The Universal Machine

Fred Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and the author of Black and Blur and Stolen Life, both also published by Duke University Press, and In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix 1. There Is No Racism Intended 1 2. Refuge, Refuse, Refrain 65 3. Chromatic Saturation 140 Notes 247 Works Cited 271 Index 281

"It's this spirit of the collective effort of study and exchange and resonance, the effort to keep the channels open and keep listening, that has made Moten (or, maybe, 'Moten/s') such a celebrated thinker. At the end of sentences like these, you want to say something like Amen." - Jess Row (Bookforum) "At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten's trilogy has reinvented both. . . . In its mixture of theoretical complexity and disarming directness, Moten's beautifully written trilogy offers the sheer pleasure of art." - Lidija Haas (Vulture) "2018 must go down for me as the year of Fred Moten's trilogy: Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. You could say they're essays about art, philosophy, blackness, and the refusal of social death, but I think of them more as a fractal universe forever inviting immersion and exploration, a living force now inhabiting my bookshelf." - Maggie Nelson (Bookforum) "My favorite book(s) of 2018 are the three volumes of Fred Moten's consent not to be a single being, individually titled Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. In this collection of essays stretching back fifteen years, Moten challenges the reader to imagine a radically interconnected aesthetic and political sphere that stretches from Glenn Gould to Fanon to Kant to Theaster Gates, sometimes in the space of a single sentence. This trilogy is one of the great intellectual adventures of our era." - Jess Row (Bookforum) "consent not to be a single being, titled after a phrase of Edouard Glissant's, ranges across an impressive number of disciplines: black studies, performance studies, aesthetics, phenomenology, ontology, ethnomusicology, jazz history, comparative literature, critical theory, etc. Without announcing its intervention as interdisciplinary-Moten deftly renders discipline beside the point. . . . Taken together, the series amounts to a powerful argument for black study-as an analytic, an impetus, a mode, the collective shout from a radical vista, whose bellow requires nothing less than 'passionate response' (Moten 2003)." - Mimi Howard (boundary 2)