bordarretazos

“El desarrollo del ‘pandemicismo’ reside precisamente en ese “volverse viral”, en ese estar en todos lados, una cierta generalizabilidad de los virus (…) La naturaleza misma de la enfermedad no puede ser propiamente explicada. Pero esta enfermedad no puede ser comunicada debido a su comunicabilidad omnipresente. En el virus “volviéndose viral,” también nos movemos más allá de un devenir biológico de lo social y de los medios hacia una comunicabilidad excesiva. La inhabilidad para comunicarse efectivamente y de manera pública de aquellos que conocen mejor de un tema es establecida por un exceso pegajoso de comunicabilidad bio-mediático-afectiva”

(Anna Munster, An aesthesia of networks, pág. 119.

«Las relaciones no deben ser pensadas como un cimiento, como sucede con la conectividad en la figura contemporánea de la red. Las relaciones se están formando en cada momento de manera activa: ‘En el empirismo radical, escribe William James, no existe un cimiento o fundamento; en realidad es como si las piezas se unieran por sus bordes, siendo la transición experimentada entre ellas la que forma el cemento que las une»

Anna Munster en An Aesthesia Of Networks, pág. 7.

«Dicen que estamos demasiado endeudados. Que necesitamos un mejor crédito, más crédito, menos gasto. Ofrecen reparar nuestro crédito, una asesoría crediticia, un microcrédito, un plan financiero personalizado. Nos prometen igualar de nuevo la deuda y el crédito, el crédito y la deuda. Pero nuestra deuda permanece en mal estado. No dejamos de comprar una nueva canción, una nueva ronda. No es crédito lo que buscamos, ni siquiera una deuda, sino una mala deuda, lo que es decir una deuda real, una deuda que no pueda ser pagada de vuelta, la deuda a la distancia, la deuda sin acreedor, la deuda negra, la deuda queer, la deuda criminal. Deuda excesiva, deuda incalculable, deuda sin ninguna razón, deuda separada del crédito, la deuda como principio de sí misma.

El crédito es un medio de privatización y la deuda un medio de socialización. En tanto sigan siendo una pareja en la violencia monógama de un hogar, de una pensión, de un gobierno, de una universidad, la deuda únicamente podrá alimentar un crédito, la deuda únicamente podrá desear un crédito. Y el crédito únicamente podrá expandirse por medio de una deuda. Pero la deuda es social y el crédito es asocial. La deuda es mutua. El crédito avanza únicamente en una dirección. La deuda, por el contrario, avanza en todas direcciones, se esparce, escapa, busca refugio. El deudor busca refugio entre otros deudores, adquiere deuda de ellos, les ofrece deuda de vuelta. El lugar de refugio es el lugar al que únicamente le puedes deber más y más porque no hay acreedor, no hay pago posible. Este refugio, este lugar de mala deuda es a lo que llamamos lo público en estado fugitivo (the fugitive public). Atravesando lo público y lo privado, el estado y la economía, lo público en estado fugitivo (the fugitive public) no puede ser conocido por su mala deuda, sino únicamente por sus malos deudores. Para los acreedores es sólo un lugar en el que algo está mal, aunque eso que está mal –la cosa invaluable, la cosa que no tiene valor– es lo deseado. Los acreedores buscan demoler ese lugar, ese proyecto, con tal de salvar a los que viven allí de sí mismos y de sus vidas.

Lo investigan, reúnen información acerca de él, tratan de calcularlo. Quieren salvarlo. Quieren romper su forma de concentración y poner los fragmentos en el banco. Pero súbitamente, aquello que el crédito no puede entender, la cosa fugitiva por la que no se obtiene crédito, resulta ineludible.

Una vez que empiezas a ver la mala deuda, empiezas a verla en todos lados, a escucharla en todos lados, a sentirla en todos lados. Esta es la verdadera crisis para el crédito, su verdadera crisis de acumulación. Eso es lo que hace a la mala deuda tan malvada. La deuda ahora empieza a acumularse sin él. La vimos ayer en un paso de baile, en unas caderas, una sonrisa, en la manera en que se movía una mano. La escuchamos en un momento de descanso, un corte, una cadencia, en la manera en que las palabras saltaban. La sentimos en esa manera en que alguien guarda lo mejor que tiene sólo para dártelo y después ya no está, dado al fin, una deuda. No quiere nada a cambio. Tienes que aceptarlo, tienes que aceptar eso. Estás en deuda pero no puedes dar crédito porque no lo tomarán. Después suena el teléfono. Es el acreedor. El crédito te sigue la pista. La deuda olvida. No estás en casa, tú no eres tú, te mudaste sin dejar tu dirección de destino llamada refugio»

Fred Moten y Stefano Harney, «Deuda y estudio» en Los abajocomunes, pág. 96. Traducción modificada. Descargable aquí: https://bordarretazos.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/acomunes_web_pags.pdf

“ROWELL: When one looks at your poems, one discovers a new texture of English, or one finds a struggle toward language, or one is revealed the inadequacy of English to render all you want to say. (It’s even difficult for me to fashion the exact phrase or sentence to describe, with certainty, the linguistic field of your poetry. [Laughter.]) “Words don’t go there,” as Charles Lloyd is reported to have said when he was ask to comment on one of his musical compositions. Actually one might be inclined to say the same about some sections of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, especially the section on Cecil Taylor. Some of the writing there reminds me of your poems. I would not be surprised if you have written a poem on the subject of that section of In the Break.

MOTEN: It’s true that a lot of the objects of inquiry in my critical work are objects of inquiry in my poetry as well. My wife, Laura Harris, has been working on the relation between experimental and documentary aesthetic forms, on what it means for artists and critics to consider both as modes of inquiry, and this has had a big influence. She has really transformed the way I think about and write poetry. Writing a poem has become for me, at least in part, an attempt to find out some things and to try to work through some things intellectually, emotionally, and musically. I’m trying to find out some things, get at some things, and consider some things, while at the same time trying to makesome things. That process is a struggle toward language that tries to struggle toward things; it is movement in preparation. In In the Break I refer to Eric Dolphy talking about preparing himself to play with Cecil Taylor: I’m trying to write in preparation, as well; maybe not to play with Cecil but to abide with his work better or more fully, to listen more carefully and creatively and critically. For me, this sense of writing as preparation or even anticipation constitutes something on the order of a mode of inquiry. And this gets us back to some issues that are embedded in your first question, issues concerning the differences and the relations between modes of inquiry (the poetic and the critical, the experimental and the theoretical). Many of the folks I write about in In the Break —Billie Holiday, Adrian Piper, James Baldwin, Dolphy, Taylor, and, probably above all, my late mother, B. Jenkins—I have written poems about as well. There are thematic and stylistic gaps between these modes of writing/inquiry but the connections probably far outweigh them. I think these connections are getting stronger, more pronounced in my work, but, at the same time, I’m still deeply committed to maintaining the distinction between the two modes and to the notion that they are both indispensable in this preparation for, or struggle toward, things. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that distinction, how to inhabit it and trouble it at the same time and in the interest of things. The difference between a poem “about” Lady Day and a chapter on her in a more properly critical or theoretical text might emerge in the poem’s challenge to syntactic or semantic norms, in its going after a sound that might not get you where the word or the sentence gets you, but might get you past the word’s or the sentence’s limits or, even better, might take the word or the sentence past its own limits. It’s not so much that a critical text might allow me to say this while a poem might allow me to do this; it is, rather, that they can both be beautiful ways both to say and do this. What Lady does to the words (and the sentence)—“Don’t explain”—explains everything. Anyway, I think that the oppositions between theory and experiment, poetry and criticism, are constraints that enable us when we resist them and when we resist the urge simply to obliterate them. In the end, I want my criticism to sound like something, to be musical and actually to figure in some iconic way the art and life that it’s talking about. At the same time, I also want my poetry to engage in inquiry and to intervene, especially, in a set of philosophical and aesthetic questions that are, I think, of profound political importance. This is, for me, a specifically Afro-diasporic protocol.”

en “Words Don’t Go There”, an interview with Fred Moten, por Charles Henry Rowell. Descargable aquí:  https://sci-hub.tw/10.1353/cal.2004.0178

“ROWELL: You are one of those rare academics; you are a poet as well as a literary and cultural critic. In each of the sites you occupy, you attempt to engage audiences through written and spoken words. But each of these sites, we often contend, requires particular ways of speaking that we assume are different—and, in some instances, are directly opposed to each other. We definitely argue that these two forms of communicating—criticism and poetry—are produced by different sensibilities, and what results are two distinct forms of communication—one critical and the other creative. This has led, of course, to contemporary critics ignoring contemporary literature, especially poetry, and contemporary writers not reading contemporary critical texts. Where do you stand in this divide? Or should I ask the question this way: How do you negotiate the two sites you occupy—that of “high” theorist and that of “experimental” poet?

MOTEN: I don’t think I’m that rare, partly because the folks who have been the most influential for me operate precisely within that dual mode and partly because those who have influenced me have influenced many others as well. Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey have been and remain extremely important to me. They are both deeply embedded in the commitments and protocols of a strain of American poetic experimentalism that goes back to Whitman and Dickinson and that includes seminal figures like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan. Like all of these writers, Baraka and Mackey find it necessary to make contributions to poetics to ground and justify the kind of deconstructive and reconstructive pressure they put on poetic norms. Their poetry and their writing about poetry always reveals how hard and how seriously they think about the nature of poetry in its relation to the world and to history. That kind of thinking must be an intensely theoretical endeavor; it brushes up against and infuses and is infused by the kind of thinking that people usually consider philosophical. So that there are some “high theoretical” tones that mark both the poetry and the poetics of, say, Olson or Duncan and those tones or their variants are evident all the time and everywhere in Baraka and Mackey. Moreover, Baraka’s engagement with German philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Marx, and Mackey’s encounter with contemporary French theorists like Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida are also very evident in their work, giving it a whole other kind of theoretical or critical intensity. And this is all in the service of a deep immersion in the massive theoretical demands and resources of Afro-diasporic art and life. So that the two writers who have the most immediate and lasting influence on me move in the necessity of a breakdown of the oppositions between poet and critic, experimentalist and theorist, from within the complexity of the Afro-diasporic cultural field. And their critical extension of their own multiple lines of origin just lays down tracks for the future investigations of a whole lot of others (as Hortense Spillers, another great poet-critic, might say). So many names come to mind; it’s hard to think of all this in terms of rarity, and it’s hard to think of the divide between high theory and experimental poetry as an especially difficult one to negotiate.”

en «Words Don’t Go There», an interview with Fred Moten, por Charles Henry Rowell. Descargable aquí:  https://sci-hub.tw/10.1353/cal.2004.0178