The Open Tangle: On Fred Moten and Experimental Political Theory

• In Event: Narrative and Political Theory: Experimentation, Canon Dynamics, and Reinvention

Abstract

Can there be an experimental political theory? In what sense could it properly be called experimental? What distinguishes the experimental from the standard way of reasoning about political concepts? This paper claims that political theorists can discover fruitful possibilities for experimentation within the activity and genre of political theory by looking to their colleagues in other branches of the humanities, specifically the literary arts. It considers some possibilities for thinking about experimental political theory on the model of experimental poetry, rather than experimental science, by looking to the example of poet, critic, and theorist Fred Moten, whose recognition as a vital force in contemporary political theory is long overdue.
The paper begins by raising the meta-theoretical and methodological commitments of contemporary political theory and showing how Moten’s “fugitive socio-poetics” offers a valuable alternative (and complement) to the current way of thinking politics. It considers Moten’s trilogy of critical writings consent not to be a single being alongside his poetic oeuvre to contrast the method and practice of fugitive critique with today’s dominant mode of normative political theorizing. Although avowedly “anti-political,” Moten’s work nevertheless demonstrates, through its wide variety of rhetorical and philosophical strategies, a possibility for an experimental political theory. The paper gives a view of what political theorists can learn from Moten, and in what sense such a political theory might properly be called “experimental.” And it gives several reasons for the value and desirability of an experimental branch of political theory.

Author

• Lowry Pressly, Brown University