What a week. The lecture Fred Moten gave regarding Daniel Tiffany’s piece in the Boston Review was incredible, incisive, and revelatory. Every time I hear him speak he opens up new avenues of thought for me.
Thinking back to In the Break I wanted to talk a little bit about something we touched on briefly during last class, that tendency of his to critique with generosity. While the lecture was much more polemical than I’d ever seen him, you could see that the frustration he held as regards Tiffany was because he’d been foreclosed upon, because there was no opening for a conversation. This kind of conversation, this thinking together, which he does so eloquently with Stefano Harney in The Undercommons, is such a compelling and generative mode of thought. What if we weren’t looking to elevate ourselves over other people through critique, but rather to include them in our thought processes and elevate the thoughts themselves by exposing them to other contributors? This is what I think he achieves in that opening chapter of In the Break when he discusses Hartman’s work and talks about what he believes she misses in her excision of the Aunt Hester scene. What is at stake is the value of developing thought and community beyond an individualistic, competitive mode of interaction.
On page 4, he says “This is not to say that Hartman tries but cannot make disappear the originary performance of the violent subjection of the slave’s body. Indeed, Hartman’s considerable, formidable, and rare brilliance is present in the space she leaves for the ongoing (re)production of that performance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originarity of that primal scene.”
It’s such an extension of thought to not simply point out the shortcomings of someone’s approach, but to note that there is something valuable in another method. There is something actively cooperative going on in these pages that I find missing from a lot of academic texts, and I think that there’s something fundamentally revolutionary in the work Moten presents, simply because he does provide a way to be together in the intellectual world.
/Joshua W
Thinking back to In the Break I wanted to talk a little bit about something we touched on briefly during last class, that tendency of his to critique with generosity. While the lecture was much more polemical than I’d ever seen him, you could see that the frustration he held as regards Tiffany was because he’d been foreclosed upon, because there was no opening for a conversation. This kind of conversation, this thinking together, which he does so eloquently with Stefano Harney in The Undercommons, is such a compelling and generative mode of thought. What if we weren’t looking to elevate ourselves over other people through critique, but rather to include them in our thought processes and elevate the thoughts themselves by exposing them to other contributors? This is what I think he achieves in that opening chapter of In the Break when he discusses Hartman’s work and talks about what he believes she misses in her excision of the Aunt Hester scene. What is at stake is the value of developing thought and community beyond an individualistic, competitive mode of interaction.
On page 4, he says “This is not to say that Hartman tries but cannot make disappear the originary performance of the violent subjection of the slave’s body. Indeed, Hartman’s considerable, formidable, and rare brilliance is present in the space she leaves for the ongoing (re)production of that performance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originarity of that primal scene.”
It’s such an extension of thought to not simply point out the shortcomings of someone’s approach, but to note that there is something valuable in another method. There is something actively cooperative going on in these pages that I find missing from a lot of academic texts, and I think that there’s something fundamentally revolutionary in the work Moten presents, simply because he does provide a way to be together in the intellectual world.
/Joshua W
Thank you so so so much for writing this and performing its importance again on the blog, for sharing.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I agree and am tired of critique as a mode of writing and speaking. You might be interested in what Karen Barad has to say about critique in this interview:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/--new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
"Critique is too easy, especially when a commitment to reading with care no longer seems to be a fundamental element of critique." (A quote from the link)