A Poetics of the Undercommons

Fred Moten first delivered this remarkable lecture at Threewalls in Chicago, prompted by Harold Mendez’s show “but I sound better since you cut my throat.” Sputnik & Fizzle’s annotated and expanded transcription of A Poetics of the Undercommons includes an original preface by Stefano Harney and a reprint of Moten’s reflections on Mendez’s exhibition. Moten deftly explores various avenues of thought, explaining how he and Harney first developed a notion of the “undercommons” in their influential book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Autonomedia, 2013). His is a lively and fascinating discussion of the disparate connections between Object-Oriented Ontology, Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, Franz Fanon, and Frank Wilderson, as well as the Buddhist philosophy of Nishida Kitarō—and how all these various intellectual threads shaped his ideas about blackness, sociality, and the “undercommons.”