The work that first codified Afrofuturism is John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History. The forty-five-minute documentary completed in 1996 unified a number of literary, musical, political, cinematic, and theoretical elements into a system that constituted a definition. We finally knew what we were talking about when reading Octavia Butler, listening to Drexciya, or watching Black Panther. Despite the success of this unification, the definition of Afrofuturism proved over the years to be a loose bag. And a good part of this looseness can be attributed to the fact that the initial codification of Afrofuturism, though highly theoretical, still lacked an adequate theory of technological development, which capitalism does not at all lack.
Why has technology progressed so rapidly and so continuously in capitalist culture? Nothing like “better, stronger, faster” exists anywhere else in our historical or archeological records, whether in dirt or in books. Sophocles famously praised human “prows” and “plows” in Antigone, yet those prows and plows did not change for the next two thousand years after the play was first performed, 440 or so years before the birth of Christ. Why not? Why was the world so slow for so long? And why did it suddenly accelerate by virtue of an economic system that centered the accumulation of a form of value that is, as Marx points out in the first volume of Capital, immaterial? If this question is not answered, Afrofuturism can only remain a loose affiliation of elements attributed to a variety of artists, musicians, theoreticians, and writers.
To tighten things up a bit, we can begin with what presently stands as the most important Afrofuturist work of this decade, poet Saul Williams and playwright Anisia Uzeyman’s 2021 film, Neptune Frost. To guide us through this oneiric work, we can turn to key parts of Steven Shaviro’s contribution to the Timecodes book series, Neptune Frost: Movies Minute By Minute.1 Because the goal of Timecodes is to “allow [the author] to make maximum use of their time in each minute,” Shaviro’s book provides a very close (from “Minute 1” to the end, “Minute 101”) and, as a consequence, useful reading of the result of Williams and Uzeyman’s script. Shaviro himself is a culture critic of amazing breadth whose work is tightly connected to continental philosophy, itself a kind of international currency for concepts.2 And he has written about and contributed to Afrofuturism since its codification by Akomfrah in the second half of the 1990s.3
Though Neptune Frost is futuristic, it’s not really set in a future that’s far from the present time. In this respect, it shares key features with the cyberpunk movement launched in 1984 by William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. But whereas the hi-tech in cyberpunk fiction was consistent with, or extrapolated from, real-world developments in capitalist innovation, a number of the technologies in Neptune Frost (particularly the weapons and police armor) appear to have developed in a universe not substantially different from ours (even if different in what traditional Marxists call the base) yet on a track parallel to it.
Neptune Frost also has magical elements, such as the main character’s seemingly spontaneous gender transformation. And like Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), it enters a twilight zone between a conventional feature and a musical. This blending can be interpreted as a consequence of the increasing impact of Black direction on cinema. As a whole, however, the science fiction we see in Neptune Frost is recognizable. It’s by no means out there or fantastical.
“Neptune Frost,” writes Shaviro in the book’s preface, is “a science fiction movie. As theorists such as Raymond Williams (1978), Tom Moylan (2014/1986), and Fredric Jameson (2005) have all argued, in contemporary society the utopian imagination finds its most powerful expression in science fiction” (2). This expression results from a contradiction in the form of capitalism: It needs a future to ensure its economic growth—this is its conatus—but the future is by definition virtual, immaterial, and therefore vulnerable to counterclaims, such as those of the utopias we find in science fiction. In short, what science fiction contests is the capitalist vision of a future world.
With that in mind, we can begin by asking: What kind of utopia does Williams and Uzeyman’s Afrofuturist film imagine? First, it’s a utopia that emerges from the e-waste that’s exported to an African country (the film was shot in Burundi), which itself produces and exports a key raw material, coltan. “Coltan is the most plenteous source of tantalum,” writes Shaviro, “an element needed for the manufacture of modern electronic and computing devices” produced and distributed by corporations in middle- and high-income markets (6). Without this raw material, Elon Musk, for example, would not have reached a level of wealth, in terms of dollar value (rather than material things—a distinction that’s of grave importance), that in number doubles (if not triples) the estimated number of stars in this galaxy.4
Second, Neptune Frost’s utopia, which is not realized in the movie (it remains in the future), will likely be distinct in form and content from post-Nyerere socialism (Julius Nyerere, founding father of Tanzania, was pragmatic). It will also likely be distinct from the classical Marxist conception of a future society whose relations are linked and reproduced by state-of-the-art technologies developed during the late stages of a capitalist moment defined as real subsumption.5 Williams and Uzeyman’s utopia, which is viewed from the site of its potential of emergence, is much more nebulous than the orderly and even predictable communism of the future, which, as the philosopher Carol Gould explains, has a rationality, efficiency, and productivity that far surpasses what we find in existing capitalism.6 Marx’s communism, in Gould’s reading, is condemned to be a new and improved capitalism.
The Neptune utopia, which is not identified or named in the movie, is envisioned (or projected into the future) by a community of hackers based in a rainforest that conventional Western eyes might see as a location for a nature documentary. But for those familiar with the iconography of armed struggles across Black Africa after the Second World War, it will recall a guerrilla camp. The resemblance, however, ends there. The freedom fighters of Black Africa’s twentieth-century liberation movements were actually fighting for what can only be described as bourgeois rights: the right to self-determination (“everyman got the right to decide his own destiny”), the right to vote (“I don’t want my people to be tricked”), the right for formal equal opportunity (“no partiality”).7 This is not what we find in the postrevolutionary guerrilla e-waste base called Digitaria. These hackers / freedom fighters have other dreams in mind. In “Minute 30” Shaviro writes:
[Neptune Frost] rejects both sides of an all-too common binary. On the one hand, it rejects the idea that digital technology is a neutral tool that can be used indifferently for any end whatsoever. On the other hand, it also rejects the idea that a fixed set of social relations and forms of domination is irrevocably built into the technology. Technological inventions and developments radically alter ways of life. But the process is multi-sided: new forms of social life and social organization, such as the experiment of Digitaria, can lead to unanticipated technological mutations as well. (36–37)
What Shaviro points out here, and elsewhere in the book, is this: Williams and Uzeyman’s utopia is not prelapsarian or regardant.8 There’s no looking or going back from there. Pre-encounter Africa is not in this picture. That is not the kind of revolution these hacker-guerrillas are aiming for or could even imagine. In short, Digitaria is nothing like the “second chimurenga” of Zimbabwe’s “war of independence” (1964–79). There is little to no communication with the ancestors here.
But all of this brings up two important questions: How will the hackers get to this utopia? And where is it located? Shaviro answers the former question in “Minute 51”: “[All] these different groups of characters [in Digitaria] are exploring, each in their own ways, what Deleuze and Guattari call lines of flight: not just physical movements of departure and escape but also new articulations of possibility and hope” (102).
Shaviro’s reference to “lines of flight” is of great importance, particularly if we consider that it concerns not the actual, which is real, but the virtual, which is also real. Lines of flight constitute two important things: one, unactualized possibilities, and two, a journey to somewhere that’s not here. The pathway to Digitaria’s utopia is made possible by a line of flight, which is not actual but virtual. We can find another way of putting this by briefly examining what French economist Thomas Piketty calls a “switch point.”9
There are two kinds of switch points. You have the conventional type, which is singular and, as such, can offer only one way out of (or redirection from) what is established. In this way, the switch point can lead to a new development or stage within capitalism, such as the transition from liberalism to social democracy.10 In Neptune Frost, however, we find the second type of switch point, which is in a state of superposition. Its presence is not singular, but multiple. It’s not confined to one possible direction, but opens to many all at once.
Shaviro writes: “[Digitaria is self-reliant.] Here they both work and play. A lot of the time, we see them partying and dancing. But Digitaria is also an Archimedean point, from which they can intervene in, and struggle to overthrow, the capitalist world order. In its many dimensions” (ix). To overthrow the present and oppressive system, which is multidimensional, the pathway to Digitaria’s utopia must have, for any chance of success, multiple possibilities all at once. This can only be achieved if this e-waste zone is in a state of superposition.
To better understand the phantom switch point that appears in Digitaria and informs the movie as a whole, it is useful to recall the computer program DMS in Maureen McHuge’s short story “The Kingdom of the Blind,” which Shaviro describes and analyzes in his 2016 book Discognition.11 The story goes something like this: After the computer program “begins to exhibit what might well be thought of as deliberate behavior” (turning on this and turning off that in a fashion that’s orderly but inconsistent with its key function, which is to “monitor and manage” the network of an average healthcare company), two software engineers, Sydney and Damien, wonder if they’re dealing with a system bug or actually witnessing a new form of consciousness that’s entirely alien to humans because DMS is not, obviously, a living thing.12 It doesn’t “see or hear,” nor “eat or breathe.” If this network flickering is indeed artificial self-awareness, it results from a switch point that is in the same phantom/probabilistic state pictured in Neptune Frost because a singular switch could never lead to a total break from the program’s primary function, which is, at the end of the day, the progressive accumulation of capital.
Why? Because a conventional switch point is what the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible”—a real possibility right next to a possibility that’s actualized. This proximity means redirection doesn’t go far beyond what already exists. It’s predictable. One can consider the adjacent possible as the public option (a low-cost government insurance plan that competed with the overpriced ones on the market) that appeared during the actualization process of Obamacare in 2014. That switch point, that adjacent possible as the public option, which would have universally reduced the cost of healthcare in the US, was not pulled and so remained virtual.
The unknown switch point that transformed the machine in “The Kingdom of the Blind” was in a condition that Kauffman describes as “unprestatable,” which means its result couldn’t be presented or predicted, even if the state of the switch point was known by the machine or its operators. Why? Because its possibilities were too numerous (or multidimensional) and not virtually unified by compossibilies (related possibilities). This is why for DMS—this precursor to AI—the result is so unexpected that it leaves the computer scientists in Maureen McHuge’s story in a state of wonder.13
The phantom switch point that appears in Digitaria is unprestatable. It’s speculative. And so the kind of utopia that it might actualize is difficult to discern or pin down or predict. There are only two things we can know about it: one, that it is in the future (or outside of the circle of capitalism); and two, because it emerges from a human community (the hackers) rather than from a machine, its multiple possibilities are necessarily all tied to the basic human needs neglected by a system of needs that focuses on things, or, as Marx put it, “the relation of things.”
And now for the second, and probably most important, question, as it relates to the adequacy or inadequacy of a work characterized as Afrofuturist: Where is this utopia that’s actualized by a phantom switch point? Shaviro provides the answer in “Minute 6”: “In the drumming here, as in its other uses of music, song, and dance, Neptune Frost pushes toward a reconfigured, ecstatic temporality: an experience of time beyond the reach of capitalist work discipline” (11).
Now we’re talking. But I would add space to this temporality because capitalism has a definite space-time that structures its mode of discipline. Capitalist temporality finds, as far as I can tell, its most complete description in Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination; and its spatial description in Carol Gould’s Marx’s Social Ontology. Capitalist time is Newtonian, in that it is implacable and unidirectional, and therefore absolute.14 Capitalist space is Cartesian and geometrical, and Gould’s conception of it is not only Cartesian but sets into motion rules of interaction that are mechanistic.
With Gould, capitalist space, which is ultimately dominated by time, exists on a grid with objects (people and things) that have a purely causal relation with each other. This results in a capitalist objectivity that appears to be ruled by the same laws that govern a game of snooker.15 This objectivity is a consequence of transforming—or “exploding,” to use Gould’s word—relations that are initially and intimately internal (or soul-to-soul) into the external relations of “atoms” that are formally free. This objectification corresponds with Marx’s definition of alienation in his Grundrisse. Altogether, this is the space that the Neptune Frost hackers want to exit. And the hope is that the desired future will realize a space that’s not so objectionable.
Clearly, Neptune Frost’s utopia is outside of capitalism. But there is something that’s also outside of this culturally constructed form of space-time: capital itself. Capitalism, a world-encompassing Concept that corresponds with what Hegel called the Absolute Idea (spirit talking to itself about itself forever), exerts an influence not from within but externally.16 The things (phenomena) inside of its zone of influence are enclosed, in the sense of Hegel’s system. It’s a circle that has one point from which its processes depart (value) and to which they return (surplus value). And so, all we see within this circle are the atoms/things (phenomena) powerlessly bouncing about in a circulating space contained by a Newtonian time that’s fixed no matter where you are, whether a factory in China, a supermarket in the US, or a coltan mine in the heart of Africa.
But time in this social system is also historical and progressive. This means all objects (people and things) are being pulled in one direction (there’s no going back) that’s defined by greater and greater technological complexity, and this technological expansion expands the circle that The Concept (The Absolute Idea) influences. If we were to explain this system only by events within its totality (The Absolute), we would end up with a picture of a reality that’s in essence autopoietic. Capital would then be like a biological organism that spontaneously and continuously regenerates itself. And so, progress would appear to be just as natural as the warmth of sun rays or the pull of gravity: something that happens on its own under the right conditions. But this is not at all the case. What drives, or better yet pulls, progress into the future is The Concept (The Absolute Idea) of capital, which is outside of the space-time system or configuration space. Despite its atemporality (or self-designated eternality), capital is forever in the future, forever unreachable, like a sun fixed in the sky of a planet, a sun that determines what can and cannot grow on this planet, a sun whose distance, despite its drawing power on the planet, never changes. The sun remains the same as its one circulating planet grows and grows. This is the stuff of science fiction.
But this is how it works. The Absolute Idea is outside of the capitalist economy, The Absolute. But it has a force that’s not only attractive (in the direction of the future) but also repulsive (the future is never sufficient, and, as consequence, is never reached). The latter force compels humans (Gould’s spatiality) to continuously produce the new, which is the source of relative surplus value (Postone’s temporality). The products of this labor then enter the past, but accumulatively appear to be moving toward the future as progress. The 2007 iPhone is followed by the 2008 iPhone and the 2009 one, and so on, and what we see are iPhones heading (or attracted) to capital, which is outside of history and never changes in the future.
One can see in this operation something close to what inspired Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History, which, as we noted at the beginning, codified Afrofuturism: the ninth thesis in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The angel in this thesis is also outside of the world of things, outside of its storms called progress, which “irresistibly [propel it] into the future.” But the Absolute Idea as capital does not want to “awaken the dead.” It wants nothing but progress.
Neptune Frost fits this bill perfectly, which is why its form of Afrofuturism adequately explains technological development. But this is not the case with other works considered Afrofuturist.
Indeed, one of the leading representations of technology in Afrofuturism is closely connected with the Afrocentric movement of the 1970s and ’80s. This post–Black Power art and political movement made a mistake similar to Hegel’s habit of confusing capitalist progress with universal history. This is the source of the insistence among proponents of Afrocentrism that ancient Egyptian technology was not only advanced but also African. Sun Ra is certainly in this camp. Not only did he not provide an explanation for technological progress, but he also made progress into a mystified form essential to Africanness. Another example is found on the album covers of the 1970s funk band Earth, Wind & Fire. What we see, again and again (Raise!, All ‘n All, Elements of Love), is the influence of Afrocentric Hegelianism on Afrofuturism—Hegelian because it imposes a historical development specific to capitalism on all cultural temporalities. For Afrofuturistic Afrocentrism, ancient Egyptian technology (which is fetishized) leads directly to its Western forms, and by this move, Africa is revealed to be more civilized than the rest (or the West). This thicket of Hegelian confusion is not found in the books of Octavia Butler nor in the theories of Kodwo Eshun nor in Williams and Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost.
In Neptune Frost, advanced technology is specific to our times, to the constraints that reproduce its economic space and temporality, and its identifiable forms of exploitation. Technological progress is not transhistorical. And the link between us and the societies of antiquity is far more biological than cultural. For humans, as animals, the cultural makes all the difference. And so Neptune Frost complicates our relationship with machines (Afrocentrism not only renders it Hegelian, but also normalizes it through its transhistorical assertions).
What Neptune Frost—and Shaviro’s analysis—make clear is that for an interpretation of technological development to be meaningful, it must not be universalized but specific to capitalism. Advanced technologies do not come from the stars (Black Panther) nor from the distant past (Sun Ra), but from “blood, sweat, and tears” in an economic system that came into existence four hundred years ago. If this fact is missed, then the future, and therefore science fiction, is also lost. And if the future is lost, then Afrofuturism as a movement is worthless. Our battles are in front of us, not behind us.
Steven Shaviro is the former DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University and the author of numerous books concerning science fiction, critical theory, speculative realism, and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Timecodes is a series published by Bloomsbury and edited by Nicholas Rombes and Nadine Boljkovac. The basic concept is this: Each volume in the series “focuses on one film, exploring it minute-by-minute beginning with minute one, and ending with the final minute before the closing credits.”
For example, Shaviro writes in “Minute 5”: “Neptune Frost exemplifies Gilles Deleuze’s claim that, in cinema, ‘the image is not in the present’; rather, ‘the image renders time relations—relations that can’t be reduced to the present—sensible and visible.’” Steven Shaviro, Neptune Frost: Movies Minute by Minute (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026), 10. All subsequent page references to this source are cited in-line.
Shaviro was an early member of the Afrofuturism listserv started by Alondra Nelson in 1998.
This is a play on a quote from the key Victorian capitalist Cecil Rhodes, which appears in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire: “The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonised. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far” →.
Shaviro writes: “Neptune Frost is not opposed to high technology; indeed, it is deeply technophilic. But the film is also strongly concerned with the questions of who controls technology, how they use it, and for what ends” (36).
She calls it “communal society of the future.” See Carol C. Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx's Theory of Social Reality (MIT Press, 1978).
These quotes are from Bob Marley’s “Zimbabwe” (1979).
Karl Marx’s concept of communism, as Ágnes Heller points out in her 1974 book The Theory of Need in Marx, wasn’t regardant but fully future-oriented. This orientation, however, is not without its problems because it does not ask: Where does the future come from? And, more curiously, if not pressingly, where exactly is it located?
In the English-language edition of Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, Arthur Goldhammer brilliantly translated Piketty’s “trajectoires et bifurcations” as “switch points,” which has a greater political charge than mere “bifurcations.” A switch point presents, in a place and time, a “possible future trajectory” that’s not determined by, and may even collapse, an existing state of affairs. Piketty: “But the role of historical research is precisely to demonstrate the existence of alternatives and switch points and to show how choices are conditioned by the political and ideological balance of power among contending groups.” Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 2020), 381.
And this is what Piketty had in mind in Capital and Ideology because he is, ultimately, a post-Keynesian socialist.
Shaviro writes: “DMS’s job is to monitor and manage the ‘physical plant—thermostats, lights, hot water, and air filtration’—of the Benevola Health Network, a group of hospitals and health care systems spread across North America. DMS keeps track of ‘security cameras, smoke detectors, CO detectors, and a host of other machines,’ checking for things like run-down batteries and misaligned sensors.” Steven Shaviro, Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016), 45.
Shaviro: “The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously wrote of the difficulty of understanding ‘what it is like to be a bat.’ It is even harder to imagine ‘what it is like’ to be a nonorganic system like DMS, given that its presumptive mentality is so radically different from any mentality of the human kind.” Shaviro, Discognition, 52.
Spinoza: “Wonder is the thought of any thing on which the mind stays fixed because this particular thought has no connection with any others.”
I have written about Postone’s temporality in my essay “Which Angel of Death Appears in Afrofuturist Visions of Hi-Tech Black Societies?” e-flux journal, no. 106, February 2020 →.
This condition is examined in a 2023 book by Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, 2023).
The externalization of capital as a concept will be discussed in my next essay on longevity and the death of the afterworld.
