Futures and Fictions Page 19
0x14 Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial as intervention in digital and cultural ones. Changes to the built environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. As the embodiment of ideological constellations, the production of space and the decisions we make for its organisation are ultimately articulations about “us” and, reciprocally, how a “we” can be articulated. With the potential to foreclose, restrict or open up future social conditions, xenofeminists must become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for collective choreography — the coordinated writing of space.
0x15 From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying “domestic realism” has no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The home is ripe for spatial transformation as an integral component in any process of feminist futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere — the way of the commune — or bearing its burdens manyfold — the way of the single parent. If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while penalising those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour.
0x16 From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into gender systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution of hormones — who or what this distribution prioritises or pathologises — is of paramount import. The rise of the internet and the hydra of black-market pharmacies it let loose — together with a publicly accessible archive of endocrinological knowhow — was instrumental in wresting control of the hormonal economy away from “gate keeping” institutions seeking to mitigate threats to established distributions of the sexual. To trade in the rule of bureaucrats for the market is, however, not a victory in itself. These tides need to rise higher. We ask whether the idiom of “gender hacking” is extensible into a long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what hacker culture has already done for software — constructing an entire universe of free and opensource platforms that is the closest thing to a practicable communism many of us have ever seen. Without the foolhardy endangerment of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by pharmaceutical 3D printing (“Reactionware”), grassroots telemedical abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble a platform for free and open-source medicine?
0x17 From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, xenofeminism avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of technomaterialist hegemonic proportions. Like engineers who must conceive of a total structure as well as the molecular parts from which it is constructed, XF emphasises the importance of the mesopolitical sphere against the limited effectiveness of local gestures, creation of autonomous zones, and sheer horizontalism, just as it stands against transcendent, or top-down impositions of values and norms. The mesopolitical arena of xenofeminism’s universalist ambitions comprehends itself as a mobile and intricate network of transits between these polarities. As pragmatists, we invite contamination as a mutational driver between such frontiers.
OVERFLOW
0x18 XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean complexity is a labour requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at odds with “waiting”. Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not only implies the creation of material infra-structures to make the values it articulates explicit, but places demands on us as subjects. How are we to become hosts of this new world? How do we build a better semiotic parasite — one that arouses the desires we want to desire, that orchestrates not an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage, but an emancipatory and egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery?
0x19 Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved. We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to construct a new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions for it, and for any number of related problems, might unfurl with ease. Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual politics — a language that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked, and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence. We understand that the problems we face are systemic and interlocking, and that any chance of global success depends on infecting myriad skills and contexts with the logic of XF. Ours is a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption rather than rapid overthrow; it is a transformation of deliberate construction, seeking to submerge the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps.
0x1A Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, “Nature” shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!
If nature is unjust, change nature!
SONIC UTOPIAS: THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY
A Conversation between Kodwo Eshun, Ayesha Hameed and Louis Moreno
Louis Moreno: I thought we could begin by talking about our reactions to seeing this film tonight, as for many this might be their first contact with The Last Angel of History1, and for others seeing it again it could have triggered different ideas and thoughts about what they thought the film was about. For my part, I realise that for all these years I’d seen a different film. When it was first shown on Channel 4 in the mid 1990s, The Last Angel of History was called The Mothership Connection and it was a sort of bastardised version, because — and I’ve only just realised because it’s the first time I’ve seen the film since the 1990s — they removed the crux of the SF narrative and the explanation of the “Last Angel”. So in my memory, The Last Angel of History exists as TV doc about SF, techno and jungle called The Mothership Connection circulating on a VHS tape around twenty years ago. But watching it this evening what seems clear is that The Last Angel of History is not some artefact of rave culture and cyber-theory lost in the midst of the 1990s. It’s not as a historical document that gives the film its power, but that it’s engaged in a “live” project. So watching it today, right now, even though the tech and visual FX may date it, its structure of feeling still seems extremely vibrant. It still seems to engage with its original project, which as you say Kodwo at the end of the film, is to “get out of right now”, “to bring the future into the present”. So, if we could start with you, Kodwo, as somebody who was involved in making the film, what’s your sense of the project?
Kodwo Eshun: The Last Angel of History is a film much more discussed than screened. It might be useful to reconstruct the conjuncture from which it emerged and
to which it contributed. Last Angel was conceived by the Black Audio Film Collective as an intervention into a number of academic debates taking place in Britain and in the UK in the early 1990s around the question of black popular culture. Within the US, there was a consensus that hip-hop epitomised the organising principle of black popular culture. It was the point around which all black popular culture converged. You will notice that there is not a single mention of hip-hop throughout Last Angel. That was a polemical exclusion on our part. It was not that we disliked hip-hop. Far from it. Rather, we, that is, myself, director John Akomfrah and scriptwriter Edward George of Black Audio Film Collective, disagreed with the canonical claims made in the name of hip-hop by the majority of American academics. It seemed to us that the cultural mutation from rave to hardcore techno to jungle techno to jungle to drum ‘n’ bass from 1990 to 1995 in Britain rendered those claims insufficient. This ongoing exclusion of what Simon Reynolds would later call the hardcore continuum compelled us to challenge the consensual account of black popular culture, to question its premise and its parameters. Instead we argued for an unblack unpopular culture that took the role of jungle and drum ‘n’ bass seriously, that elevated techno to its critical role from which it was habitually expelled and which affirmed dub as a critical sonic process throughout Afrodiasporic musics.
Throughout 1994, Edward George, who narrates and also plays the role of the Data Thief in Last Angel, would travel to my flat in Kensington. We discussed the relations between music, science fiction, futurity and theory. These ideas of music as a vehicle for the affirmation of alienation and extraterrestriality whose implications extended far beyond music emerged years later in the publication of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Edward and John wrote the scenario for Last Angel and then travelled to Detroit and New York to film interviews. In September 1995, Channel 4 broadcast the thirty-minute version of the film entitled The Mothership Connection. At the same time ZDF broadcast the forty-five-minute version entitled The Last Angel of History. Time Out reviewed The Mothership Connection with predictable hostility. By contrast, Last Angel was well received by Spex magazine in Cologne. In 1997, Diedrich Diederichsen organised the Loving the Alien conference at the Volksbühne in Berlin. In the US, techno musicians such as Mike Banks of Underground Resistance immediately expressed appreciation for the film; academics proved somewhat slower.
Figure 1. © Smoking Dogs Films. John Akomfrah (1995), The Last Angel of History. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
LM: Ayesha, as a writer and theorist, why is The Last Angel of History so crucial to your work? We’ve heard Kodwo say that the film was made as a vehicle to counteract the “future shock absorber” effect of mundane cultural criticism at the time. But in teaching and thinking about contemporary culture, how does it connect with your work and research today?
Ayesha Hameed: As you might know, one crucial difference is that I’m not from the UK, so I didn’t see The Mothership Connection on Channel 4 like you did. I encountered this film only a half-dozen years ago. I use it to teach, and I refer to it in my own work. As Kodwo just said, a lot of people don’t necessarily watch the film as much as it has become a reference point. That said, there’s something incredibly relentless and uncompromising about the film itself. So in a way, you can jump into it in medias res without knowing its broadcast history and the context of its production and just start watching it and try to follow all the clues it leaves. The density of the narrative is uncompromising in its theoretical richness, its contextualisations and its philosophical bent. On top of all that, there’s the audio and the sequence of images which are also incredibly complicated.
So I thought it would be nice to create a taxonomy of what is actually in the moving image itself. Every time I see this film, I see and hear something new. This is a list of props that I saw. The first and one of the most striking props is the Data Thief’s reflective metal spectacles, the presence of which is interesting because the film is all about sound. You see the Data Thief wearing these glasses when he is sitting beside the two computers, one of the “lenses” of these spectacles is saturated with light. The Data Thief is also holding a blackbox. When the Data Thief refers to this contraption as a blackbox it reminded me of this lecture that Matt Fuller gave at Goldsmiths where, drawing from Bruno Latour, he talked about blackboxes. He described how Latour talks about how the blackbox as an object that you put everything you don’t know about into. It becomes a cipher for the ways in which things work: that you put these incomprehensible things into the blackbox. What goes into it is transformed by the blackbox into what comes out of it. So you use the blackbox without understanding what has happened in between. Matt contrasted that with what W.R. Ashby was doing much earlier than Latour in trying to think about the blackbox. Ashby said that it becomes a cybernetic thing because it implicates us as subjects. I was thinking about this when I wondered why the Data Thief is holding a blackbox. And wondered too, why is he holding these glasses?
The Data Thief also has a block of wood and a giant nail. He’s constantly proffering the block of wood out. I don’t know what the nail is for. He also has this bent stick. This was interesting to me when I was watching it, wondering what the point of these props was. The bent stick is initially introduced after a B-roll image of a solar flare, and the shape of the stick mirrors that flare. So the shape of the stick anticipates the arc of the solar flare.
KE: What you are pointing to is the performative dimension of speculation. Last Angel begins with Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” from 1937. Robert Johnson sings, “Me and the devil, walking side by side” in his unsettling voice. The Data Thief, played by Edward George, wearing special sunglasses, then says, “Flash forward 200 years” to the year 2137. The Data Thief is a time-traveller that navigates what he calls “the internet of black history”. Everybody he visits is a historical figure and every prop he picks up is a techno fossil. What is mundane to us is enigmatic to him. His role is to excavate fossils and to narrate these fragments. Edward George also plays the role of the narrator that comments on the epistemological enquiries of the Data Thief. The complexity of the film has to do with keeping those roles distinct.
Figure 2. © Smoking Dogs Films. John Akomfrah (1995), The Last Angel of History. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
LM: Let me ask you both a speculative question: if the film was being made today, how would it engage with contemporary music? One thing that gives the film its “periodicity” is the compartmentalisation of sonic genres — techno, jungle, house, primarily. Also electronic music still exists as an underground culture. But if the film was being made today, music seems much more compressed and hybridised, almost all forms of popular music have been compressed into one universal electronic dance music genre. But back in the 1990s there seemed a more tangible separation between sonic forms of dance music, which gave an opportunity to infiltrate and subvert the mainstream, or provide fusions with science fiction, philosophy, politics and so on. So I’m just wondering if you think there are the same opportunities in contemporary sonic culture to recombine sound, space and thought in order to re-engage this sense of futurity?
KE: As you watch A Guy Called Gerald and Goldie speaking, you begin to hear the ways in which the music they are making presupposes a theorisation of its conditions of production. That is the case for all the other musicians as well. But with drum ‘n’ bass, there is a special urgency that emerges from the producers being asked to articulate the music they are inventing. When Gerald says that jungle represents a world that is “changing from the analogue to the completely digital”, today’s viewer recognises that she or he lives on the other side of that change. You can hear that music producers of the 1990s were living through this change. The ability to articulate this shift, to narrate this epochal passage in all its contingency takes on a specific poignancy at this moment. When Greg Tate states that “all eras of black music are collapsed onto a chip”, it is possible to hear the entire film as a dramatis
ation of the possibility space opened up by Afrodiasporic avant-gardes as they transition and transform sonic practice from analogue scarcity to the digital abundance in which we live.
What I see and hear now are the absences. Missy Elliot’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”, which announces the arrival of herself, Timbaland and Hype Williams, is still two years in the future. There is no way for Last Angel to register her existence as yet. Musics like kuduro or Shangaan Electro are not available for Last Angel. What animates Last Angel is the sense that the producers and novelists and writers are grappling with vast technosocial processes that instantiate themselves in musical form much earlier than other artforms. Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which we all read at the time, proposed such an argument in 1985. By 1995, we all experienced that sense which Goldie describes when he states that “we are the future”. 1995 is also the year that I met Mark Fisher, Steve Goodman, Luciana Parisi, Nick Land and Sadie Plant of the Cybernetic culture research unit or Ccru, who were all based at Warwick University. The questions around Afrofuturism articulated by Last Angel converged with questions of Cyberfeminism and the Cybergothic formulated by the Ccru at Warwick. There was a real sense of asymptotic intensity that compelled a desire to invent forms that combined digital abstraction with concrete reality.