Well, we will continue the session of this morning dedicated to the three artists that have proposed a workshop for the day-to-day and now I will present you now a Kotjo Esun. Kotjo Esun is an artist and teórico that reside in London and as many of you know, is co-founder of the Otolit Group the Otolit Group. The Otolit Group has been exposed in many international expositions and also in individual expositions, obviously, and I want to mention some of the most recent that have happened in Casco, Oficina of Art and Design and Teoría, but also in the Museum of Serralbes
and Bergen Kunsthalle, among others. To focus more on Kotjo, I want to mention that this writer is also author of numerous texts and books, among which he wrote the book Dan Graham Rock My Religion in 2012 and also the book More Brilliant Than A Sun Adventures in Sonic Fiction written in 1998. He also worked as editor, as co-editor, in particular, on the number of the third text of the number 108 dedicated to the militant image. The title of that number was The Militant Image as Cine Geography.
and also to mention that apart from her practice artistic and her practice as a writer, she is also a teacher and has a faculty in the department of visual culture of Goldsmith College and also works at these moments as a guest researcher in the Master's program of Art and Diseases of Ginebra. Finally, the title of the conference is the final scene of Hiena's, a parenthetical corporation. With this, I'll leave it with him. Thank you very much, Cocho. Thank you very much, Lera. Everybody hear me? Okay, good. Can everybody hear me now?
Okay. Well, of course I'd like to thank Lera for this invitation. And I'd like to thank all of the team here in Mosteles, Alvarado, Pablo, all the people who've put up with many months of emails and prevarication. I'd like to thank all of you for coming out on a boiling hot afternoon to hear me talk. I've enjoyed many of the talks of the last few days. I've learned a lot. I was last here, I think, seven years ago, and I have many good memories of that time. So it's been a pleasure to be here. So I'm going to give a talk, which I've given a number of times, but I adapted each time.
And it's a work in progress. So it's very much scaffolding towards a future book, which examines the formulation of what over the last 20 years or so has been called Afrofuturism, which is the kind of cultural movement that formed in the US and the UK around questions of mutation, synthesis, alienation, abstraction, extraterritoriality,
the relations between the non-human, the post-human and the inhuman as they relate to questions of becoming in relation to the questions of African diasporicity, the continent and the relation to life after slavery and the making of the African subject under conditions of racial capitalism. So it's a broad movement, but this talk comes out of a new project which returns to the project of Afrofuturism, but rethinks it. So I'm going to just start.
So in the last decade, the last 10 years or so, the artists and critics situated within the continent have pointed out that the Afro in Afrofuturism takes little or no account of the invention of African futures. so that the Afrofuturism that was formulated during the 1990s in the UK, the US, the Caribbean, Europe is a project really developed by and for Afrodiasporic practitioners. So this broad project I'm going to orientate around two readings of a particular film called Hyenas from 1992.
too. And hyenas helps me to formulate a specific argument, which is that in many parts of the continent, in Nairobi, in Johannesburg, in Cape Town, in Lagos, in Kinshasa, many critics, many artists now argue that Afrofuturism is Americocentric. It's America-centered. It's anglo-centric it's too british and this is inscribed within its founding moment in the early 90s so there is a an argument should new critics and theorists and artists should they redirect afrofuturism towards taking account of the cultural production of african futures that's to say the
invention of literature, of music, of theory that is produced within the continent or should they replace the name altogether and come up with a new term that is capable of grasping the scale and the scope of futurities that are being imagined and invented in the continent now in the present of a planet whose future extinction can be forecast with ever greater certainty. So there is a demand if you travel to these different cities and you meet artists and theorists and critics in Kinshasa, in Lagos, in Cape Town, in Johannesburg, there is a desire
for the new. There is a common task of inventing African futures, and this confronts contemporary artists and theorists as a present and urgent task. And this urgency, which is articulated in literature, in music, in video, in animation, in virtual reality, more or less concedes that there have been no African futurisms, no African science fictions, no African speculations, no African inventions to speak of until now. So there is a painful awareness of this gap between what has happened in America and Britain, the work around Asan Ra, the work around Lee Perry,
the work around George Clinton, around the novels of Samuel R. Delaney, the novels of Octavia Butler, There is a painful awareness that all of the cultural practice and cultural theory, artistic innovation that has taken place in the diaspora exists in a kind of gap between the diaspora and the continent. As if the diaspora is far ahead and practitioners in the continent have to catch up. And this feeling of having to catch up gives the generational present an urgency. but it also inscribes a belatedness into cultural practices. It is as if the current generation has overlooked the cultural practices that have already been produced inside and outside
of the continent. It is as if they are deaf and mute and blind to the range of continental fictions, fabulations forms and forces that have been invented and imagined and intervened so the recent talks I've been giving under the name of the Continental Futures series is not so much to invent a new term African futures or African science fictions but it is to turn towards works that have been overlooked works that have been under theorized works that have been unacknowledged. It is to examine projects that were already futuristic before Afrofuturism even
had a name, before Afrofuturism was even formulated in 1993 by the American critic Mark Derry, but of course going much further, in fact, throughout the 20th century. So the idea is that certain projects, certain practices, certain writings and musics have been occluded and overshadowed by Afrofuturism. And in the present, we can return to these moments and revisit them in a new way. And so it is this imperative to return to certain overlooked art forms that allows us to revisit this film Hyenas.
Hyenas, which was directed by the Senegalese film director, Jibril Diop Mambeti, in 1992. It was his second and final film. He died in 1998. so revisiting Hyenas which is what I will do today and in fact revisiting its final scene means to return to Hyenas which we can understand as a cinema of demoralisation so in 1992 Hyenas was both celebrated and criticised for its aesthetic disenchantment of community and of morality, that were understood to be specific to the continent.
But what if we understand hyenas' aesthetic of disenchantment to be directed not only to the present of 1992, but also to be aimed at the future, to be aimed at what community and morality would become? so can hyenas be understood not only as a satire on greed but as a work that seeks to anticipate in order to undermine the horizon of expectations that would look forward to the next decade of the continent can we see hyenas as a work that prefiguratively disenchants
the exuberance of the economic forecasts for the continent of Africa that were projected for the second decade of the 21st century. From our point in 2016, we can look back at Hyena's forward-looking disillusionment of a future in which Africa is supposed to be rising, a future that is enacted in the final scene of hyenas, a future that anticipates the present. So in order to sketch these out in more detail, can we play the first clip of hyenas? Thank you. So it's about eight minutes.
I have a lot of people who are not here. I have a lot of people who are not here. I have a lot of people who are not here. I have a lot of people who are not here. The people who are not here are the people who are not here. The people who are not here are the people who are here. They are the people who are here.
They are the people who are here. They are the people who are here. They are the people who are here. They are the people who are here. How many million? How many million? How many million? How many? How many? How many? How many? How many? How many? How many? What do you want? How are you?
How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? I am... I am... I have been here for a while. I have been here for a while. I have been here for a while. I have been here for a while. Why are you here? Why are you here?
I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to say that I have to I am. I am. I am. I am.
I am. I am. I am. I have to go to the village of the village. I have to go to the village of the village. What are you doing? Where are you? I'm going to go. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 1945.
I was born in Koloban. I was born in Ramatou. I was born in Ramatou. I was born in Ramatou. I was born in Ramatou. I was born in Ramatou. What are you doing? What are you doing to the tribunal? We are doing it. We are doing it. We are doing it. What are you doing to the tribunal? What are you doing to the tribunal? What are you doing to the tribunal? What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing to the tribunal? You're deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf.
I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm deaf. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die.
What? I've got a million people. Why are you doing this? I'm not going to fail. Ramatou, I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die.
I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die. I have no idea what to do. I have no idea what to do. I have no idea what to do. I have no idea what to do. I have no idea what to do. I have no idea what to do. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Okay, so if you go to the website of California Newsreel, who are the company that released hyenas in the USA, they give a brief description of hyenas, which gives some more details for the key court scene we've just seen. So the website says, years ago, when Jibril Diop Mambeti was living in the port district of Dakar, a beautiful prostitute would descend from high society each Friday night to treat the poor of the quarter to a lavish meal. They named her Lingair, which means
unique queen in Wolof, the main language in Senegal that everybody speaks in this film, and Ramatu, which means the red bird of the dead in mythology of ancient Egypt. And suddenly one Friday, this woman, this prostitute was not there. She did not appear. And at that point, Mambeti decided to invent a history for her, to invent a fictional history. He imagined her to be the sole survivor of an outcast family that was slaughtered by a superstitious village which still lived in fear of her return. Mambetti only discovered an ending for his fiction years later when he saw Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn in the film version of Friedrich Durenmatt's play De Besuch de Altendama, or The Visit of the Old Woman.
It's a play from 1955, which was translated into English in 1962, and was made into a Hollywood film in 1964 called The Visit. So in this reclusive Swiss master's bitter tale of a wealthy, aged prostitute's vengeance against the man who betrayed her, Mambeti recognised the fate of Lingair Ramutu, and in appreciation he dedicated his African adaptation to the great Friedrich. That's how the film ends, with this dedication to the great Friedrich. So in Mambeti's version of this 1955 play and this 1964 film, Lingair Ramatou was a beautiful and spirited but poor young woman from the sleepy village of Colaban, who fell in love with a young man called Draman Dramair.
And when she became pregnant with his child, he denied paternity and bribed two men to say they had slept with her so he could marry a wealthy wife. Driven from the village, her ideals shattered. Lingair was forced into prostitution and has now become the richest woman in the world, as rich as the World Bank. so hyenas depicts as we can see in this clip the we see the beginnings of a gradual process by which the impoverished townspeople they're not villagers they're townspeople of colaban succumb incrementally and inevitably to the promise of wealth the promise of 100 000 million
dollars or euros or francs. The promise of wealth that is offered by Lingair Ramatu and the future of unimaginable wealth offered by Lingair Ramatu in exchange for the sentence of death that is visited upon the grocer Draman Dromer is staged as the gradual victory of the sovereignty of money, over morality, and self-determination. So Hyenas appears to us as a fable, a fable of female retribution visited upon a former lover whose historical betrayal and perjury forces her to leave the town of Colaban that sided with patriarchy against justice.
so the choice that Ramatu presents to the people of Colaban the choice that we just saw and the decision made by the town turns upon the town's capacity for sacrifice the sacrifice through expulsion which is recounted and re-narrated by Ramatu in the clip and by the chief justice who is played by Mambeti himself. So Mambeti, the director, plays the chief justice in The Black. So it is the townspeople's capacity for sacrificing, for scapegoating Ramatu, which is ensnared
by her and redirected against the grocer, against Dramea, in the name of his past injustice against her, which now blocks the path to a new future of wealth. So the town of Colaban exemplifies the corruption of the neo-colony. The historical gendering of the law is channeled towards the future of world capitalism that is personified in the malevolent sovereignty of Lingairamatu. And the universality of this narrative, according to the critic Kobna Mercer, resides not in the translation into an African context of a European story that is originally set in a Swiss village,
but in the way Mambeti observes the human capacity for violence when shared responsibility is instead polarized onto the scapegoat within the logic of retributive justice. And this reading clearly makes a lot of sense. It's not that this reading is incorrect or mistaken. it's more the case that arriving at such an understanding of the fatality and the futurity of hyenas as a film fable entails reading for and imposing a transparency that is not in the final scene is not on close inspection evident or visible so in order to do that in
In order to understand this reading of the final scene and of this question of fatality and futurity, maybe we could dim the lights once more and then we could play the second clip. Thank you. Which is about nine minutes. Thank you.
I am the only one who is here. I am the only one who is here. I am the only one who is here. I am the only one who is here. I am the only one who is here. I am the only one who is here. I am the only one who is here. If you are a man, you are a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who
I am not sure how to do this. I am not sure how to do this. I am not sure how to do this. I am not sure how to do this. I am not sure how to do this. I am a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a man who is a
The blighted landscape of the desert. Outside the town of Colaban, in the desert of the political, the town's men walk in line across the mountain's edge. In the distance stands the chief justice. On the promontory, the flat rock, stands Lingair Ramatu. The male town's men, the male town's people of Colaban, gather to put Draman to death, to sacrifice him. They wear black wigs, powdered faces. They gather round Draman. They repeat words, not for the money, not for the money. Their muttering increases in volume. They press around Draman. The sound of the wind increases in volume. In the distance, the ocean. They
walk away leaving a fabric. Droman's coat, which nobody touches. A bulldozer pushes red earth over the scene. The sound of an aeroplane appears. Above the horizon, the skyline of a central business district. The earth reveals the tracks of bulldozers. An anonymous man, a hunter, stands and stares at the fabric. The discarded remnant of Draman's jacket marks the ground as sacred, sacred in the sense that it is set apart from common use, sacred as in Saka. So on the website of the California newsreel, this site which acts as a kind of
conventional and commonsensical reading of the film, this final scene, the scene we just saw, is described as follows. In the film's climax, the townspeople literally consume Draman, leaving only his clothes behind like hyenas. So according to this interpretation, the sentence of death visited upon the grocer, Draman Dramare, is carried out in a ritual of collective consumption, a ritual of collective cannibalism. In a conversation with the critic Joan Rodenbeck, published in October magazine, October Journal in summer 2010, the respected New York University-based critic,
the Malian critic Manti Diwara, agrees with this reading. He says that Ramatu, quote, just sits down and waits. Rodenbeck replies, yes, she waits them out. And then Diora says, it happened slowly. She doesn't get into criticism of anybody. But look, they literally ate the guy. He disappeared. And Rodenbeck agrees, ate the guy. So according to this interpretation, the final scene of hyenas is a ceremony of ingestion and digestion. In a brilliant recent essay published in Efflux called Neoliberalism and the New Afro-Pessimism, Mambeti's Hyenas, the Seattle-based scriptwriter and critic Charles Mudady
interprets the final scene of hyenas as a communal killing, a killing whose egalitarian ethos can be associated by ecologists and anthropologists with the formation of what could be called hunter-gatherer societies. So according to Mededi in his interpretation of this final scene, the stark conclusion of hyenas is that the mechanism of communal killing of the egalitarian ethos has effectively been captured by neoliberalism. The mechanism of communal killing that supports the egalitarian ethos can be argued to be the mechanism by which human morality was spawned and shaped. He says, it is much, much older than
democracy and much more about the animal origins of our humanity. So according to this interpretation, what we see in the final scene is a ritual of communal killing, which is nothing less than the depiction of the anthropological origin of morality in the process of being captured by neoliberalism. The final scene of Hyenas then depicts the death of human morality qua morality, the death of morality as such. Dramandre Mare, the grocer of Colaban, therefore, quote, dies in the poisoned pool of human morality. His death is also the death of what made us human
in the first place. Our morality, which was itself developed to keep tyrannical behavior in check for the survival of the community. And that's the quote by Charles Mudedi. So these three interpretations, by Mudedi, by Mantia Dewara in conversation with Joan Rodenbeck, and by this distribution company, this website, all of these reach a consensus on the final scene. It is a scene of consumption and it is a scene of cannibalism. It is a scene in which the townspeople sentence Draman and they repeat their sentence. But we could say that what they do obscures what they say.
That is, their bodies obstruct the viewer, the spectator, from seeing what it is they actually do. the townspeople sacrifice the grocer in the name of what they call justice but there is no sacrifice there is no murder there is no putting to death what there is is the presupposition of sacrifice by us what there is is the inference of murder the presupposition of ingestion the scene of putting to death as we saw is occluded and by preventing the viewer from occupying a point of view from which to see what happens what we do see is that justice is not seen
to be done what we see is that a ritual of sanctioned murder if that's what it is is mystified what we see is an occluded ceremony of hidden justice so this final scene in hyenas can be understood not as a murder not as a sacrifice not as cannibalism but more precisely as an act of occluded incorporation by a corporate personhood a corporate body whose opacity does not thwart transparency or universality as Edouard Glisson proposed,
but instead acts as the fatal precondition for integration into the political sequence of global capitalism. In the Poetics of Relation, Edouard Glisson argued that the right to opacity thwarts the transparency of power and frustrates the right to difference that presupposes transparency. Opacity is a singularity. For Glissant, it is an ontological capacity. But it is not clear, precisely clarity, it is not clear whether Opacity then, in 1991, 1992, or now in 2016, operates only as a counter power to the transparency of power. It could be said that
opacity is a predicate that is capable of being mobilized on the side of power as much as it is a tactic that can be mobilized against power. Today power reserves the right to opacity for itself and imposes transparency upon its subjects. The final scene of Hyenas could be understood as a performance of the sacrificial logic of structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s, as a dramatization of the cuts demanded by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in return for loans, as a cinematic evocation of the rituals of murder that founded neoliberalism in Chile, in Russia, in Chile, in America, in UK, as a fable of the
magical practices of market fundamentalism, as an allegory of the magical thinking that flourishes in the age of market fundamentalism. So the final scene does not exactly reveal murder, nor does it reveal sacrifice, nor does it reveal ingestion. What it dramatizes is incorporation. The town's men incorporate Draman, the grocer. They become an incorporated body, and this incorporated body serves to distribute responsibility for its actions. Everybody and nobody is responsible for disincorporating Draman. At the same time, this incorporated body becomes a person with rights.
The final scene of hyenas, then, could be understood as performing the practice of becoming a corporation, a corporation that, according to the memorandum of articles in commercial law, cannot be killed. The town's men become immortal through an act of incorporation. And what you hear in this scene are the sinister sounds of a corporate muttering. And these voices that speak and mutter to themselves cannot be attributed to any one specific person. It is a collective, aggregate vocalising. Could this be the sound of a corporation coming into existence?
Could these vocalizations be the sounds of the townsmen of Colaban taking upon themselves the role of a corporate body? What does incorporation sound like anyway? If a corporation could speak, what would it sound like? What would it say? What would it dream of as it institutes itself through an act of self-sanctioned violence? The townsmen enclose Draman. They circle him. They surround him. They bracket him. They are a human bracket. The scene takes place between parentheses, between brackets. The scene is enclosed.
the final scene can be seen as a parenthetical scene of incorporation and as the philosopher Gabriel Catrin argued very helpfully when I presented this paper in the Performing Arts Forum in St. Urm he seized on this notion of bracketing and said that we can understand bracketing in a philosophical sense as a term that Edmund Husserl uses to describe the notion of the phenomenological epoch. The epoch is the generalized suspension of judgments by which the field of experience manifests itself in its pure phenomenological
givenness. The question is, can this suspension of judgment, which is a technical question inside of philosophy, can it be speculatively extended beyond its phenomenological precondition to the cinematic suspension of Lingair Ramatou's death sentence? and what this implies if we follow Katrin's line of thought is that the accomplishment of the disincorporation or the murder of Dramand Dramare a disincorporation that we cannot help but interpret as a murder what this implies is that this accomplishment takes place
in and through the paradox, the paradoxical form of the suspension of Ramatou's death sentence. So Hyenas literally brackets the accomplishment of the sentence of death, which is to say that it is not possible to know what exactly happens in the final scene of Hyenas, to force a resolution of the inherent ambiguity of this final scene is to miss the point of the final scene. The inscription of this ambiguity can be understood as the only way to withdraw from the dilemma that is being proposed. Either the townspeople of Colaban
accept Linger Ramatu's offer of money in exchange for the death of Draman Dramere, or they refuse her offer. if the people of Colaban accept or refuse Ramatu's offer of money then they would already be accepting the terms of an externally imposed dilemma and the three critical interpretations that I read and which you can read everywhere in the 25 years since hyenas emerged the critical interpretations are really quite clear on this. The people of Colaban accepted Lingair Ramatu's offer and they put Draman Dramair to death.
But the stubborn fact is that there is a blind spot at the scene. There is a black hole at the scene of incorporation and disincorporation. or rather the blind spot takes the form of an occluded incorporation. There is a topological anomaly that is inscribed at the heart of the historical process that is being launched in this final scene. So instead of seeing this scene in Charles Mudady's sense as an archaic practice which is captured by neoliberalism, could we say rather that the inscription of ambiguity at the
heart of the final scene opens a zone of inherent uncertainty at the heart of the historical sequence of capitalist development that is being instituted in this scene, which is to say Dramandramare is Schrodinger's cat and as Schrodinger's cat he is neither dead nor alive and it is this uncertainty that diagonalizes the binary dilemma imposed by Lingare Ramatu that is to say it is this uncertainty that draws a diagonal between the dilemma of accepting or refusing the offer imposed by Lingair Ramatu. The forthcoming historical sequence is inherently
ungrounded by the accomplishment of the sentence in the form of a suspended bracketing, which is why I liked John McHale's presentation. He accomplished the sentence imposed upon him by suspending it. Nobody knows how or when the hidden potentialities of this zone of uncertainty will explode or unfold. What we do know is Droman's rumpled coat and the wind and the blasted ground. Where does Droman's body go to? Does it become music? This performance of corporate incorporation produces a disincorporation whose cause and whose effect remains opaque.
opaque. It forecasts a future in which incorporation cloaks its causes and shields its effects. What can be seen in the final scene of Hyenas is the enactment of a shell. The town's men form themselves into a shell corporation, a corporation without active business operations or significant assets, a corporation that disguises or deflects business ownership from law enforcement or the public. The townspeople enact the collective figure of a shell corporation that exists as an account, that counts itself as an account of no account, that counts itself as a legally
incorporated empty personhood, a shell corporation embedded in the desert of the political, in an extraterritorial jurisdiction. In the distant horizon can be seen a shining city and this magical urbanism, as the urban geographer Mike Davis calls it, emerges all at once in a scene of accelerated development. At the very end of the film, we suddenly see the shining city. We hear the drum machines that beat out a defiant and desolate synthetic tattoo that mixes into the roar of an aeroplane that travels across the stereo field. A bulldozer reverses at the edge of the horizon,
beyond the scored mud and the single baobab tree and aeroplane lands. Africa is rising. Africa has risen. The parenthetical disincorporation of drama and drama is the prerequisite and precondition for a projected future in which Africa is rising throughout the first decade of the 21st century, a central business district has appeared on the horizon, a horizon that envisages an era in which Africa will rise, at a time in 1992 when the dismal science of development economics forecast a continental failure. In December 3rd, 2011, The Economist
magazine announces on its front cover that Africa is rising, the hopeful continent. The Economist declares that, quote, after decades of slow growth, Africa has a real chance to follow in the footsteps of Asia. Over the past decade, six of the world's 10 fastest growing countries were African. In eight of the past 10 years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan, even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere's slowdown, the International Monetary Fund expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia. So the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% in 2011 and nearly 6% in 2012.
And this future that is forecast by The Economist, that was forecast by The Economist, is followed by the forecast of Time magazine in 2012, whose front cover read, Africa Rising. In October 2013, the Harvard Business Review front cover reads, Africa's time is now. so from 1992 hyenas looks forward to the horizon of expectation announced in 2011 2012 and 2013 a horizon of expectation for the economic future of the continent what the final scene of hyenas envisions is the fatal precondition for the acceleration of
economic development. It is a futurism that imagines the ethical and political costs of the continental futures forecast by a development complex that operates inside and outside the continent. In 2016, the forecast as a chronopolitical practice can be distinguished from and contrasted with the chronopolitical practice of prediction. According to Elena Esposito in her recent lecture, Blindness and Power in Algorithmic Prediction, the forecast and the prediction each presuppose
different operations and each create different futures. Esposito asks the following question. How do we face the future? We limited human beings with limited access to data and limited ability to process data. We face the future only at best with forecasts, which can be more or less precise, but which are always affected by our unavoidable uncertainty. we can do this using statistical procedures using probability calculus and sampling and generalizing from a sample which is an inevitably limited part of a statistical universe we make
aggregate forecasts on a macroscopic level starting from a sample at a lower level that's how we predict how the economy will fare, how a political party will fare on the next election. So that's how The Economist and Time magazine and Harvard Business Review come up with their forecasts. But Esposito says that big data does not have this limitation. Algorithms can access all data about a phenomenon. they can access an entire statistical universe they do not need sampling they do not need statistical procedures that's why they make predictions not forecasts they can process
the universe they can process all data about this universe and in this universe they look for patterns that the computer can abstract from this so-called ocean of data. And that is something that is completely new in our world. So Esposito distinguishes between two kinds of futures, the present future and the future present. Algorithms predict the present future based on total statistical patterns. Statistical samples, on the other hand, provide the basis for forecasts that generate what she calls future presence. The present future of algorithmic prediction
is characterized by the forward projection of today's uncertainty. by contrast the future present of the forecast is an open future that produces a present that is different from today the future that hyenas anticipates is the future present of the statistical forecast of 2011 2012 and 2013 hyenas forecasts the models and graphs and horizons that time magazine, The Economist, and the Harvard Business Review use to forecast their futures. The anticipatory power of dramatization of the final scene of hyenas then seems to reach
its limit when we reach the present future of algorithmic prediction. the computational powers of pattern and correlation surely dwarf the computational limitations of the economic forecast but Elena Esposito adds one more critical factor the present future of algorithmic prediction can be described as blind because the present future cannot include itself. Algorithms cannot predict futures that take account of their own predictions, and this blindness is a limit that is internal to and constitutive of big data.
There is a blind spot at the scene of incorporation. There is a blind spot at the scene of disincorporation in hyenas. Does the blind spot in hyenas unground the forthcoming historical process of algorithmic prediction, whose statistical blindness is operative now? Does the inherent uncertainty of the fate of Draman Dramere anticipate the uncertainty at the heart of algorithmic prediction? Thank you. Of course, I have no sense of time whatsoever.
So I don't know how much time we have left for thoughts or questions or comments or just responses of any kind. But I'll be happy to respond to anything anybody has to say. Thank you.
The translators are only until 2 o'clock in the afternoon, so what we're going to do is to go directly to Sylvia and Graham and to concentrate the questions to Cod, you and Sylvia together and we can improvise with the translation. So what I'm saying is that the translators are just staying until 2, so what we are going to do is now go directly into Sylvia's and Graham's presentation and then… Yes, yes, with a little pause. Yes, yes, yes, definitely. Yes, so how, yes, yes, so how can we do, because it's this problem, yeah.
Okay. Unlike the others, we haven't written a text. So, we disobeyed. We would ask a little help for the translators, but it's going to be very short. And then we are going to let Sinema speak in our place, and we don't need the collaboration. of the translation. Okay, so then... Okay, so we then... Okay, great. Great. Okay, thank you, Sylvia. I don't know if... I don't know if...
I'll start... There are a lot of things. Well, thanks. Wow, that was really amazing. as an analysis of this film and of this sequence. I think when I was watching the sequence, from the critiques that you were talking about, who had, in a sense, given this, I must say that it never entered my mind that this scene was about cannibalism. In a sense, what transpired for me was the question of what Goddard would say, sur le cinema, which is the fact that the last scene is a scene also of disappearance in a way.
And so this question of the Schrodinger's cat and the inherent placing in suspension. But then there's also another really interesting thing which happens in the switch between the long shot and the short and the close-up, which is that from a long shot it looks like some kind of pool that they are gradually drifting away from. I couldn't figure out what it was. You can call this blind spot, but it has this kind of transformational form and force, this point of the screen that becomes several different things as you're watching it.
You're trying to work out what it is finally as it reveals this point. One of the things that we can say is like magic. It's something like magic, in a way, that returns to the very early relation between cinema and magic at its very beginning. The story of disappearances, the way that cinema imagines disappearances, that people can just disappear like that into wherever. I would say that the fate of this character is also a certain agency simply of him as a character of pure cinema, which is this ability to suddenly just do a vanishing act. Which maybe, I don't know, it's just another side
of the thing which, in a sense, avoids the question of incorporation. There is an element which isn't fundamentally neither, it's not incorporated and it's not disincorporated by the group, by the community, but it is a disappearance or a disincorporation whose actual agent can't be located. It's the disappearance of its own agency, as it were. It's the predicate of disappearance without the subject of disappearance. It's a predicate separated from its subject. Yeah, that makes total sense.
the return to that cinema as a disappearing act that moment in which cinema and magic cine magic the indivisibility of that moment I had an earlier version in which I said he disappears between shots that the shot you would expect to see him in some way receive his sentence is in a way replaced by the ocean that sudden shot to the sea but yeah I couldn't agree more this question of disappearance is
critical, in fact your reading is actually very close to Mambeti's own reading, he says something quite similar so it was very important not to resolve that reading and so what's striking is how how critical reading resolves that question of disappearance which I call disincorporation the way it settles for all these understandings I mean there are many more I collected as many as I could because over 25 years films accumulate and sediment you know a kind of corpus of a kind of corpus of misunderstandings you know a sum total of readings in which the visible
is not the same as the image and is not the same as the evidentiary all of these things are conflated when actually the key is to distinguish them all so the question of disappearance is a question of belief right it's a question of not being able to believe your own eyes this is the question of magic magic is the disarticulation of the image from belief the kinds of tricks of causation that magic plays on you so you know you see the kinds of magic is one way of understanding magic is a kind of it's a kind of popular
popular neurology. The magician plays tricks with attention and expectation and misdirection and causation. The magician fictionalizes cause and effect and they fictionalize belief and they fictionalize attention. They play with it as a material and clearly certain kinds of cinema have done the same thing and Mambetti's brilliance in this scene is to is to in a way draw on those powers and also in another direction from the algorithmic futures because in a sense he's drawing on powers which although the film is projected towards this kind of horizon which is also a Fatima
Morgana also the question of the horizon of the yeah that's a good way of thinking about it but But the cinema returns to, if you like, a locus of its own power, which is, in a sense, running in another direction from this kind of question of algorithm, which is based on being able finally to see things, to actually, for data to be completely visible to it. Which is finally to say that cinema is not data. is something you know it's like something which resists dataization yeah and that binary you know did they didn't they saying which would you know yeah part of its stupidity basically yeah thank you
Thank you very much for the excellent intervention that you have done. I wanted to relate a question that you asked yesterday in the workshop. I said that thanks for the excellent conference that you have done and I wanted to bring a question that I have planned yesterday in the workshop, which I think is interesting to put it on the table, which is the question of the opacity, because everything that you have planned has to do with the transparency as a problem in the government systems and in the democracies and in the systems that try to be transparent.
The film, I think, is the possibility of the cipher or the opacity as a problem for the collective, or as a possibility for the collective. So it would be interesting to be more in this direction, the opacity as a possibility for the collective. Well, so Glissant's Poetics of Relations is translated into English around 91, but it's a series of essays that he writes in the 80s.
and uh glisson when you look through his his writings from his 60s his first book of poetic theory called poetic intentionality which is at the end of the 60s he's continually changing and adapting his notion of opacity and by the 80s opacity is this um it's this question of singularity which evades the demand for transparency, the demand for enlightenment, the demand for clarity and also moves against the right to difference.
And, you know, there's a kind of... There's a strange... The fact that they emerged around the same time 91-92 suggests that we could say that both Glissant and Mambetti in their very different ways were searching for a way to formulate a more complex notion of subjectivity that is not tied to agency and a predicate, a capacity which is not necessarily tied to a subjectivity or an agency. I think
opacity, in Glissant's term, had a poetic and an ontological and a political capacity which in the present becomes fascinating for us in the sense of it becomes understood as a tactic, as a kind of tactical media operation becomes understandable as a kind of queer tactic and which clearly resonates in a world of surveillance surveillance operates on that double level on one hand surveillance is is transparency as such on the other hand surveillance is not operating on the level of the visible
at all. Surveillance is operating on the level of data, which has nothing to do with visibility as such. But the work of Zach Blass, he really takes this notion of informatic opacity and works with it in a compelling way. What he shows is that in under conditions of biometric surveillance, what you see is the fact that many African and African Caribbean skin tones actually are not recognised by surveillance. The actual databases that surveillance draws on tend to recognise only white skins.
So there's a certain sense in which African-Americans already escape surveillance. but this escaping from surveillance exposes them to a further disciplining precisely because the fact that they escape surveillance the fact that they are opaque is what gets them tagged as a potential threat so that the opacity is not the opacity that allows them to escape from surveillance is not an opacity that is directed by them. It's an external, it's as if transparency imposes an opacity upon them that they themselves do not want. In other words, maybe many African-Americans
would rather be recognized and be able to go through a biometric data system. They don't want to escape it and then be tagged as a possible potential threat. In other words, under certain conditions, a pasty is not only a tactic. A pasty is a kind of enforced imposition under conditions of surveillance, which means that under certain conditions, African-Americans would like to have the capacity to be transparent. So in other words, the notion of a tactical idea of a pasty doesn't mean that a pasty has an inherently progressive dimension to it.
A pasty seems to be utilised and operationalised by power and against power. And in a way, the kind of the recent, the kind of the excitement around a pasty cloaking, camouflaging, disappearing, that that entire set of practices needs to be more specified because there are anomalies which have to be taken into account. So it's only if you assume that we are all transparent
under the eye of power that a pasty seems to be something like this counterpower. But if you take into account this question of how African-American skin tones are understood, then it's not that simple. So I'd say we need a more nuanced notion of how a pasty functions. We need something like a political calculus of a pasty, something like a political economy of a pasty, which doesn't simply assume it's virtue or it's insurrectionary, or it doesn't necessarily assume its insurrection-y capacity,
because I don't think it has that in and of itself. And in a way, Glisson's notion was more modest than that. It's just in the 25 years since that, a kind of theoretical inflation has taken place, which Glissant himself encouraged. By the time of 2007 in his last book, Glissant was again talking about Pasty in a much larger sense. So in a way, he himself expanded it and then in a way gave permission to other people to in a way take the term and put it to work. So I think it's really complex and it depends on a kind of understanding of an economy,
both of surveillance and of what has been called surveillance. You know, both surveillance, S-U-R, and surveillance as in S-O-U-S. We need a political economy of both of those and their entanglement. Thank you. Solamente un comentario. Thank you very much.
of afrofuturism and even of some referents and some movies. And in that sense, in relation to the idea of opacity versus visibility, it seemed interesting to see what is what can be done. If that tendency to not want to see, has also something of possibility in itself. If it is a rejection for finding other references and in that way... I mean, with this film in particular, that leads us to the problem of being very visible and with the end, it leaves suspense.
I'm a little bit liant, but what happens when we see this film and suddenly the film becomes a reference that we can all share. However, the end of the film doesn't resolve the narrative, doesn't resolve the sense. So, it was interesting to me the question of opacity in front of that problem you had at the beginning, that rejection of seeing images, on the other hand. I don't know if it has a sense. Yeah.
Yeah. So in a way, most of the critical discourse around hyenas is a discourse of disambiguation. The idea is to disambiguate the uncertainty of what occurs. however it's interpreted it's necessary to to come to an understanding that in a way reconstructs a causation that is not actually evidentiary
so the part of the project is to first of all insist on an ambiguity but then second of all my initial statement was designed to say that the search for continental futures, which is just the shorthand term I use, in a way overlooks the fact that there are already futuristic films. So when hyenas appeared, it was understood not as a film of continental futurism, nor even as a film of Afrofuturism, but as a film of Afro-pessimism. So there's another
version of this talk in which I describe three different discourses of Afro-pessimism that are operational. The first discourse in the 1980s was a developmental discourse of American journalism, which forecasts a kind of future of doom and gloom for the African continent, a continent of war and famine and genocide and disease. This is the notion of Afro-pessimism, that the terrible future of the African continent is inherent to the people and conditions. In other words, it's African people's fault that the future of the continent is so bleak. This was crudely speaking
what Afro-pessimism in its first incarnation was, and it was very much formulated in American and conservative magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly. So that's Afro-pessimism one. Afro-pessimism two is a discourse that emerges around 2000. And this is based more around the idea that there is a cinema and literature of self-critique and disenchantment, which examines the fact that the problems of many countries are at least as much to do with the problems of the one-party state and of self-rule. So this is a kind of existential cinema of disillusionment and disenchantment after the end of Pan-Africanism, after the end of independence.
So it's a kind of confrontation with the failures of the state. It's a confrontation with the failures of ideology. It's a confrontation with the costs of ideology and the costs of independence. And what happened with hyenas was that hyenas was interpreted as an example both of the first kind of Afro-pessimism and of the second. So it was critiqued for being Afro-pessimistic in the first sense, for saying that, crudely speaking, the fault of the problem with the continent is the problem with its people.
But it was celebrated for being a cinema of disenchantment and a cinema of disaffection and a cinema without consolation, a cinema that condemns without consolation. So it was both critiqued and celebrated. And these are two forms of Afro-pessimism, in the 80s and the 90s. And then there is a third recent notion of Afro-pessimism, which emerges in America, which is a discourse which is largely philosophical, based around the writings of literary theorists and philosophers such as Hortense Billers, the African-American feminist theorist, Orlando Patterson, the Jamaican sociologist,
Frank B. Wilderson III, American theorists, and they effectively and rapidly argued that slavery never ended, emancipation was never completed, and that the afterlives of slavery continue into the present so that the conditions of racialized capitalism have merely evolved and that the questions of independence is the form that slavery now takes. So under those conditions, they argue for a third notion of Afro-pessimism. so part of my argument was that afro-pessimism is an afro-futurism so in the 1980s stewart hall
would argue that race is the modality in which class is lived so class class is experienced through race race is the modality in which class is lived so in this other version of the paper the argument is that pessimism is the modality in which the future is lived and part of the argument is to argue that these three modes of afro-pessimism can be re-articulated as three kinds of Afrofuturism. And that in order to do that, in a way that the kinds of futurisms
being argued in the continent now need to face two ways. They both need to invent new futurisms, of course, but they also have to do this work of disarticulating works that are already futuristic but are somehow locked in previous discourses. So you have to return to previous films, previous books, previous novels, previous theories, which are in a way locked by their admirers and their critics. And you'd have to return and do a work of disarticulation. So this project is a project of disarticulation. So I return to these moments where there is a work which is celebrated and critiqued on a certain discourse.
And the idea is to undo that discursive celebration and discursive critique and then say, what if this is a futurism, but a futurism that was understood differently then? And how can we understand it now? so then you get the paradox that even before afrofuturism in its american-centered phase was formulated we already had continental futurisms so hyenas is 91 92 that's before last angel of history it's before mark dairy formulates the notion of what afrofuturism is So there is already a continental futurism. It's just that it's misnamed and its discursive constitution is blocked and contained.
so it's a double project and so in a way the critique coming from critics and artists especially in Cape Town and Johannesburg the critique is a good one but in a way in a way there's a kind of underneath the critique is a kind of desire to join the kind of uh to join there's a kind of a sense of there's a it's unfair but there's a desire to join afrofuturism and to say you know to say on one hand i don't want to belong to it on the other hand i want to widen it enough so that i can join it and that's because afrofuturism to use jonah
conference term has a kind of brand economy to it. It sounds seductive. It sounds appealing. It's self-congratulatory. Of course, who would refuse the idea of being a futurist? It's very appealing. So in a way, it's an internal battle which is taking place. But it's a battle over the directions of culture. And Afrofuturism is a kind of way to condense those questions. And if you're aged between 18 and 25, then there is a lot of energy to create new forms of futurism, new speculations, which is clearly to be affirmed.
But simultaneously, this work of disarticulation should happen in parallel with that, not instead of. so in a way I do the second in the solidarity with the first but I'm not so interested in a kind of a kind of sometimes there's a weird kind of ressentiment like a kind of resentment against Afrofuturism in the 90s as if to say, oh you Americans and you diasporic Brits you were busy having good time in the 90s and you didn't take any notice of us now it's our turn we're going to show you there's a bit of that as well and you think yes but
the point is not to join an expanding club the point is to is to work on several fronts at once the question of opacity is part of that but opacity is kind of one opacity is one it's one of these master words, it's one of these master concepts that draws a lot of critical energy and a lot of artistic energy towards it because it seems to offer a mode of navigation that speaks to a desire for secession and speaks for desire to move through, to move in and through and by way of occlusion and away from a kind