#undercommons

Here, gatherings were promiscuous; there were no criteria for entrance, only that you lived anarchically, which is to say you let the space fill you up when you got there.

Justice is only possible where debt never obliges, never demands, never equals credit, payment, payback. Justice is possible only where it is never asked, in the refuge of bad debt, in the fugitive public of strangers not communities, of undercommons not neighbourhoods, among those who have been there all along from somewhere. To seek justice through restoration is to return debt to the balance sheet and the balance sheet never balances.

Like a sliver under the skin, my grading and assessment of student writing has always bothered me. Often I’d leave a student conference or the grading of a paper feeling unsatisfied with my strategies, knowing that the student will not hear the good in my comments, only see the disappointing grade. And that grade will overdetermine not only how that student understands her writing in my class, but our relationship and her ability to grow as a writer. The pedagogical advice I got in grad school to “just get them to write and write a lot” doesn’t work most of the time. The problem lies, as I have come to see it, in the fact that my past students weren’t a part of the assessment process at all. They didn’t contribute to the creation of the assessment rubrics used, the assessment processes, or the figuring of grades. These were things I did because I apparently knew best. But there was a time when I didn’t know best, yet I was allowed to do these things as a first-year graduate teaching assistant. In a few years, I began to learn what “good writing” could mean in various contexts, how to see this in writing, and talk about it to others. In short, I learned what good writing was by assessing writing myself and talking to others about it. In soft terms, this is what community-based assessment is all about. … should I [as an instructor] assess and give grades, [students will] figure out what’s really going on: They’re writing and I’m evaluating. It’s the same old thing. The bottom line is: They have little need to form active learning stances and few opportunities to develop into self-conscious, reflective writers. And more importantly, they haven’t been pushed to become agents in their own education: How will my writing course help them in their future writing? Have they addressed how their self-assessments might diverge from their teacher’s or their peers’? Have they explored how they might find reliability in a network of varying and vying voices making evaluative claims about their texts? In short, have they struggled with an understanding of assessment as it pertains to their writing? These are the core questions my pedagogy attempts to urge students to explore through a framework of repeated assignments, and class-constructed rubrics. … Feminist pedagogy agrees with this kind of classroom, in which difference and the centrality of the male professorial voice is reframed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, in “The Politics of the Mind: Women, Tradition, and the University,” asks if we can “conceive [of] difference without opposition” and thus “challenge the ancient male-female binarism as an intellectual imperative” within the academy (Gabriel & Smithson, 1990, p. 31). Essentially, Heilbrun attempts to show how Trilling’s famous notion of the “life of the mind” has come to characterize academic endeavors in general. And I include the classroom in these endeavors. This notion embodies “wholly male-centered culture and university,” binarism (Gabriel & Smithson, 1990, p. 28). Furthermore, she asks: “what is lost to this ‘life of the mind’ — to mind itself, to colleges and universities, to that proud contemplation of texts and culture to which Lionel Trilling devoted his life — when women are excluded from taking their full part?” (p. 29). If we rephrased Heilbrun’s question to fit the writing classroom, the answer, to me, seems obvious. What is lost when we exclude most of the stakeholders in the classroom from fully participating in their own assessment and the grading processes — in their own praxis? Can a full, rich democratic community of fellow-writers, fully engaged in all aspects of their writing as active learners, critically reflective, bound together in mutual endeavors, be fostered without their own participation in the assessment and grading of their writing?

Most shit, we don’t know anything about. Knowing shit about shit is a seductive illusion that bookish entanglement provides. The real shit is some meetings and some dances. In this regard, the book’s applicability is musical.

The mission then for the denizens of the undercommons is to recognize that when you seek to make things better, you are not just doing it for the Other, you must also be doing it for yourself. While men may think they are being “sensitive” by turning to feminism, while white people may think they are being right on by opposing racism, no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing “this shit down” until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us. Gender hierarchies are bad for men as well as women and they are really bad for the rest of us. Racial hierarchies are not rational and ordered, they are chaotic and nonsensical and must be opposed by precisely all those who benefit in any way from them. Or, as Moten puts it: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”