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ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
i'm getting that fred moten's assembled feel trio of fanon, arendt and levinas is just all a thoroughly spellbinding display of care and generosity to the afropessimist moment in thought and study now. the eponymous thing in *the universal machine* is moten's gradual building out toward a truly committed non-exclusionary ethical continuum. or totality. digression: unfortunately, for my co-instigator homies, over the course of a number of years while working on propaganda i became needlessly preoccupied with an awful pun "indifference engine"ќ: see, it's meant as satire of techies' gentlemanly disinterest (awkwardness, ineptitude, contempt) of the pertinent worldly affairs of social life: right here in san francisco. the indifference engine produces a deodorized undifferentiated unmarked seamless ahistorical fully-utilized sociality. evictions, deaths, cultural erasure of black life in the tenderloin for shea butter twitter, black lives matter mural in the twitter headquarters lunch room, and so on. this necropolitical interplay seemed key. "indifference engine"ќ failed at propaganda because my colleagues pressed that not every potential one recognizes charles babbage's thing as ancestor to their smartphone; and being shitty at math i'm unclear what the fuck the difference the difference engine deals with is, and how to make the metaphor work with the interdictory topic of difference that is vital to black feminist thought. nevertheless my conceit was that techies would immediatley clock the diss (or diss attempt) and be inconsolably debilitated and called out for their indifference and the endless violence it wrought, displacing folks so they can work on more apps nobody asked for. solving the deluge of tech industrial waste meant shocking the techie out of his indifference. stokely had something to say about imagining the conscience of the oppressor. but we're all san francisco"_? ah, this survivorship. what was the point of the whole borg cautionary tale? and adrian piper's non-exclusionary elan, ethically bound, which is what possessed me to make the indifference engine propaganda in the first place, because i'm engaging your disengagement: "welcome to the struggle"ќ for what? the system theoretical abstract take of the world is related to the totality that opportunists squeeze out of the movement for black lives to fit into that same antiblack system as a race relations manager/pundit. the presumption of a unified thing to be put to use fills me with anxiety. but hasn't moten always been writing more material for me to be anxious about from the start? i mean if i just want to be anxious. a question is whether moten's remaining a motherfucker in black can be misconstrued to extend the nation beyond the nation, in essence, in image like the black power fist we'd do at actions: queerness' serial disappearance and emergence. sutured to the white heteronormativity that demands to watch in hegelian soup. it's unsettling. discursively grounded as this state of affairs might be hubristically captured and exhausted as "unsettlement"ќ. desedimentation eternal. foucault's multidirectional power matrix. the co-arrival of essence and performance is an event that produces maddening beauty and difficulty: *the consent to not be a single being* motive force for this trilogy taken from the edouard glissant quote in response to manthia diawara documenting asking about their transatlantic oceanliner trip remains a class dodge. i'm sorry. i've grappled with this anxiety for some time, ever since reading cedric robinson's skinny chapter 7 from *black marxism* about how touissant led his white slaveowners away from the insurrection. warriors running into colonizer bullets with spears. how unkillable? that this is the meaning of radical black expression makes me want to do something. supposedly this deep and irresistible instigation, this sending, is blackness, maybe, sometimes. this is a metaphysical discussion. i guess. let's talk about moten's language on privilege. this book happens within capitalism, so you can look at the release of moten's collection of essays as either rendering manageable or accessible or paywalling off installments to maximize profits. how moten considers privilege is puzzling. it's not some thing reified by so-called post-soul epigones on social media. otherwise how would you know what to consent against? consent which is not consent will be to an abstract totality where accountability vanishes, like the (an)origin point of the arc of a molotov cocktail from within, no behind, no in vague proximity to a mob. this notion of essence is from within which one can accumulate the anonymizing or assimilative effects of the nation, as i continue to carp, undoing the heterogenous intervention of black feminism. why was "no white person killed in a slave rebellion in colonial virginia?"ќ quoting robinson quoting edmund sears morgan, on and on. yet time and again this is what i say when accomplices cringe at the reach of the military industrial surveillance apparatus. the uncontainable surround. i'm strugging with being thrust across the threshold of "ontotheology"ќ. i don't want to go. i've already gone. what are we?
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