Table of Contents

Preface  vii
Acknowledgments  xv
1. Not In Between  1
2. Interpolation and Interpellation  28
3. Magic of Objects  34
4. Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia  40
5. Taste Dissonance Flavor Escape (Preface to a Solo by Miles Davis)  66
6. The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings  86
7. The Phonographic Mise-en Scène  118
8. Line Notes for Lick Piece  134
9. Rough Americana  147
10. Nothing, Everything  152
11. Nowhere, Everywhere  158
12. Nobody, Everybody  168
13. Remind  170
14. Amuse-Bouche  174
15. Collective Head  184
16. Cornered, Taken, Made to Leave  198
17. Enjoy All Monsters  206
18. Some Extrasubtitles for Wildness  212
19. To Feel, to Feel More, to Feel More Than  215
20. Irruptions and Incoherences for Jimmie Durham  219
21. Black and Blue on White. In and And Space  226
22. Blue Vespers  230
23. The Blur and Breathe Books  245
24. Entanglement and Virtuosity  270
25. Bobby Lee's Hands  280
Notes  285
Works Cited  317
Index  329

About the Author

Fred Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and the author of B Jenkins, also published by Duke University Press, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and coauthor of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study.

Reviews

"Simply put, Moten is offering up some of the most affecting, most useful, theoretical thinking that exists on the planet today.... Moten’s work makes the activities of reading and thinking feel palpably fresh, weird, and vital."
*4Columns*

"Some readers will come here because of The Feel Trio, because of The Undercommons. Some because Moten is the activists’ theorist, the contemporary art institution’s darling, because of performance studies, jazz studies, literature. Some readers will come here to encounter a brain that is at once more erudite, generous, capacious, fierce, jokey and infuriating than most others on the planet right now. Everybody ought to arrive here to be schooled and troubled, elated and confused, invited and indicted by a sparklingly original vision for black study."
*Full Stop*

"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."
*Bookforum*

"Be ready to be wowed; be ready to be challenged; most of all, be ready for the long haul. It is, apparently, the first in a planned trilogy. Moten is tracking his own course, and it’s fast-moving and spectacular."
*Rain Taxi*

"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." 
*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."
*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."
*Bookforum*

"A brilliant collection of essays, part of a series that investigates notions of Blackness and its representation. This is writing and practice that summons the irregular and the resistant.”
*The Art Newspaper*

"A signal voice in boosting and articulating Black aesthetics and cultural theory over the last two decades. . . Moten is also a walking testament to stylistic freedom."
*Art Review*