Undercommons

This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where
heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice.

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral
underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres.
Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall.

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless
mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover.
The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.

Erik Bordeleau characterizes the political collective the Invisible Committee as a revolutionary and literary force entangled within a complex field of power relations. He asserts that the collective configures a politics of enunciation that oscillates between anonymity and extreme personalization. 
This essay is part of the research theme Commonist Aesthetics

Propositions for Non-Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent begins from an urgent need to outline the contours of what living in non-fascist ways could mean in uncertain times, when the resurgence of fascism violates the infrastructures and very foundations of a livable life.

The reader connects to BAK's research strand Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing), a long-term itinerary for generating knowledge about, developing proposals for, and activating tactics of “non-fascist living”: that is, practicing life—and thus modeling a world—decidedly void of fascisms. Moving from critique to propositions, the project attempts to articulate and inhabit methods of de-individualized living and to practice ways in which multiplicity and difference establish relations other than those structured by power and hierarchy.

Propositions for Non Fascist Living: Tentative and Urgent, edited by Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, includes contributions by Rosi Braidotti; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jota Mombaça, and Thiago de Paula Souza; Stefano Harney and Fred Moten; Patricia Kaersenhout and Lukáš Likavčan; Sven Lütticken; Jumana Manna; Dan McQuillan; Shela Sheikh; Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture; and Mick Wilson.

The publication marks the beginning of BAK's BASICS series, published in collaboration with MIT Press. The readers in this series probe some of the most urgent challenges of our time, engaging them through theoretically informed and politically driven artistic research and practice. If BAK is conceived as a basis—a base where art and theory meet social action to collectively negotiate the social, political, environmental, and technological conditions in which we live and, more importantly, develop and actualize proposals for being together otherwise—then BASICS is its publishing equivalent.

True to its name, the series offers “basics” that narrate in a new language the contemporary predicament, as well as ways to resist it. BASICS is a response to our current global and planetary emergencies. It initiates a revisiting of critical questions as much as it seeks to develop afresh the building blocks of lexicons, tactics, scenarios, and relations that make action possible in the face of the contemporary situation.

Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas | Published by BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2019 | Design by Sean van den Steenhoven for Leftloft, Milan | English language | 200 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262537896

"Widespread perceptions of ‘crises’ of higher education call for the challenge of re-imagining and re-composing it. Recognizing that this is no easy task, I resist simplifying solutions that tend to suppress the complexity of the challenge. To counter such limitations of vision, I motivate the construction of my theory from engaging with controversial questions that are composed from the perspectives of those actors who are most marginalized from higher education, that do not immunize from critique the positions of those who narrate crises about higher education, that explore the rich interconnections of higher education with wider institutions, and that highlight the processes of co-constitution of higher education with its abject figures and places. For examples of the simplifications against which I develop my problematic as a response, I analyze the history of narrations of the ‘national dropout crisis’ and ‘crises of global higher education.’ To signify my anti-reductionist re-centering of the marginalized in the composition of my theory, I make my key problematic: how should higher education be changed from within, re-working it against its current forms, while also re-composing it from the outside and the margins, with those who are excluded and marginalized, and for enabling the alternative regimes of study that they are already enacting? I abbreviate this problematic as: “within and against // with and for.”

Through examining the literature on the politics of higher education and interviewing contemporary participants in struggles around this problematic, I draw out key controversies, particularly between different approaches to describing the complex relations between communities, people, resources, communication, study, teaching, and knowledge. Focusing on narratives that take critical perspectives on university reform and that present radical alternatives to the institutions of higher education, I find that these approaches also fall back on simplifications, and thereby, neglect to bring the ‘within and against’ and ‘with and for’ struggles together in order to grapple with the controversies around the complex tensions between them. In opposition to critical university reformers’ simplification of drawing on a romanticized ideal of ‘public higher education,’ I show how this ideal is based on modernist assumptions—particularly what I call the education-based regime of study—that short-circuit a deeper questioning of what is at stake in contemporary struggles. For a non-modernist, more nuanced alternative to the concepts of ‘the public’ and ‘education,’ I elaborate interconnected concepts of ‘study,’ ‘the common,’ ‘commons,’ and ‘undercommons.’

Focusing on the historical and contemporary oppositions between the modernist/colonial education regime and alternative regimes of study, I theorize how they are articulated in the undercommons of movements for abolition, decolonization, exodus, and composing communal futures. Then, I illustrate the complexities of this conceptual framework through deploying it to describe the historical and contemporary examples of marronage and Zapatismo. Elaborating the theory further in relation to regimes of study, I use it to analyze a contemporary community- and movement-embedded free university, Experimental Community Education of the Twin Cities (EXCO). Through militant co-research in my roles as an organizer and as a facilitator of a class on ‘Radical Pedagogy,’ I investigated how dispositions acquired through institutions of the education-based regime of study infiltrate activities of aspirationally ‘radical’ study and pedagogy. Against the usual romance of ideals of ‘community,’ ‘commons,’ and ‘education,’ my theory provides more nuanced guidance for organizers of movement-embedded study projects to create better infrastructures for courses in which participants can grapple with the controversies of their intersecting lives, places, communities, and movements. Taking a decolonial perspective to unsettle modernist/colonialist ideals of ‘security,’ both in classrooms and employment, I call for building relationships-in-struggle between the ‘waste products’ of the education system—from ‘dropouts’ and ‘contingent faculty’ to Foxconn workers—in and through spaces of autonomous study."

in: Texte zur Kunst, Heft Nr. 113, Thema 'Diskriminierung', März, 2019, S. 75-90 

Mit dem Einzug der AfD in den Bundestag sind Diskriminierung, Rassismus, Misogynie und Xenophobie wieder salonfähig geworden. Umso mehr gilt es, derlei instituierte Strukturen offenzulegen und zu benennen, um Gegenmaßnahmen ergreifen zu können. Die Soziologin Çiğdem Inan beschäftigt sich mit Entstehungsformen und Unterscheidungen gesellschaftlicher und politischer Strukturen von Rassismen, die sie entlang verschiedener philosophischer Theorien ermittelt. Im folgenden Text grenzt sie die Begrifflichkeiten voneinander ab, wobei sie insbesondere auf Ursprung und Auswirkungen des affektiven Rassismus eingeht.

Duke University was founded on tobacco wealth, and now it has a tobacco-free campus. How should we understand this change? How can communities around this university, and higher education broadly, reckon with our historical and ongoing complicities with tobacco capitalism? This article examines how the individualized subject has been historically constructed, in response to resistances, through supplementary relations between the university and tobacco industries. With abolitionist university studies, the authors focus on the postslavery university as a key site for these individualizing processes. They situate Duke as a nexus of new means of capitalist accumulation, including, on the one hand, the postslavery university as an institution for disciplining, individualizing, and differentiating wage laborers and, on the other, the tobacco industry's shift to monopolization and mass consumption of tobacco commodities. The long Black freedom movement continues in the post-WWII era with resistances that push capitalism into crisis, while simultaneously, capitalism's coping mechanism of tobacco use has the unintended consequence of mass death. This article explores how, at the site of Duke, part of capitalism's response to resistance movements has been to deepen the individualization processes, charging individuals with taking on responsibility for the costs of both tobacco use and higher education. The authors ask how narratives of smoke-free and tobacco-free campuses could interlink with postracial narratives to obscure how the tobacco companies and universities have accumulated capital through racism, deception, dispossession, and exploitation.

Finance is not primarily about monetary value but rather social-political design – a mode of coordinating emergent potentialities through the design of collective attractors.
What type of futures can be called into being through a reprogramming of our socio-financial protocols? Bordeleau problematizes the capacity to generate new techno-social and organizational forms in dialogue with the modes of social encryption that Moten and Harney have described, in their book The Undercommons, as fugitive planning:  immanent ways of being together in motion that resist the language of self-valorization and protect the “earthen informality of life”.

Dialogues and essays exploring collaboration in artist collective & self-organized cultural production

During the industrial revolution artisans and craft workers sparked struggles against exploitation while the force of law drove unions underground. Today conditions are different… yet they are not. Collective organizing is pre-empted not by legal prohibition but rather by a perverse internalized neoliberal logic that celebrates the precarious creative worker as its exemplar.

Combination Acts draws together fifteen years of conversations with artists, musicians, activists, and theorists about the nature of collaborative practice. What sociality is produced by their practices? What forms of collectivity do they animate and embody? Taken together these dialogues provide a series of study notes for and from the self-organization of the undercommons, gesturing towards an aesthetics that occupies a space of power for itself by coming to close to, but never finally reaching, a set form.

“The mood and tense of revolution can be obscure even to those who act it out – as polyphonic combination, cutting normative conceptions of person and number – in beautifully everyday experiments that strain against the brutally ongoing. Thankfully, in this timely primer, Stevphen Shukaitis reminds us how to conjugate the verbs to live, to fight, and to enjoy.” – Fred Moten, New York University

“Combination Acts offers an overview of political cultural tools and tactics radicals have mobilized over the 20th century and into the 21st.  Shukaitis steers through rebellious terrain, from cyberhacking and forms of sabotage to critiques of global neoliberal institutions and horizontal re-commoning, opening new terrains of speculative imaginative possibilities. A necessary guide to militant culture in the new millennium.” – Jaleh Mansoor, University of British Columbia

“Combination Acts is an exhilarating read as it boldly combines optimism (the always renewed burden of struggles on the left) and pragmatism (the requirement of actually existing praxis). Engaging dialogues and theoretical analysis are also combined in this cutting-edge study, on material and in ways that are indispensable for carrying forward the spirit and actuality of insurgent togetherness. The key question of the book – what interventions would be needed so that the grammar of self-organization would not find itself rendered into the fixed forms of capital’s continued accumulation demands? – is answered through multiple narrative documents of real-life experience crossing through the art field. At the very least, the book informs us of the depth of critical thought from which practices of anti-status-quo alternatives stem; as for what the book achieves at its best, this is dependent on whether and how we seek to implement what we learn from it. An essential and inspirational reality check on collaboration, labour, its content and discontent, and the conundrum of art activism, among numerous other markers of the zeitgeist.” – Angela Dimitrakaki, University of Edinburgh

How can we deal with the apparent contradiction between the normative ideals of critical theory and the practice of the current university system? To answer this question, I consult three classical criticisms of the university system: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French educator Joseph Jacotot formulated a pedagogical critique of the disciplinary effects of the educational system; at the beginning of the twentieth century, German historian Franz Rosenzweig articulated an ethical critique of the hegemonic educational system’s distance from life; and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, British feminist Sara Ahmed proposed a political critique of the oppressing functions of academic institutions. Taken together, these critiques can serve as an orientation for critical intellectual practice even within the academic system. Finally, I try to describe the relation between critical theory and the university thus evolving by utilising Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept of the “undercommons”.

I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in
public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial
sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly
legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments
that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining
away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical
counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation process by
analyzing both the dominant and vernacular discourses that
emerged in response to eight black churches that were burned
in a ten-day period following the June 2015 AME church
massacre. I also consider how these vernacular rhetorics mobilize
fugitive fragments from what Karma Chávez calls the
“undercommonsense” to form a survival discourse and what
possibilities those radical (from Latin radix, “root”) meaningmaking
practices may hold. This essay advances communication
studies scholarship by connecting discursive approaches to race
and racism with rhetorical scholarship on fragmentation, ideology,
and public memory. It offers a vocabulary for confronting civil
society’s material rhetorics that mask the material realities of
racism and racial oppression, and calls for rhetoricians to take
seriously the common-sense racism that perpetuates these
dynamics and how it might be revised or contested.

The unprecedented global intertwining of pandemic and revolt have disrupted the present and future of the social-economic order. This crisis of power opens new possibilities for non-sovereign life and action. This strange here and now is our starting point for a digital conference to reflect on the openings in our moment, to think beyond inherited political orders toward an indissolubly common life that can be located in destitution, fugitivity, and refuge.

On November 13th-16th, 2020, Indiana University’s 2020 Critical Ethnic Studies symposium brings into dialogue two zones of contemporary insurgent study: the undercommons and destituent power. To explore social life that evades political constraints such as citizenship, sovereignty, and governance, we seek to build upon the work of Fred Moten, Stefano Harney and Giorgio Agamben. Reveling in the fields that ground their work, the Black radical tradition and Italian Autonomia, this forum seeks to collect and share what we’ve learned from the practices and forms of life that are already breaking free of politics.

Das spekulative Handbuch bietet vielfältige Techniken für ein radikales Lernen und Vermitteln. Es umfasst konkrete Anleitungen, Erfahrungen und theoretische Überlegungen. Die Texte beteiligen sich an der Konzeption einer Vermittlung, die das gemeinsame Experimentieren (wieder) einführt. Im Seminarraum, in Workshops, auf Festivals, in Fluren, Parks und der Stadt finden Lernen und Verlernen statt. Texte und Anleitungen u. a. zu: Filmessays, Collagen, Banküberfällen, der Universität der Toten, wildem Schreiben, konzeptuellem speed Dating, neurodiversem Lernen, Format-Denken, dem Theater der Sorge, dem Schreiblabor, dem Körperstreik.

2014 é o ano do centenario de Abdias do Nascimento e de Carolina Maria de Jesus. Com relação ao legado destes dois autores, centrais na construção de um imaginario “fugitive” para a experiencia politica e estetica da negritude na Amerika portuguesa, permanece até o momento o mesmo silencio de sempre na esfera pública, em seus meios intelectuais hegemonicos, na verborragia opaca da imprensa burguesa.

A proposal to the worlds regarding how to approach the concept, phenomenon, and institutions of education. I offer a brief history of education, locating its origins in the Inquisitions and Witch Hunts of Europe and detail its contemporary role in spreading addiction to money as a mechanism of colonial control. I bring some concepts together from various authors toward a more functional and flexible framework of how liberation-minded people(s) might navigate in and outside of education toward a world of relations not controlled by capitalism, empire, and money. The concept of (Under)Commons of this piece is influenced by the title of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies" and also maintains an appreciation for the more widely studied concept of the Commons. "Preliminary Notes v1.0" denotes this as a work in progress that I hope to involve in wide conversation amongst a variety of audiences with stakes in life on earth as I continue to develop further versions until it becomes a complete book. As per the title, "Playing to Live, Not Living to Pay" is the primary goal here.
Please send any feedback to playingtolivenotlivingtopay@gmail.com

A Perícia Popular no Centro Histórico de Salvador foi um espaço de colaboração urbana desenvolvido, entre 2016 e 2019, na cidade de Salvador, Bahia (Brasil). Inspirada nas ideias de "estudo negro" e "planejamento fugitivo" de Harney & Moten (2013), esta iniciativa de experimentação coletiva veio à tona através de uma parceria entre a Associação de Moradores e Amigos do Centro Histórico de Salvador (AMACH) e um conjunto de professores, pesquisadoras e estudantes da Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA). Estabelecida institucionalmente como uma disciplina de extensão universitária, foi ofertada durante quatro semestres na Faculdade de Arquitetura da UFBA. Como prática investigativa, a Perícia Popular visava produzir uma avaliação coletiva –não restrita aos conhecimentos dos especialistas– que indagasse nas condições de moradia de um conjunto de habitantes do Pelourinho, nome histórico e popular com o que se conhece o Centro Histórico de Salvador. Colocando em questão as técnicas de governo da cidade e contrariando as pretensões excludentes do Programa de Recuperação do Centro Histórico de Salvador (1992) –cujo avanço e implementação comportava a remoção da maioria da população– esses moradores conseguiram resistir ao seu despejo, conquistando o direito à moradia dentro do espaço urbano em que habitaram por décadas. Um Termo de Ajustamento de Conduta (TAC), aprovado em 2005, reconhecia aquele direito. Contudo, após 11 anos da aprovação do TAC, aquela comunidade continuava desprotegida: sem moradia estável, nem horizontes discerníveis.

A proposal to the worlds regarding how to approach the concept, phenomenon, and institutions of education. I offer a brief history of education, locating its origins in the Inquisitions and Witch Hunts of Europe and detail its contemporary role in spreading addiction to money as a mechanism of colonial control. I bring some concepts together from various authors toward a more functional and flexible framework of how liberation-minded people(s) might navigate in and outside of education toward a world of relations not controlled by capitalism, empire, and money. The concept of (Under)Commons of this piece is influenced by the title of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies" and also maintains an appreciation for the more widely studied concept of the Commons. "Preliminary Notes v1.0" denotes this as a work in progress that I hope to involve in wide conversation amongst a variety of audiences with stakes in life on earth as I continue to develop further versions until it becomes a complete book. As per the title, "Playing to Live, Not Living to Pay" is the primary goal here.
Please send any feedback to playingtolivenotlivingtopay@gmail.com

This paper is a theoretical discussion of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Harney & Moten, 2013) as a contribution to critical education in public schools. The undercommons serves here as an epistemic device, or a way of seeing and knowing, in relation to public education. The function of this device is to establish an appreciative view of student survival and activist behaviours and to centre educational policy as a potential mechanism of student exclusion. I propose that the practice of inclusion in schools coexists with unacknowledged operations of exclusion. The undercommons is employed as a lens to make such mechanisms of disenfranchisement apparent. I advocate here for an extension of inclusive education which, in addition to targeted supports for particular demographic groups, must concern itself with more general practices of disenfranchisement.

It has been two years that Germany's and Austria's governments opened their borders following the pressure of migration movements. Since then, a lot has changed, and not much for the better. Did the demarcations and enclosures of the nation states win once and for all? How does the present situation differ from the one of 2015? And what has migration got to do with social networks, affect and forms of commons?

in: Texte zur Kunst, Issue 113, Discrimination, March 2019, pp. 74-91


When the Alternative for Germany (AfD) won seats in the German parliament, discrimination, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia moved from the fringes to the center of the country’s political discourse, adding urgency to the need to expose and identify such institutional structures so that countermeasures can be taken.
The sociologist Çiğdem Inan explores the genesis of racisms and their different social and political structures, drawing on a range of theories to pin down her protean subject. In what follows, Inan outlines a set of key distinctions, examining, in particular, the sources and effects of affective racism.

In reflecting on new sociabilities and communities, Christoph Brunner and Gerald Raunig ask how individuals “enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum,” and how a being “can take another being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and world.” They respond with a detailed consideration of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons as a micro-political active power.

Migration scholars, and the universities and institutions who fund them, at times neglect to address the ways in which the traces of the imperial past, and references to the 'post' colonial serve to obfuscate and legitimize discriminatory practices in their work. The 'imperial eyes' of the academy set the terms and limitations on interactions, locations, and relationality in research, reducing the agency of migrants, producing stratified configurations in the positionality of both migrants and researchers and, subsequently, exacerbating dynamics of exclusion and extraction. As early-stage researchers, we see a critical need for an approach to migration studies which undermines the ongoing impact of colonialism and the norma-tivity of institutionalized, hierarchical narratives that haunt academia. Our research builds on the work of scholars who write about the autonomy of migration, liberation theorists, and critical Indigenous perspectives, but our positions are also influenced by those on the 'frontlines' resisting various manifestations of violence and exclusion. In this article, using an interdisciplinary model, we propose the notion of collective self-inquiry to critically question and inquire into our own methods and approaches and provide a set of methodological tools that can be applied by other researchers within and outside of the university. These tools invite us to work collectively and look more critically at the b/ordering of movement(s) across former empires, thus helping us navigate towards the undercommons, a place where the liberatory potential of the academy can be realized.

Un spectre hante le ronronnement désormais gentiment consensuel de la théorisation des communs : le spectre des undercommons. Ce fantôme est encore diaphane en France, où il ne se montre qu'exceptionnellement. Dans le monde anglo-saxon, il hante de plus en plus de pensées alternatives radicales, qui y reconnaissent une inspiration et une référence majeures, mais aussi une inquiétude taraudante, quand ce n'est pas une vague menace. Et non sans raison : le spectre des undercommons a pour vocation d'encercler toute certitude politique trop bien établie et de déstabiliser toute présomption de souveraineté, pour ne nous laisser en partage que notre incomplétude-avec pour seule rédemption de faire de cette incomplétude individuelle notre seule vraie force collective. D'où est donc sorti ce spectre ? Des plumes croisées de Stefano Harney, penseur nomade invité aussi bien dans des écoles d'art que dans des programmes de management stratégique, et de Fred Moten, poète, philosophe et professeur des arts de la performance à New York University. Ils ont publié ensemble, depuis le début des années 2000, une série de contributions à diverses revues, reprises sous forme de livre-manifeste paru en 2013 sous le titre The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study 1. Quatre singularités conspirent à faire de cet ouvrage l'une des publications les plus importantes de ces vingt dernières années : une écriture, une radicalité, un vocabulaire, une attitude. D'abord une écriture, où théorie et poésie riment en une étreinte passionnée, faisant de chaque phrase à la fois la formulation rigoureuse d'un mécanisme d'exploitation (ou d'une tactique d'insurrection) et le prisme cristallin d'un indomptable miroitement du sens. Leur texte est proprement incompréhensible, si comprendre revient à faire le tour d'un problème, à le saisir pour le résoudre avant de passer au suivant, avec le sentiment serein du devoir accompli et l'assurance réaffirmée de sa maîtrise des savoirs. La lecture des Undercommons est avant tout, pour le lecteur français, une expérience de dépaysement et de désorientation, qui commence par son insaisissable titre. Celui-ci a la propriété d'affoler les traducteurs automatiques (DeepL, Google Translate) qui, en l'espace de quelques pages seulement, le rendent par « sous-communs », « sous-fonds », « sous-domaines », « sous-ensembles », « sous-communautés », « sous-communes », « sous-communaux », « souterrains communs », mais aussi « laissés-pour-compte », « exclus », « sous-facteurs », « sous-commissaires », ou encore « infidèles ». Cet erratisme rend moins compte de la bêtise des machines que de la richesse d'une créativité indissociablement poétique et conceptuelle. Que ou qui sont donc ces undercommons ? Ce(ux) dont la solidarité à jamais fuyante préexiste toujours déjà aux « problèmes » que la politique identifie (suscite, exacerbe) en prétendant les « fixer », au double sens de les épingler et de les résoudre. On trouve les undercommons dans les entrées d'immeubles de banlieue, dans les cafétérias du CROUS, 1 Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Wivenhoe, Minor Composition, 2013. Une traduction française collective, coordonnée par Lena Monnier et Rosanna Puyol, est en cours, avec pour horizon une publication d'ici 2021 auprès des Éditions Brooks. Une sélection d'extraits paraîtra dès ce printemps dans le n° 79 de la revue Multitudes.

The paper employs a logistical analytic to highlight convergences and conflicts between different processes of spatialisation, and the mechanisms of resistance and subtraction that invest them. The spaces with which the paper deals are located at the intersection between the politics of migration management and the forms of spatial organization of supply chains, with particular reference to agribusiness. By means of case studies drawn from different contexts, among which the Tavoliere and the Plain of Gioia Tauro, the progressive articulation of forms of zoning is examined, which relies on the institution of Special Economic Zones within agro-industrial enclaves. Not only are forms of management of the mobility of commodities and people not necessarily mutually reinforcing. Forms of subtraction and resistance are also enacted by the subjects of containment policies.

Das spekulative Handbuch bietet vielfältige Techniken für ein radikales Lernen und Vermitteln. Es umfasst konkrete Anleitungen, Erfahrungen und theoretische Überlegungen. Die Texte beteiligen sich an der Konzeption einer Vermittlung, die das gemeinsame Experimentieren (wieder) einführt. Im Seminarraum, in Workshops, auf Festivals, in Fluren, Parks und der Stadt finden Lernen und Verlernen statt. Texte und Anleitungen u. a. zu: Filmessays, Collagen, Banküberfällen, der Universität der Toten, wildem Schreiben, konzeptuellem speed Dating, neurodiversem Lernen, Format-Denken, dem Theater der Sorge, dem Schreiblabor, dem Körperstreik.

A proposal to the worlds regarding how to approach the concept, phenomenon, and institutions of education. I offer a brief history of education, locating its origins in the Inquisitions and Witch Hunts of Europe and detail its contemporary role in spreading addiction to money as a mechanism of colonial control. I bring some concepts together from various authors toward a more functional and flexible framework of how liberation-minded people(s) might navigate in and outside of education toward a world of relations not controlled by capitalism, empire, and money. The concept of (Under)Commons of this piece is influenced by the title of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies" and also maintains an appreciation for the more widely studied concept of the Commons. "Preliminary Notes v1.0" denotes this as a work in progress that I hope to involve in wide conversation amongst a variety of audiences with stakes in life on earth as I continue to develop further versions until it becomes a complete book. As per the title, "Playing to Live, Not Living to Pay" is the primary goal here.
Please send any feedback to playingtolivenotlivingtopay@gmail.com

Advocates of ‘slow scholarship’ have called for building relations of care and solidarity across the university. This requires tracing how academia’s unequal temporal architecture makes some people’s temporally privileged situations interdependent with others’ more oppressed temporalities. Understanding such interdependencies is necessary for going beyond mere allyship and toward becoming accomplices in a shared struggle for mutual liberation. But these relations can be obscured by romanticizing the academic project. To de-romanticize academia, we offer a critical, decolonial history of the university. We highlight how, on the one hand, intertemporal relations are mediated through people’s inter-relations with and through the land and, on the other hand, how they are masked by colonial ways of thinking. Nostalgia for the university is often tied with an ideal of liberal democracy. Feelings of anxiety about ‘speed-up’ originate in the liberal ideal of the slowly deliberative citizen ...

When thinking about how to 'decolonize' the classroom, and more specifically how we can embrace emotions and create open, transformative spaces, our point of departure must always be the realization that we, students and lecturers, are 'in it together'. The realization that study has been made impossible under the conditions in which we are being made to operate by and within the University: the realization that lecturers and students are (being) put together in the classroom under, what Ann Laura Stoler would call, similar conditions of duress. Albeit not entirely the same, these similar conditions under which we are being made to operate make 'decolonizing education' an incredibly difficult task, especially if students and lecturers are separated. A separation that doesn't only happen along the lines of hierarchy, but very much also along the lines of the belief that students are the 'enemy', or more specifically, students 'ask too much of our time'. This 'time question' is of course interesting, especially when the students aren't the cause of our time issues, but rather these issues emerge out of administrative and financial policies. In other words, the conditions under which we are being made to operate are structured along the lines of a racial-patriarchal-capitalistic logic on which the University is build and operates. This is of course why we speak of 'decolonizing the University', because we work from the understanding that the University is very much build upon various colonial histories and in so many cases the University is a direct result of colonialism.

This paper proposes some reflections on the notions of “use” and “dispossession”, attempting to identify enabling points of convergence between the two. Dispossession carries within itself an aporia. While, on one hand, it connotes a mode of subjugation, on the other hand, when designating a condition of being ‘moved to the other and by the other – exposed to and affected by the other’s vulnerability’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 1), dispossession can be understood as a political resource, in terms of a fugitive relation to processes of liberal subjectivation. In the work of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, it is this latter acceptation that comes to name the informal, insurgent sociality of what they termed the “undercommons” (Harney and Moten, 2013), operating as something of a collectivised art of ontological sabotage. Giorgio Agamben’s rethinking and radicalisation of “use”, it will be argued here, can be intended as yet another articulation of the same mechanism: a form of gestural practice that collapses any clear distinction between subjective “agents” and objective “patients”, between effecting and affected – an encounter that, in its immediate plurality, cannot be appropriated. What can be learnt, what coordinates for action can spawn from this conceptual dyad? Can a dispossession of, in, and as use pose a challenge to ‘the sanctity of property and proprietorial notions of the self’ (Hartman, 1997: 115) that threaten to colonise our (inter)acting? When observed against a backdrop of nanopolitical experimentation (cf. Nanopolitics Group, 2013), dispossession and use could jointly help activate shared sensitivities, amplify dissident complicities beyond individual intentionalities, and choreograph collective haptic explorations, rooted in the becoming one another’s condition of possibility for acting.

Students are 'universally' subjected to debt and financialisation; a subjectivation which has most recently defined the University of Auckland student movement. This movement currently consists of two intersecting groups: Reclaim UoA and Petty and Vindictive. The logics of finance construct students as investors and enclose the commons of the university, necessitating the creation of an 'Undercommons'. The theory of the Undercommons (Harney and Moten, 2004) suggests we must look beyond the university for progressive alternatives. The student movement must find a 'universal' response to financialisation which does not subsume the 'particular' struggles of those who make up that movement.

With the climate of Brexit, xenophobia and white supremacy on the rise, health and safety of Black and Global Majority people under threat during the spread of Covid in the UK and elsewhere, a discussion of colonialism, migration, borders, and equality – in the classrooms and outside – is more pertinent than ever. Situating the ongoing Decolonise the University movement as part of broader social justice struggles to address the political, social, and economic crises we find ourselves in today, I propose a few ways of decentering Theatre and Performance Studies in the form of a manifesto. What follows is a meditation on precarity, critical pedagogy, Black study, feminist survival, ethical research praxis, and the violence of caste, colourism, and racialisations.

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