Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Showing posts with label Critical theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Critical theory. Show all posts
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis by Alberto Toscano Verso, 2024
[Publication date: October 24, 2023]
How do we understand the return of fascism today?
In
a world shaken by ecological, economic and political crises, the forces
of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand. How
should we name, map and respond to this state of affairs?
Late Fascism
turns to theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing
their capacity to illuminate our moment and challenging many of the
commonplaces that debate on this extremely charged term devolves into.
It can be tempting for any contemporary assessment of fascism to reach
for historical analogy. Fascism is defined by returns and repetitions,
but it is not best approached in terms of steps and checklists dictated
by a selective reading of Italian Fascism or National Socialism.
Rather
than treating fascism as an unrepeatable phenomenon or identifying it
with a settled configuration of European parties, regimes, and
ideologies, Toscano approaches fascism as a problem and a process, one
that is intimately linked to capitalism's demands for domination.
Drawing especially on Black radical and anti-colonial theories of racial
fascism, Late Fascism makes clear the limits of identifying fascism
simply with the political violence of bygone European regimes.
Developing anti-fascist theory is a vital and urgent task. From the
"Great Replacement" to campaigns against critical race theory and
"gender ideology", today's global far-right is launching lethal panics
about the threats to traditional political, sexual and racial regimes. Late Fascism
allows us to rediscover some truly inspiring anti-fascist thinkers,
rooted in their turn in largely anonymous collective practices of
worldmaking against domination, traditions of the oppressed that remain a
resource for those set on dismantling the hierarchies and segregations
that the partisans of Order and Tradition seek to revive and reimpose.
REVIEWS
"There
are no unearned claims here. Rather, one feels that Toscano has thought
through the political stakes of every single sentence in this crucial
book. Late Fascism is
painstaking in accounting for, differentiating, and connecting the many
historical contexts and iterations of fascism - from the onset of
colonial modernity, through the mid-twentieth century, to the present
day."
--Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox
"Alberto Toscano's Late Fascism
brilliantly elucidates what Adorno once called 'the meaning of working
through the past' to grasp fascism's capacious aptitude for untimely
reappearances to resolve crises, real or not, to save capitalism from
itself and restore the necessary political order such rescue operations
require. Rather than drawing upon fascism's past in his approach,
Toscano 's account persuasively lays to rest an interpretative scheme
that explains such unscheduled repetitions by appealing to analogical
comparisons of past and present as if they were the same. His own
strategy positions history and memory against the present to disturb one
another, unveiling uneven historical differences and incommensurables
removed from an everyday dominated by exchange. Toscano's lasting
achievement is the program of watchfulness he so carefully constructs to
uncover the contemporaneity of late fascism in our midst, but never too
late to recognize its ever-present morbidities."
—Harry Harootunian, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Chicago
"In
this bold book, Alberto Toscano argues that the old checklist for
identifying and understanding contemporary fascism won't work. To
apprehend its present-day manifestations, we must consult writers from
the Black radical tradition and critical ethnic studies. With his
characteristic erudition, Toscano combines innovative readings of
Western Marxism with insightful interpretations of the genealogies of
anti-racism. This is an indispensable book for a distressing time."
—Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale University
"Alberto
Toscano is one of the most significant and original political theorists
of our contemporary moment. In this work on the nature and aetiology of
late fascism, he moves us beyond the European interwar examples as
fascism's "ideal-type," and deconstructs the alleged opposition of
fascism and liberal democracy. He instead emphasizes multiple origins,
locations, and temporalities of fascisms; the imbrication of fascisms
within colonialism, slavery, capitalism and counter-revolution; and is
precise about fascisms' libidinal claims and the weaponizing of
atavistic social energies turned against racial, religious, sexual and
gendered others. Toscano engages an illuminating range of anti-fascist
thought: from Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille, and Leo Löwenthal, to
Angela Davis and George Jackson; from Stuart Hall and Ruth Wilson
Gilmore to Jairus Banaji and Furio Jesi - with dazzling results."
—Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four Continents
"Can
we speak of fascism before fascism? Alberto Toscano believes we can. In
his learned excavation of debates across the twentieth century, he
revives still unanswered questions about the location of the prison, the
market, and the bedroom in theories of fascism. He also reminds us to
ask what late fascism is afraid of. What is it trying to prevent? In
this way, a study of fascism becomes a roundabout recovery of repressed
and forgotten utopias-a flashlight in the dead of night."
—Quinn Slobodian, author of The Globalists
"Late Fascism
is brilliant, incisive, and right on time. We are living through a
moment when the "F" word is no longer taboo and the threat of fascism
lurks everywhere. And yet, so mired in debates over definitions,
typologies, and analogies that our understanding of fascism remains
elusive. Alberto Toscano avoids this trap by turning to anti-fascist
thinkers, whose groundings in anticolonial, antiracist, and
anticapitalist struggles remind us that liberalism is no enemy of
fascism, and fascists flower in the hot house of capitalism." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Toscano's
wide-ranging, erudite study is both theoretically satisfying and
politically inspiring - an essential reference for rethinking fascism
and antifascist politics today."
—Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies
"In
this book, Toscano provides us with the language and analysis necessary
to theorize our current moment, one in which the danger of fascism is
as real as ever."
—Jake Romm, Protean
"Toscano's
high-octane new book on heterodox theories of fascism ... traces the
myriad ways it has been deployed over the past 100 years, mining each of
them for parallels with the present."
—Oliver Eagleton, The New Statesman
"Concise and intellectually ambitious."
—Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
"Late Fascism is such an important book."
—Jason Read, e-Flux
"Toscano's
penetrating, theoretically grounded analysis is an essential resource
for understanding and confronting the resurgence of reactionary
ideologies."
—Dimitri Vouros, LSE Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alberto Toscano
is Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and
Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at
Goldsmiths, University of London, and Term Research Associate Professor
at the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University. He is the
author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), Cartographies of the Absolute (with Jeff Kinkle, Zero Books, 2015), Una visión compleja. Hacía una estética de la economía (Meier Ramirez, 2021), La abstracción real. Filosofia, estética y capital (Palinodia, 2021), and the co-editor of the 3-volume The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (with Sara Farris, Bev Skeggs and Svenja Bromberg, SAGE, 2022), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Abolition Geography: Essays in Liberation (with Brenna Bhandar, Verso, 2022). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory
and is series editor of The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is also
the translator of numerous books and essays by Antonio Negri, Alain
Badiou, Franco Fortini, Furio Jesi and others.
Episode 12: Alberto Toscano on Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism & the Politics of Crisis +Black Radicalism:
This interview took place on 30 January 2024. Toscano discusses his recent book, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism & the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023), as well as the Black Radical Tradition in America and internationally, abolition, as well as the relationship between fascism and liberalism historically as today. Toscano also offers an insightful commentary on disturbing parallels between far right culture and certain trends in "anti-woke," left-wing white nationalism in North America.
Alberto
Toscano discusses his major new book Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and
the Politics of Crisis. This free event delved into Toscano’s latest
book, highlighting the continued and necessary development of ongoing
anti-fascist thought and organization.
Toscano was in dialogue with Gastón Gordillo, Lisa Lowe, and Jordy
Rosenberg and the Q&A moderation by Am Johal. Presented by the SFU
Vancity Office of Community Engagement and the SFU School of
Communication.
In a world shaken by ecological, economic and political crises, the
forces of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand. How
should we name, map and respond to this state of affairs?
The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a
path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing
anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great
Replacement’ to campaigns against critical race theory and ‘gender
ideology’, today’s global far right is launching lethal panics about the
threats to traditional political, sexual and racial hierarchies.
Drawing especially on Black radical and anti-colonial theories of
fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily
with the kind of political violence experienced by past European
regimes. Rather than looking for analogies from history, we should see
fascism as a mutable process, one anchored in racial and colonial
capitalism, which both predates and survives its crystallization in
Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. It is a threat that continues to
evolve in the present day.
On December 7, 2020, Erin Hagood and Duyminh Tran interviewed Angela Davis via Zoom. Davis is a political activist, author, and academic whose work has focused on issues on race, class, and feminism. What follows is an edited version of their discussion.
Duyminh Tran: Could you give us a brief overview of how you became interested in Marxism?
Angela Davis: I can tell you that it seems that I was primed by the social environment of my childhood to be receptive to Marxism. My parents had a number of friends who were members of the Communist Party. As a very young child, I had no idea what that was, but I’m certain that the ideas that were instilled into me by my mother had something to do with that. I just can’t tell you exactly how.
I do know that when I attended high school in New York in Greenwich Village at The Little Red School House/Elisabeth Irwin High School, a good number of the teachers had been blacklisted because of their political affiliations and beliefs. As a matter of fact, because they were not allowed to teach in the public school system in New York, the teachers created a cooperative school based on the experiments in progressive education by a woman named Elisabeth Irwin.
My history teacher was a Marxist. At the age of 15, I seriously read The Communist Manifesto as a document we were studying in our class. Due to my parents’ connections, I was active in the youth organization of the Communist Party when I was very young. Embracing Marxism came rather naturally. It wasn’t a result of a prise de conscience, as one might say — it just happened organically.
DT: On the topic of your graduate studies, what were the reasons you decided to go to Germany to study with Adorno?
AD: I had been studying French literature as my undergraduate major. In the course of studying French literature, I came across quite a number of writers who were also philosophers such as Sartre and Camus. I realized that, while I was extremely interested in the literature and the aesthetic dimension, I was more interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the ideas. I didn’t realize this until I was a senior. I had spent a year in France studying at the Sorbonne. Marcuse, who was teaching at Brandeis University at the time, had been away my sophomore year, and I was away my junior year. I had heard him speak and was looking forward to taking classes with him during my senior year. When I explained my predicament to him, I told him that I was very interested in continental philosophy. At that point I was primarily interested in the existentialists. As a result of my studies in France, I had been reading a lot of Sartre and Camus, as well as other phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty.
I told Marcuse that I was interested in philosophy but did not possess a foundation because I had never even taken an introductory course to the history of philosophy. And then, on the spot — I was in his office hours at the beginning of the first semester of my senior year — Marcuse said, “Well, let’s study philosophy!” For that entire quarter, I met with him weekly to discuss texts from the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Locke, and others. He then told me that I would have to take his graduate seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which was quite frightening because I had only begun to study philosophy. How could I possibly participate in a class with graduate students who had probably been studying philosophy for many years? But I overcame my fear, took the seminar, and Marcuse called upon me to give the first paper of the seminar.
That is basically how I got hooked on philosophy, but I should point out that I was not really interested in the analytical philosophy that was most popular at that time. What captured my interest was critical theory, which was the approach taken by Marcuse and the Frankfurt School of philosophy — a philosophy applied in an interdisciplinary context as it might assist in the process of changing the world. Marcuse then suggested that I study with Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas, who was a young professor at the university at that time. It turned out that was exactly what I was looking for.
Erin Hagood: Oftentimes when young people read the history of this period in politics, the philosophy of people like Sartre or the members of the Frankfurt School is often counterposed to the Old Left communists. Those seem to have been two traditions that both influenced you. Could you speak to how what you learned in the Little Red School House and from the communists related to what you learned by reading Sartre and studying with Marcuse and Adorno?
AD: I don’t think that there was such a clear division at that time. Of course, there was the up-and-coming New Left as exemplified by the New Left Review, for example, which I read during the 1960s. At that particular time, even though I was close to people who were members of the Communist Party, I identified more with the emergent examples of Left theory, politics, and activism that the French intellectuals espoused.
One of the reasons I felt drawn to France was because of the political engagements of public intellectuals. I did not, at that time, consider myself a proponent of the so-called Old Left, but it was always a part of my environment due to my family and friends. I remember that, when I was studying in Frankfurt, I actually went to East Germany because James Jackson, a prominent figure in the U.S. Communist Party, was there for a meeting. He was a very close friend of my parents, and I continue to be friends with his children. His wife, Esther Jackson, was also a major figure. She’s still alive and is 104 now. She was the editor of Freedomways and did a lot of political work in the literary world. Politically, I was drawn to what I considered to be the more radical instantiations of Marxism than to the Communist Party, which I tended to associate with my parents and older generations.
EH: We would like to ask you about your experience with activism in the 1960s and eventual participation in the Communist Party. In your autobiography[1], you talk about your experience in the Black Panther Political Party and the criticisms you had of many groups with which you worked such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. What ultimately brought you to the Communist Party? What did you learn from your experience in the Black Panther Political Party during that period?
AD: Initially I was a member of the Black Panther Political Party, one of the many organizations that took on the designation Black Panthers from the Lowndes County Freedom Democratic Party, whose symbol was the black panther. Then I was a member of LA SNCC. Finally, I joined the Communist Party and shortly thereafter the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (the Black Panther Party with which we are all familiar today). My decision to join the Communist Party, first of all, had to do with a sense of an important lack in the other organizations that I had joined. While I was passionate about Black liberation, I’ve always sought a commitment that embodied interrelations and connections.
I can remember, even when I was growing up in Birmingham, that although white people were certainly racist, we had to be able to reach them because workers’ struggles were important. I suppose I absorbed some of these ideas from the Communists in my social environment. Therefore, having worked with so many black organizations such as the Black Youth Alliance, black student groups, and the Black Panther Political Party (which ran candidates at the time), I understood that black liberation had to be viewed in the context of a broader meaning of freedom.
Two of the people I became close with as I worked in the Black Panther Political Party and LA SNCC, Franklin Alexander and his wife, Kendra Alexander, were members of a formation within the Communist Party called the Che-Lumumba Club. This was a black club within the Communist Party that was not entirely accepted by the larger leadership structure in New York. However, it was accepted by the Communist Party leadership in California as an important way of participating in the black liberation movement while embracing the class struggle and developing a Marxist analysis.
It was actually related to a very specific experience I had as an activist, when SNCC was dismantled because of disagreements regarding the part that women should play in the struggle and specifically their eligibility for leadership roles. Women who were nominally in the leadership of LA SNCC but were not permitted to publicly represent the organization at press conferences, rallies, etc., demanded to be acknowledged because we were actually doing most of the actual work — as is usually the case in movement and other organizations. We also demanded to be recognized as spokespersons. This tension within the organization also had to do with who was a Marxist and who wasn’t. The internal tensions finally led to the demise of the organization.
I’ve always been someone who needs collective contexts, but my organization fell apart as a result of these internal struggles over gender and politics. Kendra, Franklin, and Franklin’s older sister Charlene Mitchell invited me to consider becoming a part of the Che-Lumumba Club in Los Angeles. I was so impressed by the work that they were doing that it seemed like an opportunity to have collective reflection and input. It was also an internationalist organization that addressed local, national, and global issues.
EH: You state in your autobiography that you reflected on how your philosophy was connected to your politics. In your essay “Marcuse’s Legacies,”[2] you note that the difference between Adorno and Marcuse seemed to hinge upon how their ideas related to the activism occurring during the 1960s. Could you tell us why you felt their disagreement was significant and what those ideas meant specifically for your politics during this period?
AD: That’s a very interesting question. I never quite thought about it in that way but thanks for posing it. I did learn a great deal about working within the context of contradictions. I really appreciated Adorno’s analysis. I loved his lectures, read his works voraciously, and had conversations with my student friends in Germany about his work. On the other hand, so many of us were utterly critical of him for his failure to recognize that it was possible at that moment to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Marcuse was actually doing this. He was doing his philosophy and working within the realm of ideas, but also participated in the radical movements of that era. He spoke at rallies, advised activists, and engaged in reflections on activism in his writings of that era. By contrast, Adorno’s position was basically that the revolution we wanted should have already happened. However, it did not happen due to major flaws in the theory. He believed that our role at that time was to deeply immerse ourselves in theory so that we could generate a theoretical framework capable of producing successful revolutionary activism.
Many of us felt that this stance did not reflect the dialectical approach on which he himself always insisted. He saw his work as dialectical. How could one divorce theories and praxis, ideas and activism in that way? In Frankfurt, we had many conversations about the value of Adorno’s work that also helped us to develop an immanent critique of his stand with respect to activism.
I’m thankful for the fact that you posed the question in those terms, because I never quite thought about it that way. Your formulation of the question highlights what I now consider to be an important feminist method — working within the very tensions defined by relations of contradiction. Although I did not see myself as learning how to work within the context of contradictions, this is precisely what I was attempting to do. When I joined the Communist Party, I was extremely critical of a number of issues related to the party. However, based on the experience I had in Frankfurt, I realized that it was possible to be engaged and active while simultaneously remaining critical.
I see this as a feminist stance. The capacity to dwell within contradictions and render them productive is an important element of feminist methodologies. I’m recognizing now that I had encountered dilemmas that required that insight in the late 1960s when I was studying with Adorno.
EH: What do you mean by rendering contradictions productive? What might be an example of rendering a contradiction productive in political activism?
AD: As Audre Lorde wrote, “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.” This methodology eschews the usual approach to contradiction, which is advocacy to choose one pole or the other. Let’s take a contemporary example. I’m extremely critical of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for numerous reasons. They aren’t the candidates we need to lead the country in a radical direction, but I’m not going to wipe my hands of them and do nothing, an unfortunately popular position. I think that it’s possible to be critical while simultaneously recognizing how important it was during this last election to get rid of looming fascism by voting against its proponents. Biden and Harris definitely don’t represent the path we need to take in this country, but they do represent the possibility of creating a more open political terrain where activist support of more radical trajectories can play out, even in opposition to their political positions. If we learn how to work at the heart of this contradiction, we may be able to push for those changes that the Biden/Harris administration opposes.
EH: In a talk you gave in 2008, you noted that many of the collective demands of the 1960s have transformed into individual benefits in the present. In retrospect, did the New Left’s studies of Marx prove adequate to the task of grasping historical transformations in capital such as, for example, changes in the meaning of race, the economic decline of the black working class, and the post-industrialization of the Midwest, in order to effect political change?
AD: The impact of neoliberal ideology has tended to emphasize and further embed the already destructive idea that the individual is the primary unit of society. The paradigm is the individual on the capitalist market. I believe that, in that lecture, I spoke about how affirmative action was intended to uplift entire communities of color and women but was misconstrued as an individualistic solution.
The project was never about individuals. It was always about communities. It has been difficult to create a popular discourse that could help people realize the importance of distinguishing between the individual and the collective. At least, in 2020, perhaps half of the country finally acknowledges that we do need strategies that address structural and systemic racism. It’s not about a particular individual’s capacity to become the first to accomplish something. It’s about uplifting entire communities and attempting to extricate them from the structural problems that have persisted since the aftermath of slavery.
As socialists and the Left more broadly have developed over the past few decades, there has been a pervasive tendency towards reductionism. One might look, for example, at Bernie Sanders and his notion during the previous election that racism can be addressed by attending to its economic dimensions. Jobs for all will end racism. To a certain extent, I think he is right, and we have to embrace these solutions. At the same time, Sanders fails to recognize the particular dynamic of race and racism. Cedric Robinson pointed out that capitalism, from its outset, has always been racial capitalism as a result of colonialism and slavery.
Those inheritances are still with us. Over the last period, the reductionism of what came to be called the New Left has abated somewhat, but there are still vestiges of this tendency to declare that the overarching problem is capitalism, while ignoring the urgency of opposing racism and misogyny. There is an assumption that all one has to do is solve the problems of capitalism in order to fix racism, misogyny, and many other issues that continue to be inaccurately characterized as special interests. Criticisms stating that attempts to address racial or gender issues are divisive have proven to be absolutely incorrect. We are in the process of reimagining what it means to challenge racial capitalism and struggle for a socialist future. Questions of race, gender, and ability all have to be centered.
We could have a very long conversation about this, but I just want to point out that the longstanding failure to embrace a feminist analysis of capitalism and the role of reproductive labor disarmed a great number of traditional Marxists who didn’t want to disturb the notion that the (white) male proletariat is the incontestable agent of change in history. Nowadays, we are seeing an entirely different global economy with women and girls participating in the manufacturing sector. Some of the most progressive unions have recognized that they have to change their approaches. The failure to acknowledge these material changes signals a need to rethink the theoretical framework.
This is one of the things I really appreciate about critical theory. One not only uses these conceptual methods to try to understand the world but must also constantly question the conceptual apparatus. One must ask: why am I using this tool, this concept, this particular theory, this method? How does that change the outcome of what I am trying to learn? How do changes in the material world have an impact on my theoretical framework?
NOTES:
[1] Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 2013).
[2] Angela Davis, “Marcuse’s Legacies,” in Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, ed. John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb (New York: Routledge, 2004), 43-50.
Dr. Martin Luther King (1929-1968), Jr. and Malcolm X (1925-1965) following King's press conference at the U.S. Capitol about the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Photo taken on March 26, 1964. It was the only time these two giants met in person.
"Every generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it."
--Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Of all our studies history is best qualified to reward our research"
--Malcolm X (1925-1965)
THE REVOLUTION BEGINS (AGAIN): 1955-1965
For an entire century prior to the mid-1950s an extraordinary number of black political and cultural activists, intellectuals and writers, musicians and composers, visual artists and athletes, entertainers and workers waged an intense, unrelenting, and bitterly fought public battle for political, economic, and human rights, cultural autonomy, and social respect and recognition in a highly segregated, ruthlessly capitalist, and profoundly racist nation that actively resisted this movement through a pervasive and deeply entrenched apartheid system that legally sanctioned and promoted racial discrimination, oppression, exploitation, censorship, and exclusion in every area of U.S. life, society, and culture. The post-slavery era after emancipation in 1863 was marked by the pervasive denial of voting rights, brutal economic peonage and exploitation of black workers, widespread and extreme forms of overt physical violence by white mobs (i.e. lynchings, beatings, arbitrary imprisonment, rapes, assaults, assassinations, bombings, arson, shootings, etc.) against black people in general, and a distinctly separate and highly unequal social, educational, and economic structure that gave not only white elites but whites in general great punitive power and control over the national black population. Thus in employment, education, health care, housing, access to public institutions and facilities, and the equal opportunity to compete for jobs, wages, and the distribution of resources (as well as enforced legal protections against discrimination and exclusion), African Americans were forced to endure immense suffering, repression, and neglect for many generations after slavery officially ended in January, 1863. Most of these imposed structural, institutional, systemic, and ideological restrictions on the freedom, mobility, and self determination of African Americans lasted well into the 1960s, and of course, many of them are still very prevalent and intact today.
It was this ongoing historical reality that such major and legendary black political and cultural figures as Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) Frederick Douglas (1818-1895), Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), William Monroe Trotter (1972-1934), Paul Robeson (1898-1976), A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), Richard Wright (1908-1960), Louis Armstrong (1901-1970), Duke Ellington (1899-1974), Bessie Smith (1898-1937) and Billie Holiday (1915-1959) among many others sought eloquently and forcefully to confront and defeat through their tremendous interventions in the general political, social, and cultural life of the nation in the period from the mid 1850s to the mid 1950s. It is this extraordinary legacy that serves as the bedrock historical foundation of the revolutionary movement of African Americans during the mid and late 20th century, and deeply influences the very form and content of what intellectuals, artists, and activists were able to achieve in the crucial historical period of 1955-1975 that is the focus of this study.
1955 marks a major watershed in African American, and thus American, history. It is also significant as a beginning of this modern development in African American thought, art, and activism because that year marked the start of a dramatic collective response of black people in the U.S. to the deeply frustrating limitations and repressions of the late 1940s and early 1950s period when, after a million black soldiers fought against fascism in the name of the United States in the Jim Crow segregated armed forces during WWII (1942-1945) for “democracy and freedom” abroad in Europe and Asia, found themselves still being denied fundamental human and democratic rights in their own country in the immediate postwar era. This virulent racism, coupled with the deadly specter of McCarthyism (1947-1965) in American politics and public policy against all forms of mass-based democratic liberal and radical reform activity as well as all socialist and communist revolutionary movements for freedom, justice, peace, and equality in the United States resulted in millions of African Americans still being widely subjected to the horrific, cruel, and deadly absurdities of racial oppression.
Thus it was in the period from 1955-1965 that a massive amount of intellectual, physical, cultural, and spiritual energy was expended by a forceful and insistent new generation—actually two generations--of African Americans (largely born between 1915-1945) on behalf of a radical updating and expansion of the movements and activities of the previous century of African American intellectuals, activists, and artists. The “New Negroes” of this period often embodied and openly expressed a widely diverse consensus of philosophy, artistry, and social-political thought and behavior that was highly innovative, original, and daring in its approach to questions, problems, and challenges facing the United States in general, and the African American people in particular. What’s noteworthy about the emergence of this new generation of individuals is the fact that they came from widely different class backgrounds and geographical regions yet still shared a cultural sensibility and social consciousness that actively sought to challenge the status quo in politics and art. It is this insistent demand for radical social, ideological, and aesthetic change that unites these historical contemporaries, and serves as the foundation for their stunning interventions in American society and culture. It was not surprising given these general concerns and realities that the period from 1955-1975 eventually proved to be one of the most dynamic, volatile, and radical eras in the history of the United States. This is the narrative that I will examine and tell in this book.
Part I: Who Are These People?:
“The New Breed” Demands a Change
In 1955 political, cultural, and social life in the United States was on the surface very staid, conservative, and white. Mass cultural conformity and various forms of social repression were widespread and strictly enforced throughout the nation. White supremacy, sexism, homophobia, censorship, and hegemonic ruling class coercion and domination were common and largely accepted or at least not opposed by millions of Americans. Black people were especially held in contempt and patronizing indifference by millions of white Americans, and though such traditional national civil rights organizations as the NAACP (founded in 1909), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality founded in 1942), and the Urban League (founded in 1913) had made limited progress in their various national and local campaigns for legal, constitutional, social, and economic reforms, it was clear to everyone concerned both in and outside of the movement that these efforts, while necessary, were not sufficient. Neither were the primarily moral and ethical appeals of such nonviolent Ghandian-influenced organizations as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) formed in 1957 or even the separatist black religious and cultural nationalist doctrines, values, and programs of such alternative organizations as Elijah Muhammad’s NOI (Nation of Islam) whose position in the 1950s and early ‘60s was being largely represented and enunciated by its National Minister, Malcolm X, via Muhammad. Many black people during this period were also rapidly becoming involved in trying to either augment, or even in some instances replace, these various ideological and institutional groups with even broader and more secularly militant/radical forms of social theory and activism.
In the cultural and aesthetic sphere such major African American popular artforms as Jazz, Blues, Rhythm & Blues, and Rock and Roll, as well as independent black innovations in literature (fiction, poetry, and the essay), musical and dramatic theatre, dance, comedy, painting, and sports were continuing to make astonishingly rich and creative contributions to modern art throughout the world, and were often at the forefront of the general African American revolution in the U.S. in the period under examination here. Such major iconic artistic figures as Miles Davis (1926-1991), John Coltrane (1926-1967), Chuck Berry (1926-2019), James Brown (1933-2006), Charles Mingus (1922-1979), Sarah Vaughn (1924-1990), Bud Powell (1924-1966), Max Roach (1924-2007), Art Blakey (1919-1990), Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993), Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), Nat King Cole (1919-1965), Sam Cooke (1931-1964), Dexter Gordon (1923-1990), B.B. King (1925- ), Etta James (1938-2012), Otis Blackwell (1930-2002), Eric Dolphy (1928-1964), Little Richard (1932- ), Chester Himes (1908-1984), Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1934- ), Marvin Gaye (1939-1984), Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Nina Simone (1933-2003), Ishmael Reed (1938- ) Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Bob Kaufman (1925-1986), Sammy Davis, Jr. (1925-1990), John Lee Hooker (1917-2000), Romare Bearden (1913-), and Muddy Waters (1915-1987), among many others, constitute a genuine revolutionary vanguard of American artists for the mid and late 20th century.
It was in this electrifying and dangerous climate and context of great social and cultural change and conflict that this era (1955-1960) began. Despite the oppressively rigid and severely glacial surfaces dominating American life large cracks and fissures were already beginning to take place just beneath this façade. It’s highly significant to note, for example, that an obscure 25 year old black middle-class Baptist minister from Atlanta, Georgia (with a newly earned Ph.D in philosophy and theology from Boston University), had begun his public ministry in a small Christian church in Atlanta inherited from his father (also a preacher) at almost the exact same time that a poor, equally obscure black 29 year old ex-convict from Lansing, Michigan (and later Boston, Massachusetts), had, after serving a six and a half year sentence for burglary, began working in 1952 as a member and then minister of a Muslim sect in the U.S. known as the Nation of Islam (NOI). After being appointed minister of the largest mosque in the NOI in Harlem, NY in August, 1954, he had quickly emerged as a major leader within the national hierarchy of the organization. These two individuals were completely unaware of each other and were completely unknown to the rest of the country at the beginning of 1955. By the end of the year, however, both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X would be nationally, and in King’s case, internationally famous.
In March of 1955 a legendary 34 year old black jazz musician and composer would die and be immediately catapulted into mythological cultural status. By the end of year an entire new generation of black musicians, singers, and composers who had already been heavily influenced by, and revered this individual, would also be aggressively extending and expanding his musical legacy on a global scale. His name: Charles Christopher Parker, Jr., better known as “Bird.” Two then obscure 28 year old musicians and composers from St. Louis, Illinois, and High Point, North Carolina (later Philadelphia), one of whom had been a member of one of the late master’s groups, and the other who based a large part of his aesthetic, technical, and expressive style on this same person’s enormous contribution, went on to join forces in 1955 in an ensemble whose sound and style revolutionized American music during this period and for all time. Within a year the leader of this group (Miles Davis) would become world famous, and his partner, collaborator, and colleague (John Coltrane) would also quickly follow within three years with a group of his own that would have an equally influential and powerful international impact.
However it was a horrific racially-charged incident on August 27, 1955 that would further shock and enrage black people in the U.S. and be seen by many both then and later as a pivotal historical moment that embodied the zeitgeist of the era. The incident would also serve as a major galvanizing force for the modern civil rights movement and this new generation to aggressively assert itself in the nation at large. What precipated this dramatic turn of events was the vicious murder of a fourteen year old black male by two white adult men. The young boy was from Chicago and was on his summer vacation visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi. Accused of whistling at a 21 year old white woman at a local grocery store near his uncle’s home, the adolescent was then brutally kidnapped by the husband of the woman and his friend on the evening of August 24. Till was forcibly abducted from his uncle’s home and driven out into the country by the white men who made Till strip naked, beat him severely, shot him in the head, mutilated him, and then attached a cotton gin fan to his nude body so that it would sink to the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. The badly bloated and decomposed body was found three days later disfigured beyond recognition.
Till’s mother came to Mississippi to identify her murdered son and return him to Chicago for funeral services and burial and found the hideously disfigured corspe unrecognizable except for a ring that she had given her son before he left for his visit. Incensed and distraught that her child had been the victim of a such a savage racist act, Mrs. Till insisted that her son’s casket remain open at the funeral so that “the whole world can see what they did to my son.” Thousands of blacks attended the funeral, and the story caused a sensation in the national black community in the U.S. where deeply disturbing photos of the ravaged corspe were published in the black and white press (especially in an issue of the highly popular black weekly magazine Jet). The murder and subsequent trial and verdict were also headline news all over the globe as an international readership condemned and denounced the U.S. for its ongoing tradition of racist terror. Meanwhile a rapid, unjust trial was held in Mississippi where the two men were quickly acquited by an openly racist all white male jury. Just as they had done in thousands of previous lynch cases involving the brutal arbitrary murders of blacks by whites throughout Mississippi’s extremely bloody racial history, the white Judge, the jury, the two acquited men, as well as the white wife of one of the two men all publically maintained that Till “deserved” his fate, and that black people in general (and in particular black boys and men) had better “know their place” and continue to stay well inside the rigid boundary lines of segregation.
The shockwave of this event, coupled with the ongoing protests throughout the country calling for voting rights, social and economic equality, democratic reforms, and the end of instutionalized racial segregattion in all areas of American life inaugurated a new generation of African Americans in the historical struggle for revolutionary changes in the society and culture, and this generation (known by many as the “new breed”) was more than up to the task.
The national and international outrage generated by the verdict in the Till case (and of course many other similar incidents of the era) had immediate repercussions throughout the entire black (diasporic) world. It was certainly no coincidence that at precisely the historical moment when African Americans were aggressively asserting themselves in the United States, the citadel of white supremacy in the West, continental Africans and those of African descent in the Caribbean and South America were simultaneously engaged in fierce battles of their own against European imperialism for national liberation and independence. These intense political, economic, cultural, and ideological struggles against French, British, Portuguese, Dutch, and Belgian colonialism in countries like Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria, Trinidad, Algeria, Kenya, Guyana, Tanzania, Martinique, Senegal, and Barbadoes, among many other newly emerging black nation-states, were instrumental in the extraordinary explosion of radical social, political, and cultural consciousness, organization, and activity that characterized the period.
Thus, the same fierce demands for justice, freedom, and social/economic change that served as the motor force of the nascent modern Civil Rights movement in the United States and spurred the determination of the ‘New Breed’ to insist on a new social and political agenda with respect to “racial matters”, were echoed and openly supported by blacks outside North America who saw their own national struggles and concerns as an integral part of what their brothers and sisters in the U.S. were doing. The international linkages that were advocated and established during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s by such central figures from Africa and the Caribbean as the psychiatrist, political theorist, and revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon (Martinique), the Pan-Africanist and President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, the radical political leader and President of Egypt, Gamel Nasser, poet, social critic, and activist Aime Cesaire (also from Martinique), political philosopher and President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, the political theorist, philosopher, writer, and activist leader C.L.R. James from Trinidad, and the legendary revolutionary political activist and leader from South Africa, Nelson Mandela, among many others, were crucial to educating and organizing thousands of black people throughout the world to combat oppression and transform their lives. Not insignificantly African American activists like Malcolm X, and later Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, and James Foreman spent substantial time abroad in Africa during the 1960s and ‘70s prosletyzing on behalf of radical ideological and cultural alternatives to Western forms of colonization.
Another major development of the late fifties period involved the rise of black visual artists, dancers, athletes, singers and songwriters to major mainstream status (if not immediate recognition). The profound aesthetic contributions of these artists led to a massive seismic shift in the form and content of American popular culture and signaled the arrival of new, original conceptions of what could be expressed and achieved in these fields. The rapid emergence and pervasive acceptance of the popular musical expressions known as “Rock and Roll” and “Rhythm & Blues” were largely due to the major musical and lyrical innovations of such legendary black musical figures as Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles, Charles Brown, Amos Milburn, Etta James, Wynonie Harris, Charles Brown, Otis Blackwell, Bo Diddley, James Brown, and Little Richard who from 1945-1965 essentially invented (and reinvented) these forms, despite the white media’s stubbornly erroneous, brazenly false, and egregiously racist insistence during the late fifties and early sixties (and beyond) that white artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison (and later the Beatles and Rolling Stones) were primarily responsible for the music’s existence and evolution.
In painting, dance, and sports African Americans like Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Emma Amos, Augusta Savage, Ed Clark, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Betye Saar, Norman Lewis, Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, Lois Mailou Jones, Bob Thompson, Alvin Ailey, Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Bob Gibson, Bob Hayes, Maury Wills, and Lou Brock brought a startlingly new and dynamic sensibility to the arts of movement, gesture, and visual style that emphasized a highly refined, precise, and nuanced use of speed, mobility, grace, crative expressiveness, and power in their work and expressions. These elements were also evident in the independently unique personalities of these individuals which were often characterized by great dignity, poise, intelligence, discipline, and elegance...(to be continued)...
I saw and heard you and Robin Kelley speak with a quiet yet fiercely intelligent insight as well as an exhilarating explosive stillness at Bethany church last night. Your mutually creative and scholarly work (yours and Robin's) I have read and treasured deeply for nearly two decades now prior to last evening but I was still not wholly prepared for the sheer verification/validation/vindication of your inspiring remarks and analyses and the visceral as well as “intellectual” impact of their (myriad) meanings and active possibilities. So thank you for the CLARITY and the calm, measured grace, generosity, and intensity of your considerable (and ongoing) thought and practice. What you shared with the audience (and myself) was much more than a public “rallying of the troops” for the clearly and as always o so necessary battles and engagements to come, but you managed the far rarer feat (I was gonna say ‘treat’) of making the complex and intricate connections that were always already there in our collective hearts and minds that much more real, energizing, and purposeful through your open commitment to confronting the “difficult” challenges and requirements of actual political, intellectual, and aesthetic engagement—which is to say, STRUGGLE. Like Monk’s “Ugly Beauty” you not only nailed it but gave us all something to genuinely work and strive for in our own thought and practice(s)…Not bad for a couple hours on saturday night! So thank you again brother for the ‘WORK' (another Monk classic with Sonny Rollins on board). We all need to sweat more than a little if we are going to find what we really need and what we’re all still restlessly searching for (truth, justice, peace, love, community)…
Radical Theorist Fred Moten Among the 2020 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant Winners by Helen Holmes 10/7/20 Observer
PHOTO: Theorist and poet Fred Moten. John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University / YouTube. Fred Moten (b. August 18, 1962)
In an extremely turbulent year rife with a proliferation of badly-executed and harmful ideas, it’s a comfort that people with good ideas are once again being honored with the annual distribution of MacArthur fellowships. Awarded each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and amounting to $625,000 that’s distributed to each awardee over the course of five years, the MacArthur “Genius” grant is an extremely coveted honor for creatives in many different kinds of fields. This year, the recipients include Larissa FastHorse, a Native American playwright and choreographer and cofounder of the consulting firm Indigenous Direction, the conceptual artist Ralph Lemon and the theorist and poet Fred Moten.
In addition to producing books of poetry that that interrogate themes of universality, fugitivity, suppression and liberation, Moten has also produced some of the most influential theoretical texts in recent memory. These texts include In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, I ran from it but was still in it and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, the latter of which being a comprehensive exploration of “an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped.”
Moten is also a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and is especially lauded for his development of new ways of understanding the intersection of joy and pain in Black social and cultural life. “I’m trying to do that in the interest of always trying to advance joy, over against the conditions that produce pain,” Moten told the MacArthur foundation.
“Upward Mobility means getting closer and closer to the people who want to kill you”
Do Black Lives Matter?: Robin D.G. Kelley and Fred Moten in Conversation
January 8, 2015 · by admin · in Events
On December 13, 2014 Critical Resistance was honored to host Fred Moten and Robin D.G. Kelley for a conversation on the impacts of the prison industrial complex on Black communities. The conversation was a collaboration with Oakland’s Bethany Baptist Church and was skillfully moderated by Maisha Quint. Here is video footage from that powerful event. Many thanks to Lucas Gilkey for video documentation and Nicole Deane for editing.
FRED MOTEN: I’m going to start off just very briefly. First of all what Robin Kelley says in that piece that Rachel just quoted from seems to me to be absolutely true and so true and sometimes so obscure that it needs to be repeated again and again, which is that we’re in a state of war. George W. Bush declared a war on terror and that war on terror quickly came to be understood as a permanent war but the war on terror that’s a permanent war is just an extension of a war we’ve always been in. And I think that in fact insurgent social life, black social life, has always been as terrible to the likes of George W. Bush as anything Osama Bin Laden did or thought about doing. It’s important to understand that the drones that are sent into our communities that go by the names of Darren Wilson or Daniel Panteleono (sp.). or Justin Bulby or Stacy Coon etc., represent a longstanding tradition of brutal inviolate technological innovation visited upon us in the most horrific ways. And I think it’s important to understand that this state of war has always existed and in a weird way the drones that are sent into our community imagine themselves to be self defensive. Settlers always think they’re defending themselves. That’s why they built forts on other people’s land and then they freak out over the fact that they are surrounded—and they’re still surrounded. It’s important to understand that this doesn’t constitute justification for the violence they commit, but it’s an important thing for us to remember because it gives us some indication of the forces that we actually represent. And we need to know something about who we are and what we are. And with that in mind I think it’s really important to understand not only these sort of intense continuities that what it is we’ve seen over these last few weeks and months is an extension of what Ida B. Wells called lynch law. When I was in college I had these friends and we were naive enough to think that—well I don’t even know if that was it, I don’t know if we were naive, but we certainly believed that some historical force had sent us to Harvard to plot revolution (laughter) and so we would walk around with that in mind. I remember we used to talk about the fact that during what the black historian Rayford Logan called “the nadir” that period really after Reconstruction between 1880 and 1920, that someone black was lynched at the rate of roughly one person every forty one hours and we used to cite that statistic all the time. And I think what was naive about what we were doing was that we somehow thought that that statistic had waned or it had been somehow eclipsed after 1920. And I actually think that the rate has increased since then. Which is again indicative of the fact that we are in a state of war. But it’s not enough to say that or to understand that it seems to me because we need to understand what it is the state is “defending itself” from. And I think in this respect the particular instances of Michael Brown’s murder and Eric Garner’s murder are worth paying some attention to because what the drone Darren Wilson shot into that day was insurgent black life walking down the street. I don’t think he meant to violate the individual personhood of Michael Brown. He was shooting at mobile black sociality walking down the street in a way that he understood implicitly constituted a threat to the order that he represents and that he is sworn to protect. Eric Garner on an everyday basis initiated a new alternative kind of marketplace, another mode of social life. That’s what they killed, OK?
So when we say that black lives matter I think what we do sometimes is obscure the fact that in fact it is black life that matters. That insurgent black social life still constitutes a profound threat to the already existing order of things. And part of the reason that it constitutes such a profound threat is its openness. Its unfixity. The fact that anyone can claim it. The fact that it can claim anybody, it seems to me, and I’ll just close with this. I was just thinking about a couple things on the plane coming up here today. Clearly, both in the instance of Michael Brown and the instance of Eric Garner these are manifestations of ‘broken windows’ policing. And what they make clear is we are the broken windows. We constitute this threat to already existing normative order. And I think that the police have this regulatory function that’s designed to destroy broken windows. Even in a weird way to fix them by destroying them. I study literature and philosophy and I guess about ten or twelve years ago I became obsessed with this passage in a book that is sort of the culmination of the philosophical work of a figure who most folks claim to be the most important modern philosopher in the Western tradition, Immanuel Kant. And the book is called 'The Critique of Judgement.’ And in that book Kant writes “The imagination in its lawless freedom produces nothing but nonsense. It must have its wings severely clipped by the understanding.” He opposes the lawlessness of the imagination with the regulatory policing function of the understanding. And there’s a whole complicated but not very surprising way in which imagination is both racialized and gendered and sexualized in all these profound ways all throughout the Western philosophical tradition. Kant’s interesting because he understands that you can’t do without imagination but he definitely wants its wings clipped. He demands that it be regulated. In the history of English poetry the window has often been conceived of as a figure for imagination, as a kind of lens through which we see, through which we envision. And part of what’s at stake is that I think to fix a broken window is to fix another way of imagining the world. To literally fix it, to destroy it, to regulate it, to exclude it, to incarcerate it. But also at the same time to incorporate it, to capitalize upon it, to exploit it. To accumulate it. This state can’t live with us and they can’t live without us. It’s important to recognize too that the 'broken window', the alternative unfixed window through which we see the world is not just the way in which we see something that doesn’t exist but it’s also the way in which we see and imagine that which does exist. It’s important to imagine how things might be otherwise but it’s also really important to see and understand who and what we are right now. Because I think they see who and what we are. They see who and what we are through the sights of their guns. Through their surveillance mechanisms. I sometimes think they know more about who we are and what we can do than we do. Emancipation produced two problems or kind of extended a problem, deepened it. The enslaved persons were protected property. And at the same time they constituted a threat in their conscious activity every minute of the day to the very idea of property. So that in the aftermath of Emancipation when that property was no longer protected a new set of innovations and regulations had to emerge. Again under the rubric of policing. That’s lynch law. ‘Broken windows’ is an extension of that. So I think it’s really important to be able to understand just enough about what they do so that it can give us a little bit more clear understanding about what we do and what we are. How we need to act. How we need to behave. Not in response to them but in the deepest and the most radical extension of a historical tendency of black social life. To constantly imagine and enact another way of living on earth. So I’m very happy to be here today with you all to talk a little about that…(Applause)…
Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present by David S. Wallace
April 30, 2018 The New Yorker
The philosopher, essayist, and poet Fred Moten. Photograph by Kari Orvik
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David S. Wallace is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.
WHO IS FRED MOTEN?
Fred Moten (born August 18, 1962) is an American poet and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is professor of performance studies at New York University and has taught previously at University of California, Riverside, Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Iowa. His scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study which was co-authored with Stefano Harney, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and The Universal Machine (Duke University Press, 2018).[1] He has published numerous poetry collections, including The Little Edges, The Feel Trio, B Jenkins, and Hughson’s Tavern.[2]
Biography
Fred Moten was born in Las Vegas in 1962 and was raised in the segregated black neighborhood on the western end of the city. His parents were among the black families that made up the Great Migration, the period in US history when many black families moved from the deep south to seek out new prospects in the northern and western parts of the country. His parents were originally from Louisiana and Arkansas and after resettling in Las Vegas, his father found employment at the Las Vegas Convention Center (and later worked for Pan American Airlines), and his mother worked as a grade school teacher.[3]
Moten enrolled in Harvard University in 1980 hoping to pursue a degree in economics. His interest in sociopolitical discourse, the work of Noam Chomsky, civic outreach, and political activism led him away from his studies. At the end of his first year, Moten was required to take a year leave. During this time, he worked as a janitor at the Nevada Test Site, wrote poetry, and discovered the works of T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad, among many others.[4] His return to Harvard was more successful and led to developing his understanding of prose and finding more inspiration for his own work. It was also during this time that he met his would-be collaborator Stefano Harney. After graduating from Harvard, Moten went on to pursue his PhD at University of California, Berkeley.[3]
Critical work
Moten makes considerable intellectual contributions to the discourses of black studies, poetry and poetics, critical race theory and contemporary American literature. He has been profiled by Harvard Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and LitHub.com about his life and work in scholarship. In 2016, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society. Moten's work The Feel Trio (2014) was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award.[2] He also received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award (2018).
He has served on numerous editorial boards including American Quarterly, Callaloo, Social Text, and Discourse. He has served on advisory boards for Issues in Critical Investigation at Vanderbilt University, the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, and was on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York.[5]. As of September 2018, Moten is an associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he teaches courses in Black studies, poetics, music and critical race theory. [6]
One of his most well-known works is a series of essays he published with Stefano Harney in a book called The Undercommons. Throughout these works he criticizes academia's drive to professionalize the student, logistical capitalism, debt–credit hierarchies, and state-based institutions. He offers a theory of hapticality and to stay in debt to one another as a means of understanding one's own relationship to the world and to others.
In 2009, Moten was recognized as one of ten “New American Poets” by the Poetry Society of America. Poet and nonfiction author Maggie Nelson writes of Moten’s work, “With insistence, music, and a measured softness, Fred Moten’s poems construct idiosyncratic, critical canons that invite our research and repay our close attention. … It is hard to make poetry that shimmers on such an edge. Moten does so, and then some.”
Moten was a member of the Board of Managing Editors of American Quarterly from 2004 to 2007 and has been a member of the editorial collectives of Social Text and Callaloo, and of the editorial board of South Atlantic Quarterly. He is also cofounder and copublisher of the small literary press Three Count Pour.
Statement:
"Black studies 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."
Works:
The Universal Machine (series: Consent not to be a single being; Duke University Press, 2018)
Stolen Life (series: Consent not to be a single being; Duke University Press, 2018)
Black and Blur (series: Consent not to be a single being; Duke University Press, 2017)
The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016)
A Poetics of the Undercommons (with Harney, Stefano; Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016)
Who touched me? (with Wu Tsang; If I Can’t Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016)
The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015)
The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014)
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Harney, Stefano; Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013)
B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010)
Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009)
I ran from it but was still in it (Cusp Books, 2007)[8]
In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003)
Poems (with Behrle, Jim; Pressed Wafer, 2002)[8]
Arkansas (Pressed Wafer, 2000)
References
Moten, Fred (2018). The Universal Machine. Duke University Press. p. 305. ISBN 9780822370550.
Moten, Fred (7 November 2014). "Fred Moten". Fred Moten. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
"The Low End Theory". harvardmagazine.com. 8 December 2017. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
Stasio, Nicole Campbell, Frank. "Duke Professor Carries On Tradition Of Black Radical Poetry". wunc.org. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
"Fred Moten – UCR – Department of English". english.ucr.edu. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
Moten, Fred. "Professor". Tisch Directory. Retrieved March 20, 2019.
Wallace, David. "Fred Moten's Radical Critique of the Present". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2020-02-11.
Poets, Academy of American. "About Fred Moten Academy of American Poets". poets.org.
Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney), The Feel Trio and The Little Edges. A new poetry collection, The Service Porch and a new collection of essays, consent not to be a single being are forthcoming. Moten lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.
Presented by the Pearl Andelson Sherry Memorial Fund and the Program in Poetry & Poetics
October 6, 2020
UPDATE: Fred Moten is a 2020 MacArthur Grant receipient/"Genius" (see below):
Creating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life.
Title: Cultural Theorist and Poet
Affiliation: Department of Performance Studies, New York University
Location: New York, New York
Age: 58
Area of Focus: Art History/Theory/Criticism and Visual Culture
Website: New York University: Fred Moten
Published October 6, 2020
About Fred's Work:
Fred Moten is a cultural theorist and poet creating new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. In his theoretical and critical writing on visual culture, poetics, music, and performance, Moten seeks to move beyond normative categories of analysis, grounded in Western philosophical traditions, that do not account for the Black experience. He is developing a new mode of aesthetic inquiry wherein the conditions of being Black play a central role.
Moten’s diverse body of work coheres around a relentless exploration of sound and its importance as a medium of Black resistance and creativity. His first book, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), offers seminal insights that emerge from taking sound, as opposed to visual or textual imagery, as the point of departure for interpretation. For example, in considering Frederick Douglass’s famous account of the “terrible spectacle” of slavery, Moten identifies the screams of Douglass’s Aunt Hester as the materialization in sound of Black resistance, thus opening onto a new way of understanding the trauma of slavery as something not just seen but emphatically heard as well. Moten’s recently completed three-volume theoretical treatise, collectively called consent not to be a single being (2017–2018), includes essays written over the course of fifteen years. The breadth of his theoretical insights in these volumes extends across the arts and humanities—from the music of Curtis Mayfield and Billie Holiday to the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Theodor Adorno—as he explores notions of performance and freedom and formations of Black identity.
Moten continues the project of his theoretical work in his poetry. In his 2014 collection, The Feel Trio, for instance, language hovers at the edge of sense so that sound rises to the fore and the reading of the poem approaches musical performance. Through his writing and lectures, Moten is demonstrating the power of critical thinking to establish new forms of social actualization and reconfiguring the contours of the cultural field broadly.
BIOGRAPHY:
Fred Moten received an AB (1984) from Harvard University and a PhD (1994) from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 2017, he has served as a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He has taught previously at the University of California at Riverside, Duke University, and the University of Iowa. Moten’s additional publications include All That Beauty (2019), The Service Porch (2016), The Little Edges (2015), B Jenkins (2010), and Hughson’s Tavern (2009); and he is co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013).
Posted by Charlene Elsby | July 9, 2019 | Book Reviews
THREE BOOKS BY FRED MOTEN:
Fred Moten, Black and Blur. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017; 360 pages. ISBN: 978-0822370161.
Fred Moten, Stolen Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; 336 pages. ISBN: 978-0822370581.
Fred Moten, The Universal Machine. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; 312 pages. ISBN: 978-0822370550.
Reviewed by J. Moufawad-Paul, York University.
Fred Moten’s theory trilogy, Consent Not To Be A Single Being,
defies easy categorization. On one level, this project is a series of
separate essays organized into three books,fragments given an
organizational totality by the convention of the book and the category
of trilogy. But on another level, structured according to themes
expressed in the prefaces of all three books, there is a unity to the
multiplicity–a “fugitive” unity, to use one of Moten’s dominant themes
that becomes more apparent and coherent as the trilogy progresses.
Perhaps the closest analogue to this project is Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus that, purporting to be akin to a record, exhorted the reader to cut in at any track–but this comparison is unfair to Moten. If Consent Not To Be A Single Being is
a record (or three related records), it is not the record imagined by
Deleuze and Guattari. Rather, these books are records akin to those used
in hip-hop, sampled and recursively themed, where the haptics of the
hand locating the space in the break is more significant than dropping a
needle on another track. More than simply the apprehension of the
record as an artifact, this trilogy is theory as jazz experimentation,
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone dissonance, hip-hop elaboration, Gould’s Goldberg Variations.
It is theory as music, even when it is not talking about music, guided
by the singular understanding “that the Atlantic slave trade and settler
colonialism…are irreducible conditions of global modernity–that is, of
the very idea of the global and the very idea of modernity. These ideas
include and project modernism, which is also to say postmodernism.” (Black and Blur,
198) Moreover, this theory trilogy is a prolonged and polyphonic
attempt to think blackness as “the name that has been given to the
social field and social life of an illicit alternative capacity to
desire.” (The Universal Machine,
234) The relationship between the “irreducible conditions of global
modernity” and “an illicit alternative capacity to desire” is a response
to a recurring foil in all three books: the anti-blackness of Kant’s Critique of Judgment–a key text in the project of modernism and known for ascribing an illicit imagination to blackness.
Reviewing a trilogy that theorizes
according to an experimental musicality is difficult. How can we think
Moten’s project in a single review, when it samples and plays with
multiple thinkers and aesthetic expressions? Theorists such as Hartman,
Marx, Adorno, Robinson, Fanon, Althusser, Spillers, Glissant (from which
the trilogy’s title is taken), and others cut across a vast plethora of
aesthetic landscapes from J.S. Bach and T.S. Eliot to Samuel R. Delany
and Thornton Dial. Moten’s project is thus a fugitive poetics of
assemblage; theory as aesthetics, aesthetics as theory. Or, put another
way, this trilogy translates the sensibility of music to theory, and so
we can speak of themes, movements, refrains, elisions, motifs, etc.
The first question that needs to be
answered in a review of a theory trilogy is structural. That is, how do
these three books work together as discrete but overlapping? Consent Not To Be A Single Being moves from disunity to unity. Whereas Black and Blur (BB) functions as a patchwork assemblage that travels quickly and playfully across numerous terrains, Stolen Life (SL) begins to draw the various themes into focus, and The Universal Machine (UM)
concludes the trilogy with the highest level of formal unity. In some
ways, this feels like a particular musical tactic, where seemingly
disparate movements gain a progressive logic as the work proceeds–or the
tactic of a particularly long novel that approaches denouement.
I will do my best to address each of the three books below but, due to
the immensity of this project and its formal structure, there will be
much I cannot discuss in even an extended review.
Beginning with Black and Blur,
we can possibly locate the dominant theme of this poetics of assemblage
in a sentence that, in its Preface, Moten indicates was meant to be the
first sentence of his 2003 work, In The Break: “Performance is the resistance of the object.” (BB,
vii) In order to perform an act of fugitive theory that traces the
nocturnal economy (to use Mbembe’s terminology) of modernity through
aesthetic representation, Moten is engaged in a resistance to the object
of his analysis as it is given by dominant ideology. “Our resistant,
relentlessly impossible object,” he writes, “is subjectless predication,
subjectless escape, escape from subjection, in and through the
paralegal flaw that animates and exhausts the language of ontology.” (BB,
vii) This exhaustion of the language of ontology is what he will call,
as his own theoretical terms emerge and cohere over the course of this
project, “paraontology.” Through black aesthetics, Moten works to
excavate the neglected aspect of the being imbricated by modernity and
post-modernity’s ontological proclamations–the being of the slave trade
and settler-colonialism–that exists beside, beneath, and between what is
claimed to be existence. This project is not a “remembering” but
instead “a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding
rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the metaphysics upon
which the idea of redress is grounded.” (BB, ix)
Hence, Black and Blur
proceeds with a relentless cutting into the metaphysics of modernity,
so as to reveal its wound. It is the crawlspace of Harriet Jacobs,
“above the main floor of her grandmother’s house, where she confined
herself for more than seven years in order to escape mastery’s sexual
predation.” (BB,
69) The first book of the trilogy indeed feels like a fugitive crawl
through modern aesthetics–both the aesthetics deemed acceptable by
modernity and their underbelly, as well as the ways in which this above
and below meet in the crawlspace. Directly before Moten’s chapter on
Jacobs and the film apparatus predicated on the parasitical apprehension
of a black girl, for example, he explores Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and the ways in which Gould’s translation of modernity’s high art moved downwards, pointing to the fugitive crawlspace.
The entirety of this first book in
the trilogy works to connect the above-ground instantiations of
modernity with their critical underbelly, a relationship of value
determined by slavery and settler-colonialism, in a kind of theoretical
crawlspace. Hence Moten’s habitual return to Adorno who, despite
claiming to be an opponent of the culture industry’s business as usual,
sought to oppose contemporary expressions of art by valorizing avant-garde
modernity. Rather than simply dismissing Adorno’s theory of music
(which has been rightly criticized for its racist rejection of jazz),
Moten enlists it so as to read it against Adorno’s own racist investment
in the illusions of modernity. That is, what Adorno privileged as music
resistant to the culture industry, “will have already been anticipated
not only in the very music that Adorno dismisses but also in the style
of his dismissal. Adorno never talks as cogently about the interplay of
development and stasis, or even development and regression, as when he
speaks of it in relation to blackness, to femininity, to black
femininity in and as jazz.” (BB, 131-2)
The second book, Stolen Life, begins with a long chapter interrogating the passages in Kant’s Critique of Judgment
that deal with the lawlessness of imagination. Since Kant’s analysis of
imagination is driven by his anti-black racism (and was foundational
for modern European racist philosophy), Moten reads this conception of
lawlessness against Kant, connecting it to the themes of fugitivity and
refusal that guide the former’s project. Central to this book is the
theme of a lawless imaginary against a white supremacist legislation of
thought–synonymous with the legislation of enfleshed bodies and thus the
legislation and theft of life itself–that becomes “an irrationalization
of the social.” (SL, 89)
In Stolen Life,
the theme of fugitivity is forced into further coherence, emerging
against the foil of Kant’s legislation of imagination. Moten defines
this theme as, “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of
the proper and the proposed.” (SL,
131) Against the white supremacist home of rationality, “that can be
inhabited even by those who think they are calling the very idea of
home, let alone that particular home, into question” (SL,
107)–since whiteness can be at home everywhere in an imaginary it has
constructed–fugitivity is “a desire for the outside, for a playing or
being outside… it moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and
writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to
propriety.” (SL,
131) From this fugitive imaginary emerges “the ongoing possibility of a
general, often gestural refusal [that Moten has] been trying to think
under the rubric of abolitionism.” (SL, 103) Against the lawful imagination, we are asked to think a politics of fugitive refusal.
This tension between the white
supremacist imaginary of legislation, a fear of a lawlessness that is
racialized, and the insurgent black imaginary of lawless fugitivity that
is operationalized through the experience of stolen and oppressed
existence is also the tension within modernity and enlightenment. The
trilogy began, as aforementioned, by proposing to think the underbelly
of modernity. Stolen Life
thinks through enlightenment categories, with Kant front and centre,
guided by the claim that “the unfinished project of enlightenment is not
but nothing other than the unfinished project of abolition.” (SL, 113-4)
If slavery and settler-colonialism are “irreducible conditions of global modernity,” as Moten exhorted us to think in Black and Blur,
then what does it mean to think modernity’s underbelly from the
crawlspace of slave ships, plantations, and colonial killing fields?
That is, to think the global stolen life that was foundational to the
enlightenment cosmopolitanism celebrated by Kant? One answer is to
celebrate a kind of new cosmopolitanism derived from that historical
experience: this is Paul Gilroy’s answer, and it is not one that Moten
finds particularly satisfying. (See BB,
293-5, n. 3) Nor does Moten find it theoretically salient to designate
slavery as “social death,” as Orlando Patterson does. To seek another
form of cosmopolitanism is to resort to “the claim of the citizen, the
democratized sovereign, in such a way as to confirm the already given
requirement that the relation of blackness to the nation-state be
understood as analogous to that between a stubborn monolith and a
finally irresistible solvent.” (SL, 197) Otherness does not persist to challenge the processes that made it other
to begin with but is instead appropriated by, and disappeared in, these
very predatory processes. But to understand the violent othering as a
complete social death, where any form of subjectivity is obliterated,
implies that there are no voices and experiences to excavate that can
found an alter-enlightenment project of unfinished abolition:
There are those who act
as if the only way to speak or fathom or measure the unspeakable,
unfathomable, immeasurable venality of the slavers is by way of the
absolute degradation of the enslaved. But such calculation is faulty
from the start insofar as we are irreducible to what is done to us, that
we were and remain present at our own making, even in the hold of the
ship, and that this making, that presence, this presence in that void,
this fugitive avoidance in and of and out of nothing, nowhere,
everything, everywhere, is inseparable from fantasy. (SL, 196)
The problem for Moten, then, is that
“what Gilroy figures as moribund” and “what Patterson figures as tragic”
cannot cognize the fugitive subjectivity that white supremacist
legislation has either sought to disappear, by subtracting it from the
condition of modernity, or render insensible, by dismissing it to the
realm of lawless imagination. (SL,
198) If there is a cosmopolitanism to be found in fugitive resistance,
it is “the hope for an undercosmopolitanism that might abolish the
Kantian line.” (SL, 194) Here we find a clear echo of Moten’s earlier work on “the undercommons.” (See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons.)
As noted above, The Universal Machine
is the most focused volume of this trilogy. The various threads are
pulled together in three long chapters that ostensibly focus on Levinas,
Arendt, and Fanon. Here the themes of the previous two books are worked
out through an engagement with a “swarm” found in “phenomenology’s
exhaust and exhaustion.” (UM,
ix) This “exhaust and exhaustion” of phenomenology is located in the
aforementioned philosophers, each representing possible end points of
the discipline. The implicit question guiding these three meditations is
what can be salvaged from the most radical expressions of
phenomenology. Moten’s examinations of Levinas and Arendt, though
occasionally sympathetic, demonstrate that both inherit, as much as they
struggle against them, the Kantian categories critiqued in Stolen Life.
With Levinas, this inheritance is
revealed by “his embrace of the homogeneous medium–the abstract and
general equivalent known as Europe or European Man.” (UM,
50) Levinas’ valorizaton of the Bible and the Greeks as “the only
serious issues in human life” because “everything else is dancing,” (UM, 1)
for example, echoes Kant’s claims about the lawless imagination. The
fact that Levinas delivers such statements while talking about Africans
dancing to mourn the dead–referring to Africans as “a dancing
civilization” and claiming that Africans “weep differently”–demonstrates
the a priori
assumptions behind his supposedly radical phenomenological project,
underscored by his defensive additive: “no racism intended.” (UM,
1) Moten’s excavation of Levinas’ philosophy reveals that, far from
being a philosophy of the other or a phenomenology of alterity that it
presumes to be, it in fact preserves Eurocentric categories of being.
That is, Levinas’ “disavowal of and/or escape from being…[are] submitted
to the commitment to the European.” (UM,
23) At best, Levinas points us towards “the philosophical realization
that being tends towards escape, in a fugitive practice of animation.” (UM,
64) Such a realization, however, is only indicated by the Levinasian
project, which is ultimately constrained by all that it has inherited
from Heidegger, Husserl, and the European monologue.
Moten’s critique of Arendt is much more pointed and direct than his exploration of Levinas. Indeed, the second chapter of The Universal Machine
is the most focused and polemical. While some philosophers have
attempted to establish a radical philosophy on an Arendtian foundation,
the tradition to which Moten belongs has long been aware of the
“antiblackness that infuses and animates Arendt’s work.” (UM,
66) Arendt’s liberal defense of Jim Crow era USA, her opposition to
forced desegregation, and her inability to understand what was at stake
during the Civil Rights era were not, as her defenders claim,
anachronistic; they were essential to her understanding of the human
condition. Hence her horrendous essay, “Reflections on Little Rock,”
where she ventriloquizes both Elizabeth Eckford and Eckford’s mother,
arguing that their participation in desegregation was violence to them
as well, is consistent with Arendt’s understanding of violence in On Violence, her theory of the social in The Human Condition, and her understanding of politics and slavery in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
For Arendt, violence is understood as a violation of the state of
affairs; the fact that this state of affairs, particularly US white
supremacist society, is itself the worse kind of violence cannot be
grasped, because her entire approach (which is just a translation of
liberalism into the register of phenomenology) lacks the theoretical
categories to cognize such thought. Hence, her assumption that
desegregation was a violent state imposition (despite her cringe-worthy
attempts to claim this violence was not white supremacist, that it was
visited upon the Black community as well) could not grasp that
“[s]eparation’s constant and violent assault on equality is always most
emphatically an assault on black social life. Segregation is the
modality through which that assault is carried out.” (UM,
100) Although Moten recognizes that Arendt possesses an “attitude of
rejection” against “the ongoing administration of this world,” he also
demonstrates that she “share[s] it against her will and against her
thought.” (UM, 138)
The final section of The Universal Machine,
and thus the trilogy as a whole, is Moten’s meditation on Fanon. This
section is simultaneously the most interesting and the most frustrating
of all three books. It is nteresting because, against Levinas and
Arendt, it attempts to locate a phenomenology of blackness in a
heterodox reading of Fanon; it is frustrating, because this reading is
itself frustrated by a pathologization of Fanon in the very act of
examining Fanon’s discussion of colonial pathologization. In this
chapter, Moten occasionally seems to claim that Fanon’s critiques of
culturalism are simultaneously a critique of blackness, due to Fanon’s
many statements about how the colonized’s past is determined by the
colonial present, that attempts to retrieve it are pathological, and
that it is better to focus on an anticolonial future. While Moten’s
assertion that “flights of fantasy in the hold of the [slave] ship,” and
the “parantological totality” of these flights of fantasy cannot be
dismissed as pathological, since they prove that the slave was not truly
subjected to social death, (UM, 198) this more has to with the theme developed in Stolen Life
in response to Patterson than an engagement with Fanon. Indeed, Fanon’s
interrogation of colonized culture in these passages was concerned with
the actual political danger of cultural nationalism. This danger was
something that every revolutionary anticolonial movement at that time
was dealing with, because culturalism had destroyed, and would continue
to destroy, multiple revolutions. (There is a reason, for example, that
the problem of cultural nationalism was one of the main themes of Ngũgĩ
wa Thiong’o’s novels in that period.) At the same time, however, it is
clear that Moten’s meditation on Fanon is of a different order than his
meditations on Levinas and Arendt. His engagement with Fanon, after
clearing away the pseudo-radicalism of Levinas and Arendt, is an
engagement with a fellow traveler. In fact, my frustrations with this
chapter were also evinced by Moten:
Earlier, I assert that
Fanon is saying that there is no and can be no black social life. What
if he’s saying that is all there can be? The antephenomenology of spirit
that constitutes Black Skin, White Masks
prepares our approach to sociological or, more precisely, sociopoetic
grounding…by way of the description of the impossibility of political
life, which is, nevertheless, at this moment and for much of his
career, Fanon’s chief concern. The social life of the black, or of the
colonized, is, to be sure, given to us in or through Fanon, often in his
case studies, sometimes in verse, or in his narrative of the career of
the revolutionary cadre. (UM, 233)
Hence, there is a marked ambiguity in
the way that Moten engages with Fanon, while drifting in and out of
other exploratory registers, which is echoed in his parallel claim that
“[b]lack optimism and Afro-pessimism are asymptotic…their nonmeeting is
part of an ongoing manic depressive episode called black
radicalism/black social life.” (UM,
234) Rather than attempting to uncover a lost cultural essence, Moten
is trying to think the social life that precedes and survives as
fugitive refusal, the supposed “social death” of slavery and
colonialism. In Black Skin, White Masks,
in thinking the “fact” or “lived experience” of blackness in a white
supremacist world, Fanon comes to the recognition that blackness is an
othering constructed by the white world–that, as a black man in Paris,
he is “overdetermined from the outside.” (Black Skin, White Masks,
95) While this othering is indeed a fact and lived
experience–categories of race were historically determined by the
European colonial powers as a process of racialization–for Moten, this
generates a set of shadow questions that animate the final sequence of
his trilogy, the central one being: “if, as Fanon suggests, the black
cannot be an Other for another black, if the black can only be an Other
for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life?” (UM,
141) That is, according to phenomenology, there needs to be a circuit
between self and other in order for there to be social recognition and
thus social life. But for Fanon, black life is othered to such a degree
within the confines of racist social formations that the othering and
the non-other are already determined; there can be no black life outside
of this circuit that counts as a fully social life. Fanon would of
course respond that, yes, this is the point, which is why his solution
was always a revolutionary one: destroy the confines that dehumanize
racialized life. Although Moten is not at all opposed to such a violent
solution, as his critique of Arendt’s notion of violence demonstrates,
he is also concerned with recovering the sense of a social life in the
break, the crawlspace, the hold. Such a task is extremely challenging,
because it is difficult to cognize something that has rendered opaque
slavery and settler-colonialism, the underbelly of modernity. The
difficulty of such a recovery partially explains Moten’s obliqueness:
how do you enunciate the thought of something that cannot be fully
thought, that is a fugitive and outlaw possibility, battered by a
history of erasure?
If I have one significant criticism
about these books, then it is a criticism with the way in which Moten
adopts contemporary theories of sovereign power. That is, occasional
exceptions notwithstanding, Moten tends to uncritically adopt the
Foucault-through-Agamben conception of sovereignty that mystifies social
relations, due to its inability to break from the conception of social
power inherited from Hobbes and classical liberalism. In Stolen Life,
for example, he writes that “[w]hat remains necessary are the ongoing
imperatives of exodus from the genocidal construct of human sovereignty
that ceaselessly consumes what it is meant to protect.” (SL,
226) Such a claim is a recurrent theme throughout the trilogy. What
results is a conflation of the state and nation with sovereignty, which
is common for this type of analysis, and this prevents him from being
able to conceptualize what a state or nation are beyond being sites of sovereignty–which is tantamount to declaring power is power.
This understanding of social power
results in a possible lacuna in his interest in furthering the black
radical tradition: Black Nationalism was central to the black radicalism
of the 1960s/70s and, however we might judge it now, was significant in
revealing which radicals were the allies of Black Liberation. When Hal
Draper called Black Nationalism, “Jim Crow in reverse,” radicals knew
which side of history he stood on, regardless of his Marxism. And what
do demands for an “exodus” from sovereignty–which are identical to
claims made by Agamben who, as Weheliye has argued, ignored both slavery
and settler-colonialism–mean for radical Indigenous struggles that have
generally understood national sovereignty as central to their
existence? Due to such an understanding of social power, therefore,
Moten makes the occasional strange claim, such as when he claims that
the “subprime debtor…is also a freedom fighter” (UM, 245), which I am sure would be news for many subprime debtors.
Moreover, the fact that this
contemporary understanding of sovereign power has been theoretically
developed according to the work of Carl Schmitt, with his reactionary
“blood and soil” understanding of sovereignty, should render it
immediately suspicious. Unfortunately, and partially because of Agamben,
Schmitt’s conception of juridical power has been assimilated by an
entire host of radical theorists, and Moten is being pulled along by
this academic fad. This fad, in my opinion, needs to be challenged,
because we should not accept fascist categories to understand the
political. Thankfully, the strength of his work transcends this
problematic adoption.
The greatest difficulty of this
theory trilogy is its linguistic opaqueness. To be fair, much of
so-called “continental philosophy” is equally opaque, if not downright
obscurantist, so it is not as if Moten is any more or less difficult to
apprehend than Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, or any éminence grise
in the continental tradition. The difference between Moten and these
thinkers is that the difficulty of Moten’s style and engagement has less
to do with a failure to write clearly and more to do with the
difficulty of his subject matter. How does one think the underbelly of
modernity, a fugitive sensibility that emerges against the predatory
legislation of colonial history and yet still strives for its own
intelligibility as the project of unfinished abolitionism? As Fanon
tells us, colonialism functions to render the colonized insensible to
thought itself. Thus, against what is deemed “stupid” by “the
regulators” of thought, Moten advances a “contrarational” poetics that
is wagered as the basis for a new “universal machine.” (UM, 246) Even at its most oblique points, Moten’s expansive theory trilogy is always a poetics of resistance.
Additional Works Cited
Frantz Fanon (2008), Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.
Fred Moten (2003), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
