Ralph Lemon: "My initiating presence was as a cipher for a few other voices: friends talking around the multifaceted idea of value (and values) in a kind of subliminal brainstorming. Specifically, the relationship between value and how we remember and forget something presented, something to be watched covertly or overtly in a time-based signature. An attempt at writing and talking performance with disappearing ink, perhaps."

Fred Moten: "This a recording. Trill mark the terror of being valued. The bottom confirm without signaling live and let, tap and type, footwork and fingerwork, needlework and noodling, comping and camping how that solo put together. See us tip past meaning lighght, lit with an extra sigh? See you can’t say, see by flash in movement, see that coughgh, is that the new thingng, has new shit has been brought to lighght, man, see, see, turn noise out a fuzzy head. Falsettoed bottom see the error of being valued. Say make me see it again. Repetition without a pulse, when the pulse is new in every instant, still be pulse. They be drinking and whatnot to the music. I had to wait until the picking was good. The smoke and everything—it’s not a concertized thing. Can there be such a thing as a concertized thing? I be drinking and whatnot to the music. I be drinking and whatnot to the music. Whatnot to the music. What’s not to the music? You had to be fighting not to play in these clubs. My favorite things fight concertization. Concertization is like conceptualization only tighter. It wants to be concretization, like a piece for four hands, three of which can’t tremor. Dana Ward says that “Fun, Fun, Fun” is the musique concrète of patricide. Concert music is the fun, fun, fun of patricide. Mingus want to kill the phantom of the opera. He want to play the cello for all it’s worth. He want to play the drag mix but he can’t mix thang. He want to play the disc coquette. When Marshall Allen’s people beat the air, transcription faded into document. I heard them people beat the air. This a faded aftermath of some little drumming y’all can’t hear. It’s a time lag between what I’m playing and what y’all hear. This a live in concert thing, when live fades and concert flays, frayed out into vinyl, but what you holding, as you know, is neither here nor now. I was playing but you couldn’t hear me, like you were Glenn Gould smelling himself underneath that vacuum. It was probably the maid vacuuming, laughing at him falling in the sound well, where the sound can’t get out, outta sound so he can feel abstract between the noose’s theses, like you were Frankie Knuckles in caress, the sugar ditch beneath the house’s vacuum, no values, nothing to say, mute beyond report, muted in delay, make you wait on make me wait, Nate said, moved in homeless core, changed in thrash laugh, lored, black flagged till."

Fred Moten: "One of Deleuze’s last essays is called “The Exhausted,” or that’s how it’s translated—the French title is “L’épuisé.” It’s about Beckett’s television plays. Deleuze makes this distinction between being exhausted and merely being tired. To be tired is to still operate within a system determined by the opposition between the possible and the impossible, but to be exhausted is to no longer be able to imagine the possible, or to operate within its protocols or even its negation. I think about this in relation to a culturally specific question of value. Listen to Jesse Jackson’s mantra: “I am somebody.” What I think he’s trying to articulate and assert is a certain possibility, one that emerges out of the experience of being devalued. His refrain suggests another: “I must be respected, I must be protected.” This implies that we have been conceived as not valuable and so have been not protected, not respected. It’s similar to the musician who is saying, “Our thing is not a concertized thing.” They didn’t respect our music; they didn’t value our music: They saw so little value in our music that they would drink over it. But then I think of the great Mingus album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, in which he basically simulates a club environment. Mingus hated the sound of drinks tinkling when he played. He wanted a pristine sonic space that wouldn’t be interrupted by the kind of behavior that devalued the music. But he also wanted the feeling of the club! So on the album he actually announces the songs as if he’s at a club. That social situation, marked by disrespect, turns out to be a condition of the music that Mingus wants to play. Maybe exhaustion has to do with a system structured by the distinction between people who have value and people who don’t; a system in which to not have value is tantamount to having been assigned a price. I have no value; they bought me. This particular system of devaluation, which operates by way of the ascription of value, ought to be exhausted. We’re exhausted by it. And that means we don’t simply turn around and say, “I am valued; I have value.” The music is always trying to figure out some other way of responding to this situation; the music doesn’t establish itself in relation to a preconceived idea of what constitutes value. And Mingus’s music does this in concert, or in a kind of subconcert: the underground concert of the club, a social space that blurs the distinction between performer and audience, where the music is neither exalted by the prevailing valuations that correspond to being concertized in the normative way nor ashamed of its radicalization of the concert. The music is always exploring what it is to be invaluable, to exceed the given structure of value. Obviously there’s a social insurgency that accompanies that exhaustion, that desire to exhaust the system and make something else."

Claudia La Rocco: "Like cows in a cow pasture, placidly doing our cow thing. When it is over, really over, after one false ending, those of us who have stuck it out will offer thank-yous, applause. We will feel like we got something. We will get something whether we feel it or not."

Ralph Lemon: "I think this conversation is also breaking down these inter-institutional silos. And that is only a good thing. It's less about performance being valued in art institutions, and more about its generative potential -- what it does for a particular place. And it's about how more and more interstitial performance work might become valued. Not is valued, but how it might be. That, to me, is very exciting."