Find part one of this two-part interview here.


Zach Peckham: How do you think about the interdisciplinary nature of The Red Earth Project in relation to cybernetics? Or, to move beyond the term, how does a multi-modal approach particularly serve the political-aesthetic inquiries at the heart of your writing and art?

Michael Salu: I guess I could say this trans-disciplinarity, led by my writing, operates as an act of resistance. It is an attempt to retain freedom of thought and form from the nagging concerns of the market economy of writing. Writing for me is essential to giving home to an existence of different realities formed and fractured by colonial legacy. The resistance to standardized forms comes quite naturally. I think that’s also due to my art background. I focus more on what the concept or question is pulling me towards. You can see a polyphonous through-line here with the many layers of my literary work, right through to the anthology, an attempt to speak with others, the collaborative form as community, however fleeting, and again as something playing with the traditions and fundamentals of literary expectations, whilst, really, the intention is something conceptual and entirely removed. My hope is readers of both the anthology and Red Earth encounter an instability in the works—a sense that there is likely more—and want to seek it out.

There is a clear subtext to the work I’m doing in this space. In my opinion, much of the digital realm as it is currently constructed has been shifted to become a facilitator, or enactor, of a fascistic societal structure, with “AI” as it is currently marketed and implemented the latest marker of this, where we are increasingly encouraged to forgo critical thinking and to ignore how society is actually formed and slide along its autonomous rails. Much of the methodology appears to be about prepping human behavior to be compatible with machine and not the other way around, which we can see in countless examples, like the lifestyle mimesis from tech-optimists eschewing decadent time-wasting sensualities of existence like cooking and luxuriating in the pleasure of eating for time-optimizing replacement meals. There appears to be an inevitable end result to self-regulating systems based on an exclusive humanist model. Such societal evolution isn’t new per se, but this particular technological cycle seems especially dangerous and perpetual and redolent of what I think cybernetics attempts to address. I’m very suspicious, and have been for a long time, especially with how little we question algorithmic influence, given how we can clearly see the impact of these feedback loops on physical society.

When I encounter the term cybernetics, I assume some connection to the work that was coming out of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), if not in the sense of an aesthetic tradition or discourse then maybe at least a sort of spirit. I taught a class last semester at the Cleveland Institute of Art that explored expressions and interpretations of tech in the literary imagination, where we read a lot of canonical sci-fi, cyberpunk, postmodern and posthuman theory, and contemporary speculative and experimental texts that were thinking in imaginative ways about and with technology, digital and otherwise. After exploring what felt like every permutation of the same potential dystopic tech future—one of our key questions in the class was why the human technological imagination curves and then loops so predictably, why our thinking about tech and its possibilities seems to repeat the same patterns, over and over, across time—we ended that semester with a unit on cybernetics/cybernetic literatures. This offered a fresh turn or escape hatch from that same doomed sci-fi cycle we’d been observing for weeks, disrupted our thinking and quite honestly challenged the students and myself to even make sense of some of the ideas at the heart of that foundational, hardcore CCRU research and writing. Yet, even if our understanding was somewhat limited or necessarily intuitive, the idea of hyperstition—we read through “Hyperstition: An Introduction”, a short interview with Nick Land conducted by Delphi Carstens in 2009, now hosted at 0(rphan)d(rift>) archive—seemed to account almost totally for that predictability while simultaneously suggesting a very good reason for cybernetics’ tendency to dip into the occult, especially when considering this work’s attention to the incidental artifact, the ghost or noise generated in instances of imagining and culture-making.

What parts, if any, of that original CCRU research have influenced you as a writer and thinker? Are there other bodies of work in cybernetics that you consider particularly formative? How do you see this “tradition,” as it were, meaningfully extending, either in Cybernetics, or Ghosts?, or beyond, in contemporary literature? And how do you account for or think about cybernetics’ relationship(s) to the occult?

First off, having read several of Nick Land’s essays, it’s quite something to see his thought so concisely here. I think what he suggests about the potential for the intensity of fiction as a device of something more than expression chimes with how I approach prose. I find it hard to simply write for the pleasure of the sentence. I have to face outwards, use the internal to parse the external and vice versa.

I would have enjoyed sitting in on your class! Their observations are very interesting, and I think speak to what I’ve been attempting to explore, certainly with The Red Earth Project. Is potential for the human condition limited by its lack of imagination, or exposure to knowledge? Is the “human” technological imagination limited by its own humanistic framework which might restrict imaginative potential due to this separation from other dimensions of life?—and I include human life in this. I’d suggest this contributes to repetitive fatalism. I don’t believe it’s possible to imagine progressive technological futures with this exceptionalism upheld. Eschewing reductive identity politics, these observations are a definite subtext to the anthology. I think it was Dionne Brand I heard say that the rhetoric of humanism arose with slavery. I pay much attention to the ways the legacies of this exceptionalism are carried into the technological space, where the capacity is for machine learning to replicate, and even entrench through automated processes the violence of epistemic and racial imbalances. “AI” championed with such fervor by VCs is extractive and isn’t for everyone, but takes from everyone. I’m interested in the universal “we” and the way this pronoun is utilized as a mode of erasure, because it is clear “we” does not apply to everyone. So I look beyond the traditional contours of a posthuman definition and who owns transcendence, and instead look to the posthuman as what lies beyond and before humanist epistemology.

I noted Land’s interviewer’s use of the word archaic in referring to occult systems, to which I immediately flinched. Firstly, I don’t group Indigenous practice and thought this way, and I think this can be dangerous. In Nigeria for example, practitioners of Voodoo (or Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices) have been gradually shifted to the margins of society, with Christianity in particular as the long-lasting colonial weapon over the psyche, but in the vein of Land’s hyperstitive persistence, Voodoo remains there, making decisions, or casting a shadow over decisions left to the Christian god. Indigenous spiritual devotion shreds the edges of monotheism to become something else, a pervasive possession, speaking when one thinks they’re speaking, acting when one thinks they’re acting.

CCRU has been influential, certainly as a framework for thinking through exponential technological time. Kodwo Eshun, who was affiliated with CCRU, is someone who has explored technological temporalities from an African and African diaspora perspective. I suppose where my work diverges is in a tighter focus on one cultural tradition, and explicit ownership of the liminality I mentioned earlier. Red Earth borrows from The Divine Comedy and the works of William Blake as I’m acknowledging the influence of these literary and artistic traditions as both an essence of my Western education, but beyond that also integral to colonial legacy through education and cultural assimilation.

It’s exciting to see you describe these limitations and then augment them with other experiences, politics, and texts to build a more nuanced or pointed framework. A kind of hacking or remixing. This feels related both to trans-disciplinarity and the ways in which your work, which conceptualizes a technologized humanity not limited to or even irrespective of “the West,” challenges that core cybernetics fieldwork just as writing in diaspora challenges conventions of literary canonization.

This makes me want to ask: Who and what are some of your key influences? Artistically, politically, intellectually?

There’s an amorphousness to this field which I think is limited by its semantics to the layperson. There are many points at which I resist CCRU and cybernetics in general. My influences come from reading widely. I probably took most to Schizophrenia and Deleuzian theory as a conceptual space—something I’m actually thinking through with my current work-in-progress – which I guess I might call a novel, at least for the moment—which looks at madness as a mode of transcendence from societal and geo-political violence.

As I write, I think of formative influences and I think being a kid and teen in the 90s reflects in my work. I think of musical influences of the time, technological possibility and foreboding: artists like Bjork, Tricky, Basic Channel, Underground Resistance, Aphex Twin. The dark incantations of Memphis rap. Wutang. Later, Burial. I’d argue these are all of cybernetic experimentation, and of course this is the decade of CCRU, which I was too young to know much about at the time. More recently, I’ve been interested in the writings of Yuk Hui, particularly his rethinking of objects and subjects in the digital realm. Before that, years ago, I read a fair bit of Douglas Hofstadter’s work. I do, quite unconsciously, take a lot from cognitive science and the sciences in general, into my writing and art. I’m currently reading Theweleit Klaus’s Male Fantasies Volume 1: Woman Floods Bodies History. It’s a work on the image of women in the fascist unconscious, which I’m reading for my novel, but also because I’m interested in this particular psychic paranoia and hauntedness, for the reasons I’ve mentioned. I like to be informed, to know what and who I’m dealing with, which is critical as a person of African origin.

I had a cyberpunk flurry early on in my reading life, complementing my interest in science fiction films and video games at the time. So I’d read quite pulpy stuff, usually whatever I could find in a second hand bookshop I tended to visit in South London. Of course William Gibson was seminal. Steve Aylett also springs to mind from this time, and later I encountered Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler. I can definitely see the influence of their worldbuilding in my work today.

Thinking toward literary futures, I think of the small press as the space where that future is made. I’d love to know a little bit about your experiences working with Calamari Archive, Subtext Books, and other small press publishers based in the US and UK. Independent, autonomous imprints like these are often able to bring challenging, subversive, or simply unwieldly work into the world that would not otherwise find receivable forms or readerships, given that it is decidedly not a product that can be proven viable in economic terms prior to publication. Do you feel there is an inherent relationship or kinship between the kind of writing in Cybernetics, or Ghosts? and Red Earth and the small press? In what ways have small presses uniquely supported this work, or your own? What is your own relationship to small presses, or, maybe even more superficially, the term “small press” itself?

Small presses, big ideas! Or so it appears. Which makes me wonder. Isn’t literature meant to challenge us and help us grow? I find this conversation about economic viability of writing interesting. You would think by now the bigger publishers might have enough data to be able to intuit what the public wants, but it seems to remain quite a passive process. Doesn’t this passivity put publishing on the back foot when it comes to what does and will shape our cultural landscape?

Calamari have been incredible to work with. I find the autonomy of small press publishing quite liberating and this reflects how I work, as an independent artist. Calamari are an excellent example of this. They’re only interested in ideas and not what monetary value can be extracted from them. Derek White, Calamari’s publisher, was incredibly enthusiastic about The Red Earth Project when he came across extracts from it online (which is an indicator to put one’s work out there, you never know who is looking) as well as my original book artwork. I’d created a one-off hand-bound leather edition of Red Earth that I exhibited as an artwork in a solo exhibition I had here in Berlin. It was in part a tongue-in-cheek exercise riffing on literary value. I probably made more from selling this single work than I might from a typical contract with a big publisher.

Subtext are relatively new as a press, just a couple of years old, but have been an innovative record label for experimental, avant-garde music for a couple of decades. With friends in the industry, I’ve been adjacent to this world. James Ginzburg, who heads the label, and I have been in conversation for some years about a collaboration. There’s synergy between our respective approaches to art. Working with them has been refreshing, a really open space for creating this anthology without compromise, right down to the generative design. It has also been good to experience how a record label approaches production and promotion, which is a little different but some things could also apply to the small press environment, and record labels have already been through many of the struggles now faced by publishing houses.

I’m in it for the ideas, I’m passionate about writing as a vehicle for critical thinking, as well as really pushing the form, prioritizing challenging but enjoyable reading experiences. It has taken time to form an ecosystem of collaborators that understand, or are open to my approach. The small press environment is where one is more likely to see writing about the kinds of things we’re discussing, which shows their importance, but it’s also a shame. Real progressive thought is either chamfered down to palatability for commercial purposes, diluting its actuality, or very often remains in the confines of the academy, which again can be rather limiting. I’m not against working with an agent or larger publisher, if they understand my approach, or the right project unearths, but it seems this work fares best with brave, independent support.

Zach Peckham is a writer, editor, and educator. He is the author of the poetry collection As If And (New Mundo, 2026) and his writing has recently appeared in Annulet, APARTMENT, Landfill, mercury firs, Oversound, and Tilted House. He holds an MFA in poetry from the NEOMFA and teaches at Cleveland State and the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is the managing editor at the CSU Poetry Center and an editor-at-large at Cleveland Review of Books. He also runs a small press called Community Mausoleum and a journal called Coma.


 
 
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