A Poetics of the Undercommons

Fred Moten first delivered this remarkable lecture at Threewalls in Chicago, prompted by Harold Mendez's show "but I sound better since you cut my throat." Sputnik & Fizzle's annotated and expanded transcription of A Poetics of the Undercommons includes an original preface by Stefano Harney and a reprint of Moten's reflections on Mendez's exhibition. Moten deftly explores various avenues of thought, explaining how he and Harney first developed a notion of the "undercommons" in their influential book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Autonomedia, 2013). His is a lively and fascinating discussion of the disparate connections between Object-Oriented Ontology, Martin Heidegger's phenomenology, Franz Fanon, and Frank Wilderson, as well as the Buddhist philosophy of Nishida Kitarō-and how all these various intellectual threads shaped his ideas about blackness, sociality, and the "undercommons." Excerpt from A Poetics of the Undercommons: "Part of a rough outline of the trajectory I want to trace starts with a little exegetical commentary on the poem that Abby just read [Rock the Party, Fuck the Smackdown], and in particular to think about things-why I was concerned with things-and to see if I can figure out a way to move from concern about things to concern with nothing, or with nothingness; and, moreover, to see what nothingness and thingliness have to do with what Stefano and I have been calling the undercommons; and then to think about how nothingness, which is to say no-thingness manifests itself as a kind of practice, a practice that Denise Ferreira da Silva might describe as differentiation without separation, which is necessarily social and aesthetic, and which one can begin thinking about as a kind of poetics."