method and style from the analog that it subsumed and which in turn processed earlier forms of media technology after its own affordances. Key moments here might be George Clinton’s Funkadelic and Lee Perry’s Black Ark. These versions of analog signal processing took pop presence and processed it into an echo or loop. Space invades the texture of the song. Distortion becomes its own instrument. “Listening becomes a field trip through a found environment.”102
Funkadelic was an alien encounter imagined through metaphor of the radio, connecting human-aliens to station WEFUNK, “home of the extraterrestrial brothers.” Its repetitive urging was to give in to the inhuman, to join the Afronauts funking up the galaxy. It was built out of tapeloops, doo-loops, mixadelics, and advertising slogans for nonexistent products. Underneath the off-pop hooks, Funkadelic altered the sensory hierarchy of the pop song. “The ass, the brain and the spine all change places … The ass stops being the behind, and moves up front to become the booty.” This was not the bodyshape proposed by pop. “Moog becomes a slithering cephalopod tugging at your hips.”103
Funkadelic accelerated and popularized sonic concepts that in part came from jazz, or more specifically what Eshun calls the jazz fission of the 1970s. This encompasses the cybernetic, space age jazz of George Russell, “a wraithscape of delocalized chimes … Russell’s magnetic mixology accelerates a discontinuum in which the future arrives from the past.” Also in this bag are the 1970s albums of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, where effects pedals become instruments in their own right. Here’s Eshun evoking the sound of Herbie Hancocks’s Hornets: “Moving through the echoplex, construction is cloned from a singular sensation into an environment that dunks you head-first in a horde of heat-seeking killer bees.”104
Effects defect from causes, detach from instruments. It’s the expansion of an era when industrial communication split sounds from sources, as R. Murray Shafer has already suggested.105 It was hard to hear at first. Take, for instance, Alice Coltrane’s controversial remixing of John Coltrane’s Living Space. It in turn might be made possible by Sun Ra’s work from the mid-1950s onward, with his alternate Black cosmology.106 For Sun Ra, to be Black is not to be figuratively the Israelite, fleeing bondage, but to actually be descended from the Egyptians, to belong to a despotic power—which rules elsewhere in the galaxy. Soul music affirms Blackness as the legacy of the suffering human. In contrast, Ra is an alien god from the future. This is not alienation but affirmation of the alien.
Sun Ra lends himself to an Afrofuturist reading, which would highlight his claim to be from Jupiter, to be the author of an alterdestiny. And in Eshun there’s a more specifically Black accelerationist reading, or perhaps hearing, or maybe sensing. It’s not an alternative to this world, but a pressing on of a tendency, where through the exclusion from the human that is Blackness an escape hatch appears in an embrace of one other thing that is also excluded: the machinic. Sun Ra’s Arkestra was for some of its existence a bit of a male monastic cult.
Accelerationism is often presented as a desire for a superseding of a merely human model of cognition, but it is still rather tied to a valuing of cognition that has particular cultural roots. Perhaps cognition is not up to speed.107 Eshun:
There’s a sense in which the nervous system is being reshaped by beats for a new kind of state, for a new kind of sensory condition. Different parts of your body are actually in different states of evolution. Your head may well be lagging quite a long way behind the rest of your body.108
Otolith II posed three questions: “Capital, as far as we know, was never alive. How did it reproduce itself? How did it replicate? Did it use human skin?”109 The operative word here is skin, implicated as it is in what Gilroy calls the crisis of raciology. Perhaps one could ask if capitalism has already superseded itself and done so first by passing through the pores of the skin of those it designates others. But one might wonder whether, if this is not capitalism, it might not be something worse. Eshun already has an aerial attuned to that possibility, filtered through the sensibility of (for example) Detroit techno, with its canny intimations of the subsuming of the street into a militarized surveillance order, from which one had best discreetly retire.
One could keep searching back through the database of Afrofuturism, beyond Eshun’s late twentieth century forays, as Louis Chude-Sokei does in The Sound of Culture.110 As it turns out, what is perhaps the founding text of Futurism is a perversely Afrofuturist one: Marinetti’s Mafarka: The Futurist, first published in 1909. It’s an exotic tale of a Muslim prince’s victory over an African army, and his desire to beget a son, part bird, part machine, who can rise up to conquer the sun.111
Or one might mention Samuel Butler’s anti-accelerationist Erewhon, the ur-text on the human as the reproductive organ for the machine. Its imaginary landscape bares the traces of Butler’s experience in New Zealand, in the wake of colonial wars against the Maori. Or, as Angela Davis notes, even though tied against their will to the plantation, even though they may never have seen one and only heard the sound in the distance, the Black spirituals early on started to imagine the getting on board the freedom train.112 The technics of the railway was already an imaginary vector out of the slave condition, a sweet chariot of iron and smoke.
It may turn out that the whole question of acceleration is tied to the question of race. Haraway usefully thinks the spatial equivalence of the non-white, the nonman, the nonhuman in relation to a certain humanist language. But thought temporally, humanism has a similar problem. Spatially, it is troubled by what is above it (the angelic) or below it (the animal).113 Temporally, it is troubled by what is prior to it (the primitive) or what supersedes it, including a great deal of race panic about being over-taken by the formerly primitive colonial or enslaved other. Particularly of that other, in its unthinking, machinelike labor, starts to look like the new machines coming to replace the human. In this regard, the rhetorical strategy of Black Accelerationism is to positively revalue what had been previously negative and racist figures. As such, and as in Viveiros de Castro, it’s a permutation on the old mythic forms made productive in a new way.
Lisa Nakamura: Digitizing Race
Lisa Nakamura is a pioneer of the study of what used to be tagged as “race in cyberspace.”114 Now that the internet is everywhere, and race and racisms proliferate on it like fungus on damp newspaper, her work deserves renewed critical attention. Her book Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet is over a decade old, but it turns out that looking perceptively at ephemeral media need not render the resulting study ephemeral at all.
Digitizing Race draws together three things. The first is the postracial project of a certain (neo)liberal politics that Bill Clinton took mainstream in the early nineties. Its central conceit was that all the state need do is provide ‘opportunities’ for everyone to become functional subjects of postindustrial labor and consumption. The particular challenges of racism were ignored.
The second is a historical transformation in the internet that began in the mid-nineties, which went from being military and scientific (with some creative subcultures on the side) to a vast commercial complex.115 This led to the waning of the early nineties internet subcultures, some of whom thought of it as a utopian or at least alternative media for identity play, virtual community, and gift economies. In A Hacker Manifesto, I was mostly interested in the last of these. Nakamura is more interested in what became of identity and community.
One theme that started to fade in internet culture (or cyber-culture in the language of the time) had to do with passing online as something other than one’s meatspace self. This led to a certain gnostic belief in the separation of online from meatspace being, as if the differences and injustices of the latter could just be left behind. But the early cyberculture adepts tended to be a somewhat fortunate few, with proximity
