A View of a Landscapeand Other Church Problems

Abstract

Thinking with Fred Moten's approach to aesthetics in the trilogy consent not to be a single being and Kevin Beasley's A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012–18, this introduction reflects on the way the philosophical project of aesthetics is entangled in the relationships between the legal and the paralegal, law and lawlessness, sensibility and sensoriality, form and informality, nonsense and common sense, exclusion and invagination, objecthood and thingness, motion and stillness, as well as the previousness, prematurity, and postexpectancy of black generativity. Inspired by the issue's contributions’ option for incompleteness and canted temporality and by Moten's description of a “church problem” as the problem of the togetherness of things, it then approaches the issue's content thinking, practicing, or witnessing “undercommonsense” in the making, whereby the aesthetic can be understood not only as a processing site but also as a space of congregation.