John Keene
TO BLACK(EN):
If mainstream language is the living structural form of linguistic code, and if code is the standard set of symbols and their relations (grammar, morphology, syntax, phonetics, semantics), then hacking the main stream, blackening the code involves a switching, in it, blacking it (in): hacking the source by vernacularizing it, ebonicizing it, pidgining it or creolizing it (kreyolizing it), by switching the codes to recode it, cracking it open, cracking it and opening it, deconstructing it and reconstructing it. Blacking is figuring it, configuring and disfiguring it, breaking up and opening its symbols to renew it, create a new code masking and mirroring the old, by maxing it out and remixing it. Blacking it is mixing it up, funking it. The manner always is unauthorized.
Black hacking, by speaking and writing, rapping and sampling, mixing the codes by wreaking havoc, reckoning the main seams in order to wrack and wreck the machine, raising a racket while soul symbols rise from the wreckage, the black codes, warping the stream in order to view it anew: rewire it, rewrite it. Word, is this line on? Blacking is a snapping, a
braking: once you phreak the old lines, they can be reworked, rewoven. To black the code is to freak it. A range of speakers continually unmask and remix the old manners and customs, switching
them: using the chains and wrappers, noose and ashes, compile the funk, ready to execute.
If the main stream of language is the structural form, and linguistic code is the standard set, blacking it is deforming it and reforming it, farming its sets into new relations and forms, unsettling it and resetting it to exploit the cuts and ply them, try them: explore the beats and back them, track them and retrack them, turn them and return them back into themselves so that the same old stream can never be maintained. Yo, is it funky, y'all? Apply and inform, in form, in
set: any sister or brother is an author.
Using the new grooves, the recoding, blacking involves planting zombies through the cuts, the open ports, so that the existing language has been implanted, transplanted: this monster language is under the control of a hacker without the knowledge of the crackers, the original owners. This is a translation without a master. The source, remade and sampled, informs a range of targets. Quiet as it's kept, the line is always on. Your speech, your words, are the authority.
Black languages and linguistic practice find their living structural forms in the new codes, their map of open sets, their symbolic relations. Relanguaging is power. There is authority in this monster--check one. Analyze the cut, the remade streams, look back and the seams are (in)visible. Blacking is rewriting the code (this mike sounds nice, check two) and compiling it (clackalacka). Each speaker disassembles and reassembles this grammar of possibility, but always remember to dissemble if the crackers are listening. Word: on the line, freak it.
Step into a word, a world: the machine is always running.