I’ve got a friend, white, who’s been perturbed by recent discussions around issues of race, who keeps asking me, “What do they mean by ‘whiteness?’ What’s ‘whiteness?’” Darned if I know. You don’t ask a bird for lessons in ornithology. And while Fred Moten knows the difference between “white” and “whiteness,” his explanation of the former might help answer my friend’s question: “the most important thing about white, which my mama pinned on me like a rose, is that it is not what it is. that’s the most important thing about everything, but it’s most important here, since white always be trying to grasp the essence of what is in a fog of graspable essence called what is.” So what about black, or blackness? For that, I start with Mallarmé, who says it’s writing—for “one does not write luminously on a dark field; the alphabet of stars alone, is thus indicated, sketched out or interrupted; man pursues black on white.” I think this accords with Moten’s words, in his most recent book of poetry, all that beauty: “Blackness is the ceaselessly miraculous demonstration that there is no black and white, just sun and shade.” The blur—a key term for Moten as a theorist (Black and Blur, 2017)—arising from the interplay of brightness and shade was well known to the Symbolists, Mallarmé above all. Just enough differentiation between darker and lighter allows legibility to commence, if not to come to term, since it is merely “indicated, sketched out or interrupted.” Emerging somewhere, however far back, in the wake of Mallarmé, and most evidently of Un Coup de dés, all that beauty is very much about its constellations of (deceptively) black type on paper. Moten is not averse to using the surface of the page to blur reading. In all that beauty that surface is about twice as wide as high, which forces the eye to keep traveling back and forth somewhat uncomfortably from side to side (like following the tennis match in Strangers on a Train); sometimes there are prose paragraphs that run the whole width of the page, and these outstretch the readerly gaze, make the eye want to glide too quickly over the middle, taking it in as a blur. Another kind of blur in this poetry, one I like a lot, is the blurring of sound and sense in Moten’s relentless wordplay—as when he makes Mallarmé dance with James Brown: “Pli, Plea, Plié.” The fog of Bruges, writes Mallarmé, dances like that, “furtively and visibly” divesting itself, fold according to fold, pli selon pli. What’s left after such a performance? “All that’s left of church is us in all that beauty, which is untranslatable if you know the language.” Or in other words, “whatever you came here for what you came here for is y’all.” Beauty: “to feel blackness as a deeply energetic position from which to communicate a deeply energetic appositional communicability.” That communication has a choral dimension no matter how much Moten loves to play the role of virtuoso improvising soloist: Each poem is given with one or many others, named but also unnamed, uncounted, underdetermined—for instance, in the first poem, titled “come on, get it!” he is “with Michelle Castañeda, Laura Harris, Arthur Jafa, Ra Judy, Julian Moten, Lorenzo Moten, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Elizabeth Povinelli, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Wu Tsang’n’em.” Some names I recognize, most I don’t, but what I think counts the most is that recurrent “’n’em,” all the others. They might be something like Jodi Dean’s idea of the comrades, who could be “anyone but not everyone.”
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Fred Moten, all that beauty, is published by Letter Machine Editions, Seattle, 2019.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.