Fred Moten

EO

In Arthur Jafa’s Dreams Are Colder Than Death, you return to Frank Wilderson’s reading of Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection—that “we must remain in the hold of the ship, despite our fantasies of flight.” That phrase haunts me. Has that sentiment continued to will itself into a future present? What does it mean, now, “to remain in the hold?”

FM

Well, I don’t know if that’s such a great question for me. That’s Wilderson’s formulation. What I remember is him writing, in the acknowledgments of Red, White & Black—which is an interesting place for the formulation to be—“to remain in the hold of the ship despite our fantasies of flight.” Maybe he’s elaborated it more fully elsewhere that I’m not aware of. What struck me then as important was the relationship between fantasies of flight and remaining in the hold. If these two things are opposed, that also means they are bound up with one another. That gives a double valence to what it means to remain in the hold. And it also means you’d have to investigate, as deeply as possible, what it is to remain in the hold, and what that actually constitutes as a set of practices, rather than simply a fate that befalls one.

Flight and fantasies of flight are not opposed to remaining in the hold. They are part of the practice of remaining in the hold. They are held together, even in opposition to one another, in flight from one another, even in fighting one another, so that what it is to flee and what it is to stay are entangled with what it is to fight. Fantasies of flight here might imply not only dreams, or ideas, or some kind of ideational structure, but fantasy as its own particular modality of social practice. The musical sense of fantasy comes into play here, where fantasy refers to the contrapuntal, the multiply voiced—with multiplicity describing or relining or realigning or reweaving differentiation, whether internal or external. If fantasy implies the differentiation that constitutes and animates sociality, then that active, social, and necessarily aesthetic (that is, sensual) practice is also part of what it means to remain in the hold. To conceive of or to practice the hold as a modality of maintenance, of remaining inflight and struggle, implies connections to mourning but also to what Stefano and I sometimes call “militant preservation.”

So Wilderson’s statement is rich in the way that it sticks and moves. Its preservation and its capacity to serve and preserve can be thought of in terms of a hold or holding, where what’s at stake is not only cargo, not only being made cargo, but the practical charge of maintaining, embracing, and sustaining social structure as a modality of embrace. There is an erotic element here, in the broadest sense of the term. To meditate on the statement is to open a field of associations that exceed what Wilderson intended. But does a statement belong to intention? Can it be held there? Doesn’t it fly from and within that holding? A statement exceeds intention. It should. That excess—that uncontainment—is what we ought to seek to embrace.

EO

How were you thinking about Blackness when you wrote on Adrian Piper and what was at stake? What conditions presented themselves?

FM

I don’t know what was at stake. I was interested in Piper’s work. The reason I’m often reticent in interviews is that the more I do them, the less I like them. I’ve done too many of them, and I keep hoping that each one will be the last, but I can’t seem to shut the fuck up. Too often you’re asked to summarize or defend what you were doing twenty years ago, and I don’t have much interest in that. But maybe I can say what I was trying to think about.

I think about Blackness as a set of practices. If I go back, maybe I was more immersed then in thinking about performance, so to think of Blackness as a modality of performance was something I had in mind. But I think it’s better, or more precise, to talk about it not as a modality of performance, because I think about performance differently now (as something that can be seen but not quite heard in the term preformance), which is an open set of open practices. Even then, to the extent that I was thinking about it in terms of performance, I was already trying to move away from Blackness as identity, as a set of qualities some people have and others don’t—which is really to think of Blackness as a set of properties, which is also to think of Blackness as a modality of property. I think whiteness is a modality of property. And in this respect, I subscribe wholeheartedly to Cheryl Harris’s notion of whiteness as property, in addition to whiteness as a set of properties. In fact, my tendency is to think of whiteness as something like the very idea of property—as the principle of property.

In which case, my tendency is to believe but also to want to believe that Blackness is against property. That it is, though it is not reducible to, the practical critique of property, the breaking or breakdown of property and of the proper, the disruption of position, the slide, as Amiri Baraka says, from the proposed. As Nathaniel Mackey says, echoing and augmenting and concentrating and diverting Baraka, “it’s on the run from ownership.” But that means it’s on the run from any assertion of any Black person that they own it, right? It’s an open but full fledged critique of ownership. I don’t believe in the value or the possibility of Black ownership. This is why I’ve never been interested in discourses around appropriation. I believe it’s necessary to formulate a strenuous critique of extraction and a strenuous critique of theft. But appropriation strikes me as problematic, because it presupposes Blackness as property. It presupposes Blackness as proper to this or that body, this or that individual proprietor. And of course you can extrapolate from this or that legitimate proprietor of Blackness to some larger communal notion of Blackness as a kind of cultural property that Black people own. But to me, that’s a bourgeois formulation. And it’s a brutal formulation. A liberal formulation. A bad formulation. It is, in fact, the formulation essential to the history of our brutalization. So, for me, Blackness is an inconsistent totality of practices. You could and should use the phrase Hartman likes to use: “a set of practices of refusal”—of property, of proprietorship, of the proper—in every possible permutation of that term.

EO

In DACTD, you say of Blackness: “You can have it only if you give it away.” That’s why I return to “The Resistance of the Object” from In the Break, where you describe painting as “a kind of mirroring.” I’ve been thinking about narrative in that same frame—as a form of whiteness, as an extension of ownership, as a mode of captivity. And yet, like you suggest, mirroring need not be capture. It can be resonance, passage. That’s what brings me to Derrida’s Glas: not only as a theoretical map with its doubled columns and mirrored distortions, but as a reminder of the material itself. Glass conceptually aligns with transparency, yet it is never neutral—it reflects, refracts, and imposes. It permits passage but also fixes, grounding what it frames in a specific space-time continuum. Like photography or minimalist architecture, it structures perception while seeming to disappear.

FM

Frames what thing?

EO

Blackness.

FM

Blackness ain’t no thing. It’s kinda like that cool toll or knell or ringing resonance you hear in the word glas, whose sound and meaning share and shard, like a true friendship, in the break between French and English. But maybe you’d like to distinguish framing or mirroring from fixing, when I’m not so sure that distinction can really be made. And even to talk about Blackness as a thing—that’s already a problem for me, though the way it ain’t no thang, just the way we be saying something all doubly negative like that, indicates that no thing always bears the trace of the imagined thing. I mean, I keep thinking about all this and the clearer it becomes, the blurrier it gets. That’s why I have no investment in explaining or defending those earlier formulations. Even in 2003, I was wary of “resistance of the object.” I used it, it seemed like it meant something at the time. I don’t disavow it, I’m not ashamed of it, but it’s imprecise however much it pretends to be definitive. I was already trying to come to grips with that formulation in the midst of making it. Already by the time of “The Case of Blackness” you can see the shift. The phrase “resistance of the object” was a way of moving away from Blackness as subject—something owned or expressed by a subject—toward Blackness as object. But soon after, I was shifting again, from object toward thing. By the time that essay came out, I was already wary of the thing. There’s a trajectory you can trace: away from the subject, away from the object, away from the thing, toward nothing. No thing. By “Blackness and Nothingness,” that’s where I am, and I’m still on that path.

What that means is that I can still talk with people, I can understand the appeal of framing or mirroring, of representation or the gaze as something that enables experience without being caught in fixity. I know what people want when they want that. Part of me still recognizes the desire. But it’s harder and harder for me to share it. That doesn’t preclude conversation, friendship, or common projects. It just means I don’t feel comfortable with those terms anymore.

EO

So, is it about wanting a new language? Because I wonder what becomes of the project once the work itself enters the world. An essay might form in the early 2000s, circulate in fragments or in conversation, presentation, then finally appear in book form years later—but by the time it does, you’ve already moved on in your thinking. How do we engage you in that movement or meet you where you are?

FM

Well, that’s another reason I’m reticent about interviews. I’m happy to talk with people because that’s working—we’re trying to discover a way to think about things, a way to say things, and hopefully the way we think and the way we say will have an impact on the way we do what we’re supposed to be trying to do. And what we’re supposed to be trying to do—I take this seriously from first encountering Wilderson and Sexton—is to bring the world to an end. Not just this world, but every possible world. It implies a general refusal of the very idea of world, and of all the declensions that derive from it: self, body, person, nation, state, plantation, home. We have to kill that if we’re going to live better. Those are the terms of the ongoing war against subsistence, as Ivan Illich would put it, and as my friend Manolo Callahan would put it in Illich’s wake. So, this is the work. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. And trying to come to grips with me, or my work, is not part of it. In fact, it’s antithetical to it. I don’t mean to seem disingenuous. I know we all live within contradiction. As much as I would love never to use the word “I,” I can’t even start a sentence without it. That’s a contradiction at the level of thought, but also at the level of everyday life. There are things I have to do, things that seem to be filtered through that metaphysical assumption. I think about that a lot—why is it that my radical disbelief in individuation is only made coherent through the language of individuation? How does that work? Why does that work? That’s a deep problem. Not a deep philosophical problem, but a deep problem for thinking and for living.

EO

So how then are we to reckon with the academy and criticism?

FM

Philosophy was once assumed to be a set of practices meant to deal with that problem. Now I think philosophy is a set of practices designed to regulate it, even to sustain it, rather than eliminate it. At any rate, I don’t think anybody is required to encounter me or my work. I want to disappear into the common project. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. And the contradictions emerge because I say: my writing, my criticism—it might seem to fixate on an individual artwork, an individual artist. But, if criticism is done with sufficient rigor and imagination, what it always moves toward is the disappearance of the individual object, the individual artwork, the individual artist. That’s what criticism is. It begins with the individual, but if it’s done right, the individual disappears.

And in that respect, criticism has a relation to physics. Physics begins with the atom—Richard Feynman says that’s the basic assertion. But when physics is done rightly, the thing it assumes is the thing it can never establish. My old teacher Stephen Booth used to talk about the physics of Shakespeare’s sonnets, reading them in such a way that by the end they turned into an ill-defined cloud, like David Bohm’s atom, like the medieval “cloud of unknowing.” I was just looking at one of Baraka’s last books, Digging. There’s an essay in there called “It’s Not About You.” It’s a phrase he heard Albert Ayler say all the time: “it’s not about you.” Somebody thinks it’s about him—it’s not about him. It’s not about you. It’s ain’t about me, says Channel Tres. It’s about the project. But it’s a dilemma. How can we mean it when we say it even if I can’t quite mean it when I say it?

EO

What is the role of the Black critic then?

FM

The Black critic has no role, except to disappear. To disappear into the practice of criticism. Just as the role of the Black artist is to disappear into social and aesthetic practice. That’s the role. And it’s one I’ve wrestled with, suffered with, especially in the last eight or nine years. Because I love art. I love what people call Black art. I love some Black artists, deeply. But I’ll put it this way: I also love bacon. That doesn’t mean it’s good for us. And I haven’t been able to stop eating bacon—I haven’t even tried. Same with Black art and Black artists. Just because I can’t give it up doesn’t mean I believe in it. But, somehow, even though it seems, as Huey Copeland says, that you and I, as artists or as critics or just as attenuated persons, are “bound to appear,” you and I have to act like you and I are not, because you and I are not, because we are not.

So, to the extent that I’m devoted to those things, the nature of that devotion is dispersive. Belief in any individual entity, if it’s true belief, ends in disappearance, just as it begins in preappearance. You practice its dispersal. Same with God: if you really believe in God, your devotion disperses God, with evangelical intensity. Same with Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. It doesn’t remain intact. And if it doesn’t remain intact, it doesn’t remain in fact. Yet something else emerges in its place, or maybe just else as emergence in placelessness, if you pay close enough attention.

EO

And language? The encounter with a text?

FM

Yes. Language, or text, gathers to disperse. Gathering and dispersal go together like remaining and flight. And every gathering is new, and different. Gathering as encountering, as approaching—not as something that ever quite coalesces, or arrives, or is arrived at.

EO

Has friendship changed what you need the work to be?

FM

Friendship doesn’t leave the imaginary entities we call friends intact. Zora Neale Hurston says, “My tongue is in my friend’s mouth.” Which means it ain’t your friend’s mouth anymore. Which means it ain’t your friend. Friendship doesn’t preserve you. It isn’t a regulated system of relationality designed to confirm the individual integrity of its participants. It doesn’t work like that. Everybody knows it doesn’t work like that—you just have to be willing to admit it. And when we theorize friendship as if it did preserve us, we’re not theorizing friendship—we’re justifying capitalism and liberalism. That’s what that is. It’s fucked up, but it’s true. There’s this thing we say we’re doing, but really we’re serving the thing we say we hate. And it’s not even a clear description of what we’re actually doing. It’s a degradation of what we’re doing. It’s not even what we want. It’s just settling for something when what we want is something else.

EO

Do you think this has been guided by the internet—sped up by it? Or has it already superseded technology, become its own modality, the capitalism of it, the same thing under a different name?

FM

This is why Heidegger—fucked up as he is—is indispensable, whether we want him to be or not. Rather than disavow our indebtedness to him, we need to figure out how to deal with it. Because Heidegger gives us a much broader historical understanding of what technology is. And it ain’t about the internet. It’s just as much about the book. It’s just as much about the artwork. There’s nothing fucked up about the internet that wasn’t already fucked up about the book, the artwork, the idea of the person, the idea of—hell—even the baby as a technological apparatus.

At a certain point, what’s at stake is the deep relationship between technē and ontos and logos—not just technicity and being, but technicity and the metaphysical foundations of the ontological assumption. Not just “How is being constituted?” but “How is a being constituted?” Heidegger’s distinction between being and beings doesn’t give us some pre-metaphysical difference. The constitution of being and the constitution of a being have one thing in common, so to speak: individuation.

EO

I think it’s like authorship. Like what you were saying earlier about the “I.” It gets repackaged as an extension of the you. But the “I” isn’t a declaration—it’s a manifestation, atoms of different things coming together to make a thing.

FM

It’s difficult, and sometimes even unnecessary, to try to be precise with this language. I tend to valorize precision. I love to try to practice it, but maybe it’s less about definition than about paying closer attention. The closest I can get is to say this: there is a constant practice of differentiation, of differing. Not the gathering and dispersal of things, but rather gathering and dispersing as practices. A constant practice of differing. And the closer I get to that, the blurrier it gets, the blurrier I get.

EO

It’s like a form of watering, of giving or maintaining life.

FM

Maybe. But water isn’t more prone to this practice than any other element. Maybe it’s easier to see with water, but dirt is doing it too. This is why physics, chemistry, biology are important, if I can be so bold and presumptuous and obvious—they help us grasp instabilities that the human sciences tend to regulate and police.

EO

I was thinking about something you’ve said before—that “if the work really matters, you don’t worry where the tools come from. You take what you need, wherever you can find it, and you deal with the consequences later. If you’re worried about purity, you’re not serious about the work.” I keep turning that over in relation to imitation and borrowing—because it feels less like differentiation than dispersion, not the difference of a fixed identity but the dispersal of practice across whatever is at hand.

FM

It strikes me that we all think this, even if we don’t all act on it all the time: it’s better to be open than it is to be closed. It’s better to be open and of course, if you are an extension of a history of brutalization, of a history of brutalized vulnerability, then it seems like you have ample justification for closing off rather than opening up. But in fact, just because you’re justified in feeling that or in doing that doesn’t mean that you’re right. You know, you can have all kinds of justification for shit. Matter of fact, everybody feels justified in what they do. But, here’s the thing, it’s very simple. Generally, I would tend to want to choose the ethical over the moral. I was looking at an old Chomsky interview the other night. He was saying that there’s a simple moral rule that we should all want to follow, that of not being a hypocrite, that if you apply standards to others, you should apply those same standards to yourself. Within that kind of simple moral calculus, you can’t impose an ethical and moral imperative on one entity to be open if you aren’t willing to be open yourself. We could think about this today with regard to immigration, for instance.

EO

Yes.

FM

So, most of the time, you have to be open. We’re under an ethical and moral obligation to share, and implicit in that ethical and moral formulation is, I think, a pretty stringent and unconditional refusal of the proper that, ultimately, means that individual morality fades in an ethic of the common. You’re not saying, “Oh, you can come have some of my shit.” You’re saying, “This ain’t my shit. This is our shit.” That’s what you’re saying. And you can’t say that with regard to some things and then not with regard to other things. And you can’t say that without your own diminishment, and it turns out you can’t even own your own diminishment, all of which is a condition that the common sense of liberalism, properly dispersed amongst its proprietors, must abhor. It feels, to that common sense, that what’s relinquished is individuality and so what’s called for is the regulation and incorporative exclusion of difference; it feels like what’s being lost is freedom and so what’s called for is the criminalization of flight. If I want to keep what I have I better close it up and shut it down.

Saying, “No, this ain’t yours, you can’t have this,” that’s Trump. That’s MAGA. So, I guess I do believe in just that Chomskyan level of minimal consistency. You might justify saying, “This is mine” with, “Well, but we were fucked up. We were fucked over. We’ve been buked. We’ve been scorned. We were stolen. We were brutalized. We were murdered.” That’s why we’re justified in saying, “Yeah, this is ours. You can’t have this.” But I just don’t know of any fucking people in the history of this fucked up world who can’t pull out that justification when they want. You can say, “Yeah, but the way they did it to us was special.” Well, everybody thinks that the way it was done to them was special. Of course, each of these instances of brutality and genocide are particular. They each have their particular historical features, but they’re not special.

EO

Or they’re not different.

FM

No, they’re different. They just ain’t special. And they’re not only different from every other instance, but every sub-instance within each individual instance is different from every other sub-instance. What I’m saying is not complicated; it’s real simple. It seems to me to be very simple and also fundamentally unassailable. And if you decide that what you want to do is not accept it or to assail it, then you have to come to grips with the moral and, very quickly, the ethical implications of that. Little kids know this. This is not a complicated, deep philosophical problem, it’s just simple. What’s complicated and philosophical is the amount of bullshit that people have to put themselves through in order to believe that it ain’t true.

EO

I like the phrasing you used, “minimal consistency.” It makes me think about factual error and the violence of citation.

FM

Yeah, oh man. I don’t go to the movies much anymore, but I like Instagram. I mean, I don’t do TikTok, but there’s this woman on Instagram, I don’t even know what her name is, Black woman, I think she’s in the South somewhere, and her instagram handle is shayhairmuseum. I kind of want to say she’s in Charlotte, North Carolina. I think she might be a professional comic, but a lot of people sort of do these virtuosic routines and stuff on Instagram. She, or the character she portrays, lives in this sort of middle-class neighborhood and runs, or who has sort of declared herself to be the head, of the homeowners association. She runs around from house to house messing with people because they didn’t put the top on their garbage can or they didn’t immediately return their garbage can to their yard after the garbage pickup. Her tagline, after she tells people, “You need to pick up your trash. You didn’t pick up your trash after that party,” is “CITATION!” So she’s giving them a citation for breaking the rule, for not properly managing property. And in general, that’s the way I feel about citation, academic citation, thought it might seem contradictory since I certainly believe in dropping names.

Citation, at a minimal level, is just how you identify the texts you are engaging with. So, citation is a kind of announcement of engagement, but it is not a substitute for engagement. Now, engagement is what you do when you’re involved in a common project with other people. Citation is what you do when you’re trying to establish intellectual property rights. I just don’t believe in intellectual property rights. I don’t believe in intellectual property. But what you’re also always doing is saying, “Look, I don’t own this; I couldn’t do this by myself; this text is incomplete.” And of course what’s also indicated immediately is that incompleteness of the text and its author is in common. The more citations that a text has, the more incomplete you realize that the establishment of intellectual property is and must be. Because when you cite a book, you are by definition citing every citation in that book. It’s a kind of infinite regression. And it proceeds almost like mega-exponentially. All that citation really is, as far as I can tell, is an attempt at a kind of enumeration and a kind of naming. It’s precisely playing itself out in that relay between number and name. It’s an enumeration of the uncountable. And an attempt at naming the unnameable. It is an occasion that helps us to understand more deeply the radical incommensurability of every on the one hand and all on the other hand. It’s the distinction that I learned from my dissertation director, who was a great, great, great, great person. He wasn’t really my dissertation director. He was more like my dissertation sponsor. His name was Julian Boyd. And when I say sponsor, I mean it in the sense that you would use that term in the recovery community. Because a dissertation isn’t like a thing you finish. Really, it’s a kind of malady that you are attempting to recover from.

Anyways, he was very much interested in the distinction between mass and count, which within the realm of things, let’s say, is analogous to the distinction between ergon and energeia, the old Aristotelian distinction between, work and working that is distilled or resolved into the dew of the distinction between product and process. So, process is to all as product is to every, which is to say every individual thing. So, the irony, or the rub, is that the lady who runs the property association, who’s telling everyone that they’re not properly managing their property, or minding their business, can’t mind her business. Deeper still, the trouble with busybodies like her is that she has no business of her own. Someone might even tell her that she needs to get her some business so she can stop minding theirs, which she has no business doing in the first place. Of course, the thing about shayhairmuseum’s posts is the delightful comments they elicit because people know and love Miss Lady. They can’t do without her. The neighborhood is incomplete without her. She carries on like nobody’s business and we’re good with that. It’s almost like her carrying on is a kind of liturgy, a celebration of mass, a dilution of count even, if it’s in the language of individual accountability. She turns citation into recitation in a way that academics are not always able to pull off, which is to say, with humor, that we neither can nor want to mind our own business.

EO

That makes me think about what’s the difference between diagnosis and pedagogy.

FM

Oh yeah. Well, that’s a cool formulation. You have to break down the word diagnosis first— -gnosis, knowledge, pedagogy. Diagnosis. It’s like if you watch that old TV show House, which I used to love. Me and my partner watched it all the time. The term that they would use in House is “differential diagnosis.” First of all, diagnosis in the way that they practice it in House is a collective, communal enterprise. The differential diagnosis simply referred to the fact that when presented with symptoms, the task of the diagnostic team was to throw possible ideas out of what this shit could be. Of course, there was a tension in the show. House was a teacher as well as a diagnostician. He had a pedagogical function as well as a diagnostic function. And a lot of the tension in the show was about how his pedagogical function was constantly in conflict with the diagnostic practice he was engaged in. The pedagogical function was the part of him that was just an asshole, right? Because he thought he knew every damn thing and he was always trying to tell everybody every goddamn thing. The diagnostic practice was kind of deep and interesting because that was the part of House that wasn’t about what he knew. It was about what he didn’t know.

It was about a practice of discovery and, by definition, a practice of experimentation, of testing. You think it’s, you know, smallpox? Let’s test for that. The testing was not so much about finding the offending organism or the offending condition as much it was about treatment. You test for the thing, the disease, by treating it. And if the treatment didn’t work, then it must be something else. It was always him and three younger doctors. And technically he was the leader but it was a quartet, it was an ensemble. The shit was musical in that regard. People were throwing out things out in the interest of approaching healing. And that was also kind of cool about the show because the healing that they were supposed to be approaching never quite got there. But no, that’s a cool distinction. One way to think about it is that we’re constantly trying to negotiate the tension between diagnosis and pedagogy. I would even want to say that maybe we need a different word even than diagnosis. We need another prefix because dia- means apart. So we need something that also approaches the gathering, which is together.

EO

As a kind of junction-making?

FM

I don’t know. Con-diagnosis, maybe. Condifferential diagnosis. In other words, we need a word that would give us something like this beautiful phrase that River Barad uses: “cutting-together-apart.” So, what we need is we need a little bit of togetherness to infuse diagnosis. And then it would really work good. But yeah, it definitely moves against the grain of a kind of authoritarian weight that burdens pedagogy.

EO

And so what about death as it relates to misdiagnosis, citation, and scholarship writ large. How does one grapple with perpetual death?

FM

Well, death. I mean, I think that the tremendous amount of significance that we place on death is very much structured by our inability rigorously to adhere to what can be given to us by this distinction between every and all. I’ve thought about it a lot, I guess you could say, with regard to the notion of genocide. I believe that the conditions under which Black folks live are genocidal conditions. I’ve said this a lot of times, and I still believe it. I mean, my mother died on her 66th birthday, and the cause of death was cardiac arrest. But that was a kind of proximate and imprecise cause of death. I believe that the true cause of death was anti-Blackness. Under this regime of anti-Blackness, to be a Black person is to be a person who will die of anti-Blackness. That’s what kills every Black person. But of course, what genocide within the framework of anti-Blackness is supposed to accomplish is not the death of every Black person, but the radical elimination of Blackness. And in this regard, genocide is unsuccessful and will remain so. They will kill every one of us, but they can’t kill us all.

EO

Does this speak to legibility at all?

FM

I think that in general, when folks are talking about legibility and capture, they’re talking about a collective of individual entities called Black persons. And I don’t even think legibility and capture are precise terms within the framework of either an individual Black person or some imagined community or collectivity of Black persons. I think it’s an imprecise term with regard to Blackness, but these are also imprecise terms with regard to Black persons. Like, I don’t think that those terms do the work that people want them to do when they use them. Legibility refers to reading, and to declare a thing unreadable is to offer a reading of that thing. So, in other words, what’s being approached there is a spectrum. And what we’re really talking about is not illegibility, what we’re talking about are the limits of reading.

EO

Or naming.

FM

Or naming, or capture. These are not absolute terms. They all operate on a kind of spectrum. There is not a point of precision, or absolute location, so to speak. There’s a realistic spot that we might be trying to approach, but not a point, in that regard. The geometry implied in these terms is rough. I want to be clear that even if you posit the individual entity, legibility, capture, or nameability—all of those terms are imprecise. And, if they’re imprecise for the individual entity, then they are obviously imprecise for that which is, in fact, not an individual entity. And Blackness is not an individual entity.

EO

Did you see Ryan Coogler’s Sinners?

FM

No, I haven’t seen it yet. My partner and I were talking about looking at it with our son last night, but we all went to sleep. I’ll probably see it. My old buddy and friend and fellow traveler, R.A. Judy, last time I talked to him, a week or so ago, he was berating me for not having seen it. He was finding things in it that I wouldn’t necessarily have been looking for. I promised him that I would look at it. But in general, man, it’s not that I don’t watch movies. I watch a lot of TV and movies and stuff. I’ve just never had that impulse to just rush out and immediately see something because a Black person did it or because Black people are in it. Just because my experience of that, generally, has been one of disappointment. I love to see Black people, but I just don’t necessarily have to see Black people on a screen. If I want to see people who look like me, I go to Brooklyn. You know what I’m saying? I never had this desire to see an image of myself on a screen. I grew up around Black people. You know what I mean? And when I go see Black people on screen, I guess I get disappointed because they seem like they’re not like the folks I grew up around. And that’s not a statement of intra-diasporic chauvinism. What I love in a film by, say, Diop Djibil Mambety, is the massive concentration of richly differential familiarity. I see something that looks and feels like something I grew up around but it’s not the same. It’s like what I grew up around because the people I grew up around were radically and emphatically and constantly but also, somehow, casually not the same. But with a lot of so-called Black movies that I have gone to, whatever comfort I was supposed to feel by seeing something that I could identify with or relate to is unavailable to me. I mean, I remember when I was a little kid, and somebody Black was on TV and I would rush upstairs and make sure I got my mom. But that was 1968. And I was six. Now, I am looking for something more, something different. But Judy tells me that’s what I’ll find in Sinners, that there’s work being done in Sinners. He’s my friend. He never steers me wrong. I don’t know if I believe him, but I believe in him enough that if he tells me I should see it, I should see it, and then, seeing will be believing. So I’m going to see it.

EO

What about Nope? Jordan Peele’s film, or Get Out, which also lingered about culturally.

FM

Get Out. I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t think it was all that. And so, I didn’t go see the subsequent ones. There’s an old Richard Pryor routine about The Exorcist, in his first really big hit album, That Nigger’s Crazy, and there’s a part, you know the thing I’m talking about. I always felt like that way about Get Out. It’s like, for the folks I grew up around, the movie would have never happened, which is to say, I think it speaks to an experience which I can’t quite share. Maybe I’m a generation removed or something.

Let’s say that part of the privilege that I grew up with was something that was not available, so to speak, to my grandparents. It was as a function of my education and of a certain so-called upward mobility. I get to spend lots and lots of time with the people who are trying to kill me. But, hell, that’s not even right.

EO

So how are we meant to ground ourselves despite these encounters?

FM

My grandmother cleaned up this white woman’s house for 30 years. So, she spent ample amounts of time around the people who were trying to kill her. It’s just that she was trying to go home. She wasn’t trying to hang out with that woman; she was ready to go home. That was kind of the way I was raised and that was the kind of the attitude we shared: I got to work, but I want to hang out with my friends, which is the open set of people who don’t want to kill me. I remember something Nate Mackey used to always say, like, “Why would you want to spend a lot of time around people that make you nervous?” I don’t want to be nervous on my off hours. And now look, some of this breaks itself. The history that we live in is a history in which these formulations can be broken down relatively precisely along racial lines. And in different extensions along gender lines, along lines of sexuality. You kind of want to find your people because you want to be comfortable. Especially when you ain’t at work, you want to be comfortable. But then there’s also ways in which the racial categorization of this question of comfort breaks down and it doesn’t always operate that way. But in general, my tendency is like, I want to be around people that I feel comfortable with.

And if I don’t feel comfortable, I’m out. I’m gone. I’m out. So, Get Out. I subscribe to the imperative to get out. It’s just that the getting out was supposed to happen in minute 3, not 123. I think a whole lot of Peele’s work is an extension of that principle. And of course it’s complicated. Maybe if I were really serious about what I’m saying, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be on Mars. Because Senegal or Italy ain’t far enough, are they? I also think that maybe what’s really at stake is how we understand the topology and the topography of getting out as an activity. And these are questions that one could talk about, let’s say, with regard to fugitivity, where fugitivity is an ongoing practice of escape. It’s a practice. It’s not an accomplishment or an achievement. And it is not determined by the simple opposition between inside and outside. And we come back again to the paradoxical imperative of remaining in the hold despite our fantasies of flight. To stay with rather than to give up friends, even if that giving up is in the name of individual advancement or upward mobility or the liberal’s liberation.

EO

Can you speak to practice versus language?

FM

Well, I had a colleague when I used to teach at Duke named Julie Tetel Andresen. She’s a linguist, a really interesting linguist, as well as a great romance novelist. She insists that it’s really important to try to avoid the term language in favor of the term languaging and to think about language as a practice rather than as an entity. That was hard for me to take at the time because I was, and still am in a lot of ways, so influenced by Chomsky. Her notion of language was very much part of a critique of the Chomskyan program, which tended to think of language as an entity or an endowment and grammar as an organistic system. For her, it was necessary to think about the language practices that we engage in. I’ve come to believe in the rightness of what she was trying to help me understand. I wouldn’t oppose language and practice. And that doesn’t mean that I’m trying to recapitulate a way of thinking about language in purely performative terms. J.L. Austin was still trying to think about language as an entity. He argued that a neglected part of that entity was its capacity for doing things. One of the things that I was trying to do in In the Break was to push towards a foregrounding of the practicing of language that also strained against Austin’s understanding of the performativity of language. Because if you think about language as an entity, as both Chomsky and Austin do, you’ve got to then concern yourself with all these elements that are not traditionally considered linguistic—what Austin called “mere accompaniments of the utterance,” or what Chomsky called “nonsense.” I was interested in a practice of languaging that was also being given through and in and by way of those accompaniments, which can not only do but undo—dig, as George Clinton almost might say.

EO

I want you to talk about Toni Morrison.

FM

Why?

EO

Because the story you shared of your grandmother called her to mind.

FM

First of all, the greatness that I am most committed to that coalesces around the proper name, Toni Morrison, is a set of again, common social aesthetic practices in writing. When I think about Toni Morrison, I immediately also think about Gayl Jones and Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara and June Jordan and Gloria Naylor. Not just some undifferentiated entity called Black Women Writers, but a specific sort of communal practice of Black women’s writing within which Morrison played a really, really integral part. Anything that takes her out of that communal frame, so to speak, or anything that extracts her from that communal practice, is a disservice not only to that practice, but also a disservice to her. Morrison’s an interesting problem because of what it is that people want to call Morrison’s greatness. Morrison’s greatness is of a different order than, say, what we might call Aretha Franklin’s greatness or Louis Armstrong’s greatness or Duke Ellington’s greatness or Billie Holiday’s greatness. Because when we say Duke Ellington, for instance, we mean the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He was always supported and enabled by the people in his band. But we tend not to think of writers as having a band, let alone being in a band or being a band.

So, when I think of Morrison, it feels like a sign of respect to make sure that we know that she was in a band. What it is to be in a band is not unlike what it is to remain in the hold. We want to remain in the hold, not just because we want to constantly remind ourselves of how fucked up everything is, but also because that’s where the people are. That’s why we want to remain there. You know. I’d rather be in the hold with my folks than be free by myself. And of course, the whole fucked up history of freedom is that freedom is just the freedom to be by yourself. Another word for which is death, okay? Or if you will, social death, okay? But what social death means, as far as I can tell, is radical extraction from the social. Another word for that is “whiteness.” I believe that this is the sort of ethical problematic that Morrison gives us really, really emphatically all throughout her fiction. Some of this simply has to do, as you were saying, with the ethical problematic of the novel as a particular kind of instantiation and achievement of, if you will, the metaphysical desires underlying narration and it’s co-conspirator Bildung or picturing, in the general project of self-picturing that structures intellectual life in modernity.

I kind of feel like she’s writing fiction that goes against the grain of the moral and political-economic imperatives of fiction writing since the rise of the novel, and so she’s consistently giving us these sort of set pieces in which we see, for example, what happens to Sula when she tries to leave the hold. Or what happens to Violet when she tries to leave the hold. Or what happens to Sethe when he tries to leave the hold, and so on. This is why the imperative of what it is to love our flesh is so powerful. It’s not just what Baby Suggs is saying, it’s the social situation within which she says it—she says it as a person who is giving us a banquet. And the problem with the banquet that Baby Suggs provides is that it’s too rich. I was looking at the interview November did with Wilderson and was struck by the way he loves Sarah Vaughan. If I’m not mistaken, in that interview, he says something about Sarah Vaughan in relation to remaining in the hold. I kind of feel like it’s worth paying attention to. I would say that here is where my understanding of the hold might diverges from Frank’s. Maybe the way Frank understands the hold is that the hold is something like what one might call the collective denial of the fantasy of individuation. The refusal of the fantasy of individuation.

EO

Why is Morrison or anyone of that matter read that way?

FM

I think that a lot of times when people read Morrison, they want to insist that what Morrison’s doing is attempting to create the conditions that will allow us to achieve proper individuation. I think that what Morrison’s work does is alert us to precisely what is brutal and vicious about the fantasy of individuation that has been refused to us. And, at the same time, she’s also recounting for us, with us, the brutality of the denial of that fantasy. See, there’s two levels of brutality here: there’s the brutality of the denial of the fantasy, and then there’s the brutality of the imposition of the fantasy.

EO

I think what comes to mind is the thought that we’re not alone together, but we’re together alone.

FM

I don’t think the alone is right.

EO

Hm, we’re together, we’re not one.

FM

Yeah, together, we’re not one. And deeper still, there is no one. There is not one. There’s no alone. I think, rather than alone, I would tend to use the word abandoned—that our togetherness is a togetherness in abandonment. It is also a togetherness in abandon. If you were to break it down to an illegitimate level of simplicity, abandonment dovetails with exile, with isolation, in the way that, let’s say, Orlando Patterson uses that notion when he speaks of “the genealogical isolate.” Abandon, on the other hand, also dovetails with unnameability, innumerability, wildness, fugitivity, if you will. That relay between abandon and abandonment, that’s what I would connect up with the together here. Not alone, not one. But abandon and abandonment. Dovetailed, even. Cut-together-apart, to speak condifferentially diagnostically.

To get back to Morrison, I think that the virtuoso is placed in a very, very difficult position. And Morrison is a virtuoso. The virtuoso is subject to abandonment. And also, in a way, subject to a certain kind of resentment, like Baby Suggs. The virtuoso is often forced to stand alone. It’s funny because my mother loved Sarah Vaughan. She was a great lover of jazz vocalists and I think Sarah Vaughan was the pinnacle for her. She was the pinnacle because there didn’t seem to be a note that she couldn’t sing. The only analogs would be Pops and Aretha.

I don’t identify with Baby Suggs in that scene where she’s giving the sermon. Baby Suggs is virtuosic not only in her capacity to sermonize, but also in her capacity to cook. If you remember, the people at the feast got mad because there was too much food. I never really felt this way towards Aretha, but I have felt this way towards Sarah Vaughan and towards Toni Morrison, which is, they’re just giving me too much. I feel this way about Michael Jordan. Their virtuosity is almost oppressive. I don’t want that much. I don’t need that much. I can’t handle that much. I want to see some limitations. It’s like when people say, “Well, Clifford Brown’s a better trumpeter than Miles Davis.” That’s true. But I love Miles Davis in a way that I could never love Clifford Brown. I love Magic Johnson in a way that I could never love Michael Jordan because I can sense his limitations and see how he works through and over the edge of them. What one gets in Magic, for instance, is a feeling of somebody who has transgressed the limit, right? Sometimes I feel like with Toni Morrison, she never gets to the limit. Like, it must be this tremendous burden to never be able to reach the edge of what you can do. I feel like that’s true of Morrison, and also kind of true of Jordan in a way, and it’s true of Sarah Vaughan. How do you work when you can never get to the edge, when you can never go over the edge?

So, I love Gayl Jones in a way that I could never love Toni Morrison. And of course, to go over the edge of virtuosity is also to go over the edge of virtue as an individual quality. It’s so much about being more than just a great writer or more than a good person. What we want is what it is that the great writer can’t achieve, what it is that the great person can’t achieve. We want more than that. We want something that’s over the edge. We want something that’s over the edge of the individual work, that goes where the individual work can’t go. That’s over the edge of the atom; we want what the atom in its completeness can’t get to. And, of course, what evil people do, what happens in the wake of evil, is that we go over the edge of the atom’s completeness. We split it in half, so to speak, and kill everything. But it’s not just about the splitting, or of the atom. If you’re so committed to the idea of the completeness of the thing, while at the same time desirous of what it is that that completeness can never offer or achieve, then you generally tend to want to break it or split it. And that’s the history of our relation to the atom.

That’s also the history of our relation to the individual subject. But it’s not just about the splitting or Spaltung, as Freud puts it, in the name of a kind of regulatory marshalling of the energy that is released. It’s deeper than what, in some fucked up way, that still ends up reifying the individual entity.

What we want is more than that more they want. We want more than more than, so that less than is neither utterly out of the picture nor inoperative. We want more and less, right? We want more and less than one. More than one is not enough. Less than one is not enough. We want more and less than one. The moments in Toni Morrison’s work that I most appreciate are those in which the work intimates both more and less. There are a couple moments that do that, which are very, very powerful. One, of course, is the admonition to love our flesh because flesh is more and less than body. Another is that moment at the end of Sula—an old friend and mentor of mine, the great writer Cherry Muhanji pointed it out to me the first time—when Nell says, “But we were girls together.” We were girls together. This is something that Morrison is really working through, when the language she’s been given, so she can give us some language to describe this problematic, is inadequate to the giving in which she is, and we are, involved. It can be too easy of a moment for critics to latch onto. We can become attached to the virtuosity and what it seems to achieve rather than to what vituosity only approach. And Morrison leads us to that point of attachment. We think that the problem is that Sula was an artist without an art form when it wasn’t about Sula. It was about being girls together. When we’re girls together, what we are or, more precisely, what is giving, is social aesthesis, right? That is neither art nor art form nor artist. That’s not what Sula is, that’s what Sula be giving. We were girls together. That’s one way to look at it. But I tend not to talk about Morrison too much because we have so hypervalorized the individual figure that we can neither hold her nor let her go.

EO

That made me think about Maya Angelou.

FM

In what respect?

EO

In terms of trying to extract her from her context.

FM

Well, extract is the right word. In other words, this hypervalorization of the individual figure is extraction. And as a mode, it’s murderous.