Futures and Fictions Read online

  JH: Yeah. We can broaden or contextualise the discussion; we could say that that in a way, the fact that you have taken a specifically visual approach to a specifically sonic subject, I mean, we could use that as an example of how sound works, that sound is not just what your ears hear or even what your body feels, it’s also in the dance. That it is a way of inhabiting other selves. And so this is mythology that we are in. The absolute prime example is of course Sun Ra, from whom everybody draws, but Beyoncé also had Sasha Fierce as her alter ego. So what is being appreciated with music is a whole world, and now in one sense that is very well-known, recognised since the 1980s of MTV and music videos as well. But I think on a more kind of subtle level of talking about myth and imagination, and allowing us to feel and see and know ourselves as different people. This is part of, if you like, the quest of the Afrofuturism project, so in a way the future provides a space for us to reimagine ourselves, right. But also, the sound itself provides a space to reimagine ourselves. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali talked about music as prophecy; of it being able to go to places and anticipate things that have yet to happen, this is sound in the fullest sense (Attali 1985). Music offers these possibilities for liberation, possibilities for creating a better future.

  HO: Absolutely. To return to your Goldsmiths presentation, you had these really interesting diagrams, these graphics that were illustrating sound waves, if I remember correctly? Just on the subject of visualisations of sound…

  JH: Yeah, well that is something that the multisensory nature of sound affords. I’m interested in diagrams — in the work of Deleuze and Charles Sanders Peirce in terms of semiotics — as they provide an expression or gesture of relationships, rather than a representation, though they are of course visual. Diagrams as a form of expression are very ancient, as for example in the tradition of alchemy. Some of the finest diagrams are the alchemical ones, the Ripley’s Scroll, for example, which is from the sixteenth century and people like the alchemist Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest. Historically, there is a whole tradition of understanding not through text and words and the linearity of language, but in a more holistic and relational way, which of course lends itself — expresses itself — mythically. And so part of Eko’s quest, to put it like that, is to find ways to visualise sound. That can be done, starting in a very simple way, by taking an analogy of the light spectrum, the colours of the rainbow, Newton’s diagram if you like, and just applying that to sound. So the bass frequencies, the bottom end which takes you from deep reds and purples up through greens, oranges and yellows of the treble, using the colour spectrum to express the pitches of the auditory spectrum.

  And then in the dancehall session there is also an actual visual spatalisation of sound with the vertical configuration of each of the speaker stacks with the scoops or bass bins at the bottom and the tweeters on the top of the stack. So you’ve got a physical vertical dimension, which also expresses frequency. From that it is very easy to visualise how the sound waves come out as visual waves, and these in different colours. The whole business of the spatalisation of sound in the arena, the space of the dancehall session, is something I have been researching for a while (see Henriques 2011 and 2014). And the specific thing here is that they do not use the conventional configuration of speakers either side of the stage because with the sound system there is no stage, because there is no artist; it’s more a phonographic medium, in Jamaica. Instead they set up three speaker stacks, not two. (“Channel One” sound system over here are also set up in this manner). So, that gives a triangle, all pointing inwards onto the crowd in the middle. That gives you not a flat plane of sound, but a three-dimensional volume of sound, an area which is imbued, filled with the sound waves from the massive speaker stacks pointing inwards.

  Figure 4. Julian Henriques, Single Speaker Stack Frequency Rainbow diagram from treble to bass (grayscale version).

  HO: Like a pyramid of sound. I am just thinking of a kind of triangular set-up...

  JH: Yeah, in a way. You could put it like that, a pyramid of sound. Triangulation of sound with the audience in the middle rather than as distinct from the normal stereo where — mimicking the proscenium arch — the performance is located on one side as if it was a live band and the audience positioned on the other side. This idea of the stage, still the default for theatre design, was first formulated by the Jacobean architect Indigo Jones. And so it is us and them — us as the audience and the act on the other side of the divide. By contrast with the sound-system session the sound comes from all around, through us as the audience on the stage, where the stage is everything between the three speaker stacks.

  HO: But there is this notion that the audience is inhabiting the architecture of the sound, which is being transformed. It’s a kind of teleportation within this defined area of sound that is created by this triangular structure that you are talking about.

  JH: Yeah, it’s literally taking off...

  HO: A sonic transporter?

  JH: Yeah, exactly, it is a sonic transporter, at the level of pleasure, right, of just pure bodily delight. The body embodying itself with other people, you are feeling, you know you are feeling with the sound in the music. But also the spiritual level, going back to the alchemy, it’s the refinement of the soul, in this case through the sound of music, raising consciousness. This is an ascendance to a more beautiful place, but you need to purify yourself to get to that place — Africa if you like. This is also of course in the bigger picture the next life, which this life is preparing us for, so to say, you know in traditional belief systems, that is often the case. So it is working on all these levels. What is so beautiful about it is the street culture. It’s a street technology. So here is all this richness, sophistication, subtlety, understanding, which is happening completely outside any academy, any official anything. It’s something that is being developed with the people for the people. And that’s a knowledge system, a way of knowing how sound works.2 And that’s something to give respect to and to learn from.

  HO: Absolutely! It seems to be a seminal narrative that informs a large part of mainstream contemporary media and music. The origins of those experiences we talk about. We could talk about the experience of surround sound, for example. Within this kind of street culture and dancehall you talk about, there is a grassroots culture, a precursor to the commercialisation of similar notions of surround sound that you have in the mainstream. But there is a complete erasure of the link to the grassroots of the sound experience.

  JH: Yeah, there are lots of these erasures. Somebody put it to me that Foucault is credited as the man who understands discipline, right. In fact, really that all comes from Black Power in the United States and in terms of what the prison system was doing there. Foucault never makes a single mention of Black Power or the prison-industrial complex that Angela Davis has long been campaigning against. Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby were doing their dub experiments in Jamaica in the 1960s, discovering for themselves the material nature of sound — likewise in the European avant-garde tradition Pierre Schaeffer is widely recognised as pioneering with his musique concrète. The history that gets written is invariably only all about the avant-garde pioneers, rather than what was going on in popular culture, where the work was being done out of necessity, in two-track recording studios in Kingston, Jamaica, in the tropics. This is normally not seen or heard as part of the bigger picture. That is what we need to do, we can use the cultural capital of the academy to recognise these narratives. That is to recognise in terms of technology and sound, what popular culture has been doing, where it comes from as black and brown people — and thereby where, if you like, modern civilisation comes from. And that disavowal, that blindness to these origins, is unfortunately as much part of the modernist project, as it is part of the future that Afrofuturism is projecting for us.

  HO: It is interesting again you mention that, because I see this also within the work that I am doing —
often the live performance aspect of it actually for me is just a gesture. I see it as a marker to try and get the audience to engage with the histories of the original material and question the sense in which it is easy to think about aspects of popular culture and black culture as purely ephemeral or transient. The action of trying to create a moment when the audience re-engages — often I perform with the original image, I stand next to the original image and for me that is about a kind of ‘pointing to’, asking people for a moment of time to actually look at this image and give it time.

  Figure 5. Harold Offeh (2015), Covers Live: After Funkadelic, Maggot Brain, 1971. Live Performance at MAC, Birmingham, UK 2015. Photo by Open Aperture UK.

  I am interested in what you were just talking about there in terms of what is underpinning the Captain Eko project as a kind of co-opting of the academy into a very specific political aim in terms of giving recognition, and visibility and voice, and agency, ultimately, to these histories.

  JH: Yeah, and we are doing that in a very practical way which has come up since, which might be interesting for you. In January 2016 we did two Sound System Outernational events.3 They both gave recognition to the practice of sound-system cultures and popular street culture and brought some of the local sound systems and crews and followers into Goldsmiths for a whole series of seminars and workshops that allowed us to recognise what we are doing and how important that is. It was really about building the relationship between the research in the academy and the local community. It was also intergenerational. One of the speakers was Young Warrior who is the son of Jah Shaka, and Young Warrior brought his mum down. And the women sound systems, like “Legs Eleven” and “CAYA” (Come As You Are) and the pioneer “V Rocket” from Nottingham, who have a lot of experience. So there is a real practical engagement with the culture, which Goldsmiths is in a very good position to have an input on, to encourage. We had several local sound systems and the university supporting it, in terms of the College’s goals of “outreach”, in terms of their “impact”. The university and higher education is under attack in all kinds of ways and the future is hardly rosy. But still it has a residual capital, a cultural capital that can be used in these ways to encourage the recognition of the value of popular cultures. Not just as entertainment, of course, they are that, but in terms of these deeper strands. Without an understanding of the popular street cultures and technologies we are going to have a distorted view of what technology itself is. So, this is really necessary mainstream stuff. No, seriously. If we have a mainstream that is deaf and blind to black culture, well then we get a kind of warping, in my view, an eviscerating of our humanity.

  HO: Absolutely.

  1. Evidence for this thesis has been traced in the financial records of slave ownership by the “Legacies of British Slave-ownership”. See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/; accessed 20 September 2016.

  2. This is discussed in detail in terms of the sonic logos in Henriques 2011: 242-74.

  3. See our blog, https://soundsystemouternational.wordpress.com; accessed 20 September 2016.

  Works Cited

  Attali, Jacques (1985), Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chude-Sokei, Louis (2015), The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

  Eglash, Ron (2007), “Broken Metaphor: The Master - Slave Analogy in Technical Literature”, in Technology & Culture, 48.2: 360-69.

  Foucault, Michel (1986), “Of Other Spaces”, in Diacritics, 16: 22-27 (also available at: http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html; accessed 20 September 2016).

  Henriques, Julian (2011), Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing. London: Continuum.

  ——— (2014), “Rhythmic Bodies: Amplification, Inflection and Transduction in the Dance Performance Techniques of the ‘Bashment Gal’”, in Body & Society, 20: 79-112.

  Williams, Eric Eustice (1964), Capitalism and Slavery. London: Andre Deutsche.

  HOW MUCH THE HEART CAN HOLD

  Annett Busch

  Something alluring unfolds over three screens that is too enigmatic to speak of as a crisis, yet the crisis is clearly present. A lost space opens up in John Akomfrah’s latest three channel installation, The Airport (2016). Bright warm light, a wide-angled viewpoint, a composition of straight lines. Figures in melancholic composure: walking, sitting, waiting. A female voice singing a song in Greek. The cinematic space opens onto a time of mourning and recollection. Fragments of newsreel dialogue connect these different “spacetime” images with a present in which they have not yet arrived. The past, with its heavy burden, cannot impinge upon the claims of the future, so it seems. Present time comes into the image through direct sound, and while image and sound are technically disconnected, they merge in our perception.

  The following text is based on a movement of thought that one can possibly imagine as a rollercoaster, a looping line that turns around at least twice and ends up slightly displaced: memory, in moments and fragments, passing through the “amorous organ of repetition” — the heart, as Gilles Deleuze puts it in his introduction to Difference and Repetition — to find a divergent form on the border of knowledge. Writing along the border of knowledge — of what is known, what can be known — is what Deleuze calls science fiction. “How else”, he asks,

  can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border that separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write (1994: xxi).

  Writing on, with and about film, and on the films of John Akomfrah in particular — less in the mode of film criticism than as an attempt to understand an arrangement of image, sound and voice — can become science fiction in this very sense. Not only as writing that skims the border of knowing and not-yet-knowing, but as a transcription of a future that evolves from an image arriving from the past, an image that is not evident and not necessarily visible. The image must be seen through. It is not so much about reading and deciphering the image, but more about discerning how its echo reaches us. Much has been written about the artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah in recent years, particularly since his filmic and sonic oeuvre (and that of his long-time collaborators from the Black Audio Film Collective era and after) began to circulate as multi-channel installations in galleries, biennales and museums. The strong presence of media coverage and the relative absence of the work itself can make it difficult to experience the adventure of ignorance and surprise, of not-yet-knowing. The discursive framing of the work can suggest that we have already seen it. Seen what? To avoid the trickery of depressive boredom — as audience, spectators, passers-by, as readers and writers — falling for the assumption that the media has already said it all — and to regain the possibility of writing, and seeing, we must first realise that we only know “badly”.

  Hope — A Form to Move On

  “In the Shadows of the Real”, a lecture given by Akomfrah in the context of a student-based project on Afrofuturism at the Art Academy in Trondheim in March 2016, slows down our assumption and reveals what we have not seen, what we have not listened to carefully enough. The lecture accompanies and informs this writing and unrolls as recurrent theme. Taking The Principle of Hope, the all-too-famous, yet little-read book by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, as a point of departure, Akomfrah elaborates on the idea of the “utopian image”. Written between 1938 and 1947 in exile in the United States and published in three volumes between 1954 and 1959 in the GDR, and only translated into English in 1986, Bloch’s extensive history of utopian thought had a difficult career and seemed completely absent as a reference for many years, at least in Germany. The German edition gained momentum in the late 1960s and 1970s within the student movement, which Bloch, then already in his late eighties, was emphatically engaged i
n. People who once experienced Bloch debating always emphasised the importance of his rhetoric as an expression of lived theory, with concepts animated and renewed through spoken language. A decade later, after his death, Bloch’s concepts of hope and utopia had already become popularised and emptied of meaning. He was further labelled as someone who bridged Christianity and Marxism; all before The Principle of Hope had even been published in English. What too easily resonates with the concept of hope is the association with Christian passivity. But Bloch rather suggested an affective methodology, a form and a movement: “The essential content of hope is anything but hope” (Zudeick 1985: 308). He defines hope as an emotion that “goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them […]. The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong” (1995: 3).

  Following Akomfrah’s take on these concepts also means going back to moments of departure, loaded and necessarily full of hope. Hope as the incitation of a new beginning can display a vast field of lost traces, liberating and challenging in their simplicity. Going back to Bloch through the reading and appropriation of a Marxist-informed Afro-British filmmaker to nourish a thought on the concept of the “elsewhere” with regard to image-making fundamentally shifts the perspective, context and tone of my own memories of Bloch’s book being part of my parent’s bookshelves. This also implies that I have more of a specific sentiment for that very book which recalls a sense of Christianity, than a particular knowledge. For whatever reason, Peter Zudeick’s biography, The Devil’s Buttocks, is one of the very few items from that time, a kind of heritage, that survived all my relocations spanning twenty-five years, and now it is the first time I had a reason to read it. Bloch, who “dropped out of the race between his fellow Western Marxists like György Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno” — all of whom were significantly missing from my parent’s bookshelves but became much more important for my further education — got a second life.