Sensoria. Маккензи Уорк
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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