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In the scholarship on Brathwaite that I’ve read so far most critics see in the Sycorax Video-Style (SxVx) either the culmination/advancement of Brathwaite’s aesthetic project of creating a “total Caribbean community” using what he has famously called “nation language,” or, on the other hand, they see a radical evolution of his aesthetic project that overturns his focus on the particular dialect/idiolectic “nation-language” he had advocated for in his previous work. Ignacio Infante’s “The Digital Vernacular” argues for the former, while Carrie Noland’s “Remediation and Diaspora” argues for the latter. Infante’s essay takes this to the limit, arguing that Brathwaite’s own historicization of the utopic “virtuality” offered by computer memory constitutes something like a lost potential of real utopia. In a fairly techno-utopian vein, Infante suggests that the purest form of the SxVx style is available only to the user, Brathwaite, typing in real-time on the Mac SE/30, and that anything else succumbs to the old problems of inscriptive media like paper. The only “video” Infante can imagine in the SxVx is the literal computer screen illuminated by dancing pixels while Brathwaite types. This is far too reductive a poetics for Brathwaite, whose sensitivity to the verbo-voco-visual matrix of poetry, I think, became like video in its negotiation of the discrepancy between the sonic and the visual. My ultimate feeling is that we have to take absolutely seriously the SxVx as video, perhaps, even, as video poetry. Video, after all, was a nascent medium in the 80s. Videos were especially popular among bootleggers, so it became something like a creative evolution of the Dub culture Brathwaite was part of. The medium of video is notoriously difficult to pin down (not unlike poetry), but most scholars eventually tend to agree that it has to do with the imbrication of sound and visual information on magnetic tape; that is, it is a post filmic medium at its core, but little else. Even that is too strict a definition, for the technology of video really emerged during the broadcast era, so video became inextricable to television and the domestic space. And the word “video” continues to be used today to describe audio visual information that plays in a linear timeline and has nothing to do with magnetic tape. In any case, Infante’s reduction of “video” to “computer” or “computation” is wrong, or at least reductive. So, too, is Noland’s discussion of “code” as something like the only mediating force at work. Certainly computation is part of the matrix constituting SxVx, but it is more than that. And beyond “code,” the entire apparatus of the Mac SE/30 should be taken into consideration, opening the materiality of Brathwaite’s SxVx onto the web of industrial manufacturing and supply chains. I think Noland, by the end of the essay, opens us toward discussion of the poetry in this way when she argues,

“I would argue, then, that Ancestors marks the end of a certain postcolonial ontology: a belief in the uninterrupted, expressive plenitude of call-and-response, in the uncomplicated self-identity of African subjects, and in the “immanence” of truths unveiled without the use of an “outside technology” (90).

Carrie Noland focuses on the increased discrepancy between sound and sight inaugurated by the SxVs, and how this discrepancy actually “reawakens” our sense of sight and sound from the droll slog of conventional print-based media, bringing Brathwaite into conversation with a history of the avant-garde aiming to re-enliven the senses after the dulling effects of modernity. Although Brathwaite does discuss, to some extent, the re-awakening of a pre-scriptural culture, claiming that computers are closer to oral cultures, I wonder, ultimately, if rather than some kind of nostalgic “reawakening” of sensation bringing us “back” to some kind of hieroglyphic culture, if it is not more accurate to say that the SxVx reorients our senses, or, perhaps, disorients them (at least insofar as it resists or throws into question our understanding of the sensory mediation expected by poetry).

Noland writes, and while there is much I disagree with in the article, I do tend to agree with this, that “Digital, “improvisation”…threatens to become detached from any connection to a specific community, a specific set of voices’ (95). Here, Noland suggests that the danger of the SxVx is that it detaches Brathwaite’s aesthetic from the specifically Caribbean goal he earlier focused on with his theory of “nation language,’ derritorializing it, and I think this is (partly) true, especially given the inherently global object a computer is. Trends in global history offer the same problem: the Anthropocene, Climate Change, etc., while experienced asymmetrically, also present no “outside” or “specific voice” to appeal to for guidance. At the very least: “Avant-garde experiment and diasporic practice attack in historically and geographically specific ways the particular impositions suffered as a result of the technologies through which they achieve materialization,” while also exploiting “the particular options offered by those technologies” (94-5). This opens thinking about the SxVx on a broader scale, as part of the global trend of digitalization and the increasing control of information systems. In Noland’s language, it opens us to “the X” as the “internal other, not a sound but instead a mark (X) that cannot be vocalized, that cannot be performed” (90). 

In both cases, the authors tend to refer to Brathwaite’s own account of the development of the SxVx in relation to three events: the death of his wife, the loss of a hard drive containing many of his files, and a brutal attack on Brathwaite by burglars. While one kind of writing about what a poet’s work does involves reference to biographical material, there are aspects of the SxVx that go beyond Brathwaite’s biography and that also cannot be explained by reference to what he says about it. In any case, it’s not all that interesting to me critically to say, “this is what Brathwaite says his work does,” and then to repeat that in a critical style that essentially agrees with Brathwaite.” What would be the point of writing about it, then? It is possible that critical accounts of SxVx have been weighed down too heavily by Brathwaite’s own account of the purpose of the SxVx, in part because of the many interviews he gave on the subject, perhaps even out of respect for Brathwaite himself.

I’m interested in reading the SxVx as a signal “infrastructuralist poem” that troubles structuralism and poststructuralism, appearances and essences, and identity in general, especially the identity of what constitutes the poem and what constitutes criticism of the poem. Often unremarked on in the scholarship on Brathwaite is that he developed the SxVx at precisely the moment of the global unleashing of neoliberal capitalism’s great acceleration in the form of the massive deregulation of markets characterizing the 80s. It also began around the fall of the Soviet Union, “the end of history,” so to speak, or the dawn of “capitalist realism,” as Mark Fisher would have it. At the time when “poetics in the expanded field” was trying to understand what a poem is relative to art’s long ago “dematerialization of the art object.” A poem, however, unlike the traditional art object the expanded field of minimalist sculpture and performance sought to abolish, was never a singular object like a painting or sculpture is. It has always been an entity formed by the social relation of language, a differing and difference making system of meaning. Conversely, while art dematerialized, if anything, poetry materialized, precisely at the point when whole territories of language’s heterotopic existence began to be legislated by the logic of the database.

I aim to make a strong connection between Brathwaite’s own thinking of ghosts and spirits in relation to the technology of the computer (without losing the specificity of Brathwaite’s explicitly reference to Vodun culture), and the ghostly time the 90s is, an anticipatory time of a future yet to come that already seems to determine the present, hence the apathy. (cf. Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, for example, or Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic, or later, of course, the eternal stasis of the bodies harvested in The Matrix and/or Minority Report’s complex dealings with time and crime). The hauntologicaly hyperstitional vibe of the 90s was partially the result of the rapid increase of financial speculation and this process’s attendant “making of indebted man,” as Maurizio Lazzarato would have it, or what Achille Mbembe has called the “the becoming black of the world,” and what others might refer to as the general proletarianization of life that we experience today as the pervasive condition of radical precarity, the gig-economy, and “the death of capital,” in the words of Mackenzie Wark. Indeed, Brathwaite’s Sycorax-Video-Style should be read alongside Dub, Raggae, and hip-hop’s transformation (co-evolvement) with techno, house, jungle, drum n bass, etc. There is no doubt that Brathwaite’s work is hauntological. But is it hyperstitional?

Of course, Fisher’s hauntology derives from Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, a text suffused with the ghostly, the haunted, time’s “out-of-jointness,” and the radical discrepancy between the essence of a thing and its appearance. Marx, for Derrida, is the ultimate spectre, the endlessly recurring signifier for a world liberated from the strictures of private property and hierarchical capitalist rule. Marx is not hollow, but reveals the hollowness of the capital relation. Derrida’s main metaphor for this hollowness throughout Spectres comes from Hamlet, specifically the armor worn by the king’s ghost. When sovereignty becomes indeterminate and ghostly, then time is out of joint, but this is precisely when the specter appears to remind us of the artificiality of our understanding of identity, especially the naturalized identity of commodities. To outline briefly, Brathwaite’s SxVx, like the king’s armor in Hamlet, creates an indeterminate shell or carapace around the identity of the poem in the form of its processural topological condition as a split thing, irreconcilably fissured in its identity as the “original” and the “remediation.” This brings the question of identity to poetry and poetics in a unique way, and gives the critic an explicit, impossible challenge. What do you read? The absent center of Brathwaite’s oeuvre, the hollow of identity shielded by the armor of the SxVx, is a diffuse set of points describing the shape of Brathwaite’s quite difficult to track oeuvre, with its many versionings, evolutions, transformations, and indeterminacies. The king doesn’t not have clothes on, the king is clothes all the way down. We understand it (sovereignty) exists only in negative, in relation, as a fundamentally opaque but active field of forces. Power is the expression of this field of forces. Anaoriginal by nature (in Fred Moten’s sense), the work, finally, presents only the possibility of critical dehiscence from the desire for an “actual” poetic object, any determinate poem whatsoever. This, I think, shifts critical responsibility to an ethic of care, and away from an ethic of explanation, paranoia, or even reparative reading. It might shift us away from reading altogether. The death of the reader, too. Perhaps it produces a subjectivizing concern, where the poem must be understood as the catalytic dissolution of subject/object boundaries continuing to infect the discourse of philosophical aesthetics (See: Nicholas Whittaker, “Blackening Aesthetic Experience). The SxVx is the articulation of a ghosted presence that conforms to no presence; it is a hollow nothing or an “internal difference,” where meaning lies. But a hollow nothing is not nothing, it is no-thing, where form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Or “when” I should say. This is poetics, not aesthetics. 

While I’m interested in reading the differences between the “original” and the SxVx texts, as well as the SxVx texts “without original,” as mentioned in the previous post, I’m most interested in formulating a poetics of the conditioning of this diffuse realm of aesthetic experience (that we will syncretize into poetics as that which is without aesthetics or experience) that essentially includes the exclusion of apprehension and understanding — what I think Jean Francois Lyotard means by “passing” — and/or the anoriginal “materiality” where Derrida’s trace defers and differs. One of the ways Brathwaite’s work brings this space to attention, if not apprehension, is in the sheer difficulty (read: impossibility) of locating it. That passing place, for Brathwaite, is a writing of the disaster, as in Blanchot’s formulation of the disaster as what everything becomes under the disaster, even as that everything is understood as a fissure from the stars (dis / aster). “The disaster ruins everything, all while leaving everything in tact.” We are under the disaster in precisely the same way as we are under the stars. One of the disasters today is that the spacetime between the computer and the printer, or reader and writer, or user-protocol-user, a spacetime that becomes, in poetry, no space at all, no time at all, the absolute limit of space and time where that limit becomes what is shared, what shares, and at its best, marks a possible heterotopia, and/or the constant processural utopia of difference — this possibility has been colonized by an essentially disastrous, barbaric notion of time, by systems moving at ¾ the speed of light (as Bernard Stiegler would often write) with the explicit goal of reducing all space and time to a profane machine for profit, all while destroying our ability to dream. Possibility here becomes the impossible. Ghosts emerge when the dream is dead. 

In my next post, I plan to discuss how several versions of Brathwaite’s piece “Asturias” presents the critic with a new challenge. While I’ve been unable, so far, to track down the “original” publication in Black Renaissance Noir, I have been able to find some transcribed versions (whether by computer or by human I can’t tell). These new versions of the SxVx should give us pause, and offer a novel development in the indeterminate, diffuse, open-set-topology Brathwaite’s poems encourage us to expand into, or rather, become. It turns out that OCR makes of these poems even stranger artifacts than they already are.