HOME TRAINING
Fred Moten on
the practice of practice
and Black struggle
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUE
BLACK STRUGGLE & BLACK LIBERATION
Cierra Michele Peters: I am really curious about what’s on your mind these days. What questions or conversations have been inspiring you lately?
Fred Moten: Well, man, that’s not light. That’s actually heavy [laughs]. The things that I’ve been thinking about for the last while are pretty much the same things I’ve been thinking about for forty years. I’ve come to characterize these things in different ways over time. Forty years ago, I would’ve said Black struggle and Black liberation. And now, I would say Black struggle—and put “liberation” in brackets for a minute, just to reconsider that term. I would say more and more that has meant thinking through the relation between what we would call Black art, or the Black arts, and certain fundamental questions that people would consider to belong to physics and mathematics.
And another way to put it would be that I’m interested in how these elements converge. So, how are Black struggle and that realm of activity that has generally been talked about under the rubric of Black art - how are these aesthetic and sociological issues bound up with some fundamental questions about the nature of reality and the language that has been generally thought to be the privileged way that we come to know that reality? And of course, the difficulty of this for me is that I guess I was sort of trained in the study of Black art. Most of my training, I would say, was home training in terms of how I was raised, and that home training was augmented by school training. The training in the sociological aspects of things was also home training, augmented by school training.
But with regard to the physics and the math of it, I probably didn't have very much home training, and I haven't had very much school training either. So that's a real dilemma because how am I supposed to be trying to think about these physical and mathematical questions when I can't really do math? That appears to be, and it also is, a real limitation. So for about thirty years I have been trying to overcome it and to train myself.
CMP: Honestly, when you said math and physics, I thought that that was going to go a completely different way. I thought that you were about to start talking about supreme mathematics. [laughs] Could you expand your definition of Black struggle?
There’s a poet named Ed Roberson who I think is one of the greatest living poets. I think [he’s] in his early eighties now. He's based in Chicago. He’s always been a brilliant poet, but his work as a poet has been interspersed with teaching in a university, and with his deep study and with various modes of working in the fields of doing botany, architecture, oceanography. Well, Sylvia Winter talks so brilliantly about—and Katherine McKittrick picks up that brilliance—this notion of the science of the word. Roberson is one of the great lyrical scientists of the word, which is a status he has achieved by way of poetic and scientific study.
He's got this book that came out in 2010, it's called To See the Earth Before the End of the World. I've just been living with, and in, that book. Sometimes a book is so expansive that you can’t close it; you sort of walk into it and once you walk into it, you can't get out and you don't want to get out. In the last twenty years or so, the two other books of poetry that have been like that for me are M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong [2008] and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas [2017].
Anyway, my current definition of Black struggle would be the imperative to see the earth before the end of the world, and in another sense to save the earth before the end of the world. That’s how I would define Black struggle at this point. The reason I would produce a certain distance between Black struggle and Black liberation at this point is because in a certain way, liberation is a worldly ideal. This imperative to save and to see the earth is not a matter of freedom nearly as much as it’s a matter of obligation and entanglement.
And that’s a hard thing to say because if anybody in the history of the world has earned the right to be concerned about freedom, it’s Black folks. I recognize how difficult it is, how demanding it is, and how debilitating it is, to say that Black struggle at a certain point needs to detach itself from what has been generally understood to be its telos, its reason for existence, its origin and its end. But I feel like raising that question is valid at this moment.
Wealth emerges from that gathering of deficits.
Mark Hernandez-Motaghy: I want to follow up on this "home training, augmented by school training," particularly with regard to your understanding of wealth. You’ve spoken about a type of wealth that comes from a shared practice, one that rejects sharing extracted surplus and instead embraces sharing needs. It doesn’t try to eliminate these needs but instead cultivates them. Can you speak to figures or experiences from your upbringing—in Las Vegas or Kingsland, Arkansas—that might have shaped this understanding of wealth?
I mean, my parents were divorced when I was 11, and I stayed with my mom, and I always had this very close relationship with my mom and her parents. And I was an only child and she was an only child. So we were part of this very tight unit, even though it was also very connected to a big and huge extended family on my grandfather's side. And I lived in Las Vegas, where I was born, until I was 14, and then we moved away. But I spent the last two years in Arkansas, where I graduated from high school and got much more of an everyday experience with that extended family, though I’d spent a lot of time down there when I was younger, spent summers down there with my grandparents and stuff like that. I don’t mention my father and my father’s family as much. There was a kind of estrangement there, but his family was also very close-knit, and most of them moved [from Louisiana] to Las Vegas together in the late fifties and early sixties. My everyday experience of extended family when I was a kid was with his family—his sisters and a brother, his mom—and then in living with my maternal grandmother during my last two years of high school. In both of those situations, that sense of the absolute importance of sharing needs was crucial, and it played itself out most regularly and most profoundly in family gatherings and Sunday dinners.
I was talking with a friend last night who is working, hoping, planning to have a baby and saying that my experiences of parenthood are very different, I think, from what my parents and grandparents experienced. Now, I was just saying one of the most important things that a parent needs to be able to do, especially younger parents when kids are little, is to be able to do this gesture here [motions outward] as in take this baby, and I grew up with my father's side of the family. When I grew up, if you walked into the front door with a carriable baby, you did not get from the front door to the kitchen with that baby. The baby was gone, and you probably didn’t see the baby until you were ready to leave. The baby would be passed from hand to hand. The baby would be up the street carried by his little cousin on her hip. All the pieties around parenting “taking a village” can be so easily degraded into bullshit politics. But there’s an actual practical way that stuff works. And what it all indicates is the radical incompleteness of any individual figure that we would call a parent.
So it allows us to make a distinction between the figure of a mother—and it’s a figure, which is to say, a figuration, a fabulation, which doesn’t mean there aren’t people we call “mother” and have intense affective relations with—but the actual practice of maternity cannot be carried out by an individual person. And what we actually grow up in and with, is what a friend of mine, Terrion Williamson, calls a maternal ecology. In a maternal ecology, what is shared is in some sense not abundance, but inadequacy and incompleteness. The first thing you share is that you can’t do it all by yourself. Wealth emerges from that gathering of deficits.
If wealth has some relation to what we might call extra or surplus, it emerges out of inadequacy and deficit. And so, all of a sudden, what it is to be less than enough, or less than one, in collective practice becomes more than one, greater than one. These are things that you learn by being exposed to them. You are also being brought up in this very rich discursive field in which people are constantly refining and discussing those practices. A lot of the ways in which that discussion and refinement and theorization gets coded is as gossip—talking about people. But in fact, you got a whole lot of people who are literally, seriously, constantly asking a few very rich questions: “What are we doing? How are we doing it? How well are we doing it?” which to me, in a philosophical discourse, would correspond to something that we call ethics.
The other question that is constantly being addressed and discussed in these intensely practical ways that are at the same time richly theoretical is—I’ll use very specific technical language— “How does shit go together?” You could try to clean it up a little bit and say something like, “How are things organized?” or “How do things go together?” So those questions are constantly being played out, and they’re being played out on the dance floor, in the kitchen, at the barbecue, at church. “What are we doing and how does shit go together?” One could then say that these are the fundamental questions of Black struggle, and another way to put it would be, these are the fundamental questions of Black study.
Actually, the real technical formulations would be, “How do shit go together?” and “What the fuck are we doing?” You have to put the fuck in there because there’s an urgency to the question. You have to displace “does” with “do” in order to indicate the technical precision that is possible as a function of how shit ain’t got no dog in the fight between singular and plural. These questions are constantly being iterated and reiterated under the duress of a state of emergency. In Kingsland, Arkansas, on the west side of Las Vegas, where I was growing up, this is what everybody was concerned about. Those questions don’t go away.
Ain’t nothing but practice; practice is all there is.
CMP: I appreciate that you began and ended with assembly. I’m really interested in your perspectives on assembling, and this notion of practicing how we gather so we can build a better world or “renewing our habits of assembly,” as you once said, borrowing from Manuel “Manolo” Callahan. At the Boston Ujima Project, assemblies are critical to our governance and decision-making structure. We have more than 900 members; half of them are working-class community members of color living in the city of Boston, and we have an extended network of community members who have been gentrified outside of the city who get to make decisions with us at one time or another. We learned a lot of this from Cooperation Jackson, based out of Jackson, Mississippi.
A lot of what we're thinking about, especially when we're having conversations about who gets to make decisions in a place like Boston, we really want to struggle to make shared ethical decisions around this expanded notion of community development and an economic imaginary that's grounded in cooperation and relationships rather than hierarchy and who's got it. Because of our investment fund, a lot of people are really excited about who gets to make decisions. Why is it not the investors? The space of the assembly— a three-day space of learning and making decisions together— as a decision-making tool, but it's also a base building space. And so that's my background on assemblies, but I'm really interested in your perspective on assembling and assembly and how you built on Manuel Callahan's work in this area.
It's funny, I was just looking at an email from Manolo a minute ago, and Cierra, there's a lot of threads to tie together just based on what you said. And it is cool to know that your work is going on in Boston. I went to college in the Boston area and Stefano Harney was there too.
It must’ve been 2013 when I met Manolo because he came to give a talk at the invitation of a scholar who was a grad student at UC Riverside at the time. Her name is Angélica Camacho, but everybody calls her Pickles. She was writing this brilliant dissertation on the prison hunger strikes in California in the early 2000s, and she now teaches at San Francisco State [University]. Pickles invited Manolo and his two comrades: Annie Paradise, a researcher with the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab who lives and works in the Bay Area, and Gustavo Esteva, the late, great Mexican philosopher and educator.
The first time I heard the phrase “renew our habits of assembly” was from Manolo. It was like a bell going off in my head when I heard him say that. Manolo was very much influenced by Gustavo, and Gustavo was very much under the influence of Ivan Illich, the great Austrian priest, philosopher, and pedagogical theorist who lived in New York and Puerto Rico in the 1950s before moving to Mexico in the 1960s. So, there’s this intellectual tradition that Manolo and Annie are embedded in and it dovetails with some things I was trying to think about with friends in college - Paolo Freire, liberation theology, pan-Africanism, and Black radicalism. But what’s most striking about the phrase is how resonant it is with similar formulations that were constantly being made by the women who ran my grandmother’s church in Arkansas. What Manolo did was give it a new spin, amplifying its resonance. I’ve been thinking about it, and luckily have had the chance to think about it with him and with Annie and with a lot of other folks, too.
At the time I was in Boston, the forms of radical social organization that were going on included movements in the poetry world, which I got to know through a teacher named Bill Corbett, but which went back to some folks that came before Bill. There was a really interesting queer poetry world, with radical experimental poets like Steve Jonas and John Wieners and people like that in the sixties, whose social and literary work poet David Grundy writes about recently, and beautifully, attuned to how, at around the same time, Black women like the Smith Sisters [Barbara and Beverly Smith] at the time of the formation of the Combahee River Collective [in the seventies] were doing radical social organizing in Boston, too. And then, I don’t know if y’all know this name, but Sarah Small was an extraordinary woman who was doing really powerful social organizational work in Roxbury, going back to the sixties. She was someone I had a chance to meet and work with a little bit as a college student. She ran something called the Packard-Manse [House] in Roxbury, and has an interesting connection to the Smith Sisters because so much of the Smith Sisters’ organizing was intensified in response to the serial murder and disappearance of Black women in Roxbury [in 1979].
Well, Sister Sarah, which is what we used to call her, was involved in responding to those murders, but Packard-Manse was also literally a kind of settlement house that helped unwed mothers in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan at that time. This is kind of pre-gentrification South End, back when Columbus Avenue was rough. It is different now, obviously. She’s somebody whose history is really worth studying. The way I got to know her was through a person who was very influential in my thinking and in my development, the Boston minister Eugene Rivers, who has been doing community organizing in Dorchester for many, many, many years. A lot of his organizing, as with Sarah Smalls, was very bound up with their religious commitments. Rivers is a deep and devout Pentecostal.
So all of these things are for me bound up with this idea of renewing habits of assembly. That was what we were initiated into as a kind of ideal by Rivers and by Sister Sarah. Those memories were resonant in my head when I first heard Manolo use that phrase.
The work can never be understood again as somehow insulated from the contaminations of the job.
THE PRACTICE OF PRACTICE
CMP: I want to turn to the creative work that you do. You’re a scholar, you’re an artist, and you’re a poet, writer, literary and cultural critic. For me, you were the first scholar I saw doing interdisciplinary work in a real way, in practice. What’s your process for creating alone? What’s your process for creating together? How is it different? Is it the same?
I would say two main things. There’s practice, and then in order to practice, you have to practice. You have to practice practicing. [laughs] For me, the two things that define practice are that it is collaborative and continual. In this regard, practice operates in distinction from what one might call action, which tends to be individual and intermittent. Now, this is a totally risky formulation. I’ve been thinking about it for a while but, at the same time, and very literally, I just thought it up. I know it’s true. And I also think it’s true. And I'll think about it a lot more after we get through talking. I’m gonna keep practicing it, keep rehearsing it. It might turn out to be bullshit, but I don’t think so. Let’s see if it can at least contribute to the general fertility.
So, the tricky part is, how do you practice to get ready to practice? Often when we think of practice, let’s say with music or sports, people usually think of solitary work, which is supposed to prepare you for the chance to play with others. But it seems to me that what people call solitary practice really involves intense forms of collaboration, the way that people work out and the way that they prepare. In sports, for instance, these athletes have teams, they’ve got nutritionists, they’ve got coaches and workout partners. It’s a collaborative effort to get what appears to be one player out on a tennis court to play against, which is also to say with, other people. And it’s the same with musicians. Every assumed moment of solitude turns out to be illusory if you consider, for instance, the way a musician might study a score or play along with a recording.
Now, let’s say my so-called practice—for lack of a more precise term—is generally reading and writing. Well, of course, reading is by definition collaborative. It’s an engagement; it’s an entanglement. It appears in the first instance to be an entanglement between a reader and a text, or a reader and a writer. Of course, that text turns out to be this complicated weave of other texts.
So, to the extent that there’s something called “my practice,” [it] happens in the margins of other books. It turns out that this practice is one where reading is inseparable from writing. There’s got to be some writing that goes along with it. A lot of the writing I was doing was just straight up in the margins of books, even if it’s just underlining, tracing my finger over something, using those little sticky notes in the PDF application, or texting myself something—pulling off to the side of the road because in the book that I’m listening to on tape, they said something that I got to stop and text to myself. So it’s this call-and-response that is in and also between reading and writing. I think of it as riding, like when my dear old next door neighbor John Moore used to pull out of his driveway and say come on, man, come ride with me. He’d tell me where we were going when we got there. Reading and writing are mobile accompaniment, with a little bit of mystery.
And It’s not just a call-and-response between a reader and a writer, or between a reader and a text. Insofar as you’re adding to the text as you’re reading it, and insofar as the effect that the text has on you as a reader is inscriptional, the text writes on you—rewrites you. The text rides with you. You take it somewhere it didn’t know it knew about, though it had somehow been preparing both itself and you to go there. That’s the interplay between “practice” and “practicing so that you can practice.” And ultimately, that relay between practice and practice displaces the relay between practice and the game or between practice and the real thing. Ain’t nothing but practice; practice is all there is. Again, the phrase we could use to describe this constant interplay of practice and practic[ing to practice], is the renewal of our habits of assembly. Because riding is a modality and the motility of assembly, and it lets you know it’s a modality of assembly and disassembly and renewing the assemblage.
You’re always doing it with other people, but sometimes you can really actively insist on doing it with other people. There’s always a kind of inadvertent collaboration going on with friends, and sometimes even with enemies or whatever. But then there’s a moment when you can actively decide, “Okay, this is how we’re going to do it and this is how we’re going to present it.” I would say the so-called scholarly work with Stefano and I started out more in terms of creative work. We met as writers for a literary magazine at Harvard, and he was in a lot of ways my first real tutor, you could say, when it comes to contemporary American poetry, which he was immersed in, in a way that was different from my own immersion in it coming from my home training. We were able to converge.
And all of everything I'm doing right now is within the framework of collaboration with my friend Brandon López, and more intermittently, and hopefully there will be more, with Gerald Cleaver. Gerald is a great drummer and Brandon is a great bassist, which means they are both great percussionists, rhythm scientists, and they let me ride with them. The extent to which I'm playing an instrument with Brandon and Gerald is the extent to which you might call poetry—not voice—an instrument. Or, you could say that Brandon plays the bass and Gerald plays the drums and I'm playing in the margins of a text.
And so I am sort of taking marginalia that I've written and playing with and in the margins of it, not necessarily reading it straight, but imagining it to be an instrument that I'm playing and that I can also, so to speak, work as a medium of spontaneous composition, which you might also think of as decomposition, which is sometimes also called improvisation, which is supposed to be more than merely reciting words over music. It sort of started off like that, because I couldn’t really do any better. But then as I learned more from them, it became something different. But the point is it's all about the practical decision to collaborate and continually to practice this practice we’ve been practicing, where we try to figure out how shit go together while we’re trying to figure out what the fuck we be doing. Please excuse the technical jargon.
To the extent that there’s something called
“my practice,” [it] happens in the margins of other books.
MHM: I have another follow-up question, this time about practice and labor: I’m curious how we might distinguish our work, or the work, from our job. I’m thinking about our readers, many of whom consider themselves cultural workers, who are uniquely positioned to address these questions about challenging conventional ideas of value, labor, and work, while getting their needs met.
Well, what is it to be a cultural worker? The first thing that has to happen is that you have to call yourself a cultural worker. And maybe on the most basic level, if you’re either lucky or delusional and maybe sometimes both, what it is to be a cultural worker is to make your living that way—which is to say, you are either lucky enough to be able to make a living that way, or you were delusional enough to insist on making a living that way, even if you can’t make a living that way. Maybe those are the people who tend to call themselves cultural workers, or even worse, creatives.
There’s something insidious about the term, isn’t there? We tend to think that the term cultural worker emerges by way of a certain kind of exaltation. In fact, I think it emerges by way of a kind of degradation. It’s a function of oppression in many ways and that oppression is a complex operation. Culture is denied and devalued at the same time that it is fetishized and sold. It is raised to a level of abstraction in the guise, or what Clyde Taylor called “the mask of art,” so that those who make it have to somehow gain admission to it. The cultural worker can be seen, in this regard, as a beneficiary of this thieveish and exclusionary largesse. And it’s hard to say these things because all of us tend to feel like it’s better to be a cultural worker than it is to be a soldier or a banker or a lawyer; the status of cultural worker is a kind of refuge and antidote reserved for a special few. But we have to recognize that it turns out that banker and cultural worker are not antithetical to one another. Often, the cultural worker is subordinated to the banker and to the political economic order that the banker is attempting to maintain. So maybe it’s necessary to try to imagine that we can make a distinction between cultural worker and cultural work, or maybe we can make a distinction between cultural worker and working culture that might be useful.
This whole question of the difference between the work and the job, that’s complicated too, because I used to feel pretty good about the possibility of separating the work from the job, and I’d be like, well, the job is this mechanism through which I have to do a whole bunch of shit that I don’t want to do, but it’s also the mechanism through which I can get paid and be able to take care of myself and do things I need to do for my family and so forth while also doing work that I think of, that I was raised to think of, as important.
But a lot of what happened on campuses and in the art world in the past year has made it impossible, I think, to maintain any simple distinction between the work and the job. The work can never be understood again as somehow insulated from the contaminations of the job. So to boil it down to a sentence: Because I don’t know that it’s possible anymore to make this distinction between the work and the job, it makes it all the more important and necessary to try to figure out how better to engage in the practice of that interplay between cultural work and cultural play and to recognize that these are fundamentally collaborative practices, which are deeply concerned with the constant renewal of those questions with which we began: “What the fuck are we doing? How do shit go together?” To be fundamentally concerned with addressing those questions, or to be constantly involved in the working out of those questions, ultimately requires us to be extraordinarily skeptical about what one might call the figure of the cultural worker, and also any given instance of cultural work.
Two of the terms that seem to me to be especially problematic these days are artist and artwork. And this is a particular dilemma for somebody who has been so fundamentally interested for all in that realm of endeavor, under the rubric of the Black arts. To now find myself being really, really skeptical about Black artworks and Black artists is an uncomfortable kind of sensation. And it’s funny, I have to experience that discomfort in a double way. One is in terms of being something like a critic, so to speak, of Black art, and an admirer, so to speak, and even a student of, Black artists. The other is in terms of being unable not to call myself a Black artist.
It’s difficult and disingenuous of me to refuse that status. A simple way to put it would be that I can't keep writing all these poems and keep saying that I’m not a poet. Okay, then well, what the fuck are we doing when we’re writing these poems, when we’re making this music, when we’re listening to this music? What the fuck are we doing? The most important lesson that I learned in addressing that question was from my partner Laura Harris, who offers in her Experiments in Exile1—and I’ve basically been studying and trying to augment this formulation since I first heard her utter it twenty years ago—the distinction between art, Black art, and the aesthetic sociality of Blackness.2 A lot of what I’m interested in right now is how to better understand that what we’re doing is engaged in the aesthetic sociality of Blackness, as opposed, on some level, to the making and the criticism of Black art.
So how is it that the aesthetic sociality of Blackness gets reduced to Black art? How is it that Black art in turn gets reduced to this problematic interplay between Black artists and individual works of Black art? And then what happens when individual works of Black art and Black artists have to go through the horrific process of being processed within an art world that is also always a financial world? That processing is terrible—I mean it to sound like the processing of meat, the processing of food, the processing of these things which are fundamental to our capacity to nourish ourselves.
Ultimately, how are we to understand this horrific process, in which the aesthetic sociality of Blackness is reduced to Black art as it moves in the gauntlet between Black artists and Black artworks, and comes out, at the end of that process, as a financial instrument and, deeper and more frighteningly still, as a securitized intention? Interestingly, this declension corresponds to an earlier one that we have come to understand in the study of the history of slavery: How is it that a socio-aesthetic field of Black communal life gets processed into groups of individualized Black persons that then get processed and abstracted into labor power that can then be further processed into financial instruments and units of moral security and legitimation? That’s what the economic history of slavery shows us. So it’s funny, and it’s horrific, that one process which we associate with the most extreme brutalities of, let’s say, the early nineteenth century in Mississippi, or Barbados, or Brazil, or Martinique, is being played out right now in the galleries of New York and London and Venice and Brazil. The brutalities are in some ways harder to chart now because they’re less obvious and less spectacular in being so much more superficially rewarding. But they’re not less vicious.
NOTES
1. Laura Harris, Experiments in Exile: C.L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
2. Ed. Thinking with Laura Harris, Moten’s conception of the “aesthetic sociality” of Blackness operates on the premise that Black people have developed collective modes of being and expression through, but not solely from, their exclusion from full participation in the dominant social, political, and aesthetic world. These expressions emerge within and against the restraints of racial capitalism, coloniality and the nation-state and, as a result, transgress the frameworks of formal citizenship, state recognition or individualism. Rooted in, yet unconfined by, the histories and memories of West African traditions, the Middle Passage, and resistance to enslavement, these collective expressions manifest in everyday extraordinary performances—from the foods created, the dances popularized, or the games invented (or reinvented). Blackness here is not understood as a racial category, but rather as an “irreducible difference” (Harris 2018). Moten argues that the world or culture of Blackness is distinct from individual art objects made by Black people or the broader idea of “art.” Instead, it reflects a radical reimagining of social life and value, not merely a response to exclusion, but a generative force shaped by Blackness’s position outside political life and the grand narrative of the nation-state, as the “other” against which the political subject is defined.
This article appears in the UN/MAKING issue.