A few ways in and through Fred Moten's In the break - "Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester's Scream"
(page numbers based on the pages of the printout, not the book)
On Blackness
1- "the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that an arranges every line - is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity."
On Black Performance (Black History)
8/9- "the animative materiality - the aesthetic, political, sexual, and racial force - of the ensemble of objects that we might call black performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of human being (which would necessarily bear and be reducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope someday to call, subjectivity)."
16- "There occurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one distruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter."
17- "It's the ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion, the performance of the brith and rebirth of a new science, a phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis, the reproduction of blackness in and as (the) reproduction of black performance(s)."
18- "This is to say that enslavement - and the resistance to enslavement that is the performative essence of blackness (or perhaps less controversially, the essence of black performance) is a being maternal that is indistinguishable from a being material.
20/21- "This interest is, in turn, not in the interest of a nostalgic and impossible suturing of wounded kinship but is rather directed toward what this irrepressibly inscriptive, reproductive, and resistant material object hood does for and might still do to the exclusionary brotherhoods of critics and black radicalism as experimental black performance."
21- "This animateriality - impassioned response to passionate utterance - is painfully and hiddenly disclosed always and everywhere int eat racks of black performance and black discourse on black performance."
On Subjectivity
1-"defined by the subject's possession of itself and its objects, is troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert that that the subject seems to be possessed - infused, deformed - by the object it possesses."
6>> "Is there a way to subject this unavoidable model of subject to a radical breakdown?"
On the Object (the commodity)
6-"I want to show the inter articulation of the resistance of the object with Marx's subjunctive figure of the commodity who speaks"
12- "the (exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, as it were, before exchange."
12- "a nature that is give as a kind of anticipatory sociality and historicity."
14- "What remains secret in Marx could be thought as or in terms of race or sex or gender, of the differences these terms mark, form and reify. But we could also say that the unrevealed secret is a recrudescence of an already existing notion of the private (or, more properly, of the proper) that operates within the constellation of self-possession, capacity, subjectivity and speech."
16- "the truth about the value of the commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value - that is not intrinsic - that Marx assigns to it."
20- "But if this theoretical placement of the enslaved labourer outside of the field of exchange positions her as non commodity, it does so not by way of some rigorous accounting but rather as a function of not hearing, of overlooking." (my emphasis)
On Speech and Noise
6-"I am interested...in the implications of the breaking of such speech, the elevating disruptions of the verbal that take the rich content of the object's / commodity's auralotu outside te confines of meaning precisely by way of this material trace."
24- "Passionate utterance and response together take the form of an encounter, the mutual, negative positioning of master and slave. This encounter is appositional, is shaped by a step away that calls such positions radically into question."
25- "Where shriek turns speech turns song - remote from the impossible comfort of origin - lies the trace of our descent."
On Music
14- "what's at stake in the music: the universalization or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to subjection, the old-new thing, the freedom drive that animates black performance."
24- "let the call and response [...] operate as a kind of anacrusis (a note or beat or mimicked word improvised through the opposition of speech and writing before the definition of rhythm and melody. Gerard Manley Hopkins's term for anacrusis was encountering. Let the articulation of appositional encounter be our encountering: a nondetermining invitation to the new and continually unprecedented performance, historical, philosophical, democratic, communist arrangements that are the only authentic ones."
8- Glissant: "For a Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech."
27- "black radicalism is (like) black music. The broken circle demands a new analytic (way f listening to the music)."
6/7- "establishing some procedures for discovering the relationship between the 'heart-rending shrieks' of Aunt Hester in the face of the mater's violent assault, the discourse on music that Douglass initiates a few pages after the recitation of that vicious encounter, and the incorporation or recording of a sound figured as external both to music and to speech in black music and speech."
7-Nathaniel McKay: "broken claims to connection," "wounded kinship," "sexual cut."
On Language (Saussure)
8- "the possibility of a critique of the valuation of meaning over content and the reduction of phonic matter and syntactic 'degeneracy' in the early modern search for a universal language and the ;ate modern search for a universal science of language."
ABBEY LINCOLN - Tryptich - Prayer, Protest, Peace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMaUDAeiSIY
What is the edge of this event? What am I, the object? What is the music? What is manhood? What is the feminine? What is the beautiful? What will blackness be? (25)
(page numbers based on the pages of the printout, not the book)
On Blackness
1- "the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that an arranges every line - is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity."
On Black Performance (Black History)
8/9- "the animative materiality - the aesthetic, political, sexual, and racial force - of the ensemble of objects that we might call black performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of human being (which would necessarily bear and be reducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope someday to call, subjectivity)."
16- "There occurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value, one distruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter."
17- "It's the ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion, the performance of the brith and rebirth of a new science, a phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis, the reproduction of blackness in and as (the) reproduction of black performance(s)."
18- "This is to say that enslavement - and the resistance to enslavement that is the performative essence of blackness (or perhaps less controversially, the essence of black performance) is a being maternal that is indistinguishable from a being material.
20/21- "This interest is, in turn, not in the interest of a nostalgic and impossible suturing of wounded kinship but is rather directed toward what this irrepressibly inscriptive, reproductive, and resistant material object hood does for and might still do to the exclusionary brotherhoods of critics and black radicalism as experimental black performance."
21- "This animateriality - impassioned response to passionate utterance - is painfully and hiddenly disclosed always and everywhere int eat racks of black performance and black discourse on black performance."
On Subjectivity
1-"defined by the subject's possession of itself and its objects, is troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert that that the subject seems to be possessed - infused, deformed - by the object it possesses."
6>> "Is there a way to subject this unavoidable model of subject to a radical breakdown?"
On the Object (the commodity)
6-"I want to show the inter articulation of the resistance of the object with Marx's subjunctive figure of the commodity who speaks"
12- "the (exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, as it were, before exchange."
12- "a nature that is give as a kind of anticipatory sociality and historicity."
14- "What remains secret in Marx could be thought as or in terms of race or sex or gender, of the differences these terms mark, form and reify. But we could also say that the unrevealed secret is a recrudescence of an already existing notion of the private (or, more properly, of the proper) that operates within the constellation of self-possession, capacity, subjectivity and speech."
16- "the truth about the value of the commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value - that is not intrinsic - that Marx assigns to it."
20- "But if this theoretical placement of the enslaved labourer outside of the field of exchange positions her as non commodity, it does so not by way of some rigorous accounting but rather as a function of not hearing, of overlooking." (my emphasis)
On Speech and Noise
6-"I am interested...in the implications of the breaking of such speech, the elevating disruptions of the verbal that take the rich content of the object's / commodity's auralotu outside te confines of meaning precisely by way of this material trace."
24- "Passionate utterance and response together take the form of an encounter, the mutual, negative positioning of master and slave. This encounter is appositional, is shaped by a step away that calls such positions radically into question."
25- "Where shriek turns speech turns song - remote from the impossible comfort of origin - lies the trace of our descent."
On Music
14- "what's at stake in the music: the universalization or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to subjection, the old-new thing, the freedom drive that animates black performance."
24- "let the call and response [...] operate as a kind of anacrusis (a note or beat or mimicked word improvised through the opposition of speech and writing before the definition of rhythm and melody. Gerard Manley Hopkins's term for anacrusis was encountering. Let the articulation of appositional encounter be our encountering: a nondetermining invitation to the new and continually unprecedented performance, historical, philosophical, democratic, communist arrangements that are the only authentic ones."
8- Glissant: "For a Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech."
27- "black radicalism is (like) black music. The broken circle demands a new analytic (way f listening to the music)."
6/7- "establishing some procedures for discovering the relationship between the 'heart-rending shrieks' of Aunt Hester in the face of the mater's violent assault, the discourse on music that Douglass initiates a few pages after the recitation of that vicious encounter, and the incorporation or recording of a sound figured as external both to music and to speech in black music and speech."
7-Nathaniel McKay: "broken claims to connection," "wounded kinship," "sexual cut."
On Language (Saussure)
8- "the possibility of a critique of the valuation of meaning over content and the reduction of phonic matter and syntactic 'degeneracy' in the early modern search for a universal language and the ;ate modern search for a universal science of language."
ABBEY LINCOLN - Tryptich - Prayer, Protest, Peace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMaUDAeiSIY
What is the edge of this event? What am I, the object? What is the music? What is manhood? What is the feminine? What is the beautiful? What will blackness be? (25)
I'm going to be talking about this in my blog post, but Moten's "What will blackness be?" quote that you mention is just so beautiful and gripping.
ReplyDeleteThis first chapter centres on Black performance (or Blackness or Black History) but specifically instances of it in the past or the not-so-distant past. His references to Frederick Douglass and his look at Blackness in the context of (post)-slavery (which is done so affectionately through his constant return to and citing of Saidiya Hartman's work on the subject) are fixed in a more historical inquiry. It is not until this quote on page 25 that a possible imagining of Black Futurity takes place.
His question seems almost detached from the rest of the chapter. Almost a break in thought or interruption of one thought with another. And I wonder when this break happens? When does Moten *really* shift from speaking about the past to imagining the future? I don't think it happens right as these questions are posed nor in the lines that immediately proceed them, but there is a moment (or series of moments) where this inquiry into "What will be Blackness be" takes form. It makes me think if when we speak about Black performance historically, we are also talking about its future as well.