In Further Considerations on Afrofuturism Kodwo Eshun hooks into 3 main threads:

1. memory-->attention. middle passage was "founding trama" of modernity, countermemories have therefore overdetermined black intellectual culture. Eshun calls for counterfutures.

Eshun's Afrofuturism "aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective."

2. SF Capital, sci/tech and feedback:

"Science fiction might better be understood, in Samuel R. Delany’s statement, as offering “a significant distortion of the present” (Last Angel of History 1995). To be more precise, science fiction is neither forward-looking nor utopian. Rather, in William Gibson’s phrase, science fiction is a means through which to preprogram the present (cited in Eshun 1998). Looking back at the genre, it becomes apparent that science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present. " (Eshun page 5) also "A subtle oscillation between prediction and control..." (p. 5 anD 6)

3. beyond tropes of science fiction, "as Gilroy (2001) points out in Between Camps, the articulation of futures within the everyday forms of the mainstream of black vernacular expression"

turning to music, where these 3 threads are woven:

"Afrofuturism approaches contemporary digital music as an intertext of recurring literary quotations that may be cited and used as statements capable of imaginatively reordering chronology and fantasizing history. The lyrical statement is treated as a platform for historical speculation. Social reality and science fiction create feedback between each other within the same phrase." (page 14)

Afrofuturism teaches, among other things, that sound and music don't so much install the register or the aural or the oral where visual culture held sway over Western writing as much as they open up our capacities for noticing all the rest of what we can do with words. Finding rhythm with words, at the same time, follows the same organizing principles of entrainment that turn up again and again in neuroscience, semiotics, and the physical sciences. Rhythm is the art of mixing serial and parallel modes to intervene on time itself, in time. In Phonographies, Alexander Weheliye (2005) finds this mixture in the writings and practices of W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and Walter Benjamin, who “rhythmify temporality via of syncopation, taking on variously the form of grooves, monadic shrapnel, and haunting echoes, of the past, present, and future. Time ceases to behave solely as meter only when these three forces coexist, even if unequally and in a fragmented manner” (p.105). Weheliye understands this fragmentation as a necessary condition for marginalized cultural practices to “unbolt altogether new and different versions of time...synonymous with the rhythms found in and sounding from the grooves of sonic Afro-modernity” (p.105). Wikis don't replicate or substitute for the experience  that prompted the syncopative brilliance of DuBois, Ellison, Benjamin, or Scratch Perry...  but

Building on the theories of W.E.B. DuBois (double consciousness), Charles Mingus (triple consciousness), Glen Gould (recording's effects on music), Tricia Rose (repetition and noise), and countless others, Paul Miller uses the term "multiplex consciousness": "Rhythm science builds on the early successes of file-sharing to create a milieu where people can exchange culture and information at will and create new forms, new styles, new ways of thinking. The Dj spreads a memetic contagion, a thought storm brought about by annoyance and frustration with almost all the conventional forms of race, culture, and class hiearchies. Hip-hop is a vehicle for that, and so are almost all forms of electronic music. At the there best, these genres are about...how forms and feelings transmute from one medium to another" (Rhythm Science "multiplex consciousness" section).

Rhetorical communities can, then, like biological and mechanical symmetries, form in a musical way. Nils L. Wallen’s (1991) book, Biomusicology, builds a working definition of music resonates with cybernetic definitions of the dynamics of information. Rhetoric and composition has been more interested in assessing how student writers—who, as we shall see, Wallen might name “sub-systems in a superior feedback loop”—cultivate “preserving” or “fluctuation controlling processes” of writing. And this is perhaps partly because classroom space works as a site of fluctuation control. If classrooms can also be thought of as a “subsystem,” (ecology) then they are far too often the subsystem that is not open to the set of processes that increases fluctuation in feedback loops. When we say "open-sourcing" the writing classroom, we are interested in the possibility of cultivating group-composed, dynamic, open-ended project spaces that emerge as “dissipative structures," patterns that emerge to order the disorder and chaos that is elemental to openended creative production. In wikis tuned, by means of linking-based assignments, for interactivity, students perform “evolutionary” writing, where they participate in “fluctuation increasing processes” and fashion principles of coherence as well. A balance of what Edward De Bono (1969) calls depatterning and patterning tools and then intervene on the autopoesis and strategies of "self-enhancement" that sometimes propogate in multimedia contexts and open up space for commons-formation. Here, as with music, principles of nesting train participants in the subtleties of time and timing. "Music," Wallen argues, "is an open system of evolving structures growing into sound artifacts which not only consume actual time but generate virtual time; the system and its space-time structures are ultimately conditioned by bio-geocultural parameters of behavior and deportment....music relies upon a superior feedback loop compounded by three subsystems: (a) the auditory system as integrated in the complex brain circuit: sub-system1 (SS1); (b) the sounding structures of the artifact as analogue to living organisms: subsystem 2 (SS2); and (c) the space-time environment: sub-system 3 (SS3). The superior feedback loop alternates, like the subsystems, between positive (fluctuation increasing=evolutionary), and negative (fluctuation controlling=preserving) processes; they are, by defintion, open, comparable or analogous to a dissipative structure." (Wallen, pp. 16-17). To elaborate further on the language of dynamic "sound artifacts," Wallen refers to the ordering effectuated by dissipative structures. Wallen relies on Erich Jantsch (1976), whose article "Self-Realization through Self-Transcendence" characterizes dissipative structures as systems that come about as adaptive processes

This would involve the cultivation of ecologies that unhinge readers’ semantic-overlay practices and highlight the ways language routes through larger networks (nested positive and negative feedback loops in the argot of biomusicology) in order to rehearse and perform the Dionysian techniques, gestures, and signing that would "run the program," the experiments that install gradients (the living texts of information exchange) in a struggle for entropy, experiments that enact transitions of energy between living systems.

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