Since we're skipping quite far forward in the book (In the Break), I thought I would post some passages that might help the reading. And: very important - please bring the reading to class! It's absolutely essential to have the words in front of you to really appreciate a close reading!!!
On Black Performance (Ellington)
See, black performance has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus— invagination, rupture, collision, augmentation. This surplus lyricism— think here of the muted, mutating horns of Tricky Sam Nanton or Cootie Williams— is what a lot of people are after when they invoke the art and culture— the radical (both rooted and out there, immanent and transcendent) sensuality— of and for my people.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 486-489). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On Blackness as "uncontainable outside"
Such blackness is only in that it exceeds itself; it bears the groundedness of an uncontainable outside. It’s an erotics of the cut, submerged in the broken, breaking space-time of an improvisation. Blurred, dying life; liberatory, improvisatory, damaged love; freedom drive.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 494-496). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On identity and blackness
The voice of Julian Bond attempts to put forward an understanding of what Ellington might have meant by “beyond category,” particularly the categories of identity. The voice-over manifests some of the pitfalls of analytic interpretation and in so doing reveals at least some of what’s problematic in constant invocations of Ellingtonian elegance and, especially, Ellingtonian universality— mainly the avoidance of what is most truly, deeply, elegantly, and radically universal in Ellington’s work. Bond takes Ellington’s wonderful performance of the response to one of those questions that so often makes you cringe when you watch sixties documentaries on black folks as a kind of evasion of a particular— most probably racial— identity. But the drive for ever greater unities in Ellington is not animated by the desire for some empty and colorless universality. The cascading and augmentative whole that Ellington constantly achieves, breaks, and exceeds in and with his band, his instrument, is a black whole, a black, brown, and beige whole, even as it is also that which both is and contains “the group of those who admire Beaujolais, those who aspire to produce something fit for the plateau, those who aspire to be dilettantes.” More to the point, the beautiful, musical interplay between my people and the people, prefaced by Ellington’s jabbing, caressingly disruptive accompaniment of his own utterance, gets at something way more than the appeal to a universality that, in its lack of particularity, could never be a universality at all. (my emphasis)
“Duke was only after your confidence,” communicating, arranging his orchestra that is you. He’s choreographing, writing a dance with his utterance and conveying a desire for some movement that is divergent and in unison, a
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 497-512). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On sound and/as love
Ellington would sing the parts, forging the preparation of the music beside writing, the orchestra’s change of motion driven, given, proportional to his motive force or drive. That drive, again, is love.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 514-515). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
What I’m really trying to say is this: Ellington’s music reconfigures the context in which everything, which is to say music, is read (+ = more).
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 570-571). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On the problem (the whiteness) of the avant-garde
The idea of the avant-garde is embedded in a theory of history. This is to say that a particular geographical ideology, a geographical-racial or racist unconscious, marks and is the problematic out of which or against the backdrop of which the idea of the avant-garde emerges.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 584-586). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
What I’ve been specifically interested in here is how the idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically— as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 599-601). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
blackness is an avant-garde thing
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 604-605). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On the materiality of sound
the materiality of voices that the music represents.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 706-707). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Here lies universality: in this break, this cut, this rupture. Song cutting speech. Scream cutting song. Frenzy cutting scream with silence, movement, gesture. The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic. Every disappearance is a recording. That’s what resurrection is. Insurrection. Scat black magic, but to scat or scatter is not to admit formlessness. The aftersound is more than a bridge. It ruptures interpretation even as the trauma it records disappears. Amplification of a rapt countenance, stressed portraiture. No need to dismiss the sound that emerges from the mouth as the mark of a separation. It was always the whole body that emitted sound: instrument and fingers, bend. Your ass is in what you sing. Dedicated to the movement of hips, dedicated by that movement, the harmolodically rhythmic body.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 716-722). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
A possible formulation based upon the inclusive redefinition of writing: it’s not that Taylor creates visible speech; rather his is an aural writing given an understanding of writing that includes nonverbal graphic resources.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 912-913). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Ellison knows that you can’t really listen to this music. He knows, before Mackey as it were, that really listening, when it goes bone-deep into the sunken ark of bones, is something other than itself.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1206-1207). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
How to activate the noise’s transcendence of the ocular frame? Such questioning is not in the interest of replacing the ocular with the aural, not in the interest of putting another metaphysics forward. Rather, one is interested in what the noise carries— not that it’s something figured as other than the ocular, just that it’s critically easier to discern while remaining, paradoxically or not, so profoundly avoided. What there is in the music is irreducible to music; meanwhile, racialization is given in a visualization of music that forestalls the enactment of what the music holds.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1221-1225). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Then, here, we ask: what if we let the music (no reduction to the aural, no mere addition of the visual but a radical nonexclusion of the ensemble of the senses such that music becomes a mode of organization in which principles dawn) take us?
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1686-1688). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
"Words don't go there"
Charles Lloyd, asked to comment on a piece of his music by a radio interviewer, answered “Words don’t go there.” 30 Words don’t go there. Is it only music, only sound, that goes there? Perhaps these notes and phrases will have mapped the terrain and traversed (at least some of) the space between here and there. Words don’t go there: this implies a difference between words and sounds; it suggests that words are somehow constrained by their implicit reduction to the meanings they carry— meanings inadequate to or detached from the objects or states of affairs they would envelop. What’s also implied is an absence of inflection; a loss of mobility, slippage, bend; a missing accent or affect; the impossibility of a slur or crack and the excess— rather than loss— of meaning they imply. Where do words go? Are they the inadequate and residual traces of a ritual performance that is lost in the absence of the recording? 31
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 754-762). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Changes, like that from word to growl, occur here taking the word to where it does not go but neither to any origin as pure sound nor to the simple before of the determinations of meaning. This change and movement might be at the phonemic level, might mark the generation of or from a lost language and/ or a new thing that is, in spite of its novelty, never structured as if the before that is absent and indeterminate had never been or does not still remain there.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 766-769). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On ritual (and/as the everyday)
The spatio-temporal constitution of ritual raises ambiguities as well. On the one hand ritual is durative. The structure and dance of its positions is ongoing, part of an annulus that seems unopposed to the uninterrupted process of the everyday against which it would be defined. But what of the punctuality of the endlessly/ daily repeated event? This punctuality is, too, of ritual, and ritual thus lends punctuality the aura of ceremony: the special occasion. There is, then, a temporal contradiction in the opposition of ritual and nonritual, one that activates in both terms a juxtaposition that is manifest as the traumatic/ celebratory and obsessional rhythmic breakage of the everyday and that implies a directionality of time— a spatio-temporal constitution— that transforms rhythm into a double determination: of position or movement, on the one hand, and syntagmic order on the other.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 872-878). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Beyond structure
What is immediately required is an improvisation of singularity, one that allows us to reconfigure what is given beneath/ outside the distinction between the elements of the structure and its total form. Because what I’m after is an asystematic, anarchic organizing principle (I note the oxymoron), a notion of totality and (ensemble-) tonality at the conjunction of the pantonal and “that insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion.”
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 972-975). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Taylor is working through a metaphysics of structure, working through an assumption that equates the essence or structurality of structure with a center. What I’m interested in in Taylor is precisely the refusal to attempt a return to the source: one that is not, on the one hand, forgetful of what is lost or of the fact of loss; one that is forgetive, on the other hand, in the Falstaffian sense of the word— nimble and full of fiery and delectable shapes, improvisatory and incantatory when what is structured in the mind is given over to the mouth, the birth, as (that which is, finally, way more even than) excellent wit.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 979-984). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
The tragic
The tragic in any tradition, especially the black radical tradition, is never wholly abstract. It is always in relation to quite particular and material loss. This is what “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” is about: the absence, the irrecoverability of an originary and constitutive event; the impossibility of a return to an African, the impossibility of an arrival at an American, home. “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” is a response to political homelessness and this is the sense in which it is tragic; and this is also why Baraka, between 1962 and 1966, became America’s great tragic poet by way of an improvisation through the opposition of the existential and the political, which extends and improves, say, the formulations of “Sartre, a white man.” 14
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1647-1652). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
The poem (as sound) - Amiri Baraka
rather, we might want to think of the poem as the entire field or saturation, flood or plain, within which the page, sound and meaning, the live, the original, the recording, the score exist as icons or singular aspects of a totality that is, itself, iconic of totality as such.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1701-1703). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
The break
rather we might look at that temporal-spatial discontinuity as a generative break, one wherein action becomes possible, one in which it is our duty to linger in the name of ensemble and its performance. That break allows, indeed demands, a fundamental reorientation that we might call novelty, that always exists at the heart of tragedy and elegy, which is there in Baraka’s poetry and is there as that poetry would enact— through the opposition of description and explanation— the free music and politics, the free mode of organization it moves within and points to and whose logical structure it shares.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1726-1730). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Cecil Taylor's Chinampas #5.04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0deltV0ffS8
On Black Performance (Ellington)
See, black performance has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus— invagination, rupture, collision, augmentation. This surplus lyricism— think here of the muted, mutating horns of Tricky Sam Nanton or Cootie Williams— is what a lot of people are after when they invoke the art and culture— the radical (both rooted and out there, immanent and transcendent) sensuality— of and for my people.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 486-489). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On Blackness as "uncontainable outside"
Such blackness is only in that it exceeds itself; it bears the groundedness of an uncontainable outside. It’s an erotics of the cut, submerged in the broken, breaking space-time of an improvisation. Blurred, dying life; liberatory, improvisatory, damaged love; freedom drive.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 494-496). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On identity and blackness
The voice of Julian Bond attempts to put forward an understanding of what Ellington might have meant by “beyond category,” particularly the categories of identity. The voice-over manifests some of the pitfalls of analytic interpretation and in so doing reveals at least some of what’s problematic in constant invocations of Ellingtonian elegance and, especially, Ellingtonian universality— mainly the avoidance of what is most truly, deeply, elegantly, and radically universal in Ellington’s work. Bond takes Ellington’s wonderful performance of the response to one of those questions that so often makes you cringe when you watch sixties documentaries on black folks as a kind of evasion of a particular— most probably racial— identity. But the drive for ever greater unities in Ellington is not animated by the desire for some empty and colorless universality. The cascading and augmentative whole that Ellington constantly achieves, breaks, and exceeds in and with his band, his instrument, is a black whole, a black, brown, and beige whole, even as it is also that which both is and contains “the group of those who admire Beaujolais, those who aspire to produce something fit for the plateau, those who aspire to be dilettantes.” More to the point, the beautiful, musical interplay between my people and the people, prefaced by Ellington’s jabbing, caressingly disruptive accompaniment of his own utterance, gets at something way more than the appeal to a universality that, in its lack of particularity, could never be a universality at all. (my emphasis)
“Duke was only after your confidence,” communicating, arranging his orchestra that is you. He’s choreographing, writing a dance with his utterance and conveying a desire for some movement that is divergent and in unison, a
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 497-512). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On sound and/as love
Ellington would sing the parts, forging the preparation of the music beside writing, the orchestra’s change of motion driven, given, proportional to his motive force or drive. That drive, again, is love.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 514-515). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
What I’m really trying to say is this: Ellington’s music reconfigures the context in which everything, which is to say music, is read (+ = more).
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 570-571). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On the problem (the whiteness) of the avant-garde
The idea of the avant-garde is embedded in a theory of history. This is to say that a particular geographical ideology, a geographical-racial or racist unconscious, marks and is the problematic out of which or against the backdrop of which the idea of the avant-garde emerges.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 584-586). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
What I’ve been specifically interested in here is how the idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically— as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 599-601). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
blackness is an avant-garde thing
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 604-605). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On the materiality of sound
the materiality of voices that the music represents.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 706-707). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Here lies universality: in this break, this cut, this rupture. Song cutting speech. Scream cutting song. Frenzy cutting scream with silence, movement, gesture. The West is an insane asylum, a conscious and premeditated receptacle of black magic. Every disappearance is a recording. That’s what resurrection is. Insurrection. Scat black magic, but to scat or scatter is not to admit formlessness. The aftersound is more than a bridge. It ruptures interpretation even as the trauma it records disappears. Amplification of a rapt countenance, stressed portraiture. No need to dismiss the sound that emerges from the mouth as the mark of a separation. It was always the whole body that emitted sound: instrument and fingers, bend. Your ass is in what you sing. Dedicated to the movement of hips, dedicated by that movement, the harmolodically rhythmic body.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 716-722). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
A possible formulation based upon the inclusive redefinition of writing: it’s not that Taylor creates visible speech; rather his is an aural writing given an understanding of writing that includes nonverbal graphic resources.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 912-913). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Ellison knows that you can’t really listen to this music. He knows, before Mackey as it were, that really listening, when it goes bone-deep into the sunken ark of bones, is something other than itself.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1206-1207). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
How to activate the noise’s transcendence of the ocular frame? Such questioning is not in the interest of replacing the ocular with the aural, not in the interest of putting another metaphysics forward. Rather, one is interested in what the noise carries— not that it’s something figured as other than the ocular, just that it’s critically easier to discern while remaining, paradoxically or not, so profoundly avoided. What there is in the music is irreducible to music; meanwhile, racialization is given in a visualization of music that forestalls the enactment of what the music holds.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1221-1225). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Then, here, we ask: what if we let the music (no reduction to the aural, no mere addition of the visual but a radical nonexclusion of the ensemble of the senses such that music becomes a mode of organization in which principles dawn) take us?
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1686-1688). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
"Words don't go there"
Charles Lloyd, asked to comment on a piece of his music by a radio interviewer, answered “Words don’t go there.” 30 Words don’t go there. Is it only music, only sound, that goes there? Perhaps these notes and phrases will have mapped the terrain and traversed (at least some of) the space between here and there. Words don’t go there: this implies a difference between words and sounds; it suggests that words are somehow constrained by their implicit reduction to the meanings they carry— meanings inadequate to or detached from the objects or states of affairs they would envelop. What’s also implied is an absence of inflection; a loss of mobility, slippage, bend; a missing accent or affect; the impossibility of a slur or crack and the excess— rather than loss— of meaning they imply. Where do words go? Are they the inadequate and residual traces of a ritual performance that is lost in the absence of the recording? 31
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 754-762). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Changes, like that from word to growl, occur here taking the word to where it does not go but neither to any origin as pure sound nor to the simple before of the determinations of meaning. This change and movement might be at the phonemic level, might mark the generation of or from a lost language and/ or a new thing that is, in spite of its novelty, never structured as if the before that is absent and indeterminate had never been or does not still remain there.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 766-769). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
On ritual (and/as the everyday)
The spatio-temporal constitution of ritual raises ambiguities as well. On the one hand ritual is durative. The structure and dance of its positions is ongoing, part of an annulus that seems unopposed to the uninterrupted process of the everyday against which it would be defined. But what of the punctuality of the endlessly/ daily repeated event? This punctuality is, too, of ritual, and ritual thus lends punctuality the aura of ceremony: the special occasion. There is, then, a temporal contradiction in the opposition of ritual and nonritual, one that activates in both terms a juxtaposition that is manifest as the traumatic/ celebratory and obsessional rhythmic breakage of the everyday and that implies a directionality of time— a spatio-temporal constitution— that transforms rhythm into a double determination: of position or movement, on the one hand, and syntagmic order on the other.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 872-878). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Beyond structure
What is immediately required is an improvisation of singularity, one that allows us to reconfigure what is given beneath/ outside the distinction between the elements of the structure and its total form. Because what I’m after is an asystematic, anarchic organizing principle (I note the oxymoron), a notion of totality and (ensemble-) tonality at the conjunction of the pantonal and “that insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion.”
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 972-975). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Taylor is working through a metaphysics of structure, working through an assumption that equates the essence or structurality of structure with a center. What I’m interested in in Taylor is precisely the refusal to attempt a return to the source: one that is not, on the one hand, forgetful of what is lost or of the fact of loss; one that is forgetive, on the other hand, in the Falstaffian sense of the word— nimble and full of fiery and delectable shapes, improvisatory and incantatory when what is structured in the mind is given over to the mouth, the birth, as (that which is, finally, way more even than) excellent wit.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 979-984). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
The tragic
The tragic in any tradition, especially the black radical tradition, is never wholly abstract. It is always in relation to quite particular and material loss. This is what “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” is about: the absence, the irrecoverability of an originary and constitutive event; the impossibility of a return to an African, the impossibility of an arrival at an American, home. “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” is a response to political homelessness and this is the sense in which it is tragic; and this is also why Baraka, between 1962 and 1966, became America’s great tragic poet by way of an improvisation through the opposition of the existential and the political, which extends and improves, say, the formulations of “Sartre, a white man.” 14
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1647-1652). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
The poem (as sound) - Amiri Baraka
rather, we might want to think of the poem as the entire field or saturation, flood or plain, within which the page, sound and meaning, the live, the original, the recording, the score exist as icons or singular aspects of a totality that is, itself, iconic of totality as such.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1701-1703). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
The break
rather we might look at that temporal-spatial discontinuity as a generative break, one wherein action becomes possible, one in which it is our duty to linger in the name of ensemble and its performance. That break allows, indeed demands, a fundamental reorientation that we might call novelty, that always exists at the heart of tragedy and elegy, which is there in Baraka’s poetry and is there as that poetry would enact— through the opposition of description and explanation— the free music and politics, the free mode of organization it moves within and points to and whose logical structure it shares.
Moten, Fred. In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (Kindle Locations 1726-1730). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
Cecil Taylor's Chinampas #5.04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0deltV0ffS8
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