to ward freedom - an introduction to the study

Written By Omnia Saed
When I was first introduced to Fred Moten, it would take me hours to deconstruct a single chapter (it still does). Translating and postulating on the combination of words, and syntax, and theory that Moten had deliberately composed to represent a thought, and what I would later understand as a reckoning, a re-positionality, of being.  

I was angry at the act, the noun here, the act of, struggling to understand a text that had the potential and foresight to reposition understandings of self, of freedom, of being. I remember scribbling in the margins over and over and over again - theory must be accessible for practice. practice must be accessible for theory.  

Reckonings require intimacy.
I was wrong. For…. a whole lot of reasons. 

Considerably the assumption, the false pretense that intimacy is devoid of struggle. Struggle here situated in safety.* A struggle that is not overtly romanticized for its deliverance, but for the objective understanding of its pervasiveness. We struggle when we are vulnerable with someone we love for the first time. We struggle when we try something new, we struggle when we fight for something we deeply believe in, we struggle to be morally righteous, generative, kind and compassionate even when our cups run empty. And when we delicately and deliberately arrange a combination of words and syntax, structures and theories to represent ideas of existence that exceed the confines of language and the worlds we have bared witnessed and lived with/in... we struggle. 
Which is why I find this interview with Moten so important to my understandings of movement. He explains,
 “I think that writing in general, you know, is a constant disruption of the means of semantic production, all the time. And I don’t see any reason to try to avoid that. I’d rather see a reason to try to accentuate that. But I try to accentuate that not in the interest of obfuscation but in the interest of precision.”

I wouldn’t learn until later that for Moten, finding precise language when writing was a prelude to the act, noun again, of teaching. 

“The critical language, which some folks might say is inaccessible or too full of what they might call jargon is a kind of shorthand, or a mode of technical notation, in which one is trying to work out some ideas whose most fundamental expression will be oral, and given in the context of teaching. So the writing is notes for teaching, for choir practice, so to speak. Some of the strangeness at the level of diction, or the convolution maybe of a certain kind of sentence structure, comes out of an interest in getting a certain kind of precision, but the precision is not in the first instance about presenting it in a precise way for publication, but getting the idea out right, where writing is a kind of method of thought.”  

I think of movement here not just as a literal shift in my personal understandings and approach to text but in developing a practice that recognizes and appreciates the interrelated bonds, the kinetic energy, between intimacy and a generative imagination. In other words, to imagine the alternatives to our current moments/states of being we must search,, we will struggle,, to find the language. 
I start this series with Moten (..some may be confused as to why, I possibly am too) because his interview reminds me of all the ways we persist to find precise and purposeful language to communicate, to dream, to imagine and ultimately, love — a verb. 

I love to think of the powers that situate our understandings of self and community, that which demand worlds that cherish and harbor our relationships to both ourselves and one another, feelings that remind us that we are seen, that the choirs are heard and our teachings are to be read out loud. That the possibilities of freedoms are far reaching and that the madhhab-i ‘ishq (pathways of love) are divine. 

I pray this month is filled with reckonings and groundings for collective movement and I pray we search for precision in finding language(s) for collective tenderness, intimacy and care. I hope these offerings find a home in that prayer.
He has to find the path in herself, as the Qur’an says: “[We shall show them our signs…] and inside their own selves, do they not reflect [on this]?”….There is no path to God better than the path of the heart. This is the meaning of “the heart is the house of God.” 
— Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani, Tamhidat

 

anyways, here are some other readings that touched my heart this week:

Omnia Saed
Previous

Let’s Plot to Make the Moon Jealous