Hearing Bob Kaufman's San Francisco

Those of you that are familiar with this blogger's sordid past may recall that I once worked at one of San Francisco's most famous historical sites: City Lights Books. Having grown up in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, City Lights was more of a church to me that the catholic school I attended several blocks away on the other side of Washington Square Park. When I returned to the city in 2008 after a nine year absence, I was offered a position in the mail room of the store's publishing division. My year at City Lights was one of the most enriching spaces I had the fortune of experiencing during my time in the city. Aside from meeting some of the most brilliant artists in the San Francisco Bay Area (see D. Scot Miller's blog AfroSurreal Generation: http://dscotmiller.blogspot.com/), I also was introduced to an entire archive of poets, writers, and artists that I had remained entirely unaware of despite my self-proclaimed literary knowledge.

Amongst these many discoveries was the poet Bob Kaufman (far right in above photograph). Kaufman, whose autobiographical context remained hidden or unavailable much in the same way Ondaatje writes the life of Buddy Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter, remains prominent in my mind several years removed from San Francisco. Called by some, the "original beat," Kaufman's relationship to that entire generation of writers and artists remains somewhat difficult to articulate. The aesthetic differentiation of Kaufman's poetics from the likes of Ginsberg is the sense of movement that seems to animate a form that is not entirely different, at least at first glance, from his contemporaries.

I dedicate this post to Kaufman largely because I am trying to get down on paper what may or may not someday materialize into a completed project. The work of Kaufman and its place(s) within and across multiple genres intrigues me as someone whose interests--among many--are post-WWII cultural production in the San Francisco Bay Area and the intersections of radical politics and literary forms.

The brief research I have conducted on Kaufman leads me to ask a few questions/thoughts I would like to keep in mind as I move on this project:

1. Kaufman, someone who was seemingly not interested in leaving the sort of archive his contemporaries had the good fortune to have collected for them, challenges our conception of the poet/artist/performer. As someone who was interested in getting "involved in uninvolvement," Kaufman the figure evades us. What does it mean to be a poet who relies on the sonic deliverance of his poetry to ensure its capacity for (re)production? (Kaufman did not start writing down his poems until the late 50's when he moved to San Francisco.)

2. Kaufman took a vow of silence to protest the Vietnam War. What does his silence do to the sonic dimensions of his poetry? Do they have to be considered the same? Or does Kaufman's "uninvolvement" make us reconsider the sets of relations we may or may not consider inherent between the poet and poetry?

3. An oft unrecognized figure in a predominately white, male literary movement, I am curious about the emerging radicality (and its various forms) in the area and if there might be any connection between Kaufman and these emergent political forms. In particular, does this relationship, real or imaginary, have anything to do with the shared spaces or origins of their performance?

From James Baldwin's film Take This Hammer

I realize that these thoughts are somewhat scattered and probably only make sense to myself. However, this will be the project that occupies the majority of my time for at least the next year, so I wanted to try and lay a some kind of foundation for things to come. More on Kaufman soon.

Link to Baldwin's Film: https://diva.sfsu.edu/bundles/187041

"Fugitive Images" (Part 1)

I an attempt to get off on the right foot, I am posting something I wrote a while ago. This is the introduction to a research project I recently "completed" on Hurricane Katrina and photography. Before I moved to Durham, NC, I was living in Brooklyn and attending school in the city. This project represents a culmination of the research that took up about 18 of my 24 months in New York. I will post more of the project, but I am hesitant as I know the project will continue to grow and change over time. Enjoy:

The Structures of Circulation,[1] an Introduction:

Founded in 1846 in New York, the Associated Press exists today as the world’s largest non-profit, news co-operative. A conglomerate of some of the news industry’s largest media outlets, the AP provides one of the easiest and most accessible sources for the circulation and dissemination of individual news stories, videos, and photographs. At the same time, the AP acts as one of the largest photography and video custodians in the world, with readily accessible archives dating as far back as 1896. With over 10 million photographs in their possession, many of the most iconic news photographs of the last 100+ years remain maintained and leased through the AP’s archives. Images ranging from the violence of war to the triumph of sports, the quotidian to the once in a lifetime, there is no shortage of topics cataloged in these collections.However, while the vastness of the AP’s archives is unquestionable, the seemingly effortless accessibility and unmediated sale of these documents for the purposes of wide-range circulation poses a set of questions about the politics of reproduction.

The AP archives, in many ways, defy the traditional structure, and perhaps even ethics, that have sustained particular forms of academic research for so long.[2] While on the one hand, the AP archives, through their digitization, are accessible to a much wider audience. At the same time, their access is submitted to an economy regulated by copyrights and regulated reproducibility.Unless one acts as or on behalf of a member of the AP co-operative, they must pay certain fees to reproduce images, videos, etc. This does not differ greatly from any other image or video-leasing database, however, the mechanized and typological systems of organization that constitute the AP’s archives on the internet structure a very specific mode of engagement with archival documents. The AP’s web site uses a search engine, a system in which the initial terms of engagement with the document are almost entirely those of the researcher. This sign of technological development, not foreign to most databases, and the possibilities of reproduction made available by AP’s archives tells us something about the relationship between visibility and documentation, particularly when they surround incidents that most directly effect people of color and communities of color. One of the most striking examples of this is Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 decimated much of the U.S. Gulf Coast region and supposedly made acutely visible the pervasiveness of racism in this country.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina—an event that is as much a socio-historical event as a meteorological one—there remains a variety of representations of this event. Through film, written accounts, photography, government documents, news media, and artistic renderings, to name a few, the formal and informal collections each attest to the severity of this disaster. At the same time, there are a number of accounts that focus on the collective and individual responses amidst, and in the face of, these dire conditions. These aspects represent the human element of this tragedy, an entry point that many U.S.-based news outlets used for their coverage.

Those photographs collected during and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina constitute one of the most familiar and widely circulated archives of U.S.-based disaster images in the 21^stcentury, rivaled perhaps only by those of the 9/11 attacks in New York (2001) and the Gulf Oil Spill (2010). Many of these images, controlled by the AP, perpetually exhibit the natural destruction and wide range of human responses to this event. While either taken by AP photographers or archived by the AP, many of the same images find themselves deployed and circulated in a variety of different ways. Those who remember the media coverage of the event will surely remember the national news’ distinction between “black looters” and “white scavengers,” (an example examined later in the paper). This comparison perhaps best typifies the potential issues when such an archive finds itself deployed in the service of particular narrative frameworks.

In the midst and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there are few communities as homogenized and memorialized as the various communities of black New Orleanians who remain dispersed, romanticized, vilified, and, at times, transformed into refugees.The hypervisibility^[3] of these residents during the storm generated an endless cycle of news stories that trafficked in the familiar troupe of black victimhood, whether self-imposed or otherwise.Similar to past tendencies of major news networks to articulate moments of crisis and violence within predominately black communities as unstable and potentially violent, (Hurricane Betsy (1965), Watt’s Riots (1965), L.A. Riots (1992)), explanations of Hurricane Katrina came to rest, at least in part, on the specter and fear of black criminality. The young boy pictured in Figure 1, so effortlessly branded a looter, begins this discussion in the following section. Although black criminality is not the only troupe employed or made available by the coverage of these events—nor is it the only one taken up in this paper—in some ways it is the most familiar and easily accessible from a critical lens.

Figure 1. (Associated Press/Dave Martin/2005).

AP archives structure and operate within a particular desire for visibility. At once accessible, and endlessly reproducible under certain conditions, the disseminated news photograph mobilizes the visual as inseparable—or highly critical to—the narration of specific events. Photographs of Hurricane Katrina, as news or narrative, are no different. The selected images from the AP tell us something, or at least opens up the possibility of asking, about blackness and this desire for visibility. Each photograph, as I argue in the following pages, services the construction of what Allan Sekula refers to as a “social terrain” premised on the relationship between knowledge and visibility.[4] However, within this particular archive, the circulation of these images destabilizes such terrains, even in their attempt to codify them. Drawing on the work of Sekula and others, I am interested in a mode visibility that at once recognizes the potential for an image’s movement as it actively engages and resists such terrains.

Within such an analytic framework, this paper attempts to engage with the following images while mindful of certain guiding principles or steps. First, to engage in a reading of the selected images is to be simultaneously concerned as much with what the image captures, as well as what surrounds it. Therefore, crucial to the actual process of reading are the sites of deployment and the social life, if you will, of each image. The best record of these sites comes in the form of publication, captions, and contrasting images. Second, an engagement with the politics of reproduction remains crucial throughout this paper. Part of the argument this paper puts forth rests on the critique of reproducibility so masterfully argued by the likes of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten.[5] Hartman, followed by Moten in dialogue with Hartman’s work, criticize the ways in which scenes of violence carried out on the black body immure us to such violence. Although Hartman and Moten respectively make different choices regarding the reproduction of such scenes, both are acutely aware of the politics and stakes in such an act. However, in my choice to reproduce the above and following images, I attempt to argue against the technological, historical, and visual reproducibility allowed for and promised by an institution such as the AP. With this in mind, it is my hope that the reproduction of these images bears not the reinstantiation of a singularity that their deployment would initially hope to suggest, but something more akin to a specificity which animates alternative readings of these images. Finally, circulation cannot be understood as a suitable replacement for understanding movement within the image. The importance of these images should not be lost within the framework of critique. These photographs, and particularly those people in the image, do not cease to have value, but rather, must be reconsidered alongside their particular modes of circulation. In the instance of this archive, the precondition for circulation rests upon a static characterization of blackness. Circulation functions in the service of a certain malleability of the captured subject to fulfill the desires of racial and class identification placed on the capacity of this visual medium. The interest in movement as a resistant and dynamic component of the image animates a different possibility of reading the image, even in the context of their circulation.

---

[1] Although “circulation” seems as though it is a rather straightforward term, it emerges quite a bit throughout the course of the paper and therefore, I feel, deserves at least a working definition. Generally thought of as the public availability of knowledge of something, circulation must also be understood to have certain limits. Separate and distinct from merely those who have not been exposed or have access to something, circulation should be understood as restricted or imposing a set of restrictions on that which we attempt to follow, from its formulation, reproduction, and reception.

[2] I am weary of using the term “ethics” in relation to the archives and archival practices of academic research. It seems as though particular disciplines and modes of research persistently traffic in a practice of unethical readings, and therefore are always already void of any tradition of ethics. Therefore, I do not want to make the AP stand alone in this charge, but I do feel the relationship between ethical practice and their mode of dissemination/circulation is at the heart of what I am trying to argue in this paper.

[3] Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Oxford University, 1997).

[4] Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter, 1986) 3-64.

[5] Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003).