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