
Here are a few excerpts:
“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (Ellison 62).
“Let us close with one final word about the blues: Their attraction lies in this, that they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self. Nowhere in America today is there social or political action based upon the solid realities of Negro life depicted in Black Boy; perhaps that is why, with its refusal to offer solutions, it is like the blues” (Ellison 73-4).
“Thus along with the themes, equivalent descriptions of milieu, and the perspectives to be found in Joyce, Nehru, Dostoyevsky, George Moore, and Rousseau, Black Boy is filled with blues-tempered echoes of railroad trains, the names of southern towns and cities, estrangements, fights and flights, deaths and disappointments, charged with physical and spiritual hungers and pain. And like a blues sung by such an artist as Bessie Smith, its lyrical prose evokes the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singing lustily as he probes his own grievous wound” (Ellison 264-5).
I am working on a glossary entry for “attunement” and have preliminary notes about the term below:
ReplyDeleteWhen frequencies collide in meaningful ways.
The rhythmic shift of phonic substance to respond to the pace, pitch and tone of another across striated landscapes of time and space.
Attunement is a concept that comes to mind when watching Garret Bradley’s America and witnessing the seamless blend of scenes from Lime Kiln Field Day fold into Bradley’s counterarchive of Black social life. The white cotton fabric blowing on the clothes line overlays on images of young rambunctious boys chasing, leaping, and bouncing off of one another; the white fabric wanes and the image of the Lime Kiln mother with white lace curtains framing her figure appears in the window chastising them through the imagined temporal bounds that otherwise would have them untethered. Bradley weaves together these fragments of Black social life that exceed the limited frame of the imperial archive and demonstrates the resilient rhythms that extend beyond the regimented logic of linear histories of progression. Bradley attunes her film to what exceeds it.
Borrowing from Tina Campt’s concept of adjacency as “the reparative work of transforming proximity into accountability; the labour of positioning oneself in relation to another in ways that revalue and redress complex histories of dispossession” attunement also addresses the ways in which the visual frequency of Black life reverberates amongst others in the global struggle for liberation. How can we attend to the transit of this frequency from Ferguson to Gaza? What is difference without separability, to borrow from Denise Ferreira da Silva? The phonic substance and visual iconography of civil rights movement transcend the borders of America. What does it mean for Palestinians living in the highly segregated city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) in the occupied West Bank to protest President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel by desegregating the streets wearing t-shirst that read I have a dream and “Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom” playing over a megaphone. The protestors were attacked by Israeli settlers and 9 Palestinians were detained by the occupation soldiers. The visual frequency of Black life is irreducible; it carries multitudes of opacities but nonetheless reverberates throughout the world.
In many ways, Arthur Jaffa’s Apex demonstrates the impossibility of attunement, as soon as we feel we can recognize and place an image it disappears. The reverberating pulse of the electronic beat propels us through the beautiful, the terrible, and the unbearable images of the weather of anti-blackness and the resilient refusals of Black life which exceed it without pause. The fixed quality attributed to photographs, the defining feature of the discovery of the medium, is violated as Jaffa moves us through what Tina Campt has defined as “still-moving images.” Attunement almost sounds like atonement, it gestures at repair through a common rhythmic alignment, but it also plays at the tension between between I hear you and I listen to you.