A BLACK GAZE,
Opaque Bodies, + the Masked Face A Glossary by Jane Freiman
Introduction For my honors thesis in American Studies, I am researching New York’s anti-masking law, which is really a series of laws banning disguise and mask-wearing from 1845 until 2020. In particular, I focus on how the law was applied to queer, trans, and gender variant subjects, as well as modes of queer masquerade that arise in encounters with law enforcement. Throughout its many iterations, the law was employed to arrest people for so-called “crossdressing,” claiming that it was a kind of disguise that threatened the law’s desire to identify, know, and manage its subjects. My project is concerned with the politics of exposure, visibility, and surface. It attempts to show how criminalized racialized and queered subjects express, perform, and play with excess, illegibility, and opacity. I propose that these are qualities constitutive of and produced by masking that work outside of the state’s drive to uncover, reveal, and lay bare. “An Act to prevent persons appearing disguised and armed” was passed in 1845 after a group of white tenant farmers reportedly attacked police officers while “disguised” as Native Americans. As cited in the dissent of People v. Archibald (1968), delivered by Jacob Markowitz, “The `Indians’ were in fact farmers, who as part of their costumes, wore women’s calico dresses to further conceal their identities.” Policing of gendered and racialized performances involving clothing and its interactions with the body were therefore a concern of the law, though not a central legal issue, from its very beginnings. “An Act to prevent persons appearing disguised and armed” existed as two sections of Chapter 3 of the Laws of 1845: Section 1: “every person who, having his face painted, discolored, covered or concealed, or being otherwise disguised, in a manner calculated to prevent him from being identified, shall appear in any road or public highway, or in any field, lot, wood or enclosure, may be pursued and arrested in the manner hereinafter provided.”
Section 6: “Every assemblage in a public house, or other places, of three or more persons disguised as aforesaid, is hereby declared to be unlawful.”
In 1881, both sections became recodified as sections 887 and 452 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, preserving much of the same language. In 1909, Section 710 re-enacted Section 452 in its entirety and in 1965 it was replaced by Section 240.35(4). It was this final iteration that was still in existence at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It determined that a person is guilty of loitering when they, “being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration, loiters, remains or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked or disguised...except that such conduct is not unlawful when it occurs in connection with a masquerade party or like entertainment...”
On May 11, 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter to Governor Cuomo demanding the repeal of this law. She claimed that the law was inconsistent with Governor Cuomo’s new order requiring New Yorkers to wear masks in public places due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, James expresses concern that “an unnecessary police-civilian encounter over a low-level offense could lead to a bad outcome that exasperates police-community relations.” In oversimplified terms, the stakes of this legal discrepancy—in which you could be arrested both for wearing a mask and for not wearing one—are higher for Black subjects. The stakes are death itself. Moreover, the act of wearing a facial covering in public, especially a cloth or homemade one, is itself a behavior that puts Black people at bodily risk, owing to police violence. Caroline Lawrence and the COVIDDynamic Team take up this issue in their study, “Masking Up: A COVID-19 Face-off between Anti-
Mask Laws and Mandatory Mask Orders for Black Americans.” In this article, they argue that the coexistence of anti-mask laws and mask mandates disproportionately endangers Black Americans. In tying the contemporary politics of the mask to legal histories of anti-mask laws, they argue that anti-mask statutes were never designed, as proclaimed, to protect Black Americans from Klan violence. They call for the repeal of such laws. I personally came to this research at a time when anti-mask laws and scholarship around them were at a pivotal moment. The arrival of mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic was in some ways, in addition to posing a disproportionate threat, at the same time a site of possibility. New York is an example in which the conflicting mask mandates have the potential to incite the repeal of long-standing anti-mask laws that particularly threaten gender variant people, protestors, sex workers, and Black and Latinx folks in low income and immigrant neighborhoods. This semester-long meditation on a new Black gaze has helped immensely in pushing my project in new and richly generative directions as I try to theorize a concept of masking and masquerade alongside archival study of legal documents. It has led me to consider these textual descriptions of masking as not only enlivening a mode of performance that engages with visibility, but a new visual order in itself. In other words, how might the subjects of this study embody a structure of looking that exists outside of the visual logics of the law (legibility, recognition, capture), which I am tentatively terming the “legal gaze.” In what follows, I will focus primarily on the designated concepts and films of the course, while adding in a smattering of terms and analyses relevant to my thesis work. I envision this as a kind of bricolage of these two parallel courses of study, rather than a cohesive mixture of the two or a comprehensive application of one to the other. Above all, this is an experiment, one that is in a constant state of unfolding as I continue to encounter and re-encounter these terms and their visualizations in different contexts.
Cast of Characters
(after Saidiya Hartman)
The following set of “characters” do not appear explicitly in the rest of the glossary. Rather, their ghostly outlines haunt the theoretical discussions that follow.
The Masked Crowd
The masked crowd—to take from Hartman’s term, “the chorus”—poses a threat to the normative delimitations of the law. The masked crowd is an insurgent, shifting assemblage of dazzling beauty and creativity. The masked crowd acts, moves in a state of malleability and ungraspability. Not locatable or identifiable as stable legal subjects, the multisensory force of the masked crowd is always in relation and multiplicity. “The singular life of this particular girl becomes interwoven with those of other young women who crossed her path, shared her circumstances, danced with her in the chorus, stayed in the room next door in a Harlem tenement, spent sixty days together at the workhouse, and made an errant path through the city” (Hartman 15) Hartman defines the Chorus as “All the unnamed young women of the city trying to find a way to live and in search of beauty” (xvii). The chorus shifts the focus from individual subjectivities to a mobile amalgam, precisely concerned with movement or stasis through the city (loitering). Hartman is interested in a web of intersecting paths, rather than tracking down with exactitude one specific path.
The Loitering Body
The vagrant desires of the loitering body make themselves known in the crowd. The loitering body has a desire for too much. Too much space, too much movement, too much stillness, too much time. The loitering body is always and already outside of its proper place (Athanasiou & Butler). It dosen’t belong there. It has no right to be there, to linger, to remain. The loitering body practices the art of flight and of staying put.
The Legal Gaze, or the Look of Modernity
This term refers to the law’s desire to identify, know, and manage its subjects. The legal gaze seeks to make subjects legible, in order to make them legislatable. It is a penetrating gaze, lusting after transparency and summarized in the gesture of the reaching or grasp: ““...whose transparency aimed at grasping...A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation” (Glissant 192). Glissant considers this “...this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures” (Glissant 190), and obsession seems an appropriate characterization. In her exegesis of Josephine Baker and the Modern surface, Anne Anlin Cheng historicizes this term, placing it within Modernist aesthetics and Modernity. She asks, “Is the twentieth-century fascination for transparency a pleasure about seeing into or through things?” (Cheng, Second Skin, 1). This gaze, though attributed to the law in my project, is also constitutive of film, photography, architecture, and medicine. It is a modern structure of seeing—one that has deep historical roots, but operates distinctly in the modern era—that does not recognize disciplinary bounds. Moreover, we can periodize modernity—as Hartman, Moten, Harney, and others do—as the beginning of European contact with the West, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and the Middle Passage. The incipience of modernity is inherently linked to colonial violence on a massive and enduring scale. As such, this gaze is inherently tied to racialized subjection. It is in conversation with the gaze that fixes and fragments Fanon in place, the gaze of “Look, a negro!” (Fanon). Although the phrasing of a “legal gaze” appears to be a disembodied term removed from the specific people wielding power, its bodies are multitudinous. They are the legislators and the cops on the streets, the drafters of the laws and their enforcers. They are more than this, too. In considering the Black gaze with regards to film, the legal gaze is also in conversation with a structure of looking that belongs to traditional Hollywood cinema, a way of looking at subjects in order to consume or identify with them (Mulvey). This is the colonial/white/legal/modern gaze. Each of these gazes are distinct, but insidiously intertwined.
A Black Gaze
(attempt no. 1)
Drawing from my work on masking and masquerade, as well as the rich theoretical and artistic explorations of this class, I contend that a Black gaze produces a structure of looking that respects the opacity and irreducibility of Black subjectivities, while soliciting the affective labor to feel with or alongside another and across/with difference. A Black gaze is thus inherently spatial in its formulation. Its grammar of proximity and placement requires work, the work of positioning oneself in relation to an experience that is not your own. A Black gaze alters the categories of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility through a process that is always more-than-visual. Rather than privileging only obscurity, occlusion, and invisibility—as a study of the mask is wont to do—a Black gaze offers a framework for staying with the trouble of visualizing Black life, joy, and death.
Opacity
“The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” (Glissant 191) “Her body is exposed, but she withholds everything. ‘The body shows itself,’ complying with the demand, yet ‘it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it.’ Is it possible to give what has already been taken?” (Hartman 2) In my research, I’ve been grappling with how to figure masking as a material practice involved in but surpassing utter invisibility and occlusion. In other words, how does a mask—in the law’s capacious definition of it—function beyond an instrument of concealment and obfuscation? How is it activated by interactions with gendered and racialized bodies to perform or convey meaning? For example, Mel Chen conceives of a mask as a screen that both projects and reflects affects. Recently, I’ve turned to Edouard Glissant’s distinction between opacity and obscurity in Poetics of Relation. He says, “Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity” (190). In my understanding of Glissant’s theory, a body can be seen but not exposed, understood but not grasped and consumed by the state. The opaque preserves difference and illegibility without preventing collaboration and co-feeling. Glissant adds, “Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components” (190). It is not the gesture of the grasp, nor the space of enclosure, but the “texture of the weave,” a coming together of opacities that diverts the gaze from any singular singularity (Glissant 190). Opacity asserts the irreducibility of Black subjects, positing that difference and non-transparency are not hurdles to feeling across/alongside/ with distance. I argue, further, that this distance refers to that which results from people being differently positioned towards precarity.
Precarity
ACT ONE
1. both a state and a sense, i.e. “the sense and awareness of precarity” (Sharpe 5) 2. a proximity to violence, vulnerability, and death that is unequally shared and induced by the state 3. a position or place re: potential injury, relating to the body in space 4. unlivability, disposability, unintelligibility, unrecognizability; determines what is a life and what subjects are worthy of living 5. not precariousness, which is equally shared by all; instead, a selective and heightened induced inequality 6. Black precarity is a creation and condition of modernity, an enduring attribute of the “afterlives of slavery” (Hartman)
Performativity
1. the notion, developed by Judith Butler, that gender is constituted by a series of repeated acts, and that bodies are both acting and acted upon by norms; the repetitive and iterative nature of performative acts allows for possibilities of rupture or change 2. related to which forms of living and acting one’s body are deemed unrecognizable and subject to a state of precarity:“The performativty of gender is thus bound up in the differential ways in which subjects become elligible for recogmition” (Butler, “Performativity,” 4) What is the difference between performance and performativity? What counts as performance?
Performance
1. an artistic medium or event that resists commodity form and usually involves bodies in space 2. ephemeral, but not without lasting effects or transmission of memory (Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire)
Dispossession
1. the creation of subjectivities whose “proper place is non-being”; the lives of these non-subjects could be described by precarity (Butler & Athanasiou 19) 2. a state of non-being that is also nowhere; a relationship of bodies in space [see: precarity]; socially designated disposability that aids the functioning of the state
Exposure
1. making certain subjects vulnerable to conditions of violence and precarity, as well as hypervisibility and surveillance 2. a process of laying bare or revealing 3. (photography) the amount of light that reaches a camera’s sensor; determines how light or dark an image will appear (Adobe) 4. often implies force or lack of consent
“The intertwined bodily and territorial forces of dispossession play out in the exposure of bodies-in-place, which can become the occasion of subjugation, surveillance, and interpellation. It can also become the occasion of situated acts of resistance, resilience, and confrontation with the matrices of dispossession, through appropriating the ownership of one’s body from these oppressive matrices. Acted upon, and yet acting, bodies-in-place and bodies-out-of-place at once embody and displace the conditions of intelligible embodiment and agency” (Athanasiou & Butler, “The Logic of Dispossession,” 22)
The Wake
via Christina Sharpe
Wake Work
1. a practice of care as a methodology for contending with Black death and precarity 2. a consciousness towards living in the ongoing aftermath of slavery: “To occupy and be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (Sharpe 13) [see: performativity (a condition of being acting and acted on)] 3. an engagement with a past that is in the present, a past that refuses to be past 4. a practice that requires affective labor
Witnessing
1. a mode of looking and feeling with or alongside, rather than looking at [see: hapticity]; inherently engages multiple senses 2. in the tradition of Holocaust memory studies, usually specifically involves a testimonial about traumatic lived events; as such, requires affective labor of both the witnessed and the witnesser; may produce discomfort on the part of the listener; a relational re-telling
The Weather
1. an all-encompassing climate of anti-Blackness
Precarity in Bronx Gothic In Bronx Gothic (2017), Okwui Okpokwasili stages wake work as a mode of contending with Black precarity and/as proximity to death. Okwui demands that her audience looks and feels alongside the sight/site of a Black body in pain. Using the language of witnessing that Professor Campt associates with Sharpe’s work, Okwui says in the documentary, “We are going to sit together and we are going to witness the pain of the Black body…”. Okwui creates a structure of looking—a Black gaze—that requires durational emotional engagement. It requires sitting and staying in the wake. It is precisely in the encounter with the violent death of the Black girl, who both is and is not Okwui, that her performance of opacity becomes particularly potent. At this moment, the distinction between the two girls subsides. The “texture of the weave” comes into view and the individual strands recede, so that they may not be plucked out and examined. Her voice and body language becoming increasingly distraught, Okwui says “And the nameplate, it has my name on it. And I pull out the note and it's all in my handwriting. But that's because I copied it, new, right? And now I'm telling you this and I'm looking at that ugly girl...and I'm looking at her still as stone because it's like looking in a mirror. I'm looking in a mirror." In witnessing Black death alongside her audience, Okwui creates a crisis of identification for her audience by inviting them to situate themselves within a mobile constellation or web of Black subjectivities, rather than a stable or easily locatable Black subject. The audience must then expend emotional work to locate themselves within a visual and more-than-visual (sonic, corporeal) web of multiple selves. The next section addresses this ungraspability in greater detail.
Okwui Okpokwasili, Bronx Gothic, 2017
Interlude: Recognition / Recognizability In their conversation on dispossession, Butler and Athanasiou make repeated reference to the legibility and intelligibility of subjects. Precarity is inextricably intertwined with the politics of recognition: which bodies count? Precarity is an induced state that is prescribed to those who are deemed not to matter. These subjectivities are not recognized by the state as persons. In my research on anti-masking laws, I’m interested in articulating a relationship between recognition and recognizability, since the language of the laws are precisely concerned with making subjects visually identifiable and recognizable as individuals. The laws ban disguise in an attempt to prevent anonymity, and thus, anonymous “criminality.” What bodies are deemed criminal as a result of their very existence is precisely a question of precarity. In my writing, I ask, how might one’s unintelligibility as a subject in the eyes of the state (in which they are unrecognized) be connected to the more literal facial occlusion banned by these laws (in which they are, we are to believe, unrecognizable). In Arthur Jafa’s Apex (2013), opacity is figured through the pacing of archival images, which flash across the screen at an unsettling rate. As a result, many of the images are unrecognizable. In a very literal sense, what is being depicted is hard to determine in the split second that it flashes across the screen. They are unlocatable; they can’t be placed. At the same time, many of the Black bodies they depict are displaced, dispossessed, and unrecognized by the state. Many of them become opaque to the viewer. And because the images can’t always be identified (the gesture of the grasp), the Black death and precarity they depict also can’t be identified with. There is no possibility for possession. Each image is irreducible in itself, and it is only the “texture of the weave” that we can approach.
Gesture
1. a specific kind of repeated or citational act; not quite action 2. a bridge between the linguistic and the embodied when it comes to performativity: “a citational act [that] traverses the domain of language and performance” (Butler, When Gesture Becomes an Event, 178). In other words, it emulates language through its citational nature. 3. inhabits a space between performance (assumed to be embodied) and performativity (assumed to be linguistic). Note: Tina Campt distinguishes between a definition of movement and motion, with the former being a “change in position of an object in relation to a fixed point in space.” and the latter a “change of location or position of an object with respect to time” (Campt, “Visual Frequency” 34). Gesture could be described as motion in one part of the body that does not involve the movement of the entire body across spatial distance.
Refusal
1. a quotidian practice, beyond resistance or opposition, that does not accept or acknowledge the terms of Black precarity; a negation of a negation
Practice 1. v. to repeat an action again and again in the hopes of improving performance of that action or getting gradually closer to a goal 2. n. a process that involves possible failures 2. as a visual practice, refusal produces a new structure of looking (a Black gaze) that is not just about not-seeing (obscurity), but about contesting the assigned category of non-being by restructuring who gets to look, who is seen and recognized 3. “the refusal to be refused” (Moten & Harney) 4. a refusal to stay in one’s proper place (Butler & Athanasiou); this includes the art of staying put (“loiters, remains or congregates,” Section 240.35)
Sabotage
via Sarah Haley
1. a strategy of destruction carried out in everyday acts 2. “the rupture and negation of Western epistemologies of law and order, racial hierarchy, and gendered racial difference and docility, and the power of coerced black female subservience” (Haley 5) 3. part of a Black radical tradition 4. a practice of refusal of Black precarity 5. “the will to break and transform rather than to tweak” (Haley 5)
Waywardness via Saidiya Hartman
1. following one’s own capricious, wanton, or depraved inclinations (ungovernable); following no clear principle or law (unpredictable); opposite to what is desired or expected (untoward) (MerriamWebster) 2. a radical art of living in excess of the bounds of the state’s terms and seeking pleasure outside of them 3. an experiment in living that privileges the following qualities: excess, sensuality, desire, beauty, pleasure, possibility
Beauty
Fig. 1 “Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much (Hartman 33). Fig. 2 “In the girls’ longing for beauty lurked something criminal and promiscuous. Too great a love of beauty was often the sign of ungovernable wants and errant ways” (Hartman 116). Fig. 3 An excerpt from chapter one of my thesis, describing a group of friends standing on a subway platform before one them will be arrested for so-called “crossdressing”: “Their beauty is undeniable. It is a dangerous, excessive kind of beauty. Together, they revel in a state of too-muchness. Too loud, too late, too many people (for any more than one presents the threat of the crowd, of queer assembly and collective dreaming), too much makeup, too-high heels, too much desire. Visually, sonically, haptically—they are too loud to ignore. They must not be refused.”
Refusal in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments In a visual sense, refusal exceeds simply a refusal to be seen. It may be figured as the refusal to be looked at, as an object of the gaze, or the refusal to be identified with in the visualization of one’s pain, in the case of Okwui. At the same time, masking, construed broadly, can be a mode of protection from unwanted gaze. Like Okpokwasili, Saidiya Hartman also considers the politics of visualizing the Black female body in pain in “A Minor Figure.” Using her words as a kind of mask—defined here as a material or otherwise covering of the face and body—she explores the protective power of retroactive obfuscation, as well as its significant limitations. In this chapter of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman writes about a photograph of an unnamed Black girl, posed without any clothes for a photograph by the painter Thomas Eakins. Her treatment of the photograph could be described as a practice of care and witnessing, of wake work. Hartman approaches this “minor figure” with intense responsibility. She grieves the violence the girl endured and attempts to protect her from the ongoing violence of her exposure in this photograph. When, after several pages of speculative interiority and questioning, Hartman finally presents the photo, it is partially occluded by text, literally written over by an alternative story to the one it attempts to tell. She asks, “Was it possible to annotate the image? To make my words into a shield that might protect her, a barricade to deflect the gaze and cloak what had been exposed?” (26). Hartman stays with and does not look away from the impossible pain of the image, nor does she allow the reader to look away. It takes up an entire spread of pages, without even the breathing space of a margin. The photo must be contended with in all its grief and pain, but Hartman refuses to reproduce the violence of exposure. We are called upon to witness the girl’s pain but not her forcibly exposed body. This act of partial occlusion obscures the image while attending to its opacities, its fundamental unknowabilities (such as the absence of a name) that are not a barrier to feeling with Hartman and with the image itself. The overlapping of modes of obscurity and opacity in this analysis of Hartman’s act of refusal perhaps points to the complexities of translating Glissant’s theory into a very literal and material application, rather than a metaphorical one. There is certainly a place for obscurity (as protection, for example) in a practice of radical masking and in the “errant paths” of the masked crowd and the loitering body. At the same time that Hartman enacts refusal as protection, the girl is enacting a string of refusals of her own. There are at least two layered practices of refusal—as a relationship to visibility— happening in the image as it is presented to us. The girl’s gaze meets the view of the camera, not in an invitation to move closer, but in a way that says, “stay away from me” (35). It belies what Hartman terms a “symphony of anger” (29). She describes the visibility of the girl’s body as follows: “Her body is exposed, but she withholds everything. ‘The body shows itself,’ complying with the demand, yet ‘it does not give itself, there is no generosity in it.’ Is it possible to give what has already been taken?” (Hartman 2). As Hartman points to with this sobering question, this kind of refusal or withholding may only be possible under certain conditions, and may not be possible at all for this young girl—a young girl who is one of many, of a multitude, of the chorus. For, in preserving the irreducibility and singularity of this one girl, Hartman is also always conscious of “the texture of the weave.” She argues, “[a]nonymity enables [the girl] to stand in for all the others. The minor figure yields to the chorus. All the hurt and the promise of the wayward are hers to bear” (17). Hartman retools the silences of archival sources, in which this girl is consigned to anonymity, as a shifting of the “burden of representation” (21) from the site and sight of the exposed body. This is a move toward radical collectivity, while preserving the girl’s distinct irreducibility. She is singular but not alone, one of a chorus of radical Black women and girls pursuing their desire outside of the terms of the state that consign them to a state of precarity and acting their bodies outside a structure of recognition.
Affect
ACT TWO
1. v. to act on or cause a change to something 2. v. to touch the feelings of someone; to move emotionally 3. n. (affect theory) the force that precedes and produces emotions; always both physical and mental; after Spinoza, any manner in which entities affect and are affected by one another, capacity for action
Affective Labor
1. “the labor of human contact and interaction, which involves the production and manipulation of affects. Its “products” are relationships and emotional responses: “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excite- ment or passion” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 96)” (qtd. in Oksala 284) 2. may involve the suppressing of one’s own (“negative”) feelings in order to produce (“positive”) feelings in another (Oksala 291) 3. a kind of labor that comprises at least four distinct categories: care work that is not commodified; care work or reproductive labor that is commodified; waged labor that aims at producing affects; unwaged labor that aims at producing affects (Oksala 290) 4. a specific category of immaterial labor Immaterial
Labor
1. labor whose products are intangible
Affectability
via Brittnay Proctor & Denise Ferreira da Silva
1. the ability to be influenced or affected by something 2. a state of subjection particular to Black women, akin to precarity in that it involves an induced state of heightened vulnerability to others’ power 3. a state of subjection that allows for, among other things, the expropriation of Black women’s affective labor to manage and (re)produce the affects of others “Black women’s affective labor is not constituted out of “agency,” but is often enacted by their subjection. One might argue that black women’s ontological positioning in the world allows them to have their affective labor expropriated to the end of producing others affections. Indeed, the expropriation of black women’s affective labors is merely a facet of their affectability” (Proctor, footnote 6, p. 10)
Haptic
via Tina Campt, lecture 12/1/21
1. related to the sense of touch; in particular, related to the perception of touch and proprioception
Proprioception
1. perception or awareness of the position of one’s body in space, or an orientation in the world through the body [see: dispossession (orientation and exposure of the body in space)]
Hapticality via Fred Moten and Stefan Harney
1. “a way of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you”; “the capacity to feel through others” (98) 2. a feeling initiated by modernity (read: the Middle Passage) and a feeling that is Black 3. a feeling of love that comes from dispossession
Hapticity
via Tina Campt
1. feeling through others, not feeling for others 2. a practice of affective labor; an exertion of work and energy 3. a labor that may fail 4. the labor of feeling across difference and different experiences of / positionings toward / proximities to precarity 5. a feeling that “includes but is not limited to physical contact (touching), visual contact (seeing), and psychic contact (feeling), as well as sonic encounters with frequency and vibration (Campt, “Visual Frequency of Black Life,” 43). 6. a feel and an agent of touch that is not the gesture of the grasp [see: opacity]
Empathy
1. the ability to understand and share the feelings of another “Hapticity is not empathy. It is not ‘feeling for’ another. It is labor. It is the work of feeling precarious or feeling precarity in relation to differentially valued and devalued bodies in the absence of any guarantee of respite, respect or recognition. It is a gamble that will likely end in failure that is worth taking the risk nonetheless. It is the gamble to allow oneself to be touched and moved completely independent of physical contact.” (Campt, “Black visuality and the practice of refusal”)
Interlude Preliminary thoughts towards skin, surface, the face Recent studies in critical race theory, queer studies, affect theory, and performance studies have attempted to take another look at surface, especially as it relates to skin of/and racialized bodies. These explorations have been termed “surfacism” or “surface aesthetics,” and are summarized in Uri McMillan’s introduction to Volume 28 of Women & Performance. Among other things, scholars interested in surface studies are interested in seeing skin as something other than a stable and impermeable boundary between the body and the world. Skin, and Black skin, is always shifting and malleable. In Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, Anne Anlin Cheng troubles the hard divide between surface and depth, exterior and interior. She takes up how Baker’s skin, particularly its qualities of shine, were made to project and reflect her audience’s desires and affects [see: Mel Chen, mask as screen]. Cheng notices a peculiar quality to Baker’s exposed nakedness [see: Saidiya Hartman, “A Minor Figure”] in which “being unveiled often also means being covered over” (Cheng 8). She attends to “skins that both reveal and conceal” (Cheng 11). In each of the previous case studies of this glossary—Okwui’s vibrational movements and sweatladen skin, the unnamed girl’s naked body covered by Hartman’s lexical mask—we have been presented with the question of the visibility of the Black woman’s body. How might we read skin as an accretion of malleable surfaces, some artificial and some bodily, that trouble notions of transparency, legibility, and access. McMillan summarizes Cheng’s project as follows, using Glissant’s language in “For Opacity”: “Within “the aesthetic of black shininess lay cultural possibilities for a performer” (97) like Grace Jones, who offers to us the sensual pleasures of surface and shine, via skin, and a spectacular opacity in lieu of transparency.” In other words, how is skin [related to] opacity? In the analysis that follows, and using the framework of hapticity, I will attend to surface, skin, and the face as sites of contested and complexified legibility. In particular, I will attend to the face, as a site historically associated with heightened “corporeal authenticity” (Cheng 14). Like skin, ut in decidedly distinct ways, the face is both a source and a site of identification. First, exaggerated attention is given to the face to literally identify someone as a stable subject. Secondly, and relevant to the concept of hapticity, faces are seen as a site for identification in an empathic sense, a place where interiority comes to the surface and is made visible (and potentially graspable) through expression and gesture. Alteration of facial features thus poses a problem of non-identification or misidentification in the eyes of the law. We might think of the simple question, why have there been so many laws policing the covering of a face, rather than other segments of the body? What does a face do? Why might the occlusion of its surface pose a threat to the normative order of a legal society? “having his face painted, discolored, covered or concealed, or being otherwise disguised” (Section 887) “being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration” (Section 240.35) This law’s anxieties about anonymity concentrate and congeal around the “masked” face. It’s definitions of such a disguised face are strategically vague and capacious, at the same time that they use oddly specific language. That is, though “painted, discolored, covered or concealed” appear to describe quite specific tactile modes of disguise, they leave room for diverse applications. Furthermore, “or being otherwise disguised” effectively walks back the specificity of these terms, leaving enforcers of the law to define disguise liberally and subjectively. The word “painted” in this clause of Section 887 was likely another reference to the origins of the law in 1845, in which white anti-rent protesters painted their faces to alter the appearance of their skin tones and masquerade
as Native Americans in order to assault police officers. “Discolored,” thus, serves as a reference to the origins of the law in reacting against and preventing racial masquerade. It reveals fears about the instability of race and of whiteness, contested at the sites of the skin, as a boundary between the self and the social, and of the face. Racialized masquerade appears to have been doubly dangerous according to the drafters of the law, because it posed not just a general risk of impersonation or anonymity, but a specific risk of racial indeterminability. +++
Hapticity in Crystal and Dreams Two of Arthur Jafa’s films give us a model for figuring surface and skin in relation to hapticity, touch, and affect. Both Crystal and Nick Siegfried and Dreams Are Colder Than Death include nearly stilled close-up footage of a face. In Crystal and Nick Siegfried (2017), we are shown an intimate portrait of a person being caressed by a disembodied hand. As we watch, they lean away from the touch, closing their eyes repeatedly in discomfort, rather than pleasure. It is a caress that hurts. An intimacy that wounds. And though we witness this interaction, we are not let into the narrative. The intrusion of the words “Boys Don’t Cry” across the screen heightens a sense of ambiguity and confusion. The title remains unclear: Who is Crystal? Who is Nick? Are they married? Related? Do these names align with the two figures whose bodies are present in the film, or do they reference something else altogether? Their eyes draw our attention, seeking answers in their depth. They carry the potential of a shared interiority but they do not reveal anything but a feeling of hurt. Our attention is drawn equally to the surface of their skin, its sheen or “queer gleam” (Larsen), its hue, the way it yields to touch, bending with the gentle but ungenerous pressure of the hand. In “The Visual Frequency of Black Life,” Tina Campt writes of this film, “It is a refusal that embraces opacity and inscrutability by twinning distance with vulnerability within its relentlessly tight, intimate frame—a frame that gives us access not just to a tear, but to skin, pores, breath, and touch” (35). The profound intimacy of proximity to bare skin has the potential to create a sense of empathy between the figure and the viewer. Yet, as the figure leans away from the caressing hand, so too do they withhold themselves from the viewer. The unbreakable, direct gaze is not an invitation to touch or an agent of empathy. It preserves distance and honors opacity. The nakedness or bareness of skin is not a mode of transparency, though it does allow a kind of removed intimacy. We cannot feel the figure’s pain, but we can witness it, in a structure of looking that preserves a multidirectional gaze. In a sense, the face—its hyper-realistic skin—becomes a kind of mask in itself. A moldable layer that negotiates a complex interplay of access and inaccess, of feeling through or alongside but not with or into. Black skin becomes a site of opacity rather than transparency or exposure. A single tear leaves a trace of the encounter on the figure’s skin. No mark is left by the hand itself; rather, it is displaced onto the face in the cut of the tear. Their final refusal comes when they turn away from the camera, as black hair is made to disappear into black background. We can no longer even see this tear, this mark of the pain inflicted. We are refused entry, at the same time that we are called into the intimacy of feeling through difference. In Dreams Are Colder Than Death (2014), we again witness a sequence of unbearably slow and unbearably close facial footage. I am referring here to the sequence wherein Hortense Spillers, renowned scholar of Black feminist studies and theorist of the flesh, recounts in detail a string of deaths in her family. The notion of unbearable closeness calls back to precarity as a positioning. Jafa’s films bring us into an uncomfortable proximity with Black precarity, that requires the affective labor of positioning oneself towards / around / within / without it. The closeness of the camera is one technique of figuring this relationship. As in Crystal and Nick Siegfried, the camera is so close
that the textures of Spiller’s skin become visible—pores, fine wrinkles, eyebrow hairs, traces of a metallic blue eyeliner. Jafa doesn’t let us turn away. As with Hartman’s altered image, there is hardly any room to breathe. The frame is often so close that parts of Spiller’s face get segmented, so that only part of it is contained within the screen. Speaking very slowly, Spillers begins to recount her own experiences of Black death, as a result of induced precarity: “I know, irretrievably, that I am going to lose everything that I have ever loved and then I’m going. And I know that because I saw my niece die in March. My sister went into the hospital. Six weeks later and do you know, that that woman literally grieved to death. My sister died because she grieved for her child.” The list of family members she has lost continues in excrutiable detail and number, played over nearstilled footage of Spillers walking, standing, and sitting, but never speaking. At one point, she tells the invisible interviewer, “She looked right at me, like I’m looking at you.” Though we cannot see this particular gaze, we can imagine it, as Spillers looks at the camera too. In one moment her eyes are closed, briefly shutting out the viewer, the immense pain of retelling these memories. Her eyelids are fluttering ever so slightly as they strain to remain closed. In this portrait of a face, we are brought into intimate proximity with the pain of another. We are forced to grapple with how this pain moves through her face and across her skin. As a result of this embodied closeness, we are asked to expend affective labor to situate ourselves in relation to Spillers’ encounters with Black death, as well as her enactment of refusal of the precarity of Black life, her consternation and refusal to accept these conditions. This is the work of hapticity, a labor of love figured on-screen and solicitied in the viewer. It is the work that Jafa’s films—in part through their visualizations of Black skin, surface, and faces—call upon us to perform as viewers.
Arthur Jafa, Crystal and Nick Siegfried, 2013
Arthur Jafa, Dreams are Colder than Death, 2013
Conclusion A Black Gaze + the Masked Face Apex (2013) is imbricated in questions of surface, skin, and the face introduced in the previous section. At 0:24, Josephine Baker, who Anne Cheng writes about with regards to surface and nakedness, appears in a feathered skirt. The image is dramatically cropped, so that it includes only her torso and ends above her grin. This narrow string of feathers, meant to invoke primitivist tropes, both point to and protect Baker’s nakedness. The film also includes a barrage of faces, some disfigured, some fictional, some iconic or historically recognizable, some in blackface (as well as Black faces covered in black paint), some covered in masks (fashionable ski masks, superhero masks), some belonging to animals. There are also many depictions of Mickey Mouse, whose iconic visage was inspired by minstrelsy and blackface. At 2:20 there is an image of a minimalistic mask, likely a Fang Ngil mask from Gabon, followed by a robot’s metallic visage. Jafa’s images resonate visually with and against each other, gesturing toward a kind of narrativity that is always incomplete and fleeting. They also create a temporal strangeness, recalling pasts into the present through visual similarities. Alongside the visual motif of Mickey Mouse, there are also many depictions of blackface and minstrel performers, of which Tina Campt writes, “The images register in high contrast, juxtaposing hyperwhiteness against the full spectrum of brown-to-blackness that refracts the distorted hue of white supremacy. Suturing the two is the play of painted faces: blackface as the negative mirror of stunning black faces” (Campt 36). For Jafa, the face appears to be an important site of figuring Blackness—how it is constructed, construed, contested. The painted faces, the literal masks, the artificial and the CGI visages all serve to undermine facial legitimacy and legibility. Jafa troubles the face as a site of identification and identificatory potential. They are false, inorganic, unstable. They trouble the very notion of a stable racialized and bounded (materially, socially) body. What is real and what is artifice? What is “authentic Blackness” and what is costuming, masquerade, performance? Jafa offers no answers. The stability of racialization is troubled at the site of the face. Moreover, the faces are always in motion, animated by the beat and strobe, always slipping away. Returning to the gesture of the grasp from Glissant, these faces are not made available to us to hold. And yet, a larger force or energy or propulsion—in other words, some affect—is produced by the rapid sequencing and the visual resonances between images. The film generates a feeling. It is an unpleasant feeling that requires work (affective labor) in order to situate oneself in relation to the opaque sequence of images. This is the labor of hapticity that is demanded by a Black gaze, a structure of looking and feeling alongside Black precarity and refusal. A structure of looking and feeling that privileges opacity over transparency in visualizing Black bodies, skins, and faces as unstable, opaque sites that do not obscure or obstruct feeling but reject fetishistic exposure. A Black gaze grapples with the trouble of visualizing Black bodies and Black life in a way that does not solicit empathy, identification, or pleasurable looking, but, instead, the work of feeling together and alongside another who is differently positioned. It is the work of positioning oneself in a relation to Black life and death. A refusal to acknowledge the conditions of Black precarity, as well as a refusal of a structure of looking that allows pleasurable and identificatory access to Black subjects without the effortful exertion that is hapticity.
Arthur Jafa, Apex, 2013
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