When I met the poet, critic, and theorist Fred Moten for lunch near Washington Square Park recently, he ordered a hamburger, and asked the waiter to hold the aioli. When the food arrived, it was clear that his request had not been followed. After a brief, disappointed examination of the bun, Moten, who recently became a professor at N.Y.U. after a few years at the University of California, Riverside, found an idea.
“I think mayonnaise—actually, sorry, this is stupid, this is crazy,” he said.
“Not at all,” I said.
“I think mayonnaise has a complex kind of relation to the sublime,” he said. “And I think emulsion does generally. It’s something about that intermediary—I don’t know—place, between being solid and being a liquid, that has a weird relation to the sublime, in the sense that the sublimity of it is in the indefinable nature of it.”
“It’s liminal also,” I offered.
“It’s liminal, and it connects to the body in a certain way.”
“You have to shake it up,” I said. “You have to put the energy into it to get it into that state.”
“Anyway,” Moten said, “mostly I just don’t fucking like it.”
Moten had agreed to meet so that I could ask him about his newest books, three dense volumes of critical writing, written in the course of fifteen years, and gathered under the name “consent not to be a single being.” The first volume, “Black and Blur,” has writings on art and music: Charles Mingus, Theodor Adorno, David Hammons, Glenn Gould. The second, “Stolen Life,” focusses on ideas that Moten describes as, broadly, “sociopolitical.” The third, “The Universal Machine,” deals with something like “philosophy proper,” as he put it to me, and is broken into “three suites of essays” on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon.
Moten speaks softly and, once he gets going, in long, complex paragraphs. He is drawn to in-between states: rather than accepting straightforward answers, he seeks out new dissonances. On the page, this can take a complex and even forbidding form. “Black studies,” he writes in an essay collected in “Stolen Life,” “is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution on its edge; its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth.” A reader may need to sit with that sentence for a while, read it over once or twice, perhaps look up the word dehiscence (“a surgical complication in which a wound ruptures along a surgical incision”).
In person, though, Moten’s way of thinking and speaking feels like an intuitive way of seeing the world. Moten was born in 1962, and he grew up in Las Vegas, in a thriving black community that took root there after the Great Migration. His mother was a schoolteacher, and books were always present in the house, from works of sociology to anthologies of black literature. Moten went to Harvard, but falling grades led to a year off, back home, which he spent, in part, working at the Nevada Test Site. Out in the desert, he got a lot of reading done. “I like to read, and I like to be involved in reading,” he said. “And for me, writing is part of what it is to be involved in reading.”
Moten’s 2003 book, “In the Break,” a study of the “black radical tradition” through the notion of performance, took up the ideas of such pioneering black-studies scholars as Saidiya Hartman, exploring them within a freewheeling discourse on phenomenology and jazz. For Moten, blackness is something “fugitive,” as he puts it—an ongoing refusal of standards imposed from elsewhere. In “Stolen Life,” he writes, “Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.” In this spirit, Moten works to connect subjects that our preconceptions may have led us to think had little relation. One also finds a certain uncompromising attitude—a conviction that the truest engagement with a subject will overcome any difficulties of terminology. “I think that writing in general, you know, is a constant disruption of the means of semantic production, all the time,” he told me. “And I don’t see any reason to try to avoid that. I’d rather see a reason to try to accentuate that. But I try to accentuate that not in the interest of obfuscation but in the interest of precision.”
In 2013, Moten published “The Undercommons,” a slender collection of essays co-written with his former classmate and fellow-theorist Stefano Harney. For a book of theory, it has been widely read, perhaps because of its unapologetic antagonism. “The Undercommons” lays out a radical critique of the present. Hope, they write, “has been deployed against us in ever more perverted and reduced form by the Clinton-Obama axis for much of the last twenty years.” One essay considers our lives as a flawed system of credit and debit, another explores a kind of technocratic coercion that Moten and Harney simply call “policy.” “The Undercommons” has become well known, especially, for its criticism of academia. “It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment,” Moten and Harney write. They lament the focus on grading and other deadening forms of regulation, asking, in effect: Why is it so hard to have new discussions in a place that is ostensibly designed to foster them?
They suggest alternatives: to gather with friends and talk about whatever you want to talk about, to have a barbecue or a dance—all forms of unrestricted sociality that they slyly call “study.” The book concludes with a long interview of Moten and Harney by Stevphen Shukaitis, a lecturer at the University of Essex, in which Moten explains the idea.
We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.
Moten maintains that this kind of open-ended approach can be brought to bear everywhere, and can address even those subjects that might seem most traditionally academic. Over lunch, we spoke about Moten’s essay “Knowledge of Freedom,” collected in “Stolen Life.” It’s a critique of Kant that considers the philosopher’s ideas about the imagination and his “scientific” racism alongside a close reading of “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” an autobiography published, in London, in 1789, the year after Kant published his “Critique of Practical Reason” and the year before he published “Critique of Judgment.” Equiano was enslaved in what is now Nigeria, worked for years on British ships, and later, in the United States, bought his freedom.
“I neither want to refute Kant nor put Kant in his place,” Moten said. “I want to think about Kant as a particular moment in the history of a general displacement.” This, he added, “requires recognizing that Kant is a crucial figure in the development of the very concept of race on something like a philosophically rigorous level. But, of course, the fact that the incoherence that we call race can somehow be compatible with something like philosophical rigor lets us know something about the limits of philosophy, you know?”
Moten’s poetry, which was a finalist for a National Book Award, in 2014, has a good deal in common with his critical work. In it, he gathers the sources running through his head and transforms them into something musical, driven by the material of language itself. The poem “all topological last friday evening,” collected in Moten’s 2015 book, “The Little Edges,” begins:
taken to bridges from lula to lela to lena to eula to ayler to tala to
tore up
but untorn and bend
like fenders breathe, felder’s or fielder’s, that family, man, that
recess.
so much more than air and world and time.
The poem unfolds as a chain of references, from free-jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler to Andrew Marvell. We may not know exactly how we moved from one to the other, but there’s pleasure in getting lost in the dance.
When we discussed his poetry, Moten, citing Amiri Baraka, made a distinction between voice and sound. “I always thought that ‘the voice’ was meant to indicate a kind of genuine, authentic, absolute individuation, which struck me as (a) undesirable and (b) impossible,” he said. “Whereas a ‘sound’ was really within the midst of this intense engagement with everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to make a difference, so to speak, within that noise. And that difference isn’t necessarily about you as an individual, it’s much more simply about trying to augment and to differentiate what’s around you. And that’s what a sound is for me.”
As we finished lunch, I asked Moten what his next projects might be. He began, typically, with everyday things: unpacking from the move to New York, getting his two children enrolled in school, adjusting to walking everywhere again instead of driving. Then, in the same casual tone, he said that he was working on two new books, and that he might try his hand at opera soon—perhaps write some librettos. And he’s still trying to figure out how to teach a good class, he said. He wasn’t sure that it was possible under the current conditions. “You just have to get together with people and try to do something different,” he said. “You know, I really believe that. But I also recognize how truly difficult that is to do.”
A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, I attended a reading that Moten gave at Zinc Bar, on West Third Street, with the poet Anne Boyer. A large audience had crammed into the bar’s back room, shoulder to shoulder and sweating to hear the two readers. Moten recited an excerpt from a new work, somewhere between essay and poem, that had recently been published by The New Inquiry, called “come on, get it!” “Improvisation is how we make no way out of a way,” he read. “Improvisation is how we make nothing out of something.” Moten was elegant onstage. He read with an ease that somehow harmonized the complex counterpoint and references of the work.
Midway through his reading, Moten paused, and asked for some water. Promptly, a tall, full glass was passed from the bar, hand to hand, over shoulders, down the stairs, and up to the stage. But by the time it got there, Moten had already been offered a bottle of water by someone else. He acknowledged the gesture, took a sip, and resumed his performance.
Sourse: newyorker.com
