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FIGURE 1.
Sondra Perry, Wet and Wavy Looks — Typhoon Coming On (2016),
for three-­monitor workstation. Frame grab.
27
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The Unfungible
Flow of Liquid
Blackness
This is something that I call the flow
Not many if any, ’cept for Vinnie, can say they know
In fact, detracting that is something that I rarely show
Because my tongue is actually fast but then again
it’s slow . . .
— Naughty by Nature, “Everyday All Day”
W
hen rap lyricist Anthony Criss, better
known by his stage name, Treach, proclaims what he does is called “the flow,”
and then says that is because his “tongue is actually
fast but then again it’s slow,” we know he is talking
about the rhythm of his poetic fluidity as well as his
delivery. There are many ways of defining this in the
technē (the poetic know-­how) of rap. Drew Morisey
describes flow as “drum patterns over an instrumental converted into words, that is, drum rhythms over
the instrumental that are in word form, coming out
of the rapper’s mouth, his voice.”1 This is about sonic
technology; more precisely, it is about the temporal
harmonizing of distinctive instrumentalities of sound,
each with distinctive sonic qualities, in some sort of
orchestration or arrangement. Flow, then, is the fluidity in the cadence and sonic clarity in tone of the human voice. Such fluidity is referred to in phonetics as
“liquid,” following the classical Latin designation, li­
qui­dus, which itself translates the Greek term for fluid,
υγρός (hygrós), used to describe the slippery effect
of sonorant consonants on meter in classical Greek
poetry. Rap’s flow is liquid like that, and it is a liquidity of a complex lineage. It is worth recalling Édouard
R. A. JUDY
liquid blackness
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© 2021 R. A. Judy
DOI 10.1215/26923874-8932565
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
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Glissant’s account of the emergence of that lineage
in modernity with the imposition of sound on the enslaved peoples taken from Africa.2 We can imagine
the imposed noise to be the cacophonous sounds
onboard the European slave ships, known generically
as “Guineamen,” onto which those captured Africans
were loaded and transported to the plantations and
mines of the New World. Throughout that so-­called
Middle Passage of the triangular transatlantic trade,
phonic materiality was meaningful in itself. The pitch,
tonic color, repetition, and so rhythms of noise articulated an in ­situ order of referentiality and relationality.
Among the more repeated arrangements of sounds
clearly directed at the captives as that noise to which
they were violently compelled to respond in identification was “Negro,” or its cognates, “Neger,” and
“Nègre,” depending on the nationality of the ship.
As Fred Moten has pointed out in In the Break, that
imposition of noise was an inaugural moment in “the
animative materiality — the aesthetic, political, sexual,
and racial force — of the ensemble of objects,” which
he says might be called “black performances, black
history [or] blackness.”3 The animative materiality he
refers to is also sonic, the sound of the heartrending shrieks in response to the noisy identity violently
imposed on those captive bodies. What is inaugurated is an order of verbal performative practices that
will be iterated in ring shouts and spirituals, invisible
church sermons and worldly work songs, as well as
the blues, jazz, toasts, and even everyday signifying —
where, to again quote Moten from the same In the
Break passage, “shriek turns speech turns song.”
Each of these practices articulates a complex, highly
dynamic confluence whereby multifarious traditions
of performing human being — we might also call this
performing “cosmological mimesis,” meaning the
material representation of being-­in-­the-­world — flow
together with what we are wont to call “modernity.”
When we speak of the liquidity of blackness, we
mean it in two senses. The one we are talking about
right now is the liquidity of these confluent performative practices of blackness. My reasons for dubbing
this poiēsis in black will be set out at the end of this
piece. The other is the cash value of blackness. There
is a historical, oft­times generative, tension between
these two liquidities. In exploring that historicity, it
behooves us to bear in mind that both these senses
of liquidity are hallmarks of modernity.
It is hard to speak these days of liquidity in relation to modernity without referencing, or at least
having in mind, Zygmunt Bauman, whose use of “liquidity” as a metaphor denoting the nature of our
present moment hinges on his account of modernity
starting with developments in technologies of transportation that made it possible to traverse greater
distances in increasingly less time, resulting in space
and time becoming separated from each other so
that time has history. That alacrity fueled another
determinate characteristic of modernity delineated
by Bauman: “its compulsive and obsessive modernizing — and modernizing means liquefaction, melting and smelting,” he tells us; but then he thinks it
important to point out that “initially, the major preoccupation of the modern mind was not so much
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The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness
29
the technology of smelting . . . as the design of
new moulds into which the molten metal was to be
poured and the technology of keeping it there.”4 Acknowledging that this liquefaction is characteristic of
modernity from the beginning, Bauman differentiates between prior periods of liquefaction and what
he terms “the present time . . . of fluid modernity,”
by which he means the global political economy
that emerged in the second half of the twentieth
century. In prior phases, preexistent configurations
of dependency and interaction — bonds interlocking
individual choices in collective projects and actions,
such as traditional feudal loyalties, rights, duties, and
ethical obligations — were smelted only to be recast
into new molds of social positioning. Bauman speaks
of “patterns, codes, and rules” of conduct when
referring to the instrumentalities of these new modes
of positioning.5 We can readily recognize them as
semiosis — in the sense of a systemic process of signification — of sociality, and just as readily construe
the liquefacted bonds they displace along the same
lines. What distinguishes the current phase of liquefaction is that the new semiosis into which the preexistent ones are to be recast have become themselves
in increasingly short supply. In effect, the process of
liquefaction has become so absolute there are no enduring new patterns into which things are poured,
only ever-­increasing liquidity, in the economic sense;
which is to say that everything is monetized and fungible in accordance with the ubiquitous free market.
Bauman’s account has a significant lacuna, however.
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Although attentive in his analysis to the role played
by the separation of space and time in the historical
emergence of capitalism and the economy as the basis of social life, he completely overlooks the trans-­
atlantic slave trade.
This is no trivial oversight given that for three centuries (from the seventeenth to the nineteenth), the
most advanced technology in speedily traversing
great distances was the galleon ship, the mainstay of
European maritime commerce — and the fastest type
of galleon, utilized in a most lucrative commerce, was
the Guineaman. Nothing exemplified the increased
alacrity in movement Bauman delineates more than
the Guineaman. What’s more, in its physical structure,
with its divided hull and main deck complemented by
the systematic use of its onboard tools of torture, the
entire ship functioned as a smelting machine, liquefying the solidity of whatever preexistent process of sociality, whatever semiosis, the captured souls loaded
in its hull came with — whether Soninke, Wolof, Bambara, Fulfulde, or Yoruba. Onboard the Guineaman is
where the process began of liquefaction and setting
the liquefied material into the mold of an exchangeable commodity asset codified in commercial language and law as “Negro.” Arguably, the fact that
the Negro resulting from the Guineaman’s smelting is
energy readily convertible into cash — such facility of
cash conversion being the meaning of “liquidity” in
economics — suggests it is a preeminent, if not principal, instantiation of modernity’s liquefaction; so much
so that we can reasonably say: There is no Negro ex-
cept that there is the liquefaction of modernity, and
there is no liquefaction of modernity without the Negro. This paraphrase of Marx’s remark in The Poverty
of Philosophy — “Without slavery you have no cotton;
without cotton you have no modern industry” —
emphasizes the centrality of Negro liquidity in the
accumulation of the monetary wealth that financed
capitalism’s industrial expansion.6 From roughly 1820
to 1864, that liquidity was the basis of an expansive,
sophisticated system of credit financing that revolutionized American and international banking, in which
factorage firms, such as the New Orleans – based Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana
(CAPL), played a major role. A regional investment
bank chartered by the Louisiana legislature in 1827
to assist slaveholding planters in securing favorable
credit facilities, CAPL provides a heuristic of how this
system worked.
Planters wishing to borrow capital from the association first acquired shares by mortgaging slaves and
land. They were then entitled to borrow up to 50 percent of the mortgaged property value in CAPL bank
notes, used to finance the expansion of their cotton
production. Those bank notes were secured by a
large cash reserve raised through the sale of bonds
in financial markets throughout the United States
and Europe. A single CAPL bond had the face value
of five hundred dollars, the average market price for
a young Negro male at that time. Secured with the
credit of Louisiana, those bonds would reach maturity in ten to fifteen years, yielding their investors 5
THERE IS NO NEGRO
EXCEPT THAT THERE IS
THE LIQUEFACTION OF
MODERNITY, AND THERE
IS NO LIQUEFACTION OF
MODERNITY WITHOUT
THE NEGRO
percent in annual interest. According to CAPL’s Mortgage Book, in 1828 it received from its European broker, Baring Brothers, receipts from bond sales in the
amount of $2.5 million in sterling bills. With this cash
reserve, the bank began lending out $3.5 million in
new notes to its planter-­shareholders.7 Negro liquidity
was thus a significant component of a collateralized
credit market, which spread the financial risk of expanding entrepreneurial-­driven growth in cotton and
sugar agriculture while also generating the financing
needed to fuel that growth. CAPL was functioning as
a financial intermediary from borrowers to depositors,
effectively creating money by issuing its bonds in order to accumulate capital. In this scheme, money was
simply a debt, or unit of account that transferred purchase power from the future to the present — that is
to say, so planters could buy more slaves now and pay
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The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness
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Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana
bond note (1836).
FIGURE 2.
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later based on profit expectations. The bank’s ability
to create money was due to its liabilities being made
acceptable by the state of Louisiana’s guaranteeing
these transactions, which induced an auction-­like financial market in which risk of default was minimized.
As long as the nominal value of the asset — Negro
liquidity — grew relative to that of their bonds, the
bank’s net worth increased.
Something about Negro liquidity, however, is
phantasmagorical and fetishistic, in Marx’s sense. The
$500 market price for a young Negro male, reflected
in the face value of a single CAPL bond being sold
in the Western world’s financial markets, was a monetization of the material energy embodied by the
Negro as an asset. Whatever the number arrived at,
whether $500 or $1500, it signified the cost of acquiring the Negro asset and not the surplus value generated by his productive energy. In other words, while
the Negro was, in certain respects, a fixed capital asset essential to the generation of profit, the Negro’s
liquidity was a financial asset that in ­and of ­itself was
a source of wealth. My point is that Negro liquidity, as
the principal collateral in an extensive banking credit
system, was so thorough a monetization that its relation to Negro work was somewhat tangential; not
in the sense that it was marginal or of limited importance, but in the sense that ownership of a Negro indicated creditworthiness, irrespective of what work
that Negro did. Moreover, the accumulated wealth
generated by that credit system, measured in Negro
liquidity, was the largest in the nation. In 1850, the
accumulated slave assets had a market value of $1.3
billion, which was 80 percent of the total cash market
of the South and one-­fifth of the wealth of the United
States as a whole, nearly equaling its gross national
product; by 1860 those assets had increased to $2 billon. Needless to say, the 1863 emancipation without
compensation effectively eliminated Negro liquidity,
precipitating a severe system-­wide crisis in the credit
market. Be that as it may, the system of credit financing based on Negro liquidity will find an iteration
of sorts in the twenty-­first-­century art market, where
ownership of black expression provides collateral for
raising capital.
Today, works by black artists such as Sondra Perry
(figs. 1 and 3), Kara Walker, and Glenn Ligon are financial investments, which is a determination of the market and involves a complex set of relations between
the function of curation, market forces — such as auction houses and galleries — museums, and academic
art criticism and history. As with Negro liquidity, while
the intrinsic qualities of a piece — say, for instance,
Perry’s Wall 2 — are factors in determining its speculative liquidity, what is actually being evaluated is the
viability of the credit financing system in which it functions as an asset. A quick look at the 2019 Deloitte Art
& Finance Report gives a clear sense of this. So too
does the Artemundi Global Fund’s 2019 website posting, which — professing “art can be useful beyond its
emotional, intellectual, and cultural value” — claims
to have helped investors achieve attractive rates of
return to the tune of $1 billion over the thirty years
since its founding in 1989 by “using art as a tangible
asset.”8 Art, however, does not have anywhere near
I CALL THIS POIĒSIS IN
BLACK — AN ACTIVITY
PERPETUALLY
FLYING AWAY FROM
THE CAPITALIST
COMMODIFICATION
OF LIFE
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The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness
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FIGURE 3.
Sondra Perry, Wall 2 (2017). Frame grab.
the liquidity the Negro did. In fact, it is notoriously
illiquid, a fact that Artemundi claims to overcome
through its proprietary methodology for managing
art investment portfolios. Yet among the six axioms of
Artemundi’s investment strategy listed on its website,
one resonates sharply with the nineteenth-­century
credit financing system based on Negro liquidity, and
that is its rule to only “acquire artworks in which we
can apply appreciation strategies.” A variable in such
appreciation is the artist’s name brand; and value is
added when the artist is black. In other words, the
artist’s blackness has some liquidity. That, of course,
was the point of Keith Obadike’s 2001 eBay auction
of his blackness as fine art. The increasing speculative
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value of black art is evidenced in the portfolios
of asset-­based bankers, such as Athena Art Finance,
and Borro Private Finance, whose function as financial
intermediaries between art galleries and the art
market — both private and institutional collectors —
ever so resembles that of the nineteenth-­century antebellum factorage firms financing slave liquidity.
And just as the Negro liquidity on which those firms
speculated was tangential to the actual expenditure
of Negro labor in commodity production, so too the
liquidity of blackness on which art speculation feeds
is only tangentially related to the continual activity of
proactive creation and performance of new formal
processes in which the black artists are engaged.
This tangency reiterates the difference in types
of liquidity instigated by modernity’s presumed liquefaction of myriad African semiosis and imposition
of the Negro, with which we began our discussion.
What I want to attend to here is how the previously
discussed animative materiality instigated with that
imposition unfolds as a type of liquidity much more
preoccupied with sustaining fluidity than a new mold
into which fluidity can be fixed. The compelling violent force of modernity’s liquefaction notwithstanding, elements of those African semiosis remained in
the stream poured into the Negro mold. With respect
to the so-­called Negro, we can say there are multiple
semiosis at play, and these elements have inflecting
iterations of fluidity, which I call para-­semiosis. Para-­
semiotic fluidity provides for infinite dynamic possibilities of expression bound only by the limits of
human imagination. These possibilities are dynamic
in the sense that the only “determinate” is the continual activity of proactive creation and performance
of experimental forms of expression. We learned
from Aristotle to call this activity poiēsis, which he described as “saying possibility.” In the blues, taking up
this poiēsis is termed being at the crossroads, where
the figure varyingly called “the Devil,” “the Black
Man,” “Exu,” “Eshu,” and, more widely, “Legba”
dwells. Legba is “the Black Man” at the crossroads,
and the poiēsis there with him was instigated when
the noise, Negro, was imposed. I call this poiēsis in
black to foreground its being heterologous to capitalist modernity’s liquefaction — that is to say, an activity
perpetually flying away from the capitalist commodifi-
cation of life. As such, it is being-­in-­apposition; not in
the rhetorical sense of apposition as exegesis, which
would suggest blackness is an explanation of Negro, but in a polyvalent sense, combining the general
grammatical connotation — “being side-­by-­side in
close proximity” — with the biological, where “appositional growth” refers to the accretion of additional
layers of cell wall material onto a preexisting cell wall,
a process that strengthens the overall cell structure.
I do not wish to be misconstrued here as suggesting
blackness is some type of essentialism, the continuation of putatively pure “African” practices. On the
contrary, just as there is no Negro except that there is
the liquefaction of modernity, so too there is no African except with modernity, as V. Y. Mudimbe showed
us some time ago.9 More to the point at hand, poiēsis
in black is also a function of modernity’s liquefaction.
It is not a question of whether this para-­semiotic poiēsis escapes the Negro mold and continues essentially
African practices free from contamination by commodification and monetarization. What I want to underscore is the dynamic confluence of intra-­elemental
transformations enacted by poiēsis in black in relation
to modernity’s persistent liquefaction. In other words,
poiēsis at the crossroads cannot but be a performative critique — which is the most parodic when it is
the most mimetic — of capitalism’s commodification
of life. It is a performative contradiction instigated at
modernity’s liquefaction. This confluence is what Anthony Braxton dubs “trans-­African functionalism,” giving particular emphasis to “Creative Music,” which is
definitively experimental and so not readily reduced
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The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness
35
to a cash-­price; until it is, at which point its experimentation gets bent into “black exotica,” Braxton’s
label for the process whereby the expression of poiēsis, the art — in this case, jazz — gets separated from
what the artist was thinking and feeling in its performance.10 This lineage of experimentation in apposition to modernity’s liquefaction is the confluence
where rap flows. It is the liquid doings of black art.
Claudia Rankine’s 2019 one-­act play, The White Card,
dramatically portrays the continual effort of the black
artist to stay one step ahead of the process of monetization, to para-semiotically proliferate lines along
which the possibilities of saying, of poiēsis, continue.
We see such effort looking at Sondra Perry’s Typhoon
Coming On, with which we opened our essay, and
can say along with Treach: “This is something that I
call the flow.” ■■
R. A. JUDY is professor of critical and cultural studies in
the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
He is the author of Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder
/ Poiēsis in Black) (2020) and (Dis)forming the American
Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave
Narrative (1993).
Notes
1 Morisey, “How to Rap.”
2 Glissant, Poétique de la relation.
3 Moten, In the Break, 7.
4 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, iv.
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5 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 5.
6 Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, 97.
7 On the CAPL, see Baptist, Half Has Never Been Told, 245–47.
On factorage firms in general, see Kilbourne, Debt, Investment,
Slaves; and Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development.
8 Artemundi, “Celebrating Thirty Years.”
9 See Mudimbe, Invention of Africa.
10 Braxton, quoted in Lock, Forces in Motion, 26, 67.
Works Cited
Artemundi. “Celebrating Thirty Years Of Artemundi: Leaders In
Art Investment, Pioneering Art as an Asset.” www.artemundi
.com/celebrating-­30-­years-­of-­artemundi/ (accessed June 12,
2020).
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the
Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic, 2016.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity,
2012.
Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
Kilbourne, Richard Holcombe. Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit
Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825 – 1885. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
Lock, Graham. Forces in Motion: The Musical Thought of Anthony
Braxton. London: Quartet, 1988.
Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. Moscow: Progress, 1955.
Morisey, Drew. “How to Rap: The Definition of Rap Flow Finally
Explained.” YouTube, June 2, 2014. Video, 7:17. www.youtube
.com/watch?v=gpQRDufB3nM.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American Economic Development.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
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