Anti-dialectical Noise, Improvisation and the Temporality of Black Social Life

This article examines how Black social life might be thought beyond the dialectical and ontological frameworks that have historically bound it to social death. Beginning with the critical tradition’s inability to apprehend Black life as improvisation rather than negation, it explores how the tension between Afro-pessimism and Black optimism turns on the question of refusal: whether the fugitive, improvisational practices of Black existence are confined by anti-blackness or exceed it. Drawing on Fred Moten’s concept of paraontology, the article argues that improvisation constitutes a modality of refusal that neither ruptures nor submits to social death but moves within its fissures, curating a space between Afro-pessimism and Black optimism. As Black noise, improvisation disrupts the linear time of modernity and the ontological grammar that couples blackness with negation, reconceiving refusal as an anti-dialectical practice that deforms the structures that seek to define it and sounds the untimely temporality of Black social life.