They know its not love.

"To distance oneself professionally through critique, is this not the most active consent to privatize the social individual? The Undercommons might by contrast be understood as wary of critique, wary of it and at the same time dedicated to the collectivity of its future, the collectivity that may come to be its future. The Undercommons try to escape from critique and its degradation as university-conscious and self -consciousness about university consciousness, as Adrian Piper say, into the external world. [ ] The sovereign army of academic antihumanism will pursue this negative community, seeking to conscript it, needing to conscript it. But as seductive as this critique may be, in the Undercommons they know it is not love.

Between the fiat of the ends and the ethics of new beginnings, the Undercommons abide, and some find comfort in this. Comfort for the emigrants from conscription, not to be ready for humanity and who must endure the return of humanity nonetheless, as it may be endured by those who will or must endure it, as certainly those of the Undercommons endure it, always in the break, always the supplement of the general intellect and its source. When the critical academic who lives by fiat (of others) gets no answer, no commitment from the Undercommons, will then certainly the conclusion will come: they are not practical, not serious about change, not rigorous, not productive."

FRED MOTEN, THE UNDERCOMMONS: FUGITIVE PLANNING & BLACK STUDY

On life and death, blackness and nothingness

Not just the absence, the refusal of a standpoint.
Existence without standing from no standpoint.


What is it to think without a standing point.

"This is to say that what I do assert, not against, I think, but certainly in apposition to Afro pessimism, as it is, at least at one point, distilled in Sexton’s work, is not what he calls one of that project’s most polemical dimensions, “namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death” (Sexton 2011b: 28). 

What I assert is this: that black life—which is as surely to say life as black thought is to say —is irreducibly social; that,
moreover, black life is lived in political death or that it is lived, if you will, in the burial ground of the subject by those who, insofar as they are not subjects, are also not, in the interminable (as opposed to the last) analysis,“death-bound,” as Abdul JanMohamed (2005) would say."

Not just the absence, the refusal of a standpoint.
Existence without standing from no standpoint.

What is it to think without a standing point.

FRED MOTEN - in BLACKNESS AND NOTHINGNESS

TO AFFIRM IN THE INTEREST OF NEGATION WHAT NOTHING IS.

HE CAN POINT TO BUT NOT BE COMMUNIST or BLACK SEMIOTICS 100216

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.

Black Semiotics N452

THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE 
IN THE PRESENT 
IS BOUND UP 
WITH WHAT IS GIVEN 
IN SOMETHING MARX 
COULD ONLY SUBJUNTIVELY IMAGINE: 
THE COMMODITY WHO SPEAKS.

(the uncut cut in the break of Fred Moten's musico-thinking-sexual-knowledge of meaning)

IF COMMODITIES COULD SPEAK 
THEY WOULD SAY THIS:
OUR USE-VALUE MAY INTEREST MEN
BUT IT DOES NOT BELONG TO US 
AS OBJECTS.
WHAT DOES BELONG TO US AS OBJECTS, HOWEVER, IS OUR VALUE
OUR OWN INTERCOURSE AS COMMODITIES 
PROVES IT.

(the Capital cut)