#alexander g weheliye

[sasukeisawake]

one of my favourite excerpts from alexander g. weheliye’s habeas viscus: 

alt ID: Building on Hortense Spiller’s distinction between body and flesh and the write of habeas corpus, I use the phrase habeas viscus-- “you shall have the flesh”-- on the one hand, to signal how violent political domination activates a fleshy surplus that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality, and, on the other hand, to reclaim the atrocity of flesh as a pivotal area fro the politics emanating from different traditions of the oppressed. The flesh, rather than displacing bare life or civil death, excavates the social (after)life of these categories: it represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never annihilate lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds. 

[notchainedtotrauma]

Because black suffering figures in the domain of the mundane, it refuses the idiom of exception.

from Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human by Alexander G. Weheliye

[adesireforhealing]

We were never meant to survive into adulthood, at least not as sensitive femme/feminine Black boys.

from 808s&Heartbreak by Katherine McKittrick&Alexander G. Weheliye

[unusualmodesofresistance]

How do we tell the story outside of the splash of sexual violence (and thus anti-blackness), since summoning the violence encountered by Black folks is so often bullied into doing the psychic, physiological, and affective dirty work for white supremacy? Whenever there is some type of crisis around “intimate” violences in particular, Black folks are summoned as ciphers through which that labor is accomplished without it having to affect the actual structures of white supremacy.  Instead of confronting the many violences, sexual and otherwise, white men and women committed against Black female persons (“high crimes against the flesh,” Spillers calls it), the broken and torn black person, lynched, stands in as representative-knowable-enclosed-locked-down violence.

from 808s&Heartbreak by Katherine McKittrick&Alexander G. Weheliye

[wanderingandactingout]

Where is the appreciation for Black women R&B singers’ sounding of the strenuous labor of both love and heartbreak ? How does the Black female voice carry out the care work of Black women’s labor, which cannot be recognized as such, as Saidiya Hartman argues ? Where is the love for that something you do ?

from 808s&Heartbreak by Katherine McKittrick&Alexander G. Weheliye 

[ahistoryofanxietyandanxietyand]

Where do you go when your being is too much for this world? Where? Where is our love?

from 808s&Heartbreak by Katherine McKittrick&Alexander G. Weheliye

[morethanboomtschk]

From White Brothers with No Soul to Black Counter Culture, a conversation with Alexander G. Weheliye at CTM 2021.

Despite the marketed perception of Berlin as a city overflowing with techno music; until the late 80s, the city’s music scene was dominated by rock music with artists like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Sinéad O’Connor and Pink Floyd performing in celebration of the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. American Forces Network (AFN), a free radio and television service setup by the United States military in Germany in 1945, was very influential to the German people who were exposed to exported American music for the first time; and specifically, experienced the wealth of Black music that had been bottled up, contained and distributed by the American music industry. Jazz, funk, soul, disco, hip hop, house, techno and popular music–as constructed and standardized by Berry Gordy and Norman Whitfield at Detroit’s Motown Records – would pour across the airwaves introducing German listeners to musicians like Donna Summer, James Brown, Marshall Jefferson and others. Black music had appeared in Germany almost out of nowhere in a way that ought to be reminiscent of the counter intelligence initiatives that the United States had been known to use in previous scenarios involving military occupation.

Nevertheless, the electronic dance music that would emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s amongst the African-Amercian youth counterculture of industrialized cities like Chicago and Detroit–separated from the convention of popular American music – would have a particular effect on the “no future generation” of Germany, offering a surge of life and way of expressing themselves both ahead of and during the collapse of the Berlin Wall. There was no human or culture attached to the electronic rhythm and soul music that they were experiencing, and this anonymity and detached quality would be a key feature of how the Berlin underground rave culture would peel apart the layers of the third wave, Black technological music and drape over it the diplomatic logos of German intellectualism. In a scene from “We Call It Techno!,” a 2017 documentary on the rise of German rave movement–produced by Electronic Beats, an international marketing program initiated by Deutsche Telekom AG–a roaming “rave-voyeur” camera operator surveys a German club space, landing on a pair of skinheads. The cameraman asked the two young men, “What is it that inspires you with techno music?” The skinheads reply, “I think techno expresses the emotion of today’s times in the best way of all, basically the blankness of society.” ↝ Read More

[rrrauschen]

AW: One of the reasons it is important to me to make these points, is that it is still really relevant to the way Germany conceives of itself. The discursive and institutional grounds, the conditions of possibility, are already there, forming a mirage of openness. International perceptions of Germany have really greatly changed in past years, now that being German is no longer so tainted by Nazism, as it was 20 years ago. At least partially, this is due to Germany having a self-understanding as being really open, which it is to a certain extent. On the other hand there is a deep-seated unwillingness to actually look at itself as a not-exclusively white nation, which is not only a problem of a few neo-Nazis or the Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) folks but also affects the white German liberal and leftists spheres. In fact, it seems much more pernicious in these contexts because of the systematic denial of everyday institutional racism.

The terms have changed slightly since the German colonial period but nevertheless it often has the same feel for me: there is a public discourse about being open and taking so and so many asylum seekers every year but there is a fundamental disconnect about the communities and folks who have lived here for generations and are still talked about as foreigners that can't be integrated because they refuse to comply with traditional, white, notions of German culture. This has been happening for the past fifty years at least. The situation is different for Russian and Polish Germans who have been integrated, but it hasn't happened for Afro-Germans, Asian-Germans, Arab-Germans, and Turkish Germans, i.e. those who are visibly different from white Germans.

The historiography of Berlin Techno really benefits from precisely the idea of Germany as a newly loosened-up bastion of Teutonic whiteness. I've described this elsewhere as how Germany has had to constantly create a kind of 'Unschuld' for itself, an innocence by distancing itself from responsibility for anything that is not related to the Jewish community, which is now conveniently not very present within Germany. And of course the Holocaust did not only affect the Jewish community. These are tendencies that arch through German history and historiography. Partially this is due to the fact that large-scale German colonialism 'only' lasted from the Berlin conference to the end of World War I, which means it is something that can be continually disavowed in order to not 'untune' the harmonic scaffolding of German collective memory.

[samueldelany]

Alexander G. Weheliye: FuturePasts: Afrofuturism, Blackness, and Technology, a lecture. 10/21/17, at Dortmunder Uni.

"Afrofuturism excavates the important function of everyday technologies in global Black cultures, and imagines, inspired by science fiction, alternative Black pasts, presents, and futures. In this way, Afrofuturism upends colonial ideas that construe white, western cultures as more civilized and developed than Black cultural formations. My lecture will provide a historical genealogy of Afrofuturism and consider how in recent years its central ideas have spread through popular culture."

[casualgardener]

having the book felt worth in one sentence

“Which is not to say that agency and resistance are completely irrelevant in this context, just that we might come to a more layered and improvisatory understanding of extreme subjection if we do not decide in advance what forms its disfigurations should take on.” - Alexander G. Weheliye in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

[baroquespiral]

Fragments on Nick Land and Acceleration

1. In my attempt to grasp a nebulous accelerationist aesthetics, a repeating figure is not the alien but the familiar.  Compare two visionaries of the posthuman weird: Land and Porpentine Charity Heartstring.  Porpentine is a quintessential “nostalgebraist”, whose visions of the future are constructed entirely out of a personal vocabulary Porpentine’s self-universalization as a marginalized person, of course, is both ironic and radically polemical - but it is still a distinct tactic.  She constructs anthropomorphic, gently ironic, sharply perverse therapeutic fairytales.  White identity politics is the anthropomorphism to which Land inevitably succumbs.  Both manifest the “post”-human and radically Other as images of themselves.  The Accelerationist is everywhere opposed to the pedestrian, human-scaled concept of “diversity”, which is distinguished from the thorough biopolitical splintering of humanity.  (Are there even any accelerationist Afro-pessimists yet?)  Yet we see less images of fracture than of “tiling the universe” - see also the tentacle, the perfectly simple, ubiquitous limb.   2.  @philsandifer claimed to be unable to figure out what Land’s ultimate response to “we’re fucked” is, and pins him between two options, “accelerationist hypercapitalism” or “tribal identity and guns”; Land explicitly acknowledges he’s not telling which, for occult reasons.  In this case Sandifer’s strategy of obsessively text-focused deconstructive reading lets Land pull over a Groucho Marx glasses-tier disguise over on him.  In the real world, the people pushing tribal identity and guns and the people pushing accelerationist hypercapitalism are now - especially after their staged final battle in 2016 - obviously the same people.  And Land’s “ambivalence” about the supposed choice he presents just lets him support them from two different angles.  He’s definitely too smart not to realize he’s doing this.  Nick Land, more likely, believes that the way past the Great Filter is only sufficiently non-obvious for such a filter to exist because the Filter presents itself to technologically advanced civilizations as two equally apocalyptic choices.  Scylla and Charybdis - the original setting where the only way out is through.  To beat the Great Filter you actually need tribal loyalties, lots of guns and a facetentacled hypercapitalist monster economy to buy them.  At least Land puts some effort into keeping the secret of his solution by never talking about one of the cultural touchstones of the alt right and of his own cybergothic aesthetics: Warhammer 40K.  Sure, the Imperium may have declared a permanent Crusade against the Weird, but the explicit thematization of the game is that that’s a bullshit narrative to drum up artificial tribal identification: the Emperor is basically a Skulltopus and the Astartes are a Tau or ‘Nid-style specialized subspecies.  Its premise is basically "cybergothic totalitarianism got humanity through the Great Filter of the Warp and the Chaos Gods, but at what cost?”  The Imperium is The Ruin and its Vauung gestates as the Emperor’s disembodied consciousness approaches chaos godhood in its own right. My advice to anyone who starts thinking he might be onto something is to consider that the very concept of a “Great Filter” presupposes that we know how to recognize signals from a more advanced civilization.  Consider that Alexander G. Weheliye synthesizes Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism through Weird sounds.  Consider that the Dogon claim to have been visited from the stars millennia before they were “discovered” by Europeans.  Shut up and listen.

3.  (from the S/ACC (Spiral Accelerationism) MANIFESTO) The first instance of “the only way out is through” is Scylla and Charybdis.  “Cybernetics” refers to the figure of the navigator.  There are many, perhaps an infinite number of traps.  There are many, perhaps an infinite number of openings.  G. A. Cohen defends Marx’s “technological determinist” primacy thesis (the primacy of the forces of production over the social forms) against the accusation that it is “demeaning to humanity”: “Once we notice that the development of the forces is centrally an enrichment of human labour power the emphasis on technology loses its dehumanizing appearance.  A development of productive power is an advance in the ‘mode of self-activity of individuals.”  Bostrom, Yudkowsky and the theorists of orthogonality define intelligence as instrumental capacity, virtually indistinguishable from force.  This is hardly incompatible with Land and Negarestani’s anti-orthogonal view of intelligence as its own telos.  Intelligence explosion signifies the exponential expansion of agency.  This agency need not be human, or even machine.  The fantasy of my last year of childhood, of the animals forced out of their forests massing in armies and trampling the cities, is also acceleration (archeofuturism, neo-animism).  Why have the only people apparently aware of this impending explosion abandoned themselves to fate?

4. Speaking of listening, hanging out with a bunch of accelerationists obsessed with jungle music permanently associated the social form of collective dance with industrial terror for Land, who doesn’t like any new music any more. Now he lives in China, where the only pop music is melodramatic ballads.

[notchainedtotrauma]

Where do you go when your being is too much for this world? Where? Where is our love?

808s&Hearbreak by Katherine McKittrick&Alexander G. Weheliye

[adesireforhealing]

Where do you go when your being is too much for this world? Where? Where is our love?

from 808s&Heartbreak by Katherine McKittrick&Alexander G. Weheliye

[mugasofer]

My advice to anyone who starts thinking he might be onto something is to consider that the very concept of a “Great Filter” presupposes that we know how to recognize signals from a more advanced civilization.  Consider that Alexander G. Weheliye synthesizes Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism through Weird sounds.  Consider that the Dogon claim to have been visited from the stars millennia before they were “discovered” by Europeans.  Shut up and listen.

You heard it here first, folks: believing in the Fermi Paradox is talking over people of colour.

[wanderingandactingout]

Where is the appreciation for Black women R&B singers’ sounding of the strenuous labor of both love and heartbreak? How does the Black female voice carry out the care work of Black women’s labor, which cannot be recognized as such, as Saidiya Hartman argues? Where is the love for that something you do?

from 808s&Heartbreak by Katherine McKittrick&Alexander G. Weheliye

[ahistoryofanxietyandanxietyand]

When we are over it, no longer paying attention, back to sex and clothes and self-directed rituals of so what, Drake’s “Worst Behavior” lashes in the background and Miles Davis is everywhere haunting our hysterical objectivity with scoffing whispers.—

from An Artist’s Guide to Herbs: Blue Vervain by Harmony Holiday

The long histories of racial violence, the looming and real violations, the heart and the 808s, the mathematics and the flesh, the science of the word—these are sites that may not be ordinarily understood or thought together, but when they are, they reveal black life and black livingness as shifting locations enfleshed by the arteries of enduringly heartbreaking and joyful routes and roots. The hollow muscular organ filled up.

from 808s&Heartbreak by Katherine McKittrick&Alexander G. Weheliye