While Afrofuturist sonic fictions and processes such as dub virology focused on the armory of effects (particularly reverb, delay, and subtraction) whose techniques of abstraction facilitated a proliferation and generation of a kind of “dub diaspora,” it has been argued that such preoccupations neglect the role of more traditional weapons of sonic warfare within postslavery black music, especially the voice. Spirituals, for example, were deployed as sonic weapons by both black and white abolitionists in the struggle against American slavery. The protest and yearning expressed in song or the rhythmically spoken word, from gospel, to soul, to roots reggae, to hip-hop and R&B, continued this mobilization of the voice. It is against this background that some writers have, from a more humanist stance, criticized Afrofuturism, raising the question of the vocal material on which its armory of sonic processes is effected. Two pertinent examples of these critiques of Afrofuturism can be located. They target both its dub virologies and its affinity, in its most compelling strains, to an alien inhumanism.
The first, fired from what is essentially a traditional cultural studies perspective, concerns the political semiotic content of the transmitted voice within, for example, reggae, and the potentially deracinating effect of musical deterritorialization. In a polemical article entitled “Back to the Roots,” music critic Simon Reynolds noted how the virologists of sound seemed to gravitate around instrumental electronic musics (from dub to techno to glitch), revealing as much by what they left out of their poststructuralist musings as what they included.1 Reynolds accuses “the cluster of ideas [that] can be described as the Afro-futurist discourse, but it actually has multiple facets: dub as deconstruction (of the song, of the metaphysics of musical presence); the producer as mad scientist, dark magus, shaman, trickster; the ‘Macro Dub Infection’ notions of dub as post-geographical virus and of dub’s sonic instability as an education in ‘insecurity.’”2 He complains that what all these dub virologies shared was ironically the “exaltation of producers and engineers over singers and players, and the idea that studio effects and processing are more crucial than the original vocal or instrumental performances.... The really distorting side effect of the Afro-futurist privileging of the producer, though, is the fact that reggae actually involved people saying stuff about stuff has almost totally been forgotten.”3
For Reynolds, by focusing on the dub virus as a set of abstract processes that have migrated across the Jamaican sonic diaspora to infect and mutate music from elsewhere, the sonic material that dub deconstructs through its sonic processes, that is, the human voices and their politico-semiotic content relating to everyday social, political, and religious concerns, were being ignored. Reynolds specifically is referring to an alleged failure of dub virologists, for example, David Toop and Kodwo Eshun, to give due discussion to the content of Black At-lantian oral culture in their writing.4 Yet while Reynolds is certainly correct to attempt to rechannel some critical attention to the voice, the representational dimensions of black popular culture generally, and Jamaican music specifically, are hardly lacking in the discourses surrounding these themes. If anything, the dub virologists operated in precisely the blind spot of such discourses, adding a techno-affective dimension to compensate for the clichés and moralism that Eshun attacks in the introduction to More Brilliant Than the Sun. An audio virology would therefore have to tread carefully in its formulation of contagious oral cultures—careful not to lapse back into those models that subordinated the sonic dimension of the word at the altar of its written face in order to break speech’s aura of authenticity and presence. Contagious orality must therefore be placed within the rhythmic and vibrational infrastructure of the plane of machinic enunciation. To extend an audio virology in these directions would involve a discussion of the virological traits of those phonemic populations that we know as speech, song, and their evolutionary linguistic ecosystems, technical decompositions, and recompositions. Reynolds’s comments notwithstanding, the dub virologists helped open up this key dimension of machinic orality in the understanding of black music.
A second and related critique was aimed not so much at dub virologies directly but what, for Eshun, certainly accompanied this, that is, a dystopian ear for the alien and the machinic. In many ways, Reynolds’s criticisms of Afrofuturist dub virology run parallel to those made by Alexander Weheliye in his own discussion of the cultural politics of the interface of black music and technology. In a sense, Weheliye attempts to “humanize” aspects of Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun.5 Building on what was already implicit in Eshun’s work, that is, a theorization of the synthetic voice, and drawing from more recent discussions of African American and Black British popular music, including those of Reynolds, Weheliye begins to flesh out the contagious orality he claims is missing from Afrofuturist theory. In essence, the concept of “hypersoul” is added to “hyperdub.”
Weheliye’s writings on Afrofuturism are skeptical. In his book Phonographies: Grooves in Afrosonic Modernity and an earlier essay, “Feenin: The Post-Human Voice in Contemporary Black Popular Music,” he argues that the vocoder poses a specific problem for Afrofuturist theorizations of black musical technoculture.6 For media theorist Kittler, the vocoder is another example in the inventory of military technology mutating popular culture. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, he notes, ignoring Homer Dudley’s late 1920s research into the Voder, that the vocoder was first implemented between 1942 and 1945 by Claude Shannon at Bell laboratories and Alan Turing in the British Secret Service. It was, Kittler proclaims, “a wonder weapon which was to make the transatlantic conversation between Churchill and Roosevelt safe from interception by Canaris and the German Abwehr, and which like so many electronic achievements of the Second World War, is now indispensable to popular music.”7 Taking the envelope of one signal (formant), for example, a voice, and transposing it onto another (carrier), for example, a synthesizer, “one acoustics controls the other”:
In order to test his vocoder, by the way, Turing first played a record of Winston Churchill’s belligerent voice, whose discreet or cut-up sampled values he then mixed with a noise generator using modular addition. Whereupon British officers heard the voice of their prime minister and commander-in-chief contaminate the speakers as just so much white noise [not to say, primal sound]. Appropriately, Turing’s vocoder was named after Delila, who in the Book of Judges tricked another warrior, the Danaite Samson, out of the secret of his strength. Turing’s skill as a tinkerer, however, revealed the secret of modern political discourse to be something far worse than weakness: “a perfectly even and uninformative hiss” which offered no regularities and, therefore, nothing intelligible to the ears of British officers or those of German eavesdroppers. And yet, sent through the vocoder a second time, Churchill’s original voice emerged from the receiving end.8
The vocoder is therefore another reminder of where popular entertainment media technologies productively “abuse” the technologies of war. This is the upside to the militarization of everyday life. Alongside mechanical and magnetic recording, radio transmission and now digital sampling, time stretching, and automated tuning, the vocoder afforded another schizophonic mutation of the voice that intensified its contagiousness, helping generate a new kind of infectious orality that would prove inspirational to German Electronische Musik and catalyze a vector that runs from Wendy Carlos, through Kraftwerk, Laurie Anderson, Herbie Hancock, Africa Baambatta, Zapp, right up to Tupac and beyond. In fact, in the hands of Afrofuturist musics, the vocoder became a means for upgrading one of the few possessions transportable during forced migration: oral culture. The vocoder synthesizes the voices of the wandering ghosts made homeless at the origins of modernity.
Weheliye’s intervention is two-pronged, with one spike aimed at the (white) posthumanism of cyberculture theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and the other at the (black) futurism of Eshun. Weheliye argues, contra Hayles, that we can understand the synthesis of the human voice with intelligent machines without assuming that “information lost its body.” Contra Eshun, he claims that neither is it necessary for a black posthumanism to take on alien form.9 For Weheliye, through examining the vocoder within the context particularly of African American R&B music, a different form of posthumanism is produced, “not mired in the residual effects of white liberal subjectivity.” And this, he claims, makes possible a model of “subjectivity located in the sonic arena rather than the ocular.”10
In reality, Weheliye’s discussion of “hypersoul” via the vocoder effect is much more compelling than his arguments against either Hayles or Eshun. He builds on Eshun’s observation that “soul” and the “postsoul” tendencies are present in all-black popular music as divergent pressures toward the organic and inorganic, respectively. The vocoder effects and its synthetic voice and antinaturalistic desiring machines form a powerful example precisely because of its virulence within what is otherwise renowned as an overwhelmingly humanist genre of “soul” music.11 But of particular interest here is Weheliye’s critical engagement with Afrofuturism.
Eshun’s strain of posthumanism intensifies cultural cybernetics with the recognition that New World black subjects had been persistently excluded from the category of the human. He constructs Afrofuturist lineages within the fringes of black pop, avant-garde, and electronic music that seceded from the human so as to imagine and pursue, in terms of fiction or a sonic machinism, or both, other modes of thought, experience, and collectivity. He maintains, in a passage also quoted by Weheliye, that
the idea of slavery as an alien abduction means that we’ve all been living in an aliennation since the eighteenth century. The mutation of African male and female slaves in the eighteenth century into what became negro, and into an entire series of humans that were designed in America. That whole process, the key behind it all is that in America none of these humans were designated human. It’s in the music that you get this sense that most African-Americans owe nothing to the status of the human. There is this sense of the human as being a really pointless and treacherous category12
Eshun therefore pursues those sonic fictions that positivize the identification of Black Atlantians with objects and machines alluding, of course, to the original meaning of the robot in Czech as slave. But for Weheliye, Eshun is merely inverting a binary opposition installed by colonialism itself. In this sense, he argues, against Eshun, that it “is precisely because slavery rendered the category of the human suspect that the reputedly humanist post-slavery black cultural productions cannot and do not attribute the same meaning to humanity as white American discourses.”13 Weheliye indicts Eshun for not taking into account the contagion of Afrofuturism on genres considered to lie within the soul tradition. Weheliye, like Reynolds, argues that emphasizing the inhumanism of Afrofuturism encourages a tendency to focus on its instrumental musical currents at the expense of the black voice. The vocoder adds a contagious, machinic orality to the abstract sonic effects and robot rhythms of the “postsoul” tendency of black music identified by Eshun.
Weheliye traces the shift from the vocoder to the vocoder effect, from the focus on an analog technology to a digital one. The vocoder effect is Weheliye’s key example of the failure of Eshun to consider the way Afrofuturism would infect genres of black popular music (R&B) that were not self-consciously technology focused (techno). He analyzes the vocoder effect within R&B to show how a disjunction between form and content occurs. He notes that the content of certain R&B lyrics, while processed by the vocoder effect, do not reflect the technological machines that filter them, so much as the machines of desire, thereby mutating soul into hypersoul music.
Eshun argues that all black music contains two divergent tendencies, which he terms the “soulful” and the “post-soul.” In More Brilliant Than the Sun, he is obviously most interested in how these tendencies were playing out in Black Atlantic at the end of the twentieth century, particularly as represented by a “humanist R&B” and a “posthuman techno,” but he does note that he is also concerned with the mutant symbioses of these two tendencies.14 It somewhat misses the point, therefore, to argue that Eshun does not give enough attention to the (technologically mediated) voice, especially since he emphasizes time and again that his main object of analysis is the futurhythmachine. In a later essay in which he addresses turn-of-the-century R&B, he is consistent in following his more rhythmanalytic concerns developed in his earlier work to look at the hyperkinetic audiovisual syncopations of Hype Williams’s video work and how they were infected by the stutter-funk of Timbaland and Missy Elliot.15 Again, as with the case of Reynolds’s critique of dub virology, it is hardly the case that the majority of discourse surrounding the history of black popular music pays no attention to the human voice and what it refers to. In fact, it rarely does anything but this.
The main problem of Weheliye’s critique, unfortunately typical of academic posturing, is that he criticizes Hayles and Eshun for not doing something that neither of them set out to do in the first place, by implication rhetorically weakening the power of his more important argument regarding the need to make issues of race more central to cybertheory. In addition to continuously conflating concepts of the machinic with mechanistic, a key drawback of Weheliye’s critique of Eshun is that it partly suffers from the advantage of retrospective arrogance. Actually it was only the late 1990s innovations in U.S. R&B and their influence on U.K. garage that occurred after the publication of More Brilliant Than the Sun that consolidated the conception of “hypersoul” which Weheliye deploys against Eshun’s earlier version of Afrofuturism.
Both Weheliye and Reynolds are making similar arguments against Afro-futurism from the point of view of a humanist critique of posthumanism and recent developments in popular electronic music. Of course, if these arguments were merely terminological disputes, of discursive inversions, redefinitions, and interpretations, then maybe the issue could be left there. Despite the social con-structionist methods of much techno theory and those who critique its ideology, cybernetics is much more than a set of discursive formations, but operates at the level of the construction of reality itself, not just its representations.
Weheliye’s analysis stays somewhat limited by its confinement to the discursive formations and the social constructions of the human. While circling around a rhetoric of embodiment, he merely discusses texts with little attention to the body, its resonant frequencies and technological conjunctions. It is the material transformations of cybernetic culture and its mutation of what a body can do that renders the category of the human problematic, more than just a question of discursive formations. The “meaning attributed to humanity” that Weheliye is concerned with just points to the tip of the iceberg. Eshun’s more general reason for pursuing an alliance with the inhuman, as clarified in his “Further Considerations” essay, goes beyond his postcolonial antihumanism.16
Eshuns materialism is evident, for example, in his critique of Richard Daw-kins’s version of memetics that stops short of complete immanence, excluding himself and science from his cultural virology. Eshun’s work deserves a much more serious treatment than an identitarian cultural studies, even in its more synthetic variants, makes possible. Contra Reynolds and Weheliye, the Black Atlantian futurism as specifically described by Eshun stands as a conceptual event whose reverberations for a theory of sonic warfare should be welcomed, not responded to defensively.
On a more constructive note, even Weheliye himself notes that while “singers remain central to the creation of black music, they do so only in conjunction with the overall sonic architecture,”17 a sonic architecture, which for Reynolds, can be addressed only through an approach to the “sound of politics” developed in the 1970s, coupled with the 1990s orientation to the “politics of sound.”18 It is clear from the preceding discussions of the voice and the limits of dub virologies that an audio virology is a call for an ecological remit. What is meant here is that its map would begin from an inventory of the frequencies, bodies, feelings, machines, utterances, emissions, codes, processes, affordances, economies, and environments involved in any sonic nexus. Such an affective ecology is not opposed to the representational concerns that Reynolds poses, but rather comprises the very environment out of which politicolinguistic assemblages in popular music are generated. Instead, it is more accurate to maintain that the processes of dubtraction, the schizophonic psychic effects in both producers and listeners, the sorcery of sonic processes, and the contagious deterritorialization of Afrofuturism’s dub virology are not opposed to “people saying stuff about stuff.” Rather, if the power of Jamaican sonic processes is to be recognized in their profound influence on Western musical culture, then this is as much about the contagious machines of thought emitted by a dub virology as the politicized content of its lyricists. Either way, this detour through Afrofuturism and the politics of black music illustrates the tactical importance of rhythmic and vibrational processes in producing conditions for affective mobilization.