Power of People

This paper is about the power of the people (in numbers and over time) to witness, document, and conjure power, thus manifesting their own communal realities that often sit in contrast to oppressive state accounts. It is about the transmission of information to help define and sustain communal identity. Conjuring is not the frivolous making of fiction but rather a participatory and collaborative communal act that takes into account lived experiences; it is attentive to the past, the present, the future, and the politics of scale. I would like to examine these ideas of scale and collective conjuring of power as applied to the notion of Black witnessing as well as the Black futures archival project Iyapo Repository.11Iyapo Repository is a resource library created by Ayodamola Okunseinde and Salome Asega and developed as part of their residency at Eyebeam, Brooklyn.Iyapo Repository is a Black archive that exists in an undefined future; it houses a collection of digital and physical artifacts created to affirm and project the future of people of African descent: 

The workshops begin with a history of the Iyapo Repository project. Participants then split into groups of archivists of the future repository, and the provided card prompts help them to uncover and document archaeological artifacts from this imagined future.

With Black witnessing, as with Iyapo Repository, we recognize the significance of collaborative and participatory praxis as foundational to the generation of knowledge. But also key is how the scale of participation plays a role in creating space for negotiation, and how the scale of time tends toward a more accurate communal account.

I recall, as a preteen, attending a county fair with my family. My siblings and I were drawn to the Jelly Bean Guessing Contest, a game where fair attendees each guess the number of jelly beans in a gallon glass jar. The game required we come within a ±10 count of the correct number of jelly beans to win the prize, a stuffed animal. I guessed too low; my brother and sister guessed too high. To our disappointment, none of us won the prize. Individual participants’ guesses generally varied by orders of magnitude. Yet, averaging multiple, slightly informed guesses over time would yield a more accurate count.

Statisticians and social scientists would no doubt see the connection between such a method of aggregating collective wisdom (understanding that knowledge within a group supersedes the knowledge of even its most intelligent individual member) and those of nineteenth-century polymath Sir Francis Galton, as described in his 1907 text “Vox Populi.”33Francis Galton, “Vox Populi,” Nature 75, no. 7 (1907): 450–51.But where Galton’s use of these methods affirms ideas of eugenics and scientific racism,44Sir Francis Galton was a proponent of eugenics. He put particular emphasis on “positive eugenics,” aimed at encouraging the physically and mentally superior members of the population to choose partners with similar traits.I would like to co-opt them to argue for the conjuring of collective power within oppressed and disenfranchised communities. 

There is power in numbers, and not just, as generally thought, with respect to physical force or the notion of majoritarian democracy, both of which can tend toward a “tyranny of the majority,” where the pursuit of the majority’s objectives may be at the expense of its minority factions. But there is also power in the “comprehension” that, by organizing, one might stimulate collective action in a community, thus creating change. By “comprehending,” I mean something beyond merely recognizing that numbers (of people) can create change. By “comprehending,” I mean a collective metacognitive process, which does not take scale as ontologically stable but instead as protean and generative, leaving open the possibility of emergence. If the effects of scale (in time and number of people) are variable, what benefit might we derive from paying attention to it in a reflexive fashion?

Let’s consider the Jelly Bean Guessing Contest as a collective challenge of conjuring.

The collective count here represents an attempt at a collective grappling with a solution for a problem (how many beans). While the solution of the correct number may not be fully reached, the collective process of deliberation still holds power. Thus of importance is not necessarily the count itself but the consensus building, negotiating, method development, relationship forming, collective sense of achievement, and integration of external feedback through, perhaps, an ethnographic lens. Also significant is the manner in which each iteration of the exercise informs the previous and future exercise, and how scale in both numbers of participants and length of time might tend toward a more accurate community consensus. All of which, I argue, constitutes “conjuring” power.

But what does counting beans have to do with any notion of empowering communities? To make the connection, we might want to change the problem. How might communities collectively come together to grapple with state-sanctioned violence? In Looking as Rebellion: The Concept of Black Witnessing, journalism professor Allissa V. Richardson notes that in 2014—in the wake of highly publicized killings of unarmed Black men, women, and children—"African Americans were dismissive of official police or media reports. They wanted video evidence that came directly from the community itself.”55Allissa V. Richardson, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 7.The African American community and activists sought to document and archive the atrocities in their own voice and as a collective. The activation of this communal power is termed “Black witnessing” by Richardson, who notes: “Black witnessing is reflexive, yet reflective. It despairs, but it is enraged too. Black witnessing is not your average gaze. Before now though, we have lumped it in with mere ‘media witnessing.’”66Richardson, Bearing Witness While Black, 5.

The difference between “Black witnessing” and “media witnessing” is not just a difference of reflexivity or reflection but also one of temporal scale. Black witnessing, in its attempts to link threads of atrocities to the past, gives power to contemporary witnessing. In doing so, collective accounts related to the murder of George Floyd may recall or be influenced by the murder of Michael Brown, and subsequently the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the murder of Emmett Till. In addition to this temporal scale, there exists, in concert, the participatory scale. That is to say, the scale in the number of witnesses enables dialogue across varying “Black public spheres.” Black public spheres are places where members of the Black community connect virtually and physically around the world. From Black Twitter to barbershops, spheres like these—regarded as critical social imaginaries—draw “energy from the vernacular practices of street talk and new music, radio shows and church voices, entrepreneurship and circulation.”77Richardson, Bearing Witness While Black, 18.Dialogue and negotiation between these spheres attempt to stabilize power,88Richardson, Bearing Witness While Black, 17.and as such the conjuring of power is possible only when a certain threshold of participants within the various “spheres” is met, all of whom draw legitimacy through an affirming temporal connection to the past. As in the jelly bean conjuring challenge, scale of both time and participants might enable a tendency toward a more accurate community comprehension.

This idea of witnessing also may be extended on the temporal scale into the future. Through what designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby coined as “speculative design,” Iyapo Repository seeks to capture the anxieties of the present and future as yet another form of collective witnessing by contemplating and prototyping conditions that “will increase the probability of more desirable futures.”99Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 6.In the same manner as how Black witnessing draws power from the past, one might consider how speculative future witnessing could conjure power and lend voice to contemporary witnessing and social issues. 

The artifacts held in the Iyapo Repository, which are created from participants’ manuscript submissions, constitute an archive of a future communal witnessing. Using the jelly bean model, we might regard the written submissions and their artifacts as the beans to be counted. The communal count is the “grappling for a solution.” Again: the final tally is not the most important aspect; rather, what is most significant is the discursive power of the artifacts to generate reflexive and reflective spaces for community witnessing and conjuring of power over time. By “reflexive,” I mean the ability of the archive to look back on itself to generate knowledge, and by “reflective,” I mean the power of the archive to reflect contemporary social justice issues.

In the spirit of creating reflexive and reflective spaces, we invite submissions of artifacts based on existing manuscripts to add to the communal Iyapo Repository archive.

We regard these potential artifact submissions as another method of collective witnessing and documenting. If each submission, similar to a bean, represents an individual account, then in the collective count, we move toward a semblance of “comprehension” of a collective Black future. Additionally, the artifact submissions represent yet another example of the power of the people to work collectively through time in conjuring power with the ultimate outcome of manifesting communal realities. It is our hope that the discourse conjured from your artifact submissions lends voice toward contemplating solutions for pressing social issues.