The adoxic adventures of John Henry in the 21st century

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Notes

1. Arendt's (1958: 63 n62) translation of this pre-Platonic fragment (“The people should fight for the law as for a wall”), like the spirit and much of the content of the work in which she presents it, inspires this essay directly.

2. The framing of a discussion of technoculture grounded in Black societies, culture and politics must begin with moral and civic philosophy for a simple reason: the pervasiveness of market mentality and technical sensibilities that haunt so much of public “moral” discourse can lead only to emaciated and embarrassingly curt discussions of the countless question marks that modern technoscience regularly pushes up through the dirt of our tattered civic spaces. In a strange fashion, the technoeconocentric position – I use the term “position” loosely to refer to theory, analyses and commentary focused more or less solely on the economic significance of technological change to Blacks – foregrounds this point.

3. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (2005: 8–10).

4. See Rai (1999), Slaughter and Rhoades (1996), and Bennett (2004) for discussions of the Bayh–Dole Act, creation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and case law supporting significant expansion of patentable subject matter. See Arendt (1958), Latour (2003) and Winner (1977) for philosophical arguments suggesting that any barrier between laboratories and other social spaces is more or less imaginary.

5. A surrogate for this position might be Timothy Jenkins's unabashedly bourgeois “Black Futurists in the Information Age” (2003 reprint), or James Boggs, “The Negro and Cybernation” (1966). Obviously ideology understood in the vulgar sense does not impact this collective's coagulation. The broad ideological spectrum traversed depicts the tenacious and strange attraction the technology/economics confluence exercises.

6. My discussion of technological determinism draws heavily upon Bimber; his account is, in my opinion, currently definitive, and is especially useful in evaluating the significance of various technologies. Compare Winner (1977: 324) and McLuhan (1995: 238f) regarding technological “somnambulism” and the “Narcissus trance,” respectively. Both these terms seem to fit within the definition of normative technological determinism. Though sharing certain assumptions with technological legislation, technological determinism lacks the proactive dimension and the voluntaristic potential of the former.

7. The term Afrofuturism was neologized by Dery (1993). See also Nelson (2002: 14). However, Eshun (1998) argues that the general analytics, themes and arguments of Afrofuturism predate Dery's christening.

8. Ron Eglash tagged this titular issue in the closing moments of his essay in Nelson (2002: 60).

9. Derrida's (1985) explicit engagement with the Nietzschean corpus is valuable for numerous reasons, but, in this context, especially so for suggesting a limit to textual appropriation generally (29) and for anticipating and problematizing (possible) Afrofuturist entanglement in a “powerful [Nietzschean] utterance-producing machine that [possibly] programs the movements” (29) of all three brands of Futurism.

10. Considering Baraka's erudition, it is likely that he is referring to Wiener less as some form of orginary precedent than as a nod to the then intense discussions of cybernetics, the latter surely at least a partial inspiration for his poetic essay. Classic examples of substantivist thought include Marx's Capital, Engels' On Authority, Marx and Engels' The German Ideology and preeminently Heidegger's essay The Question Concerning Technology. More contemporary substantivist analyses can be found in the works of philosophers associated with science and technology studies, such as Winner (1977, 1986) and Latour (1992); the New Chicago jurisprudence of scholars such as Lawrence Lessig (1998); and software designers subscribing to the methodological and design principles of captology as developed by B.J. Fogg (2003).

11. Winner's most famous example of material governance is his description of Robert Moses' new Long Island bridges and the racist and classist values embedded therein. See Winner (1986). Lessig uses the same example (1999: 92).

12. Sheree R. Thomas' anthology (2000) of marginalized science fiction and futurological literature written by Black authors, and Martin Kevorkian's (2006) critical analyses of cinematic depictions of Blackness and information technology are two excellent and provocative starting points, the former presenting futures, near and remote, that center on matters of Black culture, the latter deconstructing the racial politics of major science fiction films such as the earliest Star Wars trilogy.

13. Though my remarks go to the condition of Black folk, I see no reason that the basic arguments should not find some similar degree of appropriateness within the contexts of other politicized populations.