Undercommons

Discussion

"The tension between the ideals and practices of autonomous education projects is theorized most explicitly in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s eloquent essay. This tension is built into the concept of “undercommons”, which raises the question of how the subversive intellectual can be *in* but not *of* the university, i.e., treating it as a “place of refuge” and a source of resources for subversive projects without losing one’s ideals in the process of professionalization. They consider how, under conditions of increasing precarization, teachers can organize themselves from within those conditions, living for “the beyond of teaching … allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others” (147). To escape the professionalizing disqualification of the joys of their teaching labour, they can go “with hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons”. Along the lines of the recent motto of the Anomalous Wave student movement in Italy, “we won’t pay for your crisis”, Harney and Moten describe how the university tries to offload its crises onto students, making them “come to see themselves as the problem” (148). The university needs teachers to impose on students this “self-diagnosing” lesson. Yet, this increasingly precaritized “labour upon labour” creates risks for the university, because, “like the colonial police force recruited unwittingly from guerrilla neighbourhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways”, who can organize themselves into “maroon communities” (149). Against attempts to disqualify them as “unprofessional”, Harney and Moten call on these maroons to see the Undercommons as a perpetual war in which they must collectively “problematize themselves, problematize the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger”." (http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/9-4/9-4johnsonmeyerhoff.pdf)