THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART XV: 'FRED MOTEN'
Fred Moten. Music. All That beauty. Final Knowledge. The little girl and Diogenes. The Last Summer. The 1000 Hours.
‘FRED MOTEN’
To show that this accumulation of girls’ chat—see previous parts—is not just madness or out-of-control simplification, what happens if we turn from these ‘girls’ to a ‘man’, as if a ‘man’ can and should certify what the little girls say, and as if I was not already doing that from a certain place said to be my own? What happens if our guy is Fred Moten? What does Moten name next to these little girls and women and what does he do? What is his name and what is his voice in something like an angelicism element?
We are thinking of his book All That Beauty for example, and what it does, and what it constantly asks and does about doing, by doing nothing and by doing something, by doing something about nothing and by doing nothing about something, and by doing more and less than nothing and more and less than something: by doing nothing about nothing, by doing all that, about nothing and something and everything and the ‘and everything’ too.
Most of all, perhaps Fred Moten is like the little boy (girl) who turns up at the house of girls (vultures, angels, dolls, leaders, and so on) with their mother (sovereignty, earth, etc) there for the first time, and can hardly believe his eyes because it is in the zone of the ‘language’ of the little gynaecium, into which he is openly invited, and so can chime in and play act with the same things, the same bits of more and less than ‘language’.
Here is Moten being playful enough to hit a whole handful of reading cues at the same time in All That Beauty, in the same musical patch:
Recital just wants to be against
the grain of all that; it’s supposed
to fall off all that in asking, what are
we doing? Regarding all this re-
covery, what the fuck is all that?
What the fuck are we doing? Are we
gonna lose all of what we found
in loss in all this hoarding and citing?
Falling off of the music. Falling off and the music. Falling off and music. Music and musical telepathy. Musical telepathy and the musical notes and refrains of asking. Asking as fucking. Hoarding as asking. Fucking asking. Fucking fucking. Fuck hoarding and citing. Fucking fucking without question. Music as citing and hoarding. Not asking as citing and hoarding. Asking as music. And refrain. The opposite of hoarding. The opposite of all thoughts. Of all opposites. To be against the grain where the grain is the extinction of all that. To be all and that and all that. To be all of all that that. All this this. All that that. Are we about to lose? Are we really about to lose all lose all again without even once knowing everytime what it was? What did we find even in loss we are or were about to lose? In music? In recital and grain.1
Let’s all say what Moten says about all this and all that:
what the fuck are we doing
Or join all that—all these recent notes on the end of a universe—together like this:
They say there are no real monsters but there are. Why do they lie? What do they do when they do that, that lying? Why do they always start like that, the adults? Why do they always do and only do? Will someone tell me what doing even is? Is it even a thing? What the fuck are we doing? What the fuck are they doing? How the fuck do I know any of this is right?
Or:
music is fucking. music is not. why don’t we even refrain. time to start stopping but stopping is not. meditation is all not music. meditation is not. just relax. what the fuck do you even mean. why the fuck you even repeat. why the fuck we even be. why the music we even be. let’s bless all that beauty in case. just in case of a save. case in case of case. save for sake of save
What Moten says introduces into what we are saying at the very least a kind of archival dimension. When we say or ask what they are doing or why all they do is do, it seems we are also asking about the archive, and how that does or achieves anything at all. Whether it does at all. Whether the idea of saving is contrary to what it does. Whether saving ourselves is contrary to, so to speak, what it says it does. What if not a single one of our ideas, at this stage, is what it says and says it does? What if what is what’s looking won’t see us through?
FINAL KNOWLEDGE
Contrary to all that said, the tub of Diogenes inside which the little girl. Contrary to the language of adults, politicians, philosophers and poets, the mute ‘language’ without questions of the finally enlightened child. ‘Finally’ does not mean ‘totally’. ‘Perfectly’ does not even mean all that beauty, or mess. ‘Mute’ is full of pure sound. We do not mean that the child, the little girl, finally arrives at absolute knowledge in a simple way. But also, we do mean that and why not? Since all of this doing has been done and leads us only to this big nothing, why not right there in what waits to place a bet only on itself beyond all causal and anecdotal intelligence? What are we waiting for? Something? Or nothing? And why do we wait for death? Why do we wait for extinction? To call it extinction? Why do we wait for death and extinction to say what each is, to say them quickly, now, to not be scared, to not be scared to realize that we are not as scared as we make out? What are we clinging to when we say all this with citations and in the mode of hoarding or its opposite and full of expectation, as if someone will recognize it soon and that will make a difference, or as if the more people that read it the more difference that will make and the more will be done as opposed to the silent congruence of a single line? Perhaps the stacking up of questions and words that are unsimple or not complicated enough in the right simple way is ‘part of the problem here’, as they say. And then, once again, we come back to Greta without name to say this. Who is Greta without name? Why is she not ‘for the archive’ even though we love her and want to hold her? Even though we hate her just as we hate all that beauty and all that angelicism and the rest in real life?
SUPPLEMENTARY CONSIDERATIONS IN THE QUIET AND TOTAL WAR TO UNDERSTAND WHAT NOT UNDERSTANDING THE END OF THE UNIVERSE MIGHT HAVE MEANT BEFORE THEY ALL FELL OFF
Readers tell me this series on the end of the universe has some resonance with them, and it sounds like they mean a piece of music. And perhaps they do. A piece of music for invisible girls. Wild girls know what bits of ext are. Nobody prefers Adorno to Benjamin or knows the color of one better than the tones of the other without loving the Benjaminian Edenic because Benjamin knew better than anyone that the fragment is the better way to leave you to finish a coming thought like a coming body let be. A finished thought is finished, obviously, and an unfinished one is still finishing, yours to be found. Still to come. But there again, we all know that—and that too, the ‘we all know that’. The proper understanding of the end comes not at the end but right before it. Everyone needs a school of the end because the understanding of the end is everything and full of mistakes. In fact all that one can think and want to speak at and to the end is this fullness and falling off of mistakes. One by one one picks through and finds that only perhaps by being right next to the end as exasperated teleology is one at the end and all the others namely all the other options have fallen off. The end of the end is the end—or rather, when the end truly will have been what it was meant to have been and to come then it will have had had nothing to do with the and nothing human about it at all.
Are we
gonna lose all of what we found
in loss in all this hoarding and citing?
Since all is going it seems, we try to archive that going itself. Are we really gonna lose all that we found in loss, all that could be in complete loss, in a complete state of loss, by trebling down on its finding for itself on the archive and without at least leaving some cues for one or two certain things to be found out outside the school? Citational capital is one thing. School is another. School’s out for angelicism summer. I wonder if I can fit 1000 hours into this Angelicism summer.
Really we are talking about a new type of school and how angelicism bounces beyond it none too soon taking its assassins within with it. School is all about formation, culture, and so on. The German word is Bildung. Here we can discuss an abbreviated cue:
1000 hours
The 1000 hours is the idea that you have to spend a certain amount of time studying or reading or at college or whatever before getting to the point of being able to say the point, which is weird when the overhanging sign may be genuine extinction. In angelicism and in this series especially there is a tension between commentary and idea, and between school and dissolution. In some ways we are trying to fragment rather than dissolve this tension, knowing as we do when I live I live ambiguously unsettled in this ambivalent ambiguity. Hegel’s way of speaking about the 1000 hours happens to be to talk about the young girl and a certain beauty of the young girl. Here is the cue from Hegel:
They have become what they are to us now—beautiful fruit already picked from the tree, which a friendly Fate (ein freundliches Schicksal) has offered us, as a young girl might set the fruit before us.
Beware here, it’s tempting to think the fruit is the young girl herself, that when we read this moment she appear before us in conceptual guise and everything is luscious and free for a while—and perhaps it is. The young girl is the figure here of the one who takes care by offering and as if serving the fruit for us. The important consideration is this:
the beautiful fruit is already picked
We don’t go to pick it and the girl doesn’t go to pick it for us. The life of cultural objects is no longer so upstream at all, to be worked back to and through or whatever, since here the image makes it very clear that the fruit the girl brings us is already taken down from the tree. What does this mean? And let’s be brief:
school is out
and
the internet means that school is (not) here and not just there
and
the young now have to fend for themselves and read without reading and this risk right here is the risk they will be read before they get a chance (to read)
If the girl is young here we may eventually associate this naturally with beauty, the same beauty of the fruit, but it also makes us think that this fruit is by definition in the progression of culture Hegel already described long ago handed down to us, the young, like the little girl called Marx or Moten or angelicism01, at a point that gets sooner and sooner and then as if vanishes. We might imagine right now in 2022 that there is no fruit, no girl, maybe just a hand, and the mythology of a friendly Fate (ein freundliches Schicksal).
CONCEPTUAL ABBREVIATION
We have the firm conviction that angelicism is a perfectly expressed statement of a situation and is therefore cancel proof. That it perfectly describes what happens to the school, the fruit, the flower, and the girl—and their diagram. It is mathematically perfect in its messiness and in its perfect collective judgement of not having to care. It doesn’t have to be (well) written all the time to contain the best writing. It doesn’t have to be written out at all, and this gives it a rigidity that is also floppy like a flower, or color engroove. Writing no longer resonates because of technique, and we are convinced every blog by angelicism is not by a simple One. That none of them are. That one of them are are. Angelicism could never do ‘full disclosure’. Disclosure is no longer available on the terms angelicism has achieved. We are secure in this knowledge not as a matter of reading or conceptual art but ‘practice’ (meditation)—which is to say that the zero one is vulnerability itself and its engroove. Our main focus now and this summer is the film but angelicism can continue as anything else and do anything it wants: Be Clone; Be Summer herself. Angelicism contains the whole of Heidegger for example but only in the same way the hot preteen clone girl would bring it you after it has been taken from the tree no longer by the wall. By the time this gets there you will not have to read it, you will have understood and skipped. But this would explain the large readership of angelicism relative to the weirdness and difficulty of its content. In Heidegger there is the forgetting of Being and in angelicism that is simply named as ‘extinction qua extinction’. You believe we could be more clear? Try it.
Let’s say therefore that 1000 hours is way too much in 2022 and that our main problem now is the calibration of extinction as the calibration of abbreviation. In both cases it’s a matter of what makes a certain tempo good or bad. We need to keep a distance with and within the 1000 hours. Do we even know what an hour is when it comes to reading and online telepathy? All we know is school’s out and angelicism is eternal. And also that angelicism is emptiness, that angelicism is out, the out one one. We also know angelicism cannot fall off because it matches emptiness, but so does everything. And everything.
1000 HOURS/ANGELICISM SUMMER
Really, then, we are searching for the tempo of a last summer or something. Cue:
Outline: the German word is der Grundriß, i.e. the ‘précis’ or the abridgement. In Hegel’s opinion the outline is the best and most appropriate format for a work of philosophy. ‘Grundriß’ also means plan or sketch.
I added here but then moved to this note: ‘In love and falling off and all that and everything on everything on emptiness emptiness emptiness and everything. On god on everything on sky on infinities.’
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