Fred Moten — The Universal Machine (2018)
The third volume of Moten’s consent not to be a single being trilogy (preceded by Black and Blur and Stolen Life). Moten continues his project of thinking blackness not as lack or wound but as a generative, fugitive sociality — the undercommons, the “hold” of the slave ship, the informal, exorbitant sociality that exceeds and refuses the accounting of liberal political economy.
“The universal machine” evokes Turing’s universal computation — a machine that can simulate any other machine — as a figure for the way that Black radical tradition has always already processed the universal claims of Western modernity, finding in their exclusions and remainders the material for alternative worldings. Moten reads across philosophy, poetry, music, and performance to track this fugitivity as a persistent political and aesthetic practice.
For OM: Moten’s work grounds the Afropessimist critique in OM’s Moloch essay — the argument that some failures have ontological roots that no coordination mechanism can address without confronting the game board itself. Moten’s undercommons is extitutional space made explicit in the register of Black radicalism: the generative social outside institutional legibility.