[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. There are more geniuses among us all last week. If you were listening, we spent a few minutes at the end of each show with a genius a day. In other words, five of our local 2020 MacArthur Fellows, the awards better known as MacArthur Genius Grants. Today, we're sneaking in one more, because there was one more from our area, and it's new York's Fred Moten, a cultural theorist and poet who was honored to "the MacArthur Foundation for creating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics cultural production and social life." Congratulations, Fred Moten, and welcome to WNYC. We so appreciate you joining us today.

Fred Moten: Thanks for having me.

Brian: In our brief time, one of the things that you've tried to do in your scholarship, as well as in your poetry, is to construct in the words of the MacArthur Foundation new modes of aesthetic inquiry that center blackness. How does one develop new modes of inquiry?

Fred: In my case, it's just been a function of trying to study and understand the rich field of aesthetic inquiry which is already given in Black culture. Maybe the easiest and best way to, for instance, formulate new ways of aesthetic inquiry or new modes of aesthetic inquiry into, say, Billie Holiday's work is just by trying to listen to her as intently and as carefully as possible, because she gives us a way of understanding of the rich experimental work that she's actually trying to do.

Brian: You mentioned Billie Holiday. I'm aware that in your first book In the Break, you examine performance in the formation of Black identities and Black resistance, or you put philosophers like Kant into conversation with musicians like Billie Holiday. What does that look like?

Fred: It looks like trying to search for an excavate in Kant the most interesting and the most radical and most experimental forms of thought that he's able to produce, but to excavate those from some of the most retrograde and vicious and ugly modalities of thought that he both produced them and passed on and accepted from the European tradition that he found himself embedded in.

A lot of it is just maybe reading Kant against the grain of himself. Again, for me, figures like Amiri Baraka, or Cedric Robinson, or Billy Holiday, or Betty Carter, they have embedded in their work modes of thought and thinking that maybe allow us to, for a minute at least, rescue Kant from his own worst impulses.

Brian: One of the ideas I know that comes through in In the Break is how so much of Black performance is improvisation, and for you as an accomplished poet, in your collection The Feel Trio, and national book award finalist, there's this definitely intellectual rigor and also a musicality. One of the many people you referenced in that collection is William Parker, the bass player who's an improviser among other things. What's the relationship between your poetry, which is a written form, and

improvisation which you make up as you go along.

Fred: I actually don't know if it's right to say that improvisation is something that you make up as you go along. I know that, ordinarily, it's conceived as a mode of aesthetic endeavor which is seen as being in the moment and impromptu and it's work that is supposed to have been done without foresight. What it means to work without foresight, I think, and I'm beginning to understand more and more, is really what it is to work while you're looking back and looking behind. In this respect, improvisation is critical, and it's a form of memory.

It's a form of critical memory. It's what happens when you think and work and compose in real time while I'm looking back on history, which is often, at least in our case, in the Black tradition and in Black social life, a brutal and violent history. You can hear all that when William Parker is playing, and of course the impossible beauty which no one could ever have possibly asked for in any legitimate way, is that people can turn that terrible history into moments of beauty.

Those moments of beauty don't undermine that history. They don't erase that history, or they don't negate that history, but they complicate that history, and they make that history into something which if we use it right, we can transform the world.

Brian: In our last 45 seconds or so, in an essay I read about you in ARTnews, the author says, "Moten has become a siren of sorts for artists and curators who find in his words ideas to put into their own practice." As you now get this MacArthur Genius award, do you see your work, or do you want to influence other artists in certain directions? We have 30 seconds.

Fred: Not if I want to influence other artists so much, but I want to be with them, I want to involved in a common project with them. I want to be involved in a common project with the social life and the social world out of which the art emerges. I'm happy to be with other people who want to do that work, and that includes both artists and a lot of other people I just meet and hang out with walking up and down the streets, so that makes it fun.

Brian: We have to leave it there with Fred Moten, cultural theorist and poet who was just named a MacArthur Fellow. It concludes our six segments, six brief conversations with six people from our area who just won MacArthur Genius Grants. Thank you so much for joining us.

Fred: Thank you for having me.

Copyright © 2020 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.