Midwest Modern Language Association

Music against the Law of Reading the Future and "Rodney King"
Author(s): Fred Moten
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 27, No. 1, The Future
of the Profession (Spring, 1994), pp. 51-64
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association
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 Music Against the Law of Reading the
Future and Rodney King
Fred Moten

Thoughit is the most fittingindex of a refusalto present evidence of my

work in the proper and sanctioned settings, I apologizefor my absence.
I'vebeen in the woodshed, I'vebeen with my class. Perhaps,though, I am
here in spirit. Perhaps I am with you in the spirit of The Music' whose
resonanceI would like to direct againstthe law. I hope so. I wanted to be
here today in orderto see if it were possible to breakthe law of readingor,
more precisely, to move improvisationallythroughreadingas the neces-
sarily inadequate evidentiary sign of our work (the mark of its conceal-
ment in and subordinationto [the]disciplineand its interstices),the unde-
cidable significationof totality and justice.

Whatmakes us think we can talk aboutthe future?How mightwe move

beyond the anything-but-neutralstructures and effects of the future?
What would an interdisciplinebe? Would it be constitutedby or against
the law (particularlyand most importantly the law of reading) and its
restrictive procedures?How can we avoid the constraints of a double
oscillation:of reading,between disciplines?Whereinlies the possibilityof
an anarchic- and anarchronic- adisciplinarity?As you can see, if I were
here I would focus on a few words and phrases,theirusageand interinani-
mation: future/(inter)discipline/singularity/idiom/reading.
I don'twant to talk about the future because it is always to come and
because it, too, shall pass. But if I were here I guess I'dhave to.
However, I'ddefer this obligationwith a brief discussionof the relation
of the law of readingto the productionof readings:the law of readingis
not the activationof an interplaybetween readingitself and the interpre-
tive system it constitutesand by which it is constituted.It is, rather,mani-
fest in a certaindoubleness outside this deconstructiveprocess:a process
in which the interminable oscillation between deconstruction and the
complex of its others fosters an artificial interarticulationof methods,

FredMoten 51
styles, and idioms within which not only the text of literaturebut the idea
of totality are disappeared.How do we move from the erasureof totality
that is jointly enactedby those who would appealto it by invokingits sign
and those who would render it undecidableby deconstructingthat sign?
The futureof our (inter)disciplinehas to do with whether or not there is
a future for reading/s. Having a commitment only to something that is,
let'ssay, other than that future, I'dlike to offersomethingother than read-
ing: for I believe there is no place or time for our work in reading. I no
longer want to produce readings, nor do I want to make a kind of naive
argumentfor the process of reading,to offerto you some argumentfor the
publication of that process: because it is always alreadypublic whether
people admit or indicate the incompleteness of their work or not and
because the oscillationbetween process and productjust keeps us in the
very field from which all our legitimate anxiety stems-the.temporal
frame which structures,finally, an ethical dilemma.
Let us not, then, make the future our project.Rather,let us improvise.
Whatwould it mean to improviseand not to read?Whatwould it mean to
do so in a way that is far removedfrom any predictionor projectionof the
future (of an undecidable interdiscipline)?Deeper still, what would it
mean to improvisethroughnot only what Heideggercalls "thevulgarcon-
ception of time"(the simple, primal groundof a past/present/future),but
the tremblingof ecstatic temporalityagainstwhich much of what would
now constituteour work is produced,movingtowardsan anarchronythat
silences these categorieswith an ensemble time?
Even if I were here, I'donly be able to briefly outline or sketch what I
mean by improvisation:how I see it as an antidotefor readingand a radi-
cal refiguringof interdisciplinarity(ahybriditythat always has the primal
difference of disciplines in its heart);how it resonates for me most pro-
foundly in the Afro-Americantradition;2how this resonanceis bound in
the deepest ways to the possibility of justice as somethingother than that
which is always to come; and how these issues convergefor me in a series
of oppositionsthatget alignedwith some exemplarymomentsandaccounts
of readingand in a phrasewhich begins the title of a book and, let'ssay, of
an endeavor, both of which I've been obsessed with for some time-
namely, ReadingRodneyKing3as an attempt to uncover the paradoxical
everydayness of the violent and ritualdeferralof justice, its subordination
to the in/determinationsof the future.

II
In what precedes I have attemptedto preserveall the marksof an occa-
sion4and its aurality. It has been difficultto do so because I have never

52 MusicAgainstthe Lawof Reading

recited the words above though voice is, I think, present in a certain con-
ventionally hidden way. I mean, here, to signal a reversal or revision of
the more prominent understandings of voice in writing. I do not mean
tone or style or idiomatic singularity - in short, nothing that would be that
finally and inaudibly specific difference of a singular writing subject or
that subject's necessarily etiolated freedom- I am thinking here of the pro-
logue to Ralph Ellison's InvisibleMan, in which the reduction of freedom to
the individual voice is ironized in the midst of a fall into the depths of The
Music which reopens the possibility of freedom as action informed by an
improvisational analytic. Nor do I mean a pedagogical or conversational
form that would signal the dialogic multiplication and restructuring of the
singular voice of any writing subject. Nor, finally, would I speak of any
fragmentation or deconstruction of the very idea of a singular voice:
instead what I hope to signal is an understanding of voice that is aural and
audible, on the one hand, and total, on the other. Voice, here, is a certain
generative-organizational (improvisational) structure, a paradoxically an-
archic principle of totality (which, in other work, I call ensemble), inscribed
in writing.
I have been interested in the conditions of possibility of the preservation
and accentuation of (this particular understanding of) voice precisely
because I think it might be useful in the eradication of the hegemony of
reading. This is not just an academic question, for to loosen the grip of
reading is to loosen, as well, the grip of interpretation. This is important
precisely because of interpretation's status as the deferral of freedom or of
justice, a deferral enacted in singularized and differentiated reading and
legitimated by the law which structureS the production of readin'gs. Here,
then, are some brief extensions of points touched on in the first section,
some music against the law of reading in the sound of Rodney King.

III
A brief passage from Andrezj Warminski's Readings in Interpretation:
The only thing more foolish than thinkingthat one can be "against'interpre-
tation, meaning, philosophicalsystems, and all the (Greek)gifts that, say,
phallogocentrichumanismbringswith it is to thinkthat one can do anything
to resist it by invokingthe immediacyof the "concrete," "politics,"
"history,"
and the like without,before,interpretingits texts, never mindreadingthem.
A double game, a double (ironic)strategyis necessary. If the hegemony is
that of systematicnonreading- and this is certainlythe systemthat supports
the university, its organizationinto disciplines and departments,and, one
might add, its attemptto neutralizeand absorbthe texts of "deconstruction"
by takingthem as still another(albeitnegative)approachor method among
others (e.g., psychoanalytic,Marxian,structuralist,sociological,etc.) avail-

FredMoten 53
 able to the consumerwho can affordit, pay for it (usuallyby not readingits
texts)- then reading,for example,the systematicallyunreadtexts of H1lder-
lin, Hegel and Heidegger,is that strategy.
Warminski's understanding of reading leads him to perceive a hegemony
of non-reading which has lead not only to the fragmentation of the univer-
sity into disciplines (and here he echoes Heidegger's critique of the mod-
ern university) but more importantly to the de-particularization and facile
assimilation of deconstruction to the fragmented disciplinary regimes of
the university. For Warminski, in short, the absence of the de-totalizing
power of reading produces the effect of the disaggregation and differen-
tiated organization of the university-as-totality. Unfortunately the highly
mediated nostalgia for a problematic instance of totality does not'prevent
Warminski's participation in that process by which reading has become a
negation of totality. The asymmetry of the relationship in reading
between (a certain desire for) totality and its other is not - as Warminski
would have it - a function of the totalizing force of interpretation or, more
precisely, of the homogenizing erasure of deconstruction. How do we
move from this erasure -jointly enacted by, on the one hand, those who
would appeal to it by invoking its sign and, on the other hand, those who
would render it undecidable by deconstructing that sign? This question
has to do with (the improvisation of) the future.
While Warminski's work might tempt us to conflate theory and reading,
that which is insidious in reading-its differing of totality, its deferral of
justice - is present even in the most radical attempts to distinguish reading
from the theory of reading. Here, for example, is a passage from Barbara
Christian's "The Race for Theory":
Frommy point of view as a criticof contemporaryAfro-Americanwomen's
writing,this orientation[towardliterarytheory]is extremelyproblematic.In
attemptingto find the deep structuresof the literarytradition,a majorpre-
occupationof the New Criticism,many of us have becomeobsessedwith the
natureof readingitself to the extent that we have stoppedwritingaboutlit-
eraturebeing written today. Since I am slightly paranoid,it has begun to
occurto me thatthe literaturebeingproducedis preciselyone of the reasons
why this new philosophical-literary-critical theory of relativityis so promi-
nent. In otherwords, the literatureof blacks,women of SouthAmericaand
Africa, etc., as overtly "political"
literaturewas being preemptedby a new
Western concept which proclaimedthat reality does not exist, that every-
thingis relative,andthatevery text is silent aboutsomething- which it must
necessarilybe.
On the one hand Christian here decries the diversion of colleagues from
the interpretation of Afro-American women's literary representations of
reality to the theorization of reading, theorization which sees reading in a
way that is presumably aligned with the kind of formulations Warminski

54 MusicAgainstthe Lawof Reading

makes regarding reading, namely that it undermines the very kind of
interpretations to which Christian is devoted. For Christian, theory fixes,
totalizes, and prescribes in generalizations which are as inevitably reduc-
tive as the operation of interpretation in Warminski's schema. The caesu-
rae created by theory disallow the ritual sublimation of the critical self in
the interest of the literary work (an effect to which Christian has allegiance
even if its profoundly unclear how such an eclipse is to be reconciled with
the desire/necessity- to which she also has an allegiance - to save one's
own life [62] ). We find in Christian a paradox similar to that in Warminski:
a denunciation of the totalizing effects of (theoretical) reading done in the
name of a desire to valorize a fundamental figure of totality, reality itself.
Christian is caught, finally, between an allegiance to undecidability (a
theorizing which constitutes a reading against, rather than with, theory),
openness, non-fixity, and another allegiance to fixity as particular and
differentially determined spirit, voice, or history. And both of these alle-
giances are incommensurable with the totalization that is "reality."
This temporal or aspectual distinction within the theoretical/literary
critical act is addressed in the last moment of/call to reading that I'llbriefly
examine. This passage is from Avital Ronell's "Video/Television/Rodney
King: Twelve Steps Beyond The Pleasure Principle":
The defense team take down involvedapproachingGeorgeHolliday'svideo-
tape by replicatingthe violence thathad been done to Mr.RodneyKing.The
unquestionedpremise upon which the team of lawyers based its defense of
the police called for an interpretationof video in termsof a "frameby frame"
procedure.... The chillingeffectsof warpingvideo intofreeze-framephotog-
raphy cannot be underestimated, and teaches us that video requires a
reading-somethinghavinglittle to do with immediatesense perception.The
temporizationthat readingvideo entailswas haltedby both sides of the case
(theprosecutionappearedto believe that the video "spokefor itself"and did
nothing to producea readingof the idiom of video).
Ronell, as does Christian, reads against cessation: the cessation of continu-
ity by the defense and the cessation of reading by the prosecution; and in
both instances temporization and its cessation are inextricably linked
within the in/determinations of reading itself. This double temporality of
reading is marked in Ronell's elaboration of the form a temporizing read-
ing should take:
So, in the spaceof interruption(anatopyorinterruptionthatused to be called
"televisionland"),there exists a muted injunctionto read the hiatus and let
oneself be markedby the hiatus- a necessity of negotiatingthe lineageof the
net. Granted,I am displacingthe focus fromtelevisionas totality,to the seri-
ality of derangement,a place deranged,dislocated,disarticulated,a "place"
where serialityalways involves the possibilityof serial killing.

FredMoten 55
Here the call for a temporizationis articulatedwithin the logic of interrup-
tion, the inevitabilityof frame-ingor of the break,the im/mediatecaesura
of reading (even of the readingof the caesura).This paradoxreveals the
fact thatany readingof the idiomof video demandsan appealto continuity
which is contradictedby the very idea of idiomaticdifference;such a read-
ing opens an endless motion between temporizationand cessation. We
pause at the boundaryof an/otheridiom, the place of hybridityor unde-
cidability (the Warminskiandeconstructionof interpretation);we pause
and- within the caesuraof encounter- offera temporizationin which we
can read the other idiom. And there is here, too, that displacement of
totality that occurs in its link to serialityby and in the law of the singular.
Here, one is faced with the ineluctable dangerof temporizingreading:
thatit is interminable- a slow, potentiallyparalyticnegotiationthat,finally,
enacts a deferral of justice as absolute as freeze-frameinterpretation.
Whatis the speed of truth?Whatis the speed of rigor?If it is the deliberate
speed of (racial)justice, the unapproachablefuturity of the "tocome"in
tandemwith what it opposes- the tremblingof the present, the oscillation
of the arche as frame and the ongoinginstitutionalforce of law - then we
have arrivedat the point in which the truth and rigorof readingin what-
ever temporality must be improvised in the name of present justice.
Ensemble- the improvisation,ratherthan reading,of totality- allows an
accord between the ongoing and the "tocome"which renders the very
categoriesof that opposition meaningfulin a new and limited way.
This last example leads us back to the beating of Rodney Kingand its
aftermath,the totality of which I call RodneyKingin an effortto indicate
the convergenceof man, phantom, beating, ritual, mundaneoccurrence,
event, trial,text, negation,principle.I'minterestedin what happenswhen
someone is captured,the one who, moving nomadicallywithin or along
the boundariesof the systemofjustice,is suddenlyarrestedby its powersof
enforcement,its phantasmicimaging,and is thus enframedand thus made
subjectto framing,to readingas a temporizationof the framewhich opens
a suspension, a trial, a passion;one whose capturereopens the seemingly
interminable event of reading and the productionof readings to a ques-
tioning which is always in dangerof becoming what it would critique.
Variousreadingstrategieshave been appliedto RodneyKing- formalist,
legal, historicist,feminist, post-colonial- and all seem to me to have origi-
nated in the same logic and all comprise,within that logic, an inconsistent
totalitywhich coheresby way of some mysticallaw.5This law is the same
law which produces and is maintained in the negational framing of
RodneyKing:the same law whose productionand maintenanceopens the
enduring aporia or infinitely curved space-time of the history of philos-

56 MusicAgainstthe Lawof Reading

ophy, which is to say, in at least a partialsense, "ourhistory":this law is the
law of singularityof which the law of readingis a function.
A reading of RodneyKing which seeks to be consistent with the law
within which it is endlessly constructedand deconstructedreplicatesthe
conditionsunderwhich RodneyKingtook place, because that readingwill
have been subject to the same law that maintainsauthorityover Rodney
King. This does not mean that RodneyKingdoes not demand analysis-it
means, rather, that it demands an unprecedented analysis, one which
obliteratesthe law of singularity.Such analysis would be unprecedented
in that it would be: beyond the frame of authoritythat is opened by the re-
presentation of what is unrepresentable- that which Trinh T. Minh-ha
calls the "multipleoneness of life";beyond all and any possibilitiesopened
in the idea of a whole art;beyond any valorizationof the nomadic or the
deterritorialized;beyond any conceptualizationof a borderor a boundary;
beyond, finally, all of the determinationsof these by the law of reading.
Suchanalysiswould questionidiomicityitself. I would, therefore,analyze
RodneyKing-not within, or in the interest of, any particularidiom or
translationof/between idioms; rather,I would analyzeRodneyKingin the
interest of an improvisationof the laws of singularity,idiom, and reading.
This improvisationrequiresworking throughthe idiomaticboundaries
separating social science and the humanities (particularlyas they con-
verge around questions of justice and freedom). This entails, too, an
improvisationthroughthe oppositionalways in which we encounterthe
world, namely, prescriptively (or normatively)and descriptively. These
issues impinge upon historyand its narrativestructure- the syntaxof his-
tory and its movement throughtime and the movement throughtime of
the individual events in history- if we wish to assume (if only to later cri-
tique) an ontologyof the event thatis structuredaroundthe individuation
of events. What I'm after is an improvisationor anarchronizationof the
syntax of history and of the event.
One must ask, then, aboutthe statusof RodneyKingas an event in a way
that is prefiguredbut not exhausted by Ronell. Another set of questions
(such as: Is it a fully individuatedparticularnever to be repeated?Is it a
durative,mass or pluralevent, an occurrencewhich is not one, an absence
markedonly by what precedes and proceedsfrom it, an instanceof a kind
of recurrencein the onto-politicalstructureof history as the deferral of
justice within the regime of singularity?Are these questions regarding
RodneyKingmade more complex by virtue of the way in which the event
was recordedand disseminated?)must be added to the question concern-
ing the syntax of video (How is it that the narrativeswhich lead us to the
event in question are submergedwithin the absence of a cut in the elec-
tronic signal of video that is quickly and arbitrarilyvirtualizedby a form

FredMoten 57
of readingin which the video is brokendown "frame" by arbitrary"frame,"
phoneme by phoneme, into an artifact which becomes, paradoxically,
self-evident,an iconic momentwithin the wholly determinedand wholly
unanalyzedsyntax of "ourhistory"?).
CertainlyRodneyKingis placed within a syntax, that of the video appa-
ratus, as well as within a certain phantasmic grammaror racist vision.
That vision constitutes a narrativeof singularityand differencerich and
horrific in its material effects, not only with regard to the specifics of
Americanracism, but in relationto the broadercontext of the formation
and ongoing restructuringof Los Angeles (particularlythe complex and
highly mediated interplay of deindustrializationand reindustrialization)
in the still broadercontextof globalizationand the puttinginto contingent
and indeterminate"play"of laborby multinationalcapital(a development
which, despite Homi Bhabha'sassertionthat "freedom'sbasis [lies] in the
indeterminate,"6is profoundly coercive and is, therefore, an indetermi-
nacy which has a severe over/determinationat its heart that ironically
forces the migrationof laborinto the originof its misery).These historical
movements and their grammarsconverge on the beaten body of Rodney
King and disperse and reconverge on that body's negative, Reginald
Denny. Yet the trajectoriesof these convergencesoften seem to vanish in
the overwhelming flash of light of the videos themselves, as if the indi-
viduatedsyntaxof the video replicateditself in the events which the video
captures, as if nothing comes before or after the unmediated and uncut
signals which contain the visual representationsof those beatings. The
effect of this individuationis that what occurs in their aftermathand as
their surroundings,the uprising, is given over to either the realm of the
inexplicable,the arbitrary,the savage,the non-intentionalor apolitical,or
to a range of explanations (the social scientific, the aesthetic, the philo-
sophical)which are all impoverishedprecisely because of their idiomatic
isolation each from the other.
Anotherpart of what must be done is to think the question of the event
in its relationto the oppositionsbetween ritual(inits, above all, bodily and
positional essence) and the everyday, and between these and (the textual
nature- at least accordingto Levi-Strauss- of) myth. All these issues are
played out in RodneyKingand have everythingto do with the relation,if
there is a relation,between a teleologicalsyntax of history (we mighteven
call this aufkldrungor enlightenment)and the onto-anthropologyof the
event (which we might very well call, after Heidegger,lichtung,or clear-
ing).RodneyKing,then, makes a very definiteintellectualdemandupon us
to work throughidiomaticdifferencesand throughthe law of singularity
which constitutes those differences as well as through the differences
which allow the anniversarialconstitutionof the event, its significationin

58 MusicAgainstthe Lawof Reading

 video, and the readingof that signification.It also demands a breakdown
of the oppositionwithin interpretationbetween descriptionand prescrip-
tion as well as a breakdownof the oppositionbetween interpretationand
change. Rigor and deliberation, rather than that immediate response
which is a function of the self-evident, are required, then, if we are to
addressthe particularityof this "event"and take advantageof the political
and intellectual space it opens, the new historicaltrajectoryit provides.
RodneyKingboth demands and opens the possibility of an understand-
ing and organizationof totality. As the LosAngelesTimesasserts in a par-
ticularlypure instance of blindness and insightand as geographerEdward
Soja(re)writesin his criticalecho of the Times,"Itall comes togetherin Los
Angeles."I would add that it all comes together,more particularly,in Rod-
neyKing:not only in the convergenceof the forces, structures,and effects
of racism, imperialism, nationalism, multinationalism,and capital; not
only in the gatheringof those who have been driven to Los Angeles by
these forces in the past forty years-white working class refugees and
their LAPDdescendants, black southern refugees and their descendants
(who have become the objects of LAPD surveillance and the targets of
LAPDterror),and those who have escaped U.S.-sponsoredterrorin South
Koreaand El Salvadoronly to find its domestic manifestationsin the U.S.;
but also in the mode of engagementwhich would challengethe idiomatic
boundaries among philosophy, history, literary criticism, law, film
theory, political economy, anthropology,geography and urban studies
and allow us to think aboutwhat happenedand to keep it fromhappening.
againand again.This means not anotherinter-or multi-disciplinarity,but
rather a real adisciplinarity within which totality might actually be
engaged; this also means staying in the sound of what we read a little
longer and in a differentway: to inhabit the anarchronyof the improvisa-
tional ensemble ratherthan the time of the caesura.This ethico-temporal
choice is given us whenever we hear-The Music.

IV
SounderthespellofthereeferI discovereda newanalytical wayoflistening
to music.Theunheardsoundscamethrough,andeachmelodiclineexisted
of itself,stoodoutclearlyfromalltherest,saiditspiece,andwaitedpatiently
forthe othervoicesto speak.ThatnightI foundmyselfhearingnotonlyin
time,butin spaceas well. I notonlyenteredthe musicbutdescended,like
Dante, into its depths. And beneaththeswiftnessof the hot tempotherewas a
slowertempoand a cave and I enteredit and lookedaroundand heardan old
womansinginga spiritualas fullof Weltschmerz as flamenco,andbeneaththatlay
a still lowerlevelon whichI saw a beautifulgirl the colorof ivorypleadingin a

FredMoten 59
 voicelikemymother'sas shestoodbeforea groupof slaveownerswhobidforher
nakedbody,and belowthatI founda lowerleveland a morerapidtempoandI
heardsomeoneshout...
Then somehow I came out of it, ascendinghastilyfromthis underworldof
sound to hear LouisArmstronginnocentlyasking,
WhatdidI do
To be so black
And blue?
At firstI was afraid;this familiarmusic had demandedaction, the kind of
which I was incapable,and yet had I lingeredthere beneath the surface I
might have attemptedto act.'
Certain iconic moments here can offer us a clue for an improvisation of
reading and an improvisation through the laws of reading and of the pro-
duction of readings under whose discipline we labor. For there is a certain
understanding of totality-an understanding prompted by and constitu-
tive of any hope of present justice - given as a possibility in the improvisa-
tion of the gap/chiasmus/caesura/cut which these passages represent.
Check what Nathaniel Mackey calls the sexual cut:8
I admitthis is business we've been over before,but bearwith it long enough
to hearthe cricketlikechirpone gets fromthe guitarin most reggaebandsas
the echoic spectre of a sexual "cut"'(sexed/unsexed,seeded/unsown,etc.)-
"ineffableglints or vaguely audiblegruntsof unavoidablealarm.. ."
You got me all wrong on what I meant by a "sexual'cut'"in my last letter.
I'mnot, as you insinuate,advancingseveranceas a value, muchless pushing,
as you put it, "athinly veiled romanceof distantiation."I put the word "cut,"
remember,in quotes. WhatI was tryingto get at was simply the feeling I've
gotten from the characteristic,almost clucking beat one hears in reggae,
where the syncopationcomes down like a blade, a "broken" claimto connec-
tion. ... Listeningto BurningSpearthe othernight,for example,I driftedoff
to where it seemed I was being towed into an abandonedharbor.I wasn't
exactlya boatbut I felt my anchorlessnessas a lack, as an inured,eventually
visible pit up fromwhich I floated,lookingdown on what debrislookinginto
it left. By thattime, though,I turnedout to be a snakehissing,"Youdid it, you
did it,"rattlingand weeping waterless tears. Some such flight (an insistent
previousnessevading each and every natal occasion)comes close to what I
mean by "cut."
"An insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion": a
beginning without origin- neither the systemic structure of the trace, nor
the direct articulation of a simple presence: rather ensemble - improvisa-
tional and anarchronic totality- is given for us here as a possibility in the
moment at which we "lingerin the music," in which action becomes a pos-
sibility to be enacted. No inactive suspension between any rendering of
the reading subject as undecidable and any simple revalorization of some
old and singular version of that subject, but an ensemble agency directed

60 MusicAgainstthe Lawof Reading

toward free action in the anarchronic temporality of improvisational
lingeringin the "sexualcut"of the music.
To lingerin the music is to improvise:to get more thana glimpse, an inti-
mation, a revelation and to do less than endlessly read or imagine our
research as that which would both describe and culminate in the estab-
lishment of a sign of ensemble. If there were ever an adequatelingeringin
the music it would be ensemble activated beyond revelation, research,
and reading, and beyond their laws. How do we commit that action for
freedom and forjustice, an action againstthe law (of reading)?How do we
organize?Partof the answer seems to me to be embeddedin the attitudes
we take regardingour work, in the necessity to imagine ourjobs as activi-
ties which exist independently of the injunction to produce readings as
evidence of our working within the law and discipline of singularity,
idiom, reading.
This entails a radicallydifferentconceptionand enactmentof organiza-
tion-the spatio-temporalgenerativity in and through which we think
those issues fundamentalto the possibilityof a sense, and alteration,of the
world. The music continues to light and sound the form of precisely that
organizationwhich we must improvise. Thatform is improvisationitself,
the political directionthroughthe binaryand its internaloscillationin the
name of a totality which is, itself, the improvisationthroughthe opposi-
tion of descriptionand prescription,interpretationand change.The music
of the improvisingensemble, as it is miraculouslytransmittedin the aural-
ity of writing, is the sensual space and moment in which totality is gen-
erated. That space and movement is where we must linger, is where our
work, the improvisationof totality, remains.The Music moves againstthe
law of readingwhich is manifest in the commodificationand fetishization
of illusory finished products- many of which unproblematicallyvalorize
the "open-ended" or in/determinateprocess in which they are produced-
which are, in the end, easily identifiableeffectsof intellectuallaborin the
capitalistorder. The conditions of that labor inevitably result in readings
suspended between homogeneityand heterogeneity,succession and con-
tinuity, event and context, and mirror, quite unsurprisingly,the global,
multinationalcapitalistsystem from whence they come. Our work must
diagnose and avoid the spirit of (that)system and we must, I think, be
attuned to the fact that such a task has everything to do with how you
sound. The sound of the thinking of the whole.

V
Here, then, is what I was doing (this is not a refrain)before I began to
struggle with the organizationof this paper. I wanted to improvise the

FredMoten 61
ensemble, the totality, of Ellison, to whom we've alreadybeen listening,
and Marx, whom I'llsample now:
Butthe humanessenceis no abstraction inherentin eachsingleindividual.
In its realityit is the ensembleof socialrelations.9
I was tryingto deal with what is "given"in Marxbut remainsto be played
out, played outside, in and from what it is and where it is, though"ensem-
ble" resonates, vibrates truly, opens Ellison'sversion of that old philo-
sophicalstandard,"one,and yet many"to a radicalbreakdown.ForMarx's
word and the improvisation it enacts, the practical, human-sensuous
activity it is and calls for, lies in a sensuality, a music, to which he will not
have been attuned. Is Ellison attuned to this music?Yeah, though in the
absence of Marx'sphrasingthatattunementis still, perhaps,not enoughto
distinguish Ellison as one of the "few[who] really listen to this music."10
For really listening will have constitutedprecisely a lingeringin the gen-
erative gap between "ensemble"and "socialrelations"(a gap which dis-
places that between the one and many) in which we are propelled from
interpretation- through the opposition of prophecy and description- to
change.
If one takes the famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbachto be the paradoxi-
cal, uninterpretable, unapproachabletelos of a Marxian metaphysics,
then we can say that Ellison'srelationto Marxismtakes on anothercom-
plication, one held in the reversion to ontological description and the
question of ontological description'srelation to change. And just as we
would move throughthe connection of ontology and truthin an improvi-
sation of Heideggerianaletheia, so must we move through the kind of
empirical disclosure that signals a Marxian descriptive totality or an
Ellisoniannarrativetrajectorywhich, if not Marxian,is nothingotherthan
Marxian.Whatremainsundisclosedis organization,agency, free associa-
tion, improvisation. Nevertheless the phrase remains, the work which
never seems to carrywith it the hallmarksof reading,remainsalways and
everywhere.
Therewill never have been an adequatereadingor accuratedescription
of events, actions, interpretations,readings,texts, bodies which are held
togetherin and under the name of Rodney King;there will have been no
truthof RodneyKing,no understandingof what he did to be so be so black
and blue, independentof an improvisation;therewill have been nojustice
outside of organization.Truth,understanding,improvisation,and organi-
zation are held within that phrasaltotality which is only realizablein its
relation to the organizationof the unprecedented, that second-aural-
inscription in writing which amounts to nothing other than a chance to
hear the sound which containsthe possibility of action. Readingforces us

62 MusicAgainstthe Lawof Reading

to gloss over that phrasing, but if we can find in our critical and pedagogi-
cal practices a method of lingering there we will have been shown how to
work.

University of Iowa
Notes
1. This term is most immediatelyan echo of the title of a recentbook of Amiriand
Amina Baraka'sTheMusic (New York:William Morrow Co., 1987). Their title
refers specificallyto that music which is overwhelminglythe creationof African-
Americans, though the complex indeterminationsto which the racializationof
music is subject(despitethe quite determinedracialconditionsin which the music
is formed),renders"TheMusic"an inoperativesynonym for "BlackMusic."There
are at least a couple of reasonswhy "TheMusic"is a propernoun too complexand
generalfor its own good: the term immediatelyexceeds itself since it gives itself
over to the action, the makingof the music, which is at its heartand it refersto the
organizingprinciplewhich enacts,finally,a very precisedeconstructionof its own
internalstructure-the dialecticof noun and verb, effectand action, music and its
making- which seems to operateas a kind of unity-in-duplication.Butit is the fact
of the term'sirreducibility- its refusalto be containedby any of the possibledefini-
tions which, in fact, it contains- that makes me want to retainit. The term corre-
sponds to an understandingof totalitywhich is, as you'll see, somethingI hope to
make much of.
2. Whatis to be madeof this?Onlythis:thatas longas thereis discipline,as longas
there are (inter)disciplines,there must be African-AmericanStudies.If the emer-
gence of the discourseof the otheris to be fully manifestas truthratherthan as an
artifactof an all too facile assimilationor an equally simple rejectionand submer-
gence, it has to breakthe law, to breakthe law of the law, and it has to think in the
most rigorousway the question of the future, to move into the future of the tradi-
tions'sthinkingof the future- breakingthe laws of narrativeandtestimony,break-
ing throughthe prescriptiveforce of the hegemonyof description,improvisingthe
aporiaof idiomicity,andinterruptingthe power of disciplinarity.Thatclues forthe
movement toward these projects are embedded in texts which are largely
neglected outside of the interdisciplineof Afro-AmericanStudiesand in cultural
practiceswhich remainunthoughtbeyond the boundariesof that interdiscipline,
means that for the future-until we work through the in/determinationsof the
future and its connection to (inter)disciplineand reading(s)-Afro-American
studies remains,today, a necessity.
3. Thebookto which I referis RobertGooding-Williams,ed., ReadingRodneyKing,
Reading Urban Uprising, New York, Routledge, 1993.
4. The occasion was the 1993 annual convention of the Midwest Modern Lan-
guage Association.I was unable to attend the meeting;however, Tom Lutz, who
was kindenoughbothto invite me to participateon his panel entitled"FutureInter-
disciplines"and to submitthe presenttext for this publication,readthe remarksin
section I. Here, then, is a furthercomplicationof the relationof voice to the singu-
larpresenceof the writingsubjectand of the relationof this singularityto the aural.
I would arguehere for the importanceof sound to what I am offeringhere but ob-
viously that soundis not reducibleto the sound of the singularvoice of the writing
subject.

FredMoten 63
5. Note, here, the echo of a text which has been both an enablerand an objectof
my examination,a text which I cannotbeginto addresshere butwhich remains,for
me, unavoidable:Derrida's"Forceof Law:The MysticalFoundationsof Authority"
collectedin Cornell,Rosenfeld,and Carlson,eds., Deconstruction andthePossibility
ofJustice(New York:Routledge,1992)3-67.
6. See the paperBhabhapublished/deliveredunderthis phrase/titlein October61
(1992):46-57.
7. InvisibleMan (New York:Vintage, 1972) 12.
8. NathanielMackey,BedouinHornbook(Lexington:CallalooFiction Series/Uof
KentuckyP, 1986)30, 34.
9. KarlMarx,"Theseson Feuerbach,"in KarlMarxand FrederickEngels,TheGer-
manIdeology,trans., Lawrenceand Wishart(New York:InternationalPublishers,
1970) 122.
10. Invisible Man, 12.

Works Cited
Christian,Barbara."TheRacefor Theory."CulturalCritique6 (1987):51-63.
Ronell,Avital."Video/Television/Rodney
King:Twelve StepsBeyondThePleasure
Principle."differences4.2 (1992): 1-15.
Warminski,Andrezj.Readingsin Interpretation.
Minneapolis:U of Minnesota P,
1990.

64 MusicAgainstthe Lawof Reading