In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (review)

Fred Moten's In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition offers a searching theory of performance that performs the space of its possibility, performs the possibility of the opening of an acoustic space in which the "phonic substance" that launches his project can be heard. Or rather, following the demand of this work, In the Break opens a space in which the cry that initiates and constitutes this book is made visible. It establishes a poetic that makes possible a semantics of the anguished cry. Moten's book opens with a cry, that cry, which cannot be reduced to one cry, any one cry in particular, although there are many particular cries—memorial, historical, and indelible—that reverberate throughout his work. The cry remains instead an ensemble of cries—one after another and through one another—that erupts from the depths of two "peculiar institutions" (slavery and literature) and opens onto the history and catastrophe of slavery in America. But the result of Moten's work is always more than a performance, more than the aggregate of gestures that falls within the valorized space of performative writing: In the Break marks an event according to the terms with which Moten describes it—encounter, ensemble, improvisation, and the invocation of the "knowledge of freedom." Moten thinks the performance and performativity of "blackness," aligning himself with a tradition that he simultaneously locates and creates, performs as an encounter with black culture and its phonic traces. "Blackness," he writes, "is an ongoing performance of encounter: rupture, collision, and passionate response." Moten's work is a singularly remarkable achievement, one that establishes new possibilities of thinking history, literature, theory, philosophy, aurality, and an experience of blackness in America that cannot be separated from the materiality and animateriality of black performances.

In the Break consists of three sections—"The Sentimental Avant-Garde," "In the Break," and "Visible Music"—and is framed by two sections titled "Resistance of the Object"; the first subtitled "Aunt Hester's Scream," the second "Adrian Piper's Theatricality." The first "Resistance of the Object" establishes a set of theoretical provocations regarding the voice, the cry, the crisis of irrepressible "phonic substances"—irreducible to meaning and language—that constitute a history of black experience, literature, and performance from the underside of the Enlightenment. They form an ensemble and epistemology of blackness, of black identity which, Moten says, following Ralph Ellison, is fated to "become one, and yet many." Moten describes the epistemology that guides his work as "a kind of knowledge that moves from somewhere on the other side of either reason or experience, intelligibility or sensibility, and that is not reducible to any originary state of nature." "Out-from-the-outside," Moten calls it. In the opening pages of In the Break, Moten sets the tone for a series of "passionate responses to passionate utterance, painfully and hiddenly disclosed always and everywhere in the tracks of [black] tradition." The cries that initiate Moten's inquiry, from Olauduh Equiano's curses (and prayers) to the cries of Aunt Hester that Fredrick Douglass records, build toward a powerful ensemble of voices that generate in Moten's work a rigorous thinking of the phonic substances that harbor a "knowledge of freedom in the absence of what we would recognize as the experience of freedom." These breaths, sounds of birthing, dying, and surviving that Moten painstakingly and painfully chronicles have been excluded from the archives of experience and language in the post-Enlightenment episteme. Of the prophetic call of freedom submerged in the slave's cry, Moten asks, "Is knowledge of freedom always knowledge of the experience of freedom even when that knowledge precedes experience?"

In his opening pages, Moten initiates a tone, a pitch, an expressivity that traverses the registers of literature, critical theory, cultural studies, ethnic studies, music, performance studies, and African-American history, art, and...