[-empyre-] Welcome to the -empyre- April 2016 Discussion: Liquid Blackness: Formal Approaches to Blackness and/as Aesthetics

[Jenny Gunn]

Alessandra is right to emphasize the function of liquid blackness as a reading strategy, and one that I think becomes particularly useful in instances in which race is seemingly irrelevant. But as Fred Moten has illustrated in "The Case of Blackness," the possibility of abstracting blackness is only wishful thinking. I recently viewed the opening credits of David Fincher's 2011, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which the bodies of the protagonists played by Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig emerge in a liquid, viscous, oily sea of blackness. Why blackness? What can blackness do, what movement, multiplicity, amorphousness, does it allow for that nothing else seemingly can? 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 4, 2016, at 6:35 PM, Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu> wrote:
> 
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> Thank you, Murat, for your contribution
> 
> Part of what I think Jenny’s comments are attempting to highlight is how “liquid blackness” entails a reading strategy that privileges aesthetics and form, In doing that, it also emphasizes how blackness might, on the one hand, both “detach” and “attach” to people and things and, on the other hand, how it might “behave”, so to speak, on its own. 
> 
> As I believe other discussants will point out, attention to the “liquidity” of blackness can bring to the foreground a fundamental instability and multiplicity as Chip Linscott’s work on Miles Davis exemplifies. Simply put, in the very disjunctions that he describes with the concept of “talking B(l)ack” (between "performing and not performing, speaking and not speaking, sounding at will but not on command, all of which are of a piece with Miles’ celebrated use of silence and noise in his music”) one might find modes of black resistance as well as modes of black expansiveness. As Chip also writes, “in pushing at the edges of the synesthetic, Blackness hinges, swinging, never settling, between the poles of vision and hearing.” In so doing, it delivers a productive "break; sound cutting through image, vision percussively sounding on the body."
> 
> I want to offer another example of this reading strategy. For the first "liquid blackness" Symposium (Spring 2014) I asked one of the graduate students  in my program—Adam Cottrell—to write an essay about two dance performances that were part of the event. One, by T.Lang, was an excerpt from a longer piece called “Post Up” and the other, called “Heart of Palm," was a piece created for the occasion by Jerylann Warner and her company Gathering Wild Dance. In his writing on these pieces, Adam focused on the possibility to read movement as form in order to “specify ‘liquid blackness’ as the active exercise of self-variation which complicates calcified and preconceived notions of blackness.” He concluded that in these two dances “blackness bubbles” understood both as noun (a thin film of liquid inflated with air) and a verb (to flow with a gurgling sound). In this bubbling, blackness expands and multiplies, suggesting a much larger and generative scope. 
> 
> 
>> On Apr 4, 2016, at 12:39 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
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>> I remember very vividly my experience of the trial. Though white, I was rooting for O.J. Why? I think the trial was partly a struggle between the advantages of celebrity (and O.J.'s image as a good guy, do you remember the Hertz commercial?) and the disadvantages of race. I had one additional personal contact with O.J. My son Rafael who was about seven or eight at the time, my wife and I were walking in Manhattan Chelsea district one Sunday. I noticed O. J. and his wife Nicole walking in our direction and passing us. After they had passed us, I told my son and my wife that the one passed us was O.J. Simpson. Excited, to have a better look, my son turned back, ran past O.J. and Nicole and turned back again walking slowly towards them. Once near them, O.J. suddenly crouched and tackled my son aware what he was doing. It was a sweet moment. Obviously, my rooting in the trial for him was partly affected by the incident.
>> 
>> I think it was an atrociously run trial. The prosecutorial team, two of its top members were having an affair put the controversial cop (I forgot his name) on stand and asked him the question whether he ever used the n word knowing full well that his answer would be a lie. He was caught in that lie, I think, that Cochran exploited/used beatifully turning the race factor into an advantage and got the jury pass a not guilty verdict. Of course, we don't know O.J. did the killing or not. Due to his crazy behavior later, my instinct say he did.
>> 
>> The O.J. Simpson team also hired the Jfamous ewish lawyer (what was his name, not Berkowitz?) to prevent him as a talking head on TV from making negative comments. As far as I could tell, the guy had not other function, except for getting paid to keep his mouth shut, and sat in one of the councel's chairs during the trial.
>> 
>> Ciao,
>> Murat
>> 
>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 10:58 AM, Jenny Gunn <jgunn7 at mygsu.onmicrosoft.com> wrote:
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>> Hi Murat,
>> 
>> Thanks for your comment. I was specifically referring to the way the series connected the emergence of the Time magazine cover and the realization of O.J. and his defense team that the issue of race was going to be a fundamental element of the case. (The episode makes a strong case for the power of images!)
>> 
>> I can't be sure if this had any basis in reality. The series is based on Jeffrey Toobin's book, The Run of His Life: The People v O.J. Simpson. It would be interesting to see if there was in fact a connection historically between these two events: the magazine cover and the hiring of Cochran. 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>>> On Apr 4, 2016, at 10:40 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
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>>> Hi Jenny, I have one question. As I understand it, the causal link you are making between the appearance of the Time cover and O.J. Simpson hiring Johnny Cochran as his lawyer, is this a link that O.J. Simpson or someone close to him made or is it your observation?
>>> 
>>> Ciao,
>>> Murat
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 4:31 PM, Jenny Gunn <jgunn7 at mygsu.onmicrosoft.com> wrote:
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>>> Thank you to Alessandra for inviting me to participate in this week’s discussion. One of the initial questions I had in becoming involved with liquid blackness was how will I know it when I see it? But you don’t have to find liquid blackness, it finds you. Or, in other words, once you know it, you will inevitably see it. This happened recently while watching an early episode of The People vs. O.J. Simpson. This episode dealt with the publication of the “American Tragedy” Time magazine cover that infamously saturated the blackness of O.J. Simpson’s mug shot. As Alessandra states, liquid blackness considers “the increased detachability of blackness in contemporary culture and its ability to circulate apart from black people, often at their expense.” While this episode of The People vs. O.J. Simpson clearly indicates the detachability of blackness, in this case, blackness seems rather to attach to O.J. and at his expense. The early episodes of the series ruminate on O.J.’s arrest and his realization (and also Marcia Clark’s) of the impossibility of transcending race: despite O.J.’s success, his Brentwood address, his golfing buddies, when he is charged with murder, his blackness finds him again, and this is stunningly figured in O.J.’s confrontation with the Time magazine cover. It is in this moment that for the first time he realizes the gravity of his plight and his disadvantage in the legal system as a black male. Up until this point, O.J. had avoided engaging with race in planning his legal defense, but shortly after the publication of the Time magazine cover, O.J.’s defense team hires Johnny Cochran. This is but one example of liquid blackness, which plays out in many contexts, forms, and with a range of affective tonalities, that illustrates the value in thinking blackness as liquidity.
>>> 
>>> Jenny Gunn
>>> PhD Student, Moving Image Studies
>>> Department of Communication
>>> Georgia State University
>>> jgunn7 at gsu.edu
>>> 
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu>
>>> Sent: Sunday, April 3, 2016 4:12 PM
>>> To: soft_skinned_space
>>> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the -empyre- April 2016 Discussion: Liquid Blackness: Formal Approaches to Blackness and/as Aesthetics
>>> 
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>>> I want to thank Chip for sharing the way the concept of “liquid blackness” has shaped his work on Miles Davis.
>>> 
>>> Before I comment on the way the formal/aesthetic concept of “liquid blackness” and the methodology for formal and material reading it entails has led Chip Linscott to articulate his work on Miles Davis the way he does, I need to first mention that “liquid blackness”  describes also a research group I coordinate at Georgia State University.  In this instance, however, “liquid blackness” is spelled in italics and lower case, which is the same way we spell the title of the online publication associated with the work of the group.
>>> 
>>> The mode of research and the possibilities of “liquid blackness” as a concept are deeply intertwined.
>>> 
>>> The research group began very informally around the hosting of a film series (together with Emory’s Department of Film and Media Studies) in the fall 2013: the "L.A. Rebellion: Creating  a New Black American Cinema," which showcased films made at UCLA by students of color in the mid seventies to the early nineties.
>>> 
>>> Since then, the group has hosted other film series, including the Black Audio Film Collective, from the UK (in the Fall 2014), and a year-long research project on Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977), an experimental jazz film that to this day is considered the most successful attempt to transpose the improvisational form of free jazz to the cinema. We are now pursuing a research project on “Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness” which was inspired by Arthur Jafa’s film Dreams are Colder than Death.
>>> 
>>> I mention this to highlight an important element: which is the fact that every project we undertake has two characteristics. First, it faces 3 ways: it faces the scholarly community, the artistic community, and the curatorial community. Second, it has 3 components: it always entails an event (or series of events), a research project, and a publication, as a way to open the research up to a larger conversation.
>>> 
>>> Because of the mostly “informal” way this has occurred, we have found that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of “study" (as developed in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study,) as a way of thinking together inspired by the dynamics of the jazz ensemble, possesses the characteristics of liquidity that well describe the way we also carry out our projects.
>>> 
>>> It is in this spirit that people like Chip Linscott, Jenny Gunn, Lauren Cramer, and Cameron Kunzelman will contribute to this conversation, since they have worked with us in various capacities and have experienced this multi-layered and flexible mode of thinking and doing.
>>> 
>>> In my future comments I will seek to highlight also the important contributions of other members or collaborators
>>> 
>>>> On Apr 3, 2016, at 8:57 AM, Linscott, Charles <linscoc2 at ohio.edu> wrote:
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>>>> Shhh: On the Blackness of Miles Davis’ Voice
>>>> 
>>>> Charles P. (“Chip”) Linscott
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> The core themes of "liquid blackness" find expression in much of my work, but a signal example is my writing on Miles Davis. While racist visuality transforms a subject into an object, barring subjectivization through an objectifying visual classificatory system, I argue that Miles’ musical, sonic, performative, and visual techniques form a network of interventions through which Blackness can be rethought. By beginning with a post-beating photographic image, I initiate an extended encounter with numerous instantiations of the “voice” of Miles Davis. At turns abstract and concrete, this voice comes from the figure of Miles—a constellation of acts, processes, performances, and events, but also a body and a subjectivity. This voice intones what Fred Moten calls “the resistance of the object,” which is the radical subjective refusal of Black fungibility and the objectifying processes of racialization. This resistance comes in many forms, but a signal component is “talking B(l)ack”: performing and not performing, speaking and not speaking, sounding at will but not on command, all of which are of a piece with Miles’ celebrated use of silence and noise in his music. Paradoxically, Black people in America are compelled to both speak and not speak, to sound and not sound, to be and not be. Talking B(l)ack is thus a form of self-possessive voice that resists possession by the phantasmatic body of the scopic. Davis’ voice encompasses a complex of processes through which he and other Black subjects might speak, sing, or cry out in resistance to the visual hegemony of Whiteness. In pushing at the edges of the synaesthetic, Blackness hinges, swinging, never settling, between the poles of vision and hearing. Somewhere between the conceptual and the material, the shadow of instantiation falls across the body. In that liminality, rather than strict ocularcentrism or phonocentrism, is a lurch toward the parataxic, a tenuous eddying relationship between hearing and seeing. It is a break; sound cutting through image, vision percussively sounding on the body. Thus, the conceptual-material hierarchy of epidermalization is persistently challenged by Black political and cultural practices such as those enacted by Miles Davis.
>>>> 
>>>> Many thanks to Alessandra and the rest of the liquid blackness crew for everything, as always.
>>>> CPL
>>>> 
>>>>> On Apr 3, 2016, at 2:08 AM, Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu> wrote:
>>>>> 
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>>>>> I want to thank Derek Murray for this invitation to moderate this month’s discussion on the critical possibilities of the concept of “liquid blackness.”
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> “liquid blackness” is a concept I have been using to describe a particular critical attitude towards the way in which blackness is often encountered in contemporary visual and sonic culture, i.e. in “liquid,” immersive form. It is designed to act as a deliberate pressure point in order to think of blackness as something that is both “common place” (because it is constantly encountered in everyday mediated and unmediated interactions) and “commonsensical” (because produced or conjured up through the cooperation of everybody’s sensorium). Thus, “liquid blackness” understands blackness as a way to organize the human sensorium according to elaborate, flexible, and outrageously erratic sets of articulations that constantly draw and redraw what we would call the “color line.” Building on Mark Smith’s argument about how race is sensorially made, how sensorial experience is historically specific and how the sensorial construction of race is deployed in order for race to make sense, “liquid blackness” expresses an option for a formal and aesthetic approach to blackness, where “aesthetic” encompasses the sensible, the sensorial, and the sensate and the interactions between them. “Liquid blackness” claims this fluid sensorial terrain as its object of focus.
>>>>> 
>>>>> “liquid blackness” makes an option also for materiality and spatiality. In order to think about “liquid blackness,” one has to think of blackness as a type of “thing” (or a substance, or a type of matter) that fills the space “in-between” people and things. In other words, “liquid blackness” takes seriously Harry Elam’s observation of the increased detachability of blackness in contemporary culture and its ability to circulate apart from black people, often at their expense, and seeks a way to attend to this process, including its frequent erotic charge. In this sense, liquid blackness can be seen as the aesthetic production of black fungibility.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Finally, “liquid blackness” is also a way to think about the expansive possibilities of blackness and black cultural expressions—especially when blackness is let free to explore its own genius and its own possibilities. Here, liquidity can encourage a mercurial imagination of infinite potentialities.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Apr 1, 2016, at 9:43 PM, Derek Murray <derekconradmurray6719 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
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>>>>>> Welcome to our April discussion on -empyre- soft-skinned space, Liquid Blackness: Formal Approaches to Blackness and/as Aesthetics.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The moderator of this month’s discussion will be Alessandra Raengo (United States). We are thrilled that Alessandra Raengo’s exciting and timely research on race, aesthetics, and form has been the catalyst for this month’s topic, which highlights conceptual issues around the materiality of blackness as it expresses itself across various forms of cultural production, including: visual art, cinema, music, and photography. Thanks to you, Alessandra, and each of your guests for joining us this month.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Moderator Bio:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Alessandra Raengo is Associate Professor of Moving Image Studies in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University and coordinator of liquid blackness, a research project on blackness and aesthetics. Her work focuses on blackness in the visual and aesthetic field and her essays on contemporary African-American art, black cinema and visual culture, and race and capital have appeared in Camera Obscura, Adaptation, The World Picture Journal, Discourse (forthcoming) and several anthologies. She is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and of Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (Bloomsbury Press, 2016). With Robert Stam, she has also co-edited two anthologies on adaptation studies, Literature and Film and A Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2004 and 2005).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> We turn the discussion over to you now, Alessandra, to further introduce us to your topic, your exciting research on Liquid Blackness, and to share the bios of those guests who will be participating in the conversation this month.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> All best,
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Derek Conrad Murray
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Soraya Murray
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Co-Moderators, -empyre-
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>> 
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