The Cybernetics of Hoodoo Divination

Abstract

I t is an undeniable feature of twenty-first century life that our robust digital sphere has shrunk the vastness of spacetime, enabling information to traverse the globe at the speed of light, necessitating reorientations to the way social groups relate and sustain themselves across physical and cyber domains. These transformations have impacted the arena of religious practice as well, where “online and offline” sites of gathering and worship “have become blended or integrated,” particularly driven by the proliferation of social media and streaming video services. As such, discourses of the Digital Age often highlight the “newness” of digital cultures in distinction from “outdated” analog cultures. But scholars addressing the intersection of Black religion and digital religion must take care not to replicate the overarching presumption that digital technology is actually something new. The sensibility that likens technological novelty with improvement is nothing other than a reinstantiation of the technoscientific myth of progress, which first emerged during the Rationalist Revolution of the seventeenth century and reached a zenith during the Industrial Age of the nineteenth century. Positing the West as the terminal direction of Time’s flow, the chronotopic focal point where History’s dialectical struggle would culminate with Enlightenment, this Eurocentric imagination justified the colonial subjugation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia on account of their “primitive” nature. And while the literal and figurative fallout from mid-twentieth-century nuclear warfare greatly reduced the persuasive power of this myth, the emergence of Internet culture at the dawning of the new millennium revived humanist hope that technology might save us from our postmodern condition. In his landmark critique of historiography, James Snead revealed the colonial stigma of deeming Africans “outside” History has no meaningful coordinate without a linear temporal frame of reference that separates time into discrete units, and cordons off those time units already-experienced as the past, from those units of ongoing time we acclaim the present, and the succession of anticipated-impending time units called the future. The Africanist disavowal of historical time makes it impossible to declare the faculty of African temporal perception as behind that of the European. Rather, “the African is also always already there, or perhaps always there before, whereas the European is headed there or, better, not yet there.” Thus, while Enlightenment conceit espouses “there is no repetition in culture ... only... difference, defined as progress and growth,” Black culture contains an “organizing principle of repetition” that structures one’s “perception of repetition, precisely by highlighting that perception.” From Snead’s description of Blackness-as-organized repetition, I generate the corollary notion Blackness-as-algorithmic. Specifically, I argue that Hoodoo divination rituals harness the