I found reading The Undercommons to be a welcome challenge for re-entering academia (perhaps in some ways ironically). For one, the language was truly difficult to grasp — Moten and Harney seem to love metaphors and poetics, especially when the metaphor ruptures (lysis) into the literal, or is both metaphor and literal. They build, as described in the vivid interview section, a real glossary of terms with saturated yet always-circling meanings, never quite reaching one direct definition. At first, many of those partial-metaphorical choices lost me in the early chapters, but, as I read on and especially after the interview section, I really began to flow with the text’s rhythm.
To go along the thought process of the undercommons itself, moving into spaces of “already” active study, I wanted to spend my post doing some less-than-formal self-reflection (and I promise in future posts to be a bit more rigorous). There were indeed many moments in the text into which I couldn’t help but read myself. At other moments, I could recognize that the text was moving beyond my personal reference or explicitly particularizing on empathies I cannot hold, for example in theory/affect of “blackness” (put in quotes to reference the text’s decision to not capitalize). I want to acknowledge that I found myself, in reading, in that tension between familiarization and reading against my own privilege.
That being said, I did want to reflect on parts of The Undercommons that I read myself in. I’m sure I’m not the only one who spent the text reflecting on my experience as an undergraduate. The idea of the study always being done outside the classroom, and that the university is not creating intellectual work but rather attempting to reduce and organize it, maps directly onto my experiences at Columbia. I would say that the majority, if not plurality, of intellectual rigor in my education came from what Moten and Harney might call the “undercommons:” socialist reading groups (I had to prepare a presentation that took me longer to write than many essays…); inter-student-group attempts and failures to build solidarity networks (perhaps an example of “planning”); eavesdropping on conversations in the cafe, only to find new politico-social networks; a growing realization that university “diversity and inclusion” and “multicultural organizations” were working, in spite of the well-intentioned employees within, to de-escalate autonomous student organizing and rather subsume it into the academy; living in university-designated queer housing (a strange form of fugivitity, perhaps)…
I don’t bring these up to center my own experiences, but to open a space for my classmates to do something similar if you also had resonances. This was a piece I just couldn’t think about in the abstract—it felt like it asked me to apply it to the material reality of the university as it stands.
These reflections make me ask: what work was done in any/all of those moments? To whom do I owe my study, and with whom should I prioritize building it? How do I approach graduate school with a newfound recognition of study as always ongoing, always already in action? What is the political reality of this university and its debt/credit/governance/policy and all the rest?
Another element from The Undercommons that really struck me was, in the interview section, when Moten and Harney talk about their collaboration and the process of study as “play” (104-108). It reminded me of my best friend in undergraduate, whom I would invite over to my dorm room to just talk and talk, and it felt like striking an intellectual match for me. They spoke a language with me that I’ve rarely found in other places. We would build idea upon idea, then suddenly we’d be pulling up an InternetArchive blog, or a YouTube video, or I’d leaf through a book on my bookshelf and begin reading out loud. They studied computer science and film (“performance hacking,” they’d say), while I studied literary theory and gender. I’d use a word, and they’d respond with a way of thinking about that word that I never would have imagined. With them, anything could be a text or an interpretive tool, and metaphors and literality constantly recombined. It felt like the best intellectual work I did through all of university.
I do partially bring that up just to enjoy the memory, but it does bring to mind, for me, some pertinent questions, especially when it comes to method in English. What changes when we account for texts as “living” and “social,” and begin to regard academic work as not just on paper and in the classroom, but in friendship and intimacy, in political consciousness and the never-completed process? Where do we go from here in (de-)structuring our collective learning, especially now that we are so closed off from one another?
