Queer Times, Black Futures

Kara Keeling

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479820429
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A serious intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom. Keelingreads selected works, such as Sun Ra’s 1972 film Space is the Place and and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar “speculations” of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.

1

“It’s after the End of the World (Don’t You Know That Yet?)”

Afrofuturism and Transindividuation

Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune.

—Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

“In the Dark”

Somewhere in the middle of the 1974 film Space Is the Place, Sun Ra’s band, The Arkestra, begins to play a tune called “It’s after the End of the World.” That tune launches forth with a few bars of tentative tones and sounds. Then come lyrics—a refrain sung and shouted in a voice that we recognize today as feminine, if not female, by its quality. Over and again, this voice insists, “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?”1

This refrain—“It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?”—asserts another temporality and coordinates, which exist within, but are incommensurate with, those taken as the dominant logics of existence of a world (only one) characterized by statistical predictability, control, temporal continuity, and coherence. The feminine voice creates a “calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos,” which insists that it is “after the end of the world.” This voice “jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.”2 This refrain opens a marvelous (im)possibility: “the world” does not cohere as such. If it once did, it no longer does. Already, it has ended. Whatever existence “we” can claim, wherever that can be claimed, and however it can be characterized, cannot take the continuity and stability of a world as axiomatic.

Soon after it begins, the refrain in Space Is the Place—“It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?”—is overtaken by other sounds, another attempt to organize chaos. Perhaps the limited space organized by these sounds is not music but a wall of noise, loud yet fragile. It collapses and . . .

“At Home”

. . . leaves “us” homeless. Homelessness is our home. We carry the abyss that Édouard Glissant characterized so well. For Glissant, the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade and the formation of “the new world” mark an apocalyptic catastrophe. We are forged in its wake. With specific reference to those who can be identified as Caribbean, Glissant explains, “The abyss is also a projection of and a perspective into the unknown. . . . This is why we stay with poetry . . . We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”3 At home in open boats and spaceships launching for the unknown, we hum the refrain, “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?” Homeless at home. We improvise.4

“Toward the World”

The soundtrack of Space Is the Place segues into “Under Different Stars.” Here, cosmic forces are perceptible even as the earthly forces of the abyss linger and are transduced into another world, here, now, in the world some believe is (a) just one. The sound and image tracks of Space Is the Place, the matter on which they are recorded, and the discourses that circulate about it—in other words, all that constitutes Space Is the Place—melds with that world, which is not (a) just one, opening that world all the way, to a point where we can believe in it again. And it leaves us with only a belief in this world.

Now. Where to begin?

In response to that question, Meaghan Morris starts—in the middle of the chapter in Identity Anecdotes entitled “Crazy Talk Is Not Enough: Deleuze and Guattari at Muriel’s Wedding”—with the first paragraph of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s plateau “Of the Refrain,” found in the middle of their book A Thousand Plateaus. Morris explains, “The paragraph itself can be read as a little song, a nocturnal creation myth or ‘sketch’ in the middle of the book; it is not a genesis story of the logos and light, but a song of germination in darkness.”5 Although, as Morris points out, “there is no special analytical virtue in emphasizing ‘Of the Refrain’ over any of the other plateaus in A Thousand Plateaus,” I begin with it because doing so calls attention to the improvisational elements of any beginning, which always happens in the middle of other things, and because it makes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “the Refrain,” “Milieus and Rhythms,” “the Cosmos,” and “the Unequal or the Incommensurable” available to this book as heuristics and technologies through which to encounter the space-times at the intersection of contemporary formulations of “queer” and “Black,” which we can grasp, here at the beginning anyway, as schematically structuring antagonisms of our present social and ontological systems, respectively.6

With this metaphorical use of the musical refrain, Deleuze and Guattari offer a method of creative production that also offers insight into what, as I discuss later in this chapter, Gilbert Simondon refers to as processes of collective individuation. Deleuze and Guattari explain that the Refrain consists of three aspects which Morris describes using Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation in the “Contents” section of A Thousand Plateaus as “in the dark, at home, toward the world.” Deleuze and Guattari state: “The refrain has all three aspects, it makes them simultaneous or mixes them.” One sketches an uncertain “center in the heart of chaos” in order to “organize a limited space” that can protect “the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do.” One “launches forth, hazards an improvisation.” As in music, the refrain offers an anchor to which we return after any improvisation.

Alondra Nelson points out that it has become a habit to start projects about Afrofuturism with Sun Ra.7 Later in Queer Times, Black Futures, I will start again elsewhere. Here, however, I sketch an uncertain center via a refrain from Sun Ra, a musician best known as an innovator of free jazz. I start with Sun Ra because he created his own cosmology, eschewing his given name and place of birth, Herman Blount, born in 1914 in Birmingham, AL, and taking the name Sun Ra, claiming to be from Saturn. I understand this to be a generative act of (re)creation that, as I have suggested in reference to his film Space Is the Place, posits an alternative imaginary of extant space and time, and the set of possibilities that reside therein. Although he was an eccentric jazz musician, his interest in outer space and unconventional musical expressions influenced later musical groups, such as George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Digable Planets, Public Enemy, and Shabazz Palaces, among others. It also finds a filmic expression in Space Is the Place.

In the opening sequence of Space Is the Place, Sun Ra’s character announces that he wants to set up a colony for Black people on another planet to “see what they can do on a planet all their own, without any white people there.” About that utopian aim, he states, “Equation-wise, the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended. We’ll work on the other side of time. We’ll bring them here through either isotopic teleportation, transmolecularization or better still, teleport the whole planet here through music.”8 The rest of the film involves Sun Ra’s character playing a game of cards with a character called “The Overseer” to win a bet for control over the destiny of Black people, and traveling between 1943 Chicago and 1969 Oakland, California, to convince Black people to travel to that planet with him. The film ends with Sun Ra defeating “The Overseer” and setting into motion an “altered destiny.”

As Sun Ra surveys the planet he discovered at the beginning of the film, he announces, “The music is different here. The vibrations are different. Not like planet earth.” The idea that music might affect vibrations and energy patterns and, hence, consciousness aligns with the ideas of other avant-garde artists of the 1950s and 1960s, who used aesthetic techniques of “plastic dialogue” to articulate what was then perceived to be “a new relationship between individuals, society, and the environment.”9 Sun Ra’s innovations within jazz and Big Band improvisation were part of a larger subcultural preoccupation among avant-garde artists with then-emergent metaphors of “energy, spirituality, metaphysicality, and freedom” and “new definitions of improvisation.”10 Various conceptualizations of Afrofuturism have drawn on the temporality of, or the organization of time within, Sun Ra’s particular version of plastic dialogue and the politics it supports.11

Music offers an especially rich terrain for Afrofuturist expression because it imbricates sentient bodies with technology, such as microphones that amplify and project a singer’s voice, or the tools of music production, recording, and dissemination, such as mixing boards, synthesizers, musical instruments, radio, television, the Internet, and so on. Increasingly, music and audio culture are inseparable from digital technology, as Alexander Weheliye and others have reminded us.12 A burgeoning interest in a serious critical engagement with music and aurality has emerged at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first as one of the richest and most dynamic areas of intellectual cultural production today. From within African American Studies, for instance, thinkers such as Weheliye, Lindon Barrett, Daphne Brooks, Fred Moten, and Paul Gilroy, among others, have called our attention to the convergence of “Blackness” and “sound” and “music” in order to complicate the hegemony of vision in the epistemologies of race.

The timing of this reemergence of a sustained and dynamic scholarly interest in music and aurality in Black studies is significant. In The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, for example, I begin by noting the historical coincidence of the invention and dissemination of moving image technologies with W. E. B. DuBois’s prescient statement that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”13 Working with and sometimes against Deleuze’s writing on cinema, The Witch’s Flight explores the ways that the ontologies and epistemologies that cinema makes perceptible and organizes—especially those informing social relations ordered along lines delineated by commonsense understandings of race, gender, and sexuality—have become imbricated with how capitalism exploits labor power, enabling it to reach into even our leisure time and make it productive for Capital.14

The Witch’s Flight has a soundtrack that provides a way to mark both the importance of sound to “the cinematic” and how music might offer an epistemological, and, as Fred Moten’s work suggests, ontological, register within the cinematic that (perhaps) allows one to sense what does not appear or resists appearing through its currently available logics. Yet, in film, the soundtrack is customarily secondary to the image track in terms of eliciting a commonly available perception of present images; as such, it is available in The Witch’s Flight and in the cinematic more broadly as a reservoir of uncommon sensibilities and subterranean knowledges at the same time as it becomes part of the cinematic’s workings, perceptible as what Deleuze refers to in his work on cinema as “sound situations” or “sound-images.”

In chapter 1 of Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, “Beyond the Movement-Image,” Deleuze identifies Italian Neo-Realism as the mode of filmmaking through which a new cinematic image, the time-image, becomes perceptible. This image is constituted through “the purely optical and sound situation which takes the place of the faltering sensory-motor situations” after World War II.15 The increased significance of the time-image in filmmaking after World War II marks a historical transition in which what Deleuze calls “the soul” of cinema shifted away from the regime of the movement-image, which was characterized by its reliance on sensory-motor situations. As the sensory motor image—the movement-image—collapses, a “pure optical-sound image” emerges, “any-space-whatevers” proliferate, and another regime of the image makes itself felt: that of the time-image. The time-image makes “time and thought perceptible” by making “them visible and of sound.”16 The relationship between the movement-image and the time-image is important in Deleuze’s work on cinema because it allows for a range of expressions, perceptions, and possibilities within the cinematic while pointing to what Deleuze calls “an outside more distant than any exterior,” or a radical Elsewhere that does not belong to the order of the cinematic, yet invests in the cinematic in order to rip it open from the inside.

The last sentence of the final chapter before the “Conclusion” of Cinema 2 reads: “What has now become direct is a time-image for itself, with its two dissymetric, non-totalizable sides, fatal when they touch, that of an outside more distant than any exterior, and that of an inside deeper than any interior, here where a musical speech rises and is torn away, there where the visible is covered over or buried.”17 The Witch’s Flight ends with Deleuze at this point, with a provocation that reads like an (im)possible, perhaps fatal, promise.18 Deleuze seems to suggest that the cinematic movement-image and the time-image, regimes that organize the hegemony of vision in modernity, orchestrating their service to money’s interests among other things, come under pressure from sound and music, which Deleuze refers to at the end of Cinema 2 as “musical speech.”19

One of the intellectual projects that Afrofuturism, with its interest in technology, asks us to engage involves exploring what the digital regime of the image, sound, and/or perception makes available to thought. Throughout the present project, therefore, I take seriously the ways that the rise and tearing away of what Deleuze calls “a musical speech” might mark a third passage from one regime to another within the cinematic.20 Although toward the end of Cinema 2 Deleuze considers what he refers to as “the electronic image” in ways I will explore throughout Queer Times, Black Futures, the digital regime of the image is a component of what Deleuze elsewhere refers to as “societies of control.” The digital regime of the image facilitates the phase of racial capitalism Jodi Melamed has called “neoliberal multiculturalism.”21 The growing significance of sound and audio culture is among the many important transformations one might trace with(in) the digital. Eccentric jazz musician Sun Ra and other avant-garde jazz artists likewise situate sound and audio culture as central to technological transformation.22

Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist interventions in Space Is the Place, as well as his performances and recordings of free jazz, are best contextualized within the broader sociocultural, political, and economic context of strugg...