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Categotry Archives: Fred Moten

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On Birds & Kitchen Tables: Conversations of/in the Undercommons

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Categories: Fred Moten, Stefano Harney

Car Seat of The Undercommons

On Birds & Kitchen Tables: Conversations of/in the Undercommons

“The weapon of theory is a conference of the birds. The kitchen table is its public and its publisher.” – Stefano Harney & Fred Moten

In the ten years since it was published, one of the most striking things about The Undercommons as a text was how it resonated, and continues to resonate, with different groups of people, from disenfranchised teaching assistants to precarious artists and political organizers. The patterns of circulation and engagement with it as a text provide an interesting example of undercommon sociality, or as Moten and Harney refer to it, black study.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the book’s publication Minor Compositions is planning a series of events, discussions about the book and how it resonates with people. Think of it as a conference of the birds, or maybe even literally a conversation around a kitchen table. Keeping in mind the ethos that informs the text these events will less be formal presentations, and more picking out selections from the text for reading and discussing together.

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All Incomplete

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Categories: Fred Moten, Stefano Harney

All Incomplete

All Incomplete
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

Building on the ideas Harney and Moten developed in The Undercommons, All Incompleteextends the critical investigation of logistics, individuation and sovereignty. It reflects their chances to travel, listen and deepen their commitment to and claim upon partiality.

All Incomplete studies thehistory of a preference for the force and ground and underground of social existence. Engaging a vibrant constellation of thought that includes the work of Amilcar Cabral, Erica Edwards, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Hortense Spillers and many others, Harney and Moten seek to share and understand that preference.

In so doing, Moten and Harney hope to have forged what Manolo Callahan, echoing Ivan Illich, calls a convivial tool that – despite the temptation to improve and demand, develop and govern, separate and grasp – helps us renew our habits of assembly.

All Incompletefeatures the work of award winning photographer Zun Lee, exploring and celebrating the everyday spaces of Black sociality, intimacy, belonging, and insurgency, and a preface by Denise Ferreira da Silva.

Bio:Stefano Harney and Fred Motenare authors of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. They are students of the black radical tradition and members of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective. Zun Leecarves out communal spaces where Black storytelling can thrive. He often makes photographs to remind him how to be grateful. He tends to forget often. Denise Ferreira da Silva teaches at the University of British Columbia and is a member of Coletiva.

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Combination Acts

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Categories: Alan W Moore, Fred Moten, Gee Vaucher, Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Stevphen Shukaitis

Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons
Stevphen Shukaitis

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bio: Stevphen Shukaitis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, Centre for Work and Organization, and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009) and The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor. Continue reading →

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The Undercommons

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Categories: Fred Moten, Stefano Harney

Undercommons

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
Introduction by Jack Halberstam

In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons. Continue reading →