Description
Book SynopsisPoems that follow systems of chance and divination to counter corrosive financial systems. Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s
Black Box Syndrome is a series of poems—or “black boxes”—based on black hexagrams in the
I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. Following the aleatoric tradition popularized by the surrealists and extended by the work of John Cage and Jackson Maclow, these poems cast their lenses on the hazards of the incessant financialization of everyday life. Synthesizing chance-operational aesthetics with Aztec anatomical science, conspiracy theory with systems theory, and the black box model with the concept of the “influencing machine,”
Black Box Syndrome explores tensions between lyric excess and digital compaction in the age of pandemic. Over and against the corrosive world-shrinking effects of Wall Street risk management and futures trading, the black boxes in this book propose a counter-divination that distorts, deranges, and decolonizes the logic of empire.
Trade Review“With
Black Box Syndrome Moctezuma reveals himself to be one of the finest contemporary poets of risk. Thinking past probabilistic risk analysis, this book enlivens older and outlasting speculative analytics such as fate, fortune, divination, and influence. Built from the computational concept of the black box (a system known only by its inputs and outputs) and the structural poetics of the I-Ching, this book tangles with the inescapably vulgar qualities of uncertainty: prefrontal cortex, financial instruments, divinatory practices, global supply chains, dream horizons, paranoiac demographics, and pre-nodal subjects. In a startling collection of hexagram poems, Moctezuma’s
Black Box Syndrome discloses the sigil hidden in the vulgarity of chance, that is, poetry always.” -- Edgar Garcia author of "Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography"
“In its formal constriction, Moctezuma's
Black Box Syndrome triggers torrents of lyric profusion. Nervy and nutritive, this is the black box as cosmic mysterium, optic macula and nourishing milpa, cunning and exact in its cycles of pliancy and rest. Like the dream machines Clare and Blake confected against the crises of enclosure and industrialization, Moctezuma's black boxes form a marvelous anti-mechanism against all forms of supremacist thought.” -- Joyelle McSweeney, author of "Toxicon and Arachne"
