From Consensus to Virtual Reality

This post is a kind of companion to "Becoming Animal". With an open acknowledgement of the source (Tobias's commentary on dancecult), the hypothesis follows: becoming-alien, its *play* on the alien allows us to infiltrate in-between, say, the identity operations of Marxist phenomenology that devalues and sees as "alien" the processes of commodity fetishism (and/also, as Lefebvre would put it, the technics of the machinic object as alienating production) and the AfroFuturist practices, rhythms, technologies, musics and (contra/sub)cultures that embrace, twist and play (with) the alien. There's a lot of bracketing in this last sentence as there's a LOT to think about here, namely quite a challenge to certain fundamentals of leftist politics *as well as* philosophies that rely upon the purity of the phenomenon (which is to say most of analytic philosophy, phenomenology, I guess what Derrida calls "metaphysics").

An interesting way into this for Derrida fanatics might be to consider Derrida's deconstruction of Marx's phenomenology in _Specters of Marx_ that not only shifts ontology to hauntology (from the phenomenology of presence/absence to hauntology of specters) but reveals a similar opening of the alien. The alien is no longer that which *negatively* alienates, distances us as pure subject from work or the pure object from its fetishistic character. The alien precedes the subject and the object, and its meaning is displaced from a negative process of "alienation" to one which is incorporated as part of the process of becoming. "Alien" here can be thought as an otherwise "other" though now displaced from Eurocentric discourses of the "other" which deconstruction is prone to.

To address the question of violence. Here, the alien is liberated through a certain *violence of reading* -- like any great philosopher's reading -- which deconstruction reveals as inherent to any kind of reading, but I think reading violence here means reading liberation -- though again, the idea is to think neither in positive/negative (good/evil) terms of morality, judgement, value, and so on. We are talking about FORCE. The unsettled question here is ethics. FORCE in the name of what. Ghandi exerted FORCE or violence upon his body (fasting). His "nonviolence"falls under a FORCE of inertia enacted upon the state (mass hunger fasts). "Nonviolent" protesters today chain themselves to things and go limp: a violence is enacted in their immobility. I would question, in a way, their adherence to "nonviolence" as a _pure ideology_, though I fully grasp its tactical or even strategic necessity, its value as a media discourse. But as for ethics, Derrida spent his later life working through exactly this problematic: how to read the affirmation of deconstruction as "ethical", ethical to what or whom, and in what meaning of ethos / ethics.

Now, at least in this context, inserting AfroFuturism into the mix allows the alien to take on a pragmatic role when answering the charge: "In the name of what does one perform such a reading, by claiming that that which alienates us is a part of us? For isn't there obviously alienated work and forces of appropriation?"

The response begins with: in the name of what has come already. In the name of AfroFuturism. Of course it might be the case that a scholar such as Adorno (whom otherwise I deeply respect) would critique AfroFuturism outright. This is one possible response, but one that is deeply troubled (let's sidestep such critique for a second). Let us say that if one doesn't wish to negate an existing culture outright, one then has to *deal* with it and *deal with* how it has *worked* for certain people, dammit. Just like hip-hop's the Game -- how it has created an economic empire, form of creative expression, political and social force, media empire, for the afro-disapora where there was little -- it can't simply be written off as "representing" or "furthering" mysogyny and violence.

And the question above can be thought in terms of technics or technology in general: that it comes not from outside to overtake the human and render us as slaves to the machine, but comes from us, is part of us to begin with. And unlike Hegel it will and never can be re-synthesized properly; nor does it merely belong to certain class interests (as if classes could contain the dissemination of "alienating technics" today!). Which does not mean either that passive acceptance of pro-technological discourse is the answer (i.e. the California Ideology, Web 2.0, utopian technocracy in all its forms and twists with late-capitalism), but rather, what is called for is an attentiveness to a slightly more complicated form of infiltration and intervention, a reappropriation of the technics -- ah, let us play or spin here on the play of the Technics 1200, exappropriated for readjusting the rhythms of music and moving bodies -- which is where one finds AfroFuturism.

Such an answer of 'what has already come to pass' is the subtle counterpoint to every enunciation that is more or less commonplace in deconstruction, "in the name of what is to-come [à la à-venir]..." -- in the name of the future, which of course is part of the gesture: for what monstrous creations AfroFuturism has birthed --!!-- and from which we know not what the future can bring.
I take the cue here from Kodwo Eshun, in _More Brilliant Than The Sun_ -- really I am just riffing on his work some 10 years ago now -- who writes of Detroit Techno (as well as jungle and strands of hip-hop and black science fiction such as Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delaney) as AfroFuturist: that is, of the Alien dream, going Offworld, the sci-fi alien embodiment. Escape velocity from postslavery, not as "escapism" -- ie a fantasy -- but as effective escape hatch. Like hiphop's The Game, Black Wallstreet, going Alien is counterindustry. It's not a theoretical presupposition, but rather comes out of (Detroit) technoculture itself, notably in the members of
Underground Resistance, from Drexicya (aquatic race of Afrofuturist ocean dwellers that are the 'black mermen', born from black slaves thrown overboard off the slave ships of the Atlantic -- halfway between Africa and Jamaica, one could say) to DJ T-1000 (the assembly line, the AfroFuturist black body as machinic, nameless, identity displaced into machinic repetition) -- or Jeff Mill's X-101 series ("rings of saturn"), the entire Axis label.

Eshun pushes Going Alien a bit over Getting Real, something of a polemic, though I think anyone far into hiphop knows that hiphop always gets Surreal at its most creative points -- think Outkast's 1996 album ATLiens, which opens with "Are you alien...?" on one track, or "Greetings, Earthlings....". Of course Dr. Octagon is key here, Kool Keith, but so is the uber_realism of NAS or Mobb Deep, a kind of displacement of the steet into counterimaginaries that become increasingly offworld (think NAS' track off album 2 where he rhymes from the point of view of an intentionally misfiring gun). And of course DJ Spooky wrought AfroFuturism not only by bringing dub into the hiphop equation, thus illbient, the tripped out sphere of the spook, but by remixing theory and sociopolitical realms, a kind of transversal spook flitting in-between the dancefloor and the lecture hall...

Going Alien is a way to move postracial, think postracial, post identity politics, for we can all go alien, as Sun Ra invites us to, as Underground Resistance calls out for us to join in "deprogramming the progammers" -- as RAMM:ELL:ZEE writes, if it's about race, then who's racing? RAMM:ELL:ZEE, one of the early graf writers and noted MCs (he's in the movie WildStyle), took graffiti burners, armed them, then took them off the wall, and animated them three-dimensional into letter racers [ check it --
http://gothicfuturism.net ].

Going Alien is everywhere... we're living it... it's the way to handle, one another tip, alienation... and everywhere an inverted twist to Marx's alienation, which becomes here the -- in Hegelian terms -- reappropriation of the alien not to synthesize identity (self-conscious through overcoming alienation, commodity fetishism, etc.) but rather, embracing alienation to become alien. We are inseparably machinic now, we cannot disassociate as Marx envisioned. In fact AfroFuturism points toward strategies interior to alienation: Alien Nation, which communicates along the levels that UR proposed... Nation 2 Nation, Galaxy 2 Galaxy, Universe 2 Universe...

I post as well some surprisingly lucid commments from disinformation about Jodi Dean's work on the relation of the alien to conspiracy theory. If belief in alien abductions, (as per Tobias's riff on Afrofuturism), and especially the eco-friendly kind described by Harvard Professor John Mack, and featured in last night's documentary, Stefan Alex's "Experiences"), then should we really just take their adherents to task for failure to acknowledge realism? If it is something other than liberal humanism that fosters the solidarity of a critical posthumanism, than is there not something valuable in this as well? Mack may have helped confer some legitimacy on alien abduction experiences, but Dean points out how this occurs in tandem with the contingency of modern communication: a movement from consensus to virtual reality, in the sense that universal narratives become relativized (by gesturing in this postmodern direction, Dean predictably became exposed to accusations of postmodern relativism by academics, who must have been motivated, at least in part, by a desire to preserve their privileged authorial voice, which secured their tenureship; much like those journalists who attack bloggers).
In other words, how is the belief in alien abduction qualitatively different to Christopher Priest's imagining of a world where identity has to be renegotiated in relation to migrant experiences? Unsurprisingly, Kodwo Eshun reappears in the clip from "Martians and Us", discussing Priest.

http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id251/pg1/