The dying Black body in repeat mode: the Black ‘horrific’ on a loop

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to watch a Black man dying in repeat mode? This paper deconstructs the notion of consuming Black death in a loop (or repeat mode) online and its redistribution in the virtual realm centring the Black body in this pornotropic assemblage. The spectacularisation of Black death and its juxtaposition as a banal encounter is examined against the history of slavery and White oppression. The enactment of Blackness as lacking form or ontology redrafts the virtual sphere in enacting a politics of refusal for reconstituting Blackness adduced through its fluidity. The virtual as an unstable and disembodied realm is re-read as a generative graveyard for reclaiming Black consciousness and Black humanism. In countering the ‘Black horrific’ the paper discerns digital platforms’ agentic and sensuous potential as a stage for performative insurgency to resurrect an affective Black body politic through the disembodied formlessness of the virtual sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• black consciousness
• black death
• black humanism
• afropessimism
• paraontology of blackness

Introduction

This was shortly after the horrific killing of George Floyd in America. An email on an academic mailing list on ‘Internet Research’ raised concerns from a Black student on what it means to watch a Black man dying in repeat mode against the brutal lived reality of racism and Black subjectivity in the US. That question seemed to bridge the historical and present reality of ‘Black death’ as a recurrent banal encounter against the offerings of the viral digital economy which offers death on a loop or ‘repeat mode’ abstracted from its socio-cultural context and historicity. Black death and its material production as Black flesh (Spillers 2003) are part of a historical visual regime and a paraontology (Chandler 2006; Moten 2003) of White supremacy. It engenders Black flesh and Black death through a set of significations in which the popular and interminable aestheticisation of its demise, its visual abstraction into a shadow archive, and its present manifestations of death on a loop on digital platforms provide a continuum. Black death configured through its excess and recurrence as a mode of signification opens up an enquiry into the genre of the ‘Black horrific’ as a resonance in distributing Blackness,¹ inducing a Black visuality through Afropessimism² (Wilderson III 2014). Blackness cannot lay claim to the capacities that constitute human subjectivity in the world as it is a commodity in corporeal form (Warren 2017, 223). Franz Fanon (2008), in delineating the Whiteness of ontology in the ‘historico-racial schema’, asserts the imperceptibility of the Black body. The colonial history of race and racialisation and its white-defined realm of being is actively involved in the exclusion of Blackness. Black humanity as dispossessed of ontology is not assembled as a being, neither is it attributed form or is it capable of realising the aesthetic or sensuous. This naturalisation of this non-being becomes universalised and subsumed as an intrinsic logic in the governance of Blackness. For Wilderson and Frank (2010, 57), the bridge between Blackness and anti-Blackness is ‘the unbridgeable gap between Black being and human life’.

The paper proceeds by exploring the historical resonance of the ‘Black horrific’ through time as a banal encounter. It then re-premises Black death through the digital economy in which it assumes both speed and virality, exacerbating banality. It conceptualises what it means to watch Black death on a loop or in repeat mode on digital platforms within the playground of semiotic capital and how the dead Black body even in death functions within a power archive and is racialised through this necro-aesthetic. The paper offers hope in the last section through an argument that Black death is re-appropriated and ‘post-humanised’ where communal grief and Black spirit are re-enacted through new modes of sociality and jouissance online where the marginalised and formless can ‘feel back’. Blackness not inscribed through ontology is already given to a ‘post-human’ status and this becomes recombined with the assemblage of digital platforms to re-articulate Blackness. Through the politics of refusal, Blackness retrieves and reassembles Black death as an agentic and purposive encounter to mobilise an affective realm of re-signification. Such an agentic proposition helps rehumanise the pain and suffering of the Black body as a collective, historical and moral encounter.

Brutality and blackness

Frank Wilderson III’s (2014) notion of Afropessimism locates anti-Blackness through everyday scenes rather than in spectacular violence to highlight the constitutive role of anti-Blackness for White civil society in the US, envisioning the social death of Black bodies forged through gratuitous violence. Rather than enacted through a post-race paradigm, the Black body is solidified and ignited through the image of the slave, inflecting the Black body as neither human nor citizen but reduced to chattel hence amenable to mistreatment and fungibility or interchangeability with commodities. While human difference becomes the premise for the proliferation of identities and subjectivities, fungibility homogenises Blackness such that identities and subjectivities are denied (Warren 2017, 396). Black humanity and its pornographic machinations as Black flesh is linked to both invisibility and its hypervisibility as a source of danger (Sexton and Martinot 2003). Within such a formulation the immanence of Black death is anticipated before its mortal encounter and, as such, Black death and violence become banalised, anesthetizing shock and rendering it into the common. In Black Skin, White Mask, Frantz Fanon (2008) argues that in the modern imagination reason takes flight whenever Black enters the scene. Hence, Black as a phobogenic designation (Gordon 2010, 196) invokes Black death through its primal quality in which death is the anticipated accident bound through its prematurity or death as excess or in excess.

The Black horrific is a historical visual regime which ignites the Black body through a set of significations in which both its spectacularisation and banalisation of its death enmesh with modalities of power and governance. The Black body is entrapped in watching its own demise while cognisant of being consumed by others through its death and recurring trauma. Digital virality and its re-articulation of the Black horrific is about an accelerated visuality in which the aesthetic of the Black body struggling to ‘breathe’ is set against the oppression of racialised biopower which distributes and reiterates Black death as a banal encounter. The entanglement and intertextuality of Black death as popular content online (and offline) reasserts platform capitalism through its libidinal racialised architecture in abstracting the dead Black body as part of its value formation. Death acquires new nodes of value as shareable and distributed content, abstracting dead bodies as fluid and leaking into new sites as part of this sharing economy and jouissance. The sharing economy abstracts ecstasy and pleasure while blurring the distinctions between the sacred and profane. The eruption of ecstatic pleasure or jouissance induces the instability of the platforms as subversive, irreverent or equally agentic in reclaiming the sensuous even within the forbidden.

Tuhkanen (2018) argues that if modern subjectivity is marked by alienation, expulsion, and (wage) slavery, it is the African diasporic subject, rather than the European industrial labourer, who is the earliest exemplar of modernity’s disaffection. This subject in its historical journey of dispossession is both a corporeal entity as well as an object without corporeality in which both the pornographic and funerary gaze criss-cross their habitus. Spillers (2003, 206), through the notion of ‘pornotroping’, examines how the horrors of slavery eroticised its brutality and conjured the captive body as the source of destructive sensuality while being objectified by the captor. The subject of the ‘pornotrope’ and its inherent sexuality produces an ‘otherness’ encoding this subjugated body as objectified, commodified and powerless. In delineating a distinction between body and flesh, Spillers carves out pornotroping as ordained through the flesh. The flesh of the slave as already possessed through control and desires locates this tumultuous flesh as preceding the body as an iconography of biopower which invokes African females and males through their wounding and vulnerability (Spillers 2003, 206). Such an evocation disrupts White obsession with the body as form; hence, the unformed flesh precedes the ‘bare life’ of Agamben’s (1998) treatise.

Flesh as a precursor to the body functions within the regime of biopower from slavery to neoliberal regimes in which this Black wounded flesh calibrated against the White body is a deficit entity due to the unattainability of Black subjecthood. Fred Moten, in articulating the historical production of Black flesh, evokes it through its suspension between sexes and genders, animate and inanimate, subject and object, animal and machine, agent and material, delineating the porousness of ontological categories as well as the brittleness of Western culture’s epistemological foundations in placing the Black body time and again as the limit and exemplar, particularly as targets of state violence on the streets (cf. Copeland 2016, 141). Blackness is situated through the violence of historical dispossession, of racial, cultural, and economic subjugation and stigmatisation (Trask 2004, 10). Additionally, the imbrication of Blackness with violence releases a recurrent trope through poverty, enslavement, colonisation, and racial stereotyping of one set of men and women by another (Wilmot 2009, 18).

Weheliye (2008), in interrogating the relationship between politics and suffering, examines and illuminates the categories excluded from the law, national communities and the human. Drawing on Spillers (2003), Weheliye (2008) invokes the sexual dimension in Agamben’s production of ‘bare life’ in which violent domination produces the tortured slave body as a deviant entity from the category of human. In reformulating Agamben’s ‘bare life’ and the sovereign states, Weheliye interrogates slavery, colonialism, lynching, and the current US prison system as constituting integral components of modern terror, invoking a contiguity between the camp and plantation in the suspension of law which other scholars have similarly observed (Gilroy 2000). In spanning a longer period than the Shoah, racial slavery as a form of extreme brutality and directed killing is not adduced through an abnormality. Producing a variant form of bare life from the camps, slavery births a body which could be killed with impunity, purged from all rights of citizenship and induced from the miasma of social death (Patterson 1982, 39–41). Slavery, in profiting from this social death, Patterson (1982, 38) argues, releases this entity into the community of his master conjuring him as a ‘nonbeing’.

Afropessimism provides a lens in understanding the present age as the ‘The New Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2020) in which the temporality of the ‘present’ is encoded through a continuity in configuring Black bodies and consigning them as Black flesh (Spillers 2003). Black flesh deprived of a body becomes a canvass for violence and the biopolitics of White supremacy, rendering this Black flesh neither amenable to history or gender, iterating it as a commodity (Spillers 2003). This flesh is repeatedly violated and transgressed or sold and acquired as property (Sharpe 2016, 27–66). Cast outside of humanity, history and family, the Black flesh is not perceptible through standard frameworks of materialism, feminism, psychoanalysis, or postcolonial studies within the vantage point of Afropessimism (Weier 2014, 423). Hence, for this Blackness the ‘grammar of suffering’ is induced through a socio-historical vacuum marked by the lack of subjecthood nor recourse to redress within White civil society (Wilderson 2010, 120). What it acquires then is an ‘American grammar’ (Spillers 2003) from a position of Black social and civic death which constitutes Whiteness and white civil society. As a ‘sentient being’ (Wilderson 2011) this entity is forged through violence, accumulation, fungibility, and terror. As a result, social and civic death as a constitutive structural exclusion of African Americans within United States society encodes Blackness as excluded from rights and inhabiting a space of violence.

The promulgation of racial violence and Blackness as beyond law positions the Black subject as always under siege and induced through major zones of indistinction, hence Blackness is the state of exception (Weheliye 2008). In such a configuration, the racial subject as foreshadowed by premature death becomes part of the normal order. Similarly, Gilmore (2002, 216) co-locates bare life and racialisation by defining racism as ‘the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death’. For Gilmore (2007, 243), racism through ordinary means achieves ideological normality while inscribing the formation of racial categories. Supremacy and trauma form a ‘Manichean delirium’ (Tuhkanen 2018, 120). Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (2008), employs ‘Manichean delirium’ from clinical psychiatry and projects a world of stringent dualism between the colonised society and the coloniser which induces a kind of specular relationship in which the violence of the colonial regime and the counterviolence of the colonised balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity. Hence, for Blackness this Manichaean delirium positions it in a permanent state of tension and equally a dreamlike frenzy or a nightmare (Tuhkanen 2018, 120). Sarah Schulman (2016), in invoking ‘supremacy’ and ‘trauma’ as mutually perpetuating and dialectical responses to each other, categorises these as mirror imagery wherein supremacy in some produces trauma in others. As this bind solidifies and prolongs a fascinated terror and becomes instrumental in birthing what JanMohamed (2005) describes as the ‘the Death-Bound-Subject’ in which a life that is considered socially dead does not have to be killed to be dead. Patterson’s (1982) notion of social death did not remove the slave’s prospect of death but commuted this as a form of biopower held by the master and orchestrated through his impulse. In other words, the death-bound-subject is defined by the need to avoid the possibilities of life as well as the possibilities of death. For Moten (2008, 739), in invoking Fanon’s (2004) idea of a shared realm of ‘irremediable homelessness common to the colonized, the enslaved and the enclosed’, Blackness operating ‘at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential’ demands a paraontology of disorder.

Within such a structural regime the Black horrific is produced, refracted through a banalization of suffering and death. This dialectics of aestheticization as a supremacy of White power conjoins with the banality of Black death as not adduced through an abnormality (Weheliye 2008). According to Raiford (2009) the mechanical reproduction of lynching by way of photographic archive has been central to the recounting and reconstitution of Black political cultures throughout the Jim Crow and Civil Rights era. The deployment in civil rights activism as well as in contemporary art and popular culture became a constitutive element of Black visuality and in the classification and subjugation of Black life. The lynching photographs were intended to provide an ideological signification inducing Blackness through these terror regimes while banalising these as cultural artefacts. When a subject is constituted as socially dead, any measure of racialised violence can be inscribed on this entity. Hence, racism and violence serve in the political suppression of Black identity: it gives whites sovereignty over their lives (JanMohamed 2005).

Black death and violence suffused through a banality of police brutality, racial profiling, hypervigilance and pathological criminality becomes the source of imploding danger. Afropessimism contends that structures of White supremacy including the police, the media, the judicial system, and the education sector produce a perception of gratuitous violence as violence contingent upon criminal acts. In so doing, through these structural forms of anti-Black violence is rendered invisible in the constant gratuitous disrespect for and wounding of Black humanity in civil society’s discourse and perception (Weier 2014, 424).

Theorising the ‘black’ horrific

Black bodies in pain, suffering or in stages of dying tap into a visual regime which through its recurrence produces a ‘shadow archive’ (Sekula 1986). Photography in its role of archiving the criminal body through portraiture produces a social body and hence technology is transformational due to its dual articulation. It enables a system of representation through portraiture but it can equally be intimately implicated in the acceleration of human denigration (Sekula 1986, 6). An archive does not reveal its interdependency with other archives, obscuring these through its internal coherence and mutual exclusivity of social groups within it. As such, for Sekula the shadow archive is an all-inclusive corpus of imagery revealing a proscribed moral reading and hierarchy within it.

For Saidya Hartman (1997), the erasure of Blackness in historical and fictional documents denies and replaces the Black subject through White vantage points as universal. This erasure in the overrepresentation of Whiteness employs universality and transferability of life in the mode of Whiteness placing the Black subject as imperceptible or in ‘the position of the unthought’. Hartman’s argument about Black flesh as replaceable illuminates its positionality of fungibility whereby the ‘virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability are endemic to the commodity’ (1997, 21). Black flesh as a commodity and its pornography of violence enacts a spectacularized communality and the banalization of its violence is a constituent part of its composition. This spectacularization pledges Black death within a visual pleasure archive in which these bodies appropriate a signification over time in encoding power over the subjugated. The compositions of banalised violence alongside spectacularized Black death through technologies of vision such as photographs produce the ‘Black horrific’. This Black horrific is neither composed through shock or suffering but amenable both to the historic archive perpetuating Black flesh as constantly inscribed through violence and lending to the pornography of the spectacular pleasure in which its fungibility as a commodity and its historic orientation of being bodiless flesh are intrinsic to this composition. The Black horrific emerges through the constant testing of the limits of pain within this power economy as part of its necro-aesthetic. The horrific ignites an invitation to gaze and the pain and suffering induces it through animality rather than the affirmation of its humanity or dignity. The Black horrific is not something that is shocking in its novelty but recurrent in its predictability.

The historical treatment of Blackness within White governance produces a ‘disembodied body’ that is commodified for the consumption beyond its immediacy or through the closure of death. This death-bound subject is not imagined through death per se but conditions which elongate its social death while being foreshadowed by moral death leading up to the Black horrific as a moment of holding Blackness in suspension between its mortal precarity and immortal profanity. Black death conjoined with the artefacts of representation and technologies which enable the virality of the repeat mode form an incestuous bind in which it ignites the Black horrific as a performative entity in unleashing suppressed desires and conjoining it with the pleasures of consumption. The Black horrific signifies how the corporeality of the Black body is possessed by forces beyond its mortality and materiality. The coalescing of the banality of violence of Black death with the spectacular induces the Black horrific as given over to aesthetic/pornographic renditions over time. This nexus of spectacular/banal is co-located with technologies of vision, facilitating a distributive economy stripped of context, but not foreclosed to co-location with historical regimes of violence which births Blackness through suffering. The spectacular of the Black horrific as compositions in excess (i.e. of suffering, humanity or moral imagination) yet constantly testing the limits of its suffering, enlarges Blackness as constantly premised through turbulence and instability (i.e. accidents, misadventures, criminality and non-compliance) and intimately co-located with death and demise.

The Black horrific is aestheticised through its inability to be consigned to the human race and as a ritual to cast it within the abject in which death, pain and suffering are not tests to restore its humanity but to revalidate its non-human attributes. The technologies of vision enable the Black horrific to be commodified and distributed or indeed retrieved as part of a visual regime of continuity from its historic representations of Black flesh to its present digital manifestations. In inducing Black death through this ‘banal aesthetic shock’ of the Black horrific it abstracts Black flesh not through dimensions of pity per se but through the limits of suffering as a recurring device and as a dominant aspect of cultural memory and its recall. Technologies of vision beyond their ability to commodify, (re)produce visceral visual regimes in their own right which mediate other sites of popular culture particularly celluloid representations and stereotypes suspending Black death through a necro-aesthetic regime and as part of its popular imagination.

Conceptual framework of the repeat mode

What does it mean to witness Black death on a loop? I want to deconstruct the new convergent digital technologies of vision as a form of techne that is pledged to constant re-enactments and instant gratification including gratuitous violence. The personalisation and convergence of technologies produce these violent acts as popular content through their mass distribution formats which can be shared, downloaded or archived. Envisioning the Black horrific through these shareable formats, mass viewing forums and personal sharing platforms craft it as not just assuaging the fecund needs of consumption and pleasure or jouissance but also through the idea of Black death as a distinct genre in the click economy with its intertextuality between celluloid representations and the shadow archive. The Black horrific witnessed in a loop or on repeat mode invokes the Black body in its constant mode of breaking down and in the process induces two modes of signification: its banality of violence and its historic continuity with the visual regime of Blackness through the necro-aesthetics of its demise and Black flesh as a site for the pornographic enactment of White supremacy.

Black Death within an accelerated economy of the ‘loop’ conjoins the Black horrific with the spectacular of technologies of vision, coalescing through the visual archives that prime the Black body as a site of the aesthetic of suffering in speed mode and its virulent spread. The loop, the replay, and the freeze-frame re-abstract the Black body as a pervasively manipulated entity which can be banalised within a mode of watching ‘real-time horrific’ as a popular category through recommendations of the sharing economy which capitalises on attention seeking and the reactive modes as impulsive response. Its co-location within the wider economy of consumption of user generated content (UGC) relocates the genre of the Black horrific within the banality and fungibility of digital screen cultures. Black death, as part of popular culture and imagination, enacts the repeat mode of ‘Black bodies dying’ within this ecology of replay and repeat, populating it with banal violence as a fervent shock culture both numbing and inducing the dying Black flesh as performative elements of the social imaginary which elongate the social archives of bodies mutilated through excess force, comingling them with viral platforms. The loop or the repeat mode documents Blackness through the speed of replay, further impoverishing the politics of pity in which Black flesh is both fictional and part of a visual regime of demise and denigration.

The ‘repeat mode’ infuses a Black liquidity in which Black death dissolves into the immaterial digital architecture swimming through its repository of imagery. In repeat mode the Black body is both the anticipated figure of doom and the limit figure of suffering invoking its historical nodality of the slave and collapsing it through the digital paradigm as a mimetic image renamed, tagged and pinned through search terms. Blackness as liquefied in the platforms of capital emphasises its materiality characterised through its fungibility. It can be passed on, shared, channelled into newsfeeds as recommendations, and become fodder for conversations and attention, and ultimately be relinquished into the digital repository contributing to the shadow archive to signify how it produces a banality of historical violence rendered on Black flesh. The repeat mode of watching induces aesthetic shock, conjoining anaesthetic numbness as a momentary visual sensual experience moulding Black death not directly or solely in social justice frames but the affective substrates of this consuming economy. Violence of Blackness captured and uploaded through convergent devices such as the smartphone is the ‘poor image’ or the rebellious ‘itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution’ (Steyerl 2012, 32).

This poor image as the ‘wretched’ (Steyerl 2012) digital form ensconced within a vast repository of decontextualised images swimming within a ‘swirl of capitalist deterritorialisation’ is about the further dysmorphic annihilation of Black flesh in which the image is re-possessed through the digital image economy and infrastructure thrusting content as unstable and amenable to re-abstraction of form as part of this consumption economy and digital formats. For Blackness and Black death this incitement into the popularity of the digital, on the one hand, and its historical commodification as the limit figure ordained through the Black horrific, on the other, propositions the body through discontinuities and as well as the Afropessimistic originary of the slave instilling it within an unstable/stable nexus of the non-human subject/object. The encoding of extra-terrestrial intelligence enacted through the opaque algorithmic or machine logic within the digital architecture will copulate with the Black death, re-igniting it through popular gaze and its attention economy as popular content, lapsing into a manipulated mode of re-making and re-circulation through the viral online. For Stiegler (2010b), mnemotechnologies combine a complex retentional economy with an attentional one. Industrial social computing entails degrees of displacement of subjects away from knowing themselves temporally through local and living memory towards an exterior function of machine memory calibrated through the needs of capital. By capturing events in real time, Stiegler attributes an over-determining quality to these events of capture such that the contingent occurrence of an event and its mediated historical reception as event coalesce to constitute a reality onto itself through constant recalibration of platform economics.

With social media and real-time uploads, the historical and immediate recombine in the encounter or sense-making in which the event is received through the affective spheres on platform capital. Platforms articulated through a retentive memory speak with their intrinsic algorithmic logic to produce an assemblage. Coalescing material and semiotic registers the machinic assemblage enmeshes affect, enunciations and disembodied presence (Thomas 2013, 22). As Deleuze and Guattari (1980) posit, the machinic assemblage can unplug a specific arrangement of elements and recombines these with other entities. If images of suffering tend to naturalise connections between violence and already marginalised peoples (Stone 2015, 179) technologies can become both signifying and asignifying machines which accelerate and thwart associations. As Jasbir Puar (2018) points out, images of violence are not exceptional in themselves but the interplay of technologies, circuits, and networks rework these through machinic assemblages, remediating a new vernacular of violence. Their ability to distribute, multiply, and reproduce the ideology and power dynamics inscribed in these acts becomes an aspect of its accelerated modernity and its means to further dehumanise the marginalised.

Disembodied black consciousness and a ‘politics of refusal’

Technology has been intimately implicated with the reproduction of form, its mutilation and erasure. Flesh can be reified or made virtual through technology. Hence, if photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, it also threatens conflagration and anarchy, an incendiary levelling of the existing cultural order (Sekula 1986, 4). As such the ‘wretched image’ online of Black bodies dying becomes part of a burgeoning shadow archive with an assemblage of brutalised lives. For Steyerl (2012, 44), these floating images equally stand in for their own real conditions of existence: denoting swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities, encompassing resistance and appropriation, and enacting conformism and exploitation. Technologies deposit their own bias while blurring truth regimes through their modes of inflection. If photographs of lynchings solidified White supremacy and claims over Black flesh, these very gruesome images used by Ida B. Wells for activism in her anti-lynching campaign were transformed in their very re-appropriation (Raiford 2012). The exclusion of Blackness and racial erasure from the realm of ontology has meant a withdrawal and equally a transcendence from the materialist, non-humanist constructions of being or having the affective and aesthetic capacity to experience itself culturally.

Photographs as part of technological regimes of remediation are then not singular compositions but yielding relations to one another, functioning through a visual indexicality of the social and moral. In so doing, Raiford (2012, 302) contends that the multiple visual representations of African Americans were always and continue to be in intense dialogue with each other. In tandem, Ida B. Wells’ engagement with the shadow archive forces us to rethink the collapsed categories of Blackness in resurrecting Black humanity. Black bodies ordained through frames of criminality, the pornographic, ethnographic, the comedic, or in the margins of the sentimental portraits of Whites demonstrate how technology has been used to reconstruct not merely individual and collective selves, but also racial and national histories (Raiford 2009, 120). Hence imagery and its re-appropriation has transformative potential.

Similarly, this poor image online can construct anonymous global networks just as it procreates a shared history, building alliances as it journeys through fluid spheres, provoking translation or mistranslation, and creating new publics and debates (Steyerl 2012, 42). Through fracture and disruption of thought and affect, Steyerl argues that the poor image prompts non-conformist information circuits (2012, 43). Losing visual substance as an unstable image on platforms, it acquires political resonance creating tractions through its mutability and travel within a voluminous repository where it can be revived and politicised through tagging, hashtagging and traffic, imbricated in the re-direction of gaze and the acquisition of affective spheres engaged in the recalibration of life and death. Its circulation can create ‘visual bonds’ (Vertov 1995) linking communities and audiences with shared interests and sense of identification just as much as global information capitalism enables mutual excitement (Steyerl 2009, 7) and unanticipated disruptions. It is within this chaos that re-materialisation of Blackness ignites, through new modes of the social and visceral. If Blackness is defined through its fluidity and virtuality and the denial of form and ontology, it then is already the ‘post-entity’ lending to the digital spheres in terms of mutability in the abstraction of form and its capacities to be re-morphed. Dying and Black bodies contain both violent and fecund potential for re-imagination and communion in the virtual sphere where they can gain speed, subvert mortality or defy the sacred. The mutilated Black body has been historically appropriated for civil action to implant Black resistance within White civil society in illuminating its absent/presence as an immanent struggle within the ontological. The banalised and brutalised Black body has been the canvass for the symbolic disavowal of social death despite its mortal demise. The politicised brutalised images of Emmett Till and his open casket invoked a public spectacle into the tormented Black flesh of a young boy, in the process transforming the Black corpse into an active projection of White inhumanity and racial injustice. This wretched grainy image widely circulated in the Black press, with thousands of mourners viewing his body directly at the funeral home (Harold and DeLuca 2005, 265), reversed the public spectacle of lynching. Enacting a dehiscence, Emmett Till was transformed from a trophy of racial violence to a mirror into the depravity of Whiteness.

The Black bodies preserved through the liminality between life and death then call out for a re-reading and re-appropriation of this traumatised flesh. For Spillers (2003, 205), preservation becomes a form of celebration transforming the body in demise into a ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’. For Moten (2013), degenerative and regenerative preservation is critical celebration for Blackness. Celebration as the essence of Black thought, the animation of Black operations, constitutes an ‘undercommon’, underground, submarine sociality (Moten 2013, 742). As a perverse form of celebration or jouissance these traumatised bodies are transformed into a ‘fleshy archive’ in which the abrasions, gashes, and lacerations record the unchecked power and inscriptions of torture over the captive body (Spillers 2003, 205). The absent centre of ontology and its denial for Blackness is unveiled through Afropessimism, yet its presence seemingly structures society and its ideological interpellations. If Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space (Sexton 2011), the virtual, given over to commodification and value accumulation of platform capital, is both a space for anarchy and non-conformism but mostly ‘virtuality’ in its premise to reclaim Black flesh and transform in its defiance of mortality online. Hartman contends that in the postbellum era, the elasticity of Blackness is not containable despite the excess of surveillance and regulation over its body (Hartman 2008, 2). Hence, the virtual liquifies mortal death as an agentic device for re-appropriation and the affective re-articulation of Blackness despite its ontological lack to feel its insides in expressing the jouissance of Blackness.

Through his philosophy of ‘Black mysticism’ Fred Moten counters the criticism of Blackness as not given to ontology without eliding into Afropessimism to denote it as the phenomenology of Black spirit. Filtering Blackness in a world of anti-Blackness is a mode of re-orientation into Blackness. Black spirit can be resurrected through art and music, and Blackness can reject form in re-enacting itself to avoid the ontology adduced through White civil society. The virtual, though fraught with dialectical tendencies between oppression and resistance, re-mediates new possibilities for filtering disembodied Blackness through a new vernacular mediated through technology and platform capital. For Moten, Blackness, as that which operates ‘at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential’, (Thompson 2017) is fluid and intangible but capable of experiencing the affective and sensuous in its self-realisation despite its lack of form. Blackness is paraontological in that lived experiences of Blackness both enact and escape the assignment of Blackness to social death, of non-being. This straining of Blackness against itself disrupts and resists the ontological. As such, for Moten, ‘it is escape and is what escapes’ (Thompson 2017).

The creation of visual bonds through floating ‘poor images’ as a shadow archive affords a politics of refusal. The politics of refusal entails the ‘rejection of the status quo as liveable and the creation of possibilities in the face of negation (i.e. a refusal to recognise a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible). This encompasses the decision to reject the terms of diminished subjecthood using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise’ (Campt 2019, 84). As Blackness is not a category for ontology or for phenomenological analysis, Moten defines this zone of non-being as experimental, in which friendship’s sociality overflows its political regulation (Moten 2013, 768).

Dead bodies possess the possibilities for igniting communion through the social and against the political in igniting a politics of refusal as agents of resistance through their immortality in the cultural memory of resilience. Patterson (2016) co-founder of the Black Lives Movement (BLM) asserts that murders of two teenagers – Trayvon Martin, 17, in 2013 and Michael Brown, 18, in 2014 – as igniting points for the movement. According to Fairchild (2017) ‘the most proximal influence was the Black Lives Matter movement – 2014 to the present – that was inspired by a seemingly endless list of innocent Black lives lost to violence’. Springing into national and global consciousness in 2014 and 2015, BLM’s emergence was marked through the demonstrations throughout the US in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of Michael Brown to bring attention to police brutality and the extra-juridical power of authorities in governing the Black population (Abdullah 2015). The BLM hashtag was created after the killers of these unarmed teenagers escaped with impunity.

With the movement embracing people at the intersections of social marginalisation such as the LGBT community, prisoners, students and others, it has been perceived as a new ‘civil rights movement’ (Patterson 2016) challenging an array of injustices from prison conditions and voting rights to a more equitable criminal justice system. Their tactics seek to draw attention to the cycles of injustice and compounded trauma which poor African American communities encounter as a lived experience. Within this the shooting and premature death of Black men and women (Baraka 2015) as anoetic reality and a mode of social control ordained through the violent history of America which is rooted in colonialism, slavery, the plantation economy, and racial segregation (Fairchild and Abdullah 2017).

The emergence of the BLM in its endeavour to recode traumatised Black flesh into humanity incorporates an intertextual bind in re-directing the gaze of the Black bodies dying in a loop online. Denying their fungibility and commemorating them through their individual names, the reclamation of dead bodies as worthy lives given over to premature death enacts both the dreaded claims of Afropessimism in remediating the ontological lack of Blackness, but in being able to feel back and in feeling jouissance as a community envisioning itself through new modes of virtual imagination and conversations. Black consciousness through social media platforms, as in the case of ‘Black Twitter’, and the re-directing and re-appropriation of hashtags is a means to inscribe disembodied Black consciousness on global platforms. If Black flesh and Black humanity is seen as living through the realm of the virtual through its social death, the virtual sphere resurrects Blackness³ through the politics of refusal and a means to re-imagine social bonds as exemplified in ‘Black Twitter’ as streams of Black consciousness and cultural conversations (Brock 2012; Sharma 2013). Similarly, Florini (2014) explores the performance of Black racial and cultural identity online through displays and cultural competence and knowledge as means to remake identities visible online. Similarly, Sharma contends that (2013, 46) Blacktags (racialised hashtags) are instrumental in the production of networked subjects with the capacity to multiply the possibilities of being raced online. Transcendence into virtuality with the absolution of corporeality creates space and digital enactment of Moten’s Black mysticism. The material body or indeed the Black body becomes fluid, re-abstracted through social and cultural expressions and interactions (Brock 2012) as a mode of sense-making and performance of racial identities lived through a White ontology on social media platforms. This act of performing race becomes an important dimension of speaking back and resistance against erasure (Nakamura 2008). Exhaustion of Blackness as a mode of life, for Moten, is the very fundamental reason not to believe in social death and that Black life is irreducibly ‘social’ (2013, 738).

The virtual as a sphere for the absorption of political ideologies and its refraction affords technological mediation to re-experience Blackness and to culturally experience it through disembodied presence. It is experimental, lending to fluidity, projected through its multiplicity, weaving through networks and embracing an immortality in which forgetting and erasure are problematic. As an imperfect medium of echo chambers and viscerality, its ability to reproduce ideological violence coalesces with the means to re-draft Black consciousness within the bowels of technological mediation, algorithmic gaze and virulence. In discussing the lynching photographs, Raiford (2012, 118) asserts that activists and cultural producers have returned repeatedly to ‘the sight of a Black [person] hanging from a tree’, making it iconic. These visual returns for Raiford illuminate the primary role of vision and visuality in Black social movements. In tandem, Black visuality, or how one is made to see Blackness and how Blackness itself sees the unseen therein is inextricable from African American movement efforts to change the conditions of Black people’s lives. The seeing is transformative, harnessing both individual and collective senses of being in the world, or ‘how we see Blackness, the meanings we attach to Black people, and the value we attach to Black life because of this ‘sight’ (Raiford 2009, 118). The dominated subject in recognising the power of her own ‘double-consciousness’ is seen but also sees. For Spillers, this return of the gaze that negotiates at every point a space for living, employs the concept of counter-logos. Spillers (2003) offers ‘counter-mythology’ as the articulation of a critically insurgent agency. Such an insurgency cuts through theological protocols of racialisation, which cannot be severed from the protocols of gender and sexualisation or from the capturing of maternity within patriarchy (Carter 2013, 594). These complexities of Black visuality and counter mythologies are reabsorbed into social media platforms to rearticulate Blackness through lived experiences, subversions, new vernacular and insider humour (Brock 2012; Florini 2014), and through the banal as well as spectacular encounters of the everyday.

Conclusion

The dying Black body consumed non-stop online as part of a spectacular economy opens up the Black horrific a shadow archive. It conjoins Blackness as an abortive project contextualised against Afropessimism and social death and the Black subject as a non-ontological entity. Formless, non-corporeal yet forged through social death and mortal death as a proximate reality, death permeates the Black body claiming it through its demise as a pornotrope. This pornotrope assumes a fecund virality online through the digital economy in which images circulate infinitum adducing the intrinsic fungibility of the Black body and its malleability in the virtual sphere. If death imagery has always been re-drafted for political agency historically, on social media it is re-birthed as the wretched image. Grainy images online work through the dialectics of platform capital and intertextuality offline and online, engendering a means to feel back as a community within White ontology through a critical insurgency. Spillers’ critical subjectivity offers as a mode of insurgent agency in releasing and resurrecting Blackness from social death. This critical subjectivity then produces Blackness as ‘mystical’ and stateless (Spillers 2003). The virtual offers an imagination of an unbounded sphere while affording a performative insurgency on a global stage invoking Moten’s (2003, 257) ‘Mystical Blackness’ as a way of elaborating this-worldly potentialities of the flesh constituting a multitude, or a different mode of organising social. This new means of social organisation of community or experiencing as an affective community induces the experimental in which dominant visuality can be reiterated and equally thwarted. Imperfect platforms can induce extreme experimentation and reconfiguration of social reality. Social media as a mutilated space of tortured and immortalised bodies is a fervent burial ground, reiterating Moten’s assertion that ‘Black is irreducibly social or lived in the burial ground of the subject’ (2013, 739). Social media as the burial ground of the living and the virulent dead is both a space to reconvene, commune and articulate the ‘unthought’ of Blackness (Hartman and Wilderson 2003) and reclaim the Black horrific as agentic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For Fred Moten, Blackness is ‘ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed to have brought it into existence’ (2013, 739). Moten invokes Wilderson, in defining Blackness as ‘fantasy in the hold’ (2013, 743).

2. The term ‘Afropessimism’ refers to a school of thought from African American or Black Studies inspired by Saidya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection which expresses disaffection with a post-racial discourse in which racial discrimination is still rife and experienced in the anti-Blackness of the everyday (Weier 2014, 419).

3. Blackness is described as an adjunct to racial slavery (Wagner 2009: 1–2).