Frédéric Neyrat: “Ecologist thought is geocentric. Its center is Gaia or a 'critical zone' which narrows our horizon even more” (The Dark Angel of History)
Stimulating, innovative and essential for anyone who wants to think about ecology: so many qualifiers that affirm here the enthusiasm for reading offered by L'Ange de l'Histoire: Cosmos et technique de l'Afrofuturisme that Frédéric Neyrat has just signed for the decidedly exciting MF editions. In a deeply original way, Neyrat lays here the foundations of an ecological thought which, beyond Bruno Latour, takes hold of Afrofuturism, its imagination and its political power to rethink ecology. And if ecology were the sign of the refusal of a Copernican revolution? Does ecology consider our relationship to the cosmos? Does it accept the foreigner or does it renew the Anthropocene which is based on slavery and the murder of black women and men? Should ecology, in order to assert itself, take charge of the question of race as the Black Angel of History invites it to do? So many burning questions that Diacritik went to ask Frédéric Neyrat for a long interview.
My first question would relate to the genesis of your powerfully original essay, The Dark Angel of History: Cosmos and Technique of Afrofuturism which has just been published by MF Editions. How was born this reflection that you lead in your essay and which poses, with force, how much Afrofuturism presents itself as a major tool for rethinking our relationship to the cosmos? In your introductory remarks, you indicate that life is made up of encounters which deviate from its course and that as such, you say again in particular, "the mythical-musical universe of Sun Ra, the co(s)mic machine of P-Funk… the feminist, tactile-planetary and para-human painting of Wangechi Mutu" played the role of a conceptual trigger: how did these artists transport you to another perception and invite you to upset your referral system? In what way have they introduced the alien into you, that is to say, have you become unfamiliar and out of place with your ways of thinking?
Introducing the alien in itself, your formula offers us a good start, in these times of pandemic, and with Ridley Scott's film, Alien, in mind. You could say that there are two ways for the alien to change us: one is by intrusion, forcing, and that is the horror movie, the zombie epidemic or the reality of Covid- 19, which transforms us into objects, into sick bodies, into patients subjected to medicine; the other is made by encounter, by a form of experience which, if it is certainly not capable of mastering what happens to it, nevertheless concerns not an object but a subject, a someone to whom something happens. something, something intense, unexpected. So I can say that I happened to experience, sensitively and intellectually, a sound, significant, visual constellation that bears the name of Afrofuturism, with the artists you mention.
Why it happened that way, I don't know exactly, but I know that Afrofuturism names for me an encounter, necessarily contingent, with multiple parameters touching on questions of racialization and political ecology, philosophy and of art, concept and metaphor. Metaphor, etymologically, is what transports elsewhere, further, beyond. Let's say that for me, Afrofuturism is the metaphor that allows me to take off from a certain type of aesthetic, ecological, and philosophical thought. For example, I really like the song "Astro Black" by Sun Ra, with its very warm, sensual, slow percussions, which are disturbed by rebellious brass, with the voice of June Tyson who tells us: "astro-black mythology / astro-timeless immortality / astro-thought in mystic sound / astro-black of outer space / astro-natural of darkness stars/ astro reach beyond the stars”. I believe that these words contain almost everything that I have tried to unfold in my book, this incredible correspondence between the mythical and the cosmological, the very ancient and space travel, the absence of time within a music that does not give us time to get used to what it awakens in us from the unknown.
Before going further into your essay, I would like, if you agree, that you define Afrofuturism as you unfold it in The Dark Angel of History. From the outset, you posit it as a cosmic revolution that the Copernican revolution did not succeed in accomplishing or which still leaves the Copernican revolution unfinished. In fact, Afrofuturism is a sensitive awakening to the impasse constituted by the Anthropocene because, according to you, this Anthropocene is deaf and blind to the cosmos: it is still too centered on men and more broadly on the earth, and forgets how the earth includes itself in a larger system of galaxies. My question here will be twofold: in what do we still live according to you, concretely, in a pre-Copernican system? And finally, how could the revolution brought about by Afrofuturism be made cosmic and, if so, at what levels? In what way, finally, is the concept of the Anthropocene, in your opinion, a concept still too centered on a way of human totemism that does not say its name and whose still unnoticed limits can be revealed by Afrofuturism?
These are questions that are at stake in a work that I am preparing on the planetary question: what does it mean to have the experience that one is on a planet launched into an expanding universe? What are the discourses, the forms of art, the techniques, which attempt to account for this experience, and what are the discourses, the thoughts which seem to remain hermetic to it? The Anthropocene is the name of a hermetism to the planetary experience, it is to act as if the Earth were at the center of the universe. Elon Musk and the other captains of New Space are much more geocentric than we think, when they want to develop a peri-terrestrial tourism industry, offering short trips to bored millionaires. Contrary to what one might think, we are a long way from the Space Age! But ecological thought is also geo-centric, its center and its horizon is Gaia, at best, or a “critical zone” which further reduces our horizon. The reason for this reduction is that ecological thought was based on the idea that it would cure us of the astronomical revolution of the 16th century by restoring the Earth to its exceptional status in the universe. You will notice, finally, that the recent film entitled Ad Astra leads us to the same point: return to the home, to the ecology of the Earth, after concluding that the universe is lifeless, whereas the film, however, almost unconsciously , shows us on the contrary the incredible splendor of the worlds which are not like ours. But we can only understand the specificity of the Earth within a comparative planetology, this is what someone like Dipesh Chakrabarty explains very well in a recent article. And that was precisely Galileo's will: to elevate the Earth to the dignity of a noble star by taking it out of its status as a dump, sordid and motionless.
But I believe that Afrofuturism can help us to become aware of this comparative planetology, to take us from ecology to exology, by allowing us to make a cosmic detour. To understand what our Earth is, we have to make it vary imaginarily, to think of it starting from the planet that it has not been, the place of dwelling that it has not been, the politics that did not take place. This is something that Jean-Luc Godard has said on several occasions, in films and in interviews: we are only told about the facts, when we should also be told about “what is not being done”. Afrofuturism is what is not done, understand this ontologically and even in moral terms: mythical, improvisation, extravagance, the impossible, the absolute, the dream of a new earth, of a planetary revolution, of a liquidation of white supremacy, of a becoming foreign to oneself which prohibits human beings from taking themselves for themselves.
I am not saying this against human beings, I love humanity, but I love it when it does not deny what in it escapes it, what is not identifiable, what can never be brought to full light. Finally, the cosmos is that in Afrofuturism: the cosmos is what makes us strangers to ourselves.
As an extension of the questioning of the Anthropocene opened up by Afrofuturism, the definition that you offer of Afrofuturism thus consists in making it a powerful cultural alternative to the white domination that it constantly denounces: the Anthropocene would thus be based on the rejection of the Black person because the Anthropocene is largely based on colonization. In fact, if Afrofuturism, in particular of a Sun Ra, proposes a new image of the Cosmos, this new relationship to the Cosmos implies rethinking the uses of technology and incidentally changing it as this use would in truth be racialized .In what way can the use of technology by Afrofuturism be considered in a racialized way, namely in what way does there exist in our relationship to the earth, to Gaia, a white use of technology such as you indicate it? How does Afrofuturism restore a political and revolutionary power to technology whose use would this time be black? Would it be through Afrofuturism to change the function of technology in order to make it a link and not a weapon: to change the weapon of domination of white capitalism into a benefit? How more broadly does Afrofuturism make it possible to show how much black people have hitherto been considered as the object of political and cosmological repression if not, as you also say, of murder?
We must first begin by reversing our gaze. Instead of beginning, from the point of view of social and political analysis, to accommodate our vision of what is white, of the position of domination of people recognized as white, we must rather see how the Black - the Black subject, the one who, Fred Moten tells us in a recent book, could not even be a subject and will only have been a “sub-subject”, a sub-subject – is the object of a rejection from which the white subject is defined as non-black. We see here that there is no white identity posited in a primary way, here it is dislodged from its ontological primacy, it is the second effect of a rejection, that of Blackness, that we can be translated as being-black, what-is-black, being a Black subject. And this rejection, it must be produced, it is not only a question of definition, it is produced by ways of doing, social and economic, and also by technologies which will install a world, cities, forms of energy production, universities, books. Colonize, exploit the bodies of black people in the mines that will give the energy of the industrial revolution, slavery and plantations that reveal a Plantationocene behind the Anthropocene, and seek a spare planet to terraform to continue the geo-capitalist logic on Earth, all this marks the fierce continuity of white technology.
Afrofuturism would then be the attempt to answer the following question: what happens if Blackness is no longer rejected, but recognized in its creative power, its infinite chromaticism as Moten says? If, instead of rejecting what is Black, the black subject, the black color, the interstellar darkness, this becomes the original dimension, the pulsation of existence? The answer is shocking: what happens then is – theoretically first – the end of the world, the end of the world as we know it. This is why even the collapsologist discourse can be used to hide the end of the world that we do not want to see, the one that would be the end of the world of anti-Blackness. Because this end, we do not know what it is, since it is the very bases of the Anthropocene and its criticism that are called into question. Yet this is what Afrofuturism allows us to imagine. In such a world, technologies lose their colonial function, their function of exploitation, a simple agricultural tool can become an enigma… Cultivate, really? But for which world, for which form of life?…
I believe that we need to rethink technology, but we can only do this from an overview where technologies cease to be tools, machines to be exploited, and become cosmological mediations, that means operators allowing us to think of ourselves as other-than-human, other-than-here, other-than-present. Imagine a society that would carry as its value the recognition of our status as wandering beings, beings who bivouac but do not inhabit, who drift instead of settling, who have lost their exceptional status to become extraordinary beings in the company of other extraordinary beings. And now imagine how technology could be put to use for this extravagance. This is the music, the painting, the Afrofuturist poetry, this is what she shows us, without of course giving us a manual, since it is this that first had to be burned.
In the new and deeply original relationship that you weave with the Anthropocene, a deeper criticism that you lead of Bruno Latour's work on the relationship that man weaves with Gaia appears implicitly. To the criticisms that Afrofuturism makes it possible to formulate on the white use of technology is added a counterpoint hitherto little raised to my knowledge, not even by Timothy Morton on ecological thought, namely the very identity of those who are concerned about environmental issues. As such, you indicate, qualifying Latour, that the question is less to know “Where to land? than "Who lands?" ". In this sense, in what way, unlike Latour, is it more important for you with Afrofuturism to ask “Where are we? and "Where do we come from?" »? Would you say that, more broadly, Afrofuturism constitutes a new theoretical substrate which would invite us to qualify Bruno Latour's remarks, in particular by bringing them a political counterpoint and an awakening to the question of race?
It is true that the field of environmental humanities today favors certain terms: Gaïa, the terrestrial, the living, and this cannot be reduced to the personality of Bruno Latour, even if he represents a major, influential figure, bringing together those and those who identify with it. But after all, it seems logical that environmental thought should concern itself with the territories of the Earth, the terrestrial oikos and Gaia! However, this obviousness risks concealing a certain number of problems, which only a political cartography of thought under the condition of the Anthropocene could help us to identify, which would perhaps allow us to consider certain political alliances as necessary, and to others like to avoid.
Let's start with the question of racialization, of "who?" “, which you point out, and here it seems to me that ecology is a little blind on this question, I could give many examples, illustrations, but there are exceptions of course. I believe that in France it is linked to the republican unconscious, which acts even among those who reject republicanism, because it is based on the idea of a monochromatic universality, and in order to contest this it is not enough to challenge far-right racism, one must also challenge what, in one's own project, however generous, perpetuates monochromatic universality. To understand what I believe contemporary thought should be heading towards, I believe that Dénètem Touam Bona, in his recent Wisdom of the lianas, tells us some important things when he speaks of maroonage as the “abolition of ecology”.
There is, secondly, the question of the cosmic opening and here the problem is that, in contemporary ecological thought, the cosmos is reduced to its terrestrial version. For example, Baptiste Morizot in Reviver les embers du vivant speaks of the cosmos and "expanding galaxy" but that's when he speaks of the forest, of "living cosmos" but about "the habitability of the Earth for us" , and the term "cosmology" is used to refer to the uses of the Earth. What he writes is interesting, but I wonder if the cosmic outside hasn't been engulfed by terrestrial living things, instead of being thought dialectically, too, as something that escapes the confinement of Gaia.
Thirdly, the question of capitalism: Frédéric Lordon is right to insist on this dimension, because an ecology that is not anti-capitalist would be sterile, but he does not have much to tell us, as far as I know, on the ecology or issues of racialization. On this point, I feel close to my comrades from the review Terrestres, even if their way of responding to Lordon ignores the racial question: "decolonize our borders of the 'political' and the 'social'", as they write in their call to respond to Lordon, neutralizes the term decolonization by territorializing it in a sentence which, through the terms chosen, ignores the colonial and racial question (https://www.terrestres.org/2021/11 /30/thoughts-of-the-living-suppots-of-capital-seminar-earthly-becoming-of-8-December-2021/). So, alliances will have to happen, between metropolitan anti-capitalism, Earth uprisings, and stellar communism, and the cartography that I am sketching here would go in this direction.
But I say this too quickly, it would be necessary to add the question of gender, eco-feminism, and technologies, to complicate my point, and then anyway making alliances does not make much sense for someone like me which means nothing. But it is perhaps through this absence that the question of the impossible Afrofuturist was communicated to me, not that there is anything comparable between my situation and that of those to whom the world has been denied, but the absence of comparison does not prevent the presence in each of us of a cursed, darkened, common part in what it represents that is lacking in the world.
Beyond the nuances and counterpoints brought to the thoughts of the Anthropocene, one of the most remarkable points of your reflection is affirmed in the way in which you yourself question your presuppositions of reflection, in particular on the dreaded question of an Afrofuturism White. If, according to you, Afrofuturism offers itself as a tool capable of questioning the white use of technology, we must on the other hand be wary of a cultural appropriation of Afrofuturism: it must remain in its estrangement theoretical so as not to see its political strength wane. How in The Dark Angel of History do you manage to thwart this trap and overcome this ethical and intellectual risk by which, the white man still exploiting the black man, could exercise a kind of reverse ethnocentrism? How to make his word at the same time fair in front of afrofuturism?
The skin is the metonymy of a world, as Wangechi Mutu's painting that I analyze in my book clearly shows. To be white is thus to carry with one the effect of racialization, which does not mean to be racist, in the sense of voting for Le Pen or Zemmour, but to live from a world which has been constituted ontologically for oneself. . Frank W. Wilderson describes this point very well: existentially, it can happen to me to be a slave, or to have an eye gouged out by the police during a demonstration; but for the black person, this type of event is not of the order of the accident, but of the essence, the accident confirming the essence.
This means that, in a certain way, I cannot avoid being among those who exploit, who by their manifestation of the white world impose violence on Black people. But this situation should not lead to a form of defense of the type: “what do you want me to do about it! “, or, it seems the opposite, “rather to be silent and erase myself, and let the “subaltern” subjects speak, the black people, those who suffered the colonial violence of France in its former empire, etc. No, we must not give a blank check to the order of the world, but challenge it, by thought, by actions, by forms of life, to find alliances, to speak out from a disidentification with the White world, thus making existence a contestation of ontology.
In this sense, constantly favoring what you call a “theoretical estrangement” seems to me a good method, including because by doing so you make the word strangely strange. If Afrofuturism is not to be co-opted, it has to go beyond me, through me – like P-Funk's Mothership, Moor Mother and Nicole Mitchell's "Eve Prototype" , and the parables of Octavia Butler – and gives rise to unexpected encounters. Philosophically, this will mean bringing about encounters, dialectical images between thinkers separated in space and time. Nothing stranger than a meeting against all odds.
One of the other remarkable axes of your work consists in opposing to the anthropocene a notion whose afrofuturism allows you to lay the theoretical foundations of what should thus be called the alienocene. If the Anthropocene proposes to deplete more and more resources to ensure the survival of man, Afrofuturism proposes, for its part, to free the earth for another cosmos by what you call a "transcendental accretion" . How does liberating the earth reveal an alien universe? In what way would the alienocene that you defend be ultimately a cosmic vision of ecology of which man would no longer be the alpha and omega? However, we must not fail to question the otherness we are talking about. You recall in particular the remarks of Franz Fanon in which the alien can also be on the side of the colonizing forces: how not to make the alienocene precisely the off-center renewal of the anthropocene?
Recently, we have seen a theoretical arms race to find out what would be the best term capable of describing the process that may have led to the list of ecological disasters, from climate change to soil sterility to the disappearance of wild species: Anthropocene? Capitalocene? Anthrobscene? There are articles and websites dedicated to listing all these names. I also succumbed to this temptation, with perhaps a slight difference of intention: my goal, with the term Alienocene, is not to give a better explanation of the capacity that technologically privileged human societies have to destratify the geological depths in an instant, but to open up the Earth to a space-time that goes beyond the scope of any defining exercise. To come back to Godard's quote, one could say: the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, that's what happened and is still happening; the Alienocene is what is not being done, it is the utopia whose function is not to present what should be but to introduce what is not being done and should have been done. long ago in human history. The Alienocene is what has not yet happened, that is why it cannot find a model to follow among the "ancestors" or animist anthropologies, except when it is a question of undoing the fact of power, of undoing the formation of the economy of accumulation, as Pierre Clastres and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro allow us to think. The alien can certainly inhabit the Earth, but the Earth cannot contain the alien.
However, this in no way guarantees that the alien is a sympathetic being, and indeed capitalism can be said to be alien, alienating, destructive, viral like the digital economy, like a metaverse interfering everywhere. This is why, in a recent article, "The Alien Protocol: Steps Toward a Communism of the Strange" in (Des)Troços, v.2, n.1, 2021), I finally propose to use the expressions "alien force", or "alien-ness", a term that could be translated into French by quality-of-being-alien, or foreignness perhaps. Because the fault of the category of alien is to make us fall back into the traps of identity: we will identify aliens as such and lock them into what we will assume to be their difference, their status as foreigners . This is why Toni Morrison, in The Origin of Others, was able to write that “there are no foreigners”. This formula only seems astonishing when we do not understand what trap it is extricating us from. So if we say: there are no aliens, but there is alien-force, the power of foreignness, then we understand that the capitalist alien is the one who imposes his identity to eradicate this which is not it, and that conversely the Alienocene is the power which consists in making foreign what one thought one had at hand.
How can Afrofuturism be the lever for large-scale political action? From the outset, you underline how much Afrofuturism in all its forms carries the new and still unfulfilled idea which consists in posing in politics and in everyday life the vibrant and open question of the impossible. Why posing Afrofuturism as a culture and openness to the impossible makes it possible to make this same Afrofuturism the active tool of a defeasance of the dominant economy? Why and how does the Anthropocene in fact refuse any idea of the impossible? Why is it ultimately by this sin of pride that the Anthropocene condemns itself as of itself?
We must return to one of the primitive scenes of the Anthropocene, where biopolitics begins, in the 17th century with René Descartes, with Francis Bacon. The latter, in La Nouvelle Atlantide, published in 1627, made the "realization of all things possible" the very sign of scientific utopia, and there is this idea, which runs until the 20th century and collapses on what the sociologist Ulrich Beck called the "society of risk", which is a society of catastrophe, this idea that we will be able to achieve everything, from perfect health to the terraforming of planets. The possible is what abounds in the contemporary imagination, which imposes itself via the Internet, Alphabet and the Metaverse, and wanting to add to the possible, even with the best intentions in the world, it is in my opinion to abound in the sense of catastrophe, climatic, but also cognitive since making possible a new false opinion is now the pinnacle of digital glory.
But with Afrofuturism, with this attempt to visualize a future beyond all possible, this cosmic vision where the Earth detaches itself from the mortal gravity which crushed all those and all those who did not represent the white possibility, this recreation of the past to starting from what it should have been and not from what it was, with this way that Sun Ra has of playing notes that are not there and Nicole Mitchell of creating a community on the flute, the 'impossible presents itself as therapy. It is not a question of realizing the possible, it is a question of unrealizing it, so that something else appears, something miraculous one could say, or marvelous, but a marvel that does not deny the darkness of the universe, death, bewilderment, the pain of existing. The impossible is when the dark as such becomes luminous without losing its darkness.
It is this point which is very important: basically, the problem with the Anthropocene is not its excess, its hubris, it is that it is not capable of the impossible, which for it must be eliminated in the name of the possible. Limiting consumption or capitalism, moralizing them, will not be enough to deactivate the mechanisms underlying the capitalocene, we know that very well, this is what forms the basis of our despair: that no reform will be enough to stem the catastrophic temporality of the Anthropocene, that is to say that it will drag on, or at least last well after our extinction. To be capable of the impossible again, in political terms this is called a revolution, which is the name of the impossible that has remained impossible, on these points it is necessary to dive back into the philosophy of Derrida as well as that of Badiou, who are two thinkers of the necessary impossible. So, of course, I'm not saying that Afrofuturism gives us a political method, I'm saying that this aesthetic and the thought that runs through it gives our senses and our intellect an idea of what a cosmological revolution would be, the idea of "a new earth, a new heaven", as the prophet Isaiah said. If Sun Ra, as he says of himself, is "mythical", it is in the sense that he does not yet exist, and to really begin to exist, this world would have to come to an end.
My last question would relate to the relationship that your essay has never ceased to weave since its beginning with the thought of Walter Benjamin, and in particular with his famous image of the Angel of History. Is it in your case an Angel who indicates a way of messianism of the past by which he would be the guide of a future which would be African? En quoi s'oppose-t-il, parce qu'il est une Arche, à la Maison Blanche, à ce futur qui ne comprendrait pas l'Afrique avec lui ? N'y a-t-il pas incidemment un risque à romanticiser la question de l'afrofuturisme en posant l'image d'un Ange Noir : en quoi est-elle au contraire un point de ralliement possible de la lutte ?
Il serait faux de ma part de dire que je ne romantise pas l'Ange Noir, je sais que vous dites cela pour pointer un danger, et vous avez raison de le faire, mais pour moi il est nécessaire qu'un certain romantisme irrigue notre horizon politique, si on entend par romantisme le dehors récalcitrant qui conteste l'ordre délétère des choses, l'absolu dont toute créature finie, en tant que finie, est capable. Et les travaux de Michael Löwy sur le romantisme comme critique interne de la modernité sont ici cruciaux. Alors, oui, l'Ange Noir comme point de ralliement, c'est-à-dire comme carrefour de nos désirs, de nos rêves, de nos combats, c'est cela même, un point de rencontre dans l'obscurité où se trame notre aspiration au monde qui aurait dû exister.
Et c'est bien en cela qu'Ange Noir est aussi pour moi la rencontre de l'Afrofuturisme et de Walter Benjamin, auquel est consacré mon prochain livre : Le cosmos de Walter Benjamin : un communisme du lointain, qui sera publié en avril 2022 aux éditions Kimé. Le messianisme du passé, c'est, pour Benjamin, l'accomplissement dans le passé du bonheur qui a été empêché, grâce à une « constellation » formée avec le présent qui le venge. Ce n'est pas seulement, comme on le dit trop à propos de Benjamin, l'interruption du présent, c'est plutôt le passage de l'absolu dans l'interruption révolutionnaire du cours du monde. Dans la Mer Rouge, les flots se retirent, et dans l'espace désormais vacant, vous pouvez entendre les sons de la Terre, vous pouvez voir l'image du bonheur, celle de l'instant absolu, la délivrance du temps.
Frédéric Neyrat, L'Ange Noir de l'Histoire : Cosmos et technique de l'Afrofuturisme, éditions MF, novembre 2021, 128 p., 11 €
