Love, Care & Belonging #2: Fugitive Planning: Reading Fred Moten
“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 RANCIÉRE)
https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Stefano-Harney-Fred-Moten
This writing is some of the most energetic, insightful and acute that I’ve had the privilege to be presented with at LCC. I was previously aware of Professor Moten’s broader writings, as the black radical tradition has so much to offer a student of contemporary sound. (e.g. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition) His critique of the contemporary university is startling in its acuity.
“[The labour of the subversive intellectual] is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow low-down maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.” (Moten)
“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.“
“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?“
“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; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.”
“THERE IS NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY & CULTURES OF PROFESSIONALIZATION”
“PROFESSIONALIZATION IS THE PRIVATIZATION OF THE SOCIAL INDIVIDUAL THROUGH NEGLIGENCE“
“CRITICAL ACADEMICS ARE THE PROFESSIONALS PAR EXCELLENCE“