Text page
Further Considerations on Afrofuturism
"Further Considerations on Afrofuturism" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 10
290 • Further Considerations on Afrofuturism SF Capital Power now deploys a mode the critic Mark Fisher (2000) calls SF (science fiction) capital. SF capital is the synergy, the positive feedback between future-oriented media and capital.
Definition · paragraph 10
290 • Further Considerations on Afrofuturism SF Capital Power now deploys a mode the critic Mark Fisher (2000) calls SF (science fiction) capital. SF capital is the synergy, the positive feedback between future-oriented media and capital. The alliance between cybernetic futurism and "New Economy" theories argues that information is a direct generator of economic value.
Definition · paragraph 18
298 • Further Considerations on Afrofuturism THE USES OF ALIENATION Afrofuturism does not stop at correcting the history of the future. Nor is it a simple matter of inserting more black actors into science-fiction narra- tives. These methods are only baby steps towards the more totalizing real- ization that, in Greg Tate's formulation, Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision.
Stakes · paragraph 8
288 • Further Considerations on Afrofuturism To establish the historical character of black culture, to bring Africa and its subjects into history denied by Hegel et al., it has been necessary to assemble countermemories that contest the colonial archive, thereby situat- ing the collective trauma of slavery as the founding moment of modernity.
History · paragraph 7
Further Considerations on Afrofuturism KODWO ESHUN Imagine a team of African archaeologists from the future - some silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dry - excavating a site, a museum from their past : a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs are identifiable as belong- ing to our present, the early twenty-first century.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.