texts & contexts

[W]e cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse […].

While describing the London Riots of 2011, Harney suggests that the riots […] do not separate out “the request, the demand and the call” – rather, they enact the one in the other: “I think […] the response is already there before the call goes out. You’re already in something.” You’re already in it. For Moten too, you are always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. What’s more, the call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many places: in jazz, in improvisation, in noise. […] Listening to cacophony and noise tells us that there is a wild beyond to the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us. […]

The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. […] [I]f we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you. […]

While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check “yes” or “no” and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered. […]

Moten and Harney also study what it would mean to refuse what they term “the call to order.” And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order, to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse […] we create dissonance and more importantly, we allow dissonance to continue – when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room.

These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harney’s world of the undercommons – the undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we create critique […]. Our goal is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles […].

Fanon, according to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the end of the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense. […]

[We] refuse the logic that stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling real politics.

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Like all world-making and all world-shattering encounters, when you […] learn how to be with and for, in coalition, and on the way to the place we are already making, you will also feel fear, trepidation, concern, and disorientation. […]

The movement of things can be felt and touched and exists in language and in fantasy, it is flight, it is motion, it is fugitivity […]. Fugitivity is not only escape, “exit” […] or “exodus” […]. It is a being in motion […]. [W]e must make common cause with those desires and (non) positions that seem crazy and unimaginable: we must, on behalf of this alignment, refuse that which was first refused to us and in this refusal reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility and do so separate from the fantasies nestled into rights and respectability. […]

[I]f there is study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together […], if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to it. And it will not be there where the wild things are, it will be a place where refuge is not necessary and you will find that you were already in it all along.

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