Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, and Michael Sawyer: "On Fugitive Aesthetics"

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] hey [Music] me [Music] me [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] welcome everybody um i'll say a few words of introduction and then we can dive right into today's conversation so first i would like to thank and introduce our speakers today and just let them know what an honor it is for them taking the time to come together in conversation with all of us so to begin stefano harney is an independent scholar and an honorary professor in the institute of gender race sexuality and social justice he is the author of state work public administration and mass intellectuality published in 2002 along with numerous articles that traverse a range of topics addressing the ideology of meritocracy in singapore algorithms and logistics and one of my personal favorites an essay on the russian anarchists krapotkin and rudy giuliani in the wake of 9 11. he is also the author of numerous or is one of the authors of numerous collective collaborative projects essays and books including the undercommons fugitive planning and black study co-written with fred moten and published in 2013 and their forthcoming work all incomplete that hopefully we can get a feel for today he is joining us from brasilia brazil fred moton is professor in the english in the department of performance studies at the tisch school in new york university in 2020 he was named a macarthur fellow for to quote their website creating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of black aesthetics cultural production and social life end quote in 2017 and 2018 he published the trilogy consent not to be a single being that up ends generates from within and moves beyond western categories of philosophy aesthetics and social life by reflecting on black experience before that he published in the break the aesthetics of the black radical tradition among numerous volumes of poetry collaborations and ongoing conversations including the one today that with stefan o'harney and michael sawyer we are privileged to be a part of fred is joining us from new york city michael sawyer is currently an assistant professor of race ethnicity and migration studies and the english department at colorado college he was recently appointed associate professor of african american literature and critical and cultural studies studies at the university of pittsburgh and will be joining their english department in the fall of 2021 he is the author of an africana philosophy of temporality homo limanalis published in 2000 and 2018 and more recently black-minded the political philosophy of malcolm x published in 2020 along with numerous articles and several exciting projects in the works including a new book called the door of return a phenomenology of blackness as a colleague and a friend michael's intellectual generosity is boundless in the last few years at colorado college alone he has created a vibrant intellectual and cultural atmosphere most recently he debuted a sonic assemblage composed with grammy award-winning multi-instrumentalist nicholas payton at the colorado springs fine arts center entitled reclaiming eight minutes and 46 seconds of juju michael is joining us today from colorado springs i'm christian sarace an assistant professor of political science at colorado college and i'm thrilled to be facilitating today's conversation before getting started i would also like to thank the colorado college's political science department the africana intellectual project and the mccue fund for sponsoring supporting and funding today's events i would also like to thank jessica pauls naomi trujillo jeff hartman and don herbst for all of their support with the building and maintaining of the infrastructure for the event last but not least i would like to acknowledge that colorado college which is hosting this event is located within the unseated territory of the ute peoples which was and is also home to the apache arapaho comanche in cheyenne we will begin today's conversation with stefano fred and michael each taking turns elaborating on the concept and practice of fugitive aesthetics after that we will let the discussion flow where it may and then in the last 30 minutes or so open it to audience questions that you can type into the chat box so without further delay stefano good afternoon everyone and um uh thank you very much for joining us today i got a few thank yous i'd like to make first if that's okay first of course to you christian for bringing us together and inviting us thank you very much um i'd like to say it's a pleasure to to meet you professor sawyer this is the first time we've had the chance but i'm very glad that we're in conversation today and i'd like to thank everybody who's taken the time to join us i can only imagine that there's a certain amount of zoom fatigue uh going around out there and uh really happy that um that you saved enough energy for us today um i think at the outset what i really wanted to acknowledge is that we suggested this title um fred and i did uh anyway um when we were asked um as a tribute to our our colleague uh and friend dr uh nicole fleetman who um has written a great book called marking time uh art uh in the age of mass incarceration um she and her book both speak for it's themselves but um i wanted to say that they've been a great influence on me as has some of her earlier work and to acknowledge her importance and what i'm thinking about and i think what both fred and i are thinking about uh today and i would just maybe jump off with one or two quick comments with regard to that and what she has opened up for me and thinking in this way um [Music] the first of course is that we slightly changed it to a fugitive aesthetics to to to think a little bit more in line with the way fred and i uh uh conceive of of um certain kinds of social life but but what what i what i particularly take from her work is is um a series of questions that she raises uh the first of course is uh when has there not been an age of mass incarceration uh the second following dylan rodriguez is well who's mass incarceration um mass incarceration as as as dylan notes um covers up uh the fact that there are some people who are mass incarcerated not everybody um so so nicole helps us to to to think uh trans-historically and also think more specifically um uh in her work um through through those ideas also i think that she raises the question of the inside and the outside of the carceral um and and and how much that can really uh stand when in a sense we could say that the carceral is wherever we find blackness in particular but indigeneity and many other forms of fugitive life that that call forth the carceral and therefore in a sense we could say that that that the carsonal aesthetic is the aesthetic of blackness we could say the carsonal aesthetic is the aesthetic that is pretty much the aesthetic of the of america uh of the americas i could say also sitting here in brazil um and that that carceral aesthetic is also one which implies all the time escape it implies all the time a resistance and a rebellion to to the to the the carceral that chases it and yet at the same time it's in the nature of the fugitive that there is no escape and it's in the nature of fugitivity that this cannot be reduced to an individual strategy that might in fact appear to have led to some kind of escape so all of these ideas come to me largely because of her work and uh if you haven't had a chance to to get to it yet i i strongly recommend it so i'd like to stop there just with that tribute and then see where our conversation can go from there thanks sorry i'm just pausing because i'm imagining some new technology for zoom in which there's actually like a plunger mute section so instead of not having any sound at all you come out with some kind of bubble miley kind of ellington bad thing or something um sound effects anyway um you know and that plunger effect uh would probably correspond to something that would something like what we might call a fugitive sound um which i guess i'll get back to in a minute but mainly i wanted to begin by um echoing stefan up like i always do uh in thanking you christian and thanking you michael for for for setting this up and for allowing us to to hang out and talk with y'all and everybody else today um i'm always glad to have a chance to do stuff with with my old friends so um and we're far away from each other now so i appreciate this um i you know and uh and i and i'm very thankful for stefano mentioning uh nicole fleetwood who who's a friend and who's done such extraordinary work um in thinking through this whole relationship between fugitivity and carcerality in in in visual art um i i think the the way that that we may be first approached the question of fugitivity with regard to the aesthetic was by way of music which is to say by way of a kind of relay in thinking about music that goes through a whole bunch of different people it goes through a whole bunch of different critics and a whole bunch of different musicians but maybe most directly for us kind of a relay that went from miri baraka to nathaniel mackey and and definitely kind of maybe situated most immediately in relation to you know the intensity and and the the the depth with which mackie has taken up this term fugitivity and all throughout his writing but but especially in a wonderful essay called contemora in which he talks about you know a kind of afro and delusion sound um that first moves in a kind of relay you know from southern europe to to north africa um as if those were actually two separate things and then um and then and then spreads out from there you know through the the logistics and the logisticality of the of the of the african slave routes um and the transatlantic slave trade um anyway we what what mackie's talking about kind of has to do with the whole notion of muting or maybe in this instance mutation with with with a kind of with a sound whose supposed givenness and whose supposed natural order is transformed um partly as a function of you know creative disruption and and and and and what one might call you know refusal of of of normativity if if not of norms and on the other hand it's obviously also therefore a function of of duress or a resistance to duress a desire to uh to to move out to to leave [Music] and also a desire uh you know to to escape um and maybe even the desire to escape the systemic relationship between slavery and freedom in the first place um and and that that aesthetic you know it sort of animates you know afro-diasporic sound um all over the world um it it it strikes me that it was already given in africa in ways that allow us to raise some important questions about politics or or maybe the alternative to politics there you know that that predate the catastrophe of the slave trade but certainly it also post-dates that catastrophe and it in its manifest in in a in a range of musics that that we often talk about you know with regard to uh beauty and enjoyment but in ways that we now have to always acknowledge that that beauty and that enjoyment is um you know infused with and at the same time also immersed in you know terror um so i guess you know that's that's what comes to my mind in at least initially in thinking about the phrase fugitive aesthetics and um and i'm happy to have a chance to talk about all of that more with with you guys and with everybody else who's who who's here so thank you very much [Music] over to you michael um just like everyone else i want to echo just how thankful i am for this opportunity particularly to thank christian and the uh political science department for allowing me to participate and also to friend stefano for in the sense let me sit in with them right it's like the highest and best honor for musicians to be able to sit in with other people so i really appreciate that also to uh have the opportunity really to think carefully about just what we we put on the table this notion of what fugitivity incarceration appear like and so what i've done is i tried to put together so i didn't stick to the chart nonetheless to put together a short thing to kind of situate the way i want to approach uh my thinking on this i call it uh just enough just enough and it starts with kind of four epigraph the first is just enough of snow to make a starting black unbelievable richard wright haiku number 523 second is serious music is a dead arc by henry pleasant the third is practice we're talking about practice allen iverson the fourth is living just enough just enough for the city stevie wonder this brief introduction on my part to this conversation is bound up with these four epigraphs and is more so occupied rather than preoccupied with the likeness of the darkness of miles davis that i will call an exemplar of what i want to call a bearable likeness to blackness that announces the opening of a fugitive aesthetic while at the same time stretching to the horizon of that possibility when i reference miles here i'm doing so by way of a conversation between james and tumei and the late stanley crouch proud to draw an attention to himself by asserting to whoever would listen that miles production the 70s was aesthetically worthless and the inevitable product of selling out to the industry into may and this is the term that orders my thinking here wants to introduce technical exhaustion as the true operating condition that krauts wants to reduce to creative exhaustion and to make it's a concept from henry pleasant's assertion that european classical music suffers from technical exhaustion aesthetic decay and social obsolescence hence the epigraph here from the text the agony of modern music insisting that quote serious music is a dead art close quote and puma corrects the record by explaining that the turn to electronic music that offends the sensibilities of the crouch was about the need to produce new sounds and colors i'm accepting into mate's argument via miles and pleasants but wonder if technical exhaustion on the part of the listener is at least as relevant as the limits a master reaches on any given platform it is possible that what a particularly culturally educated subject can produce with a trumpet in service of rejection of that context will necessarily be in excess of the cognitive state versus the cognitive potentiality of those who can only listen and not hear to the point that some sounds will be rendered invisible following fred here i read nathaniel mackey is dealing with this phenomenon when a novel from a broken bottle traces a perfume emanate he writes quote nonetheless she was singing dealing in sounds which were audible only to the mind frequencies beyond conventional hearing one understood that what she was up to was a dry run futuristic courteously utopic a not yet articulable address and envoy she sent her songs to the world but did so with the understanding that the conditions which were truly bringing into being had yet to be met close quote this in mind considering the theory and practice of a future fugitive aesthetic i'm drawn to the difficult conclusion that the conditions have not yet been met for heated for me to hear what i am listening to and now i'm thinking about walking quickly down a path trying to catch up to a figure receding into the twilight who is sometimes beyond sight or hearing because they are around the corner oatmeal i realize that i'm always already following ellison's hibernating jack the bear who reveals quote i've been boomeranged across the head so much that i now can see the darkness of likeness close quote simply put i've wondered utterances that echo around our present that i haven't tuned in to hear that again still chasing ellison's jack who asked of the reader quote who knows but that on the lower frequencies i speak for you close quote and now i'm thinking about stevie wonder's just enough as exhaustion technical and subjective in the sense of just barely as opposed to the possibility of having something in reserve and only using what is necessary there's nothing that remains here stevie signals this by the title that excises the just enoughs in the song that lands on black consciousness like the just enough of richard wright's haiku one just enough is not enough just enough the double just enoughs are absorbed by the living barely and the city barely to render their presence in the title superfluous and redundant living for the city in this perception is always already understood to be just enough just enough and now i'm thinking about the fugitivity of allen iverson who is talking about practice to a bunch of reporters who think it is all about basketball when ai is talking about life and more properly death and what he sees says it means to bleed cry and his exhaustion and fear palpable yet opaque to the symbol sports columnists who can't see the force of black death for the trees of black suffering they can't hear the lamentations because they are too busy listening to the silence of the court that has been vacated for the summer after the ignominious playoff loss that has drowned out the black noise of a funeral possession that is kind of darker than blue a.i tries to tell them quote i'm upset i'm upset for one reason man cause i'm here i lost i lost my best friend i lost him and i lost this year everything is going downhill for me as far as just that as far as my life and i'm dealing with this right here close quote bleeding crying and hurting and they're talking about practice ai's blurred the point of it has blurred to the point of indistinction the game a game practice life and death or more precisely the living he does is just enough just enough to hold all of them together to be able to just barely hide in plain sight that the murder of his best friend is a loss of guts him because there's no practice for that game because that game is life death and they all resonate in the lower register that i'm struggling to tune in before i tune out the blackness of the starting black that is bearably black against the just enough snow the contingency of life stevie describes in the city we can barely make a dollar and his mother's harley paid a penny and his bearably black sister is conditionally sure enough pretty here is the here is where the music has reached a point that our ears trick us into believing that serious music is dead when it's really the case in no amount of listening under conditions that have not been met will allow us to hear the song around us because of future aesthetic demands of us in excess of fugitive cognition thanks thank you all for your wonderful powerful poignant introductions which is a lot to um process if i may i'm just going to ask one question to try to move the conversation uh forward to um you know stefano you're talking about the nature of um fugitivity as being no escape from and also not an individual strategy and fred you're talking about it also as a refusal of normativity and um i'm still actually trying to process michael's powerful statement about the utterances that echo around us with the conditions not having yet been met in which that listening becomes possible so the question i i want to to ask is the relationship between fugitivity and refusal whereas fred as i know you've put it in several or through across a lot of your work or refusal of refusal premised on the idea that black social life refuses what has historically been refused and withheld from it the degraded categories of politics individuality or possessive individuality citizenship and humanity if i understand it correctly drawing from the work of fannie lou hamer among others both you and stefano argue that the refusal of the refusal opens up onto the fugitivity or these fugitive publics and the improvisation of social life and michael in your book on malcolm x black-minded you also addressed the revolutionary potential of the refusal of state authority and recognition that is simultaneously living within the state's sovereign geography subject to racist policing and violence and also how that refusal um you know um elicits or i think as stefano put it in his introductory remarks also calls into being those um impulses of of of carcerality so i just um as by way of my own introduction um i'd love if we could all discuss how fugitivity is both an escape and not an escape or can it escape as michael puts it um from an interview i listened to the deadly dialectical relationship with white supremacy more to approach the question from another way could we also come up with other generative scenes and figures of fugitive aesthetics that help us visualize this liminal and topographical and yet um generative space okay thing i hope i hope that i hope that made sense thanks i'm sure there's no need for us to keep the same order so i don't mean to to call that into order by by starting again now but i just uh i just had to say uh to michael that uh fred and i have shared um iverson's uh press conference uh that very press conference that you um that you you weave into that that wonderful opening on on several occasions to try to really think about without having a an analysis of the way he keeps enunciating the word practice in that right you'll recall right how he is and he's like and you're talking about practice right and he keeps there's a kind of reiteration with it so there's all these kind of reverberations from this this moment of practice which run the entire well i think they might run the entire gamut from from him belittling practice to him exalting practice you know all in the same uh all in the same performance i say um maybe i don't even want to call it a performance all in on the same interview um uh where on the one hand practice becomes like everything you know in a lot of ways i think it becomes everything in the sense that you know first of all you think he's saying to people you know what the do you think i've been doing my entire life and you want to talk to me about i mean what else you think i do every goddamn day right you know but also you start to feel practice is something a lot bigger than getting to the getting to the practice uh chords right you know when he's using the word and then on the other hand of course he's you know he senses that practice is tied to to to to his to his exploitation and and ultimately despite you know um his status to somehow also to his denigration um and he does all of that inside those repetitions and those words and and i guess i was thinking of that because when fred was talking um and talking about how when he and i came up what were the places where we started to get fugitive aesthetics you know kind of fixed into our into our being uh you know in the other ear from that because i spent many years in the caribbean in trinidad and barbados in the eastern caribbean english-speaking caribbean i i always had soca and calypso in which repetition uh just as in the blues is very central um but of course repetition just doesn't ever sound the same as it keeps going and it starts to bring in these opposites starts to bring in these contradictions so i i just wanted to note that i recall watching that with fred and just watching it explode as a as a as an interview you know that um uh never let me think about practice again the same way and fred and i were at that point already trying to think about everything we do as practice um and and trying to think about um trying to think about never being finished and trying to think about uh avoiding the productivity the development the the the the um the excellence that you know um we're all called to um inside and outside of academia so i'm very very happy to hear you um situated in the middle of your your opening talk michael no i appreciate that uh it's one of those things where when it happened right it was it was framed as being almost funny the way you're saying right because it was the sports media picked it up and it was like listen to alan iris and talk about practice and you're right right the word has so much weight in that moment and literally it's it's days after his best friend had been murdered and he's also talking about the inability to get himself to the place to do the thing right and at the same time he's got to perform this and then they're talking about trading him from the team so everything is happening to him at that same moment right and i think i agree with you right he's blurred to the point of indistinction whether practice is worthwhile or or worth full in a certain worthless in a certain way right that he doesn't need to anymore but then he seems to be saying that everything he's doing is just practice for something else but he's not sure what that next else thing is going to be because he's in an unstable condition at that point from perspective of his relationship to life and death and his relationship to the team and basketball which gives him life and so you know to me it was it's like and i really had had been waiting for an opportunity to think with people about it because it's one of those iconic moments that's bound up with allen iverson as a type of who i think set the set the standard both visually and uh probably performatively for what the modern nba is about right a kind of refusal like his refusal to wear suits his refusal to you know do whatever he's told right and and you know he's sitting there with this you know with this white t-shirt on and and you know boston red sox vintage hat and you know he's got about five hundred thousand dollars in cash in his pocket he's just doing allen iverson right but he's also in a great deal of pain at the same time and so i thought it would be interesting to think about that as as exemplar fugitive aesthetic in that kind of a way and the fact that the what i'm saying is that then the audience or the people listening can't even hear what he's saying if they're not tuned to do it properly to hear what the things are that he's saying that really matter so that's why i thought it would be helpful so i'm i'm into hearing also how you you all take stock of it as well some more information about that yeah i mean i that well i'm i'm thinking about that moment now also filtered through a couple of different kind of great works of art that that i've had a chance to um to witness that that take up that that moment um which is to say i guess you could say that well it's interesting you know i i was gonna just jump right there and say well you know what what iverson did is also a great work of art but i don't know i don't know if that's right you know in other words i don't know if what he did requires that that little moment of exaltation which might in fact reduce what he did um i i certainly believe it was aesthetic um but it might be aesthetic in a way that precisely you know escapes you know the the the carceral frame of the artwork you know in a certain kind of way um but anyway and and maybe that's also true of the so-called works of art i'm thinking of too but but there's a great poet named pete moore who in a book called zippers and jeans does this extended kind of riff on practice on practice in the game that is just beautiful and i i always hear you know uh you know allen allen iverson's you know uh tidewater virginia accent morph into pete moore's sort of memphis accent when he when he does that i wish i had a website or a recording to point y'all to with him reading those poems um but i'm also thinking of these two extraordinary filmmakers and sound artists named saul ichaski who who've done these amazing kind of uncategorizable film works in which among other things they take up that that press conference too and again it's through the intensification of the repetition that's already there in in iverson's speech you know which is a repetition that we could also talk about as practice and also as practicing um you know or something like maybe what wilson harris would call an infinite rehearsal uh infinite rehearsal for uh uh you know for a for an event or a performance um that that is always being refused that is always being fled in a certain sense so so maybe you could talk about it as a performance um but you would have to spell it p-r-e-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e um you could pronounce it the same way if you want to but that that sense of a preferentory thing um a performance it never happens the form never comes into its own um and i guess within the framework of that the way the way i always wanted to hear it you know and and i was always you know able to hear it that way just from talking with with stefano about it was is it it's almost like he was saying who the hell are y'all to be talking about practice what what the what do y'all know about practice y'all talk about the game but don't don't talk about practice you know i don't want to hear you talking about practice because practice is not your purview practice is not the the portfolio of of of ignorant sports writers right what y'all can do is to talk about the you know the simple brutal calculation of wins and losses y'all can talk about points y'all can talk about who scored the most okay and the game is within that brutal accounting okay but don't you be talking about practice you talking about practice no you talk about the game i i'll talk about practice because i'm talking about an existential you know structure which cannot be held within the brutalist accounting of wins and losses and really on a deeper level can't be held within the you know the carceral opposition of life and death okay it's it's deeper than that it's it's more than that um it's bigger than that you know um so it's you know i think it's very generous you know in a way of him to elaborate it so fully you know um in in their presence you know um and and i actually think i agree with you michael that it is about a different understanding of the game you know in ways that that i'm still trying to come to grips with because when i when i talk about basketball with my with my with my eldest son who loves the game he thinks about it a totally different way than me um and i think in a more advanced way you know because i fall back on the accounting of wins and losses you know i'm like he's like who's your favorite player i mean you know i my tendency when i think about who's a greater player is i think you know how many how many chips they got how many rings he's he's beyond that that accounting right he's something that nate mackey always writes with when it comes to lorenzo moton basketball is a question of the the eternity of style okay um so uh and i think yeah you know iverson is is you know in in many ways he's he's he's the he's he's like you say he's a prophet you know of of that um of that aesthetic disruption of the game you know uh so you know and i wonder because there's a there's a middle term too it's warming up right so somewhere between practice and the game is the warm-up and it and it and it occurs to me this happened when when pharaoh saunders was here right and i had i spent like three days with pharaoh right just being around him and every day he would stop to practice i was like what is pharaoh practicing right like is but then that was significantly different than the warm-up because when they were getting ready for the performance he played things the day before soundtrack had nothing to do with what he was going to do the night of the performance right so there was this very firm separation between practice warming up and the performance right and so then it occurred to me that and like you're saying right that's not those those two previous spaces are not spaces that the public is necessarily allowed into or even if they are into it can't un understand what's happening because it doesn't resolve itself properly right he doesn't finish the song he doesn't finish the phrase he does he's playing around with the chords in ways that don't necessarily resolve themselves and in the way we understand the resolution of wins and losses or the middle beginning or end of a song right so it occurs to me that warming up also has to be taken stock of right and what allen iverson is doing is and i think you're right to the point when one of one of the basketball writers he asked him if he ever played basketball and he says yeah and allen says i don't know you as no player he's like i know you as a columnist but i don't know you as a player to be talking to me about basketball and the guys like you know the pushback from the reporter is well should not be able to write about it he's like sure but i'm asking you what you know about it and at the level we're talking this is helpful with your proposal fred is that at the level of practice it's it's the door is closed right the gym is empty and it's just the coaches and the players doing whatever it is they need to do to get ready to to perform in front of other people so it's a it's a performative space it that is is in many ways outside of the economy the way you're pointing out right the economy of the game that has to be played but it's necessary yeah i mean i and i i also think well it you know it does raise the question concerning the status of the game and and what it's what its importance is you know um in the same way that you you know i mean i wish i wish i had i i wish i could have been there with you you know when you were talking to pharaoh sanders talking with pharaoh sanders because one of the questions i would you know be well what what's the actual status of the gig the concert like where where does it fit within within your general practice and then there's also a question of you know where does practicing fit within your general practice you know um but but it's like uh i don't think it's a matter of of i don't even think it's a matter ultimately of valorizing practice over the game in in something in a reversal that seems already embedded in what iverson is saying i it's just more like you know how all that stuff fits together is just you know completely outside the narrow framework that that this or that sports writer um you know you know it's not just to denigrate all sports writers either there's this guy y'all ever read bill simmons um he wrote this big huge ass book called the big book of basketball and it begins with this story of i don't i don't know i mean we're we're old mike so you have to give us you know a break but we actually remember you know the the those battles between the the pistons the bad boy pistons and the celtics to see who would get out of the east you know to play the lakers back in the in the mid to late 80s and and and and the detroit team was good for three was good enough to win a title for three years before they did but they just couldn't beat the celtics it was always some bad place some inbounds pass being stolen some something and there's this great interview at the end of one of those games with isaiah thomas and he and he says something like it's like magic and bird just have a secret of how to win that they don't they won't tell anybody and i don't know what it is and this bill simmons years later after isaiah retired runs up on him in a in a hotel swimming pool in las vegas and asked him what the secret is okay and and he says really you really want to know i don't think you're ready to know i mean isaiah completely you know he doesn't freeze him but he basically says i i don't i don't know if you're ready to know this but at the end of it all isaiah finally warms up to the guy and says the secret is that it's not about basketball right and um and he goes on to elaborate you know you know you know but but the point is is it feels to me like what you're suggesting to michael is that yeah there's something deeper going on than than than than can be contained even within the game of basketball you know uh let alone any individual game and that this is what and it's almost like iverson is saying that not to the sports writer but to us that the sports writer simply becomes you know both it's under the duress of his questioning that that he bypasses him in order to try to say something to us you know so yeah i think to and then to kind of return to what christian asked i think about this notion of refusal right or and what i'm trying to do is to think about and this where some of this goes back to you're you're you're talking moma right the on on uh when you talk about betty right the notion of refusing to accept freedom and return to slavery right and the question i had for you in that type of future of aesthetic i'm also curious about the space that allows for that type of performance is a particular type of spatiality right because the the space that allows for the performance of non-performance is a particular type of performative space and it seems that because of the relationship this gets this question about how we say maybe even refusing the the relationship between slavery and freedom right it also seems to me to be refusing the the possibility of having a space where slavery and freedom can exist in in concert with with each other or in opposition to each other because to that extent then there's no place for that energy to go right it was only because kentucky still exists that the performance of non-performance of freedom was possible and so that's what i was interested in kind of hearing if if you can help me understand how that relates yourself to your your argument about what betty is up to in refusing this question of freedom if that helps just very very briefly because i'm already talking too much you already got it right in in your opening statement which is you know she was playing some music that we can't quite hear yet yeah so but we but we try you know trying to listen you know um yeah i mean it's it's you know you have to be one of the most cruel people in the world to try to tell slaves and the descendants of slaves that they shouldn't be fixated on freedom right unfortunately our situation is such that that we require an aesthetics of just such cruelty so um precise you know you have to be cruel enough to recognize the intensity of that relation you know um which one cannot simply opt out of between freedom and and enslavement you know um actually there's there's one person i think who's cruel enough to have really done a tremendous amount of work on on the excavation of just that that relation and that's orlando patterson you know um you know the the trouble with part of the part of the the terrible you know sort of glorious trouble with slavery and social death um is that you have to read the freedom book too right um and uh this is great long like 125 page interview um with him that that david scott does in small acts and and that's kind of where i think he's beginning to work through that and but he had been working through it before even slavery and social depth and various things so um but dom getachu has a beautiful um review of of of patterson's new book on on jamaica the the confounding island in the nation and she she talks about that and works through those things so anyway i'm i'm i'm going on mute now i mean the thing with with orlando's the freedom book is it always struck me that it's part one right we haven't seen the other parts of it right so when you write it's like they didn't call world war one world war one because they thought it was the great war so he obviously is thinking that something else has to happen but it hasn't arrived yet right it's like it seems to me it's the same it's performing the same question of the relationship to freedom that he can't quite figure out what part two is supposed to be but knows there has to be something else and i i don't know when part two is gonna appear or whether he's he's abandoned the project or not but it seems to me that when you put out a book and call it part one and people have been waiting what is it now 30 40 years for part two there's something going on deeply related to the inability to resolve that question in a certain kind of way one of the things that's been helpful again michael about your opening and about this conversation is that um you know fred and i get asked a lot about uh what we meant when we used this term study a lot of years ago now uh and we've thought of it for a long time in relationship to practice but one of the things that um that has has come out here which is really nice is that you know we're always in a situation where study is said like practice to come before the game in this case the game is you know actually taking the test actually graduating actually doing the peer review actually you know uh uh proceeding in the profession proceeding you know to graduate et cetera et cetera so um so one of the things that we've always tried to insist is that it's it's not it's not that study replaces these other things it is that it undermines them it is that it scrambles them to some extent just as we see with with iverson's uh interview um but more than that it's you know when we when we talk about study what we're what we're after i think michael which you bring very clearly into view we're after practicing the conditions that would allow us to hear something or would allow us to to see something or would allow us to be with some people that right now we can't be with right now we can't hear right now we can't see so so so we want to try to remove study from from a position um vis-a-vis some other activity the performance uh the gig etc the game um and place it instead in that other realm of a constant resistance a constant um fugitive choreography that allows us to open up in a way a social space however temporary um however inadequate that allows us to uh to create the conditions for a minute for a day of being able to hear something uh or see something or be with people um and you know another word for another phrase for for that is simply you know black social life because that's what black social life does all the time um and and so it's really helpful to think about the iverson piece in your intro in terms of trying always to because part of what it means to to for to study is to try to explain what you're doing um either to yourself or each other or people who ask in the case of me and fred lots of times is people asking and that's part of the practice too and somehow the answer or the conversation ought to be part of an experiment failed experiment a pre-experiment in in the creating of the conditions where one might hear uh or one might see and one might um one might be with me so it be with people so it occurs to me um that that by scrambling practice in certain ways uh and by saying also in what is a kind of reversal i think you're right to say that when you're talking about the relationship with the journalists i think it's right to say that that iverson challenges him and and and in a way that we would want to see and study where you know people who question our our practice of study it has to be asked what would they know about it they always finish it you know they graduate you know you know they publish uh whatever right you know so um there's a way in which i think that it's important to insist that you know maybe study like practice is something that you know um people have a kind of uneven access to it according to to their histories and according to to their to how much practice they're doing of it um and and it means that we we can't it means fred and i for instance are even more unable to say what it is but it also means other people especially people who might be in a more regulatory frame um are are are also even more unable to know what it is um they they haven't been there they don't do it um and yet they presume um to know how it fits in with the payoff for them uh let's say so again it's very generative to think about it that way if i may try something out being very unpracticed and you know running down the court and tripping over my shoes which are probably untied um uh this conversation um brought to mind something i've been fixated on and for the last several years i've been studying uh mongolian and in the mongolian language the word to study the root of the word is actually the formation and practice of habit right and then on this word actually all kinds of other things get accreted and actually ideology spins out of this word and so does the modern word for advertisements so you have ideology being uh a combination of words for perception as well as for practice and study perception and study and habit formation and advertisement being a kind of nominalization of that but what's really interesting to me is the word education is actually a verbalization of the word to be human so the noun human gets verbalized and that means to educate and so i started thinking about is education as separate or different than from study or the root of study being this practice this habit this ongoingness that can kind of resist the ways in which certain modes of the human start to accrete and get reproduced with all of the racialization with all of the class differentiation with all of the kind of sorting or meritocracy that goes into that education so i'm riffing here this could be making no sense whatsoever and i'm okay with that um but what made me think then and this is uh the question i'd like to ask and and it could be also very simple but i'll throw it out there so if education is a kind of mimesis or a kind of trying to get right to the normative forms then practice is the departure or the fugitive escape from that kind of memetic entrapment or maybe i'm just riffing from i was listening to a talk on youtube that fred gave where i think you use the term the sad imitate the sad imitation of normative categories um so can we think about prax practice as a form of the refusal of specific modes of education that force us that that that reproduces kind of idea of the human that is actually exclusive in its ostensible universality and if that made no sense please feel free to ignore my question and talk about other things so um or to rephrase it you know practice is different right than mimesis or is it in opposition or orthogonal to that i'm not sure if this answers your question christian but it might the question was received for me here in brazil is uh it's been a momentous 24 hours here as some of you probably read in the international press lula's been freed essentially from his conviction to run for office lula and part and parts of his party have roots in turn in the base communities and are related and turn to the great palo freire who is who's from here for whom there was a kind of connection between education and huma and the human uh and humanism um and fred and i are you know we're all kind of freeri heads i mean he was a he was a hugely significant person for us in university and ever since but i think we've also always been kind of practicing a separation of of of these things and one of the things that one of the reasons that we might use study rather than education was to you know is to is to is to try to make a break from the idea that that the goal is to be become the human um and instead to to question that category entirely for for its history uh and probably an inevitable connection to a certain kind of um disastrous individuation uh culminating in the individual who is the the you know to whom freedom is attached to you know who emerges through education etc etc so i mean i i suppose that um where you know where where we really have to depart from education is is precisely you know at that point where if you click right now on columbia college's opening website or websites of any any college that i've ever been at or fred you know that the story on the front page is a story of the becoming human of every student and that's just the story that we want to break with because the becoming human of a student is the dehumanization or the destruction of everything else or worse the the inhabitation of everything else with humanness so um so you're i mean i'm only catching part of your questions i have nothing about mongolia sadly but i or or the language but i but i felt it here in brazil in a very specific way as we now once again enter the political arena you know on the left but at the same time do it do so with all the problems of politics of the human etc etc um so there's no answer to it but when i think when we're talking about study we're talking about an active process of taking apart anything like the individual and of helping each other fall apart in the face of the call of the human which again is something that you know you can't just as fred was saying about freedom you know it's in a way i shouldn't even say that you know we shouldn't be human right um because i've had the opportunity more than most to you know live that fantasy but nonetheless is how i feel you know i i well maybe maybe we could talk about this um [Music] by way of of the beautiful music that y'all were playing at the outset which i think was joe mcphee right um nation time and and i was thinking [Music] maybe one way to think about it or one way to come up on it is you know and again this is obviously you know if we remember what what michael was saying about pharaoh sanders you know take that keep keep pushing on with that you know in terms of practice in terms of let's call it the musical education of a of a saxophone player we could even call it think about it in terms of a certain kind of you know journey so to speak towards virtuosity um that that may be parallels you know the the human you know journey the the journey of a human subject towards towards the good you know um [Music] you know that that that that modality of building you know um which is you know on the one hand a certain notion of education and development but but but more generally it's about what it means to picture oneself um you know um i'm building you know or you know what what it is to be able to picture oneself to formulate a theory of oneself a concept of oneself you know as as human you know um you know and and so now is is that the goal is that the goal of of of of joe mcphee's musical education you know um you could think about it in terms of the production of tone with regard to the saxophone you know and obviously i'm thinking about joe mcfeet but i'm actually hearing pharaoh sanders and i'm hearing both joe mcphee and pharaoh sanders as you know as as in a certain sense as direct descendants of train of coltrane you know um and so i'm thinking those stories you know where you know i i i think i remember reading you know coltrane's neighbors would be leave leaving for work in the morning and he'd be playing a scale and get back that evening and something like he'd be playing the same scale you know what what was he doing what and i think it is one time um when i was in grad school in berkeley the world saxophone quartet came uh to give a concert and they had like a little kind of a talk you know like that you could go to as a student and they you know after they rehearsed and and great baritone saxophonist hammond blew it at one point he was saying he started playing this this you know this sort of chord this harmonic thing on on the saxophone and it wasn't anything it was just a scream or a squall you know and he kept saying he and it and he had to actually move his body in a certain way to to hit those notes and he said see this sounds beautiful to me but it was not on any tempered scale you know it was it was i mean to even call it micro tonal or or a kind of you know uh atonal micro tonal pantonal disruption of normative tone even but even that doesn't really get it you know but i guess what i'm saying is what if it turns out that that after the fact of attempting a kind of musical education in which you learn how to play the instrument properly then what you begin to do is expropriate the instrument right you begin to take away the instrument's properties um and it's a stripping down of normative tone you know um and you can and i feel like you can i you know i i believe that um in in black musical discourse people would talk about this sometimes as a development of a personal sound um so it it gets folded into a logic and a discourse of individuation but but my sense of it what i want to say or what i think the music is asking us to say is that it's actually not about that kind of individuation it's not about an achievement of personality you know it's a refusal of personality in that way that spillers talks about you know in the crisis of the negro intellectual the post state you know it's it's like this thing where it's not about sounding like yourself it's about sounding like everything it's about sounding like all you know um in other words the that the tone at that point becomes the location of an assembly right and and the music then becomes about this gathering and this this renewal of a certain kind of set of habits of of assembly you know to use a phrase that stefano and i learned from our friend and comrade um manolo callahan um and you know and this is something like what you know henry dumas talks about in that great story will the circle be unbroken at this gathering um you know um so so if i'm listening to mcphee i'm not you're not listening to some achievement of a perfection of tone you're you're listening to something like the the the the stripping down or the breaking down of of the oneness of tone you know of the o-n-e in tone and and and and something and it's i don't know may and you're putting some new letters in there you know like a h r you know tone becomes thrown it becomes but not not a throne you sit on but a throwing like a you know you know something happens to tone something happens to to to to to those normative scales you see that that that have been imposed as as a kind of musical rule that you know in which the emergence of tonality you know goes hand in hand with what one might call the discovery of the human so to speak within a certain kind of you know renaissance discourse you know and of course the discovery of the human is coterminous with the discovery of the new world you know uh and and and it just ain't nothing except a story of absolute brutality right so you know ralph ellison wants to say you know that that kind of declamatory musicality which he can also talk about in terms of speech he wants to say that's the moment where you know you be you know somehow you feel more human okay and um and at the same time it feels like you know maybe for us we're thinking oh this is something where you feel both less than human and more than human okay and and and you you're in you're in the thing that surrounds the human right and that refuses the human's desire you know to establish itself as the locus of an overview to establish itself as the locus of dominion and and of grasp you know um and i just think you know you know we we we're trying to investigate what it means to to not have to to not have to take responsibility for the human why should black people have to do that you know we do hey ain't we had enough truck in trouble you know what i'm saying why we got to do that you know um and you know um and again it's not about it's not educated it's not against education but well something you know that stefano i know has been thinking about for a long time especially with regards to singapore and we try to write about it in all incomplete it's it's not a disavow of education but it is a refusal of total education and a complete education it's a trying to trying to make a claim on on what we call a partial education but partial means not only incomplete but it also means preferential you know we're making a preferential option for something else you know what you're sorry go ahead mike no go ahead just quickly fred as you were talking about that i was thinking uh particularly around the um this notion of of of being surrounded by something more i was thinking of uh of my favorite lord kitchener song which is called bees melody and if you've never heard this like a lot of lord kitchener songs he's actually telling what he's doing while he's singing the song and part of what he's always telling you that he's doing because it's something he always did is he wrote both to perform the calypso and akai sometime and for his song to be rearranged by um by a steel band conductor um to be played in the big steel bands and in bee's melody he's going up a hill and he starts getting stung by bees they're literally surrounding him and at first he tries to run away and then he stops and he says but wait they're making a sweet melody these pieces runs back up the hill to get some more of this thing so literally the music is already surrounding him coming through him but actually going back out to the steel pans where it will be rearranged right in these huge like percussive melodies right it's not like the stuff you see you know on cruise ship this is you know they make the trucks bounce once they get going so he he actually is narrating being the person through which some this music is flowing from the bees to the pants um you know and of course made me think of that i thought of it as you were you were talking about this so sorry i just had it [Music] it's thinking about pharaoh in that way right and the first time i ever met him was back like in the late 90s and i had to pick him up on the airport right the first thing i went through this like real long like bout with anxiety about what do you listen to in the car with pharaoh saunders like you know you can't put him on because that seems stupid right so i picked him up from o'hare and we were driving and i'd put on um gene evans right and he was he was you know pharaoh's not a verbal person right he's just sitting there just writing and listening and then he got to gene edmonds has on on i think it's on the hitting the jug album maybe he plays confirmation and pharaoh had never heard it before and as soon as he played the first notes pharaoh just went oh and told me to pull over right he made me pull over to the side of the the the kennedy expressway he made me listen he listened to it twice said okay go ahead and drive because he had never heard he heard something that like that speaks to this notion of like you're saying stefano this thing like these bees hovering around because he's heard it all before right there was something particular that he heard that he wanted to hear twice right he needed to hear it twice to make sure it was what he thought it was and then it speaks this question of tonality right which makes me think of what what i know about you know mandarin is nothing but what i do know about it is his tonal right to speak to the linguistic tradition that the christian would bring to the conversation writing so much about what blewitt was up to and barrel's up to is to is to tell us what we've got wrong about tone right to say what you thought was the proper tone for that is not the proper tone for it and it reminds me of the way in which a vocalist will tease tone like if you listen to sam cook say jesus right he's got a thousand different ways to say those two syllables right jesus jesus jesus like he over and over he just plays with it and pulls on it in the same way right it reminds me so much about what what these and i think fred you call it the proper education of a saxophone player or something like that right gets to the point where it's it's to to know the tone but then be like okay this is where it's got it we're wrong or this is where the tone needs this additional thing to express what i need to say in that way right and and blew it has to you know his body was contorted because he was from the time he was a kid he was carrying around a heavy baritone saxophone so he even messed up his shoulders right so his whole body is related in a particular way to the baritone where it was it was it was part of his embodiment and so at the end when when blue was in the hospital right he had fallen and had laid on his left arm for a couple of days right when he had a stroke and he couldn't play anymore so i talked to him and asked him what he needed in the hospital he said i need some music to be sent to me so i was like what do you want to hear and i was like you know he's going to say you know he want to hear ornata he wants he said he went to the isley brothers right he's like i want to like send me like the isley brothers to listen to right it was like he wanted to recreate like saturday sitting in st louis watching soul train basically is he knew that he was at the end right he had run out and he couldn't play anymore because you know his left arm was gone from that perspective right and so it was it was getting back to it it reminded me of him saying he wanted to get back to those tones that the islay brothers are putting out that help him understand everything he's doing later on it's just that what you're talking about he's contorting himself to get that thing that sounds pretty to him or sounds beautiful to him right and that to me is that to me defines a type of fugitivity and then the question would these kind of talkbacks like where berkeley is he's doing what i was asking the question he's helping you develop a fugitive a system of fugitive cognition so you can hear it right he's like this is what you need to be hearing about this right or this is why this is is beautiful or not right or it's beautiful and the fact that it's not what you would traditionally think the round tone of that horn is supposed to deliver you because it's a uh it becomes an embodied practice in that way right the kind of inextricable linkage and i mean pharaoh he plays around with mouthpieces and breathes endlessly man it's like you know you've been doing this for so long he's got he takes him out of his bag he's just got him laying out there you like and during the performance he goes back in the back and still is messing with the reed in the in the in the mouthpiece to kind of get this thing that he's trying to hear that i guarantee you no one else knows what when he comes back and he's got it just right and you can't even tell what the difference is because he asked me one time he's like which one did you like better i'm like uh the second one right just like made it up because it was completely immaterial right there's no i couldn't tell the difference between because i couldn't properly hear it right so to get to that question of how that system of cognition or the conditions had not been met yet for me to be able to properly hear what it is he was doing or wanted me to hear you know i mean it's i've always wondered why it is that [Music] when people you know i mean i'm told i'm interested in all these things that i don't know anything about you know and it produces this condition where i'm asking naive you know questions um which or at least or i guess to not be disingenuous i think i'm asking deep questions that maybe these people who know say that's just naive you know um but the either deep or naive question that i have for cognitive sciences is why would you ever think that you could figure out what's going on in the brain by studying one brain at a time you know like why why would you think the cognition would actually manifest itself as something that occurs in individual units in individual cognitive units and and that's just a way of that question is a way of maybe saying you know that if if they're creating new cognitive you know systems or new new new notions of the cognitive so that we can listen if if it seems to meet it you know and i know this is what stefano was saying earlier today too that the that the one prerequisite for any of it is it it ain't about listening by yourself you know it's you know it's not about there is no listening alone you know um but uh but you know what i'm just noticing that there's a whole bunch of questions over here in the question thing so i just feel like we should maybe we should try to to look at some of these questions you know um that people are asking i i don't want yeah folks to feel like we weren't we weren't paying attention to them so um yeah oh there's i that crept up on me how many [Music] how many there are um yeah let's uh start and ask a few i just want to add one sentence that you know i've spent a lot of time you know talking with michael and reading his work as a friend and this is the first time we've met but i've spent time reading both of your collective and individual works and it was really uh fred you mentioned george lewis's tone burst um i forget where you mentioned it and so you know i've never heard it before and i put it on and that was an epiphany like so much that i was working through cognitively trying to follow the discourse of you know the traditions you're arguing in and against and lateral to you know the tone burst was that moment the glissand phrase consent not to be a single being just kind of flickered up and through me and so so so in other words like these different registers at which things make or are felt or are um embodied in different ways um i just wanted to say it was the tone burst that really spoke to me through your writing as well anyway um so let's work through some of these questions um so there's a i'll just i'm just going to work from backwards because there's a question to all of you here so could uh michael okay um could michael stefano and fred if they would like to talk a little about the generative time of practice and study i was thinking in terms of refusal of refusal towards some kind of temporal deconstruction of teleological eschatologic eschatology of capitalist newtonian time is a question um so i don't know if it's not anonymous should i read the questioner's name i've never actually done this before as a moderator um it's up to you yeah all right yeah that was a question from james miller um we'll take it i'll maybe maybe i'll just read off a few questions and then we can we can do it from there so from muhammad mia on the topic of repetition performance practice i'm recalling sawyer's engagement with islamic ritual roles in malcolm x's embodied political philosophy um okay maybe we can start with those two and then i'll just uh do my job as moderator and freak through the rest of them and try to synthesize something um yeah i'll take a run at the trying to combine the kind of two right i think for me islam and and the the notion of of the repetition right so the repetitive prayer ritual every day right creates just that type of thing right whether is it because it it's not you can't be a non-performing muslim right it's it you have to perform something like like i'm basically a non-performing christian right i don't go to church but i'm still a christian occurs to me you can't be muslim and non-performing right so the performance of the activity uh becomes itself the practice of of something like a relationship to the higher being right to to higher forms of power so without that i think to wonder if that's possible or how i'm curious how that destabilizes in malcolm's practice what i argue was islam becomes destabilizing to western systems of power particularly because it has its own system of temporality right where five times a day it during what is normally the workday you have to stop and think about god right one time a year you spend an entire month not doing the things everybody else is doing and it shifts itself around depending upon a relationship to the moon rather than a relationship to the to the gregorian or roman calendar and the third thing for me is it also creates a disruption to to the point where the the point of attention becomes the need to know which way mecca is right so you're no longer concerned in whatever political environment that you live in you're not concerned with the uptown or the downtown you're concerned with which way is mecca first and foremost and that happens five times a day and for an entire month right so i think that that creates a type of fugitive time with respect to mutual temporary with respect to the way western societal orders constructed around the judeo-christian tradition or around the capitalist notion of the workday so i think it's disruptive and my argument was that malcolm disrupts both of those with that type of practice and i think that's the way i would situate my answer to that question and and the first one about an alternative temporal practice or fugitive temporality you know do you want to elaborate on that or should i go to a different question or um since there's a a a question related um to time i was actually um if i could also throw in my own question and then move on to it to another one i'm really um kind of obsessed with both how fred and stefano talk about communism in different ways which kind of again scintillates in different moments of your conversations and texts and especially in the dialogue in the under commons or stefano you describe communism partially again as a practice of giving up something i think in your words of giving up anything like a kind of sovereign self-determination or a dispossession of ourselves um and so i i i hear that and what i love about that is i think in a way it's it's it's an anti or at least non-marxist understanding of communism because i think mark's or at least the uh reading of marx is in this eschatological tradition where the outcome of which is a kind of redemption of unalienated labor and i know fred in many passages you talk about kind of unsuturing practice from these attachments to the figure of redemption or the kind of overcoming of of alienation so to connect to the question that um um michael was just addressing like um is part of the problem that so much of political theory um including a marxist um including a marxist vein of it is attached to a kind of notion of eschatological time and then there's also the capitalist time that michael talked about i'll just throw that out there and then read a few other questions as well uh from lily epstein is the fugitive aesthetic necessarily rooted in an afro-pessimist lens in that case if i'm hearing it correctly there's some attempt to locate the fugitive in the society where the fugitive's existence is always already that of the not human rich blind asks in our condition of contingency and precarity how do we speak a more true word about ourselves refuse to be lost balls and tall weeds as spillers might have it and find our own tone to engage in the new acts of creation that baldwin demanded how do we make this a central concern of black study okay i think that's enough questions for at this point we'll come back to the other questions don't worry um but just um to uh open reopen the conversation and mute myself with the sound effect that fred was mentioning earlier well um with so many different threads um you know with regard to rich rich blitz question rich i mean i this probably won't be a very satisfactory answer but i was you know i think i probably i think i i think i know what you're talking about and i and i'm i'm 99.9 certain and i'm totally with you i wouldn't use the term true word probably you know um and i wouldn't use the term our tone and yet i feel like there's some other words that i would use that agree with what i think you mean when you use those terms okay um and you know and one way to think about black study would be that it would just be you know how we hang out and talk with each other as we you know as we work through those terms you know um not maybe to find a single one that works or to find a true word or a single tone or to adjudicate which one is the most appropriate but but you know how we would play all those tones how we would work all those tones um all those all those words um you know and and within that context those concerns that you talk about are if they're not the central concerns of black study then it ain't black study it's something else maybe maybe maybe implicit in your question is a distinction between black study and black studies and and and maybe another way to phrase the question would be that the specific conditions of contingency and precarity that we face right now which are conditions of contingency and precarity by way of inclusion right it's the specific modalities of contingency and precarity that that that emerge as a function of inclusion right um maybe maybe what's at stake is is that you know sometimes it might seem like like maybe like like maybe black studies has to reorient itself towards or towards those central concerns um but black study is simply that is is as far as i think we understand it is is just simply those concerns that concern that's that's what that's what black study is um uh and then with regard to the to the afro pessimists the question about afro-pessimism um well it's interesting that the grammar of the question um is interesting i'm just i'm sitting here trying to try to figure out how come i don't really have a problem with the term the black aesthetic but i sort of do have a problem with the term the fugitive aesthetic i'm okay with fugitive aesthetics the fugitive aesthetic that that makes me nervous you know and i think it's because the term the fugitive makes me nervous i don't have a problem with fugitivity i i don't you know i think and this was again this is something that was implicit and also at the same time explicit in in stefano's first remark there's nobody's fugitive by themselves you know there's no individual figure of the fugitive it's not no such thing no such entity um now one of the questions that might emerge with regard to afro-pessimism would be um how certain iterations of afro-pessimism i i won't say all because it's such a richly internally differentiated discourse but how there might be certain iterations of afro-pessimism which are concerned with something like what we might call the recovery of the individual figure um and and and probably maybe that would be the most fundamental place of a divergence between between afro-pessimism and and whatever you want to call what we're doing um [Music] but you know it's a divergence within kinship at least at least from from i think from our perspective um and it's a divergence within within a kinship of common study okay it's it's it's uh uh another way to put it is it's a divergence within a general antagonism and not the relative antagonism that uh that some folks like to to to focus on and certainly not the kinds of relative individuated antagonisms which which actually constitute again by way of inclusion part of the the precarity and contingency which has been visited upon black studies in the in the contemporary moment you know we fighting but we ain't fighting with them or another way put it is we fighting with them but we ain't fighting with them or you know um okay oh stephanie please well i i realize your question was also kind of hanging out there around in ways in which fred and i conceived of communism i was waiting for a second to see if fred came around to that because the other day we were talking and he did really a beautiful um take on marks in our relationships like i was kind of uh waiting for uh him to come back around to that part of the performance but um but in absence of that um i'm just going to step forward with with just a short thing about that which is to say that you know i think our understanding of marxism and of communism uh comes through the work of cedric robinson and um so as opposed to being in a frame where we might say as you were i think sort of saying christian that one moves from the the problem of individual alienated labor to the the collective subject we just uh have a different frame for thinking about that right so you know starting with his anthropology of marxism what he stakes out for us is is is that it it wasn't inevitable that we that that europe in particular and eventually the world would have to fight a certain fight a class struggle through the these figures of the individual workers who then come together to form the corporate um and it wasn't inevitable but once it happened it was accompanied by the corporate which is to say from the very beginning was accompanied by race race being another way of thinking the corporate the the whole the complete and and so for us robinson helps us from there and then through terms of order to think that we have to get away from both of those polls from the corporate poll where everything comes together in the party or in the revolution or etc you know um and and from the pull of of our liberation our individual liberation the end of exploitation up to the end of this the stealing of our labor you know we if you don't start with the idea that it's yours it can't be stolen from you and so starting somewhere else means starting with this with the with the notion of the incomplete which we get from from professor robinson of course and and that incomplete then does not um require corporatization if you're incomplete it doesn't mean that you seek out the other person to complete yourself it doesn't mean that you seek out the rest of the movement to complete something instead what it means is that you introducing completeness into every would-be corporate form undermining and resisting that that that very idea so we naturally have to come out with a kind of communism that doesn't base itself either around the corporate or around the individual access to it which is unfortunately sort of you know encapsulated in this very seductive notion of of uh you know fishing in the morning and reading floss in the afternoon or wherever else you know as it because it sounds like oh that's the kind of thing i would like to do is if it were an individual activity that became possible once you were individually freed as part of the right corporate finally the right corporation has come along you know uh and and you know it's prepared to to offer you everything you want you know um and you know it's it's uh it's you know i'm always you know i always think that there's a possibility of helping you know of studying with anybody who who studying with anybody who is interested in in any kind of notion of communism and and part of what it means to to introduce incompleteness is to find a way to to study with people who maybe don't want to study with you or maybe you know [Music] feel that they already have some sort of uh complete or corporate um location for themselves and so it's it's a practice too is all i'm saying it's a practice and not just a a conceptual tool that we we borrow from professor robinson as i think it was for him you know as well thank you so much for uh for that um to keep going with the questions uh we have one from ellis sawyer um who is curious about the role of fugitive cognition and temporality in something like hip-hop um and could you all riff for a little bit about the fugitive aesthetic in hip-hop and then julia drescher asks perhaps a naive question if the conditions to hear have not been met what might the player be listening to hearing not to oversimplify in parentheses so maybe since those both are addressing music and listening we can deal with those questions together yeah i think for me to to go to the last question first right i'm not convinced that the player is actually necessarily aware of what's happening at the time right i'm what i'm proposing is that there's an atmosphere of force around black subjectivity that produces certain sounds right and i'm saying that part of that atmosphere of coercive uh pressure also creates the conditions for not being able to hear or see certain sounds but at the same time i think it also like i said first creates a condition to produce them so i think there's an asynchron there's an asynchronous nature an asynchronous relationship between production and hearing where both in certain instances you may run into a position where the performer and the hearer and their awareness of what's going on this kind of notion of cognition that that fred mentioned before right has always been curious about what the cognitive side people have to say about using the brain to study the brain right seems like that's going to cause all kinds of problems too at the same time but i'm saying that that in this situation it may be this type of communal listening or communal system of confusion that helps through a type of practice of studying what has been produced to then be able to drag everybody to the point of understanding what's been produced which is a long way around the same i'm not sure that anybody knows what they're doing necessarily until it reaches the point of of the conditions being met for all those places all those people or subjects to meet in a space of of communal study to answer this question right and i think that for me to get to the question about hip-hop right in the future tv of it i'm i'm thinking you know i'm thinking about like then like i just the other day i was watching the the documentary about biggie right i don't know if people have seen this right it's like it was fascinating to me because for some reason when he was there were people who had pictures of them with him when they were like five years old and they were coming forward like here i am with him in third grade and he has just like brightness about him right in these pictures like this and i can i can pretty much be sure that there's no one in the world that is keeping a picture of me when i was five years old in their house is not related to me right and they're people related to me who probably don't even care to have pictures of me when they're five years old because they just don't care so there's something going on about that presence right and it becomes a type of of a way of being that i think inc that he adopts both in his personal physical comportment the way he displays himself the way he he functions and then the fugitivity of the way he produces his art right like you know to you know some of the things that he would say man it's like you know he says his one rhyme he says get in that ass quick fast like ramadan right and it's like the complexity of that statement means he's got this complete awareness of all those things at the same time but also puts them in a framework that's discernible where hip-hop becomes a vehicle for transmitting that information so i'm not sure if if hip hop capital hip h capital h hip hop is so much a style of music as opposed to a system of transmission of information or maybe that's what music is right it's a way to transmit a particular type of information i think there's a type of hip-hop that's about performing the the structure i think there's a form of hip-hop that is becomes a delivery system right and if you if you can listen properly to it and you have and you have what arthur jacobs says if you have properly humbled yourself to the form right then i think that you have the possibility of being able to hear exactly what's going on if not i think you're just you're on the surface kind of floating on top of it and you don't get the depth of of everything with what i said allison's talked about we're hurting bleeding in and and and just you know hoping at the same time right and i think all those things to me become the the complexity of the future of the aesthetic that we would call the hip-hop aesthetic that i think is within what fred says is his comfort with something like the black aesthetic that seems to have those different lines within it right and that seems to be one particular one i'm curious to figure out whether it is uh fish or foul in a way it's a delivery system or actually a practice or both at the same time what if it's a practice that makes intermittent deliveries you know i mean um which are which are in a certain sense non-non-essential um but which can certainly be very beautiful and extraordinarily you know seductive um you know this this this is just played out generally in the music you know because i have been seduced and have fallen in love so many times with so many sounds and at the same time studying the music is i think coming to grips with the fact that the music is the making of the music it's it's not the sound um the sound you know is the appearance which tells of the making of the music and it really freaks me out to be channeling plato you know by way of wallace stevens but sometimes you just don't uh well as someone once said who was seemingly intent on putting me in my place sometimes you just don't know who you who you are indebted to you know but on the other hand sometimes you do you know and it's just some you got to deal with you know but um but at any rate uh with regard to hip-hop specifically um this question of of you know practice versus delivery system which again is its own weight takes us back to allen iverson you know um it's really rich you know and and i guess i kind of tend to think that you know biggies a crucially important figure in the history of the music because i think for me biggie is asking us to call into question the epic the primacy of the delivery system and and it but it's done so by very in a very specific way by way of the specificities of his enunciation okay um there's this great great musician and poet and thinker named jerome ellis who from the perspective of someone who is a stutter were and who has a you know profound disfluency he's asking us to think more generally about disfluency in black culture and black utterance um and and and what i guess i would want to say is that you know let's say that delivery has something to do with fluency and practice has something to do with on a constant approach a constant sort of preferential option for disfluency right that in black music it seems to me you don't practice in order to become more fluent you practice in order to become less fluent okay if what we mean by fluency is a certain kind of normativity um and and so um i still will never say anything other than that rock him is the greatest rapper in the history of the music i'm just not gonna ever be able to say anything other than that but what i also recognize is that um maybe what that means is that i'm saying that you know he's the greatest deliverer of content in the history of hip-hop and and and to me the shift from from rock him to to biggie is a shift from a clarity of enunciation in the delivery of content to somebody who is cultivating not just not not not avoiding but rather cultivating the slur um you know um this cultivation of the slur is really way more intense maybe it's a bad boy thing you know seriously because mace cultivates the slur in in ways that are that are even more pronounced obviously you know but but what but but to me you know biggie's in an initial biggie's the prophet of trap right where you know that that cultivation of slur the cultivation of disfluency you know is is really really pronounced so to speak and it's done so in the interest of of reminding us that the music is the making of the music okay um and it's the you know it's the it's the existential condition out of which the music emerges you know um so and i think you could obviously you know talk about all of that with regard to with regard to fugitivity this also is something that i'm trying to learn from from from lorenzo moulton um you know who is constantly giving me a tutorial on on on various lils as i call the you know the the proliferation of right a lot of baby weight you know yeah yeah yeah so i'm trying to learn i'm doing the best i can since we have just a few minutes left um would uh michael stephano fred any thoughts to kind of conclude today's um absolutely uh wonderful uh discussion um and if we didn't get to your question i um i am deeply sorry about that but we have them and and they're noted uh but yeah so with a few minutes left would anybody like to say a few final concluding thoughts want to say thank you and then it was fun you know and uh and uh and i'm going back on mute now but thank you so much thank you christian and michael and steve i'd also like to say thank you but i also thought you know since we are looking at these uh these aesthetic examples uh you know we should remember that this has been really a horrible year for losing people um who presented various forms of the fugitive aesthetic to us uh and i i was just thinking about um for instance you roy who just died recently um bunny whaler and list goes on and on but um i think it's uh you know it's a moment just to to recall what they have done for us what they prepared for us and even though i i think michael's right that the conditions are not yet there um there's been a lot of people who've been helping us to get to those conditions who we lost this year so uh that's that's to my mind is as we talk about futures empathetics um so thank you again everyone and um i hope we get a chance to to continue our conversations yeah i obviously want to say thank you as well right it's been such a really fun opportunity to kind of talk through this and i think to just what stephanos saying right i imagine that at some point when the conditions are met all these things that we've heard will all come together in some like weird like single noise right that like carries all that information at the same time just washes over us right this reveals everything at the same time right now that's you know not to be you know all kind of you know revelations about it right it just feels like that kind of thing right in this moment to of catastrophe that we've lived through in in this the last year this long year that just keeps you know echoing forward with these losses right i think all of that is is part and parcel of us struggling to figure out how to meet the conditions to be able to to take stock and about and properly understand what it is that we've been listening to all this time right from you know dating back to equiano kind of forward right these kind of you know utterances that have that i think at some point will will be combined to a single coherent statement for us right that then helps us then go back and listen again and with a new system of kind of cognition so this really helped me with uh some of the things i've been thinking about so i really appreciate it and hope we can you know do something again and and thanks to the audience as well for their kind attention well i think on that note that's a perfect place to end and just again i am truly grateful to stefano fred and michael and everybody else and the audience and people involved in making the event and planning up to it and um i wish you all a wonderful afternoon evening wherever you are um thank you again uh this has also been just ex extraordinarily helpful for my own thinking and um and thinking together and collectively uh with others so it is almost exactly four so i guess we can end here amazing book