The Visual Frequency of Black Life

Abstract

How do we engage a contemporary visual archive of blackness that is saturated by the proliferation and mass circulation of images of violence, antiblackness, and premature death? This article explores the labor required by visual enactments of black precarity in the work of filmmaker and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. The labor of black precarity—specifically, the work required to cultivate, maintain, or articulate our relationship to black precarity—is the effort required to position oneself in proximity to, or in a place of discomfort and, for some, potential complicity with, black precarity. The article stages an encounter with the affective registers of refusal enacted in a genre of black visuality defined as still-moving-images. Still-moving-images hover between still and moving images and require the affective labor of feeling with or through them. The article concludes by expanding the discussion of Jafa’s still-moving-images into a broader enunciation of the author’s theory of hapticity, a term that articulates the labor of feeling across difference and suffering as an effortful practice of exertion and struggle to remain in relation to or in contact or connection with another.

Learning to Share the World: Reckoning With the Logistics of Whiteness in Public Galleries and Museums

“…In the gallery, we see this kind of defrosting taking place through the polyvalent gestural dynamics of children’s encounters with Last the Blast (Figure 2). Instead of a distanced and didactic contemplation of human brutality from the Archimedean point of the neutrality of the commons, we see children rising up and throwing themselves into the “visual frequency” of the image as bodies inseparable from the violence it portrays (Campt, 2019). What would it mean to disown the commons claimed by the cultural science of whiteness, while simultaneously acknowledging our complicity in its (re)possession?…”

Abstraction, witnessing, and repair; or, how multimodal research can destabilize the coloniality of the gaze

“…These are practices that are legible in particular ways to particular audiences, and when they appear in the film, those who are familiar with the visual and cultural landscapes being depicted register the political significance of their placements and juxtapositions, regardless of whether or not they themselves are practitioners. Those who are unfamiliar with the practices themselves are nevertheless hailed by the sonic and visual frequencies they experience from them (Campt, 2019). Similar processes are afoot in relation to the longer documentary.…”

“…We hold abstraction as a powerful methodology because it allows multiple, simultaneous states of engagement and legibility. We hope that through these abstract forms, audiences will be moved to feel in relation to rather than feel for another (Campt, 2019), and that they will abandon teleological notions of linear time and space that privilege the nation-state as the appropriate container for sovereign aspirations. By this, we mean to draw attention to critical Black and Indigenous scholarship that understands sovereignty not as an event or a distant horizon, but as emergent, always-already in process, and grounded in quotidian practice, decolonial love, and response-ability (Gordon, 2008).…”

‘Organize, organize, organize’: The act of surrounding, one to another

“…Additionally, in the repetition of organize × 3, it is important to consider the ways in which an interrelationship among different forms of organization themselves might be 'organized'. Here, Tina Campt's (2019) reflections on the affective work of adjacency is important, that is, the making of relations in spite of and because of the differences of experiences and power. Something which is not empathy for the other but an acknowledgement that there are no words or feelings sufficient to do the work of translation or to put yourself into someone else's shoes.…”