Abstract

This article considers William Greaves’s singular cinematic experiment Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) in light of the common expectation that blackness is a readily available visual fact. A seemingly oblique engagement with blackness is foundational to the film’s overarching strategies of misdirection and promotes particular resonances between race and sound. Following, I explore the problematic nature of black visuality and critique the notion that Symbio lacks any perspicuous engagement with race. Since the visual is clearly the dominant mode of engagement with blackness, Symbio elides this black visuality by figuring blackness differently; it sounds, sings, and performs blackness instead of visualizing it. Music (Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way), sound (primarily noise), and performance (particularly an oppositional vernacular performativity in line with what W. T. Lhamon calls “optic black”) rise to the fore. Ultimately, the engagement with sonic relations opens race to audiovisual practices of improvisation, jazz, noise, and remixing. Blackness thus emerges as performative, disruptive, relational, noisy, improvised, and available for reappropriation and remixing.

Is silence simply a matter of not playing?

—John Mowitt, Sounds: The Ambient Humanities

I always listen to what I can leave out.

—Miles Davis

But now . . . let me hear your . . . let me hear the sound.

—William Greaves, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

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