Abstract
This introduction describes catastrophizing as a kind of storytelling, a way of gathering events into a narrative of continuity and discontinuity that, when skillfully deployed, is an expression of shifts in thought. Beginning with two short stories about the rise and fall of catastrophe theory, which enjoyed brief mainstream popularity in the 1970s, and the liquid blackness journal's own history of exploring catastrophe, this introduction suggests catastrophizing is a self-reflexive scholarly and creative practice. Disciplines tell catastrophic tales to indicate when and where modes of inquiry and their forms of expression start and stop. Black studies, for example, assumes it plays a considerable role at the beginning of the end of the world; as such, the scholarly contributions to ecocriticism, performance studies, computing, queer theory, and abolition studies that appear in this issue are all methodological experiments that begin at “the end.”
Catastrophizing is a kind of storytelling. It is a way of narrating discontinuities, like radical shifts in the weather or the economy. Yet, set sometime between “before” and “after,” catastrophic tales are also formulaic.1 For that reason, talking about a catastrophe is, itself, a precarious balancing act. Because we know what comes next, it's easy to dismiss narrators who tend to catastrophize. Those truly adept at the form can describe “the straw that broke the camel's back” without overplaying the role of the guilty stalk or underplaying the grain's gradual accumulation.2 Stories told this way are as ordinary as they are extraordinary. In fact, what remains suspended in a tale of catastrophe is precisely how ordinary the extraordinary will be. Catastrophizing might mean, as Kamau Brathwaite argues, spinning a tale of magical realism or, as John Allen Paulos suggests, coming to fully understand the structure of a joke.3
Catastrophe theory is a mathematical approach to telling these stories; specifically, it is a program for calculating the point at which mounting pressure results in a sudden overturning. The concept, which presumes to explain the playful behavior of cats as well as the formation of bubbles on the surface of a liquid, was popularized by René Thom in the 1972 publication Stabilité structurelle et morphogénèse: Essai d'une théorie générale des modèles (Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models).4 In spite of, or perhaps because of, its theoretical ambition (the first sentence is: “One of the central problems studied by mankind is the problem of the succession of forms”), the academic text and the debates surrounding it achieved rare mainstream attention.5 Predictably, chapters with titles like “From Animal to Man: Thought and Language” intrigued scholars working across the arts and sciences, and apparently, as a writer for the Observer noted, “few things excite the curious onlooker more than a first-rate academic argument.”6 That lede might be a joke—humor based on the catastrophe of incongruous interpretations; regardless, it is not surprising that a theory of “everything” might cause some controversy.7 Of Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, Robert Gilmore writes, “This book was an enigma in both form and substance. It was largely inaccessible to the mathematics community because it was written in the language of biologists, and inaccessible to the biological community due to its presentation of mathematical concepts which seemed to be deep and mysterious.”8 Attempts to apply catastrophe theory in ever-widening contexts proved challenging and, as a predictor of social behaviors, the model was largely abandoned. A transdisciplinary, universal topology challenges established ways of knowing—that is, the methods that typically receive wide institutional support. Thus, a model of catastrophe theory's sharp rise and fall could, in fact, be an example from Thom's text.
Yet, the predictable “fall” of a theory for predicting catastrophes is not a miscalculation on the part of Thom or his critics, or even “the end” of the story. Instead, what this very brief history reveals is a discipline's relationship to the forms of its expression: in this case, the debate is about the kinds of thought that can and cannot occur in mathematical form.9 This opportunity for self-reflexivity is precisely why we dedicated an entire issue of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies to catastrophes/catastrophizing: to note where creative and scholarly practices envision their own beginnings and ends. liquid blackness has already published work on the topic of catastrophe—I wrote one of those essays, and it was published in the first of two issues focused on, aptly, holding black art and thought in suspension.10 Thus, we never imagined the topic's implied finality would stop us from publishing many more works on the issue of catastrophe. Black studies assumes it plays a considerable role in the beginning of the end of the world—not as a sudden discontinuity but as a source of ongoing stress that will initiate a shift in the current equilibrium. Until we reach that critical point, the pressure black studies applies may not be visible—it has been seven years since I last wrote about catastrophe in this journal. Still, the point is not to let up. As such, the image that begins this introduction, from the short film/music video Until the Quiet Comes (2013), directed by Kahlil Joseph for Flying Lotus, is the same that accompanied my previous essay on catastrophe (fig. 1). The only way to attend to that devastating curve—a particularly graphic rendering of Thom's models—is to follow it, as we have here, around and back again.
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With this call to start at “the end,” the contributors to this issue explore the catastrophic potential of audiovisual form. At the center of Thom's theory are a series of folds that bring plot points that once existed in linear order into new visible proximities.11 Here, “up close,” we can see the existing dynamics underlying catastrophes. Describing these events as they feature in installation art, advertising, and digital interfaces, the essays in this issue often trace particularly narrow curves that reflect the accelerated speeds these images express and index. For instance, facing climate change denial and apathy, versions of what Tom Cuthbertson describes as “convenient disavowal,” contemporary ecocriticism about climate change is pressed to explain the conflict and offer resolution at the same time.12 The results are blurry, but that's because they bring a source of the problem—the rhetorical misdirections that pull focus from the actual effects of climate catastrophe—into sharp relief. As a result, catastrophizing, which is typically dismissed for being excessive, is the only way to describe both the danger of sudden environmental collapse and the danger of returning to normalcy. The role blackness plays in what Cuthbertson describes as “the whole engine and texture of modernist sensibility” is of particular interest to this journal and, indeed, throughout this issue authors turn their attention to the experience of continuity and discontinuity on the distinctly smooth surface of the photographic image.13 In a culture of expanded screens that appear resistant to creases, the possibility of visualizing black life in catastrophe means attending very closely to the fold or the “gathering” referenced in this issue's subtitle. These inaccessible zones in Thom's models are potential sites of fugitivity found in black sociality, the new proximity formed “in a pinch.”
The essays in the “Studies in Black” section address the challenge of black study under catastrophic conditions. Evident in the violent backlash to the most anodyne description of racism's catastrophic effects, racial difference is an extremely sensitive system that reliably bends to the pressures of whiteness.14 In order to shift the scales, to tell stories that respond to blackness, these essays experiment with modes of unified storytelling—techniques for gathering accounts of history from the vantage point of black experience that constitute a “relation of continuity grounded on a permanent discontinuity.”15 They quite literally seek to fold the earth and the laws that govern it into the story of blackness and catastrophe.
In “Chemical Necromancy: Plantations and Petrochemical Refining in Cancer Alley,” Siobhan Angus tells the story of Louisiana's Cancer Alley, the region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that is an ongoing site of environmental violence and devastation. Angus's account begins at the turn of the twentieth century with dramatic industrial shifts that saw petrochemical companies like Standard Oil acquiring sugar and cotton plantations with the promise of ushering in a new time and space: a “New South.”16 Taking for granted the false progress of continued resource extraction, the essay traces the shifts and turns in the “plantation-to-refinery narrative” that promises to “moderniz[e] the South's backward ways by turning to the past.”17 Following the work of Katherine McKittrick, Angus's essay observes black labor as a stable state of “plantation futures.”18 Thus, in this piece “chemical necromancy” is a way to describe forms of perpetual exploitation and an uncanny reading strategy: a way of folding tragedy back into the archive of corporate communications and promotional images in order to unearth the ambivalence in a deeply entrenched narrative about the people and places sacrificed in the name of progress. Thus, Angus authors a historiography for a catastrophe that isn't over yet.
Cuthbertson's “Alberta Whittle: Weathering the Atlantic,” like Angus's essay, addresses environmental catastrophes as an expression of the “reverberating afterlives of slavery and colonialism.”19 “Weathering the Atlantic” begins with a brief but telling survey of Scottish vernacular used to describe various kinds of inclement weather. Despite an abundance of words for various kinds of rain, the survey reveals no unique phrases to describe the weather produced by climate change that feels good here, precisely because it is bad elsewhere. As such, much-needed catastrophizing about climate change presents a genuine problem of translation. Thus, in a study of Scottish-Barbadian visual artist Alberta Whittle's 2019 video between a whisper and a cry, the author focuses on the intellectual exchange between Whittle and scholar Christina Sharpe. Whittle interprets Sharpe's writing in cinematic collages, performing formal experiments in expressing the absence of some words, places, and people in the wake of the Middle Passage. Cuthbertson's essay traces Whittle's interlocutors—in addition to Sharpe, the artist's work recalls that of Annalee Davis and Wangechi Mutu—to explore kinship in the act of “weathering” precarious climates for each other.20
In the issue's only direct allusion to the dramatic catastrophe or denouement, Rebecca A. Sheehan's “Corpsing the Frame: The Fugitivity of Bad Faith in Ligia Lewis's deader than dead” unpacks the nexus of art and writing that informs Lewis's choreographic video art, including Macbeth, Carmelo Bene's 1969 film Capricci, the writing of David Marriott, and director Jordan Peele's first two feature-length films, Get Out (2017) and Us (2019).21 Elaborating upon Lewis's citations, Sheehan argues these works produce a repertoire of empty or “bad faith” gestures toward death, moves that, like all acts of bad faith, reserve the potential to make a sudden jump from one performance to another—or, to be catastrophic. At the same time that these works thematize death, underscoring it as a role reserved for blackness, they also provide the steps for playing this part in bad faith. Thus, while onstage tragedies typically reserve the catastrophe, the moment of narrative resolution, until the end, Lewis's work starts at the end (of black livingness and what should be the end of disingenuous claims about our postracial society) by choreographing these gestures to evoke the stirring of life in death or the “deadening” of the role of death assigned to blackness.
In the final essay in this section, Allison K. Young's “Renee Royale's Landscapes of Matter: Photography and the End of the World,” the “necromancing,” “weathering,” and “deadening” described in the previous works is rendered visible in the practice of New Orleans–based artist Renee Royale. Using a Polaroid camera, Royale documents the terminus between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico where oil drilling and refining has eroded the once vast marshlands, leaving what Young warns is only a “temporary coastline.”22 Royale submerges these images in the same ecological debris she photographs, effectively undeveloping her own images and producing a series of hauntingly beautiful renderings of contingency. Cracks, bubbles, and swirls in the photographs echo the deepest recesses of the catastrophic model; these are the patterns produced by the uneven and asynchronous effects of catastrophe.23 In this way, Royale's photographs are transformed from an image to an index, and, although that change takes place on the same surface, each image-status has its own beginning and end. As such, the figures in Young's essay, which also includes the work of Chandra McCormick, insist catastrophes occur not at “the end,” but somewhere in the middle.
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In this journal, the cusp—the novel shift in the system—often occurs in the Accent Marks section, and, true to form, Kevin D. Ball's “The Whirl of Permutation: Blackness, Play, and the Problem of Chess” and Lou Silhol-Macher's “Edging on Formlessness: American Artist's Black Gooey Universe (2018)” are imaginative works that explore a playful part of catastrophizing. “The Whirl of Permutation” recounts the story of Theophilus A. Thompson, a black man born into slavery who later assumed the almost too-good-to-be-true professional title of “chess problemist,” a designer of chess puzzles. Although he is not the inventor of the tactic, Thompson's published collection of puzzles, Chess Problems, gives prominent space to the “self-mate”: a sequence of moves a player strategically employs to compel their opponent to attack and win. According to Ball, the self-mate makes “para-playful” work of the rigid but effaced racial dynamics of chess and is, thus, a practice that begins at the end.24 With a similar nod to intentionally arch aesthetic techniques, Silhol-Macher's “Edging on Formlessness” closely reads Black Gooey Universe, a 2021 exhibition by the artist now known as American Artist. Beginning, unavoidably, with the artist's legal name change in 2013, a decision that initially resembled a professional self-mate, the essay details Artist's recent sculptural works as part of an ongoing effort to undo form. Focusing specifically on the fantasy of universality embedded in the culture of computing, Artist composes a series of works that cannot contain their blackness. Much like Thompson, Artist designs puzzles that force both the art world and the technological industries that are the subject of his work to acknowledge their problems with blackness.
There is a century and a half between the publication of Chess Problems and Artist's first solo exhibition, yet the prescience of these essays and their historically distinct studies of computational logics seems to hinge on their untimeliness. As Shannon Gayk and Evelyn Reynolds explain, “Catastrophic forms attempt to order, structure, or manage disorder but, in doing so, often throw into relief their own fragility, their inability to contain that which they aim to express.”25 Thus, it is the “stretched-out present” between these works that is instructive in our current discussions of technology and catastrophe that crystallize around the tantalizing promise and threat of artificial intelligence.26 Together, the essays consider the suspension of bodies and material and, to use Silhol-Macher's language, the ways technological catastrophe “edge” us and themselves, at once delaying and racing toward what comes next.
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Closely considering the beginnings and ends of their own scholarly and creative processes, the final two sections of this issue, “In Conversation” and “Critical Art Encounters,” include personal reflections on the “vulnerabilities of co-creat[ing]” in and with catastrophe.27 Chaz Barracks's “Black Joy: Everyday Black Matter and Con-Artistry Theory” and Jillian Hernandez's “Ca$h App Connectivities: High-Maintenance Feminism and Payment as Praxis” both center on Barracks's 2020 film Everyday Black Matter, an experiment in documenting black joy. Submitted together and apart, each essay details its own methodological framework and claim, while steeped in a shared process.28 For Barracks, making and writing about art in the wake of tragic loss and academic alienation, autoethnographic storytelling is an expression of black kinship and intimacy. In the particularly narrow space of an Auntie's garage, “quick rides,” the shopping sprees scheduled between more “practical” expenditures, and an independent film budget, the closeness Barracks describes is a fold in the rule of law initiated by acts of “con-artistry.” Ultimately, Barracks describes a defiant tradition of black enjoyment and abundance that occurs “in a pinch” but is never pressed.29
Before analyzing Barrack's film, Hernandez's article provides a brief discussion of the music video for City Girls’ 2020 antiwork anthem “Jobs,” which visualizes the concept of “high-maintenance feminism,” “a mode of valuation that begins with the self and sets the terms for the politics of exchange between Black femmes and institutions and individuals with access to patriarchal, economic, and racial power.”30 This mode of cultural production embraces the label of being high-maintenance (“needing a lot of work to keep in good condition”) in an aesthetic practice that luxuriates in the process of redistributing the resources denied black women and femmes. Thus, echoing con-artistry, high-maintenance feminism similarly describes pleasure-seeking as a refusal to be managed by the law or the moral value assigned to hard work and prudent financial management. Central to Hernandez's methodology is an attention to the theoretical sophistication of these practices, which exists prior to being mentioned in a peer-reviewed publication. For instance, “Ca$h App Connectivities” offers an incredibly generative account of “gathering” that is, first, consistent with other references to black sociality across this issue and, second, defined in black queer vernacular as “a response to attack that deploys shame and belittlement.”31 Gathering (definition 2) is often an outsized reaction to the initial attack; it does not care to practice moderation and, in this way, is a reminder that the value of catastrophizing (in theory or conversation) is not its predictive potential but its insistence on its own conceptual abundance.
The final essay, James Gordon Williams's “The Principle of Alloys,” is another personal account of an ongoing partnership, this time between the musician and interdisciplinary artist Maria Gaspar. Prompted by Gaspar's recent exhibitions focused on carceral spaces, which feature debris collected after the demolition of Division 1 of the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago, the pair has collaborated on two improvised performances in which Williams “played” discarded prison bars, an ordinary material that holds extraordinarily catastrophic consequences. The pianist and composer describes playing these instruments of captivity in musical performances that consecrate the bars in the Ifà orisha system and, thus, release them from this traumatic feedback loop.32 Williams's careful orchestration of these materials concludes this issue—not our study of catastrophe, just this volume—because, precisely as the title of this section of the journal describes, it is a critical art encounter in the sense that Gaspar and Williams's work pursues “the potential to become disastrous” to the disciplinary and historical architectures that would confine it. This catastrophe is as much “the end” of the issue as it is the jumping-off point of the next. ■■
Notes
Cramer, “Icons of Catastrophe,” in liquid blackness 4, no. 7, “Holding Blackness in Suspension,” was published in October 2017, and we returned to the topic in October 2023, liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 7, no. 2, “Suspension.”
Small Axe, “Visual Life of Catastrophic History,” 136.
Of sensitivity in catastrophe theory, Gilmore writes, “The final state of a system may change under small perturbations of either the initial conditions or processes applied to the system.” “Catastrophe Theory,” 118.
“The jump from the top sheet of the behavior surface to the bottom sheet does not take place at the same position as the jump from the bottom sheet to the top one, an effect called hysteresis. Between the top and bottom sheets there is an inaccessible zone on the behavior axis.” Zeeman, “Catastrophe Theory,” 70.
See “liquid blackness Issue 8.2 CFP—‘Catastrophe (a black gathering),’” The liquid blackness Project (website), last modified February 23, 2023, https://liquidblackness.com/news/liquid-blackness-issue-82-cfp-catastrophe-a-black-gathering.
