The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

by Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, J. Jack Halberstam

In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, Race, Politics, Academic, Essays

166 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2013

Reviews

[Eileen]

this is my second time reading the undercommons in full, and though i definitely understood it better this time round, it's also a bit concerning bc that better understanding is probably the result of deeper immersion in academia – which is in many ways contrary to the central impulse of the text. still troubled by how dense and unintelligible moten and harney's theory is, but the interview at the end is a beautiful concession. would recommend starting with that – it's not only the most readable part of the book, but also imo the most lucid, incisive, and satisfying. you get to appreciate the sheer simplicity of a lot of what they're saying. like, re: the university, "how come we can't be together and think together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good?" why is study naturalized as a source of misery in the university? how fucked up is that??

[M.L. Rio · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an object lesson in everything that's wrong with theory. Harney and Moten's ideas might be great, but nobody will ever know because they're buried under a landslide of critical jargon and tautological bullshit. If I never have to read anything this willfully impenetrable ever again it will be too soon.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few lines from The Undercommons:


Critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique.


We run looking for a weapon and keep running looking to drop it.


What are the politics of being ready to die and what have they to do with the scandal of enjoyment?


Can't you hear them whisper one another's touch.


Form is not the eradication of the informal. Form is what emerges from the informal.


I think you can make a good case that human being in the world is, and should be, sheer criminality. Which also, first and foremost, implies that making laws is a criminal activity.



.

[Bookshark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most powerful books I've read in a long time. It spoke to me. I felt invited into their collaborative project; I felt as if I am already a part of something I did not know I was doing. Their call is towards something that is only faintly sketched, not quite visible yet, in fact precluded from clear visibility from the perspective of the state and capital. It isn't that their ideas are entirely new (though of course nothing is ever created ex nihilo, and in fact they're quite clear that they're working in collaboration and conversation with other) but that they say things in a new way. Their words run through the reader, shaking loose an avalanche of creativity, even if their meaning can't always be pinned down precisely. It's a book that compelled me to write. I'm eagerly anticipating what others will write in conversation with this book.

Some folks are complaining about the difficulty of the language, but I think the way this book is written is an integral part of what they're trying to accomplish. They explain the purpose of the language they're using - and why it's okay to use different language if their words don't do it for you - in the interview at the end. They use words experimentally, because they're trying to get to a particular place, and they call forth the words that seem like they might get us to that place. The words are thus provisional, open to interpretation and revision. The way they write melds high theory with poetry and vernacular, and I found it beautiful. They don't use jargon the way most people do, to distance themselves from the world. Rather, their words are opaque sometimes because they're trying to speak something that is currently submerged, unspeakable, ineffable. They're gesturing towards a future that is already seeping in through the cracks of the present. It's hard to put that into words, but it's impossible to put it into conventional syntax or to say it without the support of other thinkers who have already begun to verbalize that which we lack the language to describe. They actually seem to be making only minimal references; there are many more thinkers churning in the blank spaces behind the prose, haunting the text itself.

[Hollis]

Edited: Most of what this book is saying feels a little like bullshit, but I guess I sorta like how that bullshit gets served. The writing makes me think a lot, but there are many aspects I continue to struggle with. This book opens up with a call for a revolution, with the authors ruminating on how such revolution will take a new shape from what's been experienced in the past through armed revolt, but there is a refusal to clarify what new direction or shape will contribute to this revolution-to-come. The authors dissuade people from armed revolt, because that's outdated. But people also don't need to look to political activity within the capitalist model, because that's a cycle that aims to keep itself in a constant spin. Where does that leave us? Well, we have 'study.' This book describes study in a number of ways, to the point where I begin to feel that 'study' can be a stand in for basically anything. The people just need to gather around.. talk.. listen to music.. drink some brews.. study.... and the revolution will come. Yeah, you're already 'in the break.'

I don't know, it smells like political resignation with a faux-activist claim attached, something to make people feel good about doing nothing significant. And there's nothing wrong with optimism (well, there's a complicated claim), but in this context it comes across as playing make-believe (is that all theory amounts to? I hope not). I don't mean to write what probably sounds like a really frustrated response, but even this is part of the study, right? I think Moten and Harney speak on this in the final interview, that even people resistant to 'study' are still able to (inadvertently or not) partake in the act of study. Alas, the writing whips itself into heavier circles. I recall Harney describing London riots in the interview as an event that we should being looking towards in a positive light. But, again, Halberstam's introduction framed this book that wasn't seeking to advocate for, like.. masculine surges and confrontations. But that's definitely a part of those riots, leaving me confused. While I feel like this book is filled with contradictions, it succeeds in making me think a lot (sometimes just to understand the actual claims being forwarded), so that's why I still mostly think about it in a positive light. I'll have to read more by the authors and return to this in the future.

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

In their joint written project, The Undercommons, Moten and Harney essentially set out to chart out a mapping of a new kind of relationality, a new form of sociality that attempts to defy the object relation of capitalism. Capitalism relies on a kind of social disconnectedness, it inverts the relation between subjects to a relation between objects, where relations become an anti-relationality, relations are predicated on value and people are seen only by the value they produce. This creates the kind of hollowed out capitalist subject that Moten and Harney begin to define in relation to Policy, Logistics, Governance, and Credit. In their concept of the undercommons, Moten and Harney are attempting to articulate a sociality that slips through the cracks and breaks within capitalist anti-relationality. This sociality is built upon “a different mode of living together with others, of being with others, not just with other people but with other things and other kind of senses” (119). They develop these new forms of sociality through their concepts of “fugitive planning and black study.” Planning and study become the way in which the undercommons, which Moten & Harney note isn’t a place so as much as it’s this relationality they are working at, slips outside of the increasingly rigid and formalised policy of capitalist life to generate new ways of being, or as Moten constantly returns to not consenting to being a single being. Rather we are an ensemble.

Both employ very jazz-driven language to capture the relations they want to establish which works so well in capturing the concept. They envision this kind of social life as being an ensemble, a collective improvisation of sociality that doesn’t require any sort of formal program or reasoning to establish itself. Study is something that is always happening, Moten & Harney go at length in the interview to establish that study is not what is thought in academic terms but rather this kind of collective improvisation that is always happening. They are working at developing a poetics of the everyday things that slip outside of what wld normally be accepted in “academic study,” study is happening in conversations with friends, about ideas, where to eat, what one did the other day, just general shooting the shit can be enveloped in this idea of study.

The two work within and against the system of academia (and of course as others noted they write within a [fugitive] academic style that isn’t necessarily easy to grasp unless you are already immersed in academia) attempting to generate change inside the academic systems they occupy, their study does have wider implications beyond academia. A lot of the wider implications are told in the interview that appears at the end, and the interview ends up being one of the high points of the whole text. It enacts the informal fugitive style they speak so much of because neither are afraid to talk simply and reference things you wouldn’t really see within “scholarly” and “theoretical” type work such as Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Joe McPhee, and various other musicians and music they talk on. I am a major fan of the interview format, not because it should be the place for writers to have to begrudgingly “explain” their work, because it gives a chance for the writers to delve into the greater implications of their work and why it matters to the wider world outside academic writing. The essays are fantastic and I am indeed a sucker for the more poetic vein of theory but the interview really shines for it’s informal and causal sense of diction. It certainly strikes me as “fugitive” for escaping outside the rigid confines of scholarly work. Although, of course the interview isn’t necessarily some sort of rogue method of presentation but rather it’s how Moten & Harney present themselves. They aren’t afraid to speak boldly and talk about how fucked up things are which is certainly refreshing for academics, they don’t have to present themselves with some sort of high air. It’s in the interviews casualness that they really succeed in a fugitive kind of writing bc they can so effortlessly blend all kinds of culture, bridging such high theory again with people like Curtis Mayfield or James Brown.

Certainly already in the joint writing style there is a certain sense of Deleuze & Guattari (I cld be projecting!) within what Moten & Harney are doing. Even Moten, in the interview, says: “Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it” (118). And in the project’s whole sense of fugitivity, there are resonances of creating a line of flight, sketching a cartography of a people to come, always in genesis. Moten continues by saying: “I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield” (118). I couldn’t substantiate it too well but I cld possibly see a line of thought between A Thousand Plateaus and The Undercommons. Not that D&G wld validate M&H but both teams wld generate all these new cartographies, fugitive lines of flight, generate new becomings to redefine social life and sociality.

This sense of fugitivity and the commons strikes me, this cld be because I just read it, almost as the people outside of History in Ellison’s Invisible Man. When the narrator is walking through the streets of Harlem and he is thinking about how all this social life escapes the History and history that The Brotherhood has been teaching him, he effectively realises this relationality of the undercommons. Even towards the end when he realises that he must come back into the world from his basement there is a certain kind of sociality that he cannot escape from. The undercommons is the people outside of History, the people who escape through the cracks of policy and governance. These people outside of history are there but yet they are still the people to come, always in between, always becoming.

For such a short book of 165 pages it really is brimming full of incredible ideas that have a sense of powerful urgency in our times. They work with and extend the black radical tradition and Moten’s ideas of blackness as something that is “in the break” and a “collective improvisation.” Particularly the concepts of Policy and Planning, and Study are so illuminating and invigorating in attempting to redefine and reconnect the brokenness of capitalist anti-relationality.

[Slight after note: I agree that while the work does have difficult and academic language, still within the vein of D&G and Derrida, Moten & Harney work within the tradition of academic writing so as to subvert it from within. I don’t think it’s as much obscure as it it’s trying to be an open text. It isn’t rigidly setting out to convey an exact concept and system. Rather it defies systematic concepts and operates more like a toolbox in that same D&G way. The concepts they give are meant to be in dialogue with the reader, prompting the reader to think in new ways and to generate their own new ideas from the text. I particularly love the sociality that they open up in reading a text in the interview. A text becomes a “social space” so that you can “try to be a part of it” (108). All texts are a social space the reader enters, not only with the supposed writer, but a wide context of “people, things, [that] are meeting there and interacting, rubbing off one another, brushing against one another” (108). In generating this collective improvisation of sociality, a text becomes a part of that as well. Moten & Harney are playing us a tune and ask us to pick up an instrument and join in the improv. Maybe we won’t dig what they are playing and attempt to lead the improv in other directions, perhaps we’ll be attuned and join in on the chaotic harmony. They see either way as a proper way to rehearse and dialogue with their work. And their work plays out like a Ornette, like a Cecil, like a Shepp, chaotic, harmonious, grooving, the reader can jump in the improv in many different places and take what they need. What matters, Moten notes, is that what is felt is “the new way of being together and thinking together” the interaction is what matters “not the tool, not the prop” (106). It what the reader can do in generating new potentialities of relationality that is of the highest importance. The fugitive style of writing is called for in the project that Moten & Harney are sketching.]

[Note 2: I realise I also didn’t bring up the politics of refusal they both invoke in this project. It’s anti-representational, anti-democratic (more so perhaps in the form of the current false image of bourgeois democracy?), and ultimately anti-political. They say if their project that: “We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home… We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented” (20). This ties in to Moten’s theorisations of Blackness as being inherently fugitive and homeless, Blackness as that which is “in the break” or as Massumi summarises the line of flight, Blackness, in Moten’s view, is seen as “the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance” (ATP xvi). Blackness is a line of flight outside the structuring regimes of Policy and Governance which cld be further suggested by the text’s own subtitle of “Fugitive Planning & Black Study.” Politics attempts to systematise and provide a programme for change, whereas Moten & Harney are against systematic thinking. Again, their thinking, to me, suggests so much in terms of rhizomatic thought. They are entirely against arborescent thought. Blackness is fugitive exactly because it escapes outside the arborescent thought of Policy. It is more so seen by Moten exactly as rhizomatic, eluding capitalist relations, always that which is fleeing into the distance. But fleeing to pick up its weapons. I can’t remember the exact quote D&G love from George Jackson in ATP but while fleeing, Moten agrees, that one will always picking up their weapons.

Their politics of refusal works exactly along the lines of planning and study, in working towards abolition. Moten notes that “when we talk about what Marx means by wealth - the division of it, the accumulation of it, the privatisation of it, and the accounting of it - all of that shit should be abolished” (154). This leads Moten to further exclaim, and in its striking in its powerful simplicity (something I’ve argued with people who can actually disagree with this notion!) “What I’m really saying when I say that is: anybody who’s breathing should have everything they need and 93% of what they want - not by virtue of the fact that you work today, but by virtue of the fact that you are here” (155).

Noting the discussion of Joe McPhee’s “Nation Time” I am reminded exactly (as Moten discusses too) of Baraka’s searing recording of his poem “It’s Nation Time,” a poem that almost summarises a major portion of Moten & Harney’s sociality:

“Time to get
together
time to be one strong fast black energy space
one pulsating positive magnetism, rising
time to get up and
be
come
be
come”]

[Erica]

DNF. Unfortunately, this is probably one of the most painful and frustrating readings I've ever come across in academia. Paragraphs upon paragraphs of impenetrable, vague, and (IMHO) unnecessary additions that completely obfuscate the actual points being made. The authors are frustratingly fond of using mile-long sentences and confusing descriptions that contribute very little to whatever ideas they put forth:

Never having to confront the foundation, never having to confront antifoundation out of faith in the unconfrontable foundation, critical intellectuals can float in the middle range.

HUH??? Was all this really necessary?? Clearly, there are people who found value trudging through this literary quagmire, but I am personally so tired of having to read every sentence four or five times before understanding its meaning -- and then finding out it contributes absolutely nothing to the main point of the section. The lack of clarity and concision within the writing makes reading this book extremely tedious. I'm sure there are valuable ideas buried in here, but medieval texts are easier to parse than this.

[ocelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

sure did not finish this for Moten March :'-) sorry gracelyn! Andrea Long Chu's voice saying "Theory is a mood" echoing in my head

[JJ · Rating 1 out of 5]

A whole bunch of nothing with some elevated language.

[Anđela Milašinović]

FUCK OFF

[Carrie]

“There is this particular labor process model [in the university] that’s being exported, that’s being generalized in so-called creative industries and other places, and which is deployed expertly against study.”

I noticed this at SF State -- all the students doing projects -- and the kind of projects which are like fake "study" -- all they're really learning how to do is do projects in work/business model contexts. Gross. In my day, we studied alone in cubicles on the top floor of 6 floor libraries, that actually had real books (another critique of SF State). Hours and hours or reading alone and writing notes, and not talking to anybody.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who said that poets wouldn't be leading the revolution?!

An interesting 'hacking of concepts and squatting of terms' to keep radically open the closing of totalization: "We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything" (p.20).

[Ben Albertyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We went to the public hospital but it was private, but we went through the door marked ‘private’ to the nurses’ coffee room, and it was public. We went to the public university but it was private, but we went to the barber shop on campus and it was public.”

[Jackie Manginelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is PROFOUND. Read it again and again.

[Amelia Mertha ᭟᭜᭟ · Rating 5 out of 5]

five stars for everything these essays sparked in my mind but definitely going to have to read this again (and again) because it’s dense and a little tricky

[O'Shea Akal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard read, but much needed

[Brigitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think finished is something I can say about my reading status of this book. I read every essay at least twice, and the interview was helpful in kindly explaining that we’d misunderstood a few concepts. This book is heady and it feels like a conversation throughout but with references to Foucault, Derrida, Marx, Aristotle, and so on. But it is the best book to be reading right now in the turbulence of Minneapolis and Covid 19 because it helped me understand the role of institutions, like the one I work for, in invalidating true study and becoming a pipeline for labor and production. And that last essay on logistics, I keeled when I read: “What of those who were not just labor but commodity, not just in production but circulation, not just in circulation but in distribution as property, not just property but property that reproduced and realized itself?” It is an unflinching breakdown of the nation’s exploitation of Black people, conceived in capitalist consciousness “of thing and nothing” all at once. Brutal and real. I haven’t had to think, mull over, deconstruct this intensely in a while. It was mental HIIT but that you do again and again and again. And now I want to rage even harder.

[Lyra Montoya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very unsure how I feel about this book still after reading it in its entirety. The poetic practice of Harney and Moten is clear, and makes for some particularly beautifully constructed portions in its circumlocution of the fugitive space of the somehow omnipresent undercommons. I had a much better time reading it this time than compared to when some of the chapters were assigned in a pedagogy seminar, yet I still don't fully understand the entirety of the project. Perhaps that is part of the point in the described continuous study that doesn't need to relate to the university. Perhaps.

The chapter on credit and debt was especially interesting to me. I can see and understand many of the related structures and poetics around the dialectical pairing of credit/ debt and the described heterosexual coupling under capitalism, as well as credit as a method of reification and instantiation to make the open tensed debt into something closed and we'll described. I still find myself confused and unsure of much of the project, though I certainly was effectively invited into their study and practice.

The deputizing of academics was especially poignant to me, as I had realized that I was inadvertently leaning into the punitive and penal roles the university ascribed to me as it's agent of grade based merit, and I caved to that temptation in my performance of teaching duties. I don't think I'm a particularly effective pedagogue, but I think this reading helps me move closer to that space of pedagogy.

The final interview chapter felt endless. It just went on and on and on.... if the undercommons exists in a text form that interview certainly encapsulates it; the seemingly endless labyrinthine structure creates a puzzle of words to navigate and endure and struggle with. The format is also particularly odd as it doesn't read much like a conversational interview. This is likely a result of editing, but this queer affect seems likely part of the project of the disorientation and yet ubiquity in the presence of the undercommons.

The continued effort to delocate where and what the undercommons are is reminiscent of the Dao de Jing and the lotus sutra similarly re/delocating what the Dao and way of enlightenment actually are. This delocation to me seems tied to maintaining the openness in the interiority (of the undercommons in this case) but appears in Nyong'o's Afro-Fabulations as well in delocating what fabulation does and in the project of avoiding reifing the supposedly plastic.

This book is rather hard to read but certainly communicates an interesting affect if nothing else. I wonder if I ever fully decide how I feel about this writing.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

On my third "close reading" of this now.

It's short, and poetic, beautiful, powerful.

The closing of chapter one is powerful, and it's the reason I realized at first that this bears a close reading. I don't have much to say about this for now.

Overall the early part of the book feels very Derrida. I'm reminded that JD was at UC Riverside for quite a while at the end of his career, and Moten has spent time at Riverside as well. I'd love to learn more about the intellectual climate out there a couple of decades ago, and especially whether Moten and Derrida were good friends. At least on the intellectual level, the textual friendship shines.

The essay on Academia is a joy to read, and is something I'd recommend to anyone at the beginning of grad school. Not only because it anchors the oppositional feelings we often get during those first years of epistemological steam-rolling, but also because he advocates for a bit of a plundering approach to academia. Take from it what you want, what serves you. There's a lot here. A LOT.

In addition to the Derrida vibes in the first part of the collection, here in the Academia essay I also thought a lot about Bourdieu. At some point I'll probably come back and read that chapter against the opening sections of Distinction and Homo Academicus.

So the whole thing is good, but the second half lands most powerfully for me. Both because the critique has consequences that my mind could immediately understand, and because the music of the writing is reality-altering. Just utter lyricism. My god. In addition to being analytically evisterating.

The critique of planning is good, but didn't hit me particularly hard because I don't have a lot of context in these disciplines.

But when they move on to debt, student debt in particular, and the "field" of logistics, my heart sings. So those last two chapters are by far my favorite.

After the first encounter, I found someone on the internet reading them aloud - the perfect sort of a voice for so many reasons. The musicality and power in the spoken text, for me as a listener, summoned a bit of a peak experience of the intellectual sort on that second encounter. I'm still savoring that and will be back.

Grateful for this work.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging and generative. The only comparison I can make to the Undercommons is Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Like D&G, the Undercommons attempts a novel form of concept creation as a means of rupture with dominant forms of thinking. Hapticality, the Shipped, surround, planning, Undercommons. Some extremely generative critiques of the university, debt, biopower/governance, and policy/logistics. The project here is very reminiscent to me of D&Gs understanding of lines of flight/Schizophrenia, Lazzarato’s understanding of the Indebted Man, Hardt and Negri’s stuff on multitude, etc. It’s always generative to read but I’ve got to give it 4 bc I usually find myself wondering where this tradition of refusal, flight, etc. leads us- a little too anarchist for me really.

[Olivia]

this was a tricky read but whew that interview section was just phenomenal. thinking so much about academic labor now. i don't know if i think everyone should read the book but the interview with the two of them was so beautiful! to see their process of theorizing together, theorizing as playing, the way they decide to use language, ugh it's so interesting!! also the way that they involve music in their theorizing reminded me of eliana i love you eliana you never go on goodreads so you won't read this but i'm gonna text you about it.

"Study is what you do with other people. It's talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice."

[Charissa Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry is also a form of being that Moten uses to accord with his ideas so that they have a shape (the praxis) but also a ringing tone (the idea)


Some thoughts
- de conceptualisation through language as one method to do it can be fugitive study?
- how does the fugitive academic go about doing that in the university without critiquing ?

My interpretation
- that the undercommons is alive and vibrant
- that language or overconceptualization or critique can be a way that makes static people’s lived experience.
- that the form of this book is intended to match the fugitivity of the undercommons

[Kate Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

TBH a good chunk of this initially went over my head (it’s been a while since I’ve read dense theory), but I did get a lot out of it... and then I read the fascinating and utterly endearing interview between Harney and Moten and a third guy at the end and that made me want to read the whole thing again (ideally with others!) now that I better understand the spirit in which they wrote the book. A lot of important stuff in here about cultivating a different way of being together in community and in study, insights about how to get there and what gets in our way.

[crow · Rating 5 out of 5]

And even when the election that was won turns out to have been lost, and the bomb detonates and/or fails to detonate, the common perseveres as if a kind of elsewhere, here, around, on the ground, surrounding hallucinogenic facts.

i will get shit on for this review but i think their poetics work for them. i'm forever a sucker for beautiful theory. the essay on debt and credit was my favorite

[Alf Bojórquez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un libro demasiado complejo, es como el free jazz pero en escritura.

[M. Ainomugisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s the plenitude of generative ideas and how they chafe against each other. I’d initially read the second chapter with peers in March but diving into the whole expanse of the Undercommons opened me up to a buoyant, mesmerizing exercise in the rigors of Black study.

[Nina · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is my nightmare.

[Shaazia · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's too much to think about!

[Bee ☆ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Haven't finished it yet, but here's one star anyway.

[Sydney Repak]

Listened for class. I won’t lie, a lot of this went over my head, but it was thought provoking.