Rohit Lekhi

Rohit Lekhi appears in the archive through two connected but materially different lines of work. The first is “Futureloop / Black Bedlam,” his contribution to the first swarm of *Abstract Culture*. The second is “The Genealogy of Politics,” a scholarly essay co-authored with Mark Fisher. Both lines attack the centered subject, organic unity and political representation. They do so in different registers: the pamphlet uses time-cuts, sonic references and Afrofuturist montage, while the journal article develops an explicit Nietzschean, Deleuzo-Guattarian and cybernetic argument.

This is an archive-based intellectual profile, not a complete biography. The local holdings supply clear displayed bylines and substantial texts, but no dependable chronology of Lekhi's education, appointments or later career. Folder placement can establish where the collector filed an item; it cannot by itself establish authorship or membership in the Ccru.

Futureloop / Black Bedlam

The combined Abstract Culture witness identifies Lekhi as author of item 4 in the first swarm, “Futureloop / Black Bedlam” (combined Abstract Culture witness, p. 42). Its placement matters. The contribution follows Land's “Meltdown,” Kodwo Eshun's “Motion Capture,” and Fisher and Robin Mackay's “Pomophobia,” and precedes the collectively signed “Swarmachines.” Lekhi's text is therefore an independently bylined unit inside a collective publication, not an anonymously Ccru-authored essay.

“Futureloop” is organized by abrupt temporal edits: “Cut to 1920,” “Cut to 1935,” “Cut to 1943,” “Cut to the future,” then backward and forward again. Modernist dreams of univocal representation, architectural order and technological purification are routed through fascism and genocide rather than presented as neutral machine aesthetics (combined witness, pp. 42–43). Serial chronology is the target as much as representational order. Myth and technological speculation feed the future back into the past-present, so the essay's form performs the loop named by its title.

The cuts then move through Marcus Garvey, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, cyborg discourse, Public Enemy, Los Angeles and “black technology.” Sampler practice is not merely one example among others: it supplies the essay's method. Fragments are reused, recontextualized and made to collide without being gathered into a single historical narrator. The resulting Afrofuturist account opposes the modernist fantasy of machinic command with technologies already operating through slavery, surveillance, prisons, media, music and diasporic distribution (combined witness, pp. 43–45). “Futureloop” consequently refuses both technological triumphalism and a simple humanist recovery of identity.

The archive's separate Futureloop / Black Bedlam text capture makes the prose searchable but strips away the original wrapper and displayed byline. It should be used for close reading, not as the controlling witness for attribution. The combined Abstract Culture contents and contribution header supply that evidence.

Black [Bedlam]

The two-page designed scan restores what the plain text capture loses. Its header prints ROHIT_LEKHI, the title BLACK [BEDLAM] and the running label “COLLAPSE AFROFUTURES” (designed scan, pp. 1–2). The contribution opens from The Waste Land's “heap of broken images,” but turns Eliot's wasteland against the centered, arborescent order it diagnoses. The “darkside” is not a recoverable shadow of modernity or a stable Other. It names what the regulative center can register only as fear, waste and loss of control (p. 1).

Detroit's deindustrialized “cyberia,” predatory war machines, improvised noise and accelerated remix replace the rooted tree as figures of movement. Most sharply, Lekhi writes that blackness is “not a state of being, only of doing” and locates it at t+1: not a recoverable origin, but an operation always beyond the present's effort to stabilize it (designed scan, pp. 1–2). This is why the essay rejects a photographic positive/negative model of Self and Other. Its alternative is not a new essence but unbounded currents, mongrelized noise and encounters that cannot be decomposed into a final identity.

The design makes that argument visually. Columns break alignment, quotations change scale, images interrupt the text and the closing lines overwrite one another. “The future is black” arrives as both proposition and typographic event rather than as the conclusion of a linear proof (p. 2). The later eight-page text capture preserves the wording of Black [Bedlam] on its pp. 5–8, but not this page architecture.

The Genealogy of Politics

Lekhi and Fisher's “The Genealogy of Politics” transfers Nietzsche's refusal of a “doer” behind the deed into political analysis. Politics inherits the responsibility, duty and bad conscience formerly attached to morality because it continues to presuppose an individuated subject capable of transcendent intervention. The authors ask what politics could mean in a cybernetic model of the world, where feedback, networks and nonlinear dynamics displace both sovereign agency and static structure (The Genealogy of Politics, pp. 1–2).

Their critique is directed at scale as well as subjectivity. Individual, organism, party and state repeat the same organized interiority: bounded wholes, assigned functions and top-down relations. Politics conceived from such a unit can only be strategic, managing an exterior field from a place it claims as its own (Genealogy, pp. 3–4). Molecular or rhizomatic thought instead begins from irreducible multiplicity and open systems. Theory becomes a map or tool whose value lies in what it enables, not a representation legislating from above (pp. 4–6).

The essay's cybernetics is explicitly detached from a modernist project of control. Its objects are circular causation, morphogenesis, noise, probabilities and communication between systems and environments. This makes capitalism an impersonal regulation of flows rather than the expression of a unified historical subject. Marx's formula about making history is rewritten as “multilinear cybernetic complexity,” with causal power distributed through a shifting mesh rather than centered in human will (Genealogy, pp. 6–7). The political consequence is tactical: ground-level intervention that uses openings and occasions without aspiring to become a new state apparatus (pp. 7–8).

A shared problem across two registers

The pamphlet and journal article should not be collapsed into one doctrine. “Futureloop / Black Bedlam” is a compressed, allusive intervention in sonic fiction and Afrofuturist media theory; “The Genealogy of Politics” is a sustained co-authored argument with a conventional bibliography. Yet their formal differences clarify a shared problem. Each asks how thought changes when identity, representation and centered agency are no longer its basic units.

In the pamphlet, the answer is montage: cuts, samples, temporal loops and blackness as ongoing operation. In the article, it is immanent systems analysis: maps, open ecologies, reciprocal causation and tactical intervention. Read together, they make Lekhi a useful bridge between Abstract Culture's sonic and typographic experimentation and its critique of statist, humanist politics. That bridge is the archive's strongest evidence for his place in the Ccru milieu; it is more precise than either turning him into a generic “Ccru member” or reducing him to a single collaboration with Fisher.

ATTRIBUTION CAUTION: The Abstract Culture header and contents credit “Futureloop / Black Bedlam” to Rohit Lekhi; the designed Black [Bedlam] scan repeats his name. “The Genealogy of Politics” is co-authored with Mark Fisher. These displayed credits should outrank later filenames, folder locations or a blanket attribution of everything in Abstract Culture to Ccru.