Perhaps a preface note is not needed here but I want to, by way of introduction, position myself and my thoughts. I am writing in and through my body, a sweet, Black, female one, parallel, and tangentially to Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall. Because, Blackness, collection, and sensing place are the material of my life, I want to say that yes, I am occasioned by this exhibition to place some thoughts about these things here. But I also want to say for you, the reader, the show is a prompt for me, not necessarily the whole focus of this text.
I.
Everyone wants to touch the things.
Doesn’t everyone want to touch the things?
These are Black things.
Or are these things black?
These thoughts and this questions pass like a call and response across my mind as I move through the Assembly Hall.
Touch.
In Assembly Hall, we are presented with a moment of pause, of capture in which the objects, having accumulated significant lives through serial touches have drawn us into their physical and material lives. In a sequence of four rooms, the inert objects contained here call attention to their histories of being touched and call
…more than demanding a literal touch, they are objects we literally and figuratively grasp and fasten onto. They are objects displayed and circulated with an intention to evoke sensibilities of connection in their viewers and recipients. Their effect is as tactile as it is visual, and their visuality relies on their haptic nature.1
But that is a complicated connection to think through, for Black objects that, at least temporarily, live in non-Black spaces. The permissibility of touch is only partly foreclosed because touch is not completely foreclosed. The museum is still a haptic space. Touch, with our hands, may be impermissible, but the space between the object and ourselves is that more charged because of this incomplete exchange. “Such haptic objects generate a sense of proximity, intimacy, and relation that begins with, but is not wholly dependent on, the immediacy of physical contact.” And here, finally is the problem. The haptic vulnerability of it all, that the space of the hall is open and available for all touch, the objects cannot, in this space resist. And the space is full of “potential for intense intimacy and at the same time, for intimate violence.”2
II.
What kinds of disruptive and disorderly historical accounts does this archive produce at the same time that it constitutes a law of diasporic visibility? How does it engender a set of narratives that might challenge or shift the existing logic of intelligibility that governs what can and cannot be said about the subaltern diasporic subjects that haunt, unsettle, and emerge ambivalently in and through this visual archive?3
This is where we begin, this is where historic blackness comes from: the list, the breathless numbers, the absolutely economic, the mathematics of the unliving.4
An archive.
A Black archive.
Holding these bodies together is beautiful and fraught. To think Blackness, to think archive, is to think space, place, or (geography), body, memory, forgetting, data, and deletion.
“The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of a violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise … an asterisk in the grand narrative of history’.”5
Black. Archive.
Black
[‘blak]
5acharacterized by the absence of light. a black night
5breflecting or transmitting little or no light. black water6
Archive
Far from being that which unifies everything that has been said in the great confused murmur of a discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration.7
Black is not simply the malabsorptive space in to which all light fails, or dies, neither is the archive simply the accumulation of things into contained spaces. They are, separately and together, the ground on which the world is made, on which the world has and continues to create stable, enduring, codified systems of meaning. Knowledge.
To be Black in a sense is to be Archive. It is to be the negated thing from which all other things will, through opposition, define what, who, and when, they are.
But. Can we hold this, and I mean this literally, and see a Black archive as also something else. As a mechanism to unbind our desires to literally and metaphorically touch the past from these deep and anti-black ways of knowing, as a sensual vehicle that appeals to the sense of touch?” One that “must be beheld by a whole body.”8
I want to propose that if Black is Archive, then Black folks can enter the problem of the archive as already whole bodied. Not as subjects seeking a point of origin to which we can return and fill our holes, but whole. The archive is a problem space, still, but now it is a problem, perhaps, because of touch.
Erotics here, is not solely or purely sexual, it is the want for closeness, a “painful and arousing awareness” of proximities. This is the joy and the frustration with holding Blackness and archive together. Embedded in this relationship is a drive to desire, to touch, to hold, to brush against. So that the idea of a Black archive is to already troubled by what the history of these touches signifies.
I want to think about this haptical trouble through what Laura U. Marks calls connective materialism. The idea that materiality, matter can bring us closer to the unknown, to that for “which we have no categories.”9
Notes
1 Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 44.
2 Campt, 45.
3 Campt, Image Matters, 37.
4 Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 16.
5 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 2.
6 “Definition of BLACK,” merriam-webster.com, accessed September 22, 2019.
7 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012): 129.
8 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 12.
9 Marks, xi.
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