#stefano harney

[389am]

From ‘The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study’ by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

[improvisedliturgy]

Never being on the right side of the Atlantic is an unsettled feeling, the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others. It’s a feeling, if you ride with it, that produces a certain distance from the settled, from those who determine themselves in space and time, who locate themselves in a determined history. To have been shipped is to have been moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with the ones who consent not to be one. Outlawed, interdicted, intimate things of the hold, containerized contagion, logistics externalises logic itself to reach you, but this is not enough to get at the social logics, the social poesis, running through logisticality.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

[sharpened--edges]

Why do people think working in the university is special? The university is a gathering of chances and resources; a cache of weapons and supplies; a concentration of dangers and pitfalls. It’s not a place to occupy or to inhabit; it’s a place to work, to get in and out of with such rapidity and rapacious purpose that it disappears in that its boundaries disappear. All of that work ought to be securing the capacity to use those resources and to take those chances and to pass them around to the extent that they are useful. It’s not a point on a line. It’s not an aspirational beginning or end; it’s a respirational organ that is all but certainly laced with malignancy.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (Minor Compositions, 2021), p. 123.

[discoursets]

— red blue dilapidated study space — ⋆˙

[endlessandrea]

"Fred Moten: Geopolitics is organized around continents. It’s organized through an imperial logic that is manifest in the crossing and claiming of land masses. Obviously, there’s transoceanic movement, but there’s this active practice at the level of administration and at the level of policy, about the settlement and conquering of land in a way that is predicated on, on some level, the physical impossibility of the settlement and the conquering of the sea. So that resistance to geopolitical brutality is a kind of oceanizing of land mass or an archipelagizing of land mass, which islands, in their movement and in their movements realize, or surrealize. It’s like we want to make continents move and they want to make islands stand still. This is how y’all’s work resonates with the work Mary Pat Brady has been doing for years. It turns on this radical refusal of scale and the way scale is all bound up with the concept of static, statist land mass. Layli Long Soldier accesses a history of the refusal of land mass that was already given. And it shows up in the way in which her writing recognizes the tidalectic momentum of land. She describes the mountain not as a place, not even as a relation, but rather as a general movement. She’s like Brathwaite’s secret sharer, and you share too, Hypatia: from nusantara to Namsetoura." -- From this conversation.

[1000rh]

I think Fanon is always trying to move against the grain of this itinerary of return, this reversal of image or standpoint. […] Fanon understands that the very taking of an anti-colonial stance looks crazy, from a normative perspective. For me, first of all, that’s good. That’s something that’s worthwhile. In other words, what it’s about is, “I’m gonna claim this thing that looks crazy from your perspective.” But, of course, the problem, I think, with Fanon in Black Skin, is you can do this thing that looks crazy from the normative perspective, but of course in some complicated way there is no non-normative perspective. The non-normative is precisely the absence of a point of view […]. Eventually, I believe, he comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this place which shows up here and now, in the sovereign’s space and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not.

– Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons (2013)

[romdocitizen]

The rise of logistics is rapid. Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research, logistics is everywhere. And beyond these classic capitalist sciences, its ascent is echoed ahistorically in the emerging fields of object-oriented philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, where the logistical conditions of knowledge production go unnoticed, but not the effects. In military science the world has been turned upside down. Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of logisitics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters.

And so too business innovation has become logistical and no longer strategic. Business innovation of course does not come from business. It is more often derived from military strategies of resistance to its own armies, transferred free to business. Once this consisted in transferring innovations like the line and the formation and the chain of command from military science to the factory and the office, or transferring psychological and propaganda warfare to human relations and marketing. These were free transfers of strategic innovation, requiring managers to instantiate and maintain them. No more. As everything from the internet to the shipping container testify, in keeping with cold wars and wars on terror that lead always to the failure of strategy, it is logistical free transfers that matter. Containerisation was failing as a business innovation until the American government used containers to try to supply its troops in South East Asia with enough weapons, booze, and drugs to keep them from killing their own officers, to keep a war going that could not be won strategically. Those who dreamt of the internet, if not those who built it, were precisely worried about the corruption of intelligence that the outbreak of democracy, as the Trilateral Commission thought of it, made possible in the 1970s. ARPANET as an intelligence gathering network could not have its head turned by sex or ideology, much less the powerful combination of the two. It would not be confused by the outbreak of democracy. And it assumed a never-ending accumulation of intelligence for a never-ending war that many would not want to fight. To Toni Negri’s challenge, show me a business innovation and I will show you a worker’s rebellion, we could add a pre-history the state fearing its own workforce.

-Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, "Fantasy In The Hold," The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

[jacobwren]

"I think you can make a good case that human being in the world is, and should be, sheer criminality. Which also, first and foremost, implies that making laws is a criminal activity." - Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study