Devonya N.

Havis

Blackness beyond witness

Black Vernacular phenomena and
auditory identity

Abstract The article posits that philosophys visual bias has limited ex-
ploration of the ways in which sound, and the awareness of sound, offers
an alternative framework for social change. It moves from sight to sound
and from visual witnessing to sound-based wit(h)ness to illustrate the
implications of sound as a form of political resistance. Combining insights
from the work of Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas with elements
of the Black Vernacular tradition, it articulates the ways in which the blues,
jazz and work songs evoke distinctive sound-based wit(h)ness to perform
philosophical interventions by destabilizing the status quo, offering a non-
phenotypical account of black solidarity, and transforming what counts as
work.
Key words auditory identity blackness Michel Foucault Emmanuel
Levinas philosophical intervention ritual

The following article, in Zora Neal Hurstons words, posits the possi-
bility of going straight while walking crooked. Let us understand the
crooked metaphor as a demarcation for the alterior theoretical terrain
announced in the title: Blackness beyond witness.
What then does it mean to be beyond witness? I assert that, in part,
being beyond witness invokes a withness (a sociability) beyond sight
and the ocular metaphors privileged in traditional western philosophical
theory. Even bell hooks, seeking a counter-oppressive way of seeing, asks
what process of looking allows us to counter the seduction of images
that threaten to dehumanize and colonize?1 She asserts that a counter-
oppressive look is that way of seeing which makes possible an integrity
of being that can subvert the power of the colonizing image.2

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 35 no 7 pp. 747759

PSC
Copyright The Author(s), 2009.
Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
http://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453709106239
748
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (7)
But is there such a way of looking? Does not such looking call for
simple recognition something we have been asked to go beyond?3 The
focus on visibility, while an important point of critique, maintains a
normalizing gaze4 that moves along a Color Line.5 The ability to return
the gaze, even to subvert the gaze, does not simultaneously generate a
resistance that eludes binary oppositional structures. As such, the gaze
inscribes and reinscribes systems of privilege and violent hierarchies
even bearing witness can become confessional rather than liberatory.
Let us then turn from the gaze, from looks to sound. I assert that
Black Vernacular phenomena as philosophical intervention and celebra-
tion move us beyond the ocular modality to sound which takes us
beyond witness to wit(h)ness wherein one is a relational co-participant,
engaged in a discursive community of difference. As Ralph Ellison writes:

Slavery was a most vicious system, and those who endured and survived it
a tough people, but it was not . . . a state of absolute repression. A slave
was, to the extent that he was a musician, one who realized himself in the
world of sound. For the art the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance
was what we had in place of freedom. Techniques (i.e. the ability to be
nimble, to change the joke and slip the yoke) was then, as today, the key
to creative freedom, but before this came a will toward expression . . .
enslaved and politically weak men successfully impos[ed] their values upon
a powerful society through song and dance.6

Ellison makes a move akin to Foucault, noting that despite the vicious-
ness of slavery, the system, in its deployment of power, simultaneously
dominates and gives rise to resistance. Hence, Ellison announces that
slavery was not a state of absolute repression. He calls for the possi-
bility that we might hear power as more than repressive. It might also
function creatively and the resistance to its effects could also emerge in
a creative deployment. Music, in its performative utterances, provides
the context for thinking identity beyond the gaze.7 In fact, Ellison indi-
cates that these people who were bounded by slavery invented selves
in a world of sound. The economy of sound was a philosophical inter-
vention that opened up possibilities beyond freedom.
My article, then, promotes a shift in the angle from which we
approach questions of self, identity and freedom. In doing so, it operates
from a new register that not only contests traditional western philosoph-
ical frameworks but also celebrates the possibilities generated by black-
ness that functions outside the traditional western epistemological frame.
This blackness was excluded from the western epistemological frame and
as such, for the purposes of survival, generated its own modes of ritual
celebration that have given rise to discursive communities of difference
communities that are a welcoming location for indeterminancy played
out through unique stylizations evident in sound orality, musicality
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Havis: Blackness beyond witness
and dance that evokes utterative gestures (i.e. step shows, kids games).
Through sound, the community comes into existence yet it is a coming
into existence that is negotiated in the exchange of sound. Hence, to the
extent that one is a musician capable of taking up ethical and politi-
cal obligations in the context of performing himself or herself through
sound one becomes more than a slave. One is located within a unique
community that invents itself and as a grouping of co-equals, partici-
pates in its members dynamic creation of selves. As Caponi observes:
. . . polyrhythmic and polymetric [performance] creates interdependence,
because it forces all participants to be aware of each other of their place
in the rhythmic field in relation to others and to the whole.8
This relational quality entails elements of stylized showing off that take
place within the context of vernacular community such that there is an
oscillation between the requirement to give an individual performance
that is relationally supported within a community that also exults in the
stylization. This exultation is among co-participants with each member of
the Black Vernacular community taking up an interrelated role required
for collective, relational expression within the discursive community.
Members assume a responsibility in bringing forth performative utter-
ance(s). It is within this relational, vernacular community marked by
point and counter-point, that there is a welcoming, non-totalizing experi-
ence of indeterminate Otherness. This gestures toward the communitys
strategies for living the paradox.
Again noting Ellison, who discusses blues as a particularized instance
of the above phenomena:
The blues speak to us simultaneously of the tragic and comic aspects of the
human [read African diasporic] condition. The existential reality of Black
lives combines the modes of tragic and comic, holding the apparent contra-
diction in lived experience. This has been the heritage of a people who for
hundreds of years could not celebrate birth or dignify death, and whose need
to live despite the dehumanizing pressures of slavery developed an endless
capacity for finding humor even while in the grip of intolerable suffering.
Sound in making it possible to live in the seeming contradiction, within the
paradox, becomes ritual, becomes liturgy. Music is more than entertainment.
There is a time and function involved here, and the blues which might be
used in one place as entertainment (as gospel music is now being used in
night clubs and on theater stages) might be put to ritual use in another
[place or circumstance].9

In effect, these are the phenomena of ritualized sound within the context
of a community that emerges in collective performances in which the
members participate in the creation of sound events that are discursive
but a particular type of discursive engagement. Discourse or speaking,
within this context, is a basic ethical relationship with the Other because
750
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (7)
speaking seeks response. It carries with it a responsibility placed on the
interlocutor to become engaged. The saying, moreover, forms a commu-
nity that in its responding can welcome alterity without placing it under
erasure. In this respect, the saying is a sociability that does not require
complete subsumption into the group, and, in fact, for the vernacular
community, requires an individuality that must stand in the posture of
openness whether directly confronted by an Other, or in expectation
of the Others coming. This open posture is at once an unconditioned
welcoming and an acknowledgment that the black individual is always
already othered in a negative, inhospitable, asymmetrical relationship with
traditional western culture. Yet, the strength of the vernacular community
is repeatedly drawn from evershifting, stylized performative utterance(s)
continually evoking the politicized ethical demand via the dynamism of
action and comeback supported in the sociability of the vernacular group.
As Levinas writes characterizing the way in which the face gives rise to
social relatedness:
The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse. The face
to face both announces a society, and permits the maintaining of a separ-
ated I. The face is a living presence; it is expression.10

To be myself signifies, then, not to be able to get out from under respon-
sibility. Putting self in question at the hands of the Other binds me to the
Other in an incomparable and unique fashion. Not a binding as material
is bound to the block of which it is a part. . . . The solidarity here is
responsibility. . . . The uniqueness of the Self is that no one can answer
in my place. The me before the Other is infinitely responsible.11
While Levinas is speaking of le visage autrui in its asymmetrical rela-
tionship with the ego wrenched from its solipsism, his words offer char-
acterization of the Black Vernacular community that is drawn into a
sociality through alterity. Moreover, within the context of its collective
otherness, each black person is confronted with being Other, while simul-
taneously being bound to other black people by means of a responsi-
bility to maintain individual and collective alterity. Hence, each black
person as individual and collective is placed under an ethical demand
to preserve alterity in its incomprehensibility. This is a demand that ulti-
mately becomes politicized in light of what it means to preserve alterity
within a domain in which it is continually under assault. Such respon-
sibility, then, binds the Black Vernacular community in a non-material
sociality in which individual stylizations, expressions that play in dynam-
ics of difference, highlight alterity, ultimately are strengthening and
dignifying that Black Vernacular community.12 The Black Vernacular
gesture marks acceptance of responsibility both to the Other and for the
others. The gesture also bespeaks a vernacular self who has been trans-
formed by an encounter with the Other, who does not attempt to fade
into a unity of Other/self, but who takes up the ethico-political demand
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Havis: Blackness beyond witness
issued by the Other that always overflows thematization. The obligation
to the Black Vernacular community is also assumed such that the Black
Vernacular self remains as individual and interrelated responsibility. As
Levinas writes:
Mans relationship with the Other is better as difference than as unity:
sociality is better than fusion. The very value of love is the impossibility of
reducing the other to myself, of coinciding into sameness. From an ethical
perspective, two have a better time than one.13

Sociability within the Black Vernacular community one in which the

individual remains individual and yet bound to the group in responsibil-
ity is noted along the terrain of work which can be a locus of socia-
bility for black folk. Music, as ritualized sound, transforms work making
it an element in survival rituals that underscore sociability and inter-
relatedness. In the service of communal interrelatedness in which Black
Vernacular performances are both individual and social, work is Work,
transformed from the basic notion of labor and reclaimed as dynamic
interrelatedness in the context of Black Vernacular which is a philo-
sophical intervention, a form of critique. Work in the service of critique
and critique in the role of Work enact an ethics and a politics of revolt.
Even while Work may also involve labor, however, as life activity Work
must connote more particularly for black people who were brought to
the New World only for the purpose of work, understood only as labor.
In the Africans transformation into the black American, there must
also have been a shift in Work that accompanied Black Vernacular expres-
sions. Work in the fields was communal, driven by interrelated rhythms
in which all participated equally despite the existence of song leaders.
Leaders could be rotated and were, in terms of role not style, interchange-
able. Liminal in character, Work was an opportunity for the exchange
of vernacular wisdom and stylization, it was an occasion to note the
rhythms that governed life movements and rests contained in a dynamic
yet perpetual communal existence. Moreover, Work on behalf of a mon-
strous Other (the master, overseer, employer who hired the worker out)
was turned from the exultation of black as labor into an expenditure
without return. The work song (another version of Black Vernacular
musicality) is a vernacular critique of expenditure for a monstrous Other,
altered time and the sacred time altered Work. Alan Lomaxs interview
with Parchman Mississippi Prison Farm worker, Bama, makes clear the
distinctions.

Lomax: Do you think it makes the work easier when you sing?

Bama: Yassuh.

Lomax: Do you think you do more, or do you think you can slack off
when you sing?
752
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (7)
Bama: Nawsuh, what makes it go so better. When you singin, you forgit,
you see, and the time just pass on way; but if you just get your mind devoted
on one something, it look like it will be hard for you to make it, see, make
a day. The day be longer, look like. So to keep his mind from being devoted
on just one thing, why hell practically take up singin, see.
Lomax: What do you think it takes to make a good leader in a work song?
Bama: To make a good leader in the work? What do you mean, boss?
Lomax: Whats the most important thing about a good leader? Does he
have to have a real good voice or a strong voice, or what?
Bama: Well, now, it wouldnt just exactly make any difference about the
dependability of his voice or nothin like that, boss. But it would it take
the man with the most experience to my understandin to make the best
leader in anything. You see, if youd bring a brand new man here, if he had
a voice where he could sing just like Peter could preach, and he didnt know
what to sing about, well, he wouldnt do no good, see. But heres a fellow,
he maybe aint got no voice for singin but hes been cooperating with the
peoples so long an been on the job so long till he know just exactly how
it should go. And if he can just mostly talk it why, and you understand
how to work, well, it would go good with you. It dont make any differ-
ence about the voice.
Lomax: You mean he has to know about the timing?
Bama: Yassuh. Thats what it takes, the time, thats all it is. You can just
whistle, and if you know the time and can stay in time with the axes, you
can whistle and do cut just as good as you can if you were singin. But
you have to be done experienced.14

Lomaxs and Bamas exchange is instructive. The discussion is not merely

about the singing of songs but about the transformation of time through
ritual. Instead of talking about the correlation between song and pro-
duction, Bama speaks about the effect of song on the workers state of
mind. Hence, the goal is not mastery of time but instead transformation
and communion through time. Communion, in this context, is without
utility and governed by responsibility. In this context, Work transforms
time and time transforms Work. The song makes the Work go better
because it refocuses attention from devotion to the utility of work qua
work, to a forgetting that holds work qua work in abeyance. Time func-
tions not on behalf of utility but under the spell of ritualized sound for
the sake of the Black Vernacular community. Levinas characterization
of work is an apt illustration. Levinas writes:
Work radically considered is in effect a movement of the same toward the
Other which never returns to the same. To the myth of Ulysses returning
to Ithaca we can oppose the story of Abraham leaving his fatherland for-
ever for an unknown. . . . Work fundamentally considered demands a basic
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Havis: Blackness beyond witness
generosity of the Self which in Work goes toward the Other. It therefore
demands an ingratitude from the other. Gratitude would be precisely the
return of the movement to its origin. . . . Work differs from a game or from
a simple output. It is not simple loss and it does not suffice to affirm the
Self. . . . But the departure without return and which does not lead into a
void loses its absolute goodness equally if the work seeks its reward in the
immediacy of its triumph.15

In this passage, exile and Work are linked in much the same way that
the two are connected for black Americans. The exile in work qua work
can move toward a utility of work as a glorification of the self to the
exclusion of the community, or Work can be movement without return,
a task on behalf of the Other for whom the transformed self takes up
responsibility responsibility to those in the field and vice versa. The
work song transforms time and launches a critique of work as labor.
As Levinas writes:
To renounce being in the contemporary of the triumph of my work is to
have the triumph in a time without me, to see this world here without me,
to see a time beyond the horizon of my time. Eschatology without hope
for self or liberation from my own time.16

Hence, there is a Black Vernacular community that, by means of perfor-

mative utterance(s), transforms the horizon of individual time into a
sacred time, slipping a yoke by means of ritualized sound.
The work song, as ritual sound, traces the heteronomous ethics and
politics of revolt and celebration. This communal participation in ritu-
alized sound can be characterized as liturgy. As Levinas writes:
The work of the Self in the sense of a movement without return of the Self,
toward the Other . . . would encompass . . . the Greek term which in its
original signification indicates the exercise of an office not merely gratu-
itously, but requiring on the part of one who exercises it an investment
with no strings attached. I want to circumscribe this idea with the term
liturgy.17

Levinas insists that the religious connotations of liturgy be put aside

but that the ethical aspect be retained. I concur and suggest that black
labor in the cotton fields, for the sake of survival, was transformed
through a sound liturgy. Thus, in the context of Black Vernacular phen-
omena, Work is ritual, is a liturgy that renders a philosophical interven-
tion that transforms expenditure without return into something beyond
toil into celebration that clears the way for a politics and an ethics
beyond witness.
Work characterized as an ethico-political demand can be seen in
similarities between the functioning of the work song and songs used
during the mass meetings that preceded and also sustained protest actions
754
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (7)
for civil rights. Work songs and civil rights mass meeting songs have
galvanized many Black Vernacular communities to take up politicized
ethical calls on behalf of the Other and others. In this respect, one can
argue that this ritualized sound is political as a problematization of
binary oppositions, but more importantly it also works to galvanize the
vernacular community to take up active political struggle. Ritualized
sound aids in the mobilization of courage through celebration. Boycotts
and non-violent protests during the 1960s civil rights movement were
usually preceded by songs that strengthened those who participated in
non-violent action that led to physical abuse. Ritualized sound offered
an occasion to celebrate and reaffirm the Black Vernacular community
even in the midst of struggle.
Philosophical interventions provide a means of interrupting systems
of hierarchy via certain challenges. These interventions acknowledge that
the ultimate privilege is to be able to avoid a moral test of ones commit-
ments or prejudices.18 Ritualized sound, in the context of Black Verna-
cular utterance(s), interrogates the privileged position by means of an
oblique philosophical intervention. Such ritualized sound goes beyond
the look, beyond whiteness, issuing an invitation to, as Zora Neale
Hurston would say, go straight while walking crooked.

Black Vernacular phenomena as philosophical intervention

Black Vernacular phenomena mark the an-architechtonic of the play that

is beyond witness, beyond w(h)it(e)ness, traced in the sound events that
give way to performative, discursive, communities of difference.
A crucial feature of Black Vernacular is its capacity to exceed its
concept. Hence, Black Vernacular cannot be placed under the rubric of
theory qua theory because that would presume a presence, a completion
that is never fulfilled. For these reasons, Black Vernacular in its hetero-
geneity and multivocality may be called phenomena.
Let us then talk about Black Vernacular phenomena as a set of
strategies a form of philosophical intervention that contests fixity,
marking the insistence upon grand narratives as a feature of privileging
systems. As such, Black Vernacular phenomena mark the polyvalent,
multivocal, hybrid theoretical articulations of blackness as the dynamic
context of liberatory theory the realm of doing philosophy. In evoking
the notion of doing philosophy, I want to call attention to philosophy
as a practice, or a process of habituation whereby one develops an active
critical posture in which theory and action are necessary linked. As bell
hooks writes:
. . . when our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to pro-
cesses of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory
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Havis: Blackness beyond witness
and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond
between the two that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables
the other.19
Blackness, then, in the Black Vernacular modality of performative utter-
ance performs a philosophical intervention upon philosophy itself, in-
sisting that philosophy be an active practice an art of life involving
processes of interrogation, invention and celebration.
The celebration issues forth in various registers and, in its various
modalities, Black Vernacular phenomena can be said to mark an un-
settling of such traditional conceptions as the self, liberation, revolution
and ethics. These phenomena function in ways that unsettle the western
tradition, particularly the philosophical tradition, in what can best be
described as the disruption of the primacy given to binary oppositional
structures and their attendant systems of hierarchy that give rise to the
privileging of one pole of the opposition over the other (that is, good over
bad, truth over untruth). Such privileging enables a violent hierarchy20
that prefigures the impossibility of non-reified notions of self and identity.
As an alterity, blackness (Black Vernacular phenomena in the modality
of active expression, performative utterances) is beyond the horizons de-
limited within binary oppositions. Whereas binary logic operates within
the limits of an either . . . or . . ., these traces resist binary thinking
by holding apparent oppositions simultaneously transforming not tran-
scending paradox into ritual sound celebration.
The Black Vernacular modality of performative utterance or ritual
sound, describes, in so far as possible, the play by means of which a
performance of blackness gestures toward that which cannot directly
be characterized because it lacks visibility and quantification (from the
vantage point of traditional western philosophy). As such, it is only in
the non-reified notion of performance that we can trace the imperma-
nence of blackness, the fissures through which it springs forth in every
effort to impose limits or permanence. It is this surd, present on the
margins, and suggested in the performance, that transgresses every
attempt to establish permanence, limit, truth. This play, experienced
as performance, is simultaneously an activity of creation, celebration
and resistance.
In framing our discussion, I posit that these performative utterances
talk back. In so far as blackness lies outside the modern western philo-
sophic/epistemological framework, it functions as a disruption that creates
openings for philosophical intervention the activity talking back or
engaging parrhesia. There is a relationship between the notion of talking
back and the Greek concept parrhesia. In drawing this correlation, my
assertion is that both are central to acts of transgression and resistance
because they set in motion a practice rather than a hegemonic commit-
ment to liberation and revolution that eventually reinscribe another form
756
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (7)
of oppressive regime. Hence it is critical that we understand parrhesia
as a critical means of engagement rather than a zealous attempt to force
others to submit to a particular point of view. As such, parrhesia is
different from rhetoric and fundamentalism. It hinges upon active ques-
tioning, exploration and critical examination with an interest toward
effecting what is just.
It is clear then that Black Vernacular phenomena are parrhesiastic
in character in so far as these phenomena operate in line with the parr-
hesiastic game. One who practises parrhesia, like the Black Vernacular
community, opens his heart and mind completely to other people through
his discourse.21 Hence, parrhesia marks a particular relationship between
the speaker and what is said. The one who practises parrhesia avoids
rhetoric that would hide what he thinks and instead acts on other
peoples minds by showing them as directly as possible what he actually
believes. Hence, the commitment involved in parrhesia is linked to a
certain social situation, to a difference of status between the speaker
and the audience, to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which
is dangerous to himself and thus involves risk. In parrhesia, there is
always an exact coincidence between belief and truth. . . . [T]he co-
incidence between belief and truth does not take place in a (mental)
experience, but in a verbal activity, namely parrhesia.22
While parrhesia involves speaking the truth, its primary function is
not simply truth-telling but putting forth a criticism. Hence, the parrhe-
siastes is not focused on indicating the truth to someone else and/or
convincing another of this truth. Instead, the speaker offers a criticism,
renders a critique, of himself or another. Such a critique comes from
below . . . and is directed towards above. One in the parrhesiastic atti-
tude risks his privilege to speak freely when he discloses a truth which
threatens the majority.23 He assumes such risk as a matter of moral duty,
as obligation because the speaker is not forced to speak and could, in
fact, remain silent.
The duty assumed in parrhesia involves offering a critique that helps
one to recognize what goes unseen where such seeing creates the possi-
bility of correcting what is amiss. As such, there is a relationship, too,
between parrhesia, freedom and duty. Foucault writes:
. . . parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific
relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life
through danger, a certain type of relation to himself and other people through
criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation
to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal
activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and
risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help
other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom
and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or
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Havis: Blackness beyond witness
silence, this risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of
flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.24

Blackness in its phenomenal expression as Black Vernacular phen-

omena can be aligned with philosophy as parrhesiastic expression. In
effect, the sound event, the ritual performance of blackness, draws atten-
tion to (as Foucault would say) the way institutions, practices, habits,
and behavior become a problem for people who behave in specific sorts
of ways, who engage in certain types of habit.25 Moreover, the verbal
activity of Black Vernacular phenomena call attention to
the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices which
were accepted without question, which were familiar and silent, out of
discussion, become a problem, raise discussion and debate, incite new reac-
tions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices,
and institutions. The history of thought, understood in this way, is the
history of the way people begin to take care of something.26

I would add that the above description is the practice of philosophy and
the activity of Black Vernacular phenomena. In fact, we might easily align
the Socratic parrhesiastic attitude with Black Vernacular phenomena.
Socrates offers philosophical intervention that requires a personal, face
to face relationship. As one of the Platonic dialogues notes, Socrates
ability to function as a touchstone, to offer philosophical intervention,
has credibility because he is musical. He is someone who lives in a way
that allows the speaker and his speech to harmonize with each other.
To quote one of the interlocutors: Socrates has tuned himself with the
fairest harmony, not that of a lyre or other entertaining instrument,
but has made a true concord of his own life between his words and his
deeds.27 This ability to talk back to simultaneously celebrate in sound
and offer philosophical intervention, to critique is crucial as we develop
different strategies to negotiate our ethical and political lives as we do
philosophy, because as Foucault writes:
Without the right of criticism, the power exercised by a sovereign [read as
government, state, etc.] is without limitation. Such power without limita-
tion is . . . characterized as joining fools in their foolishness. Foe power
without limitation is directly related to madness. The man who exercises
power is wise only insofar as there exists someone who can use parrhesia
to criticize him, thereby putting some limit to his power, to his command.28

Philosophy Department, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, USA

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758
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (7)
Notes
1 hooks (1992: 6).
2 ibid.
3 This is a reference to Kelly Olivers work, Witness Beyond Recognition
(2004). The work calls for an alternate account of identity that moves away
from a politics of recognition. Moving beyond witness seeks to make an
even more radical shift that involves going beyond the request or require-
ment for recognition.
4 The idea of a normalizing gaze is an allusion to forms of hierarchical obser-
vation that manage and manipulate bodies through an optics that is designed
to elicit conformity to a norm. Michel Foucault has described the normative
gaze as a feature of disciplinary power. In particular, he discusses the panop-
ticon as the model apparatus for insuring maximum visibility while main-
taining an observer who remains unverifiable but is always assumed to be
present. See Discipline and Punish (1979) for a more extensive treatment
of panopticism.
5 W. E. B. Du Bois popularized this term as a means of describing and con-
testing the hierarchical division of humans according to observable pheno-
typical differences.
6 Ralph Ellison, Blues People (1995: 856).
7 Gaze in this context refers to those philosophies that are bound to ocular
modalities. Such philosophies would include those that: rely on self-
consciousness through recognition; call for seeing the others humanity as
a basis for liberation; halt at the face-to-face.
8 Caponi (1999: 510).
9 Ellison, Blues People (1995: 856[286]).
10 Levinas (1994: 667).
11 Levinas (1966: 3447).
12 Caponi (1999: 510).
13 Cohen (1986: 22).
14 Lomax (1997: 1, track 12: What Makes a Work Song Leader?).
15 Levinas (1966: 37).
16 ibid. (1966: 38).
17 ibid.
18 Coles (1993: 172).
19 hooks (1994: 61).
20 Welton and Silverman (1988: 194).
21 Foucault (2001: 1213).
22 ibid.
23 ibid. (2001: 21).
24 ibid. (2001: 1920).
25 ibid. (2001: 74).
26 ibid.
27 ibid. (2001: 989).
28 ibid. (2001: 29).

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Havis: Blackness beyond witness
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