[...] The power of great fiction to challenge that common sense lies only partially in reflecting our lives back to us like a mirror; a great deal more resides in its capacity to dispossess us of our preferred assumptions, plunging us into knowledge like photographic paper into its chemical bath, revealing, even against our will, all the gray areas we find inconvenient, unpleasant, even impossible to acknowledge.

In essays like “The Foreigner’s Home,” one almost hears echoes of Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulated life under late capitalism and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle as she examines the disorienting loss of distinction between private and public space and its effect on our interior lives. The politicization of the “migrant” and the “illegal alien,” Morrison argues, is not merely a circling of the wagons in the face of “the transglobal tread of peoples.” It is also an act of bad faith, a warped projection of our own fears of homelessness and “our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging,” which reflects back to us the anxieties produced by the privatization of public goods and commons and the erosion of face-to-face association. Our lives, Morrison tells us, have now become refracted through a “looking-glass” that has compressed our public and private lives “into a ubiquitous blur” and created a pressure that “can make us deny the foreigner in ourselves.”

For Benjamin, the horror of our historical trajectory lies in the Angel’s inability to close his wings. What prevents that closure is the insistent storm of “progress,” the stubborn belief of liberals, fascists, and communists alike that technology and rational control are positive forces that merely have to be harnessed to their respective utopian projects. The political ideology of the modern world—the storm pushing to reach the “Paradise” of modernity’s impossible utopias—is in fact violent, Benjamin thinks, precisely because it cannot or will not make that which is truly valuable in the past whole and tangible to the present. The powerful may monumentalize historical icons in order to glorify the state in the present, but this is merely in order to further cement the belief that they are legitimately carrying us all forward into a better future. What they will not permit is any chance for the wretched, for those suffering at the base of the social pyramid, to come to know the past that is really relevant to them.

Benjamin’s usefulness for the writing of “critiques” in the contemporary academy has muted, even eclipsed, the theo-political intensity of this revolutionary anarchism. He has become a kind of Che Guevara for a portion of the intelligentsia that feels it must talk the talk but cannot begin to imagine how to walk the walk. Some are embarrassed by his ardency, by his conviction that Art and Politics and History are One, and that getting them right is about saving the world by ending the one we know. Some grumble that his work is too cryptic. But the truth is that his writing is not hard to understand; it is hard to look at directly. His aphoristic fragments singe like solar flares: “The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope.” Who can survive that test? Who today would dare to read Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal or Blanqui’s prison writings on astronomy as serious reports on the state of damnation of the modern world? Who is prepared to say that social media, AI, and robotic automation are not just the products of neoliberalism, “the society of control,” and lack of oversight—but visions of Hell? I’m not saying that Benjamin doesn’t see any redemptive opportunities in culture and technology or that our own speculations on such are not worthwhile—he does and they are. But it is undeniable that the intellectual culture of the present has come to relish that part of Benjamin’s work without committing to, or taking seriously, his anarchist and messianic call for a revolutionary politics. To continue in Benjamin’s terms, if the intellectual classes can stroll up to the precipice, look over, and decide it’s not yet time to leap, then they will not be the ones to bring the light of redemption to the people.

What is supremely profitable today is contemporary art. How profitable? In 2019, a work called Rabbit by the artist Jeff Koons sold at auction for $91 million, setting a new record for a living artist. Walker’s work fetches hefty sums too. Yet aesthetically, and more importantly, ethically, I think they are radically and diametrically opposed. Still, they are worth pondering together, Walker’s Subtlety and Koon’s Rabbit. Because they stand before us like signs at a fork in the road, indicating the options ahead. Both are signatures of contemporary Americana. Neither could have been produced anywhere other than in the USA. Both express in remarkably accurate terms an ugliness unique to our culture. Walker’s art tells us more than we want to hear about the ugliness of our past. Koons’s silver bunny shows us the ugliness of our present, and—if we do nothing to alter its course—the ugly emptiness of our future. By polishing away any possible connection to the past, and glibly seeking succor in false innocence and false universality, Koons has produced perhaps the whitest art, ideologically not ethnically, ever created. Even the white bourgeoisie no longer find its shock value palatable. In a scathing review some years ago, Jed Perl called a Koons retrospective “a multimillion-dollar mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die.” There is no real laughter, no genuine embarrassment to be had in the presence of a Koons. Irritation, indifference, transient fascination, titillation? Maybe—but never embarrassment. How could you be embarrassed? Koons, not unlike Donald Trump, is a pure pure troll: one who sees that in a society obsessed with shaming the ultimate sign of freedom, superiority, and success is shamelessness tout court, and it sells itself. It is the triumph of pure appearance—the art and politics of a deathless, lifeless, narrative-free future.

A decisive turning point came when literary critic Barbara Johnson arrived from Yale to teach a course called Deconstruction, and he first read Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Ferdinand Saussure. At the time, in a class on James Joyce, he was also reading Ulysses. “It had a rhythm I was totally familiar with, but that I didn’t associate with high art. I believed, I just sensed that it was radical; it felt instinctively to me like this was against the status quo, that the reason they wrote this way was that it was like a secret, it wasn’t for the bosses.” He felt the same way about Derrida: “This is for the people who want to tear shit up. And we were ready for it.”

In his criticism, Moten is especially attuned to a zone that Brent Edwards (a close friend and interlocuter) has called the “fringe of contact between music and language.” He’ll draw the reader’s attention to the “surplus lyricism of the muted, mutating horns of Tricky Sam Nanton or Cootie Williams” in Duke Ellington’s band, for example. Or, commenting on Invisible Man’s observation that few really listen to Louis Armstrong’s jazz, he’ll cut to an abrupt and unsettling assertion: “Ellison knows that you can’t really listen to this music. He knows . . . that really listening, when it goes bone-deep into the sudden ark of bones, is something other than itself. It doesn’t alternate with but is seeing; it’s the sense that it excludes; it’s the ensemble of the senses. Few really read this novel.”

What can one learn from the expression of people who refuse to be commodities, but also once were commodities? What does history look like, or the present, or the future, from the point of view of those who refuse the norms produced by systems of violence, who consent not to be a single being? These key concerns course through the entirety of Moten’s dazzling new trilogy, which assembles all his theoretical writings since In the Break. At a time of surging reactionary politics, ill feeling, and bad community, few thinkers seem so unburdened and unbeholden, so confident in their reading of the historical moment. Indeed, when faced with the inevitable question of the state of US politics, Moten remains unfazed. “The thing I can’t stand is the Trump exceptionalism. Remember when Goldwater was embarrassing. And Reagan. And Bush. Trump is nothing new. This is what empire on the decline looks like. When each emperor is worse than the last.”

It’s like a jungle sometimes . . . He is the savage. He is beastmode, paradoxically subliterate and over-articulate, overspeaking and overlaying official thinking and bien-pensant consideration, hyperfleshed and hypersexed, his self-flagellation and his private inferno conducted in public, like a hacked account spewing up a volcanic, heroic, and unrepentant excess of verb, of notation, of expression, of style without effort, of study without academy, of access without permission, of authority without authorship, of tradition without history, of art without museum, of a past beyond recollection, for a future within no future, and without a plan to get there.

These are lines from a lyric known as “Fragment 47” composed by the poet Sappho who lived in the late seventh century BC at Mytilene, the largest city on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea. In the poet Anne Carson’s translation, this is how it reads:

Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees

Two thousand six hundred years later, this line is still fresh. Even if we translated Eros not as a god but, more secularly, with the eros translatable to our familiar word “love,” there is still something decisively original in it. What makes Sappho’s lyric so striking? What she is describing is so common that the clichés of “falling in love” or “love at first sight” are automatic to us. Yet the lines above sound nothing like a Hallmark card. They have a definite point of view, but they are entirely free of didacticism. There is no judgment from on high; this is not a maxim intended to impress us with the poet’s wit or insight. Sappho is not speaking to a collectively culled piece of accepted wisdom. She is not idealizing a high sentiment nor satirizing a human weakness. Instead, she concentrates entirely on the roiling life of her own subjectivity. Her language draws upon and pulls into itself the imaginative resources of empirical observation, what William Carlos Williams called “the imaginative qualities of actual things.” The power of language to mirror the physical world is transfigured by inverting its location and reflecting it back to us as an interior landscape.