The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

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The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
ISBN 978-1-57027-267-7
Cover & book design by fFurious, Singapore (www.ffurious.com)

Copyedited by Erik Empson
Released by Minor Compositions 2013
Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from
autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.
Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia
www.minorcompositions.info | minorcompositions@gmail.com
Distributed by Autonomedia
PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station
Brooklyn, NY 11211
www.autonomedia.org
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Some of the chapters were published in earlier form by Duke University Press,
Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and E-flux. The authors would like to
thank the editors and publishers.
For our mentor,

Martin L. Kilson
CONTENTS
0.
The Wild Beyond:

With and for the Undercommons
Jack Halberstam
1.
Politics Surrounded
14
2.
The University and the Undercommons
22
3.
Blackness and Governance
44
4.
Debt and Study
58
5.
Planning and Policy
70
6.
Fantasy in the Hold
84
7.
The General Antagonism:

An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis
100
8.
References
160
THE WILD BEYOND:

WITH AND FOR
THE UNDERCOMMONS
JACK HALBERSTAM
It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion,

in between various modes of being and belonging, and on the way to
new economies of giving, taking, being with and for and it ends with
a ride in a Buick Skylark on the way to another place altogether. Surprising, perhaps, after we have engaged dispossession, debt, dislocation and violence. But not surprising when you have understood that
the projects of fugitive planning and black study are mostly about
reaching out to find connection; they are about making common
cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness, I would venture to
say, that is also blackness, that remains blackness, and will, despite all,
remain broken because this book is not a prescription for repair.
If we do not seek to fix what has been broken, then what? How do we resolve to live with brokenness, with being broke, which is also what Moten
and Harney call debt. Well, given that debt is sometimes a history of
giving, at other times a history of taking, at all times a history of capitalism
and given that debt also signifies a promise of ownership but never delivers on that promise, we have to understand that debt is something that
cannot be paid off. Debt, as Harney puts it, presumes a kind of individualized relation to a naturalized economy that is predicated upon exploitation. Can we have, he asks, another sense of what is owed that does not
presume a nexus of activities like recognition and acknowledgement, payment and gratitude. Can debt become a principle
of elaboration?
THE W I L D BEYOND
Moten links economic debt to the brokenness of being in the interview with Stevphen Shukaitis; he acknowledges that some debts
should be paid, and that much is owed especially to black people by
white people, and yet, he says: I also know that what it is that is
supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It cant be repaired. The only
thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new. The undercommons do not come to pay their debts, to
repair what has been broken, to fix what has come undone.
If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten
and Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and
poor people want, what we (the we who cohabit in the space of the
undercommons) want, it is this we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that
denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to
be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we
want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now,
limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the
places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new
structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have
torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and
feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want
after the break will be different from what we think we want before
the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues
from being in the break.
Lets come at this by another path. In the melancholic and visionary 2009 film version of Maurice Sandaks Where The Wild Things Are
(1963), Max, the small seeker who leaves his room, his home, his
family to find the wild beyond, finds a world of lost and lonely beasts
and they promptly make him their king. Max is the first king the wild
things have had whom they did not eat and who did not, in turn, try
to eat them; and the beasts are the first grown things that Max has
met who want his opinion, his judgment, his rule. Maxs power is that
he is small while they are big; he promises the beasts that he has no
plans to eat them and this is more than anyone has ever promised
them. He promises that he will find ways through and around and
6
T HE U N D E R C O MM ONS
will slip through cracks and re-crack the cracks if they fill up. He
promises to keep sadness at bay and to make a world with the wild
creatures that roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible
teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.
That Max fails to make the wild things happy or to save them or to
make a world with them is less important than the fact that he found
them and he recognized in them the end of something and potentially the path to an alternative to his world. The wild things were
not the utopian creatures of fairy tales, they were the rejected and
lost subjects of the world Max had left behind and, because he shuttles between the Oedipal land where his mother rules and the ruined
world of the wild, he knows the parameters of the real he sees what
is included and what is left out and he is now able to set sail for another place, a place that is neither the home he left nor the home to
which he wants to return.
Moten and Harney want to gesture to another place, a wild place that
is not simply the left over space that limns real and regulated zones
of polite society; rather, it is a wild place that continuously produces
its own unregulated wildness. The zone we enter through Moten and
Harney is ongoing and exists in the present and, as Harney puts it,
some kind of demand was already being enacted, fulfilled in the call
itself. While describing the London Riots of 2011, Harney suggests
that the riots and insurrections do not separate out the request, the
demand and the call rather, they enact the one in the other: I think
the call, in the way I would understand it, the call, as in the call and
response, the response is already there before the call goes out. Youre
already in something. You are already in it. For Moten too, you are
always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. Whats
more, the call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many places: in jazz, in improvisation, in noise. The
disordered sounds that we refer to as cacophony will always be cast
as extra-musical, as Moten puts it, precisely because we hear something in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary
and in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible. Listening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a wild beyond to
the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.
THE W I L D BEYOND
And when we are called to this other place, the wild beyond, beyond
the beyond in Moten and Harneys apt terminology, we have to give
ourselves over to a certain kind of craziness. Moten reminds us that
even as Fanon took an anti-colonial stance, he knew that it looks crazy but, Fanon, as a psychiatrist, also knew not to accept this organic
division between the rational and the crazy and he knew that it would
be crazy for him not to take that stance in a world that had assigned
to him the role of the unreal, the primitive and the wild. Fanon, according to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the end of
the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense. In order to bring
colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to power, one
has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other,
the other who has been rendered a nonentity by colonialism. Indeed,
blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the willingness
to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule,
by order. Moten takes us there, saying of Fanon finally: Eventually,
I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other
world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this
place which shows up here and now, in the sovereigns space and time,
as absence, darkness, death, things which are not (as John Donne
would say).
The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has
been refused to you. Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call
this refusal the first right and it is a game-changing kind of refusal
in that it signals the refusal of the choices as offered. We can understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in Freedom
With Violence (2011) for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in terms of its institutionalization of intimacy,
when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check
yes or no and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the
yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered.
Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what
they term the call to order. And what would it mean, furthermore,
8
to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest,
we create dissonance and more importantly, we allow dissonance to
continue when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order,
we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we
have left the room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the
idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up
an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and
the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens
through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking
for silence, the torturer tightening the noose we refuse order as the
distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain
and truth.
These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harneys
world of the undercommons the undercommons is not a realm
where we rebel and we create critique; it is not a place where we take
arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them. The undercommons is a space and time which is always here. Our goal and
the we is always the right mode of address here is not to end the
troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as
the ones that must be opposed. Moten and Harney refuse the logic
that stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode
of stalling real politics. Moten and Harney tell us to listen to the noise
we make and to refuse the offers we receive to shape that noise into
music.
In the essay that many people already know best from this volume,
The University and the Undercommons, Moten and Harney come
closest to explaining their mission. Refusing to be for or against the
university and in fact marking the critical academic as the player who
holds the for and against logic in place, Moten and Harney lead us
to the Undercommons of the Enlightenment where subversive intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity: where the work
THE W I L D BEYOND
gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still
black, still strong. The subversive intellectual, we learn, is unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate and disloyal. The subversive intellectual
is neither trying to extend the university nor change the university,
the subversive intellectual is not toiling in misery and from this place
of misery articulating a general antagonism. In fact, the subversive
intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder; she
does not want a room of his or her own, she wants to be in the world,
in the world with others and making the world anew. Moten insists:
Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to
be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world
in the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer,
like Curtis Mayfield. But thats beyond me, and even beyond me and
Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the
joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery.
The mission then for the denizens of the undercommons is to recognize that when you seek to make things better, you are not just doing
it for the Other, you must also be doing it for yourself. While men
may think they are being sensitive by turning to feminism, while
white people may think they are being right on by opposing racism,
no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing this shit
down until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only
bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us. Gender hierarchies are
bad for men as well as women and they are really bad for the rest of us.
Racial hierarchies are not rational and ordered, they are chaotic and
nonsensical and must be opposed by precisely all those who benefit
in any way from them. Or, as Moten puts it: The coalition emerges
out of your recognition that its fucked up for you, in the same way
that weve already recognized that its fucked up for us. I dont need
your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too,
however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?
The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things
or die. All of us. We must all change the things that are fucked up and
change cannot come in the form that we think of as revolutionary
10
not as a masculinist surge or an armed confrontation. Revolution

will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we prepare now for what will come by entering into study.
Study, a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that
the institution requires of you, prepares us to be embedded in what
Harney calls the with and for and allows you to spend less time antagonized and antagonizing.
Like all world-making and all world-shattering encounters, when
you enter this book and learn how to be with and for, in coalition, and
on the way to the place we are already making, you will also feel fear,
trepidation, concern, and disorientation. The disorientation, Moten
and Harney will tell you is not just unfortunate, it is necessary because you will no longer be in one location moving forward to another, instead you will already be part of the movement of things and
on the way to this outlawed social life of nothing. The movement of
things can be felt and touched and exists in language and in fantasy,
it is flight, it is motion, it is fugitivity itself. Fugitivity is not only escape, exit as Paolo Virno might put it, or exodus in the terms offered by Hardt and Negri, fugitivity is being separate from settling. It
is a being in motion that has learned that organizations are obstacles
to organising ourselves (The Invisible Committee in The Coming Insurrection) and that there are spaces and modalities that exist separate
from the logical, logistical, the housed and the positioned. Moten
and Harney call this mode a being together in homelessness which
does not idealize homelessness nor merely metaphorize it. Homelessness is the state of dispossession that we seek and that we embrace:
Can this being together in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a
place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge
of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on
the other side of an unasked question? I think this is what Jay-Z and
Kanye West (another collaborative unit of study) call no church in
the wild.
For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, we must make common
cause with those desires and (non) positions that seem crazy and
THE W I L D BEYOND
11
unimaginable: we must, on behalf of this alignment, refuse that which

was first refused to us and in this refusal reshape desire, reorient hope,
reimagine possibility and do so separate from the fantasies nestled
into rights and respectability. Instead, our fantasies must come from
what Moten and Harney citing Frank B. Wilderson III call the
hold: And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering
again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and
join it. The hold here is the hold in the slave ship but it is also the
hold that we have on reality and fantasy, the hold they have on us and
the hold we decide to forego on the other, preferring instead to touch,
to be with, to love. If there is no church in the wild, if there is study
rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together
in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our
way to it. And it will not be there where the wild things are, it will be
a place where refuge is not necessary and you will find that you were
already in it all along.
Love,
J
REFERENCES
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (NY: Semiotexte, 2009).

Chandan Reddy, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the US State
(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011).
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (NY: Harper Collins, 1988).
12
POLITICS SURROUNDED
In Michael Parentis classic anti-imperial analysis of Hollywood movies, he points to the upside down way that the make-believe media
portrays colonial settlement. In films like Drums Along the Mohawk
(1939) or Shaka Zulu (1987), the settler is portrayed as surrounded by
natives, inverting, in Parentis view, the role of aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self-defense. Indeed, aggression and selfdefense are reversed in these movies, but the image of a surrounded
fort is not false. Instead, the false image is what emerges when a critique of militarised life is predicated on the forgetting of the life that
surrounds it. The fort really was surrounded, is besieged by what still
surrounds it, the common beyond and beneath before and before
enclosure. The surround antagonises the laager in its midst while disturbing that facts on the ground with some outlaw planning.
Our task is the self-defense of the surround in the face of repeated,
targeted dispossessions through the settlers armed incursion. And
while acquisitive violence occasions this self-defense, it is recourse to
self-possession in the face of dispossession (recourse, in other words,
to politics) that represents the real danger. Politics is an ongoing attack on the common the general and generative antagonism from
within the surround.
Consider the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, first theorists
of the revolution of the surround, the black before and before, the
P OLIT IC S S URROU ND ED
17
already and the forthcoming. Their twinned commitment to revolution and self-defense emerged from the recognition that the preservation of black social life is articulated in and with the violence of
innovation. This is not a contradiction if the new thing, always calling
for itself, already lives around and below the forts, the police stations,
the patrolled highways and the prison towers. The Panthers theorized
revolution without politics, which is to say revolution with neither a
subject nor a principle of decision. Against the law because they were
generating law, they practiced an ongoing planning to be possessed,
hopelessly and optimistically and incessantly indebted, given to unfinished, contrapuntal study of, and in, the common wealth, poverty
and the blackness of the surround.
The self-defense of revolution is confronted not only by the brutalities but also by the false image of enclosure. The hard materiality of
the unreal convinces us that we are surrounded, that we must take
possession of ourselves, correct ourselves, remain in the emergency,
on a permanent footing, settled, determined, protecting nothing but
an illusory right to what we do not have, which the settler takes for
and as the commons. But in the moment of right/s the commons is
already gone in the movement to and of the common that surrounds
it and its enclosure. Whats left is politics but even the politics of the
commons, of the resistance to enclosure, can only be a politics of ends,
a rectitude aimed at the regulatory end of the common. And even
when the election that was won turns out to have been lost, and the
bomb detonates and/or fails to detonate, the common perseveres as
if a kind of elsewhere, here, around, on the ground, surrounding hallucinogenic facts. Meanwhile, politics soldiers on, claiming to defend
what it has not enclosed, enclosing what it cannot defend but only
endanger.
The settler, having settled for politics, arms himself in the name of
civilisation while critique initiates the self-defense of those of us who
see hostility in the civil union of settlement and enclosure. We say,
rightly, if our critical eyes are sharp enough, that its evil and uncool to
have a place in the sun in the dirty thinness of this atmosphere; that
house the sheriff was building is in the heart of a fallout zone. And if
18
our eyes carry sharpness farther out we trail the police so we can put
them on trial. Having looked for politics in order to avoid it, we move
next to each other, so we can be beside ourselves, because we like the
nightlife which aint no good life. Critique lets us know that politics is
radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique. So it matters how
long we have to do it, how long we have to be exposed to the lethal
effects of its anti-social energy. Critique endangers the sociality it is
supposed to defend, not because it might turn inward to damage politics but because it would turn to politics and then turn outward, from
the fort to the surround, were it not for preservation, which is given in
celebration of what we defend, the sociopoetic force we wrap tightly
round us, since we are poor. Taking down our critique, our own positions, our fortifications, is self-defense alloyed with self-preservation.
That takedown comes in movement, as a shawl, the armor of flight.
We run looking for a weapon and keep running looking to drop it.
And we can drop it, because however armed, however hard, the enemy we face is also illusory.
Uncut devotion to the critique of this illusion makes us delusional.
In the trick of politics we are insufficient, scarce, waiting in pockets
of resistance, in stairwells, in alleys, in vain. The false image and its
critique threaten the common with democracy, which is only ever
to come, so that one day, which is only never to come, we will be
more than what we are. But we already are. Were already here, moving. Weve been around. Were more than politics, more than settled,
more than democratic. We surround democracys false image in order to unsettle it. Every time it tries to enclose us in a decision, were
undecided. Every time it tries to represent our will, were unwilling.
Every time it tries to take root, were gone (because were already here,
moving). We ask and we tell and we cast the spell that we are under,
which tells us what to do and how we shall be moved, here, where we
dance the war of apposition. Were in a trance thats under and around
us. We move through it and it moves with us, out beyond the settlements, out beyond the redevelopment, where black night is falling,
where we hate to be alone, back inside to sleep till morning, drink till
morning, plan till morning, as the common embrace, right inside, and
around, in the surround.
P OLIT IC S S URROU ND ED
19
In the clear, critical light of day, illusory administrators whisper of

our need for institutions, and all institutions are political, and all politics is correctional, so it seems we need correctional institutions in
the common, settling it, correcting us. But we wont stand corrected.
Moreover, incorrect as we are theres nothing wrong with us. We dont
want to be correct and we wont be corrected. Politics proposes to
make us better, but we were good already in the mutual debt that can
never be made good. We owe it to each other to falsify the institution,
to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination.
We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.
An abdication of political responsibility? OK. Whatever. Were just
anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We arent
responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics
looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of selfgovernance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature,
every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and
consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got
politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We cant be represented.
20
THE UNIVERSITY AND

THE UNDERCOMMONS
Philosophy thus traditionally practices a critique of

knowledge which is simultaneously a denegation of
knowledge (i.e., of the class struggle). Its position can
be described as an irony with regard to knowledge,
which it puts into question without ever touching its
foundations. The questioning of knowledge in philosophy always ends in its restoration: a movement great
philosophers consistently expose in each other.
Jacques Rancire, On the Theory of Ideology
Althussers Politics
I am a black man number one, because I am against
what they have done and are still doing to us; and
number two, I have something to say about the new
society to be built because I have
a tremendous part in that which they have sought
to discredit.
C. L. R. James, C. L. R. James: His Life
and Work
THE UNI V ER SI TY A ND THE UN DERC OMM ONS
25
THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY

IS A CRIMINAL ONE
To the university Ill steal, and there Ill steal, to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is
the only possible relationship to the American university today. This
may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the
university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United
States: 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.
Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United
States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold
Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek
Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you.
But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite
company, among the rational men. After all, 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 lowdown 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
26
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. But 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.
Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the
permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the
Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education,
before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened.
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 ones 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?
Perhaps the biopower of the enlightenment knows this, or perhaps it
is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even as
27
it depends on these moles, these refugees, it will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last
chance to be pragmatic why steal when one can have it all, they will
ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university,
into the Undercommons this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal
act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act.
In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a
matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualisation of research. To enter this space is to inhabit
the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive
enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern,
on the stroll of the stolen life, 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; its 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.
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 enlightenmenttype critique, but, somehow, labor always escapes.
28
The premature subjects of the undercommons took the call seriously,

or had to be serious about the call. They were not clear about planning, too mystical, too full of belief. 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.
Still, 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. While it is better that this police function
be in the hands of the few, it still raises labor as difference, labor as the
development of other labor, and therefore labor as a source of wealth.
And although the enlightenment-type critique, as we suggest below,
informs on, kisses the cheek of, any autonomous development as a result of this difference in labor, there is a break in the wall here, a shallow place in the river, a place to land under the rocks. The university
still needs this clandestine labor to prepare this undifferentiated labor
force, whose increasing specialisation and managerialist tendencies,
again contra the restorationists, represent precisely the successful integration of the division of labor with the universe of exchange that
commands restorationist loyalty.
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
29
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 film programs, visaexpired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college
sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say
of them? It will say they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary
charge. It is the charge against the more than professional. How do
those who exceed the profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize themselves, problematize
the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger? The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book.
The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.
THERE IS NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE AMERICAN

UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSIONALIZATION
But surely if one can write something on the surface of the university, if one can write for instance in the university about singularities
those events that refuse either the abstract or individual category of
the bourgeois subject one cannot say that there is no space in the
university itself ? Surely there is some space here for a theory, a conference, a book, a school of thought? Surely the university also makes
thought possible? Is not the purpose of the university as Universitas,
as liberal arts, to make the commons, make the public, make the nation of democratic citizenry? Is it not therefore important to protect
this Universitas, whatever its impurities, from professionalization in
the university? But we would ask what is already not possible in this
talk in the hallways, among the buildings, in rooms of the university
about possibility? How is the thought of the outside, as Gayatri Spivak means it, already not possible in this complaint?
30
The maroons know something about possibility. They are the condition of possibility of the production of knowledge in the university
the singularities against the writers of singularity, the writers who
write, publish, travel, and speak. It is not merely a matter of the secret
labor upon which such space is lifted, though of course such space is
lifted from collective labor and by it. It is rather that to be a critical
academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be
against the university is always to recognize it and be recognized by
it, and to institute the negligence of that internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must
insist, the basis of the professions. And this act of being against always already excludes the unrecognized modes of politics, the beyond
of politics already in motion, the discredited criminal para-organization, what Robin Kelley might refer to as the infrapolitical field (and
its music). It is not just the labor of the maroons but their prophetic
organization that is negated by the idea of intellectual space in an
organization called the university. This is why the negligence of the
critical academic is always at the same time an assertion of bourgeois
individualism.
Such negligence is the essence of professionalization where it turns
out professionalization is not the opposite of negligence but its
mode of politics in the United States. It takes the form of a choice
that excludes the prophetic organization of the undercommons to
be against, to put into question the knowledge object, let us say in
this case the university, not so much without touching its foundation, as without touching ones own condition of possibility, without admitting the Undercommons and being admitted to it. From
this, a general negligence of condition is the only coherent position.
Not so much an antifoundationalism or foundationalism, as both
are used against each other to avoid contact with the undercommons. This always-negligent act is what leads us to say there is no
distinction between the university in the United States and professionalization. There is no point in trying to hold out the university
against its professionalization. They are the same. Yet the maroons
refuse to refuse professionalization, that is, to be against the university. The university will not recognize this indecision, and thus
31
professionalization is shaped precisely by what it cannot acknowledge, its internal antagonism, its wayward labor, its surplus. Against
this wayward labor it sends the critical, sends its claim that what is
left beyond the critical is waste.
But in fact, critical education only attempts to perfect professional
education. The professions constitute themselves in an opposition to
the unregulated and the ignorant without acknowledging the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them
but within them. But if professional education ever slips in its labor,
ever reveals its condition of possibility to the professions it supports
and reconstitutes, critical education is there to pick it up, and to tell it,
never mind it was just a bad dream, the ravings, the drawings of the
mad. Because critical education is precisely there to tell professional
education to rethink its relationship to its opposite by which critical education means both itself and the unregulated, against which
professional education is deployed. In other words, critical education
arrives to support any faltering negligence, to be vigilant in its negligence, to be critically engaged in its negligence. It is more than an ally
of professional education, it is its attempted completion.
A professional education has become a critical education. But one
should not applaud this fact. It should be taken for what it is, not progress in the professional schools, not cohabitation with the Universitas, but counterinsurgency, the refounding terrorism of law, coming
for the discredited, coming for those who refuse to write off or write
up the undercommons.
The Universitas is always a state/State strategy. Perhaps its surprising to say professionalization that which reproduces the professions
is a state strategy. Certainly, critical academic professionals tend to
be regarded today as harmless intellectuals, malleable, perhaps capable of some modest intervention in the so-called public sphere. But
to see how this underestimates the presence of the state we can turn
to a bad reading of Derridas consideration of Hegels 1822 report to
the Prussian Minister of Education. Derrida notices the way that Hegel rivals the state in his ambition for education, wanting to put into
32
place a progressive pedagogy of philosophy designed to support Hegels worldview, to unfold as encyclopedic. This ambition both mirrors
the states ambition, because it, too, wants to control education and to
impose a worldview, and threatens it, because Hegels State exceeds
and thus localises the Prussian state, exposing its pretense to the encyclopedic. Derrida draws the following lesson from his reading: the
Universitas, as he generalizes the university (but specifies it, too, as
properly intellectual and not professional), always has the impulse of
State, or enlightenment, and the impulse of state, or its specific conditions of production and reproduction. Both have the ambition to
be, as Derrida says, onto- and auto-encyclopedic. It follows that to
be either for the Universitas or against it presents problems. To be
for the Universitas is to support this onto- and auto-encyclopedic
project of the State as enlightenment, or enlightenment as totality, to
use an old-fashioned word. To be too much against the Universitas,
however, creates the danger of specific elements in the state taking
steps to rid itself of the contradiction of the onto- and auto-encyclopedic project of the Universitas and replacing it with some other
form of social reproduction, the anti-enlightenment the position,
for instance, of New Labour in Britain and of the states of New York
and California with their teaching institutions. But a bad reading
of Derrida will also yield our question again: what is lost in this undecidability? What is the price of refusing to be either for the Universitas or for professionalization, to be critical of both, and who pays
that price? Who makes it possible to reach the aporia of this reading?
Who works in the premature excess of totality, in the not not-ready
of negligence?
The mode of professionalization that is the American university is
precisely dedicated to promoting this consensual choice: an antifoundational critique of the University or a foundational critique of the
university. Taken as choices, or hedged as bets, one tempered with
the other, they are nonetheless always negligent. Professionalization
is built on this choice. It rolls out into ethics and efficiency, responsibility and science, and numerous other choices, all built upon the
theft, the conquest, the negligence of the outcast mass intellectuality
of the undercommons.
33
It is therefore unwise to think of professionalization as a narrowing

and better to think of it as a circling, an encircling of war wagons
around the last camp of indigenous women and children. Think about
the way the American doctor or lawyer regard themselves as educated, enclosed in the circle of the states encyclopedia, though they may
know nothing of philosophy or history. What would be outside this
act of the conquest circle, what kind of ghostly labored world escapes
in the circling act, an act like a kind of broken phenomenology where
the brackets never come back off and what is experienced as knowledge is the absolute horizon of knowledge whose name is banned by
the banishment of the absolute. It is simply a horizon that does not
bother to make itself possible. No wonder that whatever their origins
or possibilities, it is theories of pragmatism in the United States and
critical realism in Britain that command the loyalty of critical intellectuals. Never having to confront the foundation, never having to
confront antifoundation out of faith in the unconfrontable foundation, critical intellectuals can float in the middle range. These loyalties
banish dialectics with its inconvenient interest in pushing the material and abstract, the table and its brain, as far as it can, unprofessional
behavior at its most obvious.
PROFESSIONALIZATION IS THE PRIVATIZATION OF

THE SOCIAL INDIVIDUAL THROUGH NEGLIGENCE
Surely professionalization brings with it the benefits of competence.

It may be the onto- and auto-encyclopedic circle of the university
particular to the American state, but is it not possible to recuperate
something from this knowledge for practical advances? Or, indeed, is
it not possible to embark on critical projects within its terrain, projects that would turn its competencies to more radical ends? No, we
would say, it is not. And saying so we prepare to part company with
American critical academics, to become unreliable, to be disloyal to
the public sphere, to be obstructive and shiftless, dumb with insolence
in the face of the call to critical thinking.
34
Let us, as an example, act disloyally to the field of public administration and especially in masters of public administration programs,
including related programs in public health, environmental management, nonprofit and arts management, and the large menu of human
services courses, certificates, diplomas, and degrees that underpin this
disciplinary cluster. It is difficult not to sense that these programs exist against themselves, that they despise themselves. (Although later
one can see that as with all professionalization, it is the underlying
negligence that unsettles the surface of labor power.) The average lecture, in the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at
NYU for instance, may be more antistatist, more skeptical of government, more modest in its social policy goals than the average lecture
in the avowedly neoclassical economics or new right political science
departments at that same university. It would not be much different
at Syracuse University, or a dozen other prominent public administration schools. One might say that skepticism is an important part
of higher education, but this particular skepticism is not founded on
close study of the object in question. In fact, there is no state theory in public administration programs in the United States. Instead,
the state is regarded as the proverbial devil we know. And whether
it is understood in public administration as a necessary evil, or as a
good that is nonetheless of limited usefulness and availability, it is always entirely knowable as an object. Therefore it is not so much that
these programs are set against themselves. It is rather that they are
set against some students, and particularly those who come to public
administration with a sense of what Derrida has called a duty beyond
duty, or a passion.
To be skeptical of what one already knows is of course an absurd position. If one is skeptical of an object then one is already in the position of not knowing that object, and if one claims to know the object,
one cannot also claim to be skeptical of that object, which amounts to
being skeptical of ones own claim. But this is the position of professionalization, and it is this position that confronts that student, however rare, who comes to public administration with a passion. Any
attempt at passion, at stepping out of this skepticism of the known
into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself,
35
must be suppressed by this professionalization. This is not merely a

matter of administering the world, but of administering away the
world (and with it prophecy). Any other disposition is not only unprofessional but incompetent, unethical, and irresponsible, bordering
on the criminal. Again the discipline of public administration is particularly, though not uniquely, instructive, both in its pedagogy and
in its scholarship, and offers the chance to be disloyal, to smash and
grab what it locks up.
Public administration holds to the idea both in the lecture hall and
the professional journal that its categories are knowable. The state, the
economy, and civil society may change size or shape, labor may enter
or exit, and ethical consideration may vary, but these objects are both
positivistic and normative, standing in discrete, spatial arrangement
each to the other. Professionalization begins by accepting these categories precisely so competence can be invoked, a competence that
at the same time guards its own foundation (like Michael Dukakis
riding around in a tank phantasmatically patrolling his empty neighborhood). This responsibility for the preservation of objects becomes
precisely that Weberian site-specific ethics that has the effect, as Theodor Adorno recognized, of naturalizing the production of capitalist
sites. To question them thus becomes not only incompetent and unethical but the enactment of a security breach.
For instance, if one wanted to explore the possibility that public
administration might best be defined as the labor of the relentless
privatization of capitalist society, one could gain a number of unprofessional insights. It would help explain the inadequacy of the three
major strains in public administration scholarship in the United
States. The public ethos strain represented by projects like refounding public administration, and the journal Administration and Society;
the public competence strain represented in the debate between public administration and the new public management, and the journal
Public Administration Review; and the critical strain represented by
PAT-Net, the Public Administration Theory Network, and its journal Administrative Theory & Praxis. If public administration is the
competence to confront the socialisation thrown up continuously by
36
capitalism and to take as much of that socialisation as possible and

reduce it either to something called the public or something called
the private, then immediately all three scholarly positions become
invalid. It is not possible to speak of a labor that is dedicated to the
reproduction of social dispossession as having an ethical dimension.
It is not possible to decide the efficiency or scope of such labor after
the fact of its expenditure in this operation by looking at it once it
has reproduced something called the public or something called the
private. And it is not possible to be critical and at the same time to
accept uncritically the foundation of public administrationist thought
in these spheres of the public and private, and to deny the labor that
goes on behind the backs of these categories, in the undercommons,
of, for instance, the republic of women who run Brooklyn.
But this is an unprofessional example. It does preserve the rules and
respect the terms of the debate, enter the speech community, by
knowing and dwelling in its (unapproachable) foundational objects.
It is also an incompetent example. It does not allow itself to be measured, applied, and improved, except to be found wanting. And it is an
unethical example. Suggesting the utter dominance of one category
over another is this not fascism or communism? Finally, it is a passionate example full of prophecy not proof, a bad example of a weak
argument making no attempt to defend itself, given over to some
kind of sacrifice of the professional community emanating from the
undercommons. Such is the negligent opinion of professional public
administration scholars.
What, further, is the connection then between this professionalization as the onto- and auto-encyclopedia of the American state and
the spread of professionalization beyond the university or perhaps the
spread of the university beyond the university, and with the colonies
of the undercommons? A certain riot into which professionalization
stumbles when the care of the social is confronted with its reaction,
enforced negligence a riot erupts and the professional looks absurd,
like a recruiting booth at a carnival, professional services, personal
professional services, turning pro to pay for university. It is at this riotous moment that professionalization shows its desperate business,
37
nothing less than to convert the social individual. Except perhaps,

something more, the ultimate goal of counterinsurgency everywhere:
to turn the insurgents into state agents.
CRITICAL ACADEMICS ARE THE PROFESSIONALS

PAR EXCELLENCE
The critical academic questions the university, questions the state,

questions art, politics, culture. But in the undercommons it is no
questions asked. It is unconditional the door swings open for
refuge even though it may let in police agents and destruction. The
questions are superfluous in the undercommons. If you dont know,
why ask? The only question left on the surface is what can it mean
to be critical when the professional defines himself or herself as one
who is critical of negligence, while negligence defines professionalization? Would it not mean that to be critical of the university would
make one the professional par excellence, more negligent than any
other? To distance oneself professionally through critique, is this
not the most active consent to privatize the social individual? The
undercommons might by contrast be understood as wary of critique,
weary of it, and at the same time dedicated to the collectivity of its
future, the collectivity that may come to be its future. The undercommons in some ways tries to escape from critique and its degradation as university-consciousness and self-consciousness about
university-consciousness, retreating, as Adrian Piper says, into the
external world.
This maroon community, if it exists, therefore also seeks to escape the fiat of the ends of man. The sovereigns army of academic antihumanism will pursue this negative community into
the undercommons, seeking to conscript it, needing to conscript it. But as seductive as this critique may be, as provoked
as it may be, in the undercommons they know it is not love.
Between the fiat of the ends and the ethics of new beginnings, the
undercommons abides, and some find comfort in this. Comfort for
38
the emigrants from conscription, not to be ready for humanity and

who must endure the return of humanity nonetheless, as it may be
endured by those who will or must endure it, as certainly those of
the undercommons endure it, always in the break, always the supplement of the general intellect and its source. When the critical academic who lives by fiat (of others) gets no answer, no commitment,
from the undercommons, well then certainly the conclusion will
come: they are not practical, not serious about change, not rigorous,
not productive.
Meanwhile, that critical academic in the university, in the circle of the
American state, questions the university. He claims to be critical of
the negligence of the university. But is he not the most accomplished
professional in his studied negligence? If the labor upon labor, the labor among labor of the unprofessionals in the university sparks revolt,
retreat, release, does the labor of the critical academic not involve a
mockery of this first labor, a performance that is finally in its lack of
concern for what it parodies, negligent? Does the questioning of the
critical academic not become a pacification? Or, to put it plainly, does
the critical academic not teach how to deny precisely what one produces with others, and is this not the lesson the professions return to
the university to learn again and again? Is the critical academic then
not dedicated to what Michael E. Brown termed the impoverishment, the immiseration, of societys cooperative prospects? This is the
professional course of action. This enlightenment-type charade is utterly negligent in its critique, a negligence that disavows the possibility of a thought of an outside, a nonplace called the undercommons
the nonplace that must be thought outside to be sensed inside, from
which the enlightenment-type charade has stolen everything for its
game.
But if the critical academic is merely a professional, why spend so
much time on him? Why not just steal his books one morning and
give them to deregistered students in a closed-down and beery student bar, where the seminar on burrowing and borrowing takes place.
Yet we must speak of these critical academics because negligence it
turns out is a major crime of state.
39
INCARCERATION IS THE PRIVATIZATION OF THE SOCIAL

INDIVIDUAL THROUGH WAR
If one were to insist, the opposite of professionalization is that fugitive impulse to rely on the undercommons for protection, to rely on
the honor, and to insist on the honor of the fugitive community; if
one were to insist, the opposite of professionalization is that criminal
impulse to steal from professions, from the university, with neither
apologies nor malice, to steal the enlightenment for others, to steal
oneself with a certain blue music, a certain tragic optimism, to steal
away with mass intellectuality; if one were to do this, would this not
be to place criminality and negligence against each other? Would it
not place professionalization, would it not place the university, against
honor? And what then could be said for criminality?
Perhaps then it needs to be said that the crack dealer, terrorist, and
political prisoner share a commitment to war, and society responds
in kind with wars on crime, terror, drugs, communism. But this war
on the commitment to war crusades as a war against the asocial, that
is, those who live without a concern for sociality. Yet it cannot be
such a thing. After all, it is professionalization itself that is devoted
to the asocial, the university itself that reproduces the knowledge of
how to neglect sociality in its very concern for what it calls asociality.
No, this war against the commitment to war responds to this commitment to war as the threat that it is not mere negligence or careless destruction but a commitment against the idea of society itself,
that is, against what Foucault called the conquest, the unspoken war
that founded, and with the force of law, refounds society. Not asocial
but against the social, this is the commitment to war, and this is what
disturbs and at the same time forms the undercommons against the
university.
Is this not the way to understand incarceration in the United States
today? And understanding it, can we not say that it is precisely the
fear that the criminal will rise to challenge the negligence that leads
to the need, in the context of the American state and its particularly
violent Universitas circle, to concentrate always on conquest denial?
40
THE UNIVERSITY IS THE SITE OF THE SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

OF CONQUEST DENIAL
Here one comes face to face with the roots of professional and critical commitment to negligence, to the depths of the impulse to deny
the thought of the internal outside among critical intellectuals, and
the necessity for professionals to question without question. Whatever else they do, critical intellectuals who have found space in the
university are always already performing the denial of the new society
when they deny the undercommons, when they find that space on the
surface of the university, and when they join the conquest denial by
improving that space. Before they criticise the aesthetic and the Aesthetic, the state and the State, history and History, they have already
practiced the operation of denying what makes these categories possible in the underlabor of their social being as critical academics.
The slogan on the Left, then, universities, not jails, marks a choice
that may not be possible. In other words, perhaps more universities
promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence. Perhaps
there is another relation between the University and the Prison beyond simple opposition or family resemblance that the undercommons reserves as the object and inhabitation of another abolitionism.
What might appear as the professionalization of the American university, our starting point, now might better be understood as a certain intensification of method in the Universitas, a tightening of the
circle. Professionalization cannot take over the American university
it is the critical approach of the university, its Universitas. And indeed, it appears now that this state with its peculiar violent hegemony
must deny what Foucault called in his 1975-76 lectures the race war.
War on the commitment to war breaks open the memory of the conquest. The new American studies should do this, too, if it is to be not
just a peoples history of the same country but a movement against the
possibility of a country, or any other; not just property justly distributed on the border but property unknown. And there are other spaces
situated between the Universitas and the undercommons, spaces that
41
are characterized precisely by not having space. Thus the fire aimed
at black studies by everyone from William Bennett to Henry Louis
Gates Jr., and the proliferation of Centers without affiliation to the
memory of the conquest, to its living guardianship, to the protection
of its honor, to the nights of labor, in the undercommons.
The university, then, is not the opposite of the prison, since they are
both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the
social individual. And indeed, under the circumstances, more universities and fewer prisons would, it has to be concluded, mean the
memory of the war was being further lost, and living unconquered,
conquered labor abandoned to its lowdown fate. Instead, the undercommons takes the prison as a secret about the conquest, but a secret,
as Sara Ahmed says, whose growing secrecy is its power, its ability to
keep a distance between it and its revelation, a secret that calls into
being the prophetic, a secret held in common, organized as secret,
calling into being the prophetic organization.
THE UNDERCOMMONS OF THE UNIVERSITY IS A NONPLACE

OF ABOLITION
Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabilities 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 anything 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 critical going on above it, the professional going on without it, the uncanny 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
42
feeling we are left with is that something else is there in the undercommons. It is the prophetic organization that works for the red and
black abolition!
43
BLACKNESS AND
G OV E R N A N C E
1.
There is an anoriginary drive whose fateful internal difference

(as opposed to fatal flaw) is that it brings regulation into existence,
into a history irregularly punctuated by transformations that drive
imposes upon regulation. Those transformative impositions show up
for us now as compensation and surplus: as the payment of a massive
and incalculable debt by the ones who not only never promised it;
and as the massive and incalculable range of labored living, the thing
realized in thingsthe universality of individual needs, capacities,
pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange
that Marx called wealth. The anoriginary drive and the insistences it
calls into being and moves through, that criminality that brings the
law online, the runaway anarchic ground of unpayable debt and untold wealth, the fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially poor but extravagant as opposed to frugal is blackness
which must be understood in its ontological difference from black
people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are
given (to) an understanding of it.
2.
Consider the following statement: Theres nothing wrong

with blackness: What if this were the primitive axiom of a new black
studies underived from the psycho-politico-pathology of populations
and its corollary theorisation of the state or of state racism; an axiom
BLAC K NES S AND GOVERNANC E
47
derived, as all such axioms are, from the runaway tongues and eloquent vulgarities encrypted in works and days that turn out to be of
the native or the slave only insofar as the fugitive is misrecognized,
and in bare lives that turn out to be bare only insofar as no attention
is paid to them, only insofar as such lives persist under the sign and
weight of a closed question?
3.
The black aesthetic turns on a dialectic of luxuriant withholding abundance and lack push technique over the edge of refusal so
that the trouble with beauty, which is the very animation and emanation of art, is always and everywhere troubled again and again. New
technique, new beauty. At the same time, the black aesthetic is not
about technique, is not a technique, though a fundamental element
of the terror-driven anaesthetic disavowal of our terribleness is the
eclectic sampling of techniques of black performativity in the interest
of the unproblematically dispossessive assertion of an internal difference, complexity or syntax which was always and everywhere so apparent that the assertion is a kind of self-indulgent, self-exculpatory
superfluity. Such assertion amounts to an attempt to refute claims
of blacknesss atomic simplicity that have never been serious enough
to refute (as they were made unfalsifiably, without evidence, by way
of unreasonable though wholly rationalized motivations, in bad faith
and dogmatic slumber).
4.
The dismissal of any possible claim regarding the essence or

even the being of blackness (in its irreducible performativity) becomes,
itself, the dismissal of blackness. Differential or differentiating techniques are made to account and stand in for an absence. Appeals to
internal difference are made in order to disallow instantiation. Abstraction of or from the referent is seen as tantamount to its nonexistence. The techniques of black performance in their manifest
difference from one another, in the full range of their transferability
and in their placement within a history that is structured but not
48
determined by imposition are understood to constitute the proof

that blackness is not or is lost or is loss. In this regard, abstraction and
performativity are meant to carry some of the same weight where the
refutation of claims about the authenticity or unity of blackness becomes the refutation of blackness as such. This appeal to technique is,
itself, a technique of governance. Meanwhile blackness means to render unanswerable the question of how to govern the thing that loses
and finds itself to be what it is not.
5.
Not in the interest either of some simple or complex opposition

of Technik and Eigentlichkeit, but rather in the improvisation through
their opposition moves the black aesthetic. What is the content of
(your) (black) technique? What is the essence of (your) (black) performance? An imperative is implied here: to pay attention to (black)
performances since it is left to those who pay such attention to retheorize essence, representation, abstraction, performance, being.
6.
Disavowal is a tendency inherent in the black radical tradition,

a kind of inevitability that emerges from the pathologically auto-critical force of a more genuine (anticipatory variant of ) enlightenment,
on the one hand, and the more basic which is not but nothing other
than to say base desires that animate the ideology of uplift. The logic
of correction is political instrumentalitys fugitive, though such fugitivity has a doubled, self-consumptive edge the pathological drive
of the pathologist; the end of an anti-essentialist anti-racism without
the necessary re-routing. Such instrumentality can very quickly turn
sour or get turned out in the interest of empire (artists against art in
the interest of gold, prefabricated knockoffs with readymade provenances of a certain New York intellectuality, a state of mind, a state
mind, a mind of the United States of Exception, of the unoriginal
gangsters of The American Century who stole modern art from the
ones who stole away as modern art, the moving, motley, sculptural,
animated, theatrical things).
49
7.
But blackness still has work to do: to discover the re-routing encoded in the work of art: in the anachoreographic reset of a shoulder,
in the quiet extremities that animate a range of social chromaticisms
and, especially, in the mutations that drive mute, labored, musicked
speech as it moves between an incapacity for reasoned or meaningful
self-generated utterance that is, on the one hand, supposed and, on
the other hand, imposed, and a critical predisposition to steal (away).
In those mutations that are always also a regendering or transgendering (as in Al Greens errant falsetto or Big Maybelles bass which
is not but nothing other than basic growl), and in between that
impropriety of speech that approaches animality and a tendency towards expropriation that approaches criminality, lies blackness, lies
the black thing that cuts the regulative, governant force of (the) understanding (and even of those understandings of blackness to which
black people are given since fugitivity escapes even the fugitive).
8.
The work of blackness is inseparable from the violence of blackness. Violence is where technique and beauty come back, though they
had never left. Consider technique as a kind of strain and consider the
technique that is embedded in and cuts techniques the (Fanonian as
apposed to Artaudian) cruelty. The internal difference of blackness is
a violent and cruel re-routing, by way and outside of critique, that is
predicated on the notion, which was given to me, at least, by Martin
Luther Kilson, Jr., that theres nothing wrong with us (precisely insofar
as there is something wrong, something off, something ungovernably, fugitively living in us that is constantly taken for the pathogen it
instantiates). This notion is manifest primarily in the long, slow motion the series of tragically pleasurable detours of the immediate
(of improvisation, which is something not but almost nothing other
than the spontaneous), a re-routing that turns away from a turning
on or to itself. The apposition of Fanonian and Artaudian cruelty is
an itinerancy that bridges life and blackness. Movement towards and
against death and its specific and general prematurities and a willingness to break the law one calls into existence constitute their very
50
relationality. But whats the relation between willingness and propensity? And whats the difference between flight and fatality? What are
the politics of being ready to die and what have they to do with the
scandal of enjoyment? What is premature death? What commerce
ensues between what Jacques Lacan identifies as mans specific prematurity of birth and what Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan identifies as the
specific (and irreducible threat of ) prematurity of death in blackness?
9.
Addressing these questions demands some attempt to discover

how blackness operates as the modality of lifes constant escape and
takes the form, the held and errant pattern, of flight. So weve been
trying to find out how the commons cuts common sense the necessarily failed administrative accounting of the incalculable that is the
object/ive of enlightenment self-control; and trying to get with that
undercommon sensuality, that radical occupied-elsewhere, that utopic
commonunderground of this dystopia, the funked-up here and now
of this anacentric particularity that we occupy and with which we are
preoccupied. It must be that in exploring the black market underside
of this constant economy of misrecognition, this misery cognition,
it will be possible to discover the informal, form-giving pleasures of
the content economy: because were in love with the way the beat of
this slum-like deictic circle flies off the handle; how event music, full
of color, blows up the event horizon; how the soundwaves from this
black hole carry flavorful pictures to touch; how the only way to get
with them is to sense them. This information can never be lost, only
irrevocably given in transit. We could never provide a whole bunch of
smooth transitions for this order of ditches and hidden spans. Theres
just this open seriality of terminals in off transcription. Some people
want to run things, other things want to run. If they ask you, tell them
we were flying. Knowledge of freedom is (in) the invention of escape,
stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break. This is held close
in the open song of the ones who are supposed to be silent.
51
10.
Whom do we mean when we say theres nothing wrong

with us? The fat ones. The ones who are out of all compass however
precisely they are located. The ones who are not conscious when they
listen to Les McCann. The Screamers who dont say much, insolently.
The churchgoers who value impropriety. The ones who manage to
evade self-management in the enclosure. The ones without interest
who bring the muted noise and mutant grammar of the new general
interest by refusing. The new general intellect extending the long, extra-genetic line of extra-moral obligation to disturb and evade intelligence. Our cousins. All our friends.
11.
The new general intellect is rich. And the new regulation

wants to give you back what you got, publicly, which is to say partly,
what can only be owed. This regulation is called governance. It is not
governmentality nor is it a governance of the soul. It must be described in its inscription in that criminality that doubles as debt, that
doubles the debt, that twists in inscription, that torques.
Nikolas Rose had it wrong, governance is not about government, and
Foucault might have got it right. But how could he know if he could
not find the priority of what he knew in North Africa? Governance
is the wit of the colonial official, the CIA woman, the NGO man.
Will we be in on the joke now that we all know governmentality
so well? We can all read it like a book. Nothing goes on behind the
backs of the new cynicism (except we need to remind Paolo Virno
of what always went on beyond cynicism, what was always without
home and shelter, was always outnumbered and outgunned). Will we
be in on the joke of religion, of white trash, or the joke of development, of Marxism? When Gayatri Spivak refuses to laugh, she is told
she wants to deny the workers their cappuccini. She holds out for reduction against the insider trading of domination, she holds out for a
reduction against the coercion that exploits what it cannot reduce to
an invitation to governance.
52
Still the invitations arrive through the smirk of governmentality

by all, or on the severe and serious brow of democratisation. Critique and policy. No wonder Rose thought governance was about
government. Worse still some say that governance is merely a management neologism, a piece of old-fashioned ideology. Others
think governance is simply a retreat to liberalism from the market
fundamentalism of neoliberalism.
But we want to reduce it up to a kind of state-thought, a form of
thought which for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari supported the
rendering and hording of social wealth. A thought that thinks away
the private before the public and the private, but not exactly before,
rather a step ahead. State-thought says they burnt down their own
neighbourhood. Not theirs, before theirs. But then nobody writes
about the state any more, because governance is too clever for that,
governance invites us to laugh at the state, to look back at it, its political immaturity in the face of governmentality by all, its dangerous behaviour, its laziness, its blackness. Which means really the exhaustion
of blackness thought by the state and the new way to steal from the
stolen, who refuse to give up the secret of thieving with their theft,
the secret of their thieving of their theft.
In the newest language of the social sciences we might say that governance is generated by a refusal among biopolitical populations. Or
perhaps by the self-activity of immaterial labor. But maybe we would
like to say it is provoked by the communicability of unmanageable racial
and sexual difference, insisting on a now unfathomable debt of wealth.
12.
Governance is a strategy for the privatization of social reproductive labor, a strategy provoked by this communicability, infected
by it, hosting and hostile. As Toni Negri says the new face of productive labor (intellectual, relational, linguistic, and affective, rather than
physical, individual, muscular, instrumental) does not understate but
accentuates the corporality and materiality of labor. But accumulating
collective cognitive and affective labor from these highly communicable
53
differences is not the same as accumulating biopolitical bodies that labor. Differences here matter not for order, but order matters for differences. The order that collects differences, the order that collects what
Marx called labor still objectifying itself, is the order of governance.
13.
But governance collects like a drill boring for samples.

Governance is a form of prospecting for this immaterial labor. Immaterial labor is opaque to state-thought until it becomes labor-power,
exchangeable potentiality. Immaterial labor could easily be mistaken
for life, which is why the biopolitical must take a new form. A form
that provokes life to give up this new potential. Corporate social responsibility is sincere. The invitation to governmentality is made by
way of transfer of responsibility, and immaterial labor is distinguished
from the vitality of life, from its vessel, by the taking up of responsibility, and life is now distinguished by its overt irresponsibility.
Since neither the state nor capital know where to find immaterial labor or how to distinguish it from life, governance is a kind of exploratory drilling with a responsibility bit. But this drilling is not really for
labor-power. It is for politics, or rather as Tiziana Terranova suggests,
it is for soft control, the cultivation of politics below the political. The
slogan of governance might be not where there is gas, there is oil, but
where there is politics there is labor, a kind of labor that might be
provoked, in the words of critique, or grown, in the words of policy,
into labor-power. But this labor as subjectivity is not politics to itself.
It must be politicised if it is to yield up its labor-power, or rather we
might say, politics is the refining process for immaterial labor. Politicisation is the work of state-thought, the work today, of capital. This is
the interest it bears. And interests are its lifeblood, its labor.
14.
Governance operates through the apparent auto-generation of these interests. Unlike previous regimes of sovereignty, there is
no predetermined interest (no nation, no constitution, no language)
54
to be realized collectively. Rather interests are solicited, offered up,

and accumulated. But this is a moment so close to life, to vitality, to
the body, so close to no interests, that the imposition of self-management becomes imperative. That imposition is governance.
15.
Governance then becomes the management of self-management. The generation of interests appears as wealth, plentitude, potential. It hides the waste of the raw immaterial and its reproduction in the
flurry of its conferences, consultations, and outreach. Indeed within the
firm, self-management is distinguished from obedience by the generation of new interests in quality, design, discipline, and communication.
But with the implosion of the time and space in the firm, with the dispersion and virtualisation of productivity, governance arrives to manage self-management, not from above, but from below. What comes up
then may not be value from below as Toni Negri calls it, but politics
from below, such that we have to be wary of the grassroots and suspicious of the community. When what emerges from below is interests,
when value from below becomes politics from below, self-management
has been realized, and governance has done its work.
16.
The Soviets used to say that the United States had free
speech but no one could hear you over the noise of the machines.
Today no one can hear you over the noise of talk. Maurizio Lazzarato says immaterial labor is loquacious and industrial labor was
mute. Governance populations are gregarious. Gregariousness is the
exchange form of immaterial labor-power, a labor-power summoned
by interests from a communicability without interest, a viral communicability, a beat.
The compulsion to tell us how you feel is the compulsion of labor, not
citizenship, exploitation not domination, and it is whiteness. Whiteness is why Lazzarato does not hear industrial labor. Whiteness is
nothing but a relationship to blackness as we have tried to describe
55
it here, but in particular a relationship to blackness in its relationship

to capital, which is to say the movement from muteness to dumb insolence which may be by way of bringing the noise. But the noise of
talk, white noise, the information-rich environment of the gregarious,
comes from subjectivities formed of objectified labor. These are the
subjectivities of interests, subjectivities of labor-power whose potentialities are already bounded by how they will be spent, and mute to
their blackness. This is the real muteness of industrial labor. And it is
the real gregariousness of immaterial labor. Governance is the extension of whiteness on a global scale.
17.
NGOs are the laboratories of governance. The premise of

the NGO is that all populations must become gregarious. And the
ethics of the NGOs, the dream of governance in general, is to go beyond representation as a form of sovereignty, to auto-generating representation, in the double sense. Those who can represent themselves
will also be those who re-present themselves as interests in one and
the same move, collapsing the distinction. The NGO is the research
and development arm of governance finding new ways to bring to
blackness what it is said to lack, the thing that cannot be brought,
interests. I dont want to speak for those people is the mantra of governance.
18.
Governance is the putting to work of democracy. When

representation becomes the obligation of all, when politics becomes the work of all, democracy is labored. No longer can democracy promise the return of something lost in the workplace,
but rather becomes itself an extension of the workplace. And even
democracy cannot contain governance, but is only a tool in its
box. Governance is always generated, always organic to any situation. Democracy sits badly in many situations, and must be
worked at, made to appear as natural as governance, made to
serve governance.
56
19.
Because governance is the annunciation of universal exchange. The exchange through communication of all institutional
forms, all forms of exchange value with each other is the enunciation of governance. The hospital talks to the prison which talks to the
university which talks to the NGO which talks to the corporation
through governance, and not just to each other but about each other.
Everybody knows everything about our biopolitics. This is the perfection of democracy under the general equivalent. It is also the annunciation of governance as the realisation of universal exchange on the
grounds of capitalism.
20.
Governance and criminality the condition of being without interests come to make each other possible. What would it
mean to struggle against governance, against that which can produce
struggle by germinating interests? When governance is understood as
the criminalisation of being without interests, as a regulation brought
into being by criminality, where criminality is that excess left from
criminalisation, a certain fragility emerges, a certain limit, an uncertain imposition by a greater drive, the mere utterance of whose name
has again become too black, too strong altogether.
57
DEBT AND STUDY
DEBT AND CREDIT
They say we have too much debt. We need better credit, more credit,
less spending. They offer us credit repair, credit counseling, microcredit, personal financial planning. They promise to match credit and
debt again, debt and credit. But our debts stay bad. We keep buying
another song, another round. It is not credit we seek nor even debt
but bad debt which is to say real debt, the debt that cannot be repaid,
the debt at a distance, the debt without creditor, the black debt, the
queer debt, the criminal debt. Excessive debt, incalculable debt, debt
for no reason, debt broken from credit, debt as its own principle.
Credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialisation.
So long as they pair in the monogamous violence of the home, the
pension, the government, or the university, debt can only feed credit,
debt can only desire credit. And credit can only expand by means of
debt. But debt is social and credit is asocial. Debt is mutual. Credit
runs only one way. But debt runs in every direction, scatters, escapes,
seeks refuge. The debtor seeks refuge among other debtors, acquires
debt from them, offers debt to them. The place of refuge is the place
to which you can only owe more and more because there is no creditor, no payment possible. This refuge, this place of bad debt, is what
we call the fugitive public. Running through the public and the private, the state and the economy, the fugitive public cannot be known
DEB T AND STU DY
61
by its bad debt but only by bad debtors. To creditors it is just a place
where something is wrong, though that something wrong the invaluable thing, the thing that has no value is desired. Creditors seek
to demolish that place, that project, in order to save the ones who live
there from themselves and their lives.
They research it, gather information on it, try to calculate it. They
want to save it. They want to break its concentration and put the fragments in the bank. But all of a sudden, the thing credit cannot know,
the fugitive thing for which it gets no credit, is inescapable.
Once you start to see bad debt, you start to see it everywhere, hear it
everywhere, feel it everywhere. This is the real crisis for credit, its real
crisis of accumulation. Now debt begins to accumulate without it.
Thats what makes it so bad. We saw it in a step yesterday, some hips,
a smile, the way a hand moved. We heard it in a break, a cut, a lilt, the
way the words leapt. We felt it in the way someone saves the best stuff
just to give it to you and then its gone, given, a debt. They dont want
nothing. You have got to accept it, you have got to accept that. Youre
in debt but you cant give credit because they wont hold it. Then the
phone rings. Its the creditors. Credit keeps track. Debt forgets. Youre
not home, youre not you, you moved without a forwarding address
called refuge.
The student is not home, out of time, out of place, without credit,
in bad debt. The student is a bad debtor threatened with credit. The
student runs from credit. Credit pursues the student, offering to
match credit for debt, until enough debts and enough credits have
piled up. But the student has a habit, a bad habit. She studies. She
studies but she does not learn. If she learned they could measure her
progress, establish her attributes, give her credit. But the student
keeps studying, keeps planning to study, keeps running to study,
keeps studying a plan, keeps elaborating a debt. The student does
not intend to pay.
62
DEBT AND FORGETTING
Debt cannot be forgiven, it can only be forgotten to be remembered

again. To forgive debt is to restore credit. It is restorative justice. Debt
can be abandoned for bad debt. It can be forgotten for bad debt, but it
cannot be forgiven. Only creditors can forgive, and only debtors, bad
debtors, can offer justice. Creditors forgive debt to offer credit, to offer the very source of the pain of debt, a pain for which there is only
one justice, bad debt, forgetting, remembering again, remembering it
cannot be paid, cannot be credited, stamped received. There will be a
jubilee when the North spends its own money, is left with nothing,
and spends again, on credit, on stolen cards, on a friend who knows
he will never see that again. There will be a jubilee when the Global
South does not get credit for discounted contributions to world civilisation and commerce but keeps its debts, changes them only for the
debts of others, a swap among those who never intend to pay, who
will never be allowed to pay, in a bar in Penang, in Port of Spain, in
Bandung, where your credit is no good.
Credit can be restored, restructured, rehabilitated, but debt forgiven
is always unjust, always unforgiven. Restored credit is restored justice
and restorative justice is always the renewed reign of credit, a reign
of terror, a hail of obligations to be met, measured, meted, endured.
Justice is only possible where debt never obliges, never demands, never equals credit, payment, payback. Justice is possible only where it
is never asked, in the refuge of bad debt, in the fugitive public of
strangers not communities, of undercommons not neighbourhoods,
among those who have been there all along from somewhere. To
seek justice through restoration is to return debt to the balance sheet
and the balance sheet never balances. It plunges toward risk, volatility, uncertainty, more credit chasing more debt, more debt shackled
to credit. To restore is not to conserve, again. There is no refuge in
restoration. Conservation is always new. It comes from the place we
stopped while we were on the run. Its made from the people who
took us in. Its the space they say is wrong, the practice they say needs
fixing, the homeless aneconomics of visiting.
DEB T AND STU DY
63
Fugitive publics do not need to be restored. They need to be conserved, which is to say moved, hidden, restarted with the same joke,
the same story, always elsewhere than where the long arm of the creditor seeks them, conserved from restoration, beyond justice, beyond
law, in bad country, in bad debt. They are planned when they are least
expected, planned when they dont follow the process, planned when
they escape policy, evade governance, forget themselves, remember themselves, have no need of being forgiven. They are not wrong
though they are not, finally communities; they are debtors at distance,
bad debtors, forgotten but never forgiven. Give credit where credit is
due, and render unto bad debtors only debt, only that mutuality that
tells you what you cant do. You cant pay me back, give me credit, get
free of me, and I cant let you go when youre gone. If you want to do
something, forget this debt, and remember it later.
Debt at a distance is forgotten, and remembered again. Think of autonomism, its debt at a distance to the black radical tradition. In
autonomia, in the militancy of post-workerism, there is no outside,
refusal takes place inside and makes its break, its flight, its exodus
from the inside. There is biopolitical production and there is empire.
There is even what Franco Bifo Berardi calls soul trouble. In other
words there is this debt at a distance to a global politics of blackness
emerging out of slavery and colonialism, a black radical politics, a
politics of debt without payment, without credit, without limit. This
debt was built in a struggle with empire before empire, where power
was not with institutions or governments alone, where any owner or
colonizer had the violent power of a ubiquitous state. This debt attached to those who through dumb insolence or nocturnal plans ran
away without leaving, left without getting out. This debt got shared
with anyone whose soul was sought for labor power, whose spirit was
borne with a price marking it. And it is still shared, never credited
and never abiding credit, a debt you play, a debt you walk, and debt
you love. And without credit this debt is infinitely complex. It does
not resolve in profit, seize assets, or balance in payment. The black
radical tradition is the movement that works through this debt. The
black radical tradition is debt work. It works in the bad debt of those
in bad debt. It works intimately and at a distance until autonomia, for
64
instance, remembers, and forgets. The black radical tradition is unconsolidated debt.
DEBT AND REFUGE
We went to the public hospital but it was private, but we went through
the door marked private to the nurses coffee room, and it was public.
We went to the public university but it was private, but we went to
the barber shop on campus and it was public. We went into the hospital, into the university, into the library, into the park. We were offered credit for our debt. We were granted citizenship. We were given
the credit of the state, the right to make private any public gone bad.
Good citizens can match credit and debt. They get credit for knowing
the difference, for knowing their place. Bad debt leads to bad publics, publics unmatched, unconsolidated, unprofitable. We were made
honorary citizens. We honored our debt to the nation. We rated the
service, scored the cleanliness, paid our fees.
Then we went to the barbershop and they gave us a Christmas breakfast, and we went to the coffee room and got coffee and red pills. We
were going to run but we didnt have to. They ran. They ran across
the state and across the economy, like a secret cut, a public outbreak,
a fugitive fold. They ran but they didnt go anywhere. They stayed so
we could stay. They saw our bad debt coming a mile off. They showed
us this was the public, the real public, the fugitive public, and where
to look for it. Look for it here where they say the state doesnt work.
Look for it here where they say there is something wrong with that
street. Look for it here where new policies are to be introduced. Look
for it here where tougher measures are to be taken, bells are to be
tightened, papers are to be served, neighborhoods are to be swept.
Anywhere bad debt elaborates itself. Anywhere you can stay, conserve
yourself, plan. A few minutes, a few days when you cannot hear them
say there is something wrong with you.
DEB T AND STU DY
65
DEBT AND GOVERNANCE
We hear them say, whats wrong with you is your bad debt. Youre
not working. You fail to pay your debt to society. You have no credit,
but that is to be expected. You have bad credit, and that is fine. But
bad debt is a problem. Debt seeking only other debt, detached from
creditors, fugitive from restructuring. Destructuring debt, now thats
wrong. But even still, whats wrong with you can be fixed. First we
give you a chance. Thats called governance, a chance to be interested,
and a shot even at being disinterested. Thats policy. Or we give you
policy, if you are still wrong, still bad. Bad debt is senseless, which is to
say it cannot be perceived by the senses of capital. But there is therapy
available. Governance wants to connect your debt again to the outside
world. You are on the spectrum, the capitalist spectrum of interests.
You are the wrong end. Your bad debt looks unconnected, autistic, in
its own world. But you can be developed. You can get credit after all.
The key is interests. Tell us what you want. Tell us what you want and
we can help you get it, on credit. We can lower the rate so you can
have interest. We can raise the rate so you will pay attention. But we
cant do it alone. Governance only works when you work, when you
tell us your interests, when you invest your interests again in debt and
credit. Governance is the therapy of your interests, and your interests
will bring your credit back. You will have an investment, even in debt.
And governance will gain new senses, new perceptions, new advances
into the world of bad debt, new victories in the war on those without
interests, those who will not speak for themselves, participate, identify their interests, invest, inform, demand credit.
Governance does not seek credit. It does not seek citizenship, although it is often understood to do so. Governance seeks debt, debt
that will seek credit. Governance cannot not know what might be
shared, what might be mutual, what might be common. Why award
credit, why award citizenship? Only debt is productive, only debt
makes credit possible, only debt lets credit rule. Productivity always
comes before rule, even if the students of governance do not understand this, and even if governance itself barely understands this. But
rule does come, and today it is called policy, the reign of precarity.
66
And who knows where it will hit you, some creditor walking by you.
You keep your eyes down but he makes policy anyway, smashes any
conservation you have built up, any bad debt you are smuggling. Your
life goes back to vicious chance, to arbitrary violence, a new credit
card, new car loan, torn from those who hid you, ripped from those
who shared bad debt with you. They dont hear from you again.
STUDY AND PLANNING
The student has no interests. The students interests must be identified,

declared, pursued, assessed, counseled, and credited. Debt produces
interests. The student will be indebted. The student will be interested. Interest the students! The student can be calculated by her debts,
can calculate her debts with her interests. She is in sight of credit,
in sight of graduation, in sight of being a creditor, of being invested
in education, a citizen. The student with interests can demand policies, can formulate policy, give herself credit, pursue bad debtors with
good policy, sound policy, evidence-based policy. The student with
credit can privatize her own university. The student can start her own
NGO, invite others to identify their interests, put them on the table,
join the global conversation, speak for themselves, get credit, manage debt. Governance is interest-bearing. Credit and debt. There is
no other definition of good governance, no other interest. The public
and private in harmony, in policy, in pursuit of bad debt, on the trail
of fugitive publics, chasing evidence of refuge. The student graduates.
But not all of them. Some still stay, committed to black study in the
universitys undercommon rooms. They study without an end, plan
without a pause, rebel without a policy, conserve without a patrimony.
They study in the university and the university forces them under,
relegates them to the state of those without interests, without credit,
without debt that bears interest, that earns credits. They never graduate. They just aint ready. Theyre building something in there, something down there. Mutual debt, debt unpayable, debt unbounded,
debt unconsolidated, debt to each other in a study group, to others in
DEB T AND STU DY
67
a nurses room, to others in a barber shop, to others in a squat, a dump,

a woods, a bed, an embrace.
And in the undercommons of the university they meet to elaborate
their debt without credit, their debt without count, without interest,
without repayment. Here they meet those others who dwell in a different compulsion, in the same debt, a distance, forgetting, remembered again but only after. These other ones carry bags of newspaper
clippings, or sit at the end of the bar, or stand at the stove cooking,
or sit on a box at the newsstand, or speak through bars, or speak in
tongues. These other ones have a passion to tell you what they have
found, and they are surprised you want to listen, even though theyve
been expecting you. Sometimes the story is not clear, or it starts in a
whisper. It goes around again but listen, it is funny again, every time.
This knowledge has been degraded, and the research rejected. They
cant get access to books, and no one will publish them. Policy has
concluded they are conspiratorial, heretical, criminal, amateur. Policy
says they cant handle debt and will never get credit. But if you listen
to them they will tell you: we will not handle credit, and we cannot
handle debt, debt flows through us, and theres no time to tell you
everything, so much bad debt, so much to forget and remember again.
But if we listen to them they will say: come lets plan something together. And thats what were going to do. Were telling all of you but
were not telling anyone else.
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PLANNING AND POLICY
Lets get together, get some land

Raise our food, like the man
Save our money like the mob
Put up the factory on the job
James Brown, Funky President
The hope that Cornel West wrote about in 1984 was not destined to
become what we call policy. The ones who practiced it, within and
against the grain of every imposed contingency, always had a plan.
In and out of the depths of Reaganism, against the backdrop and by
way of a resuscitory irruption into politics that Jesse Jackson could be
said to have both symbolised and quelled, something West indexes
as black radicalism, which hopes against hopein order to survive
in the deplorable present, asserts a metapolitical surrealism that sees
and sees through the evidence of mass incapacity, cutting the despair
it breeds. Exuberantly metacritical hope has always exceeded every
immediate circumstance in its incalculably varied everyday enactments of the fugitive art of social life. This art is practiced on and over
the edge of politics, beneath its ground, in animative and improvisatory decomposition of its inert body. It emerges as an ensemblic
stand, a kinetic set of positions, but also takes the form of embodied
PLANN ING AND POL IC Y
73
notation, study, score. Its encoded noise is hidden in plain sight from
the ones who refuse to see and hear even while placing under constant surveillance the thing whose repressive imitation they call for
and are. Now, more than a quarter century after Wests analysis, and
after an intervening iteration that had the nerve to call hope home
while serially disavowing it and helping to extend and prepare its almost total eclipse, the remains of American politics exudes hope once
again. Having seemingly lost its redoubled edge while settling in and
for the carceral techniques of the possible, having thereby unwittingly
become the privileged mode of expression of a kind of despair, hope
appears now simply to be a matter of policy. Policy, on the other hand,
now comes into view as no simple matter.
What we are calling policy is the new form command takes as command takes hold. It has been noted that with new uncertainties in
how and where surplus value is generated, and how and where it will
be generated next, economic mechanisms of compulsion have been
replaced by directly political forms. Of course for the colonial subject this change is no change as Fanon understood; and as Nahum
Chandler has pointed out, the problem of the color line is neither a
matter of a new nor an old primitive accumulation. The problem is
nothing other than the way the difference between labor and capital
remains prior to its remainder and is made abundant or into abundance. Moreover what we are calling policy comes into view now not
because management has failed in the workplace, where it proliferates
as never before, but because economic management cannot win the
battle that rages in the realm of social reproduction. Here management encounters forms of what we will call planning that resist its
every effort to impose a compulsion of scarcity through seizing the
means of social reproduction. In the undercommons of the social reproductive realm the means, which is to say the planners, are still part
of the plan. And the plan is to invent the means in a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any
hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night. This ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means
of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life, is what we
mean by planning; planning in the undercommons is not an activity,
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not fishing or dancing or teaching or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such
activities possible. It is these means that were eventually stolen by, in
having been willingly given up to, state socialism whose perversion of
planning was a crime second only to the deployment of policy in todays command economy.
Of course, the old forms of command have never gone away. The carceral state is still in effect and strategic wars on drugs, youth, violence,
and terrorism have even given way to logistic wars of drones and
credit. But horrible as such state command remains, it now deputises
and delegates its power to seemingly countless and utterly accountable and accounted for agents who perform contemporary internal
versions of the knightriders and settlers of earlier state violence deputisations. Or rather, since nightriders and settlers never really went
away, deputised for segregation, anti-communism, migration, and nuclear family heteropatriarchy in much of the Global North, what policy represents is a new weapon in the hands of these citizen-deputies.
Stand your ground because man was not born to run away, because
his color wont run, because again and again the settler must incant
the disavowal and target the epidermalised trace of his own desire for
refuge is only the most notorious iteration of this renewed dispersal
and deputisation of state violence, aimed into the fugitive, ambling
neighbourhoods of the undercommons.
Content neither with abandoning the realm of social reproduction
nor conditioning it for the workplace, the two always related moves
of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state, today capital wants in.
It has glimpsed the value of social reproduction and wants control of
the means, and no longer just by converting them into productivities
within formal industrialisations of care, food, education, sex, etc. but
by gaining access to and directly controlling the informal experiment
with the social reproduction of life itself. To do this, it has to break
up the ongoing plans of the undercommons. And here, with bitter
irony, is where the hope West could still speak of in 1984, which has
subsequently gone back underground, is conjured as an image whose
fecklessness is also its monstrosity. What we talk about, in its survival,
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as planning appears, in its waning, as hope, which has been deployed

against us in ever more perverted and reduced form by the ClintonObama axis for much of the last twenty years.
Planning is self-sufficiency at the social level, and it reproduces in
its experiment not just what it needs, life, but what it wants, life in
difference, in the play of the general antagonism. Planning starts
from the solidity, the continuity, and the rest of this social self-sufficiency, though it does not end there in having placed all these
complex motion. It begins, as this disruption of beginning, with
what we might call a militant preservation. And these are its means.
Policy deputises those willing to, those who come to want to, break
up these means as a way of controlling them, as once it was necessary to de-skill a worker in a factory by breaking up his means of
production. And it does this by diagnosing the planners. Policy says
that those who plan have something wrong with them, something
deeply ontologically wrong with them. This is the first thrust of
policy as dispersed, deputised command. Whats wrong with them?
They wont change. They wont embrace change. Theyve lost hope.
So say the policy deputies. They need to be given hope. They need
to see that change is the only option. By change what the policy
deputies mean is contingency, risk, flexibility, and adaptability to
the groundless ground of the hollow capitalist subject, in the realm
of automatic subjection that is capital. Policy is thus arrayed in the
exclusive and exclusionary uniform/ity of contingency as imposed
consensus, which both denies and at the very same time seeks to
destroy the ongoing plans, the fugitive initiations, the black operations, of the multitude.
As resistance from above, policy is a new class phenomenon because
the act of making policy for others, of pronouncing others as incorrect, is at the same time an audition for a post-fordist economy that
deputies believe rewards those who embrace change but which, in
reality, arrests them in contingency, flexibility, and that administered
precarity that imagines itself to be immune from what Judith Butler
might call our undercommon precariousness. This economy is powered by constant and automatic insistence upon the externalisation
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of risk, the placement at an externally imposed risk of all life, so that

work against risk can be harvested without end.
Policy is the form that opportunism takes in this environment, as the
embrace of the radically extra-economic, political character of command today. It is a demonstration of the will to contingency, the willingness to be made contingent and to make contingent all around you.
It is a demonstration designed to separate you from others, in the interest of a universality reduced to private property that is not yours, that
is the fiction of your own advantage. Opportunism sees no other way,
has no alternative, but separates itself by its own vision, its ability to see
the future of its own survival in this turmoil against those who cannot
imagine surviving in this turmoil (even if they must do so all the time).
The ones who survive the brutality of mere survival are said by policy
to lack vision, to be stuck in an essentialist way of life, and, in the most
extreme cases, to be without interests, on the one hand, and incapable
of disinterestedness, on the other. Every utterance of policy, no matter
its intent or content, is first and foremost a demonstration of ones ability to be close to the top in the hierarchy of the post-fordist economy.
As an operation from above designed to break up the means of social
reproduction and make them directly productive for capital, policy
must first deal with the fact that the multitude is already productive
for itself. This productive imagination is its genius, its impossible, and
nevertheless material, collective head. And this is a problem because
plans are afoot, black operations are in effect, and in the undercommons all the organizing is done. The multitude uses every quiet moment, every sundown, every moment of militant preservation, to plan
together, to launch, to compose (in) its surreal time. It is difficult for
policy to deny these plans directly, to ignore these operations, to pretend that those who stay in motion need to stop and get a vision, to
contend that base communities for escape need to believe in escape.
And if this is difficult for policy then so too is the next and crucial
step, instilling the value of radical contingency, instructing participation in change from above. Of course, some plans can be dismissed
by policy plans hatched darker than blue, on the criminal side, out
of love. But most will instead require another approach to command.
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So how does policy attempt to break this means, this militant preservation, all this planning? After the diagnosis that something is deeply
wrong with the planners comes the prescription: help and correction.
Policy will help. Policy will help with the plan and, even more, policy
will correct the planners. Policy will discover what is not yet theorized, what is not yet fully contingent, and most importantly what is
not yet legible. Policy is correction, forcing itself with mechanical violence upon the incorrect, the uncorrected, the ones who do not know
to seek their own correction. Policy distinguishes itself from planning
by distinguishing those who dwell in policy and fix things from those
who dwell in planning and must be fixed. This is the first rule of policy. It fixes others. In an extension of Michel Foucaults work we might
say of this first rule that its accompanying concern is with good government, with how to fix others in a position of equilibrium, even if
today this requires constant recalibration. But the objects of this constant adjustment provoke this attention because they just dont want
to govern, let alone be governed, at all. To break these means of planning, and so to determine them in recombined and privatized ways,
is the necessary goal and instrumentality of policy as command. It
wants to smash all forms of militant preservation, to break the movement of social rest in which the next plan always remains potential
with a dream of settled potency. This is now what change means,
what policy is for, as it invades the social reproductive realm where,
as Leopaldina Fortunati noted three decades ago, the struggle rages.
And because such policy emerges materially from post-fordist opportunism, policy must optimally allow for each policy deputy to take
advantage of his opportunity and fix others as others, as those who
have not just made an error in planning (or indeed an error by planning) but who are themselves in error. And from the perspective of
policy, of this post-fordist opportunism, there is indeed something
wrong with those who plan together. They are out of joint instead
of constantly positing their position in contingency, they seek solidity
in a mobile place from which to plan, some hold in which to imagine,
some love on which to count. Again, this is not just a political problem from the point of view of policy, but an ontological one. Brushing the ground beneath their feet, finding anti- and ante-contingent
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flight in putting their feet on the ground, differences escape into their
own outer depths signalling the problematic essentialism of those
who think and act like they are something in particular, although at
the same time that something is, from the perspective of policy, whatever they say it is, which is nothing in particular.
To get these planners out of this problem of essentialism, this choreographic fixity and repose, this security and base and bass-lined curve,
they must come to imagine they can be more, they can do more, they
can change, they can be changed. After all, they keep making plans
and plans fail as a matter of policy. Plans must fail because planners
must fail. Planners are static, essential, just surviving. They do not see
clearly. They hear things. They lack perspective. They fail to see the
complexity. To the deputies, planners have no vision, no real hope for
the future, just a plan here and now, an actually existing plan.
They need hope. They need vision. They need to have their sights lifted above the furtive plans and night launches of their despairing lives.
They need vision. Because from the perspective of policy it is too dark
in there, in the black heart of the undercommons, to see. You can hear
something, can feel something present at its own making. But the
deputies can bring hope, and hope can lift planners and their plans,
the means of social reproduction, above ground into the light, out of
the shadows, away from these dark senses. Deputies fix others, not in
an imposition upon but in the imposition of selves, as objects of control and command, whether one is posited as being capable of selfhood or not. Whether they lack consciousness or politics, utopianism
or common sense, hope has arrived.
Having been brought to light and into their own new vision, planners
will become participants. And participants will be taught to reject
essence for contingency, as if planning and improvisation, flexibility and fixity, and complexity and simplicity, were opposed within
an imposition there is no choice but to inhabit, as some exilic home
where policy sequesters its own imagination, so they can be safe from
one another. It is crucial that planners choose to participate. Policy
is a mass effort. Intellectuals will write articles in the newspapers,
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philosophers will hold conferences on new utopias, bloggers will debate, and politicians will compromise here, where change is policys
only constant. Participating in change is the second rule of policy.
Now hope is an orientation toward this participation in change, this
participation as change. This is the hope policy rolls like tear gas into
the undercommons. Policy not only tries to impose this hope, but also
enacts it. Those who dwell in policy do so not just by invoking contingency but by riding it, and so, in a sense, proving it. Those who dwell
in policy are prepared. They are legible to change, liable to change,
lendable to change. Policy is not so much a position as a disposition,
a disposition toward display. This is why policys chief manifestation
is governance.
Governance should not be confused with government or governmentality. Governance is most importantly a new form of expropriation.
It is the provocation of a certain kind of display, a display of interests
as disinterestedness, a display of convertibility, a display of legibility.
Governance is an instrumentalisation of policy, a set of protocols of
deputisation, where one simultaneously auctions and bids on oneself,
where the public and the private submit themselves to post-fordist
production. Governance is the harvesting of the means of social reproduction but it appears as the acts of will, and therefore as the death
drive, of the harvested. As capital cannot know directly the affect,
thought, sociality, and imagination that make up the undercommon
means of social reproduction, it must instead prospect for these in
order to extract and abstract them as labor. That prospecting, which
is the real bio-prospecting, seeks to break an integrity that has been
militantly preserved. Governance, the voluntary but dissociative offering up of interests, willing participation in the general privacy and
public privation, grants capital this knowledge, this wealth-making
capacity. Policy emits this offering, violently manifest as a moral provocation. The ones who would correct and the ones who would be corrected converge around this imperative of submission that is played
out constantly not only in that range of correctional facilities that
Foucault analysed the prisons, the hospitals, the asylums but also
in corporations, universities and NGOs. That convergence is given
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not only in the structures and affects of endless war but also in the
brutal processes and perpetual processing of peace.
Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for
the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone
is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions
and want to be taken seriously by serious people. In the mean time, policy must still pursue the quotidian sphere of open secret plans. Policy
posits curriculum against study, child development against play, human
capital against work. It posits having a voice against hearing voices, networked friending against contactual friendship. Policy posits the public
sphere, or the counter-public sphere, or the black public sphere, against
the illegal occupation of the illegitimately privatized.
Policy is not the one against the many, the cynical against the romantic, or the pragmatic against the principled. It is simply baseless vision, woven into settlers fabric. It is against all conservation, all rest,
all gathering, cooking, drinking and smoking if they lead to marronage. Policys vision is to break it up then fix it, move it along by fixing
it, manufacture ambition and give it to your children. Policys hope is
that there will be more policy, more participation, more change. But
there is also a danger in all this participation, a danger of crisis.
When those who plan together start to participate without first being fixed, this leads to crisis. Participation without fully entering the
blinding light of this dim enlightenment, without fully functioning
families and financial responsibility, without respect for the rule of
law, without distance and irony, without submission to the rule of expertise; participation that is too loud, too fat, too loving, too full, too
flowing, too dread; this leads to crisis. People are in crisis. Economies
are in crisis. We are facing an unprecedented crisis, a crisis of participation, a crisis of faith. Is there any hope? Yes, there is, say the deputies, if we can pull together, if we can share a vision of change. For
policy, any crisis in the productivity of radical contingency is a crisis
in participation, which is to say, a crisis provoked by the wrong participation of the wrong(ed). This is the third rule of policy.
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The crisis of the credit crunch caused by sub-prime debtors, the crisis
of race in the 2008 US elections produced by Reverend Wright and
Bernie Mac, the crisis in the Middle East produced by Hamas, the
crisis of obesity produced by unhealthy eaters, the crisis of the environment produced by Chinese and Indians, are all instances of incorrect and uncorrected participation. The constant materialisation of
planning in such participation is simply the inevitability of crisis, according to the deputised, who prescribe, as a corrective, hope for and
hopefulness in correction. They say that participation must be hopeful, must have vision, must embrace change; that participants must
be fashioned, in a general imposition of self-fashioning, as hopeful,
visionary, change agents. Celebrating their freedom on lockdown in
the enterprise zone, guarding that held contingency where the fashioning and correction of selves and others is always on automatic, the
participant is the deputys mirror image.
Deputies will lead the way toward concrete changes in the face of crisis. Be smart, they say. Believe in change. This is what we have been
waiting for. Stop criticising and offer solutions. Set up roadblocks and
offer workshops. Check IDs and give advice. Distinguish between
the desire to correct and the desire to plan with others. Ruthlessly
seek out and fearfully beware militant preservation, in an undercommons of means without ends, of love among things. Nows the time
to declare and, in so doing, correctly fashion yourself as the one who
is deputised to correct others. Nows the time, before its night again.
Before you start singing another half-illiterate fantasy. Before you resound that ongoing amplification of the bottom, the operations on
the edge of normal rhythms soft center. Before someone says lets
get together and get some land. But were not smart. We plan. We
plan to stay, to stick and move. We plan to be communist about communism, to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, to be absolute
about abolition, here, in that other, undercommon place, as that other,
undercommon thing, that we preserve by inhabiting. Policy cant see
it, policy cant read it, but its intelligible if you got a plan.
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FA N TA S Y I N T H E H O L D
LOGISTICS, OR THE SHIPPING
To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose,
to connect without interruption. Only a short time ago many of us
said work went through the subject to exploit our social capacities, to
wring more labor power from our labor. The soul descended onto the
shop floor as Franco Bifo Berardi wrote, or ascended like a virtuoso
speaker without a score as Paolo Virno suggested. More prosaically
we heard the entrepreneur, the artist, and the stakeholder all proposed
as new models of subjectivity conducive to channeling the general intellect. But today we are prompted to ask: why worry about the subject at all, why go through such beings to reach the general intellect?
And why limit production to subjects, who are after all such a small
part of the population, such a small history of mass intellectuality?
There have always been other ways to put bodies to work, even to
maintain the fixed capital of such bodies, as Christian Marrazi might
say. And anyway for capital the subject has become too cumbersome,
too slow, too prone to error, too controlling, to say nothing of too
rarified, too specialized a form of life. Yet it is not we who ask this
question. This is the automatic, insistent, driving question of the field
of logistics. Logistics wants to dispense with the subject altogether.
This is the dream of this newly dominant capitalist science. This is
FANTASY IN TH E HO L D
87
the drive of logistics and the algorithms that power that dream, the
same algorithmic research that Donald Rumsfeld was in fact quoting
in his ridiculed unknown unknowns speech, a droning speech that
announced the conception of a drone war. Because drones are not
un-manned to protect American pilots. They are un-manned because
they think too fast for American pilots.
Today this field of logistics is in hot pursuit of the general intellect in
its most concrete form, that is its potential form, its informality, when
any time and any space and any thing could happen, could be the
next form, the new abstraction. Logistics is no longer content with
diagrams or with flows, with calculations or with predictions. It wants
to live in the concrete itself in space at once, time at once, form at
once. We must ask where it got this ambition and how it could come
to imagine it could dwell in or so close to the concrete, the material
world in its informality, the thing before there is anything. How does
it proposes to dwell in nothing, and why?
The rise of logistics is rapid. Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science
and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research, logistics is everywhere. And beyond these classic capitalist sciences, its ascent is echoed ahistorically in the emerging fields
of object-oriented philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, where
the logistical conditions of knowledge production go unnoticed, but
not the effects. In military science the world has been turned upside
down. Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans
dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner
of logisitics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the
drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters.
And so too business innovation has become logistical and no longer
strategic. Business innovation of course does not come from business.
It is more often derived from military strategies of resistance to its
own armies, transferred free to business. Once this consisted in transferring innovations like the line and the formation and the chain of
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command from military science to the factory and the office, or transferring psychological and propaganda warfare to human relations and
marketing. These were free transfers of strategic innovation, requiring
managers to instantiate and maintain them. No more. As everything
from the internet to the shipping container testify, in keeping with
cold wars and wars on terror that lead always to the failure of strategy,
it is logistical free transfers that matter. Containerisation was failing
as a business innovation until the American government used containers to try to supply its troops in South East Asia with enough
weapons, booze, and drugs to keep them from killing their own officers, to keep a war going that could not be won strategically. Those
who dreamt of the internet, if not those who built it, were precisely
worried about the corruption of intelligence that the outbreak of democracy, as the Trilateral Commission thought of it, made possible
in the 1970s. ARPANET as an intelligence gathering network could
not have its head turned by sex or ideology, much less the powerful
combination of the two. It would not be confused by the outbreak of
democracy. And it assumed a never-ending accumulation of intelligence for a never-ending war that many would not want to fight.
To Toni Negris challenge, show me a business innovation and I will
show you a workers rebellion, we could add a pre-history the state
fearing its own workforce.
Containerisation itself stands for what should be called the first wave
of regulatory innovation as logistics, which moves in tandem with the
first wave of financialisation, the other response to these insurgencies by capitalism, aside from violent repression. Indeed logistics and
financialisation worked together in both phases of innovation, with,
roughly speaking, the first working on production across bodies, the
second renovating the subject of production. Financialisation is perhaps the better known of the two strategies of resistance to rebellion,
with a first phase selling off factories and state assets, and the second
selling of homes and banks, only in both instances to rent them back
on credit in a kind of global pawn-broking. This had the desired effect of reorganizing any subjects attached to such pawned objects into
walking, talking credit reports, who contract their own financial contagion, as Randy Martin and Angela Mitropoulos suggest in different
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ways, eventually producing an entity hooked into financial affects in a

way that make it more logistical object than strategic subject.
But all the while logistics itself had no lasting interest in this financialised subject or its reorganization. Logistics was after a bigger
prize, something that has always haunted it but became more palpable in the double wave that produced logistical populations when the
container came to rule the waves, the roads, and the rails with information, affect, meaning shot through flesh as through other objects,
again on a scale and in a form impossible to ignore. The prize seemed
almost within reach. Of course this fantasy of what Marx called the
automatic subject, this fantasy that capital could exist without labor,
is nothing new but is continually explored at the nexus of finance
capital, logistics and the terror of state-sponsored personhood which
is instantiated in various pageants of conferral and withholding. It is
marked today by the term human capital. Human capital would appear to be a strategic category, involved as Michel Feher suggests,
with a strategy of investment in and speculation on the self. But as
Marina Vishmidt reminds us, the automatic subject of capital that
human capital seeks to emulate, is a hollow subject, and a subject dedicated to hollowing itself precisely by expelling the negativity of labor,
by exiling the one who, in being less and more than one, are his figure, his other, his double, the bearers of a generativity without reserve.
Now, human capital is the automatic subjects substitute, carrying out
its engagement with the skills of daily financialisation and logistics,
both of which act on it as if it were an impediment to movement
and not a vehicle in motion. Human capital, in other words, departs
from the strategic subject of neoliberalism, generalizing through selfinfliction the departure that subject ritually imposes upon its exiled
interiors and making of itself a porous object that still talks like a subject, as if in some burlesque enactment of philosophys dream of the
ultimate reconciliation. It is for this reason that human capital cannot be strategized, or indeed managed, in any traditional sense, and
therefore in turn we can see the hollowing out of the field of business
strategy, including the decline of the MBA degree, and the rise of
leadership studies. Leadership studies weighs down the bookstore
shelves and the business student today but leadership cannot manage.
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It is the evacuation of management by strategy in a desperate attempt

to maintain control of private gain from a form of social production
under capital that is becoming automatic and therefore not so much
unmanageable as auto-managed. What is opened up here is a course
in and for a general logistics. To read logistics is to read of the stated
desire to be rid of what logistics calls the controlling agent, to free
the flow of goods from human time and human error. The greedy algorithm of the traveling salesman still requires strategic intervention
because it cannot evolve as new problems emerge, unless one counts
as evolution the capacity to destroy, or the incapacity that allows the
self-destruction, of the contained. It cannot solve, for instance, the
Canadian traveller problem, where roads disappear under snow producing new problems for the most efficient movement of the trucks.
Here is where the evolutionary and genetic algorithms enter often in
more Lamarckian than Darwinian clothing. But one thing is agreed.
Strategy is now blocking the road as surely as snow blocks the road
to Sudbury. For logistics, the subject of whatever, as Michael Hardt
calls it, must yield to the object of whatever. Logistical populations
will be created to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to
move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to connect without interruption, or they will be dismantled
and disabled as bodies in the same way they are assembled, by what
Patricia Clough calls population racism. From here, logistics is master
of all that it surveys.
But what might look like smooth sailing, flat waters, flat being, is not
so undisturbed. Uncertainty surrounds the holding of things and in
a manner that Luciana Parisi describes, in which the algorithm generates it own critique, logistics discovers too late that the sea has no
back door. And it is not just the class of greedoids, the possessive individuals of the algorithmic world, but these new genetic and evolutionary algorithms too, whose very premise is that there must be
something more, something in what they have grasped that remains
beyond their reach. These algorithms are defined by what they are not
yet, and what they can never fully become, despite the dreams of their
materialist eugenicists. Every attempt by logistics to dispel strategy,
to banish human time, to connect without going through the subject,
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to subject without handling things, resists something that was already

resisting it, namely the resistance that founds modern logistics. Concerned to move objects and move through objects, logistics removes
itself from the informality that founds its objects and itself. There is
some/thing logistics is always after.
LOGISTICALITY, OR THE SHIPPED
Where did logistics get this ambition to connect bodies, objects, affects, information, without subjects, without the formality of subjects,
as if it could reign sovereign over the informal, the concrete and generative indeterminacy of material life? The truth is, modern logistics
was born that way. Or more precisely it was born in resistance to, given as the acquisition of, this ambition, this desire and this practice of
the informal. Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in
the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave. Breaking
from the plundering accumulation of armies to the primitive accumulation of capital, modern logistics was marked, branded, seared with
the transportation of the commodity labor that was not, and ever after would not be, no matter who was in that hold or containerized
in that ship. From the motley crew who followed in the red wakes of
these slave ships, to the prisoners shipped to the settler colonies, to
the mass migrations of industrialisation in the Americas, to the indentured slaves from India, China, and Java, to the trucks and boats
leading north across the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande, to oneway tickets from the Philippines to the Gulf States or Bangladesh to
Singapore, logistics was always the transport of slavery, not free labor.
Logistics remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in the
movement of things. And the transport of things remains, as ever, logistics unrealizable ambition.
Logistics could not contain what it had relegated to the hold. It cannot. Robert F. Harney, the historian of migration from the bottomup, used to say once you crossed the Atlantic, you were never on the
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right side again. B Jenkins, a migrant sent by history, used to turn a

broken circle in the basement floor to clear the air when welcoming
her students, her panthers. No standpoint was enough, no standpoint
was right. She and their mothers and fathers tilled the same fields,
burned up the same desert roads, preoccupied the same merely culinary union. Harney kept in mind the mass migrations from Southern
and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th century, beside themselves
in the annunciation of logistical modernity. No standpoint. If commodity labor would come to have a standpoint, the standpoint from
which ones own abolition became necessary, then what of those who
had already been abolished and remained? If the proletariat was located at a point in the circuits of capital, a point in the production
process from which it had a peculiar view of capitalist totality, what
of those who were located at every point, which is to say at no point,
in the production process? What of those who were not just labor but
commodity, not just in production but in circulation, not just in circulation but in distribution as property, not just property but property
that reproduced and realized itself ? The standpoint of no standpoint,
everywhere and nowhere, of never and to come, of thing and nothing.
If the proletariat was thought capable of blowing the foundations sky
high, what of the shipped, what of the containerized? What could
such flesh do? Logistics somehow knows that it is not true that we
do not yet know what flesh can do. There is a social capacity to instantiate again and again the exhaustion of the standpoint as undercommon ground that logistics knows as unknowable, calculates as an
absence that it cannot have but always longs for, that it cannot, but
longs, to be or, at least, to be around, to surround. Logisitics senses
this capacity as never before this historical insurgent legacy, this
historicity, this logisticality, of the shipped.
Modernity is sutured by this hold. This movement of things, unformed
objects, deformed subjects, nothing yet and already. This movement of
nothing is not just the origin of modern logistics, but the annunciation of modernity itself, and not just the annunciation of modernity
itself but the insurgent prophesy that all of modernity will have at
its heart, in its own hold, this movement of things, this interdicted,
outlawed social life of nothing. The work of Sandro Mazzadra and
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Brett Neilson on borders for instance reminds us that the proliferation of borders between states, within states, between people, within
people is a proliferation of states of statelessness. These borders grope
their way toward the movement of things, bang on containers, kick
at hostels, harass camps, shout after fugitives, seeking all the time to
harness this movement of things, this logisticality. But this fails to
happen, borders fail to cohere, because the movement of things will
not cohere. This logisticality will not cohere. It is, as Sara Ahmed says,
queer disorientation, the absence of coherence, but not of things, in
the moving presence of absolutely nothing. As Frank B. Wilderson
III teaches us, the improvisational imperative is, therefore, to stay in
the hold of the ship, despite my fantasies of flight.
But this is to say that there are flights of fantasy in the hold of the
ship. The ordinary fugue and fugitive run of the language lab, black
phonographys brutally experimental venue. Paraontological totality
is in the making. Present and unmade in presence, blackness is an instrument in the making. Quasi una fantasia in its paralegal swerve, its
mad-worked braid, the imagination produces nothing but exsense in
the hold. Do you remember the days of slavery? Nathaniel Mackey
rightly says The world was ever after/elsewhere,/no/way where we
were/was there. No way where we are is here. Where we were, where
we are, is what we meant by mu, which Wilderson would rightly call
the void of our subjectivity. And so it is we remain in the hold, in
the break, as if entering again and again the broken world, to trace the
visionary company and join it. This contrapuntal island, where we are
marooned in search of marronage, where we linger in stateless emergency, in our our lysed cell and held dislocation, our blown standpoint
and lyred chapel, in (the) study of our sea-born variance, sent by its
pre-history into arrivance without arrival, as a poetics of lore, of abnormal articulation, where the relation between joint and flesh is the
folded distance of a musical moment that is emphatically, palpably
imperceptible and, therefore, difficult to describe. Having defied degradation the moment becomes a theory of the moment, of the feeling of a presence that is ungraspable in the way that it touches. This
musical moment the moment of advent, of nativity in all its terrible
beauty, in the alienation that is always already born in and as parousia
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is a precise and rigorous description/theory of the social life of the

shipped, the terror of enjoyment in its endlessly redoubled folds. If
you take up the hopelessly imprecise tools of standard navigation,
the deathly reckoning of difference engines, maritime clocks and tables of damned assurance, you might stumble upon such a moment
about two and a half minutes into Mutron, a duet by Ed Blackwell
and Don Cherry recorded in 1982. Youll know the moment by how
it requires you to think the relation between fantasy and nothingness: what is mistaken for silence is, all of a sudden, transubstantial.
The brutal interplay of advent and chamber demands the continual
instigation of flown, recursive imagining; to do so is to inhabit an architecture and its acoustic, but to inhabit as if in an approach from
outside; not only to reside in this unlivability but also to discover and
enter it. Mackey, in the preface to his unbearably beautiful Splay Anthem, outlining the provenance and relationship between the books
serial halves (Each was given its impetus by a piece of recorded music from which it takes its title, the Dogon Song of the Andoumboulou, in one case, Don Cherrys [and Ed Blackwells] Mu First Part
and Mu Second Part in the other) speaks of mu in relation to a circling or spiraling or ringing, this roundness or rondo linking beginning and end, and to the wailing that accompanies entrance into and
expulsion from sociality. But his speaking makes you wonder if music,
which is not only music, is mobilized in the service of an eccentricity,
a centrifugal force whose intimation Mackey also approaches, marking socialitys ecstatic existence beyond beginning and end, ends and
means, out where one becomes interested in things, in a certain relationship between thingliness and nothingness and blackness that
plays itself out in unmapped, unmappable, undercommon consent
and consensuality. Blackness is the site where absolute nothingness
and the world of things converge. Blackness is fantasy in the hold and
Wildersons access to it is in that he is one who has nothing and is,
therefore, both more and less than one. He is the shipped. We are the
shipped, if we choose to be, if we elect to pay an unbearable cost that
is inseparable from an incalculable benefit.
How would you recognize the antiphonal accompaniment to gratuitous violence the sound that can be heard as if it were in response to
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that violence, the sound that must be heard as that to which such violence responds? The answer, the unmasking, is mu not simply because
in its imposed opposition to something, nothing is understood simply
to veil, as if some epidermal livery, (some higher) being and is therefore relative as opposed to what Nishida Kitaro, would call absolute;
but because nothing (this paraontological interplay of blackness and
nothingness, this aesthetic sociality of the shipped, this logisticality)
remains unexplored, because we dont know what we mean by it, because it is neither a category for ontology nor for socio-phenomenological analysis. What would it be for this to be understood in its own
improper refusal of terms, from the exhausted standpoint that is not
and that is not its own? We attach, Fanon says, a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider
the study of language essential for providing us with one element in
understanding the black mans dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other. He
says, moreover, that [t]he black man possesses two dimensions: one
with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. But this is not
simply a question of perspective, since what we speak of is this radical being beside itself of blackness, its off to the side, off on the inside,
out from the outside imposition. The standpoint, the home territory,
chez lui Markmans off the mark, blind but insightful, mistranslation
is illuminative, among his own, signifying a relationality that displaces
the already displaced impossibility of home. Can this being together
in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused,
this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which emerges
neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? Not simply to be among his own; but to be among
his own in dispossession, to be among the ones who cannot own, the
ones who have nothing and who, in having nothing, have everything.
This is the sound of an unasked question. A choir versus acquisition,
chant and moan and Sprechgesang, babel and babble and gobbledygook, relaxin by a brook or creek in Camarillo, singing to it, singing
of it, singing with it, for the bird of the crooked beak, the generative
hook of le petit negre, the little niggers comic spear, the cosmic crook
of language, the burnin and lootin of pidgin, Birds talk, Bobs talk,
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bard talk, bar talk, baby talk, B talk, preparing the minds of the little
negro steelworkers for meditation. Come on, get to this hard, serial
information, this brutally beautiful medley of carceral intrication, this
patterning of holds and what is held in the holds phonic vicinity. That
spiraling Mackey speaks of suffers brokenness and crumpling, the
imposition of irrationally rationalized angles, compartments bearing
nothing but breath and battery in hunted, haunted, ungendered intimacy. Is there a kind of propulsion, through compulsion, against
the mastery of ones own speed, that ruptures both recursion and advance? What is the sound of this patterning? What does such apposition look like? What remains of eccentricity after the relay between
loss and restoration has its say or song? In the absence of amenity, in
exhaustion, theres a society of friends where everything can fold in
dance to black, in being held and flown, in what was never silence.
Cant you hear them whisper one anothers touch?
HAPTICALITY, OR LOVE
Never being on the right side of the Atlantic is an unsettled feeling,

the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others. Its a feeling, if you
ride with it, that produces a certain distance from the settled, from
those who determine themselves in space and time, who locate themselves in a determined history. To have been shipped is to have been
moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with
the ones who consent not to be one. Outlawed, interdicted, intimate
things of the hold, containerized contagion, logistics externalises logic itself to reach you, but this is not enough to get at the social logics,
the social poesis, running through logisticality.
Because while certain abilities to connect, to translate, to adapt,
to travel were forged in the experiment of hold, they were not the
point. As David Rudder sings, how we vote is not how we party. The
holds terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to
create a new feel in the undercommons. Previously, this kind of feel
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was only an exception, an aberration, a shaman, a witch, a seer, a poet

amongst others, who felt through others, through other things. Previously, except in these instances, feeling was mine or it was ours. But in
the hold, in the undercommons of a new feel, another kind of feeling
became common. This form of feeling was not collective, not given to
decision, not adhering or reattaching to settlement, nation, state, territory or historical story; nor was it repossessed by the group, which
could not now feel as one, reunified in time and space. No, when
Black Shadow sings are you feelin the feelin? he is asking about
something else. He is asking about a way of feeling through others, a
feel for feeling others feeling you. This is modernitys insurgent feel,
its inherited caress, its skin talk, tongue touch, breath speech, hand
laugh. This is the feel that no individual can stand, and no state abide.
This is the feel we might call hapticality.
Hapticality, the touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here. Hapticality, the capacity
to feel though others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel
them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least
not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of
land, a totem. Or perhaps we could say these are now recomposed in
the wake of the shipped. To feel others is unmediated, immediately
social, amongst us, our thing, and even when we recompose religion,
it comes from us, and even when we recompose race, we do it as
race women and men. Refused these things, we first refuse them, in
the contained, amongst the contained, lying together in the ship, the
boxcar, the prison, the hostel. Skin, against epidermalisation, senses
touching. Thrown together touching each other we were denied all
sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced
to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no
space, though refused sentiment, history and home, we feel (for) each
other.
A feel, a sentiment with its own interiority, there on skin, soul no
longer inside but there for all to hear, for all to move. Soul music
is a medium of this interiority on the skin, its regret the lament for
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broken hapticality, its self-regulatory powers the invitation to build

sentimentality together again, feeling each other again, how we party.
This is our hapticality, our love. This is love for the shipped, love as
the shipped.
Theres a touch, a feel you want more of, which releases you. The closest Marx ever got to the general antagonism was when he said from
each according to his ability, to each according to his need but we
have read this as the possession of ability and the possession of need.
What if we thought of the experiment of the hold as the absolute
fluidity, the informality, of this condition of need and ability? What
if ability and need were in constant play and we found someone who
dispossessed us so that this movement was our inheritance. Your love
makes me strong, your love makes me weak. What if the between
the two, the lost desire, the articulation, was this rhythm, this inherited experiment of the shipped in the churning waters of flesh and
expression that could grasp by letting go ability and need in constant
recombination. If he moves me, sends me, sets me adrift in this way,
amongst us in the undercommons. So long as she does this, she does
not have to be.
Who knows where Marx got this inheritance of the hold, from Aristotle denying his slave world or Kant talking to sailors or Hegels
weird auto-eroticism or just being ugly and dark and fugitive. Like
Zimmy says, precious angel, you know both our forefathers were
slaves, which is not something to be ironic about. This feel is the hold
that lets go (lets go) again and again to dispossess us of ability, fill us
with need, give us ability to fill need, this feel. We hear the godfather
and the old mole calling us to become, in whatever years we have,
philosophers of the feel.
Love,
S/F
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THE GENERAL ANTAGONISM:

AN INTERVIEW WITH
STEVPHEN SHUKAITIS
STEVPHEN: Id like to start our conversation in a somewhat playful, metaphoric manner, with an idea from Selma James that I recently came across. Selma was describing the advice that CLR James
gave her for writing: that she should keep a shoebox, collecting in it
various ideas and thoughts. When the shoebox was getting filled she
would have all that was needed for writing. If you were to introduce
someone to your collaborative work through the form of a conceptual
shoebox, what would be in it? What would be in there?
FRED: The thing I felt when I read that was, if I were Selma James, I
would ask to get clarification on what he meant. The one thing I do
thats similar is that I carry around little notebooks and I jot things
down all the time. If I dont have my notebooks, I write notes on pieces of paper and stick them in my pocket. Whats funny is that I dont
think of it as a shoebox, because 95% of the time I write stuff down
and thats the end of it. Its more that I have a thought and I write it
down and then I never think about it again. Seldom do I even transcribe into the computer.
The one thing that I was interested in about the question, it strikes
me, especially in thinking about working collaboratively, with Stefano, you sort of dont need a shoebox in a way, because I always feel
like, when Im asleep, hes up thinking about something. And also,
working so closely with my wife, Laura, its not as much having a
TH E G ENE RAL ANTAGONI S M
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shoebox in which Im writing down my thoughts as that Im having a long conversation with a few people. What Im trying to say is
that the content of the box is less important for me than the ongoing
process of talking with somebody else, and the ideas that emerge. So,
I dont feel like there are five or six ideas that Im always working on
and thinking about that I can pull out of my box. Its more like there
are five or six people that Im always thinking with. If you ask me, I
couldnt tell you, oh there are these four or five ideas that Im constantly going back to that I have to have in my box. It doesnt feel that
way. It feels more like there are one or two things that Ive been talking about with people forever. And the conversation develops over the
course of time, and you think of new things and you say new things.
But, the ideas that are stuck in my head are usually things that somebody else said.
STEFANO: Its hard for me to answer because Im a person who
doesnt make notes on what I read, because I just know Im not going
to go back to them. Im not a collector in that way. But, I also feel like
theres something there; its not necessarily a box, but perhaps as Fred
says, a series of conversations. Whats also interesting to me is that
the conversations themselves can be discarded, forgotten, but theres
something that goes on beyond the conversations which turns out to
be the actual project. Its the same thing I think in the building of any
kind of partnership or collectivity: its not the thing that you do; its
the thing that happens while youre doing it that becomes important,
and the work itself is some combination of the two modes of being.
Or to put it in the way of the shipped, its not the box thats important
but the experiment among the un/contained.
STEVPHEN: Perhaps the shoebox metaphor was more useful for Selma
in the sense that she was more cut off from social contact and was trying to write by herself, and trying to think in isolation, which has its
own risks and downfalls. Reading through the texts youve written
together, there is a certain set of concepts that you both develop and
work with in ways that are somewhat idiosyncratic perhaps they are
the products of this ongoing dialogue that you have had for years, can
you explain how these particular concepts have emerged from that?
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STEFANO: I could list for you some of our concepts such as under-
commons or planning or the ones weve been working with lately,

around unsettling and the shipped. But, in a way, I feel like what Im
exploring with Fred, and what I would explore in other situations
which arent as developed but have been tried, for instance, with the
collective at Queen Mary, University of London, is this: the concepts
are ways to develop a mode of living together, a mode of being together that cannot be shared as a model but as an instance. So, I feel
more like an idea thief around this, as Guattari would say I am
hacking concepts and squatting terms as a way to help us do something. Which is not to say that we dont spend a lot of time developing and trying to make sense of these concepts or trying to figure out
how new situations or circumstances might lead us to want to continue the concept, or on the other hand to say the term is no longer sufficient for what were trying to say here. Im thinking recently
about some stuff that Fred wrote in response to a question of whether
the occupations of the Occupy Movement could be understood to
be doing something that we were calling planning. And Fred said,
yeah, not just planning but also study and also what you may even
call black study. So that for me was an example of where the concepts were letting us continue to move through different situations. In
that sense I suppose they are there for us in some ways, even if I dont
think of them as conceptual in the same way that maybe you would
think of concepts more traditionally in philosophy where you have to
make a system of them.
FRED: I think thats right. I feel, in a lot of ways, the fun thing about
working collaboratively with someone is that you literally come to

terms together. Stefano will point to different things hes read that
I havent read, different kinds of experiences that hes gone through.
Hell take a term that I would never have thought of myself and Ill
find myself totally drawn to the term and want to work with it. There
will be other times when Ill want to do something to the term.
A metaphor popped into my head. You can either talk about it as
having a kind of toolbox or also talk about it as having a kind of toybox. With my kids, most of what they do with toys is turn them into
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props. They are constantly involved in this massive project of pretending. And the toys that they have are props for their pretending. They
dont play with them the right way a sword is what you hit a ball
with and a bat is what you make music with. I feel that way about
these terms. In the end whats most important is that the thing is
put in play. Whats most important about play is the interaction. One
time we were driving in the car and my kids were playing this game
called family, and its basically that theyve created an alternative
family and they just talk about what the alternative family is doing.
This time, when they had really started enjoying the game, my eldest
son looked at me, I could see him through the rearview mirror, and he
said, dad, we have a box, and were going to let you open this box, and
if you open the box, you can enter into our world. Thats kind of what
it feels like: there are these props, these toys, and if you pick them up
you can move into some new thinking and into a new set of relations,
a new way of being together, thinking together. In the end, its the
new way of being together and thinking together thats important,
and not the tool, not the prop. Or, the prop is important only insofar
as it allows you to enter; but once youre there, its the relation and the
activity thats really what you want to emphasize. So, with that said, if
somebodys reading our stuff, and they think they can get something
out of the term planning or undercommons or logisticality, thats
great, but what matters is what they do with it; its where they take
it in their own relations. When people read their stuff it leads people
to look up and read ours. That also creates a different kind of relation
between us, even if were not necessarily cognizant of it.
STEFANO: Just pick up a toy...
STEVPHEN: Following on from that Id like to ask something about
how you approach writing together. If concepts are tools for living or
toyboxes for playing, when you pick up a text thats finished, unless
youve got some special texts that I dont know of, you dont get a sense
of the playing or the living usually. What you get a sense of is some
finished product where the collectivity animating the work that preceded it which I would agree with you is the most important thing
somehow gets lost along the way. How do you negotiate that? Or is
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there a way to flag up, in a written text, dont take this too seriously,
go out and play with it?
STEFANO: Well, one way that I do that is by revising how I say things.
So, some people might call my style repetitive, partly because Im rephrasing things all the time, but also because Im trying to show that
Im playing with something rather than that its finished. If Im going along in a kind of duh dum duh dum duh dum rhyming kind of
way in the writing, its partly to say that were in rehearsal here. And
since were rehearsing, you might as well pick up an instrument too.
So, for me, it must be right there in the writing in some form. Its not
enough to signal it outside the writing, to send the piece out and to
say, oh, really this is still open for this or that. It has to be somehow
in the writing itself that the thing hasnt closed off. Part of that is that
to write with another person is, in a sense, always to keep something
open, because you always have the question of, do they both think
that way, who said that? Instead of worrying about that, I think thats
nice. That means that the text is already open to more than one, in
that sense.
FRED: I think thats right. Sometimes, when youre listening to somebody, and youre trying to think about whos on the left channel and
whos on the right channel. And then you kind of realize that its not
really that important. You spend all this time trying to figure it out,
but then you realize that theres also this interaction and interplay
thats still going on in the text. Its not a dead thing. What you listen to or what youre reading is still moving and still living. Its still
forming.
Theres this thing I was trying to think about last year, teaching Black
Skin, White Masks, and reading it and recognizing, finally, because I
guess Im kinda slow, that, ah shit, Fanon went to medical school.
This is important. Then to be fascinated by Fanons use of the term
lyse, lysis. He didnt write critique or even analysis but invoked this
biochemical process of the breakdown of cells, which, then, experimentalists try to replicate. All of a sudden, reading Fanon means trying to find out what biochemists mean when they say lysis. What
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might a doctor mean? Then recalling that Plato has a dialogue called
Lysis that turns and keeps turning on whats interminable in the analysis or theory of friendship. Fanons text is still open and it still opens.
Now you have to go inside it. When youre inside, now, you have to
go outside of it. Actually, youre being blown out of it this happens within the context of a single authored piece when you realize
its not a single authored piece. Yeah, its under his name, and one
might say, of course that what Im saying is not only simple and true
but also mundane. Anybody who understands anything about reading will come to know this; yeah, thats intertextuality. But, theres
another way to think about it that lets you realize that its even deeper
than that. Its not just the simple fact of intertextuality that youre
talking about. Its different. Recognizing that text is intertext is one
thing. Seeing that a text is a social space is another. Its a deeper way
of looking at it. To say that its a social space is to say that stuff is going on: people, things, are meeting there and interacting, rubbing off
one another, brushing against one another and you enter into that
social space, to try to be part of it. So, what I guess Im trying to say
is that the terms are important insofar as they allow you, or invite
you, or propel you, or require you, to enter into that social space. But
once you enter into that social space, terms are just one part of it, and
theres other stuff too. There are things to do, places to go, and people
to see in reading and writing and its about maybe even trying to
figure out some kind of ethically responsible way to be in that world
with other things.
Our first collaborations were in poetry. Thats basically the better way
to put it. All of that other stuff that I was just saying which made no
sense: strike that! Weve been thinking about stuff to do. Hanging
around, talking, and drinking. Eventually things deterioriated to the
point where we were writing something. But the collaboration is way
older than the production of any text. The first thing we wrote together, Doing Academic Labor, was in 90-something. I dont know. But
there were fifteen years of hanging out together before we published
something. Hopefully, when the last thing gets published, well have
fifteen more years of hanging out together after that.
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STEFANO: And then the next publication... [laughs]. The one thing
that I was thinking about as you were talking about the text being a
social space is its exciting for me when we get to that point where the
text is open enough that instead of being studied, it actually becomes
the occasion for study. So, we enter into the social world of study,
which is one in which you start to lose track of your debts and begin
to see that the whole point is to lose track of them and just build them
in a way that allows for everyone to feel that she or he can contribute or not contribute to being in a space. That seems to me to be not
about saying theres no longer somebody who might have insisted or
persisted in getting us into that time-space of study, but rather that
the text is one way for that kind of insistence on study to be an open
insistence, to be one that doesnt have to be about authority or ongoing leadership or anything like that, but a kind of invitation for other
people to pick stuff up. Ive been thinking more and more of study as
something not where everybody dissolves into the student, but where
people sort of take turns doing things for each other or for the others, and where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they
do something. That also is a kind of dispossession of what you might
otherwise have been holding onto, and that possession is released in
a certain way voluntarily, and then some other possession occurs by
others.
I think that this notion also applies in the social space of the text itself, even where the study is not yet apparent. If you think about the
way we read a text, we come in and out of it at certain moments, and
those moments of possession are, for me, opportunities to say, well,
how could this become more generalized? This sense of dispossession,
and possession by the dispossessed is a way to think what Fred and
I call the general antagonism, which is a concept that runs through
all our work, as it runs through our sense of the world. The riotous
production of difference which is the general antagonism cannot be
tamed either by the feudal authority or social violence that is capitalism much less by policy initiatives like agonistic dialogues or alternative public spheres. But where the aim is not to suppress the
general antagonism but to experiment with its informal capacity, that
place is the undercommons or rather, whereever and whenever that
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experiment is going on within the general antagonism the undercommons is found. Being possessed by the dispossessed, and offering
up possession through dispossession, is such an experiment and is,
among other things, a way to think of love, and this too can arise in
study. I think this is the kind of experiment we are attempting with
the School for Study.
STEVPHEN: Preparing for the interview I resorted to a typically web
2.0 approach of asking on Facebook what questions I should ask. I

sent some of these to you. One question that seemed quite interesting
was whether it was possible to be part of the undercommons and not
study, or whether the undercommons includes, or could include, noninstructional university service workers and forms of affective labor
which are not immediately pedagogical
FRED: A lot of the questions from people on Facebook were, how do
you enter into the undercommons?: well, you know, the undercommons is a box, and if you open it you can enter into our world. A couple of people seem to be reticent about the term study, but is there a
way to be in the undercommons that isnt intellectual? Is there a way
of being intellectual that isnt social? When I think about the way we
use the term study, I think we are committed to the idea that study is
what you do with other people. Its talking and walking around with
other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The
notion of a rehearsal being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band,
in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working
together in a factory there are these various modes of activity. The
point of calling it study is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. These activities arent ennobled by the fact that we now say, oh, if you did these
things in a certain way, you could be said to be have been studying.
To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual
practice. Whats important is to recognize that that has been the case
because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.
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What I also want to say about that question is that it strikes me as

being overly concerned with the rightness and legitimacy of the term.
Its not so much that I want to say, oh, he or she didnt understand
what we meant by study. Its more like, okay, well, if that terms bothers you, you can use another term. You can say, my understanding of
study doesnt work for what it is that I think I want to get from what
you guys are saying. So, that person then has to have some kind of
complicated paleonymic relation to that term. They have to situate
themselves in some kind of appositional relation to that term; they
have to take some of it, take something from it, and make their own
way away from it. Insofar as you are now in what might be called a
dissident relation, you are precisely involved in what it is that I think
of as study.
So if the question is, does it have to include study?, my first response
is: okay, you dont understand what we mean by study. And then my
second response is: but its okay that you dont understand what we
mean by study, because youre going to do something else now. So, my
first response was to be correct and say, by study we mean this. The
thing that I think that you want from what were saying is precisely
what it is that we mean by study. And Im gonna say, you seem to
have a problem with study. How can you have a problem with study?
If you truly understood what study is, you would know that it is this
sort of sociality. Thats all that it is. But, then I would say, Im being an
asshole. Thats sort of taking this guy to task for not having a properly
reverent, adequate understanding of the term and what Im saying
is that its precisely his misunderstanding of, his active refusal to understand, the term that is an extension of study. Just keep pushing it.
I will always think of his or her tendency to want to avoid or to disavow study as an act of study. But, if he or she doesnt think about it
that way, thats okay.
STEFANO: At the same time, Im happy for us to say more about
study. I dont think its a question of being completely passive about it
and saying, do what you want. There are reasons why we felt that we
had to pursue these terms, and one of the key reasons which Fred
has already talked about is our feeling that it was important to stress
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that study is already going on, including when you walk into a classroom and before you think you start a class, by the way. This is equally
the case with planning. Think of the way we use policy, as something
like thinking for others, both because you think others cant think
and also because you somehow think that you can think, which is the
other part of thinking that theres something wrong with someone
else thinking that youve fixed yourself somehow, and therefore that
gives you the right to say someone else needs fixing. Planning is the
opposite of that, its to say, look, its not that people arent thinking
for themselves, acting for themselves together in concert in these different ways. It just appears that way for you because youve corrected
yourself in this particular way in which they will always look wrong
for you and where therefore you try to deploy policy against them.
The very deployment of policy is the biggest symptom that theres
something youre not getting in thinking that you need to do that
and it seems to me, really, the same with study. I think its also fine
for people not to use it or to find something else. But, equally, I think
that the point about study is that intellectual life is already at work
around us. When I think of study, Im as likely to think about nurses
in the smoking room as I am about the university. I mean it really
doesnt have anything to do with the university to me, other than that,
as Laura Harris says, the university is this incredible gathering of resources. So, when youre thinking, its nice to have books.
FRED: Of course the smoking room is an incredible gathering of resources too.
STEFANO: Yes. So, I just dont think of study and the university with
that kind of connection even though originally we were writing
about what we knew, and thats why the undercommons first came
out in relationship to the university. I dont see the undercommons
as having any necessary relationship to the university. And, given the
fact that, to me, the undercommons is a kind of comportment or ongoing experiment with and as the general antagonism, a kind of way of
being with others, its almost impossible that it could be matched up
with particular forms of institutional life. It would obviously be cut
though in different kinds of ways and in different spaces and times.
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FRED: Studying is not limited to the university. Its not held or contained within the university. Study has a relation to the university, but
only insofar as the university is not necessarily excluded from the undercommons that it tries so hard to exclude.
STEVPHEN: The particular question youre responding to was asked
by Zach Schwartz-Weinstein on the history of non-instructional academic labor, which brings me to what I wanted to ask. I understand
theres a much broader and deeper understanding of study that youre
working on. But, your work started in the 1990s by looking at particular conditions of academic labor. So this is a question about how
the broader conception of study fits into the more specific conditions
of academic labor youre talking about. Youre talking about how certain kinds of academic labor pre-empt collectivity or, almost because
they encourage a very individualistic investment in the labor, they
pre-empt that sort of broader project from emerging. So, is this something that is very particular to academic labor or is this something
that is more general to forms of labor that require this investment?
I guess my question is: how do you understand the relation between
the specific forms of class composition of academic labor and broader patterns? I think its easy for the specific to be conflated with the
more general kind.
FRED: When I think now about the question or problem of academic
labor, I think about it in this way: that part of what Im interested in
is how the conditions of academic labor have become unconducive
to study how the conditions under which academic laborers labor
actually preclude or prevent study, make study difficult if not impossible. When I was involved in labor organizing as a graduate student,
with the Association of Graduate Student Employees at the University of California Berkeley I was frustrated with the way that sometimes graduate student investment in thinking about themselves as
workers was predicated on the notion that workers dont study. But
this was more than just a romanticisation of authentic work and a
disavowal of our own inauthenticity as workers. It was that our image of ourselves as academic laborers actually acceded to the ways in
which the conditions of academic labor prevented study. We actually
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signed on to the prevention of study as a social activity even while we

were engaging in, and enjoying, organizing as a social activity. Its like
we were organizing for the right to more fully embed ourselves in isolation. It never felt like we studied (in) the way we organized, and we
never approached a whole bunch of other modes of study that were
either too much on the surface of, or too far underneath, the university. I think we never recognized that the most insidious, vicious,
brutal aspect of the conditions of our labor was that it regulated and
suppressed study.
STEFANO: Yes that was one side of what was bothering us. The other
side of it was that it looked like the university and the way that one
worked in the university was where study was supposed to happen.
So, it meant that, on the one hand, you had some graduate students
appearing to disavow study and, on the other hand, you had many academics who claimed to be monopolizing study or to be at the heart
of study and this for me meant that, first of all, study itself was becoming, as Fred says, almost impossible in the university. It was the
one thing you couldnt do in the university not only because of peoples vrious positions but also because of the administration of the
university. But, secondly, it meant that it was impossible to recognize
or acknowledge this incredible history of study that goes on beyond
the university.
That said, probably there was something I dont know about for
Fred, but I needed to work through a little bit that I was an academic worker and I needed to position myself in a way that moved beyond
its restrictions. But the other thing was that there are certain ways in
which that academic model of preventing study has been generalized. So, its no longer just in the university that study is prevented.
Because the one true knowledge transfer from the university has been
its peculiar labor process. They successfully managed to transfer the
academic labor process to the private firm, so that everybody thinks
that theyre an academic, everybody thinks that theyre a student so,
these kind of twenty-four hour identities. People propose the model
of the artist or entrepreneur but no, this is too individual, capitalism still has a labor process. The university is a kind of factory line,
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a kind of labor process perfect for reintroducing a version of absolute surplus value back into the work day by trying to fashion work
into this model which we associate with the university. And when we
look closely at what was really going on in the university, what was
really transferred was everything but study, the whole labor regime
and all the organizational algorithms dedicated to closing down study
while performing intellectual work. So, the other reason to stay within the university is not just for a certain set of resources or because the
teaching space is still relatively if unevenly open, and not just because
somehow study still goes on in its undercommons, but because there
is this peculiar labor process model there thats being exported, thats
being generalized in so-called creative industries and other places,
and which is deployed expertly against study. This is something Paolo
Do has tracked in Asia where the expansion of the university means
an expansion of this baleful labor process into society.
STEVPHEN: Theres this argument put forth by the Precarious Work-
ers Brigade and the Artworkers Coalition that whats interesting

about artistic labor is not necessarily innate to itself but how its a
laboratory for a particular kind of extraction of value, which can then
be generalized beyond the art sphere.
STEFANO: Yeah, exactly. Ive learned a lot from them.

STEVPHEN: Connected to another point you make, when we start
talking about students as co-workers, would that be to sort of disavow the disavowal of study? In your previous writing on academic labor you talk about how academics cannot acknowledge their students
as co-workers because this would pose a problem. So, what would it
mean to acknowledge that co-laboring process, not just within the
university itself but more generally?
STEFANO: I might not put that the same way today as we were put-
ting it at that time. I felt like we were involved more in an internal

critique around academic labor than I feel connected to now. Its not
that Id be running away from it, but I sort of felt we needed to do
it so that we didnt feel like we needed to keep doing it. Instead of
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putting it that way, I might say, theres a kind of fear in the university
around something like amateurism immaturity, pre-maturity, not
graduating, not being ready somehow and the student represents
that at certain moments. And supposedly our job with the student
is to help them overcome this so they can get credits and graduate.
Today its sort of that moment thats more interesting to me, because
thats a moment where your pre-maturity, your immaturity, your notbeing-ready, is also kind of an openness to being affected by others,
dispossessed and possessed by others. But, of course, in the university,
what theyre trying to do is get rid of that, so you can be a fully selfdetermined individual ready for work, or as Paolo Virno says, ready
to display that you are ready for work. So, to me, its less about the
student as co-worker, though its undoubtedly true that students do
a lot of the work, and much more about the student, as Denise Ferreira da Silva would say, as an example of an affected body. And of
course the professors, just like the philosophers that Denise is talking
about, freak out at that student, while at the same time its the thing
they work on, its a necessary point in the production cycle for them.
Theyre trying to remove anything that feels like that kind of affection
between bodies and to produce self-determined individuals. Entering
with the student into that moment, at that affective level, is the part
that interests me a bit more now than, say, engaging with them as the
worker, though I dont think thats wrong. It just seems to me less
than what could happen.
FRED: I think, looking back at those earlier pieces, that we just kept
pushing ahead, and kept moving, but that the movement was predicated on us trying to think about where we were at the time. These
are the conditions under which we live and operate, and we need to
try to think about that. Theres something wrong going on, lets think
about how it is and why it is that things arent the way wed like them
to be and we just basically had the temerity to believe that our desire for some other mode of being in the world had to be connected to
our attempt to understand the way that we were living and the conditions under which we were living at that moment. In other words,
and to me this is a kind of crucial thing: I wasnt thinking about trying to help somebody. I wasnt thinking about the university as a kind
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of exalted place in which being there is a mark of a certain kind of

privilege, and that the proper way to deal with or to acknowledge that
privilege was to take this wisdom or to take these resources that I had
access to and to try to distribute them in a more equitable way to the
poor people who didnt have the relation to the university that we
did. Me, I never thought about it that way. I was just always like: the
university is fucked up. Its fucked up over here. Why is it fucked up?
Why is it that shit aint the way it should be here? Yeah, theres some
stuff here, but obviously theres stuff in other places too. The point is:
its fucked up here, how can we think about it in a way to help us organize ourselves to make it better here? We were trying to understand
this problematic of our own alienation from our capacity to study
the exploitation of our capacity to study that was manifest as a set of
academic products. Thats what we were trying to understand. And it
struck us that this is what workers who are also thinkers have always
been trying to understand. How come we cant be together and think
together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good? For
most of our colleagues and students, however much you want to blur
that distinction, that question is the hardest question to get people to
consider. Everybody is pissed off all the time and feels bad, but very
seldom do you enter into a conversation where people are going, why
is it that this doesnt feel good to us? There are lots of people who are
angry and who dont feel good, but it seems hard for people to ask,
collectively, why doesnt this feel good? I love poetry, but why doesnt
reading, thinking, and writing about poetry in this context feel good?
To my mind, thats the question that we started trying to ask.
STEVPHEN: Its especially hard to ask that question in England where
the assumption is that everyones miserable and very polite about it

anyways.
FRED: But, thats the insidious thing, this naturalisation of misery, the
belief that intellectual work requires alienation and immobility and
that the ensuing pain and nausea is a kind of badge of honor, a kind of
stripe you can apply to your academic robe or something. Enjoyment
is suspect, untrustworthy, a mark of illegitimate privilege or of some
kind of sissified refusal to look squarely into the fucked-up face of
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things which is, evidently, only something you can do in isolation. Its
just about not being cut off like that; to study the general antagonism
from within the general antagonism. My favorite movie is The Shoes of
the Fisherman and I want to be like this character in it named Father
Telemond. He believed in the world. Like Deleuze. I believe in the
world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of
it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be
in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But thats
beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world,
the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered,
scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery.
STEFANO: About seven years ago I moved from the US to the UK,
from a university system where graduate students taught on an industrial scale, to a more semi-feudal system with a lot of precarious
adjuncts instead. But then I got connected with comrades suffering
through the Baronial systems of Italy and elsewhere in Southern Europe, and if they wanted to study they had to leave the university, at
least strategically. That opened up another question for me, which was
when you leave the university to study, in what way do you have to
continue to recognize that youre not leaving the place of study and
making a new place, but entering a whole other world where study is
already going on beyond the university? I felt I ought to have some
way to be able to see that world, to feel that world, to sense it, and to
enter into it, to join the study already going on in different informal
ways, unforming, informing ways. When I speak about a speculative
practice, something I learnt by working with the performance artist Valentina Desideri, I am speaking about walking through study,
and not just studying by walking with others. A speculative practice
is study in movement for me, to walk with others and to talk about
ideas, but also what to eat, an old movie, a passing dog, or a new love,
is also to speak in the midst of something, to interrupt the other kinds
of study that might be going on, or might have just paused, that we
pass through, that we may even been invited to join, this study across
bodies, across space, across things, this is study as a speculative practice, when the situated practice of a seminar room or squatted space
moves out to encounter study in general.
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STEVPHEN: One thing that I asked Stefano last weekend, as I was
reading the manuscript, is about the order of the chapters. Some of

the pieces feel different when you change the order in which you read
them, because you get a different sort of narrative arc, depending on
where you start from and where you end up. I think part of what Im
realizing is that the project is less, say, heres a coherent narrative that
runs this way, but more sort of things which are put together and remain open and should be presented as sort of a collection that doesnt
necessarily say, our argument starts at one and ends at five. Its more
of a collection of things which resonate with each other rather than
having to develop sequentially.
STEFANO: Yeah, I feel thats true. What I think is that each one is a
different way to get at a similar set of questions, to think about the

general antagonism, to think about blackness, to think about the undercommons. I think the impulse for me and Fred is always to try and
move towards the stuff that we like, and to move towards the mode
of living that we like. We know that sometimes that involves moving through certain kinds of critique of whats holding us back. But,
for me, each time, whats going on is that Im trying to elaborate a
different mode of living together with others, of being with others,
not just with other people but with other things and other kinds of
senses. At one point, for me anyway, I felt very strongly that this kind
of policy world was emerging everywhere and I wanted to talk with
Fred about how to find our stuff again amidst all this kind of policy
work in which everybody seemed from every spot at any moment to
be making policy. I had this image in my head of a kind of return to
a world in which every self-determined individual had the right to
make brutal policy on the spot for every person who was not selfdetermined, which essentially is a colonial or slave situation and the
kind of ubiquity of policy, which all of a sudden, didnt emanate anymore just from government but from fucking policy shops in every
university, and from independent policy shops, and from bloggers,
etc. These policy people to me are like night riders. So, I felt at that
moment it was necessary to deal with it in terms of, what would you
say is going on that occasioned that kind of frenzied attack, this total
mobilisation of the fixed? What provoked this? Thats why we ended
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up talking about planning. But theres also a part where Fred is very
directly able to address blackness in a piece. So, we were able to start
with something that we were feeling was an elaboration of our mode
of living, our inherited black radical tradition. Then, that piece ends
up with a kind of caution around governance.
At least from my point of view, Im always approaching Fred, hanging
out with Fred, to say, we know that there are things we like, so how
can we elaborate them this time, not just for each other but also for
other people, to say to others lets keep fighting, keep doing our thing.
So, its true that it isnt an argument that builds. To me, its picking up
different toys to see if we can get back to what were really interested
in. Not to say that that doesnt change. I have a richer understanding
of social life than I did a few years ago. When I started working with
Fred, social life, to me, had a lot to do with friendship, and it had a
lot to do with refusal refusal to do certain kinds of things. And then
gradually I got more and more interested in this term, preservation,
where I started to think about, well, refusals something that we do
because of them, what do we do because of ourselves? Recently, Ive
started to think more about elaborations of care and love. So, my social world is getting bigger with our work. But, each piece for me is
still another way to come at what we love and whats keeping us from
what we love. So, it isnt in that sense a scientific investigation that
starts at one end and finishes at the other end.
FRED: Its funny, this ubiquity of policy making, the constant deputisation of academic laborers into the apparatuses of police power. And
they are like night riders, paddy rollers, everybodys on patrol, trying
to capture the ones who are trying to get out especially themselves,
trying to capture their own fugitivity. Thats actually the first place at
which policy is directed. I think that a huge part of it has to do simply with, lets call it, a certain reduction of intellectual life to reduce
study into critique, and then at the same time, a really, really horrific,
brutal reduction of critique to debunking, which operates under the
general assumption that naturalised academic misery loves company
in its isolation, like some kind of warped communal alienation in
which people are tied together not by blood or a common language
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but by the bad feeling they compete over. And so, what ends up happening is you get a whole lot of people who, as Stefano was suggesting, spend a whole lot of time thinking about stuff that they dont
want to do, thinking about stuff that they dont want to be, rather
than beginning with, and acting out, what they want.
One of the people who wrote questions on Facebook is Dont Rhine
who is part of a political/artistic collective called Ultra-red which I
was lucky enough to be able to do something with a few weeks ago
in New York. He was talking about the Mississippi Freedom Schools,
and Ultra-red have been using the Freedom School curriculum as part
of their performances. These are pedagogical performances. What
theyre engaged in is essentially a kind of mobile, itinerant practice of
study that is situated around a certain set of protocols regarding the
problematic and the possibilities of sound. What theyre engaged in
is this process which, to me, is totally interesting and a model for how
one might be together with different people in the world, in different
places. My point is that the Mississippi Freedom School curriculum
asked a couple of questions of the people who were involved in it,
both the students and the teachers. One question was: What do we
not have that we need, what do we want or want to get? But the other
question, which is, I think, prior to the first in some absolutely irreducible way, is what do we have that we want to keep? And of course
theres a way of thinking about what was going on in Mississippi in
1964 that would be predicated on the notion that the last question
you would ever consider to be relevant for people in that situation, for
black folks in Mississippi in 1964, is what do they have that they want
to keep? The presumption is that they were living a life of absolute
deprivation that they were nothing and had nothing, where nothing
is understood in the standard way as signifying absence. What that
second, but prior, question presupposes is (a) that theyve got something that they want to keep, and (b) that not only do those people
who were fucking them over not have everything, but that part of
what we want to do is to organize ourselves around the principle that
we dont want everything they have. Not only is a lot of the shit that
they have bad, but so too is their very mode of having. We dont want
that. We dont need that. We have to avoid that. And what Im saying
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is that there is a kind of really sclerotic understanding of these problematics of having and not having, of privilege and under-privilege,
that structures the university as a place where policy proliferates.
So, we began thinking about the university because we were there.
And Stefano was saying, rightly I think, what we came to understand is that our attempt to understand the conditions under which
we were working led us to recognize that those conditions were being
farmed out, that those conditions were being proliferated all throughout the world that the university was an avant-garde of policy making and a place where the ubiquity of policy was being modeled for
other realms within the social world. And then, people were saying,
matter of fact, we can take a very sclerotic understanding of study,
or lets say, of knowledge production and knowledge acquisition, and
that can be the center around which we organize the export of this
whole process and problematic of policy making. So that, yeah, now
well model the workplace on a free school classroom. You wont have
fixed, individual desks anymore. Well have round tables and people
can do something that kinda seems like moving around, and well say
that we are concerned about your continuing education, and we want
you to feel free to express ideas. What in fact people were doing was
taking the kind of empty shell of what used to be called education
and saying, we can use this shell as a way of exporting the apparatus
of policy all throughout the social world. We realized that not only
are we trying to understand whats fucked up about our own situation, but were trying to understand how it is that the essential conditions of our own situation are being exported everywhere.
STEFANO: Yeah, thats right. Policy is especially directed towards the
poor, and one of the reasons for that is essentially because, as Fred was
saying, the wealth of having without owning which exists among
the poor, which is not to say that the poor arent also poor the social principle of having without ownership is ambivalent. On the one
hand, obviously, capital wants that; thats the whole intellectual property rights crap, of kind of keeping that stuff loose so people will be
productive about it. But, on the other hand, it cant really be abided in
the long term, and I think thats why you get this weird, what I call
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this extreme neoliberalism, where you get a back-and-forth, in which,

one moment there are vicious kind of drones against the poor, these
night riders making policy from anywhere said to be fixed against
anyone said to need fixing, and then the next minute, governance is
deployed against the poor. And it has to do with the alternatives to
ownership that I think are an inheritance of the poor, or a disinheritance of it, or something. You know bad cop, bad cop.
I feel theres a relation between policy and governance thats at work
here. Both of them get generated in the university not the university
alone, they also get generated in NGOs and other places as well. But,
it strikes me that with policy what youre often dealing with is somebody whose presumption is that they know the problem. With governance youre dealing more with a situation in which they imagine
in the first instance that, rather than having to fix someone in order
to extract from them, theres the possibility of a kind of direct extraction, and this is also what the field of logistics desires. In this sense,
governance reminds me of the way Mario Tronti talks about the labor process. Tronti doesnt use the term labor process, but he says,
look, the worker brings everything: the class relation, antagonism,
sociality. The only thing capital brings is the labor process, they set it
up. As Poulantzas says, they initiate it and control it. It seems to me
that this is what governance is. Governance is merely the labor process. Its the least of everything but its the organizational moment,
the organizational resistance to what we are doing. And its because
its the organizational moment that were in a situation where, for
people who are involved in forms of organization, like a teacher, for
instance, that you are much more immediately confronted, because
of policy and governance and their ubiquity, with either being almost
immediately the police or finding some other way to be with others.
You are much more immediately forced to choose. That seems to me,
also, to give a sense of why theres so much anxiety in the university,
almost immediately; theres no hiding in an imagined liberal institution anymore. In these kinds of algorithmic institutions where nothing but a logistics of efficiency operates, youre very quickly either the
police when you work in the university or you have to find some other
way of being in the university. I think thats because of the reaction to
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the growing forms of autonomy in social life, the reaction that takes
the form of governance and policy. Academics are caught up in that.
They have to confront the fact that theres no possibility that they
cant choose sides.
STEVPHEN: I would ask then what other ways are there to respond
to the seductiveness of governance? Or, what are your interests, what
do you want? Im thinking of the NGO world where you have this
prospecting for immaterial labor, for interests in order to be governed.
How do you find a response to that? The reason I look at it from the
point of view of seductiveness is I know some of my friends, and myself, who have ended up in the academy or the NGO world because
they were trying to avoid being drawn into a certain kind of labor
process, so they thought of it as their escape. But, their escape just
ended up being a different kind of prospecting, where they eventually got drawn into a different, almost deeper, more problematic form
of labor.
STEFANO: Yeah, the meta-labor process that they got drawn into.
The key thing with the NGOs and this is to some extent true in the
university, but not to the same degree, because of the strange figure of
the teacher the true ethos of the NGO is not to speak for a group
thats not speaking, but to somehow provoke that group to speak for
itself. Its all about, this group has to find its voice and speak up for
itself against the dam, and this kind of thing. On the one hand, you
think, well, fuck, what else could you do? I mean, youve gotta fight
the dam. On the other hand, it does seem to me that youre asking
people to call themselves into a certain form of identity. This is what
Gayatri means by the first right being the right to refuse rights, I
think. So, it seems to me that the NGO can often be a laboratory for
trying to solicit from people, trying to prospect from people, certain
ways that they have of being together, getting them to translate these
for, ultimately, capital. Im not a fan of this notion that were going to
be inscrutable or invisible to capital, or anything like that. But there
are always elaborations of social life that are not comprehended or exploited by capital. Capital, in its agency, just doesnt get it, necessarily.
Governance is a way to make it more legible to them in certain ways.
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Its not because somebody is trying to be illegible. I think once youre

trying to be illegible, youre already legible.
So, if youre asking me what to do in these kinds of circumstances, I
agree its a difficult question, and in practice I continue to teach in
circumstances that also include some finishing of the student, giving
them a mark and things like that. And I dont say that people should
suddenly not do NGO work. But, I also feel that its necessary for us
to try to elaborate some other forms that dont take us through those
political steps, that dont require becoming self-determining enough
to have a voice and have interests and to acknowledge that people
dont need to have interests to be with each other. You dont have to
start by saying, Im so-and-so, this is what I like to do. I mean, people dont have to relate to each other through fucking dating sites.
You dont have to elaborate yourself as an individual to be with other
people and in fact its a barrier to being with other people, as far as
I can see.
FRED: I was thinking about something you said, Stefano, about how
capital initiates, or provides a structure. And I wanted to say that I

want to think a little bit more about this supposedly initiatory power
that capital has. Because, I would say, what youre calling initiation,
is what I think of as calling the situation to order.
STEFANO: Yeah, and then it flips a switch.

FRED: Thats the way it works. And regarding the seductiveness of it,
there are two ways to think about it. One is some kind of normative
productivity that requires order, requires answering the call to order.
Or another way to look at it would be that in order to be recognizable, you have to answer the call to order and that the only genuine and authentic mode of living in the world is to be recognizable
within the terms of order. But, its kind of like that thing where you
walk into class, youre the teacher and you get there a couple minutes
early and there are people milling around and theres a conversation
already going on, and some of them might be talking about stuff you
might be talking about in class and some of them might be talking
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about something completely different and at the same time, Ive

been thinking about something, either what weve been talking about
in class or something completely different. My position, at that moment, what I am supposed to do is at a certain point become an instrument of governance. What Im supposed to do is to call that class
to order, which presupposes that there is no actual, already existing
organization happening, that theres no study happening before I got
there, that there was no study happening, no planning happening. Im
calling it to order, and then something can happen then knowledge
can be produced. Thats the presumption.
Its very hard. Whats totally interesting me is to just not call the class
to order. And theres a way in which you can think about this literally as a simple gesture at the level of a certain kind of performative,
dramatic mode. Youre basically saying, lets just see what happens if
I dont make that gesture of calling the class to order just that little
moment in which my tone of voice turns and becomes slightly more
authoritative so that everyone will know that class has begun. What
if I just say, well, were here. Here we are now. Instead of announcing that class has begun, just acknowledge that class began. It seems
like a simple gesture and not very important. But I think its really
important. And I also think its important to acknowledge how hard
it is not to do that. In other words, how hard it would be, on a consistent basis, not to issue the call to order but also to recognize how
important it would be, how interesting it might be, what new kinds
of things might emerge out of the capacity to refuse to issue the call
to order. In recognizing all kinds of other shit that could happen, see
what happens when you refuse at that moment to become an instrument of governance, seeing how a certain kind of discomfort will
occur. Ive had students who will issue the call, as if theres a power
vacuum and somebody has to step in.
STEVPHEN: Like George Orwell being pressured to shoot the elephant.
FRED: I get so annoyed with a certain kind of discourse around that
kind of weird narcissism that double-edged coin of the narcissism
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of academic labor in which you naturalise your misery on one side

of the coin, and then on the other side of the coin, you completely
accede to the notion of your absolute privilege. So, on the one hand,
you wake up every day being miserable and saying, this is the way it
is. And on the other hand, you wake up every day saying, look how
privileged I am to be here. And look at all the poor people who arent
privileged to be here. One of the deleterious, negative effects of that
particular kind of narcissism is that it doesnt acknowledge the ways
in which one of the cool things about the university (Im not saying
this is the only place where this happens, but it is a place where this
happens) is that every day that you go into your classroom, you have
a chance not to issue the call to order, and then to see what happens.
And the goddamn president of the university is not going to knock
on your door talking about, how come you didnt issue the call to order?
STEVPHEN: Well, the funny thing for me personally was my attempt
to not be in charge in that sense and instead to try to start from the
questions of why are we here? What are we doing here? Lets say
that in certain aspects they didnt get so well, namely, that the universitys response was, youre incompetent! Were gonna send you teacher training and show you how to issue calls to order.
FRED: And again I dont have the benefit that Stefanos had of being
in both academic systems, but I know that in the US they dont come,
the administration doesnt come to my class. What I think we have
here is a situation in which the presumption that the necessity of the
call to order is so powerful that they can pretty much count on people
issuing it. But they dont have to check up on you. The presumption is
that its so absolutely necessary and indispensable so why would you
do anything else? Which is great, because they dont check up on you.
You can do something else. Its not that kind of surveillance and sort
of worker discipline and regulation in the sense of it being an externally imposed force. The tricky thing is that the notion is that you are
your own policy maker; you are your own police force. Hopefully, we
will have trained you properly so that you will know you have to issue
the call to order. At that point you have to police yourself.
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What Im really trying to say is, I think, its important to make a distinction between the capacity of capital, or the administration, to initiate, as opposed to their power to call to order. Theres a difference. They
dont initiate anything. In other words, the call to order is not in fact an
initiation. If its an initiation, its an initiation in the sense of being initiated into a fraternity. Its a new beginning, lets say. Its a moment of
some sort of strange, monstrous re-birth. Its literally being born-again
into policy, or into governance. But there was something going on before that. And that initiatory moment is double-edged. You are starting
something new, but you are also trying, in a radical, kind of brutal way
to put and end to something and the horrible part is its a moment of
colonisation: youre putting something to an end and youre also trying
at that very same moment to declare that it was never there. Not only
am I going to stop you from doing this shit, but Im going to convince
you that you were never doing it.
STEFANO: Yeah, thats right. So, its sort of within that context that
I think both of us pose the question thats important to us. In other
circumstances, Fred and I have talked about this by thinking about a
certain kind of song, a soul song that you might get in Curtis Mayfield or in Marvin Gaye, where somethings going on, lets call it the
experiment with/in the general antagonism, and then the song starts.
You can hear the audience, you can hear the crowd, and then he begins to sing or music begins to start. So, the thing that Im interested
in is, without calling something to order, how can you still sing? In
the sense that not calling something to order is different from saying
that theres nothing that you want to do with others, theres nothing
that you want to start with others. We have our own versions of insistence or persistence in study.
FRED: Form is not the eradication of the informal. Form is what
emerges from the informal. So, the classic example of that kind of
song that youre talking about, Stefano, is Whats Going On? by
Marvin Gaye and of course the title is already letting you know:
goddamn it, somethings going on! This song emerges out of the fact
that something already was going on. Then, from a certain limited
perspective, we recognize, there are these people milling around and
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talking and greeting one another and then, something that we recognize as music emerges from that. But then, if you think about it
for half-a-damn-second, you say, but the music was already playing. Music was already being made. So, what emerges is not music
in some general way, as opposed to the non-musical. What emerges
is a form, out of something that we call informality. The informal is
not the absence of form. Its the thing that gives form. The informal
is not formlessness. And what those folks are engaging in at the beginning of Whats Going On? is study. Now, when Marvin Gaye
starts singing, thats study too. Its not study that emerges out of the
absence of study. Its an extension of study. And black popular music
Im most familiar with things from the 1960s on is just replete with
that. That thing becomes something more than just what you would
call a device and its also very much bound up with the notion of
the live album. The point is that its more than just a device. Its more
than just a trope. Its almost like everybody has to, say, comb that moment into their recording practices, just to remind themselves, and to
let you know, that this is where it is that music comes from. It didnt
come from nowhere. If it came from nowhere, if it came from nothing, it is basically trying to let you know that you need a new theory
of nothing and a new theory of nowhere.
STEFANO: Yeah, and this is also all over rap music, which is always
about saying, this is where we live and heres this sound.
FRED: I told you, this is how we do it. My kids listen to some shit,
and Im trying not to be that way, but sometimes Im like, let me play
yall some good music. If you listen to the Staple Singers Ill Take
You There, its got one little chorus, one little four-line quatrain, and
then the whole middle of the song is just Mavis Staples telling the
band to start playing. Little Davie [the bassist] we need you now.
Then, her father, the great guitarist Roebuck Pops Staples: shes like,
daddy, daddy. Then, the verse was like, somebody, play your piano.
Thats the whole middle of the song. Thats the heart of the song. Not
the damn lyrics. Its her just saying, play, and theyre already playing.
And thats not a call to order. Its an acknowledgement, and a celebration, of what was already happening.
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STEVPHEN: Or you have James Brown saying, take it to the bridge.

STEFANO: Yeah, and I think thats why, for me, I cant think in terms
of a management of the common because it seems like, to me, the

first act of management is to imagine that whats informal or whats
already going on requires some act to organize it, rather than to join
it, rather than to find ways to experiment with this general antagonism. Also, I think that, for me, thats why, when were talking about
a kind of unsettling, what were talking about is joining something
thats already permanently unsettled, whats shipped, against whats
being imposed on it. Youre absolutely right because Poulantzas, when
hes talking about initiation, all hes saying, basically, is, its 9am, turn
the machines on. I mean, theres no way that could have been the beginning of anything meaningful, other than control.
STEVPHEN: When you talk about the prophetic organization, how

do you mean prophesy or organization there? If youre not just calling into being something that was not there, Im trying to understand
what the notion of prophetic would be in that sense. Is it calling into
being that which is already in being?
STEFANO: For me, prophetic and a lot of the terms that were using
are just forms for me to enrich being, so that it doesnt get flattened
out into the way that its understood so often in politics. For me, its
just a way to think about the already-existing enrichment of being,
the already-social quality of time and space, which means that you
can simultaneously be in more places, and be more than one, and that
seeing things and hearing things is just a way of being with others.
It means the standpoint of every standpoint and none as Fred and I
say, the standpoint of the shipped, the containerized, the unsettled and
unsettling.
FRED: What you just said seems right to me. It is definitely about
seeing things and hearing things. Its funny, because Im happily surprised that we used the term prophetic; Im happy thats there now,
because I associate that term so much with Cornel West. There were
moments where I would have been pretty stridently against the use of
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that term, probably because of the association with pragmatism that

West asserts. But now Im like, that terms cool, because it is about
seeing things and hearing things. Another way to put it would be:
you talk about being able to be in two places at the same time, but
also to be able to be two times in the same place. In other words, its
very much bound up with the Jamesian notion of the future in the
present and classically, the prophet has access to both of those. The
prophet is the one who tells the brutal truth, who has the capacity
to see the absolute brutality of the already-existing and to point it
out and to tell that truth, but also to see the other way, to see what it
could be. That double-sense, that double-capacity: to see whats right
in front of you and to see through that to whats up ahead of you. One
of the ways in which academic labor has become sclerotic, lets say, is
precisely because it imagines that the primary mode, specifically of a
certain kind of left academic labor, is a kind of clear-eyed seeing of
whats actually going on right now and that the work is reducible to
that. Or, another way to put it is that, insofar as thats what one conceives the work to be, one is only really doing the work when the work
is absolutely in the absence of play, where play would be conceived of
as pretending, as seeing what could be, as fantasy.
BEYOND & BELOW THE CALL TO ORDER

STEVPHEN: Id like to follow up on the question of issuing a call to
order, and more particularly about not issuing the call to order. Lets
take the album Nation Time by Joe McPhee as an example. In one
sense it seems very much that McPhee is issuing a call to order, haranguing the audience into a set piece of call and response: What
time is it? Nation time. But in another sense whatever order gets
set up through that call to order, if it is one, then quickly breaks down
or mutates into something else through collective improvisation.
Fred, this connects closely to how you describe blackness as something happening in the break but I was wondering how one could
at the same time be calling to order and calling to mutation, or to a
break, or perhaps to a different kind of order.
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FRED: The enunciation, of nation time, when Amiri Baraka first

sang it, when McPhee echoes and riffs off and reconfigures it, is, I always thought, really a kind of announcement of the international and,
beyond and by way of that, the anti-national. Black nationalism, as an
extension of Pan-Africanism which is resistance to a given Africa
from within Africa accurately seen as a venal, administrative and accumulative combination of collection and division cuts the nation,
it seems to me. I mean, it makes sense, to me, only as this richly internally differentiated resistance to the Westphalian imposition, which
comes fully into its own as the simultaneous invention and destruction of Africa, as the brutal interplay between colonial viciousness
and the organization of racial murder on a grand scale. What gets
called national struggle, how it shows up in cultural assertion, and
what shows up as an international against national oppression and
the imposition of parochial brutality, is what Fanon is after to critique but also to destroy and disintegrate the ground on which the
settler stands, the standpoint from which the violence of coloniality
and racism emanates. I dont think were just making this up. I mean,
I think what were gesturing towards is real this phenomenon in
which the appeal to the nation is an anti-nationalism, in which the
call to order is, in fact, a call to disorder, to complete lysis. I mean this
is what your question is getting at, Stevphen, and it seems to me that
this is what we hear when we listen to that McPhee cut. And whats
cool is the stridency and striation of his call and of the response to
it. No purity of tone either in his horn or in his voice or in the voices
of those who, for lack of a better term, respond; the soloist is already
less and more than one and, like Cedric Robinson says in The Terms of
Order, which is really this amazing and beautiful ode to disorder, the
one who is said to have given the call is really an effect of a response
that had anticipated him, that is the generative informality out of
which his form emerges. They already know the answer to the question they sent him to ask. They already know what time it is and that
combination of answer and question, that gathering in the break of all
those already broken voices, is when music becomes a demand, takes
the form of a demand, that shows up in the guise of a single voice or
a national call. Its like a delirium (as Deleuze might say, by way of
Hume) taking the form of, moving in the habit, putting on the habit,
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of a sovereign articulation, something that an I or a we would say.

But what it is, really what it is when people say shit like What is
it? is a relay of breath that comes from somewhere else, that seems
like it comes out of nowhere. Its easy not just to get the origin wrong
but to get the whole thing wrong by thinking about it in terms of
an origin. I dont think McPhee is or means to be originary. Maybe
theres some secret way, opened up by some unique and secret word,
to move through this constant organization and disorganization of
the demand that takes the form-in-deformation of a single voice consenting to and calling for its multiplication and division. That claim
that Fanon makes about the demand being neurotic, in an already
existing conception of psychological order or normalcy or whatever
and thats something that he says in Black Skin is tied to the sort
of recognition that an anti-colonial movement would necessarily be
one that would tend toward complete disorder, total lysis. And the
neurosis is tied, not just to the fact that from the standpoint of sovereignty, the demand for sovereigntys destruction makes no sense but
also to the fact that the demand is spoken in his crazy language, in
the crazy costume of the one who thinks he is the one. So the point
is that the call to order is a call for and from disorder. Thats where, I
think, McPhee is coming from. If you listen you can hear where hes
coming from.
STEFANO: For me, with regard to the occupation movement, there
were three things in play at once, which you might call the request,
the demand, and the call. The request is basically the stuff that Wendy
Brown is herself always so paranoid about: that one is making a request to authority and by making a request to authority one is therefore already implicating oneself. Sure, there were occupation people
for whom when people were saying demand what they were really
hearing was request request to someone we want you to reform
banking, we want you to do this. Then, theres the demand, which is
non-negotiable, which is I think what Kathi Weeks is interested in.
But then, a minute ago, you were talking about a call, a call to disorder, which is already an enactment, an ontological enactment of
something. So, the demand is uncompromising, but its still in the
realm of positing something thats not there, which is fine because
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there are indeed things that are not here. But I think the call, in the
way I would understand it, the call, as in the call and response, the
response is already there before the call goes out. Youre already in
something.
To me, the call is what these guys were trying to say when they said,
but these are biopolitical demands, or this is a biopolitical politics,
which is to say, its neither a politics of requesting something from authority nor of demanding something despite authority. Rather some
kind of demand was already being enacted, fulfilled in the call itself. I
dont think that was totally clear to me or maybe to some occupy people maybe to some it was scary when it was clear; it was certainly
scary to authority when it was clear. And it was, of course, most clear
not in the occupy movement but, for me, in the London riots, because
the London riots, which and Fred has written beautifully on them
elsewhere and here we talk about them as irruptions of logisticality,
that which gives rise to the capitalist science of logistics, and today in
rampant form. Whats interesting about these riotsm, and Ive talked
to kids about it, after the three days, and they all said the same thing:
for three days we ran London. For three days London was ours. For
three days it worked according to how we wanted it to work. And,
basically, they didnt demand anything. They just started. There was a
call: come out and lets just run the city for three days. Now, maybe
they didnt run it exactly in the way everybody would have run it if
the call was fuller or different. And, of course, those kids have all received incredibly ridiculous jail sentences and everything else. Occupy has been nothing compared to that in respect to vicious state
repression in the court system. I mean, not to minimise some of the
violence against occupy people in the US. The riots were really a place
where you saw this kind of call. So, to me its no surprise that the call
through social media was what they criminalised most quickly.
FRED: I want to say something else about the demand. I still kinda
want to hang on to that term. The reason I do is because, I certainly see the difference between request and call, I want to get back
into the history of the word demand, where it also means to make a
claim, and sometimes to make a legal claim and the whole notion
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of demand is that you speak with a kind of authority. The authority

of the demand could be supplied by the state, insofar as you serve as
an officer of the state, so that you have the state and its powers of
violence and coercion behind you when you make the demand. But,
theres also the notion of a claim or a demand in which the authority
of the demand is from some kind of multiphonic delirium or fantasy
that undermines the univocal authority of sovereignty. Thats what
Im thinking of with regard to McPhee and his tone. You listen to
that record. Its 1970. Coltrane died in 67, but hes still in the air everywhere. And his tone, which was a tone of appeal appeal is a cool
word, appeal as in to make an appeal but also peal; there was an urgent intensity to his sound, a stridency. So, what Im trying to get at is
there was this notion of the cacophony of the demand.
Folks who were basically saying we dont want to make any demands there were two elements to it. One potential way of saying that we were resisting making the demand is to say that what we
were really resisting was to make a request. We did not want to make
a demand, because to make a demand is essentially to make a request,
which is essentially then already to accede to the authority of the state
to either grant or refuse your request, after the fact of having recognized your standing, your right to request, even though it is the source
of your injury, even though your recognition by the state redoubles,
rather than remedies, that injury. So, thats a kind of Wendy Brown
formulation. Then, another version of it, I thought, had to do with
the fact that the demand emerges from a certain kind of authority.
The properly authorised and authoritative speech of a demand takes
the form of a univocal, single speech. Essentially, a kind of sovereign
speaker is now drowning out, or trying to collect within his own anthemic speech, all these other kinds of speech. So, again, some single,
univocal notion of the demand emerges, when in fact what youve got
is a whole bunch of people making a whole bunch of demands, some
of which are contradictory and we wanted to maintain that sort of
ana(n)themic multiplicity, because that was the whole point.
What if authoritative speech is detached from the notion of a univocal speaker? What if authoritative speech is actually given in the
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multiplicity and the multivocality of the demand? This was something that was also happening at that same moment in the music, so
that the figure of the soloist was being displaced. Even if the soloist
was, in a certain sense, only temporarily occupying a certain kind of
sovereign position, the return to collective improvisational practices
was sort of saying, we are making a music which is complex enough
and rich enough so that when you listen to it you are hearing multiple
voices, multiply formed voices. We are sort of displacing the centrality
of the soloist. Or, another way to put it would be that, even within
the figure of the soloist itself, theres this exhaustion and augmentation of the instrument, this tingling of the saxophone and this is
something that you hear in McPhees playing on Nation Time. He
was playing harmonics on the horn, so that the horn itself becomes
something other than a single-line instrument; it becomes chordal,
social. And that chordal playing shows up for us aurally as screams,
as honks, as something that had been coded or denigrated as extramusical as noise rather than signal. So, what Im trying to do is to
consider this notion of the demand as an appeal, as a claim, where
youre not appealing to the state but appealing to one another. An appeal, in this delivery youre making all this sound, youre making all
this noise. Youre an ensemble, and thats bound up with that notion
of study and sociality that weve been talking about.
So, I want to say that I agree with everything you say about the call,
but I guess I want to maintain or keep that word demand, just because of the particular way that Fanon indexes it, because he talks
about it in relation to the settlers interested, regulative understanding of neurosis.
STEFANO: That part I like, but the part that Im concerned with in
Fanon is that the demand for him seems futuristic. And it seems
to me that, when we were looking at the Panthers again, one of the
things that seemed so cool about them is they had a revolutionary
program that was partly about preservation. So, it was like a revolution in the present of already-existing black life.
FRED: Look, heres the thing: youre right. I like the fact that Fanon
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associates it with neurosis. In Black Skin, the neurotic is problematic

and its, I think, very much tied to, or gesturing towards, a certain
understanding of black sociality as pathological and theres nothing
about that which Fanon wants to preserve, in Black Skin. In Wretched
of the Earth, on the other hand, I think theres a lot about it that he
wants to preserve. At the same time neurosis is also the condition of
the sovereign, the habitual attempt to regulate the general, generative disorder. What does it mean to call for disorder in the sovereigns
native tongue? How do you get to the ongoing evasion of natality which is where or what that call comes from or, more precisely,
through? The path that is forged by negation and reversal doesnt get
you there or gets you to someplace other than that, some delusion of
origin or home, someplace available to or by way of a movement of
return. I think Fanon is always trying to move against the grain of
this itinerary of return, this reversal of image or standpoint. But thats
why its so crucial to abide with the work of Cesaire or Baraka or Samuel Delany so that you can understand that the various returns they
seem to enact or compose are always more and less than that. Fanon
understands that the very taking of an anti-colonial stance looks crazy, from a normative perspective. For me, first of all, thats good. Thats
something thats worthwhile. In other words, what its about is, Im
gonna claim this thing that looks crazy from your perspective. But,
of course, the problem, I think, with Fanon in Black Skin, is you can
do this thing that looks crazy from the normative perspective, but of
course in some complicated way there is no non-normative perspective. The non-normative is precisely the absence of a point of view,
which is therefore why it can never be about preservation. Eventually,
I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other
world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this
place which shows up here and now, in the sovereigns space and time,
as absence, darkness, death, things which are not (as John Donne
would say).
And what I want to do is say, against the grain of Fanon but in a way
that he allows and requires me to say, no, lets look at this shit from
our perspective, from the perspective of the ones who are relegated to
the zone of the crazy or, to be more precise, I hope, from the absent
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perspective, or absence of perspective, of the delirious, the more and

less than crazy. And what were saying is we claim this, not just because its against the grain of the normative, not just because it allows
us to call for something in the future; we claim this because this is
who we are and what we do right now. Now, Fanon doesnt say that
in Black Skin, but I think hes approaching that by the time he gets
cut off, basically. This is not simply to repress or forget the pitfalls of
spontaneity or the problems of national consciousness; it is, precisely,
to remember them and what sends them; to consider what moves at
and in this interplay of study and an ever expanding sense of who
and what we are. That Derridean who, we is already active in Fanons
Algerian air that open question of the human and its sound, which
now we can take even further out into a general ecology or something
like a Deleuzean plane of immanence. And I think that you could
project outward from Fanons last work and then come back and get
something out of that interplay of the neurotic and the demand that
he is beginning to approach in the chapters on mental disorders and
anti-colonial struggle in Wretched of the Earth, because hes recognizing that anti-colonial struggle is all bound up with the radical, sort
of, non-normative form of cogitation, that its gotta be, because it
is, thought in another way. Its that shit that Shakespeare says: the
lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact. Just
edit it: the lunatic, the lover, and the anti-colonial guerilla, right?, are
of imagination all compact. And thats an aesthetic formulation that
Shakespeares making. But it has massive social implications, which
need to be drawn out, which in a certain sense Fanon is gesturing towards, something that were associating with blackness and the undercommons, something he tries to reach, something were trying to
learn how to try to reach or reach for. But, what we understand as the
social zone of blackness and the undercommons is the zone precisely in which you make that claim so that the demand is a doublevoiced thing, an enunciation in the interest of more than what it calls
for. You are saying what you want, though what you want is more
than what you say, at the same time that you are saying what you are
while in the guise of what you are not. Theres this other formulation
of Barakas that McPhee would have known as well: The new black
music is this: find the self, then kill it. That kinda thing gets said from
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the neurotic standpoint, in the neurotic habit, of the soloist. But the
soloist is not one. Just like it was always about more than the right
to vote or the tastiness of the water that comes from this, as opposed
to that, fountain.
STEFANO: And I think in part thats connected directly to being
shipped, because it means that you unmoored from a standpoint.

Once youre in all the circuits of capital, youre in every standpoint,
and at that point, the demand becomes something of the future and
the present, that has been realized and has yet to happen. So, it gets
connected back up for me with what we were talking about earlier
about hearing things and seeing things, and about the relationship
between demand and prophecy, which again is totally bound up with
having been shipped.
FRED: Its just like the stuff you were talking about: in another version
of the shipped, of logisticality, Woody Guthrie is riding the blinds
with folks who are one anothers pillows. And you can segue from
that immediately to I aint got no home anymore in this world. And
you can segue from I aint got no home anymore in this world to like
Coltranes Ascension or Interstellar Space, in which the musical form is
all about the disruption, the making of new form, outside the notion
of some kind of necessary structural return to a tonic. So, theres no
tonal center. Theres no home like that. The improvisations are unmoored in this way. And obviously this is also something that plays
itself out in Arnold Schoenberg, or whatever. So, the point would be
that, like, recognizing that the most adventurous and experimental
aesthetics, where dissonance is emancipated, are hand-in-hand with
the most fucked up, brutal, horrific experience of being simultaneously held and abandoned.
That double-edged logisticality, where the one who is shipped is also

a smuggler, carrying something and what he carries is, first and
foremost, a kind of radical, non-locatability. The point is, theres a
certain way of thinking about that impossibility of being located, of
that exhaustion of location, that only can be understood as deprivation. So, like, by way of Frank Wilderson, who, when he elaborates
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his theory of the special antagonism that structures black life in the
administered world also offers this brilliant articulation of this desire
for home I dont want to be a cosmic hobo which is necessary to
any possible embrace of homelessness. Woody Guthrie was a cosmic
hobo, Coltrane was a cosmic hobo, so even if I could be something
other than a cosmic hobo, I think what Im gonna do is embrace
homelessness for the possibilities that it bears, hard as that is, hard
as they are. Homelessness is hard, no doubt about it. But, home is
harder. And its harder on you, and its harder on every-god-damnbody else too. I aint so concerned, necessarily, about the travails of the
settler. The horrible difficulties that the settler imposes upon himself
are not my first concern, though in the end they are a real thing. Its
the general imposition of severalty, to use Theodore Roosevelts evil
terms, that Im trying to think about and undermine. He knew that
possessive individualism that the self-possessed individual, was as
dangerous to Native Americans as a pox-infested blanket. Civilisation, or more precisely civil society, with all its transformative hostility, was mobilized in the service of extinction, of disappearance. The
shit is genocidal. Fuck a home in this world, if you think you have
one.
STEFANO: Just like the people we went to school with or
maybe some of your Duke students or indeed settlers of the
globe generally.
FRED: Yeah, well, the ones who happily claim and embrace their own
sense of themselves as privileged aint my primary concern. I dont

worry about them first. But, I would love it if they got to the point
where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then
maybe we could talk. Thats like that Fred Hampton shit: hed be like,
white power to white people. Black power to black people. What
I think he meant is, look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isnt something that emerges so that you can come help me,
a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The
coalition emerges out of your recognition that its fucked up for you,
in the same way that weve already recognized that its fucked up for
us. I dont need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is
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killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker,
you know? But, that position in which you have no place, no home,
that youre literally off center, off the track, unlocatable, I think its
important. Again, I think that theres something to be gained from
that part of Fanons double alignment of the demand with neurosis.
Its sort of saying, basically, its like Malcolm X, when hed be talking
about the distinction between the house negro and the field negro.
And the primary distinction that hed make was that the field negro
would be saying, where can I get a better job than this? Where can
I get a better house than this? He was claiming the location that really wasnt his, but what he was really claiming was the possibility of
location. And Malcolms like, No! Ill be out in the field. Not only in
the hope of something more, something other, than what you think
you have but also because theres something in the field; that even in
deprivation, theres an opening.
STEFANO: Yeah, I think thats also something I felt again in these
London riots. Its always that stuff about, why are they fucking up
their own neighborhood? Of course part of it is they dont own those
neighborhoods. But part of it is also, like, cuz theres gotta be something better than home.
FRED: Its like that, what did that Home Secretary say? What are the
causes of the riots? She was like, shared criminality.
STEFANO: She doesnt know how close she was to the truth.
FRED: Shes ridiculous, and yet theres something deep and kind of
true about that. I think you can make a good case that human being
in the world is, and should be, sheer criminality. Which also, first and
foremost, implies that making laws is a criminal activity.
STEFANO: The jurisgenerative stuff...
FRED: Those kids were, basically, like, fuck this. And youre right, if
youre implying that Occupy never got to that.
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STEFANO: Yeah, it didnt get there.

FRED: A few people started talking about, lets occupy everything.
Lets occupy everywhere and thats more in line. But, we wont
come to your house and bother you. If thats the best you can do,
then thats cool too. Its better to bother someone to death than to die.
But we can move past that too.
STEVPHEN: One other thing I wanted to ask: I think part of the reti-
cence about demands is also about a certain discomfort with thinking

about or relating to the state, and how to relate to the state. Im gonna
ask two or three questions here, so it might be a bit of a mess. Not
to get too caught up on definitions, Im trying to understand the difference between how you understand the undercommons as opposed
to, say, infrapolitics, or things coming out from people like Tiqqun,
talking about zones of opacity. How does this notion compare, particularly in relation to thinking about the state? One of the things Ive
been trying to push you on for several years, Stefano, is your sort of
knee-jerk reaction to someone like James Scott. You say James Scott
and he starts kicking!
FRED: His knee hasnt jerked in twelve years! Id love to see your knee
jerk!
STEVPHEN: My question has something to do with his take on the

state, and particularly that which cannot be taken into the state. So,
in a book like Seeing Like a State, there are certain things which the
state cant figure out. It cant figure out infrapolitics, its completely incomprehensible to it. My suspicion is that youd say, no, thats stupid.
Of course its taken an understanding of infrapolitics. It does all the
time. Which is why I want to ask you about the difference between
undercommons and infrapolitics, in relation to the state. Im guessing
you are less reticent about the role of the state.
STEFANO: Well, its not that Im less reticent. Im less convinced that
theres a thing called the state, because I used to work in it. Okay,
government and state are not the same thing, but Ive never been able
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to understand the state except as an effect of certain kinds of labor.

And, when I was involved with that kind of labor, there were all kinds
of undercommons in the departments that I worked in. There was
an underlabor. There was study going on all the time in government.
And if government essentially produces effects of state in various
ways, which seems to be what Tim Mitchell and some of the smarter guys around state theory think, then for me, its not about being
against or for the state, its being about, as Tronti would say, within
and against the state, but also with and for the undercommons of the
state. So, I just dont line up on the side that theres a state, theres an
economy, theres a society, even that theres state and capital in such a
clear way. I have a much more, sort of, phenomenological, if I could
use that word which I kind of hate, approach to the state. When you
get close to it, theres all kinds of shit going on there. Most of its bad.
Most of the effects are bad. But, at the same time, some of the best
study, some of the craziest undercommons people have been working
in government agencies, local government agencies at the motor vehicle department.
I remember once going in; I remember me and my friend Pete, we
tried to get a cover for State Work, my book about this stuff. We went
into the big post office that they later closed in downtown Manhattan. It was in the days when the post office was just full of people
actually working there, before the attacks of September 11, 2001 in
New York. I went to the one in Durham very recently, actually, and it
reminded me of what it used to be like in New York, before it was all
securitized. It was only a few people but it was just like that: a big old
post office. Everyone had their booth, and in lower Manhattans post
office behind almost every booth was a black or latina woman who
had completely decorated the booth for heself. And it was full of, like,
Mumia posters, pictures of kids, pictures of Michael Jackson, pictures
of union stuff, everything. Every booth, so every time you went up,
you got a different view. And Im like, well, if these are the people who
are supposed to be making an effect called the state, then, theres got
to be an undercommons here too. So, its not helpful for me to say I
can do this and I will be invisible to the state. Or, Im not making an
appeal because the state will get me. Thats not to say that the state
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wont throw me in jail or doesnt throw people in jail all the time. I just
dont like to start from that position.
STEVPHEN: It sounds more like projecting sort of an accidental fet-
ish character of the state that sees it as whole and coordinated and, of
course, very sensible.
STEFANO: Yeah, and also, I think the fact that people work on an af-
fective state and there is a certain thing that goes on that doesnt
maybe go on in private production, because you have some notion
that youre producing the effect. Now, thats become more common
everywhere else. So, theres been a kind of way in which, well, there
used to be some idea that when youre working in productive industries youre producing stuff. Now of course everybody thinks theyre
producing effects everywhere theyre working. So, also, it seems to me
that a certain kind of distinction has broken down around that and
I think thats interesting. Also, Im not against the production of effects. I dont think that its bad that people should get together and
imagine that theyre producing something hard to see. Its just bad
that they happen to imagine nation-states.
I guess thats my position on James Scott [laughs]. You know, I get
enough shit for attacking James Scott. I really never give the guy a
thought! I used to get criticised all the time when the State Work book
came out, from my development studies friends because apparently
I called him an anti-communist, and that really made everybody
berserk. But I just meant in the technical sense that he was against
communism.
STEVPHEN: In the technical sense! [laughs]

FRED: Im actually asking the question now, because I want you to say
something more, Stefano, about this, because I actually think its important. For Scott, what is it that he thinks he means by the state? Because what youre saying, Stefano, is that theres this monolithic thing
that appears to be the referent when people utter the word state.
And youre saying its not monolithic at all, and not only is it not a
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monolith but its very, very thoroughly aerated. There are all kinds of
little holes and tunnels and ditches and highways and byways through
the state that are being produced and maintained constantly by the
people who are also at the same time doing this labor that ends in the
production of the state. So, what is it that these folks are producing?
Scott seems to refer to a monolith that is unbroken by and in the very
process of its construction. Hes one of the ones who gets us back to
the point where we ask, what is it that we dont like about that monolith. Well, its coercive power or its power to police or its power to
make policy or to foster the making of policy or its power to govern
or to foster governance and governmentality. So, what is he talking
about? I give him credit, or I believe, however anti-communist he is, I
believe hes sincere in his antipathy towards the monolith. To the extent that it exists, I hate it, too.
But, then, there are other people on the left who have no antipathy
towards the state at all. And then I think they mean, its not some sort
of monolithic mode of existence that we are all captured by and contained within at the level of our own affective relations to one another
and our everyday practices because I think thats part of what Scott
means. But what theyre basically saying is, no, what Im interested
in is this thing that has a certain kind of coercive power, and rather
than that coercive power being granted to some other mug, I want it
to be granted to me because Ill do the right thing with it. And also
the main reason is I not only believe that I would do the right thing
with it but I also believe that the kinds of things that I want to do at
the level of scale can only be done by way of some sort of state or state
apparatuses. So, their ploy is: (a) Ill do it better and (b) Im thinking
about shit at the level of scale and youre just being silly and all you
care about is these four people that youre talking to right now. See?
STEFANO: I do see, and Im also interested in this question of scale,
because thats the side of the argument scale ends up on and who it
ends up on and with. But, one of the things Im interested in, in the
history of communism, lets say, is: under what circumstances could I
allow myself to be taken up and possessed by others, be in the hands
of others, give up anything like a kind of sovereign self-determination
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that I will vote on every decision, that I will oversee, that I will be like
Lenins inspectors, coming in to make sure the states doing what it
wants? What kind of communism could there be where I could just
allow some people to do some shit for me, at the level of scale, and at
the same time those people would also at other moments allow me
to be doing that kind of thing? So, in what ways are we practicing,
when were for a dispossession of ourselves and allowing ourselves to
be possessed in certain other ways, allowing ourselves to consent not
to be one, at a moment that also lets people act on us and through us,
and doesnt constantly require us re-constituting ourselves, which I
think is implied? And this is, I think, the anti-communism of Scott.
Scotts smallness is about self-determined autonomy. When youre
small and in resistance, youre always in control.
Now, its not that then instead we go for the state, because obviously
the state, despite the fact that, as I say, its not the thing he thinks it
is, but a whole series of different kinds of shit its effects are basically
bad in the end. But, Im interested in the way in which what were doing already is and can be completely complex, that it doesnt require
some other step and that we need to practice something else. Autonomists get this all the time in Europe: critics are like, oh, its fine, you
guys can go off and do that together, but weve got a hydro-electric
system to run here. And they often fall for that, and then sometimes
youll hear the autonomists saying, what would it mean to build autonomist institutions? And maybe I misunderstood them but I think
you dont need to build an autonomist institution. You need to elaborate the principle of autonomy in a way in which you become even
less of yourself; or you overflow yourself more than what youre doing
right now. You just need to do more of the shit that youre doing right
now, and that will produce the scale. So, thats whats interesting to
me. Im interested in the way in which a deepening of autonomy is a
deepening, not just among few people, not just that intensity which
I value, but also its a deepening of scale and the potentials of scale.
FRED: Yes, I agree. I bring up scale, not to denigrate scale, but
to say, we cant cede scale to the people who assume that scale
is inseparable from the state, or from what they mean by the
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state, which is a set of apparatuses and institutions which wield

coercive power.
STEVPHEN: Agreed on that. Another thing I want to ask you about is,
over the past few years theres been another revival or proliferation of
kinds of alternative education projects, things like Edu-factory to free
schools and all sorts of free universities. What they all were struck
by is sort of, when you leave the institution, why do people want to
imagine what theyre doing in terms of the institution anyways? The
limit of the conception of collectivity is another institution.
STEFANO: Yeah, Ive been struggling with this myself, as Ive been
doing elaborations on a proposal for the School for Study that were
thinking about doing in France. The first three times I did it, I was
putting in all kinds of shit that didnt really need to be there that
was a kind of recapitulation of the university in ways that didnt have
to happen. It was only in the last version, really after Denise had
looked at it and said, why is all this other stuff in here? What youre
really interested in is study, so why not just have it be a forum for
study? And thats when the name changed and thats when we began
to click on what we were gonna try to do with it. And its absolutely
the case that, when you think youre exiting the university, youre not.
Youre taking all this shit with you.
But also, Matteo Mandarini gave us this very interesting phrase.

Tronti has this phrase where he says, I work within and against the
institution. So, the Queen Mary project was this within and against
the institution project. But its also been elaborated in Precarious
Ring stuff and other places as something that would also be known
through co-research, something like within and for. So, the within
and against gets cut with a kind of within and for. When you move
further out into an autonomous setting, where you get some free
space and free time a little more easily, then, what you have to attend
to is the shift, for me, between the within and against which when
youre deep in the institution you spend a lot of time on it and the
with and for. And that changes a lot of shit. All those things are always in play. When I say with and for, I mean studying with people
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rather than teaching them, and when I say for, I mean studying with
people in service of a project, which in this case I think we could just
say is more study. So, that with and for, the reason we move into more
autonomous situations is that it grows, and we spend less time in the
antagonism of within and against.
Some people love the productivity of the antagonism. Personally, I
dont say its not productive, but the further I get to the with and for,
the happier I am. But thats a challenge, to remember that and to do
it, and to learn how do it, if you spend a lot of time in the within and
against, as we did. Im only saying this to say, if I watch the migration
of the Queen Mary collective project from the within and against towards the with and for thats available to us by becoming this kind
of School for Study that were talking about now, we have to study
how to do that. We dont necessarily know how to do that, and were
still trying to figure out how to do that, because weve been inside so
much. Its not that you ever leave the within and against I dont care
how far you squat. Obviously, theres a shift in what becomes possible and where you can put your attention in different circumstances.
STEVPHEN: Perhaps thats why the work both of you did of
analyzing academic labor within a given position is necessary for the
leaving, so when you leave you dont bring some of the things with
you.
STEFANO: Well, at the personal level, and I started this morning say-
ing this, and I still think its true hours later, I had to go through that
academic labor shit, especially with Fred, in order to free myself in a
million different ways, including getting more into this autonomous
stuff. I only feel now that thats had a full effect, that I can think free
of all the shit that was in me through the labor process I was, and remain, immersed in. The first thing I made everyday when I went to
university was myself, and the university these days is not necessarily
the best place to make yourself.
FRED: I agree with that too. We were talking about how it was a way
for us to understand who we were, and what was going on where we
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were and to try to take more fully into account the necessity of understanding what your own conditions are. So, lets say that in some
ways, the academic labor writings represented attempts at location
and locating, mapping some sort of terrain that you were within. And
I think the later stuff is much more interested in trying to achieve a
kind of dislocation and a kind of dispersion and, therefore, it claims
a certain mobility. I agree with Stefano, well I dont know if we had
to do that, but thats where we got started. We could have got started
in another way.
STEFANO: Yeah, in a way, the undercommons is a kind of break piece,
between locating ourselves and dislocating ourselves. Whats so enduring for us about the undercommons concept is thats what it continues to do when it is encountered in new circumstances. People
always say, well, where the fuck is that. Even if you do that clever
Marxist thing like, oh its not a place, its a relation, people are like,
yeah, but wheres the relation. It has a continuing effect as a dislocation, and it always makes people feel a little uncomfortable about the
commons. For me it was like the first freight that we hopped.
FRED: Yeah, its a dislocation. As our old friend Bubba Lopez would
say, we started riding the blinds.
DEBT, CREDIT, AUTONOMY

STEVPHEN: Another area I wanted to ask about is your relationship
to autonomism: How do you draw from post-workerism, in particular

how it overlaps with the black radical tradition? Or more particularly
the way that these overlaps and connections are passed over and ignored?
STEFANO: Im not interested so much in the relationship where the
debt would have to be credited, because increasingly for me I see the

dominance of these two forms of debt in life, and theyre both so
baleful, theyre both so moralistic. You know, as Marx said, debt is
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the moral judgment on the man. But also the other kind of debt, you
know: I owe everything to my mother, I owe everything to my mentor.
That stuff also becomes very quickly oppressive and very moralistic.
There has to be a way in which there can be elaborations of unpayable debt that dont always return to an individualisation through the
family or an individualisation through the wage laborer, but instead
the debt becomes a principle of elaboration. And therefore its not
that you wouldnt owe people in something like an economy, or you
wouldnt owe your mother, but that the word owe would disappear
and it would become some other word, it would be a more generative word.
I know that too many Italian autonomists never payed sufficient attention to the black radical tradition, and I know that thats continued up to the present to some extent. What Im more interested in
right now is the opportunity to place this vital strand of European
experiment within a more global history. So, now certain autonomist
stuff is sort of popping up in India. If it comes to India as if it came
from Europe, as if it were an import rather than a version of something, then the first thing were going to lose is an entire history, that
I, for instance, dont know enough about, of autonomist thinking and
movement in India, from India. So, its not so much about giving
credit to something, as it is of seeing this or that instance of something much broader. Im not as interested in correcting genealogical
lines, as I am in seeing European autonomism as an instance of something, and others can put it in whatever global context they want but
for me its an instance of the black radical tradition, an general inheritance of the shipped, the impossible tradition of those without tradition, an experimental social poesis.
STEVPHEN: I was sort of asking, not to say oh well look whats missed,
how bad it is that theyve missed it, but more Im intrigued by the
particular ways of missing it. Autonomia seems to render blackness
in a very Leninist way. So, we care about Detroit and nowhere else.
STEFANO: Yeah. Well, in that sense it also has an unfortunate ten-
dency to reflect itself. Autonomia has a problem of vanguardism that
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its always trying to get rid of. It stands against vanguardism, but its
always about, whos really doing it and whos not really doing it? Its
still caught up with the idea that in order to be autonomous you need
to be doing politics, and then theres the persistent risk of a definition of whos doing politics and whos not thats always at work. This
is even in the Gambino pieces. For as good as they are, hes constantly
looking for where DuBois or Malcolm X intersect with real politics,
in my opinion. And yet as Matteo Pasquinelli points out, the impulse:
if difference, then resistance is at the core of Italian theory and at
is best this attention to what we would call the general antagonism
is what this tradition shares with the impossible but actually existing
tradition of black radical thought.
FRED: I defer to what Stefano said. I dont have that much to say
about it. Theres a very important, and lets call it righteous strain, of
Afro-American and Afro-Diasporic studies that we could place under the rubric of debt collection. And its basically like, we did this
and we did that, and you continue not to acknowledge it. You continue to mis-name it. You continue to violently misunderstand it. And
Im going to correct the record and collect this debt. And theres a
political component to it, too. Maybe thats partly what the logic of
reparations is about. Or even the I have a Dream speech, hes like
we came here today to cash a check. A promise was given. We came
to collect. Thats what King said. So, I dont disavow that rhetoric or
even that project. And, in many ways, Im a beneficiary of that project,
in ways that are totally undeniable and I dont want to deny.
I also think that that project is not the project of black radicalism
which is not about debt collection or reparation. Its about a complete
overturning again, as Fanon would say, and others have said. If thats
your concern, if thats your project, the mechanisms of debt collection
become less urgent. Or they become something that one is concerned
about, but in a different way. Like, I will note the debt, and I will note
the brutal and venal and vicious way in which the debt is unacknowledged. When we talk about debt, to talk about the unpayability of
debt is not to fail to acknowledge the debt. But, certain mugs just refuse even to acknowledge the debt. And I think a whole lot of what
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people want when they want reparations is in fact an acknowledgment, and they want an acknowledgement of the debt because it constitutes something like a form of recognition, and that becomes very
problematic because the form of recognition that they want is within
an already existing system. They want to be recognized by sovereignty
as sovereign, in a certain sense. So, basically, I can read a big old book
on the history of Western Marxism, and I can be alternatively pissed
off about the way that its author can write that history without writing about CLR James. Im alternatively pissed off, bemused, feel pity
for his ignorant ass, whatever. You start to feel pity for his ignorant
butt, but then you also understand the deep structural connections
between ignorance and arrogance. And you cant feel sorry for an ignorant motherfucker if hes also an arrogant motherfucker, so then
you get mad again. You stay mad, actually. But this is not a personal
injury. You have to step to it in a different way.
So, basically, Im with Stefano on this, which is that I feel like I want
to be part of another project. Which is to say Im not acceding to the
fact; its not like Im just trying to turn my eye from it. I dont want
to accept in silence without protest all the different forms of inequality and exploitation that emerge as a function of the theft and of the
failure to acknowledge the debt. Its not just that Im pissed off that
Willie Dixon never got paid the way he was supposed to get paid for
all them songs that Plant and Jimmy Page stole, but also that I want
him or his locked-up grandson to get the damn money. Im not sitting
here saying, Im above them getting the money. I dont believe that
what has happened in general is reparable, but if the United States
finally decided to write me a check, I would cash the check and put
it in the bank or go buy something stupid with it, a Rolls Royce or
a Bentley, something that will really make George Stephanopoulos
mad. I would accept the check, and be pissed off that it aint as much
as it should be. But I also know that what it is that is supposed to be
repaired is irreparable. It cant be repaired. The only thing we can do is
tear this shit down completely and build something new.
So, Im interested in the autonomist tradition insofar as theyve got
something useful to say about the possibility and practicality of
152
tearing shit up and building something new. My primary concern

with it is not that they refuse to acknowledge this, although at the
same time, their refusal to acknowledge other instances of a similar
kind of thought, or a similar kind of social phenomena, does have a
negative impact on the utility of what they do. So, that has to be taken
into account as something that has material effects. But, in terms of
just some desire for an acknowledgment, so that then Grace Lee or
James Boggs or whoever, or the similar movements outside Detroit
that some autonomists never really studied, can be noted... or, I think
theres a kind of work that people want to do where it would be like,
somebody might read George Lewiss book on AACM [Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians] and say, well, this has
to be understood in a general framework that associates it with the
autonomist movement, or something like that and that would be
an important, maybe, intellectual connection to make, and somebody
could make it, and I think that would be cool. But, the bottom line
is I think a whole lot of that kind of work of acknowledging a debt
intellectually is really predicated on a notion that somehow the black
radical tradition is ennobled when we say that the autonomists picked
something up from it. Its as if that makes it more valuable, whereas it doesnt need to be ennobled by its connections to autonomist
thought. Rather, whats at stake is the possibility of a general movement that then gets fostered when we recognize these two more or
less independent irruptions of a certain kind of radical social action
and thinking.
STEVPHEN: Thanks for that. The last thing I wanted to ask you, I
think youve already started to answer in certain ways. At one point

you write how justice is only possible where debt never obliges, never
demands, never equals credit... debts which arent paid cant be paid. I
was thinking about this, particularly in relation to the recent calls for
debt abolition or a politics of debt that says, no, well have to get rid
of all of this debt. But to me it sounds like you have a sense of debt
which cant be forgiven, cant be gotten rid of, and you wouldnt want
to get rid of. So, I want to ask you, whats the relation between debt
abolition and the debt that one would not want to get rid of ?
153
STEFANO: For me, when I use the term abolition, I mean it precisely in the opposite way. For me, abolition is both about a kind of
acknowledgement that, as Fred says, theres no repairing or paying
back the debt, so you couldnt really have anything like an abolition
of debt. I mean, you could have debt forgiveness, but I would never
use the term abolition for that meaning. And, secondly, theres a
whole history of debt that is not that history of debt, which doesnt
need to be forgiven, but needs to become activated as a principle of
social life. It can become, and already is in many instances activated
as something which, precisely as something that doesnt resolve itself into creditor and debtor, allows us to say, I dont really know
where I start and where I end. This is even my point around the
debt between a parent and a child. If its really a debt, then that debt
that you have is for more than you, its not just for you, it passes
through you, but it was a generative form of affect between two beings that is precisely valuable because it continues in certain kinds
of ways. Theres a whole history there, and what abolition means in
that case is the abolition of something like credit or measurability
or attribution, in a certain way.
FRED: I think this is where that distinction Stefano made between
credit and debt is crucial. I think what people may mean, when they
talk about the abolition of debt, is the abolition of credit. But they
probably dont even really mean that. What they probably technically mean is forgiveness, which is to say, well forgive this loan. Now,
if you get in debt again, were gonna want to get paid, goddamnit.
Whereas, what Stefano is talking about, I think and I concur, is an
abolition of credit, of the system of credit, which is to say, maybe its
an abolition of accounting. It says that when we start to talk about
our common resources, when we talk about what Marx means by
wealth the division of it, the accumulation of it, the privatization
of it, and the accounting of it all of that shit should be abolished. I
mean, you cant count how much we owe one another. Its not countable. It doesnt even work that way. Matter of fact, its so radical that
it probably destabilizes the very social form or idea of one another.
But, thats what douard Glissant is leading us towards when he talks
about what it is to consent not to be a single being. And if you think
154
about it, it is a sort of filial and essentially a maternal relation. When

I say maternal, what Im implying there is the possibility of a general
socialisation of the maternal.
But, whats at stake, its like, man, we went to look at this place yesterday, because Ive got my whole commune plan. Its like ten acres,
way out in the woods. And its like a barn. The house is falling apart.
I dont think we can do it. But there was this old lady. She and her
husband, they built it how they wanted it to be. She was like, I dont
want to sell, but shes 91 and its this kind of big old place, she cant
keep up with it. People were telling us, she owes her son a hundred
thousand dollars. And me and Laura, driving back, we were like,
how you gonna owe your son a hundred thousand dollars? How do
you owe a parent a hundred thousand dollars? Thats some crazy, barbaric shit. You have to be a barbaric monster to even be able to think
of some shit like that. You know what? Its no more barbaric than owing Wells Fargo Bank a hundred thousand dollars. You think at first
glance that its barbaric because it appears to violate some sort of notion of filial, maternal relation. But, its barbaric because its a barbaric
way of understanding our undercommon-ness. Its just particularly
blatant because its a relation between a mother and son. But, if it
were a relation between me and Jamie Dimon, its still barbaric. And
thats the problem. So, the abolition of credit, the abolition of the entire way of looking at the world, which lets say we can place under the
rubric of accounting, or accountability, or accountableness, or something, of calculation in that sense the abolition of that, in a way that
David Graeber thinks about it, but without any kind of sense of a return to some originary state of grace, but instead carrying all of what
that history has imposed upon us. Hence this argument about where
the autonomists got what they got... You know, I love C.L.R. James,
but the shit that we now have under his name, was never his private
property. Jazz aint black peoples private property. And that doesnt
mean that musicians shouldnt get paid for what they do, within the
context of this shit. What Im really saying when I say that is: anybody whos breathing should have everything that they need and 93%
of what they want not by virtue of the fact that you work today, but
by virtue of the fact that you are here.
155
What is it about adults thats so distasteful? You see a kid on the street
or in your house, you know youre supposed to feed them, right? And
then that same kid hits eighteen and all of a sudden you say, Im not
feeding you. Whats so vulgar and gross and smelly and distasteful
about the average adult that you wouldnt just assume that he should
get something to eat? I mean, youve gotta be sick to come up with
something like that. I mean, whos the worst person in the world?
Even he should have something to eat.
STEFANO: Given that, when you start to talk about this other kind
of debt, youre talking about a history of aesthetics, a history of love, a

history of organization, its not merely about what you want to abolish
which is credit but its also about what you want to live in and how
you want to live in it. And thats because the real debt, the big debt,
the wealth that Marx is talking about, is precisely that: its wealth.
So, you want to figure out some way that that wealth can be enjoyed.
And thats not by managing it, because managing it is the first step
to accounting for it, attributing it or distributing it. Its about developing some way of being with each other, and of not thinking that
that requires the mediation of politics. But, it requires elaboration,
it requires improvisation, it requires a kind of rehearsal. It requires
things. Its just that it doesnt require accounting or management.
It requires study.
FRED: Man, I remember being little, being in Arkansas with my

grandparents. My grandfather would give somebody a ride like 80
miles from our little town to another little town in his little 1969
green Buick Skylark. And there was this whole ritual process that
would occur, and it had a couple of different parts to it. One part
would be that somebody, my grandpa, would give you a ride, and before theyd get out of the car, the person would say, how much do
I owe you? And hed say, nothin. Sometimes hed feign a kind of,
why would you even ask me some shit like that? Theyd come a
whole way just for a certain set of performances. It dont mean nothin. Man, get out of this car, or something like that. But, if somebody
got out of the car without asking that shit... Hed be like, son, dont
be like that. You have to acknowledge.
156
STEFANO: And you have to rehearse, because youre involved in the

rehearsal of some other form of being in debt together. When we say
that we dont want management, it doesnt mean we dont want anything, that it just sits there and everythings fine. Theres something to
be done, but its performative, its not managerial.
FRED: And the other part of it, which was just as important, was every
once in awhile, if youre giving somebody a ride or if they gave you a

ride, instead of asking how much do I owe you?, you would just take
some money out of your pocket and say, put some gas in the car, and
get out of the car. See the interplay between those two things. So, the
reason why you asked somebody, how much do I owe you? is so that
you could be engaged in this ritual process of basically disavowing the
very idea of owe.
STEFANO: Yeah, exactly. So that you begin to practice, improvise the
relationship between necessity and freedom, not on the grounds of

owing and credit, but on the grounds of unpayable debt.
FRED: Yep, most of the while, when you had some money, it wouldnt
be a discussion. You would just say, here put some gas in the car, and
get out, leaving some money on the seat.
STEFANO: Theres a necessity moment in it, but its in the context of
the freedom, rather than the other way around, and this is the only
way it could be when we think of ability and need freed of the standpoint and then this is not a distributional politics anymore but an experiment in letting yourself discover new needs in your abilities and
new abilities in your needs in the rhythm of, not against, the general
antagonism, performed between the two and amongst the many.
FRED: Yeah, and this is why, for me, see I was looking at that, and it
was illogical, if you want to call it that, but it was also performative.
For me, Im not saying thats the only form that study takes, but any
notion of study that doesnt acknowledge that form of it is not the
study that Im interested in.
157
STEFANO: Where you find the abolition of credit you find study.
But you cant call for the abolition of credit like you hear calls for
the abolition of debt because the call to abolish credit is already
always going all, it is a call that enacts, that is enacted. In other words, we dont need anything to get in debt together. We have
already a superabundance of mutual debt we dont want pay, we
dont want to pay, so what why would we call for anything? But we
can join in this plenitude and its everyday performance. Moreover
by joining perhaps we avoid some of what credit brings and what
calls for debt forgiveness bring as unwanted results, from uplift
to settlement.
FRED: Yeah, I mean, I love Fanon, but blackness isnt some thing that
he thought of in an apartment with the others who had just arrived
at their homelessness or, deeper still, at some knowledge of it. Now,
some folks say that blackness is best understood not as a specific set
of practices in which the people who are called black engage, because
we have to account for the people who are called black but who no
longer, or never did, engage in those practices; rather, blackness, they
argue, is a project carried out by people whom we call intellectuals insofar as they refute, by way of essentially Hegelian protocols, some essentially Hegelian relegation to the zone in which all one can do is to
engage in that specific set of authentic practices which have become,
finally, nothing other than a mark of deprivation. My response is, no,
the thing about blackness is that its broad enough and open enough
to encompass, but without enclosing, all of those things and to suggest that somehow intellectual life exists on some scale on the other
side of the so-called authentic is problematic anyway. Because I figure
that performances of a certain mode of sociality also already imply
the ongoing production of the theory of sociality. I mean, Im into
that, just like Im into horny old Socrates when he sees some beautiful young boys he just wants to get next to, and they say, man, come
to the palestra because we need to talk about friendship, and hes
like, oh yeah, Ill come. Thats good too, that lysis that never seems
to come to an end total, complete, but in an unexplained or undecidable completion. What they talk about, that was good too. Theres
a bunch of different possible places from which one might approach a
158
critique of the administered world, or some knowledge of the administered self, and one of them is Papas skylark.
159
REFERENCES
On the concept of study, we would like to thank Marc Bousquet and the editors
of Polygraph: an international journal of culture & politics, especially Michelle

Koerner and Luka Arsenjuk, for an earlier conversation on the concept.
For the chapter on planning and policy, we would like to thank the organizers
and participants of the of the 2012 Winter Sessions at the Performing Arts
Forum in St Erme, France for discussions leading to revision of this piece, and
especially Jan Ritsema and Marten Spngberg.
For the chapter on logistics, we would like to point readers to the groundbreak-
ing work of Ned Rossiter and his colleagues on the Transit Labour project:
www.transitlabour.asia.
POLITICS SURROUNDED
Michael Parenti, Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (New York:

St. Martins Press, 1992).
REF ERENC ES
163
BLACKNESS AND GOVERNANCE
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. trans.

Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973) 488.
Harryette Mullen, Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Toms Cabin,

Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved, in The Culture of
Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed.

Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
On questions of blackness and style see Thelma Golden, Freestyle (New York:
Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001) as well as its anticipatory rebuttal, Amiri
Baraka & Fundi, In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style
(New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1970).
Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I, crits:
A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977)
4 and Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression
(New York: Plenum Press, 1985) 155-77.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) 143.
Kara Keeling, The Witchs Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image
of Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
PLANNING AND POLICY
Cornel West, Reconstructing the American Left: The Challenge of Jesse Jackson, in Social Text No. 11, 1984-1985, No. 11, p. 3-19.
Fred Moten, Black Op, PMLA, 123:5, 2008, 1743-1747.
164
For discussion of command as a term of economy see Toni Negri in

The Porcelain Workshop (2008), and see Paolo Virno on opportunism in
A Grammar of the Multitude (2006).
FANTASY IN THE HOLD
Omiseeke Natasha Tinsley 2008 Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: queer imaginings of the middle passage GLQ 14:2 3.
Sara Ahmed Queer Phenomenology: orientations, objects, others (Duke, 2007)

Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2008) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en
REF ERENC ES
165
MINOR COMPOSITIONS
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES:
Precarious Rhapsody Franco Bifo Berardi

Imaginal Machines Stevphen Shukaitis
New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty Felix Guattari and

Antonio Negri
The Occupation Cookbook
Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible Laboratory of
Insurrectionary Imagination
Spectacular Capitalism Richard Gilman-Opalsky
Markets Not Capitalism Ed. Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson

Revolutions in Reverse David Graeber
Undressing the Academy University for Strategic Optimism

Communization & its Discontents Ed. Benjamin Noys
19 & 20 Colectivo Situaciones
El Martillo Eclectic Electric Collective
Occupy everything! Reflections on why its kicking off everywhere

Ed. Alessio Lunghi and Seth Wheeler
Punkademics Ed. Zach Furness
[Open] Utopia Thomas Moore & Stephen Duncombe

Contract & Contagion Angela Mitropoulos
Squatting in Europe Squatting Europe Kollective
FORTHCOMING:
Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation

Neala Schleuning
The Lives of the Orange Men Major Waldemar Fydrich
FutureChe John Gruntfest & Richard Gilman-Opalsky

Islam & Anarchism Mohamed Jean Veneuse
A Very Careful Strike Precarias a la Deriva
Art, Production and Social Movement Ed. Gavin Grindon

Hypothesis 891 Colectivo Situaciones
Communists Must Write! John Hutnyk

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The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

Cover & book design by fFurious, Singapore (www.ffurious.com)

For our mentor,

The Wild Beyond:

The University and the Undercommons

Blackness and Governance

Debt and Study

Planning and Policy

Fantasy in the Hold

The General Antagonism:

THE WILD BEYOND:

It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion,

not as a masculinist surge or an armed confrontation. Revolution

unimaginable: we must, on behalf of this alignment, refuse that which

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (NY: Semiotexte, 2009).

In the clear, critical light of day, illusory administrators whisper of

THE UNIVERSITY AND

Philosophy thus traditionally practices a critique of

THE UNI V ER SI TY A ND THE UN DERC OMM ONS

THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY

The premature subjects of the undercommons took the call seriously,

have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to

THERE IS NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE AMERICAN

It is therefore unwise to think of professionalization as a narrowing

PROFESSIONALIZATION IS THE PRIVATIZATION OF

Surely professionalization brings with it the benefits of competence.

must be suppressed by this professionalization. This is not merely a

capitalism and to take as much of that socialisation as possible and

nothing less than to convert the social individual. Except perhaps,

CRITICAL ACADEMICS ARE THE PROFESSIONALS

The critical academic questions the university, questions the state,

the emigrants from conscription, not to be ready for humanity and

INCARCERATION IS THE PRIVATIZATION OF THE SOCIAL

THE UNIVERSITY IS THE SITE OF THE SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

THE UNDERCOMMONS OF THE UNIVERSITY IS A NONPLACE

THE UNI V ER SI TY A ND THE UN DERC OMM ONS

There is an anoriginary drive whose fateful internal difference

Consider the following statement: Theres nothing wrong

The dismissal of any possible claim regarding the essence or

determined by imposition are understood to constitute the proof

Not in the interest either of some simple or complex opposition

Disavowal is a tendency inherent in the black radical tradition,

Addressing these questions demands some attempt to discover

BLAC K NES S AND GOVERNANC E

Whom do we mean when we say theres nothing wrong

The new general intellect is rich. And the new regulation

Still the invitations arrive through the smirk of governmentality

But governance collects like a drill boring for samples.

to be realized collectively. Rather interests are solicited, offered up,

it here, but in particular a relationship to blackness in its relationship

NGOs are the laboratories of governance. The premise of

Governance is the putting to work of democracy. When

BLAC K NES S AND GOVERNANC E

DEBT AND STUDY

DEBT AND CREDIT

DEBT AND FORGETTING

Debt cannot be forgiven, it can only be forgotten to be remembered

DEBT AND REFUGE

DEB T AND STU DY