Abstract
A short essay on the life of images and sounds in John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea; on radical montage as the reinvention of relationality and the index of errantry; and on ghosts and justice beyond equivalence.
One could start from the middle—or the end, for that matter—as John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (2015) is a digitopic image that plays in a loop, and the credits too become part of this work that reworks itself by the mutual cooperation of its parts. Except that the parts—images or sounds or beings—are not components, and the three-channel installation constitutes not a tryptic but a single entangled image, internally fissured, indeterminate. Its time is the time of suspension, which is other than stoppage or arrest, pace Giorgio Agamben and his proposal that images be treated as forms of nymphal life, lesser beings whose temporality is released only when a subject halts and then revives their flux.1Vertigo Sea is a digitopic image because it secrets its own duration, discontinuous and yet irreducible to any stilled time, any interruption of flow or becoming.
I interpret “digitopia” as Akomfrah's name for a “yearning” that emerges in the overlay of the digital and the diasporic—a utopian wish or impulse, rather than a form; the desire to engage with the “conceptual tyrannies” (“preoccupations,” “concerns”) that have informed Black cinema, so as to define a new spatiotemporal logic of the image.2 In this respect, digitopia is not bound to a utopian subject matter, nor is it strictly a matter of representation, though it wrestles with it. If Vertigo Sea comes to form a digitopic image, it is also by remembering the dystopic, the “unimaginable” as it “assumes the guise of everyday practice” and is recorded—or not—in the archives of colonialism, slavery, migration, environmental change.3 What seals the image as digitopic is that it points not to a nonexistent location (utopia as “no place”) but to something other than location: momentum, errantry, radical relationality (fig. 1).4
In its horror and beauty, the ocean preserves the whole of the past, including the past for which there is no longer, or not yet, a trace. Akomfrah's conjuration of ghosts, then, is less a rightful gesture of representation than the “almost criminal act of inventing the past, especially since the absence of such a past is not natural, God-given, but a fate bestowed on . . . certain historical subjects,” indeed on a multiplicity of beings.5 In Vertigo Sea (fig. 2), these beings return from the future of the past, not as entities, but as nonrelational relations—relations as “minimal things.”6
Vertigo Sea makes use of three large screens, juxtaposed horizontally, to edit together found and original materials: excerpts from BBC nature films and television programs, including David Attenborough's kaleidoscopic documentary on ocean life; archival footage of whale slaughtering and polar bear hunting; the Zealy daguerreotypes, the first known photos of enslaved people; images of migrant boats in the Mediterranean and South China Seas; reenacted scenes of shackled Black men and women being cast off a ship and of Black bodies washed ashore; documents relating to the death flights that took place over the Atlantic Ocean; high-end cinematic tableaux of solitary figures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European attire, standing or sitting in proximity to water, most often amid scattered artifacts (clocks, chairs, lampshades, strollers, typewriters, navigational instruments, photo frames, dolls). The film installation also comprises intertitles (the first one reading, “Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime”); asynchronous voices (BBC reporters, a Nigerian boatman, abolitionist John Newton, unidentified characters reading from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Heathcote Williams's Whale Nation, and Virginia Wolf's To the Lighthouse); whale song; string music; opera arias; noises of rifle shots; harpoon cannon blasts.
This list is highly incomplete—and it would remain so even if it were meticulous—as Vertigo Sea rejects the model of the taxonomic classification, of the inventory, of a system in which events are made comparable—more or less the same (or different, which amounts to the same), equivalent to some degree, valuable to a greater or lesser extent. Akomfrah is deliberate on this question: “I don't think I'm saying that the killing of humpback whales in the North Atlantic Ocean has either the same weight, value, political narrative or otherwise as the drowning at sea of Africans at the height of the trade.” He adds: “What I am saying though is that there are overlaps and there are almost certainly proximities, affective or emotional, intellectual or otherwise, which you can only maintain, which don't exist if you have a ‘hierarchy,’ which I don't.”7 To create proximities across space and time, Vertigo Sea privileges juxtaposition over substitution, contiguity over similarity, engaging in a process of displacement with no telos and no gain (fig. 3).
Montage is the arrangement of these fragments that refuse to be measured, the attempt to create a relationality beyond value. Akomfrah calls it a “method of persuasion,” through which heterogenous fragments are invited to “sit together” and “agree to a form of sociality, which is tentative, provisional, and open-ended.”8 But it remains unclear who or what performs this invitation and the temptation is there to consider it as acephalic—a demand borne on the side of the images themselves, on the side of the ghosts. Except that there is no other side. Montage is the demand that the visible world be reinvented, out of the unseen and the invisible, of which it is also made.9 This is why, in generating a “coexistence of difference,” montage needs to leave room for the “unseen ghosts,” the phantoms one has not conjured up willingly, the unexpected or even undesired guests.10
The sound of a ticking clock and images of clocks, watches, measurement devices recur throughout the film. Antique clocks appear in the hands of male and female characters; piled up as debris, together with household items like chairs and strollers; displayed in surrealistic fashion, as if they alone inhabited the world. “Less than an hour . . . The people traffickers told them that the crossing would take less than an hour,” says a BBC reporter of a migrant boat shipwrecked in the Mediterranean. But even a more accurate, less criminal assessment of the duration would have failed the twenty-seven passengers, none of whom had ever been to sea. How long is time underwater? “Inside the net . . . there was big, big fish,” we hear the voice of a man who is credited as a Nigerian boatman. “I can't really explain. If anyone falls inside, they would eat that person, because those fish were very big.” And then, “The waves, it can even move a house. The waves.” Vertigo Sea begins here, with an experience of the abyss that radically eludes documentation and that the film refuses to position in a system of value. There is no money for time underwater (fig. 4).
Images of the Zong will come into view later, after the film has moved away from the open water to encounter mountains and ice slabs. Bits of archival footage show men dancing and boxing onboard a commercial ship; shooting at bears, dragging them in the snow, removing their skin; displaying the dead animals for the camera. At some point, in this black-and-white footage, a pool of blood becomes red and, in the color frame next to it, a hunting rifle washes ashore. Original and found materials are similarly interspersed throughout the film, with some figures (animate and inanimate) moving across space and time and even levels of reality, so to speak, as if they had traveled from the archival to the reenacted footage and vice versa: a hunting rifle, an antique clock, a deer, tied and hung upside down. By the time the fifth intertitle is introduced, “The sea is History: the Caribbean, 1781,” the domestic debris have reappeared on a rocky coastline and a Black man in a red eighteenth century coat and marine hat is sitting there, almost still, holding the clock in his hands.11 Now the marine and the submarine return, together with scenes in muted colors, showing Black bodies in shackles, amassed in the ship's hold, cast off the deck by the armed crew, lying dead on the shore. The scenes are brief, and will soon disappear amid images of new glaciers, and of bear and big game hunting.
Suspension is the time of displacement, of radical metonymy. The juxtaposition of screens intensifies Vertigo Sea's sliding of sense. It does not produce it by itself though, as the lateral combination of images could still obey a principle of substitution, and then both memory and justice would be dependent on a system of equivalences.12 But one cannot substitute what is never quite there, what is there also in the indeterminacy of its being, in its potential; one cannot pin down ghosts that appear neither here nor there, neither now nor then—beings that have no clear location or bounded, selfsame body. One cannot fully pin down the flesh.
I speak here of the flesh in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's indirect ontology, as the “flesh of the world” or “flesh of time,” which is not identical with the body, any body, or any autonomous temporal dimension, past, present, or future.13 Neither mind nor matter, the flesh disrupts the distinction between subject and object, human and animal, animate and inanimate. In its generality, the flesh is a “spatializing-temporalizing vortex”—it coils over itself in the reversibility between the seer and the seen, the toucher and the touched, while also breaking up, turning away from itself in “incessant escaping.”14 But I am also suggesting that we think of the flesh as an “entanglement,” after Vicki Kirby's proposal in Quantum Anthropologies: not a mixture of preexisting entities, but the embodiment of an ontological indeterminacy or ambiguity, for which there is no equivalent in classical physics.15 The flesh names a principle of unending internal differentiation.
This is the digitopic as yearning. At the same time, in its openness and generativity, the flesh finds itself most vulnerable to power's techniques of discipline and control. One can wound the flesh, mark it indelibly. One can commit “high crimes against the flesh,” such as Hortense Spillers denounces, in a practice of violence that injures the very texture of being.16 Indeed, Spillers's multivalent adoption of the term underscores that it is impossible to conceive of the flesh's potential independently of its historicity. In the cargo ship and on the plantation, the “captive flesh” is turned into “a prime commodity of exchange” through the production of enslaved bodies and what R. A. Judy calls the “imposition of Negro embodiment.”17 The flesh as radical displacement, errantry, fugitivity—as potential that can manifest itself through other embodiments—is the foil of a history of capture, forced dislocation, extraction.
But if we attend to the flesh, rather than the individual body, in retelling this history of unending violence, we also enter a domain—of thought, perception, care—in which the singular, the most intimate and untranslatable, is already made of relationality, irreducible to any entity that occupies a location, a given point in space at a given point in time. This does not entail that what emerges as singular will be intelligible by default, quite the contrary; it means, however, that it does not need to be evaluated, translated into, or exchanged for the generic to enter into relation. Endlessly displaced, neither here nor there, neither now nor then, the singular of the flesh is potential that resists being captured and traded as such. Instead, it remains suspended, which also means scattered, unlocatable, intermittent, in a space-time of coiling and recoiling, and incessant escaping. This is why, I believe, for Fred Moten, the flesh “also constitutes the most radical endangerment of the system of value, of the symbolic, of the discursive.”18 Because its “givenness in displacement,” its resistance to positionality, renders it invaluable.19
The singular of the flesh, the ghost, is that to which Akomfrah's montage refuses to give value or a fixed position. There is no money for time underwater. If the Zong marks the incipient triumph of speculation, the injuries it has inflicted to memory and justice cannot be taken up only from the side of the speculative. To reflect—to see and remember according to the logic of reflection, of the specular and speculative—threatens to deprive the singular of its internal difference, of its very spectrality, and to make it available for yet other forms of exchange. On the other hand, Vertigo Sea strives to see and remember by interference or diffraction, so that the singular, in its uniqueness, emerges as already other than itself, a configuration of the flesh.20 The Black man in eighteenth-century European attire might be, indeed, likely is, Olaudah Equiano, the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). But the scenes in which he appears and to which he is contiguous do not quite unfold as his autobiography, even if we read the latter for its multivocality and temporal digressions, or open it up to the reworkings of Afrofuturism.21 Equiano, the ghost, becomes visible here (there), now (then), not as an individual or the representative of a collective, not even as an individual where multiple histories intersect, but as an errant being, a being of diffraction (fig. 5).22
What of the viewers in this emerging pattern of interferences? Do they at least get to occupy a location, or are they too set adrift? I mentioned the solitary figures in period costumes—Equiano being the most prominent—as they sit or stand amid a northern landscape, their backs turned to us.23 One could identify with them and look at the surrounding sights (including those that appear on the adjacent monitors) as if from their vantage point. This positioning would already be enough to provoke a certain vertigo, with characters from the past looking at images of their future (our past), and these images looking back at them (at us) from an uncertain time. But there would still be too much of the sublime in this vertigo of the viewpoint. Akomfrah's montage invites us to participate in a more disorienting experiment, to experience a memory that does not find anchorage in a subject, let alone a human one. We too join in with the images—we too become images—fragments of time that are being reconfigured in excess of value. This is another way of saying that, by disordering the “relation between character, location and temporality,” Vertigo Sea also precipitates a mutation, no matter how fleeting, in the being of its viewers;24 that its ghosts appear and disappear throughout its scattered body, including here or there, where I am writing or watching the film.
And yet, we know all too well that not even ghosts are safe from power's forms of capture. Cinema itself has traded in ghosts since the beginning and the move to the commercial gallery space has only intensified film's commodity status.25 “A minute, here, is worth a million,” says the male protagonist in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962). He is speaking about the minute of silence held at the Rome Stock Exchange to commemorate a deceased stockbroker, but he could be speaking about a minute of cinema. “Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place”; “a minute of image . . . costs a day of collective work.”26 Gilles Deleuze makes this statement as he is about to pursue cinema into “time's abyss,” into a duration that is qualitative rather than quantitative. There is no outside. By becoming images, we become beings whose other side is time, or money; laboring images, images of free labor . . . and we become something other, not the opposite of laboring images, but something uncertain, unmeasurable as such, out of which new relationalities might emerge. ■■
Notes
Agamben, “Nymphs,” 60–80. See also Agamben, “Difference and Repetition,” 313–19. For a critique of “stoppage or arrest” and the notion of form to which they relate, see Torlasco, The Rhythm of Images.
Akomfrah, “Digitopia,” 21–29. See Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, for the distinction between form and wish.
This turn to errantry and ontological indeterminacy follows in the steps of several thinkers: Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Glissant, Poetics of Relation; Nancy, Sense of the World.
On the philosophical relevance of these terms, see Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, Visible and the Invisible, especially chapter 4, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” 130–55.
Alessandra Raengo emphasizes the “inner vibrancy” of Akomfrah's high-definition images and contrasts this imperfect stillness with the frantic movement of exchange. See Raengo, “Cosmopolitanism,” 288.
On justice, equivalence, and speculation, see Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic.
Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, Visible and the Invisible, 148. See also the volume's “Working Notes” for an interrogation of the flesh as “flesh of time” (165–275).
Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies. In her reading, Kirby directly draws on Barad's theory of agential realism. As a “generalization of superposition,” entanglement constitutes a nonclassical relation and pertains to the wave (rather than particle) behavior of matter. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, especially chapter 7, “Quantum Entanglements,” 247–352.
On diffraction as both a phenomenon and a methodology, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.
I find inspiration for this reading of Equiano in Wright, Physics of Blackness. However, as I draw from Barad's interpretation of quantum physics, I engage in a radical questioning of the individual as entity and of the present as now-point. Furthermore, this questioning pertains to the domain not of epistemology but of what Barad calls “ontoepistemology.” See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 44.
On the figure of Equiano as an analogue of the viewer's position, see Demos, “Feeding the Ghost”; on the Rückenfigur as a figure of opacity, see Grønstad, “Archival Ghosts,” and Verbeeck, “L'homme de dos.”
While addressing the aporias of motion, Raengo discusses Akomfrah's gallery practice in relation to the tension between a “politics of access” and a “politics of form.” See Raengo, “Cosmopolitanism,” 283.
