Utopia 7/13 | On "Concrete Utopianism," Fred Moten, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Kaiama Glover, & Gary Wilder

uh welcome to Utopia 7 13. uh welcome everyone here welcome to Nadia Abu alhaj welcome to kayama Glover welcome to Fred moton and of course welcome to Gary Wilder this year at Utopia 1313 we are studying concrete uh Utopias we're trying to lay both a critical Foundation uh which was where we started uh the first semester with the chenbaribar the second semester with Noam Chomsky we're also exploring material instantiations of concrete Utopias from cooperation Jackson in Jackson Mississippi to Union organizing right here at Columbia University passing through worker cooperatives eco-farming Cooperative solidarity economics and cooperation writ large tonight we focus our seminar on another critical theoretic intervention a new rich and deeply engaging book concrete utopianism the politics of temporality and solidarity by Gary Wilder just published uh uh by Fordham University press in 2022. in the book Gary Wilder advocates for a turn away from certain strands of contemporary critical thought um perhaps I was lumping them together as kind of forms of negative dialectics and and pessimism afro pessimism certain cultural strands of post-colonial thought and for a turn or rather a return to more we could say constructive political forms of critical and practical engagement Gary Wilder one of the leading critics and historians of francophone black Atlantic social thought draws in large part on those Traditions to counterpose to critical Skeptics a path towards a more positive engaged political stance Gary Wilder's concrete utopian Vision might be called using his words a possible well his and others possible impossible internationalism uh Wilder's book forms part of a contemporary Rebirth of new forms of utopianism that can be sometimes called concrete Utopias at least by Gary wilderidge and baribao earlier Ernest spluck and in this seminar itself sometimes called real Utopias uh from a different slightly different perspective Eric Olin writes book envisioning real Utopias also thought sometimes of through the French term utopia which we'll be working on with laicia Reese in Paris for Utopia 1113. the exact terms of course have implications but the overall arching thrust of this we might call it a movement is to revive within critical theory but turn to Praxis um our distinguished colleague at Columbia kayama Glover has curated this seminar and brought us all together here all of you Utopia 13 to converse with uh Fred moton Nadia abuel Hajj and Gary Wilder to think critically about concrete utopianism so I want to thank you okay I also want to give a special thanks to the human Center and Eileen galuli who we're working with and of course a big shout out to Fonda Shen from the center for making all of this happen thank you so let me uh introduce our guests uh in I'll go in alphabet we're going to be a little bit going out of that order but let me start with Professor Nadia Abu alham who is the Anne Whitney Olin professor in anthropology here at Columbia University co-director of the center for Palestine studies she's the author of several books numerous Journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archeology in Pakistan Palestine to the question of race and genomics today her books include facts on the ground archaeological practice and territorial cell fashioning in Israeli society and the genealogical science the search for Jewish Origins and the politics of epistemology uh uh I Am A Glover is the Anne Whitney Olin professor of French and Africana studies here at Columbia University faculty director of the Barnard digital Humanities Center her teaching and research interests include francophone literature particularly that of Haiti and the French uh alte colonialism and postcolonialism and sub-Saharan francophone African Cinema she's the author most recently of a regarded South Caribbean Womanhood and the ethics of disorderly being and Haiti Unbound a spiralist challenge to the post-colonial Canon uh Fred moton uh it's one of our most brilliant poets today cultural theorist whose work explores critical theory black studies and performance studies Fred Martin is the author as you know all uh with Stefano Harney of The undercommons Fugitive planning and black study and all incomplete we had the privilege of reading and discussing the undercommons as part of Praxis 1313 it was a remarkable session with Jack halberstam who's here with us and Mark eBay Heather love and Allegra McLeod it was um it was uh it was inspiring I I always come back to this passage from the under Commons right um in our abolitionist World um I think we all do uh this passage where he writes they write on page 42 what is so to speak the object of abolition not so much the abolition of Prisons but the abolition of a society that would have prisons that could have slavery that could have the wage and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new Society hopefully we'll be able to engage that since abolition is on the table in Gary Wilder's book um Mr Moten is also the author of numerous other books and volumes of essays and poetry including in the break uh Houston's Tavern B Jenkins the few Trio the little edges the service porch and many more uh professor in the department of performance studies at nyu's Tisch School of the Arts so I want to welcome all of you to this panel and all of you as well uh and Gary Wilder of course who I introduced a little bit earlier but uh uh come back to now um I I redid everything there we go thank you of course uh Gary Wilder's professor of anthropology uh with cross appointments in history and French at The Graduate Center at CUNY uh where he's also the director of the committee on globalization and social change Gary's work on the French Empire francophone West Africa and the Caribbean and black Atlantic social thought is located at the intersection of uh historical of history historical anthropology intellectual history and critical theory he's the author of Freedom time decolonization and the future of the world and the French Imperial nation-state negritude and Colonial humanism between the world wars and of course his newest book concrete utopianism is what we'll be discussing tonight so I wanted to thank you all and I want to thank you for coming and also want to thank all of our colleagues and friends who are in the audience with us for a great conversation Jack thanks for coming Kendall Thomas Emmanuel Sada I see Jay Gossett omavi Shakur Eileen galuli thanks for joining us Reinhold Martin as well so everyone's here and uh I'm going to turn it over first then to kayama Glover welcome and thanks foreign so if you're not fed up with things let me just say again thank you so much Bernard for creating this space for us to have this conversation of course thank you Gary for bringing this book into our world and giving us this opportunity to think about uh the rich provocative and fascinating ideas you bring up here I'm looking forward to this conversation from very different perspectives on something so urgent which will be a key word in the remarks I'll be making today in addition to um the word love so I um I curated this panel and I meant to sort of Fade Into the background but I did want to get my two cents in before seeding the floor too my colleagues um so I'll get started I took uh at Heart to Heart your um suggestion to be conversational because we have a lot of conversations I'm going to continue in that vein can everyone hear me when I turn away from the mic it's all you cannot you see so thank you Eileen so this is I'm gonna be like this is this good all right so knowing you Gary as a friend as a scholar is someone who thinks writes teaches and very much lives the political Concepts that were you in all of your work and and I use worry very pointedly not in the sense that we're so comfortable with preoccupy me in my work but actually in a very affective way that were you in the ways that are visceral and material um this urgency that animates all of your work in this book in particular so knowing you is this kind of a scholar worried about the world that you study I want to take as a Point of Departure the idea that every bit of the the rich theoretical analysis and close reading that you do in this book all of the trouble you take to establish a more expansive and entangled genealogy of leftist critical thought you do all of this in service in authoring to I read your book as issuing a series of reminders of tools that we've maybe dropped too carelessly dropped and forgotten even maybe forgotten how to pick up forgotten to pick up with this book you mean for us to read to reread to reflect to imagine and to do you're shaking us I have this image of you sort of shaking Us by the shoulders as you're writing this I guess piping and shaking at the same time asking us and the US I'm referring to are kinds of folks that are in this room right self-style Progressive academics and Scholars and thinkers you're asking us to snap out of it to to think differently to be more bold and to return to things as I said that we may have left behind and there's this sort of undertone or Vive in the book as if you can't even believe that we haven't done that yet that we're still operating in a sort of uh Funk as it were and so I wanted to start by saying all of this just to be clear about how I read this book by which I mean allowing its insights to kind of land as so many Embers urging me urgently to be sparked into thinking more imaginatively or imagine more actively so taking very seriously you're repeated and sustained attention to imminence to imminent critique which I take to mean you're pushing at the borders and the conventions and the habits of the given in the now and your exhortation to collapse and enrich and stop time so to explore its alternatives and one of those Alternatives among many one that particularly intrigued me because of my current work which considers you know and for anyone who's told me heard me recently especially talk about this work that's kind of fraught work that considers a utopian thinking of the Cold War Haitian militant socialist novelist and erotic poet honey de bestler one of the Alternatives or tools or Embers that came out of this book is as they mentioned earlier love um and love Shore humanist and fraternal and yes we love one another but also an equally love is essential and even sexual phenomenon the erotic obviously is what I'm talking about is a radical proposition on the order of the profane illuminations that you point to in the book you know identified by by Benjamin as an interruption of the everyday as perhaps surprising uh generative certainly Interruption of the everyday and Awakening another term you refer to in the book A making of the familiar or the taken for granted into something strange and inspiring Awakening is a necessary part then of our critical project and our objectives and so sure let's go to towards you know throughout the book I'd say and then culminating in this kind of or crystallizing In This Moment toward the end for those who brought your books along 270 to 271 where you evoke Cornell West and a shield and bembe and their insistence on the quote revolutionary Power of Love Again fine we've heard this before but the idea right of Love is this de facto grounds for a future-oriented politics I'm interested in this moment where you turn from West and in bembe for the Lord toward Audrey Lord her important ruminations in fact on conflict and tension within communities of solidarity which is something that runs throughout throughout your book and notably uh to her essay uh eye to eye black women hatred and anger and so it struck me about that moment is that you and and this is where I'm hoping you're going to help me with my book and also we can maybe chat about this if you're interested um that you didn't turn to the uses of the erotic right her essay from 1978 which is a response to uh the second wave feminist and the question of pornography as either degrading over or empowering of women but in this essay her insistence unquote desire is a creative Force for revolutionary change so I went back to to that essay for the umpteenth time and I realized remember just how gendered it is that is I thought more more about how love the quote-unquote Revolutionary Power of Love um has been taken seriously or not taken as seriously as a political position by for or available to men and that struck me in a book that is so for reasons that are obvious uh the interlocutors the folks that you're thinking about are overwhelmingly men um and so I thought that that Lord's provocations in the uses of the erotic are especially significant to the kind of thinking that your work engenders in as much that as in this essay the uses of the erotic she moves from sexual desire to the poetic and the political to the poetic as political you know she has that great question what do you mean a poetic revolutionary a meditating gun Runner right she's asking us to think about um the power of the erotic is embedded in intimacy and sharing which are actually you know obviously necessary for solidarity and for the practice of politics and has this quote quoting her sharing deeply any Pursuit with any with another person so she's talking about sex uh talking forms a bridge between two people and lessens the threat of their difference like dancing building a bookcase writing a poem examining an idea end quote so this seamless movement that Lord does from the interpersonal and the relational to the material and to the philosophical all of this seems to me to Accord with with the Keening toward World Oneness from a space of idiosyncrasy Singularity and locality that your work proposes so a space it reminds us it reminds us that is imminently possible and but I don't know if you're up to talking about sex as it relates to Utopia at all um and in the materiality of Utopia this evening and we can certainly render this idea of the erotic less sexy if we use terms like candidiality or or entanglement or whatever else but in the spirit of ever so slight disruption that your book encourages us to to notice and inhabit and given that from what I've seen of the seminar is the Utopia seminars thus far the one sort of solid evocation of Love um was about the pathology is attached to the ways in which capitalism monetizes love or monetizes um love for work let's say I think there's maybe Utopia 413 or I don't know I was looking back at those um I just wanted to leave that door ajar um to hear your thoughts on how and why men seem to have overlooked the erotic as a solid or a concrete project of utopian World building um and are we destined to keep doing so um do any concrete utopian projects based in the erotic have political purchase or possibility today and I'll leave it I'll leave it there beautiful thank you thank you so much and Emma for opening up that way um and uh I think we'll go next to okay Nadia and then Red Mountain I first of all apologies for thank you Eileen apologies for being late I was in a classroom um so I wanted to thank also Bernard and kayama for organizing this and for including me although I hope as well I hope maybe I don't hope but I'm feeling definitely like sort of outside this wheelhouse much more than the other people here so you might have to bear with me okay concrete utopianism is an ambitious and deeply erudite book one that thinks through the work of a variety of prominent intellectuals and theorists in order to provide the framework for a different modality of politics and thinking most centrally it calls upon us that is those on the left to move away from the work of negative critique and towards a project of thinking a radical otherwise more than just making an argument in favor of the importance of tuning Our analytic and political Focus to the possible impossible that is to what possibilities lurk within or Can Be Imagined in excess of our present I think the book enacts that very political project yes it reads in a critical mode but then it moves to find possible impossibilities buried within and born of decidedly violent histories quite specifically the histories of the Middle Passage slavery and Plantation the plantation economy in that history and in the political theorizing or the Poetics of Reason born of it there is a grounding here for thinking outside existing Horizons of the taken for granted the problem of culturalism and identitarianism as Theory and or as politics is one object of Gary's critique it is one horizon of the taken for granted that we need to reject in the here and now if we are to imagine an otherwise in short if we're going to create a more livable and survivable World some genre of an older Marxist commitment to internationalism is for Gary essential and what's more contrary to what the realists the culturalists and the melancholics and if you read the book we moved through it and I have to admit I fall into the category of the melancholic although I'm not really sure I embrace it the way some of these people like as a principal um so contrary to them or what they may believe creating a more livable world is not just essential it is also possible so Central to Gary's an imaginative project is the thinking of major black intellectuals and more specifically key figures whose historical location and thought is born of the Atlantic slave trade more specific yet the Caribbean of the Caribbean and of the Caribbean and Edward Edward we saw are Central here but before discussing however briefly the place of the history of the Atlantic slave trade as a way of thinking the possible impossible I'm going to take a detour into Gary's critique of what he calls left culturalism maybe over determined as the Anthropologist on the panel so I quote one way to begin thinking about organizing convergence while respecting diversity is through a practice of translation this is these are Gary's words it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar and I have to say as an oddly classic anthropological project for you Gary I continue the quote the task is to do so in ways that emphasize both the irreducible Gap and possible relation between strangeness and familiarity but Gary continues this potential Affinity between translation practices and solidarity politics is foreclosed by currents or left currents of left culturalism whose important attention to cultural Singularity often leads to quasi-ontological insistence on categorically in commensurable forms of life unquote so let me Begin by emphasizing the beginning of the quotation which was actually a quote but I don't know from what organizing convergence while respecting diversity in other words whatever this new internationalism is going to look like it isn't in the name of some homogeneous using our Universal politics or future so what is the problem with such Frameworks Gary argues the political limitation for example of afropessimist thought is quote that its insistence on ontological incommensurability implies a present assumption that current concurrent conditions are unsurpassable unquote this ontological orientation he then goes on to say is characteristic of a culturalism although unless acute form perhaps that also quote runs through some recent currents of post-colonial thinking unquote such accounts he explains it face internal heterogeneity and contradictions that is within cultures and or they posit in commensurabilities among them and more specifically between the west and non-western life worlds let me quote again I would argue that the tendency to address the problem of translation by making ontological claims about language cultures and life worlds is analytically dubious and politically limiting the critical challenge is to insist on entanglement and intend to impurity while respecting even producing singularities unquote it is precisely the question of entanglement as a foundational condition as perhaps what one might call following Ian hacking's notion of historical ontology a historical ontological condition that makes the black Atlantic so rich the black black at my own thought so rich for Gary to think with enter Edward Gleason and his quote-unquote Poetics of relations I quote from Gary's book the song characterizes relations as an open totality wherein the whole is not the finality of its parts for multiplicity intertality is total diversity closed or self-referential totalities are part are founded upon root identity that grounds the myths of pure organ Origins and continuous lineages root identities also authorize the colonial expropriation of other people's territory in contrast relation identity must be relational is based on the context no it is relation okay see I don't know very much it's on the context among cultures or contacts among cultures that create a chaotic Network relation opposes the totalitarianism of any monolingual intent unquote Nissan's concept of relation is particularly productive in this book precisely because of its refusal of Origins there is no prior no authentic form or moment that glisson is trying to recuperate here as Gary points out visance notion of relation is grounded in a particular history that perhaps made such a quest or political imaginary for An Origin impossible that is the history of the Middle Passage anti-black slavery and Plantation production as Gary puts it this Plantation Matrix which is glisson's term established a established dehumanizing conditions which dialectically fueled by what at least on variously calls detour diffraction air entry creolization in relation unquote I'm deeply sympathetic to Gary's weariness of identitarian and or cultural forms of politics for both intellectual and epistemological and I mean sorry and political reasons I don't buy into it's for some version of it's It's epistemological or ontological conceits and I share Gary's I also share his commitment that the alternative cannot be some abstract unmarked universalism but yeah nevertheless it's a nice Never Last in reading the book I often felt that references to diversity or difference or singularities operate at a level of such a level of abstraction that I wondered how analytically one would begin to Grapple with or imagine or engage the question of singularities or diversity as part of imagining concrete Utopias sorry utopianisms I wonder if given that not of all of our histories are similar to that of this song revisiting and re-reading Assad and or Chuck rubarty might Pache Gary's reading provide some more concrete sorry insights I couldn't avoid that in short are there afraid their frames are there frames tradition for asset and history one and two for checkerboardy are those frames really frames sorry culturalisms forms of asserting ontological difference I'm beginning to begin with Walter mignola before I get back to Assad which will I focus on I actually agree or I agree with Gary about that mignola's concept of the D Colonial falls into the kind of culturalism and assertion of ontological difference of which Gary is wary I mean neural posits and I'm quoting from the book incommensurable differences between Western and non-western epistemologies or civilizations unquote he and I'm quoting again insists ways of knowing are bound up with particular ways of being and writes I am where I think unquote what's more I would argue and here I'm probably going farther than Gary did Mineola seems to presume that there is some decolonial prior to be recuperated and he looks to indigenous life worlds to find it somehow they are not just incommensurable but seemingly still untouched it's the only way we can recuperate them this kind of culturalism mimics an anthropological primitive imaginary of old just now it does so in the name of a politics of the otherwise the D Colonial now in other words there is a very different moral and political conceit and I too am quite wary but I said in chakravarti I think are doing something quite different let me focus on Essen just because I know his work more thoroughly he relies as Gary points out on the concept of tradition which he reads via Alistair McIntyre and he does this sort of in specific in thinking about religion and particularly Islam but I disagree that assets conception cannot incorporate the practices or arguments for example of my Islamic marxists or feminists who and I'm quoting Gary May challenge the same forms of conservative piety or political Islam that Western liberals do do but on different grounds and for different aims unquote traditions in assets sense operate with different grammars and inform different forms of life but nothing in that claim makes them in commensurable one from the other at least not Prima facia moving away from an anthropological concept of culture which is often deeply presentist in a historical the concept of tradition as that argues allows us to think about quote the conditions that produce meanings and practices and forms of life perhaps then his work might allow us to do two things which is May well be different from the direction his work has been taken in by many of his acolytes um first to think more specifically about what we mean when we say differences or Singularity what are their conditions of possibility what are their forms that produce particular forms of life how are they made and sustained over time and how do they change put another way Assad might provide us with one conceptual frame within which we can begin to have a more concrete conversation about difference as his as historically produced and ways to ex sorry difference ways to explore and engage analytically these singularities but and this is my second point this is not to say that incommensurability is not one possibility that one might run up against one real historical possibility in reading the book and it's optimism much appreciated but I remain melancholic subject I was left to wonder can we so easily set aside those moments of possible incommensurability or non-passage across singularities as Beth povinelli points out in the introduction to her cunning of recognition one common move in multiculturalized Multicultural theorizing has been to say we will set the difficult moments aside for the moment that is we will set aside those moments and issues that we cannot come to an agreement on and we will imagine a Multicultural Society in their absence and not just because we cannot rationally agree on those moments or issues but because affectively they can generate disgust and she uses the response to clitoridectomies as one example in Europe and the U.S but aren't those moments of non-passage aren't those the precise moments with which we need to Grapple the clothes I just want to note the conclusion um takes a rather different term these movements are extremely concrete and decidedly located and I wanted to think a little bit about more about what it means to be located black lives matter or prison abolitionist movements one could even argue about that about the climate change movement yes it speaks to and of the survival of the planet but it does so nevertheless from particular locations and the account here makes it sound perhaps more seamless as an internationalist project than I suspect it is what's more it's striking to me how many of these examples are U.S located some of which have traveled Occupy Wall Street some of which less so black lives matter I do not say this Gary to imply that you need to use other more Global examples I'm also not so sure that staying in America so to speak is always necessarily a problem not all movements have to be International have international or Global reach nevertheless I want to think about their located-ness and the ways in which Progressive or not a movement of marginalized and racialized citizens at home can reproduce some of the inequities of Imperial power or be blind to them so let me just pause and say something about it summer of 2008 the right the movement from Gaza to Ferguson because the invasion of Gaza happens at the same moment as Ferguson and what there were two things about that that really struck me um in terms of a kind of Imperial blindness one and this is again a kind of movement that includes Palestinian Americans who um unify and Arab Americans with black Americans and others in in sort of drawing parallels between what's happening in Gaza and what's happening in Ferguson but in fact what's happening in Gaza it's not that there aren't threads but to read it through a an American racial imaginary and structure is a serious problem Gaza is much the siege of Gaza and its bombardment is much closer to what happened in Fallujah with the U.S Siege of Fallujah so partly the question is what is the racial model that is presumed here but then the second is Fallujah right the U.S is at War has been at War for 20 years and is still at War and very little sort of there and that fact has not emerged as Central in American Progressive politics over the last um 20 years and certainly in the rise of of trump so there's a kind of blindness to the fact of the U.S as an imperial state right so finally so I want to end by returning to tawal Assad like Gary Assad thinks thinks we should take seriously that translation is never easy never seamless speaking to anthropologists he argues perhaps we have spent too little time thinking about translation as what he calls a scandal part of that Scandal is what he refers to in an earlier article translating culture as the problem of unequal languages and the problem those unequal languages posed to the task of translation certainly that is true of those Worlds at the receiving end of American Imperial War and harm that have rarely ever figured and certainly not prominently in Progressive U.S politics over the past 20 or more years even as the U.S has been and continues to be at War how the call then for concrete optimism I mean concrete utopianism well that was a Freudian slip the imaginative Act of seeing the possible impossible how that call can exceed the frame and especially in the powerful nations of the North seed that Imperial frame and especially in the powerful nations of the north may be the source of a Melancholy that is not just misplaced what's more it raises the question of whether or not some internationalisms need not incorporate the north at all to go back to Samir Amin who figures prominently in the books his earlier political imaginary in the 50s and 60s one that imagined an internationalist Politics as structured around the non-aligned movement and what we have come to call the global South thanks thank you thank you Nadia and um I I think I'll come back on some of those themes later but um let's hear first from Fred moton oh thank you Bernard and kayama and everybody it's a pleasure to be here um so I wrote like four short paragraphs but but I realized that they were sort of more like the end of of of something so I didn't actually have a beginning so I have to improvise I guess the beginning um and uh and and in doing so I I run the risk of making it seem like I'm conflating this this very powerful and beautiful work that you did Gary with some work that um that I find less less so but it's not but even if I find this work then I'm going to mention you know informally sort of less powerful and beautiful it's it's not because I'm not in a in a certain kind of way sympathetic with it and um and it really goes back to kind of two sort of kinds of experiences of frustration that I know I've been feeling and that I've I think a lot of other people maybe my age um and and part of the problem is that maybe the people who are feeling this is my age are my age too um so one is just this kind of feeling of fatigue when it feels like you're constantly arguing with people who you agree with or 99 of everything you know and it just feels like a weight you know on your shoulders you know um particularly because so much energy is poured into that that that um that that not enough energy it feels like is is directed towards let's say who who we might all roughly agree to be the enemy and and of course that thing that that that frustration ought to itself be critically examined it even if it doesn't feel good it might not necessarily be the case that it's a that it's a bad thing it might just be that that maybe we're not comporting ourselves towards one another in the in in a in the best way that we could be okay and then the other feeling is more of an age-related thing that I share with some of my colleagues and you know we you know talk have two-hour conversations in the afternoon you know with feeling a certain kind of restoration towards some of our students you know and um about no idea what you're talking about and it's and it and I believed it over the course and specifically you know within within black studies for some of us it has taken a very particular kind of shape over the last 10 years that that I think we need to to talk about but in a certain kind of way and um and the reason why I bring this up is because there are two sort of public instances of this this this this sort of bad feeling or feeling that can sometimes happen you know like it's actually the case that you know students can hurt you know their teachers feelings and and and this is two instances of it in the in in the in the last few you know weeks that that I just wanted to briefly mention and those are the instances that I'm contrasting to what it is that I think Gary has done it much more and you know and it's very profound and and and and and rigorous and elegant way um so maybe part of what I'm trying to talk about is that thing where you know you cry out as a function of your hurt feelings and then maybe that more deliberate kind of thing that can happen when you sort of try to understand or hurt feelings and then think about it a little bit more and again I'm not trying to suggest that we denounce and refuse and renounce crying out that immediate outcry I I think they need to be thought together so okay so one instance is uh there is an article published February 10th in a journal called uh I have to look it up because I never earlier this channel before um which is an interesting phenomena in and of itself not that I know every Journal but this did Jesus I think it's sorry um it's called Compact magazine uh so Che always knows what I'm getting ready a really interesting and Brilliant scholar who teaches uh sort of theology political theology at Villanova and black studies named Vincent Lloyd some of you probably familiar with some of his work and it's called a black professor trapped in anti-racist hell and and without going into too much detail because I don't want to take up more of my time more than my time it's the story of a Class A summer class he was teaching at the under the auspices of the Telluride Association in in the class just blew up and and one way to think about it is that the Telluride Association which is just sort of you know well-moneyed Association that does something like what melon maze does except for high school kids and they isolate you know or identify promising students of color and ship them off for six weeks of kind of college seminar class at some place like Cornell which is where his was and basically but what's happened is that over the course of the last 10 years the alumni of the Telluride Association who take up a lot of the work of administering the association once they've gone through it have become increasingly influenced by you know this sort of three-headed monster that we'll call wilkism Dei slash afro customers okay and and the reason why I like that is not because I'm here to be I mean I am you know woke and and I'm old enough to be woke and I'm old enough to not be still some kind of way about being woke you know but uh you know I'm also old enough to to to to to to joke about wolves you know and um and in Dei you know okay like I'm a product of it on some basic level and then at the same time I you know one sees all of the brutal and vicious ways in which it was always already incorporated into a liberal mechanics of retrenchment that you know so we we know that too and and obviously you know many of us have our own complicated relation to afro pessimism but let's just say that before it became a name or or a kind of academic brand it was always a kind of feeling that it animated the thoughts and and and meditations of most of the black folks I knew and it was just simply this basic realization that this is up and it doesn't work and it's never going to work okay um so that it was always on the cusp of a kind of call for the possible impossible if you will right that's that's all it ever was that you know and and then this is why you know if you read afro-pessimism or read wilderson's work particularly his work because it's so autobiographical you always are confronted with the interesting question of where he came from like how did he happen well he had Parents he grew up in somebody's house and they thought that too even though they just you know anyway okay so um Lloyd's class got blown up and because there was a a a a a a a black graduate student who was also a kind of co-facilitator for the class though she didn't attend the class who would sort of undermine everything he did in the classroom at night with the students and eventually two things happened one two Asian American students who were sufficiently converted to this particular kind of critique were kicked out of the class which on there there is no possible circumstance in which that could be justified and everything should have been shut down at that moment but he didn't shut it down at that moment during when the class got shut down it was because the students then came and read him the Riot Act each each student reading a paragraph of a critique of him in which they accused him of anti-blackness and that's when the class got shut down okay which is to say the class got shut and he's you know very brilliant smart dude there is no possible anti-racist credential that he doesn't have there is no work in the the study of anti-blackness that he doesn't know and hasn't done and he got accused and his his feelings got hurt okay now what's interesting is the discourse that has emerged around this thing is one one element of the discourse is that the students were insufficiently committed to the liberal procedure of the seminar they were insufficiently committed to to the kind of work that you can only do in a seminar and they they wanted him to lecture it was obvious thing where they they had to kind of and and one element of it that people then took up was the notion that they were so caught up in their own in the identity of their own victimization right like literally they weren't able to get over there's this it's a tricky thing they were caught up in their own victimization okay which then we might say well they had been hurt their feelings had been hurt but it's never said that way it's rather just said that they were insufficiently committed to asserting their own resilience in the face of that victimization all right so the so the imposition of the you know the imperative to be resilient was imposed upon 16 year olds right at the very moment in which they were beginning to discover that maybe you know in that way that only 16 year olds can discover happily if they get if they're lucky enough so somebody else sees it everything is up too now for a whole lot of 16 year olds a whole lot of black but not exclusively black 16 year olds who read books and think I mean I got one in my house you know they look they read afro-pessimism and they say somebody else knows that this is up too because they've been hurt okay the second example and I'm sorry if I go into neoko shibasawa who teaches at Brown in the history department and who just published an essay in 2022 I think it came out after concrete utopianism and I wish she had read concrete utopianism before she wrote this essay but it's an essay about it's called where's the reciprocity and again the villains here the well the primary feeling I believe to keep it short is afro-pessimism in in in this which now she makes a distinction between a certain doctrinal afro-pessimism and something that she calls afro-pessimism light which she presumes to be a derivative of doctrinal afflecksonism when in fact it's the precursor right of doctrinal afro-pessimism and it's just that General sense that black folks along with a lot of whole other folks in the world have said that this is up right just just just that and you know but but of course within the structures of the university and and and and the imposition of scarcity and and and and all the various ways in which various identitarian structures and and groupings are made to compete with one another for scraps you know conflicts emerge but of course those conflicts emerge within the the the normative liberal procedures of politics and then the fantasy is that there could be is that there has been at some point even though no one can ever really remember when this ever happened but at some point there was something called Coalition which would run against the grain of that right it's this sort of it's a kind of empiricist attitude towards Coalition recognize but but the Coalition that people are having making this empirical claim empiricist Claim about remember Coalition and everybody's like no but we don't because it never really happened like that right um it doesn't mean that there were all these moments of convergence but whether or not they ever Rose to the level of what it is that we would call a political Coalition or for that matter sunk to the level of what we would normatively no but I think political Coalition I think Israeli caness it close to you know in the last two months okay that's a political Coalition okay you know for you know and or whatever we we can you know in this instance there's no reason whatsoever to single out is we can find a meaning we don't matter where what what what liberal democracy you go to you can find these moments of convergence of Interest which of course okay so but and and when I bring up Professor Shiba salad I see you gotta understand she she was writing out of her feelings she felt that the solidarity that she had constantly been showing was not reciprocated and I believe that she's right okay and so there was a question of like she wrote Because her feelings were her and at the same time it was a in the same way that Vincent Lloyd wrote because his feelings were heard but the trouble with writing immediately from the position of your feelings haven't been hurt is that you sometimes don't get enough time to think about how it is that other people's feelings are also hurt okay and um and and I say all this to say in the most emphatic way right that the disciplinary that has been imposed upon her is utterly and absolutely wrong petitions are out there to be signed to overturn the disciplining that brown university project you know directed at her ostensibly for writing and Publishing this essay and it should be absolutely overturned and every in my opinion I everybody it doesn't you know it has nothing to do with the content of what she wrote it it it it it it it it has everything to do with their sense that she violated liberal procedure okay okay so that's the so those are the examples that I'm thinking about that I was also thinking about in in relation to Professor Wilder's text and and now I'm just going to read these four paragraphs and and I apologize for taking up so much time um and I hope this makes sense anyway what remains of the necessity for Destruction to radical ideological and ideational dismantling how do we avoid being caught up in that phantasmatically descriptive descriptively false practically effective because so brutally ideological assertion of the end of ideology that Daniel Bell made 60 years ago Daniel Bell McGeorge Bundy George Kennan Hannah Arendt and Samuel Huntington were part of the first and still dominant wave of anti-wokism and the fact that they all did it from a position that then and now most people would describe as liberal must be noted and analyzed Perils of a kind of emotive anecdotal rejection of corrosive vocalism when it is understood to have taken its most virulent form in late adolescent afro-pessimism is that it is usually accompanied by recrudescence to the forms and procedures of democratic demonstration and administration which in the way that begins to roll with bell and crests with Huntington and his fellows is all about demarcating and enforcing limit on demos with biopolitics and bio policies residual enactment enactments and claims upon sovereignty at stake is what will have occurred in the frontier between two problematic questions how will the people rule themselves how will the people be ruled pieties regarding the slow productivity of the seminar which the teacher must still husband in semi-divine invisibility or in Pierce his fantasies that confuse intermittences of friendship sympathy and regard with the Loveless convergence of interest that more properly defined and comprise political Coalition continually relinquish the capacity empirically to imagine and practically to sustain the sociality that is the substance I believe of what Professor Wilder names and desires under the rubric of concrete utopianism at stake is what he after Ellison calls the boomerang of History those uncanny untimely ways that every instance of supposed emancipation created conditions for a new form of racial domination that's a quote not only for African Americans but for the entire Global array of African and afro diasporic peoples you know which is the the primary concentration of the of the book um but but Allison comes in there to in its relation to what ondai at the great afro Guyanese feminist activists and theorists refers to by way of George lamming and chinwa Achebe as betrayal wherein liberatory aspiration and its material traces are still exploited in dispersed when quote those we nurture and sacrifice into Power help not us but our enemies the kind of power into which intellectuals are nurtured and sacrificed must now become a matter of concern not only at the level of what we say and write but also at the level of How We Gather and organize precisely to consider the social physics the ethics in ecology and erotics of thinking Gathering organizing and fighting I just said it right it's because I'm following behind as close as I can right but thank you question uh if indeed it's still happening again and that's a resonant phrase that that uh that that Professor Wilder's book repeats and Echoes if it's still happening again in the ongoing assault on black life then how do we account for the ways that persistence and repetition are held in the very structure of our own thinking in the name of the defense and flourishing of black life this question concerns the force of liberalism in the discourse of Liberation and it must effectively note the redoubling of that lingering recluse essence of the it is still happening again that had already tainted liberalism's resistance to authoritarianism or if you'd rather biopolitics democratization of sovereignty but how can we move through the retreat to and review of the classics which seems only right in lieu of the hurt feelings that the callous hyper-individuated nastiness of the recently awakened pessimist induces when what we need rather is a Relentless probing of those Classics with absolute and violent love in order continually to root out of them and of ourselves the residual sovereignties that animate the liberal anti-libertory procedures of civil Butchery this is what Professor Wilder asks in and in the brilliant and elegant and searching area edition of his asking he models that more he models that more than mere Retreat and review and return but what remains then of the role and force of what might be called negation I'm interested precise specifically in the status of a certain phrase the end of the world as well as with a certain critical stance towards the history and the promise of interracial Coalition politics and with a certain analytic regard within that with a certain analytic regarding the constitutive force of understand of a certain understanding of anti-blackness all of which are now usually associated with afro-pessimism I'm not here to offer a defensive afro pessimism or of its primary theorists proponents or adherents and they would hate it if that's what I was here for no more than I am here to defend negative dialectics or postcolonial cultural Theory I'm here in the wake of Professor Wilder's needful uh and elegant provocation which is not an attack on these Tendencies but an extension to them of readerly comradeship and care to pray uh and Care um but I am here to praise destruction it's not enough simply to assert the destruction and engagement can be compatible one would also have to show and continue to enact the history of their compatibility to be against constructive forms of political engagement is not to be against engagement the very idea of holistic Vision requires us to consider deeply the semantic field or plane or plane that entanglement in engagement imply what is it to imply what food works there or that but what if there is no politics or political science or Theory or Theology of entanglement rather what if there is a physical sociality and sociology of entanglement which will have required a shift of terminology from the translocal to the non-local just as it will have required this deep investigation of physical and ecological ethics of Engagement in entanglement according for critical destruction of the metaphysical foundations of politics is inseparable from a constant concern with the ethical practice of Engagement this would have been a matter concerning the techniques of mutual Aid of improvisational curacy as well as a matter of Direction and attitude what if the a formative blow of the general strike is in the first instance proximate caress what if betrayal is given in the instant of our comportment towards the enemy which the relay between war and politics demands what if we help our enemy precisely to the extent that we comport ourselves towards him in that instant of the desire for impossible recognition that is the essence of politics or political life understood as the necessarily interracial inter-subjectivity that concretizes and embodies the human in and for the regime of the concept students rather than being scolded for their failures in Liberal intellectual subjectivity which are all traceable to accepting some status of victim to which they have been relegated by their teachers and the stuff they read needs support in how to figure out what their relationship is to historical and present victimization interracial intersubjectivity is a system for the production and distribution of pain what on the other hand might be some good techniques for engagement and entanglement where does it hurt ask Ruby sales what if the beginning of the end of the world which will have been the end of the self and the body is given in this question which is the first question and in another how can we make it feel good neither of which will have ever been directed towards the enemy as Professor Wilder knows and shows this will have been practiced not a game socio-aesthetic practice and not the game of Honor thank you Fred those are some paragraphs to support paragraphs um I'll be very brief before turning it over to Gary so that and Gary can respond and then we can open it up to some more conversation as I was listening Fred to the to the first story you were discussing and uh I was thinking instead of frustration maybe embracing um embracing the continued challenges and the contradictions um and I was thinking of course of that last line or one of those last lines in uh Raisin in the Sun I had to figure it out you know it was as a guy right who and who says you know I I he wants to return to fight and he says you know my own countrymen will step out of the Shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat right um don't you see such a thing as my own death will be in advance they who might kill me even actually replenish all that I was right this notion that in fact maybe it's Embrace of these um generational challenges and uh and killings uh and and abolitions uh that might be productive and so that so Gary I I put my questions I wrote my questions up on the on the blog so you've had a chance to get a sense of them I think that was part of the third question I'll just go over them quickly that was part of the third question in part which is about embracing these contradictions rather than trying necessarily to resolve them and I think that somehow in the very notion of concrete Utopia and concrete utopianism there is a fundamental tension and it's the tension between what was the tension between concreteness and utopianism in a way it's the tension between wanting to find Utopia is that are in fact real really existing and that's the thrust of concrete utopianism in in part uh um but also to believe in certain things that should be um that aren't yet uh that aren't yet present and it's and in a Way Concrete utopianism it doesn't resolve that tension or all or necessarily some some of the tensions for instance with afro-pessimism or negative dialectic it doesn't seem it doesn't necessarily seek to resolve right it might just be that you know we need to be confronted with these uh in our in order to kind of shape our Praxis so that was a question that was a third question the second question I think very much follows along followed along with Nadia's question which was an invitation to think more about the question of internationalism and the relationship between domestic struggles and internationalism and the examples that you gave again when I think of prison abolition something that we many of us in this room are committed to and spending a lot of time working on um the American prison the American carceral society is unique in so many ways um that of course prison abolition always was actually a project that was at a they were there were Global manifestations of it earlier than there were in the United States actually uh when you think of Matheson's book from 1974 right these were early forms of uh prison abolition that that come here but it's not clear today that in the necessarily in the work of of prison abolition in this country right now it's so much a question of internationalism as dealing with the peculiar institutions right that are so unique and exceptional to this country so it's an invitation to think also through the role of internationalism in these struggles um it uh it might be true also of a debt cancellation another topic that you raise uh in terms of a concrete Utopia our debt our student debt structures in this country are somewhat unique uh associated with gigantic private universities that make people pay unconscionable sums of money for tuition right um uh so uh so it's not it's not necessary so anyway so that was the second question and then I'm going backwards rolling it backwards but the the first question had to do with um the fact that so many of these concrete Utopias are conquer utopians that we we discuss here in in this seminar um abolition uh the black lives matter movement Etc and and how exactly and and that we you know uh discuss in in the in in the undercommons right um abolishing a society that could have prisons how is it exactly that the in that the theoretical and intricate engagement and sparring with the different traditions and contemporary critical theory today um changes what we're doing uh in a way uh in the streets right does does it or and is that a is that so how how would it concretely change uh what we're actually doing as say abolitionists so those were the three questions and I fleshed them out more uh on the blog but so that's a lot of different uh a lot of different thoughts and reactions and maybe you could you know open the conversation for us and then and then we can continue and bring everybody else in let me begin my my my thanks thank you kayama for curating this having this idea bringing us together and thank you Bernard for hosting and creating this space and this frame for this conversation uh you get to a certain age and you realize that you don't have to be right where people don't have to agree with you but you want to provoke the conversation and this is just the kind of conversation I want to provoke although if this becomes a kind of uh uh uh an adjudication of afro-pessimism it would be a a not this I I mean the conversation about the book uh it would be unfortunate although I'm glad it's on the table and we will continue to you know I'm sure I'll continue to talk about it there was a kind of until your four paragraphs I think I had like okay I can do this I can do this and this and this and then the four paragraphs and then we got these three on so I'm not really sure between answering specific questions because I'm a kind of uh a completionist uh and I want to go all in and go one by one but I think my brain will explode and I will lose it and I will just run out the clock so let me organize myself a little bit and talk to the three of you and then you although there's also the two of you and then like love and there's a lot of effect here uh a few uh hurt feelings and love but a few things first of all right first of all my friend you know it's interesting when you talk about this stuff like I think I could repeat 80 times in the book and I probably do 50 times I'm not an optimist and this is not about optimism and yet that's how it's read well to a melancholic it seems that the point but but part of what I say when I talk about melancholy is that it that my critique of a kind of categorical a left Melancholy a fatalistic pessimism of pessimist metaphysics has nothing to do with personal disposition I mean I'm as pessimistic as you are I am sure yes I am sure about the prospect of things being otherwise anytime soon or any time in my lifetime or any time before the planet and you know is done uh uh you know and so I think that's interesting the kind of and this is not a a criticism of your reading specifically but I think one thing that came up in these comments is this this kind of assumption and Fred a lot of your comments were about like you know the other thing this is not is not it's not an anti-woke book I mean it's not against wokism where certainly although hearing you I can see how it could play into that discourse in all kinds of ways but I try over and over through the book to you know I curate the thinkers that I'm so excited by not because they have facile Notions of reconciliation not because they are optimists and certainly not because they are liberals but because they begin with as forceful a notion of harm or Singularity or specificity or locality or rootedness as almost as as those who we regard as some of the fiercest uh and strongest and most persuasive uh Advocates of that position and I'm kind of my method is to be with them eighty percent of the way 70 90 it depends uh and reach a certain point where I say it's this turn that I just want to raise as a question it's this term that I find politically unsatisfying it which is not the same as saying let's not talk about harm let's not talk about destruction let's pre let's set aside those difficulties in the translation chapter and in the when I talk about translation in solidarity and internationalism I say over and over and over I mean I defy you to to find the place where I say let's set aside these difficulties I say the question is what do we conclude about the difficult days are they the starting point or the proof that the project is impossible it may be impossible but I do wonder about the price we pay by assuming that those difficult possibilities of forging some kind of uh some kind of connection across very clear and very painful and very messy differences is not worth taking up Fred I think talked about you know gave a very forceful and persuasive uh and moving account of of of that harm and that repeated harm uh and why it may not be worth taking up but I guess for me the question uh and I'm looking uh Fred now is I mean I feel like I also begin I don't have the lived experience of being black in America uh but I also politically uh be analytically and politically begin with the certainty that things are up and not working and not workable within the liberal frame so the other thing that I'm struck by both all three of these comments is that somehow and I guess and maybe on mischaracterizing what I'm saying all throughout the book but I am struck by the quick way in which a conversation about translation or solidarity practices or internationalism which I explicitly linked to a Marxist tradition and certain black thinkers not all black you know certain black thinkers is somehow read as a kind of residual liberalism and and my whole point in this book one of the points there are many whole points and I'll stop up and let let you respond but one of my points in this book is to say that that cannot be those cannot be the choices that either it's things are deeply up or we have some facile optimistic liberal idea that we can all get along or something so at the ends of the world I mean that's a revolutionary proposition and I also you know maybe we can talk about the difference between the end of the world and the End of This World um and we can so sorry I see that you have something bubbling so the only reason I'm sure I'm coming going out of my turn but but so some of what I guess I'm thinking right now has to do with this very complicated feeling of being really really happy to be here and at the same time thinking that there's something really really wrong with with the protocols of this particular kind of gathering because I was agreeing with you man and the reason why I brought up those other two examples was because I was saying what you do is not like yeah yeah no I heard that I heard that and and and so if there's any you know and and and and for instance for me and I don't know if you all know that it's great Theologian and and um you know uh uh activists really sales but when she asks where does it hurt it's precisely this profound gesture of solidarity and translation that's really what that question is you there's something that you feel and I need I can see that you feel it but you need to tell me a little bit something about there needs to be just a little bit of language so that I can so that I can be with you in this feeling that's exactly what she's doing so so I feel like that's a lot of what your book is that's advocating precisely so what I'm saying is is that the the protocols even the protocols of sort of academic uh disputation or our academic uh commentary it's as if they they this thing comes so close constantly to to to constantly Reviving some residual hurt that we all have of having been misunderstood right and I'm saying no I I don't think I'm with you I'm not against you no no I know that but but what I'm saying is and then with the specifically with this question of because this is andya's question and that's question is it's not even it's like how does this keep happening how does this betrayal keep happening given everybody's good intentions how 10 wouldn't wouldn't it be necessary for us not to accuse each other of liberalism but rather constantly to be vigilant about the liberalism that probably just can't help but be embedded in our Liberation is discourse those two words are connected for a reason and and this is it's not accusing anybody it is just saying this is something we would have to constantly be vigilant about you know and and so returning to Lisa would mean reading Gleason reading four residual liberalism in gleesaw by way of glissau's critique of liberalism yeah there's there's a lot of liberalism at least long wouldn't we in the spirit of confibiality of I love the patient work of the seminar that was one of your lines right beautiful uh so forget these protocols and certainly I am uh I you know feeling misunderstood gets me out of bed in the morning so that is uh that is not uh that is and that is uh what to make of that no but uh but I think that maybe part of part of that interrogation you're talking about is about uh also slowing down and saying let's let's uh let's try to and I'm not accusing uh anyone but let's try to distinguish between the long history of the entanglement of uh Liberty and liberalism the Liberty is not a term I use a lot in here emancipation is is a term uh For Better or For Worse uh but that you know the question is what we do about that long history what we do about the boomerang of history and I think part of the task is uh again not to stop at the recognition of that deep deep you know fatal I mean maybe it's maybe it's unsurmountable uh link between liberalism and Liberty and I think part of the the the the Animus or the the the the friendly Act agonism and I'm glad you prayed that you saw that most of the thinkers I was disagreeing with I was taking very seriously and and and not you know attacking um but I think uh part of of the question is uh what we do again about the boomerang of history about that link whether we stop with that recognition and I guess I've had a sense that in the academic world within critical theory uh so often and this is the tools that we have forgotten to pick up and maybe you guys uh don't agree with me but that we have learned to stop at the recognition of that bad entanglement without saying well then what and they're they're then there's there's the kind of uh uh transgression for transgression's sake there's Retreat there's intoxication there's uh you know there's a kind of uh Refuge they're all reasonable responses to what under these conditions is an impossible situation for sure but I think you know the end of the world or the end of this world is another reasonable uh and realistic Way Forward since this is not going to work as you said is up and it's not gonna work but it is uh you know part of my hope in here is that we can remember traditions of thinking about the end of the world that uh that isn't just stuck in the impasse of it's never gonna work it doesn't mean I know how it will work or that it will work uh but that uh there are Traditions revolutionary traditions of uh not just wishing for otherwise but making the world otherwise so in that sense I'm not against the destruction that you're talking about that I think that I think uh you invoke at all sorry I'm losing my train of thought well look over to this side of the table okay um well one thing you can do also in terms of disrupting the usual uh academic Forum which we try to do here is to actually bring folks in uh so that there's also some engagement and conversation so so the minute you know you want in just uh just tell me okay um and um but um yeah I mean uh one of the things I take it about this question of the end of the world in your in your book itself is that um the planetary solution that you're proposing embracing right uh from an internationalist perspective doesn't allow for uh falling into too much of a morose take on the end of the world I take it I mean in other words like it's it's fine for us old people to talk about the end of the world but I mean there's like you know all of our students Young and the younger Generations they can't be as flip about it I take it but I take it that's part of your argument right um okay let me win back a little bit so I'm not misunderstood about you know because I want to come up with the localization it's it's a personality defect it's hardwired but come back to the kind of local and locality uh I certainly you know I have that moment where I talk about uh how popular sovereignty Collective self-management is both necessary for human freedom and a necessary obstacle to human freedom and entangled world so I certainly am not in one a one-sided way ever in here saying planetary internationalism as opposed to I'm opposed to provincialisms but not localism throughout the entire book I say oh I mean so like I repeat these sentences over and over about finding ways to relate Collective self-management or popular sovereignty or autonomy what however whatever you want to call it to interdependence to entanglement to translocal uh practices to transversal alignments I don't have a one-size-fits-all claim that every single political act or engagement has to follow some kind of planetary formula but I do believe that the harms that we are up against have to be understood in the frame of forms of domination that exceed any self-managing community so unless and that the entanglements I'm talking about it's not that's not either wishful thinking or something I'm condemning it's just to me that that is empirical that is a a fact of the world uh we live in so any project for social justice or or human Freedom Pastor reconcile reckon with the kind of scale of those harms that doesn't mean that every single act has to uh be Internationals it certainly doesn't mean that there's a single uh political subject and it certainly doesn't mean that there's some uh you know common term that is directing all of this although I am taken by Samir a means non-liberal called not non-liberal call for uh non-liberal call for um a new internationalism of peoples and he also continually says we need a post-band drone project of the south for the South and and these harms affect all the people on the globe and the north itself is divided in the essentially the ways we're talking about I mean these are racial formations for example not only they're divided in many ways so that anything you know any kind of new internationalism uh must include the nor should include the north as well if it's going uh to be effective so I think I mean I think I was I think through here hearing your responses through here I think there are times when the examples I give and this is not a book about examples I mean that's just the kind of hastily written conclusion that was uh it's not a book about examples but the example when I talk about examples so that people can understand part of what I am talking about uh I'm torn because most of the time I'm trying to give examples of what I mean by concrete utopianism which is not concrete utopia's it's utopianism indexes an orientation and a practice and a kind of way of seeing and thinking and knowing and doing uh that uh uh that links the actually existing uh mess we have to the prospect to the potential for different kinds of Arrangements but I also in using those examples I say and look at this even these local things are very International there's a kind of there's a Glo you know there's a global dimension in so many of these uh in so many of these projects so I think you know internationalism sometimes I go from solidarity to internationalism um um as interested in so on the one hand and I'll stop here for a second in in one second on the on the one hand uh I do believe that this Keening to one world I love that that line I do believe that in this uh uh uh one world that is uh harming so many in so many ways that uh there cannot be a man there can't be socialism in one country there can't be emancipatory projects that are restricted to I mean they can do you can do a lot in small places you can do a lot in Refuge uh you know in places of Refuge in intentional communities in uh in uh but so on the one hand I do believe that the harms were up against require a different scale of thinking about these things on the other hand when I talk about internationalism solidarity translation partly you know I am so taken by that leninist formula of transforming the Imperial War into a Civil War which is not to say that we're all one or if we just kind of like set aside these differences and difficulties we will realize sameness and uh or a common purpose and I'm certainly not talking about abstracting from differences to into to come up with this underlying same thing but I am saying that in any different situation at all the scales we cannot know in advance what the primary axes of division and possible alignment are and that they have to be discovered and they have to be constructed and that's not easy I don't know how to do that I don't know how that will happen but I think in that you know you you were practicing that kind of translation in the precisely the ways you were talking about Gaza and Ferguson so I'm not talking about a practice of translation that again uh erases those differences in order to kind of have this transparent sameness or to translate one experience into another register but uh so anyway it's that so internationalism I think maybe you know my fault certainly for using it in a in a in a in a kind of uh in multiple ways let's say but I think those those Tran the transversal is as important as the translocal and the translocal can operate on many scales the translocal could be you know uh uh within a region and it could be the planetary um but yeah let's just say go go ahead I was just gonna say look I'm not I I was not saying that we're into that one I I didn't mean to imply that I think that well obviously I said you're not trying to create a sameness and I know that in the structure of the book you're talking about translation in in I said like you know I said it's worth as a scandal is partly I think what you're doing it's not easy the way gears would have thought yeah but I think the question about and I don't think anybody is reading this is saying you're creating a model here but I think why the conclusion is interesting and important in relation is in some ways to get to this and to begin to sort of imagine this is what I got was thinking through the book and then we got to it at a conclusion to begin to imagine what a con what concrete utopianisms might open up or imagine along this axis of singularities and sort of transversals and internationalisms right when you get to the end there's something about thinking more concretely about the located-ness not the local but what it means to be located and what we mean when we say singularities and how we might think with and through them that I think is as important and that because of the nature of the theorizing and the people you're drawing on it's that that question of the difference or the diverse or the singularity remains at a level that I think he's not quite up to the overall project so that's what I think the important of the importance of the end is and and again I agree it's not I didn't mean to accuse you of being like James what James Taylor no that can't be his first name Taylor but Charles Taylor because obviously they are literally setting aside all the difficult moments but I thought it was interesting and this was more of an aside that the idea of incommensurability and that possibility is just something and I get it as anthropologists oh my God incompenserability and cultures can drive one nuts but I often think about political and commensurabilities like what it means to be so attached to an ideology that it really is in commensurate right for sure and I just there's a kind of allergicness to the even the possibility which is different than difficulty of incommensurableness or in commensurabilities in this political imagine you're trying to produce and on the one hand I get it but that's also the world we live in so how one could sort of begin to try to think that I I don't have an answer either I'm just saying I I kind of responded a little bit to the kind of allergicness what about Gleason who has that great line where he says I do not need to understand my neighbor to be in solidarity with my neighbor yeah but sometimes I refuse to be in solidarity for sure that's a different kind of severe means political judgment to understand is different that's more the anthropological translation there's the you know it's like I don't know I was listening to a lecture and then I'll be quiet too at What's um I'm never really bad with names um is that how you pronounce her name um and she talks about the problem of just a vowel and we're all pitching the end of the world and we all gotta get off the train but nobody's willing to jump off the train right and there's a sense of we can create it and it's because we're all so individuated so it's like if we could create we need a collective in order to jump off the train together but I but what if I have a collective and you have a collective and my jumping off the train I'm not jumping off the train because it's okay for me it's just not okay for you that's the the the question of incommensurability to me that's something of how do we grapple with that which is a kind of singularity that they're politics they're enemies there there's a war we're in a war right okay we're gonna work yeah sorry I guess following following no I mean I'm I hear you I wonder if we can if it's even fruitful to try to think about relation without making commensurable without commensurability yes but I think there is trying to open up foreign I'm sure there are other people have other questions I want to shift what I've taken to be um a focus at least in these last few exchanges on a question of of solidarity and to return to the question of temporality um and I want to do so by way of the text that I found helpful in trying to uh Wade through these very rich uh interventions and that Gary is your um little piece that you wrote a few years ago in one of my favorite little journals political Concepts on anticipation um because I think what you have to say there about the politics of anticipation I'm just going to read a little bit um of what she's saying that I say we can think of anticipation as a kind of political disposition whereby radical actors cultivate a state of readiness or any political possibility and a will to overcome existing Arrangements by acting from the standpoint of a not yet redeemed World from this perspective anticipation three figures by enacting the supposedly impossible it indexes a political temporal orientation rather than an affective State on ideological discourse and one of the things I find interesting about you're saying what you write when you say on this essay is that you've just offered us the example of the black radical tradition so you talk about the boys you talk about Gilroy you talk about Moten on uh the the traditions of black improvisational music um and so the question that I want to ask is uh from within a black uh within the perspective of black radical tradition because I was thinking about this enacting a future which is not yet arrived um took me back to a piece I wrote several years ago uh in which I discussed among other things an event which took place uh 63 years ago this month the Greensboro sit-ins where a group of black college students from a local College went to the local Woolworths uh sat in at the lunch counter filled up all the seats uh they were not allowed uh to eat at the Woolworths that say they did not have the right uh to eat at the Woolworths but they sat down anyway uh and enacted a Futurity that had not arrived right they they did not have the right to do it but they performed rights that might exist in uh a future which had not yet arrived um and they did so you know I I imagine fairly pessimistically because they knew that however uh non-violently and specifically they acted they were going to catch hell right they were going to get beaten or perhaps uh worse so in thinking about this question of of uh concrete utopianism as a disposition toward the future and in drawing on the black radical um tradition I'm just wondering um what utility the concept of anticipation uh might have for these conversations that we're having right now uh that might um move the conversation along right because uh I I'm I'm sensing uh a kind of impasse around uh certain Concepts like liberalism right um and they were fighting for rights which Constitutional Rights that's a liberal Democratic concept but they were doing so in uh the most uh arguably radical Way by enacting a concrete utopianism in the teeth of uh the kinds of violence whose recurrence in the years since is precisely what is given rice afro-customism right um and yet you know we are their heirs what is it about that moment and this moment uh that makes the politics of anticipation that they practiced in 1960 so thoroughly unattractive yeah um and uh can you use this concept of anticipation uh to sympathetically try to understand the life world and the perspective of a 16 year old right uh who knows that things are up even though they can if they have the money uh go to the Woolworths uh and eat right so there's there's that kind of Futurity um and yet the sense uh all these many years later which I do not think is uh uh not without uh Foundation of no future right uh and I think uh you know I feel some obligation although I'm you know I'm I'm a member of the I Have a Dream generation right quite literally I'm the same age as Martin Luther King Jr the third right um but you know I want to honor and uh try to understand what it is that makes the afro-pessimistic uh uh uh philosophy philosophical uh uh uh perspective uh so resonant among uh the generation uh uh the the Trayvon generation right uh and and I'm I'm I'm hoping that you know this idea of anticipation uh and uh its attractions or disenchantment about it might be one way uh for me at least to understand uh this conversation uh and what the stakes are thanks Kendall uh do you want to how do you how do you need to jump in yeah I think it would be good and then we can bring somebody else in in uh Fonda in the back other people go ahead go ahead I'll get Gary I thought because it was very constructive there's so much uh I can't I can't do justice to it but you bring up since you start with temporality you bring up two two reasons why thinking about kind of punctual time doesn't do it politically uh the reason why that gesture doesn't resonate now is what Ellison calls the boomerang of history or you know Gleason also calls this painful sense of time uh this is the kind of structural systemic uh uh systemic um anti-blackness that is woven into the very fabric of this society and this uh political formation that will not be overcome through you know reformers reforms uh it will not be overcome through liberalism it will repeat again and again and again so on the other hand you're also bringing up this kind of pre-figurative practice of anticipation that I talk about and I think you're absolutely right that in that moment of the sit-in uh uh those were practices of anticipation there was no way I don't know that we can look back and say you know that was because you know openings and ruptures come at different moments so I'm not sure that we can uh I wouldn't want to denigrate those practices at that moment but I think the key thing about anticipation this notion of anticipation is that it pushes against the idea that first we have a plan and a program and a uh and a formula and then we enact it it's through these practices that we somehow come to understand what is possible although I also you know passionately write about call for these practices of political imagination where somehow uh thinking thinking what's not you can't possibly think because the terms of that thought can only come from a future that doesn't yet exist but somehow there's a Poetics involved in there and so many of the people I do write about with excitement in the book uh practice that vocal marxists and the the black critics uh and it's that Circle between thinking the unthinkable and uh only being able to do so through these anticipatory practices that may or may not shift things so again there's an art there's is an argument against a formula a single formula I mean I think you know in part to to come back to where we started uh afro-pessimism is where or what we Loosely as Fred was saying you know it's not you know there's a lot of the kind of various sentiments and uh propositions and conclusions that we bundle together in there is attractive because uh because of precisely what we've been talking about the boomerang of History the fact that so much does not change the fact that there is this repeating harm the fact that that anti-blackness is woven into the very fabric of this social order I think and you guys we can have a big debate about this I think in part it's so attractive because we don't have a lot of robust revolutionary traditions we don't have a robust left and the left we've had is a long history of anti-blackness also and being you know the labor unions and the political parties and the theory uh has a long history of being eurocentric and racist and yet there is a long tradition of black Marxist for example who who who you know might offer a different kind of uh way of telling that story between that moment and this moment that isn't uh that isn't doesn't require a metaphysical claim that the present we have will repeat for ever and ever with certainty I don't you know I think it's I I I don't think we have a lot of alternative uh idioms and and traditions and kind of collective practices for uh I mean I don't know other people have other ideas although [Music] oh oh sorry I'm so sorry and one of the things that I do that's anticipatory is I call myself president Crossing so I do that with other leaders that I work with we call each other president you know and it may seem obnoxious online when people see us doing that because we are unknowns but we have to do that because we're pan-africanists you feel me and I believe in a United Africa and that's what I work for you know so I feel like that's a tradition that I'm creating and I hope that other people do the same thing you know if there's other black people in the room who are not doing it do it call each other president you know and you are a black president and you are not Obama you know what I mean do it there's nothing wrong with that we have to do this stuff you feel me and that's how I find peace because it's a nightmare this is a night nightmare we're living in a nightmare yeah thank you yeah yeah you're welcome thank you this is this is so beautiful yeah thanks thank you so much for that intervention we have another uh and feel free to introduce yourself as well hi my name hello hi hi uh my name is Elliot uh I was an undergrad at the forest and I am writing a thesis on solidarity so this is a very interesting uh and very engaging topic for me uh so my question I kind of have a question and then I have uh kind of uh just some thoughts uh when I first started researching solidarity I was talking to a philosophy Professor on how to Define solidarity and he said there's a strike happening just just write down the the path uh for for uh workers rights were working for the the dining hall uh and it was uh he said if you want to know about solidarity go uh talk to them and go stand in solidarity and go see what it's actually like uh and I think there's a big difference between the theorization of solidarity or the the concept of solidarity and the way it's been practiced uh not only in the US but also so in Europe is my more uh point of reference The Point of Departure from this so I guess my question is uh what concept of solidarity should I be epistemically sensitive to uh as you frame it in your book because I haven't with all due respect I get an apologies I haven't read your book uh and uh placing concrete uh is this a project of affective solidarity or organizational solidarity uh and for the sake of metric thinking of a history of solidarity is this solidarity pay in solidon with liberal salvader uh uh embedded in what framework of solidarity or what what solidarity is actually being uh uh emancipated in your project uh is Mike I guess is my question or what what is the concept because that's where I'm I'm at right now okay great thanks thanks well that might be a good grounding Point uh a good concrete grounded uh place to uh to address um do we have more do we have any other yeah okay Jay why don't we take two more and then we'll um J and then in front and then Gary go ahead um okay okay yeah uh thanks so much this has been so rich um I think I'm still sitting with your question Kendall about the anticipatory and the Greensboro sit-ins um and I guess I had a question uh I think because Fred I think you talked or mentioned um interest convergence and I've been reading a lot of Derek Bell like silent covenants and I know that afropessimism was being discussed but I'm actually curious about critical race Theory with its roots and a kind of legalism but maybe it exceeds that and I'm just curious if folks have thoughts especially since it's in so much um circulation right now thanks thanks Jay let's also pass the mic up front here I just wanted to thank everybody what's your name oh yeah my name is Jordan Daly uh I just want to thank everyone in the panel for being here and for organizing this this is a truly wonderful event um I guess my question in some ways is selfish uh do we have a model for what it means to be human you know like do we know what it means to get together you know like to be hurt to cry to be with each other to be erotic with each other to feel you know the room do we do is that too abstracted for us do we need a reminder of what that is and I think yeah you know if we don't have a model I guess I would like to know what that is because I feel like I have difficulties Being Human every day surviving here and so to have a pragmatics of Being Human or becoming human or becoming humans right is a kind of question that I'm concerned with what does it mean to be human but that's all I got thank you thank you are Alessandra did you want to jump in uh good evening and thank you for this night I'm Alessandra and I wanted to to do a commentary and the question uh documentaries um a paragraph that I always quoted I think is for August he says we may act as if we were free we may act uh as if we don't have any border then uh I am a stage director then this as if it's quite interesting to me um the commentary was about uh maybe in a vast inexpensive uh mental uh view which in your book is suggested to accompany the analysis of the real then maybe the Utopia the concrete Utopia you say when you say that maybe sometimes they are already with us as an accident as a it depends something that maybe is it it's not visible but it's already there and I always think about itaro Calvino in the the last words of a work which is quite two topic I think is etched invisible invisible cities when he ends he says uh it says uh we may act uh trying to in the hell well a lot I've heard today were factor in the fact word in the hell to catch the what is not hell and to keep and maintain and and keep warning working then about the as if I have a question because uh what is concerned with the mimetic cards and you speak a lot of that in the book uh we didn't speak about that in this evening but I think about what the mymetic card the mimetic cards like Cinema photography or theater as well of course and of course we are aware that for uh that that the results have been used as manipulated and and oppressive and uh systematically uh enslavering to by a regime of control like the ecatholic church or the white supremacy or the Third Reich and then my question is so simple is what uh was Benjamin was asking on photography it was suggesting well we don't just have to forget the artwork and multiply the ways production but we have to uh to verify that the that these tools are not they're not again in the circular media they are not possessed by the big system of the media and the control then my question uh Gary may be that this question I would I should answer but I ask you because you do this question and you can ask in your book no because I'm really a theater director and I always think about that because there is a contradiction how we can make the visible the invisible become visible as an artist spectacular how it can be visible without being captured how it can be visible in a world that would where all is uh uh or or all is uh assumed immediately by the by the regime of of of control thank you okay so we have we have actually maybe we just don't why don't we have one more um I know it's too much but on the other hand uh I want to hear from people and uh and bring it in and then maybe Gary you could address some of these maybe we could go down the table also and have reactions to some of these different thoughts including kind of anticipation Etc so dorotea and then uh Gary and then we'll come across the table go ahead hi um Dorothea uh I I think I'm kind of at a loss of how I I think I'm not entirely happy with how I'm going to face this question but I'm at a loss for how to phase it better I'm interested in I guess how uh concrete utopianism uh I guess speaks to um problems of solidarity across different vectors of Oppression I think I'm um I was um particularly thinking of the the passage that I I believe Abu al-ha Hajj brought up um about uh Islamic Marxist and Islamic feminist uh challenges to uh conservative forms of Islam um and kind of trying to think about that in in relation to um a chapter from from uh another wonderful uh book by a different author um Catherine McKinnon's uh feminism unmodified when she speaks about in in uh her chapter whose culture when she speaks about feminist uh challenges to a um air uh Tribal Law um U.S Native American tribal law that um she regarded as in some ways uh patriarchal um she talks about kind of the difficulties of um navigating between uh on I guess uh between on the on the one hands this difficult history in the United States of um subtler colonialism and of course the difficult history of of sexism that uh she's speaking to more directly um I guess I'm I'm wondering is there I I think you speak quite a lot about the relationship between kind of um theorists who place themselves in this position of particularity and critique uh kind of universalism or cosmopolitanism I I'm kind of wondering does does concrete utopianism have a way of uh I guess dealing with relations across different particularities that's all thank you uh so we'll come back to you Gary maybe and you can address some of these um where to begin I'm still thinking about Kendall's question also uh and and the practices of anticipation and uh I think we I could maybe link it a little bit to Alessandra and some of the and this question of being human maybe try to and bring it back to kayama can I do that it's not here because I don't know what this is either uh but I mean you know those that the the that that anticipatory practice of the sit-in is also you know uh it it it it it's a brave act they put their lives on the line uh it was anticipating a future and also back to the kind of precedent there's a kind of there's an Aesthetics to all of this and I don't mean uh what I mean is that you know part of breaking the frame part of this impossible attempt to think what we do not yet have the terms to think is what art is and what art can do and I don't think you know we should just think of art as as as the actual poem on the page though it's also that but uh I think you know that moment of the sit-in is an aesthetic moment that brings together uh a kind of practice a hope a risk a kind of builds builds forges Connections in that in that moment you know part of these anticipatory practices and part of these solidarity practices are not just a matter of pre-constituted entities that are self-contained and whole that come together in that Coalition that Fred was talking about uh which is you know one way of thinking about it and their history is of that and but that's that's that's a little different from uh the ways in which these kinds of solidarity practices and anticipatory practices uh and these moments of conviviality and I think Aesthetics and erotics go together here uh the love and the conviviality go together uh as uh practices that produce certain kind of spaces that allow for different kinds of subjectivities to emerge and different kinds of we needs to emerge again not that you know one knows ahead of time what will happen not that you follow some kind of formula but I guess I am interested in on different scales uh the way in which uh these kinds of risky practices and attempts at translation the Ferguson uh the Ferguson uh Palestine moment may be fraught with misunderstanding and attempts to each to subordinate the other and yet something might emerge there some kind of which is different from abstracting from differences in order to say oh look we are the same now through the practice something else emerges and I think that is uh there's a temporality there and there's a Poetics in that I think there's a you know a reason why cesare talks about poetic knowledge and Gleason talks about a Poetics of of relation and I think this you know that is linked I want to try in a very fumbling way since I probably only have two minutes now out uh which is fair I want to hear from everyone uh this this this business about being human and certainly there is no model for Being Human but I think we can clearly say that certain kinds of systemic Arrangements make it possible asymmetrically impossible impossible for anyone to be properly human whatever that means and I say that advisably I know the moment you say properly human it is you know it it creates a lot of problems and I think there's an asymmetry to uh uh to that impossibility but I think uh capitalism and racism and instrumental rationality and you know technocracy you know all of these things make it we do know we have learned something about modernity that we cannot that human capacities cannot be allowed to develop in all of their potential ways under these arrangements and yet the the concern the concern which I you know again Fred will not only I'm arguing with my own former self always in in in these moments that concern that I certainly what you know came up with and and took very seriously of the harms that emerge the moment you invoke that category of the human the the normative imposition of one notion of Being Human that can be uh you know deeply problematic deeply harmful can reproduce all we we know that I'm not laying that aside but I am saying again that that's the story but I think we have at least in the modes of thought that I am uh calling into question or feeling uh kind of airing my frustration with maybe oh God I was gonna say I am not writing out of hurt feelings but I sound like a guy writing out a good feeling so I will take that seriously and and think about that but I think we have you know we've had for 50 years uh it has become deeply problematic to even raise the question you raised again I don't I know you're not accusing me of liberalism but it does seem like you know that that that that that post-structuralist and postcolonial Theory does make that link between any implication of the human and a kind of liberalism which is why I talk about uh both you know uh Gleason's Notions of Being Human for example uh says there's Notions of Being Human for example but also Marx's notion of human emancipation and I think we've lost a lot where we pay a certain kind of price I mean there's dangers in using that language and yet uh you know can we think about that in and I don't know where how you guys got the idea I'm not into negative dialectics that dorno is one of my guys and I am all negative dialectics all the way so so I wonder uh if we can think you know both think about the necessity to not just ask your a question but to kind of break the frame of this kind of table and all these things to kind of uh go into also the space again not in a Not In a Sentimental not a liberal sentimental mode but in a kind of radical associative solidaristic risky uh uh process of kind of self-alienation in a certain way where we it's both you know uh exhilarating and terrifying and there will be harms for sure uh but that uh and I think you know Aesthetics and erotics and uh love in all the iterations of Love Are crucial at this moment and I I I think the kind of the two Traditions I talk about there are a lot of them and they're not singular Traditions uh give us Concepts and resources and Frameworks for starting out fiercely critical about existing Arrangements that will never allow for human happiness and yet go to both of these places including your place and including your place and I think we need to remember those that that's what I would say um sorry okay why don't we go down the table I haven't forgotten your question um Brett do you want to jump in thank you pause enough trouble already no no um well I guess I'm always kind of stuck by struck and also struck by and stuck in this particular conundrum which is I I can listen to my friends talk and I say I think I know exactly what you mean and I agree with it but I wouldn't say it that way and I think it's probably really important to not say it that way um and and you know um I don't know how to you know I don't know how to deal with that problem um particularly because then in the very Divergence you know in that very moment of differentiation for instance everything I believe in everything that I everything that I think and that I hoped at least saw means by relation is what I would subscribe to except I would use the word differentiation um okay so that every so that that moment of differentiation it that's that's the way relation works okay so but but but but the metaphysical Assumption of individuation the metaphysical Assumption of world of self of body the the the the assumption that thinking is in the first and last instance conceptual these these have implications and and one of the implications is it makes it really hard for us to to get together and and I also believe that that the invocation of the human really you know again I I know what you mean and I'm with you I agree with you but I I can't say it that way and and I think it matters that it you know but but but um you know so I don't so so that's what I was saying really this of course this very problematic to me is the condition of possibility and the condition of necessity of translation yes as an act of solidarity right that's all that that that's what that is um so how do we get together in difference right how does how do we gather so that we can prop or improperly disperse right this is you know how do we have a party of orgy whatever you know how we play some music it's the same question um I'm guess I guess I'm just convinced but it might just be being picky it might just be a function being a certain kind of nerd that you know it just feels really important to use to investigate I don't think I have the right words for any of it but to continually ask these questions so that we can dislodge any word from ever seeming as if it were the right word so uh Dorothy how's that your name so maybe I'll say I think the thing is may I think your question actually hits sort of nail on the head which is that it's my obsession possibility of incompenserability any kind of sort of internationalism or solid right one can say it is both translocal and internationalists or movements of solidarity and yet we recognize singularities but any political project is also a normative project right so there are some singularities that a feminist is not going to abide by right so I think that is the kind of moment of non-passage and to talk you know so almost seamlessly about the kind of singularities that one of course will recognize within these kind of more concrete you know solidarity or Universal not Universal I guess utopianism's projects right that there are it's a normative political project and there are certain singularities that are definitionally excluded and I think that we slip too easily sometimes or maybe like we have to sort of gesture towards of course diversity of course difference but there are differences that well we're not so ready to get on board with and that's the piece that I think what has to be owned in a different way so I don't have an answer but I think the question is like I mean at the kernel of that contradictions or the impossible is there right and those aren't the kinds of solidaries you can say well I can either agree that we don't see the world the same or agree to disagree there's certain things you're not going to agree to disagree on right oh my God I will call that politics what you just mentioned no of course but it's politics that's working through what specifically do we mean by singularities how do we engage them what are their concrete forms what are the moments where translation is not just a scandal or difficult right and that I don't know whatever right yes I agree I agree yeah we've come to an accord I I would just add that um this is in reference to Madame president's intervention and um and the question of the human something that strikes me just in listening to this debate is thinking about why we are more comfortable in some ways and these contexts arguing with one another and and um contesting perhaps and we are in questions that that are maybe more fundamental about how to be and and that are more worrisome because the answers are a bit more difficult and maybe don't have homes of volumes that are telling us that story and so maybe we don't think those questions belong in these spaces but I'm curious about a world in which those are the first questions that organize Gatherings like this for me right now I'm thinking about the erotic as one of those really thorny like what is she talking about here like why um questions that might open doors in different directions than the arguments that are so well trod um and that even though we're feeling perhaps antagonistic or contested we're actually comfortable in those antagonisms and that's worrisome um especially when we're all claiming to be on the same side so it's weird how much we find um and so yeah but when you kind of burst into and I've also been watching how you write in your notebook it looks like poetry what you're doing he doesn't feel a whole page he has like these lines of notes just it's a different way of being in the space and it's hard harder um than some of the ways we're used to talking to one another as we respect one another as intellectuals and Scholars and students so yeah yeah so I would say that at this point I'm a little bit stuck on the notion of being misunderstood which somehow plays such an enormous role in this conversation and wondering how the notion of feeling misunderstood uh relate how how how it's possible how to deal with that in a context of this agonistic kind of um these agonistic engagements uh that are pure that are really agonistic um like in other words how how can you actually have agonism when you have being misunderstood or is there any way in which that can be productive yeah I take it that you know when I come out of reading kind of the undercommons I was gonna look for a passage and a few passages of it but when I come out of reading that I really feel as if it wasn't it was extraordinarily brilliant critique in part of the just um Assad of kind of academic agonism in a way uh I thought I thought that more than anything I felt it was aimed that it that it hit hard at us critical theorists and our discourse in a way um and so right now I'm I'm I'm I'm a little bit back to my original question I think ultimately and and that's where I probably end up with my if I were to say feeling both misunderstood and not addressed is how does the how does this kind of agonistic misunderstood Quagmire that we seem to be in like change in any way what I do in terms of my abolitionist practice so I think that's that's kind of like that's where I that's where I end up feeling unsure and totally misunderstood Gary totally misunderstood we can happy to come back around to that question but I'd like to say something to uh uh were kind of speak with Fred about that your last thing you said how do we get together and difference how do we gather so we can improperly disperse this this having a sense of the thing and being endlessly frustrated with all the attempts to name it um I just to I can't now I'm all self-conscious I can't say just to be clear but uh I'll say that anyway to be clear I certainly don't think I've cracked that nut in any way or have some name uh and maybe this didn't come through but what I hope comes through because I I love that you just said that Fred because in a sense my I am moved by the feeling and maybe this is like kayama said there's the kind of painfully obvious painfully been all parts of so much of this but I am moved by a strange urgency that that is that's the question I mean it's a question that works on the kind of the most intimate interperson you know from from the orgy to the party to the polis uh that kind of you know you framed it and phrased it uh so well and that's you know in a in a sense this thing so I I don't feel frustrated I wouldn't use the language of Quagmire I think this is this is this is this is the these are the kind of spaces this is the kind of work this is kind of the conversation that is uh you know will it I mean I don't draw some instrumental line between we do this and you know we get eight billion dollars or 11 billion dollars from the NYPD but I do think that this kind of how do we get together a difference how do we gather so we can improperly disperse now that that may seem like it rolled right off your tongue because you struggle with that and you think about that and you reflect on that in all kinds of powerful ways but I don't see that as the center of our conceptual conversations our strategy conversations or political practices maybe effectively they always are underneath that but I feel like so often the stories I'm given or the ways I'm asked to think about these things slide into kind of either ORS that are not don't don't have the quality of what you just put on the table so in a sense I feel like yeah that's that's you know that's the plea that's the Urgent plea in this book and it certainly doesn't start with I've sorted it out and when we just go to Marx's First International we have the answer to this or that if we read glisson as closely as I tried uh relation is the Magic Bullet but I am taken by thinkers traditions of thought and political uh practices experiments the city might be one of them depest is another one uh that that give us resources for the difficult conundrum that you are talking about and and all we can do is think not apply that stuff not have take their answers for our answers but to um to sit to dwell in that space conceptually interpersonally and and politically because I think that is that's the task uh yeah but please well maybe I'm sickness honestly no doubt understanding is a little overrated also productive misunderstood and this translation but I guess well it's interesting thing it's like for me that question where does it hurt it's been very material for me it's taking me over the last three months because I couldn't walk you know the first time I've been out of my house to do something like this in three months I mean there's no reason there's no reason there was there was I would not be here like if I didn't think that that's what you were doing like what I said that seems asleep scroll so easily from if it seem to roll so easily from my tongue it's in part because I read your book so I don't know I'm not we don't we don't really use we just mean I don't argue no no it's like it's like my last point was not agonistic at all it was just like yes yes yes exclamation exclamation exclamation but but it well yeah like I said maybe I'm just misunderstand I just feel like um but but we do have differences so for instance but again it's no point it's doesn't matter yeah it really does matter you know I I will say this I mean um I thought that what we were trying to do in the under common I think Stephanie always say this too is pretty much the same thing than what I thought you were trying to and concrete told me this and and to the extent that me feel misunderstood about that book it's because when most people say the undercommer is what they really mean is the University and the other Comes This is one chapter yeah and if we had to do overview we would put that we wouldn't put that shaft but but but with this thing up yeah there but there are histories there are flashes and moments of these that in which the thing that we say that we characterize it we rightly name as the impossible possibility it happens it happens all the time it keeps happening it's ubiquitous to actually it's how we manage to still be breathing with you um and so really it's a question of a kind of again an empirical imagination it's one thing to try to imagine what doesn't exist and it's full of other thing and it seems like it might be a little bit harder to try to imagine what it does and um so that to me is a really important aspect of the book and and and and um and then at the same time to imagine these things that have existed to see how they have work to see that what it is that we want has already been you know and and is already on somewhere it doesn't negate this question of the is it still happened again no the Bloomerang so so at the very moment at which we celebrate the ubiquity of what it is that we actually want at the very moment that we celebrate the amazingly beautiful typical anomaly of anticipation like Professor Thomas was describing we still at that moment we still are responsible for paying attention to the book right now that's that's the that's the and then where is the movement how does it happen where does it work you know what if it works in these terms that we use that we appealed like the interpersonal right that's the you know and and that's and and you know we I feel like we have a responsibility to ask to try to ask those questions and at the same time we have a responsibility to try to make it not hurt when we ask those questions we try to make it right I hear you to be saying something somewhere also about being commensurability like just the not we don't have to be not there but I think try to make it that was a great way to end if we I thought maybe maybe that was a great place to end I think yeah yeah yeah yeah