The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (review)

After reading Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's collaborative work for a second time, I realized how urgent their invitation to join the undercommons is—how vital it is to reach for an alternative way of being, seeing, and loving one another. Though readers might be familiar with components of their argument by way of their critical article on subversive intellectual practice and the university in Social Text (2004), this more expansive offering introduces new terms, clarifies previous terms, and encourages the redirection and/or dismissal of other terms still in use. Comprised of six unique but interrelated essays and an interview, The Undercommons is a provocative world-making project or, at the very least, a radical reorientation toward love and belonging that has deep ties to a Black radical tradition. Importantly, Harney and Moten do not necessarily initiate this world-making project; rather, they make clear that what we need to get free and to stay free—what we are waiting for—already exists and can be traced back to the "hold" of the ships that crossed the Atlantic with enslaved persons—thus making their "undercommons" inextricable from Blackness itself. In their estimation, the task in front of us is to rethink or to rediscover what we need, where we might find it, and how we might navigate an endless array of apparatuses and institutions that stand in the way.

By pulling on a rich radical black tradition—including Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Malcolm X, Édouard Glissant, fugitive enslaved persons, maroons, and even James Brown and Marvin Gaye—Harney and Moten reveal and problematize an increasingly administered world, its politics, and its aesthetics. As they survey various iterations of management in the contemporary moment (from governance to policy and from credit to logistics), they smartly ask about the character of command—of regulation, of fixing—that requires certain modes of existing, ones that often bar us from what we love, from one another, and from other things and senses. In The Undercommons, readers will not find an endorsement of many of the buzzwords that regularly accompany conversations about injustice and liberation: For example, words like restoration, healing (or rehabilitation), uplift, community, self-determination, consciousness, reparations, historical correctives, or even home-building are disrupted and re-routed. For Harney and Moten, the answers cannot involve the aforementioned terms because they all remain saddled by a rehabilitative enterprise; they all signal a movement from something/someone in need of repair to something/someone that has been or should be repaired. Not only do Harney and Moten contest the very diagnostical impulse, but they also expose how the prescription for treatment is neither coincidental nor politically neutral. In this way, their critique and their alternative-building (life in the undercommons, that is) are inextricably linked to Disability Studies—and Black Disability Studies, particularly—because of its persistent dismantling of knowledge-power that makes bodies mean and that attempts to delimit what bodies can/should do.

As they describe the undercommons that they so value, Harney and Moten explain that participation requires us "to look squarely into the fucked-up face of things" and to issue fervent and relentless refusal.¹ By refusing what has always already been refused to Black folk, queer folk, Indigenous folk, poor folk, and other similarly marginalized, the undercommons promotes an ethos of "getting lost and staying lost," to borrow from Dreamworks's Madagascar for a moment. (If a reference to an animated film seems like a bizarre or inappropriate reference here, recognize that the undercommons privileges the nonsensical as it seeks new ways to live, to think, and to interact, especially ones that contest perpetual mediation). To live a life of the undercommons, we must learn to live with brokenness, to neglect our debts, and to refuse to repair ourselves.

Indeed, we perhaps should go further and abandon any so-called refuge in an identity or a self...