Archival Simultaneity: Past and Present in Arthur Jafa’s “Love is the Message, the Message is Death” (Copy)

At first glance, it would appear that Arthur Jafa’s 2017 found footage film Love is the

Message, the Message is Death does not necessarily lend itself to thinking with a

historiographical lens. The piece presents a seamless continuity between contemporary and

historical fiction and nonfiction audiovisual clips, with no regard for presenting any clear

analytical argumentation about the past. However, taking seriously the challenge of the late

Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot to what he calls “the production of history” implies a

critical approach towards the archive as a form of racialized dispossession: the silencing of

different modes of engaging with past, present, and future. Arthur Jafa’s work wrestles with such

an entanglement, disrupting the dispossessing violence of the linear archival form familiar to

historical argumentation. Instead, the piece’s formal construction allows for the looping

simultaneity of Black American social life to challenge the linearity of an archival form that

relies on the separation of past from present.

The stakes of approaching Love is the Message as an intervention into history-telling

become clearer through an engagement with Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s

extensive critique of the historiographic tradition. In Silencing the Past: Power and the

Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot critiques the “storage model” of the historical

discipline, where archives represent fixed repositories of the past to be reconstructed later

through linear historiography.

1 For Trouillot, rather than objective fixed repositories of history,

1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1995), 14.

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archives cannot be separated from a process of knowledge production that creates silences “at

four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources), the moment of fact

assembly (the making of archives), the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives), and

the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).” 2 On the

surface, Trouillot’s critique seems to echo Foucault and Derrida, whose critical interventions

focus on archives “less as a physical institution than as a system that governs what can be said

about the past.” 3 Indeed, Trouillot maintains his central investment in critiquing the authority of

historiography as the only possible method of engaging with a past riddled with violent silences.

However, Trouillot’s critique of history differs from Foucaltian and Derridean

approaches by grounding itself in the very material archival institutions reproducing historical

and contemporary anti-Black violence and dispossession—echoing some of the same concerns

that come through in Arthur Jafa’s work. Compared to Derrida and Foucault’s critique of

archives as immaterial systems of power, Trouillot is much more keenly invested in thinking

through the materiality of archives precisely as physical institutions, systems of material

production of the past and ordering its relationship with the present. More importantly, counter to

the lack of critical approaches to racial violence in much of Foucault and Derrida’s writing,

Trouillot centers the silencing of enslaved Haitian revolutionaries by an archive built upon their

ongoing racialization and dispossession. For Trouillot, the reproduction of history’s silences

comes into view precisely because of the ongoing nature of racial dispossession—because

history is the result of ongoing relationships of power. 4 The seamless relationship between past

and present that emerges in Trouillot’s critique of history echoes Love is the Message, which

2 Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 26.

3 Jaimie Baron, The Archival Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, (New

York: Routledge Press, 2014), 5-6.

4 Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, xix.

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presents an audiovisual continuity of Black social life and anti-Black violence across both past

and present.

In order to understand with greater precision the relationship between the formal qualities

of Love is the Message and archives as material institutions of power, it would be helpful to take

cues from Caroline Levine’s expansive notion of form. In Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy,

Network, Levine argues against notions of form familiar to literary theory and film studies that

take textual construction as a self-contained object for the study of form. Instead, she advocates

for “broadening our definition of form to include social arrangements.” 5 Form, for Levine,

includes any notion of organizing time, enforcing hierarchies, or any other method of “ordering,

patterning, and shaping” that exists in both texts and a broader political world. 6 More importantly

for Levine, the political work of forms, wherever they can be located, lies in their affordances:

the latent possibilities hidden within any form. 7 With this understanding of form, Love is the

Message could be read as a formal intervention against another social form existing beyond the

film: the archive as an authoritative repository of historical facts.

Love is the Message, the Message is Death is striking for what it shares with the archival

form: like archives, the film relies on oftentimes violent audiovisual “documents” that produce

silences through their embeddedness in power relations. Structured by Kanye West’s “Ultralight

Beam,” Jafa’s piece breathlessly moves between images of police violence, viral videos of Black

dance, feats of Black athletes, scenes from sci-fi films that echo anti-Black violence, historical

footage of Black radicals, and countless other popular sounds and images of Black American

social relations. Through the arrangement of these clips, Jafa maintains markers of their lives

5 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2015), 2-3.

6 Ibid, 3.

7 Ibid, 6-7.

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outside of his ordering, such as including image watermarks and juxtaposing different aspect

ratios. 8 Accounting for the dynamics of power embedded in the outside lives of each and every

one of these clips would be an exercise far beyond the scope of this paper—yet it is undeniable

that each piece of the montage contains a frame that excludes as much as it includes. The images

of police violence against Black people, for instance, reproduce anti-Black violence through the

frame of a bystander filmmaker, or from surveillance footage. Images of popular culture or films

are dictated by flows of capital in production, exhibition, and distribution. Moreover, besides

containing the inevitable silences in the production of documents, each of these clips also has a

life in digital circulation ruled by the dictates of corporate social media platforms. Though not

many of these clips exist as documentation to be used for historical evidence or argumentation,

they both contain and silence slices of Black social life structured through the relations of racial

capitalism.

However, while Jafa’s piece relies on audiovisual documents, its formal arrangement of

these documents differs from the historical form because it resists linearity and evidence,

insisting on the affective formlessness of memory. Rather than ordering its images based on the

time of production, or the historical moment represented, Jafa’s ordering of Love is the Message

seems to imply the simultaneity of past and present of anti-Black violence and persistent Black

social life. Since the clips include fictional and nonfictional elements, the piece maintains its

distance from carrying the burden of proving anti-Blackness through evidence. Beyond the

rejection of an evidence-based address, these audiovisual clips are marked by their popular social

lives in digital circulation, allowing the viewer to reflect on the memory of having first witnessed

8 This is what Baron would call the index of the archival document: markers that prove the document as

coming from another previous context of use. Baron, The Archival Effect, 10.

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these clips. Finally, the entire film loops endlessly into itself, almost ascribing an eternal quality

to these clips. None of these formal qualities follow how the archival form instrumentalizes

documents—the result is a form that disrupts an authoritative, reifying discourse of historical

archives that fix the past and present in place through linear narrative.

Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death is altogether disinterested in a

project of linear historical reconstruction of the history of Black American culture. While relying

on some of the affordances of audiovisual archival documents, the piece gestures towards the

overwhelming simultaneity of historical and contemporary Black social life under ongoing

conditions of anti-Black dispossession. Rejecting the authoritative domain of historical archives,

the film insists on a more formless, affective register, activating viewers’ memories of

witnessing these simultaneous documents. The political work of the piece lies precisely in this

affordance: allowing viewers to reckon with the absurd loop of witnessing audiovisual

documents of Black social life that contain more life and death than could ever be captured in the

authoritative domain of the archive. Perhaps the life and death spilling from these documents

resist even the authority of Arthur Jafa as the author-editor, and the art world as a broader social

form in which it is embedded.

Bibliography

Baron, Jaimie. The Archival Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of

History. New York: Routledge Press, 2014.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2015

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.

Boston: Beacon Press, 1995