[-empyre-] Liquid Blackness and Materiality / blockbusting

[Alessandra Raengo]

Thank you, Renate, for letting us know you have been following with interest—I really appreciate it --and for thanking Johannes for his posts (and I want to thank Simon too… I haven’t forgotten your question but it was too open-ended for me to be able to address it in any meaningful way. Maybe it will come back around again?) 

Thank you Sarah for your effective summary of some of our week’s conversations and to Kan and Cameron for your great posts.
And, thank you Derek and Soraya for inviting me to do this. 

To address Johannes:
immediately after I sent the post I realized that I had conflated two things that are important to keep distinct: the desire for materiality and the commitment to materiality.

The first is what is described by liquid blackness as the imagination of blackness as a giant tub of lubricant. liquid blackness here describes the racial phantasmagoria thickened into a sensorial/affective experience of materiality. Or, if I can be at my most brutal, it describes an imagination of secretion insofar as liquid blackness is both what might be harvested and an ideal environment for harvesting (as in Under the Skin as well as Corporate Cannibal itself, insofar as Grace Jones cannibalizes the corporate person by secreting liquid blackness). Liquid blackness is what makes Grace Jones’ digital avatar, inspired by Richard Wilson’s 20:40, feel like an oil spill, as video director Nick Hooker described it.  [So, in this sense, not only is the digital materially produced, as Cameron was describing, but—especially through the mediation of a liquid blackness— it can be materially felt]

In very “meta” terms we could say that focusing on the liquidity of blackness in this context is a way to shift from from questions of representation to questions of secretion. Affect is the new discursive. So here the material is reduced to its most disposable but also sensorially true aspect: that which is fungible, tactile, felt, … that which fills the space in between, completes unfinished sentences, fills out an empty signifier, bestows a sentient fetish to the commodity, and so on. 

The political, ethical, or theoretical commitment to materiality is different. 

As Sarah says: "The sensory is a material experience, and an embodied experience, but never cultural neutral (nor perhaps political neutral) and therefore becomes the site of production of collective identities, or a site of domination.”
Or, again, consider how Sarah emphasizes the way Ken explains that blackness “flows through a body at biological risk … and helps form a continuity of political experience.”  The commitment to materiality in this case ranges from describing the investment in not being too metaphorical and  figurative, and let blackness become a trope or purely discursive, to investing in wanting to understand the “at risk” part of these black bodies (whether truly black or coalitionally black). Within the examples you offered, the commitment to materiality manifests itself in understanding, for example, as you say "the historical complexities of displacement and socio-economic/political shifts (and destructions) of black neighborhoods (the third and fifth wards) in Houston” and more. What is blackness on the ground, in the actual conditions of existence? 

So here, thinking about blackness as a material thing, as something that has undeniable material on-the-ground repercussions, becomes also a commitment to “holding it in suspension” and “putting it in the middle of our conversations”… In other words, I am asking that we keep blackness into focus in our inquiries while knowing that we don’t really ultimately know what it is and therefore its contours will continue to change according to the angle/style/discipline we approach it from, the questions we pose, and the investments we have.

I also ask that we do the work of continuing to tease out the difference between the desire for, and the commitment to, materiality, given how slippery this slope can be. 

Ultimately, this is quite the opposite of what you are describing as a "constantly evoking exhausting contradictions that can't be solved under the realities of our political and economic system.” It is blackness itself that is plastic and protean and therefore has to be continuously described, while making sure that our descriptions do not fixate it into just one thing. 


Alessandra    


> On Apr 23, 2016, at 3:52 PM, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> hello all:
> hmm, the week is almost over then? and the oo's have not been tackled enough have they?
> 
> and what if one were to remain skeptical, Alessandra, about this "commitment to materiality"
> and what does that mean?  You are actually implying a commitment to the unpredictable, if we
> follow your posting? absolutely important yet unpredictable? 
> 
> I wondered about what was said on the music video (Kanye West’s digital avatar), as I feel I can't commit to manipulated digital images and animations, i would not
> know what that means. How do you "approach blackness as a 'thing' which our collective critical act can hold in suspension and in the middle of our intellectual conversation."...?
> the thing as Bataille's 'informe" (Derek's modernist reflection brought that up I think)?
> 
> On the other hand, I remember the historical complexities of displacement and socio-economic/political shifts (and destructions)
> of black neighborhoods (the third and fifth wards) in Houston, and the transformations of the city (and living costs, -- and living
> costs in London are even more outrageous and I wondered what was meant, in one of Cameron's posts, of "British uprisings" of the latter half of 20th century - I must have missed those) –-
> and thus the harsher economic realities that affect commitments to ethnic and racial identities. (in the Project Rowhouses in Houston there also works an odd 'heritage cultural'
> impulse that I always found peculiar even if it clearly was committed to the materiality of the left over old, so-called shot-gun, houses). The shot gun house as an art space, the blue glass and steel skyscrapers
> of the downtown oil company headquarters gleaming in the background. 
> 
> 
> Which makes me wonder how commitment to materiality works alongside performativity, as it was pointed up in the remarkable post here on Kalup Linzy’s low tech videos.. and
> Alessandra, you then raised the notion of "post-blackness" which seems to be a contradiction to your other writings?
> 
>>> 
> Derek has discussed Linzy’s work within the context of post-blackness which for me is also a way to “unmoore" art practice from the sociological (not the political) imperatives of identity politics. Linzy’s work, as Derek described it, shows this unmooring whimsically in action. In doing that, it puts into focus two things:
> 
> the first concerns the mobility that blackness acquires in the process of being "commonly made" (through the understanding of aesthetics as the interaction between the sensorial, the sensible and the sensate I describe in my essay) and the second regards the repercussions this common “making” of blackness has on the question of representation. Linzy’s work puts in circulation a variety of affects that become performances of mobility: voice detached from body, representational markers detached from identity, genre detached from its customary mode of production, and so on. For me, his is a performance of an extraordinary mobility as if he was “riding”, so to speak, a liquid material/affective substance he has constructed through his very performance. If there is indeed “liquid blackness” in his work, as Derek argues there is, then it is both the condition for what he is able to achieve AND its end product
>>> 
> 
> 
> or maybe not, maybe we are constantly evoking exhausting contradictions that can't be solved under the realities of our political and economic system (late capitalism).
> 
> 
> Johannes Birringer
> 
> 
> [Alessandra schreibt]
> 
> Yet, there is something important about committing, as scholars, to the materiality of this fact. Committing to the materiality of blackness.
> 
> Sarah wonders about the “last instance” (in terms of the material vs. the ideological) and several of us have brought up Fred Wilson’s drop-shaped black glass (and black objects in general or black liquid as in Under the Skin) as a way to think through some literally material blackness. The impulse to think about petroleum in relation to race came out of that. Cameron too describes Kanye West’s digital avatar as “material,” as Johannes also pointed out….
> 
> Is materiality, in this context, a fact or a commitment?
> 
> When I think about how Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal gets written about, I cannot not help but notice that, in this writing, blackness is what brings the digital back to some sensorial realm where it would otherwise not exist. Blackness “thickens” the digital and makes it touchable, sensible, and affectively/erotically charged. This is where liquid blackness is descriptive of trajectories of appropriation and desire.
> 
> Yet, on the other hand, in all the examples offered this week by Ken and Sarah, materiality reasserts itself as the site where blackness actually coalesces in sometimes unpredictable and yet absolutely important ways. The material here is not just some un-descript and cozy matter — it is not a lubricant— but rather it is where lives are lived (or not), fights are fought, and a future might or might not be built.
> 
> This is not an argument but rather simply an observation. And I wonder whether there is a way we can bring this week’s conversation to a close while attending to both of these ways in which materiality asserts itself.
> 
> 
> 
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