The Undercommons

PARSE invites you to a seminar with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on their widely influential book of essays, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013). In it, they draw on social and political thought as well as aesthetic critique to formulate a social poesis of upheaval and self-organization, confronting the force of politics, capitalist logistics, policy and governance.

”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. We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self- governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption.”
—Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

As this will be a seminar based in discussion, participants are expected to read the book beforehand (available here: http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf). The conversation, however, will focus on the following chapters in particular: ”The University and the Undercommons”, ”Blackness and Governance”, ”Planning and Policy”, and ”The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis.”

Stefano Harney is Professor of Strategic Management at Singapore Management University.
Fred Moten is a poet and Professor of English at University of California, Riverside.

The seminar will be followed by a poetry reading with Fred Moten and a conversation between Moten and Khashayar Naderehvandi, poet and doctorand at Akademin Valand. This public event is co-organized by Göteborgs Litteraturhus, Akademin Valand, and PARSE.
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