Fred Moten & Stefano Harney: A Conversation

Introduction [Music] hey everybody i'm just looking through the screens and seeing some folks i know some that i don't know it's great that you're all here with us thank you for coming so on behalf of oakland summer school i want to welcome fred moten and stephan o'harney um if you're excited to be here in this zoom space with them do you want to just show some kind of like jazz hands or hearts or waves or whatever you got any kind of love yeah oh yeah the reactions that's great too whatever you have people it's good to see you all thank you for being here um so it's a great honor to be in this space in this moment with everyone who's assembled um my name is chica okoye and i will give us a brief introduction to this time and then i'll pass it to my co-moderator akande before we get into some discussion with stephanie very influential on me and um fred moden is the guy who i as classes i was auditing somebody um somebody else's audio right now uh not me right now do you mind just muting your um your audio and thank you in advance for bearing with all the funny things that can happen in these kinds of gatherings so just to get us started uh we're going to have this conversation today for close to 90 minutes on the west coast we'll be wrapping up about 1 30 that specific time so uh we'll do some quick introductions here and then myself and akande will ask questions that fred and stefano will respond to after that we'll have a moment of breaking out into small groups so we'll spend around 15 minutes in small groups with each other it'll be randomized maybe four or five people per group and in that time folks can get together you know introduce themselves and figure out some questions you may want to ask to our two guests today and we'll have a google document that you can enter some questions into and following that period we'll get back together as a large group and we'll go through some of those questions probably we won't get to all of them but uh that's how it looks um if you have any technical problems you'll be able to chat directly to oakland summer school um and we have a wonderful volunteer named michelle who will help you out to her the best of her ability so um yeah so we'll go into it so let me introduce um akande x my co-moderator for today akande x is a california-based writer and researcher of philosophy and literature he is a melon may's undergraduate fellow who is graduating from university of southern california with a degree in philosophy his interests include philosophy of cognitive science finding alternate alternate forms of higher education and anarchism his other interests include hiking and tending to his budding garden so i'll pass it to you akande yeah thank you thank you so much chica and again it's a honor to be here with everyone um i'll i'll give chica's bio and then i'll give stefano owen fred's bio so uh chica akoye is an independent scholar who focuses on histories of black liberation struggles uh she co-founded black life a series at the berkeley art museum and pacific film archive a monthly live event that showcased the work of black artists and intellectuals chica is the program director of buddhist peace fellowship a non-profit that works to enhance the spiritual power of activists and movements working for progressive change and to give the bios of our uh our our guest we're so happy to have you here stefan o'harney and fred moden are authors of the under commons fugitive planning and black study About Fred Stefano by autumnal media and minor compositions in 2013 and the forthcoming all-incomplete also from minor compositions neander commons has been translated into braille spanish and german with further translations under underway in thai portuguese italian french swedish and indonesian fred teaches in the department of performance studies at new york university stefano is an independent scholar and holds an honorary professorship at the institute of gender race sexuality and social justice at the university of british columbia fred is also the author of all that beauty from lighter machine editions in 2019 stefano is also author of state work public administration and mass intellectuality from duke university press in 2002 fred lives in new york city and stefano lives in brasilia they are both members of the mardi gras listening collective and the anti-colonial machine and the institute for physical psychology amongst other collaborative projects so thank you so much again for being here so excited and we'll just just roll right into the questions if that's all right um so you know from from what i understand this is your first public uh you know talk since the uh election so i feel like it's only right that we kind of open with a question on the of you know whatever you want to call it you know what's going on with uh with the election so you know and i was thinking about your we want a precedent um uh essay uh that you wrote and yeah i guess i'm wondering if anything has changed since you've uh written that uh essay and uh you know it doesn't sound like uh from from what fred said you know before we started that he's not too pleased with uh people celebrating and all that so yeah i'm just curious to hear your general thoughts on the on the election and the moment we're in politically well they think first of all um thank you guys so much for oh am i can you hear me yeah we can hear you yeah just wanted to uh thank everybody for coming and for to thank everybody for thank you akane chica all all the folks who helped danielle you know open summer school we're glad to be here with you all today um it's a pleasure um you know i mean i feel like you know life is hard you know so you know you shouldn't need to have too much of an excuse to have a party you know um but it was loud you know down around here where i live last night and i just i wasn't feeling it you know like that myself but i it's funny i mean in a way almost like i feel like i always say well my mind you know has changed just since we were talking five minutes ago but i but yeah i i you know you like you know i mean i think that on the one hand you know people grab on to whatever little hope they can find you know um and then i think you know uh it's the job of Life is hard everybody you know to you know to think about the actual you know practical you know capacity you know that is attached to that particular hope um and you know um so on one hand i don't want to bash anybody's hopes you know but um on the other hand you know we we still have to keep doing what we were always what you know what all of us have done it's just annoying sometimes you know like i get these texts from people saying um now we got to get to work like i've been working you know i mean or you know you know these celebrations i remember it i i'm i'm 58 years old you know i remember similar celebrations when bill clinton was elected you know after eight 12 years of reagan bush you know i remember the obama so i you know i you know it's just try to not get too low and try to not get too high you know so anyway i'm just blattering stephanie steve what do you think well um just before i start please if i could also say thank you to akande thank you to chica thank you to melissa special thanks to my friend laura nelson who first connected us with oakland summer school and everybody in the oakland summer school collective thank you for for having us here and and thanks everybody for for being here with us and i see a few also a few friends of the friends in the audience thank you it's good good to see your names um well we were talking about this actually the other day and of course the problem as fred's hinton with the formulation um let's get back to work you know um is that um you know we can uh deceive us a little bit because you know i think when you hear somebody like angela davis or how you used to hear howard's inn telling you to go out and vote and then get back to work they had a very different idea about work than i think the people who are texting fred have about work you know because part of what we mean when we say well we we've been working all along here is that every day when we wake up you know we everything we do all of us here you know basically just barely keeps this this system afloat our hardest efforts uh every day in our in these institutions on the streets you know essentially every day we wake up and we follow the path of reform because if we didn't reform this this thing every single day it would collapse under the weight of its own stupidity you know under the weight of its own ugliness so we so the problem is that formulation which is such an easy liberal formulation to make such a dangerous formation in my view to make in our view you know um is exactly what you get each time here nobody says to you you know amongst the people that we spend time with nobody says to you well things are going to be okay now because you know clinton's been elected or obama's been elected or jimmy carter's been elected right they say to you well that's something and now we're going to get back to work basically saying to you go work your ass off keeping this [ __ ] thing from falling apart right and we'll get back to you in four years and then we'll say it all over to you again right so i think it's important for us to say we're not working in in between these four years you know we're we're we're at war as me and fred were saying the other day you know in between these elections we're at war um it's not a matter of of of just doing the work because the work is reform and in the old formulation you know revolution or reform we've already proven reform doesn't do [ __ ] because we do it every single day it's the only reason the universities are still standing you know it's the only reason that pretty much all our institutions are still standing is because we every day do enough reform to keep them from collapsing under their own contradictions so so we can't think of ourselves as going back to work i think we really have to think of ourselves as going back to war a war that's of course been brought on to us and in which we are largely involved in various forms of you know mutual self-defense so that's why the the the kind of uh knowing critique of democratic party or electoral Our contradiction politics i think can be so frustrating because it it it hides a much more malicious idea that our jobs is is to is to keep this [ __ ] going and it's been like that for four or five hundred years you know the thing would not work if every day it wasn't us who was actually stuck in the position of keeping the thing going that we actually want to see destroyed right that's our contradiction and anticipating some of the other great questions that we've been posed you know that's our that's our problem with the university you know that but that's the problem pretty much you know every institution every government we face right is you know we're in this position every day where we should be you know we keep going the thing that we want to destroy and that's just our position you know that's that's where we are and we're we follow in the footsteps of of of of millions who've who've done that and so we can't complain but we also can't deceive ourselves and thinking that going back to work is going to be enough you know we're at war you know a war that has say been brought to our doorsteps um every day what what our friend manolo callahan uh taught us uh was you know a war on our very subsistence of war in our lives um so so i get i guess that's probably where fred gets his move i'm sitting here in sao paulo and you know it's 90 degrees and the bars are open so it's a little different for me at the moment but i think i can figure fred's move thank you for those reflections and responses to the current moment i would like to ask you now about the undercommons your book that you wrote together that came out in 2013 and i think does some work to describe these antagonisms that you're this contradiction that you've just named for us stefano um and i just i wonder what what you all were trying to say um or figure out in the writing of that book and how that's the same or how that might be different now in 2020 well it's funny i mean um i think one of the interesting things is that we've over the last maybe a few months especially um having had a lot of opportunities to to talk with folks like like we are right now we we've had a chance to you know reflect on it um and and i think um so there's a couple of things one is you know as stefano says a lot we we were we were trying to help each other through or or to deal with you know the contradictions of working in the university um and it was something that we came uh i think probably that we had always been concerned with those contradictions and embedded in them in in increasingly more conscious ways since we met in college in like 1982 you know um and and and that it we we weren't able to maybe fully articulate it as much then but we were living these conditions under which we were like well we want to be here with each other we want to be you know studying with each other we're interested in things and why is it that the institution that we came to in order to study together keeps keeping us from doing that you know why why does that keep happening and and then there's the the question of why it keeps happening which is sort of adjunct to the actual practice of saying well we're going to try to study anyway we're going to do that anyway um and you know we lived through that on a kind of practical level you know um when we were students together and then we all you know we went to grad school and went separate ways for you know in that moment still maintaining contact with each other but there was a moment in the late 90s when we were together in new york again and hung out a lot and we were and we were facing the same problem but this time we were facing that problem from the perspective of being junior faculty rather than being um you know students undergraduate students um and you know that was 20 years ago when we began to write together in in the face of that problem um and and eventually it emerged under the rubric you know and under between the covers of the undercommons some of our questions but but the undercommons is misleading in a certain kind of way because i think by the time we published that book we were i don't want to say past that problem but but it had not become but it wasn't any more our sort of fundamental and abiding concern how to live or how to survive the contradictions of the university it was um we had we we had We had we had i think maybe we had kind of pulled ourselves through something you know in before you know sort of before the undercommons was published we had pulled ourselves through something maybe maybe what we had pulled ourselves through is just any kind of tendency to con to to to flagellate ourselves because of the contradiction any tendency to think that our living in that contradiction was a function of some personal moral failure right and so and one way to think about it is that in that book it is we it's i think sometimes it maybe seems like in that chapter on the under university in the undercommons that we're trying to valorize a certain individuated figure of the uh subversive intellectual or the critical intellectual and trying to maybe give some primer for how one might become that figure but really no it was what what what has become more maybe more clear to us now and and what we want to help to make more clear to other people is it was never about the valorization of that figure it was always about to try maybe more of a diagnosis of that figure and a recognition of the limits of that figure um and so uh you know that's and and and so and it was the limits of ourselves as as as individual instances of such a figure that we had again come to try to understand and to try to try to work through um i i i'll shut up now because i i'm i think i'm probably i know i just went on too long and i'm sure i didn't even answer the question but steel my my uh my tongue is in my friend's mouth so well like the only that's exactly how i would say it but the only other thing i would add is that you know we one of the things we realize and which i'm sure you realize and if you're if you've been through graduate school you're going to graduate school or thinking about going graduate school in it right now etc you know gradually you get more and more isolated but not only that the method of thought turns you even against your own subject matter um towards spending so much more time critiquing the [ __ ] that you hate than exploring and experimenting with the stuff that you love and and that's the other thing that we realized was going on in the undercommons that that in order to get to that stuff that that we loved we we had to stop getting individuated into this model of the of a certain kind of intellectual you know um and it turns out that that meant also getting out of the individual uh as a figure itself and and even more than that in order really to start to be with the stuff that we love in order really to to to spend our time um with all of the beautiful insurgent experiments that you know were the reason that we got interested in things in the first point it wasn't just that we almost couldn't do it by ourselves but even in the course of the under comments and then subsequently and this i think is coming through in the new book all incomplete even the two of us was not enough even blurring our ourselves together you know was held a lot better but it wasn't enough and so you notice in our bio that we now we're telling people more that we're working with other people more um and that's that's not just a function of saying okay well we've we've experimented with with a certain kind of undoing between ourselves let's do that with them it's direct function of saying it's you know we need to be with other people to love this stuff because this this is this stuff that we love is collective the stuff that we love is cooperative this stuff that we love is shared um and and can't be retained or owned um you know in any any proper manner it has to be constantly re-socialized against the forces like critique like citation that would individualize it again um so our pleasures to be working with cccr with matagar listening collective with with anti-colonial machine these are these are pleasures of of being able to get back to what we love well we got brought up loving you know in families and in communities which we lost somewhere along the way you know through a professional education but fortunately we we didn't lose it completely um so all that was sort of going on in the under commons um too i think yeah because i always felt like it was a misreading you know for certain uh academics and thinkers to say that you know they feel comfortable in the undercommons or the under commons as a space that you know or being a critical academic is again something to be uh you know celebrated and while you know it is good to be critical rather than you know like passive you know i never really agree with that idea that you know it's good to be there um which kind of leads me to my my my next question and that's on uh your recent essay the university uh last words because to me it seemed Last words like that was like a complete shift in tone from that essay in the undercommons the undercommons of the university it just it was just very like i don't know for lack of a better words angry and it just seemed like you were just done with the university and i don't know i guess like you know my question is you know with that sort of tone in the university last words like when is like when's the moment that the critical academic leaves the university or or even like tries to abolish or like starts open planning against the university well again it it uh well it's one of the reasons why i keep wanting to say it's good to be in oakland even though i'm not in oakland but it's going to be virtually in oakland um we were talking about i can't remember which zoom it was over the last two or three days people at some point we were talking we were talking about cedric robinson who who we're always talking about and always trying to talk with you know um and he's from oakland you know um and and we were and i guess one way to one of the lessons i mean i i one of the 4 000 universities that i appear to have worked for was university of california santa barbara and in my my office for the couple of years i was there was directly above his office um one floor above and his door was his door was open you know to to students and and to you know into younger faculty and i came to he allowed me to believe that i could claim to be his student you know in a way that was very loving and gracious and and um and and we i mean i think we both you know feel that way so the point is um i used to live i used to listen to him talk a lot and one of the things that a kind of recurring motif in conversations with him he liked to talk about the fact that he imagined that the contradictions of capitalism you know were becoming so onerous and so profound and so heavy that the system would collapse under its weight and in this way as you know he wrote a book called black marxism which was a critique of a certain kind of marxian thinking from the perspective of what he calls the black radical tradition but it was also very evident and clear that that there were aspects and elements of marx's work that he was absolutely committed to always okay and one of them would be maybe this kind of a certain kind of historicism that was predicated on the notion that at a certain point the contradictions would become too great and so he would say you know we have to heighten the contradictions you know Contradictions but i think maybe we're beginning to recognize that now it's very interesting it's important to recognize that the contradictions of capitalism are also contradictions that we live within through that we don't we don't we can't be unscathed by those contradictions at the same time as we want to heighten those contradictions and and intensify those contradictions from an antagonistic sort of perspective we can't blind ourselves to the fact that in that very process in that very work the contradictions also impose themselves upon us in profound ways which is just a long-winded way to preface the simple answer to the question of kindness which is like on the one hand there's a sense in which we must say that the critical intellectual the subversive intellectual doesn't leave the university that is in a certain sense the natural habitat of the critical and subversive intellectual and to say that isn't to disavow that figure you know it it what's what's also I need a job important to to to see it seems to to me is that you know the you know i i got a job i'm glad to have a job i need a job okay like i have to work you know i mean we sorry i'm black they had a really great conference in honor of cedric when he was about to retire from uh ucsb and and he insisted at this conference that the night before the proceedings started officially everybody get together and watch devil in a blue dress right the the carl franklin film of the walter mosley novel and um and there's a moment at the end of that film where you know you know easy rollins you know played by denzel washington and his friend uh deacon odell who's played by um oh man i can't albert is it albert hall um at one point easy saying easy has basically said to himself that he's going to set up shop as a private investigator so alberto he says you how are you going to get a job and there's at one point denzel said i ain't stunned no job uh and and and odell said you ain't studying no job how are you gonna live okay so but we're not private eyes we i personally personally don't have no other skills this is the skill that i got so i need the job okay and that places me you know and us you know squarely in the contradiction i mean stephanie's been living without a damn job for you for two years this [ __ ] is not fun you know so so i'm gonna keep working in the university for two reasons same reasons that i think general baker kept working at dodge and ford motor company even though he was they had an organizer for the legal revolutionary black workers because aida workers are there the students are there i want to be in the university because the students are there but also because i need to make a living now what that means is these contradictions are contradictions that i have to live every day and live through every day and be scarred by every day at the same time that we're also trying to heighten these contradictions and deepen these contradictions every day so it's really not about leaving the university as much as it's about trying to implode the [ __ ] from inside of it and that that that ends up sounding very uncomfortably like a very a set of variations on justifications for reform i know that that's why that stuff the stefano was talking about about reform or it's very much like some of the formulations now that maybe you know joy james makes in these kind of brilliant ways about the figure of the captive maternal you know um which we could say more about but yet we're just i don't know what to say you know we're just working we're trying to work under conditions of war which are under conditions of of contradiction um i'm not trying to be pure we can't be pure i'm not trying to hold anybody else up to that [ __ ] because i can't hold myself up to it you know anyway i'm i'm putting myself on mute now for 10 minutes i want to jump in and say something that really moved me that you shared fred in a recent talk that you and stefano did i think it was with the uc riverside uc irvine students um we said that um enslaved people were not worried about their complicity with the plantation something like that and i feel i feel some echoes of what you've just shared in that in that kind of a formulation i think it's useful you know that we are scarred by this war um and we gotta keep living it i don't know if stefano you wanted to add anything over uh i have yeah please go ahead sure um well one of the things that fred and i have been talking about recently a lot together is um is um these these kinds of questions of class that emerge in in post-colonial nations partly because we just had the benefit of being in conversation um with so many people who who have direct experience with post-colonial nations been one of the expansions in the way we've been able to to talk because of course here in the united states we're still basically in the midst of the longest anti-colonial movement in history which is what the black struggle is that's what the indigenous struggle is in this country um and it ain't over you know but of course a whole bunch of other things get thrown up in these other contexts so so what i what i kind of wanted to add chica is that there is of course this question of um our complicity and we've spoken about ways in which we can move this complicity towards a and we use the italian term complete to talk about uh developing accomplices unseen accomplices uh within this institutional complicity such that complicity begins to shift and becomes a bigger problem for the institution that does for you because now the institution is saying i feel like it's not just her in the room today i feel like there's some some kind of plot going on here i feel like there is some kind of conspiracy in the way that this person does not arrive as a proper individual who then can start to worry about the individual problem of complicity and how one strategizes as an individual between uh compromise and sellout and and and your practice and your revolution instead this this sense of of complete allows us to start to think that it was a mistake for them to let us become complicit in this institution because us is us not me not i um but we've also been thinking and talking about how we still need to make a distinction between complicity and betrayal um and and the person who has really helped us to think about this is a great guyanese feminist intellectual activist called india whose work just came out uh posthumously and is appropriately titled the point is to change the world and indaya was uh was a was a comrade of of walter rodney but she was also someone who took a certain kind of distance from this comrade whom she loved in order to do all kinds of independent feminist organizing within the left in guyana and within the left in the caribbean in general she's got there's a lot to say about her and and once this book gets out more i think we'll all be talking about her and of course she's well known in the caribbean already the english-speaking George Lambing caribbean in particular for her absolutely compromising critique which was she always remained completely inside this revolutionary left while also being a critic of it um but she has a great essay where she talks about the work of george lamming the great barbadian uh novelist and she says look the key the key theme in all of lambing's work his his speeches from the 80s as well as his novels from before his in his his work afterwards as a teacher etc they all hinge around this question of betrayal and what kind of betrayal is this and she's very clear she says this is the betrayal of someone who's come out of the people we're not talking Postcolonial betrayal about the the imperialist betrayal we're not talking about the the plant the plantocracy's betrayal you know we know we know we can expect you know that to happen what we're talking about is a betrayal that occurs largely through the mobility that comes from education in the colonial and then post-colonial nation largely through the phenomenon of being sent from trinidad to oxford from lagos to oxford etc right and all of lambing's work is around this post-colonial problem of betrayal how it's not just a matter of uh the middle classes who clr james had warned us for years shouldn't be allowed to take over in an independent period but it is the way in which the middle classes and the larger imperial system pulls out through education people from from the working classes from ordinary african and indian working classes and poor and gives them this opportunity and then uh creates a condition in which betrayal becomes all too easy and in lambing's famous novel the village one of the one of the own one of their own from the village ends up selling land on which the village uh is standing right so i say all that uh she could say that we have there's all this work all the time to do between the complicity that we have among amongst the complicity we have amongst the the need we have uh to to work and not be uh not get sucked into an individual strategy with how we feel good about work and nonetheless also with these with these questions of of betrayal um you know and i say that of course because we just had an election so we're about to see a really great example of it um you know um and that's where we you know that's the terrain on which we're working and it's it is intense you know i'm sure it's intense for all of you if it's intense for me it's important to think too that i think that this notion of betrayal is it's really it's a structural formulation that really ought not be indexed to this or that person's individual moral failing it it's not really it's really not a matter of personal responsibility another way to put it would be that part of the betrayal is already given in believing in and acceding to the metaphysics of personal responsibility and and you can see that you know within the class composition of the of the critique of the one who betrays okay can take can take a can take a double form right there's a working-class critique of the middle class one who betrays okay and and and we want to say that that working-class critique is grounded maybe in certain forms of in in certain kinds of empirical life that we would want to honor and pay attention to but we also recognize and and it's a powerful sort of actually quite vicious and and much more prevalent discourse is the discourse in which the middle class so-called intellectual constantly understands working-class people as themselves being engaged in betrayal right but those forms of betrayal take the form of selling drugs or doing [ __ ] you ain't supposed to do or you know you're constantly flirting with non-respectability right that's a discourse of betray and these are both discourses of individual moral agency that that on the one hand okay refuse the forms of radical complicity that we would actually have to constantly be renewing and on the other hand never take into account the forms of problematic complicity okay that that that again we would talk about under under a general framework of betrayal that that you that could be enacted from any position within the [ __ ] okay and so i guess you know it's impo that's what i'm there's a kind of everyday practice that we have of complicity that we have to engage in of of collaboration that we have to engage in i mean i was thinking about this this morning talking with laura hair i mean collaboration on a purely the etymology of collaboration simply means working with but there's an interpretation of working with that then amends to working with the phrase one another but the imposition of that phrase one another implies a structure of individuation and separation okay of re individuation in relation that [ __ ] up the force and the radical force and power of collaboration okay and and i i i have i was reminded of this by my prime mary you know by by by the one see this is the thing i was reminded of this by the one with whom i am constantly collaborating but what i was reminded of is that that very formulation of collaboration is already a betrayal and it already produces all kinds of difficulties for the collaboration within which we are supposed to practice okay and what it means is not only that we have to refrain the ways in which critique can so easily devolve into a kind of nasty meanness that anybody might exhibit toward anyone else's impurity right and i know y'all know about that but we also have to refrain from from this sense that that uh well we we we we have to refrain from the notion that somehow there's an individual transcendence of the institutions within which we are supposed to practice complicity and that that individual transcendence is primarily a function of some kind of new theoretical advance there is no theoretical resolution to the contradictions of the metaphysics of individuation ain't no theoretical position that's that is adequate that will allow us to escape that [ __ ] okay the way we escape the metaphysics of individuation is in our is in collaborative practice that's wow that's so much that you just offered there thank you for those reflections um i'm gonna i'm gonna try to uh formulate so i guess i'll move on to this question that i had um and i'm not sure if it's a good segue or not but i want to try to make sure to get it in um about the way that the two of you write um you know in a lot of different places about how it is that or that it is um that uh oh my let me consult my notes i'm getting lost um [Music] okay right so so thinking a little bit about blackness and and and what you all describe as racial difference or um internal difference let's talk about the way that racial difference brings regulation into being or law into being um and another way that i've heard you say this is that resistance is primary and i'm wondering if you can explain a little bit more about this notion and maybe if you want to talk also about blackness and how you think about blackness um yeah and what i shared with what we shared with you earlier i said i quoted um from what you guys had written after michael brown was killed that blackness names um or stands in for life itself earth itself um so i'm trying to combine a couple questions here and um do what you want with it please um well thank you maybe i can start and then fred if you want to jump in at some point on this because it's a lot um [Music] uh do this but the first thing to say about it is that this is really a way of a practice of thinking that we are really doing uh collectively with a whole bunch of other black studies scholars with a whole bunch of people in in community etc so um this is really not something that you know stefano and fred are producing um closer to the fact would be that we're being produced by it so um just to say that so that's the first thing to to part of the specific part of your question you i mean you you probably know you probably know that there there's the the phrase from the lose about um resistance being prior which in in turn informs a whole uh political tradition um in italy around the priority of workers over capital which is a revision of marxism but we also know in the case of both traditions that you know duluz was aware of people like george jackson um of the of the panthers of black movements in general um we know that there was all kinds of um of social intercourse between the italian left and the league of revolutionary black workers and um and so when we when we talk about resistance being a prior in particular when we talk about blackness being prior we're we have all that in mind but we're also moving back through a long history in which you can you can watch the the vicious ways in which regulation kicks in in the face of of What comes first collective self-organization uh amongst the damned of the earth and so when you read history the pattern appears always clear that what comes first is mutual aid self-organization a return to to some way of living with and in the earth and a rejection of this worlding that comes with european thought and then a brutal interdiction to try to prevent these experiments and that's not to in any way romanticize what is the day-to-day life of called the damn to the earth but rather to to to reverse [Music] certain assumptions about where where um where life-giving power um really resides um so that's that's it's almost like a device for us when we're approaching things to be able to say to ourselves okay well if this [ __ ] was like is like this right now what was going on right what was going on so when we we visit because friends let us visit places like a village in mexico that's experiencing um some some forms of brutality you know of course one wants to critique the brutality one wants to get you know get them out but also you want to know well you know why'd they have to do this Race wars because there was something going on there was something going on that they couldn't abide uh and keep their their vicious system of accumulation and exploitation in in place um and then the final thing to say is and maybe maybe fred will well fred should do whatever but um you know we again should return to cedric robinson here because it's robinson who teaches us in his anthropology of marxism book about the ways in which there is a battle inside europe uh between a kind of medieval socialism that is emerging um uh really from in large part from the fact that europe is is coming out of its isolation and it's and it's sort of vicious in one set of it's just interesting wars but between that kind of nascent socialism which we find silvia federici and others also help us to find this you know which we find in in in communities of women in amongst monks amidst communities of foresters etc etc and the emergence of state formation what foucault is going to call those race wars which need to consolidate these populations and are going to aren't going to use essentially these these categories of race which are coterminous in their origin with the emergence of something like the human right so contaminants with all that stuff and they're going to use that as a way um to to to to exploit whole populations divide whole populations captur whole populations et cetera and he talks a lot about ireland in this regard just like marx and engels does right um and so one of the things that and this is also a place where we we always need to reference our friend and teacher denise ferreira de silva who's who tells us about how the emergence of philosophy from the 1600s is also going to reinforce this by emphasizing the the self-determination of this emerging individual against the affectability of those who are being racialized um of those who are are being uh prepared for a new uh uh sexual division of labor for for a new new forms of patriarchy etc the affectable the slave the servant the the foreigner who can't possibly ever become sovereign then gets grouped um and racialized and that's what finally that's the civilization that european civilization is the one that arrives in africa and again robinson says this is the tragedy you have the meeting of of an inferior civilization and a superior civilization at this exact moment with the resulting you know horror um that we see and of course by inferior civilization he's talking about the europeans right um so so what's interesting and all that is that you can say that blackness is fair before uh it gets firmly attached to black people um which is then gonna do of course right and even still we might wanna say that although black people bear the unbearable burden of that blackness as it is perceived by power it's not necessarily coterminous with them because we can see that that's the case historically um and so some of what we're trying to do is to to mobilize blackness as uh as a as a way to name the mutual experiments the shared experiments in giving life in the face of a death dealing system that emerges as that time in which we live in heightened contradictions today i'll stop there part of what just to add one little bit i mean that we we live the brutal history of the the racialization what what fanon will call the epidermalization okay of of these beautiful radical experiments that that stefano is describing um the the epidermalization and racialization of of the alternative and that epidermalization and racialization firmly attached the beautiful experiment to black people and we have come to know the beautiful experiment now as blackness um and we can't turn our backs on that history we can't go back before that history which is why we have to take into account the necessity of a distinction between blackness and the people who are called black the people who are racialized and epidermalized as black at the same time as we have to constantly recognize that the people who are epidermalized and racialized as black have a privileged but we could also similarly say an underprivileged relation to blackness that these things are are are true and then there's much more to be said about by way of both denise de silva but also horton spillers about the irreducible gendering of blackness right the the intensity with which blackness then also gets associated with an impossible maternity that that is both as a matter of choice and as a matter of imposition is socialized all throughout the black social field um these are you know but but you know there's a but you know we can never detach blackness from black people and we and we know that on the one hand it's not arbitrary where it is that we go to look for blackness right we we know where we have to go to look for it and at the same time we'd be looking for it everywhere okay and but partly because the the repression of it is ubiquitous right but it lets us know that we have to look for it everywhere okay she's like you know we know the best places to look we know the most likely places to look but we look forward everywhere okay um and that means we also have to understand you know the general ubiquity of anti-blackness okay um [Music] you know and and maybe this is a place where like stefano says you know well there's no question of anybody doing this work by themselves or in pairs or it's a general it's a general The general project project and you know maybe the easiest way to put it the best way to put it without is that there's antagonisms within the general project but those antagonisms are ours to share wow that that is absolutely brilliant and and you know chica and i were talking about uh blackness and you know while we were reading your work and you know we were just curious like what what are the limits or what are the bounds of blackness because blackness seems to be it seems to permeate through so many uh histories and cultures and politics in your work like i'm curious like if we could like and i don't know if i'm framing this question in like the right way if we could like stand at the bounds of blackness or see the bounds of blackness like what would that be or what yeah what are the bounds of blackness if that make sense well just i'll say something now be brief so stefano can pick it up but um you know maybe maybe maybe maybe to slightly shift the question just a bit that it's not i don't i don't i can't say i don't know i i don't know not only how one would determine the bounds or the limits of blackness but also whether or not you know i mean another person that we've learned from a lot you know um is named chandler and and and i've all you know we've we've been influenced and convinced by the way in which he thinks about blackness as what he calls the illimitable um i mean man you know there's all kinds of freaky cool technical questions one could get into if you're sort of pseudo philosophically minded you know like some of us are you know we would we would it would allow us to to to think through what the relationship might be between say um boundedness that is at the same time illimitable in the ways in which its constant and rich internal differentiation can't be stopped or placed under limit even if it's placed under repression even if it's placed under the most brutal forms of bounded carcerality even if those forms of bounded carcerality ev those forms of bounded carcerality in a way almost are reflective of an of a of another modality of boundedness that strangely operates as if it were an open field okay and and so maybe the other way i would put it then would be something like man i'm less interested in the question of the boundaries of blackness and i am in the question of what it means to be bound to blackness and then on another level what it is to be bound for blackness what it is to be on the way to blackness how it is that blackness could be a thing that you could be both on the way to and be bound to and bound within you know but but these are questions which basically place us not against the limits of blackness but against the limits of metaphysics okay which um which came to [ __ ] up blackness but keeps losing you know and it's just a really bad loser okay and and it's a bad loser that produces very very vicious material effects you know um again i'm not i'm really not trying to be a smart i mean i'm really not trying to be all cute you know i'm saying man that in a lot of ways this whole problematic of blackness is is is as it were on the one hand you could say that it's the platform or the conceptual scheme from which we then could begin to say something intelligent about boundaries about limits about the problem of the whole about parts versus holes right about about that general condition of thought which tries to see the world as a whole which bertrand russell calls that general condition metaphysics blackness is the conceptual scheme we could say from which we can then begin to think metaphysics or critique metaphysics it's just that that's a [ __ ] metaphysical formulation and it's a misunder in it and it and it it places blackness right back into this the framework of what another well what what what the old berkeley philosophy professor donald davidson would have called the very idea of a conceptual scheme okay so so so it's a it's a conundrum it's a dilemma that that that that you've that that you that you raise um and it's part and it's very connected to the reason why before i i was we were saying it this ain't a matter of formulating the proper theoretical position or trying to imagine blackness as the proper you know sort of feels uh sort of ground of that proper philosophical subjective position it's a what's at stake is a way more radical and rain more fundamental apocalypse um and it's part of the reason why you could get you know you could get a whole bunch of people in the room who have a bunch of different varying formulations about blackness and anti-blackness for that matter you have jared's section over here and you know tiffany with bobbo king over here and katherine mckittrick over there and frank willison over here and robin kelly and r.a judy and you know and and they might disagree on a whole bunch of [ __ ] but the one thing they would agree with is that blackness has something to do with the end of the world which is to say with the end of the metaphysical project of worlding that stefano was talking about which as and and how we live it okay under the political economic regime of virulent you know [ __ ] coloniality okay um blackness is the end of that [ __ ] okay um so it it it's what the the illimitability of blackness is hopefully to be mobilized in the interest of the of the limitation of that right okay of putting that [ __ ] as it were in its place okay i'm going to bust in here i want to say thank you so much um for everything that you're sharing we're a little we're a little over our time that we had originally planned which always happens um but i wonder if stefano and fred if y'all are able to stay like another 10-ish minutes then what we had said maybe we could still get people into small groups for a shorter time to just talk with each other about their reactions and then come up with a couple more questions for y'all that works okay thank you so much so i think that's fine okay cool cool so i think breakout rooms um we're going to move into a breakout room session so folks can get together with um possibly some new people to talk about some of these ideas and if you're coming up with questions together please share them in the google document that um if um michelle or melissa could drop that doc in the chat before people go let's do 10 minutes and break out so it'll be three or four folks 10 minutes just share with each other what you're reflecting on now and uh if you want to write some questions out we'll we'll just pick like from a bouquet of flowers we can't get to them all but thank you everybody so i think we'll go into the rooms we'll see you back here hi can you hear me oh hey sorry i was i took a minute to unmute myself and figure out my tech um all right is it just us yeah i think this so did you get an invitation to a breakout room hold on i can hardly hear you i might i might have to go inside um can you say something again yeah can you hear me now i can hear you but it's super super soft i'm just gonna go i'm outside so that might be the reason why i'm sorry about all this for sure okay just give me a second okay um sorry what's your name my name is michelle i'm actually gonna go ahead and assign you to this is actually just like our main room i'm gonna assign you to a breakout room is that is that okay yeah i thought we were in our breakout room no it's all it's all good i'm gonna send you uh you'll see a couple more books in just a moment okay great sorry about that no problem all right so cool if i uh share the flyer and some music yeah i think that's totally fine okay i think these might just be some folks who didn't want to join the room okay cool twilight okay welcome back we're we're at least most of us i think are coming back now so thank you for that experiment and collaboration we appreciate everyone going into that um into that moment of sharing and i did see a question in the document that that spoke to something fred you were just sharing with us in our little small group um about can you say more about the captive maternal um well what i feel like i ought to do is um is first of all if you'll bear with me if i can get my uh my chops my my my my zoom chops what i want to do is actually find the the essay i i don't feel that it's right for me to do anything other than mention the concept and the idea that i'm because i've become very invested in it and trying to understand it but the full elaboration of it has to be through the work of joy james herself right so um and it's a and i'm talking about not some private communication but just a text that i read kind of after having seen uh maybe a film or a video of her giving a talk um so uh i feel less capable of you know uh i don't want to explicate it um beyond what i already said but what i do want to do is um is is is is point you to an essay of hers called the womb of western theory trauma time theft and the captive maternal okay and um and if and if you let me i think i can do this i'll try to actually upload it into the chat if that's okay can i do that okay um so so i'll stop talking now and just do what i do that and y'all keep going so it'll be in there in a minute so okay and i think uh we'll close with one last question let's see i'm pulling it up right here okay so what does collaborative practice look like in terms of scale and access in concrete terms for revolutionary aims what would be the relation of these ideas to the entity of the revolutionary party well um that's a great question and um you know we we didn't mention this as much but of course we we we're deeply influenced by um more orthodox histories of revolution too in my case the grenada revolution in the caribbean you know affected my thinking a lot um but we you know we we well aware of the revolutionary tradition in uh that we were spoken speaking of when we when we which we could have spoken about excuse me when we were talking about these other kinds of post-colonial regimes which went through these sort of colonial administrated independences and of course we know that those revolutionary movements are not without their moments of betrayal either but i think you know it also goes back to a persistent problem that we've tried to address around this sort of fallacious notion of scale and of scaling up right um which really needs to be reversed um most of what we think of as scaling up is essentially scaling back you know and and you could take this all the way philosophically because you just take it all the way right back to marx you know and his the way he understands the abstract and the concrete right the more abstract you get the more you scale up from the concrete the more you lose you know and and you don't just lose it you know you know in terms of uh um of of richness of of the of the general antagonism you lose it in the sense that you enter into these this these these um forms of isolation um so if if if i could maybe answer the question with reference to again to to walter rodney i think when rodney is talking about grounding rodney is talking about trying to dwell in the in in the concrete differences um that that that make up um the different kinds of experiments that we're where we're interested in and that that erupt you know um in all kinds of ways so when when in in ground news with my brothers walter rodney you know is talking about sitting with rastas and allowing them to teach him about their constantly emergent practices their inventions as they live them day by day and this is what he keeps saying he's saying look you should see how healthy these people are what they're eating you should see how they gather you know he's talking about these very concrete practices um and you know that's the that's the source for us that's the return to the source um and and further one gets from that through revolutionary parties that um appoint themselves on behalf of people um through political systems uh like the representative systems like the us etc the further you get from the source the further you get from from your strength um and you know at the same time of course that source that grounding um is eruptive it it can it can throw you out and back and and into confusion it's not a place of utopia it's the general antagonism and and all kinds of things erupt because another way to think of blackness is as this eruption um into into what is supposed to lead you know regular life um i mean even even in a place as lost as ours the united states even in a system as hopeless as ours you know the other day probably a lot of you saw corey bush give a a talk it was just you know that you have to have a hard heart not to cry when she gave that speech right um so you know there's these eruptions all the time that remind you of the the groundings you know that are that are there if we'll stay there um and and and feel um the richness of what we can share together if we avoid um this worlding um and that's what that's all i finish here uh with what i have to say about it you know that's all that's all we're trying to say about study you know study is that place where you get together in order to help each other fall apart into this general antagonism to to help each other you know lose that individuation and find the sharedness that is the basis of our non-metaphysical being let's say um or anti-metaphysical being um and it's just the practice that we do and think about in our way um but it's you know it's nothing original that's what groundings was um that's what the red thread work is that andaya does in guyana amongst women so um so scaling up that you know it's tempting but it's the same temptation as electoral politics or or the revolutionary card or anything else you know and it's it's the place where we see betrayal play itself out you know bernard court phyllis court in in in in the grenada revolution they thought that they knew that they had they needed to represent at scale the grenadian people and they murdered you know um uh jacqueline kraft and maurice bishop you know on the basis of that belief that that that's the betrayal and that betrayal as as we said is that's a systemic betrayal if you allow yourself to come into that kind of representation um and and that's why we try as much as we can through study with everybody not to come into that not to appear like that you know our concepts you know don't rise to the level of any kind of rigor but that doesn't mean that they you know um that they that they're nothing you know yeah thanks this this is excellent i i want to ask maybe just a final question from the chat or not from the chat from the uh shared document that uh somebody placed in there about what about the end of the world um that has happened over and over for indigenous people if y'all would want to say anything about that well i mean it it i think it might be i don't know enough to answer that question but i do know a little bit enough to know something about what else i would have to know to be able to address it and it would have to be about you know we'd have to as stefano was saying maybe scale it down and talk about what not just which indigenous peoples we're talking about and what their conceptions of world were and what happened to bring those conceptions of world to an end because world is a con concept so it would have to be you have to maybe ask the question that way or on the other hand you might begin to address it by thinking through the relationship between indigeneity and earth what if that's that's kind of the way i would want to you know i think that's the way that we've been trying to begin to think through those questions look in other words what that would mean would be partly what that would mean would be this that as as as as brutal and as apocalyptic as the phrase end of the world seems to be and as final and as violent as that phrase seems to be when we apply it to what has happened to indigenous peoples in in this hemisphere let's say but not just this hemisphere it's not even close to being an either an accurate or an adequate account of what was actually done to and taken from indigenous peoples like what was actually done and what was actually taken is not approached by the phrase or by the notion end of the world what comes closer to approximating or to describing what was done to and taken to indigenous people is entrance into the world forced entrance into the world forced displacement by the world okay forced brutalization at at the advent of world right as a function of the prosecution of globality okay as a conceptual framework and as a political economic force so so part of what's at stake is now are there indigenous conceptions of world that are different than than the european model of world can we actually properly discuss european structures and ideas of world in a way that does not also allow them to take on the honorific of indigenous that these are [ __ ] up questions you know that require a lot of common work okay but but what i would want to suggest you know what what we're trying to say you know is that uh we simply refuse to presuppose the goodness of world and we also simply refuse to presuppose the naturalness of the world that means we're more inclined to think about the end the beginning of the world okay in its alignment with brutality then we are inclined to think about the end of the world in its alignment with brutality um but but you know that's a formulation which i don't feel so great or confident about you know and it's it's a formulation that has to be refined by way of study and by way of an immersion a fuller immersion than than we have been able to begin so far but that we have hopes of engaging in soon that would maybe give us another way of understanding let's say non-european conceptions of world this is a brilliant posing of a question um rather than an answer i think and i'm i'm so thankful for this conversation i think uh we should we should close it now as we've gone a little bit over so i want to just with so much gratitude uh thank you fred and thank you stefano for the work that you are doing and the way that you continue to share it with all of us it's been this incredible pleasure and honor to study um this work in preparation for this event and to to be here and sharing this time and space with y'all um so i just want to thank you so much from the bottom of my heart um i also want to thank everybody for the time you spent together also posing some questions rather than you know positing answers um sometimes that's what we can do and i see so many thank yous coming through the chat so that's wonderful um thanks for sharing everybody i want to mention a couple things just thank you to everybody who's been helping with oakland summer school helping make these events happen there are a lot more coming um so you can check the website which is oaklandsummerschool.com sorry.org um and there's even a talk today with keith mchenry from food not bombs um so just you know keep your eyes open on that akande is doing a talk later in the month that i'm very much looking forward to um that i think we'll talk about some of the questions that have been raised today so i'll pass it to you akande to say any last words and and yeah yes i mean thank you so much again uh stuff knowing fred it was an absolute honor to be able to speak with you both i've been researching and studying your work for years now so it's surreal to be able to to speak to you both um and yeah i want to thank again you know everyone at the open summer school the volunteers that have been helping us out and creating these uh incredible discussions and events you know i want to give a special shout out to michelle uh who's uh i i think uh she's she's oakland summer school is the name but you know she her name's michelle and she's been helping us out so much and danielle and scott and uh laura nelson i think i'm not sure where where she's calling uh in from but yeah thank you so much because i feel like the the roots of this event can be traced to laura and as well as um melissa and uh grant and yeah i guess just the whole oakland summer school group so and and thank you all for being here and you know tuning in it's a it's an absolute uh honor again to be here right now with you all so i think that's all i have to say well thank you everyone we we had a great time and uh you know we're only a zoom away so hopefully we'll get together again soon yeah thank you it's been a pleasure um i just want to say one last thing was just i mean i was just texting you well well anyway we want to be able to anyway it was a pleasure we we get a chance to talk with a lot of folks and meet a lot of people and what i'm hoping we'll be able to do sometime very soon is a much better job at getting all the different people that we're able to meet together with amongst themselves to to hopefully be a kind of a conduit through which you all can get together with some of these other folks who we're meeting and um the chance to meet with folks and talk with folks makes us always feel you know like like not just the good [ __ ] is around the corner but that is everywhere you know so um anyway so thank you very much we will try to keep doing try to do a better job of sharing that with everybody [Music] okay thanks everybody yeah thank you again i think we're gonna have some music to tune to for everyone to kind of trickle out with but uh yeah thank you again thank you you