The Universal Machine

313 Pages·2018·14.74 MB·English

by  Fred Moten

The Universal Machine
This page intentionally left blank
consent not to be a single being
The
Universal
Machine
FRED MOTEN
duke university press durham and london 2018
© 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of
Amer ic a on acid- free paper ∞
Designed by Amy Buchanan
Typeset in Miller by Westchester
Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-
Publication Data
Names: Moten, Fred, author.
Title: The universal machine / Fred Moten.
Description: Durham : Duke University
Press, 2018. | Series: Consent not to be a
single being ; [v. 3]
Identifiers: lccn 2017036792 (print) |
lccn 2017056619 (ebook)
isbn 9780822371977 (ebook)
isbn 9780822370468 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822370550 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Black race— Philosophy. |
Blacks— Race identity— Philosophy. |
Philosophy, Black. | Racism— Philosophy.
Classification: lcc ht1581 (ebook) |
lcc ht1581 .m6846 2018 (print) |
ddc 305.89601—d c23
lc rec ord available at https:// lccn
. loc.g ov/ 2017036792
Cover art: Thornton Dial, Monument to
the Minds of the Little Negro Steelworkers,
2001–3. Steel, wood, wire, twine, artificial
flowers, ax blade, glass bottles, animal
bones, cloth, tin cans, paint-can lids, and
enamel; 38 x 76 x 46 inches. © 2018 Estate
of Thornton Dial / Artists Rights Society
(ars), New York.
CONTENTS
Acknowl edgments / vii
Preface / ix
1. There Is No Racism Intended / 1
2. Refuge, Refuse, Refrain / 65
3. Chromatic Saturation / 140
Notes / 247
Works Cited / 271
Index / 281
This page intentionally left blank
ACKNOWL EDGMENTS
Earlier iterations of some of the writing collected here appeared in the jour-
nals African Identities, Criticism, and South Atlantic Quarterly as well as in
the following books: The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Stud-
ies, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (Oxford University Press);
Hannah Arendt zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Ulrich Baer and Amir Eshel
(Wallstein Verlag); and Fanon postcoloniale: I dannati della terra oggi (Ombre
Corte).
This page intentionally left blank
PREFACE
The Universal Machine is a monograph discomposed. Riding the blinds gone
way off the rails. Though a certain movement might be discerned from object
to thing to no- thingness, in general, and in the generative absence of a teleo-
logical princi ple, what you have here is a swarm. I hope it’s also a party cum
polygraph, establishing truth by feel(ing) despite juridical and philosophical
inadmissibility. The swarm has no standing, trou bles understanding’s proper
subjects and objects, even when both are radically misunderstood as things.
It is not so much antithetical to the rich set of variations of phenomenologi-
cal regard; rather, it is phenomenology’s exhaust and exhaustion. On the one
hand, phenomenology’s comportment toward the thing itself (as given in
experience, as consciousness) is deformed by an insufficient attention to the
thing itself; on the other hand, phenomenology’s assumption of thingly indi-
viduation renders no-t hingness unavailable and unavowable. What remains
of phenomenology in this fallenness and being-t hrown? The social life of
no- things bumps and thuds and grunts in plain song. When phenomenol-
ogy is exhausted, no- thing insists on social life. Frantz Fanon’s adherence to
phenomenology’s possibilities is given as a kind of manifesto for sociogeny
expressing disbelief in social life, wherein the new discipline he invokes and
practices takes the form of an autopsy report. It is pathontology (as opposed
to paraontology— W. E. B. Du Bois had already discovered the necessity of an
improvisation [a movement; a dehiscence; a quickening] of ontology for the
study of social life, as Nahum Chandler teaches us) and therefore relatively
unattuned to (what) remains, the exhausted, its marked breath and black
lung.1 High lonesomeness is both an effect of and a remedy for coal dust,
which is moved ground. Edmund Husserl, too, is phenomenology’s exhaust,
as are Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Fanon, among others. This
is to say that phenomenology’s spirit, its song, its animation, its aspiration is
its exhaust, the thing that it expels, that it abjures, as disor ga nized, as an an-
archic princi ple of disorg a niz a tion or constant reor ga ni za tion, the enformal,