BLACK BOX SYNDROME
Black Boxes and Chance Operations
Black Box Syndrome is a series of poems (or "black boxes") based on the hexagrams in the I Ching. Following the aleatoric tradition popularized by the surrealists and extended by the work of John Cage and Jackson Maclow, the poems cast their assorted lenses (or coins, or yarrow stalks) at the hazards of the incessant financialization of everyday life. Synthesizing chance-operational aesthetics with Aztec anatomical science, conspiracy theory with systems theory, and the black box model with the concept of the “influencing machine,” Black Box Syndrome articulates the tension between lyric excess and digital compaction that encodes poetic discourse in the age of pandemic. Over and against the corrosive world-shrinking effects of Wall Street risk management and futures trading, the black boxes in this book propose a counter-divination that distorts, deranges, and decolonizes the logic of empire.
“In its formal constriction, Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s ‘Black Box Syndrome’ triggers torrents of lyric profusion. Nervy and nutritive, this is the black box as cosmic mysterium, optic macula and nourishing milpa, cunning and exact in its cycles of pliancy and rest. Like the dream machines Clare and Blake confected against the crises of enclosure and industrialization, Moctezuma’s black boxes form a marvelous anti-mechanism against all forms of supremacist thought.”
“With ‘Black Box Syndrome’ Jose-Luis Moctezuma reveals himself to be one of the finest contemporary poets of risk. Thinking past probabilistic risk analysis, this book enlivens older and outlasting speculative analytics such as fate, fortune, divination, and influence. Built from the computational concept of the black box (a system known only by its inputs and outputs) and the structural poetics of the I-Ching, this book tangles with the inescapably vulgar qualities of uncertainty: prefrontal cortex, financial instruments, divinatory practices, global supply chains, dream horizons, paranoiac demographics, and pre-nodal subjects. In a startling collection of hexagram poems, Moctezuma’s ‘Black Box Syndrome’ discloses the sigil hidden in the vulgarity of chance, that is, poetry always.”
“During the coronavirus pandemic, life became remote; consciousness, stripped of somatic partnership, was trimmed to the size of a Zoom square. The poems of ‘Black Box Syndrome’ articulate the traumas (and revelations) of such constraint in a new Book of Changes, where the technological present grips the fingers of the ancients and pulls them into their algorithmic rooms. Each synthetic hexagram sizzles with a fusion of influences in ‘closed circuit telepathy.’ Electric and mesmeric, this book will explode your brain in the best way. ”
“Dream-workings, plastivores, military lingo, an economics of exorbitance, war, torture, computation, a theogony in music, visual and acoustical repetitions, incantation, murmuration, a poetry of graceful removal, of closed-circuit telepathy: in Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s remarkable ‘Black Box Syndrome,’ the poet, availing a trickster’s shapeshifting commitments, discovers how ‘narratives of miscreancy are common where the yolk of the sun splatters’ in this series of austere, mysterious, and relentlessly intelligent poems that show his readers a total ideogrammic plan for the chaos magic needed to face the machinery of our harrowing present.”
DIALOGUE ON BLACK BOX SYNDROME
Diego Báez: Your book, Black Box Syndrome, employs the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching to shape each individual poem and give structure to the overall collection. Even as someone previously unfamiliar with Chinese cleromantic practices, I found your use of the hexagrams a surprisingly straightforward means for giving shape to each poem. How did you land on using the I Ching as an organizing structure for the book?
Jose-Luis Moctezuma: The I Ching provided a means of intellectualizing and modeling an oppositional cleromancy to the algorithmic capitalism that operates unseen and unperturbed in our daily lives, a thematic current which runs throughout the book. The “financialization of daily life,” as a book by Randy Martin named it, is a phenomenon predicated, among a multitude of things, on futures trading and the “management of risk,” and it can be seen in the widening economic rift between (what McKenzie Wark called) the “vectoralist class” and everyone else, a perilous situation which is reducing culture as such to the realm of economic access. I see it as a predatory form of divination, via algorithmic computation and A.I. mediation, practiced with a view toward specific financial outcomes and the accumulation of interest at the expense of a socially ethical human coexistence.
The I Ching belongs to the oldest of human traditions, the poetry of divination and cosmic order, and it precedes and preempts the vulgar magicks of financial market speculation. In a way, the I Ching served as an obsidian mirror for me, a mechanism that reflects both itself and the practitioner, in which a void of infinite possibility rests like an interstice that changes with each gesture, action, and thought. The I Ching was ultimately a liberatory mechanism as much as it was a lens for thought.