from Day

Fred Moten
3.25.17
The political economy of the art world and the academy
is such that here I am, addressing white people. But my
addressing white people doesn’t mean the work is addressed
to white people. The work is addressed to no one at all. As
Prince used to say, “please come.”

4.2.17
What I learned from Zora, Dara: world is dry land; earth
is water. Our inhabitation is posthumous and prenatal. The
shit is posthumorous and preternatural. In the muck, the
swamp, on shore, wading (waiting, weighed), bathing—we
laugh to keep from laughing like a tremendous submachine.
The earth(l)iness of black life is irreducibly marine. Digging
is a kind of diving. Having (been) returned to the sea, we
see that shit. Keeping our head above water so we can
dive, dig? Amphibian, ungrounded, and undergrounded,
and ana(r)grounded, life. At sea, adrift, as prehistory of an
already given fallenness. Black life is wet. Like when Mackey
tends to certain fluidities of gait. The brutal clearing of

3
land, forgetting the river’s memory, Toni Morrison says,
in Mississippi. Suné Woods says The Escapist sings rose at
summer while singing I never learned to swim.

4.3.17
What’s it like to look at and listen to blackness, hybridizing
poetry and criticism? What is it to hesitate forever to call
oneself a poet?

4.12.17
To disappear in a loose arrangement of flowers.

Slave narrative isn’t the genre in which one gives an account

of slavery and oneself; slave narrative is the disappearance of
oneself and the diffusion of slavery in the giving, which can’t
be accounted for, of the account.

4.14.17
Just be making something all the time so you can use it to
be making something with somebody all the time. Maybe
the distinction is between impathy and empathy—one
emerging from a point of view, the other occurring in shatter
and embrace. Tyrion, Terrion, but who knows which is
which—maybe it all goes back to the same black athenic
vehemence, passion, an in-feeling of outness sung for the
caravan. Ain’t no nonviolent way to look at it. The camera
pans down, moves down, spiraling into the wine and urine-
stained hallway. And what the camera moves toward, as eye,
I a hand that somehow was and is the camera, the hand’s
gesture at and with and in all this beauty, being the camera’s
motion, its having fallen, in fallenness, is all that beauty.

4
Lorenzo Moten
Humanities C, 3rd and 8th, T/Th
April 17, 2017

XIV

The smile of life is a blackbird.

The blackbird is the creator of a happy living.

You see the sun, a garden, a river. A blackbird shall be seen.

A blackbird brings joy to the world.

Black is the base of a drawing and an art piece.

Black is the color of the sky when stars shine.

Black is my culture and color.

5
4.20.17
Whiteness is the set of interpersonal relations. The only good
white person stopped.

Renewing the delineation of, and attention to, the concept

and materiality of antiblackness is essential. But blackness’
most fundamental difference, its essential entanglement, is
not to antiblackness but to black people. Antiblackness is not
the set of interracially interpersonal injuries. It’s a genocidal
and geocidal force of endlessly bloody distraction. A tractor
beam used for the earth’s displacement. Miscreants trying to
put where they live in their pockets.

4.30.17
We neither occupy nor have but, rather, share spacetime. We
share it to shards, du noir, the lived experience of blackness
fucking up the ingenuine article.

5.12.17
Resistance is an atmospheric condition whose relation to
power, which is derivative of resistance, is itself derivative.
What if resistance were preservative, unrestricted, explosive
endogamy? We tend to think of antiblackness as the denial
of personhood to black persons. It’s also the imposition of
personhood upon blackness. It’s raining men, I wish it would
rain, but when I enter black study, my feelings will get their
exercise elsewhere, along the road to my disappearance.

Is there an etymological, and then, perhaps, conceptual,

connection between a parent and apparent, Zo, so beautiful
you let me disappear?

6
5.13.17
Analyses of white supremacy that assume it to be a matter
between subjects sometimes fail to recognize its grounding
in the very idea of the subject. Consider, for instance, the
subject of Rachel Maddow: at least the klan knows who they
are and ain’t scared to show it.

5.15.17
The denial of genocide ought never be traded, through what
Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the “equations of value,” into
everything, or anything, being about you.

(Para)topology is rhythmic placelessness in folding, bending,

crumpling. Back to Living Again, with its inborn recursion, is
prolegomenon to any future metaphysics (or a metaphysics
for a preface that can’t stop coming).

5.27.17
Placelessness. The preservation of placelessness under a
duress that manifests itself as placement. To be put in place
and kept in place; to be conferred a place and to have to have
it, to own it and keep it as one’s own. To have a body imposed
upon one, as one’s place, one’s simultaneous foundation
and incarceration, in denial of n+one. What we preserve,
under the duress of regulation, is placelessness. Black
topological existence, anatopological or undertopological
existence, all out from and all up under existence, an
ascendant, transubstantial (which is, in this case, absolutely
and beautifully and profanely proximate to what Povinelli
calls cosubstantial) un(der)grounding—the dislocation and
differentiation of the mass. The celebration of the mass is

7
displacement: unruly, anamonastic dispersion, cœnobitic
diffusion, and, as such, in all of its transformative force,
preservative. Placeless place, as Kaplan says? Or gateless,
bloodstain’d gate? Vestibular blur. Verstimulant mule. The
vestiblur be mulebone blue, which the soloist, who is not
one, impersonates. Flesh is shared, shard, cursed, damned,
quicked, incarnate incompleteness.

On the question of the sociological in relation to black life and

black art. Is what RA Judy calls the (Event of the) Negro the
sign of reviled, refused, recombinant generality? Can there
be a mode of individuation, with regard to the possibilities
of relationality, that doesn’t partake of the metaphysics of
positionality? Isn’t the incalculable also, of necessity, the
innumerable? For RA, individuation—and the individual—
is not just not one; they are, more generally, split and
supernumerary. This constitutes a kind of paraindividuality,
pa(i)red individuation, whose design is pointed toward a self
that is, at once, discreet and incomplete, open, processual,
but dignified. He is after the delineation of an “intelligence-
in-action” (to use one of his favorite phrases of Du Bois)
that concretizes a non-transcendental, anti-subjective self.
Impersonation given in and as an open set of open sets of
animaterial differences.

5.28.17
What’s the relation between multiplicity and divisibility?
What if the umbrella underneath which dividual and
individual, singular and multiple, exist is, in fact, the concept
and condition of separation? What’s “the relation between”
placelessness, timelessness and inseparability? Is there a

8
fundamental relation between number and separation?

Maybe vision is the (hidden) scandal. PIE root *weidh- «to

separate»/ PIE root *weid- «to see.» It is as if to separate is to
see; as if separation is, at first, an ordering of the seen that is,
more fundamentally, an ordering-in-seeing. What if to think
in disorder, like RA, like Denise, is to think without (ordered)
seeing? (What’s the sound of that dropped “h”?) What
if this interplay of ordering and seeing is Einbildungskraft?
What if disorder is given in/as Phantasie, an anoriginal
jurisgenerativity of the swarm, an inordinate envisioning of
the differentially inseparable?

Can RA outline and demonstrate the compatibility

of sentient flesh, thinking in disorder and subjective
experience? Is the problem the assumed relation between
subjective experience and transcendence; or is the problem
that subjective experience is given always by way of a prior,
presumably originary, separation? Is transcendence simply a
quality that we give to separation? Is transcendence simply
separation’s shame, masked as exaltation? If the problem
is the maintenance of the maintenance of separation, then
transcendence is the blur that movement makes in not
arriving.

5.31.17
RA thinks the negro as event as an irrevocable passage
through embodiment (as imposition and theft). Call it
the trace of the thing in nothingness, which implies that
nothingness is given in a withdrawal from the thing where
transcendence is constant and radically anarchic. Perhaps,

9
in this regard, bodies are just remnants of calculation left to
the devices of their own dissipation, which is instantiated in
attempts to describe experience with reference to the subject,
thereby constraining us to picture and enumerate the subject
of experience at the intersection of the in/di/vidual and the
(in/di)visual.

Does AJ think that all that he says and theorizes of cinema’s

extravagance of the image is somehow compatible with some
fullness of the black subject? But what if AJ—in moving
through the very idea, the very image, of the individual—is
movement through the in/di/visual, as well—in exposure
of the inseparability, the common roots, of the visual and
the vidual? What is the vidual? An anti-sensual seeing in
separation, and of it. Then, the visual is the sensual register
regulated such that the assumption is confirmed. Black
Visual Intonation/Dynamic Visual Phenomena are given,
most emphatically, in black topological existence’s refusal
of the vidual and the visual. Seeing is blind if it can’t hear.
Blur’s not only in but of the visual, an exogamous swerve or
spin, a calibanilistic curve or curse, that animates it from the
beginning by way of a detoxification that eradicates the taint
and scourge of purity. Of would have been outside, hear
that? Funk not only moves, it can remove, dig? Dive!

6.4.17
Maybe that’s all life is, anyway, that dance, the open necessity
of that contingency. And then it’s down to the direction of fit
regarding invitation and acceptance. Who dead? What would
it be for the dead to get down like that? Dead in the constancy
of thwarted little deaths, dead in the hope of not having to

10
deal with death, whiteness is vampirically omnicidal, one by
one. Join us down here, we say, as Rankine says we say, to
every shade. Hospitality is the austere, unlonely office of the
homeless.

6.9.17
Gotta learn to see through things. Gotta learn to love being
seen through. Things are transparencies, lenses, not like
open caskets through american pictures but what, in turning
from the illusive, delusional density of that thing, might
have let lovers get down in the environment. The work is
vestibular in its disappearance when disappearance ain’t just
vanishing but radical in(di)visibility that apposes itself, in
radical presence, to the merely apparent. The disapparent.
Radical presence is dissed appearance; it’s like some lotion
made of valyrical steel.

What if the art world is just a formal conspiracy to make sure

that the nothing that is seen through is displaced by things
that can only be seen when they’re the only things to see?
What it is to see through a radical presence is obscured by
desire for the monument, the mirror of the dead, which—
with sound logic and absent morals—identifies transparent
instrumentality as a degraded antagonist. The work is a
disappearing passage to the socioecological plain. Imagine an
echomusecological museology—to arrange the scene you set
and are and see. Steven Feld’s field. James Baldwin’s scene.
Why destroy a Schutz when you can destroy a Rembrandt,
or a Rothko? I used to know all these people who knew how
to see through shit. Then, I found myself, here.

11
6.14.17
Man is a singularity one all but can’t help but believe in. But
all can do it easy.

Our shit is stoically subhistorical.

6.24.17
Neoliberalism, in one aspect, is a concerted attempt to
obscure the essential and essentially exclusionary relation
of identity and politics, which is better known as liberalism.
It’s ashamed of where it comes from, a cold city built on a
dry marsh. Lots of loose talk about hills, and light, but here
we come, the wet recrudescence of the marsh, the much
more than malarial denizens of le marais, anti- and ante-
aristocratic swarm. Disaggregated, we’re constrained to use
identity as a weapon against the motherfuckers who invented
it. Little pellets, bitter lil’ ol’ bullets, little bitty pullets, twiddle
bullshitters, our primary target is identity. This paradox
lets us find ourselves. Enlightened, we’re constrained to use
politics as a weapon against murderers and their intentions.
Our primary target is politics. This paradox obscures us. We
try to protect ourselves from them and forget to protect us
from ourselves.

7.9.17
Why is there something rather than nothing? So devils can
steal it.

7.20.17
Art militates against our terrible capacity to devolve into
subjectivity. Violence is all it is. Beauty is the (w)hole in what
you see through.

12
7.25.17
World is a picture. The personal occupation of a point of
view is that picture’s condition of possibility; if one can
occupy that point of view, and take that picture, then one
can be pictured, too. This reflective picturing of spacetime
is Newton’s physics and Kant’s metaphysics doing the nasty,
unmoved, without moving, or just not moving all that good.

corrigenda for “gayl jones”

Does Corregidora come (to)

correct or is she a thing
to be corrected? Does she
bear correction? Must she
bear correction? Is her bearing
alive? Can she bear, as Alex
might say, that orsinic inability
to bear the music we bear?
We got an ear for unbearable
detail, as Alex might say. Can’t
stop. Won’t stop when we
get enough. Can’t call it.
Can’t claim it. Ain’t mine.
Sing it. Can’t say it. Run tell
that degenerate sound,
defective gourd and cold
flow bairn, unbjorn, baby. mama,
come on! Can’t come, son.
Won’t come. It’s a cold, cold
coming. It’s like ice around
my heart. I know I’m gonna quit
some body. Every time this
feeling starts we done made us
some connections. We cut

13
 your hard and lonely will
off. We wound your death
and play that back as more
than just not you. This you?
Naw, this just not you, my
beautiful sister. Black is so
much more than just not you
it hurts. Gimme more, gimme
more, I want it, I like it.
Party on fire, then I’m gone,
nothing to correct
’cause it’s all connected.

Slave song isn’t properly oppositional because it isn’t properly

autobiographical. All it tells is nobody’s story, assuming the
apposition, generation after impossible generation

7.29.17
as the word “disguise” coolly reveals itself. The concealment
of identity understood as the disavowal or displacement
of appearance. To disguise is to cover by way of a kind
of uncovering. It marks the mutual orbit of concealment
and unconcealment, obscurity and revelation, hiding and
showing, disappearance and monstrosity. Bad habit. Strange
habit. Off inhabitation.

Antiblackness is not personal but is it experienced personally?

If so, is that experience real? Or true? No. It’s way more
fucked up than the real thing.

14
8.4.17
Works of art are to be seen but art only works if it’s seen
through. Its queerness, its gemlike, quadrophenic black
bitchiness, its nothingness, is its transparency, its transience.
To be seen through is to can’t help but move. Is there a
book of transparencies for which cinema prepares us?
The anicinematic isn’t a return to the book; it’s the book’s
transparency. Dance of the turn and fold, not cut or tear,
which ain’t about rendering things transparent but about
enacting the transparency through which we see (no) things.
We see (through) things. Regarding this disregard, in the
open air, black art is criticism in the afternoon.

Wu, here’s an idea: Sustained Glass—a book of transparencies;

an anaredactive loosening of leaves!

15
from Day © 2017 Fred Moten

Belladonna* Chaplet #218 is published in an edition of 150—26 of which are

numbered and signed by the author in commemoration of his reading with
Simone White on October 9 at Abrons Art Center in New York, NY.

Belladonna* is an event and publication series that promotes the work of

women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-
form, multi-cultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk
about, unpredictable, dangerous with language.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

The 2017 Belladonna* Chaplet Series is designed by Anthony Cudahy, Ian

Lewandowski, and Rachael Wilson.

Chaplets are $5 ($6 signed) in stores or at events, $7 ($9 signed) for

libraries/institutions.

To order chaplets or books, please make checks payable to Belladonna Series,

and mail us at: 925 Bergen Street; Suite 405; Brooklyn, New York 11238

(please add $2 for postage for the first chaplet, plus .50c for each additional
chaplet in a single order)

You can also see more information on each book and order online:
www.BelladonnaSeries.org