On the night of Joe Biden’s big speech, I prepped for the spectacle by Zooming with black alt leftists who addressed an “ensemble” very different from the Democratic Convention.
The online meetup I attended featured Fred Moten—a prominent Afro-American prof—and Harmony Holiday—“dancer, archivist, and author of five collections of poetry” (who’d also written a rave review of Moten’s last book). They put on “an improvised reading and listening session” in which they shared poems of their own and songs by others. They may have been making it up on the spot, but sparks didn’t fly. Monotony not spontaneity ruled their square Zoom biz, due in part to the grain of their voices. Holiday read her poems in an odd monotone, giving each word the same weight. She seemed almost completely disengaged from her material. (The unmusical quality of her voice made irony of her lovely name.) I’m guessing her style of reading and writing may have been impacted (a word I use only with tongs but it fits in this case) by Moten’s anti-humanist aesthetic/politics. More on that anon.
After hearing their flat poetry reading, Biden’s approach to his script later that night seemed full of life and feeling and variousness. It was dramatic too. Stakes were high because Biden has seemed less fluent in recent years, not that he was ever Joeloquent. I could barely watch his performance, since I was scared he might not meet this moment when hope and history must rhyme. Per Seamus Heaney’s poem that gave Biden his speech’s ender. Biden likes Irish poetry as the tv audience was reminded earlier in the night by Brayden Harrington—the twelve year old with a stutter whom Biden befriended during the primary season. The boy told how Biden had encouraged him to recite Yeats’s verse since it had once helped Biden overcome his own speech impediment. Harrington went on to add to the evening’s drama quotient by passing his own test. When he quashed his stutter to endorse Biden as millions of viewers watched, he spoke to what abides: human struggle.
That’s lost on fortunate scum like Trump. But there’s something iffy about Prof. Moten’s stance toward struggle too. Not that he has a born winner’s imperviousness to “losers.” Moten may be a tenured radical, but he aims to place himself on the side of underdogs. That “undercommons” he’s limned in a manifesto written with longtime collaborator, Stefano Harvey, is an academic realm made up mainly of marginals whose career paths have been more dicey than Moten’s own:
Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentor-less graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers.
Moten’s identification with such outsiders doesn’t mean he’s into struggle. His way in the world upholds surviving not striving. “Self-improvement” is anathema to him. He may have climbed the academic ladder, but he’s intent on distancing himself from any faith in upward mobility or professionalism, any ethos that might be conflated with the meritocracy’s. But he’s not just down for social living (to borrow Rastas’ revaluation/enhancement of the term socialism) or critical of culture that’s all about “the Self.” He’s against “individuation.” Or as he put it in another staged conversation in an academic setting: “Fuck a self…Fuck a body.” His girth is part of his shtick. He sits with his indignity—his large gut signaling ease with his own appetite and disdain for self-improvement, self-discipline, and health itself.
In the run-up to Trump’s election in 2016, Moten looked forward to the end of Obama’s “regime of hope.” I’m sure Moten agreed with standard leftist plaints about our black President’s trimming, but I bet he was particularly put out by Michelle’s anti-obesity campaign. (“Let’s Move!”? I’d prefer not.) I’m reminded just now of an incident that occurred on the campus where Moten expressed his Rottenesqe contempt for “a body.” The one time I visited Duke University, I walked the grounds with a couple companions. Banter with a genteel lady gardener led one of my crew to bring up Mrs. Obama’s garden. End-o-convo. Our white southern interlocutor was repulsed by the idea of Michelle (and the girls) digging in the White House’s back yard. Moten’s antipathy for Obamas doesn’t make him a brother under the skin of that Daughter of the Confederacy, but their convergence seems notable.
Moten claims he’s out to go “left of black.” Despite the rad veneer, though, he’s not searching for new directions. He still bows to “Generation Theory’s” first avatars. (I recall nosing around the 2003 book that made his reputation, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and wondering then at his hoary Lacanian yada yada: “Is there a black mirror stage?” etc. [1]) Moten remains a dead-ender when it comes to the lamentable era of literary theory. He avers there’s not much difference between “the study” that produces his theses and his poetic practice. (The title of the first item in his Poetry Foundation archive—“Fugitivity is immanent in the thing but it manifests transversally”—was all the evidence I need on this front.)
Verse by self-canceling authors is bound to be pretty deadly as that Zoom rap between Moten and Holiday proved. But their rap had a soundtrack as well. I’m sure those of us who listened in were grateful to Moten for sharing a minute of a David Murray ballad, “Patricia.” (More please!) But we paid for our rapture. After Holiday played a recording of Fannie Lou Hamer singing a 60s freedom song, Moten’s answer-record was Klein’s “Another Dust”—a digital track tagged as “ambient” “classical” “electronic” “gospel” “London”. Moten claimed this cryptic mess by an Afro-Brit was the sort of protest music Mrs. Hamer would’ve been making had she’d lived to see Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s Convention. That seems unsound even if Moten knows something untoward about Mrs. Hamer’s musical evolution. (Did she jump from Spirituals to Joy Division? Or develop a taste for dissonant guitar armies?) While it’s true Mrs. Hamer became a national figure when she stood up to LBJ and party hacks on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Convention in Atlantic City, I have no clue why Moten believes she’d’ve shared his contempt for today’s Democratic Party ticket. After all, Biden owes his nomination to a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who’s “proudly black, unapologetically Southern.” I’m guessing Jim Clyburn would seem like family to Fannie Lou Hamer.
Moten’s spin on Mrs. Hamer’s legacy seemed even further out of time once Biden started his own speech by quoting Ella Baker (“a giant of the Civil Rights Movement”). His invocation of Baker was on point since she was a born organizer who sensed “personal relationships were the building blocks that led to solidarity and collective action.”[2] The Convention’s story of Joe—better than nobody, nobody better—highlighted his own authenticity. It meant to bring home his knack for relating to everyday people—that Amtrack ticket-taker, that elevator operator, that black House member who knows all politics is local (and who met his wife in jail).
Politics for Ella Baker was more about listening to folks like Fannie Lou Hamer than messaging to the grassroots from on high. An anti-ideologue, she acted on a radical political vision focused on democratic values rather than programmatic details.
No blueprint could be rigidly adhered to. There was an organic interaction between the people involved in social change and those opposed; among different sectors, generations, and regions of the movement; between what we know and what we dare to dream. Although Baker had a definite worldview, which she articulated, enacted, and defended, there was fluidity and flexibility in the positions she took and the alliances she formed.[3]
Biden’s current stance seems Bakeresque. He’s got plenty of position papers but he insists this election is about the “soul of America.”
The line of Baker’s that Biden used to get him going—“Give the people light, and they will find the way.”—dates back to Baker’s long stretch with the NAACP, before she moved through Martin Luther King’s SCLC to help found SNCC. During her time with NAACP she once spelled out how the process of organizing was profoundly emotional. It didn’t rest on superior argufying:
There’re some people in my experience, especially “the little people” as some might call them, who never could explain the NAACP as such. But they had the knack of getting money from John Jones or somebody. They might walk up to him: “Gimme a dollar for the NAACP.” And maybe because of what they had done in relationship to John Jones, he’d give the dollar. They could never tell anybody what the program of the Association was. So, what do you do about that. You don’t be [sic] demeaning to them. You say, well here is Mrs. Jones, Mrs. Susie Jones, and remember last year Sister Susie Jones came in with so much…Now, somewhere in the process she may learn some other methods, and she may learn to articulate some of the program of the Association. But whether she does or not, she feels it. And she transmits it to those she can talk to.[4]
Don’t be put off by that phrase “the little people.” Baker wasn’t condescending. She fought with NAACP officials who refused to put themselves on the line for black folks “who didn’t conform to the dominant culture’s notions of social respectability.” Looking back on her battles with them, she once recalled “how they would be against the idea of going to battle for the town drunk who happened to have been brutalized when being arrested, because who was he?”[5] Things have changed, of course. Black elites, for the most part, are no longer stuck on a respectability politics that lifts them above poor and working class people of color. But Baker’s angle on that “town drunk” was just one aspect of a class-consciousness that put her at odds with many of the Movement’s black leaders in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Her experience as a woman, who was treated with the disrespect by male bosses even as she was expected to do most of their detail work, further distanced her from patriarchal chief spokesman:
…she had come to recognize that the bedrock of any serious social change organization is not the eloquence or expertise of its top leaders; it lies, instead, in the commitment and hard work of the rank-and-file membership and the willingness and ability of those members to engage in a vibrant and reciprocal process of discussion, debate, and decision making.[6]
Howard Zinn once recalled that the first time he really saw Mrs. Baker on the case was in Albany Georgia, where SNCC and its allies, including Martin Luther King, engaged in a long campaign to desegregate the city. Zinn arrived in Albany in 1961 as it was becoming the focal point of the Movement. King would end up in the city jail three times and cultural figures like Bob Dylan were in and out of Albany. But Baker was unmoved by celebrity. Zinn recalls noticing her doing her work off to the side, locked in on each of the young people who’d recently been arrested (and released)—talking quietly with them to see what each of them would need to get through the coming days. Baker was self-aware when it came to her approach to the Movement: “You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
That line has an extra kick right now. According to our American Strong Man, Joe Biden is “weak, he’s a weak person, he’s always been weak.” Trump knows, though, that Biden’s empathy is what makes him such a threat. And, on the real side, Biden has shown he’s strong enough to take a punch and give back a hug. His generous decision to put Kamala Harris on the ticket after she came at him hard during the campaign is a sign of strength.
Biden, though, probably went outside the tradition of Ella Baker when he chose Harris over Stacey Abrams. I’m pretty sure I’m hearing Baker’s true heir when Abrams gets granular about how local organizers should address potential voters–“You talk about what the job does, how it works for people, how people get to choose who does that work for them when they vote.”
Abrams’ straight talk cuts right through the discourse of Fred Moten (and his buddy)’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Her model of patient engagement and moral seriousness makes the authors of The Undercommons sound like spoiled teens:
An abdication of political responsibility? OK. Whatever. We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented…
There’s a back story to this sort of bluster. Moten and Harney might’ve invoked the scholarship of Piven and Cloward on the process by which disruptive Poor People’s Movements got co-opted by institutions and politicians. (Piven is still taking up disruption, by the way.) But Moten and Harney lean on more recent pronouncements by the anonymous “Invisible Committee” who were in vogue on the European left a few years ago. At the risk of committing a gaffe like Joe – “You ain’t black.”– Biden, I’d say Moten’s radical chic readiness to co-sign off on a “general antagonism to politics” makes him a traitor to his race.[7]
Notes
1 It seemed like it should’ve been a no-brainer for Moten to steer away from “a theory of human development in which a child’s relationship to a mirror is held to be more significant than its relationship to its parents.” After all, the tradition he was interpreting was made in part by Art Tatum, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, The Blind Boys from Alabama et al. I’m wary of hammering on here but just in case that “mirror stage” still needs shattering…
One measure of the value, truth or explanatory power of a theory is its ability to predict novel facts or at least to accommodate facts not taken into account when the theory was originally formulated. If epistemological maturation and the formation of a world picture were dependent upon catching sight of oneself in a mirror then the theory would predict that congenitally blind individuals would lack selfhood and be unable to enter language, society or the world at large. There is no evidence whatsoever that this implausible consequence of the theory is born out in practice.
2 Quote from Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement.
3 Ransby.
4 Ransby.
5 Mrs. Baker’s refusal to disavow of “the town drunk” reminds me of this 2018 cell-phone photo of Biden talking with a homeless guy.
On Biden’s way out of a D.C. movie theater with his daughter, he’d run into a homeless man named Rashid who was having problems receiving a housing voucher from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—a voucher which could help him move off the streets to live in some kind of secure and clean housing…
Joe Biden listened to Rashid, then went back inside the movie house to find a paper and pen, and reportedly wrote down the name and number of someone he knows who might help.
It was this image of the former vice president, handing a note of help and speaking patiently to a man who lives on the streets, that was snapped by passer-by on a cellphone and posted on social media sites. The photo captures a moment that may seem too rare these days, especially in Washington, D.C.: a small, telling, private and unscripted act of kindness.
Joe Biden has been praised for his grace and goodness. He didn’t just give a handout to a man in need, but a hand of help, and stayed to talk. He saw Rashid not just as a homeless man, but a human being.
6 Ransby.
7 Betrayal may be what Moten is best at. He’s featured in many YouTube videos and I haven’t watched all of his performances, but the most compelling moment in the videos I have seen came when he shamed one of his acolytes. The drama went down at a Duke event I mentioned above. Moten and innovative historian Saidiya Hartman took part in a public rap session under the rubric: “The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possession.” Blurbs for the program suggest Moten’s stuff was a major influence on the academic duo who “co-convened” “The Black Outdoors”:
The title of the working group and speaker series points up the ways blackness figures as always outside the state, unsettled, unhomed, and unmoored from sovereignty in its doubled-form of aggressively white discourses on legitimate citizenship on one hand and the public/private divide itself on the other. The project will address questions of the “black outdoors” in relationship to literary, legal, theological, philosophical, and artistic works, especially poetry and visual arts.
That interracial duo—J. Kameron Carter (Duke Divinity School/Black Church Studies) and Sarah Jane Cervenak (African American and African Diaspora Studies, UNC-G)—joined Moten and Hartmann on the stage. Their group discussion seemed to reach a dead end after an hour. Ms. Hartman tried to be responsive to the duo’s prompts but she’s more at home with history than cultural theory. The panel was set up for Moten to act as Wisdom Machine and at a certain point he pulled his own plug. The co-conveners began to flail. A phrase of Moten’s, “luxuriant withholding,” came to my mind as I watched him force Mr. Carter and Prof. Cervenak to call and respond to each other as they waited for his two cents… “The field in some way feels like the out from the out—the outfield”…”It’s like Michael Brown walking down the middle of the Ferguson street. In some sense he was being fielded…And the street itself already names a kind of fielding activity—a violent fielding activity”…”So this gets us to the question we’re messing with, what are we talking about when we talk about the outdoors in relation to blackness?”
When Moten finally spoke (after a last long pause-and-cough) he began haltingly:…”I guess…I just have a general sense of having come to an impasse…in a certain kind of way.” He mused on the need to talk and think things through outside of the “normative white gaze.” Then he turned his own gaze on Prof. Cervanak and averred that prompts like hers were “debilitating.” Her black partner Carter tried to deflect the blow by turning to the audience (“Y’all!”) and inviting then to join the discussion. In the YouTube video, I couldn’t make out Prof. Cervanak’s response to Moten’s insult, but I did notice she headed off for a far corner of the room as soon as respondents in the audience started to hold forth. Her colleague Carter ended up on the opposite side of that room.
When I watched the opening sequence in the “impasse” between the duo and Moten, it reminded me of an early Mike Leigh movie. I felt I was in the midst of a comedy of jargon taken to extremes. But this reality show ended up in a not-so-funny place. How does it feel to be a disciple of someone who disrespects you in public?