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Fred Moten. In the Break: the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Candice M. Jenkins
Fred Moten. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 315 pp. $54.95 cloth/ $19,95 paper.
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Fred Moten's In the Break takes as its subject matter both black performance and black radicalism, ultimately arguing that the two concepts are, if not one and the same, then mutually constitutive to the point of being nearly impossible to separate. Drawing upon and complicating a Marxist analysis of commodity and value, Moten suggests in his introduction that the "freedom drive," a kind of formal resistance to objectification, is "the essence of black performance." More riskily, he intimates that such resistance is actually the "essence" of blackness itself, and that this blackness--or, perhaps, this particular performance of blackness--is something that must not only be seen but heard if it is to be understood. The resistant sound of black performance is at the center of Moten's analysis, not only because "'black radicalism is (like) black music," but because even that which can be understood as an insistently visual black moment (such as, for example, the now-infamous 1955 photograph of Emmett Till's body, which Moten discusses at length in his third chapter) bears an unavoidable trace of the materiality of black voice.
For this reason, in its attention to black avant-garde artistry from the 1950s and 1960s, Moten's work focuses as much on music and visual art as it does on literature, and seems particularly interested in readings (or soundings) of jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, and Miles Davis--as well as the later, more troubled work of jazz and blues vocalist Billie Holiday. Moten places such performances in dialogue with an exhaustive collection of Western philosophers and theorists, including Sigmund Freud, who in chapter one helps Moten to think through the question of "drive" in Ellington's music; Martin Heidegger, whom Moten fruitfully relates to LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka in chapter two, the book's longest and most ambitious chapter; and Jacques Derrida, whose theory of "invagination" suffuses Moten's text as a whole but seems most productive when related to his readings of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and, later, the work of black philosopher and conceptual artist Adrian Piper. In each of these (as well as numerous other) points of theoretical and creative convergence, black music, or a performative black sound more generally, remains close to the surface of Moten's inquiry.
In fact, jazz is not merely the subject matter of much of Moten's work, it seems to be the work's stylistic inspiration. Moten's text is less an argument than an extended meditation, and he does not so much present his ideas as perform them, rift upon them, leave and return to them, rehearse and re-rehearse them--or, perhaps, repeat them with a (signifying) difference. Moten's assessment of black performance as black radicalism is shaped, in part, by his conviction that black performance equals improvisation, and his elaborate, recursive prose reads like an extended experiment with this idea. The experiment is not always successful--there are moments when his eagerness to play with language only serves to obscure the brilliance we might otherwise hear in his words. That brilliance is certainly there, however, as when, in chapter two, Moten cogently addresses the overlapping homophobia and homoeroticism to be found in Amiri Baraka's writing, or as when, speaking of Baraka's ambivalence about the work of reputedly gay composer Cecil Taylor, Moten asks provocatively, "Is jazz a kind of closet[?]"
What readers may be left wanting more of, after reading Moten's challenging volume, is precisely this kind of direct attention to the matter at hand. Yet part of the work's conceit is that the matter at hand--namely, the complex, sounded relationship between black performance and black radicalism-cannot be attended to directly, must be arrived at gradually, circuitously. Thus the painstakingly mapped, iterative trajectory of Moten's argument sometimes prevents a thorough investigation of the most powerful subtexts and corollaries to his theory. By the time he writes, near the end of his last chapter, "None of this will have been meant to deny that the model of blackness as black performance as black radicalism I've been trying to think about is extreme in its masculinism[,]" thereby acknowledging what would otherwise be a crucial oversight within his reasoning, the acknowledgment comes almost too late to be useful to the reader or to the volume as a whole.
Still, the power of Moten's project lies, partly, in its grand ambitions, and in the author's fluid mastery of so many theoretical and philosophical positions. Moten's genius is his ability to draw upon the work of thinkers as varied as Nathaniel Mackey, Hortense Spillers, Kaja Silverman, Edouard Glissant, Angela Davis, Roland Barthes, and Frantz Fanon, among many others, and to speak through and then beyond their ideas. He does so in order to articulate, to improvise, a deeply considered investigation of what it is to scream, to resist--that is, what it is to be radically black.
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