La dat: Saturday 26th October 2021
THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP
TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY
IS A CRIMINAL ONE…
“To the university, I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal”
I thought that it would be interesting to revisit the Harney and Moten reading, that I first encountered during the Teaching & Learning Unit on the PGCERT. The reading touched on the idea of belonging, visibility, and invisibility and how students alongside staff who are ethnic minorities become eponymous with being seen as other and how this creates a power imbalance. The idea of being “other” distinguishes what we choose to normalize in relation to ourselves and how our positionality creates this intangible dynamism that reflects as is macrocosm the world outside of academic institutions.
The term “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, comes to mind when reading the undercommons.
It was interesting looking at who Harney&Molten define as the undercommons:
“Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its development, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited unwittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute made. Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation, and the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down lM programs, visa-expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers and what will the university say of them?”
Harney & Moten introduce the start of the sentence with the term labour upon labour and providing the space for its development, creates risks.
It is incredibly clear that academic institutions need to offer spaces for its non-white academics and students but there is an insidious undertone; Harney & Moten want the reader to understand the crux of the essay which is the historical power balance of white Caucasians who represent these institutions and black academics, students who have infiltrated these spaces and whos’ mere physicality and position threatens the orthodoxy of how these spaces have been historically run. The passivity of these academics regulates them to the underbelly of the institutions called the undercommons which is used as not only a tool to dehumanize their experiences but create passivity.
Reading the undercommons Eula Biss book – No Man’s Land underpins what Harney and Moten are trying to get the readers to understand about how power and visibility can always be challenged when race is not a factor of your existence but once that comes into play it changes the power dynamic so to speak. To belong is to assimilate, once the subjects of the undercommons are able to relinquish the naivety of trying to belong a -posteriori, they are able to understand that you were never meant to belong, therefore in order to create a sense of belonging you must infiltrate which means rather than changing the systems, systems are to overhauled with new ways of creating inclusivity and rather than shifting power, creating power so that there is equality.
Those who pose a threat and are catalyst of change, are seen as troublemakers, educational terrorists inflicted like ravenous parasites on seemingly innocent bourgeois institutions who look to corrupt the system that tries to corrupt, silence, and pacify them with the autocratization and the professionalization of the education system. The reference made by the authors to the social pathological/ social organism of a society is a representation of the university which looks to enlighten but nullifies your ability to question the questions. The university is structured and funded in a way that the “undercommons” do not benefit from the system, the university infantilizes students “turning insurgents into state agents” the only means of success and production is how profitable students are post-graduation. The undercommons are unwanted but profitable financial commodities that are there to make up the numbers. The general consensus that you get from the reading, is that rather than becoming pawns a means to an end is that students should find their own communities, construct their own learning, and curve their own space of belonging and should be disruptive; professionalisation of the university upholds the social milieu for the status quo. There’s almost a theological tone “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other”- Matthew 6:24 that beguiles an insurrection instead of passive unity.
“It’s not teaching that brings us in (holds the social capacity) but something that produces the not visible, side of teaching, thinking through the sun side of teaching”
Teaching/ teachers are meant to transcend more than knowledge, teaching is meant to break down the invisible but tangible class barriers it’s about more than a commitment to more than the profession. You become more than someone who instructs but instruments for positive and social change and there’s clearly a schism when it comes to students who benefit from this type of teaching. When Harney and Molten write about “bringing us in” it’s about creating a space of belonging that doesn’t exist, love, and care for all students. The whole idea of the Universitas problematizes and brings to the forefront the whole idea of inclusion/ exclusion. The Universitas produces fugitivity; because students, undercommons are unwanted but necessary commodities that are important diversity inclusion tools in the recruitment process of the university. It brings to the forefront the first lecture by John Wisdom about the marketisation of the university. It seems like the university’s purpose particularly from a political standpoint is not solely for the expansion of knowledge and experimentation but what the student can bring to the job market (some more than others) which defeats the purpose of enrichment.
Reading the essay second time around, my perspective on the idea of power as a as a black female academic has really changed.
I started thinking about the sub-cultures that have been created in the university, or groups that have been started to address the problem of inclusivity and the widening attainment level between white students and ethnic minority students. I think that on one hand, it creates intersectional safe spaces for academics and students; but it is a by-product of exclusion were marginalised groups are exactly what Harney & Moten have spoken about which is that they are in essence the epitome of the undercommons. These groups are needed but it can also be counterproductive because there is a balanced dualism where power is given to create these groups; but in order to change the power in balance, there has to be a level of transparency, where all spaces equate to belonging. I think that my experience as an AL, and where I felt like I was positioned was in spaces to do directly with race, and although I felt that intellectually my experience and understanding of these issues could be beneficial, it also meant that my identity as a woman of cour could only be visible in those spaces.
There is a collective effort to now understand the struggles of POC in UAL, and this is incredibly complex because experience is not monolithic therefore my experience as a woman of colour will differ from a black female, or male who is a Muslim; disability, sexuality the narrative and how we understand these complexities changes as we try to understand how power intercept’s identity and visual politics.
In the same breath, the idea of power and the history of colonisation come into play, how we understand power and who has the capacity to really make changes are intertwined.
The starting point is colonisation, and this swift but brute way of thinking takes place in the university in relation to knowledge just like in the process of colonisation the main focus is to dominate/interrogate displace a devolutionary Process, becoming the dominant authority. The undercommons become fugitives within this process because they are inherently not sold into this false sense of belonging/promise. They are challenging the institution by intellectually antagonising probing the university that calls into question their place within the institution which threatens the willful ignorance and blindness that the university employs which exposes a fragility that can be exploited therefore the only way to challenge the undercommons is to silence them.
“The prevailing ideology in a society reflects the interests of the ruling class and maintaining their dominance it is built into societies myths and Philosophy where the pro literate adopts it as their own view of the world, and they have been co-opted by false consciousness that hides from the desperate condition of their lives under the capitalist system “
The question here is whether the universities want to shift the power balance to the “undercommons”?
Whether their survival as an institution depends on a power imbalance.
For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, the center of their reform is to decolonize a counterhegemonic approach to society and culture: the idea of false consciousness professionalisation of university feeds into a capitalist system. It’s quite possible that the relationship to the undercommons is the structurally fractured relationship between coloniser and colonised this is reinforced through the institution’s; so automatically within universities the under commons become fugitives of knowledge victims of an imperialist environment when they look for a means of escape.
Foucault and the under commons
Michael Foucault Theories about knowledge and power provides a pedagogy to think about the performative structure of knowledge:
“How the state produces discourse that is scientific and upholds social-historical”
Foucault highlights state power – relationship with performing knowledge and specifically thinking through how the state certain anchors certain discourses that reproduce the power of the state whilst “subjugating the history of the other I am pointing out the history of colonization through dominant courses of knowledge”
Foucault highlights one of the many ways that power is maintained, knowing who we effectively uphold, and the types of knowledge that we reference also contributes to structural inequalities. My position as an AL who is a woman, within a patriarchal system it is disempowering because gender raises a conflict of who is more pragmatic and with the addition of race sociologically being so to speak at the bottom of the food chain coupled with discriminatory idealisms surrounding intelligence you are stripped of your power because these prevailing beliefs are subconscious.
Moten and Harney argue:
“Refuse to order as a distinction between noise – music and chatter knowledge pain and truth make, and refuse offers we receive to shape that into music”
The idea of making music and a place of not belonging is akin to the idea of displacement and, the undercommons, using their situation to create music that beckons hardship but resonates a beauty from the suffering that looks to emancipate. Historically music from rock& roll, jazz, drill music was created because these groups of people were pushed out, it is not really but creating a sense of belonging or asking for power, but it’s the ability to forge, your own institutions where power is not given but created.