Cut to 1920: the dream of univocal representationism has
shattered in the face of modernity's greatest paranoia trip to
date. The orgasmic intensities of mass suicide have laid bare
the 'nightmare condition of self-domination' . 8 million
dead...this is only the beginning. Modernity seeks salvation - a
new vision, an eternal myth - to redeem us from 'the formless
universe of contingency' .
'By order bring about freedom' screams Le Corbusier.
Technological efficiency and machinic production is the path
to salvation. White heat will cleanse the defiled soul of
modernity. The fascist war-machine is replenished.
'We declare that the splendour of the world has been
increased by a new beauty: the beauty of speed... Beauty
exists only in struggle. A work that is not aggressive in
character cannot be a masterpiece... We want to glorify war the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the
destructive act of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas for which
one dies..."
Cut to 1935: The thirst for machinic efficiency is by now
unquenchable. Ezra Pound engages in a quest to command
meaning within an ordering machine of language. Everything
can be called by its right name and 'has one place only, and
no place is occupied by two things at the same time' . But as
the machine launches into overdrive, as order-construction
intensifies, the waste piles up - putrefying and formless. But
'[n]othing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of
outsideness is the very source of fear.' As long as it remains
stubbornly elusive waste will corrode machinic beauty. It must
be given its right name. 'Jew slime', 'morass of high kikery',
sewers of Pal'stine', 'the vague stinking pea soup', 'crowling
slime of a secret rule' .
'The gasp of surprise which accompanies the experience of
the unusual becomes its name. It fixes transcendence of the
unknown in relation to the known, and therefore terror as
sacredness... Man imagines himself free from fear when there
is no longer anything unknown.'
Cut to 1943: Modernity's soul is cleansed in Bauhaus-inspired
death camps.
Cut to the future (4600 BC): Remixing Genesis - '[F]irst, the
moon separated from the earth. Then, the first humans,
Original Man, were black people.' . The renegade black
scientist, Yacub, created the white, 'devil' race.
Serial time never makes it to the future. The present,
however, must always mythologise beyond itself - how else
can it survive? Alie-n-ations dissipate these linear memory
tracks - re-learning the past as future. The future feeds into
the past-present.
Cut to 1920: 'Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!...Let Africa
be a bright star among the constellation of nations' . Garvey
invokes a being-african in order to re-learn the future as past but being-african can only ever be present. Being-african has
(literally) no future.
'I'd rather call myself an alien 'cause I don't understand
society.'
Becoming-african - 'is bodily thought, beyond the realm of
possibility, in the world of the virtual. At once superabstract
and infraconcrete, it grasps the environment of molarity
common to different bodies from the perspective of the
potential curtailed.' 'Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said,
must become black.'
Cut to the future: Le Son'y Ra (Sun Ra), born of Saturn, trips
out of linear time at escape velocity. 'Space is the Place,
Space is the Place, Space is the Place'. And Coltrane,
'terminally impatient with limits, with the trivial categories and
opposites within Earthly language' , purges all traces of
vestigial fictionism in Interstellar Space.
'..only real humans would want to become robots'.
Cut to the future: Technological speculation - 'syncretic belief
systems such as voodoo, hoodoo, santeria, mambo, and
macumba, function very much like the joysticks, Datagloves,
and Spaceballs used to control virtual reality.'
'The emergence of machine intelligence coincides with the
discovery that machines are complex systems, and complex
systems are everywhere...assemblages "at the edge of order
and chaos"'
Cut to 1964: McLuhan envisages a total prosthetics - 'an
electronic skin' engendering macrocosmic Man. The
modernist fantasy of machinic domination is re-enforced - the
fascistic fantasy of transcendence.
Contra - Harraway's Cyborg is located 'in the belly of the
monster, in a technostrategic discourse...According to the
Human Genome Project we become a particular kind of text
which can be reduced to code fragments banked in
transnational data storage systems and redistributed in all
sorts of ways that fundamentally affect reproduction and labor
and life chances and so on.'
Cut to the future (1990): 'Armageddon bin in effect' - slavery
has already distributed the black genome - code is
fragmented into catastrophic 'modalities of identity without
hope of resolution' - what does it mean to be human now?
'Afrikan we is all Afrikan'
Cut to 1997: Predator remixes - the authorial voice is slowed
down and its attendant ocular is irradiated. Predator learns to
decipher complex codes. 'Not a book, only libidinal
instalments.' - can you feel it?
Cut to the Future: Black technology - sampler methodology.
Voodoo transformers turn molar passivities into molecular
intensities - the fascist fantasy putrefies into the
hallucinogenic nightmare of the darkside. Corbusian clean
space is disfigured - demolished - by wall scrawl. 'Bleeper
culture' networks the black economy. The howls of atomic
dogs pierce the bourgeoisified calm of radiostate FM. Black
box technology is oppositional art...'a specific miss-use and
conscientious desecration of the artefacts of technology' .
Cut to 1992: Los Angeles - video-capture - Black Planet bin in
effect.
Cut to the future: Black technology - CCTV surveilance, ECT
shock therapy, lo-cost bodies authenticate transnational profit.
Hi-tech prisons over-capacitate (critical limit 2020),
slow-release contraception - court-enforced.
Cut to the future: no future, no future, no future, no future...
BLACK [BEDLAM]
What are the roots that clutch,
what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun
beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket
no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is a shadow under this read rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding beside you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land
Eliot's invitation to behold the darkside is emblematic of a
modernity that is always already putrefying. The darkside is
not modernity's shadow, not its Other, the darkside cannot be
reclaimed at sunset. The 'Son of man' cannot reference that
for which he is not pivotal, that which eludes his regulative
framework. Beyond there is only fear, modernity's fear - fear,
loathing, contempt - Welcome to the Terrordome.
In the Waste Land 'the dead tree gives no shelter, no relief, no
sound of water. Arboresence is death. The tree is ever more
burdened - the White Man's burden - the centre must be
reinforced - pathological state consumption is the only
response. And as if obeying some logarithmic formula, the
distinction between the centre and its burden becomes
imperceptible. And the shadow - albeit astride - is recovered at
dusk with elemental regularity. But paranoia and neurosis are
by now endemic - something eludes totalisation - it can only
be known by fear - by now, that fear is almost uncontrollable.
Welcome to the Terrordome. Identity is photographic image positive and negative film - transparencies overlaid dissolve
into blackness - blackness is Self-immolation. The roots of
blackness are strangulating. Predatory war machines
accelerating through the jungle - uprooting arboreal
sedimentation - mongrelising 'authenticity'. Feral improvisation
displaces arboreal code with a revolutionary - almost
cataclysmic - velocity. Speed kills! - the war machine invents
absolute speed (Deleuze and Guattari: 386).
Accelerate through the de-industrialised cyberia of Detroit,
Michi(ne)g(u)n. All that remains of the motor city are decaying
monuments to the Rustbelt. Sedimentation is suicide. But
sedimentary death is slow and lingering - the centre screams
ever louder, ever more anguished - desperate to replenish - to
reterritorialize - through violence and coercion. But blackness
always eludes this moment - its is always already beyond
sedimentation. Blackness is not a state of being, only of doing.
Blackness refuses ontology - refuses the photographic
moment of subjugation. That moment is always past. The
centre territorializes the past in the present. But always the
present is past. The future is all there ever is. There is only
ever t+1 - and only blackness exists here. No beginning, no
end, no directional impulse - only ever movement in time.
"What will make that current flow into words?" asks Irigaray, "It
is multiple devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. Yet is
cannot be decomposed...There rivers flow into no definitive
sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without
fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility. This life - which will
perhaps be called our restlessness, whims, pretence, or lies."
(Irigaray: 215)
The sedimented identarianism of the Self-Other is always
already past - deconstruction has no place in the future. In the
future there is only noise. Mongrelised noise - re-mixed and
re-spliced into epileptic intensities that are never known - only
encountered. Thought is stretched/ reversed/accelerated
noise - fu(n)cked-up schizo.
Arborescence demands silence - anti-cult de-programming
techniques must be executed. Delete the future - surrender to
the centre - postpone Armageddon. Yet, as Baudrillard says,
"Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporised.
The explosion has already occurred:
What more do you want?" (Baudrillard). Slavery, imperialism
and brutalising racism is always in effect. This is the future...
The future is black.
Works cited
Baudrillard, J (1989) 'The anorexic ruins' [trans. D.Antal] on
D.Kamper and C.Wulf (eds.), Looking Back at the End of the
World, New York: Semiotext(e)
Deleuze, G and Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia [trans. B.Massumi],
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Irigaray, L. (1985) This Sex Which is Not One [trans. C.Porter
w/ C.Burke], Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press