right. The escape hatch the performative art (and sport) that interested Martin found is close to the queer art of failure, in that it recognizes a new volatility in its conditions of operation. It lets go of the guiderail.
The secularization of the aesthetic seems homologous with the subsumption of the value chain under control of information. The power of what I call the vectoralist class is an aesthetic power, a power over appearances, over the stocks, flows, and (more importantly) the vector via which information is managed and material production is ordered. The aesthetic—in the sense of the apprehension of information—integrated the everyday into commodification but also changed what the commodity form is. It is not just that information became a commodity but that the commodity could now take the form of information itself.
Tiziana Terranova suggests that counterhegemonic struggles are now about tactics in a turbulent flow of information. In this connection, Ngai’s identification of three operative aesthetics is useful and can be instrumentalized as styles of engagement. These are aesthetics about the subsumption of creative effort of what I called the hacker class, into the commodification of information and the informationalization of the commodity. Clearly this era of the zany, the cute, and the interesting may also pass. The Anthropocene may require a revolution in modes of perception, affect, and cognition.
But all this too may be automated. I sometimes joke with my “millennial” students and “post-millennial” kids that our last job will be to figure out how to be cute so our new artificial intelligence (AI) overlords will keep us mere humans as pets. Or perhaps they will find the weird data we throw off interesting—although we will still have to be careful not to become persons of interest. Maybe our AI overlords will evolve a posthuman language in which to LOL at our zany mammalian antics. But Ngai’s book is no joke and may well be the basis for a manual for appearing to each other, that we might feel and know and think each other, and endure.
Kodwo Eshun: Black Accelerationism
Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying,
We are hostile aliens, immune from dying. —The Spaceape
There are two bright stars of London culture whose premature deaths I still feel. One is Stephen Gordon (1970–2014), aka The Spaceape. The other is Mark Fisher (1968–2017). Both made works that to me are haunted by the nameless dread of the Anthropocene. But they were also forward slanting culture agents, whose work was constantly abrading the dead skin of the times. Mark Fisher:
Capitalism has abandoned the future because it can’t deliver it. Nevertheless, the contemporary left’s tendencies towards Canutism, its rhetoric of resistance and obstruction, collude with capital’s anti/meta-narrative that it is the only story left standing. Time to leave behind the logics of failed revolts, and to think ahead again.43
As Fisher and Gordon were both well aware, an orientation toward an imminent, immanent future is a hard thing to achieve in a culture shaped in the present out of the past, as a selective tradition. Marx: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”44 Inherited ways of writing make the present over as if it were more of the same. Perhaps music might be more attuned to the present than the past. Music too is made in the present out of past materials, but in its field of resonance one might detect unknown pleasures and feel unfathomed spaces. As Kodwo Eshun writes in More Brilliant Than the Sun: “Everything the media warns you against has already been made into tracks that drive the dance floor.”45
A word for this might be accelerationism.46 If it had a key idea, it is that it is either impossible or undesirable to resist or negate the development of the commodity economy coupled with technology. Rather, it has to be pushed harder and faster; it has to change more rather than less. It is an idea, a feeling, an orientation that might make most sense among those for whom the past was not that great anyway. And so, not surprisingly, the best text on accelerationism was also about Blackness—Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun.
It’s helpful to make a preliminary distinction here between what Aria Dean calls Blacceleration or Black Accelerationism and Afrofuturism, although the former may be a subset of the latter.47 Black Accelerationism is a willful pushing forward that includes an attempt to clear away certain habits of thought and feeling in order to be open to a future that is attempting to realize itself in the present.
Afrofuturism is a more general category in which one finds attempts to picture or narrate or conceive of Black existence on other worlds or in future times, which may or may not have an accelerationist will to push on. If Black Accelerationism is a particular temporal and spatial concept, Afrofuturism is a genre that includes both temporal and spatial concepts within the general cultural space of science fiction. That in turn might be a subset of modernism, with its characteristically nontransitive approach to time.48
The term Afrofuturism was coined by Mark Dery, drawing on suggestions in the work of Greg Tate.49 It’s become a lively site of cultural production but also scholarly research, providing a frame for thinking about the science fiction writing of African American authors such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler or more recently N. K. Jemisin. It has also become a popular trope in contemporary cultural production. The Marvel super-hero movie Black Panther (2018) is a veritable anthology of its visual figures. Afrofuturism also shows up in music videos by Beyoncé, FKA Twigs, and Janelle Monáe.50
Monáe’s video Many Moons contains one of the key figures of the genre. It shows androids performing at an auction for wealthy clients, including white, vampiric plutocrats and a Black military-dictator type. The androids are all Black and are indeed all Monáe herself. The android becomes the reversal, and yet also the equivalent, of the slave. The slave was a human treated as a nonperson and forced to work like a machine; the android is an inhuman treated as a nonperson but forced to work like a human.
These figures have a deep past. But first, I want to explore one of their futures or a related future. After writing More Brilliant Than the Sun, Eshun co-founded the Otolith Group with Anjalika Sagar. The first three films they made together, Otolith parts I, II, and III, offer a different “future” and a cultural space in which to think of Black Accelerationism.51
Otolith is in the genre of documentary fiction or essay film, descended from the work of Chris Marker and Harun Farocki. The conceit involves a future character who is a descendent of present-day Otolith co-founder Anjalika Sagar, who lives in orbit around our planet and who is working through the archives of her own family.
Otolith links the microgravity environment to planetary crisis, where orbital or agravic space is a heterotopia inviting heightened awareness of disorientation.52 “Gravity locates the human species.”53 This is a speculative future in which the species bifurcates, those in microgravity function with a modified otolith, that part of the inner ear that senses the tilting of the body. In the terms of the revived structural analysis of myth offered by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, this is a myth about the end of both the human and the world.
Sagar’s imaginary future descendant looks back, through her own ancestors, to the grand social projects of the twentieth century: Indian and Soviet state socialism, the international socialist women’s movement, and (as in Anna Tsing) the Non-Aligned Movement. One of Sagar’s ancestors had actually met Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.54
The last part of Otolith meditates on an unmade film by the great Satjayit Ray, The Alien.55 Its central conceit, of an alien lost on earth who is discovered by children, strangely enough turned up later in the Hollywood film ET. Otolith speculates on whether Hindu polytheism
