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From the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean: the sounds of quantum history

Iain Chambers

Talk by Iain Chambers delivered as part of the event “The Black Atlantic at 30: Revival and Erasure” (Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL, London, 5th of May 2023) celebrating the 30th anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic (1993)

These are simply some notes inspired by the critical sea-change induced by Paul’s The Black Atlantic. For, if Paul’s work crucially registers the racial constitution of the political economy, languages and institutions of the modern Atlantic world and the making of the West, it also does something more. It proposes a profound interrogation of what passes for history and knowledge, querying their grammar and interrogating their disciplining of the contemporary condition.

 

Fluid archives suspended in water sustain aquatic memories that connect bodies of water to bodies in the water: from the Black Atlantic to today’s Black Mediterranean. Registering the marine world as essential to the making of modernity—from slave ships and sea-borne empires to container logistics, the industrialised extraction of its resources (from fish to fossil fuels) and the centrality of inter-continental migration to the modern epoch—we encounter the brutal consistency of colonialism in the haunting racism that produces the violent grammar of inhospitality, today etched in the ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’ (Hortense Spillers) on the body of the contemporary migrant.

Unlike linear chronologies and accredited histories, such rhythms and flows release the recursive dynamics of other inconclusive narratives entangled in indeterminacy and contingency. We find ourselves at sea, a little lost and uncertain beneath more expansive, wilder skies. A necessary reorientation interrupts and reworks the terra-centric Occidental template of historiography, sociology, and philosophy, puncturing their faith in rendering the world transparent to their will. It leads to what Denise Ferreira da Silva has called a moment of knowing contrary to modern knowledge, which she calls a ‘foreign language’ in her borrowing from Octavia Butler

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And then, diving deeper into the archive, we are taken through the plantations of the Americas, Manchester cotton factories and the Atlantic coast of Africa back to the eastern Mediterranean seaboard where Italian merchants in the Balkans and medieval Black Sea ports on the steppes purchase Slavs for the slave markets of Cairo and Genoa, Venice and Naples. (Along with the thousands of slaves sold yearly in the slave market of early fifteenth-century Venice, it has recently been researched that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, Caterina, was an enslaved person, probably captured by Mongols in the Caucasus and sold to Venetians.)

 

From the Black Atlantic to the Black Mediterranean, seas of dispossession and un-belonging have constantly exposed colonial modernity’s political, juridical, and onto-epistemological limits. They promote a constant critique of the possessive liberal premises of Western democracy. Today, those on the water in their small boats and dinghies, the wretched of the sea, the damned of the Mediterranean, cannot source their identity in the nation-state’s territory. Justice fails. Without papers or documents to verify their liberty, they are captives: objects reduced to the anonymous juridical space once occupied by the enslaved. Without rights, they are without an acknowledged place in the world. Waste ‘in human shape’, to borrow the phrase that Paul used to refer to those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire in 201

 

As Sylvia Wynter’s noted unpacking of Occidental cosmology so effectively points out, this debasement, hierarchisation and othering of human life are central to the political constitution of the modern European nation-state and its appropriation of the planet. Meanwhile, the excluded and negated sustain black holes of concentrated historical and cultural energy that continue to exist and resist. Their persistence provokes the end of a particular historical and philosophical constellation and the inauguration of another. They dub modernity, cut up its languages, remix the coordinates, and exercise their rights to live in another present and here imagine an alternative, or counter, future. And this returns us to the Gramscian and Fanonian insistence, so eloquently pursued by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, that the warp and woof of culture is the fundamental texture of political life.

 

As the form of subaltern life today most sharply identified by Occidental law, surveillance and public discourse, the “illegal migrant” (and who decided that?), her unauthorised practices and knowledge, constructed on the move, proposes a form of political hacking that exposes all the limits of a purported democracy and its concepts of freedom and citizenship. Other equations exist, constructed and codified in the multiplicity of other bodies that matter, not simply my own. We here find ourselves in far deeper waters, offshore, drifting away from the colonising imperative of the Occidental episteme and what Ruth Gilmore Wilson powerfully calls ‘vulnerability to premature death’.

 

Beyond Giorgio Agamben’s noted thesis of ‘bare life’, the migrant and many others propose the exceptional state that exposes the limits of European humanism and its custody of universal rights. We are taken to the edges of the abyss to venture beyond Agamben, and much of modern philosophy, for which philosophy is the West and the West is philosophy. For the migrant, the non-white body, even if mute and lifeless, strips away the political and philosophical paradigm of Europe. Her presence interrogates my authority in the world. This explains the fear and the violence of the response.

 

Today, the ‘autonomy’ of those practising all the difficulties of ‘freedom’, below and beyond the brutal confines of the nation-state, bends and breaks the established frontiers of identity and citizenship. The migrant, like indigenous resistance, non-white native life and the poor of the planet, reiterates Frantz Fanon’s request to demand human behaviour from the other. We, or I, am that other. Against the limited adjustments of multi-cultural liberalism, this evokes the further skies of a radical and planetary humanism so persistently pursued in Paul’s work that, as Aimé Césaire and Fanon insisted, is to be measured against the world, not merely Europe and the West.

 

So, this is not simply about histories from below or presumed peripheries reconfiguring the centres of power and their languages. On the contrary, introducing non-authorised coordinates, bodies, and lives forces us to acknowledge the violent denial that constitutes our present; that is, query the temporality and terminology of the inherited narrative and its institutional pedagogies. Rather than an adjustment through the recovery of the resistance and the refused, we confront a further radical undoing and reconfiguration of what we understand by terms such as history, documents, archives, testimony, genocide and memory as we ask who has the right to narrate, define, direct and explain… to have rights.

 

Myths of neutrality unwind and evaporate. In its place, the open and precarious practice of registration subverts the distancing logic and control of colonised representation.

 

This undoing of our usual understandings of time and space, history and geography, as they speak again and are folded into further accountings of life, place and death, produce what Paul in The Black Atlantic called a ‘rhizomorphic, fractal structure’ (4). Or, as Sun Ra put it, ‘Change your time to the unknown factor’. This is the mobile composition and altogether less guaranteed spacetime of what I would call quantum history. It is where the colonial clock is contested and interrupted by other times, by the temporalities, rhythms and pace of others.

I will now use the rest of my time deploying a language dear to all of Paul’s dauntingly erudite research and writing: music, to sound out the emergence of a contemporary Black Mediterranean. In different ways, we both understand music not as a simple illustration of historical processes seemingly occurring elsewhere or as a symptom of pre-existing cultural forces and relations but rather as a transforming and critical language in its own right.

Within it lies the deeper pursuit of displacing the ocular hegemony of white sight (Nicholas Mirzoeff) with subaltern, black sounds. Once again, challenging disciplinary borders so as not to propose the history or sociology of music, but music as history, as sociology. Not to think in the boring Kantian manner of music as an abstract object of study and seek to render sound transparent to universal knowledge, but to decompose that imposition by thinking with music as practice, process and proposition.

 

Mediterranean musicality permits us to travel in spaces and temporalities that precede and exceed the disciplinary logic and methodologies of the modern nation-state. They produce less linear understandings of spacetime and more stratified and ragged maps. These do not simply mirror a unique will to power. Sustained in sound, this critical opening muddies the illusory transparency of transcendental Occidental rationality.

 

In the gaps, sliding between the authorised notes, bending and distorting the dominant cultural arrangement so that other cultures and histories voice other Mediterraneans, reasoning is freed from the singular temporality of unilateral modernity. Instead, it leads to further understandings of the making and becoming of a Mediterranean lived otherwise.

Mediterranean blues, where the scales and alternative tonalities, drawn from Islam and the Arab and Ottoman worlds, from Africa and Asia, historically and culturally mingle with the sounds of the diasporas of the Black Atlantic. The hint of a cry (think of Arab song, flamenco, Neapolitan vocals, fado and rebetika), the nasal intonations, the dark, rough granular texture, the insistence on melisma rather than a distinct intonation, the voice on edge, close to breakdown, registers the body in the sounds of a distinctive Mediterranean musicality.

Consider the famous rebetika singer Rosa Eskenazi, a Turkish-speaking Sephardic Jew born in Istanbul and raised in Thessaloniki and Athens. Rosa perfected her art in the taverns of Piraeus, singing in Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Ladino and Armenian. At the height of her fame in the 1930s, she recorded in Athens and Istanbul. Her biography is only one of the multiple musical maps transmitted around the Mediterranean where to paraphrase Ralph Ellison; one loses one’s identity to find it.

 

Such sounds, their musical mixture and continual creolisation, allow us to think with music creating folds in time. Condensed in sound, in its contemporary performance, are sonic archives that interrupt the crushing institutionalisation of historical time and disturb the chronologies. To elaborate on a past to be registered, we confront what returns us to Paul’s ‘back to the future’. Like the presence of the contemporary migrant, such sounds reopen the violent archives of the colonial constitution of the present. Both disturb and interrogate a singular telling. More than a simple counter-narrative, these deeper histories propose the dispersion and undoing of the hegemonic premises that seek to fill in the details, frame the picture and conclude the story.

 

There is so much music I would love to play to sustain this argument on the ongoing composition of another Mediterranean spacetime. However, here I, too, remain trapped in the consequences of a linear order!

So, let’s experience this possibility just for a few minutes by listening to a piece of music sung in the most widely spoken language (in all of its variants and dialects) of the Mediterranean: Arabic. Here distinctions between high and popular culture fall away: The famous Egyptian singer Uum Kalthuum set modern poetry to music, then transmitted through the Arab world by radio and audio cassettes to a largely illiterate audience. And the music we are about to hear also sustains other historical echoes not distant from the European shore: flamenco, Neapolitan song, and re-betiko. We hear this in the shared minor keys and micro-tonalities of what today is a subaltern Mediterranean becoming black (Achille Mbembe).

 

To listen to the Palestinian singer and ‘ud player Kamilya Jubran and the constant return of never the same sung over improvised patterns on her ‘ud (the instrument of philosophy), we hear an aesthetics that sustains ethics, its poetics, a politics. We are invited to re-orientate understandings and confront a more complex and open reception of the formation of a modernity that is never merely mine, ours, or yours.

Qawafel

 

To draw a phrase from The Black Atlantic and conclude: what we have just heard engages us with ‘an enhanced mode of communication beyond the petty power of words…’ (p.76).

This requires listening and learning from a new set of genuinely trans-disciplinary and historical coordinates sustained by a sociology of the imagination, quantum history, ‘the fictive work of theory’ (Katherine McKittrick), and the ‘force of black speculative vision and practice’ (Jayna Brown).  All of which are amplified in Paul’s writing and research. The illusory guarantees of theoretical architectures dependent on accumulative linearity, the universalisation of their premises, and the violence of their exercise are pushed out of joint. We are encouraged to step outside, contest control, escape… listen… respond… dance… and while seeking with Jimi Hendrix to kiss the sky, become accountable for the always incomplete, even incomprehensible, composition of another spacetime.

Thank you, Paul.

Platform politics in Europe – Where is the user?

Viola Sarnelli

(Cover: Fabrice – Muiderpoort Station, Amsterdam 2010, detail. Photo: Giulia May)

 

In a dystopian present marked by physical isolation, digital platforms are acquiring an even more central role in our private and social lives. They enable us to connect with our loved ones, to look for useful (or misleading) information, rethink our work connections, find online yoga courses, buy goods and share uplifting or emotional contents – in short to live in and feel a system of interconnected close and wider communities.

While the social, cultural and psychological outcomes of these new patterns of interaction with digital media are yet to be seen, just before the beginning of the pandemic era a series of studies were trying to assess the impact of digital platforms on political participation. The International Communication Journal’s last issue of 2019, with its special section dedicated to Platform Politics in Europe, looks like an ideal occasion to try and resume some of the many open questions on digital platforms and their political use – as we try to process other uses in a version heightened by our hyperconnected isolation.

Edited by Marco Deseriis and Davide Vittori, the feature included six case studies on the use of digital platforms in different European contexts and involving various political actors. While the common thread was how each platform makes some degree of political participation possible, one central question remains mostly unanswered, and even unasked: who are the users of these digital platforms, how do they use the platforms, and why in these studies they are almost never given a voice?

1. Digital platforms shaping the “long 2010s”

Social media platforms and digital democracy platforms. The “long 2010s”, as Deseriis and Vittori call them, have been dominated by anti-austerity and anti-authoritarian movements incorporating social media in new and disruptive ways. While the “inner logic” of commercial social networks might have facilitated social movements in their emerging phase, it appeared to be less suited to long-term strategies (van Dijck & Poell, 2013). This is why some groups moved to specialised (and open) software tools for their organisation and decision making, creating new digital democracy platforms. Deseriis and Vittori insist that the communalities between political use of social media platforms (SMPs) and digital democracy platforms (DDPs) are more relevant than their differences. Still, they are significant: SMPs are mainly focused on commodifying user data and extracting profit from this information, although, thanks to their large user base, they have surely contributed to revitalise political action. DDPs, on the other hand, can in principle support democratic participation and deliberation, but they tend to have limited impact and scope.

How is algorithmic logic affecting participation? One important theme in recent debates is how much ‘algorithmic logic’ conditions the agency of Social Media Platform users. On the one end of the spectrum there is the idea (e.g. van Dijk & Hacker, 2018) that an algorithmic logic, replacing the editorial logic of earlier media generations, is more pervasive and shapes users’ participation in subtle ways. At the other end there are those who emphasise users’ creativity and resourcefulness (e.g. Clark et al., 2014), showing how people can play with platform affordances, repurpose features, and circumvent limitations. Another author contributing to the special issue, Maria Bakardjieva, concludes that “citizens’ participation … cannot be reduced to the design of the platforms alone, but it is certainly affected by it”. What makes the difference, she argues, is “Who participates? In what? For what purpose?”.

 

(Street mosaic in Grodno, Belarus. Photo: Victoria Strukovskaya)


2. E-government, party and civic platform users

Can a digital platform empower party members? Deseriis and Vittori try to assess the impact of the platforms used by Podemos and 5Stars, respectively “Participa” and “Rousseau”, on internal party democracy and power imbalances. Both parties show a “technopopulist orientation” (Deseriis, 2017), but also strong differences in terms of political and ideological trajectories. These are also reflected by diverging organisational models: a variety of centralised and decentralised decision-making bodies (Podemos) versus no intermediary party bodies at all (5SM). Deseriis and Vittori argue that despite these important differences, in both cases “the affordances of these platforms are often employed selectively” and mostly used to just confirm decisions already taken by the party leaders. This might be one of the reasons for the sharp decline in voter turnout both platforms registered after the first year. Other possible reasons include the drop-out of early adopters or the fact that members are asked to vote too frequently, or – in the case of the 5SM – that when it comes to controversial issues, Rousseau only provides members with their leaders’ viewpoints and no alternatives. New studies would need to confirm these hypotheses, and include extensive feedback from the users of both platforms.

Can a platform preserve the quality of a debate over time? Looking at social media platforms one might be inclined to say no, but digital democracy platforms used by local administrations in Europe have also tried to reshape participation and deliberation. In their study on Decidim, the platform allowing citizens to contribute to Barcelona’s Strategic City Planning, Borge Bravo, Balcells, and Padró-Solanet looked at “the deliberative quality” of the debate on tourism and hospitality in the city. What emerges from their analysis is that time is a key factor, as conversations on platforms like Decidim go through different stages. While at the beginning most users focus on developing persuasive and rational arguments, as the discussion continues there is often noticeable “degradation” of the debate. This can make other users less interested in taking part and lowers the threshold of acceptable arguments, while the few active users left might turn the debate into a personal confrontation. The conclusion is that spontaneous online deliberation is possible, but that the difficulty lies in “ensuring and preserving the quality of deliberation over time”.

How are users positioned in e-government platforms? As Bakardjieva argues, it very much depends on who created the platform, who takes part and what strategies the users adopt to influence political powers. Her study compares three different online platforms created in the Bulgarian city Stara Zagora: an e-government platform; a citizen-lead collaborative platform, My e-Municipality; and a Facebook page.  On the e-government platform established by the municipality, citizens can report faults or request documents, and, as happens in similar cases, users are positioned as clients. What makes the collaborative My e-Municipality different is that it has been “conceived and designed by citizens”. Through interviews with the activists’ core group, Bakardjieva describes how My e-Municipality users are “not only enabled to issue a comment or signal, but also entitled to a timely response”. Most importantly, this collaborative platform built a strong negotiating position over time and is now recognised as a stakeholder by the city administrators, while maintaining a clear autonomy.

 

(Photo: Peyman Farmani)

3. The user of commercial digital platform

Is one platform enough to promote participation? Bakardjieva also provides a textbook example of how each platform can serve different scopes. When another group in Stara Zagora started campaigning to save a local park from development plans, it became clear that contention “needed different tools than cooperation … and the activists found them in the multipurpose platform Facebook”. To this group Facebook offered “a generic communication apparatus that was well understood and skilfully used” by the citizens. At the same time, Bakardjieva concedes that “effective participation … could not be engineered through Facebook (or, arguably, any platform) alone”. In the case of the park, the support offered from other groups was crucial to mobilise the larger city population. In general, as it has been argued since the early 2010s with the idea of media convergence and similar frameworks, it is essential to keep looking at how digital platforms connect (and overlap) with other political and media forms.

Can a platform combine participation and representation? In another contribution to the special, Louise Knops and Eline Severs presented the case of the Citizen’s Platform for Refugee Support (CPRS), a Facebook page created in Belgium as an answer to the 2014-2015 refugee crisis to coordinate first-hand assistance with basic logistics. They analyse how over the years the CPRS “has increasingly taken up the role of spokesperson”, speaking on behalf of Belgian people who support more inclusive and welcoming immigration policies. This resonates with previous studies arguing that online social networks can strike a compromise between the logic of participation and the logic of representation (Gerbaudo, 2017).
Interestingly, the article also underlines the important role played by the CPRS Facebook page administrator, constantly filtering and selecting content posted and shared by members of the platform, thus remembering that editorial logic can coexist with algorithm logic, and in some cases still plays a central role. In this case however, as the authors admit, more research with platform members would be needed to validate their results.

Can a platform combine participation and social learning? Dan Mercea and Helton Levy explore the relationship between participation and social learning on Twitter, looking at a set of retweets for the British “People’s Assembly” from mid-2015 to early 2016. So far, network theory has approached social learning mostly as a diffusion process needing social validation, which on Twitter can correspond to retweets. At the same time, as Mercea and Levy note, retweeting can also be seen as a process of “knowledge curation” in as far as “it filters out noise such as spam”. In the case of the People’s Assembly, they argue that retweets “helped distribute knowledge that made visible the grounds for association and cooperation” among different actors on Twitter, while maintaining “a common and public pool of knowledge about the movement”. Their study involved a small number of interviews with Twitter users, but – again – Mercea and Levy suggest that more empirical data would be needed to expand their findings.

 

(Photo: Vladislav Nikonov)

4. The user as a target: it’s just (computational) propaganda

Are online platforms just facilitating reactionary politics? While this special issue looks mostly at barriers to participation, other recent studies focused on what someone would call the dark side of online platforms. After all, Brexit did happen, and other reactionary campaigns have been pretty successful in Europe and beyond. One of the features explaining this unexpected popularity of digital platforms with far-right parties is their participatory dynamics, which according to Gregory Asmolov (2019) create ideal conditions for “participatory propaganda”. The concept of propaganda, although digitalised, is clearly problematic, as it recalls the old and luckily surpassed debate on the media “effects” on mobilisation. Still, Asmolov rightly point out that the outcome of manipulative information is not necessarily mobilisation: in several cases – think of Cambridge Analytica or Breitbart – it rather aims at political disorientation and social disconnection.

Are the users helpless targets of bots and trolls? Since 2015 the Computational Propaganda project (Oxford Internet Institute) has been investigating the assemblage of social media algorithms, autonomous agents, and big data involved in information manipulation. Their last report on the “Global disinformation order” claims that investments in this field saw a 150% growth in the last two years all over the world – in liberal and authoritarian, Western and non-Western states. “Cyber troops” are now operating through bots, and human and cyborg fake (or stolen) accounts; they work to discredit political opposition and drown out political dissent. Despite there being plenty of alternatives, Facebook seems to remain “the platform of choice” not just because of its global scale, but also its key features: the close ties that make up the network, the incorporation of political news, the capacity to host groups and pages.
What is clearly left out of this picture is the meaning people give to the information found on social media. And, while one would expect political communication and political sociology to be dominated by the view of the user as a target, among new media theorists also seem to gain popularity apocalyptical views of “an invisible, oppressive system that tries to deceive us” where trolls are allowed to “permanently disrupt our thinking and behaviour” (Lovink, 2020).

 

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani / Unsplash


5. Conclusion – Stuart Hall and platform thinking

Platforms as meeting points. So, what are we left with? As Emiliana De Blasio and Michele Sorice argue in another piece included in the special issue, one non-controversial point is that the idea of the “platform” has slowly become a meeting point between very different perspectives. Interestingly, at the end of their encyclopaedic tour de force on political participation literature, De Blasio and Sorice also mention Stuart Hall and his unmatched capacity to combine “methods and tools from political sociology with those from media studies and social analysis of antagonistic cultures”. This multimodal, critical but solid analytical perspective is precisely what seems to be missing in most contemporary media theory, which can be at best inspiring but often inaccessible and/or politically barren.

Platforms for critical times. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 emergency measures in Asia and in Europe, commercial platforms have shown some of the best and the worse practices of content sharing and connection building. Social networks are conveying disinformation, fake news and staging the performances of unlikely pandemic experts or professional narcissists. At the same time, such a crisis opens to an actual social and technological reset, to which digital platforms could contribute with information aimed at supporting communities, finding solutions to shared problems and redistributing resources. While it is too early to see the development of ad- hoc and non-commercial platforms, a possible direction is indicated by early initiatives such as groups, pages or wikis built to gather and coordinate local and global solidarity efforts.

Prescribed users and missing users. The most useful suggestion in the special issue possibly comes again from Bakardjieva, who borrows from de Certeau (1984) the view of platforms as “ensembles of possibilities and interdictions”, characterised among other things by their “prescribed” user (Latour, 1992) but also “their anticipated and manifested uses”. Comparing different types of platforms, as Bakardjieva does in her study, is necessary to understand more about the variety of subject positions that platforms create for their users. The only piece missing from the picture is once again the users: we need more of their voices to learn what they actually do with all of the platforms designed for (and against) them, in ordinary as well as extraordinary times.