The Radical Pragmatism of the Subversive Intellectual

January's "the spark" essay discusses Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's conception of the undercommons of the university, and what fugitive planning and black thought offer the subversive intellectual.

In this post: Activist pragmatism, the undercommons, and the task of the subversive intellectual today. I talk about scholars featured in the upcoming "resources for the resistance" post.
Next week: I write about why I believe in our (Audre) Lorde's uses of the erotic, the power of lesbian feminism for ALL of us, and how love informs our work both within and beyond the university.
Last week: I talk about career transitions from academia to beyond and having to realign your identity, values, and process.

Part One: The Radical Pragmatism of the Subversive Intellectual

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s “The University and the Undercommons,” changed my life. I read it as a recent academic fugitive, with a Ph.D. in hand and not much else to offer the world outside of academia (it seemed). Through it, and their corresponding book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study," I re-imagined how I thought of myself-- no longer as a failed academic but as a future public intellectual with important shit to say. Because the university is worth fighting for. Because education writ large is the only way to ensure a healthy democratic reality.

With Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities in my heart, and bell hooks as my guide, I resolved to find a way to continue to live the life (and lifestyle) of an academic where I taught some, had dedicated time off to write large projects, and where I attended conferences and wrote articles to engage in a healthy discourse about the state of education today. No small feat and I’m not sure that I’ve accomplished that yet, or if it’s even what my career goal should be. I’ve learned a radical acceptance of having absolutely zero clue what I will be doing in a year, much less five. 

It is in this liminal space that feels like you’re just waiting for things to get better, or until something works, you have the psychological space to re-imagine your life, your identity, your work, and how you want to make a living. Which is to say, my professor stealing my work and then punishing me for it was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Because it was clarifying. Because I came to a deeper understanding of what it means to be an activist-scholar in today’s digital smorgasbord. And where I found an amazing community of alt-acs (alternative-academics), and tenured professors alike, where we exchanged ideas and experiences and hopes for the future with each other. 

And now, in January 2022, I’ve finally found acceptance, direction, and meaning in my life as both a writer and a general rabble-rouser. I’ve finally built the foundation of what I hope to turn Post-PhD and its legacy into, something far larger than me, and something that will hopefully not even need me.

Because we have real work to do. And it’s time we come together, and share our resources, experiences, and imaginings so that we can re-imagine the future university as Black, queer, subversive, and above all, seeks restorative justice through intellectual reparations. 

Jack Halberstam, in his introduction “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons,” does an amazing job of introducing us to the value of the undercommons, and the urgent task of the denizen of this place of “wild beyond” the university. Importantly, he describes the task of coalition-building, and it is this description with which I founded post-PhD:

“The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things or die. All of us. We must change all the things that are fucked up and change cannot come in the form that we think of as “revolutionary-- not as a masculinist urge or an armed confrontation. Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we prepare now for what will come by entering into study. Study, as a mode of thinking with others separation from the thinking that the institution requires of you, prepares us to be embedded in what Harney calls “the with and for” and allows you to spend less time antagonized and antagonizing”

This is how I think of the reality that there is a huge ideological consensus amongst those within and beyond the university that something is terribly wrong, but despite this, there is a very little on-the-ground movement towards uniting what bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, and others call “uniting praxis with practice.” This means that one’s ideological beliefs must also be complemented with practice in the real world-- what you do on a daily basis must matter. 

Part Two: What are the undercommons?

I imagine the undercommons as an inverse of the university commons, in the beyond space of higher education’s constraints around the pursuit of knowledge. It is not a sanitized quad with donated benches and flashy marketing. It exists in the dark beneath, where we find each other slowly, forming a rhizome of connections, ideas, and discourses. Some of us once tried to exist in the above, and some of us still do, but most of us, the Black, indigenous, queer, and poor, exceed the confines of the modern university’s role for the intellectual. It is necessarily an activist space that is similarly fraught with antagonisms and trauma. But it is there, in the beneath, where, as Fred and Moten say, “the work gets done.” 

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The denizens of this undercommons are no saviors, nor are they reformers. As Halberstam explains: “The undercommons do not come to pay their debts, to repair what has been broken, to fix what has been undone.” Instead, the undercommons is about refusing to “ask for recognition and instead, we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls.”

As Jack Halberstam concludes in his stunning introduction to The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, “the path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you.”

Part three: The Task of the Subversive Intellectual

“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.” 

What Moten and Harney call for is a coming together of scholars, intellectuals, academic drop-outs, alt-acs, and the general public to try to reclaim the university from the claws of neoliberalism, which is also, consequently, Frederic Jameson’s late stage capitalist wet dream come home to roost.

Moten and Harney lead us to the “undercommons of the Enlightenment” where subversive intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity: “where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.” 

We all have an ethical responsibility to the future, and what that means literally, is that we must support the scholars coming up behind us because we know just how much the odds are stacked against them because they are also stacked against us. 

The call-in:

Post-PhD began as my undercommons, and I want it to become a source of solace, inspiration, and resources for all of us concerned about the state of the university today. It’s my (and our) small attempt to not go down without a fight, to try to warn and educate those younger than me, coming up in the same toxic system. We are all so passionate about what we study, why we study it, and what there is to learn about it because we have dedicated our entire lives, metaphorically and literally, to the pursuit of knowledge.

We, as engaged citizens and intellectuals in the most expansive definition of the word, have solutions, we have the capacity to imagine things differently. Now, we must summon up the gumption to break from the university, be it spiritually, literally, or epistemologically, and rethink how to continue to do the work, beyond the confines of the university.

So how do I practice being a subversive intellectual?

By sharing the wealth and creating a digital archive, a source of solace, inspiration, and practical-fucking-advice on how to navigate becoming otherwise, becoming fugitive. Because here in this maroon community, as Moten and Harney attest, is where the work gets done.

I hope you’ll consider joining me both by becoming a post-PhD member for $6 a month, but more importantly, by contributing, sharing with your like-minded colleagues, and practicing for perhaps the first time our scholarly lives, what it means to be within a community, as bell hooks write.