“Pornotroping” critiques oversimplify the transmission of political resonance. Representing Black suffering in an attempt to prevent it is a symbolic disavowal of social death.

Technology has been intimately implicated with the reproduction of form, its mutilation and erasure. Flesh can be reified or made virtual through technology. Hence, if photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, it also threatens conflagration and anarchy, an incendiary levelling of the existing cultural order (Sekula 1986, 4). As such the ‘wretched image’ online of Black bodies dying becomes part of a burgeoning shadow archive with an assemblage of brutalised lives. For Steyerl (2012, 44), these floating images equally stand in for their own real conditions of existence: denoting swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities, encompassing resistance and appropriation, and enacting conformism and exploitation. Technologies deposit their own bias while blurring truth regimes through their modes of inflection. If photographs of lynchings solidified White supremacy and claims over Black flesh, these very gruesome images used by Ida B. Wells for activism in her anti-lynching campaign were transformed in their very re-appropriation (Raiford 2012). The exclusion of Blackness and racial erasure from the realm of ontology has meant a withdrawal and equally a transcendence from the materialist, non-humanist constructions of being or having the affective and aesthetic capacity to experience itself culturally.

Photographs as part of technological regimes of remediation are then not singular compositions but yielding relations to one another, functioning through a visual indexicality of the social and moral. In so doing, Raiford (2012, 302) contends that the multiple visual representations of African Americans were always and continue to be in intense dialogue with each other. In tandem, Ida B. Wells’ engagement with the shadow archive forces us to rethink the collapsed categories of Blackness in resurrecting Black humanity. Black bodies ordained through frames of criminality, the pornographic, ethnographic, the comedic, or in the margins of the sentimental portraits of Whites demonstrate how technology has been used to reconstruct not merely individual and collective selves, but also racial and national histories (Raiford 2009, 120). Hence imagery and its re-appropriation has transformative potential.

Similarly, this poor image online can construct anonymous global networks just as it procreates a shared history, building alliances as it journeys through fluid spheres, provoking translation or mistranslation, and creating new publics and debates (Steyerl 2012, 42). Through fracture and disruption of thought and affect, Steyerl argues that the poor image prompts non-conformist information circuits (2012, 43). Losing visual substance as an unstable image on platforms, it acquires political resonance creating tractions through its mutability and travel within a voluminous repository where it can be revived and politicised through tagging, hashtagging and traffic, imbricated in the re-direction of gaze and the acquisition of affective spheres engaged in the recalibration of life and death. Its circulation can create ‘visual bonds’ (Vertov 1995) linking communities and audiences with shared interests and sense of identification just as much as global information capitalism enables mutual excitement (Steyerl 2009, 7) and unanticipated disruptions. It is within this chaos that re-materialisation of Blackness ignites, through new modes of the social and visceral. If Blackness is defined through its fluidity and virtuality and the denial of form and ontology, it then is already the ‘post-entity’ lending to the digital spheres in terms of mutability in the abstraction of form and its capacities to be re-morphed. Dying and Black bodies contain both violent and fecund potential for re-imagination and communion in the virtual sphere where they can gain speed, subvert mortality or defy the sacred. The mutilated Black body has been historically appropriated for civil action to implant Black resistance within White civil society in illuminating its absent/presence as an immanent struggle within the ontological. The banalised and brutalised Black body has been the canvass for the symbolic disavowal of social death despite its mortal demise. The politicised brutalised images of Emmett Till and his open casket invoked a public spectacle into the tormented Black flesh of a young boy, in the process transforming the Black corpse into an active projection of White inhumanity and racial injustice. This wretched grainy image widely circulated in the Black press, with thousands of mourners viewing his body directly at the funeral home (Harold and DeLuca 2005, 265), reversed the public spectacle of lynching. Enacting a dehiscence, Emmett Till was transformed from a trophy of racial violence to a mirror into the depravity of Whiteness.

The Black bodies preserved through the liminality between life and death then call out for a re-reading and re-appropriation of this traumatised flesh. For Spillers (2003, 205), preservation becomes a form of celebration transforming the body in demise into a ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’. For Moten (2013), degenerative and regenerative preservation is critical celebration for Blackness. Celebration as the essence of Black thought, the animation of Black operations, constitutes an ‘undercommon’, underground, submarine sociality (Moten 2013, 742). As a perverse form of celebration or jouissance these traumatised bodies are transformed into a ‘fleshy archive’ in which the abrasions, gashes, and lacerations record the unchecked power and inscriptions of torture over the captive body (Spillers 2003, 205). The absent centre of ontology and its denial for Blackness is unveiled through Afropessimism, yet its presence seemingly structures society and its ideological interpellations. If Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space (Sexton 2011), the virtual, given over to commodification and value accumulation of platform capital, is both a space for anarchy and non-conformism but mostly ‘virtuality’ in its premise to reclaim Black flesh and transform in its defiance of mortality online. Hartman contends that in the postbellum era, the elasticity of Blackness is not containable despite the excess of surveillance and regulation over its body (Hartman 2008, 2). Hence, the virtual liquifies mortal death as an agentic device for re-appropriation and the affective re-articulation of Blackness despite its ontological lack to feel its insides in expressing the jouissance of Blackness.

Through his philosophy of ‘Black mysticism’ Fred Moten counters the criticism of Blackness as not given to ontology without eliding into Afropessimism to denote it as the phenomenology of Black spirit. Filtering Blackness in a world of anti-Blackness is a mode of re-orientation into Blackness. Black spirit can be resurrected through art and music, and Blackness can reject form in re-enacting itself to avoid the ontology adduced through White civil society. The virtual, though fraught with dialectical tendencies between oppression and resistance, re-mediates new possibilities for filtering disembodied Blackness through a new vernacular mediated through technology and platform capital. For Moten, Blackness, as that which operates ‘at the nexus of the social and the ontological, the historical and the essential’, (Thompson 2017) is fluid and intangible but capable of experiencing the affective and sensuous in its self-realisation despite its lack of form. Blackness is paraontological in that lived experiences of Blackness both enact and escape the assignment of Blackness to social death, of non-being. This straining of Blackness against itself disrupts and resists the ontological. As such, for Moten, ‘it is escape and is what escapes’ (Thompson 2017).

The creation of visual bonds through floating ‘poor images’ as a shadow archive affords a politics of refusal. The politics of refusal entails the ‘rejection of the status quo as liveable and the creation of possibilities in the face of negation (i.e. a refusal to recognise a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible). This encompasses the decision to reject the terms of diminished subjecthood using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise’ (Campt 2019, 84). As Blackness is not a category for ontology or for phenomenological analysis, Moten defines this zone of non-being as experimental, in which friendship’s sociality overflows its political regulation (Moten 2013, 768).

Dead bodies possess the possibilities for igniting communion through the social and against the political in igniting a politics of refusal as agents of resistance through their immortality in the cultural memory of resilience. Patterson (2016) co-founder of the Black Lives Movement (BLM) asserts that murders of two teenagers – Trayvon Martin, 17, in 2013 and Michael Brown, 18, in 2014 – as igniting points for the movement. According to Fairchild (2017) ‘the most proximal influence was the Black Lives Matter movement – 2014 to the present – that was inspired by a seemingly endless list of innocent Black lives lost to violence’. Springing into national and global consciousness in 2014 and 2015, BLM’s emergence was marked through the demonstrations throughout the US in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of Michael Brown to bring attention to police brutality and the extra-juridical power of authorities in governing the Black population (Abdullah 2015). The BLM hashtag was created after the killers of these unarmed teenagers escaped with impunity.

With the movement embracing people at the intersections of social marginalisation such as the LGBT community, prisoners, students and others, it has been perceived as a new ‘civil rights movement’ (Patterson 2016) challenging an array of injustices from prison conditions and voting rights to a more equitable criminal justice system. Their tactics seek to draw attention to the cycles of injustice and compounded trauma which poor African American communities encounter as a lived experience. Within this the shooting and premature death of Black men and women (Baraka 2015) as anoetic reality and a mode of social control ordained through the violent history of America which is rooted in colonialism, slavery, the plantation economy, and racial segregation (Fairchild and Abdullah 2017).

The emergence of the BLM in its endeavour to recode traumatised Black flesh into humanity incorporates an intertextual bind in re-directing the gaze of the Black bodies dying in a loop online. Denying their fungibility and commemorating them through their individual names, the reclamation of dead bodies as worthy lives given over to premature death enacts both the dreaded claims of Afropessimism in remediating the ontological lack of Blackness, but in being able to feel back and in feeling jouissance as a community envisioning itself through new modes of virtual imagination and conversations. Black consciousness through social media platforms, as in the case of ‘Black Twitter’, and the re-directing and re-appropriation of hashtags is a means to inscribe disembodied Black consciousness on global platforms. If Black flesh and Black humanity is seen as living through the realm of the virtual through its social death, the virtual sphere resurrects Blackness3 through the politics of refusal and a means to re-imagine social bonds as exemplified in ‘Black Twitter’ as streams of Black consciousness and cultural conversations (Brock 2012; Sharma 2013). Similarly, Florini (2014) explores the performance of Black racial and cultural identity online through displays and cultural competence and knowledge as means to remake identities visible online. Similarly, Sharma contends that (2013, 46) Blacktags (racialised hashtags) are instrumental in the production of networked subjects with the capacity to multiply the possibilities of being raced online. Transcendence into virtuality with the absolution of corporeality creates space and digital enactment of Moten’s Black mysticism. The material body or indeed the Black body becomes fluid, re-abstracted through social and cultural expressions and interactions (Brock 2012) as a mode of sense-making and performance of racial identities lived through a White ontology on social media platforms. This act of performing race becomes an important dimension of speaking back and resistance against erasure (Nakamura 2008). Exhaustion of Blackness as a mode of life, for Moten, is the very fundamental reason not to believe in social death and that Black life is irreducibly ‘social’ (2013, 738).

The virtual as a sphere for the absorption of political ideologies and its refraction affords technological mediation to re-experience Blackness and to culturally experience it through disembodied presence. It is experimental, lending to fluidity, projected through its multiplicity, weaving through networks and embracing an immortality in which forgetting and erasure are problematic. As an imperfect medium of echo chambers and viscerality, its ability to reproduce ideological violence coalesces with the means to re-draft Black consciousness within the bowels of technological mediation, algorithmic gaze and virulence. In discussing the lynching photographs, Raiford (2012, 118) asserts that activists and cultural producers have returned repeatedly to ‘the sight of a Black [person] hanging from a tree’, making it iconic. These visual returns for Raiford illuminate the primary role of vision and visuality in Black social movements. In tandem, Black visuality, or how one is made to see Blackness and how Blackness itself sees the unseen therein is inextricable from African American movement efforts to change the conditions of Black people’s lives. The seeing is transformative, harnessing both individual and collective senses of being in the world, or ‘how we see Blackness, the meanings we attach to Black people, and the value we attach to Black life because of this ‘sight’ (Raiford 2009, 118). The dominated subject in recognising the power of her own ‘double-consciousness’ is seen but also sees. For Spillers, this return of the gaze that negotiates at every point a space for living, employs the concept of counter-logos. Spillers (2003) offers ‘counter-mythology’ as the articulation of a critically insurgent agency. Such an insurgency cuts through theological protocols of racialisation, which cannot be severed from the protocols of gender and sexualisation or from the capturing of maternity within patriarchy (Carter 2013, 594). These complexities of Black visuality and counter mythologies are reabsorbed into social media platforms to rearticulate Blackness through lived experiences, subversions, new vernacular and insider humour (Brock 2012; Florini 2014), and through the banal as well as spectacular encounters of the everyday.

Conclusion

The dying Black body consumed non-stop online as part of a spectacular economy opens up the Black horrific a shadow archive. It conjoins Blackness as an abortive project contextualised against Afropessimism and social death and the Black subject as a non-ontological entity. Formless, non-corporeal yet forged through social death and mortal death as a proximate reality, death permeates the Black body claiming it through its demise as a pornotrope. This pornotrope assumes a fecund virality online through the digital economy in which images circulate infinitum adducing the intrinsic fungibility of the Black body and its malleability in the virtual sphere. If death imagery has always been re-drafted for political agency historically, on social media it is re-birthed as the wretched image. Grainy images online work through the dialectics of platform capital and intertextuality offline and online, engendering a means to feel back as a community within White ontology through a critical insurgency. Spillers’ critical subjectivity offers as a mode of insurgent agency in releasing and resurrecting Blackness from social death. This critical subjectivity then produces Blackness as ‘mystical’ and stateless (Spillers 2003). The virtual offers an imagination of an unbounded sphere while affording a performative insurgency on a global stage invoking Moten’s (2003, 257) ‘Mystical Blackness’ as a way of elaborating this-worldly potentialities of the flesh constituting a multitude, or a different mode of organising social. This new means of social organisation of community or experiencing as an affective community induces the experimental in which dominant visuality can be reiterated and equally thwarted. Imperfect platforms can induce extreme experimentation and reconfiguration of social reality. Social media as a mutilated space of tortured and immortalised bodies is a fervent burial ground, reiterating Moten’s assertion that ‘Black is irreducibly social or lived in the burial ground of the subject’ (2013, 739). Social media as the burial ground of the living and the virulent dead is both a space to reconvene, commune and articulate the ‘unthought’ of Blackness (Hartman and Wilderson 2003) and reclaim the Black horrific as agentic.