Sobcommons - The Earth is Round

Undercommons

16/07/2024

Culture • Feminism • LGBTI • Books • Racism

By JACK HALBERSTAN*

Preface to the recently published book by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

It ends with love, exchange, camaraderie. It ends as it begins, in movement, between the various ways of being and belonging, on the way to new economies of giving, taking, being with and for, and ends with a ride in a Buick Skylark to a completely different place. Surprising, perhaps, after dealing with dispossession, debt, displacement and violence.

But not surprising when one understands that “fugitive planning and black study” projects are mostly about making contact to find connections, making common cause with the shattering of being, a shattering that, I would venture to say, is also blackness. who remains black, and who will remain, despite everything, destitute, for this book is not a recipe for reparation.

If we don't try to fix what was broken, what happens? How do we resolve to live with brokenness, with being broken, which is also what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “debt”? Well, since debt is sometimes a story of the given, other times a story of the taken, but always a story of capitalism, and since debt also means a promise of ownership, but it never fulfills that promise, we understand that debt is something that cannot be paid.

Debt, as Stefano Harney says, presupposes a type of individualized relationship with a naturalized economy that is based on exploitation. Is there, he asks, another sense of what is owed that does not presuppose a nexus of activities such as recognition and acceptance, payment and gratitude? Can debt “become a drafting principle”?

In the interview with Stevphen Shukaitis, Fred Moten relates economic debt to the shattering of the being; he recognizes that some debts can be paid and that much is owed by white people, especially black people. He further says: “But I also know that what must be repaired is irreparable. There is no repair. The only thing we can do is completely destroy this shit and start from scratch” [pp. 180–81]. The undercommons do not come to pay their debts, to repair what was broken, to repair what was undone.

If the reader wants to know what the undercommons want, what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney want, what black, indigenous, queer and poor people want, what we want (the “us” that cohabits the space of the undercommons), Here's the thing - we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acceptance generated by the same system that denies: (a) that anything has been broken [broken] and (b) that we deserved to be the broken party; Therefore, we refuse to ask for recognition – on the contrary, we want to dismantle, dismantle, tear down the structure that, at this moment, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond and to access the places we know exist outside your walls.

We cannot predict what new structures will replace the ones we still live with, for once we have broken it all down, we will inevitably see more, see differently, and feel a new sense of wanting, being, and becoming. What we will want after the “break” will be different from what we think we want before the break and both will necessarily be different from the desire that arises precisely from being in the break.

Let's think another way. In the melancholic and visionary film version of Maurice Sendak's work Where the monsters live (1963), made in 2009, the little adventurer Max leaves his room, his home and his family to explore an untamed beyond and finds a world of lost and lonely beasts that promptly make him their king. Max was the first king of the untamed beasts that they did not eat and who, in turn, did not try to eat them; and beasts were the first adult creatures Max knew who cared about his opinion, his judgment, and his rules.

Max's power comes from the fact that he is small, while they are big; he swears to the beasts that he has no intention of eating them and that is more than anyone has ever sworn to them. He promises to find ways through and around, “slip through the cracks” and open them again if they close. He promises to keep sadness at bay and create a world with the untamed creatures that “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and bared their terrible claws.” The fact that Max fails in his intention to make the beasts happy or save them or create a world with them is less important than the fact that he found them and recognized in them the end of something and a potentially alternative path to his own. world itself.

The beasts were not utopian creatures from fairy tales, they were rejected and lost subjects of the world that Max had left behind and, because he moves between the Oedipal land ruled by his mother and the ruined world of savages, he knows the parameters of the real – he he sees what is included and what is left out and is therefore able to set sail for another place, a place that is neither the home he left nor the home he wants to return to.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney want to point to another place, a wild place that is not simply the remaining space that delimits the real and regulated zones of well-mannered society; rather, an untamed place that continually produces its own unregulated wildness. The zone we entered through Fred Moten and Stefano Harney is continuous and exists in the present and, as Harney says, “a demand that was already being activated, fulfilled in the calling itself” [p. 157].

In describing the 2011 riots in England, Stefano Harney suggests that riots and insurrections do not separate “the request, the demand and the calling” – rather, they enact one on the other: “But I believe that in the case of the calling – as I do the I understand, the call is inscribed in the dynamics of the call and the response – the answer is already there, even before the call is uttered; I believe that the call comes after the response. We are already in the middle of something” [ibid.]. We are already in it. For Fred Moten, we are always in that thing that we call and that calls us.

Furthermore, the call is always a call to disorder and this disorder, or this wild nature, manifests itself in many things: in jazz, in improvisation, in noise. The disordered sounds we refer to as cacophony will always be considered “extramusical,” as Fred Moten says, precisely because we hear something in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and that, in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible. Hearing the cacophony and noise tells us that there is an untamed beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.

And when we are called to that other place, the untamed beyond or, in the apt terminology of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “the beyond beyond,” we have to give ourselves over to a certain kind of madness. Moten remembers that, even when Frantz Fanon took an anti-colonial stance, he knew that “it would seem crazy”, but, as a psychiatrist, he also knew not to accept this organic division between the rational and the crazy; I knew it would be crazy for him not to take this stance in a world that had assigned him the role of the unreal, the primitive and the savage. Frantz Fanon, according to Fred Moten, does not want the end of colonialism, but rather the end of the point of view from which colonialism makes sense.

Therefore, to put an end to colonialism, one must not tell truth to power, one must inhabit the crazy, absurd and vociferous language of the other, that other to whom colonialism attributed a non-existence. In fact, blackness, for Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in the manner of Frantz Fanon, is the desire to be in the space that was abandoned by colonialism, law and order. Moten takes us there when he says of Fanon: “Finally, I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which means the other world, the world we inhabit and where we perhaps even cultivate this absence, this place that appears here and now, in the space and time of the sovereign, as absence, darkness, death, things that are not (as John Donne would say)” [p. 162].

The path to the indomitable beyond is paved by refusal. In Undercommons, if we start from any point, it is the right to refuse what has been refused to us. Quoting Gayatri Spivak, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call this refusal the “first right” and it is a type of refusal that changes the game, in that it signals the refusal of choices as they are offered. We can understand this refusal in the terms in which Chandan Reddy puts it in Freedom With Violence (2011). For Reddy, gay marriage is an option that cannot be challenged at the polls. Although a series of criticisms of gay marriage can be highlighted in terms of the institutionalization of intimacy, when one goes to the polls to vote, with pen in hand, it is only possible to mark “yes” or “no” and “no”, in this In this case, it could be more calamitous than “yes”. Therefore, we must refuse the choice offered to us.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they call a “call to order”. And what it would mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstatement of the law. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest that when we refuse, we create dissonance and, more importantly, we allow the dissonance to continue – when we enter a classroom and refuse to call to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, a disorganized study, but the study that precedes our call and will continue after we leave the room.

Or, when listening to music, we should reject the idea that music happens only when the musician walks in and picks up the instrument; music is also what precedes the execution, the noises of appreciation it generates and the speech that happens around it and through it, producing it and appreciating it, being in it while listening to it. Thus, when we refuse to call to order – the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising the baton, the speaker calling for silence, the executioner tightening the noose – we refuse to call to order as a distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.

These types of examples get to the heart of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's world of the undercommons – the undercommons is not a domain where we rebel and generate criticism; it is a place where we can “open fire against the sea of anguish / And, reluctantly, put an end to them”. The undercommons are a space and a time that is/is always here. Our goal – and here “we” is always the correct mode of expression – is not to put an end to the problems, but to put an end to the world that has created these particular problems as those that must be faced.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney reject the logic that stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan and a way to prevent serious politics. Moten and Harney teach us to listen to the noise we make and refuse the offers we receive to give the noise the form of “music.”

In the essay “The university and the undercommons”, present in this edition and already known to many readers, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney come close to explaining their mission. Refusing to be against or for the university and, in fact, demarcating the critical academic as the actor who precisely maintains in force the logic of “for or against”, Moten and Harney lead us to the “undercommons of enlightenment”, where subversive intellectuals are equally involved with the university and with fugitivity: “where work is carried out, where work is subverted, where the revolution is still dark, still strong” [p. 29].

We learned that subversive intellectuals are unprofessional, unschooled, passionate and unfaithful. Subversive intellectuals are not trying to expand or change the university, subversive intellectuals are not toiling in poverty and, from poverty, articulating a “general antagonism”. In truth, subversive intellectuals enjoy the trip and want it to be faster and wilder; They don't want a roof of their own, they want to be in the world, in the world with others, and make the world new.

Fred Moten insists: “Like Deleuze, I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it until the end, because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be there in him. And I intend to keep the faith, like Curtis Mayfield. But this is beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, it is out there in the world, in the other thing, in the other world, in the lively noise of recent times, dispersed, improvised, in the refusal of the ordinary to the academy of misery.” . [P. 136]

The mission of the inhabitants of the undercommons, therefore, is to recognize that, when we seek to improve things, we do not just do it for the Other, we must also do it for ourselves. While men may believe they are being “sensitive” by becoming feminists, while white people may feel they are being right by opposing racism, no one is ready to embrace the mission of “putting it all down” until they realize that the structures they oppose are not just harmful to some, they are harmful to everyone.

Gender hierarchies are as harmful to men as they are to women, and they are truly harmful to everyone else. Racial hierarchies are not rational or orderly; they are chaotic and meaningless and must be fought precisely by all those who in some way benefit from them. Or, as Fred Moten says: “See, the problem with the coalition is that the coalition is not something that comes so that you can help me. It's a maneuver that always comes back to your own interests. The coalition comes from your recognition that it's shit for you, in the same way that we already recognize that it's shit for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is also killing you, you idiot, albeit much more gently, understand?”[p. 166].

The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things or die. All of us. We must change everything that is fucked up and this change cannot come in the form of what we consider “revolutionary” – like masculinist exasperation or armed confrontation. The revolution will come in a form that we cannot even imagine yet. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney propose that we prepare now for what is to come by entering into a study dynamic. Study, a way of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution demands of us, prepares us to be incorporated into what Harney calls “with and for” and allows us to spend less time antagonizing and being antagonized.

Like all world-building, world-shaking encounters, when you enter this book and learn how to be with and for, in coalition, toward the place we are already building, you also feel fear, trepidation, worry, and disorientation. Disorientation, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney will say, is not just inconvenient: it is necessary, because then you will no longer be in one place moving on to another, but you will already be part of the “movement of things” and you will be on your way to that “proscribed life social nothing.”

The movement of things can be felt and touched, it exists in language and fantasy, it is escape, it is movement, it is fugitivity itself. Fugitivity is not just escape, “exit”, as Paolo Virno might say, or an “exodus”, in the terms offered by Hardt and Negri. Fugitive is being separated from the settlement. It is a being in movement that has learned that “organizations are obstacles to our own organization” (Invisible Committee in The coming uprising) and that there are spaces and modalities separate from logic, logistics, what is welcomed and what is positioned. Moten and Harney call this “being together in helplessness,” which neither idealizes nor metaphorizes helplessness. Helplessness is the state of dispossession that we crave and embrace.

“Could this being together in helplessness, this interaction with the refusal of what was refused, this subcommon apositionality be a place from which emerges not one's own consciousness or knowledge of the other, but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side? of an unarticulated question?” [P. 110].

I think this is what Jay-Z and Kanye West (another collaborative unit of study) are referring to when they say “there is no church in the jungle” [no church in the wild].

For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, we must make common cause with those desires and (non)positions that seem crazy or unimaginable: we must, in the name of this alignment, refuse what was initially refused to us and, in this refusal, reshape the desire, reorient the hope, to reimagine possibility, and to do so separately from the fantasies nested in rights and respectability.

Instead, our fantasies must come from what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, quoting Frank B. Wilderson, call the “basement”: “And so we remain in the cellar, in the brokenness, as if we were entering, again and again, into the world broken, to chart the visionary company and join it.” [P. 107]. Here the hold is the hold of the slave ship, but it is also the dominion we have over reality and fantasy, the dominion they have over us and the dominion of deciding to renounce the other, preferring to touch, be with, love.

If there is no church in the jungle, if there is study rather than the production of knowledge, if there is a way to be together in the wreckage, if there are undercommons, we must find our way. And it won't be where the untamed beasts live. It will be a place where refuge is unnecessary, and you will discover that you have always been there.

*Jack Halberstam, Activist and philosopher, he is a professor in the Department of Humanities and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University. He is the author, among other books, of The queer art of failure (Ed. CEPE).

Reference

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study. Translation: Mariana Ruggieri, Raquel Parrine, Roger Farias de Melo, Viviane Nogueira. São Paulo, Ubu, 2024, 222 pages. [https://amzn.to/3WpNz47]