Through intertwined methodologies of visuality and performance,
Fleetwood and Campt explore the role of affect in representations and/or
perceptions of Black vernacular/quotidian experiences within the dominant public
imaginary, which often flattens Blackness to identifiable visual performative
codes. Both texts demonstrate how images of Blackness renders the Black subject
within the dominant gaze. Concerned with challenging this perpetual simplification
of Black identity, Fleetwood poses the question, “How do we return to what we
already know with curiosity and openness so that new forms of knowing and
recognition emerge?” (7). I argue that Campt’s methodology of “listening” to
images exemplifies such a practice of “curiosity and “openness” with the potential
to lead to alternative forms of knowing beyond predominant visual and performative
codes that perpetuate stereotypes of Blackness.
Campt undoubtedly critiques the dominant cultural “troubling
vision” of Blackness and argues that the embodied modality of sound enables us
to “listen” to the “lower frequencies” of images (33) to re-envision simplified
or problematic understandings of the Black experience. She asserts that attention
to these lower frequencies illuminate the connection between touching and
feeling in relation to visuality (100), enhancing our attention to the
affective domain and the multiple temporalities that contextualize the images. By
listening to an “ensemble of images together” (43), Campt offers “a complicated
account” (37) as opposed to an “easy reading” (42) of Black identity within the
photographed subjects, such as in Chapter 2 when she places the Gulu archive
into conversation with Mendolsohn’s collection, imagining multiple possibilities
for “strategies of diasporic survival” contextualizing the identities of the “sitters”
(41). Thus, Campt’s integration of visuality and performance seeks to approach seemingly
“quiet,” quotidian, mundane, or ignored images and challenge initial perceptions
or easy readings that risk reproducing normative stereotypes of Blackness.
However, I am curious if, in some ways, Campt’s emphasis on
the visuality of Blackness negates the possibility of “openness” in Fleetwood’s
sense (as Fleetwood argues that it is the attention to visuality itself that
leads to the “troubling vision” of Blackness). For example, how does Campt’s
theory play into Fleetwood’s concept of non-iconicity? Fleetwood argues that
non-iconicity is a “aesthetic and theoretical position that lessens the weight
placed on the black visual to do so much. It is a movement away from the singularity
and significance placed on instantiations of blackness to resolve that which
cannot be resolved” (9). On the one hand, Campt’s emphasis on multiplicities of
diasporic survival and identity surrounding an image align with this movement away
from singularity—say, for example, the perception of a Black subject as a “pimp”—but
do her suggestions of multiple tropes
of Black identity simply expand the iconicity of the Black subject?
Additionally, does her primary emphasis on male Black subjects or “sitters” render
the black female as what Fleetwood would refer to as “excess flesh?” Fleetwood
argues that “the black visual has been framed as masculine, which has
positioned the black female visual as its excess” (9). While Campt approaches
her work from a Black feminist perspective and includes multiple female “sitters,”
in no way does she ignore Black femininity,
but an overwhelming majority of her selected images feature male subjects and
(understandably, of course) comment on dominant narratives of the masculine Black vernacular.
Thus, while this post is mostly questions and positioning of ideas at this point, in my
presentation I hope to interrogate how Fleetwood and Campt’s methodologies of
integrated visuality and performance align and converge, particularly in terms
of their understandings of affect and embodiment.
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On failure in/as performance, by Nelesi Rodriguez
Christina León's article, "Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra's Corpus," examines Xa...
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Christina León's article, "Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra's Corpus," examines Xa... -
For my presentation, I will be focusing on one of the recommended readings for the week, the introduction to José Esteban Muñoz's Disi...
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This week, I'm interested especially in what I'm calling "theoretical methodology" (although maybe that's just a fa...
I'm going to sidestep the question of feminism and representation, briefly which I think is a really good one but might quickly take us into the weeds of questions around feminist theory's fidelity to feminist subjects (which Imani mentioned briefly at the end of class), to think about Campt's writing style, on the heels of Vasquez last week. As you note, Campt frames herself as offering “a complicated account” (37) as opposed to an “easy reading” (42)—in fact, she asks us "to resist such easy readings" (42). We could also think of this related to "counterintuition," which is by definition something difficult to engage with.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm thinking about the ease with which I found myself reading Campt's book, which on a first read through did go really quickly—I think a little under two hours. So yes, some of its is clearly narrative, there are a great deal of images, but there is also a clarity to the prose despite a kind of suspension-of-being-convinced I also experienced. It was always clear to me where we were, what we were looking at, and the mode by which we were doing it, even if I still have (good, useful) questions about the modes/mechanisms by which we turn to the haptic, listening, etc. On the one hand, its a virtuoso performance of scholarly writing; on the other, I'm curious if others had this experience of ease while reading the book, even if the affective experience was decidedly not as smooth. Is this a function of a reading practice that asserts this smoothness (the "skim" or the "read for argument")? Is this within the writing? The question of feminist theory's fidelity to feminist objects or people of study perhaps reasserts itself here—does Campt's style sidestep certain kinds of academic/theoretical questions or conversations? Snorton's work wasn't out yet, but Campt does cite Spillers, although not the passage about captivity and ungendering. Is this a kind of road-not-taken?
We could think about this with Citizen, too, in the way Imani described a lot of it as "quiet"—what does it mean for language to be quiet, in addition to visual culture? How does genre or form work differently in facilitating our access to certain kinds of frequencies?
Since I'm interested in questions around the dominance of visual culture in relation to racial legibility, I found your questions about Campt's discussion of visuality and Fleetwood's concept of non-iconicity really resonant with my own. I think though that Campt's listening methodology tries to think beyond visual readings that produce iconicity and that are, therefore, similar to state, governmental, colonial, etc. modes of capture. In guiding us to think about the sonic and haptic qualities of images, I think that Campt also avoids the production of iconicity in terms of how she temporally situates her methodology. To go on what will seem like a slight detour: in "Further Considerations on Afrofuturism," Kodwo Eshun highlights the predictive quality of capitalist temporality. He writes, "It is clear that power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively. Capital continues to function through the dissimulation of the imperial archive, as it has done throughout the last century. Today, however, power also functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures" (289). This was on my mind as I was thinking about iconicity because I think that there's something in reading images with an investment in iconicity--its presence and ongoing production--that is related to the predictive quality that Eshun talks about. Especially when we are talking about images of black subjects, it seems like iconicity works by predicting what it will see in the image rather than by remaining open to what it will hear or feel through the image (and remaining open to the way in which those "underneath" sonics and haptics might lead thought/scholarship "astray" the way that the detail does in Vazquez's Listening in Detail). The beginning of Campt's second chapter seems crucial here in that it begins by acknowledging the easy first reading, the one that is focused more on looking than on listening. In regards to temporality, Campt's methodology moves past both the predictive and the iconic by opening itself onto the uncertain sounds it might hear and the uncertain things it might feel. This openness to the uncertainties that may emerge after acknowledging and moving on from the first easy reading remind me of Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds, which also speaks from an investment in the theorization and practice of a black feminist methodology, in that "demonic" methodology is explicitly linked to uncertainty.
ReplyDeleteThe question that Celena poses of whether Campt’s emphasis on the visual actually runs the risk of commodifying the Black body more is an interesting and necessary one. It reminds me of what Sylvia Wynter once referred to as the “contradictory dualism” of Black women writers who find themselves obligated to use traditional Western discourses of feminism and other hegemonic modes of knowing in order to theorize about concepts that go beyond “the limits of our present ‘human sciences,’ to constitute itself as a new science of ‘human forms of life’ (“Beyond Miranda’s Meanings” 356). I am not sure that it is possible to get out of these kinds of webs of contradiction when we dare ourselves to theorize beyond the limitation of certain conceptualizations. I think that it is precisely in these contradictions where we might be able to discover glimpses of something new or different. Campt tries to initiate this difference with listening to images as opposed to looking at them. However, as mentioned by some people in the class—and taking from my personal experience with reading Campt—I found it quite difficult to put this into practice and was not even sure if what I was doing was actually the real “listening” that Campt wants us to engage in in the first place. As was also commented in class, this type of unease or discomfort is nothing new when it comes to enacting practices as divergent as what the author of "Listening to Images" proposes. I believe we might also read this discomfort or confusion as a signal of an encounter or moment in which we find that something new that has the potential to create this “new science of ‘human forms of life’". Furthermore, perhaps this question of whether Campt is helping to perpetuate stereotypes is a sign that we are not yet at the cognitive or intellectual stage to conceive of this new form of thinking. Not fully understanding how to listen to images and feeling this unease inevitably causes us to go back into our intellectual comfort zones and resort to thinking in tropes and stereotypes again. My question would be: Is this problem really caused by Campt’s theorization falling short in some way, or is it that the reader’s mind fails to understand things outside of our current regime of truth (or both)?
ReplyDeleteThe past week, I’ve been trying to unpack why it was so difficult for me to “listen to images” in the way Campt proposes in her book. Celena’s exercise asked us to do just that, yet I found myself consumed with the “quiet” of the room as opposed to the “quotidian” of each photograph. That is, I was hyper-aware of my attempts to create meaning through the practice of listening to images (which Campt warns is a recalcitrant exercise) instead of spending time sitting with my discomfort witnessing and “listening” the quotidian of each photograph.
ReplyDeleteI realized that in order for Campt’s methodology to be fruitful, I need to decouple my knee-jerk reaction to understand documentation and archival presence as inherently un-quotidian. While I was never able to articulate this before, this exercise forced me to ask why I find the photographs, performances, and sounds I find in the archive as departures from the ordinary, even if they explicitly depict the “real.” In other words, I unknowingly assumed that because these texts exist beyond their ephemeral moment, they are naturally representative of larger questions and modalities. I recognize this practice may be more productive in the kind of archival work I do with early modern drama, but I am now questioning these assumptions and looking to be more mindful in allowing texts to be what they are as opposed to what I want.
Along these lines, I am interested in how this bias finds it way into other interactions I have with archival material. I am intrigued by similar questions as Sam’s above in considering how we can extend Campt’s ideas elsewhere. Can language be quiet? Can performance (particularly in the theater) be quotidian? The very act of putting something on stage to be experienced by spectators seems to put tension on the very premise of theatre as quotidian, but perhaps what it does is actually make subjects more legible to us while also allowing for possibilities of uncertainty.