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ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
get hype! fuck you if you're not excited. this is what we've been waiting for! a single-authored (mind the imprecision) longplaying text following fred moten's 2003 *in the break*, if not a true follow-up. moten offers that this three volume collection of essays is a testament to "his work" (whatever one might mean by that) continuing the anoriginal notions of haptic invagination, xenogenerous jurisgenerativity, matriarchal function and other operations of a blurry black radical tradition began in *in the break* with the dangerous and regrettable attempt to predicate blackness as something/anything. *consent to not be a single being: black and blur*, "blur and breathe" is ultimately, if one will allow me a perhaps violent and disserving oversimplification of moten's beauty, a rowdy and incalculable celebration destroying/enjoying bad meaning good meaning no boundaries. this hegelian mud undoes distinction in its constant flaunting. overly depending on what you might have been expecting after *in the break* falls to a moot point, i want to say. this is a collection of essays i've heard bits and pieces of in other forms as i doggedly tracked moten's every recorded utterance across the internet. i'm super-familiar with the majority of ideas presented here, so one could argue (very desperately) that this is a lesser work than *in the break* since it fails to be a total work that moten has never publicly presented before. to be fair, i know very little of how much of *in the break* was published elsewhere prior to the 2003 release. hitting moten for the first time this will be an earthshattering revelation. it's hard to feel disappointed by elements of the book-length publication of moten's sheer genius. this marks the first time moten speaks about rap, odb and pras near the beginning and closing with a rumination on his reverence for rakim. there's so much. lots of the essays aren't cultural criticism on individual works; sometimes the writing begins and then switches in a desultory stream of tangents. although there are lingual passages that serve as monogram treatments of a single artist, like glenn gould. moten is always often using one thing to talk about something else, unbounded and fugitive, how things blur and move. this is more pronounced in later essays, especially the near-penultimate a version of which was previously available in online lecture recording form. here moten leans on this want to get up in between, or rather the not-between charles gaines with stokley carmichael, and then samuel r. delany and marilyn hacker, with wittgenstein and glissant on top: this "libidinal saturation" in and through munoz, is what the vast and varied haptic ensemblic refusal of individuation, scoring and underscoring the undercommons, is (imprecisely) about.
ainepalmtree's review against another edition
this collection was dizzying and difficult, reminding me of the etymology of the essay, they are effortful attempts to articulate ideas, demanding much of reader and writer. nevertheless moten's writing is sprinkled with so many gorgeous lines and insights that it makes me want to keep reading him.
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