The University and The Undercommons

Placeholder for my notes on “The University and The Undercommons” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013, p.22)

“THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY IS A CRIMINAL ONE”

“it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.”

“In the face of these conditions 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.”

the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses[?], with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow low-down maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

“What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of that onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the state[?]” that Jacques Derrida calls the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it[?]. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object[?] as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization.”

• Interpretation: The subversive potential of teaching lies in its ability to challenge the normative functions of the university.

“it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching.”

“The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.” But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching” is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond “the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the enlightenment. The waste lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase – unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the enlightenment truly better than this?”

• Interpretation: Critiques the socio-economic conditions of university teaching where teaching is reduced to a means of sustenance while researching is the end goal (‘ideals of the enlightenment’). Challenges that true enlightenment comes from transcending “teaching for food.” and proposes value in collective labour of resisting normative structures of the university.

“the life stolen by enlightenment[?] and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.”

• Interpretation:
  • Fugitive Enlightenment: Enlightenment escaping normativity of traditional enlightenment & institutionalized knowledge including instead marginalized and criminalized identities and acts of reclaiming life.
  • Undercommons: where traditional norms and professionalization are challenged. stands in opposition to the professionalization of critical academics.
  • Prophetic Teaching: Teaching in the undercommons is not about completing a set curriculum but about fostering a visionary and transformative form of collective knowledge and existence.

“As Fredric Jameson reminds us, the university depends upon “Enlightenment-type critiques and demystification of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed planning and ‘development.’” This is the weakness of the university, the lapse in its homeland security. It needs labor power for this “enlightenment-type critique,” but, somehow, labor always escapes.”

• Elusive Labor: Labor power required for critique is resistant to control seeking autonomy and freedom in their work. A tension where the university needs this labor but cannot fully contain or control it.

• Enlightenment Paradox: Principles of critique and rationality, foundational to the university, also question and demystify which cannot be fully contained within any institutional framework.

“And yet this labor force cannot reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. The university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already dedicated in this direction. Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics of the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realisation and always necessarily be inadequate to it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem.”

• Wow. This is brutal. Teaching people that “YOU ARE A BURDEN.” Labour (people) is an obsticle to be overcome. We are all in the way of capital.

“the dream of an undifferentiated labor that knows itself as superfluous is interrupted precisely by the labor of clearing away the burning roadblocks of ideology.”

• Undifferentiated Labor:

  • The ideal of labor that sees itself as superfluous, or unnecessary, is challenged by the active labor of dismantling ideologies.
  • “Undifferentiated labor” implies a homogeneous labor force without distinctions or specialized roles.

• Restorationists vs. Specialization:

  • Restorationists likely refer to those who wish to return to a traditional, undifferentiated model of labor and education.
  • The increasing specialization and managerialism in labor represent a successful integration of labor division, countering restorationist ideals.

• Control and Resistance: The university’s role in policing ideology and fostering differentiated labor reflects ongoing tensions between control and resistance. The labor force is both managed and allowed to develop autonomously to some extent.

• Economic Integration: The specialization and managerial tendencies within the labor force represent a successful integration of labor division with the broader economic universe, countering traditional restorationist ideals.

• Opportunities for Change: The presence of Enlightenment critique and clandestine labor creates opportunities for alternative forms of labor and thought to emerge, challenging institutional constraints.

• Risks and Refugees:

  • The university labor force may include individuals who are marginalized or operate outside the mainstream—refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways.
  • These individuals pose a potential threat to the established order, akin to how a colonial police force might inadvertently recruit from guerrilla neighborhoods.

• Maroon Communities:

  • These are groups of individuals who exist on the margins or outside the normative structures of the university.
  • Examples include composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, queer management professors, ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, and more.

• Unprofessionalism as a Charge:

  • The university labels these marginalized groups as “unprofessional,” not arbitrarily, but as a critique of their transcendence beyond professional norms.
  • This charge is directed at those who exceed and escape the profession, posing a problem and danger to the university.

• Constant Struggle and Hiding:

  • The undercommons, composed of these maroon communities, are always engaged in a struggle, constantly in hiding and at odds with the mainstream university environment.
  • This contrasts with the “fanciful communities of whimsy” described by Bill Readings; the undercommons are in a state of perpetual conflict and concealment.

[… more stuff here todo]

“THE UNDERCOMMONS OF THE UNIVERSITY IS A NONPLACE OF ABOLITION Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extra- legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabili- ties to premature (social, civil and/or corporeal) death.” What is the difference between this and slavery? What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of any- thing but abolition as the founding of a new society. The object of abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would be, to return to Spivak, uncanny. The uncanny that disturbs the criti- cal going on above it, the professional going on without it, the un- canny that one can sense in prophecy, the strangely known moment, the gathering content, of a cadence, and the uncanny that one can sense in cooperation, the secret once called solidarity. The uncanny feeling we are left with is that something else is there in the under- commons. It is the prophetic organization that works for the red and black abolition!”