Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Their work investigates the spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world — reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. They are currently an Annenberg PhD Fellow in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC in Los Angeles.
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As algorithmic models increasingly assist, judge, and manage human life, a growing
amount of scrutiny, criticism, and backlash has ensued, calling into question the
violence of such powerful applications and demanding a renewed focus on bias, ethics,
and governance. At the same time elite academic institutions and massive tech firms
have been adaptively adept at the capture and depoliticizing of its critics [Whittaker 2021]. Calls for a fundamental reckoning with the logics and
violences of computation have been largely disciplined into niche new industries of
expertise which Phan, Goldenfein, Mann, and Kuch refer to as economies of
virtue.
In response, this essay explores Black Computational Thought as a
critical intervention into the residues of Post-Enlightenment thought mapped onto and
subtending contemporary computational logics. By placing computation within such
genealogical bounds, we are free to ask the question, what other proximal places
might we look to to recover computational practices that challenge colonial logics of
coercion? What other genres lay in wait? Black Computational Thought holds open these
proximal possibilities and directs our attention to the quotidian, social, opaque,
woven, and fugitive practices of computation born from Black diasporic movement.
A commentary on Black Computational Thought as a unique critical intervention.
Sucked by the tongue and the lips
while the teeth release the succulence
of all voluptuous disintegration
I am turning under the trees
I am trailing blood into the rivers
I am walking loud along the streets
I am digging my nails and my heels into the land
I am opening my mouth
I am just about to touch the pomegranates
piled up precarious
This is a good time
This is the best time
This is the only time to come together
Fractious
Kicking `
Spilling
Burly
Whirling
Raucous
Messy
Free
Exploding like the seeds of a natural disorder.
-June Jordan, From Sea to Shining Sea
These are the words that close June Jordan’s poignant poem,
Natural order is being restored.
Natural order means you take a pomegranate
that encapsulated plastic looking orb complete
with its little top a childproof cap that you can
neither twist nor turn
and you keep the pomegranate stacked inside a wobbly
pyramid composed by 103 additional pomegranates
next to a sign saying 89 cents
Each
Natural order is being restored
Natural order does not mean a pomegranate
split open to the seeds sucked by the tongue and lips
while teeth release the succulent sounds
of its voluptuous disintegration
The natural order is not about a good time
This is not a good time to be against
the natural order.
In this scene Jordan describes the quotidian spread of economic dispossession through
newly liberated financial markets that mark the Reagan administration and a stark
shift towards neoliberal economic policy in the U.S. This rise corresponds to an
increase in supply chain logistics, managerial monitoring, just in time production,
deindustrialization, the contraction of public benefits, shifts in surplus state
capacity, the financialization of the market, and builds the architecture for a
global marketplace later inscribed through Free Trade Agreements Each,
are intentional moves that draw our attention to what Murphy would call the
economization of life. By this she means, a historically specific
regime of valuation hinged to the macrological figure of national
economy.
It names the practices that differentially value and govern life in terms of their
ability to foster the macroeconomy of the nation-state, such as life’s ability to
contribute to the gross domestic product (GDP ) of the nation. It is distinct from
commodifying life or biocapital, or from the broader history of using
quantification to monetize practices
In this passage Murphy is speaking to the ways in which life becomes valued by its
ability to contribute to larger consolidated national and international markets.
Additionally, she is pointing to the transposition of this valuation into a larger
logic underpinned by quantification, aggregation, scale, calculability, and
monetization. Central to the functioning of this shift is an imposition of
separabilityall that can be known about the things of the
world is gathered through formal constructs such as time, space, quantity,
quality, relation, and modality
This was not a good time to be found with a gun
This was not a good time to be found without one
This was not a good time to be gay
This was not a good time to be Black
This was not a good time to be a pomegranate
or an orange
This was not a good time to be against
the natural order
She uses the line, This was not a good time to be a
_________
, each time inserting a different subject position, as a device
to show both the pervasiveness of who is affected as well as the sectarian divisions
that rose in response. Jordan speaks to this tension in a 1981 interview with Adriane
M. Livingston, Peter Merchant, and Mary Elsie Robertson stating:
I really think that I know that Americans now are simply overwhelmed; like what is happening, what can we do. Everybody's tendency is understandably to try to take care of yourself; cover your back, make sure you have a house, a door for the key. I say that as understandable as that is, it seems to me that we cannot afford to divorce ourselves from what is happening in South Africa, for example, or for that matter, what is happening in West Germany, or Poland any more than the Reagan administration divides these issues. I think that the Reagan Administration and people in that; they see everything in global terms. From Brooklyn to Angola is not a big jump for them at all. I think that unless we, the people, begin to think in the same way, to make these connections, really on a visceral level, I feel for the survival of the species
Jordan’s words resound today as an echo. At the time of this writing, we are
currently entangled in cascading scenes of stark economic inequality, increasing
climate crisis, mass global displacement, a rapidly growing global pandemic, and
intensified state sanctioned and extra legal racial violence centered in xenophobia,
anti-blackness, and cis-hetero patriarchy. While the edges
This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screensharedon a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control) and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It’s a future that claims to be run onartificial intelligencebut is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyperexploitation. It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants
Yet today, as was the case in 1980, is not a time of futility but of radical reimagining and visceral reconnection. In the closing of this poem Jordan returns to the pomegranate finally succumb to desire, voluptuously disintegrating. In the final lines she writes that this is the only time to come together,
The abolition I speak of has roots in all radical movements for liberation and particularly in the Black Radical tradition. The abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically (meaning we don't yet know how, which is what magic is, what we don't know how to explain yet) - the abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically, resists division from class struggle and also refuses all the other kinds of power difference combinations that when fatally coupled, spark new drives for abolition. Abolition is a totality and it is ontological. It is the context and content of struggle, the site where culture recouples with the political; but it is not struggle's form. To have form, we have to organize.
We can see the form of abolition organizing in the flourishing of public acts of
rebellion, mutual aid projects, community accountability practices, transformative
justice trainings, everyday people gathering to block evictions, calling in
organizers, and hosting popular education workshops beyond the university. This
organizing can also be seen in the connections made between surveillant technologies
and carcerality. Increasingly, pressure is being placed on the ban of facial
recognition technologya desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the
proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being
outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or
instrument…moving outside their own adherence to the law and to
propriety
This essay takes up this call. It wrestles with our present moment, by which the old
world is dying. This paper takes seriously the call that June Jordan makes and the
emergence of a fugitive politics of refusal, so that the new world can be born.
Possible but not eventual, the present offers a moment of clarity. It is the time to
ask — Why does anti-blackness seem to perpetually overdetermine and saturate the
operating system regardless of who is programming it? How do we begin to move to
forms of critique and resistance that relinquish a certain focus on the
apparatusdispositif,
in his
1977 interview apparatus
refers to the institutional, administrative, and physical
structures through which power relations are formalized.
What follows are the beginning sketches towards what I am calling Black Computational
Thought. Built upon a long history of prior work, refute conceptions of the
digital that remove Black diasporic people from engagement with technology,
modernity, or the future
the forms of violence and
domination enabled by the recognition of humanity, licensed by the invocation
of rights, and justified on the grounds of liberty and freedom
Black
I will work primarily from two points of departure. The first engages the scholarship of Black feminist + trans studies scholars as they speak through grammars of fugitivity into othered ways of being and sharing knowledge that disrupt the coherence of the enlightened Subject as individuated, rational, and self determining. I then extend these thoughts through a reading of the Freedom Quilts, a clandestine system of mapping escape routes for enslaved Black people, as a vital form of computation that forces us to rethink what computing can be when freed from its dependence on colonial pursuits of managing bodies, spaces, and resources.
In the closing lines of From
For Bey, fugitivity is primarily a praxis that makes real other ways of living
together in the world. On this they state, It is not
necessarily a model or template; it is, in fact, defiant of these. It is a flash, a
glimmer, a flicker that forces us to see and do differently. It engenders our doing
something, not our being something; it engenders our moving with others on unruly
grounds
'Blackness' names, gives discursive flesh to, a critical existence, a disobedient
world-working, an irruption upon the norm that crisisizes the scene so we can
reimagine the terms and meanings of the world in which we live
Many scholars across Black studies, trans studies, queer studies, and Black feminism
it is a demand placed on us all to ensure that self-determinative spirit for others as well, to come at them with an utter, terrifying openness, presuming nothing, letting them show us as much or as little of themselves as they wish. This is how we form a different world worth living within: the radicality of all this movement work we’re doing rests in the ability to be fractured and critiqued by the forgotten, to give oneself, radically open, to the unknownness of the other, and to accept as a gift the various iterations of “Y’all need to get y’all act together
This understanding of self determination that Bey offers cannot be held individually but is always a practice of relating to others while moving through unknown currents. Gender here is not something that can be presupposed or prefigured. This also begins to open the space for engaging gender as a non-proprietary relationship. Bey draws a relationship between one’s ability to determine their own gender and the openness of receiving that determination by another. This reflects some of Bey’s earlier points about the intimacy that fugitivity offers in coming undone together. In this fugitive space the assumption to know someone based on their temporal presentation is undermined. Such a practice of intimacy begins with compassion and humility to ask, return, and re-return. This leaves space for the fluidity of gender while not eliding the ability to find temporary homes in its folds. Coming undone is not a permanent place of residence. This is crucial as it doesn’t disavow the material ways in which we move through the world and the imposition of gender. Rather, at its best this fugitive gesture allows for a reflection of the power relations by which subject formations occur. This posture recognizes the power in normative gender formation as a particular performance and asks where power might be built elsewhere.
Thinking fugitivity in this way sets it apart from the enclosure of method,
technique, or model and instead bears a strong resemblance to Diana Taylor’s work on
repertoire. Rather than a static archive, repertoire enacts
embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing — in
short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible
knowledge
being there,being a part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning
This focus on fugitivity as repertoire, as embodied knowledge, as gesture, and
movement extends Bey’s fugivitity from being a critical response to subjection and
raises questions about the ways in which such a radical undoing can also be a
practice of information sharing and knowledge production. The repertoire requires
presence as its mode of transmission. Through the presence of participants coming
together again and again, knowledge is produced and reproduced. It is held in the
fleshy extensions of those that share space on unruly grounds. In this context the
transmission of information is not separate from the material embodiment of those
involved. In fact it is dependent on material bodies in relation. The data is encoded
and transmitted through acts taken together. It remains local.to look at the local conditions of data can be a
form of resistance to the ideology of digital universalism and threat of
erasure that it poses to myriad data cultures
Mutual aid can also generate boldness and a
willingness to defy illegitimate authority. Taking risks with a group for a
shared purpose can be a reparative experience when we have been trained to
follow rules
each time a portion of the territory is exhausted,
the group moves around. Its function is to ensure the survival of the group by
means of this circularity
work toward
identity, and exile can be seen as beneficial, when these are experienced as a
search for the Other (through circular nomadism) rather than as an expansion of
territory (an arrowlike nomadism)
My engagements with fugitivity are an attempt to struggle with what it means to live
in the theory of fugitivity. Rather than just theorizing on what it can promise, I am
interested in how we can begin to recognize a fugitive praxis. In doing so I turn to
Tina Campt’s seminal text, Listening to Images. Rather than speaking to fugitivity as
a constant exhaustive physical act of movement and escape, Campt is interested in the
quiet and quotidian. Campt works from this position toward a theory of fugitivity and
situated understanding of the politics of refusal. Writing on this Campt states,
the quotidian must be understood as a practice rather than an
act/ion. It is a practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create
possibility within the constraints of everyday life. For blacks in diaspora, both
quiet and the quotidian are mobilized as everyday practices of refusal
Keeping with this focus on the mundane, Campt works through identification photography
as her primary material to think with. She theorizes these photographs has having a
sonic quality that operates at a haptic level, only understood through feeling.
Borrowing from Georges Perec, she refers to these photographs as infra-ordinary, — everyday practices we don’t always notice and whose seeming
insignificance requires excessive attention
Despite its complications, or perhaps because of them, fugitive praxes are important to break open the disciplining logics of rationality and separability. Fugitivity at its best is a repertoire that requires interdependence for care and regular maintenance. I am invested in practices of computation that emphasize such interdependencies while moving through the processes of sharing, storing, and making meaning together. Here, the social and the technical are explicitly intertwined rather than ignored or mechanistically separated. In what follows I hope to show how fugitivity opens computation to being a practice in the making, co-constituted through social repertoires and formations. It is not universal or standard but operates through specific genres. I believe it is within such genres that we might find social processes that make the space to return again and again while immersed in the practices of sharing information and risk together.
In this final section I will bring forth Bey’s subject come undone, Taylor’s
repertoire, and Campt’s infra-ordinary to bear as I locate them within the Freedom
Quilts as a future leaning computational past and a living body within Black
Computational Thought. I frame this discussion through David Golumbia’s
computationalism. In his text, The Cultural Logic of Computation, Golumbia makes a
distinction between computers and computationalism. For him computationalism is
is the view that not just human minds are computers but that
mind itself must be a computer — that our notion of intellect is, at bottom,
identical with abstract computation, and that in discovering the principles of
algorithmic computation via the Turing Machine human beings have, in fact,
discovered the essence not just of human thought in practice but all thought in
principle
as a commitment to the view that a great deal, perhaps all, of human
and social experience can be explained via computational processes
computationalism entails not merely rationalism per se, but a particular species
of rationalism with clear conceptual and historical weight, which we nevertheless
seem all too ready to forget
secondary (efficient) causes
of motion. This focus on efficient causes
reduced the complexity of being into observable differences made certain through
measurement. This certainty made a mechanistic world view possible by which
difference is irreducible and creates the contours by which our ethical
considerations for each other are limited and macerated. Interiority qua universal subjectivity emerges from numerical rationality applied
as an understanding of human subjectivity, and not vice versa. This is not to
reject the idea of subjectivity outside of rationalist modernity: it is rather to
suggest that the particular and elaborated form of interiority we associate with
present-day modernity underwrites an unexpected and radical mechanism
universal
ethic falls away is
in fact embodied within white European signification. da Silva argues that, in both cases, cultural difference sustains a moral discourse, which
rests on the principle of separability. This principle considers the social as a
whole constituted of formally separate parts. Each of these parts constitutes a
social form, as well as geographically-historically separate units, and, as such,
stands differentially before the ethical notion of humanity, which is identified
with the particularities of white European collectives
Through the principle of separability which da Silva grounds in Kantian reason, the
different pieces which are imagined as components of an ordered world are
incommensurable with each other. Their relationship is one of unbridgeable difference
and distance. The mechanism that Golumbia describes sits at the center of this
ordered world and is inscribed in the moral project of the human, written as white,
European, and male. Therefore the others of Europe can only be measured by their
difference to white European humanity and are therefore subjected to partial
protections through rights and partial violence. This undergirds one of da Silva’s
primary questions, How the racial combines with other social
categories (gender, class, sexuality, culture, etc.) to produce modern subjects
who can be excluded from (juridical) universality without unleashing an ethical
crisis?
I have attempted to jeopardize the status of
the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what
might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By
throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the
transparency
of sources as fictions of history,
I wanted to make visible the
production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic slave trade and, as well, in
the discipline of history), to describe the resistance of the object,
if
only by first imagining it, and to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries
of the commodity
One of the primary tactics that informs the design and function of the Freedom Quilts
is the use of everyday objects to circulate information within traditional African
societies. Speaking on the power of everyday objects Tobin and Dobard state, Communicating secrets using ordinary objects is very much a part of
African culture, in which familiarity provides the perfect cover. Messages can be
skillfully passed on through objects that are seen so often they become invisible.
These objects are creative expressions of African artisans and give tangible form
to the cultural and religious ideas of their kingdoms
learned and taught via an oral tradition, based on memory,
aided by the use of specially designed mnemonic devices. Encoded staffs, stools,
memory boards, sculpture, and textiles chronicled the history of a people. But
only the griots and the diviners were able to read them
The quilt code which Tobin and Dobard uncover, includes ten primary patterns and a number of secondary patterns. Each pattern had two meanings, both to signal to those enslaved to prepare to escape and to give clues to indicate safe directions on the journey. Following these instructions enslaved people would know when to gather the tools they would need for the coming journey, the time to escape from the plantation, ways to navigate hundreds of miles to Cleveland (as a prominent location for continued travel to free destinations in the North), places to find fresh clothes and shelter, and practices for recognizing other confidants. This mnemonic device was used in addition to sampler quilts which held all ten primary patterns in sequence to aid in recognition while on the run. After leaving the plantation enslaved people would encounter quilts bearing single patterns left in public to air. These quilts became the constitutive matter that held together disparate subterranean connections. Because the circulation of information traveled widely and lacked centralization, the mnemonic devices used and patterns themselves changed often to insulate from outside parties learning and understanding the quilt code. For such a complex system to work it required a tremendous amount of labor, maintenance, and shared risk. This means that aside from the use of everyday objects, the making of shared diaspora cultures through the combining and mixing of cultural artifacts gave rise to fugitive formations themselves, in Bey’s sense of the word.
Here, computation is not an internal process housed in the Subject (in a vacuum of interiority) that sees and measures the exterior world as a series of different bodies upon which forces are acting. Instead the Freedom Quilts become a site in which Blackness is being written through the creolization of symbols, meanings, context, and codes that literally calculate pathways to fugitive escape and flight from the plantation. Programmability, in this context, complicates the temporality of code as executable function, as cause and effect. The Freedom Quilts generate a type of code that doesn’t execute automatically but makes the act of interpretation explicit. While encountering quilts left in public fugitives would discern the code and simultaneously have to read it in context, within the geography of placement. In this instance the executability of code is halted as a declarative axiomatic language imagined within syntax. Code is not an absolute instruction but is read in addition to landscape. Differing from the programming of second-order cybernetics, the landscape is not reintegrated into code, making it workable. Instead the limit of computation is held by the materiality of space, it is not transcended. Black people on the run would read the code with the landscape and continue on their journey. Computation in this instance does not need to be a totalizing logic that engulfs everything but lives alongside bodies in motion, in relation to geography, reading both simultaneously.
This relation between Black sojourners, geography, and the quilt code also extends to
ancestral calculations.We are the future predicted by the careful
calculations of our ancestors, their specific choices about when to breathe,
when to sleep, who to be, where to go, and for how long
Computation here engages difference outside of separability.I am
highlighting the ways in which the organization of information and capital in
the 1960s powerfully responds-across many registers-to the struggles for racial
justice and democracy that so categorized the U.S. at the time. Many of these
shifts were enacted in the name of liberalism, aimed at distancing the overt
racism of the past even as they contained and cordoned off progressive
radicalism.
When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe,
difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the
expression of an elementary entanglement
One such formation resides in the quilting bees on plantations. Quilting bees were collective circles of primarily women that sat together and constructed quilts in collaboration. Because these quilts were often sourced from various spare pieces of fabric they were piecemealed and required numerous people to collect and plan each quilt. Quilting bees were sites that were both social and operated as convergences for vital stops along the plantation grapevine. Referencing James Oliver Horton’s work in
interregional communication system existing between free blacks of the Northeast, the Midwest, and the South and enslaved Southern blacks. Horton chronicles how enslaved blacks and free blacks were able to meet at inns frequented by traveling plantation owners who were accompanied by black slaves acting as drivers and servants. He discusses how black sailors were able to exchange information with enslaved blacks at port cities; how slaves who were hired out to shops were able to gather information; how the black churches, even under the scrutiny of whites, acted aspost officesfor messages containing escape routes and instructions for escape and survival; and how plantation slaves hired out to work in a neighboring town served as dispatchers of these messages
As Tobin and Dobard document, sites such as quilting bees became gathering spaces through which communication between free Black people in the north, white abolitionists, and the enslaved took place across numerous plantations and regions were able to send messages and communicate. Again, because agency was assumed only within the Subject figured as white, propertied, and male, enslaved Black people that accompanied their masters were able to play covert roles as dispatchers of secret messages. Likewise, quilting bees were seen as docile innocuous gatherings associated with craft and feminized labor. Yet, it is exactly this infra-ordinary quality of Black quilt making and its capacity for agency that allows for resistance to take place in the open.
Looking at quilting bees in this way also allows us to build on Tiffany Lethabo King’s understanding of fungibility, as it relates to computation.
As a Black fleshy analytic, I argue, Black fungibility can denote
and connote pure flux, process, and potential. To be rendered Black and fungible
under conquest is to be rendered porous, undulating, fluttering, sensuous, and in
a space and state at-the-edge and outside of normative configurations of sex,
gender, sexuality, space, and time to stabilize and fix the human category. Black
fungibility is an expression of the gratuitous violence of conquest and slavery
whose repertoire has no limits or bounds. It operates both materially on the body
and produces Blackness (as idea and symbol) as a discursive space of open
possibility.
The ways that Blackness works in the diaspora to give rise to various gatherings
blurs this line between the separability of things, echoing Moten’s definition of
blackness as a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that
anarranges every line.
were able to compile facts regarding geography, landmarks, places to avoid,
obscure trails, mileage, and the locations of safe places where food and rest were
waiting, many escaping slaves knew where to go and how to get there. Former
runaways shared their own tactics and routes of escape. Most early escape attempts
were individual efforts by slaves, not part of any organized cooperative ventures
headed by Northern abolitionists.
Elsa Barkley Brown speaks brilliantly about the ways that material cultures carry
alternate understandings for socially, economically, and politically ordering the
world. Speaking specifically about Black women’s quilting practices she writes,
African-American quilters prefer the sporadic use of the same
material in several squares when this material could have been used uniformly
because they prefer variation to regularity…In other words, the symmetry in
African-American quilts does not come from uniformity as it does in Euro-American
quilts; rather, the symmetry comes through the diversity
…for each person is allowed, in fact required, to be
an individual, to go his/her own way, and yet to do so in concert with the
group-to be an individual in the context of the community
Here the digital is returned to the digit, to the hand, to haptics, textures, and textiles, to the process of making through material and proximal relations to each other, to making through endured engagements with difference. Brown’s reflections on Black women’s quilting practices carry aspects of Bey’s self-determinism as a repertoire for ways to share information and knowledge with each other through endured practices of risk taking.
In closing, I want to be clear: Black Computational Thought is not just a historic
recovery of the fact that Black people have done some shit with numbers. It is an
epistemic confrontation with the logics of computation situated elsewhere and
challenges the very nature of what we consider computation to be and to have been. It
is an argument for forms of computing embedded in technologies of living,it is a force
where the political and logical encounter the spiritual being, where activists
and spiritualists come together to make sense of black life and journey toward
black wellness
humble, and strategic, subtle and discriminating. It is
devious and exacting. It’s not always loud and demanding. It is frequently quiet
and opportunistic, dogged and disruptive
It strives for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as
the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen. The grammar of
black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but
must….It is the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is
not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future
now — as imperative rather than subjunctive — as a striving for the future you
want to see, right now, in the present
grappling with precarity, while maintaining an active
commitment to the everyday labor of creating an alternative future
black