A Poetics of the Undercommons
Description:... 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 Kitar?-and how all these various intellectual threads shaped his ideas about blackness, sociality, and the "undercommons."
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