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Contents
editorial
DJO BANKUNA
Pissing On The Rainbow Nation
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ôs haatie wit mense nie. Hoekô haat julle vi ôs?
GLENN HOLTZMAN
The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Black artists and the paradox of the gift
Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani
ZWELEDINGA PALLO JORDAN
JOHNNY DYANI: A Portrait
JOHNNY MBIZO DYANI
A Letter From Mbizo
ARYAN KAGANOF
Johnny Dyani Interview 22-23 December 1985
SALIM WASHINGTON
“Don’t Sell Out”
LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO & HERBIE TSOAELI WITH JOHNNY DYANI
In Conversation with Mbizo
ZOLISWA FIKELEPI-TWANI & NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When Today Becomes The Past: The Archive as a Healing Process
ASHER GAMEDZE
Tradition as improvisation | Continuity and abstraction
GILBERT MATTHEWS & LEFIFI TLADI
An Interview with Lars Rasmussen
EUGENE SKEEF
The Musical Confluence of Johnny Dyani and Bheki Mseleku in Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script ii: Ontology Of The Bass
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iii: Musical Offering
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iv: Home And Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script v: Experimental Philosophic Incantations
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life
ED EPSTEIN
Spiritual
CAROL MULLER
Diasporic musical landscapes: Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Dyani, and Sathima Bea Benjamin in an African Space Program (1969-1980)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Riot in Progress (Legalize Freedom)
S’MAKUHLE BOKWE MAFUNA
Notes on the Exile Years
KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR
Who the Son was?
ARYAN KAGANOF
Somebody Blew Up South Africa
JONATHAN EATO
Interludes with Bra’ Tete Mbambisa
MAX ANNAS
Morduntersuchungskommission. Der Fall Daniela Nitschke
SHANE COOPER
Lonely Flower
THANDI ALLIN DYANI
"I love you. You don’t have to love me but I love you."
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Shades of Johnny Dyani
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz is my Life
TJOBOLO KHAHLISO
Shebeening
FEDERICO FEDERICI
Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology
ANDRÉ CLEMENTS
Vita-Socio-Anarcho
DEREK DAVEY
Verge
borborygmus
MUSTAPHA JINADU
Trapped
VUSUMZI MOYO
From Cape-to-Cairo – AZANIA
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
In a foreign tongue...
SHARLENE KHAN
Imagining an African Feminist Press
DILIP MENON
Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)
CATHERINE RUDENT
Against the “Grain of the Voice” - Studying the voice in songs
GEORGE LEWIS
Amo (2021), for five voices and electronics
STEVEN SHAVIRO
Exceeding Syncopation?
BRUCE LABRUCE
Notes on camp/anti-camp
PATRICIA PISTERS
Set and Setting of the Brain on Hallucinogen: Psychedelic Revival in the Acid Western
frictions
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Doctor Patient
KNEO MOKGOPA
Vuleka Mhlaba (What Would Happen if Madiba Returned?)
CHURCHIL NAUDE
Die mooi mooi gedig en anner massekinners ….
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Travelling on the Khayelitsha Train
SISCA JULIUS
Islands in the stream
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
Nobody’s Mullet
GADDAFI MAKHOSANDILE
The Face of Hope
VONANI BILA
Extracts from Phosakufa (the epic)
NIQ MHLONGO
Mistaken Identity
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships part 2
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
How to Become an African President
JEAN RHYS
The Doll
OSCAR HEMER
Coyote
MICHALIS PICHLER
Bibliophagia
claque
LINDELWA DALAMBA
From Kippie to Kippies and Beyond: the village welcomes this child
GWEN ANSELL
Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain
MKHULULI
Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic
LIZE VAN ROBBROECK
DECOLONIZING ART BOOK FAIRS: Publishing Practices from the South(s).
DYLAN VALLEY
The Future lies with folk art: Max Schleser’s smartphone filmmaking THEORY AND PRACTICE
PAUL KHAHLISO
Riding Ruins
DIANA FERRUS
Ronelda Kamfer’s Kompoun: unapologetic and honest writing.
UNATHI SLASHA
Piecing Together the Barely Exquisite Corpse: On Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on the Speculative Archive
WANELISA XABA
One from the heart: Dimakatso Sedite's Yellow Shade
BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
Uit die Kroes: gedigte deur Lynthia Julius
FRANK MEINTJIES
Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony - a discourse on the unrelenting and ruthless process of colonial conquest
ekaya
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Call Me By My Name: Ubizo and Ancestral Names for Abangoma
HILDE ROOS
In Conversation with Zakes Mda: "The full story must be told."
INGE ENGELBRECHT
Tribute to Sacks Williams: A composer from Genadendal
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
A tribute to Hilton Biscombe
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
Resisting the Siren Song of Race
off the record
SANDILE MEMELA
Things My Father Taught Me
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
On returning to my grandmother’s land (notes for a film)
HILTON BISCOMBE
A boytjie from Stellenbosch
KHOLEKA SHANGE
Art, Archives, Anthropology
RITHULI ORLEYN
On Archives, Metadata and Aesthetics
KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
The Nomadic Mind of Teshome Gabriel: Hybridity, Identity and Diaspora
FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON
Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn - episode 2
GEORGE KING
Sustaining an Imagined Culture: Some Reflections on South African Music Research in Thirty-Five Years of Ars Nova
RAFI ALIYA CROCKETT
Loxion Fabulous: Temporality and Spaciality in South African Kwaito Performance
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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MKHULULI

Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic

My disquisition will start by cautioning that what we attempt to do here could easily be characterized as what Calvin Warren, in his response to Jared Sexton’s review of his book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism and Emancipation, refers to as “intellectual cruelty and a disregard for black existence— a certain scholarly malpractice”, that is, “a resignation of black thought”. Secondly, I want to reductively perform what Michael Riffaterre refers to, in a book called Fictional Truth, semanalysis, that is, a study of the unconscious of the text, which should not be confused with the study of the unconscious of the author or that of the reader, but at the same time we want to follow Tumi Mogorosi’s methodology in attending to the underlying unexamined operative logics of the inferences worked out in the book. I’m saying this to caution that at some point this might appear as though it were not a reading of Mogorosi’s book. These notes are divided into three parts, the first (this one) focuses on the concept of (black) noise, the second on what Mogorosi refers to as performative silence and the last a comparative study of the concept of DeAesthetic.

In his book, Tumi Mogorosi introduces us to a concept called DeAesthetics (a concept under erasure), which he describes as “a performance of/ from a space of dislocation”. A non-gesture that “disrupts fixed entities by way of movement, opacity, non-action as a kind of remixing, working with silence, leaving gaps, taking away, or with-holding from (in a musical sense, looking for the cut or the break as the place or space for breath)”. This space-time concept gives an account of embodiment as a limitation and as such calls for “disrespecting embodiment to the widened perceptual encounter”.

In the second chapter, Mogorosi begins with an urge to think of blues and swing music as fields of possibility. He tells us that the blues begin with catastrophe, a cry and a scream. Of course, his attendance to this is done through Saidiya Hartman’s non-accounting of how Frederick Douglass came into the world of slavery, through his witnessing of Aunt Hester being whipped.

Let us briefly turn towards Mogorosi’s study of Jezebel and Venus. Here, Mogorosi lingers on what he calls an “impossible question”, one that is made possible by way of Hartman’s theorization of impossible speech as that which, as Mogorosi states, “comes by being incapable of speaking for or as Jezebel/ Venus – the impossibility she thinks of as ‘writing at the limit of unspeakable’”. What Mogorosi reads, subsequent to this passage, is the silent space between notes as slippages or alleyways which require a different ear or navigation.

In thinking about Brenda Fassie’s Too late for Mama, Mogorosi reads the first verse as opening with catastrophe, sustained by “a minor cadence” which is read here as a confirmation, if you will, of what Frank B. Wilderson III calls the lack of narrative arc [in thinking about oppression of or the gratuitous violence enacted against black people], which is to say, as Wilderson does, that “the violence which both elaborates and saturates Black “life” is totalizing, so much so as to make narrative inaccessible to Blacks”, “leading to an association of Black music with what was seen as music that lacks both a tonal center and structure”. Or as aptly described by Hartman in Riot and Refrain (in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 2019) when she says, “To those outside the circle it is a din without melody or center”. One could liken Hartman’s reading of this “sonic tumult and upheaval” as black noise to the reading of noise enacted by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver in their 1964 text titled “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” wherein it [noise] is thought of as “unwanted additions” that interfere with and distort the signal as it is transmitted through the air and telephone wire, “creating a veil of uncertainty when it comes to interpreting the original meaning or signal” and as such acquires the status of a negative sonic interruption.

Returning to Mogorosi with a rather lengthy quote:

Hartman speaks about groans and cries of songs that become un-decodable as they serve at the limit of coding, as something other than utterable. But inversely she speaks about shrieks that find their way into speech and song, and by doing so invokes the scene in Narrative by Frederick Douglass about Aunt Hester being whipped, her shrieks being his initiation into slavery. This is how Moten in In the Break establishes it, as some kind of musicality of that shriek that can be associated with the kinds of screams vocalists and musicians have produced, with focus on Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s duet Triptych. This is in that ‘terrible music’ that Aunt Hester’s scream is transformed into the song of the ‘great house’, the terrible way of impossible being as the condition of a possible coming into being of such a song. In other words, this is how and why Blackness becomes a theory of the end of the world.

In an essay titled Venus in Two Acts Hartman (2008) coined the term “critical fabulation”, which is a type of history (or the narration of it) that not only challenges positivistic attempts to rely on archival evidence and facts, but also refuses to reiterate the events of slavery, as they are reproduced in archival sources about the materiality of its effects. This is preceded by a similar gesture made in her book, Scenes of Subjection, leading to an engagement with/by Moten wherein he proposes that we contest the originality of the primal scene and imagine other modes of living that challenge what he refers to as “an unavoidable mode of subjection”. Here we are required to think with Paul Gilroy’s politics of lower frequencies enacted in his reading of black music:

Created under the very nose of the overseers, the utopian desires which fuel the complementary politics of transfiguration must be invoked by other, more deliberately opaque means. This politics exists on a lower frequency where it is played, danced, and acted, as well as sung and sung about, because words, even words stretched by melisma and supplemented or mutated by the screams which still index the conspicuous power of the slave sublime, will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims to truth.

This would later inspire modalities of thinking about noise that contest the discursive attempt to make legible and as such commodify the experience of the enslaved (see Hartman, 1997 and Moten, 2003 for their debt to Gilroy). Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman (2005), for instance, call black noise the shrieks, the moans, the non-sense and the opacity that emerges from practices of resistance:

What we call black noise Robin Kelley would describe as a ‘freedom dream’, or Fred Moten would describe as ‘the surreal utopian ‘nonsense’ of a utopian vision’, the freedom we know outside of the opposition of sense and intellection. [This black noise] represents the kind of political aspirations that [are] inaudible and illegible within the prevailing normative political rationalities insofar as what they call for is wildly utopian and derelict to capitalism.

As Inigo Wilkins demonstrates (as we will later show) in his work, it is rather misguided to place noise and excess in opposition to capitalism and reason insofar as doing so fails to consider the “multi-scale complexity of noise.”  The Hartmanian-Motenian understanding of noise here seems indistinguishable from opacity, insofar as we see in Nathanja van Dijk’s navigation of noise which she thinks of as “a leap in the dark: a rather brave move away from certainty to orient yourself towards the unknown, towards uncertainty”, and at the core of the Glissantian configuration on opacity, is an insistence on being “decoupled from the violence of the colonial world-making project and its ways of seeing and knowing” and of course this insistence on opacity is “not about remaining in the shadows, but

an active refusal of the Eurocentric demand that experience be made transparent (or legible)”.

Here, we want to problematize what we wish to term “the fetishization of noise”, however our problematization of this fetishization, albeit proposing a metacontextual reading of noise, is not in line with or does not necessarily parrot the one enacted by Rene Thom in his 1983 paper titled Stop Chance! Silence Noise! wherein he says “this fascination with randomness testifies to an antiscientific attitude par excellence”. We subsequently observe that he reviles this, insofar as it characterizes, according to him, a deliberate mental confusion of those working in the literary register, that those trained in “the rigor of scientific study/ rationality” barely fall for.  

Aaron Zwinstcher like Mogorosi (at least insofar as the use of erasure is concerned) thinks noise as a concept under erasure, he reads noise apophatically, which is to say, for him noise can never be fully apprehended but rather attended to obliquely through negations. I want us now to turn away from Zwinstcher, to whom we will return shortly.

What I want us to do is take seriously Wilderson’s injunction that we “stay in the hold of the ship” and how this converges with Cecile Malaspina’s reading of noise as “lived ambiguity” (from Miguel Prado’s Noise and Morphogenesis), and how this leads to a reconfiguration of the white immunological drive. I want to do this without going through the various expansive genealogies of the readings of the concept of noise as done by Malaspina, Wilkins and Miguel Prado.

Wilkins in enacting a critique of the reading of noise as taken up in the humanities seeks to problematize the fetishization of noise as randomness, indeterminacy, uncertainty and chance. Through a metacontextual reading, he builds “a case for a concept of noise that can act, instead, as index of intelligible constraint”, which, unlike what we have witnessed enacted in the reading of noise in what I’d reductively call Black Studies, does not, as Ray Brassier says, “want to eliminate ambiguity in the conceptualization of noise, but rather make it explicit…”. 

In the insistence to only think noise through this fetishized register what gets overlooked is the other side of this lived ambiguity of noise, so that in tarrying with it, we are confronted with the reality that unveils, that to twiddle with noise only reveals the limits of the concepts or domain within which we are operating but does not necessarily mark a break or move towards freedom. It is perhaps this lengthy quote from Malaspina that lays bare a more succinct description of noise as lived ambiguity:

Noise (accidental, non-necessary, increasing uncertainty and ‘freedom of choice’ in probabilistic terms) is also normal and ubiquitous, often subject to a highly predictable statistical form, called a normal distribution. So predictable, in fact, that telecommunications can mimic its uniform distribution across the frequency band, and use what is called additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) as a basic noise model for the underlying behaviour of a system, so as to later distinguish phenomena like fading, interference, dispersion or other chaotic or unpredictable (non-linear) events. Noise that at first presented itself as non-reproducible stochasticity, for the communications engineer, on the contrary, becomes characteristic for the underlying behaviour of a system. The least we can say is that the relation between noise, stochasticity, the accidental and the predictable is far from simple.

Zwintscher in a rather less protracted manner gestures towards the same in accounting for noise as lived ambiguity: “Noise is both background and parasite, both ground and disruption, and undecidable in the difference”.

Albeit admitting to this lived ambiguity of noise and going to lengths to account for it, Zwintscher in his attempt to theorize human being-as-noise chooses to pursue what he thinks to be or contain the radical capacities of noise, that is, what we’ve characterized here as the fetishized reading, noise as randomness, indeterminacy and chance. It is Wilkins who reminds us that contrary to this elaboration of randomness, chance and uncertainty as undermining reason, we ought to consider them as the achievement of it, so that for him noise is intrinsic to reason and in a positive manner, it is a relationship of complex reciprocity. Wilkins adopts William Wimsatt’s proposition that “models and heuristics are indispensible tools for scientific research precisely because calculation of all aspects of a problem in the manner of a Laplacean demon is not possible: “the scientist must consider the size of computations, the cost of data collection, and must regard both processes as ‘noisy; or error-prone”.

Wilkins turns this apparent shortcoming into a virtue by demonstrating how the failures that ensue from the application of heuristics reveal important facts about the object under investigation”. What we see here is the intentional and motivated incorporation of noise into a system as “a beneficial effect or as a functional aspect of its operation”. So that the conception of noise as randomness and interference a la Shannon and Weaver is now regarded as essential or intrinsic to the adaptability and variability of a system. Wilkins further states that, “Reason is not opposed to noise; on the contrary it thrives on the discovery and explanation of noise, the prediction and control of random processes”.

In light of this, the proposition we would like to make is that we take seriously Wilderson’s injunction to stay in the hold of the ship, so that if reason thrives on randomness and noise, what happens to what we think of as black noise? Does it mark or serve as the background through which the world reconfigures itself through this white immunological drive, as one would’ve noticed with dub and jazz music? The reading of the immunological drive adopted here is attended to through Fréderic Neyrat, who thinks of it by way of co-reading Spinoza’s concept of conatus or the “effort to preserve in its being” (1677, as cited by Neyrat, 2017) and Jacques Derrida’s reading of the death drive which is described as the drive to “destroy all that might stand in the way of its ultimate goal: to be and to remain intact, sheltered from all harm, from all damage”.

Which is to say then, what happens when black noise does not necessarily mark a rupture In The Break but rather marks a reconfiguration of the world in an attempt to preserve itself or persist in being, in an otherwise form? What then do we make of Mogorosi’s Hartmanian-Motenian reading of the musicality of the shrieks/ black noise, as that which potentiates

a theory of the end of the world?

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