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Aesthetics

Sianne Ngai: Zany, Cute, Interesting

I commonly encounter two problems when I try to teach aesthetics. One is that today’s students don’t seem to relate to categories of aesthetic experience and judgment such as the sublime and the beautiful. Another is that in today’s cosmopolitan classroom, these seem like rather western categories. An approach that might help here is Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.¹ The our in the title is a delicious provocation.

The book presents two problems of its own: first, it is written from within the upper echelons of literary-critical and theoretical work, as conducted in our top universities, a world to which I do not belong. Can it be made interesting for those of us in more ordinary day jobs? Second: is it possible to extract from it some concepts that can help with the making of a counterhegemonic culture in our times?

Rather than the sublime and the beautiful, Ngai offers three categories, which one can already see at work on the surface of social media, distributed more or less as “zany blogs, cute tweets and interesting wikis.”² Even just as common words, zany, cute, and interesting seem intuitively right as keys to what many people want to look at, laugh with, sigh over, and share with others. If you want to make a meme, in the general sense of a unit of media that will be shared by others, those three all work.³ The question is, why?

To cut to the punchline: “The best explanation for why the zany, the interesting, and the cute are our most pervasive and significant categories is that they are about the increasingly intertwined ways in which late capitalist subjects labor, communicate and consume.”⁴ They are the material through which we can have perceptions and share judgments that seem most closely related to what we do, say, and use in the twenty-first century.

Ngai frames this as a tension between the relative novelty of these aesthetic categories and something that appears as more of a constant—capitalism. The pressure I want to put on this is to ask whether they are indicative not of “late” capitalism, but “early”’ something else.⁵ But first, let’s flesh out the three categories.

The zany: it’s a performative aesthetic that is hot and sweaty, anxious and excessive. It is physical and sometimes libidinal. It is about activities where play becomes a job or work gets too playful. It involves imitation and mimicry, as if trying to copy what someone else does but doing it clumsily. It may be done as a joke but taken seriously or done seriously and taken as a joke: think Lucille Ball or Hugo Ball. Injury is possible: think Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line. It borders on camp, or what Jack Halberstam calls the queer art of failure, as in Sandra Bernhard or Kikki and Herb.⁶ But the zany is more likely to convert triumph into failure than failure into triumph. Think the coyote’s endless labor of trying to catch the roadrunner.⁷

The zany performance can be too rigid or too elastic. Either way, there’s instability between doing a job and performing a role, or between cultural and occupational performance, or between play and labor. The zany can be desperate or stressed, but it is not Dionysian frenzy; it is more precarious and forced, like bad porn. Obliged to play, the zany can be sexy but not joyous.

The stock character of the zanni was originally an itinerant servant, a peasant forced by drought or war into the city. The zagna was the female counterpart. The zanni and zagna are supposed to repair the amorous relationships of others. Comedy ensued. The zanni came to refer to a second mime imitating another very broadly, an anarchic improviser. He was a “substitute for another guy.” He mutated into the Cable Guy and as such is linked to post-Fordist labor and is caught in-between modes of production, in this case between industrial work and service work.

The zanni shows up again as Kramer on Seinfeld: like Jerry, only more so. All the show’s characters perform versions of what Paolo Virno calls virtuoso labor (what for Angela McRobbie and others is affective labor).⁸ Ngai also thinks of this as feminized labor, a term Paul Preciado would push back on, in the assumptions it makes about what is feminine.⁹

Feminized labor is certainly at play in movies like Richard Pryor’s The Toy, in which he dresses as a waitress to get a job. Ngai thinks there are ambiguities for women about skills formerly associated with their special role in social reproduction now being used in the workplace. If there’s a genre that performs this kind of performativity, reality TV shows like Top Chef, Project Runway, or Drag Race are examples of it. They are all about aesthetic judgments on forms of virtuoso or affective labor.

The cute: The word derives from the word acute. The word itself is a cute version of an edgier word. The zany is to be held at a distance; the cute is intimate, domestic. We have powers over cute things, and yet they still seem to make demands of us. The zany is about production; the cute is about consumption. The zany is about the worker; the cute is about the product. The zany is hot and may involve sharp implements; the cute is warm and fuzzy. If the zany is about performing subjects, the cute is about subject–object relations, including transitional objects, like the plushie the child can love or (if the kid is anything like my daughter) just abandon in the strangest places.

Cuteness lacks beauty’s novelty, singularity, and untouchability—and power. The cute can be handled and fondled. It is proximate to kitsch, to easy consumption, to the simulating of affect.¹⁰ The cute commodity often seems to be asking: Are you my mother? The cute thing can be a fetish, masking its own making, but it can also be utopian, a model of a world of use value without exchange value.

Marx imagines commodity fetishes a bit like child actors, squealing and appealing for their buyers.¹¹ Cuteness is perhaps a kind of fetish redoubled. It tries to work on the fantasy of the fetish itself. It pines for the utopia of the qualitative, which seeks refuge under capitalism in the fetish. Cuteness is a fantasy of the commodity addressing its protector. One feels like one is carrying out its wishes. Its exaggerated passivity can provoke sadism or care. It can also hint at a pastoral fantasy of use value that could be rescued and kept safe, as in the Toy Story movies. The cute provokes a desire for intimacy to cut out exchange. Its powerlessness can itself be powerfully erotic.

Ngai: “the ultimate index of an object’s cuteness may be its edibility.”¹² It is sweet but edged with disgust. Keston Sutherland points out that the metaphor Marx uses in Capital for abstract labor is Gallerte, which in English might translate as aspic, brawn, or gelatine—all achieved by boiling down animal parts.¹³ The transformation of concrete labors into abstract labor renders the laborer into something akin to the notorious pink goo or pink slime that industrial, processed meat now contains. Ngai: “If undifferentiated labor in this text gets figured as a quivering, gelatinous food implicitly made up of ground-up human workers, the inverse of or antidote to this image of being dissolved into food might be the image of a face emerging from inside a cookie.”¹⁴

One can connect this reversibility of the cute to Walter Benjamin’s observation that the gaze of the cute creature can be considered our own gaze, looking on at the process of com-modification itself, with which we compulsively identify, and in the face of which it is tempting to appear small and vulnerable and plead for special care.¹⁵ The cute renders production as if it were a domestic activity, but one charged with eroticism and violence. Ngai wonders if it’s any accident that Japanese culture exploded with its own version of the cute, the kawaii, in the era of rapid postwar industrialization. Perhaps it was a way of learning to love defeat on a national scale, but one redoubled in the private sphere as learning to love exploitation. The term kawaii sounds fairly close to kowai— the scary. Cute eroticism can be sweet, but biting—fanged phenomena.

While one thinks most readily of stuffed animals, the cute might also be in play in such refined works as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.¹⁶ In spite of its proximity to kitsch, the cute can be an avant-garde tactic. Here it is “less a fantasy of art’s capacity for revenge on a society that renders it harmless, than a more modest way of imagining art’s ability to transform itself into something slightly less easy to consume.”¹⁷ Ngai here offers a really interesting reading of one of Francis Ponge’s miniature poems, in which an orange is deformed in the act of consumption, in some small mute act of resistance.¹⁸

In a lovely twist, Ngai writes: “It is as if the authority figure’s ‘Hey, you!’ in Louis Althusser’s scene of interpellation fell short of arriving at the second person pronoun, doubling back on itself to become an act of hailing one’s own incomplete hail.”¹⁹ I would have a slightly more sinister take on this: a world in which every surface becomes a weaponized adorable, not hailing but cooing: “Hey … Hey … Hey.”²⁰

There was something adorable about Theodor Adorno. And something cute even about his masterpiece Minima Moralia, his self-helpless book for and from damaged life, with its coy refusal of dialectical resolution. In it are a lot of kitsch items, like the useless gift articles produced by a specialized industry for people who no longer know how to give.²¹ This junk is still closely tied to art, as kitsch lurks in art. So perhaps one can reverse the gesture and find the aesthetic in the cute, as a kind of fetish that protects against fetishism.

The interesting: If the zany is about subjects, and the cute is about subject–object strangeness, then the interesting is about things. Or maybe information about things or even the circulation of forms of information. It is not a performative or commodity aesthetic, but a discursive one. If the zany is hot, and the cute is warm, then the interesting is cool, ironic, detached, even clinical. It’s a small surprise of information, of some variation from a norm. It can have a documentary impulse. It is interested in comparison, in anomalies and systems; it alternates between reason and surprise.

For Isabelle Stengers, what is interesting in science is a proposition that associates the largest number of actors.²² The interesting also assembles the social, but what is sociologically interesting also has an aesthetic aspect. It measures the tension between understanding and wonder. Theories are not interesting when obvious, improbable, or unprovable. Ngai:

From the hard sciences to sociology to literary studies, the interesting thus seems to be a way of creating relays between affect-based judgement and concept-based explanation in a manner that binds heterogeneous agencies together and enables movement across disciplinary domains.²³

The interesting is an aesthetic without content, for the modern ironic self, like the detectives Nick and Nora in Hammett’s The Thin Man.²⁴

It’s an aesthetic category one might connect to the flâneur and the dérive. Ngai links it to the rise in the circulation of printed matter, to which I might, in the spirit of T. J. Clark, add circulation through the modern city.²⁵ From Baudelaire to Debord, the dérive emerges as an anthropological version of the interesting, a method on the boundary between the regularity of the city and its possibility for anticipatory utopian moods.

The interesting lacks universality. “The interesting is thus a style of serial, comparative individualization.” And yet the interesting enables movement between aesthetic and nonaesthetic judgment, between pleasure and cognition: “the feeling that underpins it seems to lie somewhere between an object-oriented desire and an object-indifferent affect.” Experience is just what one agrees to notice, when interest flickers from passive to active awareness. It is prior to affect: a generic, minimal judgment. As curiosity, it could be the libido of theory, both a driver and danger to reason. It’s a feeling of not yet knowing, an absence of a concept, “a kind of zero-degree aesthetic judgement.”²⁶

The interesting anticipates but is continuous. It is not arresting, not a pause in time, like the sublime or beautiful. It happens in a flowing duration but makes and marks a difference. It can thus only be historical. It might—finally—be a secular aesthetic. The interesting can be irritating, with its repetitive flick between the familiar and the unfamiliar, identity and difference, continuity and break. But its variance from the norm can be small, its affect minimal, its risk manageable. As Raymond Williams notes, risk is the link between aesthetic and economic senses of “interest.”²⁷

For Susan Sontag, photography makes everything interesting. Barthes tried to arrest the serial repetition of the photographic studium with his more singular punctum. Here one might want to connect the interesting to Vilem Flüsser’s famous essay on photography as a machine that incorporates everything as an image.²⁸ In modern literature, the interesting is Beckett, Perec, or Stein’s The Making of Americans, and more recently, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which one could read as a novel about the novel as the temporal repetition that produces the interesting.²⁹

In a surprising move, Ngai links the interesting in the novel, particularly the realist novel and its modern variants, to conceptual art. They are all interested in investigating generic appearances, the serial, the algorithm, the schema, paperwork and official procedures. Conceptual art is a forensic art. Conceptual art shares a paradox in detective fiction identified by Franco Moretti: it must tell ever new stories but must reproduce the same schema.³⁰

The interesting addresses a world of speeded-up information by asking for a slowed-down attention. Sometimes, the information about the art becomes the art, as in On Kawara postcards. If modern art was once a special kind of commodity, then a special kind of service, now it is a special kind of derivative financial instrument.³¹ Ngai: “Interesting conceptual art was both an instance of and an art about this absorption of modes of circulation into modes of production.”³² But I think we blew through that moment toward a full subsumption of both into control of the value chain through the information vector.

And so:

Diachronic and informational, forensic and dialogic: the aesthetic of the interesting has the capacity to produce new knowledge. From Adorno on the products of the culture industry to Cavell on Hollywood screwball comedies, [to Ngai on the interesting], all contemporary criticism is thus, in some sense, an implicit provision of evidence for why the object that the critic has chosen to talk about is interesting.³³

In this way a critic might still influence public judgment, crossing the border between general and specialized, making subcultures cohere, watching the detectives.

The zany is a subject, the interesting an object, and the cute a hybrid. All are in-between play and labor, and they signal an era in which work becomes play and play becomes work. All three are both ways of feeling and ways of relating, and they mark an era in which both work and play are also tied into a constant effort to make or maintain sociality. These seem common experiences for those parts of the overdeveloped world where more and more people seem to do service work, “creative” work, work with information.

The particular affective responses involved are hardly grand ones. The cute evokes feelings through its vulnerable and diminutive form. The zany is itself a feeling of flailing helplessness. (Ngai does not include erotic frenzy but one might as well, particularly if hyperbolic and joyless.) The interesting is a moving target, tracking along with the difference between norms and anomalies. These might all be trivial or bathetic feelings—but they are not detached, disinterested, or leisurely contemplation of the beautiful. Nor are they the overwhelming force of the unmasterable sublime, which one nevertheless puts back in its box with the gesture of respect or recognition of delight. They nest between those two extremes. We are dealing with weak forms and subtle powers that make the histrionics of the sublime in Lyotard or Land look a bit dated.³⁴

In a novel formulation, Ngai suggests that art really has become autonomous. Moreover, the other great ambition for art, its merger with everyday life, has also come true at the same time. Both utopias came to pass, but not quite in the form anyone envisaged. They happen through rather than against the commodity form. Art survived through weakness, through a faint facility for standing-in for nonalienated labor, as a vague and friendly ghost rather than the specter haunting Europe. The aesthetic is still with us, but in banal form, lacking religious solemnity. You can cuddle up to it at night or glance it in a museum. “Hey…”, it says. It can be awesome but never inspire awe. It has no higher power to appeal to and not much up its sleeve.

That aspect of art that really did fuse with the everyday becomes almost indistinguishable from neurotic symptoms: Interest cycles through irritating obsessions and boredom; cuteness reeks of manipulation that provokes phobias and disgust; zaniness performs hysteria or mania. Everyday art is the kipple of once-great genre tropes: cuteness is the pastoral in a .jpeg; the zany is a comedic return and reconciliation in a .gif; the interesting is realism in a Facebook quiz.

The ubiquity of these more secular aesthetic categories may be related to “the increasing routing of art and aesthetic experience through the exchange of information.”³⁵ The aesthetic now attaches to performance, commodity, and information. This connects a series of historical phenomena:

the convergence of art and information; the loss of tension between art and the commodity form; the rise of an increasingly intimate public sphere and of an increasingly exchange-based private one; the proliferation and intensification of activity in both public/private domains that cannot easily be dichotomized into play or work.³⁶

While more secular than the sublime, all three also put pressure on the category of beauty: cuteness violates the distance to the object, zaniness troubles the concept of spontaneous play, while the gaze of the interesting is clinical but remains unmoved.³⁷ The aesthetic experience is just not to be found where classical western aesthetics thought it was. Ngai: “Can distance, play and disinterested pleasure—essential images of freedom rather than compulsion or determination—still be considered reliable ‘symptoms’ of the aesthetic, if late capitalist culture’s most pervasive aesthetic categories pose such a challenge to each as such?”³⁸

Schlegel and Fredric Jameson now appear as the synthetic observers of transitional moments. Ngai:

If, in response to the loss of the sacred under conditions of secular, industrial modernity, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries plunged headlong into the resacralization of the aesthetic, the contemporary moment seems defined by a desacralization of the aesthetic turn, but a desacralization caused precisely by the aesthetic’s hyperbolic expansion.³⁹

Contrary to Jameson, Hiroki Azuma got the postmodern moment right when he noticed a shift from a grand narrative to a vast database—of cute elements or moe-points—as what was already emerging in Japan in the nineties.⁴⁰

Aesthetic theories may themselves have their aesthetic modes, the beautiful being no doubt the most common. Jameson’s aesthetics may have tried to pull off the sublime: You were meant to feel as if you stared into the abyss of the totality itself. If we think of Adorno’s Minima Moralia as cute, then what do interesting or zany aesthetic theories look like? In these terms, Ngai’s own book seems to work in the interesting mode. Perhaps the new only appears against the background of a constant—in this case, eternal capitalism. It can have novel features, but somehow its essence remains the same. It can be late but all tomorrow’s parties still go on and on and are all the same.

What would not just a zany aesthetic, but a zany aesthetic theory, look like? In retrospect, I think I tried it in A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.⁴¹ The titles themselves name kinds of performing-subjects, who, like the zanni in his time, do emerging kinds of labor. Gamer Theory itself was performative, appearing online as a networked book. It worked within Oulipian constraints and was certainly not cool but a lot of hot, hard work.⁴² It wasn’t as compellingly zany as Eddo Stern’s Tekken Torture, a modified fighting game that gave real electric shocks when players were hit by their opponents, but it felt that way.

Unlike the interesting, the zany really works against its constraints. There’s an acceptance of a given form and temporal constant in the interesting that the zany pushes exhaustively and exhaustingly past. Maybe with a touch more of that mania we can then unmoor the aesthetic experience of the interesting, the zany, and the cute from the assumption of an eternal capitalism. Maybe this isn’t late capitalism, but early something else.

What might be novel is the ownership and control over the entire value chain through command of the information vector itself. Here I’d like to connect Ngai to the pioneering work of Randy Martin, whose interest was in forms of performative aesthetics that might include her category of the zany but are perhaps a bit broader. The zany is anxious about doing it right. The escape hatch the performative art (and sport) that interested Martin found is close to the queer art of failure, in that it recognizes a new volatility in its conditions of operation. It lets go of the guiderail.

The secularization of the aesthetic seems homologous with the subsumption of the value chain under control of information. The power of what I call the vectoralist class is an aesthetic power, a power over appearances, over the stocks, flows, and (more importantly) the vector via which information is managed and material production is ordered. The aesthetic—in the sense of the apprehension of information—integrated the everyday into commodification but also changed what the commodity form is. It is not just that information became a commodity but that the commodity could now take the form of information itself.

Tiziana Terranova suggests that counterhegemonic struggles are now about tactics in a turbulent flow of information. In this connection, Ngai’s identification of three operative aesthetics is useful and can be instrumentalized as styles of engagement. These are aesthetics about the subsumption of creative effort of what I called the hacker class, into the commodification of information and the informationalization of the commodity. Clearly this era of the zany, the cute, and the interesting may also pass. The Anthropocene may require a revolution in modes of perception, affect, and cognition.

But all this too may be automated. I sometimes joke with my “millennial” students and “post-millennial” kids that our last job will be to figure out how to be cute so our new artificial intelligence (AI) overlords will keep us mere humans as pets. Or perhaps they will find the weird data we throw off interesting—although we will still have to be careful not to become persons of interest. Maybe our AI overlords will evolve a posthuman language in which to LOL at our zany mammalian antics. But Ngai’s book is no joke and may well be the basis for a manual for appearing to each other, that we might feel and know and think each other, and endure.

Kodwo Eshun: Black Accelerationism

Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying,

We are hostile aliens, immune from dying. —The Spaceape

There are two bright stars of London culture whose premature deaths I still feel. One is Stephen Gordon (1970–2014), aka The Spaceape. The other is Mark Fisher (1968–2017). Both made works that to me are haunted by the nameless dread of the Anthropocene. But they were also forward slanting culture agents, whose work was constantly abrading the dead skin of the times. Mark Fisher:

Capitalism has abandoned the future because it can’t deliver it. Nevertheless, the contemporary left’s tendencies towards Canutism, its rhetoric of resistance and obstruction, collude with capital’s anti/meta-narrative that it is the only story left standing. Time to leave behind the logics of failed revolts, and to think ahead again.⁴³

As Fisher and Gordon were both well aware, an orientation toward an imminent, immanent future is a hard thing to achieve in a culture shaped in the present out of the past, as a selective tradition. Marx: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”⁴⁴ Inherited ways of writing make the present over as if it were more of the same. Perhaps music might be more attuned to the present than the past. Music too is made in the present out of past materials, but in its field of resonance one might detect unknown pleasures and feel unfathomed spaces. As Kodwo Eshun writes in More Brilliant Than the Sun: “Everything the media warns you against has already been made into tracks that drive the dance floor.”⁴⁵

A word for this might be accelerationism.⁴⁶ If it had a key idea, it is that it is either impossible or undesirable to resist or negate the development of the commodity economy coupled with technology. Rather, it has to be pushed harder and faster; it has to change more rather than less. It is an idea, a feeling, an orientation that might make most sense among those for whom the past was not that great anyway. And so, not surprisingly, the best text on accelerationism was also about Blackness—Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun.

It’s helpful to make a preliminary distinction here between what Aria Dean calls Blacceleration or Black Accelerationism and Afrofuturism, although the former may be a subset of the latter.⁴⁷ Black Accelerationism is a willful pushing forward that includes an attempt to clear away certain habits of thought and feeling in order to be open to a future that is attempting to realize itself in the present.

Afrofuturism is a more general category in which one finds attempts to picture or narrate or conceive of Black existence on other worlds or in future times, which may or may not have an accelerationist will to push on. If Black Accelerationism is a particular temporal and spatial concept, Afrofuturism is a genre that includes both temporal and spatial concepts within the general cultural space of science fiction. That in turn might be a subset of modernism, with its characteristically nontransitive approach to time.⁴⁸

The term Afrofuturism was coined by Mark Dery, drawing on suggestions in the work of Greg Tate.⁴⁹ It’s become a lively site of cultural production but also scholarly research, providing a frame for thinking about the science fiction writing of African American authors such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler or more recently N. K. Jemisin. It has also become a popular trope in contemporary cultural production. The Marvel super-hero movie Black Panther (2018) is a veritable anthology of its visual figures. Afrofuturism also shows up in music videos by Beyoncé, FKA Twigs, and Janelle Monáe.⁵⁰

Monáe’s video Many Moons contains one of the key figures of the genre. It shows androids performing at an auction for wealthy clients, including white, vampiric plutocrats and a Black military-dictator type. The androids are all Black and are indeed all Monáe herself. The android becomes the reversal, and yet also the equivalent, of the slave. The slave was a human treated as a nonperson and forced to work like a machine; the android is an inhuman treated as a nonperson but forced to work like a human.

These figures have a deep past. But first, I want to explore one of their futures or a related future. After writing More Brilliant Than the Sun, Eshun co-founded the Otolith Group with Anjalika Sagar. The first three films they made together, Otolith parts I, II, and III, offer a different “future” and a cultural space in which to think of Black Accelerationism.⁵¹

Otolith is in the genre of documentary fiction or essay film, descended from the work of Chris Marker and Harun Farocki. The conceit involves a future character who is a descendent of present-day Otolith co-founder Anjalika Sagar, who lives in orbit around our planet and who is working through the archives of her own family.

Otolith links the microgravity environment to planetary crisis, where orbital or agravic space is a heterotopia inviting heightened awareness of disorientation.⁵² “Gravity locates the human species.”⁵³ This is a speculative future in which the species bifurcates, those in microgravity function with a modified otolith, that part of the inner ear that senses the tilting of the body. In the terms of the revived structural analysis of myth offered by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, this is a myth about the end of both the human and the world.

Sagar’s imaginary future descendant looks back, through her own ancestors, to the grand social projects of the twentieth century: Indian and Soviet state socialism, the international socialist women’s movement, and (as in Anna Tsing) the Non-Aligned Movement. One of Sagar’s ancestors had actually met Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.⁵⁴

The last part of Otolith meditates on an unmade film by the great Satjayit Ray, The Alien.⁵⁵ Its central conceit, of an alien lost on earth who is discovered by children, strangely enough turned up later in the Hollywood film ET. Otolith speculates on whether Hindu polytheism foreclosed the space in which an Indian science fiction might have flourished. The popular Indian comic books that retell the stories of the Gods are indeed something like science fiction and call for a rethinking of the genre.

Otolith also gestures toward American science fiction writer Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967), which imagines a quite different future than that of Otolith but that similarly tries to decenter imaginative possibility.⁵⁶ In this book, the only survivors of a vanished earth are Hindu. Their high-tech society is also highly stratified. Its rulers have God-like powers and the technology to “reincarnate.” The central character, described in the book as an “accelerationist,” challenges this class-bound order.

During the Cold War, while much of American literature was basically suburban white boys talking about their dicks, science fiction did a lot of the real cultural work.⁵⁷ Zelazny’s book is not a bad example of how far American science fiction could get in imagining a non-western world that was neither to be demonized nor idealized and whose agents of change were internal to it. Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler went even further in using worldbuilding as a literary device for asking about how concepts like race and gender, or even the human, come to be in the first place.⁵⁸ In science fiction, unlike in literary fiction, worldbuilding has to at least be plausible.

Afrofuturism is a landscape of cultural invention that we can put in the context of a plural universe of imagined future times and other spaces, which draw on the raw material of many kinds of historical experience and cultural raw material. And just as Afrofuturism functions as a subset of science fiction modernity, there might also be many kinds of accelerationism. The posthuman ends up being more than one thing if one can get one’s head around currently existing humans as being more than one thing.⁵⁹ The orbital posthuman of Otolith might in many ways repeat a figure from that little-known accelerationist classic, JD Bernal’s The World, The Flesh and the Spirit.⁶⁰ But it does so inflected by particular cultural histories.

Which brings me to More Brilliant Than the Sun. It is a text whose strategies include putting pressure on language through neologisms and portmanteau constructs, in order to let the future into the present.⁶¹ Eshun sets himself against modes of writing about Black music that are designed to resist hearing anything new. “The future is a much better guide to the present than the past.” Thus, “the rhythmachine is locked in a retarded innocence.” You are not supposed to analyze the groove, or find a language for it. Music writing becomes a futureshock absorber: “You reserve your nausea for the timeless classic.” Eshun’s interest is rather in “Unidentified Audio Objects.”⁶²

We no longer have roots, we have aerials. Eshun is resistant to that writing that wants the authentic and seeks for it in music, that wants to locate it in organic community, whether in the Mississippi Delta for the blues or the burning Bronx for hip-hop.⁶³ He is resistant to the validating figure of “the street” as the mythical social or public place where the real is born.

From the Net to arcade simulations games, civil society is all just one giant research-and-development wing of the military. The military industrial complex has advanced decades ahead of civil society, becoming a lethal military entertainment complex, reprograming predatory virtual futures. Far from being a generative source for popculture, as Trad media still quaintly insists, the street is now the playground in which low-end developments of military technology are unleashed, to mutate themselves.⁶⁴

As Black Lives Matter has so consistently confirmed.⁶⁵

For Eshun, disco is “audibly where the 21st century begins,”⁶⁶ even if most genealogies of pop delete its intimations of the sonic diaspora of Afrofuturism. Like Paul Gilroy, Eshun thinks of Black culture as diasporic rather than national, but unlike Gilroy, he is not interested in a critical negation of the limits of humanism in the name of a more expansive one.⁶⁷ His Black culture “alienates itself from the human; it arrives from the future.”⁶⁸ It refuses the human as a central category. If the human is not a given, then neither can there be a Black essence. There’s no “keeping it real” in this book. The writer’s job is to be a sensor rather than a censor.

The field of study here is not so much music itself as the ambiences music co-generates with spaces, sound systems, and bodies. It’s not an aesthetics of music so much as what the late Randy Martin would have recognized as a kinaesthetics. One could even see it as a branch of psychogeography, but not of walking—rather, of dancing.⁶⁹

The dance does not reveal some aspect of the human, but rather has the capacity to make the human something else. Eshun follows Lyotard in extending Nietzsche’s insistence that the human does not want the truth. Here, the human craves the inauthentic and the artificial.⁷⁰ This is the basis of a sonic accelerationism: the objective is to encourage machine-made music’s “despotic drive” to subsume both its own past and the presence of the human body.⁷¹

Black Accelerationism, operating mostly but not exclusively through music, aims “to design, manufacture, fabricate, synthesize, cut, paste and edit a so-called artificial discontinuum for the futurerhythmachine.”⁷² As Hiroki Azuma maintains, machines don’t alienate people.⁷³ They can make you feel more intensely. They enable a hyperembodiment rather than disembodiment.

Let’s work backward through the sonic material Eshun feels his way through. What’s not to like about late nineties Detroit techno?⁷⁴ Here we might start with what for Eshun was one of the end points. Drexciya is an unidentifiable sonic object that comes with its own Afrofuturist myth. The Drexciyans navigate the depths of the Black Atlantic. They are a webbed mutant marine subspecies descended from pregnant slaves who were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage, as if they had escaped all of slavery’s scenes of subjection.⁷⁵

Drexciya use electronic sound and beats to replay the alien abduction of slavery as sonic fiction, or as what Sun Ra called an alterdestiny.⁷⁶ As Lisa Nakamura shows, certain popular Afrofuturist material like the Matrix movies make the Black or the African the more authentically human and rooted.⁷⁷ What appeals to Eshun is the opposite claim: that Blackness can accelerate faster away from the human. It’s an embrace rather than a refutation of the slave-machine figure, pressing it into service in pressing on.

There was a time when avant-garde music was beatless. Drum and bass went in the opposite direction: “drumsticks become knitting needles hitting electrified bedsprings at 180 bpm.” The sensual topology offered by 4hero or A Guy Called Gerald use drum machines not to mimic the human drummer but replace it, to create abstract sonic environments that call the body into machinic patterns of movement. “Abstract doesn’t mean rarified or detached but the opposite: the body stuttering on the edge of a future sound, teetering on the brink of new speech.”⁷⁸

Rhythm becomes the lead instrument, as on A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology:

dappling the ears with micro-discrepancies … When polyrhythm phase-shifts into hyper-rhythm, it becomes unaccountable, compounded, confounding. It scrambles the sensorium, adapts the human into a “distributed being” strung out across the webbed spider-nets and computational jungles of the digital diaspora.⁷⁹

One could say more about how quite particular musical technologies program in advance a kind of phase-space of possible sonic landscapes. The human sound-maker is then not the author but rather the output of the machine itself. For Eshun this is a way to positively value the figure of Blackness as close to the machinelike and remote from the fully “human.” Perhaps an insistence on Blackness as fully human rather overvalues the human. And if whiteness is supposedly most close to the human, then there’s every reason to think less of the human as a category in the first place. This rhetorical move is central to Black Accelerationism. The coupling of Blackness with the machinic is what is to be valued and accelerated, as an overcoming of both whiteness and the human.

If there’s a sonic precursor and stimulator for that line of thought, its acid house music as a playing out of the unintended possibilities of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer. It was meant as a bass accompaniment for musicians to practice to, but sonic artists such as Phuture made it a lead instrument, exploring its potential not to imitate bass but to make otherworldly sounds. Eshun: “Nothing you know about the history of music is any help whatsoever.”⁸⁰

Eshun mostly works his way around hip-hop, being rather disinterested in its claims to street authenticity, not to mention its masculine bravado.⁸¹ He makes an exception for the late eighties work of the Ultramagnetic MCs. Here the song is in ruins, language is reduced to phonemes. The rapper becomes an abstract sound generator, dropping science. Eshun quotes Paul Virilio from Pure War to the effect that “science and technology develop the unknown.”⁸² Science is associated not with what is demonstrated or proven but the opposite, which might be the condition of possibility of science in the more conventional sense.

As is common among those who read a lot of Deleuze during the last century, Eshun favors an escape from the rational and the conscious, a slipping past the borders into the domain of affections and perceptions. In the language of Gerald Raunig, it’s an attempt to slip past the individual into a space of dividual parts, in this case, of skins rippling with sonic sensation.⁸³ It’s not consciousness raising so much as consciousness razing.

Here, sound that works on the skin, on the animated body rather than the concentrating ear, might take the form of feedback, fuzz, static. In the eighties these were coming to be instruments in themselves rather than accidental or unwanted byproducts of instruments that made notes. One can hear (and feel) this in the Jungle Brothers or Public Enemy—the sound of a new earth, a Black planet.

It is not the inhuman or the nonhuman or the overhuman that is to be dreaded. What one might try to hear around is rather the human as a special effect. “The unified self is an amputated self.”⁸⁴ The sonic can produce what the textual always struggles to generate—a parallel processing of alternate states or points of view. This is not so much a double consciousness as the mitosis of the I.⁸⁵ This is a sonic psychogeography that already heard the turbulent information sphere that Tiziana Terranova’s writing later conceptualizes. But it’s more visceral than conceptual, or rather, both at once: “concepts are fondled and licked, sucked and played with.”⁸⁶ Sonic landscapes are intimate but not exactly commodities, and certainly not, in Ngai’s terms, cute.

Of the recognized hip-hop pioneers, the most lyrically and conceptually adventurous was the late Rammellzee, who worked in graffiti, sculpture, and visual art as well as producing some remarkable writings, all bound together with a gothic futurist style he called Ikonokast Panzerism.⁸⁷ His work appeared always with a layer of armor to protect it from a hostile world. He already saw the hip-hop world of the streets and the police as a subset of a larger militarization of all aspects of life. His particular struggle was against the military perceptual complex, and his poetic figure for this was the attempt to “assassinate the infinity sign.”⁸⁸

Rammellzee ingested and elaborated on futures opened up by the discovery of the possibility latent in the direct-drive turntable of the breakbeat. Adventures on the Wheels of Steel by Grandmaster Flash could stand-in as an emblem of that moment. Breakbeat opens up the possibility of the studio as a research center for isolating and replicating beats. The dj becomes a groove-robber rather than an ancestor worshipper. “Hip-hop is therefore not a genre so much as an omni-genre, a conceptual approach towards sonic organization rather than a particular sound in itself.”⁸⁹

The turntable becomes a tone generator, the cut a command, discarding the song, automating the groove. It’s a meta-technique for making new instruments out of old ones. John Cage had already been there, arriving at the turntable not through encounters with gay disco so much as through a formalist avant-garde tradition. As Eshun wryly notes: “Pop always retroactively rescues unpop from the prison of its admirers.”⁹⁰

Couple the turntable with the Emulator sampler and you have a sonic production universe through which you can treat the whole of recorded sound as what Ngai thinks of as the interesting or Azuma thinks of as a database rather than as a grand narrative. Or rather, that technosonic universe can produce you. In Eshun’s perspective, the tech itself authors ways of being. The Emulator sampler discovers the sampled break and uses Marley Marl as its medium.

New sounds are accidents discovered by machines. “Your record collection becomes an immense time machine that builds itself through you.”⁹¹ The machine compels the human toward its parameters. The producer is rather like the gamer, as I understood the figure in Gamer Theory: an explorer of the interiority of the digital rather than romantic revolt beyond it.⁹² Digital sound reveals the body to itself, as a kind of sensational mathematics for kinaesthetes.

If there is a “Delta blues origin story” here for digital Black music, it is an ironic one. It is the German band Kraftwerk.⁹³ But rather than delegitimizing Black digital music, Eshun has an affirmative spin on this. Black producers heard themselves in this echt-European machine music. They heard an internal landscape toward which to disappear. Sonic engineers such as Underground Resistance volunteer for internal exile, for stealth and obfuscation. Even for passing as the machine, as when Juan Atkins releases works under the name Model 500.

“Detroit techno is aerial, it transmits along routes through space, is not grounded by the roots of any tree … Techno disappears itself from the street, the ghetto and the hood … The music arrives from another planet.” A production entity like Cybotron “technofies the biosphere.”⁹⁴ Or escapes from it, building instead a city of time.

Escapism is organized until it seizes the means of perception and multiplies the modes of sensory reality… Sonic Fiction strands you in the present with no way of getting back to the 70s … Sonic Fiction is the manual for your own offworld breakout, re-entry program, for entering Earth’s orbit and touching down on the landing strip of your senses … To technofy is to become aware of the co-evolution of machine and human, the secret life of machines, the computerization of the world, the programming of history, the informatics of reality.⁹⁵

The dj intensifies estrangement, creating alien sound design. Music making is deskilled, allowing for more hearing, less manual labor. The sound processes listeners into its content. Detroit techno comes with a plethora of heteronyms, in parallel rather than serial. And it counterprograms against the sensuality of Funkadelic.⁹⁶ “Techno triggers a delibidinal economics of strict pulses, gated signals—with techno you dance your way into constriction.” It favors the affectless voice over the glossolalia of soul. Techno is funk for androids escaping from the street and from labor. “Techno secedes from the logic of empowerment which underpins the entire African American mediascape.”⁹⁷

As in the work of Donna Haraway, the machinic and Blackness are both liminal conditions in relation to the human; they are treated not as ironic political myths but as programs to implement with all deliberate speed.⁹⁸

There is a heightened awareness in HipHop, fostered through comics and sci-fi, of the manufactured, designed and posthuman existence of African-Americans. African aliens are snatched by African slave-traders, delivered to be sliced, diced and genetically designed by whiteface fanatics and cannibal Christians into American slaves, 3/5 of their standardized norm, their Westworld ROM.⁹⁹

In somewhat Deleuzian terms, Eshun traces a line of flight from Blackness through the machine to becoming imperceptible.¹⁰⁰ “Machine Music therefore arrives as unblack, unpopular and uncultural, an Unidentified Audio Object with no ground, no roots and no culture.”¹⁰¹ But far from erasing Blackness, this disappearance is only possible through Blackness or its analogs.

The digital soundscape is a break in both method and style from the analog that it subsumed and which in turn processed earlier forms of media technology after its own affordances. Key moments here might be George Clinton’s Funkadelic and Lee Perry’s Black Ark. These versions of analog signal processing took pop presence and processed it into an echo or loop. Space invades the texture of the song. Distortion becomes its own instrument. “Listening becomes a field trip through a found environment.”¹⁰²

Funkadelic was an alien encounter imagined through metaphor of the radio, connecting human-aliens to station WEFUNK, “home of the extraterrestrial brothers.” Its repetitive urging was to give in to the inhuman, to join the Afronauts funking up the galaxy. It was built out of tapeloops, doo-loops, mixadelics, and advertising slogans for nonexistent products. Underneath the off-pop hooks, Funkadelic altered the sensory hierarchy of the pop song. “The ass, the brain and the spine all change places … The ass stops being the behind, and moves up front to become the booty.” This was not the bodyshape proposed by pop. “Moog becomes a slithering cephalopod tugging at your hips.”¹⁰³

Funkadelic accelerated and popularized sonic concepts that in part came from jazz, or more specifically what Eshun calls the jazz fission of the 1970s. This encompasses the cybernetic, space age jazz of George Russell, “a wraithscape of delocalized chimes … Russell’s magnetic mixology accelerates a discontinuum in which the future arrives from the past.” Also in this bag are the 1970s albums of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, where effects pedals become instruments in their own right. Here’s Eshun evoking the sound of Herbie Hancocks’s Hornets: “Moving through the echoplex, construction is cloned from a singular sensation into an environment that dunks you head-first in a horde of heat-seeking killer bees.”¹⁰⁴

Effects defect from causes, detach from instruments. It’s the expansion of an era when industrial communication split sounds from sources, as R. Murray Shafer has already suggested.¹⁰⁵ It was hard to hear at first. Take, for instance, Alice Coltrane’s controversial remixing of John Coltrane’s Living Space. It in turn might be made possible by Sun Ra’s work from the mid-1950s onward, with his alternate Black cosmology.¹⁰⁶ For Sun Ra, to be Black is not to be figuratively the Israelite, fleeing bondage, but to actually be descended from the Egyptians, to belong to a despotic power—which rules elsewhere in the galaxy. Soul music affirms Blackness as the legacy of the suffering human. In contrast, Ra is an alien god from the future. This is not alienation but affirmation of the alien.

Sun Ra lends himself to an Afrofuturist reading, which would highlight his claim to be from Jupiter, to be the author of an alterdestiny. And in Eshun there’s a more specifically Black accelerationist reading, or perhaps hearing, or maybe sensing. It’s not an alternative to this world, but a pressing on of a tendency, where through the exclusion from the human that is Blackness an escape hatch appears in an embrace of one other thing that is also excluded: the machinic. Sun Ra’s Arkestra was for some of its existence a bit of a male monastic cult.

Accelerationism is often presented as a desire for a superseding of a merely human model of cognition, but it is still rather tied to a valuing of cognition that has particular cultural roots. Perhaps cognition is not up to speed.¹⁰⁷ Eshun:

There’s a sense in which the nervous system is being reshaped by beats for a new kind of state, for a new kind of sensory condition. Different parts of your body are actually in different states of evolution. Your head may well be lagging quite a long way behind the rest of your body.¹⁰⁸

Otolith II posed three questions: “Capital, as far as we know, was never alive. How did it reproduce itself? How did it replicate? Did it use human skin?”¹⁰⁹ The operative word here is skin, implicated as it is in what Gilroy calls the crisis of raciology. Perhaps one could ask if capitalism has already superseded itself and done so first by passing through the pores of the skin of those it designates others. But one might wonder whether, if this is not capitalism, it might not be something worse. Eshun already has an aerial attuned to that possibility, filtered through the sensibility of (for example) Detroit techno, with its canny intimations of the subsuming of the street into a militarized surveillance order, from which one had best discreetly retire.

One could keep searching back through the database of Afrofuturism, beyond Eshun’s late twentieth century forays, as Louis Chude-Sokei does in The Sound of Culture.¹¹⁰ As it turns out, what is perhaps the founding text of Futurism is a perversely Afrofuturist one: Marinetti’s Mafarka: The Futurist, first published in 1909. It’s an exotic tale of a Muslim prince’s victory over an African army, and his desire to beget a son, part bird, part machine, who can rise up to conquer the sun.¹¹¹

Or one might mention Samuel Butler’s anti-accelerationist Erewhon, the ur-text on the human as the reproductive organ for the machine. Its imaginary landscape bares the traces of Butler’s experience in New Zealand, in the wake of colonial wars against the Maori. Or, as Angela Davis notes, even though tied against their will to the plantation, even though they may never have seen one and only heard the sound in the distance, the Black spirituals early on started to imagine the getting on board the freedom train.¹¹² The technics of the railway was already an imaginary vector out of the slave condition, a sweet chariot of iron and smoke.

It may turn out that the whole question of acceleration is tied to the question of race. Haraway usefully thinks the spatial equivalence of the non-white, the nonman, the nonhuman in relation to a certain humanist language. But thought temporally, humanism has a similar problem. Spatially, it is troubled by what is above it (the angelic) or below it (the animal).¹¹³ Temporally, it is troubled by what is prior to it (the primitive) or what supersedes it, including a great deal of race panic about being over-taken by the formerly primitive colonial or enslaved other. Particularly of that other, in its unthinking, machinelike labor, starts to look like the new machines coming to replace the human. In this regard, the rhetorical strategy of Black Accelerationism is to positively revalue what had been previously negative and racist figures. As such, and as in Viveiros de Castro, it’s a permutation on the old mythic forms made productive in a new way.

Lisa Nakamura: Digitizing Race

Lisa Nakamura is a pioneer of the study of what used to be tagged as “race in cyberspace.”¹¹⁴ Now that the internet is everywhere, and race and racisms proliferate on it like fungus on damp newspaper, her work deserves renewed critical attention. Her book Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet is over a decade old, but it turns out that looking perceptively at ephemeral media need not render the resulting study ephemeral at all.

Digitizing Race draws together three things. The first is the postracial project of a certain (neo)liberal politics that Bill Clinton took mainstream in the early nineties. Its central conceit was that all the state need do is provide ‘opportunities’ for everyone to become functional subjects of postindustrial labor and consumption. The particular challenges of racism were ignored.

The second is a historical transformation in the internet that began in the mid-nineties, which went from being military and scientific (with some creative subcultures on the side) to a vast commercial complex.¹¹⁵ This led to the waning of the early nineties internet subcultures, some of whom thought of it as a utopian or at least alternative media for identity play, virtual community, and gift economies. In A Hacker Manifesto, I was mostly interested in the last of these. Nakamura is more interested in what became of identity and community.

One theme that started to fade in internet culture (or cyber-culture in the language of the time) had to do with passing online as something other than one’s meatspace self. This led to a certain gnostic belief in the separation of online from meatspace being, as if the differences and injustices of the latter could just be left behind. But the early cyberculture adepts tended to be a somewhat fortunate few, with proximity to research universities. As the internet’s user-base expanded, the newcomers (or n00bs) had other ideas.

The third tendency Nakamura layers onto the so-called neoliberal turn and the commercialized and more-popular internet is the academic tendency known as visual studies or visual culture studies.¹¹⁶ This in part grew out of, and in reaction against, an art historical tradition that could absorb installation art but did not know how to think digital media objects or practices. Visual culture studies drew on anthropology and other disciplines to create the “hybrid form to end all hybrid forms.”¹¹⁷ It also had something in common with cultural studies, in its attention to low, ephemeral, and vulgar forms, treated not just as social phenomena but as aesthetic ones as well.

Not all the tendencies within visual culture studies sat well together. There could be tension between paying attention to digital media objects and paying attention to vulgar popular forms. Trying to do both at once was an exercise in self-created academic marginality. The study of new media thus tended to privilege things that look like art; the study of the low, the minor, or the vulgar tended to favor social over aesthetic methods and preoccupations. Not the least virtue of Nakamura’s work is that she went out on a limb and studied questions of race and gender and in new and ephemeral digital forms and as aesthetic practices.

One way to subsume these three questions into some sort of totality might be to think about what Lisa Parks called visual capital.¹¹⁸ How is visual capital, an ensemble of images that appear to have value, created and circulated? How does social differentiation cleave along lines of access to powerful modes of representation? Having framed those questions, one might then look at how the internet came to function as a site for the creation and distribution of hegemonic and counterhegemonic images of racialized bodies.

Here one might draw on Paul Gilroy’s work on the historical formation and contestation of racial categories, or the way Donna Haraway and Chela Sandoval look to cyborg bodies as produced by biotechnical networks, but within which they might exercise an ironic power of slippery self-definition.¹¹⁹ Either way, one might pay special attention to forms of image-making by nonelite or even banal cultures as well as to more high-profile mass media forms, cool subcultures, or avant-garde art forms.

There are several strands to this story, however, one of which might be the evolution of technical media form. From Nick Mirzoeff, Nakamura takes the idea of visual technology as an enhancement of vision, from easel painting to digital avatars.¹²⁰ In the context of that historical background, one might ask what is old and what is new about what one discovers in current media forms. This might be a blend of historical, ethnographic, and formal-aesthetic methods.

A good place to start such a study is with interfaces, and a good way to tie together the study of cinema, television, and the internet is to study how the interfaces of the internet appear in cinema and television. Take, for instance, the video for Jennifer Lopez’s pop song, “If You Had My Love” (1999). The conceit of the video is that Lopez is an avatar controlled by users who can view her in different rooms, doing different dances in different outfits. The first viewer is a young man who appears to be looking for something to jerk-off to; other imaginary viewers include teenage girls and a rather lugubrious interracial threesome, nodding off together on a sofa.¹²¹ We become voyeurs on their voyeurism. But the interface itself is perhaps the star, and J-Lo herself becomes an effect. With the interface, the imaginary user can make J-Lo perform as different kinds of dancer, slotting her into different racial and cultural niches. The interface offers “multiple points of entry to the star.”¹²² She—it—can be chopped and streamed. It’s remarkable that this video made for MTV sits so nicely now on Youtube.com, whose interactive modes it premediates.

Another example: There was (and still is) a lot of commentary on The Matrix (1999), but not much of it lingers over the slightly embarrassing second and third movies in the franchise.¹²³ They are “bad films with their hearts in the right place.”¹²⁴ Like the J-Lo video, they deal among other things with what Eugene Thacker in Biomedia called immediacy, or the expectation of real-time feedback and control through an interface.¹²⁵ As Nakamura drolly notes, “This is an eloquent formulation of entitlement.” Where the Matrix films get interestingly weird is in their treatment of racial difference among interface users under “information capitalism.”¹²⁶

The Matrix pits Blackness as embodiment against whiteness as the digital. What goes on in the background to the main story is a species of Afrofuturism, celebrating the erotics of the Black bodies as that which is most remote from the whiteness of technics. It’s the opposite of Black Accelerationism, in which a close proximity of the Black body to the machine is in advance of whiteness and to be desired. In The Matrix version, the Black body holds back from the technical and retains attributes of soul, individuality, corporeality, and this is its value. Nakamura: “Afrofuturist mojo and black identity are generally depicted as singular, ‘natural’ … ‘unassimilable’ and ‘authentic.’” But with the bad guy Agent Smith, “Whiteness thus spreads in a manner that exemplifies a much-favored paradigm of e-business in the nineties: viral marketing.”¹²⁷ The white Agents propagate through digitally penetrating other white male bodies.

At least race appears in the films, which offer some sort of counterimaginary to cyber-utopianism. But as Coco Fusco notes, photography and cinema don’t just record race—they produce it.¹²⁸ An algorithmic technics may in the main exacerbate the production of racialized difference.¹²⁹ Lev Manovich notes that it’s in the interface that the photographic image is produced now, and so for Nakamura, it is the interface that bears scrutiny as the place where race is made. In The Matrix, race is made to appear for a notionally white viewer.

The presence of blackness in the visual field guards whites from the irresistible seduction of the perfectly transparent interface … Transparent interfaces are represented as intuitive, universal, pre-or postverbal, white, translucent, and neutral—part of a visual design aesthetic embodied by the Apple iPod.¹³⁰

Apple’s iconic early ads for the iPod featured blacked-out silhouettes of dancing bodies, their white earbud cords flapping as they move, against bold single-color backgrounds. For Nakamura, they conjure universal consumers who can make product choices, individuated neoliberal subjects in a color-blind world. Like the “users” of J-Lo in her video, they can shuffle between places, styles, cultures, ethnicities—even if some of the bodies dancing in the ads are meant to be read as not just black-out but also Black. Blackness, at the time at least, was still the marker for the authentic in what white audiences desired from Black music. In this world, “Whiteness is replication, blackness is singularity, but never for the black subject, always for the white subject.”¹³¹

Nakamura:

This visual culture, which contrasts black and white interface styles so strongly, insists that it is race that is real. In this way the process of new media as a cultural formation that produces race is obscured; instead race functions here as a way to visualize new media image production … In this representational economy, images of blacks serve as talismans to ward off the consuming power of the interface, whose transparent depths, like Narcissus’ pool, threaten to fatally immerse its users.¹³²

If Blackness usually stands for authentic embodiment in this visual culture, then being Asian stands for proximity to the tech.¹³³ The Asian shows up only marginally in The Matrix. Its star, the biracial Keanu Reeves, was like J-Lo racially malleable for audiences. In his case he could be read as white by whites and Asian by Asians if they so desired. A more ironic and telling example is the 2002 film Minority Report. Tom Cruise—was there a whiter star in his era?—has to get his eyes replaced, as retinal scanning is everywhere in this film’s paranoid future. Only the eyes he gets belonged to a Japanese person, and the Cruise character finds himself addressed as a particularly avid consumer everywhere he goes. Hiroki Azuma and Asada Akira had once advanced a kind of ironic Asian Accelerationism, which positively valued a supposed closeness of the Asian with the commodity and technology, but in Minority Report it’s an extreme for the white subject to avoid.¹³⁴

Race at the interface partakes now in what Paul Gilroy notes is a crisis of raciology, brought on by the popularization of genetic testing.¹³⁵ The old visual regimes of race struggle to adapt to the spreading awareness of the difference between genotype and phenotype. The film GATTACA (1997) is here a prescient one in imagining how a new kind of racism of the genotype might arise. It imagines a world rife with interfaces designed to detect the genotypical truth of appearances.

Nakamura ties these studies of the interface in cinema and television to studies of actual interfaces, particularly lowly, unglamorous, everyday ones. For instance, she looks at the avatars made for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which started in 1997 as an application running in Microsoft Windows. Of interest to her are the self-made cartoonlike avatars users chose to represent themselves to their “buddies.” “The formation of digital taste cultures that are low resolution, often full of bathroom humor, and influenced by youth-oriented and transnational visual styles like anime ought to be traced as it develops in its native mode: the internet.”¹³⁶

At the time there was little research on such low forms, particularly those popular with women. Low-res forms populated with cut and paste images from the Care Bears, Disney, and Hello Kitty are not the ideal subjects of interactivity imagined in cool cyberculture theory. But there are questions here of who has access to what visual capital, of “who sells and is bought, who surfs and is surfed.”¹³⁷ AIM avatars were often based on simple cut and paste graphics, but users modified the standard body images with signs that marked out their version of cultural or racial difference. This was a moment of explosion of ethnic identity content on the web—to which there was a racist backlash yet to come.¹³⁸

AIM users could download avatars from websites that offered them under various categories—of which race was never one, as this is a supposedly postracial world. The avatars were little gifs, made of body parts cut from a standard template with variations of different hair, clothing, slogans, and so on. These could be assembled into mini-movies, remediating stuff from anime, comics, games; as a mix of photos and cartoons, flags, avatars.

One could read Nakamura’s interest in the visual self-presencing of women and girls as a subset of Henry Jenkins’s interest in fan-based media, but she lacks his occasionally overenthusiastic embrace of such activity as democratic and benign.¹³⁹ Her subaltern taste-cultures are a little more embattled and compromised. The kind of femininity performed here —laced with cuteness—is far from resistant and sometimes not even negotiated. These versions of what Hito Steyerl would later call the poor image are hard to redeem aesthetically.¹⁴⁰ Cultural studies had tried to ask meta-questions about what the objects of study are, but even so, we ended up with limited lists of proper new media objects, of which the AIM avatar was not one.

The same could be said of the website alllooksame.com. The site starts with a series of photographs of faces and asks the user to identify which is Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. (Like most users, I could not tell, which is the point.) The category of the Asian American is something of a post–Civil Rights construct. It promised resistance to racism in panethnic identity but paradoxically treated race as real. While alllooksame.com is an odd site, for Nakamura it does at least unite Asian viewers in questioning visual rhetoric about race.

Asian American online practice complicates the digital divide, being on both sides. The Asian American appears in popular racial consciousness as a “model minority,” supposedly uninterested in politics and eager to get ahead in information capitalism or whatever this is. Yet she or he also appears as the refugee, the undocumented, the subsistence wage service worker. For Nakamura, this means that the study of the digital divide has to look beyond the race of users to other questions of difference and also to questions of agency online rather than mere user numbers.

In some racialized codings, the “Asian” is high-tech and assimilates to (supposedly) western consumerist modes. In others, the encounter between postcolonial literary theory and new media forms produces quite other conjunctures. To collapse a rich and complex debate along just one of its fault lines: imperial languages such as English can be treated either as something detachable from its supposed national origin or as something to refuse altogether.

The former path values hybridity and the claiming of agency within the language of the colonizer. The latter wants to resist this and sticks up for the unity and coherence of a language and a people. And, just to complicate matters further, this second path is also a European idea—the unity and coherence of a people and its language being itself an idea that emerged out of European romanticism.

Much the same fault line can be found in debates about what to do in the postcolonial situation with the internet, which can also be perceived as western and colonizing—although it might make more sense now to think of it as colonizing not on behalf of the old nation-states as on behalf of an emerging postnational geopolitics of what Benjamin Bratton calls the stack. Nakamura draws attention to some of the interesting examples of work on non-western media, including Eric Michaels’s brilliant work on video production among western desert Aboriginal people in Australia and the work of the RAQS Media Collective and Sarai in India, which reached out to non-English speaking and even nonliterate populations through interface design and community access.¹⁴¹

Since her book was published, work really flourished in the study of non-western uptakes of media, not to mention work on encouraging local adaptions and hybrids of available forms.¹⁴² If one shifts one’s attention from the internet to cellular telephony, one even has to question the assumption that the west somehow leads and other places follow. It may well be the case that most of the world leap-frogged over the cyberspace of the internet to the cell space of telephony. Yuk Hui even asks if there are non-western cosmotechnics.¹⁴³

The perfect counterpoint to the old cyberculture idea of online disembodiment is Nakamura’s study of online pregnancy forums—the whole point of which is to create a virtual community for women in some stage of the reproductive process. Here Nakamura pays close attention to ways of representing pregnant bodies. The site she examines allowed users to create their own signatures, which were often collages of idealized images of themselves, their partners, their babies, and (in a most affecting moment) their miscarriages. Sometimes sonograms were included in the collages of the signatures, but they separate the fetus from the mother, and so other elements were generally added to bring her back into the picture.

It’s hard to imagine a more kitsch kind of cuteness. But then we might wonder why masculine forms of geek or otaku culture can be presented as cool when something like this is generally not. By the early 2000s the internet was about 50/50 men and women, and users were more likely to be working class or suburban. After the here-comes-everybody moment, the internet started to look more like regular everyday culture. These pregnant avatars (“dollies”) were more cybertwee than cyberfeminist (not that these need be exclusive categories, of course).¹⁴⁴ But by the early 2000s, “the commercialization of the internet has led many internet utopians to despair of its potential as a site to challenge institutional authority.”¹⁴⁵

But perhaps it’s a question of reading outside one’s academic habitus. Nakamura: “‘Vernacular’ assemblages created by subaltern users, in this case pregnant women create impossible bodies that critique normative ones without an overt artistic or political intent.”¹⁴⁶ The subaltern in this case can speak but chooses to do so through images that don’t quite perform as visual cultural studies would want them to.¹⁴⁷ Nakamura wants to resist reading online pregnancy forums in strictly social-science terms and to look at the aesthetic dimensions. It’s not unlike what Dick Hebdige did in retrieving London youth subcultures from criminological studies of “deviance.”¹⁴⁸

The blind spot of visual cultural studies, at least until recently, was vernacular self-presentation. But it’s hard to deny the pathos of images these women craft of their stillborn or miscarried children. The one thing that perhaps received the most belated attention in studies of emerging media is how they interact with the tragic side of life—with illness, death, and disease. Those of us who have been both on the internet and studying it for thirty years or so now will have had many encounters with loss and grief. We will have had friends we hardly ever saw in real life who have passed or who grieve for those who have passed. In real life there are conventions for what signs and gestures one should make. In online communication they are emerging also.

Nakamura was right to draw attention to this in Digitizing Race, and she did so with a tact and a grace one can only hope to emulate:

The achievement of authenticity in these cases of bodies in pain and mourning transcends the ordinary logic of the analog versus the digital photograph because these bodily images invoke the “semi-magical act” of remembering types of suffering that are inarticulate, private, hidden within domestic or militarized spaces that exclude the public gaze.¹⁴⁹

Not only is the body with all its marks and scars present in Nakamura’s treatment, it is present as something in addition to its whole being.

We live more, not less, in relation to our body parts, the dispossession or employment of ourselves constrained by a complicated pattern of self-alienation … Rather than freeing ourselves from the body, as cyberpunk narratives of idealized disembodiment foresaw, informational technologies have turned the body into property.¹⁵⁰

Here her work connects with that of Maurizio Lazzarato and Gerald Raunig on machinic enslavement and the dividual respectively, in its awareness of the subsumption of components of the human into the inhuman.¹⁵¹

But for all that, perhaps the enduring gift of this work is (to modify Adorno’s words) to not let the power of another or our own powerlessness stupefy us.¹⁵² There might still be forms of agency, tactics of presentation, gestures of solidarity—and in unexpected places. Given the tendency of the internet culture in the decade after Digitizing Race, perhaps it is an obligation now to return the gift of serious and considered attention to our friends and comrades—and not least in the scholarly world. The tragic side of life is never far away. The least we can do is listen to the pain of others and speak in measured tones of one another’s small achievements of wit, grace, and insight.

Hito Steyerl: Art Is Beauty That Does Not Try to Kill Us

Thinking of getting into the art world? According to Hito Steyerl, here’s what you may find:

Public support swapped for Instagram metrics. Art fully floated on some kind of Arsedaq. More fairs, longer yachts for more violent assholes, oil paintings of booty blondes, abstract stock-chart calligraphy. Yummy organic superfoods. Accelerationist designer breeding … Conceptual plastic surgery … Bespoke ivory gun handles. Murals on border walls.¹⁵³

“Good luck with this,” she concludes, “You will be my mortal enemy.”¹⁵⁴

The art world does not seem like a promising place from which to write and think critically about the world as it is, let alone its possibilities for being otherwise. It seems to have floated free from any other world. And yet in Duty Free Art, Steyerl finds a way to make its autonomy interesting. Its separation affords her the possibility of observing, if not the totality of the world, then at least a few more sides of it than many others see. What she sees is planetary civil war, sharpening class conflict, and the enclosure of the informational commons into proprietary theme parks.

From her art world vantage point, history appears to have a tempo no longer accessible to humans, running backward, from a vacant future to a festering past. “What was public is privatized by violence, while formerly private hatreds become the new public spirit.” A spirit drunk on twitterbots, fake news, internet hacks, and “artificial stupidity”¹⁵⁵—mostly in the service of actual or aspirational authoritarian rule.

It was the lapsed Marxist Werner Sombart who probably coined the term creative destruction, although it is also associated with Joseph Schumpeter.¹⁵⁶ Today’s ruling class embraces it without the ambivalence and irony the term once had, under the more anodyne labels disruption and innovation, which in actuality means the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion. The practice of design is celebrated, but weapons design is not mentioned in polite company.

Art appears floating above all that. Its autonomy rests in part on its weird economy of value. It is about singular things rather than mass commodities. It is also an economy of presence, which is in turn an odd subset of what Yves Citton thinks of as an ecology of attention.¹⁵⁷ Sometimes the encounter with the artist is of more value than the work, because the artist is rarer. Artists are cheaper to transport than art, because they don’t require the specialized handling and insurance. This means that the artist has to be permanently available to be present and usually without getting paid. This attention to the artist is bad for the artist’s own powers of attention. The artist gives off an aura of unalienated labor and unmediated presence but is actually living in a fragmented, disjoined junktime.¹⁵⁸

Various proposals for an art strike, by Lee Lozano, Stewart Home, and others, have never quite worked out, because the artist does not exactly perform labor in the first place.¹⁵⁹ But maybe there is a kind of attention strike that goes on all the time. Your body is there, present and correct, but you are distracted, checking Instagram. Your attention is on strike, and that distraction is then captured as value through one or another networked, computational device.

If your body is present but your attention is not, then perhaps that’s a sort of proxy for presence. A proxy is there in place of something else; it at least counts for something and registers as a valid stand-in. Steyerl wants to ask who or more likely what is getting to make the distinctions between valid and invalid stand-ins. When is one’s existence recognized as giving off a signal and when is it just noise? That might be the fault line today between existing and not-existing, in a polity, a culture, an economy, even in the definition of what might be allowed to live.

Perhaps because the art world is rather slow on the uptake with all things technical, it’s a useful vantage point from which to think it’s much bigger and more powerful rivals in the information and image trade. Take for example what is happening in computational photography.¹⁶⁰ The lenses on cellphone cameras are not that great, so the production of the image rests in part with computation, which is more and more inclined to make images out of what the computer thinks you want to see. It decides on your behalf what in the visual field is signal and what is noise.

What happens in an individual camera happens on a bigger scale in the policing of images of sex and violence online. When is an image signal, and when is it noise? It only appears as if algorithms are deciding all this for us now. There is a lot of what Astra Taylor calls fauxtomation, where such work is outsourced to a globally subcontracted workforce.¹⁶¹ But developers are on the case, designing “probabilistic porn detection.”¹⁶² It works by feeding millions of images into a computer so it can find the patterns, so the computer can determine whether that’s a ginger cat next to a teapot, or some obscure sex position, such as Yawning, Octopus, Fraser MacKenzie, Watching the Game, Stopperage, Chambers Fuck, and Persuading the Debtor. You can look those up for yourself to see if they’re real or if Steyerl made them up, but then all the services with which your computer communicates about its actions will know you wanted to know.

What’s at stake when algorithms clear noise from information? Steyerl updates Jacques Rancière’s distinction between the crowd or public and the mob or multitude.¹⁶³ The former can make demands, which they should do through their representatives, or proxies. The latter is noise, to be met with the riot police. Our representatives are in some cases still people, and sometimes they are elected. But we also have images that function as our proxies, if we are lucky enough not to be excluded as noise. It may not be a one-way street, however. “As humans feed affect, thought, and sociality into algorithms, algorithms feed back into what used to be called subjectivity.”¹⁶⁴

The image is an effect of an algorithm, which may be a proxy for something, but it may have generated that for which it is a proxy through scripted operations. These operations model in code what it is they are supposed to double, whether it is a population or the subject of an individual photograph. What computation produces as signal out of noise is generated by a probabilistic template of what ought to be there: “Likeness becomes subject to likelihood.”¹⁶⁵

The business of producing image and information proxies is of course immensely gameable.¹⁶⁶ There’s all kinds of proxy cold war going on, not all of it the fault of “The Russians.” Indeed, “The Russians” are now a proxy stand-in for the whole crazy game of information warfare, fought as often as not with noise. There’s all sorts of actors, acting through stand-ins, duplicates, dupes, sock puppets. It is what the situationists called détournement on an epic scale, producing what elsewhere I called the spectacle of disintegration.¹⁶⁷

Global civil war contains shooting wars too, also fought through proxies. These are the military equivalent of shell companies. “The border between private security, private military company, freelance insurgents, armed stand-in, state-hackers and people who just got in the way has become blurry.” It’s not so much a deviation from a norm as the new normal.¹⁶⁸ “To state that online proxy politics is reorganizing geopolitics would be similar to stating that burgers tend to reorganize cows.”¹⁶⁹

Steyerl: “Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal. Information is passed on as a set of signals that cannot be picked up by human senses.”¹⁷⁰ The critical approach is less about interpreting hidden power structures underneath an orderly culture as it is a practice of questioning the routine habits of apophenia, the selecting of patterns in random data. Your camera’s computer detects what it thinks you want to see in the noisy data captured by its lens. (Kittens!) Your social media service detects what it thinks is acceptable content amid the dick pics. A deadlier version is National Security Agency’s Skynet, trained to find “terrorists” in cellphone data from Pakistan. But were the thousands killed by missile and drone actually terrorists?¹⁷¹ Hard to say, as there’s no empirical test or benchmark for Skynet’s procedures.

Perhaps it’s a matter of finding different patterns, based on different protocols. Steyerl wants to show the connection between the design of death and the design of life. Her emblem is what Harun Farocki called the suicide camera, or what I once called missilecam, the nose-cone camera sending signals of its progress as it approaches its target.¹⁷² Steyerl: “the camera was not destroyed in this operation. Instead, it burst into billions of small cameras, tiny lenses embedded into cellphones.”¹⁷³ Now we are overrun with the fallout of zombie cameras that failed to die.

The camera may once have framed the world as if it were there to be made into a picture for a person. But now humans are just part of a landscape that machines picture for other machines. “If the models for reality increasingly consist of sets of data unintelligible to human vision, the reality created after them might be partly unintelligible for humans too.”¹⁷⁴

Who can forget the internet weirdness of Google’s Deep-Dream images, which reveal the presets of machinic vision and yet which managed to visualize the unconscious of circulation, with added cuteness? As Sianne Ngai reminds us, the cute can also have its scary side, as when DeepDream decides that what emerges out of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs is a series of disembodied puppy-heads. It had a habit of recognizing patterns that aren’t there. “It demonstrates a version of corporate animism in which commodities are not only fetishes but morph into franchised chimeras.”¹⁷⁵

Humans are an inconvenience for machines. It’s a commonplace to think of work as turning humans into robots, but the humans always seem to remain repulsively mammalian. One way that computation has resolved the human into the world of the machine is through games. Alan Turing’s famous Turing Test was a way of deciding if something is human.¹⁷⁶ If we think the way something communicates with us is human, then it is. He based it on a parlor game, involving the guessing of someone’s gender just from notes passed under the door.

John von Neumann tried to formalize the whole problem of decision and decidability with game theory. If we can simplify the stakes and certain tricky concepts such as rationality, utility, and information, then decision can be a science. Following Philip Mirowski, Steyerl argues that the difficulty of human decision-making was resolved in economic theory by taking humans out of the equation.¹⁷⁷ If the rationality of humans is a problem for economic theory, replace humans with computation, with rational nonhumans, and let them loose on the world. “It is striking how much reality has been created as a consequence of different iterations of game theory.”¹⁷⁸

Steyerl: “The point is that games are not a consequence of computers making the world unreal. On the contrary, games make computers become real. Games are generative fictions.”¹⁷⁹ Steyerl borrows my term for this: we live in gamespace.¹⁸⁰ “So, regardless of whether humans ever were ‘rational’ in the way game theory assumed, a lot of people have now been trained to understand rationality in this way and to imitate its effects.”¹⁸¹ Gamespace becomes more real, because more rationalizable, than the world it was supposed to model. And we are now all inside it, along with everything else.

For a while, we were all obliged to pass online reverse-Turing tests to prove to machines that we were something like a human. Captcha, which made you write out letters you saw in a fuzzy picture, tested whether you could impersonate a human to a machine, not whether a machine can impersonate a human to a human. This is no longer necessary now that Google has a scripted operation that models what a human is.

Computational models can decide not only whether you are human enough to be online but what you will want to do when you get there and what you will like. These models have an aesthetic dimension, in that they model your taste as a kind of ideal form and serve you with things that are like what it presumes you are like. In everyday aesthetics as in economics, models rule. Whether it’s a fashion model or a financial algorithm, the universe of forms is a sort of Platonist ideal that becomes the world, becomes gamespace.

Only the art world appears to have a solution to this. Attempts have been made to manage art algorithmically, such as ArtRank, which advises investors on which art to buy based on its proprietary metrics. But more usually, the autonomy of the art world banishes the ideal, the model, the beautiful form, from the world and quarantines it in museums. Where once the avant-gardes wanted to unleash the beauty of art on life, we may now count it as good fortune that at least one species of ideal, elegant, beautiful form is kept separate from the world—that of art.

Looking back out at the world from the quarantine of the museum, the task for humans is now to understand how machines picture the world. “Maybe the art history of the twentieth century can be understood as an anticipatory tutorial to help humans decode images made by machines for machines … Mondrian is perhaps an unconscious exercise for humans trying to learn how to see like a machine.”¹⁸²

Museums are not what they used to be, however. In Benedict Anderson (or before that, in Harold Innis), the space of a nation-state could be regulated by the space-binding media of printed newspapers and also by the time-binding media of the museum.¹⁸³ But the national museum is now flanked by other phenomena. Consider Freeport art storage, where art remains permanently in transit—and duty free. One facility is reputed to hold thousands of Picassos. It’s an art world example of what Keller Easterling calls extrastatecraft—a kind of secret museum, a “luxury no man’s land.”¹⁸⁴

Or consider the documents to be found in WikiLeaks that may show that the architect Rem Koolhaas was in negotiations to design a museum for the Syrian government. His office will not confirm their authenticity. Many dictators now favor contemporary art museums, biennales, and art fairs as a way to look fashion-forward in the dictator world. The national museum may have once provided some sort of temporal anchor for the modern state, but the contemporary art museum can’t perform that purpose. Following Peter Osborne, Steyerl sees contemporary art as a proxy for a kind of transindividual junktime.¹⁸⁵ They are a proxy for the nonexistent global commons. It’s like the commons, but out of harms’ way—autonomous.

“Seen like this, duty free art is essentially what traditional autonomous art might have been, had it not been elitist and oblivious to its own conditions of production.”¹⁸⁶ Here Steyerl builds on Peter Bürger’s famous critique of the failure of the avant-gardes and suggests a little of what might be culled from the wreckage.¹⁸⁷ But we have to keep in mind art’s conditions of possibility now: dictator’s contemporary art foundation, arms dealer’s tax shelter, hedge funder’s trophy, art student’s debt bondage, aggregate spam, leaked data, unpaid precarious labor, all accumulating as value in the freeport.

Steyerl frankly takes advantage of a position in the art world, whose simulated autonomy is doubled edged. The art world is a point from which to observe the destruction of many features that were once characteristic of a certain modern, capitalist world and the installing of some other mode of production and control, still based on exploitation and oppression, but of an algorithmic and derivative rather than disciplinary and industrial kind. Both the autonomy of the art world and the disruption of the historical world may yet, in subtle, minor ways, be dialectically reversible. Their negation of the world might be negated in little ways.

On the side of art, Steyerl wants to stay close to what Gregory Sholette called the dark matter of the art world, such as all the invisible affective labor performed by gallery assistants, curatorial assistants, interns, art students, and the like.¹⁸⁸ She even defends the International Art English that has sprouted out of the billion art world press releases now pouring into our inboxes. Steyerl has a thing for low genres, and the art world press release, written by the assistant or the intern, is surely one of the lowest.

Steyerl’s knack for rethinking very low genres reminds me of the work of Lisa Nakamura, particularly when Steyerl looks at romance scams, that subset of internet scam where the scammer gets the mark to fall in love with them and then takes their money. Steyerl reads them through Thomas Elsaesser’s work on melodrama, a form all about impossibility, delay, submission, and repressed or forbidden feelings.¹⁸⁹

The romance scam comes with customized products from a hyperprivatized culture industry, targeting those excluded from metro dating markets as too old, too fat, or too much a parent. Race and empire play a role, as the scammers are often from outside the metropolitan world. As does language, as translation software might be used to produce an odd semblance of English or some other metropolitan language. To Steyerl, these are “languages from a world to come.”¹⁹⁰ After all, there’s usually a trace of hope in any epistolary form.

Such moments are rare. The internet is no longer a space of possibility. It became, we are told, the best of all possible worlds. The internet, like cinema, like all the preceding technical gods, is dead. The internet is now surveillance, free labor, copyright control, troll-enforced conformism. As for cinema: “Cinema today is above all a stimulus package to buying new televisions, home projector systems, and retina display iPads.”¹⁹¹

Where the cinema became the core of a specialized culture industry, the internet rewires all of production and circulation, subjecting the making of things to the control of information protocols. Steyerl: “What kind of corporate/state entities are based on data storage, image unscrambling, high-frequency trading, and Daesh Forex gaming? Who are the contemporary equivalents of farmer-kings and slave-holders?”¹⁹² I call them the vectoralist class. Where the capitalist class owned the means of production, the vectoralist class owns the vector of information. That is the ruling class of our time. What I think Steyerl’s perceptive vision offers us (to update Fredric Jameson) is not the cultural logic of late capitalism but the algorithmic logic of early something else.¹⁹³

Reality is now made of and by images and models designed for computers and sometimes even by them.

Improbable objects, celebrity cat gifs, and a jumble of unseen anonymous images proliferate and waft through human bodies via WiFi. One could perhaps think of the results as a new and vital form of folk art, that is if one is prepared to completely overhaul one’s definition of folk as well as of art.¹⁹⁴

And to understand both the folk and the art, it might help, as Lev Manovich has also counseled, to understand the proprietary software within which the folk thinks it designs the art, but which might actually shape both to its own designs.

Before it’s too late. Steyerl does not hesitate to use the F-word: fascism. Perhaps what we’re looking at now are “derivative fascisms.”¹⁹⁵ Fascism is a gap in representation itself. What some call the “neoliberal” moment appeared to be one in which forms of political representation declined in favor of forms of market participation. But then these too receded, leaving economic exclusion, debt overhang, and riots in their wake.

Some inherited forms of cultural and aesthetic politics might not work in this context. As followers of Antonio Gramsci, cultural studies advocated seizing the means of cultural representation.¹⁹⁶ This was part of a long march through the institutions meant to secure political representation and state power. But now an inflation of cultural representation correlates more with political disenfranchisement. Everyone can have their cultural proxy, even if, as Yves Citton reminds us, it is a long way down the Google search results. But political representation, political proxies, seem not to function. Fascism happens when political representation collapses; it’s a short circuit, reality by fiat. It appears to do away with mediations, proxies. Fascism blocks reality, it is a “blind spot filled with delusion and death.”¹⁹⁷

Maybe it’s time to try different aesthetic tactics.

The Soviet avant-garde tried to counter a socialist realist aesthetic of ideal models with productivism, an art that hewed close to labor, the machine, and their product.¹⁹⁸ Perhaps what Mark Fisher calls today’s capitalist realism might be met with what Steyerl calls an aesthetic practice of circulationism, which finds ways to circulate not only images but value.¹⁹⁹ Maybe it could short-circuit existing networks. Maybe short circuits are the problem, and it could instead reinstate what Bernard Stiegler calls the long loops of culture, art, and education.²⁰⁰

The figure of circulation might be linked here to a certain reversibility of terms. Duty free art may be the art that circulates through international art fairs or freeports. It might even be a kind of decentralized currency, an analog bitcoin, encrypted in International Art English. But it might also be an art that shucks off the old duties to history, faith, and nation and exploits its own liminality as a radical project.

Speculation may refer to a world in which derivative markets overshadow markets in actual things, trading not just in actual time but every possible forking timeline. “It represents mood swings around derivatives of derivatives.”²⁰¹ Speculation might also be a philosophical tool, for risky thought with a looser relation to its object, which may find new objects hitherto undetected. In the spirit of Randy Martin, Steyerl senses a world of volatile relations between referents and signs, persons and proxies.

Steyerl: “What is the opposite [of] design, a type of creation that assists pluriform, horizontal forms of life, and that can be comprehended as part of a shared humanity?”²⁰² Against a gamespace that is everywhere and leaves no option but to try to game it from the inside, desirable games might be restricted in time and space, able to be reset, scores erased. They would have rules that are not proprietary secrets and can be modified by the users.

Steyerl is no accelerationist: “Acceleration is yesterday’s delusion.”²⁰³ But she might still be interested in an aesthetic of detecting the forms of information that contour the totality of this world as it is experienced from the inside and also what it can contribute to making it otherwise. This might take the form of particular hacks or of the equally challenging task of imagining the totality otherwise.

The Situationist artist Constant Nieuwenhuys is a touch-stone for Steyerl here.²⁰⁴ His central question was how to design an infrastructure where humans could play freely, on top of a gamespace of machine logistics that ordered the world of things. This was Constant’s New Babylon (1956–74), in which his New Babylonians could be world nomads, rather like an international art biennale imagined as a free global party.²⁰⁵

Maybe it was not a realistic plan. In Steyerl’s aesthetics, it’s the gap between New Babylon and the world that is the value of the utopian. The point is not to make the world over into sameness with the model, the ideal, the algorithm, but to think and act in the difference. This is not quite how I read it, but perhaps our approaches can be squared. I treat New Babylon as radically practical. I read Constant as doing what Charles Fourier did, which is to pursue the practical so relentlessly that our actual totality appears by contrast to be fake, made up, impossible. Because it is. It won’t last, and we all know it.

For me the limit to stressing the autonomy of the art work is that it becomes an object of contemplation, of a particular mode of attention. But it’s not a matter of imposing the work on the world and falsifying it. It is rather a matter of pursuing the practical question, the question of the good life, so thoroughly as to show how the commodity form has falsified the world, made it unable either to be beautiful for us or beautiful without us.

Yves Citton: Ecologies of Attention

I once tried to watch Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) for as long as I could. I lasted maybe twenty minutes. The whole eight-hour film is a single shot of the Empire State Building. It got boring, but then a bird flew by and it was like being struck by lightning.

One could think of the subject of all Warhol’s art as the act of paying attention. It is worth having Warhol in mind while reading Yves Citton’s The Ecology of Attention. Warhol is not mentioned in it, but he does cover both ends of the attention problem. On the one hand, Warhol made work that is very demanding of attention; on the other, he got his own image to circulate as an instant attention attractor. He understood the value of attention.

He was not the first, of course. Citton begins with Gabriel Tarde, who starts a line of thinking about an economy of visibility whose currency is fame.²⁰⁶ It became an economy in a double sense, in that fame can be measured, and the attention it garners can be scarce. An increasing wealth of information means a scarcity of something else. Economists treat attention as a commodity, to be hoarded or strategically acquired. Citton wants to put some critical pressure on that view, by paying attention to what it leaves out. Perhaps the design of the attention-gathering apparatus is suboptimal.

Attention is not a new concern. The ancient art of rhetoric was about taking and holding it.²⁰⁷ Among the moderns, attention to innovation in style has long been a way of renewing attention. One might connect this to the way Sianne Ngai thinks about the aesthetics of the zany, interesting, and cute, each of which draws attention to, and also away from, aspects of modern life, to production, circulation, and the commodity, respectively. Warhol pioneered forms of all three as ways of attracting attention.

Citton offers an attention ecology rather than an attention economy. The latter tends to start with individualized attention as if it always existed, whereas an attention ecology takes an interest also in how attention regimes produce individuals in the first place.²⁰⁸ This ecology can be rather noisy, more like the turbulent information soup studied by Tiziana Terranova than the simple sender → receiver of the classic communication diagrams.²⁰⁹

One cannot make causal statements about the media any more than one can about the weather. Neither works like a gun or a hypodermic. Media, like weather, may have material, agential, and formal causes, but not final causes. They don’t tend toward a goal. And it may help to think more about formal causes a little more than agents or materials. This was McLuhan’s innovation, to think of media as not being about objects or subjects, but forms that shape both.²¹⁰ The form of a given media shapes how things can appear to us and what kinds of subjects we can be in regarding them.

This is not too far from what Karen Barad calls an agential realism, where the agents are produced retrospectively by an apparatus that assigns them their distinctive identities.²¹¹ Hence, one can think of media as a matter of attending together, where the attention is shaped in particular ways, carving out things to perceive and know and individuating us into our selves through the act of attention. The feelings I have of a self are cut from the flow of transindividual affect that may be the main thing media are actually for and about.²¹²

A view which sees an ecology—rather than a more restricted economy—of attention might wonder if it is working quite as it should. Even assuming we are all the rational actors of economic folklore, one can wonder if we can really attend to what might matter and decide accordingly. Such an optimistic view depends on us having access to useful information to attend to in the first place. “The rationality of our behavior is constantly jeopardized by the deficiency of the information we have about the environment. In other words: we never have the means to pay enough attention.”²¹³ Our behaviors are irrational because our actions are constrained by the surreal spectacle to which we are supposed to constantly attend.

An economy attending only to a metrics of attention has no way of measuring or even really knowing what is needed to reproduce the conditions of attentiveness themselves. Bernard Stiegler has a usefully counterintuitive argument about this: the problem is not that we are narcissistic, but that we are not narcissistic enough.²¹⁴ The dominant attention economy is too impoverished to enable us to individuate ourselves from it. We don’t go through Freud’s stage of primary narcissism, from which one might return and get some perspective on the world. Instead, we remain within an undifferentiated and pre-individual state, a group narcissism, in which state we get a bit crazy, trying to both belong and be separate without a primary separation to secure either. For Stiegler, mass shootings are symptoms of this failed media ecology. Citton’s diagnosis is a little different but not incompatible.

Citton channels Paul Valéry: attention is the struggle against entropy. It’s the effort to direct oneself to what matters and in the process both preserve and adapt the forms of the world. Like Paolo Virno, Citton is interested in clichés, proverbs, habits of speech—what he calls schemas.²¹⁵ These are the collective reserve of accumulated experience that we test and hopefully can modify when they come in contact with new perceptions of the world. I would connect this to what Bogdanov called tektology, which one could see as the organization of collective attention through a self-aware practice of filtering and modifying the schemas or worldviews that our collective labors have inherited from our predecessors.²¹⁶

Like Bogdanov, Citton is interested in something that is at once a politics and an aesthetics of attention. There are four different regimes of attention, of acquired schemas or habits, perhaps even genres. One could call the four regimes alertness, loyalty, projection, and immersion.²¹⁷ Alertness attends to warnings and threats, to what has to be excluded. Loyalty is the opposite pole; it is about trust, mutuality, solidarity, community, what “binds” us through the long term. Projection is looking outward from the familiar, looking for what is mine or ours. Immersion is allowing the strange or the new to come in.

Immersion fascinates, projection bedazzles, loyalty hypnotizes, alertness excites. One might have need of all four, but the current attention economy privileges some over others. Certain kinds of games, for example, highlight alertness. So does Fox News. A certain kind of art and a certain kind of pedagogy, on the other hand, might try to counterprogram with loyalty and immersion, with an acceptance of others and a joint project of new sensation, negotiated through what Ngai calls the interesting, in which the artist eases us toward the new sensation by securing our trust with formats that hold and repeat the strange or overlooked elements of the work. Warhol’s Empire might be an example here: repeating the one thing, but gently on the eye.

But what’s more common, when it’s not the alert, is projection. Attention economies like us to feel at home, as if the world is no more than our living room with brighter colors. It’s a way of working with the constraint: that our attention is limited but information is abundant. We’re encouraged to see a handful of what in media industry parlance are called “properties” as an extension of home, a landscape onto which to project, populated by a handful of stars and characters.

In Guy Debord or Vilém Flusser there’s the beginnings of a critique of the political economy of stardom.²¹⁸ As Debord said, stars model the acceptable range of desires to which one might look. As Flusser saw, the attention paid such objects increases their value. Here I might put more stress on how attention both adds value but may also exhaust it. Jean Baudrillard thought seduction ran a fine line between exposure and concealment.²¹⁹ Dominic Pettman thinks we may be overexposed and have reached peak libido, falling into diminishing returns on visibility.²²⁰

Citton: “from the moment we start living off visibility, everything that lifts us out of obscurity is worth having.”²²¹ Attracting attention even starts to appear as an ethical goal. One is supposed to “raise awareness” of worthy goals and to oneself in the process. As Baudrillard already saw in the seventies, the logic of visibility has its evil side.²²² Acts of terrorism and shooting sprees exploit this same visibility. They are the hideous other side to Debord’s motto of the spectacle: “that which is good, appears; that which appears, is good.”²²³

Citton usefully connects the logic of media as value to finance. The culture industries now work less like manufacturers and more like banks. Their market capitalization is a derivative of the attention value of a portfolio of the “properties” they claim to own or claim to be able to keep extracting from the information commons and privatizing. The culture industry is the finance industry whose financial instruments monetize the unconscious. I think we could extend this by connecting Citton to the work of Randy Martin. Perhaps it is not just that media becomes finance, but finance becomes media.

Financialization might then be just one piece of a transformation of the commodity economy under the control of information. Matteo Pasquinelli draws our attention to prevalence of ternary structures, inserting themselves between information providers and receivers, parasites channeling off a surplus of the flow generated by attention,²²⁴ which then shape attention in the interests of generating their surplus. This might give rise to whole new categories of political and cultural struggles about the geopolitics of what is visible and not visible, or about what Nick Mirzoeff calls the right to look.²²⁵

Besides our day jobs, if we have them, we have a whole other job these days, doing free labor for Google, Facebook, and others. The culture industries at least let us relax while they did the job of entertaining us. What I call the vulture industries of social media outsource that to us as well. The vulture industries might form a component, alongside finance and some other curiously information controlling businesses, of a distinctive kind of ruling class. Citton uses my term for it: the vectoralist class. This ruling class concentrates power by controlling stocks, flows, and protocols of information and keeping an information surplus for itself.

In Citton’s reading, the vectoralist class is more than a power over information. It is a power over attention and visibility—even knowability—as well. Its rise is premised on the digital as the latest wave of what Stiegler calls grammatization.²²⁶ For Stiegler the invention of writing, the seriality of the production line and digital tech are all part of the same, long, historical phenomenon of grammatization. It reduces the sensory continuum to digital bits, imposing a grammar on their order. It standardizes the world, now including everything from software (Manovich) to urban design (Easterling).

Grammatization leads to information abundance, channeled in vectors of control, but then subject also to ternary forms that interpose themselves between ceaseless information and limited attention spans. One example is Google, whose PageRank algorithm is modeled on academic citation ranking procedures.²²⁷ Another is Facebook, modeled initially on the look-books of elite American universities. They might between them crudely cover the two ternary procedures most common: ranking and rating. The former uses an algorithm to choose what humans want; the latter uses humans to choose what algorithms want. In both cases the attention of the humans is for sale to advertisers.

What results is a fairly novel kind of cultural inequality. Citton:

What counts … is not whether something gets included (or not): it is being at the height of visibility, right at the top of the first page of search results. The new proletarians are not so much the “excluded” as the “relegated.” The organization of our collective digital attention by Google structures our field of visibility on the basis of a PRINCIPLE OF PRIORITIZATION: the power of the vectoralist class consists in the organization of priorities, rather than the inclusion or exclusion from the field of visibility.²²⁸

Citton quotes Paul Valéry: “attention is vector and potential.”²²⁹ Attention is a pressure, an effort, a Spinozan conatus—a tendency toward endurance and enhancement. Attention comes from ad-tendere, to tend toward. Citton emphasizes an irreducible, qualitative aspect of attention. What the industries of the vectoral class do is turn the vector into the scalar. But in this media regime, the arrow always has to be measured. An attention ecology is reduced to an attention economy.

Citton:

The vectoralist class is not exploitative because of its “power to move anything and everything” but because of its requirement that “value be realized” in countable terms. Such is THE TRUE CHALLENGE OF THE DIGITAL CULTURES now emerging: how can you take advantage of the vectoral power of the digital without allowing yourself to be inprisoned in the scalar cage of digitalization? Only the art of interference, the elusive art of hackers, can rise to such a challenge—which is at the heart of the attention ecology in the age of its electrification.²³⁰

I take a slightly different view: the problem is not so much that the vector becomes the scalar, for that attention has to be measured. The problem might be more what is attended to, and what is measured. Perhaps we could pay attention to what this commodity economy can’t include as something measured, but which is not some ineffable qualitative and vital force. It is rather some quite measurable things whose measure does not compute because it does not take the form of exchange value. That might be one aspect of ecology, for example. Earth science can measure climate change, but this economy can’t really pay attention to it.²³¹

So what’s to be done? Citton thinks we can start paying attention to attention itself as something that can be learned, cultivated, practiced, designed, in ways that produce forms of both collective and individuated becoming. To do so involves stepping down a scale, from attention ecologies to forms of joint attention and finally to individuated attention. It is helpful to fixate on neither the big picture nor the individual, but to look at what could mediate in-between.

Joint attention could be like Sartre’s being-for-another: I know myself through imagining that others attend to me when I attend to something.²³² I picture my observations as themselves observed. There might be quite a few varieties of this joint attention, particularly when people are in groups. There can be co-attention to the same event, at a concert, or reciprocal attention on the dance floor. (This is an aspect Eshun doesn’t really cover.) We don’t all have to feel the same, but our feelings in joint attention are a continuum, and we usually do our best to harmonize with it. That shared feeling might be the hardest part to capture in a media form. As many have noted, conversations in real life can tamp down potential spirals of anger; emojis don’t really do the trick.

Teaching situations are full of moments of joint attention going right or going wrong. Teaching can often be a matter of improvising ways of steering attention. Citton follows Cathy Davidson in thinking that if there’s a problem with attention in the classroom, it may not be as simple as blaming the kids or their phones.²³³ To isolate one material or agential cause is to miss how it’s a matter of a formal cause, an ecology in which school, teacher, students, and phone are all components. If kids are bored with school, maybe school could engage them differently and in more interesting things. Davidson calls this the new three Rs: rigor, relevance, and relationships. Which might be a way of saying that some key things to teach are things about attention itself as a difficult art.

It was sometimes imagined that making learning more “interactive” would make it work better. Citton thinks there are reasons to retain the masterly as well as the interactive approaches to teaching. It’s a matter of whether a teaching style is working to focus attention and at the same time convey the art of attention itself. Maybe even the notorious massive open online courses might work for certain kinds of learning, if structured around something other than the education tech for the sake of it, saving money, or capitalizing on the prestige of a brand-name university. As Citton suggests, Rancière’s famous ignorant schoolmaster might not have known the French he was teaching, but he knew how to sculpt attention to it.²³⁴

Ecology here seems to me a kind of impossible goal—like justice in Derrida or communicative action in Habermas or the world republic in Karatani—which might either be a regulative ideal or a sort of atemporal presence.²³⁵ Ecology, like God, does not exist and is probably impossible. Yet it remains in the background. But there might be more than one ecology. Our visions of it extend out from our actual labors and practices. It looks different depending on what you attend to.

Citton mentions two ecologies: the radical and the managerial. The radical ecology of attention comes out of things like the Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter movements. It wants to rebuild the whole practice of what can be seen, heard, known, shared, from the ground up. The managerial ecology of attention comes out of things from institutional forms that try to hold the line against the complete subsumption of attention into the regime of exchange value. It operates on a slightly bigger scale and is perhaps less bracing in its ambitions. Citton wants us to attend to both rather than choose between them. After all, part of steering away from attention in the modes of alertness and projection is to background the habit to digitize, to binarize, to make it all about us or about them.

The space for a politics and an art of attention thus covers a range of sites, from the radical to the managerial, and might be about all four forms of attention, but perhaps with a different emphasis. Attention is a form of care for the defense of the group, but it is also for maintaining its qualities and stabilizing its habits while being open to the new. To pay more attention to the reproduction of abilities is to include things feminism insists are undervalued as they are classified as women’s work. Here we could connect the theme of attention to that of emotional labor. As Hito Steyerl observes of the art world: why does it always fall to women to attend to how everyone feels about the show or the project? To pay more attention to openness to the new is to pay attention to what artists do when they pay attention and to the things they are trying to show us might be interesting. Warhol is an example of that.

Where political groups are concerned, attention may be key to avoiding the opposite problems of endless splits and rigid groupthink. If one attends to the transindividual feelings of a group, one may be able to tune it, without insisting that everyone think or feel the same way. As Anna Tsing has shown, political actions can be successful even with very divergent worldviews involved. This might be a matter of the transindividual imaginal politics that Chiara Botticci extracts from the psychoanalysis of Castoriadis.²³⁶