Black and Blur consent not to be a single being Black and Blur FRED MOTEN duke university press durham and london 2017 © 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Miller Text by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Moten, Fred, author. Title: Black and blur / Fred Moten. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2017. | Series: Consent not to be a single being ; v. [1] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017024176 (print) | lccn 2017039278 (ebook) isbn 9780822372226 (ebook) isbn 9780822370062 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822370161 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Blacks— Race identity— United States. | African Americans— Race identity. | African diaspora. Classification: lcc e185.625 (ebook) | lcc e185.625 .m684 2017 (print) | ddc 305.896/073—d c23 lc rec ord available at https:// lccn.loc. gov / 2017024176 Cover art: Harold Mendez, but I sound better since you cut my throat, 2013–2014. Digital print transferred from unique pinhole photo graph. 20″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist. CONTENTS Preface / vii 14. Amuse- Bouche / 174 Acknowl edgments / xv 15. Collective Head / 184 16. Cornered, Taken, Made to 1. Not In Between / 1 Leave / 198 2. Interpolation and 17. Enjoy All Monsters / 206 Interpellation / 28 18. Some Extrasubtitles for 3. Magic of Objects / 34 Wildness / 212 4. Sonata Quasi Una 19. To Feel, to Feel More, to Fantasia / 40 Feel More Than / 215 5. Taste Dissonance Flavor 20. Irruptions and Incoherences Escape (Preface to a Solo by for Jimmie Durham / 219 Miles Davis) / 66 21. Black and Blue on White. 6. The New International of In and And in Space. / 226 Rhythmic Feel/ings / 86 22. Blue Vespers / 230 7. The Phonographic Mise-en Scène / 118 23. The Blur and Breathe Books / 245 8. Liner Notes for Lick Piece / 134 24. Entanglement and Virtuosity / 270 9. Rough Americana / 147 25. Bobby Lee’s Hands / 280 10. Nothing, Every thing / 152 11. Nowhere, Everywhere / 158 Notes / 285 12. Nobody, Every body / 168 Works Cited / 317 13. Remind / 170 Index / 329 PREFACE The essays in Black and Blur attempt a par tic u lar kind of failure, trying hard not to succeed in some final and complete determination either of them- selves or of their aim, blackness, which is, but so serially and variously, that it is given nowhere as emphatically as in rituals of renomination, when the given is all but immediately taken away. Such predication is, as Nathaniel Mackey says, “unremitting”—a constant economy and mechanics of fugitive making where the subject is hopelessly troubled by, in being emphatically detached from, the action whose agent it is supposed to be.1 Indeed, our resistant, relentlessly impossible object is subjectless predication, subject- less escape, escape from subjection, in and through the paral egal flaw that animates and exhausts the language of ontology. Constant escape is an ode to impurity, an obliteration of the last word. We remain to insist upon this errant, interstitial insistence, an activity that is, from the perspective that be- lieves in perspective, at best, occult and, at worst, obscene. T hese essays aim for that insistence at its best and at its worst as it is given in objects that won’t be objects after all. In its primary concern with art, Black and Blur takes up where In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition leaves off.2 In the Break was my first book and is, therefore, the cause and the object of a great deal of agony. For instance, I suffered, and continue to suffer, over the first sen- tence, which I can’t repeat because it was meant to be second. I can only tell you what the first sentence was supposed to be: “Per for mance is the re sis- tance of the object.” Sadly, agony over the absence of the right sentence is not lessened when I consider that there is something wrong with it, and when I recognize that most of the writing collected in Black and Blur—a nd its companion volumes, Stolen Life and The Universal Machine—a ttempts to figure out what’s wrong with it and, moreover, to understand the relation- ship between the devotional practice that is given in recitation of the sen- tence “blackness is x” and the analytic practice that moves to place under an ineradicable erasure the terms per for mance and object. There is a rich, rigorous, power ful, and utterly necessary analytic of anti-b lackness that en- ables that devotional practice. But to be committed to the anti- and ante- categorical predication of blackness—e ven as such engagement moves by way of what Mackey also calls “an eruptive critique of predication’s rickety spin rewound as endowment,” even in order to seek the anticipatory changes that evade what Saidiya Hartman calls “the incompatible predications of the freed”—is to subordinate, by a mea sure so small that it constitutes mea sure’s eclipse, the critical analys is of anti-b lackness to the celebratory analys is of blackness.3 To celebrate is to solemnify, in practice. This is done not to avoid or ameliorate the hard truths of anti- blackness but in the ser vice of its vio- lent eradication. There is an open set of sentences of the kind blackness is x and we should chant them all, not only for and in the residual critique of mastery such chanting bears but also in devoted instantiation, sustenance and defense of the irregular. What is endowment that it can be rewound? What is it to rewind the given? What is it to wound it? What is it to be given to this wounding and rewinding? Mobilized in predication, blackness mobi- lizes predication not only against but also before itself. The great importance of Hartman’s work is given, in part, in its framing and amplification of the question concerning the weight of anti-b lackness in and upon the general proj ect of black study. It allows and requires us to consider the relation of anti- blackness as an object of study—if there is relation and if it is the object—to the aim of her, and our, work. Any such consideration must be concerned with how blackness bears what Hartman calls the “diffusion” of the terror of anti- blackness. For me, this question of bearing is also crucial and In the Break is a preliminary attempt to form it. Subordination is not detachment. Disappearance is not absence. If black- ness will have never been thought when detached from anti-b lackness, nei- ther will anti- blackness have been thought outside the facticity of blackness as anti- blackness’s spur and anticipation; moreover, neither blackness nor anti- blackness are to be seen beneath the appearances that tell of them. The interinanimation of thinking and writing collected here might be character- ized as a kind of dualism, but I hope it would be better understood by way of some tarrying with Hartman’s notion of diffusion, which is inseparable from a certain notion of apposition conceived of not as therapy but alternative operation. In my attempt to amplify and understand the scream of Frederick Doug- lass’s Aunt Hester, which he recalls and reconfigures throughout his body of viii / preface autobiographical work in successive iterations of the brutal sexual vio lence to which it violently and aninaugurally responds, I began to consider that the scream’s content is not simply unrepresentable but instantiates, rather, an alternative to repre sen ta tion. Such consideration does no such t hing as empty the scream of content. It makes no such gesture. Rather, it seeks after what the scream contains (and pours out), and after the way that content is passed on—t oo terribly and too beautifully—in black art. In seeking after that content and its irrepressible outpouring, distance from the vicious se- riality of Aunt Hester’s rape, and the general “theft of the body,” in Hortense Spillers’s terms, it can be said to (dis)embody, is impossible.4 Any such dis- tance could only ever be an absolute nearness, an absolute proximity, which a certain invocation of suture might approach, but with g reat imprecision. Black art neither sutures nor is sutured to trauma. T here’s no remembering, no healing. T here is, rather, a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the meta- physics upon which the idea of redress is grounded. That trauma—or, more precisely the materiality of her violation and of the viol ence that makes that beating pos si ble and legible and, in the view of the violator, necessary—is carried in and transmitted by Aunt Hester’s scream as a fundamental aspect of its own most ineluctable and irresistible sharpness and serration. This bearing and transmission are irreducible in the scream even if the scream is irreducible to them. Aunt Hester’s scream cannot be emptied of the content it pours out in excess and disruption of meaning, of the modality of subjec- tivity or subjective embodiment that makes and interprets meaning, and of the sense of world or spatiotemporal coherence or global positioning or pro- prioceptive coordination that constitutes what Amiri Baraka might call the “place/meant” of possessed and/or possessive individuation. Aunt Hester’s scream is flesh’s dispossessive share and sharing, and the question, r eally, for those who attend to it, is whether it is enough. My tendency is to believe that in the material spirit of its absolute poverty, Aunt Hester’s scream is optimal, as absolute wealth. Where some might see in my analys is a decoupling of her scream from the context of viol ence, I think of myself as having tried, and in the intervening years having continued to try, to forward a broader, richer, and more detailed understanding of that context. Not only are Aunt Hester’s scream and its content themselves uncontained by the bounda ries that emerge in the relay between self, world, and repre sen ta tion but the vio- lent context of that scream and its content, and the very content of viol ence itself, are so uncontained, as well. In the Break was a preliminary report on preface / ix