Dean's Lecture Series: Fred Moten on Plato, Dickinson, and the Philosophical Blues

thank you it is an honor and a pleasure to introduce Professor Fred mton Professor Fred moton will deliver this year's Steiner lecture a scholar and a poet Professor moden is currently professor of performance studies at New York University and he is distinguished professor ameritus at University of California Riverside has also taught at Duke University Brown University and the University of Iowa and I would be remiss not to mention that his poetic work the field Trio from 2014 garnered him to Los Angeles Times book prize and was a finalist for the national book award he was also awarded a mcauthur fellowship popularly known as The Genius Grant forgive me for and I quote creating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of black Aesthetics cultural production and social life much more could be said about his pioneering work and his many titles listed but I'll limit myself to a note of person privilege Professor moton has no idea about this but I met well this he knows of course I met Professor M at Princeton University when I was completing my Graduate Studies and this is what he didn't and doesn't know it was this off-hand remark he made about K K's geography and the technological spatialization of the globe that gave me the idea that I didn't know I needed to complete that heavy assignment I trust that in the talk to follow titled the gorgeous nothings Dickinson Plato and the philosophical Blues others too as I certainly did will find in Professor moden a unique source of intellectual inspiration please join me in welcoming Professor Fred molon um thank you Professor Wilson and uh I want to thank everybody um who's made it possible for me to be here tonight it's just a real pleasure I want to thank um Veronica I don't know if she's here for helping me with the logistics and last night when I was wandering around looking confused Calvin brigh helped me find the pritsker center everybody's just been uh very very friendly and very welcoming um from the initial invitation up to this moment and um and I have to say I've never no one's ever stood up when I walked into a room before so I'm I'm a little freaked out but uh but I I'm gonna try to get over it um I I feel like um you know the respect that all of you have here students and and faculty and Administration staff the respect that you have for thinking um is so palpable um that um that it really literally is something that you feel like you can breathe in um e even at this high altitude and um and and so I'm very very thankful to be here even though I guess I should also say that I'm a little intimidated about being here too um and in fact it's the intimidation that was you know other Beyond Professor Wilson's kind invitation it was the the risk of being intimidated it was the most uh attractive thing um usually when you give a lecture the The General understanding is that you know more about what you're talking about than the people who are in the audience and um in this instance I I have a feeling that the reverse is true um and it's one of the reasons why I think um probably the most ubiquitous Mark um in this uh developing manuscript is a question mark I have a lot of questions which I hope you can not necessarily answer but but help me to address and and I should say that as much as I want to be um absolutely respectful of the Traditions that you um that you that you engage in and honor here I do have one request it's not a demand it's just a request and that is that if anybody has a urge to answer to ask a question or you feel confused abused or annoyed by something that I say don't don't wait till the Q&A um just just blurt it out right now um it'll it'll help right and in fact it is in fact this question of let's say what we might call the um the protocols of study that's a a big part of what I'm interested in trying to talk about um today tonight um it it even it even manifests itself with regard to the whole problem of lecturing in the first place um my I have two two teenage kids who still can't get their minds wrapped around the fact that sometimes people invite me to lectures um they they're so sick of it now um but but I but I'm at the same time that I am let's say given to lecturing that it probably and certainly they would say that it is my primary mode of of interaction I'm also very very reticent about lecturing particularly in so far as it feels like it's a betrayal of the sense of pedagogical responsibility that I that I definitely want to take up um it's this complicated thing right how do you if you know something is true and you know something is good you just want to tell somebody right you just you just want to share it you don't really just want to share it you want to impose it um and yet if most of what you think of under the rubric of good has to do with the refusal of imposition at any kind it produces a conundrum that is just about impossible to to work oneself out of um and often this conundrum manifests itself as a particular problem regarding the distinction between seeming to be good and actually being good um people nowadays in in certain political circles talk about this under the rubric of performativity um or virtue signaling and some of what I guess I want to talk about a little bit today is the problem of political and philosophical performativity and virtue signaling as it manifests itself in this great and exasperating dialogue by Plato um called gorgeous and and that's one of the things I get guess I'm a little um I tried to take Greek in uh in college I knew I should I knew I needed it I knew it would be good for me but and it was good for me um for that one day did I that I uh that I lasted in the Intensive summer Greek Workshop but um so I don't know that uh but I I I I just you know it was like uh I just got knocked out you know I tried to get up but I just I just couldn't make it by the count of 10 um so I don't even know if I'm pronouncing these words right I don't know if anybody knows the right pronunciation um but a lot of what it is that I want to say today is predicated on the idea that that um go r g i a s is um sounds pretty much like g o r g EO U okay so all right um so in my description and I'll repeat it now I'm hoping that we can conduct what I guess I'm calling a kind of parah philological thought experiment in which we look for traces of gor Gus um the the ancient Greek philosopher or sophist depending on how you look at it um in which we look for traces of of a lost work of his um called on nature or the non-existent in the folds of Emily Dickinson's envelopes perhaps our findings will provide some occasion to celebrate and cultivate the mystical poetical and sophistical field that causes philosophy but which also causes so much trouble for philosophy it even I guess I would want to say gives philosophy the blues um it's it's it causes a certain depression for philosophy um it turns out that this Blues has something to do with with resolution or the desire for it and determination or the desire for that and these can be considered both musically and philosophically and this is something that shows up and and operates not just in the dialogue um called gorgeous but also in fadis as well um where Socrates um in in in in in in in in in a in a in a moment that is replicated relatively frequently throughout the dialogues declares his love for what um he calls or at least what is translated as divisions and collections um and I would even argue that he's also implicitly declaring his love for sublation as well and I'm interested in what Dickinson might be said to hold against that love um and let's say that part of what it is that she holds against it is dissonance and and irresolution and indetermination or indeterminacy for Dickinson poetry was inextricable from correspondence and from a kind of regular practice of writing that got all the way down to the materiality of the paper itself Dickens Dickinson's critics over the course especially of the last I would say 40 years particularly in the wake of one extraordinarily pathbreaking and faithful critic of hers who's also a great Poet by the name of Susan how Dickinson's work has as you know let's say increasingly been the subject of a kind of salvage or rescue operation in which not only is her Persona as an artist rescued from some of the orthodoxies of of normative Dickenson criticism and let's say that those orthodoxies began in the work of an interlocutor of hers uh who in some ways was a kind of uh introduction to something like a a literary world at least for a Bruth moment the the writer and ab iist Thomas Wentworth higginson um that one of the common places of of this sort of Orthodox Dickinson criticism is that it was the job of Dickinson's critics to correct her okay not only to correct her idiosyncrasies as a writer but also to correct idiosyncrasies in her text and those idiosyncrasies were often just seen as mistakes or random marks um just or just you know the the the Hallmarks of a figure who for whatever reason did not seem to be concerned with a normative sense of of what constitutes publication and in this respect what people did was that they took those elements of the text that might indicate its unfinishedness and simply eliminated them from the text in order to produce an illusion of finnishness an illusion of resolution okay um in this respect Dickinson's work was sort of disqualified from the intensity of its own sort of historical um radicalness right so that one way to think about Dickinson is that she's an early precursor of the kind of work that by the 1950s was being valorized uh in in the in the work of poets like well first HD but also Ezra pound William Char Williams Robert Duncan Charles Olen um and and it is in Olsen's work and Duncan's work in particular that this that this new Poetics kind of took on a name and the name was a open field Poetics okay so Dickinson is seen usually as somebody who is not you know let's say a part of that tradition instead she's often replaced within that literary tradition or that sense of the literary tradition by Whitman right it's not that Whitman doesn't have a place in it it's just that Dickinson has a place in it too and it was the work of Susan how especially which began to try to do the remedial work of allowing Dickinson to have that place okay now the thing is is um Dickinson's strangeness her weirdness seems to me to be so profound that even it has to be rescued from the people who are attempting to rescue it right like it's even way more out than than people want to say um and and I think and there's a second wave of critics in the in the wake of how who have begun to do that work um there's a couple in particular that I'm interested in and that I'll quote tonight one named Jan bvin the other named Marta Werner and it's interesting that these are folks who are you know they certainly have deep deep literary critical sensibilities and sensitivities but they are also um also folks who are in some ways primarily trained in in visual art which is to say that when they look at Dickinson's work they really look at the work as if it should be looked at rather than immediately read right right it's not that reading is a bad thing or a or a debilitating thing but there is a moment in which it is useful to be reminded that before you can read something you have to look at it and not only that that before you that in the relay between looking at it and reading it other possibilities of looking emerge for instance the possibility of something like looking with rather than simply looking at which then means that the poem even as a kind of visual object begins to Veer away and deviate from its status as object and that veering away from from object hood is something that that I'll hopefully I'll try to get to um I mean I'm going to get to it I'm just uh yeah it's always just horrible thing you kind of think man do I have enough do I have enough to take up an hour it's like yes I do I wasn't sure but oh God anyway okay um but that doesn't mean y'all shouldn't interrupt so when I say that so so I'll repeat myself for Dickinson poetry was an extricable from correspondence she it wasn't just that she folded lots of poems into letters it was that I think she was constantly trying to undermine the distinction between poetry and letter and this is a way in which I think it's not to say that Dickinson was unconcerned with publishing she was concerned with a whole other idea of publishing right she was constantly I think making her work public but that but it was a public that was determined by these profound modalities of intimacy right and um and because she was inria bound to correspondence and because she was also what I one would call her a regular writer she was a daily writer I even would want to say that she was a diaristic writer right um in a way that maybe sometimes we would associated with the Poetry of another great mid century mid- 20th century figure of experimental po American Poetry Frank O'Hara who was constantly writing what he called his I do this I do that poems right he had a book called I don't know if anybody likes he had a great book called lunch poems which are just poems he wrote at lunch you know as he was wandering the streets of New York engaged in various forms of really interesting either aesthetic or sexual activities um the these I do this I do that poems were could be conceived of as a kind of record not only of what was happening to him and with him but also a record of his thinking a work a record of what he was experiencing a record of what he was seeing okay and also hearing so that for instance even if you don't know Hara you might know probably his most famous most anthologized poem which is called the day lady died it's about the day that he found out that Billy Holiday died in 1959 and again it's a perfect example of this I do this I do that okay um and and I want to say something about again the place and the force of indeterminacy and irresolution in I do this I do that okay actually I'll digress again for for my digression like y'all probably all seen The Godfather right so remember that scene where uh it's Christmas and Don coron has just been shot and the only one who doesn't know about it is my only one in the family doesn't know about it is Michael right and and they're coming out of uh Radio City Music Hall they just saw the Bell what is it the bells of St Mary's and and Kay is asking him if he likes her better than ingred Bergman you know or something and then she walks past the news stand and the camera stops which had been tracking them I think stops and then we see her go back to the news stand cuz what she had seen out of the corner of her eye was a late edition of a New York paper saying Don V Corleone had been shot right so part of what's at stake is this whole is what it is that we can see out of the corner of our eyes Okay um this this I'll again I'll I'll try to get back to that let's say it's a it's got something to do with Corners um Dickinson was into paper cuz paper was special and to a certain extent scarce and she was raised with like really intense New England habits of thrift and so she wrote on everything on all kinds of things she didn't just write she didn't just send letters in in envelopes in which she thought that the envelope was a mere container the container itself often contained or had writing right and what was interesting is that the writing was kind of shaped and constrained by the shape of the envelope right so envelopes are broken up in into Corners right or into triangles and she would write on those triangles and and she was a little bit random it seems like when it came to kind of she didn't have a particular system as to how one would get from one triangle to another and then sometimes she'd insert a third triangle into these two triangles right so again the very materiality of the paper itself was was crucial and see what I want to do is I want to try to make an analogy between the material conditions and material sort of resources that were available and that were being you know used by Dickinson for her writing and the material social but also speech conditions of philosophical inquiry or study as it was you know done you know in in in I guess fifth century BC Athens she explored the folds of envelopes as if constraints of size and shape were openings onto infinite scope did she insert poems in letters or build letters up around the poems in order more effectively to oscillate between cryptography and cryptology all the right where the letter is sometimes people read the letters as if they are a key to the meaning of the PO poems but then sometimes it feels like the poems are a key to the meaning of the letters right what came first right did she insert poems into letters or did she build up letters around the poems all this surreptitious messaging is like a kind of tradecraft do y'all all know that word it's like a it's a word spies use right if you ever watch like MI5 or you know those uh Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy they use the term tradecraft to talk about how they do their spy work okay and I want to suggest that that tradecraft is potentially a useful word to consider how it is that she was constantly delivering all these surreptitious messages we should consider if tradecraft might be adequate as well for all that moves in what turns out to be a really tight all but immeasurably small relay between the love in the assertion of wisdom right sophist a sophist is a wise person right matter of fact what the history of philosophy is constantly teaching us is that a sophist is actually a wise ass right which brings a story to mind um the great philosopher maybe maybe the greatest living philosopher Judith Butler who's often not included by professional philosophers within the Brotherhood and it is distinctly a Brotherhood of philosophy right one time she came to NYU to give a talk and I you know people get nervous you don't think people get nervous but they do and she was nervous about the talk or I should say now I think they were nervous about the talking and at the end of it I think they were kind of Happy to go to dinner and have a couple of glasses of wine um but maybe maybe they drank the wine a little too fast you know and uh I Pro okay but this is I signed a release I know this is being recorded but it's not going to be it's not going to be on YouTube or anything but uh but the the uh so the assistant provos NYU who was a kind of big Theory head you know he he had come to the talk and then to the dinner and I don't know what happened I don't know why but he said something she the butler just didn't like and she said they said you're a sophist she said it with like extreme contempt right like like like it was the lowest possible thing that you could be okay and um it's funny because the reason why I think of it is because I believed it part of what she would say or they would say if you excuse me I'm part of what they would say if you if you asked would be he was being a smartass he was being annoying he was playing fast and loose right with these very specific and very particular and and honorable ways that we have developed over the course of thousands of years to try to discover the true and the good and there was nothing more contemptuous uh for her for them than that okay um a philosopher is a lover of wisdom right and again the history of philosophy has been I think pretty adamant about this distinction between the wise ass and the lover of wisdom all right and it has only really been in the last maybe 30 or 40 years in the work of people like Joshua Billings and before them GB kerfeld and Barbara cassan that people have begun to reconsider the moralistic division that emerges in philosophy between the love of wisdom and the desire to be a smart ass the desire to seem smart right okay and um and so it is within the framework of that reconsideration that I want to get back to trying to think about gorgeous um in his relation to what it is that uh well okay so we have to consider the itinerant all but stateless figures who are constrained as gorgeous and Socrates are sometimes by by or as if or as if by one another either to be or to seem to be concerned with how it is that they might advise the city the Polish regarding right and wrong if you look at the dialogue gorgeous which I'm assuming that many of you have or if not all have you you have okay that's that's that's so cool you you told me it would be cool and it is cool you know so now it's funny right cuz now I know that you've read it and of course all it makes me want to do is want to like do a plot summary but why you already know it but I will anyway right but you but remember right cuz like there's weird stuff that happens in this dialogue um it's like some it's like some man thing they were having you know like again like you know it's it's hard not to to see or hear or feel the contempt that Socrates has for gorgeus right he's like this guy's a wise smart he's not really serious you know I don't like this guy really you know and he here he is he's in my city you know and I'm gonna Jack Jack him up you know he's like so he he he says look you know that stuff that you do it's not really it's rhetoric you know it's it's rhetoric and and rhetoric is separate from philosophy right and part of what's at stake is the thing about philosophy what in Nobles philosophy what makes it important what makes it worthwhile is that if you engage in it in a proper way it gives you some things that you can say to be helpful for the establishment of the state and for the state's own movement in the direction towards the true and the good and you can't do that doing the kind of stuff that you do you just want to persuade people of positions that you don't particularly think are true you're just interested in the mechanisms of persuasion right and you probably just want to do it for some money right and we're serious here right and you're just you're just a sellout you're like you're selling out thinking right and what's funny about it is that like gorgeous is like okay man I just I just wanted to come hang out and talk you know you seem really upset um you know you're you're like cross-examining me and I brought my friends and and and you you don't really seem to be all that interested in anything that we have to say and you're brow beating us with these questions you know um but you know what man go ahead you clearly you got something on your mind and you need to get this you need to you need to get this out of your system and um and and so Socrates proceeds to interestingly present himself as if he were incapable of fully adhering to those honorable Protocols of thinking that for which he is a philosophical Touchstone if for whatever reason in this dialogue he just can't can't seem to present himself as the one who is ignorant and who doesn't know he is the one who knows and he can't help but tell what he knows and it takes the form of this brutal oscillation between a kind of what what at one point uh uh calicles calls you know a a a a a mob rhetoric right you know an orator of the mob and for the mob and then other times and this is what you know gorgeous calls him sort of towards the the the the end of the dialogue he just says you're just a pro you're just a prosecutor and and for prosecutor you can sort of read persecutor you're just brow beating us and at one point gor says and this is the last thing that gor say he just disappears gor just disappears from the dialogue right the last thing he says is just let him finish right just let him finish and in the last I don't know 15 20 Pages or so of the of the dialogue is a monologue it's Plato or excuse me Socrates just going off right and it's annoying okay and the reason that it's annoying is because you because I think sometimes I think I agree with him okay but I'll get back to that part later okay the point is is that philosophical tradecraft has something to do with political capacity it has something to do with the imposition of policy why is it that those who are so concerned with the difference between mere appearance and that which is the case are so committed to the Shady nuances of the secret which thoughtful speech simultaneously holds and withholds and again there's this moment of extreme rhetorical trickiness that Socrates devolves into I I'm sure he must have been ashamed of himself he says to Cal look you're kind of just like me you you there's two things really that you love right you love the deos and then you love this guy named deos right just like me I love alabes and then I love philosophy and thing is Your Love of the deos will make you say anything right Your Love of the deos is structured in such a way that if the deos says something that you disagree with you'll say I dis I you'll say you're right I agree with you deos right I agree with the people okay right that's that's how you know my love is for philosophy okay and I can only say what philosophy tells me to say right that's a dirty trick that's a dirty argumentative trick right my very desire is struct Ed in such a way as that it only will allow me to proceed in the direction of the true and the good right whereas your desire is structured in such a way that it will just lead you to the Rabel and not only will it lead you to the Rabel it will lead you to the changing of the Rabel when the Rabel changes its mind you'll change your mind okay when when and and what it means is you you won't arrive at a proper definition right that all the work of division and collection that separates the dialectic from rhetoric you won't do that work you can't do that work okay which is to say and therefore you are incapable of the proper modality of sublation that will allow you to achieve right you know what what ultimately Hegel says we're supposed to achieve this beautiful melding you know of self-consciousness in the state and and it's it's unfair right it feels bad to Sak SES had to betray himself in this way just to make an argument for the true and the good I don't think that Socrates wanted to be a state philosopher but at this moment he becomes one okay and um and again he does so by way of a of a dirty rhetorical trick okay um what I want to do is I'm interested in Dickinson as a kind of potential foil because I don't think Dickinson is all that interested in what one might call the Shady nuances of the secret she's interested in this constant opening and indetermination of the secret right it's interesting there's potentially a kind of mystical content manifests it that manifests itself in Poetic practice which Bears a secret and which might even be said to tell a secret but which doesn't determine the secret the secret remains open okay um anyway this critic who I mentioned Jan bvin writes the gorgeous nothings and that's with the E is an excerpt from Emily Dickinson's manuscript a821 in choosing it as the title for this project and there's a book called The Gorgeous nothings which is collect some of Emily dickson's what they call her envelope poems okay in choosing it as the title for this project I was thinking of dickson's own definition for nothing in a letter and here's Dickinson and it's it's one of her what one might call scann letters a letter that partially breaks out into something that we would recognize as verse by homely gifts and hindered words the human heart is told of nothing nothing is the the force that renovates the world and her definition for no is the wildest word we consign to language these gorgeous nothings are that kind of nothing bvin writes and she says that the manuscripts and the the the the envelopes are usually referred to as scraps within deaconson scholarship well what I'm concerned with here tonight is scraps and what has been confined to scraps including this famous but not quite findable text right by gorgeous called on nature or the non-existent okay not just Dickinson's but also gorgeous as nothing is the force that renovates the world and what if it is also the force that innovates the world or what if renovation implies a tear down so complete that world will have no longer been possible this is a fearsome enough project to have freaked out Philosophy for 2 200 years philosophy has to be concerned with something with some things in fact in their constant Division and collection and that dialectical motion is supposed to keep us on the path to truth and to the good scraps are problematic in their incompleteness they are insufficient both as object objects and as enablers of seeing though poets remain deeply concerned with the way Revelation can still be held or held out by inadequate emanations of the sun I think gorgeous had a similar concern he decided to face up to how it is that obscurity might make or light away even while fully acknowledging the possibility of being misled now there's another little line from that man manuscript a821 where Dickinson writes afternoon and the west and the gorgeous nothings which I compose the sunset I keep and I'm thinking gorgeous nothings which I compose the sunset I keep and I'm thinking I was thinking where what is gorgeous nothings mean there and then I just the other day I was trying to figure out what I'm going to teach next year and came across this poem by Paul Salon called thread Sons thread Sons above the gray black wastes a tree High thought grasps the light tone there are still songs to sing Beyond mankind so now Thread songs I think that Dickinson's gorgeous nothings are kind of like are kind of like uh Salon thread sons and what does he mean I think what he means is those those threads of sunlight right that occur as a function of obscurity as a function maybe of cloud cover or of a window shade you know what I'm talking about the the little the sun patches that your cat might might get into right okay um what what is this what does partial illumination make possible for us okay what is it to know right and emphatically to know in the absence of any illusion of complete knowledge and what might philosophy have to do with that it's it's something that poets are always concerned with and and they seem relatively unashamed with trying to work through and think through this obscurity there's another poem that it reminded me of and I'll only read the first stanza I think it's my favorite actual poem um okay and see part of what I'm getting ready to try to say is is it's my favorite poem but what I'm also trying to say is is what I'm also doing by thinking about Dickinson in relation to gorgeous in relation to salon and now in relation to John Dunn is that there's probably no such thing as an individual poem right it's my favorite poem because it seems so emphatically to convince me that there's no such thing that there's nothing like that right it's gorgeous in that nothingness it's a called a nocturnal upon St Lucy's day it is the year's midnight and it is the days Lucy who scares seven hours herself unmasks the sun is spent and now his flasks send forth light squibs no constant rise the world's whole sap is sunk the general bomb the hydroptic Earth hath drunk with as to the bed's feet life is shrunk dead and interred yet all these seem to laugh compared with me who am their Epitaph this is amazing extraordinary poem which is a kind of OD to nothing and it manifests itself almost as a kind of attempt to calculate right you know how I mean y'all know I don't really know but you know how in so far as it's possible to conceptualize one Infinity that would be bigger than another Infinity right what dun is doing is attempting to conceptualize one nothing that would be less than other nothings right okay and the nothing that is the quintessence of nothing is him in the wake of the loss of his wife right okay but but what I'm interested in is these light squibs no constant rays right it's this inconstancy of light the Brokenness of light the incompleteness of light that becomes an illuminative experience for him right it's you you anyway you see so so I'm thinking that thread Suns and light squibs and gorgeous nothings are all bound up with one another okay now a slight detour um I actually wrote this out so I guess I'll read it or at least I'll try this will be the part where you'll somebody will have to say what what what you certain things and what I mean is how things fall or fold or Decay into a kind of sonol luminescent breakdown or dissonant confusion in which the last word or the last note or the unique name or the final Declaration of unique namelessness disappears those kinds of things become clear in Translation which in so far as it includes m transations is more precisely referred to as a translational field or feel let me repeat in a different way and more emphatically something implicit in what I just said philosophy includes mistakes science includes mistakes we can get at this by way of the English translation of a book by um by French philosopher named jacqu ronier um and his phrase that is the the subtitle of this book I'm thinking about the phrase I'm thinking about and please excuse my horrible frenches partage right that was bad that was really bad um partage right which is a cool word because you know if you're you know if you speak English you feel like you got it right um in part or apartness a parting right okay but now the people who translated the phrase they translated it as distributions of the sensible or distribution of the sensible and distribution is is a mistake but it's an illuminative mistake it's a thread sun it's a light squib right partage is probably better translated maybe more accurately let's say as as as sharing right and sharing is cool because sharing means both something that we could do together or partake of together but it also implies differentiation or cutting up right too okay and it and it there's both of those both of those meanings are there and they can't be they can't be they can't be disappeared okay um how far does partage shift from sharing when it is rendered is distribution consider this problematic of sharing consider then that if metaphysics is concerned with the distribution of things in the world or let's well I didn't say that I was gonna I'm I'm I'm trying to keep from sometimes I make up words and then I have to explain them so there's a word the word I'm think the word I wrote is anim materiality okay so Mater seriality right y'all okay anima right breath Soul okay so I'm so part of what I'm interesting is the notion of the idea of a kind of animated materiality um it's probably aligned with certain things that people think of like like maybe Jane Bennett interesting political theorist who writes about vibrant things or you know um it's it's it's it's it's meant to to allow you to consider how it is that things which one might thought one might have thought of either as in adamant or as soulless have some breath some quickening some life and for those of us who study you know black history and the black tradition you you would probably be able to easily understand why this would be a thing that we might be concerned with right to to show or to prove that things which have been considered lifeless or soulless are not that way okay but it extends beyond that project to a more General I would even say ecological project okay and right so the question is you know what what that translation does is it says anim materiality can be distributed it can be accounted it it can be separated right and subdivided and and placed within a kind of calculus that depends upon you know the simplest sort of conception of the number line there can be a thing and then another thing and then another thing and that this is the way that anim materiality shows up in the world this is how it is distributed one thing at a time one by one by one by one endlessly okay so it's involved in what I would call or what could be called a metaphysics of individuation okay partage does not quite move in that implication it seems to suggest that there can be difference without separation okay to use a phrase that a a great scholar named Denise the Silva likes to use okay and what I'm interested in okay is so when I kept saying Yeah there's no I I know I this is my favorite poem but it's not a poem it's not separable as an individual entity I know it because every time because when I was reading Paul salon and when I was reading Emily Dickinson I was also reading John dun then too you see what I'm saying right this thing this poem that seems to be in this letter that Emily Dickinson wrote it's not really a poem and the letter is not really a letter they're Inseparable from one another they're entangled with one another right there's some spooky action at a distance that seems to be linking Paul salon and John Dunn and and there's a whole bunch of other people up in that party too right that that I don't have time to to talk about um and we're all there too okay physics specifically and particularly quantum mechanics gives us some ways that we might be able to to conceptualize or to think this phenomen phenon okay but but the kinds of but the notion of the distribution of the sensible as opposed to the sharing of the sensible that notion is embedded in a kind of classical mechanics and a kind of classical ethics right that I think Socrates is deeply embedded in the process of attempting to establish in gorgeous and what gorgeous is attempting to do is to say wait a minute the reason why I'm saying why I'm talking about nature or the non-existent the reason why I have to make a make make kind of an appeal or a plea to this really scary idea of the non-existent is because my consideration is at existence and non-existence and for that matter being and nonbeing are what one might call distributive philosophical terms the very IDE idea the Assumption of individuation is embedded in those terms okay and and and what gorgeous seems to be aware of right the gorgeousness of his nothings is all bound up with let's say a tendency towards confusion a tendency towards irresolution a tendency towards indetermination which for Socrates right is tantamount to mob rule to tyranny okay to or at least you know it lends itself it moves in those directions okay it's one way to think about it is that it is this old political philosophical prejudice against indeterminacy that imagines that indeterminacy necessarily leads to chaos which then necessarily leads to tyranny okay so that's why Socrates is so upset he's serious he thinks it's really bad okay and he wants to guard against it he thinks that the force and place of rhetoric and philosophy leads towards these indetermination it's not just that rhetoric can persuade people to do bad things right it's that rhetoric can persuade people that the hard and fast distinction between the good and the bad right is something that it lives and works and operates outside of any any capacity that we have to determine and then there's part of me that one way to think he thinks you know it's kind of like if you ever get a chance a great book that was totally important for my intellectual formation it's a book um well a couple of books that Noom chsky wrote in the mid-60s one called at war with Asia and the other called for reasons of state and it's this moment where he's sort of combining his philosophical and linguistic meditations with his political formulations and he has a particularly vicious critique of BF Skinner and behaviorism and his critique takes the form of an emphatic plea for Human Nature like thing about BF Skinner is he thinks human beings are infinitely malleable and they can be made to do anything and what we should do is respect the fact that there is a kind of human nature that ought not be violated and human nature in shamsky's estimation is connected to the ways that he thinks about truth and the ways that he thinks about the good and and you know it's a it's an argument for which I have like tremendous sympathy okay but the part that trips me up is when well one way to think about it is he is also concerned all throughout his work as a linguist and as a political commentator with the distinction between what seems and what is right between mere appearance and actual being okay between seeming to be good and actually being good and you know what he has to do he makes a case for what is he makes a case for being he makes a case for the being of the good Socrates does this too the trouble is is that when Socrates makes a case for the being of the good he uses rhetorical means to to do it right and not just any rhetorical means but again tricky nasty rhetorical means right tricky rhetoric he becomes a boore he hollers at people he won't let other people talk he cross-examines because he just knows he's right and he knows that what he's right about is good for everybody okay and it allows it require you this a trou can you can you believe in the good can you believe in what is without making a case for what is okay right can you believe in that which is the case without making a case for it what I think gorgeous does and what I'm inclined to follow is that he makes a plea for what is not okay which is to say he makes a plea for a notion of the anim material that isn't subdivided into individual units and he's willing to accept the confusion and the constant differentiation and the constant indeterminacy that goes with that another way to think about it is he's interested in the people rather than in the state he's interested in the people in all their confusing their weirdness their strangeness their won't do right right he will protect the people right against the grain of the state okay now what I'm trying to say finally is that Dickinson's poetry similarly to Dun similarly to to to Salah also makes a plea for indeterminacy okay and what it does I think is it does it in this way is it says what if there's something on the other side of the opposition between what seems and what is what if the good isn't distributed and therefore diluted by the opposition between appearance and actuality what if the good is something that shows up for us every day constantly as a problematic of our practice right I mean we could think about it with regard to current events right we could say let's say if you if you believe in if you have a commitment okay remember there was a a statement that was made written and then published in art Forum expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people a couple of weeks ago and then of course the person the guy from art forum who was the editor who published it was fired and then what immediately happens what was that statement for why did people why were people so committed to signing it I signed it I didn't want to sign it the reason I didn't want to sign it was not because it didn't mention Hamas and its Massacre the reason I didn't want to sign it is because I didn't want to sign a statement I'm tired of statements I've been signing statements and writing and signning petitions for 40 years and and they don't work right why why do people want to sign statements make again I think what Socrates might say is people have a kind of inability to distinguish between seeming good and being good right see what I mean I have sympathy with socrates's position okay but I also know that Socrates position can be mobilized in the interest of a moralism that is utterly and completely not just select But ultimately a moralism that doesn't just it's not that it lends itself to this or that state but it lends itself to the constant defense of the very idea of the nation state and we've seen how that moralism has been mobilized over the last two weeks too so here's my point what if we decided that what we wanted to do right was not express our solidarity with anti-colonial struggle but actually engage in anti-colonial struggle right let's practice it and we need to practice it because we're not very good at it right it has to become our practice but we have to practice our practice because we don't do it very well yet we probably don't even really know how to do it we're probably going to make a lot of mistakes they going to be a lot of failed experiments right but on the other side of this conflict between seeing and being good right we could just try to do some [ __ ] basically right okay so for me what Dickinson's practice is is again this constant practice of trying right and failing okay constant embeddedness in an ongoing experiment okay and and and that for me is all bound up with and is an actual expression of the gorgeousness of nothing the gorgeousness that acrs not to the attempt to delineate the good to Define it right but to practice it and to recognize that our practice of the good will always be imperfect okay um okay there's a lot of stuff I skipped and I like I said I was scared I didn't have enough but I guess I had more than enough and I don't know I should there's good stuff in here too but oh well I guess I'll um I guess there's nothing left for me to do except say thank you very much for for standing up for me and for your kind attention thank you but you don't have I'm assuming y'all are kind enough to stand up for everybody so I know it's not just me so thank you