Other but not elsewhere. Existing simultaneously in different strata of understanding. Moten and Harney’s The Undercommons is a book that has echoed widely with its refusal to either negate or advocate for institutional power, rather linking overlapping layers of oppression (or “interlocking systems of domination” as bell hooks says in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics) to each other and noting the existence of spaces made within structures by those who do not fit.
Specifically, these spaces are institutions of control, and because Moten and Harney both teach in the university system, their experiences are mostly drawn from the institution of universities. Their central concept, “the undercommons,” highlights the ungovernable realm of social life, the place where we—colonized, queer, otherwise marginal—make meaning with each other.
As dense as the language of this book is, it contains exciting concepts for me, and links with Jack Halberstam’s book The Queer Art of Failure, Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray’s Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, Matt Brim & Amin Ghaziani’s Imagining Queer Methods, and José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia.
Threading through these books are central themes of acknowledging central paradigms or power structures and outsiders’ relationships to them. Halberstam, in The Queer Art of Failure, is positioning outsider-ness or queerness as an act of refusal, the refusal actioning a negation of those dominant paradigms. Halberstam says, “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam, p.2).
This links in interesting ways with Moten and Harney’s rejection of formality in relation to learning. They note that in a classroom, the ‘call to order’ is ingrained as a formal beginning to learning, instead of acknowledging in the “disorder,” the “study” that is already happening. “What emerges is a form, out of something we call informality. The informal is not the absence of form, it’s the thing that gives form” (Moten & Harney, p. 129).
These embraces of the value embedded in informality and disorder are part of what I have identified as necessary for the action of the inherently messy act of community-building as well. Even within the “creative” space with the focus on “creativity” at UAL, it is traditionally structured and approved spaces and notions of what is acceptable as “learning” that receive funding. Funding is the clearest process an institution has of showing support and reification of ideas and values.
In part, this is because these “messy” concepts that don’t fit squarely in disciplinary structures are hard to measure quantitatively. As Stefan Colini explains in his book Speaking of Universities, British universities in particular have a “semi-autonomous” funding system, meaning they are partly subsidized, similar to institutions like the BBC, but through public loans to individual students. This leads them, specifically among university systems around the world, to have specific mechanisms for accountability, entrenching performance metrics more centrally than elsewhere.
“The extension of ideas of democratic accountability leads societies to search for mechanisms by which to test and measure the performance of universities, along with all other industries and services, thereby generating another set of tensions as mechanical procedures are devised which attempt to provide some reliable quantitative indicator of forms of intellectual quality that, ultimately, can only be judged not measured.”
– Colini, page 232.
Colini continues, saying “The activities of thinking and understanding [likewise community and social support] are inherently resistant to being adequately characterized by quantitative metrics” (Colini, p.151).
By contrast, Moten and Harney are advocating for more emphasis to be placed on the places where meaning is created and co-created, rather than only on formally recognized routes of learning. They say, “study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice” (Harney & Moten, p. 110).
Recognizing and holding space for these sorts of speculative practices to happen is at the core of what I am attempting with my project. This being together is what is denied by the siloization at CSM and UAL. Without structured support to be together, all we are left with are formal learning spaces.
Now, both Moten and Harney, and Raunig & Ray in their book about critical practices and institutional critique in art, are advocating not for leaving the institutional space altogether, because that is not always possible. Rather they are recognizing the power of extending the accepted definitions of what it means to belong there, and indeed, what is there, to begin with.
“Here exodus would not mean relocating to a different country or a different field, but betraying the rules of the game through the act of flight: ‘transforming the arts of governing’ not only in relation to the institutions of the art field or the institution art as the art field, but rather as participation in processes of instituting and in political practices that traverse the fields, the structures, the institutions.”
– Raunig & Ray, page 11.
Moten and Harney: “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” (Harney & Moten, p.38).
This push/pull dichotomy, of being inside/outside is also a distinct hallmark of queerness. In Imagining Queer Methods, the editors Matt Brim & Amin Ghaziani say “queer theory sees a world that is “vague, diffuse, or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive, or indistinct changes like a kaleidoscope. or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all” (Brim & Ghaziani, p. 13).
By acknowledging this diversity of people, ideas, ways of learning, and positionalities, we can begin to move towards more inclusive, holistic, and supportive notions of what learning and living in institutional environments can encompass.
Halberstam nods to this, saying: “open here means questioning, open to unpredictable outcomes, not fixed on a telos, unsure, adaptable, shifting, flexible, and adjustable. An “open” pedagogy, in the spirit of Ranciere and Freire, also detaches itself from prescriptive methods, fixed logics, and epistemes, and it orients toward problem-solving knowledge or social visions of radical justice” (Halberstam, p.16-17).
Because in the end, this refusal of or “failure” within the dominant systems can actually signal the potential for other modalities to be born. These themes are possibly rooted in José Esteban Muñoz’s 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, in which the central call is for hope in the utopian ideals embedded in the possibilities queerness contains. This book has been an important touchstone for me over the past decade, particularly in the face of overwhelming obstacles.
Orienting towards hope rather than despair, in specific types of participation rather than nihilism, in possibility rather than acceptance of what-is, is a good place to end this project and this post.
Even if the larger changes I have been seeking to enact have been frustrated and thwarted by time, space, and access, they are still actions of hope in another reality that I can feel, just there, close enough to touch.
“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…the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery” (Harney & Moten, page 118).
Works Cited:
Brim, Matt, & Ghaziani, Amin (2019). Imagining Queer Methods. New York: NYU Press.
Collini, Stefan (2017). Speaking of Universities. London: Verso.
Halberstam Jack (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe, United Kingdom: Minor Compositions.
hooks, bell (2015). Yearning : Race Gender and Cultural Politics. New York and London: Routledge.
Muñoz, José Esteban (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press.
Raunig, G., & Ray, G. (2009). Art and contemporary critical practice: reinventing institutional critique. London, MayFlyBooks.