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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 Humanities1
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
Improvisation, in its divergence from the given, frequently will not allow us not to hear noise, the creaking of categorization, the noise categorization suppresses and the noise, not admitting doing so, it makes.
-Nathaniel Mackey, Paracritical Hinge2
Music in its own right is frequently considered generative and connective. Under such terms, music is a social force with the power to foster relations among people and groups and to spur social and political change. Going further, it is often argued that jazz itself is neither music nor genre but rather a critical and social practice-even a mode of being-that opens dialogue and, as A. J. Heble writes, "reinvigorates public life" and "builds purposeful communities of interest and involvement"3 Jazz may in fact be particularly good at creating new forms of relation due to its group improvisatory nature and its emphasis on collective listening and coextension, if not cooperation.4 When jazz happens, it is sometimes dissonant, noisy, and even disorganized-none of which are necessarily undesirable traits....