Temporalities of power,sociality,and struggle in Fred Moten and Judith Butler

Abstract

Throughout his corpus, Fred Moten insists on a unique temporality: sociality is always primary, both temporally and logically. Power arrives to individuate this primary sociality, dividing it into subjects, but it survives fugitively as a struggle against power. At numerous points in their work, Judith Butler also posits sociality as primary, but with a crucial difference: power’s arrival enacts a totalizing constitutive force onto subjects, erasing any possibility of accessing the sociality that preceded and gave life to both power and subjects. This essay elaborates on this fundamental temporal disagreement between two of today’s most influential critical theorists.

Introduction

Throughout his corpus, Fred Moten constantly emphasizes a temporality of social struggles that situates sociality as primary. In an interview, Moten’s longtime collaborator Stefano Harney makes this temporal primacy clear:

Insurgency is primary. Rebellion comes first. We don’t rebel against the police because there’s police. The police come after us if we show ourselves as that primary antagonism … What does it mean to show ourselves? Well, what it doesn’t mean is that somebody who is an individual is walking along and gets killed by the cops. That’s what we see once we’ve moved into the frame of visualization … There is something that called those cops out before that person … There’s this general antagonism which blurs the distinction of any individual person (Moten and Harney, 2020a: 15–17”).

The stakes of the primary antagonism of sociality are here affirmed theoretically: the police as archetype of authority arrive to individuate the assembly of sociality, which exists already in and as insurgency. In what precise form, though, does insurgency survive before its conscription into the individuating authorities of the state and the police? How does sociality live before the emergence of named individuals marked in the codes of authority?

There are historical reasons for this primacy of struggle that are not always specified in Moten’s work. In the transatlantic slave trade, Euro-American enslavers specifically grouped enslaved Africans in incompatible cultural groups, placing people together who did not speak the same language or have the same traditions, thereby prohibiting the possibility of assembled dissent. ¹ Through the disjunction of difference, enslavers sought to homogenize black life, producing a racialized population in which, as Cedric J. Robinson writes, “all are equally incomplete” (1980: 199; original emphasis). This incompletion, however, was assumed by the enslaved as fugitive sociality; their social life was practiced as constant uprisings and escapes.

The imposition of incompletion exposed a sociality that exceeded the reach of the imposition itself. Enslavers attempted to produce and determine black lives as slaves, but in doing so they unwittingly exposed a survival that exceeded their own project. This foundational moment of the USA set up the dialectics of fugitivity and raciality that continue to define its sociopolitical tension. As Laura Harris writes, “Blackness, in this sense, manifests itself in what is perceived as the unruly creativity and disorderly sociality that the subject, in its commitment to the idea of its own freedom as self-determination, … must at all costs defend itself against” (2018: 3). The impossibility of the freedom of black lives exposes a form of fugitive survival that persists in the excess of both freedom and self-possession as the definitional logics of American capitalism’s subjective regime. In this essay, I attempt to situate this excess sociality in Moten’s corpus. Moten insists on this sociality’s unique temporality: sociality is historically primary, which makes it constitutively insurgent.

To bring out the political practice of this temporality, I study Moten’s insistence on primacy in relation to Judith Butler’s similar proposition. Both maintain that sociality comes before individuation. Where they differ is on the relation of this sociality to constitutive authority. For Moten, as Harney lays out above, power arrives after the insurgency of sociality. For Butler, meanwhile, power and sociality are historically tangled in a process of continuous mutual constitution, through which each remains forever reliant on the other.

In this essay, I closely read the corpuses of Moten and Butler to bring out the political meaning and matter of this temporality of insurgency. I begin by exploring Moten’s many poetic elaborations of what a primacy of insurgency entails as a theoretical, social, and historical proposition, before turning to the numerous criticisms of Moten’s position. In the following section, I engage with Butler’s reading of this temporality. In the final two sections, in order to clarify the stakes of these temporal propositions, I stage Butler’s then Moten’s respective conceptions of primacy in relation to Louis Althusser’s famous description of the scene of interpellation.

Moten’s temporality

In their 2013 collaboration The Undercommons, Harney and Moten criticize the institutional temporality of the university by arguing that “before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching” (2013: 27). The social practice of sharing knowledge historically and logically precedes the institutional appropriation of knowledge as a formal and productive exchange. Logically, one must already have had the experience of shared knowledge in order to have any knowledge to share; one’s pursuit of this sharedness of knowledge also brings out the historical primacy of sharing, revealing the future perfect aspect of sharedness, as Moten writes in a collaboration with Wu Tsang: “The first time I heard the sound of your voice it filled me with a sense of future perfect. The friendship I will have had” (Moten and Tsang, 2016: 7).

Friendship here is not a response to encountering a stranger. One does not begin as an unknown other. Instead, once friendship becomes the form of the present relation between two people, a historical primacy is revealed: we were already friends. “[F]riendship is what survives knowing one another,” Moten says in an interview. “Friendship comes before knowing one another and it survives knowing one another. It survives the rules of individuation that incarcerates the differences that actually make friendship possible. It both anticipates and survives individuation” (Moten et al., 2021: 8). Friendship is the condition for an assembly which does not yet realize that it is presupposed in friendship. Before individuation, there is social life. This social life is undivided into units of mutual interest; it exists, as Moten and Harney say, as a practice of sharing (Moten and Harney, 2020a: 35–36”).

Harney makes the temporality of this primary sharing clear: “Sharing is not an interpersonal relationship. … One doesn’t share. One is shared” (Moten and Harney, 2020a: 41”). Sharing is not something one does; sharing, instead, is the prior and primary condition of being withdrawn into the individuating appearance of one. First (historically), one is shared, and (logically) one must be already shared. As a pedagogical proposition, this temporality disrupts the institutional authority of universities that claim primacy over learning, situating themselves as the generative site at which the sharing of knowledge can occur. In the primacy of being taught and of teaching, where the sharing of knowledge is a friendship that will have been had, the institution serves only as the formalized appropriation of sharing.

In their latest collaboration, All Incomplete, Moten and Harney give a wider range of examples of how this primacy of sociality might be exposed as an insurgent practice. This “may entail forming a band, hosting a barbeque, a dance and a drink. It may be a farm and a daycare, an experimental writing collective, or a mechanics shop. Any form of detoxification from the interpersonal” (Harney and Moten, 2021: 121). At first, these examples seem impossibly quotidian, appealing to a poetic imaginary that has no practical application. But, for Moten, the removal of the appearance of interpersonality is always radical, in that it exposes what racial capitalism and its temporal order cannot bear: the survival of black sociality despite its racialization.

The fugitive black survival that Moten celebrates is not merely the revelation that brutalized lives survive within the frame of their eradication, but that they survive in a sociality that exceeds the temporality of their racialization. In the excess of slavery and its afterlife, black sociality mobilizes certain lives as surviving fugitively. “Blackness,” as Moten says in his endlessly complex idiolect, “is consent not to be one: not just to be more + less than one but the mobilization of that indiscretion and incompleteness against or ‘otherwise than being’” (Moten, 2018a: 242). Temporally as well as logically, insurgent sociality survives in a form that precedes and exceeds the individuation of social life as subjects.

While Moten is not foremost concerned with the precise history of this primary insurgency—which, as I explore below, is the focus of many criticisms of this temporality—he nonetheless makes it clear that the logical primacy of sociality, as the generative impulse to which power subsequently responds, comes as a function of its historical primary (Moten, 2008: 187). This has been Moten’s concern since the first sentence of his first monograph, In the Break: “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003: 1). Africans were turned into objects through enslavement, but those objected people never stopped resisting: they escaped, they jumped overboard, they formed fugitive communities, and they continuously rose up against their enslavers to insurgently refuse their status as objects, turning objectification into objection. Moten’s political and theoretical task, as he writes in the footnote to the sentence above, is to expose the transgressive performances and performativity of blackness:

Blackness, in all of its constructed imposition, can tend and has tended toward the experimental achievement and tradition of an advanced, transgressive publicity. Blackness is, therefore, a special site and resources for a task of articulation where immanence is structured by an irreducibly improvisatory exteriority that can occasion something very much like sadness and something very much like devilish enjoyment. To record this improvisational immanence—where untraceable, an original rootedness and unenclosed, disclosing outness converge, where that convergence is articulation by and through an infinitesimal and unbridgeable break—is a daunting task (2003: 255n1).

The condition of violation that marks black lives today is both maintained and disrupted by the history of blackness, in that the persistent project of racist violation was constantly exceeded by the “irreducibly improvisatory exteriority” that marks black social life. Blackness is sustained in the excess of its violation through the public performances of black sociality, which range from barbeques to music, as Harney and Moten propose (2021: 121).

As the above passage clearly shows, though, Moten’s style often does more to obscure this historical primacy than to expose it. While maintaining an insistence on the historical primacy of resistance to oppression throughout his corpus, this is often conveyed through poetic statements that come across more as scripture than scholarly arguments. In All Incomplete, for example, Harney and Moten argue:

Prior resistance to individuation is both the primary mode of our perversion as well as the structure and activity of persistence that is most essentially productive of value. In this regard, perversion is total education’s primary object and justification insofar as all our efforts at social reproduction must be deemed wrong, insufficient, and weak (2021: 63–64)

At first, here, social life is revealed to be rooted in prior resistance, which comes before individuation. There is already a historical argument at work here, even if not clearly outlined through historical analysis. This social life is perverse in that it is not reducible to the normative form of individuality. This perversion both allows for the survival of sociality as prior resistance and feeds capital with its endless energy: it is the activity of social assembly that impels people to constantly gather in productive ways, which can be appropriated by authority in its many forms. Through this process, the repressive regime of “total education” (taken from Foucault) appears to be the generative power, producing perversion in order to control it. However, perversion is in fact the justification for total education insofar as the latter is reliant on the prior excess of the former: perverse sociality always exceeds the format of aggregated individuals.

While Moten does not provide a critical history of the precise material form in which insurgency survives, nor explain what exactly insurgency is in relation to critical studies of revolutionary movements, he remains consistently dedicated to a striking temporality: insurgency is primary. At stake in the primacy of insurgency, for Moten, “is not so much what constitutes political experience but what antepolitical forces remain in the wake of political reduction and regulation” (Moten, 2018b: 107). A disruption of the political is awakened and actualized in turning to the antepolitical force of insurgency, but the practical mechanics of that turning, as well as what to look for in the forms of sociality that precede the political, are as yet unclear. In the next section, I look into recent criticisms of Moten’s temporal proposition, before turning to Butler’s theorization of this temporality in order to bring out the stakes of a possible primary insurgency.

Criticisms of Moten

George Shulman criticizes the primacy of struggle posited in Harney and Moten’s reading of the Black Panthers. In The Undercommons, they argue that the revolutionary group was revolutionary because it had no politics; it was not a group gathered under the name of shared interests, but was rather a social assembly that emerged precisely as the continued practices of their specific and local sociality. “The Panthers theorized revolution without politics,” as Harney and Moten write, “which is to say revolution with neither a subject nor a principle of decision” (2013: 18). Their practice was the survival of black sociality rather than the representation of subjects under a set of common interests.

Shulman questions the withdrawal of politics that Harney and Moten celebrate here: “By shifting the revolutionary from politics to sociality, by depicting Panthers engaged only in planning as social reproduction but not in politics, their agonistic refusal to be governed appears only against ‘politics,’ not as a politics or a tension within politics” (Shulman, 2020: 288–289). Harney and Moten’s political withdrawal creates a binary in which everything that engages with politics is complicit in the bourgeois, white supremacist form of the subject and its discourse of mutual interests, while anything that exceeds politics is deemed truly revolutionary.

The challenge of this antipolitics may depend on the meaning of excess, to the extent that Moten seems to uncritically celebrate any excess to the normatively political. As Shulman notes, Moten’s idealization of the ante-political excess of politics lacks a historical materialist grounding. Historical and contemporary cases of political refusal—Shulman lists “Native tribes, maroons, or Zapatista activists”—ultimately have to return to a certain conception of grouped interests based on political subjectivity (2020: 291). They have to realize themselves at some point as a coherent subject-group in order to protect themselves from internal divisions. However excessive to normative politics the group may be, it becomes split by “inequalities of class, gender, or homophobia”, and then it needs an appeal to a coherent political interest that supersedes these divisions (Shulman, 2020: 291).

Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s criticism similarly encounters in Moten a possible absence of political application, which Okoth finds by equating Afropessimism with Moten’s “black optimism”. Afropessimism is one of the two main traditions in contemporary black studies—which is also called the black radical tradition—alongside black optimism, which centers on Moten’s work, although Moten no longer uses this term. The crucial difference between these traditions for the purposes of this essay is that, while they are certainly antiracist anticapitalists, Afropessimists explicitly refusal political action. They argue that black life is already lived as death, already closed to the possibility of life insofar as life is the ontology of whiteness (see: Hart, 2018).

While Moten’s “black optimism” might seem directly opposed to Afropessimism, Okoth argues that ultimately Moten’s celebration of life, and his emphasis on the survival of black sociality despite the insistent enforcement of its death in white ontology, is nothing but a slight variation in terminology: Afropessimists say “death” and Moten says “life”, but ultimately, for “both Afro-pessimists and Black Optimists, the afterlife of slavery is characterised by the social death of the Black/Slave” (Okoth, 2020: np). This social death situates all political activity in a prior negative ontology from which blackness can never emerge; blackness is not, in Okoth’s reading of both black radical traditions, a social grouping organized around common interests, and therefore cannot be elicited into revolutionary abolitionist projects.

While Okoth quotes Moten as noting “the slightest most immeasurable reversal of emphasis” that separates his project from Afropessimism (2020, np), the former’s inattention to the significance of this reversal makes his criticism miss the entire point of black optimism. This reversal is made clear by Harney in an interview:

There’s so much misunderstanding, especially in Afropessimism, about Indigenous sovereignty. … That comes from putting things backwards: imagining sovereignty precedes the rebellion. And … that’s just not correct. Historically, … the experience of Indigenous struggles is that one can find a … fugitive home [in a] land that’s not sovereign (Moten and Harney, 2020b: 31–33”)

In this historical understanding, the Indigenous use of land as a social and fugitive home precedes its forced accumulation into the sovereign privacy of capitalist settler colonialism. While Indigenous land is subsumed into the form of property, the “fugitive home” nonetheless survives. It lives on in a fugitive temporality, within and against the subsumptive present.

As one of Afropessimist’s primary theorists, Frank B. Wilderson III—whom Moten calls “the last great theorist of the subject” (Moten and Harney, 2020a: 24–25”)—writes, Afropessimism understands Black people as the “baseline other” of white Humanity (Wilderson, 2020: 164). ² The world of Humans, for Wilderson, is constructed on the scene of the slave plantation, where (white) Humans are embodied subjects and (black) Slaves are the negative non-identity of Being, produced and maintained by whiteness. As Wilderson writes, “the Slave wakes up in the morning wondering, What will these Humans do to my flesh? A hydraulics of anxiety that is very different than exploitation and alienation” (2020: 303). The operation of the World, for Wilderson, is mechanical and automatic: racism does not arise from the bad intentions of misguided people, but is the structural groundwork of the possibility of Humanity qua whiteness, which forms the central axis of Being and its impulse to consume and destroy its negative impossibility, i.e., blackness.

In this sense, the nonbeing of blackness exceeds working-class exploitation, Indigenous dispossession, or misogynist patriarchy. “Slaves themselves are consumed, not their labor power. Slaves are implements, not workers” (Wilderson, 2020: 304; original emphasis). This total negativity is structurally necessary to the World-making project of whiteness, for Wilderson, which opens a multiform impossibility that constitutes the adamant pessimism of his project. All pursuits of redemption, in any form, including critical theory and revolutionary struggle, must ultimately realize themselves in the form of the World, which is a constitutive part of whiteness, making any movement an affirmation of the nothingness of the Slave. There is no possibility of promoting or even experiencing the “fugitive home” in which Harney grounds the primacy of insurgency. “Afropessimism,” for Wilderson, “is a looter’s creed: critique without redemption” (2020: 174).

Black optimism contests the looter’s creed by arguing that we do not loot in response to our property being taken, nor are we formed by the imposition of possession or its absence; rather, social life is already riotous, already looting before there is anything to loot (Shulman, 2020: 284). The subsequent question is: what to do with the loot? Black optimism is not far from a looter’s creed, in its celebration of the radical excess of black sociality that disrupts the oppressive order of every racializing institution, but its next step is to share the loot. The looter exceeds the logic of property, taking and sharing instead of appropriating and accumulating. Their possession of property is public and shared, not private and expansive. “Homelessness is the condition in which you share your house,” as Moten says. “Literally, it’s the condition in which you give your house away, constantly, as a practice of hospitality” (Moten and Harney, 2020b: 13–14”).

This is “the slightest most immeasurable reversal of emphasis” that Okoth uses to homogenize the projects of Afropessimism and black optimism, but the difference is vast: for Moten and Harney, sociality is the prior condition of life, the survival of which is constitutively insurgent; social life is the constant insurgent practice of sharing. This sharing precedes its appropriation into the logics of private property, and remains despite appropriation: people continue to be socially constituted by the fundamental generative principle of sharing and being shared. Carried into the world of private property and racializing violence, this sociality of sharing persists as an internal insurgency, disrupting the possibility of the full totalization of private property. For Wilderson, meanwhile, the process of appropriation produces a necessary nothingness that is constitutively dependent on the productive project of whiteness and its regime of private property. For Afropessimists, there is nothing to go back to, and no surviving remnant in the present, while for black optimists, the fugitive survival of insurgent sociality in the present is the revolutionary project always on the brink of actualization.

Moten brings this temporality out through poetic practice, by appealing to aesthetic traditions that constitute black survival in the US as insurgency. ³ There is no direct or necessary political program for this insurgency, in Moten’s work; its insurgency comes from the fact that it exceeds politics. The primacy of insurgency is antepolitical. Moten’s claim, as Shulman writes, should be understood as the operation of a fugitive imaginary. This imaginary summons a social life that exceeds its capture by the history and afterlife of enslavement. Moten’s work is formed of “depictions of impasse as nominations that could be otherwise; as organizing fictions whose world-building effects we must trace and assess; as speech-acts we can take up, revise, or refuse” (Shulman, 2020: 273). Moten’s work is at once a poetics, a praxis, and a critical methodology of primary insurgency.

Moten’s argument for the primacy of insurgency, as his critics notice, is not political. As he writes, its stakes are “what antepolitical forces remain in the wake of political reduction and regulation” (Moten, 2018b: 107). Often, criticisms of this position result in a dismissal of Moten’s work or of black studies generally as an important tradition in radical theory (Leung, 2023: 46). Moten’s “antepolitical” argument, though, is intended as a criticism of both the strictly political focus of more hegemonic critical traditions and the antipolitical tradition of Afropessimism. It is crucial, for Moten, that blackness precedes the racializing history of racial capitalism, and that this antecedence makes blackness constitutively insurgent. The primacy of insurgency antagonizes power’s claim to historical and logical primacy. This is the insurgency of Moten’s temporality of social primacy. In order to bring out a practical theoretical intervention in this temporality of primary insurgency, I now turn to Judith Butler, who, over decades, has studied the relational temporality of power, sociality, and struggle.

Butler’s temporality

While Afropessimists affirm power as historically and ontologically prior to and generative of social life, Moten—in the tradition he used to call black optimism—proposes the radical inverse of power’s priority, arguing that social life comes first, and power is a reaction to the irreducible survival of sociality, which constitutes sociality’s insurgent character. Judith Butler’s thinking is situated in the middle of these positions. For Butler, fundamentally, people gather on the streets in rebellion in response to power. As is typical in Butler’s work, this analysis of power is structured across two parallel temporalities: one psychoanalytic, one political. Throughout their mid-career works—especially The Psychic Life of Power and Precarious Life—they make clear that the antecedence of power to its manipulation of and affective manifestation in subjects occurs in both temporalities.

Politically, the structure is as follows: “the historical time that we thought was past turns out to structure the contemporary field with a persistence that gives the lie to history as chronology” (Butler, 2020: 54; emphasis removed). Butler—as is typical of their work from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, excluding Excitable Speech ⁴ —uses the Foucauldian structures of governmentality and sovereignty to theorize the presupposition of power in those individuals who emerge as subjects (Butler, 2004). Once people realize themselves as subjects, whatever they were before this subjectivation is erased by the totalizing reach of power.

Butler’s political temporality finds its equivalent in one’s personal, originary exposure to the Other: “If my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the ‘we’ is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against [without] denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation” (2020: 22–23). So, despite the perceived antecedence of power at the level of our subjection, we are constituted in sociality, in necessary and infinite relation to others. Social life precedes the diremption that power enacts between sociality and subjects.

The subtlety of this temporality is revealed later in the same essay, where Butler exposes the subjective emergence of a distinction—albeit impossible and never complete—between oneself and Other, which is preceded by power in the form of primary caregivers:

there is bound to be some experience of humiliation for adults, who think that they are exercising judgment in matters of love, to reflect upon the fact that, as infants and young children, they loved their parents or other primary others in absolute and uncritical ways—and that something of that pattern lives on in their adult relationships. I may wish to reconstitute my ‘self’ as if it were there all along, a tacit ego with acumen from the start; but to do so would be to deny the various forms of rapture and subjection that formed the condition of my emergence as an individuated being and that continue to haunt my adult sense of self with whatever anxiety and longing I may now feel (Butler, 2020: 26–27)

The primacy of power is set up as a layered framework of subjection, which works upon the subject with an ideological function that makes it inaccessible in the wake of having become a subject.

Butler and Moten agree that sociality precedes the individual, but for Moten that sociality is a struggle that precedes power, whereas for Butler that sociality is already constituted in relation to power. “At the most intimate level,” as Butler summarizes, “we are social; we are comported toward a ‘you’; we are outside ourselves, constituted in cultural norms that precede and exceed us, given over to a set of cultural norms and a field of power that condition us fundamentally” (2020: 45). The subject is produced through the formational institutions of power. As Adriana Zaharijević emphasizes, despite “the unyielding rigidity of the hegemonic structures within which it takes place”, Butler’s subject is nonetheless “vested with a certain revolutionary agency” (2021: 23). This agency is complex and constituted within the norms of power, though, rather than a sovereign will to which each subject has autonomous recourse.

In Gender Trouble, Butler employs this complex temporality in their primary critical concern: the deconstruction of sex and gender. There, Butler maintains a close separation between “the gender of the performer” and “the gender of the performance,” which allows them to propose drag or masquerade not as a uniquely emphatic moment overcoming sex’s otherwise scientific binary, but as the revelation of the fabrication at work on every level of the performance of both sex and gender (2007: 187). Gender is “a fantasy of a fantasy. … To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect—that is, in its effect—postures as an imitation” (Butler, 2007: 188). Drag is not the parodic performance of a gender but rather another constitutive parody of the fiction that comes to undergird this performance as if it were the performance’s origin.

The gendered/sexed subject performs this looped fantasy in public, as the constitution of a gendered social life, which for Butler means this subject cannot form their own gendering intentions. Their impulse to imitate a fantasy must have been formed by a power that precedes the subject: the performance that maintains “gender within its binary frame … must be understood to found and consolidate the subject” (2007: 191). At the same time, “forms of regulatory power [are] sustained in part through the formation of a subject,” so the desire of power is exerted in creating the subjects it subsequently needs to survive, a need which is denied through its repressive faculties (Butler, 1997: 19). Ultimately, “the mechanism of repression is prohibitive and generative at once” (Butler, 2007: 126).

In Butler’s temporality of subject-formation, then, the subject is presupposed in a power that consolidates the fantasy of its own generative existence by subsequent performances of an illusory gender binary, performances which “effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal” (2007: 192). Once the illusion of a gendered/sexed origin is established, and subjects are more or less successfully performing the fantasy of a fantasy which is in fact a groundless but antecedent power, this power then refutes its agency in the construction of subjects: it is both prohibitive and generative.

In their earlier works, Butler is attentive to the necessary maintenance of the power that forms the subject in the process through which the subject disavows itself of this power, ⁵ which for Butler is a task of “re-signification” (Butler, 1997: 104), i.e., of interpreting the world through questioning. The subject simultaneously maintains and eradicates the power that formed them as a subject, thereby disconnecting the signifying tie between power and subject, to the extent that the subject appears independent, and their gendered performance comes out as a natural way of being.

This illusory independence is the grounding of the possibility of subjection. Subjects emerge from the power that prohibits their knowledge of their own emergence. The complication of this determination by authority for a radical theory of insurgency comes out in Butler’s numerous ruminations on the ways in which performativity signifies in excess of its referent. Butler is dedicated to the primary politics of performativity, in that this social mode rebuts and constantly complicates power’s claim on primacy. However, like Moten’s formulation of the primacy of insurgency, Butler’s performativity is beset by numerous difficulties when it is applied to the theory and practice of struggles. In the final two sections of this essay, I attempt to make these difficulties clear by reading Butler’s and Moten’s temporal theories in relation to a well-known political heuristic: Louis Althusser’s scene of interpellation. My concern here is not with Althusser’s theory of interpellation itself (which I will, therefore, leave largely unquestioned), but rather with staging Butler’s and Moten’s temporalities of sociality and power within a scene that makes their possible (ante-) politics as clear as possible.

Butler: Performatively re-signifying the interpellative address

Discussing Louis Althusser’s famous scene of interpellation from his 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Butler writes, “called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, … I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially” (1997: 104). This follows the Foucauldian framework in which “resistance [is] an effect of power[:] the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversions, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations” (Butler, 1997: 99; see also: Checchi, 2021).

In this formulation, the voice of authority brings both subjects and their social life into being at the same time. Subsequently, in a way that is entirely opaque to themselves, subjects begin to resist this thrownness into the social, thus exceeding the demands of power as the constitutive other, becoming instead the paradoxical I without Other (Butler, 1997: 31–62). So begins the subject’s unbearable despair and fundamental constitutive impossibility: the subject can only be a subject on the condition of the performance of this overcoming of constitutive power, and yet the subject requires that relational constitution in order to maintain itself as a subject in the social.

In Althusser’s scene of interpellation, an individual is walking along the street. From behind him, a police offer calls out, “Hey, you there!” The individual turns around. “By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject” (Althusser, 2001: 118). The relational constitution of subjects and power here occurs only when the subject responds to being called. The capacity to become a subject is reliant not only on the presence of an other who calls one into being, but also on the form of address: for interpellation to work, language must already be inscribed with this power to subject its receivers (Butler, 2005: 67). So, although sociality in the form of language is temporally prior to subjects and their subjection (Butler et al., 2000: 271), the appropriation of language by the authority figure in the scene of interpellation—who turns language into a mechanism of subjection—erases its prior sociality, projecting the function of interpellative address into the past of socially formed language.

In Bodies That Matter, Butler pursues a mode of address that would disrupt the appropriation of language by authority. They ask, “are there other ways of being addressed and constituted by the law, ways of being occupied and occupying the law, that disarticulate the power of punishment from the power of recognition?” (2011: 82) Arguing that Althusser did not consider “the range of disobedience that such an interpellating law might produce” (2011: 82), Butler questions how any refusal ever takes place if the law fully constitutes its own mode of address. In pursuit of a claim that subjects might have on withdrawal and refusal, Butler turns to performativity as the catachrestic citation of norms, through which subjects assume the language of power but disrupt its intention of sustaining their subjection (Butler, 2005: 24). Subjects, uniquely, can speak as power without becoming power, affording them a constitutive means of rebellion (Butler, 2000: 10, 82).

Butler roots this performative refusal in the precarious authority of naming. For interpellation to work, the subject must already bear a name that is recognizable both to themself and to authority. To be called upon, to be assumed as an individual with the capacity to become a subject of power, one must first be named, and any means this named subject has for withdrawing from these interpellative assumptions relies on and is constrained by the presupposition of a name (Butler, 2011: 83). One is already grounded in a tradition of power that precedes one’s agency of withdrawal: to refuse one’s name, one must first both be named and recognize the capacity of authority to call on oneself by use of that name.

This emphasis on naming highlights—although Butler does not explicitly identify this—Althusser’s own conception of interpellation as the simultaneous act of multiple authorities. For Althusser, despite the simplicity of the narrative in the 1970 essay, interpellating power is not singular, and imposes no single demand on the subject. Instead, as he writes later, it “is realized not on the basis of a single ideology, but of several ideologies at once, under which the individual lives and acts his practice” (Althusser et al., 2006: 241; original emphasis). This multiplicity of powers produces in the interpellated subject a certain possibility of movement, since those powers are themselves struggling for primacy among each other. “What results is a play and a space of multiple interpellations in which the subject is caught up, but which … constitutes the ‘freedom’ of the individual subject, who is simultaneously interpellated by several ideologies that are neither of the same kind nor at the same level” (Althusser et al., 2006: 241; original emphasis). In the confusion of multiple forces, the subject is opened into a form of agency that is entirely reliant on the fact of having been interpellated and constituted in and by power. The subject’s agency here is a function of subjection. Meanwhile, the subject still bears the dual capacity of the name: to be recognized by the authorities, one must remain named, so refusing that name cuts the relation on which both power and subjects are reliant.

Crucially, naming is understood by both Althusser and Butler as a transitive act (Butler, 2011: 171). Something names something. A name is not simply had, but given and responded to in a relation of struggle. The name, though, precedes the individual act of interpellation, as Butler notices (2011: 83). It is given by a multiplicity of conflicting authorities, but also by prior sociality: one’s name is also one’s place in a community, one’s relation to history and local meaning. The unnamed is invisible to power, undetermined in its coordinating logics of address, but equally, when one responds performatively as a refusal of one’s name, one risks losing one’s constitutive social grounding. Insofar as, following Althusser, one’s family, work, and immediate peers are as much a part of one’s interpellation as officers of the law (Althusser et al., 2006: 241), by refusing this frame one risks losing access to the sociality that precedes the subjection of being named. Sociality and power are bound together before the subject emerges, in Butler’s understanding, so the subject cannot refuse power without also refusing sociality. This is the political limit of Butler’s understanding of interpellation: refusal is an act conducted by agentive subjects against their dual constitution by prior power and prior sociality.

The possibility of withdrawal from interpellation, for Butler, is in the fact that interpellation, as “an act of discourse with the power to create that to which it refers, … creates more than it ever meant to, signifying in excess of any intended referent” (Butler, 2011: 82). This excess is the playful space of performativity, where a disruptive and fugitive return to sociality becomes possible.

The performative refusals that Butler discusses in Bodies That Matter operate on the basis that interpellating authority is in fact reliant on its self-recognition in subjects: through interpellation, it does not so much produce subjects as produce itself. For Butler, authority—broadly conceived as the ruling force that oppresses subjects and represses their rebellion—is primary, but its primacy is dependent on its continued self-production in its production of subjects, a production, however, that exceeds its own self-sustaining intentions. It always produces more than it can control; this excess is the space of performative rebellion, through which authority is challenged by the very transitivity it produces.

Butler’s temporality of subjects, power, and sociality, as it is understood through interpellation, is reliant on the a priori assumption of the possibility of a response to interpellation in each subject. In order for the performative refusal of being called upon by one’s name to function as a political act, authority’s own act of calling upon the subject must first be impelled by an expectation of coherence. The officer, in Althusser’s scene, must expect the subject to be potentially recognizable as a subject. As we will see, however, Moten finds a striking absence in this expectation: it does not account for those whose very being is the a priori refusal of subjection—which in Moten’s work is primarily but not only black Americans—who, in the racializing afterlife of slavery, are precisely those who are refused the name of subject.

Moten: Fugitive life before interpellation

In Althusser’s scene of interpellation, the police officer is already separated from the social life of the street: history begins with a police officer standing against the social life of the public. Disallowed in this clear staging of the 1968 student uprisings is the obscurity of sociality before the official staging of the scene. In that obscurity, differential access is afforded to the condition of emerging into the public: some people are selected as the constitutive prohibition of public appearance, forcibly rendered incapable of appearing as potential subjects within the scene of authority. As a poet and a theorist, Moten uses speculative, poetic, and critical methodologies to access the obscured temporalities that precede the staging of the political scene of interpellation.

The “envelopment of all thinking by the European subject” that occurs in Althusser’s staging, Moten argues, results in a specific temporal intervention in which individuals are understood to emerge in public as already potentially subjects (Moten, 2018b: 3). Instead, he pursues a fugitive expression of blackness that precedes and exceeds the public appearance of political assembly. Before the political form of assembly, for Moten, is social assembly, which arrives in a form that is only perceivable within the framework of European critical thinking as a violent disruption. Specifically drawing on Hannah Arendt’s condemnation of black student protests in the 1960s’ United States, Moten argues that the sacrifice of political protest to which Arendt appeals is reliant on the presupposition of individuation, in which an individual qua potential subject abandons their subjection in favor of a political project of refusal. What Arendt cannot perceive is another social movement happening before and beneath that sacrificial moment: “Perhaps there is a kind of violence, to be sharply distinguished from cruelty, that is required in order to see such terrible ecstasy, and to work the difference between sacrifice and selflessness, which is given as study, in care,” Moten writes (Moten, 2018b: 97). To sacrifice oneself democratically for the selflessness of the public requires the presupposition of an agentive self, a full self that is redeemable by self-relinquishment. “You not only have to have but also to be something in particular in order to sacrifice or to be sacrificed” (Moten, 2018b: 98).

Moten’s social violence, “given as study, in care”, is then the violence of precisely not sacrificing oneself to the demands of violation. The survival of black life, for Moten, is a refusal of what has been refused, a mode of existing in excess of the foreclosure of the possibility of democratic sacrifice. It is precisely not as a political assembly that this survival occurs, but as the primary insurgency of sociality. Moten describes the fugitive figure who precedes and exceeds the silently racializing scene of sacrificial interpellation as “the one who ruptures normativity precisely by way of the captivating force of her having been captured by and excluded from it” (Moten, 2018b: 44). The revolutionary rupture of this fugitive movement is its temporality: “There is an insistent previousness that evades the natal occasion of the state’s interpellative call” (Moten, 2018b: 44). Before the authoritative scene of interpellation, a prenatal fugitivity blurs any possible mechanics of subjection and individuation in the scene of recognition. It is as a function of being removed from this scene, from the staging of the politics of the public, that black life is rendered fugitively unindividual, giving consent not to be a single being, which “is not where one is lost, but rather where the irruption of difference is staged in the appearance of singularity” (Moten, 2018b: 112). As Moten writes in Perennial Fashion Presence Falling,

you can’t

be somebody if

you can’t be someplace

(Moten, 2023: 101)

To appear as a potential subject in public—which is the condition for performative refusals of power in Butler’s reading of interpellation—presupposes, for Moten, an a priori selfhood already marked in the history of the subject.

Exploring this complexity through the poetic mode of open questioning that both he and Butler often employ in their critical texts, Moten asks,

What if the political is nothing other than a public slippage into the self that black selves—inoperative in the face of juridical and philosophical impediment, impossible given the constitutionally brutal enforcement of the law of selves—are constrained to perform with sly, deformative alterity? (Moten, 2018b: 104)

Fugitivity, here, is a constraint that affords flight; it is the violation that gives way to the excess of violence. The ambivalence of black survival is that its fugitivity is a function of its accumulation of enslavement; the “terrible ecstasy” of blackness is occasioned by the refusal of black being. But Moten, in his black optimism, insists that this refusal is met by a second refusal: “the refusal of that which has been refused. Life which has been stolen steals away in this refusal in a range of insurgencies that, insofar as they call regulation into question, can be said to anticipate its beginning and its end” (Moten, 2018a: xii).

This fugitive anticipation of violation in another kind of violence is brought out in Moten’s work by a necessarily speculative and poetic methodology. His way of giving textual life to this insistent previousness performatively follows the obscurity of that previousness itself. Despite its highly rarefied appearance, Moten’s theory of primary insurgency is deeply intertwined with the obscurity of this primacy’s history.

In Moten’s view, the issue with the concise heuristic of interpellation is that something has already been assumed about the potentiality of the object who becomes a subject through being called. Interpellation “is issued forth in and from the voice of the fixed coordinate” (Moten, 2018a: 207). The caller recognizes either a framework of possibility or its lack, establishing a spatiotemporal plane in which certain subjects are fixed in relation to power, while others are transient. Some subjects are not fixed in place as subjects; instead, they are fugitive. This fugitivity is the exposure of a sociality that exceeds the possibility of full recognition by power. Fugitive lives move “outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety,” while also being assigned punishment for this movement outside propriety (Moten, 2018a: 131). Blackness, for Moten, is not the master of its own anteriority; it is not another authority that determines the insistent previousness of black life: “Mobilized in predication, blackness mobilizes predication not only against but also before itself” (Moten, 2017a: viii). Fugitivity’s temporal anteriority eludes even itself.

In a series of poems presented as diary entries, Moten celebrates and laments the dual condition of blackness as the fugitively punished obscurity before interpellation.

World is a picture. The personal occupation of a point of view is that picture’s condition of possibility; if one can occupy that point of view, and take that picture, then one can be pictured, too. This reflective picturing of spacetime is Newton’s physics and Kant’s metaphysics doing the nasty, unmoved, without moving, or just not moving all that good (2017b: 13) ⁶

Moten focuses here importantly on the otherness of the subject who acts as the authority in the interpellative scene. The positioning of the caller in relation to the called opens an anxiety in the caller: can I be called too? What will come of me if I am spoken to by that which was not a subject until I called on it with my authority?

These questions are subtended by the presupposition of a constitutive relation between Subject and Other. But who cannot be called into being by this questioning on account of being unrecognizable as a potential subject? Moten continues, with a playful shift of the layout of poetic paragraphs that is a familiar feature of his poetry:

Every time this

feeling starts we done made us

some connections. We cut

your hard and lonely will

off. We wound your death

and play that back as more

than just not you. This you?

Naw, this just not you, my

beautiful sister. Black is so

much more than just not you

it hurts. Gimme more, gimme

more, I want it, I like it.

(Moten, 2017b: 13-14)

The relation that opens in the impossibility of being recognized as “you” is split by a temporal distension: to not be recognized means having been black, a present-perfect-continuous that refers to an ongoing past, to the presence of the traumatic wound of the past instantiated in the fact of having been property, and therefore of being unrecognizable as a potential subject.

This unrecognizability in the ongoing past, however, is not a mere condemnation or the marker of an absolute negative being (as it is for Afropessimists). Instead, it reveals a feeling that made “some connections”, connections whose immediate response is to find meaning in the present in which subjects are brought into being by interpellative power. The question “This you?” demands that the subject reveal themself as singular and separate. But the unrecognizability of this sentient being exceeds the format of being named as “you”: “Naw, this just not you”. The non-youness of this subject is not abstract; it is precise and particular; just, exactly, not you. ⁷ Blackness is not called upon by authority because it is unrecognizable as a potential subject, which occasions a fugitive possibility of life otherwise. This fugitive life is already ongoing, already disrupting the possibility of the full expansion of interpellation. For Moten, blackness is a living glitch in the system of recognition.

For Butler, the subject can refuse the interpellation of power by performatively redeploying the expected mode of address. For Moten, however, this capacity is differentially given according to racialization. For black objects of interpellation (in the US at least; these processes function differently in different contexts), response is already foresworn as a possibility through the accumulation of enslavement. The descendent of human property is already barred from speaking, so their lack of response only affirms their racialization as black. Black refusal must operate otherwise than the refusal to respond. For Moten, it survives precisely as fugitivity. Moten finds this fundamentally constitutive fugitive sociality within every act of address: within one’s name survives the residue of a nameless being, a social life that cannot be addressed.

The radical temporality of primary sociality spans both Butler’s and Moten’s work. For Butler, subjects are preceded by both sociality and power. It remains difficult to assess the specific temporal relation between sociality and power. For Moten, on the other hand, sociality adamantly precedes both power and subjects. What remains difficult in Moten’s corpus is locating the temporal relation between power and subjects. Both of these temporalities tend to nullify the need for organized struggle in the present. Both, however, insist that sociality comes before subjection: first, there is social life, which is then appropriated by power and produced as individual, competitive subjects. Where they differ is on the positioning of power, which Moten places after and as a reaction to sociality, and which Butler places alongside sociality as irreducibly bound up with its historical formation and survival.

It has not been my intention in this essay to argue with any certainty that either one or the other of these positions is correct. It is my intention, rather, to highlight the radical uniqueness of these temporalities in Butler’s and Moten’s works, diverging significantly from the many traditions that place power as the primary and generative historical force (see: Mason, 2025). These temporal theories, which are so crucial to the corpuses of Moten and Butler, have rarely been studied. I have here attempted to clarify the importance of these temporalities for the respective corpuses of these theorists, which I hope will contribute to a more thorough and careful engagement with the radical temporalities of their work.