Prosperity Marxism – Episode 10: On THE UNIVERSITY AND THE UNDERCOMMONS with Stefano Harney

Michael Pelias and Peter Bratsis discuss the state of academia with Stefano Harney.

Stefano Harney is the co-author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study (2013) and the forthcoming All Incomplete (2020), both from Autonomedia/Minor Compositions. He is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. Together with Tonika Sealy Thompson he runs Ground Provisions, a reading residency. He is also co-founder of School for Study, a collective of teachers in higher education experimenting with ensemble teaching. Stefano has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and an A.B. from Harvard University.

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

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, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and 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.