Wayward Movement: Aberrance and Fugitivity

READING

DAY 4

Wayward Movement: Aberrance and Fugitivity

In this chapter, you are going to read a few essays written in response to the introduction of Aberrant Movements, The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze by John Rajchman, and a few chapters of The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.

On a white and cold Saturday, November 4th, 1995 Deleuze opened his window and contemplated the cold breeze. Deleuze threw himself out of the window. Deleuze was an atheist. (A quote from the Keyword Deleuze, written by Shardenia Felicia)

Aberrant Movements gives us an insight into Deleuze’s philosophy and his way of thinking. Rajchman explains how Deleuze tries to find the logic behind the irrational, illogical, and aberrant movements. For him, a movement is all the more logical the more it escapes rationality. ‘There is always something schizophrenic about logic in Deleuze, which represents another distinctive characteristic: a deep perversion of the very heart of philosophy. Thus, a preliminary definition of Deleuze’s philosophy emerges: an irrational logic of aberrant movements.’ (Rajchman)

To create a concept around aberrant movements he seeks to create a logic to link them with other concepts. So, in order to define the abnormal, normality needs to be defined first. But for Deleuze there is no philosophy of the ordinary, the regular, or the legal. A philosophy of the ordinary for him, is the death of philosophy. To bypass this he creates another concept; ‘transcendental empiricism’ or the philosophy of immanence, by which he takes up and radicalises the empiricist school of thought, developing a systematic alternative to the mainstreams of modern continental philosophy. With the help of this new ontology, Delueze can define the new logics life ceaselessly produces, which are always the subject of their own irrationality. →

‘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…’ (Moten and Harney)

The Undercommons is Moten and Harney’s invitation to imagine and think about ‘another’ vision of the social order. The book draws on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought to develop and expand its concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. These essays invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.

‘The undercommons can be seen as a conceptual space composed of people who denied resources and have been excluded from the commons, and its entailed rights and privileges. Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers.’ (Moten and Harney)

Reading between the lines, Moten and Harney don’t believe in a revolution in the traditional sense, not even rebelling against the constitution. What they instead prescribe for the future is to focus on ‘study’, and try to find each other.

‘The undercommons want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places we know lie beyond its walls… so in the end, it is not a realm where we rebel and create critique; it is not a place where we “take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them. The undercommons is a space and time which is always here . . . our goal . . . is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles like the ones that must be opposed.’ (Moten and Harney)

Based on:

John Rajchman, “Aberrant movement”

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The Undercommons”

Film screening: Terrence Malick, Badlands, Solange Knowles, When I get Home