Bringing A Beauty About Reason (or, BABAR); the questions, vol. 2

Some meditations on beauty, perception, and being read... also, a continuation of "the questions" column

A few months ago, I was having a winding conversation with a good homie post-watching our shared compatriot Kidist’s documentary (comprised of a set of interviews with two Black femmes, addressing aesthetic/appearance and their relationships with their bodies). After wandering through our shared takeaways and appreciations, we settled onto a conversation surrounding what ‘beauty’ is, or what ‘getting fly’ means to us. 

Borrowing from and expanding on an idea I first came into contact with via menswear writer @dieworkwear on Twitter (who himself borrows from Chomsky): I submitted that to me, beauty is a construction akin to language. Less abstrusely, it’s a coherence or sense-making exercise. It can (and often does) exist outside of countenance and clothing, and applies in my mind to all varieties of presentation. Argumentation, arrangements, verities, varial flips; if someone is putting together a sentence using the language of their medium and its references, then their work is beautiful. This referential or semiotic context can still be original or heretofore unseen, maybe even hard or unpleasant to deal with, unsightly in its meaning despite its coherence; but, if its expression is clear and its components are syntactically soundly placed, a thing can be beautiful. I think this was an attempt to step outside of my ego, recognizing that beauty is not simply a question of personal taste but a channeling of past, spirit, and perception, into future; in doing so, I made beauty dependent almost entirely on legibility. 

Something’s openness, vulnerability, or accession to being read is what we define as its legibility: can we parse what we’re seeing? Beyond the words on the page, is it comprehensible? What is or isn’t is of course context-dependent, language-dependent, and reference-dependent; but interacting with a thing on its own terms feels as fair an assessment as possible. This is nearly impossible to do as one person—no one among us contains the depth and breadth required to attempt what I’m proposing—but this is where subjectivity becomes relevant: what is readable, and moreover what is enjoyable to read or what we take from what we read, is what distinguishes tastes. Also, I favor language as an analogy because I then get to make my own silly SAT-esque word associations, e.g. AAVE is to English as Black is Beautiful is to Western textiles/advertising culture as Lo-Lifes are to Ralph Lauren.

There are some small problematiques of this formulation I’m working through… for instance: language shifts constantly and at varying rates in various geographies, so what is or is not a legitimate sentence changes frequently—how do we account for this re: legibility? A potential answer: perhaps ‘legible’ could share critical duties with ‘audible’? What we hear in spoken variants of languages encompasses a much vaster range of expression, verbiage, even slang, than what we see on the page, but what makes sense to our ears also shapes language in a more immediate way; so too can the vernaculars of our creative speech in familiar and unfamiliar forms alike. Fred Moten, famed Black theoretician and poet, offers that “[e]verything always needs new language. We constantly have to renew the language of any mode of inquiry”, and I’m inclined to agree. We can choose how lax we wish to treat the grammar of our amalgamated aesthetics; advancements in how we speak and write come from fucking language up, so how effectively we eff can become a metric for beauty as well.

All this aside, I have some unresolved questions that I’d like to leave for the reader as an exercise. As an example: I’ve talked about this before, but one of my favorite pastimes is the discovery and discernment of graffiti gripping walls, signposts, highway signs, and store windows. What I find beautiful about pieces and tags are their stylistic advances, their largesse, their placement—but the letters themselves are often barely decipherable. Is a throw-up beautiful because its dimensionality and shape descend from a certain regional tradition, because its history and prevalence tell me something new about its writer—or is it ugly because I can’t tell what it’s strictly ‘saying’?

Further: I think where things get a bit trickier is in the thick of making something legible to begin with…it’s been argued that legibility is the foundation upon which modern statecraft is erected. Making populations into social security numbers, race categorizations, genders, making land into borders and parcels, conscripting groups of people into tax codes—all of these operations allow public and private entities to in turn operate on us as distinct objects belonging to and abiding by papers (legal, monetary, and otherwise). How do we distinguish meaning-making from these sorts of bureaucratic bundlings, and avoid the attendant nonsense? Recently, I heard someone intelligent posit that governance and economic structures can be art too… I know the ‘legibility’ framework can accommodate this kind of argument, but should it?

Along these same lines: there are artifacts of language that are specifically coded against being read by such governing factors, chief among them the numerological signs that compose 5%er religiosity; drug and ‘gang’ slang fit in this box too, as would any other communications from the margins that are intended only for an audience situated along that same periphery. Are such expressions only valuable/beautiful in their originating contexts? Henry Louis Gates, Jr, is working on producing an “Oxford Dictionary of African American English”; is this a work of criticism? Is it a worthwhile endeavor? Is there a beauty in illegibility, a sort of post-structuralist stance? Human beauty is exemplified in our frontal orifices; less obliquely (and less sexually), we carry our prettiness in our faces. Yet seduction often necessitates a sly ambiguity of intention and of communication, a play that resists clarity—what do we do with this?

Related aside: the work of Hank Willis Thomas, particularly “The Embrace” in Boston Common, raises many questions; with much uproar at the sculpture’s vagueness relative to its intended communication (a commemoration of the love held by Martin Luther King, Jr, and Coretta Scott King, abstracted by Thomas into a set of bronze arms hugging), I’m curious—do Black artists have an unfair burden placed on them to be figurative/literal/readable?

Moreover: is there a violence inherent to reading or perceiving something? Schrodinger’s cat isn’t dead until we open the box; is it more cruel to check if it’s alive, or to allow the little guy liminality? Frank Wilderson, noted Afro-pessimist theorist, has argued in building his criticality re: Blackness that it is “a structural position of noncommunicability,” a relegation outside of being and out of the kind of readability that would ordinarily allow people citizenship. Even the colloquial “read for filth” offers us a negative framing for perception as beauty-seeing or beauty-making (as beholders of eyes, and so on).

I don’t have the answers to any of these questions; I don’t know if they’re even resolvable… all the same: I don’t have a better framework (or at least I don’t yet).

For more reading/watching on the subject:

“Kijani”, by Yasiin Bey, proffers haunting thoughts on beauty beyond death and how desire presents danger;

“On Beauty”, a poem I love by Khalil Gibran that I just want you to read;

and this interview with Fred Moten, which alternately appreciates and reproaches art criticism for how the field observes and reads works.

P.s. Special thank-yous this go-round to CJ Felix, the aforementioned homie with whom I talked flyness, and to Stephen LaFume for having a loooong and amazing conversation with me in Nubian Square at like 10:45pm that helped me sharpen my points 🙏🏽.

P.p.s. It’s my birthday today! I’m turning 24 :)