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B 4
A lot of it is just trying to figure out how to say something. How to read. Not how to offer a reading, or even an interpretation, but a performance of a text, in the face of its unintelligibility, as if one were forced/privileged to access some other world where representation and unrepresentability were beside the point (so that the response to the terrors and chances of history were not about calculation, not bound to replicate, even in a blunted and ethically responsible way, the horrors of speculation), where new materialities of imagination were already on the other side of the logic of equivalence.
Fragmentation is also about more, an initiation of the work’s interior social life, a rending of that interiority by the outside that materializes it. The logic of the supplement is instantiated with every blur, every gliss, every melismatic torque, every twist of the drone, every turn of held syllable. I want to attend to the necessary polyphony. I don’t wanna represent anything and I don’t want to repair anything but I do wanna be here more in another way. I think, in the end, Zong! works this way but even if it doesn’t work this way I want it to work this way. I want to work it this way, in coded memory, as the history of no repair, as the ongoing event of more and less than representing.
Posted in Uncategorized on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 by Fred Moten.
Comments (2)
The force/privilege shared space there in the face of opening up (to) that other world is very helpful to this one today, as is feeling the thought of attending to the necessary polyphony (the second time I’ve bumped into that word today) as an impulse behind pushing the work past its available exoskeleton. That and that I’m trying to figure out how to talk tomorrow morning about a poem that has something of that dynamic in it and some other stuff:
“But this is an important aspect of the question
Which I am not ready to discuss, am not at all ready to,
This leaving-out business. On it hinges the very importance of what’s novel
Or autocratic, or dense or silly. It is as well to call attention
To it by exaggeration, perhaps. But calling attention
Isn’t the same thing as explaining, and as I said I am not ready
To line phrases with the costly stuff of explanation, and shall not,
Will not do so for the moment. Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leavig
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves
presence, but still.
Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off
themselves.”
from The Skaters by little JA
Hey Anselm,
I wish I could hear you talk about it. In lieu of his explanations, in their absence, I just want to break up what is present in order to make new things, which soon will be struggling to be off themselves. Struggling to be off. Past the available exoskeleton, as you say. And the greatest thing, for me, is how the passage you gave us sounds. That impulse/push you mention is there and definite but not like a bad paper. Shuttling, instead, between broken treatise and bent song.