Notes toward a Virtual Poetics: An Essay on Solaris, Assemblage, and Blackness

My inquiry aims to recast the media of new media studies both as an interface and a racialized site of violation. I call on the writings of artists, theorists, and social scientists to redefine this word; to explore the ways the language of new media and the virtual spaces they occupy might describe an emergent, politically charged poetics. As a primary text, I examine Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (and Andreĭ Tarkovskiĭ’s adaptation), whose black ocean resists actively the scientists’ attempts to apprehend or describe it. Both novel and film, as with the Solarian surface itself, perform, I argue, an opaque, Virtual Poetics—a generically unstable aesthetic model at once of, but not bound exclusively to, Black aesthetics. More critically, I point to a racially charged figure in Lem’s text, who doubly mediates the colonial pasts endemic to the genre, in order to establish the political stakes for artists who commit to opacity as an aesthetic principle. I set the scholarship of Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Simone Browne, Lisa Nakamura, Saidiya Hartman, and Julia Kristeva in conversation with art-objects by poet Dolores Dorantes and visual artist Jeron Braxton to provide a grammar with which we might approach this poetics.

science and technology studies, Solaris, poetics, virtual reality, surveillance studies, Black aesthetics

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

This poem by Palestinian American poet Noor Hindi reads as a vital inflection point in debates surrounding aesthetic practices in contemporary poetry, and was published in the December 2020 issue of Poetry, one of the longest-running literary magazines in the United States. Active since 1912, Poetry magazine is currently administered by the Chicago-based independent literary organization Poetry Foundation—first established by the magazine in 2003 after the receipt of a $200-million donation from the late philanthropist Ruth Lily (Poetry Foundation, n.d.). Since that time, Poetry has become one of the most prominent resources available to those who want to become more familiar with the discipline, and with the contemporary US poetry milieu. More critically, the Poetry Foundation, as a highly visible literary institution, has repeatedly become the subject of controversy; their decision to publish the racially inflammatory work of conceptual poet Venessa Place, one example of many, incited both widespread criticism of the writer and an ongoing public reckoning with Poetry Foundation’s values as an institution (Calder 2015). Together these details might reveal the central position Poetry magazine occupies both as a recurrent site of literary conflict, and as a catalyst through which prevailing aesthetic and institutional biases can be critiqued and addressed.

By deploying metaphor’s impossible leap in wry, sometimes bitter ways—“I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad. / He watches Al Jazeera all day”—Hindi’s “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” signals the death of metaphorical language, while at the same time relying on metaphor’s unstable, spectral “something” to make the poem’s affective turns at each line break possible. When the “I” of the poem tells the “you” about “children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies,” for example, who or what does the poem transmute in its line break? The “I,” the “children,” or both? Is it the poem or the tank that enacts this rapid transformation?

On one hand, Hindi’s provocative poem grapples actively with the inability of our current media ecosystem, or of language itself, to hold the political reality of the armed conflict at the Gaza Strip; at the same time, the poem reads as a meditation on the aesthetic decision to work with metaphor and with abstraction—that is, to write poetry at all. This skepticism of the efficacy of metaphorical language, of poetry itself, might reflect a rising attitude held within the poetry community at the height of the pandemic in 2020, and just before the US presidential election. Hindi also offers, then, an aesthetic response to the former Trump administration’s strategic, performative skepticism of both broadcast journalism and the accuracy of its reportage. More importantly, the poem seems to heed the call for what the poet Dionne Brand once termed, in a public reading, “the radical directness of plain speech.”¹ While Hindi’s poem pointedly recapitulates this aesthetic plea, it also points to its own inability to comply, and to the irreconcilable relationship between the medium, the art-object, and the space it's meant to mediate. In other words, the poem operates in a space between aesthetic transparency and opacity.

Hindi’s poem articulates both the literary context in which I write to you now, and the polemics I intend, as a poet and theorist, to open up to an inquiry that admits theories and metaphors that cross disciplinary boundaries. In drawing our attention to the medium, the poem “Fuck Your Lecture…” performs as an inherently participatory textual surface, an important strategy in the political-aesthetic space I call virtual poetics.

Race, in fact, now functions as a metaphor so necessary to the construction of Americanness that it rivals the old pseudo-scientific and class-informed racisms whose dynamics we are more used to deciphering.

My central charge with virtual poetics is to recast the media of new media as an interface, a membrane, and a racialized site of violation. I call on the writings of poets, theorists, social scientists, and technologists to redefine this word; to unfix media’s position in technology and communication studies and reactivate both its volatility and potency; to question and explore the ways the language of so-called new media and the virtual spaces they’ve come to occupy might help us describe an emergent yet persistent and politically charged poetics.

To get there you have to see some things about Solaris and its fugitive surface—which allows itself to be “unlawfully overcome,” write Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013, 35); its “radical passion and passivity…unfit for subjection” (35); and about that summer in New York when I started painting again, where it was the novel by Stanisław Lem (1961) I found first before watching Andreĭ Tarkovskiĭ’s film (1972). In Lem’s version, someone sends a scientist named Kelvin knifing through space to investigate a research facility—a facility stationed, we are told, on a distant planet called Solaris. On arrival we see that the entire surface of the planet isn’t just covered by but is an immense, opaque semi-fluid mass—a black ocean who resists actively the scientists’ attempts to test, touch, or describe it. In other words, no direct communication seems possible.

The book stages its descriptions of the ocean’s surface as a series of scientific reports, something I’ll return to later, but for now what matters most to me is what happens when Solaris, in the human-scaled drama we can understand, tries to communicate with the researchers as “visitors” (Lem [1961] 1970)—as simulacra appearing in the station, usually, as near-replicas of loved ones the researchers used to know. For the protagonist, the simulacra appear as his deceased wife, and from her arrival we get the impression that these visitors are acting as intermediaries, or serving as virtual (and material) mediums. But in the diegetic space of this story, who is visiting whom when the deployment of the term visitor inoculates, by design, the violence of the scientists’ hostile occupation of Solaris? Their small but indisputably invasive encampment, both in a foreign territory and on the body of the Solarian organism itself (however singular or multiple), shines a light on (and even flexes) the colonial pasts endemic to speculative fiction.

The violence of this occupation doesn't just happen on the outside but on the inside. In one wounding scene, the ecological consciousness of the ocean can’t help but appear as a racially charged blip—“a giant Negress,” our protagonist explains, “wearing nothing but a yellow skirt of plaited straw,” resembling the “steatopygous” statues found in “anthropological museums" (Lem [1961] 1970, 30). This outlier in the cast of speculative simulacra, its pleated grass skirt acting as an icon for Indigeneity, wears plainly these colonial histories, and appears in the book only once and without a single line of dialogue—too brief for the barest utterance. This moment is completely occluded from Tarkovskiĭ’s film adaptation, maybe for the better, but if we are to understand these visitors as mediums through which communication might be possible, as membranes, as interfaces, as surrogate sites where, like communication theorist John Durham Peters (1999) suggests, two “interiorities” can meet, then what does this virtual site reveal about the relationship between Solaris and its occupants? I am penetrated by these othering, generically fugitive, highly racialized descriptions because of how porous the Solarian ocean becomes when subjected to the apprehending violence of the scientists’ gaze—a landscape so soft, so radically vulnerable, Solaris can't stop itself from mediating that violence. How might we reconcile this vulnerability with the Solaris who, as a text, texture, and, as scholar Kate Marshall (2018) argues, an “ecological protagonist,” becomes capacious, rhizomatic, and totally resistant to any rhetoric that tries to apprehend it?

[Radio static is] a fictive copy [of] silence, a reproduction that chafes and fucks-up. It is not authentic. It has margins where worrying things happen.

Figure 1. Film still of Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) from Solaris (1972). Mosfilm Studios.

Figure 2. Film still of interrogation room from Solaris (1972). Mosfilm Studios.

This interrogation scene, clipped from Tarkovskiĭ’s adaptation of Solaris, shatters worlds. The instability of the media event described, both for the military pilot, Burton, and for his critical interlocutors, retains its emotional charge, changed but intact, despite being translated across languages and media. What’s clear about this moment to me, a Black queer multimedia artist and poet, is its opacity—the multiple layers of mediation overlaying themselves between us (the you and the I) and the textural surface of Solaris itself. This fluctuating surface performs what scholar and theorist N. Katherine Hayles identifies in “The Future of Literature” as a particular layering effect often deployed by contemporary authors experimenting with computer-mediated texts (2007, 97).

Electronic literature, as Hayles recounts, enacts this textual (and textural) effect by presenting (a) an overlay of multiple “hypertext” scripts and “compiled programming languages,” or (b) a “complex textual display” wherein layers of text appear “superimposed” over each other (2007, 97). Reflecting on the computational narrative project Screens, by artist and theorist Noah Waldrip-Fruin, Hayles offers this description: “Entering the narrative now does not mean leaving the surface behind, as when a reader plunges into an imaginative world and finds it so engrossing that she ceases to notice the page. Rather, the 'page' is transformed into a complex topography that rapidly transforms from a stable surface into a 'playable' space in which she is an active participant" (87, emphasis added).

I’m less interested in the fact of this innovation than in the textural strategies of resistance these participatory “surfaces” make possible on the page. The discursive, intercutting mediation in Tarkovskiĭ’s film, for example—a “plaster-like” surface where, like on Solaris, everything is “made of the same substance” (Lem [1961] 1970, 79)—constitutes precisely this textured, political, and aesthetic plane. The Solarian topography performs, I argue, a poetics of opacity—a generic instability, a radical refusal—an aesthetic model at once of, but not bound exclusively to, Black artistic expression. The writings of science and technology scholars Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, surveillance studies scholar Simone Browne, poet and theorist Édouard Glissant, scholars of African American literature and cultural history Saidiya Hartman and Toni Morrison, the poet Dolores Dorantes, and most importantly the animated films of Jeron Braxton, provide a grammar with which we might approach, and ask questions of, this resistant surface—a surface enacting a virtual poetics.

Consent [is] not so much an act but a non-performative condition or ecological disposition.

Virtual poetics investigates (and enacts) a series of speculative proposals for the book (realized or unrealized), with a special emphasis on the relationships between reader and language that these proposals make possible. In the broadest sense, I take virtual to mean something there-yet-not-there, interstitial, transmedial, something felt but that resists the logics of apprehension, and deploy this term to designate the particularly hard-to-define space where this poetics might occur—not exactly on the page, and not wholly in the reader, but somewhere in between. Virtual poetics, then, identifies the formal strategies, textures, surfaces, and (most crucially) the racial politics active on the page—strategies which together, with the reader’s participation, pull the poem out into this space (between art-object and audience). Through the pilot Burton’s testimony, the surface of Solaris resists a pastoral model defined by fixity and communicability. In Tarkovskiĭ’s film, the ocean’s surreal vistas, both before and after arriving fitfully as garden simulacra—as “shrubs, hedges,” and kitsch little “acacia trees”—are constantly in flux, arriving first as “yellow sludge,” seething, reportedly “[rising] up in thin strips [sparkling] like glass” (1972, emphasis added).The like-ness of this fluidic surface, as with the language deployed to apprehend it, evinces its generic instability. This same instability is of critical importance to poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney, who offers us a capacious counter-model “remarking the pastoral as a zone of exchange,” which she aptly calls the necropastoral—a site defined by flux, porousness, and suppuration: “a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects” (McSweeney 2014b). If the project of colonial occupation survives, says literary and political theorist Achille Mbembe, “[by] writing a new set of social and spatial relations on the ground,” by the grafting “of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves,” by resource extraction and, “finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries,” then the shifting Solarian surface offers bodily, topographic resistances to this assimilative project (2019, 79). In reading Solaris as a necropastoral site, then, we might consider among humankind’s many ecological depredations, as would Mbembe (whose essay, “Necropolitics,” has had a profound influence on McSweeney’s text), the assimilative, even genocidal violences endemic to colonialism. Thinking of this assimilative history, the resistance enacted by the Solarian surface takes on new meaning—becomes, like art, a counter-act of unapologetic difference. “Agree not merely to the right to difference,” demands the Martiniquan poet and theorist, Édouard Glissant, “[but] agree also to the right to opacity” (1997, 190). This resistant plea defines, for Solaris, a political and racialized charge to this landscape’s “opaque” texture: a text which, as Glissant might explain, “is not obscure, [but] is that which cannot be reduced,” “grasped,” or apprehended (193). When enacted as a verb, this doubled sense of apprehension collapses the distinctions between understanding and enclosure, bringing us closer to the epistemological and colonial violations the Solarian surface might seek, like Glissant, to resist. In this case, Solaris stages its resistance against the Western, indexical gaze, whose inciting violation arrives in the form of a demand: a demand for transparency—one just as active in scientific research as it is in legibility politics.

I maintain dominion over the crevices of myself, deep into the layers of my skin, which must never be questioned. Never doubt that these crevices extend toward an infinitely receding boundary. Come close to me to feel it.

Coming closer we might find that Solaris isn't a planet at all, but a fugitive surface—a “fictive copy” (Berg 2019, 25) illegible as a speculative ecological fiction alone. I consider instead that this complex of readings, and maybe Solaris itself, form an assemblage, and a model for Black artistic expression—an expression that sees a connection between the treatment of politically marginalized bodies, and of the nonhuman world; because the ways we ask our technology and our environment to labor, and to mediate the violent apparatuses of the state that pass through them, that use them, is connected to the ways we ask politically marginalized bodies to labor and to mediate, perhaps like Solaris, the violences they are made to be complicit with.

In its capacity as a necropastoral site, one capable of staging “networks [of] ‘strange meetings’” between the living and the dead, the visitors arriving to speak to, or perhaps through, the colonial agents with whom we are meant to empathize, become an extension of the ocean’s mediumistic capacity (McSweeney 2014a, 2). This nonhuman ecological consciousness, then, is constantly in communication with its occupying forces in complicated ways that seem to undo our notions about what communication is, means or does. Like on our world, this ocean called Solaris both reflects and refracts, except here both the observer’s material and virtual world—their ambient memories, affects, desires, grief—arrive concurrently on the textural surface—that is, there’s an ontological collapse. If we can imagine a daily experience of race that is, like affect, there-not-there thus thoroughly virtual, how does a material imagining of identity complicate our thinking about Blackness and opacity? Research and refusal? About racial politics and virtual reality?

We prefer, it is alleged, technology that resembles or approximates the human, but only from a recognizable distance. But this belief in the uncanny valley, I would suggest, itself assumes more than we should: it assumes a “we” with one universal standard for relating to other humans.

In Surrogate Humanity, theorists Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora (2019) draw an important connection between Toni Morrison’s notion of the slave’s position as a surrogate and Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) framing of this position as indebted to the abject commodification of the slave’s body. In situating these two notions, Atanasoski and Kalindi set up the discourse needed to describe what they call the surrogate human effect: a process by which “technology displaces the human-chattel-turned-man with man-made objects that hold the potential to become conscious,” and in turn come to occupy “[a] place [in the] racial order of things in which humanity can be affirmed only through degraded categories created for use, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation” (Atanasoski and Vora 2019, 13). While the stakes held by this claim are immense, it's most important to me to explore both the ways something as cypher-like and weightless as poetry can withstand, impossibly, subjects as heavy as global histories of exploitation, and the ambivalent aesthetic positions that make this possible.

If Toni Morrison claims in Playing in the Dark that the slave population of the antebellum US South was expected to “offer itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom” (2007, 37), I offer a vital misreading of Morrison’s remark, and claim instead that the enslaved body offers itself for mediation; in so doing, the multiplicity of media’s meaning starts to vibrate. Most critically, I’m interested (as poet Joyelle McSweeney might be) in the literal interpretation of mediation as a process of becoming media, opening-up the discourse Morrison attempts to historicize. By reading surrogacy as a process of mediation, and the body itself as a medium—becoming both a legible surface, and a complicated discursive and physical site of interactivity—how does this disrupt or distort the social and legal coding of enslaved peoples as fungible commodities?

According to Hartman, in Scenes of Subjection, when it comes to a slave’s body, forced to act both as human subject and commodity fetish, discourses surrounding freedom are not the only things capable of being mediated. “The fungibility of the commodity,” says Hartman, “makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved [becomes],” in this system, “the surrogate for the master’s body” since the dispossessed are made to”act,” writes Hartman, “as the sign of [the master’s] power and dominion” (1997, 21, emphasis added). The surrogate becomes, in other words, an “augmentation of the master subject” (21, emphasis added). Using this model for both the slave and for the commodity, as “vessels” “vulnerable to the projection of [others],” we can begin to draw a connection between the body of the enslaved, and the conditions of the art-object, and it is not coincidental, I think, that Hartman’s language starts to cross lexical boundaries—from economic to aesthetic, from political to technical.

Through this process of augmentation Hartman describes “the materiality of suffering regularly eludes (re)cognition” as the suffering body is continually “replaced by other signs of value [and indeed] by other bodies” (1997, 21, emphasis added). Hartman’s examination of the racialized systems of power and ownership remains relevant, and might inform our contemporary understanding of augmentation and augmented reality technologies. More critically, Hartman provides a vital language with which we might recast the hierarchical relationship between our digital and material lives—a relationship Art can reveal to be unstable and multiple. This sign substitution simulates on the slave’s body, then, not an “imaginative surface” (Hartman 1997, 6), but a virtual one: an abject interface which is as physical and permeable as it is ephemeral and indeterminate.

If the Solarian ocean becomes, like a work of new media art, an interactive surface for its foreign occupants, then this abject interface allows us to imagine the ocean’s refractive activity as one in a series of defensive strategies the surface deploys to protect itself against the logics of the human, and of the gaze; the political-aesthetic stakes of which are made clear by the single racialized simulacra in Lem’s novel—a surrogate surface for the ocean itself.

My purpose here, however, is to think deeply about the ways art-objects can occupy (and perhaps occult) this surface. What are the poetics new media technology makes possible, and how does new media’s complicity with processes of racialization both change and charge, for artists and writers, the politics of choosing to work with these technologies?

Manuel Castells, an early theorist of the virtual, claims in The Rise of Network Society, that "the multimedia world will be populated by two essentially distinct populations: the interacting and the interacted" (1996, 371). One important discursive framework for reading this divide is through the theory and technologies of surveillance. Inventor and early surveillance theorist Steve Mann devised a graph, a Veillance Plane, capable of supporting the many possible veillance positions in any given society. The two most important terms, inasmuch as they relay the watcher’s position of power, are surveillance and sousveillance. Surveillance means “oversight,” via the French prefix sur- meaning “from above,” and the root -veillance via French verb veiller meaning to watch or observe. Sousveillance, on the other hand, holds the prefix -sous, meaning “from below” or “underneath”; as a political position, suggests surveillance scholar Simone Brown, we might take this to mean to watch the watcher (Browne 2015, 19). The problem with the Veillance Plane, however, is that an individual at any one moment can occupy multiple positions at the same time. If we understand the technologies that allow this kind of vision, this gaze, as expressions of state power, then the imbrication of US citizens in the matrices of power and violence is not binary, but rhizomatic, interactive, and characterized by exchange.

Castells’s assertion, in other words, doesn’t capture the whole picture, but points crucially to the ways existing class-based and racialized economic divides might be facilitated (if not exacerbated) by current media technologies. Today, the media interfaces we touch or click daily serve as important tactile, even haptic, examples. A web browser’s interface and the physical interface of our smartphones serve as sites (and surfaces) through which matrices of power and violence interact, and can be similarly exchanged. Reflecting on the music video for Jennifer Lopez’s “If You Had My Love,” theorist Lisa Nakamura, in Digitizing Race, makes a case for the ways media interfaces do not confer race neutrally, but are instead complicit in the effects of racialization on the body: "the interface serves to organize raced and gendered bodies in categories, boxes, and links that mimic both the mental structure of a normative consciousness and set of associations (often white, often male) and the logic of digital capitalism: to click on a box or link is to acquire it, to choose it, to replace one set of images with another in a friction-free transaction that seems to cost nothing yet generates capital in the form of digitally racialized images and performances" (2007, 17).

From Nakamura’s observation, we can see the ways racialized bodies can be imagined as tactile surfaces, or might themselves learn to become, through exposure, what Nakamura describes as “objects of interactivity” (2007, 16). Solaris, for example, becomes precisely this type of object. Nakamura’s formulation reveals crucially the materials through which race might act (like Ruha Benjamin, Beth Coleman [2009], and Wendy Chun argue [2013]) as a “technology” of power—a technology through which US racialized bodies become fraught surfaces, made to mediate, as Morrison suggested, in persistent and complicated ways. When Ruha Benjamin says succinctly that “users [also] get used” (2019, 14), the rhizome of use I want to emphasize begins to take shape.

The complicity of this position, of this object of interactivity, evokes Julia Kristeva’s formulation surrounding the abject: a self who, in attempting to define the boundary where their self ends, realizes instead that “self-ness” itself is what ends, what “falls into a faint,” and arrives in a non-state in which “elsewhere” enters; arrives inside the self’s “here, jetted, abjected into” their newly borderless world (Kristeva 2002, 231). Becoming the border between self and other offers another way of inhabiting the racialized surface Hartman describes; but while the abject, indeterminate state endured by the body can be world-shattering, this exceptional “faint” Kristeva describes is by no means out of the ordinary. On the contrary, abjection is both a normalized feature of, and even common to the experience of being racialized, institutionalized, instrumentalized, and mediated—indeed, of being used—by systems of power under which the self cannot be defined as either subject or object, but as something in between.

Surrogacy, and the categorical instability the mediating surrogate endures, extends far beyond chattel slavery. Reflecting on my own experience working in warehouses and factories, or even now, in states of emergency, as the COVID-19 pandemic crisis reveals, the expectations placed on essential laborers to mediate larger apparatuses of control, apparatuses with which they/we have no choice but to comply, show us that being seen as and treated like an object of interactivity is a persistent condition of everyday life. A condition responsible for, in part, how invisibly we might enact, as interactive borders not just between ourselves and others, but between others and the state, the stratification of racial, gendered, and class-based inequities. As artists, the first step in subverting this virtual, political reality is acknowledging also that poems and other art-objects endure a similarly violent state of mediation, but do not need to endure this state transparently. Vision, in other words, doesn’t always have to come true.

An abstractionist artwork...is one that emphasizes its own distance from reality by calling attention to its constructed or artificial character—even if it also enacts real-world Reference—rather than striving to dissemble that constructedness in the service of the maximum verisimilitude so highly prized within [a] realist framework.

In poet Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, one so-called documentary poem activates (on sight) a colonial, exploitative logic adjacent to the logics of digital capitalism Nakamura describes. Rukeyser’s poem doesn’t describe but demands: “Select the mountains... / travel the passes,” and “Touch West Virginia where // the Midland Trial leaves the Virginia furnace” (2018, 62). Rukeyser’s poem doesn’t sit back like a retinal scanner, simulating for the reader, for the conquering eye, a landscape who can perform a similarly abject position. The poem becomes instead an impossible interface both prompting a user to enact its seemingly invisible “I,” and extracting from the reader the labor of simulation. But does the user or the used enact the poem? Does the poem and its surrogate, mediating landscape become racialized in the process? In poems who labor not to enact any collapse between the “I” and the scenes described—who keep their distance, like Solaris—this subversive surface feels anomalous, challenging, and vital. How might Rukeyser’s near-model landscapes inform our encounter with the opaque, plaster-like surface the Solarian ocean simulates for, or reacts against, the pilot Burton? Against vision itself?

Within the hegemonic traditions of poetic forms, the pastoral poem offers us a different counterfeit landscape: a pasture, an enclosure, whose shepherd sings both inside the poem, and as the poem—a shepherd (that is, a speaker) whose voice both utters as, and utters into being, every object seen or heard within the enclosure, that is, within the limits of the poem. This model occasions a collapse between the text and the speaker, whereby the poem speaks as the poem itself.

I think that this desire to lift the veil to reveal an original self-determined black subject fails to ask a crucial question: How did whiteness come to signify the transparent I and blackness to signify otherwise? Because it does not ask such questions, the metaphor of the veil rehearses the sociohistorical logic of exclusion, which writes blackness and whiteness as the “raw material” and not as the products of modern strategies of power. And, in the case of [Cornel] West’s account, it (re)produces the black subject as a pathological (affectable) I, a self -consciousness hopelessly haunted by its own impossible desire for transparency.

In the discourse of contemporary poetry and poetics, both for the artist and for the pedagogue, a common demand given to the text, is the demand for clarity—that it labors to perform as clear, honest, transparent, and make itself, in our capitalist context, “legible” within existing market systems. Not only do we demand this of poetry, we demand this of any artist working within a range of culture industries. I believe the aesthetic bind imposed, then, on the work of contemporary Black artists can be particularly complex and insidious. Here in the US, this demand for clarity on Black artists is twofold: to make the work legible within the apprehending gaze of the (mostly white) industry, and to make the work legible to the Black community. A number of contemporary poets, including Harryette Mullen, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, push against this impulse actively. Even as recently as 2021, the poet Phillip B. Williams’s Mutiny attempts to reveal the violence of legibility politics (Ajani 2021). Tying a thread between the discourse on opacity and an emerging virtual poetics, my contention is that Solaris, as a text and as a surface, might offer contemporary and future new media artists an opaque, textural model of Black aesthetics with which they/we might resist the politics of legibility.

Still the scientists try, in Lem’s novel, to apprehend this texture. They try through language—despite there being “no semantic system…available to illustrate the [ocean’s] behavior”—to break the surface down into linguistic or geologically scaled organelles; into “‘extensors,’ ‘fungoids,’ ‘mimoids,’ ‘symmetriads’ and ‘asymmetriads,’” which are acknowledged in the reports as “artificial, linguistically awkward terms” that nonetheless “give some impression of Solaris to [those who have] only seen,” like us, “the planet in blurred photographs and incomplete films” (Lem [1961] 1970, 111). At once revealing and occluding, the opacity of this language produces a pixelating effect—blurring the total picture at every instance of its arrival. What’s important about this linguistic process of production and classification lies in its relationship to, and difference from the activity performed by the so-called mimoids—an activity characterized by “the imitation of objects, near or far, external to the ocean itself" (113). This language presents to us a simulated linguistic surface by way of neologism—a generic vernacular symptomatic of both poetry and speculative fiction. What then do we make of Solaris’s imitative activity? Touching the surface, we might read Solaris as an agent who—like poetry itself—wants to communicate through objects or, more radically, to create a counterfeit world between “it” and its occupying force. If these artists and theorists together offer alternative strategies of survival for Black artists working in new media, how might the counterfeit resist Mbembe’s “forced [rewriting] of spatial relationships on the ground?” (2019, 79). On the body? On language itself?

When we're asked to look at the surface, to stop trying to look or talk past the art-object to something else, a spell is broken. When Art breaks this spell, the spell of our lives, the everyday disciplinary structures who want so badly not to be seen suddenly become visible.

It’s the view from an airplane on a cloudless day...sometimes mountain ranges, or plains, or city buildings...dizzy with fear [from] being up so high...[I] doubt my ability to navigate over these dangerous, distant, alien landscapes. But if I do not spring off my perch and into the air, they’ll catch up with me, capture me, and drag me down.

Architect and theorist Eyel Weizman (2017) argues, in Hollow Land, that aerial drones and other surveillance technologies allow sovereignty to conduct itself in vertical three-dimensional space—a vertical sovereignty which visual artist and scholar Hito Steyerl elaborates in Wretched of the Screen: “Vertical sovereignty splits space into stacked horizontal layers, separating not only airspace from ground, but also splitting ground from underground, and airspace [itself] into various layers” (Steyerl and Berardi 2012, 23). In this new system, says Steyerl, “different strata of community are divided from each other on a y-axis, multiplying sites of conflict and violence” (23).

If “vertical sovereignty” reveals the flattening discursive effects of the map, as a civil and cultural architecture of control, what happens when the y-axis Weizman and Steyerl describe reframes the power dynamics between the used and the user? Between art-object and viewer? Between the Solarian surface and the language deployed to apprehend it? If a poem might, like Solaris, defend itself in y-axial space, then vertical sovereignty reveals the reader to be a constitutive and complicit agent not just within the mechanisms of colonial occupation, but within virtual poetics itself.

Pan, in Greek mythology, is the god of shepherds and flocks, the name derived from paien, meaning “pasture” and hinting at the root word of “pastoral,” and in this way the prefix pan- gestures to pastoral power.

The subversive strategies offered by theorist and sociologist Simone Browne, to undermine the everyday technologies of surveillance, provide another model in which vertical sovereignty (and a space of virtual poetics) can be activated. In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Browne (2015) wants to name the “absented presence” of Blackness in the literature of surveillance, and reveal the ways post-9/11 methods of surveillance and control were grafted over the historically brutal practices of indexing, quantifying, and surveying Black life. This storing-away of lives by indexical means is designed, says Browne, to render those lives—echoing Ralph Ellison—"un-visible” (2015, 11). This is the “mise en fiches de l’homme,” says Franz Fanon, which characterizes colonial modernity—the indexing of the human (Ben Salem 2018, 541).

If, to do this, Browne’s text explores and subverts Foucault’s panopticon, a central model for surveillance (and indeed surveillance studies), then I want to explore the ways Browne’s methods of subversion might be deployed in the study of contemporary poetry, and in the poetry itself. Both the pastoral and the panopticon model a collapse between subject and object—between the mechanisms of oppression and the objects they are meant to index. Browne describes this space, the space of the panopticon, as “an architecture of control” (2015, 34) through which power can be exercised by “a play of light,” says Foucault, or “by glance from the center to the periphery” (quoted in Browne 2015, 34). This collapse between light and the gaze, and more crucially this articulation of light as both a technology and expression of disciplinary power, is critically important to Browne. There’s something revealing and circuit-like about this disciplinary process. If we are most exposed, in our everyday life, by the ways the panoptic gaze operates in supposedly closed systems, I maintain that the very technologies of power deployed within an art-object, are the very same technologies active between that object and its audience.

Browne’s opening-up of the prefix pan- in panopticon draws a taut etymological connection between panoptic regulatory power and pastoral power. First designed by Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon serves as a capacious, “polyvalent” model of “workforce supervision”—one that could facilitate, in Bentham’s words, the “punishing of the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick” (quoted in Browne 2015, 33). Bentham envisioned panoptic power as individualizing and “all-seeing,” capable of being “exercised over a multiplicity in movement” (33). While Browne’s remark about the pastoral feels anecdotal within the context of the conversation she wants to have, it’s an enormously significant term in the history of poetry. If the speaker in a poem, like a shepherd in a pasture, indexes for the reader the environment active within this enclosure, and all that remains of the speaker are the objects described, the pastoral utterance occasions, in the moment of activation, a collapse between the subject and object wherein the speaker merges with the object-cache constituting their enclosure. The poem speaks as the poem itself.

Rukeyser’s apostrophic address, in The Book of the Dead, can be traced back to this pastoral utterance. Christopher Marlowe’s pastoral poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” for example, calling out from its “embroidered” object-cache (“a thousand fragrant posies, / A cap of flowers, and a kirtle”), illustrates the subject-object collapse endemic to the genre. When restaged within the panoptic model, however, the pastoral utterance doesn’t perform this collapse for a reader, but instead becomes a pliant, indexical surface making its multiple self legible to a user. If the pasture, like a poem, is always a made-place, then the pastoral enclosure expands beyond agricultural sites to include “prisons, schools, poorhouses, factories, hospitals, lazarettos, or quarantine stations” (Browne 2015, 33). Looking to Browne’s text for subversive or revolutionary artistic strategies, we might imagine the panopticon as an alternative historical model for the poem, as an “architecture of control” in constant need of revolt (34).

Assemblages are inherently productive, entering into polyvalent becomings to produce and give expression to previously nonexistent realities, thoughts, bodies, affects, spaces, actions, ideas, and so on.

The economy of power circulating between Marlowe’s poem and the reader, between the art-object and the audience, reveals a virtual, decentralized regulatory system designed to activate at the merest “flash” of our looking; but if an important innovation to the form (the lyric) is the radical expansion of boundaries, the poet Dolores Dorantes complicates this project further by reimaging, like the Solarean surface, the discursive relationships possible between viewer and art-object, between a reader and the poem’s perspectival “I.” Historically, this perspective has been designed to meet what Donna Haraway calls the “conquering gaze from nowhere”—this colonial “eye [who] fucks the world” (1988, 581). We want to investigate bodies of art, here, that utter an impossibly multiple “I” and eye—a subversive, sousveillant eye who un-fucks the world.

In Mexican emigre Dolores Dorantes’s 2016 poetry collection Style (Estilo), translated by Jen Hofer, the speakers in these poems enact precisely this sousveillant subject, so that the burden of display doesn’t rest solely on the art-object. Style is written with Mexico’s brutal history of disappeared women in mind, and aims to rewire the closed circuit of panoptic power. First as if to erase, even short-circuit the logics embedded in the page itself, Dorantes’s text contains no page numbers at all and deploys instead a bulleted numbering system that punctuates the start of each poem; these numbers often re-occur, and are not arranged in sequential order—a sousveillant practice that obscures and subverts the indexical apparatuses of the book itself, and is consistent with Browne’s formulation.

If Roy Boyne suggests that we “draw a line through the terms Panopticon, Panoptical, Panopticism…[placing] these terms under erasure [by] drawing a black line through them, [both] allowing the idea to be seen” while at the same time “denying its validity” (quoted in Browne 2015, 41), Browne takes this act of “erasure” up as both a discursive and methodological practice. What she means is a practice of opacity, of dark sousveillance, which Browne deploys to argue for the significance of writing-in the slave ship as an alternative origin point for the surveillance of Blackness. If Glissant’s opacity is one way through which an art-object can resist the penetrating indexical gaze, then Browne’s dark sousveillance gives us another strategy of resistance. The methods of resistance deployed by Dorantes’s text, however, move beyond the frameworks offered by Browne or Boyne.

Formally and syntactically, these poems articulate a fraught political and discursive resistance that takes shape as a series of demands—demands that make the world-space of the poem occur:

7.—Close us. Destroy our mouths. Enter. Torture us in other realities. Take us with your mind and your word (Dorantes 2016)

While the invisible “you” always makes the poem possible, the multiplicitous speaker in Dorantes’s images and actions arrive through demands given to the “you” and in so doing the reader unavoidably enacts the violent disciplinary apparatuses of the poem. What are the objects of Dorantes’s book? “Goldwork inlaid painfully onto the sky”; goldwork that becomes an open circuit charged by a femicidal, patriarchal violence:

12.— We want to turn around...want you to have us face down. Your codes burning. The zone you cannot tread. We want you to hold us up pliantly. Line of graves and kidnappings for your consumption.

These near-factory poems reveal (like “laborious little flowers”) how oppressed bodies, forced to internalize and reproduce the mechanisms of their oppression, can find strength in a radically reimagined ‘nowhere’ between subjecthood and objecthood. In re-wiring this lived grammar (between subject and object), these “objects of interactivity” (Nakamura 2007, 16) subvert the power dynamics between art-object and audience.

28.—Women workers like laborious little flowers for you: gathering the honey of the drama. Of what never exists just like this book from within which we regulate your every code.”

29.—We have arrived like negation so you can exterminate us in the attempt.

2.—We will blossom without your consent. Seeds that explode, vegetation that rises up from all mouths. We will blossom fruits of blood. Trees of ash. Shoots that spring into action with a chemical glow.”

1.—We are all wanting without power. We have lashed the necessary blocks to ourselves. We will not get out. They will not find us anywhere other than unexpected passages of the mind. That is where we are. Treasures, girls like jewels. Blind and fresh.

Coming back to the body, this poem shows us the ways a voice, a “we,” can persist even after the body disappears, or is disappeared by the state. This is a virtual “we” who speaks occultly through the technology of the page. And here also we see the ways these poems, these “blind” eyes position themselves like jewels—that is, as jewel-simulacra. In crafting this virtual, textual body, these poems, as art-objects, utter with a kind of perverse opacity that pushes beyond the parameters Browne describes.

2.—They will not find us but we will be waving hello from the monitor. Talking right to your face. We will transmit from the imprisoned grave to your breakfast.”

6.— Of us all you have are shreds of sky...Live parts of a tree. Goldwork applied painfully onto the air, the skin of sky is what you have. The blue flesh of sky. Skin that you cannot trample.

Reflecting on the panoptic and the pastoral, here we see ways that the poem occupies a virtual, even interdimensional space between the book and the reader. As “goldwork applied painfully onto the air,” these poems glimmer in a space the reader—that is, the now deposed gaze called out from its “nowhere” (re: Haraway)—“cannot trample.”

Dorantes’s Style performs as an open circuit—and a subversive object of interactivity—who become charged by the reader, complicating the power dynamics between user and the used. The discursive strategies deployed by Dorantes’s text both call on and innovate the forms of address found in Marlowe’s pastoral by shifting the power away from the reader and out into the virtual, discursive space between reader and text—a technique closely resembling what Hayles found in the CAVE Lab at MIT.

The CAVE Lab (Cave Automated Virtual Environment or Computational and Visual Education) is an immersive display facility at MIT that has been used by both scientists and artists to conduct some of the earliest research on virtual reality (VR). By attending to a number of computational literature projects operable from the CAVE, Hayles identified that those technologies made possible an engagement with language that could ‘shake’ the reader out of their “accustomed place of reading” and into “an active encounter” (Hayles 2007, 98). Not dissimilar from Dorantes’s text, these new media projects enact “a complex performance in which agency is distributed between the user, the interface,” and in the CAVE’s case, a “networked and programmable machine” (98). While Style doesn’t quite operate this way, the CAVE lends a tangible model with which to imagine not just the space of virtual poetics, but also the ethical problems that might operate in that space.

If those early VR projects inadequately address the politics of the active encounter, I have to imagine what Dorantes’s text might make possible in that space. Might VR make possible an electronic literature that tells us something new about interpersonal relationships? Instead of a text that reveals itself with a touch, might strategies of opacity and sousveillance—the very same strategies performed by the Solarean ocean, as a refusal-response to the violence endemic to scientific inquiry—be deployed in emerging VR spaces, to teach us, from a young age, about permission? About boundaries? Or about race?

In Solaris, strange memories are brought into the desperate present. The water world is a beautiful assemblage, constantly shifting shape.

In a scene from Glucose (2017)—a short film by new media artist Jeron Braxton—the vectored personage of an afrolatina approaches an old TV box, an altar, maybe a Santeria shrine surrounded by candles, flip phones, cassette tapes, bones, and tribal masks—a real and imagined site here memorializing a loved one, maybe a brother. The vectored sister pays respect to, which is to say re-encounters, the deceased by playing a sequence on a virtual controller—a rhythm game both connected to and disconnected from the shrine. She takes a picture. The moment she leaves, the vector-ghost of the deceased enters (like the simulacra on Solaris), floating in through the TV screen, through its static haze, distorting in the room both the light and the sound.

Here Braxton intuits a connection between race, technology, and the occult—and that connection is mediation. To echo visual cultures scholar Jennifer Gonzalez, reflecting on visual artist Christian Boltanski, these personal objects function as prostheses of the mind, "[forming] a syntagmatic,” and, I would argue, occult, “array of physical signs in a spatial representation of identity”—“a prosthetic territory,” a virtual landscape (Gonzalez 1995, 133). As with Boltanski, Braxton’s virtual objects here articulate a mediating and material text through which an identity becomes legible, except here the mediumicity of the television, and the mediumicity of the shrine overlap with each other, ripping through the world-space the objects articulate, to collapse the boundaries between the material and the virtual.

The way this taxonomic gaze registers Solaris, however, differs in so far as it is completely unclear whether the occupying forces have any direct or ambient effect on the violences occurring within the Solarian ecosystem—an ecosystem that appears to be in a state of perpetual collapse. The scale of this collapse, this ‘tragedy’ (to echo the protagonist from Lem’s novel), appears to the scientists so large that they feel more threatened than they are in any position to stage an environmentalist intervention. This heightened state of threat and helplessness seems analogous to the ways, for example, whiteness often positions itself outside of the struggles within Black and Indigenous communities.

If within the text, however, the Solarian scholarship suggests that "no communication is possible'' and that the—so-called—mimoids and symmetriads are truly ambivalent to the scientists' experimental probing, then perhaps this break—this disconnect between the black ocean's chemical reaction to its foreign occupation and the reaction of our own earth-bound bodies to the violent hegemonies which presume to govern them—might become the site of art's intervention—a site which is intensely material yet, since “everything here passes and fades” (Lem [1961] 1970, 121), there-not-there thus thoroughly virtual; as Aase Berg describes in Tsunami from Solaris, "a text that is inward moving, fractalized, and [nonlinear]” (2019, 8). While Boltanski presents a fixed, dead landscape, Braxton’s film occupies an undead, virtual, even counterfeit landscape.

Which is what interests me most about Braxton's visual idiom: the characters and objects retain their pixelation, their edges, referents still intact, resisting authenticity and photorealism therefore drawing attention to the medium; to the surface—a surface that often spasms, jitters, and refuses apprehension. Those moments, of being simultaneously drawn to the spasming of the object and to the spasming of the medium itself, are what gives them their virtuality—and a virtual poetics. Like Solaris, Braxton expresses a prosthetic site of collapse, a poem-scape, an “autotopography” that cannot remain the same story, or sit still in the same discursive language—an “assemblage,” to echo Berg, “constantly shifting shape” (2019, 9).

Thematically, Glucose also uses the medium’s close association with playable media to say something new about race, power, and the politics of representation. At the beginning of Braxton’s film, for example, eight abstracted squares appear—the faces of playable characters enclosed in each square—while a collage-like topography looms in the background. Replaying the logics of digital capitalism Nakamura described, two boxes light up as if selected by an unseen user. A viewer familiar with the visual idioms (and aural cues) of playable media will recognize this as a ‘character-selection’ screen for a fighting game. Player one (is it a person, or the computer?), selects their character: a Black low-poly boxer, a boy, who must fight against a jaguar-headed figure in a black T-shirt. When the boxing ring appears, an audience on screen begins to cheer, to roar. Before the fight, the camera pans over to jaguar head, and a text thread unspools at the bottom of the screen; he has something to say: Is my perception of free will merely an illusion governed by forces I can’t understand?

As with Hindi’s poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” we might read Braxton’s Glucose as a politically charged art-object that sits fitfully between transparent and opaque aesthetics, that draws attention to the medium, and remains sensitive to the power dynamics between the user and the used. The radical softness of Braxton’s renderings, however—"unfit for subjection”—offers a key feature by which virtual poetics, as a surface-based art-making practice, can be understood.

The poetics active on Solaris imagines for scholars of science and technology studies a speculative research model in which both ‘scientist’—whom the ocean resists being instrumentalized by or disentangled from—and ‘object of study’ become co-agents and co-participants in ways that are complex, non-objective, and affectively charged. When read together, these case studies offer future artists of color a vital interdisciplinary language with which they can (1) situate themselves within, and further complicate, this active debate in contemporary poetry, (2) chart legibility and illegibility not as binaries but as a richly textural political-aesthetic terrain; and lastly, (3) newly understand aesthetic gestures of abstraction, assemblage, and sousveillance to be both defensive and radically vulnerable anti-colonial strategies capable of agitating the violent, indexical gaze of scientific inquiry—its occupying eye and “I”—and interrogating the spatial, intersubjective, and ethical grounds by which scientific research is conducted.

This research is supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

¹ According to my notes, Brand said this in September 2020 during an unrecorded public Zoom reading, but the precise date and location were not recorded.

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Madison McCartha is a poet, multimedia artist, and PhD student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They are the author of FREAKOPHONE WORLD (2021), and their second book of poetry, THE CRYPTODRONE SEQUENCE, is forthcoming from Black Ocean.