Sensoria. Маккензи Уорк

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СКАЧАТЬ books that retell the stories of the Gods are indeed something like science fiction and call for a rethinking of the genre.

      Otolith also gestures toward American science fiction writer Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967), which imagines a quite different future than that of Otolith but that similarly tries to decenter imaginative possibility.⁵⁶ In this book, the only survivors of a vanished earth are Hindu. Their high-tech society is also highly stratified. Its rulers have God-like powers and the technology to “reincarnate.” The central character, described in the book as an “accelerationist,” challenges this class-bound order.

      During the Cold War, while much of American literature was basically suburban white boys talking about their dicks, science fiction did a lot of the real cultural work.⁵⁷ Zelazny’s book is not a bad example of how far American science fiction could get in imagining a non-western world that was neither to be demonized nor idealized and whose agents of change were internal to it. Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler went even further in using worldbuilding as a literary device for asking about how concepts like race and gender, or even the human, come to be in the first place.⁵⁸ In science fiction, unlike in literary fiction, worldbuilding has to at least be plausible.

      Afrofuturism is a landscape of cultural invention that we can put in the context of a plural universe of imagined future times and other spaces, which draw on the raw material of many kinds of historical experience and cultural raw material. And just as Afrofuturism functions as a subset of science fiction modernity, there might also be many kinds of accelerationism. The posthuman ends up being more than one thing if one can get one’s head around currently existing humans as being more than one thing.⁵⁹ The orbital posthuman of Otolith might in many ways repeat a figure from that little-known accelerationist classic, JD Bernal’s The World, The Flesh and the Spirit.⁶⁰ But it does so inflected by particular cultural histories.

      Which brings me to More Brilliant Than the Sun. It is a text whose strategies include putting pressure on language through neologisms and portmanteau constructs, in order to let the future into the present.⁶¹ Eshun sets himself against modes of writing about Black music that are designed to resist hearing anything new. “The future is a much better guide to the present than the past.” Thus, “the rhythmachine is locked in a retarded innocence.” You are not supposed to analyze the groove, or find a language for it. Music writing becomes a futureshock absorber: “You reserve your nausea for the timeless classic.” Eshun’s interest is rather in “Unidentified Audio Objects.”⁶²

      We no longer have roots, we have aerials. Eshun is resistant to that writing that wants the authentic and seeks for it in music, that wants to locate it in organic community, whether in the Mississippi Delta for the blues or the burning Bronx for hip-hop.⁶³ He is resistant to the validating figure of “the street” as the mythical social or public place where the real is born.

      From the Net to arcade simulations games, civil society is all just one giant research-and-development wing of the military. The military industrial complex has advanced decades ahead of civil society, becoming a lethal military entertainment complex, reprograming predatory virtual futures. Far from being a generative source for popculture, as Trad media still quaintly insists, the street is now the playground in which low-end developments of military technology are unleashed, to mutate themselves.⁶⁴

      As Black Lives Matter has so consistently confirmed.⁶⁵

      For Eshun, disco is “audibly where the 21st century begins,”⁶⁶ even if most genealogies of pop delete its intimations of the sonic diaspora of Afrofuturism. Like Paul Gilroy, Eshun thinks of Black culture as diasporic rather than national, but unlike Gilroy, he is not interested in a critical negation of the limits of humanism in the name of a more expansive one.⁶⁷ His Black culture “alienates itself from the human; it arrives from the future.”⁶⁸ It refuses the human as a central category. If the human is not a given, then neither can there be a Black essence. There’s no “keeping it real” in this book. The writer’s job is to be a sensor rather than a censor.

      The field of study here is not so much music itself as the ambiences music co-generates with spaces, sound systems, and bodies. It’s not an aesthetics of music so much as what the late Randy Martin would have recognized as a kinaesthetics. One could even see it as a branch of psychogeography, but not of walking—rather, of dancing.⁶⁹

      The dance does not reveal some aspect of the human, but rather has the capacity to make the human something else. Eshun follows Lyotard in extending Nietzsche’s insistence that the human does not want the truth. Here, the human craves the inauthentic and the artificial.⁷⁰ This is the basis of a sonic accelerationism: the objective is to encourage machine-made music’s “despotic drive” to subsume both its own past and the presence of the human body.⁷¹

      Black Accelerationism, operating mostly but not exclusively through music, aims “to design, manufacture, fabricate, synthesize, cut, paste and edit a so-called artificial discontinuum for the futurerhythmachine.”⁷² As Hiroki Azuma maintains, machines don’t alienate people.⁷³ They can make you feel more intensely. They enable a hyperembodiment rather than disembodiment.

      Let’s work backward through the sonic material Eshun feels his way through. What’s not to like about late nineties Detroit techno?⁷⁴ Here we might start with what for Eshun was one of the end points. Drexciya is an unidentifiable sonic object that comes with its own Afrofuturist myth. The Drexciyans navigate the depths of the Black Atlantic. They are a webbed mutant marine subspecies descended from pregnant slaves who were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage, as if they had escaped all of slavery’s scenes of subjection.⁷⁵

      Drexciya use electronic sound and beats to replay the alien abduction of slavery as sonic fiction, or as what Sun Ra called an alterdestiny.⁷⁶ As Lisa Nakamura shows, certain popular Afrofuturist material like the Matrix movies make the Black or the African the more authentically human and rooted.⁷⁷ What appeals to Eshun is the opposite claim: that Blackness can accelerate faster away from the human. It’s an embrace rather than a refutation of the slave-machine figure, pressing it into service in pressing on.

      There was a time when avant-garde music was beatless. Drum and bass went in the opposite direction: “drumsticks become knitting needles hitting electrified bedsprings at 180 bpm.” The sensual topology offered by 4hero or A Guy Called Gerald use drum machines not to mimic the human drummer but replace it, to create abstract sonic environments that call the body into machinic patterns of movement. “Abstract doesn’t mean rarified or detached but the opposite: the body stuttering on the edge of a future sound, teetering on the brink of new speech.”⁷⁸

      Rhythm becomes the lead instrument, as on A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology:

      dappling the ears with micro-discrepancies … When polyrhythm phase-shifts into hyper-rhythm, it becomes unaccountable, compounded, confounding. It scrambles the sensorium, adapts the human into a “distributed being” strung out across the webbed spider-nets and computational jungles of the digital diaspora.⁷⁹

      One could say more about how quite particular musical technologies program in advance a kind of phase-space of possible sonic landscapes. The human sound-maker is then not the author but rather the output of the machine itself. For Eshun this is a way to positively value the figure of Blackness as close to the machinelike and remote from the fully “human.” Perhaps an insistence on Blackness as fully human rather overvalues the human. And if whiteness is supposedly most close to the human, then there’s every reason to think less of the human as a category in the first place. This rhetorical move is central to Black Accelerationism. The coupling of Blackness with the machinic is what is to be valued and accelerated, as an overcoming СКАЧАТЬ