Welcome, Angelica. Welcome, Kojo. Many thanks for providing us with the movie. It's a luxury for us. And I hope also you enjoy it to see it like stage for the third time in this small town of Bratislava, which might be quite occult to you. Yeah, I have, I will use this situation for asking you more, how can I say, explanatory and descriptive questions. So at the first, what is the otolith? Angelica, can you start? Well, we called ourselves the Ocelith Group when we founded the Ocelith Group in the early
00s, 2001, 2002. And it came because, as an idea, based on the commission that we were, our first commission really, which was a project that involved working with the Russian Space Agency in Star City in Moscow and performing a number of parabolic flights with the cosmonauts. So we performed 26 parabolic flights. And we became aware of this fact that when you are in zero gravity and you are floating away, the way you avoid being sick is by focusing on a horizontal line and keeping your eyes on that line instead of allowing your eyes
to go all over the place. So this sense of kind of being fixed stops you from kind of fixing your gaze, stops the nausea. and then we kind of researched this a little bit and we realised that it's based on this idea that within the inner ear there are hundreds of thousands of micro crystals that sit inside the inner ear in the, I can't remember, the cilia and we were struck by this image because also in Superman, the fortress of solitude We liked the idea of this crystal cave, and somehow the inner ear felt like this kind of crystalline space.
But the kind of floating nature of these mini-crystals, which were called otolith, struck us. And we liked the name otolith also, and we liked the idea of presenting ourselves as a group as opposed to a single artistic figure, because we work together, but also we kind of came out of the sort of YBA, young British artists kind of hype, sensational hype, which for us was very much the kind of announcement of sort of new labor, neoliberalism, and a kind of artist-to-be in that sort of world. And we wanted to kind of defeat this by kind of calling ourselves the Otolith Group.
Also, it was a way to stop people asking us where we were from as a kind of way to not talk about the work. So, you know, when people would say, where are you from in this accusatory manner, you feel like saying, well, haven't you studied the history of Britain? And clearly, surely you do know that there are many Indians and many Africans in Britain. so otoliths kind of gave us a way to kind of talk about the otoliths but also this sense of the it gave us a kind of future sort of anterior it gave us a futuristic kind of space to occupy
because it also related to this question of balance and this question of ground and the kind of agravic nature of our lives on Earth, which is, you know, a kind of geo... geo kind of... How do you say? It's like a sort of... The kind of relationship to the stone of the ear and to the agravic nature of our lives on Earth gave us a sense of not only of our kind of geopolitics, but also of our kind of spatial relation. that's not only about grounding us to this earth but also our kind of spatial relation to the universe. So I suppose this kind of came out of the kind of cosmism,
sort of, when we were in Star City in the murals in the ceiling in the little museum they had there, the universe was unfolding according to kind of a series of books that led to other books that led to other books. And of course for the cosmonauts, a lot of them had a quite spiritual relationship to the universe or to space travel, which was about sort of defeating the kind of mortal coil of this body and, you know, living and, you know, having an afterlife. So for us, the term kind of works in lots of different ways, and it still for us works, you know. We're talking about Otterdits. Gojo, can you tell us something more about this second part of the title of your game,
with this group because basically otolith is not just a collective artistic body. It also goes beyond and it works on the edge or even in the obvious between the theory and practice. It works very much with image and what image means. It works with image both in iconoclastic but also in very like constructive way. Maybe we can even somehow, because what I have on my mind also is like, believe in the truths of image, in the truths of photography, not only to be like, you know, counter, you know, like that it's not only empty signifier, because in your case,
image moving image and also like what the artistic group does is quite something I think I think the notion of a group or the notion of a collective is not is not a question of mathematics or numbers I mean I think one person can be a group you know I'm not sure or there are individuals anyway. But I think the naming yourself a group, or naming yourself a collective signals a break with the standard way of a kind of normative artistic career.
You know, the kind of way in which you're encouraged if you go to art school. It says that something is wrong with that way of conceiving yourself as a group, as a singular artist. It says that it's not adequate. It's not sufficient. It's not enough. I think the notion of group is linked to a notion of crisis, a crisis in the standard narrative of art. It signals a break, and it signals a statement. And the notion of group for us signals a profound dissatisfaction, discontent, unease,
with many things, with the art world as it was in the UK at the time, with the politics of the time. And these feelings of discontent and dissatisfaction have not gone away. Not in 2003, when the so-called Coalition of the Willing was preparing to launch their attack in Iraq. And not now, when Trump and his army are launching missiles into Syria. there is many things to be discontent about. And the question is what to do about them from within the field that you are in,
whatever that field is, whether it's art, whether it's medicine. It's how to announce this discontent. And the name group, the term group speaks to this. It speaks to a necessity to announce something. And so when people say, oh, the group is only two of us, in fact, there was a third, they miss this aspect. They miss the fact that the name group has nothing to do with the numbers of people in the group. It has to do with a self-authorization and a self-inauguration and a kind of a decision. This is really what drives this term group.
Then back to your movie. I will start with you Kojo. You know, on like completely nonlinear way I started to be busy with Eastman a few years ago. And it was because I mean, I was always interested in minimal music. And then through this like baroque tradition of, you Rifkin and Nyman and you know the rationalism of Cage and Reich and etc. so you just discover him and then you are completely shocked like I mean why we don't know it and so there must be something like kind of like pine
psychic with Julius Eastman because and now you do the movie so what was your like motivation, like why Julius Eastman? Like you, I discovered Julius Eastman about 10 years ago, about 2007. And I was shocked to hear this amazing composer. Julius Eastman was a gay African-American composer who studied composition in the early 60s, classically trained composer. He played piano. He played organ.
He composed, he conducted. He was a vocalist. He performed with Meredith Monk, with Friedrich Czefsky, with Hans-Peter Hentzer, with many of the famous composers of the 60s and 70s and 80s, with Arthur Russell. He composed about 40 works, but he died homeless and alone without any of his own recordings being recorded in a proper studio. So until recently, the only music we have of Julius Eastman is one CD of live recordings from different concerts in the 1970s.
There's one CD called Unjust Malaise, and this is what everybody is listening to. This is what I heard. This is what Boris heard. This is what Anjali heard. This is what everybody hears. It's on YouTube now, Unjust Malaise, which is an anagram of Julius Eastman. So when you hear it, I mean, the music is ecstatic. It's different from the minimalist music that we know. It's different from Steve Reich, from Philip Glass, from Terry Riley, from Lamont Young. It's different to all of those figures. It's got many different qualities. It's ecstatic. It's passionate. It's militant.
And this has to do clearly with the fact that Julius Eastman was the one African-American composer in the militant scene, in the minimalist scene, whether we think of the downtown minimalist scene or the, say, disco minimalism of Arthur Russell or the punk minimalism of Reese Chatham or the Ramones. In a way, there were three types of minimalism happening in America in the 70s. classical minimalism, punk minimalism, and disco minimalism. And Eastman moves between them all, but doesn't belong to any of them. So he's just a unique figure. He was a genius, and he was one of the greatest of them all.
And so when you confront the fact that he was not able to record any of his own music in his lifetime, this brings you up against the question of new music and its own racist dimension and the fact that Eastman was able to be a success within it but he still faced many limits so when people come to record his music now when they come to perform his music And there are many performances now. These performances are in a way designed to repair the historical memory of Julius Eastman.
they are a sign of the of kind of contemporary new music sending an apology to history saying that it was wrong that julius eastman died without his music being recorded and these new concerts um they've happened in recently just this year in there's been one in berlin there's been a series in oslo last year there was series in london these are designed to bring the news of Eastman's music to contemporary generations. So these are, in a way, performances that are historical, but which have an impact, an impact that is entirely contemporary.
And so we've observed these different concerts over the past few years, and they're getting more. And so part of what we wanted to do was, in a way, take part in that project, but from a different perspective. Instead of commemorating the historical importance of Julius Eastman, we wanted to turn Julius Eastman towards the future. We wanted to turn the compositions towards the future. So in the film, you hear the performer, the first person who speaks, who is a poet called Dante Michaud.
And then at the end, you hear the performer, Elaine Michaud, and they give the same speech. And this speech comes from a speech that Julius Eastman gave in 16th of January, 1980. Yeah, he gives this speech before a concert, a concert of his three compositions. And there he's explaining the names of the compositions, and he's also explaining his musical methodology. And if you hear, he talks about, he ends describing this composition, Gay Gorilla, which is not the composition that you hear. But the gay gorillas he's talking to are in the future. You know, he says, in hopes that I might be one, if called upon to be one.
And this is 1980. So here we are in 2017, 27 years after. so the idea of the film is that the pianists they are excuse me they are the gay gorillas that Eastman looked forward to so we are 37 years into his future and the idea is that they come from the future of his music and they come because now we that is to say people of color people who are lesbian, gay, trans we are ourselves under threat we live in neo-authoritarian times and the idea of this work
is that Julius Eastman's music is music that trains us for the fights and the struggles that we have the idea is that they are warriors inside of music and that Eastman's music was music for warriors, that if you listen to it, it will train you, it will give you a sense of vigilance, a sense of concentration, a sense of focus on the things that need to be done in order to defend those who you love and in order to attack those who will attack you. And so this is how we conceived the film and this is why it's dedicated to Mark Fisher, who was a friend and an ally.
And it's why it's dedicated to the Movement for Black Lives, which is an umbrella of 50 organisations, only one of which is Black Lives Matter. Everybody knows Black Lives Matter, but there are many other organisations. And so we wanted to, in a way, direct Eastman's music towards the future, the future which is coming towards us now and the future which we must make in order to defeat the kinds of fascism that we see all around us. Great. But now to me, what is interesting, and again, normally as a viewer of a film, you can't ask, you can just imagine, I was extremely interested in makeup and details,
like fingernails and then ergonomy and the whole ballet, but it's more ergonomy of hands playing players, that again, collectivity, empathy. So can you tell us something about that? Because this is like purely artistic construction, you know, which... The formal, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, I think in the way that Kojo describes in terms of Julius' kind of sort of way of refracting his kind of formal position as a composer from all these different minimalisms. You know, I think he, you know, and he queers, he queers queering, you know, quite early on in a way.
And he queers these positions in the music. And I think for us this was like the challenge of then how to film this. how to film, you know, this music being made. Because, of course, if you're brought up like us in the era when, you know, music videos and the relationship between music video and television was really interesting, you know, pre-MTV even, like New Order videos and, you know, many videos, like in Britain in the early 80s and whatever, and some in the 70s. But you're brought up in this sense that actually filming musicians can be interesting. But that was the challenge, let's say, how to work with this question of this sort of queering of the music
and with this challenge of filming a piece of music. So for us the question of reflection and light refraction became quite important. So and a kind of a tool to kind of explore you know as a system. So we of you know of course in the introduction he talks about Eastman and he talks about four pianos and four pianists in this. But this piece can also be played on two pianos with four pianists. So it's also important to say that these four pianists were an ensemble that have played Eastman for a number of years. So we didn't just pick them. We originally thought, let's try and find four black pianists, but that was quite hard in Britain.
I'm sure we would have found them in the States. But because of Mark Fisher's suicide, we didn't make the film in the States. We made it in London. so yes there was a sense also that this work is a kind of eulogy to people that have died in a way, I mean Mark being the most recent one that somehow there was something quite funereal and gothic about this but the sense of wanting to kind of explore light reflection and refraction so we worked with our camera woman to create a light piece that would hover above the pianos that would produce all these
reflections in the black mirror of the piano surfaces. And this in turn would produce a kind of light. So it has this sort of strange sense of being in a kind of space which is kind of almost holding that minimalism but allowing it to reflect so then we were interested in, I suddenly thought wouldn't it be a great thing to you know because I love nail salons and shellac nails, I love the smell of it's an ongoing study into kind of you know the way that beauty salons operate and they're kind of quite bizarre fascistic spaces where you know you get high
I mean, I like it, you can get high on smelling all that nail varnish, but also you can see the kind of fascism, especially in places like Lebanon and the Middle East, where they treat all these workers like dirt, and these women sit there like on thrones having their nails done. But anyway, I was quite fascinated by this shellac colours, you know, this kind of... And the way that you could work... I realised that they just created a new chrome which you polish and then it's sort of silver chrome which could also work with the close-ups because we were interested in the hands also as kind of laboring objects. The kind of labor of being
of playing this piece we wanted to work with because and so the hands become more unified and uniform and also begin to look more like kind of these biomorphic machines, you know, just because it's a very hard piece to play, as you might be able to appreciate. And then with the face, with the makeup, we were interested in kind of biometric forms of makeup which defeat the algorithm and facial recognition algorithms. So we researched quite a lot of images of this kind of biometric makeup and style that is also quite kind of very kind of popular, I think, sort of post-the LGBT sort of generation.
You know, there's a lot of kind of, like, transgender kids kind of doing all this weird stuff. So we were sort of interested in this kind of biometric kind of stuff. But then the makeup artist came, and she did it, and it all looked too heavy on the face. So I thought, wouldn't it be, like, keep it quite simple, let's just follow the shape of this light fitting and repeat it on the faces. And also in the installation of this work, which is two giant screens at an angle, if you might be able to notice, there's a lot of angle, different kind of angular kind of shots. We have the audience is sitting, or space for them to sit, but in the countdown, there's a break. The light fitting we've had actually placed
on top of these, on the audience, so it comes on, you know, when people are entering to see the beginning of the work. So there was all these kind of ideas around reflection, refraction, very much related to queering, and also in relation to the kind of, not, I wouldn't say post-racial, because we're not, you know, we're clearly, you know, I don't think that is, you know, then we'd have to get into a whole question of what post-racial is, I don't want to go into that, But it was more that this question of the nature of this kind of term and the way this is being used, nigger, which is automatically queered as well by Dante and by Elaine and by the musicians who three of them are white
and one of them is Indian-Australian. Identity in the construction of the people, the ensemble and the two figures is also being refracted. So for us this was all kind of a challenge and working with the cameras and the framings to produce these refractions. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, and now I mean, I know that I'll be happy to deal with more kind of fundamental and general questions. Like obviously Julian is a part of something what we can call Afrofuturism. And this discourse is a bit known in this territory.
This is a white, white, Catholic environment or post-Catholic. But it is highly important to establish these discourses here. So you as one of the pioneers of this, is it a movement or is it a notion or is it a speculation? I think Afrofuturism can be described in all those ways. ways. Very briefly, Afrofuturism as a term was formulated in the early 90s to really describe a whole set of artistic positions that
were formulated in many fields at the same time. Clearly, we can see this in music, in every type of Afro-diasporic music, from jazz, the electronic jazz of Miles Davis, the cosmic jazz of Alice Coltrane, the synthetic jazz of Sun Ra, right through to the dance music of Dizzy Rascal in the world of grime, right through to music now, whether it's Thundercat in the world of kind of prog jazz, or whether that's the label non-worldwide.
And I think Julius Eastman was undoubtedly an Afrofuturist. But we can also see this in the worlds of science fiction, in the worlds of cinema, in the worlds of theory, in the worlds of cinema and video art. So it's, crudely speaking, it is the project of Afro-Diasporic artists to claim the right to invent futures and to formulate futures from within their field. So it's a kind of, so it's a futurism which works in and against the long history of existing futurisms, whether that's Russian futurism or Italian futurism,
but really seizes the opportunity to invent futures in the context of a century in which many Afro-diasporic cultures were blocked from inventing futures. So I think from beginnings in, let's say, pretty much the UK and the US in the 1990s, Afrofuturism has really spread. And many of the most exciting aspects happen from within the continent itself, whether that's in Nairobi or Johannesburg or Cape Town or Kinshasa or Cairo or Khartoum. Afrofuturism is in many of the cities across the continent.
And so for us, it's an ongoing movement which we affiliate ourselves with. And part of the project is to link Julius Eastman's work to this kind of ongoing movement, which I would say is now in its second wave. So in a way, it's reached a new level of production. and Eastman was a pioneering figure in that context. To me, what I have learned from Afrofuturism is that, to me it goes much beyond Afro. Basically, what is the experience of Afrofuturism
is something that I can call non-Western cosmology. Non-what? Non-Western cosmology. I would say that Afrofuturism is very much rooted in the West, in a way. It doesn't only come out of the continent. I think it also very much comes out of the African-American experience, the African-American experience, in that I think the question of... I mean, Kojo can elaborate on this, but when Fred Moten, the philosopher and theorist and poet from the States, you know, talks about, you know, where he kind of thinks of himself, where he thinks of his ideas coming from. You know, I think as an Indian diasporic figure,
such as myself, could think of the subaltern figure, right? You know, the subaltern. But I think African American thinks of the hold of the ship. You know, it's a kind of pre-Marxist kind of position. that sort of sits as a body that has been turned into an object of labor, who has been reduced to this, has been reduced to a kind of abject figure who isn't even human anymore. So I think it's very different from a post-colonial position. The Afrofuturism is literally about saying, let us invent ourselves as new humans who have been taken from one place by force
and put into another place. So I think this is a very different... And when you begin to... African-American literature is deeply complex in relation to this question of what the other represents in the kind of construction of language there. And so it is... I think it's quite a deep kind of... It's quite deeply... It's quite different, I think. My point was that, you know, we are so-called former East, and the aspect of difference or the other is very much expressed in like non-linearity of histories of Western history
and the history of former East block, which can be translated, and this is what I'm saying, what I learned from Afrofuturism, that there must be a certain synchronicity. It can't be linear, but when we write history from different positions, from different hierarchies and different points of departure, we have to learn somehow from one each other. So that's why I call it, even it is rooted in West, or as, I mean, West is a cradle, as West is a cradle of so-called contemporary arts. it is still try to do the non-Western cosmology, like to move the point of the patch of how we understand history,
how we understand ourselves, out of the center to the periphery small. So. But maybe you could think of it also as coming from right inside the West, because the Western, like Elaine and Dante say when they recite this introduction, the N word is the field, I cannot even say the N-word, is the field, is this economic, is this body that is producing the economy of America. So it comes from, I think, deep inside the idea of what America, for instance, considers its economy to be or itself to be. It's this history that they have pretended never happened. So, yeah. I mean, I think there are many, at this moment in time, there are many positions.
There are several ways of formulating what Afrofuturism is. There are different positions depending on where you're located and depending on what you're in dialogue with. You know, it's very different situating yourself in Britain in relation to the continent. And then it's very different in the US. And then it's different again in the Caribbean. And then it's different again from, you know, if you're situated in South Africa or in Central Africa. or in West Africa or North Africa.
They're very different positions. It's now, above all, it's a complex question. And in a way, the complexification is part of what we want. It's part of the desire to problematise many questions, to problematise the notion of futurity, to problematise the notion of temporality, to problematise the notion of identity, to problematise the idea of the end of the world, to problematise the idea of what comes after the end of the world. It's really, I would say, it's about
a problem and a possibility for thought. And then the term which is related is Afro-pessimism. I know you've been dying to ask this question. I'm very much in Afro-pessimism. So to question Afro-pessimism Honestly, I'm not absolutely clear about that. Just give him the hard answer. Afropessimism is a discourse which really has emerged in the last 15 years or so in the American Academy.
It partly comes from African-American feminist thought, specifically the writings of Hortense Spillers. and then younger writers such as the writer Sadiya Hartman and then other writers such as Frank B. Wilderson III and in dialogue with them, writers such as Fred Moten, who Anjali mentioned. And I think for a long time, it was a really quite a small section of people who were really returning to the writings of Frantz Fanon, specifically the writings of black skin white masks more than the writings of Wretched of the Earth and they were really trying to understand this question
of the afterlife of slavery the idea that slavery is in a way no longer but in a way there is not yet abolition so slavery has been formally abolished but clearly when we look at the police murders assassinations the continual assassinations it's possible to say that slavery has not yet been abolished so we're in a peculiar time in which you could say slavery is no longer but slavery is not yet abolished. We're in the time of the no longer and the not yet.
And this temporality means that the kind of affirmative reading of African American culture, the idea that there is a kind of what Martin Luther King called an arc of history, that African-American political struggle will necessarily overcome all of the white supremacy that is put in front of it, that optimistic belief in the direction of history is no longer possible for many people. And the Afro
pessimists really disbelieve, they've given up on the notion of an optimistic and affirmative vision of history. They do not believe that history is tending towards the overcoming of white supremacy or as they call it the overcoming of anti-blackness. On the contrary, they see anti-blackness as foundational to the racial capitalism of America, and they see a continuity between slavery and life after slavery. In other words, slavery has not been abolished, it has just changed its form.
so they have a political analysis of the implications of this and above all they have an ontological analysis of this their argument is that they do not celebrate the cultural identity of blackness or of black people or of african-american culture their argument is that blackness is a condition of ontological death. That's how they describe it. Blackness is a condition of ontological death. And the implications of that are what they argue about. And this argument, which really existed amongst, you know,
a small number of brilliant academics, this argument has become much more important because of, of course, the police shootings and the police murders, the formation of the movement for black lives, which comes out of Black Lives Matter, and of course the nomination of Trump and the widespread neo-authoritarian and neo-fascism of Trumpism. all of these things have taken what was a very specific and small argument about the political ontology of anti-blackness and has made this into an argument and a set of positions that many people are now interested in.
And so that's a kind of brief summary. But I think it's unsurprising that, I mean, Afro-pessimism for me is unsurprising. I mean, it's like a position of, like, what did you say? Ontological death. I mean, when James Baldwin wrote about, and you can see him saying this in an interview, when he says, you know, talks about the monstrosity that whiteness is, I mean, it's so generous, within the kind of fabric of James Baldwin's writing and Fanon's writing and so many others. Inside all this is the technologies
for understanding the monstrosity of whiteness, right? But it's so crazy that these days, even when you talk about these subjects, white people sit there and say, well, this is nothing to do with me. I'm not black. Or this is about black people. And it's absolute rubbish. It's, in fact, the absolute opposite. So even with this generous act of literature and writing and music and theory that has been going on now for like 200 years, whiteness still sits there and says, this is nothing to do with me, which is absolutely violent, right? so of course I think it's and you know I think it's interesting how this has come out of many female writers and thinkers this kind of articulation of ontological death it's like
okay let's now just occupy this um state because that is where this militancy has to come from now if after all this time white people still sit there and say this is nothing to do with us and distance themselves from it they're not seeing the monster that they are being asked to see, because their economy, their structures, everything is there, you know, being produced on this abject kind of condition. They have created racism, not black people, not us, you know. Teraz by som otvoril forum pre otázky z publika, ak teda akési su. I just have a short reaction.
Maybe it is this violent position that you speak of that I will be in right now, but from the position of whiteness, I think I would have an apology for that because from my position if there is something that says it has to do with the black, I really say that yes, this is not about me, I do not really care, but the same thing I would do if someone said this is about white people, let's do stuff. I don't care if there is a specification in the beginning about blackness or whiteness.
Don't you think that there is also a call when you speak about Afrofuturism or Afropessimism, there is a call for difference still, that maybe not speaking of the difference is the way, or I don't know really. I don't think not speaking about difference means there is no difference. I think difference is there whether we speak about it or not. I think the valence, the weight you give to this difference you know this is what's important you know is this difference an incapability
or a capacity is this difference imposed or is it asserted is it affirmed or is it negated um i think of the fact the fact of difference there is no doubt but the questions begin there so yes your point is right but let's move on from that and argue about what the stakes of this difference are this is what's at stake here because the question of difference does not have to be a fatal one nor does it have to be pathological but in America it is the question of difference
has been pathologized. It doesn't have to be, but it has been, and there is an unbroken history of it. And this cannot be wished away. There is no magical thinking that can get us beyond the fact of this unbroken continuity by which the difference imposed on African Americans is the justification for their death and their exposure to death. The question is what to do about this. So it's not a question of difference. It's a question of what to do in a condition in which difference has been historically pathologised and a condition in which the history of this pathology is not historical.
A condition in which the past is not past. On the contrary, the past imposes itself on us every day. you'll notice that the first thing Trump did was to give the police more powers, not less, more. I think there is, you know, it's such a complex problem, you know, because at the first there is a question, who creates the normativeness, who creates norms? We are not speaking about normality. normality is always misused by those who would like to establish new dogmas and new norms what is also like a freudian problem which is like a kindergarten of freudianism is when someone speaks about the white supremacy there must be some problem with whiteness
and obviously whiteness means so many things and it's so fragmented so it doesn't exist So this violence, like call for supremacy of the whiteness is a suppression of a huge psychological problem. And obviously there is this difference which in the liberal and artistic communities is negated because we are liberals. Because we feel that we don't feel this difference. But this is the problem. This is also the form where we, I think, have to speak that there are these differences. Well, I mean, of course, difference is at the heart of it, and in terms of kind of a position of like thinking about how do we live together in the future, and how do we live together with difference, of course, there's antagonism and there's conviviality.
But I think people, when they ask this question of this, when they have this utopic kind of liberal kind of position of, like, let's not talk about whiteness or identity, what they don't actually think about is the question of, within one's own background in a place like this, for example, or in France or in Germany, in the education system, have you even read James Baldwin? Have you even read Fanon? Have you even studied the history of slavery? Have you even studied the history of capitalism? Have you studied the history of colonialism in India? Have you studied the history of the famine that the British created in Bengal? Have you studied the 150 million Africans that were murdered through slavery? So no. And then what do you think happens when this has happened?
What do you think happens in the consciousness of African Americans when this has happened? Are they not writers and scientists and thinkers who have thought carefully about Marxism, about communism, about capitalism, about how upon their bodies capitalism is inscribed? I mean, surely this is like a question you ask yourself. We're not sitting here affirming identity politics. We are sitting here sharing in the spirit of what identity politics was supposed to be about, which was about people from different backgrounds, be they gay, black, lesbian, whatever, Indian, sharing their kind of histories. That's all it is. Whether identity politics has been hijacked by neoliberalism and now by the right wing. So, I mean, please ask yourself, think about these questions a bit deeper when, you know, think about if you have read these people.
Because when I was at school, we read James Baldwin in Britain. And in America, also, kids are reading James Baldwin, despite the kind of fascist police. Kids are reading James Baldwin at school or Fanon. So, you know, think about why you haven't read those writers. Think about the curriculum. Okay. Thank you for bringing in the concept of militant during your discussion. I just want to ask you about the relation between the concept of militant and desires. Because it seems to me that actually to be a militant means to passionately advertise some kind of desire
and it also links somehow to futurity and what futurities you invent. And unfortunately it seems to me that actually now we live in a times where the majority of people are the militants of boredom and normality. So can you please explain to me what are the relations in this triangle between desires, futurity and militants? Thank you. Mark Fisher, in his last seminar at Goldsmiths, Mark teaches at Goldsmiths where I teach. In fact, we share an office. I think of us as still sharing an office, even though he's gone.
And his last seminar was called Post-Capitalist Desire. So this was his question, how to desire a life after capitalism, how to make people want that, Want it like a new need, which means how to design a new life, how to desire it as a want that you feel libidinally and as something you can touch or taste. how to have a sensorial need for life after capitalism.
And this is what he was teaching in his final seminar. And it's a question of... We think about it a lot in terms of design. Not so much designing a product for people, but designing people for a vision. We think of how design is not just a question of creating objects and gadgets and machines and devices, but it's a question of designing new needs, new satisfactions and new discontents. and the question of militancy in our age I think is about
in a way it's about updating what Marcuse called a biological in his essay on liberation there is a section where he talks about a biological need for socialism and in a way what we want to do is design a new biological need for post-capitalism and for us in Eastman's music there is a disruptive force in Julius Eastman's music because you know you can recognize the minimalism of it you recognize the repetitions the changing sameness but it's different it's just different it's just it's not really like
Steve Reich or Philip Glass or any other music that you've heard and loved. I love minimal music but this is just different and we think of Eastman as you know in a way the very fact that Eastman's music did not fit into the minimalist music of the 70s and 80s and 90s suggests that it disrupted minimalism and it's the disruption that we now hear. Now we hear how he changed and challenged the minimalism and i would say now we have an appetite for eastman there is something about
eastman when you first hear those hammering tones like a like a ringtone from the future there's first or when you hear the the kind of the repeated chorus you know or when you hear Zubin Kanga saying one, two, three, four. There is something memetic about Eastman and our whole film we see as propaganda for Eastman. That's to say it's a 27-minute composition. By the time you finish it, it should be ringing through your head. Hopefully the composition by Julius Eastman, evil nigger is just ringing through your head. You can hear it. When you go home tonight, it will start playing itself back in your head. You will hear it. Tomorrow morning, you'll get up
and fragments of it will start playing back. You'll be talking to a friend of yours and suddenly it will just, your involuntary memory will just start. In other words, the music has programmed your memory. I would say it's hacked your memory. I would say this music has hacked your involuntary memory and will now start playing itself back and you can never not forget it if you hear eastman's music once that's it it's too late you cannot forget it all you can do is pass it on say to somebody you know what i was at this screening last night some brits i don't know who they were they were talking and talking but they made this film and there was this music and you know have you heard it, you know, maybe you should go onto YouTube, have a listen to it, and then you'll hear
it, and you'll pass it on. So this is what we mean, this kind of simple memetic programming, the simple propagation of music, the music which carries with it a militancy which is imminent to the music. The music itself is militant in its propagative dimension. So Eastman is our meme. It's our music. And when I say our, I just mean us here, the people who gather to hear the music and who now become the vectors that will spread this music by passing it on. And this is a small-scale version
of what we mean by post-capitalist desire. Post-capitalist desire means using capitalist platforms for means that are not themselves capitalist. And this is part of what we want to do with this work. But I think what within that is a kind of sense of how to retain a kind of opacity. I think opacity is a way to defeat forms of exposure. And this has to be created, you know, if we think about Edouard Glissant, the Caribbean poet and writer and philosopher. I mean, I'm not going to go into that now, but I'd urge you to read Edouard Glissant and look at his book, The Poetics of Relation,
and think about the term opacity in relation to this question of creolisation, which was the language of the Caribbean, and which was a mixture of all kinds of different languages. and there was many different kinds of Creole. Within this Creole, there was a kind of hidden code through which all kinds of information were passed in order to avoid forms of capture, but also to kind of pass different kind of methodologies for survival. And I think inside of Glissant's thinking, which is actually a new project that we're going to be doing, is there's a lot to think about in relation to how to deal with capitalism and find a kind of platforms for opacity
as a kind of counter-algorithmic process, perhaps. But this is something that we could have discussed with Mark if he'd still been around. Anyway. Otaska? Hey, do you hear any of these features you mentioned, like militancy or the aim of getting beyond the current music, like club music for example, or do you think it's vanished by now? No, I think there are many exciting kinds of militancy at work inside Club Music, maybe
more than for several years. I mentioned a platform called Non Worldwide, a producer such as Chino and Moby, I think another producer called Angelo. I'm very fond of them. There's a producer in London called Klein. There's a producer called N. Polenta. A producer called Jesse Kander. Many of the producers are around the Hyperdub label. Many of the recent productions are around Hyperdub. I think there's a... I'm very much interested in artists working around black noise, a kind of new queer black noise. Some of the producers around Non, a producer called Serpent with Feet, a producer called Dedekin Cart.
I mean, there's really a lot of producers. So I actually think it's an extremely pregnant moment with many brilliant producers emerging. And their militancy takes the form of a kind of new queer noise. we can see this in many many forms whether it's more mother from philadelphia whether it's eliza crampton from the u.s um really there's a lot of producers so i think uh uh it's exciting um in a way what's missing is the the the theoretical the i mean in a way there's um journalism is
lagging behind, but luckily a lot of these producers are really good theorists themselves. Partly what's exciting about non-worldwide is that music is not only about music. Music is about theoretical and artistic positions. So they have a magazine. They do discursive events. So music is a portal. Music is a doorway from which you open up a dimension that people can cross through. People can pass from one space to another. People can join in, not so much in chronological time, but in aeonic time, a kind of time outside time.
And under certain conditions, people can access this time, a kind of ecstatic time which does not behave according to the time of the clock or the time of the watch, but it's aeonic. And this is a certain kind of militancy as well. It's not the militancy of street protests and demonstrations. In a way, a lot of the best music is a protest against the standard forms of protest music. in a way it's resistant to the typical music that we imagined of you know struggle and resistance it's not angry music made by angry men it's a it's music made by queer and trans artists
whose anger takes on very specific new forms um and this is a lot of the music that that i find most exciting these days and it needs a new language Thank you very much. Thank you very much for coming.