(Wivenhoe; New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013)
THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP
TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY
IS A CRIMINAL ONE…
“To the university, I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal”
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?”
These are the people who 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 its 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 talks us 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 whole idea of inclusion/ exclusion. The universitas produces fugitivity; because students, undercommons are unwanted but necessary commodities that are important diversity inclusion tool 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. The university is not a place that we bow down to conformity but challenge the university as an institution.
The starting point is colonisation, and this swift but brute way of thinking takes place in university in relation to knowledge just like in the process of colonisation main focus is to dominate/interrogate displace a devolutionary Process, becoming the dominant authority. The undercommons become fugitives within this process as within colonisation 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 wilful ignorance and blindness that the university employs which exposes a fragility that can be exploited therefore the only way to challenge them 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 hide from the desperate condition of their lives under the capitalist system “
In Fred Moten and Stefano Harney book on the common’s fugitive planning and black study the centre of their reform is to decolonize a counterhegemonic approach to society and culture: idea of false consciousness professionalisation of university feeds into a capitalist system. This links to The Frankfurt School: institution social research Germany 1923/ field critical theory: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm. It’s quite possible that their relationship to the under comments is the structurally fractured relationship between coloniser and colonised this is reinforced through the institution’s universities so automatically the under commons become fugitives of knowledge victims of an imperialist environment.
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 uphold social historical”
Foucault Highlights state power – relationship with performing knowledge and specifically thinking through how the state certain anchors certain discourses that reproduces the power of the state whilst “subjugating the others history I am pointing out the history of colonization through dominant courses of knowledge”
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 an intellectual diaspora, the undercommons using their situation to create music that beckons hardship but resonates a beauty from the suffering that looks to emancipation. Jack Halbertons introductory chapter the undercommons is where you come to fix something like debts to repair what has been broken pay to fix what has come undone.
Bibliography / Articles – Further Reading
Research articles
A third wave of autocratization is here: what is new about it? Anna Lührmann&Staffan I. LindbergPages 1095-1113 | Received 13 Sep 2018, Accepted 30 Jan 2019, Published online: 01 Mar 2019
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe; New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/culturalcritique.104.2019.0072?seq=1
A Passage to the Undercommons: Virtual Formation of Identity in Nikki S. Lee’s Self-Transformative Performance
Hyun Joo Lee
Cultural Critique
Vol. 104 (Summer 2019), pp. 72-100 (29 pages)
Published By: University of Minnesota Press
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0191453718768358
Kant, race, and natural history
Stella Sandford Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London, UK,Philosophy and Social Criticism 2018, Vol. 44(9) 950–977 ª The Author(s) 2018
K. Cobb, The Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture (Wiley Blackwell Guides to Theology),Wiley-Blackwell; 1st edition (20 Nov. 2005)