“Common Informality”

Abstract

This article explores how two key problems of philosophical aesthetics, temporality and form, are rethought in Fred Moten's consent not to be a single being trilogy. The article proposes that Moten's work is notable for its refusal to affirm a link between aesthetic experience, or aesthesis, and the future-bound possibility of political community. This refusal distinguishes Moten's work both from the political philosophy underlying Immanuel Kant's aesthetics and from the dialectical critique of Kant found in contemporary theoretical work prioritizing formal experimentation. The article contends instead that Moten's work is shaped by a sustained attention to “informal” patterns of aesthetic experience, for which the graphic materiality of writing functions as a privileged index. The article then explores the political and temporal implications of writing's materiality in two essays from Moten's Black and Blur. To pursue this task, it draws on Walter Benjamin's understanding of philological interpolation and argues that Moten's work, particularly in its insistence on “renomination” rather than conceptual creation, can likewise be understood as philological. The article concludes, however, by showing how the idea of linguistic freedom advanced in recent philological work is complicated by Moten's recognition of a link between predication and blackness.

A View of a Landscapeand Other Church Problems

“…with which they are identified," then perhaps in this complex history of avowal and disavowal of movement, motion, and emotion it is the anaoriginarity of lawlessness that is being played out over and over again. 111 The Liquidity of Blackness Is a (Black) Aesthetic Demand Like the essays featured in this issue, A view of a landscape invests in "church problems" -the problem of how stuff goes together -but does so by tearing things apart: the motor is in one room, and its sound is in another one; frustrated sight is rendered through muffled sounds, movement as stasis. Yet it also shows the readymade becoming fugitive; the instrument staging an insurrection, and thingliness as animated materiality.…”

“…from the various uses to which 'aesthetics' has -in its famed uselessness, or 'purposivelessness' -historically been put," and par-ticularly "the model of temporal progress that has determined the relationship between aesthetics and politics since Immanuel Kant." 76 For Law, it expresses Moten's option for "common informality," that is, the forms that informality might assume (rather than the form that supposedly precedes it, especially the form of the subject, or the subject as form), for which "the graphic materiality of writing functions as a privileged index." 77 He shows how "Moten argues for a black radical tradition whose informal expressions risk, again and again, the intractable possibility of invisibility," perhaps "a result of expression's submergence into an already existing, intentional social life."…”

“…77 He shows how "Moten argues for a black radical tradition whose informal expressions risk, again and again, the intractable possibility of invisibility," perhaps "a result of expression's submergence into an already existing, intentional social life." 78 Law focuses on Moten's option for incompleteness and flow, which he ultimately describes as a philological project that rejects the future-oriented temporality of the aesthetic and expresses reluctance to the creation of new concepts in favor of renomination and interpolation. Yet he also calls attention to black radical aesthetics' looped temporality, one based on "interpolation," in which every form is "the revelation of a content, and so -because that content is ceaselessly interpolating -remains open to further interpolations": " 'Speak, so you can speak again' is the banner that hangs over this work, and at the same time trips it up and enfolds it."…”

“…79 Ultimately, Law concludes, "if aesthetics means anything for Moten, it is not the hierarchization of matter into form, but the multiplication and dispersal of content, beyond the confines of interpretation and the demand for political effectivity." 80 While Law attends to the common informality of language, fahima ife practices undercommonsense as an ars poetica sin remedio, a "double black study of eroding and composing a new sentence, a new sentence sounded in refusal (of the social pact of writing, of grammar), a new sentence forged in friendship (of thinking with, of writing with)." 81 This practice of black study is perhaps "double" in seeking what Harney and Moten describe as the "intra-action of black study and black studies."…”