[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness- Week II: Aesthetics

[Thomas F. DeFrantz]

oh sigh.  the figure of the slave.  it hurts me so deeply, this connection of blackness to the figure of the slave. it is inevitable and totalizing?  I hope not, as an afro-optimist.  yes, I can be reduced to something else, but why would I want that for myself or for the people I love?  or for anyone? my great-great-grandmother bought her freedom; when I was little we kept her slave papers on the kitchen table. 

when I dance, I change my shape in order to express; when I sing, I alter my breath to demonstrate my ability to work in-between.  why would I theorize from a place where I cannot maneuver, from a place as a slave, when I could theorize from my creative practice, as a black person?  

and I am black, and there is an ontology to black life that embraces my being black. I don't consider this a concept in and of itself; it's more of a truth, which can have claims made against it, or can find itself to be always already pre-figured. I don’t want to not be black or to imagine outside of black, or to think of blackness as contingent and possibly impossible.  I don't want to think of black as temporary or detachable.   that hurts me in the ways that misogyny and homophobia hurt me. (have you heard of HB2 here in north Carolina?)  I can't productively theorize outside of my body in good faith (yes faith) because, well, why would I want to do that?  it goes against what I understand to be the materiality of my blackness and its fact; I theorize through my body and its gestures rather than the *idea* of its gestures. 

I'm not an object; I'm not a black body; I'm a black person with complexities born of 3 billion neurons firing.  well, this is how I will narrate myself. 

my insistence comes from our focus on aesthetics.  aesthetics are systems of thought and ideology made manifest; there are obvious and well-documented black systems of aesthetics.  they aren't metaphorical or interpretive only; they are practical ways to approach rhythm; to approach contradiction and embellishment as structural matter; to address concerns of velocity and attack; to embody the performance or demonstration of metaphor; the persistence of derision and irony as creative craft.  black performance is political in its eternal concern with relationships among (black) people.  its aesthetics are of the *now* rather than the 'what-came-before' or what might happen tomorrow.  in these aesthetic structures we do things *now,* because we must, we become the thing we dance. 

black aesthetics are harder to apply to visual objects that exist through time, because black aesthetics are concerned with right now.   so we interpret objects and texts, but that experience is very different from running the sanctuary, or holding a neighbor's baby while our cousin dances in the pageant.  

for me, the in-betweeness comes in the multi-sensory imperatives of black performance and its aesthetics, that demand widened abilities to process in several registers simultaneously.  black aesthetics are always multivalent; we rely on rhythm to organize possibility. 

so ... transvaluation, yes, but not as something done because I decide so looking at an object, but rather in the context of political protest, a scream, and a swoop towards the ground and into the gutter, only to rise up again, wily and wet.  



-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au [mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Alessandra Raengo
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 5:56 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Liquid Blackness- Week II: Aesthetics

----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Thank you, Derek for such a delicate and thoughtful post. The question of the fine line that separates the recognition of sentience from the recognition of pain highlights some of the most important stakes of the current conversation, which—I agree with Derek — is, or at least can certainly be, a productive type of “making.” 

I do want to acknowledge Marisa’s arrival and contribution to our discussion, which I personally find very exciting. 

I have questions for her: 

in relation to her description of formlessness as "a feeling about forms that exceed [the] capacity to discern pattern”, together with the implications of her theory of haunting, I wonder if this is also a way to talk about impersonal affect? In other words, affect that does not attach to any specific subject and sits in the middle — defines and shapes “the middle,” in fact?

I would imagine, but I am guessing, that this would be the type of memory lodged in the black body that Elizabeth Alexander talks about in her response to the Rodney King video. 

And for me, but I could be wrong, it also speaks to Tommy’s reference to status change ( “water-to-ice-to-mist, to keep with the liquid-ing metaphor”), where blackness might act as an agent of transvaluation, as we see at work, for example in Fred Wilson’s “Metalwork" in which Wilson lays slave shackles alongside a silver tea set of the same area. 

Again, I mention a work that might be known to highlight (as Huey Copeland emphasizes) that blackness here acts as an agent of transvaluation insofar as it is the one thing that guarantees the relationality (the “likeness”)  between these things. The silver tea set can be melted down and turned into coin, just like the slave is a material form of monetary value. 

I offer this as a response to Tommy and Marisa, and a way to engage something I am interested in: their expertise in forms of in-betweennes and their investment in movement, to hopefully help us think about possible ways to describe this blackness. 

Alessandra


> On Apr 13, 2016, at 12:38 PM, Derek Murray <derekconradmurray6719 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Greetings 
> everyone!
> 
> I have so many thoughts going through my head as I read your exciting 
> posts! In regard to Tommy’s question: “what if we all took time to 
> make black art?” I think that true intellectual work is a creative or 
> artistic act, even in its most citational iterations, as long as it 
> searches, transcend dogmas, and strives to creative innovative new 
> forms of knowledge and thought. In fact, what we are doing here on 
> this forum is inventive, resistant, subverting of hegemony—it is queer 
> and “post” and liquid, among other things.
> 
> The formal structure of language; its rules and rigidities pose a 
> particular challenge, but linguistic eloquence produces an affect that 
> music cannot, and vice versa. Obviously, the same thing could be said 
> for dance, film, performance art, painting, etc. Everything has its 
> place, and at its best, can do the work that we are all yearning 
> for—if we are open to it. Embedded within an advocacy for affective, 
> formless, blackness is a utopian impulse: one that yearns for a more 
> primal, pure, and originary expressiveness that transcends social 
> antagonism, and the stain of racial marking. I’m not sure this is even 
> possible, though I’m not sure I want it to be, because it is so much a 
> part of the human condition.
> 
> It (racism) is one type of trauma among many, but so much transcendent 
> thought and action have been produced as a result of one’s expression 
> of pain. We see this across identities. In regard to blackness 
> specifically, I’m not speaking of the often-fetishized noble suffering 
> black subject, the social symbol that sentiment is projected onto. I’m 
> thinking more about abstract feeling and form, and movement, and 
> materiality, language and code—a very nebulous and unarticulated 
> expressiveness that exudes what we call “blackness” or soul, or 
> whatever. We know it when we feel and experience it; when it’s stirred 
> in us—but nonetheless it evades all that is knowable, what is tangible 
> and what can be articulated. But how do we separate black sentience 
> from pain?
> 
> Most good art was/is given birth by suffering, but black people are 
> restrained and publicly shamed for expressing their pain. We’re still 
> fighting for our right to feel and to express, especially in the face 
> of continued and persistent indignity. Why are black people not 
> allowed to feel and express their pain, except in prescribed modes and 
> acceptable ways? There is perhaps no room in society to even 
> acknowledge that it’s real. I think this is the ontological conundrum 
> of blackness that Alessandra speaks of: that fault line between 
> afro-pessimism and afro-optimism—an ambivalence towards the presence 
> and legitimacy of black feeling.
> 
> However, in closing, I must say that I don’t see “hopeless exclusion 
> and constant invention” as separable. One gives birth to the other.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 5:41 AM, Marisa Parham <mparham at amherst.edu> wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Thanks for 
>> this, Jason. I was up early this morning reading Jones’ “Northern 
>> Hieroglyphics” essay and it’s unclear, in a good way, how I’m going 
>> to transition into the rest of my day…
>> 
>> In general I’ve finally caught up to you guys and this list, and have had the privilege of reading this week’s posts back to back. What's going to happen to me once I have to wait for the next post?
>> 
>> I am really compelled by this turn in the conversation toward motion. Affect in theory-land is circulation and for me it is difficult to conceptualize affect without motion, without movement from one person to another, or even within the space of a single body, for instance the eruption of the past--memory.
>> 
>> Affect is structure, an architecture of response, even when it is a form without a name. I don't think that this is the same as formlessness, of which we have very few examples of in the world. I struggle to think of one, but I have also had a long week and cannot be trusted. I do know that I often substitute the term 'formless' for when I mean 'big,' which is to say that what I call formlessness is in fact a feeling about forms that exceed my comprehension, that are beyond my capacity to discern pattern. Blackness is big.
>> 
>> To be clear, I am not sure this is in the same vein as the earlier discussion about form, but this is what came to mind when I read it. And I am also thinking about the tension between optimism and afro-pessimism, an interplay that gives us some interesting analogs to work with. Improvisation simultaneously epitomizes newness, while also always being underwritten by memory.
>> 
>> I should tip my hand and note that much of my own current work is based in my background in memory studies / memory theory, which over time has come to inform my work in the broader field of digital studies. I am not an artist, but I am deeply invested in questions of theory and practice, and in trying to determine when it might be useful not to let phenomena mainly emerge as metaphorical. I have arrived in digital studies by thinking about memory in the African American historical context, which led me to develop a theory of haunting, which is the language I give to how memory circulates without proper origin, for instance how one person might remember another person's experience and so on. In my current terms, thinking about memory and affect gets me to the digital because it gives me a way to think about reference in black life, without having to make a claim to monolithic or avowedly shared identity. In the name of motion, the digital sacrifices origin but, set free to circulate, at every instance of its emergence it reproduces something perhaps just as important as origin. Probably.
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