The Artists

I have seen several of M. Lamar’s live performances, including, most recently, his new work Machines and Other Intergalactic Technologies of the Spirit (2024–25). The pieces are stunning and obliterating and comprise a kind of serial study of the plantation: its instruments of enslavement, discipline and punishment, the complexity of the master/slave dialectic, of death in life, of the death and dismemberment of Black people, and of fugitivity. In the brilliant and heart-wrenching Machines he has expanded toward the cosmos, toward “the new migration,” toward Egypt and the universe, while in a serial and recursive way returning to and from the work he has done before, the work I am describing here.Footnote ²

He has described himself as Negro Gothic, as a devil worshipper, and until recently has worn an upside-down cross as part of extreme Goth clothing/costuming onstage and off. His films Legacies, Discipline, and Re-Memberments/The Demon Rising are performance environments in which he is still borrowing, reproducing, and innovating on Gothic tropes: dark and moody environments, clouds and the moon, castles, dungeons, coffins, and death. Lamar brings philosophy to his thought, his texts, and his images, especially Nietzsche, Foucault, and Hegel. His vocal sound is expansive, overwhelming, this side of atonal, a kind of fibrillation, trembling with fullness, seeming to carry many voices at once and carried and supported by the lush, harsh, rising, complex sounds he has composed and is playing on the synthesizer. His heavily ring-laden fingers often lift from the keys in conducting, lifting, bringing forth, bringing close gestures. He is a figure not to be messed with, a contemporary, Gothic, and Afrofuturist figure who expresses both history and what may come (revenge perhaps) unmistakably and as concurrent.

At times, as in Destruction, the live performance from 2016 about which I’ve written previously, he appears and reappears in a 19th-century coffin whose opening at the top end reveals the head of the corpse. The corpse opens his eyes, lifts the lid from inside this coffin surrounded by a vaporous night, to become the dead person risen, fleeing, a fugitive person slipping over and over through jail cell bars into a Gothic night. He is, as in the film Legacies discussed in this essay, the person who over and over climbs an automated plantation castration machine, the whip in his hand coerced through a hole to become his father’s “private parts,” which is severed and falls into a basket full of cotton balls. Elsewhere, he is a necromancer, bringing the dead back to life.

He is an artist, like Mackey, of serial images and themes, seriality layering temporality, punctuating with iconic symbols of violence done, anger exploded, then returned again to containment. Seriality because it cannot be over, so we circle back to look again and again. Seriality, in one of Mackey’s various summonings of its meanings and the work that it does, is “a failed advance,” the hope of moving forward “constrained,” so that seriality is a “mix of utopic ongoingness and recursive constraint” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:xiv).

Mackey, who won the National Book Award for Splay Anthem along with many other awards and honors, has been writing the Mu and Andoumboulou poems, in an ongoing numbered sequence, since 1974.

In the preface to Splay Anthem Mackey explains that he first encountered the Andoumboulou on a 1956 recording by François Di Dio of Dogon (Western Sudan/Mali) funerary rites and the “Song of the Andoumboulou” that was embedded in those rites. From a book on the Dogon by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, The Pale Fox (1945), he learned that, in “Dogon cosmology” the Andoumboulou “are a failed, earlier form of human being” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:xi). In Mackey’s vision, they are a various being or set of varied beings, a “band of nervous travellers” (x). “Seek[ing] to undo or come to new terms with rut” they “roust, rout, rouse” (x). They are an ancestor/human-in-progress, dust and particulate, resonating. They are, Mackey says, “a rough draft of the human being, the work-in-progress we continue to be” (xi).

The intangible worlds Mackey creates are built of and with sound, music, and instruments. The poems are inseparable from, cocreated with, what’s on the box that is always playing something wherever the Andoumboulou find themselves, often experimental and improvisational Black jazz, but also music from everywhere. Or there is sound or music emanating from the shifting and various forms of embodiment and/or dismemberment in the Andoumboulou themselves, with their bones as instruments.Footnote ³ In Mackey’s poems the “I” that sometimes narrates is always the we, the voice of the sociality and sometimes division and dispersion of the we. The “I” that the self-possessed (white) self depends on is disintegrated, meaningless. The “andoumboulouous we” shifts, divides, disperses, shows up again.

That “we,” as in Lamar’s work, is of only dubious materiality, experiencing amputation, or nub as a condition of Nub. They are on the “verge” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:74), the “brink” (85), never stable. They can never fully arrive. Mackey writes that the “serial form lends itself to andoumboulouous liminality” (xi) because the Andoumboulou are “calling backward and forward into question” (xi). They are always swept away again, blown away, to find themselves in the “City of Lag” (20), “Arrival” (31), “New Not Yet” (47). They are always finding themselves in history, in convex, concurrent temporalities of what has happened.

Mu comes to Mackey through many sources, resonances, and meanings, including Zen Buddhism, all of which play through the poems, and which include echoes from the great jazz/cosmic avantgardists Don Cherry and Sun Ra. From Don Cherry’s two Mu albums, “Mu” First Part and “Mu” Second Part, Mackey takes, among other things, the idea of “music as gnostic announcement” (x). From Sun Ra, the track “Mu” that opens his Atlantis record. Mackey says, “[Mu] promises verbal and romantic enhancement, graduation to an altered state, momentary thrall translated into myth.” Mu is “lingual and erotic allure, mouth and muse […] the theme of lost ground and elegiac allure recalling the Atlantis-like continent Mu” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:x). Mu, this thing that seems to brush close-up against the altered states assumed to be part of possession and with which I wish to condition the term, is the musicality sounding in the indeterminate worlds of the Andoumboulou, and vice versa, “each the other’s understudy” (ix).

Mu expresses the feeling, we might say, of the Andoumboulou moving through Lamar, a traversal by global immaterial travelers. They twine with Lamar’s body and voice, entities as vibrating strings, unstable, accelerating and falling back. The condition for this traversal of Lamar is white-out, the withdrawal from accessible visuality, the explosion of what is seen into molecularly disintegrating fields of light and particulate, serial historical images flickering, burning, self-consuming. The white-out, the full inhabitation of Lamar by the twined energies of the Andoumboulou and Mu that I imagine, arrives through both acceleration and repeat, an automation that carries both the histories of its use and its liberationist possibility.

The Performances

Lamar’s Re-Memberments/The Demon Rising (2021, in collaboration with composer, singer, and guitarist Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix and composer and bassist James Ilgenfritz) is filmed in black-and-white and set in what is perhaps a crypt with a single tomb in the dark deep of a Medieval castle, that iconic Gothic place. Lamar, perhaps risen from the tomb, stands encased in a black assemblage that is also a kind of armor, with a long black train. He seems a kind of necromancer tuned to Black death, in full black-robed glory, with a mirror at his diaphragm that seems to become an opening in his center, with its enigmatic symbol of crossed lines, an opening between life and death or a passage between.

In the chamber with him is a Black man in partial armor (a gorget around his neck, pauldrons on his shoulders, and a helmet) who is standing but appears to be dead. As Lamar sings, we see in a closeup of his chest that the man may have begun to breathe. Behind Lamar, projected, the serial images: images of large white upside-down crosses, in which, dimly, appear the iconic image of a lynching, that of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith; coffins automated into flashing repeats; fire consuming buildings. They are all in a white-out, white taking over the screen, white shapes, striated, verging on unascertainable, vibrating, flashing, aggressive, accelerating. They both appear, and resist being seen. Lamar sings his serial phrases: “Dismemberment/Re-memberment/We’re in pieces/We’re in pieces/Trying to put ourselves back together” (M. Lamar Reference Lamar2021). Images layer, white-out, multiply, degenerate (see fig. 1). So like Andoumboulou worlds, the chamber is a place of unnameability, proliferation, and dissolution, and so it seems that they may be here, thickening the chamber’s atmosphere. Gradually, Lamar’s body moves as in automation, as in an automaton, repeating over and over, as he reaches a zenith of sound and accelerated mechanical movement. We see his arm remove the man’s helmet and the man stabilizes, alive, but into what is undefined. A Black man, with a simple cord necklace, looking off slightly in an expression that is ambiguous, unreadable.

The experience of the Andoumboulou is so like Lamar’s antirepresentation of the conditional being of Black people that it is easy to imagine them moving through him as a kind of energy, suggestion, a temporary joining or song or duet. Again, dismemberment along with reassembly into a complicated temporality of transitory wholeness are central to the Andoumboulou as well, coming as they do from “the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:xv), the ongoing plantation. Nub is a “chronically resided in, repeatedly arrived at […] place name and diagnosis fraught with a sense of diminishment” (xv). In Nub, “Nub’s minions gassed us” (Mackey Reference Mackey2021:299).

In Nub,

Figure 1.

Re-Memberments: The Demon Rising, featuring M. Lamar and Ernest Maurice Davis, 2021, filmed at The Glove. (Photo courtesy of M. Lamar)

In Nub,

But, as with Lamar, amputation, or the condition of living in the republic of Nub, is not a stable or absolute condition. The nub contains regeneration.

Feeling (altered state) gives sentience back.

And I imagine Lamar’s mouth as burning with Mu, Mu as altered state. I take this from a quote by the Zen Buddhist Shodo Harada that Mackey uses as an epigraph to “Song of the Andoumboulou: 133 1/2”:

Mu in his mouth, he is singing re-memberment into being, the indeterminate nomads, the Andoumboulou, passing through, amplifying his being with their string plucking nubs, their here and everywhereness, their ancientness, the way they are drafting a human in progress in a state of liminal transit.

Even as I imagine the Andoumboulou and Mu touching Lamar as an alternative place from which to think about possession, there is no doubt that Lamar is also courting, embodying, and then challenging the long history of racializing commonplaces about possession. These, notoriously, surfaced in the testimony of Darren Wilson, who murdered Mike Brown in 2014, when he said that “Brown was like a ‘demon’ coming at him.” Lamar speaks of this incident as a founding moment for his Negrogothic (in Hobbs Reference Hobbs2023). Given the subtitle of Re-Memberments, which is The Demon Rising, Lamar seems to amplify and contest the demonic frame for what Christianity characterized as possession. In fact, Lamar says about the Negrogothic that it “always embodies a highly cultivated and critical encounter with European traditions by dispossessed Africans. Transfiguring that monstrous tradition into the holiness of our existential cry” (in Hobbs Reference Hobbs2023). I listen here to Lamar, hearing the suggestion of replacing the range of Christian, imperial, capitalist, colonial, Enlightenment, and even leftist and artistic constructions of possession with “the holiness of our existential cry.” It is a cry that we can put into contact with Mu; Lamar’s existential cry blends with, or is amplified by the altered state, that ancient enhancement, that uncapturable Mu.

Lamar’s cry is a spatial, temporal, and corporeal limitlessness, a capacious opening of worlds, in a thickening of an invisibility that provides cover for the fugitive traversal of unseen and unrepresentable spaces. In this “graduation to an altered state [altered state but also bondage or slavery], momentary thrall translated into myth” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:x), the Black Gothic Knight, the Negro Superman,Footnote ⁴ the Demon, rises. Lamar is summoning, singing, even when his voice in the film is muted, drawing from down deep, filling, expanding, lifting, breathing out for impossibly long times on a note, or notes, summoning Mu, arriving in Mu. Lamar, praising Sun Ra, whose influence is deep in his work, says that Ra “represents some kind of epitome of black transcendence, black existentialism” (in Rachel Reference Rachel2017). It is not hard to imagine that Mu, at work in the capaciousness or transcendence of Lamar’s most fully exploded moments, is a “black existentialism.”

Mu, this richly enigmatic “altered state,” does not (unlike possession) carry coloniality, does not include the designations given to possession, the way it has been and is seen and interpreted. Mu has no visual appearance at all. Or rather, when it may look like possession, it is already disappearing as possession. Mu, and its conjoined twin the Andoumoulou, is a way to elude the baggage of possession without (re)imposing reason, the self-possessed self, the individuated I. In Mu there is mysticism, there is dream as a desired state of (non)consciousness, a living relationship with the dead while also being the dead, traversal of limitless and undecidable space, beginnings and ends in spiral relation, cosmologies whirling and sung. Mu is feel-able, sense-able, a movement sidewise, “an eccentric step to the side” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:xii), a splay, an oblique angle in relation to possession.

Discipline (2020, with The Living Earth Show) forms a kind of diptych with Re-Memberments/The Demon Rising. Lamar appears again as Goth Medieval knight, with the same mirror, now also one at his sternum, the same symbols, the same long pointed blades rising from his back, the long train. “Discipline” also exists as a track on an album by M. Lamar & The Living Earth Show called Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman (2019). In his notes on the web page for this album, Lamar names his specific philosophical sources (which appear in the video as books) and comments that the album is “a melodramatic epic expressing and enacting a becoming of Black mind, body, and soul beyond the violence of both slavery and liberty.” The notes also say that “Lamar is guided in this work by a desire for a new existential philosophy on, for, and from Black consciousness, which partakes of what Fred Moten calls ‘the black Radical tradition,’ but which distinctively rejects and seeks a world beyond Christianity alongside and inseparable from white supremacist liberal capitalism” (Lamar Reference Lamar2019).Footnote ⁵ The video takes place, as does Re-Memberments, in a kind of darkened secret space, and shares many of the same aesthetic moves between a real space and a kind of whiting out into a space that is not tangible, or identifiable, with body and objects nearly disappearing, ontologically questionable, or alluding to a different kind of existence.

The video begins with a voiceover quote from Sun Ra: “I don’t deal in freedom. I deal in discipline,” spoken and repeated by Lamar in a rasping, grating bass voice.Footnote ⁶ There is a white man in a black hood trussed via various metal parts into a seated position with legs bent and held up in front of him, his neck subjected to a long metal rod, and a padlock prominently displayed as part of the apparatus. He is being forced to read, it seems, from the selection of books standing on end that surround him on one side: bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Although most of the video is in black and white, there is an image at the end in color. As in Re-Memberments, there are returns to a visually recognizable world, where things appear realistically, without effects, especially here in this color moment. The ending color image is the room where the video is being filmed, almost as if revealing the means of production, in its sort of low-budget setup.Footnote ⁷ Otherwise, the scene moves between shots of the reader-being-disciplined and the indeterminate whited-out mystic misted space escaping representational clarity.

In that space are Lamar and two musicians (presumably the duo comprising The Living Earth Show). The musicians are white. They wear black hoods. One plays an electric bass and one is pulling a wooden stick over a large hand-held cymbal. There is a sound of deep bass chanting, the screech of the cymbal, the low chords and accelerated strumming of the bass. Lamar, in the center, sings, his voice soaring into the highest of notes and swooping back down. Sometimes he sings, his mouth, operatic, wide open, but his voice is not audible. His body, in a digital effect, begins to repeat, jerkily, glitching, automating, in the white-out. Lamar is creating this automation, willing it into being, summoning it, rather than being automated by an outside force (see fig. 2). This is the moment in this video at which I see the Andoumboulou, quivering into a kind of existence in this vibrating, accelerating world, a different kind of consciousness, being brought into being.

In this film and the others, automation seems a necessary kind of force, a necessary kind of energy and vibration, molecular, attendant to, or necessary to, the gathering of what I imagine as the Andoumboulou/Mu presence in Lamar. It seems a form of Black energy, Black android energy, abolitionist energy—occurring in a whiting out of representational authority, by means of which the combined power of Lamar and Andoumboulou/Mu can manifest and unleash itself. Perhaps automation is the fullest realization of what is limitless and undecidable, a Black existentialism, or ontology, outside the prison bars.

Legacies (2017, with Mivos Quartet) is a study of plantation automation. It begins with Lamar’s serial image of the coffin through which the upper part of the corpse can be viewed, mists rising around it. Then the plantation castration machine appears. It is at first a structure that seems part scaffold and part guillotine. But then, in a move that itself seems automated, it splits down the middle vertically, the two sides moving apart, each side doubled as if in a mirror image. A tall white executioner in a black hood stands at the center in profile, doubled. Behind him, lined up on their knees, are three white bare-chested young men, doubled to six. Lamar, in a long hooded black cloak and carrying the whip, another serial image in his work, is at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the platform (see fig. 3). He walks up singing, “He cut off my father’s private parts/and likes to play with mine/He wore that hood in mobs of men/and hung him from the tree of blood/and not that tree gon swallow me.” The split image becomes two towers, versions of a guillotine, seen from the front. The whip appears in a hole in the guillotine, gradually descending until it is very long. The hooded men pull the chain/chord that seems to activate the guillotine and the whip/penis, severed, falls into baskets full of cotton bolls. Potted stands of small cotton plants sit on the floor along the walls of this ambiguous space. Then Lamar is behind bars and the whip/penis is being fondled by one of the young white men on his knees. The machine appears again, automated it would seem, and the castration happens again and again, the whip/penis repeatedly put through the hole. The violence of the act is displaced by the smooth, almost neutral automatic motion of this machine, as the fondling also repeats over and over. Then there is a mirrored split image of Lamar and a white man, whose hood he pulls off in a cotton field. They kiss. Then the machine appears again, but this time the serial image of the upside-down cross appears with what looks like the iconic photo of the 1930 Marion, Indiana, lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith superimposed, indistinctly, on it. It becomes a collage of the machine, automation, and violence. The scene changes and Lamar is now in a maze of bars, turning, trying to move through, contained, entrapped. And yet, we are returned to the coffin, a serial image that abuts fugitivity, somehow in a space and time that is (serially) exemplary of an existence that is possible, beyond, after, or before the plantation and its automated mechanics of extraction.

Figure 2.

Discipline, composed by M. Lamar and the Living Earth Show, 2020. (Photo courtesy of M. Lamar)

Figure 3.

Legacies, M. Lamar and Mivos Quartet, 2017, filmed at Participant Inc. and The Living Gallery. (Photo courtesy of M. Lamar)

Automation is, like possession, embedded in a deep and long history of varying negotiations over the status of the human and who is and is not human. Although he has not yet published specifically in this area, Edward Jones-Imhotep gave a talk at the University of Toronto on his emergent five-year project, “The Black Androids and the Technological Underground.” Vincent Tanforan, in a review of the talk, discusses Jones-Imhotep’s tracking of how Black people worked through and with technology, even as they were characterized, sometimes through the black automata that circulated in the 18th and into the 20th century, as largely pastoral, and incapable of technological intelligence (2024). Jones-Imhotep, Tanforan reports, notes that these automata, “Black androids,” were especially circulated during historical black uprisings and abolitionism.Footnote ⁸ But he is ultimately interested in the emergence of Afrofuturist androids as a counter to Black androids. In Tanforan’s account of this talk:

What fascinates me about this glimpse of Jones-Imhotep’s work-in-progress is how Lamar, having become automata, might be thought as an Afrofuturist android, confounding black automata/androids as racializing novelties weaponized against Black revolt.

In “Plantation Energy: From Slave Labor to Machine Discipline,” Nicholas Fiori gives an account of automata and automation as designed in relation to Black uprising, which of course, over and over, the techniques of automata and automation failed to quell. He writes about “the plantation’s energy regime” (2020:562), which moved from the calculation of the labor of the enslaved as metabolic energy like that of animals—the mules who drew the plows and so on—to a frame in which the enslaved are positioned within emerging industrial models, becoming part of the machinic complex emerging on plantations, including innovations like the cotton gin. Fiori suggests that “the genealogy of the human machine” evolving on the plantation through the 19th century passed “through the imperative to exhaust and control black rebellion” (563).

The connective tissue between automation and black automata, between bodies of the enslaved—synchronically and structurally embedded as part of plantation machinery—and objects that move without any volition or will from a presumably human source, is strengthened via the clock through “clockwork physics’ metaphors” (563). The enslaved were “conceived in part as linked automata that operated synchronically under the master’s command” (564), or what the musician Moor Mother (with Rasheedah Phillips and their collective Black Quantum Futurism) calls, referring to plantation time, the “master’s clock” (Don Giovanni Reference Giovanni2019).Footnote ⁹ Post-slavery, or “second slavery” (Fiori Reference Fiori2020:573), began a de-association of Black people with technology. Under the influence of thermodynamics, Fiori says, entropy became a presumed characteristic of Black laborers, who were seen as disorganized and as having too little energy to be a profitable machine. Acting on this convenient formation, the cotton industry innovated a new way to extract energy from those it imagined at a temporal, energetic, and technological distance from white energy. This was “the pushing system” (574), another way to coerce Black labor time and energy, through brutal forced acceleration of that labor.

All this put into place a situation, extending into the present, in which Black people are incorporated as part of machines. Or they are extractable energy to be, like a machine, accelerated and subject, as a machine, to automation. They are also, in slightly different but intrinsically connected formations, figured as automata or black animated objects without human interiors, or, without the necessary energy to be productive unless temporally coerced. As Fiori writes about the black automata, they were important for “further wedding representations of human machines to the qualities of subservience, un-willed-ness, and spirit-lessness associated with blacks” (2020:575). Lamar, then, brings automation into his films as both subjugation and as a vector of rebellion and transcendence, the rebellion which, according to Fiori, the translation of Black laboring bodies into machine was designed to quell.

If we revisit Re-Memberments/The Demon Rising, we see how the knight who has been reanimated becomes automaton-like in his carapace of partial armor, and the image, already highly technologically mediated, explodes into a rapturous vision; strips of substance like sedimented layers of shimmering rock, unstable vectors of racing motion toward a perspectival center from opposite sides of the screen, it flashes, runs torrent-like, a machinic rapture accompanied by Lamar’s soaring soprano notes singing “We Rise!!! We Rise!!!” Then Lamar turns, his jolting movements like being slammed backwards over and over, his arms animated, his usual fluid and expansive gestures super articulated into segmented moments. Behind him, his serial images, white shapes of fire convulsing as an indistinct city, “We Rise!!!” If the knight is a type of automaton encased in armor, stiffened into serviceable movement, this is also the moment when Lamar, Mu/Andoumboulou unrepresentably present, lifts the helmet from the knight’s head and he becomes fleshed, in full humanity. Technology, which Black people historically were not supposed to be capable of, becomes a technique for ushering in the final stages of an altered state, a transcendence of enslavement and the machine. By means of that altered state, the Black human is freed from the subjugating machine, freed from the automaton, revealing the Black humanity that had in fact been animating it all along, while also birthed through radical liberating Black Afrofuturist android technological savvy and sonic aperture, an aperture through which we can hear Mu and feel the capaciousness of Andoumboulou worlds.

When M. Lamar turns himself into a kind of machine, a Goth carapace or Afrofuturist android, technologically manipulating his movement into the machinic, he signifies on the racializing figure of the automaton.Footnote ¹⁰ He is the threat of the acceleration of the machine beyond its coerced version—accelerating into white-out, into torrents of a metaphysical substance beyond plantation control, and can be imagined as Andoumboulou. Ashon Crawley, referring to Peter Linebaugh’s thoughts on slavery, the machine, and the Luddite movement, writes that, in the case of the enslaved, breaking the machine would mean breaking one’s own body (2017:174–75). Regarding Blackpentecostal soundings, he says that he wants to think of “this created sonorous world, as using the verve of voice and noise to break the analog-organic machine, to break the automaton” (175). Lamar, on the other hand, does not break himself as machine/automaton, but as automaton is propelled by—and propels us with—the ancient soundings of Mu/Andoumboulou, “myth and mouth” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:x), “wheeling and spiraling” (xii) and “an itineracy…echoing…flight and fugitivity” (x).Footnote ¹¹

If automation holds time and bodies in place, the Afrofuturist android, singing Mu and in Mu, shatters that emplacement, those over and over again held in place in legislated motion. Perhaps we can imagine both the plantation and the shattering of the plantation and its automation as the conditions for the unassimilable and veiled worlds in which the Andoumboulou travel. Or if the plantation, as it would seem, continually reassembles itself, as we wait for the time of its ultimate destruction, perhaps the itinerant Andoumboulou are moving, unseen by it, molecular, invisible.

Speaking of what he believes to be the experience of readers of Double Trio, Mackey says it is “Something like this sense of immersion and what I call all-day music, the muse in attendance all day, every day, and the way in which to be in any point in this book, was to be in all points […] one finds oneself dispersed in a way that is rhapsodic” (Duke 2023:38). And indeed it is hard to describe the sense of travel and dispersal that the Andoumboulou/Mu poems impart. To be intensely within the reading of the poems is to be caught up with their drift, and the invisibility of it, the ruminative excess like a kind of felt, unfathomable opening to a constantly moving world just on the other side of a gauzy, drifting, undulating scrim. In “Song of the Andoumboulou: 60,” Mackey writes:

To be removed to this drift, to the other side of the scrim, is to experience a state of perception, or receptivity that is akin to that which M. Lamar’s performances open, a kind of Mu/Andoumboulou alteration, a movement in which material histories and presents burn together into a kind of alchemized transcendence, a process that is, in the republic of Nub, of necessity serialized, aiming for “the outside seriality wishes to reach” (Mackey [Reference Mackey2002] 2006:xii). Lamar’s use of automation signifies on the history of racializing possession and blows it into white-out, into rebellion, the automaton the rut and the rousing, gathering and dispersing “so much farther flung than we’d have thought,” those who reach for an outside to the nubscape.