»But what is our spirit, what will it project? What machines will it produce? What will they achieve? What will be their morality? Check the different morality of the Chinese birthday celebration firecracker & the white boy’s bomb. Machines have the morality of their inventors.«
– Amiri Baraka, Ethos and Technology1

»The practice of refusal invoked in the collective’s [Practicing Refusal Collective] name signals a rejection of the status quo as livable. It is a refusal to recognize a social order that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible. It is a refusal to embrace the terms of diminished subjecthood with which one is presented and to use negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise. The practice of refusal is a striving to create possibility in the face of negation.«

– Tina Campt, The Visual Frequency of Black Life2

»Who Killed Julius Eastman?«

– Camae Ayewa, Analog Fluids3

[intro]  »He died alone, in a hospital in Buffalo…«4

We begin with a clarification of terms…

1. Quotient [ kwoh-shuhnt ]

noun
mathematics.
1. the result of division; the number of times one quantity is contained in another
2. the number resulting from the division of one number by another
3. quota; share, as in a measure of debt or intelligence
4. the magnitude of a specified characteristic or quality

A quotient is the result of process; the dividend made fragmented by the divisor. It is a winnowing, a reduction from one form or magnitude to another – fractional, rendered as proportions and decimals, an ever extended infinitesimal. 

Quotients lend themselves to the indeterminate, a figure that carries remainders and residues that linger and are carried forward. 

Occasionally division is a process that doesn’t result in a quotient. Division that has no quotient is often referred to as »undefined« or »indeterminate.« This occurs in cases where the division operation does not yield a meaningful or well-defined result within the rules of mathematics. Instead, it expresses a preference for contradiction. Indeterminate quotients misbehave. They operate in excess of the rules, forming odd pairings and unlikely alliances. 

Still, there are techniques for addressing such contradictions and defiance. Advanced mathematical methods for handling indeterminate quotients often involve concepts from calculus and analysis. One technique commonly used to handle indeterminate forms in limits and calculus is the residue theorem. In complex analysis, the residue theorem can be used to evaluate certain types of integrals and limits involving indeterminate forms by analyzing the residues of a function. 

But what happens when these terms stray? When quotients, calculus, and residue converge and depart? When they saunter off the established path to wander errantly?5 This is a story of errant wandering, of improvised repertoires and recursive arrays – radiance borne through connection. This essay attempts to trace the residues that collect in the life of artist, composer, and musician Julius Eastman. To consider his life, and the cacophony of his encounters, as an experiment in maintaining a proximity to uncertainty. To thrive in the queer temporality of risk.6 To wander beyond the inscriptions of order, which is to say entropy.7

What follows is an experiment in the offerings of residue.8 Across three different but interconnected residues I hope to recenter a widely known but seldom mentioned period of artist and musician Julius Eastman’s life, by asking the vital question – what is the context into which Eastman struggled to find home amidst uncertainty? What does it mean to risk to live in the throes of a self, seeking home in a continuation of places that seek to dispel you? And how might such a reflection of Eastman’s life point to the limits of computing in the hopes of engaging more fully with its entropic and indeterminate ends?

These residues are the partial traces of events that have already happened. They are the ephemera from which to suggest a different understanding of Eastman’s constant pursuits for rigorously undisciplined desire within an environment of computational capture. Between absence and presence residue is rife with the potential for porosity, the unchartered movements between, amongst, and beyond. I arrange these residues into one of Eastman’s own compositional forms, what he called organic music, »That is to say, the third part of any part has to contain all of the information of the first two parts, and then go on from there. . . . They’re not exactly perfect yet. There’s an attempt to make every section contain all the information of the previous sections, or else, taking out information at a gradual and logical rate.«9

Julius Eastman died of a broken heart.

Organic music is a style that combines repetition, improvisation, and gradual transformation of arrangement. In organic music each movement contains residues of the previous movements. It is an aleatory and recursive form that always builds upon prior context. It is a repetition that doesn’t repeat but saunters just off beat gradually to the point of appearing undetected until a phase change takes place and opens a space of emphatic undeniability while still holding remnants of what has come before. By arranging these different residues together I hope to build a greater context for understanding Eastman in relation to the geography of 1970s New York City at a time of massive economic shift, financialization, and calculated abandonment. In this way these residues become recombinant and allow us shifting vantages from which to give breadth to Eastman’s life and the absences surrounding his death. My tending to residue and the contextual mechanics of Eastman’s own organic music is also to speak to the productively violent work that an erasure of context achieves both in the controlled indeterminacy of John Cage’s scores as well as the engulfing flames of the RAND Institute’s algorithmic models for resource allocation. In both instances this radical removal of context towards an assumed universality were deeply impactful in the life of Julius Eastman and serve as vital lenses through which to view larger themes that surround his death beyond simple narratives of individual pathology.  

In 1976 Julius Eastman left the relative stability of Buffalo, NY for the seductive din of New York City. Trained as a composer and pianist at the Curtis Institute of Music, Eastman was an ascendent performer known for his five octave vocal range and acute sense of motion between repetition and improvisation, simplicity and cacophony. This impressive range of talents landed Eastman in Buffalo, New York in 1969 at a time in which the city was an unlikely center for avant garde and experimental music. While in Buffalo, Eastman became a member of the acclaimed Creative Associates along other luminaries such as Maryanne Amacher, David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Peter Kotik. This period is one of Eastman’s most prolific. Between 1969 and 1976 he would compose twenty original compositions including some of his seminal experiments in graphic notion, chance operations, and improvised performance. Some notable works include, The Moon’s Silent Modulation (1970), Thruway (1970), Macle (1971), Stay On It (1973), Joy Boy (1974), and Femenine (1974).  

This period also included increased attention and recognition. Eastman was nominated for a Grammy for his vocal work on Maxwell Davie’s, Eight Songs for a Mad King (1973). That same year he won a $3,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and purchased a house in Buffalo’s nearly exclusively white West Side. He secured a job as an Assistant Professor within SUNY Buffalo’s Music Department and consistently toured. This is a time in Eastman’s life that was stable but not without its own racial tensions and subtle violences, an agitating dividend – fracturing inchoate fault lines towards a tenuous foundation. Eastman carried an inability to acquiesce into the social expectations and conventions of such stability. Sometimes implicitly, sometimes flamboyantly. The edges were jostled – frayed tethers.10

Fourteen years later he would die alone in a state hospital. Complications due to cardiac arrest. After years of various displacements, living in homeless shelters and staying in Tompkins Square Park later in his life, his heart couldn’t take it anymore: it broke. Julius Eastman died of a broken heart.

Renee Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leache’s Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music recounts many of Eastman’s chance encounters with acquaintances during this period. These are encounters pockmarked with liberal avoidance and disdain. The following are a series of quotes pulled from Packer’s own writing and interviews with Don Burkhart and Karl Singletary. Their contributions  serve to illustrate some of Eastman’s later encounters with those he considered friends and peers.

»Ultimately, Julius Eastman could not resolve his contradictions. As he veered more and more into turmoil, he lost his footing in the real world and could no longer do the work to honor his gift.« (Packer, 63).

»I told Haj not to let him in…« (63, Packer)

»He was insistent about it – that what I really wanted was a slave boy! From that point on, I couldn’t get him out of the house fast enough. So this time when he called to come over, I said, ›O.K. you can come over but not in the house. We’ll talk on the porch.‹ And he wouldn’t come. He said, ›I either come in your house, or I don’t come.‹ So I said ›O.K.”‹ And he didn’t come.« (Packer 64).

»Even before Julius left Buffalo back in the summer of 1976, I was beginning to withdraw from him because I was a little nervous and scared of him. I wouldn’t let him come up to my apartment anymore. I got that type of fear about him. He was so strange, you know. He had this “open life” and everybody should just put up with it.« (Packer 64)

»Within a week I got a call from the hospital saying that he was dead. He had given my telephone number to the staff there. From what I understand, he had been in the hospital for a couple of days. I felt real bad that I sort of forced him aside, but I just knew that I couldn’t take Julius to my home and deal with him and his way of life anymore. So I separated from him right on that corner.« (Packer 64)

These are the anecdotes that plague the absences in Eastman’s story. These stories often focus explicitly on the perceived social pathology of Eastman. He becomes the evidence of his own demise; an axiomatic proof. He is the quotient with no lingering remainders, begging no further attention. In these anecdotes he is routinely described by acquaintances as a tragic character who failed to realize his gift – undeserving and unserious. His life is attended to with little if any curiosity to understand him. Instead, he becomes a grotesquely flattened surface of himself – an unruly novelty, simultaneously supra and sub human. By stretching Eastman into this protracted flatness they project their own sense of inferiority and guilt shrouded in the trappings of a pallid white liberalism.

What starts to become clear is that Julius appears as a figure out of place. He makes a geography rather than adhering to one. This space is not a set container in which actions simply occur but a complex arrangement of contingent relations that are affecting and agential.11 Eastman does not merely find himself in a state of precarity – a shallow reflection of poor choices. Instead, he exists in a sweeping contextual shift of global economic restructuring, the virtualization of capital, and creative destruction in response to crisis. I attend to these remaining residues as a method for jumping scales moving between the life of an artist. The following residues hold sweeping changes in the landscape of New York city’s budgetary crisis, experiments toward  computation as a tool of social administration, and macro-economic shifts away from material industrial production and towards liquidity and the accumulation of finance capital.

This is the space from which I tell a different narrative, one of the refusal that Eastman lived. A refusal to capitulate to the demands of white liberal avant garde art scenes, the conservative zeal of the classical conservatory, and the loathing desperation of white liberalism to be seen as savior. This is an attempt to take a nonromantic view towards errantry, to understand the geographic imperative in all class struggle, to understand and set the spatial, economic, social, and technical context in which Eastman emerges in New York City. It is a shift in understanding causation – not a continued rationale of social pathology but a considered engagement with a spatial analytic that may better reflect the reality of ethnic cleansing, planned abandonment, and capital flow – cleansed and rationalized through spurious logics and the promise of computing.

[residue 1] »The freedom in my music does not mean the freedom to be irresponsible!«12

One year before Julius left for New York City, he performed an iteration of John Cage’s canonical work Song Books with the S.E.M. Ensemble at The University of Buffalo. Julius chose Solo for Voice #8 (»Solo«). The composition is defined by a series of Cage’s instructions for the performer such as:

»[I]n a situation with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action. With any interruptions. Fulfilling in whole or part an obligation to others. No attention to be given the situation (electronic, musical, theatrical).«13  

As early as 1971, Julius performed various versions from Cage’s Song Books, attracting the attention of Cage himself.14 However, for this performance, Julius decided to break from prior conventions and give an improvised performative lecture as »Professor Paga« on »a new system of love.« Adhering to Cage’s strict insistence that no rehearsals were allowed before a performance, Julius took a man and woman on stage and proceeded to undress the man. In the guise of a mock discourse on sexuality and the sterility of medical approaches to sex, Julius examined the naked man while switching his affect from stoic lecturer to libidinous satire. SEM performer Peter Kotik described the scene:

»Julius only managed to get the guy naked and being an outspoken homosexual, he was making all sorts of ›achs!‹ and ›ahs‹ as he was pulling his pants down. He was all over the guy while the girl was standing there rather embarrassed. Cage thought that this was some kind of mockery about him. He was scandalized.«15

Audio recordings of the performance show how well the performance was received by the audience. The recording captures the sound of an audience in rapture, applauding and laughing. At numerous times during the performance Julius has to wait for the applause to subside before proceeding. 

The performance enlivened the audience but unsettled Cage. The following day in a lecture he castigated all of the SEM performances with special attention given to Julius’s performance for its use of queer desire and its perception by Cage as being ego driven. Here I wish to quote from Cage’s lecture liberally to point out the candor of his disapproval but also the contradictory and selective ways in which Cage clings to control while at the same time removing himself as an actant within the composition and performance of his works. This tension is consistent across Cage’s work and has been the source of continued scholarship (Lewis 2002). What emerges is a highly controlled approach to indeterminacy and chance operations. Cage’s approach to experimental composition works from a particular notion of freedom and anarchy, one that allows him to conjure a tabula rasa space for which there is no referent or context. It is a space that is protracted as universal and becomes Cage’s qualification for experimentation. This blank space is the one in which Cage hides himself and suppresses his own contradictions between control (ego of the self) and indeterminacy. The result is a walled freedom with Cage’s ego serving as sentry and judge.

George E. Lewis writes comprehensively on this contradiction within Cage’s work and his ability to negate himself within the specific logics of his own creations. Lewis makes connections between whiteness, negation, and the epistemological shifts between what he calls eurological and afrological approaches to improvisation. Cage represents this eurological approach within what Lewis calls »exnomination« by which, »whiteness avoids being named and thus keeps itself out of the field of interrogation and therefore off the agenda for change.... One practice of exnomination is the avoidance of self-recognition and self-definition. Defining, for whites, is a process that is always directed outward upon multiple 'others' but never inward upon the definer.« (Lewis 42)

Cage’s critique of Eastman’s performance animates the ways that whiteness negates itself as a specific vantage point and claims a universalism while pointing its gaze outward. Cage’s purported ego death is a convenient exnomination. It is Cage’s sense of aesthetics and practice of control which evade recognition and go unmentioned. Cage states that he disapproves of Eastman’s performance because, »the ego of Julius Eastman is closed in on the subject of homosexuality. And we know this because he has no other idea to express. In a Zen situation where his mind might open up and flow with something beyond his imagination, he doesn’t know the first step to take. He’s said to be a composer. Why then is he a performer? He’s said to be a performer. Why then doesn’t he try to do the work that he sets out to perform in its spirit?«

Eastman’s Blackness and queerness are productive for Cage’s silence but only from a distance.

Cage conflates a Zen interrogation of the ego with the slippery translucence of his own whiteness. This is a space Eastman is not able to inhabit. Instead he is marked as aberrant against a white, and assumed to be neutral, background. Cage is furious because he feels a small approximation of what Eastman embodies, the unavoidable instantiation of irreducible difference – marked Black and queer. This is clear in Cage’s lecture. After banging on the piano in frustration Cage states, »When you see that Julius Eastman, from one performance to the next, does the same thing, harps on the same thing, in other words, does HIS thing and that his thing unfortunately has become this one thing of sexuality…. Admittedly, he performs beautifully and, if it were not for the fact that the performance was connected with my work, I could easily find it enjoyable.«

Eastman is the referent that Cage cannot afford. His performance unsettles the assumedly universal and contradictorily singular space of absence that Cage exalts. Eastman’s Blackness and queerness are productive for Cage’s silence but only from a distance. They become the signifiers of a marked other from which Cage can be measured as neutral and recede into a decontenxtualized non space. It is a space Cage misreads as being free of the ego. But when the space between Eastman and Cage winnows and Cage can no longer retreat into a transparent silence he becomes irate.

In his own discomfort Cage lashes out at Eastman mistaking his embrace of an obvious but unnamed Blackness and explicit queerness as »HIS thing.« Eastman’s self does not transcend into »something beyond imagination« but instead is a reflection of his own ego driven pathology having, »no other idea to express.« 

Throughout his lecture Cage continually deflects from any self investigation while obliquely extolling his own control as a composer. His responses oscillate between belittling Eastman and lamenting his role as a misunderstood father surrounded by petulant children. In a moment of paternal condescension Cage tells the story of an anarchist who adopts two Black children. This is the only time Cage references Blackness during his lecture. In his telling the anarchist brings the children home for the first time. They are overjoyed and jump up and down on their beds. In what Cage describes as touching, the anarchist found it necessary to make a rule, »No jumping up and down on the beds.« The passive aggression of this story is undeniable. Cage, who clearly sees himself as the father figure of this scene, has grown irritated by the very freedom he has bestowed upon his childish performers. This freedom paradoxically is not freely given but is conditional, ultimately requiring Cage’s approval: »The freedom in my music does not mean the freedom to be irresponsible!«

This marked a pivotal turning point in Julius’s career. What was relegated to absence for Cage was unavoidable for Julius. His very presence as a Black queer man honed his political life and work. Four years after his confrontation with Cage, Julius composes Evil N*gger, Crazy N*igger, and Gay Guerrilla (all 1979) – an affront to the sensibilities that secure Cage’s silence.16

[residue 2] »With no real evidence, I would nonetheless suggest that a great deal of the crime, the fire setting…in the black community have become quasipoliticized.«17  

The same year that Julius left Buffalo for New York City, computation attempted to rationalize the city landscape, spoken through loud sirens, controlled flames, and Cartesian grids. Between 1969 and 1976, the RAND Institute in coordination with the New York City Department of Housing and Development devised a series of algorithmic models that decimated Black and Brown neighborhoods. Two areas that lost the most housing stock and saw the highest rates of displacement during this period were the South Bronx and the Lower East Side. Both were neighborhoods that anchored Julius Eastman.

For the first year after Julius arrived in New York he stayed with his grandmother Caroline Famous in the South Bronx. Mrs. Famous owned a small apartment house consisting of six units in the South Bronx. The two of them were known to have a close relationship. She often took care of him. By 1978 Julius was no longer living with his grandmother and he later shared an apartment with his brother Gerry on E. 7th Street in the Lower East Side. His brother Gerry Eastman eventually became the caretaker of the South Bronx building; painting and putting in new windows and appliances.

This anecdote about Gerry Eastman repairing his grandmother’s building is notable as the Bronx lost 20 percent of its housing stock to fire and landlord abandonment between the years of 1970 and 1981. For some areas of the Bronx, the South Bronx in particular, up to 80 percent of housing units were lost. Nearly half a million people were ultimately displaced. Gerry’s actions show the embedded kin relations and forms of care that fall out of RAND’s resource allocation models. They show an unfurled tending to desire. Gerry’s actions signify the underlying ties that all places are supported and sustained by. His actions are not singular but stretch out across the neighborhood.

Vivian Vasquez Irizarry’s work in the documentary Decade of Fire shows the dense networks of social relations that Gerry’s actions elucidate. In her work we see the continuous efforts of Bronx residents working together to starve off negligent landlords, predatory insurance schemes, intensified financial models, and the automated destruction of their homes. This story pits two competing networks against each other; one composed of the vital activities of human life that make a place worth living, the messy spilling overlap of lives lived in close proximity, the essence of value. The other is bereft of this richness and instead capitalizes on the hollowing of place mediated through enumerated indexes of speculative returns and derivatives.

These resource allocation models adhered to a larger triage strategy known as Planned Shrinkage. It was used to curb New York City’s budgetary crisis by justifying immense service reductions and municipal spending mainly in densely populated neighborhoods of color. These service reductions paired with spurious computational modeling and predatory insurance markets accelerated an epidemic of fires that led to abandonment and neglect. The RAND Institute used spurious calculations to re-write NYFD’s fire protocols. These decisions parallel Cagean aesthetics by which the grounds for creative innovation were premised on the radical erasure of context and place. Instead of a basis in contextual ground-truthed evidence RAND’s calculations existed in a tabla rasa of  violent removal to create a space free of context or impediment to their rationalizing aspirations. For this reason their calculations had massive errors and at many various points were all out falsified to silence concerned residents and their elected representatives. In this estimation the cool ease of a relatively simplified equation led to smoldering flames and searing finance capital.

Fire weds together two conjoined shifts at a macro-economic scale that permeate down to Eastman’s first home in the city: finance capital and computation.

Public health researchers Deborah and Roderick Wallace document the ways that these decisions led to instances of serial forced displacement leaving displaced communities vulnerable to cascading health epidemics. The fires of the Bronx broke communal ties and networks leaving massive vulnerabilities that were later expressed through the HIV/AIDS and later crack cocaine epidemics. Their research points to the vital realization that these impending crises contributed to continued waves of neighborhood destabilization across three generations.18 As a result many neighborhoods were destroyed, forcing mass migrations and triggering a public health and safety crisis spanning the 1970s into the early 1990s. Researcher Mindy Fullilove calls this serial displacement root shock. Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction that follows displacement and the severing of one’s social and emotional ecosystem.

»Root shock, at the level of the individual, is a profound emotional upheaval that destroys the working model of the world that had existed in the individual’s head. Root shock undermines trust, increases anxiety about letting loved ones out of one’s sight, destabilizes relationships, destroys social, emotional, and financial resources, and increases the risk for every kind of stress-related disease, from depression to heart attack.«19

It is the stress of heartbreak.

Root shock frames the effects of large dispossessive policies as they land on the individual and the loss of community. It is a heartbreak that often goes unacknowledged and is instead concealed through explanation.  

In a now infamous memo penned by Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Richard Nixon, Moynihan responds to the heightened series of Black political rebellions that occurred across major American cities between 1964-1968. This period marked the disappointment and fall out of the Civil Rights era and the resultant rise of the Black Power Movement. In response to the Black Power Movement, Moynihan is extremely anxious about what he calls, »anti-social behavior« and pathologizes this turn towards an increased Black political consciousness premised on demands for self determination. Admittedly with »no real evidence« Moynihan states that »fires are in fact a ›leading indicator‹ of social pathology for a neighborhood. They come first.«

Fire marks the anticipatory anxiety of uncontrolled risk to spread. It is the spread of a Black political consciousness that Moynihan can only understand as risk. This period is crucial as the fear of urban riots, arson, insurance markets, and municipal uses of computing begin to conflate risk as Black political rebellion, now inscribed through logic models and proxy metrics. Fire weds together two conjoined shifts at a macro-economic scale that permeate down to Eastman’s first home in the city: finance capital and computation. Scholar Bench Ansfield notes the ways that arson and the resulting epidemic of fires in neighborhoods like the South Bronx in the 1970s were far from a spontaneous or natural disaster but instead were also the result of sweeping macro-economic changes. They uniquely note that arson is the harbinger of macro-economic shifts where assets only carry the value of their liquidity on the market. Predatory insurance markets are the vehicle through which this liquidity takes place.20 This represents a change in economic understanding that resituates the home not as a reflection of use value – a place to live – to build relations to place – to contribute to community – to support life. Instead the home became a temporary material that could be liquidated and traded through finance capital returns premised on gambled gains or losses. Arson became a political spectacle turning attention away from the disastrous consequences of calculated services cuts and instead towards a racialized narrative of social pathology and deviance.

[residue 3] The Entropic Desire of All Parts: »That is the reason that I use ›gay guerrilla‹ in hopes that I might be one, if called upon to be one.«21

Each of these residues hold a missing piece from the context surrounding Eastman’s death. By cascading each I introduce a different narrative, one that complicates his loss as a simple self pathology. Pathology removes the complicating context of the situation. It is the self rationalizing reduction that carries no remainder. A neat summary conclusion. Eastman died because of his own failings to escape his ego. The Bronx burned because its inhabitants were unfit and incapable of respectability. Pathology robs unruliness of its own desirous ways of knowing and therefore needs to be contained and denied. But desire is always in relation to the horizon. It seeps beyond boundary and permeates what is otherwise misunderstood as absence.

In Queering Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, theorist José Muñoz described queerness itself as an orientation to absence. Specifically he stated that queerness is »a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present… Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.« This »something« that is missing marks absence as an affective site for desire, and the beginnings of a path towards knowing that makes use of the ephemeral and the fleeting as meaningful markers of history that evade the devices of neat capture. For Muñoz, ephemera counts as »all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself.«22 Perhaps then absence is able to have a different relationship to evidence, not as the inverse of presence, but as a way to mark the space for desire.

For me, desire is a speculative intelligence that gives form to something that doesn’t exist yet but must – a yearning beyond the present. Julius’s desires gave rise to a network of dimly lit gay bars that held home into a different version of virtualization – not as abstract capital but as a contingent and dispersed site of belonging – fluid and in motion. With his homes in the South Bronx and Lower East Side under threat of fire and service reduction, Julius finds temporary respite in a network of gay bars and venues. It is Julius’s desire that breaks Cage’s probabilistic aesthetic of rule based and structured indeterminacy. Cage’s aesthetic is a bounded engagement with chance to starve off the threat of entropy and unmitigated chance. Julius’s desire floods and expands the infinitesimal spaces between digits that shift computing from its former construct in first and second order cybernetics that inspired Cage and towards a more contingent operation. Desire disarms the limits of Cage’s aesthetic control that marks the bounds of appropriateness, the prescribed contours for how one ought to engage improvisation and indeterminacy, the very rules to entertain chance. This tension of control and indeterminacy is one that others have brought attention to particularly in Cage’s relevance to media technologies and software performance (Funk 2016, Gillot 2019, Wojnowski 2019). These authors stress Cage’s approach to interdeterminacy as a highly structured and procedural method for producing chance.

The ghost in the machine is in fact little more than a thin white bedsheet.

Taking a note from Eastman perhaps illuminates the queer errant Blackness that may bend the rule of a conditional towards a mutually negotiated temporal agreement – pertinent to the time and space of application. A kind of contingent computing, one that doesn’t need to negate the reality of entropy but builds a relationship to it. In Eastman I find a richness towards thinking of a Black computational thought.23 One that is not about the narrowing of computing into a sub discursive space by which the optics of racial logics confer certain computational practices. It is not a restorative history of Black and African mathematics and social divinatory calculation. Instead, it is an acknowledgement of the metaphysics of Blackness as the basis for getting at a truth contained within computation – that computation is akin to entropy – it is a relation of entropy.24

In Julius Eastman I find a richness towards thinking of a Black computational thought (...) an acknowledgement of the metaphysics of Blackness as the basis for getting at a truth contained within computation – that computation is akin to entropy – it is a relation of entropy.

This essay has been an attempt to speak to the absences, the radical removal of context in a Cagean aesthetic, and to contextualize the fullness of desire, of that form of knowing so vital to Julius that points beyond the present and challenges the inscribed normative protocols towards the non-normative, the deviant, and the experimental. A longing grasped at the edges made porous. In speaking to the voluminous gait of Julius, I anthologize and scramble the residues that help me to make sense of his life and his challenge to the adherence of instructions, bucking a certain programmability.

I consider the direction of his desire as he navigated across New York in search of a horizon beyond the present. What is the residue of his own queer calculus about where to go, who to meet, and how to make home?25 What networks of encounter were built at a time when the fraying of the city’s social fabric was expedited through neat ledgers and specious equations? The residues gathered here bring us a textured reconsideration of a life that operates from a different code; the impossible calculus of desire that fosters the space for a different genre of computation.26 This genre calls to engage the flesh and the materiality of Julius, his body, his movements, the ephemera of old lovers' lofts, dim lit corners of dance floors, and the hushed tones of »vicious sissies.«27

Not causal but an attempt at holding the context otherwise elided and misunderstood as a matter of personal failing and individualized pathology. This is not to entomb Julius to his body but to consider the ways he is aware of the unavoidable politics of how he shows up in place. His own positioning draws that unavoidability into sharp contrast with Cage’s cleanly aesthetic instructions to create uncertainty. Rather, Julius understands the material stakes of his own context, unapologetically Black and queer.28 Within this context he builds a relationship to uncertainty, and commits to them as a lived expression beyond syntax.

What would it mean for software and computing at large to deal with its own limits? To redress its own histories of failure, the immateriality of its promise. To reckon with its context? No longer able to transcend towards the promise of a radical erasure, or a metaphoric immateriality; the poetics of the cloud in dissipation. To refuse the negation that Cage sanctified as a radical act of improvisation and uncertainty, how might Julius’s errant paths and scandalous desires be considered their own knowledge, a knowing that takes the form of a refusal but doesn’t remain within its bounds. A knowledge of seeking beyond what seems possible. How might this seeking through uncertainty push the bounds of our current discourses on technology beyond the inevitable collapse of meaning, and instead into the strangely otherwise? More importantly, this may be a problem through which we not only are required to think, but also are required to feel. A disastrous repertoire for a sensuous reassembling.

To read about the end of Julius’s life is to read the often repeated siren call of uniquely gifted and extraordinary Blackness caught in the perils of brilliance, succumbing to their own demise. It is a story about Nina, Billie, Donny, and Jimi.29 But much like Cage’s aesthetics of uncertainty, the context is absent.30 What precedes is an act of love. Research as an act of love, not to write the thing but to right the thing.31 To correct the story, and to come with receipts. To right the thing is to hold the residues – the ephemera left in the wake of the event. Ephemera too can be a way of knowing.

What I have come to realize is that the archive for such a practice does not exist in exhausted canons but in fragments and residues. Evidence that misbehaves and yields complex expressions. A calculus gone awry. This closing is an attempt to follow those residues to work in tandem with the absence. To engage the fullness of a pause, the cadence that breaks speech into information. Which is to say that this piece, this research, this work, quickly came out of bounds, tarrying at the edge of expectation. This text is an experiment in a different kind of algorithm making, one born from the residues needed to put a life in context. Of Black queer desire as a form of knowledge that produces wayward geographic practices to rekindle an abundance of relationships. The ties that move through uncertainty to avoid root shock, posing new questions.

What would computation look like that saunters, that sways in obtuse degrees and non-euclidian curves? A computation that lingers between the overwrought narratives of salvation and eschatological demise. Computation not as a tool, but as a desire to hold things in irresolution, as a mode of seeing and understanding, no longer a view from nowhere.32

What is the quotient of desire divided by direction, the constant upending of a predictive program set on limiting the outcomes of Black lives? 

How might desire work as a queer form of knowing that drives us to what might not seem possible in the present but is needed?

What is the queer calculus of desire that offers other forms of social organization that thrive in relationship to uncertainty? An impossible calculus of recursive loops, vibrant triplets – a fundamental blasphemy.

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Romi Ron Morrison investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, gender, and social infrastructures within digital technologies. Their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world. Their writing has appeared in publications by MIT Press, University of California Press, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Logic(s) Magazine. They are currently an Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA in Los Angeles and a 2024-2026 Just Tech Fellow. 

This text was commissioned for CTM 2026 dissonate < > resonate.