Flights of Fantasy BY Zach Ngin ILLUSTRATION Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN Daniel Navratil
I’m trying to remember where I was when I first read The Undercommons. I don’t remember where I started it, but I must have been somewhere far from home. This book moved (with) me. In a coffee shop on the other side of the country, I was somewhere near the end. And somewhere in the middle, I was sitting on the snowy side of a road, on the other side of a blind underpass. Out of view, beyond the tunnel, was a detention center. I had sat down to record the sounds of cars and how they traveled from one side of blindness to another. Horns came blasting through the tunnel, around the bend; they came as notes and as groans, in short, staccato bursts. Occasionally, overhead, a train went by. I sat and read and listened to the sonic commerce between the detention center and the world outside. I was in my first year of college, and I was sitting somewhere in the surrounding, somewhere between the prison and the university, listening to the distances. Through the essays that make up The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney ask what lies beneath and beyond institutions of control: the prison and the university, the slave ship and the settlement, systems of debt and credit. Their central concept, “the undercommons,” refers simply to the ungovernable realm of social life, the place where we—colonized, queer, otherwise marginal—make meaning with each other. It is not so much an excavation of resistance or a primer for revolution as a celebration of their inescapable, improvised fact. The undercommons are ineluctably other but never elsewhere. This is the enlightenment’s shadow archive, its flights of fantasy, its maroon community, the fugitive commons just beyond its blind underpass. And the things we’ve been waiting for: they’ve been here, if you listen; they are here, we are here; just listen.
On Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons
+++ The Undercommons was published in 2013 by Minor Compositions, a radical publisher that distributes electronic copies of its titles for free. Since then, it has become a touchstone for academics, artists, activists, and others. The book’s most famous essay, “The University and the Undercommons,” examines the relationship between the university and broader structures of law and order. “The university,” Moten and Harney write, “is not the opposite of the prison, since they are both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social individual.” In their view, both university and prison are enlisted in the same war against social life—a conquest that extracts what it can (as knowledge, as culture) and discards the rest (as waste, as criminality). Both are invested in a logic of prescription: on one side, an academic program of critique; on the other, a carceral program of correction. In the face of these conditions, they argue, “one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” This line is one of the book’s most cited: it offers to its readers a slogan, a clarion call, a shock of recognition. A shock of recognition. I want to dwell on that phrase for a minute. Those words may come closest to what I’m trying to say about this book. By now, I’ve read and reread its passages countless times, and I could never say that I completely understand it. The Undercommons is a book that creates and sustains its
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FEATURES
07 FEB 2020
