"The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.1 Blackness—the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line—is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity. While subjectivity is defined by the subject’s possession of itself and its objects, it is troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert such that the subject seems to be possessed—infused, deformed—by the object it possesses. I’m interested in what happens when we consider the phonic materiality of such propriative exertion. Or, to invoke and diverge from Saidiya Hartman’s fundamental work and phrasing, I’m interested in the convergence of blackness and the irreducible sound of necessarily visual performance at the scene of objection. Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectatorship, enjoyment and being enjoyed, lies and moves the economy of what Hartman calls hypervisibility. She allows and demands an investigation of this hypervisibility in its relation to a certain musical obscurity and opens us to the problematics of everyday ritual, the stagedness of the violently (and sometimes amelioratively) quotidian, the essential drama of black life, as Zora Neale Hurston might say. Hartman shows how narrative always echoes and redoubles the dramatic interenactment of “contentment and abjection,” and she explores the massive discourse of the cut, of rememberment and redress, that we always hear in narratives where blackness marks simultaneously both the performance of the object and the performance of humanity. She allows us to ask: what have objectification and humanization, both of which we can think in relation to a certain notion of subjection, to do with the essential historicity, the quintessential modernity, of black performance? Whatever runs off us, a certain offense runs through us. This is a double ambivalence that requires analyses of looking and being looked at; such game requires, above all, some thinking about the opposition of spectacle and routine, violence and pleasure. This thinking is Hartman’s domain. A critique of the subject animates Hartman’s work. It bears the trace, therefore, of a movement exempliWed by an aspect of Judith Butler’s massive theoretical contribution wherein the call to subjectivity is understood also as a call to subjection and subjugation and appeals for redress or protection to the state or to the structure or idea of citizenship—as well as modes of radical performativity or subversive impersonation—are always already embedded in the structure they would escape.2 But if Hartman moves in this world she also moves in another tradition that forces another kind of questioning. Consulting Frederick Douglass on all of this is mandatory and the best place to consult him is in the moments when he describes and reproduces black performance. But this is to move in the tradition of a mode of reading Douglass that conflates his story (and its graphic and emblematic primal scene) with the story of slavery and freedom; this is to risk an uncritical covering of the assertion of Douglass’s originarity; this is to approach the natal occasion that our musico-political tradition must evade. In order to sidestep this problematic, Hartman has both to avoid and to arrive at Douglass, must both repress and return to him.''

Fred Moten