BLACK SEMIOTICS 100216
'.... The commodity whose speech
sounds embodies the critique of value, of private property, of the sign. Such
embodiment is also bound to the (critique of) reading and writing, oft
conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the natural attributes of whoever
would hope to be known as human.
In the meantime, every
approach to Marx’s example must move through the ongoing event that anticipates
it, the real event of the commodity’s speech, itself broken by the irreducible materiality – the broken and
irreducible maternity –of the commodity’s scream.
Imagine a recording
of the (real) example that
anticipates the (impossible)
example; imagine that recording as the graphic
reproduction of a scene of instruction, one always already cut by its own
repression; imagine what cuts and anticipates Marx, remembering that the
object resists, the commodity shrieks,
the audience participates.
Then you can say that Marx is prodigal; that in his
formulations; that in his very formulations regarding Man’s arrival at his
essence, he has yet to come to himself, to come upon himself, to invent himself
anew.
This nonarrival is at least in part an ongoing concealment internal to a project structured by an attunement
to the revealed secret. What remains secret in Marx could be thought as or in
terms of race, or sex or gender, of the differences these terms mark, form and
reify. But we can also say that the unrevealed secret is a recrudescence of an
already existing notion of the private (or more properly, of the proper) that
operates within the constellation of self-possession,
capacity,
subjectivity
and speech.
HE CAN POINT TO BUT NOT BE COMMUNIST.
What does the dispropriative
event have to do with communism?
What’s the revolutionary
force of the sensuality that emerges from the sonic event Marx subjunctively
produces without sensually discovering?
To ask this is to think what’s
at stake in the music: the
universalization or socialization of the
surplus, the generative force of a venerable phonic propulsion, the
ontological and historical priority of resistance to power and objection to
subjection, the old new-thing, the freedom that animates black performances.
This is all meant to begin
some thinking of the possibility that the Marxian formulation of
sociality-in-exchange is grounded in a
notion of the proper that is disrupted
by the essential impropriety of the
( EXCHANGE-) value that precedes exchange.
Part of the project this
drive animates is the improvisation through the opposition of spirit and matter
that is instantiated when the object, the commodity, sounds. Marx’s
counterfactual (“if the commodity could speak it would say…) is broken by a commodity and by the trace
of a subjectivity structure born in
objection that he neither realizes nor anticipates. There is something more
here that alienation and fetishization that works, with regards to Marx, as a
prefigurative critique.
However according to
Ferdinand de Saussure, and in extension to Marx analytic, the value of the sign
is arbitrary, conventional, differential, neither intrinsic nor iconic, not
reducible to but rather only discernible in the reduction of the phonic
substance….'
FRED MOTEN IN THE CUT / IN THE BREAK
IN SEARCH OF THE ANTERIOR EXCHANGE BEYOND MARX AND SAUSSURE.
Labels: anterior exchange, black performance, black semiotics, bruno verner, commodity who speaks, cut, exchange-value, fear of music, fred moten, in the break, marxism, poetry, scream, sound, subjectivity