Reimagining Citizenship: Creative Assignment #1

Due by November 2, 2015.

The creative assignment suggestions each of us proposed are below. Allow yourself to be inspired by all of them in your creative study. We all were caught up with Fred Moten's conceptualization of "more than and at the same time less than one" (Sandra's suggestion, Meena's A and Cynthia's 1).  Make a creative study that concerns itself with this condition of "more than and at the same time less than one"...there is a part of me that wants to maintain a relationship with Blackness in this creative study so I wonder if I might ask that in your personal exploration of "more than and at the same time less than one" if there can be some visible (visible at least to you) trace of Moten's context of Blackness within your study.

Suggestions by...

Sandra:

I am actually struck by his adjectives, which he uses with reference to this condition-

e.g.:

Entangled, vulnerable, open non-full, more than and less than yourself.

I could imagine to make a study based on them

Meena:
 
A) Create a contact improvisation of your fragmented non-whole bodies, within the context of Black fragmented selfhood; try to work through knowing that your fragments are not the same or to the same extent as Black selfhood.
 
B) I'm trying out a version of this task as a dancer/facilitator in the upcoming exhibition of taisha paggett "School for Technicolor People" at LACE. Isolate sentences of Fred Moten that really stand out to you. Say those sentences out loud a few times to get a feeling for the rhythm and feeling of the sentences. Create a rhythm sequence with your feet that repeats or responds to the feelings, structures, syllables, of those phrases that you chose. You should have a movement sequence of foot rhythms. One sequence can incorporate some of the words (from your written response of Moten's talk). A second sequence should have no words spoken, just your feet in conversation with Moten's words quietly living within your interior you.

Cynthia:

(1)  Create a movement study that embodies – or rather, enfleshes – excess and lack.  Embrace irregularity, and resist wholeness and resolution.

 
(2) Ask yourself, “What does blackness have to do with me?”  Do a 10-minute free-write addressing this question, then transform some of those ideas into artistic form (movement, video, poetry, soundscape, etc.). 

Reimagining Citizenship 1: Babli's response to Fred Moten's talk:

Fred Moten Talk

https://vimeo.com/100330139

watched on October 12, 2015 and 16 October 2015

Notes-

Blackness cannot be reduced to an ontology. Blackness is a principle- a principle of a condition that is there in all of us: the principle of being “less than and more than” at the same time. And because blackness is always more and less than one, blackness it is a condition fundamentally disrupts of the concept of a (whole) self.

(though I personally always find the distinction between self and individual helpful, I need to think though more fully what this would mean for this lecture).

What strikes me in the beginning of the piece is how Moten re-counts philosophical and theoretical notions of ontology and difference in a way that highlights the ways in which black theorists W.E.B Dubois’ and Franz Fanon’s major works prefigured the works that Heidegger and – here his argument is stronger – Derrida’s and well as French philosopher’s work (from the 1960s onwards).

“One way to think of what Fanon is doing in 1952 is that it prefigures a lot of the work that Derrida will start doing roughly 10 years later”

He offers an alternative notion of universality- which as a philosophical premise was exposed in his talk as assuming the “non-fullness of black selfhood” – because it challenges the notion of universality that universalists like Kant et al. adhered to.

“As a matter of theory Kant assumes the non-fullness of my personhood”

“Laws were created to assure that non-fullness”

è American constitution: every black person is 3/5 of a man

The critique of Kant is important in this lecture (held in Eastern Europe)- and also for me listening from Germany – as a point of connection- answering the question- what does Blackness have to do with me – though I think that is very clear from the main argument (as I need it of Blackness as a principle rather than as an ontology)

But back to Kant and universalism for a moment:

Moten asks - how do we today understand the relation between difference and universalism- are still concerned with universalism?

Kant’s universality regulates difference- “regulates it, limits it and controls it”

In “contradistinction to Kant” Moten suggests “the relation between difference and universality is maintained and operates by way of and is honored not as a function of the regulation of difference, but as a function of the proliferation of difference”

I remember Meena’s question- what does this have to do with citizenship? I think,  citizenship is bound up with notions of the nation which it seem to more often than not, have difficulty or be incapable of embracing difference.

And for Moten, blackness “constitutes something on the order of a principle for the proliferation of difference, precisely insofar as it is neither, as it is always both less than one and more than one.”

“In this combination of incompleteness and excess, ok, it constitutes the living embodiment, so to speak, of the disruption, of differences, of of the of the disruptive force of difference as a universal principle, ok”

Blackness stands for:

“fundamental irregularity”

“resistance to regulation”

Moten’s connection to queer theory is another gesture me into his discussion of blackness:

The  Queer and the trans- citizen is also “less than” as well as “more than one” – “infected by impurity and multiplicity that undermines” singular notions of gender

Cynthia’s internal queer theorist asks “where is the pleasure in blackness”- I am left thinking- how does the queer notion of desire connect to Moten’s assertion that in order to embrace non-fullness (which is possible for everyone) one has to give of the desire of the fantasy of fullness.

 How does desire live in a queer-of-color debate?

This brings me to he very important question of who can embrace blackness, who can consent to blackness?  Can people who have not been subjected to the imposition of non-fullness do so?

Q: “would it be a presumption for people who are not black to claim blackness?”

A: “just call it something else then”

It is not about the ontology. Yes.

Here is where I think I get interested as well as paralyzed, when he starts looking to bthe histories of black and queer performance for “clues” for the

“enactment of another way of being in the world”

In order to claim the “less than/more than” condition, one has to give up a “normative idea of citizenship”

“a notion of home”

“Relinquish securities”

surrender to exhaustion

Accept the poststructuralist premise that “we all operate in a certain structure of deprivation and poverty” that we operate within a desire for a self, but we don’t actually have it:  “what cultural and aesthetic resources are available to us that would make it more possible for us to claim, rather than to disavow,  this condition which is already ours, irreducibly, in a way that we cannot avoid”

Assignment idea:

I am actually struck by his adjectives, which he uses with reference to this condition-

e.g.:

Entangled, vulnerable, open non-full, more than and less than yourself.

I could imagine to make a study based on them

Reimagining Citizenship Round #1: Meena suggestions for creative assignments

Can you read the writing in the photos of my previous text?

Questions and thoughts first. You don't have to answer.
 
i) Moten makes numerous theoretical interventions here to disrupt the Western European canon of usual suspects by not only centralizing, but visibilizing Black intellectual thinkers who have predated the work Western European thinkers. But never credited. What would happen if PNC worked with the lens of Blackness in addition to all the other lenses PNC uses? Name a non-Black theorist you love and an argument the theorist makes that you love. Find out what was happening around the same time of your theorist. Find a Black intellectual around the same era who was making a similar claim, or was in conversation with the ideas of the theorist you love.

ii)  Do you consider Tolliver's prayer a performance? Do you consider the Middle Passage a sort of durational contact improvisation performance? How does this change our notion of performance, of contact improv, of duration performance?

iii) How have your ancestors been subjected to philosophical and legal underminings of wholeness? 

iv) I have thought about the ramifications of accepting the gift, in the ways that I partially understand what Moten talks about when he talks about the gift that Black people have to give. Gift as loss.  I feel I have accepted partial aspects of the gift when I was more active in issues of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty years ago still living in Canada. In the post-colonial context, there is a notion of longing for that home that once existed. Here, there is no luxury of once upon a time. Giving up a sense of home, citizenship, belonging, owning property. How can I own property, own a home, on this land where this land is not, should not, cannot be my own?

v) I get the need non Black people have to compare Blackness to concepts that we might know more about. Cross-comparing to try to get even a sliver of partial understanding. Even though I feel it is destructive. In the case of queer theory for example, Moten does say that queer theories also support the "more than and less than ONE" theory that he talks about in Blackness. And that all minoritarian subjects are aware of the fantasy of whole subjecthood. But he also believes that the historical and legal traumas to Black people, to Black notions of selfhood is beyond/on the other side of any other conception of self. What is different or similar between working from Blackness as a theoretical lens and queer theory? What is similar and different about post-colonial theories?

Suggestions for creative assignment: 

A) Create a contact improvisation of your fragmented non-whole bodies, within the context of Black fragmented selfhood; try to work through knowing that your fragments are not the same or to the same extent as Black selfhood.

B) I'm trying out a version of this task as a dancer/facilitator in the upcoming exhibition of taisha paggett "School for Technicolor People" at LACE. Isolate sentences of Fred Moten that really stand out to you. Say those sentences out loud a few times to get a feeling for the rhythm and feeling of the sentences. Create a rhythm sequence with your feet that repeats or responds to the feelings, structures, syllables, of those phrases that you chose. You should have a movement sequence of foot rhythms. One sequence can incorporate some of the words (from your written response of Moten's talk). A second sequence should have no words spoken, just your feet in conversation with Moten's words quietly living within your interior you.

Reimagining Citizenship: Meena's written response round #1