A review by miguel
In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition by Fred Moten

4.0

In the Break (2003) is, by design, a profoundly difficult text to get a grasp on. I found myself listening to Kind of Blue and Lady in Satin and opening my dog-eared copies of Philosophical Investigations and Écrits. Moten’s text is referential and at times confoundingly so. And yet what the text achieves is a simultaneous enactment of a form, style of reading, style of writing, and style of thinking it announces in its pages. In the Break does not have the same analytical points of contact of texts like Scenes of Subjection or Demonic Grounds. Rather than containing an argument that is organized around a particular theoretical innovation or constellation of concerns, In the Break reads like the works of art it cites and analyzes. Reading in the mode of analytic philosophy, to distill formulations, was fruitless for me. I began to come into contact with the text when I began to read it differently, in a more literary mode.
That is not to say there are not complex formulations that are evident here. Moten writes at length about improvisation and ensemble, two of his overriding concerns throughout the text. The text revealed a dimension of itself to me in Moten’s brief evocation of drag. He writes:
The ongoing refusal of adjustment or assimilation at the same time as a movement emerges, one that seems as if it’s all about the desire to adjust and assimilate, the paradoxical inexorableness of what we now know to have been an impossible inclusion. The avant-garde is always subject to inclusion’s injunction to pass. This is what Paul Taylor, businessman, teaches us. (This is a lesson also taught and retaught at various drag balls, as if in contrast to such a scene’s other interventions, as if to signify Harlem’s ongoing prefigurative recapitulation of the whole downtown scene.) This is the political limit of realness. (Moten 166-7)
Moten includes the reference to drag and the idea of “realness” within two different registers as something like an “easter egg.” In the context of the drag ball, to have one’s “realness” (the extent to which one is passing as a particular gender, social class or presenting an overridingly recognizable pop-cultural image) judged disavows the possibility of the “reality” (in the hetero-masculinist-modernist-Enlightenment sense) of that “realness.” Moten’s text, too, passes freely through the registers of aesthetic and philosophical (false binary though it is) and seems to hold any disciplinary loyalty in contempt. It disavows the reality of the philosophical and aesthetic realness it doubly serves. This mode of thinking and writing is necessary, according to Moten, in the insurgence against anti-Blackness. To put A Tribe Called Quest in conversation with Shakespeare and Wittgenstein in conversation with Baraka is a delightfully satisfying transgression.