I THINK YOU KNOW YOU FUCKED UP: FRED MOTEN ON KENNY GOLDSMITH

One of the many reasons I am grateful for what Fred Moten says about and to the writer Kenny
Goldsmith, with regard to his appropriation of Michael Browns autopsy report, is that he addresses
Goldsmith as a person, and in doing so is able to actually communicate that Goldsmiths lack of
immunity from what Moten here calls the raciality of the concept, as such is so deeply within
Goldsmith as to both exempt him and make him totally accountable at the same time, by the same
gesture (I think you know you fucked up). Complicity especially of an infinite kind is perhaps
sometimes misunderstood as a letting off the hook, as an alibi, and yet here it turns sharply inwards
on a human being who is then released, one imagines, to reconsider, as I can then do, what the
raciality of the concept, as such might mean and how far it carries. How would it relate to
something like general repression and to the need to reconfigure semiotic priorities in general
(concepts as such as racial)? Even Derrida is not immune to this, Moten will say elsewhere. Even
those most careful with and attentive to language are not immune to fucking up through deed and
deed as language or even through the carelessness of precision. Any one can make a fundamental
mistake (so the overly placid saying goes) for which they are responsible, and something like infinite
complicity then comes through, part of Motens intimate address to a Goldsmith now so singularly
and unmistakably taken on as to be to anyone at all. Me too, you too, even Moten, even X, even Y,
even Z. All the more specifically you. Heres the whole of what Moten said, in response to
CAConrads call:

I think you know you fucked up. But do you know why you fucked up? And do you know how
you fucked up? Do you know that why you fucked up and how you fucked up are totally
entangled? Do you know that entanglement is given in the raciality of the concept, as such? I
wish I could be convinced that youre thinking right now about how and why you fucked up. I
wish I could convince you that the continued existence of human life on this earth depends
upon you thinking about why and how you fucked up.

Pause. Break. Breath. No need to read anymore. Except this again:

I think you know you fucked up. But do you know why you fucked up? And do you know how
you fucked up? Do you know that why you fucked up and how you fucked up are totally
entangled? Do you know that entanglement is given in the raciality of the concept, as such? I
wish I could be convinced that youre thinking right now about how and why you fucked up. I
wish I could convince you that the continued existence of human life on this earth depends
upon you thinking about why and how you fucked up.

The power of this simple address, in which Kenny Goldsmith is not named (but of course given the
context, he very much is), forces thought itself to regroup, to relax, to clench. Goldsmith, the human
being, is so squarely dealt with as to be put out of the way, and kept on the hook. The choice of
apostrophe feels key, and might be analyzed as a non-recursive return moment of what the
anthropocene obliterates (face, which then compensates in a frenzy of forced designation, tagging,
calling out), as does the apparent absence of explicit anger, and full presence of something perhaps
more akin to determined fierceness, clarity, disbelief coupled with wiliness and precision. The
effectiveness of this is to go so far toward Goldsmith, meeting him as a person who needed to be
addressed, precisely so that the question might be posed, so that his pinioned absolutely
unsubstitutable you (no one else in this case) become painfully fungible as anyone. Only the
absolutely unique is fungible at all.
In the responses that CAConrad was able to corral, Motens is perhaps the only one in which
we find this direct address, and once done, it seems simple and obvious as a gesture, the most
challenging thing to do since it pings itself beyond Goldsmith the man, and into the raciality of the
concept, as such, which inhabits him. Moten uses the words fucked up in a way that seems
accurate but which probably isnt intended to harm. A suspended benefit of doubt is given and
extended here and then combined with a slightly ruthless confession of powerlessness: I think you
know you did this, and yet I wish I could convince myself you did know you did this, and I wish I
could convince you how tied up all this is with the future as livable on this planet. The passage is
squarely addressed to one person and when I first read it I perhaps couldnt help be aware of that
acutely, and yet to reread it is to ask myself what I might learn here, not only as the vicariously guilty
addressee but in terms of observing how Moten says such a complicated thing with such modest and
fierce simplicity. Take for example how he moves it on, through fierceness, to a clearly stated idea:
the raciality of the concept, as such. Such a phrase is a gift, culled as it must be from years of
reading and years of testing ideas, training in material deconstruction, and then this hard-won
simplicity passed on to Goldsmith: dont you see that there is a raciality of the concept, as such, and
that even if your work could be justified according to some kind of convincing description, you
would still be part of this cognitive raciality, this coloring and taint in the concept itself, a racism, one
might imagine, in the quasi-concepts of judgment, determination and choice themselves?
To say that the address to Goldsmith can be diverted to, in principle, anyone is not to ruin or risk
its specificity, as it might sometimes appear, but instead to become aware that anything else would in
fact risk even worse. The conceptual discrimination of thinking that self-accountability, and the
identification of a momentary social enemy (though this word feels odd), can only occur at the same
time. Marxist thinking broadly seems to sometimes run on this fear or even paranoia, that if one
diverts the address or moves the terrain too quickly to a concept, even to the future of the earth as
such as concept, any socially determinable specificity is lost (we no longer have an enemy). Its not
that I necessarily need to put myself in Goldsmiths place here, and yet perhaps it would be even
worse (and discriminatory) if I were structurally inhibited from doing so. To say otherwise, and to
see infinite complicity as anything other than intimate and de jure endless, would risk the very
chance to say the raciality of the concept, as such. Moten is perhaps one of the few respondents to
imply why racism, or what he chooses to call the raciality of the concept, as such, is so important at
this specific moment, and the reason is that the continued existence of human life on this earth
depends on an understanding of this conceptual raciality. One might even say, at a stretch, that the
possibility of understanding this raciality, or of being open to it, and not just repressing it again,
means being open to the a priori possibility that not even I am immune to forgetting this too,
getting even this wrong. Do we really know yet that we fucked up, and what that means? Upon this
diverse virtual futures continue to depend.