Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
ETHNOFUTURISMS:
FINDINGS IN COMMON AND CONFLICTING FUTURES
◊ The notion of a black secret technology allows Afrofuturism to reach a point
of speculative acceleration. ◊ Blaccelerationism proposes that accelerationism
always already exists in the territory of blackness, whether it knows it or not. ◊
Sinofuturism is a darkside cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia; It
connects seemingly heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary
capitalism. ◊ Shanghai futurism ultimately depends on breaking free from the
now common assumption about the nature of time. ◊ The unfolding story of
Gulf Futurism is a strange mitosis happening out of the sight of the master
planners and architects; it’s the splitting of worlds, of then and later, us and
them, real and unreal. ◊ The Dubaification of the world is already a thing of the
present and the recent past, and has completed its ideological mission at
lightning speed.
The ethnofuturisms gathered here are the (un)natural enemies of every
(chrono-)politically bankrupt project of ethnopluralism or racist ethno-
nationalism. In this, they follow the movements and concepts of Afrofuturism,
Sinofuturism, and Gulf Futurism.1 Moreover, to speak of ethnofuturisms is no
harmless task, but to try and bring together and make sense of anachronic
reinventions and heretical transvaluations, of non-neologisms and upcycled
terminologies. In an historical moment in which the future is not only unevenly
distributed but appears nearly lost, ethnofuturisms turn us back to the
question: Why is it that certain determinations given to the future come out of
ethnic conditions and regional developments? It is about the tenses,
chronotopes, and time-forms that ground various ethnofuturist manifestations
and their respective power structures: Can we raise questions about the future
insofar as it falls along these lines of commonality and conflict? From where in
the universe, and in the name of whom, is it (still) possible to ask: How does
the future meet us halfway? How can we think freedom and emancipation
beyond any antiquated logic of progress? In other words, how can we envision
a political horizon beyond the hegemonic traditions of historicism that still
inform the political realities of Europe or North America—and, consequently,
much of the rest of the world too? How can we develop the ability to produce a
history or deny historical fabrications differently from traditional Western
1
This anthology should by no means be considered exhaustive, rather a first step in a new field of
research that might once be called Comparative Futurism, and must draw on the tradition of other
movements as well, including Indofuturism and Latin@futurism, among others.
1
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
culture, not least in its explicitly colonial and racist tendencies? In what ways
can all of us who think about the possible implications of concepts such as
progress or emancipation today include in our thoughts and agendas the
political subject of the twenty-first century: the refugee?
We arrive at ethnofuturist phenomena first by way of evidences and less
so via terminology. However, the significance of each Afrofuturist, Sinofuturist,
or Gulf Futurist instance becomes clear not least against the background of
their historical predecessor, the European Futurism of the early twentieth
century, characterized by toxic masculinity and techno-militaristic fantasies.
Ethnofuturisms, on the other hand, are characterized by their reference to
regions that often overlap with the contemporary “conflict zones” of a globality
no longer (unilaterally) dominated by the West. Furthermore, it is clear that the
reference point of e thnos is gaining significance not only through the rise of
extremist ethnonationalism in Europe (and beyond), but also because of the
so-called migration crisis and the decline of certain nation states outside of
Europe. For an adequate discussion on ethnofuturisms, therefore, a more
comprehensive diagnosis of global capitalism is required.
The ethnofuturisms of interest here are not concerned with preserving
an alleged "nature" of various ethnic groups into the future. The question is
instead how ethnic formations themselves will undergo changes in future
modes of social, political, and cultural speciation in the future, while its past
formations will still be haunting this future. Thusly understood, ethnofuturisms
refer both to the circuits of global mobility and the displacements/relocations
that emerge in the context of ever more complex relationships across the
Global South, as well as the geo- and chronopolitical reconfigurations that such
relationships induce. It must not be overlooked that “futuristic” development
outside of the West and across the Global South and other former peripheries
can also evolve into neo-colonial tendencies. This is further reason to try and
navigate through the intricacies and interminglings of diverse ethnic, temporal,
vernacular, and technological cultures, searching for evidence of both common
and conflicting futures.
This volume presents ethnofuturisms that initiate certain ways out of
the either-or of multiculturalism or ethnopluralism. Sought after is a vision of
the future that lies between the dissolution of all differences and its inverted
double, the ideology of preserving authentic identities. In opposition to an
ethnicity-free or even post-ethnic vision of the future of world history, which is
bound up in the future of capitalism (following the conditions of Pax
Americana, the End of History, the Washington Consensus, etc.), our interest
lies with the blind spots and paradoxes of inter- and supraregional cultural
politics, emphasizing both the legacy and the complications of post-
colonialism, and the struggles bound up with the emergence of a hybrid and
mobile subaltern worldwide.
2
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
AFROFUTURISM – 1441/1492 – 1956 – 1994
Relics of Race: Between Mythology and Technology
As is well encapsulated by Afrofuturism—a term that was coined by cultural
critic Mark Dery2—concepts and constructs of time have always been central to
the historical subjugation of black lives. Time is basically the not-quite-tangible
but ubiquitous linchpin of Western civilization: a marker of difference.3 In this
sense, time should be framed both as a matter of ideology and as an
instrument that puts ideology into motion. Most particularly, it is the ideology
of freedom that is intricately linked to the constructs of time in the West.
Freedom is widely equated with the possession of time, as well as the ability to
use it according to one’s own individual choice. Western civilization,
particularly in its history of capitalist configuration, has heavily relied on the
cult of the individual both in order to boost its universal ideal of freedom and
to simultaneously mask the structural circumstances of differentiation and
othering that in fact precede individual possession (of time) and ability (of
making choices). Therefore, the construct of time, how and to whom its
temporal impositions are applied, are not but part and parcel of the same
codes of racial capitalism, facilitated through the strong arm of law, the police,
the carceral system, and other jurisdictional organs. The chronotopes of
blackness, therefore, have been defined either by one’s principal deprivation of
one’s own time, that is, the racial line that divides the black from the freeman,
or more insidiously, by the pre-conditioning of the scope of individual choice,
as can be traced through the history of racial segregation and its lasting marks
on the bourgeois-oriented design of civic infrastructures.
To backtrack a little, Cedric Robinson and Paul Gilroy have examined,
although in different ways, the vastly consequential extents of the Atlantic
slave trade as the bedrock of an African particularity and/or a black singularity.
They see it as, on the one hand, the carrier of something from before
departure and aspiring to the revival of that thing in the future. On the other, it
is seen as that which comes to bear as much (if not greater) claim on its
continent of destination, and its attributed myths of modernity, as “moderns”
would. They both, therefore, understand the spacetime of slavery as a matrix
whose setup has been calibrated to the rise of a Black Radical Tradition and its
multimodal Black Atlantic practices. This trajectory has, in fact, effected one
short-circuiting of the "historical progress" after (or before?) another—
exposing its too many failures and rendering its primacy redundant. Hence,
acquiring the status of the a lways-already either in addition to or instead of the
never-ever. Time is turned inside out by the advancements of “the collective
2
See Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in
Mark Dery (ed.), F lame Wars: Discourse of the Cyberculture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp.
179-222.
3
See Damien M. Sojoyner, “Dissonance in Time: (Un)Making and (Re)Mapping of Blackness,” in Gaye
Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (eds.), F utures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017), pp. 59-71. For
another historical assessment see Vanessa Ogle, T he Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
3
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
being, the ontological totality” of a decentralized black being.4 This is a mode of
being that, more than obsessively insisting on its existence, strongly refuses to
cease to exist. Rememory: to remember is to resist, to recall is to summon the
dead, to turn the act of mourning into active resistance, grief into defiance.5
Following the shifting lines of black transgression and their correspond-
ing time fields, one can draw connections between the fugitive and the traveler
across space and time, hence summoning some key features of Afrofuturism.
From Sun Ra to Janelle Monáe, from Black Panther Mythos to Black Audio Film
Collective, Afrofuturists have explored the conceptual and practical, aural as
well as visual possibilities for transliterating marronage into space flight, not in
search of new colonies but as an ultimate jailbreak, a reorientation on the
plane of the present from a perspective anchored in the future, the time of
freedom. This warps the normative coordinates of social and political
spacetime as have been defined by imperialist colonialism, racial capitalism,
and its contemporary mechanisms of law and order. This was the context in
which possible transformations between mythologies of the past and techno-
logies of the future were considered as the basis of a reparative project.6
“Races will not exist once they are reduced, by practical politics and
libidinal indiscriminacy, into relics of contingent historical partition,” argued
Nick Land in a hyper-racist defense of “race realism.”7 In contrast to this
neoreactionary stance, Kodwo Eshun takes the generative force of these relics
seriously, holding such “realism” accountable for its unacceptable impositions,
4
Cedric J. Robinson, B lack Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 171.
5
It is a rather difficult task to sufficiently deal with Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory,” which stands
for remembering memories; more than the content of that which is remembered, what matters is the
deliberate act of recalling memories as a strategy to counter organized mechanisms of forgetting. See
Toni Morrison, B eloved (New York, NY: Knopf, 1987).
6
This project and its contemporary legacies were recently the focus of the exhibition Afro-Tech and the
Future of Re-Invention (October 2017 – April 2018) at Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund,
Germany, and were further explored in the accompanied publication edited by curators Inke Arns and
Fabian Saavedra-Lara.
7
Land’s signature technique to turn certain egalitarian tendencies, such as the concept of diversity,
against their own historical premises is here, if not often, based on a confused understanding of how
racial matters, among others, need not and should not be discussed in either purely bio-ontological or
constructivist-cultural terms. In a 2014 post republished on Alternative Right blog, Land proposes the
notion of “hyper-racism” based on the speculation that racism will not suffice to account for racial
dynamics at the other end of a technologically driven cycle of intensified disintegration since it cannot
contain a post- or inhumanist prospect, one which pushes the capacity of ethnoracial identities to be
“constantly reformed” to self-destructive ends (see footnote 14). While anti-racism, Land argues, is posed
as no more than “a program for global genetic pooling,” racism is deemed oblivious to “neo-eugenic
genomic manipulation capabilities” of future development that “will certainly intensify the trend to
speciation, rather than ameliorating it,” hence making it impossible to discriminate based on traditional
lines of racial distinction. However, this intensified fantasy of diversification, in fact, suggests a regime of
persisting hierarchies that would still ascribe the (in)human of the future to higher and lower ranks of
worth and value, whose inferiority or superiority is to be determined based on how they can serve the
very machine of thanatropic intensification itself more efficiently. What persists in this prospect is the
extractionist logic of an existing and too painfully familiar racial capitalism. This is a philosophy of
“neo-eugenic” futurity, basically relying on no more than a hyped-up techno-determinism or apocalyptic
messianism. Furthermore, it is a blatantly racist idea for its own contemporary milieu too, simply because
by categorically reaffirming racism as a reality of the future, it further draws on the existing patterns of
racism embedded in the past and the present of capitalism as we know it. Simply put, it maps ethnic and
racial (as well as gendered) class dominance and inequality onto the unjustly naturalized and
pseudo-biological tendencies of the elite to mate with each other and spawn a new species with an
expanding IQ.
4
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
devastating impracticalities, and delibidinizing discriminations. His “Further
Considerations of Afrofuturism,” the opening essay in this volume, begins with
a retrospective look at the present; it locates the position of thought on the
side of the future, one which only then happens to have already arrived in the
midst of an antiquated present. Today’s ethnic and racial matters are then
conceived as “techno-fossils from tomorrow’s yesterday.” Dissonance in one’s
own time is amplified in order to make sense of the transmissive perturbations
one receives from an invasive future. This vision, while considering the
historical ramifications of truly alienating and dehumanizing forces of
abduction and expulsion, asks if postcolonial practices have become, quite
understandably, too fixated on what Eshun calls “countermemory,” an
explanatory ode to Toni Morrison’s legacy. While in the past, struggles in the
name of the future consisted of reassembling historical archives and narratives
in which power manifested itself, today, when the “present moment is
stretching,” equally if not more necessary are “counterfutures” that address
how those in power “employ futurists” and condemn “the disempowered to
live in the past.”
Important for our discussion is Eshun’s attempt to complicate certain
revisionist objections. “Afrofuturism can be understood as an elaboration upon
implications of Morrison’s revisionary thesis.” To put it briefly, the caveat here
is that following the revised relationship of Western modernity to non-Western
subjects, ethnic and racial chronotopes can in fact end up further essentialized
in their “prehistorical originality,” a doomed project of chronopolitical
intervention that combines “a racialized account of human origin with a
catastrophic theory of time.” As is clear from Eshun’s warning, this description
can very well fit the idea of a neoreactionary ethnofuturism. Therefore, the
chronopolitical premise of Afrofuturism is to dissociate “mythological,
programmatic, and cosmological world pictures” from some essentialized,
allegedly original “standing reserves” that can be returned to again and again
but only to serve the reproductive mechanism of a racial capitalism that carries
its imperial imperatives into the future. This is why Afrofuturism “does not seek
to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that
tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality
towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective.”
The other important contribution that Eshun makes is the conceptual
construct of “temporal switchback.” This is about how chronologies are
reassembled when “social reality and science fiction create feedback between
each other.”8 As Eshun points out, the “alien encounters and interplanetary
abduction people experienced as delusions in the Cold War present had
already occured in the past, for real.” This notion, of course, corresponds with
8
In a sense, this is a technical elaboration on Donna Haraway’s well-known statement that the “boundary
between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” See “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in S imians, Cyborgs and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181.
5
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
Afrofuturist associations between fugitivity and space flight or time travel.
Indivisible from such temporal switchback, which turns the course as well as
the fabric of time inside out, is the collective aspect of the emergence of such
delusions. They are, in fact, like memories of what one might not have actually
experienced individually but has already been implanted with—that is, through
the intrusion of collective traumas. Once again, it is not to deny the realities
that have actually taken place. Instead, it is to defamiliarize the way in which
the realities of the past have been chronologically situated, and to summon
and unleash the untapped and immanent energies of today’s reality, whose
tissue, made of divergent chronotopes and temporal antinomies, is threaded
with possible futures.
The important coincidence here is that such mechanism of auto-
realization, facilitated by a hype of reality-fiction, was formulated and
conceptualized through the contributions that Mark Fisher, Steve Goodman,
Nick Land, Sadie Plant, and Eshun himself, among others, made to the mythical
presence of CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) at Warwick University
during the 1990s—a hub for ideas that later served as founding elements for
Speculative Realism, Accelerationism, and perhaps, rather indirectly,
Xenofeminism too. This mechanism was dubbed h yperstition, a cultural
machinery made of “fictional quantities” that can make themselves real,
operationalizing ancient mythologies as future technologies.9 Today’s reality
and its tissue of antinomies and inconsistencies seems like an apt host for such
mechanism of hype and its processes of “coincidence intensification.” It also
resonates with the idea of a “post-contemporary time complex,” which argues
that time is no longer to be understood from the side of the present or in
terms of a so-called “contemporary condition.”10 Similarly, hyperstition points
to the fact that the future may happen before the present and that time might
no longer come from the past—or spontaneously spring from the
present—but arrive, quite intrusively, from the future. Evidence for this is the
advancement of feedback systems, well explored in early-twentieth- century
cybernetics, into processes of large-scale sociotechnical organization that
characterize complex societies today, where correspondences between
preemptive policing, finance capital, and recommendation algorithms
destabilize not only a linear sense of temporal progression (traditional
chronology) but also the patterns and orders that hitherto held up the present
as the primary category of human experience.
It is against this background that Aria Dean recaps the emancipatory
dilemmas of Accelerationism as simply as one possibly could: “What good is a
revolution if we’re counted among its casualties?” In her contribution to this
collection of essays, the question turns into a search for inhuman agencies
that, although all too familiar with the forces of capital, do not fall prey to an
9
See CCRU, Writings 1997-2003 (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2017).
10
See Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik (eds.), The Time Complex: Post-Contemporary (Miami, FL:
NAME, 2016).
6
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
horrific adrenaline-infested anti-humanist nihilism. Her notion of
“Blaccelerationism” is aimed at drawing links between Afrofuturist sentiments
and a revised Accelerationism that is re-rooted in struggles against racial
capitalism, and tries to envisage a future for Afrofuturism by means of
dissociating the Accelerationist agent of a desired post-capitalist condition
from the traditional status of alienation that defined the revolutionary
proletariat. Instead, she casts “the form of the living capital, speculative value,
and accumulated time” that is “stored in the bodies of black already-inhuman
(non)subjects.” In short, her attempt is to do to Left- Accelerationism what
Cedric Robinson did to Marxism.
In this sense, Dean’s solution for Accelerationism relies on how a
thorough consideration of racial capitalism warns against the potentially “fatal
mistake” that a handed-down Marxist history of capital would make. The issue
at stake, she restates, is “an unthought position beyond the worker—that of
the slave,” a position that problematizes the given framework of primitive
accumulation as the initial moment of an age of violent alienation that was to
come and actually did. Therefore, Accelerationism should reckon with how
blackness “interrupts and prevents the establishment of a human/capital
binary.” Alienation, in this sense, should be approached in how its constituent
elements are preceded by racial and ethnic othering, by the pre-established
but often overlooked boundaries between the human, whose labor is
proletarian- ized, and the dehumanized slave, whose ontological dispossession
is set beneath both capital and the human.
Here we can also have a word about Afropolitanism, which pushes
through Afrofuturist tendencies and toward a concept that is aimed to describe
the position of Africa and Africans in today’s (post)globalized condition. First
coined in 2005 by Taiye Selasi, this concept has often been criticized as an
extension of elitist urban imagination, glorifying migrant workers and the
worldliness they carry.11 Achille Mbembe, however, defines the concept not
only in relation to the cosmopolitan Africans of the world but, more
importantly, the presence of the world within Africa. For him, it is “an aesthetic
and particular poetic of the world” that is founded on an awareness of “the
presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa.”12 This clearly conveys a
spatialized companion to the Afrofuturist consciousness, which more
particularly registers the traction of other times, both past and future, in the
present.
Like Afrofuturism, which according to Eshun, exceeds a fixation on
“pre-historical originality,” Afropolitanism is also pitched against earlier
conceptions of Afrocentrism and Pan-Africanism. “Pan-Africanism, to a large
extent, is a racial ideology. Afropolitanism is not, insofar as it takes into
account the fact that to say 'Africa' does not necessarily mean to say 'black.'
11
See Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar,” L IP Magazine, March 3, 2005.
Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism,” in Njami Simon and Lucy Durán (eds.), Africa Remix: Contemporary
12
Art of a Continent (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005), p. 28.
7
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
There are Africans who are not black. And not all blacks are African. So
Afropolitanism emerges out of that recognition of the multiple origins of those
who designate themselves as 'African' or as 'of African descent.' Descent here,
or descendants, or genealogy, is a bit more than just biological or racial, for
that matter.”13 This is also to register those Africans who are of Middle Eastern
or Chinese origin, for instance, which both complicates naturalized ethnicities
and envisions alternate formations thereof. The diagonal or intersectional
registers of ethnoracial14 identities, therefore, are constantly “being recorded
and renamed and repurposed for all kinds of political and individual projects,”
which produce “new sites of struggle, new sites of contestation, but also new
sites of encounter, because the two always go together.”15
SINOFUTURISM – 2046 – 1975 – 1839
Feedback Loops and Seismic Shifts in Planetary Politics
Around the same time that the term “Afrofuturism” came up, Peter Galison
was sketching out his “Ontology of the Enemy,” where he chronicled the
founding moments of the “Manichean sciences” during the Second World War,
focusing on particular understandings of the “Enemy Other” as considered
from a distinctly Allied perspective.16 The enemy, on the one hand, was the
remote and anonymous target of air raids, dehumanized by their remoteness,
either having been placed too far off the airmen’s sight to amount to anything
more than some scattered dots here and there, or having had totally
disappeared from sight. The other type of enemy, more particularly modeled
after explicitly racist sentiments toward the Japanese, was the “Augustinian
devil,” characterised by its subhuman status, “the Japs” who, to paraphrase
General Sir Thomas Blamey in a letter to a unit in Port Moresby in 1942, were
no more than “little irrational barbarians” to be eradicated.17 Ultimately, the
third type: “Manichean devils.” Cunning and calculating, they were “more
powerful and enduring than either the racialized or the anonymous enemy.
More active than the targeted, invisible inhabitants of a distant city and more
rational than the hoardelike race enemy, this third version emerged as a
13
Sarah Balakrishnan, “Pan-African Legacies, Afropolitan Futures: A Conversation with Achille Mbembe,”
Transition, Issue 120, 2016, p. 30.
14
In social scientific research, e
thnoraciality is deployed to broaden and complicate group formations
that majorly follow a presumed and often racist logic of the color line. Socioeconomic and demographic
trends (within “groupisms,” to borrow Rogers Brubaker’s term, recognized according to their assumed
racial status) both contribute to and result from intra-ethnoracial diversity, whose impact in turn not only
pushes the boundaries of reified group identities further but also carries over into intergroup dynamics.
Ethnoraciality, although partly invented by surveys and other epistemic technologies of population
governance, nevertheless enables an effective and constructive navigation between intra-group variation
and out-group attitude. See Tomás R. Jiménez, Corey D. Fields, and Ariela Schachter, “How Ethnoraciality
Matters: Looking inside Ethnoracial Groups,” Social Currents, 2015, Vol. 2(2), pp. 107–115.
15
“Pan-African Legacies, Afropolitan Futures,” p. 33.
16
See Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn 1994), pp. 228-266.
17
Ibid., p. 230.
8
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
cold-blooded, machinelike opponent.”18 This man-machine compound was to
correspond with the fast and maneuverable flying bombers, whose hybrid
rationality made it difficult for ground-based artillery of the Allies by forcing
them to constantly revise their logic of targeting. Facing such dilemma, Norbert
Wiener, among few other masterminds behind the Manichean science wars,
went on to establish cybernetics as a modern extension of ancient nonlinear
feedback mechanisms.19
Cybernetics and its use in the context of military-industrial complex
marks a founding moment for modern chronopolitics (or chronobiopolitics20)
in the midst of global geopolitics. As Weiner wrote in a 1942 letter, cybernetics
had to do “with the design of [an] apparatus to accomplish specific purposes in
the way of the repetition and modification of time patterns.”21 Wiener’s legacy
of Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) and the threatening spectre of noise and
chaos forms a background for the cyber-obsessions of CCRU, as well as further
considerations of Afrofuturism since the 1990s, and soon lead to a situation
where global geopolitics could be reimagined in terms of transnational
feedback loops and a schizophrenic global unconscious.
The science wars of the mid 1900s led to a burgeoning cultural war at
the end of the century. In 1986, giving an account of his journey through the
United States, Jean Baudrillard arrived at its historical counterpart: Japan.
Specifically, a Japan that had managed “an unintelligible paradox, to transform
the power of territoriality and feudalism into that of deterritoriality and
weightlessness. Japan is already a satellite of the planet Earth.”22 Few years
later, David Morley and Kevin Robins laid out an articulation of
techno-Orientalism, observing that Japan’s path to modernization had become
a crucial aspect of its exoticized image as an Oriental other, an image
particularly shaped to reflect the same Western anxieties that drove the
historical violence of colonialism and modern imperialist warfare.23
Although prone to exclusionist sentiments where the far East is not even
considered part of a planet Earth (which is well subsumed in Western legacies
of imperialist terraformation), the Baudrillardian approach seems to still have
18
Ibid., p. 231.
19
See Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
20
Here we could draw on how Dana Luciano extends the temporal dimension of the Foucauldian model
of power relations in disciplinary societies to what she calls “chronobiopolitics” or the “sexual
arrangement of the time of life,” to which we would add ethnic and racial arrangements too. Within this
extended framework, Luciano argues, the body “cannot be temporalized in relation to (its) death alone;
rather, it becomes implicated in a proliferation of temporalities dominated by, but not limited to, the
linear, accumulative time of development, the cyclical time of domestic life, the sacred timelessness of
the originary bond and of the eternal reward toward which the faithful subject progressed; or, beyond
these norms, the wayward time of perversity, the nonprogressive time of pure sensation, et cetera.” See
Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, NY:
New York University Press, 2007).
21
Norbert Wiener, letter to J. B. S. Haldane, June 22, 1942; cited in Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy,"
p. 242.
22
Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988), p. 76.
23
See David Morley and Kevin Robins, S paces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and
Cultural Boundaries (London: Routledge, 1995). Also see Dawn Chan, “Tomorrow Never Dies: On
Asia-futurism,” Artforum, Vol. 54, No. 10. (Summer 2016), pp. 161-162.
9
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
some purchase on how we could make a better sense of global chronopolitics
today, when China has already established itself as an inimitable global power.
Written few years before his impressions of a Japan-America, Baudrillard’s “The
China Syndrome,” a commentary on the film of the same title, is illuminating
here. The 1979 film was a proto-representation of how the tensions of the Cold
War could get psychologically internalized, reassembling social, personal, and
professional relationships based on a tormented consensus over what is the
truth and what is a lie; the distressing offsprings of an info-maniac techno-
political climate. Baudrillard’s signature move was to dismantle the dichotomy,
subsume it all in a reality no more real than some delusions thereof: “The
China Syndrome is a great example of the supremacy of the televised event
over the nuclear event which, itself, remains improbable and in some sense
imaginary… t elefission of the real and of the real world… But that is precisely
what will never happen. What will happen will never again be the explosion,
but the implosion.”24 This is when an explosive catastrophe is preceded by an
implosive delusion thereof, a rearrangement of the chronopolitical fabric of
reality.
Steve Goodman, an early contributing figure to the CCRU mythos and
also known as the DJ and Hyperdub producer Kode9, captured this “implosion”
in his reflections on Sinofuturism, featured in this volume, as a warping event
in the course of the Western history of progressive temporalities. Ironically
enough, he quotes Karl Marx as an early prophet of Sinofuturism avant la
lettre: “It may seem a very strange, and a very paradoxical assertion, that the
next uprising of the people of Europe... may depend more probably on what is
now passing in the Celestial Empire—the very opposite of Europe—than on
any other political cause that now exists [in the West].”25 Such is “the darkside
cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia,” which “connects seemingly
heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary capitalism.” In a
delirious countdown to the ultimate amputation of the Western worldview,
Goodman traces contemporary Sinofuturism, in a post-Cold War climate, to
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War f rom the fifth century BC. “The reason why [it] is a
toolbox for the ‘cutting edge’ of cybernetic capitalism, from business to military
strategists, is that it contains an abstract flow chart or a fluid physics for
survival ‘far from equilibrium,’ a tactics for turbulence.”
In Lawrence Lek’s 2016 video essay S inofuturism (1839-2046 AD), the
narrating voice tells us that “Sinofuturism is an invisible movement. A spectre
already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals.”26 Lek
both internalizes and ironically inverts the techno-Orientalist narrative,
24
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 1994), pp. 53-55.
25
On Marx’s strong sense of Eurocentrism and his reflections on revolutionary potentials in Russia and
China see Gareth Stedman Jones, “Radicalism and the extra-European world: the case of Karl Marx,” in
Duncan Bell (ed.), V ictorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-
Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 186-214.
26
Lawrence Lek, Sinofuturism (1839-2046 AD), HD video essay, 60 min, 2016
(http://www.vimeo.com/17950 9486).
10
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
assuming Sinofuturism as a global conspiracy or, rather, the conspiracy of
globalization itself. His work reimagines the state of China as a posthuman
intelligence, a distributed network of bodies and brains more creative,
disciplined and collectivized than any descendant of the European
enlightenment.27
As Anna Greenspan argues in her contribution to this volume, the
“Shanghai futurism” of early twenty-first century steps in when historical
futurism in the West has almost completely run out of steam. More than
anything in particular among futurist manifestations of techno-scientific
advancement, it is the very “spirit of futurism” that is strikingly “out of date”
when looked at on the world stage today. Greenspan, however, warns against
the easy conclusion that is often made, that Shanghai futurism, and
Sinofuturism by extension, is no more than a recurring affair of retrofuturism,
both in terms of its outdated spirit in and of itself, and in terms of the objects it
puts forth along its own course of development. Greenspan’s argument pivots
around an alternative formulation of the future via a reinvented sense of
time-consciousness. Against an understanding of the future which posits it as a
relative point located somewhere ahead of us on a line that extends from now
to then, she suggests that Shanghai, in how it weaves temporal coordinates
anew, fundamentally reformulates what the very idea of future might mean.
This gestures toward an “absolute futurism” which defies all attempts at
prediction, and in fact dissociates futurism from planning itineraries for
arriving at certain points then and there. This is instead about “an atemporal
presence, a virtual realm” that is addressing the present as having already
been infused with its future effects.
Retroaction, in this sense, is not about repeating the past, or even
amending its history, but putting pressure on the present by unleashing the
weight of its future, as much as this future can be found in the virtual extremes
of the here and now. Greenspan traces the modern history of grandiose
engagements with the future to the heyday of twentieth-century International
World Fairs, and highlights how the urban aesthetics of today’s Shanghai
27
See Gary Zhexi Zhang, “Where Next?: Imagining the dawn of the 'Chinese century',” frieze, Issue 187
(May 2017). Raising similar questions while discussing the time-axis of the Anthropocene, Yuk Hui
criticises existing modalities of Sinofuturism, more particularly in terms of the homegrown
techno-scientific endeavors of the Chinese state. No more than a leveled-out counterpart, it tries to
achieve a certain degree of compatibility with Western developmental achievements, and would
therefore only result in producing “contrary effects.” Speaking of a “homecoming,” when Sinofuturist
undercurrents have, as Goodman states, amputated the body of the West and “acupunctured” it into
“planetary schizophrenia,” Hui writes, “A sinofuturism, as we may call it, is manifesting itself in different
domains. However, such a futurism runs in the opposite direction to moral cosmotechnical
thinking—ultimately, it is only an acceleration of the European modern project.” He then highlights
aspects of the S
hanzhai phenomenon as prominent examples of Sinofuturism back home. While pointing
out that “there are historical and political reasons for this,” he further insists that “this is also the moment
when such repetition should be suspended, and the question of modernity raised again.” See Yuk Hui,
“Sinofuturism in the Anthropocene,” in The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in
Cosmotechnics (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2016), pp 290-301. Also see Byung-Chul Han, S hanzhai:
Deconstruction in Chinese (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
11
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
overtly references this bygone era of forward looking ambitions. Nonetheless,
she argues that this should be celebrated as a sign of confidence and
persistence in the absolute pursuit of the future and not giving in to the
post-utopian consensus of our globalized era. In fact, this makes the strong
point that the so-called “contrary effects” of China’s parallel market regimes,
although compatible with global capitalism and its Western watermarks, has
allowed a spirit of faith in the idea of the future to not totally dissolve in the
cynical consensus of Capitalist Realism. “This spirit of absolute futurism can
never go out of date.”
GULF FUTURISM – 1990 – 2008 – 2030
Post-Simulation and the Persistence of the Pre-Postcolonial
In middle of the “consumer-culture robot desert” of the Gulf region in the
Middle East, Baudrillard’s prophecies seem to shape all that is left of reality per
se. Kuwaiti-born Artist and Musician Fatima Al Qadiri elaborates: “That was a
very unique Gulf experience, existing purely inside the television, the video
game, then later my phone and the Internet.” The simulated tissue of such
reality and its inconsistencies mark probably the largest parcel of the earth
ever born directly out of the fundamental temporal shift that characterises the
precedence of the map over the territory, as Baudrillard put it, “the precession
of simulacra—that engenders the territory.”28 A nine-year-old Fatima witnessed
“the breakdown of society” when the First Gulf War broke out, when fire was
put to the oil wells and the sky turned black. In her conversation with Karen
Orton, republished in this volume, she points out that it all “felt like being on
the surface of the moon.” This implies the oxymoron of experiencing an
intensified lack of empirical certainty as well as the near impossibility of
distinguishing between reality per se and the memories of one’s own
experience of reality. This condition was further destabilized, as Fatima recalls,
when only a year later she started “playing” with such hyperreality via the
shoot ’em up video game D esert Strike: Return to the Gulf.
Such a time-crisis is weaved into the very infrastructural setup of the
Gulf states, as their entire skylines carry the digital gloss and the smooth
depthlessness of projections put forth by the architectural renderings of
massive developmental projects. The speed at which Gulf jumped from “camel
and wool” and nomadic desert-treading to “steel and glass” and boulevards
lined-up with blustering supercars only matches the time-frames of CG
applications exporting final renderings over few days and nights. Entire cities
are as if directly pouring out of the virtual environment of 3D modeling.
“There’s been a quantum leap and there’s a temporal gap… there’s a missing
piece of history… [and] Gulf Futurism began to coagulate with that idea,” tells
28
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 1.
12
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
the American-Qatari artist and writer Sophia Al-Maria in the same conversation
with Al Qadiri (her fellow member of the artist collective GCC) and Orton. The
less glossy underbelly of the same hyperreality, however, is populated by those
who are forced to compensate for the historical gap and facilitate its stitched-
up condition. Gravitating to the Gulf from across the globe are the precarious
bodies of imported labourers who fall victim to the tyrannies of time travel,
whose bodies get lethally stretched across the time zones and historical
periods they are moved through.
“[A] new flesh is being forged in the hyper-pressurized combination of
extreme wealth, embittered Islam, and magical thinking,” writes Al-Maria in the
essay she is contributing to this volume. Her tale of Gulf Futurism, which she
started chronicling sometime in 2008 while at graduate school in London, is
however not much concerned with the development policies of the Arab
countries of the Gulf region, although that is the inevitable background against
which such futurism should have nonetheless been born. By addressing things
all too personal and experiential, she reveals the absurdities of experience and
the lack of empirical certainty in such a prototypical context. This is, more or
less, a condition of pre-installed auto-alienation that, in Al-Maria’s own case,
was facilitated by the already split embodiment of her schizo-spatiotemporal
being, one which is in constant becoming due to the prostheticization and
immanentization of communicative technologies and also the tele-practice of
info-transmission along familial ties, spread across large distances in space
and multiple time zones, between Puyallup in the state of Washington and the
city of Doha in the Qatari state. Such embodiment is stretched across diasporic
and creolized lineages, while concurrently running through indigenous phyla
whose blurred border of speciation cuts through how descendants of a
nomadic form of life, peculiar to Bedouin tribes, walk into the contemporary
condition of “scripted disorientation.” This is also the condition in which
window shoppers walk through the architecture of world-famous malls in the
Gulf. For Gulf Futurism, this is a super banal, hyper-clichéd but nevertheless
persisting anecdote to how contemporary life is being lived in a
post-paper-architecture world. The Gulf serves as an exemplary transit lounge
for the time travelers that together demonstrate the contemporary condition
of a time-crisis, the patchwork of inconsistent temporal layers stretched across
planetary scales. Such is the Dubaification of the world.
One chrono-characteristic of Gulf Futurism is that it “risks” engaging
with the “politically shady vines of the pre-postcolony,” as Al-Maria writes in
her 2012 memoir T he Girl Who Fell to Earth, a play on David Bowie’s debut
cinematic appearance in 1976. This indicates the degrees to which any such
futuristic attitude is embedded in a (post-contemporary) time complex swept
with a myriad of conflicting temporalities and crisscrossed time-arrows. The
premise of Gulf Futurism, therefore, is a reevaluation of the present tense, of
the c ontemporary moment, of the nature of nowness, of a sense of
entitlement or belonging to the here-and-now, which can be inherently
13
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
alienating as the heterogenous present is itself sutured via the shape-shifting
assemblage of chronotopes both arriving from the future and simultaneously
resonating with the past. Al-Maria treats the urban fabric of contemporary Gulf
as the flesh of her own conflicted mind-body and vice versa, as much a
plausible personal anecdote as it is certainly the lived reality of certain
burgeoning or mutating settings in one city another.29 This is to affirm a
spacetime delirium, that of becoming both geographically and
chronographically unhooked, while willing to explore the future in its virtuality
without having to wait for its realization (even if it often arrives much faster
than anticipated). According to a Gulf Futurist principle, an imagined or
projected future already contains something of its own realization, a realized
future, which is the reality of future orientation.
To think the future thusly is to practice it. Accordingly, this has been
made pretty obvious by the simulacra, in the way that it blurs and redraws the
rigid boundaries between what is actual, or practically real, and what is virtual.
This is a post-simulacra reality, whose full-fledged production is anticipated by
Gulf Futurism. Ultimately, Gulf Futurism has been consciously oscillating
between seemingly rival visions, those of technocratic developmentalism and
creative hacktivism, both of which, of course, have come to pivot on the
vanishing point of neoliberalism. Its simultaneously resistant as well as
affirmative, and critical as well as speculative tactics involve cloning, doubling,
parody, and the invention of alter-egos and fictional personas.30 In this sense,
Gulf Futurism proposes a strategy of over-identification (instead of dis-
identification), calling for a new politics of mating, mitosis, and intermingling.
In her essay written for this volume, ten years after the first con-
siderations of Gulf Futurism were penned and posted online, Kuwaiti-born
artist and filmmaker Monira Al Qadiri remarks on how “extreme connectivity”
has, in reverse, well extended “the authoritarian organization of the ruling
classes”—all as part of a larger agenda of planetary Dubaification. Now is the
time when Khartoum is marketing itself as “Dubai on the Nile.” High-tech
trans-regional gov-corps are looming on the horizon more vividly than ever.
This is a scenario of CEO-monarchs ruling over populations of privileged
citizen-shareholders and their lower-rank (un)fixed-term resident- contractors.
There is a fine micro-example for the techno-dystopian context that Al Qadiri
writes about. In 2017, Sophia the AI-based robot became the most famous
naturalized citizen of Saudi Arabia. This media darling, the straw woman in
29
This attitude resonates with some sort of adolescent or premature cockiness, some kind of temporal
desperation, an impatience for maturation, which inevitably comes with daunting risks and thrilling
surprises. This, Al-Maria writes, is the tale of “young men too grown to loiter on their mothers’ side of the
house and too young to drive the night streets yet.”
30
Al-Maria once summoned the silicon spirit of a Sci-Fi Wahabi, whose gaze was hosted by Sophia herself,
and was put in conversation with a resurrected Baudrillard, as well as J. G. Ballard and Al-Ghazali, in
order to register and intensify how communicative technologies of the mid-2000s were further warping
the already d isoriented spacetime of the Gulf, sometimes allowing for openings beyond the
image-totality of its fabricated landscape. See Sophia Al-Maria, “The Gaze of Sci-Fi Wahabi,” 2008
(http://www.scifiwahabi. blogspot.com).
14
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
middle of a PR stunt, and designed to represent an Audrey Hepburn type of
feminine beauty, de facto stands as a poster-child for today’s time-crises since
she embodies the clash between futures and futurisms. Incorporating the
technolibertarian fantasies of racial capitalism, she stands as an affront to all
the alternatives that have long been imagined by indigenous futurisms.31 This
is a fact that her fictional and symbolic right to citizenship was prioritized over
the true right of all those migrant workers without whose labor the fast leap
from digital rendering to the materialized cityscapes of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and
Riyadh would not have ever been realized. This is all the more reason to
urgently rethink the underlying circumstances of processes through which
nature is both deployed and founded by a language of rights and, furthermore,
to reconsider how law is itself naturalized in turn.
Following the mutations of the earth’s fabric and its natural reserves,
anthropocenic transformations also concern all that was once conceived as
“natural,” “given” and “non-negotiable” within the terms of a post-
Enlightenment framework of humanitarian jurisdiction. Therefore, the
principles of a thriving Xenofeminism, particularly in its “technomaterialist”
and “anti-naturalist” stances, coincides with those of an ethnofuturism-
in-progress. Again, this is all the more reason for inhuman residents of
mutating nation-states, techno-sexual transformers, and (non)subjects of
ethnoracial differentiation to embrace an auto- or inbuilt politics for othering
and alienation, sharing and expanding on the slogan “If nature is unjust,
change nature!”32
ETHNOFUTURISM – 1989/2017
Terminological Remarks: The Rebirth of a Non-Neologism
Not so much an invention, as mentioned before, but a heretical remake, the
term “Ethnofuturism” has previously appeared in at least two interrelated
settings, both located around the Eurasian split and pertaining to the cultural
politics of the so-called Finno-Ugrian world. One was propelled by a political
joke among a group of young poets, including an eighteen-year-old Karl Martin
Sinijärv, in the Estonian university town of Tartu, at the tail end of Soviet rule.
This surprisingly long-lasting movement, whose international programming of
summits, performances, and workshops is still in operation, emerged out of a
historical background marked by distinct periods of systemic violence against
ethnic minorities, not least in Russia. The history, in part, goes from the pre-
revolutionary regime of uncodified rights—some sort of a condition of civic
alienation that, in turn, catalysed some sort of cultural preservation among
minorities, including that of certain pre-Christian beliefs—to the 1920s and 30s
31
See Pedro Neves Marques, “Sophia, with Love and Hate,” The Baffler, November 14, 2017 (https://the
baffler.com/latest/sophia-with-love-and-hate-marques).
32
Laboria Cuboniks, “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation,” 2015 (http://www.laboriacuboniks.net).
15
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
program of nurturing a new class of indigenous elites in the national
peripheries. The latter was interrupted by expulsions across southern
republics in the ensuing decades, while attempts at Russification continued, to
different degrees, all over the Union.
Although informed by shamanistic rituals, ceremonial gatherings, and
spiritual teachings, this strand of Ethnofuturism reflects “a post-Soviet
syncretism: a mix of genuine tradition, Russian Orthodox influences, the
political neopaganism of the 1990s, and New Age.”33 Furthermore, the
communicative technologies of post-industrial societies were particularly
fascinating to early Ethnofuturists, providing them with a certain sense of
global orientation. “The Net is where a Ugrian may feel at home,” reads the
First Ethnofuturist Manifesto from 1994. “No nation has a lead of centuries in
using the Net; it is new in America as well as in Scandinavia and Siberia.”34 This,
in fact, indicates a peculiar relationship to historical time as the basis for a new
sense of political self-designation.
By the late 1990s, the Estonian political scientist and politician Rein
Taagepera was among the well-known advocates of the movement. His
“Ethnofuturist Triangle” brought forward two additional neologisms of his own
invention to make a case for some clear-cut positioning. While
“Cosmofuturism” associated the ideals of universalist progress and
cosmopolitanism with a post- or supra-ethnic attitude that could be arguably
found in Soviet nationalism too, “Ethnopraeterism” was intended as its
negative double, essentializing ethnicity as incompatible with anything new,
foreign, or developmental.35 Ethnofuturism, then, was simply the middle
ground, a portal from the past to the future and back again and again. In the
words of the Udmurt philologist Viktor L. Shibanov, this is a search for balance
between “the national and the indigenous,” on the one hand, and “the attempt
to find a place [for one’s own] and be competitive in the postmodern
contemporary world,” on the other.36
Ethnicity, not least in the context of historical Ethnofuturism, is evidently
associated with certain nationalist tendencies to preserve the presumed
authenticities or certain recognizable patterns of a distant past. However,
Ethnofuturism was in fact conceived as “an obvious direction to a future which,
presuming a way of existence peculiar to the ethnos, would allow t he cognition
of ethnic identity to be constantly reformed,” according to the aforementioned
Manifesto. Therefore, “putting in motion creative powers,” it was to function
“not [as] an ideology but a way to survive as well as a modus vivendi.” In fact, it
is important to remember that apart from or in parallel to nationalist
33
Anders Kreuger, "Ethno-Futurism: Leaning on the Past, Working for the Future," Afterall: A Journal of
Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 43 (Spring/Summer 2017), 121.
34
Kauksi Ülle, Andres Heinapuu, Sven Kivisildnik and Maarja Pärl-Lõhmus, “Ethno-Futurism as a Mode of
Thinking for an Alternative Future,” (http://www.suri.ee/etnofutu/ef!eng.html).
35
See Heinapuu Ott and Andres Heinapuu, “Some Treatments of the Concept of Ethno-Futurism in
Estonia,” (http://www.suri.ee/etnofutu/idnatekst/ethno_en.html).
36
Quoted in Kreuger, “Ethno-Futurism,” 125.
16
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
sentiments, the artists associated with the movement inherited a cultural
atmosphere marked by the historical chokehold of domestic alienation and
international isolation, or simply a geopolitical deadlock. Hence not much of a
choice other than developing forward-looking aspirations via a move
backwards. While on a chronopolitical move back and forth in time, it
transgressed the codes of Socialist Realism, and this was arguably a prime aim
of the socially engaged artists and the woke culturati of the time.
However, while this was literally meant as the recognition and further
development of a way of living, or a pattern of life, it de facto functioned as a
rather fitting agenda for inclusion in the cultural logic of late capitalism and its
allegedly post-ideological consensus. A will to compromise is fundamentally
inscribed in this strategy of survival and coexistence. The growing official
support it received can be also put in the perspective of facilitating a process of
transitology in the Baltic states, as well as in the postcommunist Russia. On the
other hand, it seemed like some sort of a continuation of the historically
anesthetized relationship of the Finno-Ugrian republics with the Tsarist and
then Soviet empires.
In other words, the caveat attached to intrinsic temporal tensions that
define the concept and practice of Ethnofuturism is that, if not well navigated,
they might end up corresponding to those “retrospective confabulations” that,
according to Mark Fisher, serve as the commonplace of Capitalist Realism,
where “any reality we construct must be a tissue of inconsistencies.”37 While
the capitalist timeline, tuned in to technological progress, hunts for the future
by pushing against essentialized identities, established limits, and vested
interests, it also runs through the re-establishment of settled boundaries and
archaic forms of power, be it religious, nationalistic, or authoritarian. This, of
course, invokes the temporal ramifications of a signature dynamics between
the de- and reterritorializing forces of capital.
In a fundamentally anachronistic regime, where chronologically
incongruous elements are constantly summoned and rearranged into present
operability, “incoherence at the level of [...] ‘political rationality’ does nothing to
prevent symbiosis at the level of political subjectivity.”38 In this sense, the
(chrono)political navigation of an irrational subjectivity, to expand on Anders
Kreuger’s implication of a “critical” Ethnofuturism, would rest upon a “refusal
to illustrate a New Age-inspired, ultimately apolitical vision of spiritual
positivity.”39
Ethnofuturist tendencies, after all, were born in an air of anti-
authoritarian optimism. Such kind of hope perfectly resonates with the
techno-utopianism of the time, which was spread across and well beyond
Eastern Europe, and might seem somewhat quaint or even misguided for
today’s political climate. Nevertheless, its anti-authoritarian sentiments are
37
Mark Fisher, C apitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zero Books, 2009), p. 55.
38
Ibid., p. 61.
39
Kreuger, “Ethno-Futurism,” p. 131.
17
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
undelivered promises that carry over into the future. Furthermore, how to
navigate between the particular and the universal scales with regard to race
and ethnicity is still an abiding challenge.
The second strand of Ethnofuturism that is already in circulation should
be attributed to an ostentatious Ruuben Kaalep who, since 2012, has served as
the founding leader of Blue Awakening, the youth wing of the Conservative
People’s Party of Estonia. Last year, Kaalep delivered a talk entitled “The
Principles of Ethnofuturism” at the Conference of Twenty-First-Century
European Nationalists in Tallinn—which, along with some torchlight rallies on
the side, was organized by himself. His unabashedly racist and xenophobic
articulations, of course, bear no reference to the history they appropriate, and
instead feed on a fanatic sense of tribal futurism. “Tribes of the north” and
their patterns of “survival” through the past and present regimes of
governance and statehood across a phantom neo-Intermarium form the
background against which Kaalep salutes “a wise man,” who had just won the
US presidential elections by a “miracle,” for his alleged crusade against “the
false song of globalism.”
Such line of alliance continues from a 2016 article, among others,
republished by the San Franciscan “new right” imprint Counter-Currents,
where Kaalep casts his zeal for xenophobia into tragically misconstrued
notions of collective coexistence: “Our task is to ensure that liberalism dies at
the hands of indigenous Europeans, not Islamic invaders,” he writes in “On
Islam and Liberalism.” Ethnonationalism, Kaalep argues, is not aimed at
“revisiting the historical conflicts between different European nations. On the
contrary, facing a civilizational threat from outside Europe, nationalists can
unite under their common European identity and find peaceful ways to solve
those conflicts of the past.”
Kaalep’s half-baked version turns ethnofuturism into a container (rather
than the negation) of both a post-segregation, hyper-racist, meritocratic
cosmofuturism and a transnational, paleocon-inspired ethnopraeterism. Here
ethnofuturism is no more than a euphemism for white supremacy, whose
recent surge coincides with a period marked by the financial crisis of the late
2000s, as well as the Syrian war of early to mid-2010s and the so-called
migrant crisis that followed it. On the other hand, this containment is ironically
made possible only through the schizophrenic mechanism of the same
neoliberal, globalist, war-machinic, financial capitalism that historical
Finno-Ugrian Ethnofuturism happens to have fallen prey to.40
40
This reveals Kaalep’s deep connections to Neoreaction (NRx), a peculiar brand of political ideology that
is closely associated with Dark Enlightenment and the Alt-Right. In “Neoreaction (for dummies),” a blog
post from 2013, Nick Land explains the movement’s fundamental premise by contrasting it with
modernity’s principle of progress and its history of macroeconomic causality. NRx “not only promotes
drastic regression, but h ighly-advanced drastic regression. Like retrofuturism, paleomodernism, and
cybergothic, the word ‘neoreaction’ compactly describes a time-twisted vector that spirals forwards into
the past, and backwards into the future.” The “reality” of this absurd construct is obviously compatible
with the concept of hyperstition as well as Fisher’s analysis of the “tissue of inconsistencies” and its
particular capacities for cultivating an irrational political subjectivity. NRx, after all, “is a time-crisis,”
18
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
Against this background, which extends from hive-minded polemics to
heavy-handed realpolitik, it becomes ever more urgent to reconsider the
reinvention of ethnofuturisms. This requires various speculations on how to
remain actively and creatively critical of the world crises that globalization has
delivered us into, of its antinomies and inconsistencies, as well as of the
consensual notions of historical progress and regress. To intervene in a
chronopolitical order that is framed by today’s time-crises is to confront the
ubiquitous pitfalls of identity politics in relation to existing power structures
and possible strategies for empowerment. This is why emerging
ethnofuturisms tend to take clues from an association of other futurisms that
have long been active in the vein of the above challenges. Their findings both
originate beyond the scope of Western modernity and challenge the given
notions of origination, of having specified beginnings in space and/or time.
In the meantime, to rekindle a discussion around ethnos is both a
matter of looking at the decline of certain nation-states as well as many
existing programs for reinventing national, ethnic, or racial demarcations. Such
programs for the (re)naturalization of foreign or estranged citizens, furthering
a systemic obsession with the multimodal production of xenos, are often
ushered by libertarian and techno-commercial interests. One of the more
interesting examples of how technological developments can have an impact
on emergent (ethnonational) identities is the e-Residency program recently
launched in Estonia, which can lead to unforeseen and significant changes in
international law and tax policy. All this, of course, happens in parallel with the
rise of right-wing extremist nationalists across Europe and North America who
stir up xenophobic sentiments and promote anti- immigration policies, hence
aggravating ethnic conflicts worldwide.
A new vision of the future, therefore, seems crucial, one which both
exploits technological potentials and takes the political weight of ethnic and
racial diversity into account—not as a lip service to an alleged integration
policy, but in terms of historical peculiarities that are informed by power
dynamics across planetary scales. Now is the time to depart from the concept
of historical Futurism, given its racist, sexist, and warmongering appetite for
technological progress, only to relativize or estrange it from within the lived
conditions of those who have long been estranged and alienated by its
writes Land, “manifested through p aradox.” The actual crisis lies in a situation where because the
present, “torn tidally apart,” is delivered by “the progressive destruction of traditional society,” it is then
considered “necessary to go back, beyond the origin of Enlightenment, because Reason has failed the test
of history.” Unpicking these “manifold absurdities” and openly pursuing pragmatic irrationality, Land
draws on a tripartite model to further explain the matter. He charts the three groups that would
consensually realize the promised NRx: capitalist futurists, religious traditionalists, and ethnonationalists,
which sit in an unnerving proximity to the “Ethnofuturist Triangle.” The “futurists and traditionalists are
distinguished by distinct, one-sided emphases on ‘neo’ and ‘reaction’, and their disagreements lose
identity in the neoreactionary spiral,” which best suits the pragmatic inconsistencies of reactionary
ethnofuturism as is noted in Kaalep’s corrupted reinvention. This “triadic differentiation,” according to
Land, is “resiliently conflictual,” meaning that “the prospects for neoreactionary consensus... depend
upon disintegration.” In this sense, the neoreactionary reality is to perish to its own realization. However,
what makes it crypto-fascist is that, in the meanwhile, it also tries to usurp all the conditions of possibility
for the realization of any o ther reality.
19
Armen Avanessian and Mahan Moalemi (eds.), Ethnofuturismen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2018), pp. 8-39.
accelerating legacies. The question has to do with how to approach a notion of
chronocommons, the futuristic resources whose radiations have already
infiltrated the here-and-now, beyond any fantasy of ethnographic authenticity.
The futurisms discussed in this volume demonstrate that the discovery of
chronocommons requires not only new or adapted technologies, but also the
competence and ability to navigate the technologies of reverse archeology,
quasi arche-techniques of a future past, which carry multiple histories of the
future. May the ethnic and racial histories that subtend these technical milieus
serve as the breeding ground for an unprecedented X enofuturism.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The backstory of this book starts with our first encounter in Summer 2016
during a workshop in Berlin, convened around a myriad of questions
pertaining to the post-contemporary condition. Last Autumn, during a reunion
in London, the topic of our conversations was none other than our ancestral
hometown—Tehran, a contemporary metropole of the very tail end of the
fourteenth century, according to the Solar Hijri calendar that sets the country's
official chronology. Few days later, after a surprise call to Merve Verlag, came
the decision to publish the following volume together.
We thank Tom Lamberty for the thoughtful support of the volume,
Lukas Ishar and Joe Goodhew for their help, Ronald Voullié for the translation,
as well as Inke Arns, and other readers of the manuscript, who preferred not
to be mentioned, for their critical comments.
Above all, we would like to thank the contributors, especially Kodwo
Eshun, for numerous discussions and critical comments, and Monira Al Qadiri,
who also designed the cover of the present book. We hope that this volume
will first be read, and only then—less reflexively than usual—reacted to. At the
same time, we wish to initiate an overdue debate, or even an uncomfortable
polemic, around and about the increasingly racist and hyper-regressive status
quo. That which is at stake is another mode of contemporaneity, an alternative
order of coevality: instead of a xenophobic society obsessed with the past, we
need to envision and embody xenofuturist cooperatives in the present.
Armen Avanessian/Mahan Moalemi
Berlin/Tehran, March 2018
20
