Such a focus admittedly foregoes, at least for the moment, any granular attention to Black and Blur’s specific content (the essays include kaleidoscopically rich ruminations on Patrice Lumumba, Glenn Gould, Miles Davis, Lord Invader, Charles Mingus, Pras/Ol’ Dirty Bastard/Mýa, Theodor Adorno, Benjamin Patterson, Thornton Dial, Masao Miyoshi, Mike Kelley, Jimmie Durham, Theaster Gates, Charles Gaines, Wu Tsang, Bobby Lee, and many, many others-ruminations made ocean-deep via Moten’s particular style of layering a wide variety of figures and discourses in each essay). It feels more vital to me to use this moment to note how Black and Blur produces felt experiences of these alternatives, carves new pathways through art and thought, which, in turn, re-makes and multiplies the possible relations between them.
It’s more that so many debates between, say, something we might call “celebration” and something we might call “terror,” or something we might call “optimism” and something we might call “pessimism,” or something we might call “Afro-diasporic cosmopolitanism” and something we might call “the African American cultural field,” or something we might call “aesthetics” and something we might call “politics,” often become legible only via an unwarranted polarization that Moten’s work not only sidesteps but labors to offer inventive (yet also already-there) alternatives to. Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study.” (As in the opening of 2003’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Moten locates this foundational interdependence in the work of scholar Saidiya Hartman: “ In the Break also began with an attempt to engage Hartman as you can see, I can’t get started any other way.” Indeed, it’s Hartman’s theorization of “the diffusion of terror” in black expression that summons and undergirds Moten’s inquiry into the nature of that diffusion, its multiple ontological possibilities.) That we have to celebrate is what hurts so much. As Moten intimates in Black and Blur’s preface, that relationship is, in some sense, what it’s all about: “It hurts so much that we have to celebrate. It’s not that I’m not interested in Moten’s contributions and interventions into ongoing, crucial discussions about the relation between, say, as he puts it, “the critical analysis of anti-blackness to the celebratory analysis of blackness.” I am, and deeply so. (The book is the first of three to be published as the consent not to be a single being series, a phrase borrowed from Édouard Glissant two companion volumes, Stolen Life and The Universal Machine, are blessedly, impossibly, soon to follow.) And thank God this isn’t a review, really, because how preposterous and off the cake it would feel, at least for me, to drag Black and Blur into the world of appraisal or evaluation of argument. īecause I know Moten in a world that opposes entanglement and clear-sightedness, this must technically be a “response” rather than a “review” of Black and Blur. But as Fred once said to me in his irreducibly generous, space-making, permission-giving way, “Let’s just agree to be stupid for one another!” OK then, Fred-here goes stupid. Even if I admit that such an approach is a fool’s errand wholly inadequate to what makes Moten’s work so worthwhile and sustaining (albeit an approach socialized by my own maternal my mother teaches business writing), it still feels, well, foolish. I’m going to try to write something really plain about poet/critic/theorist Fred Moten’s new collection of essays, Black and Blur, which feels hard, because Black and Blur, like all of Moten’s work, isn’t written plainly, and I’ve always felt a little foolish coming at Moten’s writing in the (idiot) idiom of lucidity-a kind of pretended straight arrow at a field defined by incessant motion, escape. Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being), by Fred Moten, Duke University Press, 339 pages, $27.95
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