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 Perhaps one could ask if capitalism has already superseded itself and done so first by passing through the pores of the skin of those it designates others.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