2. Unbounding Syntax, Argument and Form
What happens when language ceases to
follow the conventions of argument? When
thesis, evidence, and conclusion refuse
to align? What remains when logic
dissolves? Here, writing begins to move.
Fred Moten, working at the intersection
of Black Studies and poetics, theorises
such movement as improvisation. He
proposes theory not as system, but as
sound — not as edifice, but as
vibration. In Black and Blur, he writes:
*“I am trying not to finish..”*³
This
refusal of completion is not failure —
it is form. Writing, in Moten’s
practice, becomes a kind of drift:
open-ended, rhythmical, attentive to
difference. This is also the impulse
behind Wild Research: to write without
resolution, to think without linearity.
Knowledge here is not accumulated, but
sensed. Not extracted, but composed in
relation. Not the construction of
argument, but the unfolding of
resonance.
Footnotes:
1. Édouard
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans.
Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997), 189.
2.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the
Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1975).
3. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 198.
4. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 14.
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