Fred Moten

Fred Moten writes:

I’m in a bad mood about
everybody’s bad mood, their
political depression, whatever.

and they’re so god damn
squeamish about it—they
can’t even come close to

saying how fucked up it is,
with their anempathic
numbers, but they can say
that. they so attached

to it but they can say that.
o, say what they cannot can!
to say there’s no exit from
compromised ordinariness

is an ordinary compromise,
as if there’s more danger in the
idea of flight than in staying

home, show more as if laying back where
you stay precludes flying, as if
the symposium was theirs alone. show less

This is one I'll hold close and keep going back to for, well, study—and also and especially when I need to be reminded there's space and maybe even welcome out there for my malcontented striving.

Either the best or worst thing for me to have read just now, on the edge of returning to the university in Fall 2020. More complicated than that, of course. I will be processing many of these ideas for a long time, I think. Policy & study & planning in particular -- though all of the ideas here are tied up in one another.

A few lines from The Undercommons:

Critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique.

We run looking for a weapon and keep running looking to drop it.

What are the politics of being ready to die and what have they to do with the scandal of enjoyment?

Can't you hear them whisper one another's touch.

Form is not the eradication of the informal. Form is what emerges from the informal.

I think you can make a good case that human being in the world is, and show more should be, sheer criminality. Which also, first and foremost, implies that making laws is a criminal activity.

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