I keep thinking about Fred Moten's phrase 'the critical remixing of nonconvergent tracks.' Rather than following different threads of thought/practice to a singularity where they merge naturally, cutting up our material and arrange it so that new lines can emerge. I feel especially interested in the aspect of fear, its relation to the spaces between opposed terms, how this fear can be both a blockage, limit of thought, but also the space of growth.
It seems like in one sense, the break is something that structures language/thought but materially is a place of continuity. He describes as a break the change between slavery and emancipation, but there is obviously a continuing force of racial oppression post-slavery. So we can dwell in the places of rupture and find the continuity between broken pieces, the way Fred Moten flows between Marx's changes in grammatical mood and argument to draw out a new/hidden meaning.
There was a emphasis that came up last class, and previously, on processes already being underway, processes of learning and production that go unrecognized. But slow, hidden processes mean that ideas can appear instantaneously. I liked the way Fred Moten worked in material from his everyday experience into his poems, and the background information he introduced them made the poems like experiences of his creative train of thought. I was thinking in a way I hadn't before about how poetry gives you access to the workings of someone else mind in a different way than prose. Poetry seems closer to that kind of instantaneous idea-making, where prose can fall into something more rigid.
It seems like in one sense, the break is something that structures language/thought but materially is a place of continuity. He describes as a break the change between slavery and emancipation, but there is obviously a continuing force of racial oppression post-slavery. So we can dwell in the places of rupture and find the continuity between broken pieces, the way Fred Moten flows between Marx's changes in grammatical mood and argument to draw out a new/hidden meaning.
There was a emphasis that came up last class, and previously, on processes already being underway, processes of learning and production that go unrecognized. But slow, hidden processes mean that ideas can appear instantaneously. I liked the way Fred Moten worked in material from his everyday experience into his poems, and the background information he introduced them made the poems like experiences of his creative train of thought. I was thinking in a way I hadn't before about how poetry gives you access to the workings of someone else mind in a different way than prose. Poetry seems closer to that kind of instantaneous idea-making, where prose can fall into something more rigid.
The break opens poetry to its unheard, unattended, unrecognized tonalities. The break is a lysis for the emergence of thought. A lysis of the (mother) tongue. A lysis of the thinkable, sayable, or readable = Rachel Blau duPlessis = M. NourbeSe Philip =
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