Macro view
In this time of big data, Large Language Models, [and AI dread/worship] and as neoliberal capitalism creates evermore insidious ways of commanding the our attention, it seemed pertinent to me to study the ways that capitalism has followed plantation logics [Meredith Whittaker]. Returning to Babbage and his interest in plantation logics of control of the enslaved workers in the Caribbean and his desire to make automated machines that could increase productivity. My research threads of the history of subjugation of Ireland under hundreds of years of ever refined plantation logics, of how, in arguing for liberation on the international stage, that Irish people are in fact the only non free White peoples in Europe. In this move the advocates for Irish freedom betrayed black revolutionary movements for freedom and set the foundation for the current shift to the far right nationalism that is besetting Europe.
Micro view
For Generation X in Ireland and the UK the music cultures that found themselves occupying dance halls in the UK bringing Reggae and Dub traditions and sound engineering techniques into contact with a working class who were part of the rationalization of the machineries of production. Their lives structured and quantified by the working week and factory monotony and the desire for escape along with the dissemination of recreational drugs created the perfect ground for rave culture fuelled by ecstasy and soundtracked by acid house. This potent moment created social space for people across race, sex, and class to encounter each other like never before or so the myth goes. The time of intersectionality was here.
Having taken part in these dance music subcultures I later started to research [de]colonial feminisms trying to make sense of the freedoms won and those that still needed work. I wondered what a futurist might make of an Ireland to come. Looking into the stories of female revolutionaries and political prisoners brought me closer to foundational myths or cosmologies that were enlivened in order to create the Irish from the Celt. These hyperstitions that fuelled revolutionary fires were constructed from oral traditions, pock-marked with elisions by those with the capacity to store and retrieve the mythologies. Myths would get retold from the perspective of the ruling class or religious orders, or buried along with language and ritual suppression and subsumption. Yet like the rhythms and riddims that crossed the Atlantic through the middle passage and to the Caribbean, North America and to the UK something of a technology of escapology stubbornly remained. It seems a foundation of love and an unswerving belief in connection is at the root of revolutions. A belief that despite the ruling class’s technologies of suppression, rationalization of social control and violences of fast or slow tempos that sometimes resisted brutalization when people got together, affirmed each other and said, enough.
The time of Assemblage is here.
The kairotic time of Margaretta D'Arcy's Bitch Goddess is here.
Macha: a cyborg goddess of militant pacifism is here…
Readings - personal
Thomas Nail - on sound image, Assemblage, Migrants,
Fred Moten Black & Blur
Deleuze Foucault and his interlocutors
Eryk Salvaggio Challenging The Myths of Generative AI / AUG 29, 2024
Sylvia Wynter The Autopoetic Turn
Meredith Whittaker Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control
Anne Carson Antigone
Kowdo Eshun More Brilliant Than the Sun
Julian Henriques Sonic Bodies
Edward George The Strangeness of Dub
Margaretta D'Arcy Tell Them Everything
Thomas Kinsella The Tain
This research is made possible by the support and collaboration of Siphonophorae, The Guesthouse Collective, The Arts Council Ireland and Foreign Objekt (Sepideh Majidi). Thank you also to Jennifer Redmond and Roy Wroth for thinking with me in conversation and in making.
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