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

Abstract

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.