“In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.”
Can we ethically release ourselves from a social moment that we find reprehensible? What about those we leave behind? Politically, socially, ethically can an individual be in two places at once? How do we live within contradiction and feel empowered, not hypocritical?
The Undercommons Reading Groups meets each Saturday evening from 6 – 8, usually followed with some beers and tacos at Eastlake Craft Brewing.
Free “bootlegged” paperback copies are available at Beyond Repair. For those yet to attend, a PDF is available here.
All levels and interests of inquiry welcome, from the theoretical to the deeply practical and local.
“Beyond Repair provides value that can’t be quantified or qualified with capital or numbers. It is wildly human. A project like Beyond Repair offers far more than a storefront for enlightened consumerism; it cracks the framework of profit and measurable “success” to allow experiences, conversations, stories, people’s real feelings and emotions, a chance to slip through, to be experienced by an extended community in authentic, unpredictable ways.”
Undercommons Reading Group pt.2 – There is no here or there, over or under. For an “Undercommons” to exists it resides beyond geography and exists in the space between people, “beyond the beyond.”
Over the next year Beyond Repair will act as the site for three groups to meet, each asking in one form or another, “What does a healthy neighborhood look like?” One of these groups, Food Enough? consists of environmental academics, urban farmers, and food access / justice activists. We met for the first time yesterday and plan to meet on Sunday afternoons every other week.
With our last post in mind, one thing we’ve have been thinking about of late is how to make Beyond Repair more accessible for neighbors who are hard of hearing. It’s really god damn loud in the Market and sometimes it is difficult to hear when we are having conversations around the table, or are hosting a lecture or reading. Certainly, amplification is one answer, but we’d also like to consider ideas that don’t highlight individuals through amplification. Sometimes having to be on the mic can be intimidating for folks, as well, I’d argue it can create a false divide between individuals within conversation. And so, what sorts of baffling / sound muffling devices can we add to Beyond Repair to think about these needs for those who join us that need things more quiet to help them hear?
Any thoughts are greatly appreciated. Please feel free to post ideas to our Facebook page or email us at [email protected]
Here’s an amazing video illustrating why legislation like the ADA is so necessary. But past that, why we – as humans outside of government – should be thinking about the whole of society, not just those who look and move and travel throughout the world just like us. Thanks art for making all of this so easy and enjoyable to understand.
Jeremiah Bey – frequent Beyond Repair friend / collaborator / etc – wrote the following within a post on Facebook today. How do we engage these attitudes, and their forms, which Jeremiah talks about? Not just on the local level, but cycled even further down, to the neighborhood? Many of us know that there are certain officers on the payroll within the 3rd Precinct known for abusive tactics. What more don’t we know? Past that, the very knowledge – passed from person to person – that these tactics exist within a neighborhood power structure (one with guns, other weapons, and impunity), how does that affect the psyche of a neighborhood? Terror exists in many forms and is utilized for many varied gains:
“Richard Zuley is not black, but he is a part of Black History. I will not consider this my Black History post of the day, but it’s something we should all know and understand.
Richard Zuley is the poster child for police corruption as an institutional problem. He was a Chicago PD homicide detective who created a department wide culture of torturing black and brown Chicagoans into murder confessions. When he retired from the CPD, he was invited to teach and facilitate his torture techniques at Guantanamo Bay.
Yes, his torture techniques were not only widely known about within the field of American law enforcement, they were admired. So much so, that the CIA wanted to learn from him.
Richard Zuley’s career didn’t come under scrutiny until after his retirement during a brutal “interrogation” of a Guantanamo detainee. The detainee, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, endured extensive abuse from Zuley, including a threat that Zuley would bring Slahi’s mother in to be raped by other inmates.
Zuley is also being accused of planting evidence on murder suspect, Lathierial Boyd, in 1990. During the arrest at Boyd’s expensive downtown loft, Zuley was heard telling him “no nigger is supposed to live like this”.
The Guardian wrote:
“Dick Zuley’s history as a military interrogator at Guantánamo and a police interrogator in Chicago scrambles that narrative. It suggests a continuum between police abuses in urban America and the wartime detention scandals that continue to do persistent damage to the international reputation of the United States.
Chicago, in particular, has its own deep and infamous history with police torture, with black Chicagoans its primary victims.”
Michelle Alexander encouraged us to begin connecting the dots. People like Richard Zuley not only connect dots, they sew entire seams together. My question is, just how many Richard Zuley’s are there? And if naming them could become an endless and futile game, then where should our energy be put to stop them?” – Jeremiah Bey
We’ve started a new series, Rent Check. We work with a new artist each month to make a print based off our actually rent check. Josh MacPhee started things off. So cool!!
“Thanks for participating in “What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it with the World”! I’m hoping you’ll write a few sentences about your object and its beauty. Even better if you include something about the neighborhood, e.g. if you have a special spot of beauty you look forward to walking by, how you’ve seen the neighborhood change, story or rumor…. I ran the Shoebox Gallery on the corner of Chicago and Lake for eleven years and am planning a book about it. Your input would be a great help towards a portrait of the neighborhood!
Matt Olson, of ROLU, and now OOIEE, fame came into the shop today. He caught Sam on the phone with a potential customer saying, “you understand we can do this much cheaper than Kinkos right?” Oh, boy…
Already today we’ve had people come in and talk about the role of design in helping us ask questions about ourselves; how maps devised by artists can help us see and imagine a future social landscape differently; whether we can print their zine; if we could help them devise a questionnaire to distribute around the neighborhood asking neighbors what sort of police relations THEY want to see.
I’m thinking about the links between our discussion tonight concerning The Undercommons and my feelings and experiences with the world of “Great Black Music,” the tradition, culture, and pedagogy of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and its orbit.
What occurs when you move away, not in opposition, but through your own accord? Not a counter to, but “the new thing?”
Real “new things” aren’t linear progressions. While nothing is new, ever, we can achieve “something else.” They are built, mixed together, a composite of the rubble around them. Importantly, some people see rubble where buildings still stand.
So, with the words of Harney / Moten in mind, after sharing a drink with Chaun and Nate after they stopped over at the house, after I put the kids to bed, it seems only fitting to play this cut from Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, as the chorus keeps ringing in my head:
