The future is better protected than the past.
—Chris Marker, La Jetée (1962)
The futurist legacy, the art of war in the art of noise, aside from widely debated questions of its cryptofascism, misogyny, and contemporary influence on a sonic avant-garde, is, in addition, chrono-strategically compromised. The future it wishes to speed off into rests on a unilinear notion of history, of technological progress and the enhancement of the human condition by prosthetic appendages. Man, for futurism, is not truly mutated, but is only upgraded in a white, metalicized übermensch. The futurist legacy has usually meant “white noise.” Meanwhile, the Afrofuturist version of this futurist tendency, especially as formulated by Kodwo Eshun, remains the most compelling surviving strain. Notably, here, the focus for Eshun crucially shifts from noise to the futurhythmachine and from fastness to a complex ecology of speeds. This spectral presence of the futurhythmachine haunts the this book. Eshun’s mutation of futurism immediately moves it to a much more sophisticated temporality, polyrhythmic instead of unilinear, a cyclical discontinuity in which there is a virtual coexistence of both the past and the future in the present.
The sonic processes and fictions referred to under the umbrella of Afrofutur-ism often operate themselves in the preemptive domain and are peppered by the generation of time anomalies, memories of the future, reverse causalities, and future feedbacks epitomized by the line from Public Enemy’s 1989 track, Welcome to the Terrordrome, “Apocalypse bin in effect,” reflecting the sentiment that “slavery functioned as an apocalypse experienced as equivalent to alien abduction.”1 More compelling than the straight line to the future of the modernist avant-garde, Afrofuturism often tries to conjure up an achronological nexus whereby sonic experience is riddled by symptoms of dyschronia. The model for this temporal intervention exists in condensed form in its approach to rhythm. The futurhythmachine, serving as a model, constitutes an “artificial discontinuum” that is driven by the impetus to “design, manufacture, fabricate, synthesize, cut, paste and edit.”2
Afrofuturism takes sonic futurism beyond a preoccupation of noise toward rhythm. More than the futurist rhetoric of noise, for Eshun, it is the rhythmachine that motivates and underscores the musics of the Black Atlantic. The rhythmachine is an algorithmic entity that abducts bodies, modulating their movements. The rhythmachine lies between the beats, or is the glue that congeals individual intensities together. To be abducted by the rhythmachine is to have the sensory hierarchy switched from the perception of rhythmelody to texturhythm, becoming a vibrational transducer, not just a listener. The rhythmachine constitutes a sensual mathematics, whose counting systems and algorithmic procedures take place across the skin. The skin, therefore, for the “rhythmatician,” is a skin that thinks. For this reason, Eshun challenges the beatless cliché of futuristic music for reimposing a “pre-industrial sensory hierarchy that shut up your senses in a Cartesian prison.” For him, the rhythmachine confounds in advance laments from the likes of Brian Eno when he complained that the problem with computers was that they did not contain enough “Africa” in them.3
At the same time, Eshun adopts many of the signature aims of futurism in his concern for the rewiring of sensory technologies to both mutate perception and synthesize new modes of thought. So futurism is taken as an escape pod from “tradition; instead it dislocates you from origins. It uproots you by inducing a gulf crisis, a perceptual daze rendering today’s sonic discontinuum immediately audible.... The Futurist producer can not be trusted with music’s heritage” because, for her, the “future is a much better guide to the present than the past.”4 Eshun later suggests that despite appearances, Afrofuturism does “not seek to deny the tradition of counter memory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality toward the proleptic as much as the retrospective.”5 The reason for this is the now preemptive mode of security. Speculative power, he argues, “functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures.”6 He notes how the futures industry functions “to fuel the desire for a technology boom,” and in this sense, “it would be naïve to understand science fiction, located within the expanded field of the futures industry, as merely prediction into the far future, or as a utopian project for imagining alternative social realities”7 but rather, in William Gibson’s terms, to “pre-program the present,” or, for Samuel Delaney, to “significantly distort it.”
Instead of the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, following Toni Morrison, Eshun insists that it was the “African slaves that experienced capture, theft, abduction, and mutilation [who] were the first moderns.”8 The tactic of the Afrofuturist artist and musician therefore is to “alienate themselves from sonic identity and to feel at home in alienation” because, as Tate and Eshun agree, Afro-diasporic “subjects live the estrangement that science fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same.”9 This future is always prismatic, usually characterized by an oscillation between pre-industrial Africa and scientific Africa in a cyclically discontinuous loop. African sonic process becomes a telecommunications medium operating through a vast transcontinental and transtemporal web: a rhythmic cyberspace that predated the Internet by decades. In The Last Angel of History, the protagonist is adrift in this web, like the main character from Chris Marker’s La Jetée, searching for the “distributed components of a code to a black secret technology that is the key to a diasporic future.”10
Forcing sonic futurism into contact with both critical and speculative science fiction as a means to diagnosing contemporary preemptive power, Eshun suggests that Afrofuturism’s key intervention is directed toward those cybernetic futurism’s that talk “of things that haven’t happened yet in the past tense” and thereby seek to “model variation over time by oscillating between anticipation and determinism.”11 Such a science fiction capital, as Mark Fisher has described it, produces feedback circuits that actualize desired futures within the passing present. Against this backdrop, Eshun understands Afrofuturism’s core insight as being precisely to pinpoint, combat, and subvert those predatory futurologies of science fiction capital that trap Africa, and its diaspora’s future in a demoralizing doomsday of forecast archetypal dystopia, usually economic, ecological, or epidemiological, or some combination of these. As he notes, the “density of dystopic” future casting of Africa is extreme. Afrofuturism therefore targets the “dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional” and “the articulation of futures within the everyday forms of the mainstream of black vernacular expression.”12 It is within this context that Sonic Warfare moves beyond traditional notions of futurism. The conception of the art of war in the art of noise is replaced by a rhythmanalysis of preemptive power, a cartography of diasporic bass cultures13 and their transduction of ecologies of dread, and an investigation of the concept of audio viruses that Afrofuturist musics and fictions have created. In this weird climate, where control competes with aesthetics in the speculative domain, only one thing is clear. As Whitehead wrote in Science and the Modern World, “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”14