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

[Alessandra Raengo]

Dear Murat,

thank you again for your comments. 

Here are some clarifications that might help: 

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison focuses on the work that American literature does to avoid race and maintain a sense of its own whiteness.  Morrison wants us to pay attention to the creative processes that make race seemingly invisible (like a fishbowl, as she says) even though the Africanist presence (as she calls it) in this literature performs as a necessary foil for white characters to understand something about themselves. She wants us to see the incredible amount of work it takes to deny race.

The end of the  “innocent white subject” means to take seriously Morrison’s project. It means the end of scholarship and art that works so hard to distill and remove expressive resources from the racial ground from which they derive their expressivity. 
(And therefore it does not mean that non-black artists cannot use racial language, but that they should not use it as if it was divorced form race)

Your translation is a perfect example of something that “liquid blackness” can address: how the Arab was a mark of racialized difference, one that you decided to bring to the surface by translating it with the N-word, despite potential controversy. You brought to the surface a racial subtext calling attention to how race worked underneath the term to make it signify utter difference. So you completed the work that Morrison is asking us to do: to acknowledge and bring to the surface the work of race. 

Your skepticism is not only justified but also helpful. Ambivalence is an entirely appropriate response to the idea of “liquid blackness” which, I as mentioned in earlier posts, is a deliberate PRESSURE POINT. On the one hand it responds to, and describes, scenarios of appropriation (the idea of blackness made liquid so that it can be easily circulated, appropriated, ingested, etc….. In this sense liquidity can be seen as the aesthetic dimension of fungibility), and on the other it understands liquidity as potentially expansive, as the manifestation of the multiplicity, mobility, and potentiality of blackness. 
Holding these two poles together is very difficult and slippery, but I believe necessary: there is nothing simple about race.



> On Apr 7, 2016, at 11:44 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> "This is a very helpful question, Murat.
> 
> The issue, as I see it, is not that any mention of “blackness” has to necessarily bear racial connotations, but rather that the connotations, associations, and affects that are overwhelmingly associated with virtually any mention of blackness are too often first elaborated (or post-facto magnified) in a racial context.
> 
> A more blunt way to say this is as follows: why choose blackness to do the affective, artistic, intellectual work one wants it to do, when one knows how (racially) complicated it is? And what makes one think that it can perform all that work?
> 
> In other words, rather than wondering (or lamenting) how the idea of  “blackness,” understood as a “clear” and “pure” visual signifier, or an entirely isolated concept, has come to designate “race” — has come to be “contaminated” by race, if we want to put this even more aggressively, and ventriloquizing  a form of resentment we still see way too often—we want to ask whether it is at all possible to evacuate race from “blackness,” however removed and purified we understand the idea of blackness to be. Similarly, we want to question what the investment and separate in this purity might really be about.
> 
> Thus, in a sense, we are invested in what, paraphrasing Stuart Hall, is the “end of the white innocent subject"
> 
> 
> Allesandra,
> 
> I have such a split reaction to the approach you as a group are taking in your concept of "liquid blackness." On the one hand, I see the truthfulness and force in your argument. Take Othello for instance. The hero's color is central in the play. Iago uses the image of a black man and white woman having sex together ("playing the beast with two backs") to manipulate a rich man who lusts after Desdemona to finagle money from him. Obviously, the association of blackness and race and sexuality goes back for centuries, and who is more in tune with the underbelly of human emotions or in the Trump sense popular beliefs than Skakespeare? Let me give a more recent and immediate example. Years ago, I translated a great gay Turkish poet of last mid-century, Ece Ayhan. He was very controversial at the time and dealt with the underbelly, the unofficial side of Turkish society, gays, child prostitutes, repressed, such as Armenian, minority groups in a very intricatem powerful language, full of puns, ellipses, etc. (My book has just been republished at the end of last year by Green Integer Press. Its title is A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies. I recommend it strongly both for the power of the poetry and its relevance to this discussion, as the title itself suggests.)
> 
> There is a great poem in the book whose title literally is "The Arab In the Photograph." As I write in my afterword, the poem is about a "fairy" tale gone wrong, about a child becoming a gay prostitute. In Turkish, "arab" means the negative of a photograph. But, when as a kid I was growing up in Istanbul, we used to call a rare black man we saw in the street "arab," in the sense of "look, look at the arab." I chose to translate the title as "The Nigger In the Photograph." It was a very controversial choice. Some people thought I misunderstood the word. Perhaps some did not know the slang meaning of the word. Ayhan's poetry is full of slang that creates satiric double-entendres. A few perhaps thought as a Jew I did not know Turkish well. Finally, the younger reader particularly ended up embracing the title.
> 
> I chose the word because it described best the human condition of exploitation the poem and Ayhan's poetry in general is all about. I was ready to take the risk both in Turkey and in the States, here for the obvious reason that it is basically a taboo word, unless used by blacks themselves.
> 
> Obviously, what I am saying reinforces your point about the racially (but not only racially) power of the color black as an image. On the other hand, the Ece Ayhan case points to my discomfort. Your arguments, it seems to me,is that  black should be a taboo word, particularly for a non-black artist. Am I wrong assuming that? ("Thus, in a sense, we are invested in what, paraphrasing Stuart Hall, is the “end of the white innocent subject")
> 
> I do not think I suffer from white innocence about blackness as an image, racial or otherwise. As much as aesthetic, for me "black/blackness" can be a political image. "Forbidding" its use, if that is what "liquid blackness" is implying, will lead to an impoverishment of language, possibilities, tools of expression. 
> 
> Ciao,
> Murat
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 9:36 PM, Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> This is a very helpful question, Murat.
> 
> The issue, as I see it, is not that any mention of “blackness” has to necessarily bear racial connotations, but rather that the connotations, associations, and affects that are overwhelmingly associated with virtually any mention of blackness are too often first elaborated (or post-facto magnified) in a racial context.
> 
> A more blunt way to say this is as follows: why choose blackness to do the affective, artistic, intellectual work one wants it to do, when one knows how (racially) complicated it is? And what makes one think that it can perform all that work?
> 
> In other words, rather than wondering (or lamenting) how the idea of  “blackness,” understood as a “clear” and “pure” visual signifier, or an entirely isolated concept, has come to designate “race” — has come to be “contaminated” by race, if we want to put this even more aggressively, and ventriloquizing  a form of resentment we still see way too often—we want to ask whether it is at all possible to evacuate race from “blackness,” however removed and purified we understand the idea of blackness to be. Similarly, we want to question what the investment and separate in this purity might really be about.
> 
> Thus, in a sense, we are invested in what, paraphrasing Stuart Hall, is the “end of the white innocent subject”, i.e. a subject who deploys blackness unaware of, or uninterested in, some of its connotations and where they come from and the reasons why they do the work they do.
> 
> Or, again: What (symbolic, affective, discursive…) work does a seemingly non-racial blackness do which we have not yet seen being done by race?
> 
> One final note: the difficulty of this conversation has a lot to do with the unavoidable figurality and slipperiness of all of these terms, which Simon poignantly points out in his reaction to the conversation so far. That is incredibly important, and I will address it separately
> 
> Alessandra
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> So, in a way, this becomes a choice
> 
> > On Apr 6, 2016, at 5:40 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > Allessandra, to understand you clearly: are you saying that a contemporary American or European artist (or even an artist from any other part of the world) can not, is incapable of using blackness (liquid blackness) independent from a racial dimension, whatever his or her intentions are? That blackness is irrevocably marked with race? For instance, if in my work I refer to the black hole, I am subliminally involved in a racial act?
> >
> > Ciao,
> > Murat
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 2:19 PM, Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu> wrote:
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > Thank you, Murat for this response. The tension you highlight, i.e. the fact that "the specific usages of blackness that are being discussed, even if from an "aesthetic," non-racial angle, are still being evaluated through a racial lens," is central to what we are trying to do: to engage the seeming opposition between race and aesthetics and claim blackness itself AS (among many many other things) a form of aesthetics.
> >
> > Here is the way the idea of “liquid blackness” enters this tension:
> > on the one hand, by understanding aesthetics as always racial; in other words, we don’t believe that there is a blackness that one can simply abstract from its racial connotation and deploy as a pure formal/chromatic resource away and apart from race. Jenny mentions Fred Moten’s argument in “The Case of Blackness” regarding Ad Reinhardt ‘black paintings’  to support the claim that, even when understood simply as color, blackness cannot not be “saturated” by the socio-historical. Pursuing blackness as a mere expressive matter to be freely deployed in one’s artistic act, does not automatically divorce blackness from its social life.
> >
> > On the other hand, approaching blackness AS aesthetics means to focus on how it modulates the individual and social sensorium. When Fanon is hailed by the French child in the notorious primal scene, blackness is formed by this encounter as an experience of rearrangement of his sensorium (he is turned inside out, he feels scattered and amputated, etc. ) and blackness, as Darby English points out, is produced as an in-betweeness, not as a visual gift to its observer. English invites us to think of blackness as something that happens to the body when it is hailed as black.
> >
> > Once blackness is understood this way—as a mode of organization of the sensorium, the sensible, and the sensate (which is what we mean by “aesthetics”)—then it becomes possible to understand the way it moves and what it does even when it is NOT visually present (which is one of the reasons sound is so important, as Chip articulates)
> >
> > I am aware that this second part — i.e. blackness AS aesthetics— requires further development, which I hope we can pursue in the upcoming posts.
> >
> > Thank you, Murat, for the opportunity to begin to explain this important tension
> >
> > > On Apr 5, 2016, at 7:16 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > > Hi, it appears to me the specific usages of blackness that are being discussed, even if from an "aesthetic," non-racial angle, are still being evaluated through a racial lens. Black, historically, has had multiple associations, independent from race: for instance, the blackness in mourning, the blackness of an unlit room (in addition to implying race, blackness is an absolute absorption of light as in the black hole), the blackness associated with melancholy,  film noire, etc., etc.
> > >
> > > What I am trying to say is that black (liquid black) has the ability to imply something enriching, positively powerful. Black movement knew that in the expression "black is beautiful." I remember, not much before his assasination, Martin Luther King was saying that to create real revolution one must change the negative associations of black; not, if I understand correctly, limit or see as negative every use of black in the culture.
> > >
> > > Ciao,
> > > Murat
> > >
> > > On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 2:04 PM, Jenny Gunn <jgunn7 at mygsu.onmicrosoft.com> wrote:
> > > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > > Alessandra and Chip are both 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? As a reading strategy, liquid blackness provokes engagement with these questions.
> > >
> > > 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 Linscott, Charles <linscoc2 at ohio.edu>
> > > Sent: Tuesday, April 5, 2016 12:59 PM
> > > To: soft_skinned_space
> > > Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the -empyre- April 2016 Discussion: Liquid Blackness: Formal Approaches to Blackness and/as Aesthetics
> > >
> > > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > In his superb 2011 book Sonic Bodies, Julian Henriques writes, “Sound asks questions in the way images often settle them.” I would modulate that statement for our discussion here, offering instead that images often SEEM to settle questions. What I mean is that the “fact” of Blackness—its ready legibility in cultures largely captured by scopic regimes of anti-Blackness—can be both confirmed and denied by our approaches to images. While epidermality plays an (allegedly) commonsensical role in processes of racialization, that same visual evidence is always already sutured to ideological conceptions of race. This imbrication between what is seen and what is thought results in visuality, which is neither wholly sensory nor entirely ideological, but both/and. Thinking about visuality helps to understand the complexities of OJ and a great many other things, including the liquidity of Blackness, as Alessandra and Jenny discuss. Thus, aesthetic and formal approaches to images provide an avenue whereby Blackness is a complex and heterogeneous set of processes and potentialities—less concrete and more fluid. This is not incidental to Black sonicity, which, while not so bound up with visual conceptions of the epidermal, nevertheless faces similar ideological constraints through notions such as vocal timbre, diction, cadence, and the “Blackness" of specific sounds and musics.
> > >
> > > Chip
> > >
> > >
> > > > On Apr 4, 2016, at 6:35 PM, Alessandra Raengo <araengo at gsu.edu> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> > > > 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.
> > > >
> > 
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