Study according to Moten and Harney

ESStudy according to Moten and Harney

#lyricalessay, #experiencial, #life, #crowd/collective

If I am studying now, shall I sit on that uncomfortable, light brown, wooden chair, behind that writing desk over there? In that blue-lit classroom, with the small window without curtains? If I am studying now, shall I sit behind that tall, unshaven, slim, young man in that 500 seat, crowded lecture hall, who is just a little too tall for me to see over? Or shall I sit at that dull-lit, mahogany desk, from either side towered over by bookshelves? Books. Books. Books. They wrap over me and I’m learning. I’m reading. I know! I think. Do I know?

But, truly, study begins before all this. Before the classroom. Before the book is open. Before you think you have started the seminar. Study never really begins or ends. Study is on the walk to your destination with your best friend. Skipping down the tarmac path through the park, connecting the train station with homes and schools, past the big field that used to be bigger when you were smaller, under the oak trees you used to climb, trying to catch the squirrels. To feed the squirrels. To force feed them the nuts. Skipping towards your destination together, as if there was something so exciting to get to. Side bags bouncing up, down, up, down, crashing into one another, as you giggle about your new crushes.

I am walking through study, but not just studying by walking with others. Studying by walking with you. Studying in movement, walking with you and talking about ideas, my thoughts, your thoughts, but not just. Talking about what to eat, or drink, when to sleep, how the rain is fogging up my glasses and I can’t see. Show me the Instagram meme on your phone, ‘oh that dog is so cute’, but now it’s sniffing my leg, leaving its snotty drool on my jeans. It jumps up and barks. I shout out, ‘I love you!’ and a twig cracks and breaks underneath my foot.

Interruption. I interrupt you. A pause. I pause you. I pass through you, and you can join me. Inside you. Inside your thoughts. Inside this one thought. I am eternally indebted to you, as I study with you and through you. I am inside you. You make me see. Rip my corneas out and point me in the right direction. But sorry, I took your essence. I took away your flow. I removed your spleen, your filter, and we must start over. We start again. Into study across bodies. Across space. Across things. A speculative practice of a general study.

Will I study enough today, or enough at all, to ever understand enough about anything, or understand nothing in the first place? If I study today, will I understand more about myself, or about you? We study as I am sitting with you in silence. The house is slowly getting warmer as I am huddled under two blankets on the couch with my laptop on my lap. Typing. Studying. You sit crouched next to the window on your phone. It is big, looking out onto the busy street. Observe the fat pigeon; that branch is far too thin to hold its weight, as it ruffles its feathers and approaches another pigeon it tries to woo. I wonder if it likes the attention. I can hear the cars down below. Someone revs their engine at the traffic lights, *screech*, and the bird on the twig falls down. But, of course it doesn’t fall, it can fly, although its wings seem too small

for its fat body. Can you see the girl in the window across the street? Do you think she saw it too?

It was later that night that we discovered frozen beer is only half as exciting as it seems. It’s been stuck to the back of the fridge for 5 months. It became a block of ice. You ripped it from its frozen bed and scratched off its aluminium coating. Its skin. But now the room just stinks of beer, and there wasn’t even a party.

We’ve lost track now again. Where was I? Where am I? Where are we? We are in the smoking room of a bar now and we are studying. We are in the smoking area of the club in my dreams and we are studying! He’s asking me what I want to do with my life. Do I believe in God? What are my thoughts on Brexit? You know, the existential questions. Or maybe he’s just asking me for a light. ‘Got a light?’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Got a light?’ (mimes flicking hand gesture) ‘Oh, sure sorry. Here you go’ ‘Thanks. So, ‘sup?’

I roll him one of my menthol cigarettes and he walks away, squeezing his way through the gaps in the crowd, bodies pressed up one against the other. Their bodies converse as he presses his way through the gaps, like meat through a mincer, ground up and then put back together. He loses part of himself and gains part of another, as their bodies study with one another. Becoming one, momentarily bound by a mutual encasing, like the intestine around sausage meat, then falling apart on the plate once punctured with a knife. in this place that is not recognised by others, not contributing, neglected, we are the maroons of the undercommons, and study is a mode of sociality. A way of being with others, together. I want to join the study that is already going on everywhere. In the everyplace. The no place. The all place. Beyond the blue-lit walls. Beyond the books. But I have already joined that, and so have you, and so have they. It is going on around us, always and everywhere. A world that is already at work in togetherness. It is what we do with others.

This is study, but study that is not ennobled by us saying that doing this sort of thing, in a certain way, makes it studying. It is its own common intellectual practice, and so these activities hold an irreversible, incessant, intellectuality that is already there. All around us. It doesn’t need to be forced. We are building something down here in our collectivity. Something beautiful. We are determining what needs to be learnt together, by spending time with this material and each other. What is our material? Studying without an objective. Without an endpoint. Without any sense that we will ever escape feeling permanently immature and premature in our thoughts and our study. Disconnected from individual accreditation. From completion. From anything ever leading to anything.

And so we are indebted to each other. A mutual debt. Un-payable, unbounded, and unconsolidated debt. A debt we hold in each encounter with each other, and beyond. In the study group, the hospital, the smoking area, the hairdressers lounge, a bed, an embrace. Hold me and I am indebted to you eternally, and unconditionally.

We have all been involved in this common intellectual practice of studying bodies. We are all in it together, always. We wake up, we eat, we walk together, we talk together, we dance together, we have sex, we shit, we sleep. We repeat. But I make my collective community with you here; our very own undercommons. As we study here together, I’ll see you again tomorrow for the same?