“Debt, as Harney puts is, presumes a kind of individualized relation to a naturalized economy that is predicated upon exploitation”
“we cannot be satisfied with the recognition adn acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse 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”
“In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to power, one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other, the other who has been rendered nonentity by colonialism. Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order.”
“when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening.”
“no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing this shit down until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”
“If there is no church in the wild, if there is study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to it.”
“Critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique.”
“We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”
“In fact, there is no state theory in public administration programs in the United States. Instead, the state is regarded as the proverbial devil we know. And whether it is understood in public administration as a necessary evil, or as a good that is nonetheless of limited usefulness and availability, it is always entirely knowable as an object. Therefore it is not so much that these programs are set against themselves. It is rather that they are set against some students, particularly those who come to public administration with a sense of what Derrida has called a duty beyond duty, or a passion.”
“Any attempt at passion, at stepping out of this skepticism of the known into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself, must be suppressed by this professionalization.”
“The state, the economy, and civil society may change size or shape, labor may enter or exit, and ethical consideration may vary, but these objects are both positivistic and normative, standing in discrete, spatial arrangement each to the other.”
“Perhaps then it needs to be said that the crack dealer, terrorist, and political prisoner share a commitment to war, and society responds in kind with wars on crime, terror, drugs, communism.”
“perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence.”
“The university, then, is not the opposite of prison, since they are both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social individual.”
“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”
“The anoriginary drive and the insistences it calls into being and moves through, that criminality that brings the law online, the runaway anarchic ground of unpayable debt and untold wealth, the fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially - poor but extravagant as opposed to frugal - is blackness which must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it.”
“Whom do we mean when we say ‘there’s nothing wrong with us’? The fat ones. The ones who are out of all compass however precisely they are located. The ones who are not conscious when they listen to Les McCann. The Screamers who don’t say much, insolently. The churchgoers who value impropriety. The ones who manage to evade self-management in the enclosure. The ones without interest who bring the muted noise and mutant grammar of the new general interest by refusing. The new general intellect extending the long, extra-genetic line of extra-moral obligation to disturb and evade intelligence. Our cousins. All our friends.”
“The Soviets used to say that the United States had free speech but no one could hear you over the noise of the machines.”
“The NGO is the research and development arm of governance finding new ways to bring to blackness what it is said to lack, the thing that cannot be brought, interests.”
“When governance is understood as the criminalisation of being without interests, as a regulation brought into being by criminality, where criminality is the excess left from criminalisation, a certain fragility emerges, a certain limit, an uncertain imposition by a greater drive, the mere utterance of whose name has again become too black, too strong altogether.”
“Credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialisation. So long as they pair in the monogamous violence of the home, the pension, the government, or the university, debt can only feed credit, debt can only desire credit.”
“Governance only works when you work, when you tell us your interests, when you invest your interests again in debt and credit. Governance is the therapy of your interests, and your interests will bring your credit back. You will have an investment, even in debt.”
“The student with interests can demand policies, can formulate policy, give herself credit, pursue bad debtors with good policy, sound policy, evidence-based policy. The student with credit can privatize her own university. The student can start her own NGO, invite others to identify their interests, put them on the table, join the global conversation, speak for themselves, get credit, manage debt. Governance is interest-bearing. Credit and debt. There is no other definition of good governance, no other interest. The public and private in harmony, in policy, in pursuit of bad debt, on the trail of fugitive publics, chasing evidence of refuge. The student graduates.”
“What we are calling policy is the new form command takes as command takes hold.”
“Policy is thus arrayed in the exclusive and exclusionary uniform/ity of contingency as imposed consensus, which both denies and at the very same time seeks to destroy the ongoing plans, the fugitive initiations, the black operations, of the multitude.”
“As resistance from above, policy is a new class phenomenon because the act of making policy for others, of pronouncing others as incorrect, is at the same time an audition for a post-fordist economy that deputies believe rewards those who embrace change but which, in reality, arrests them in contingency, flexibility, and that administered precarity that imagines itself to be immune from what Judith Butler might call our undercommon precariousness. This economy is powered by constant and automatic insistence upon the externalisation of risk, the placement at an externally imposed risk of all life, so that work against risk can be harvested without end.”
“Policy is the form that opportunism takes in this environment, as the embrace of the radically extra-economic, political character of command today… It is a demonstration designed to separate you from others, in the interest of a universality reduced to private property that is not yours, that is the fiction of your own advantage… its ability to see the future of its own survival in this turmoil against those who cannot imagine surviving in this turmoil… Every utterance of policy, no matter its intent or content, is first and foremost a demonstration of one’s ability to be close to the top in the hierarchy of the post-fordist economy.”
“Policy is correction, forcing itself with mechanical violence upon the incorrect, the uncorrected, the ones who do not know to seek their own correction.”
“Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people.”
“Policy’s vision is to break it up then fix it, move it along by fixing it, manufacture ambition and give it to your children. Policy’s hope is that there will be more policy, more participation, more change.”
“To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption.”
“Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of logistics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters.”
“Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against Atlantic slaves.”
“Blackness is the site where absolute nothingness and the world of things converge. Blackness is fantasy in the hold and Wilderson’s access to it is in that he is one who has nothing and is, therefore, both more and less than one. He is the shipped. We are the shipped, if we choose to be, if we elect to pay an unbearable cost that is inseparable from an incalculatble benefit.”
“Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem.”
“There’s a touch, a feel you want more of, which releases you.”
“What is we thought of the experiment of the hold as the absolute fluidity, the informality, of this condition of need and ability? What if ability and need were in constant play and we found someone who dispossed us so that this movement was our inheritance.”
“it’s not so much having a shoebox in which I’m writing down my thoughts as that I’m having a long conversation with a few people.”
“If you ask me, I couldn’t tell you, ‘oh there are these four or five ideas that I’m constant going back to that I have to have in my box.’ It doesn’t feel that way. It feels more like there are one or two things that I’ve been talking about with people forever.”
“the concepts are ways to develop a mode of living together, a mode of being together that cannot be shared as model but as an instance.”
“I’ve been thinking more and more of study as something not where everybody dissolves into the student, but where people sort of take turns doing things for each other or for the others, and where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they do something.”
“and we just basically had the temerity to believe that our desire for some other mode of being in the world had to be connected to our attempt to understand the way that we were living and the conditions under which we were living at that moment.”
“Everybody is pissed off all the time and feels bad, but very seldom do you enter into a conversation where people are going, ‘why is it that this doesn’t feel good to us?’”
“But, that’s the insidious thing, this naturalisation of misery, the belief that intellectual work requires alienation and immobility and that the ensuing pain and nausea is a kind of badge of honor, a kind of stripe you can apply to your academic robe or something. Enjoyment is suspect, untrustworthy, a mark of illegitimate privilege or of some kind of sissified refusal to look squarely into the fucked-up face of things which is, evidently, only something you can do in isolation.”
“I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that.”
“On the other hand, it does seem to me that you’re asking people to call themselves into a certain form of identity. This is what Gayatri means by the first right being the right to refuse rights, I think.”
“And I don’t say that people should suddenly not do NGO work. But, I also feel that it’s necessary for us to try to elaborate some other forms that don’t take us through those political steps, that don’t require becoming self-determining enough to have a voice and have interests - and to acknowledge that people don’t need to have interests to be with each other.”
“how important it would be, how interesting it might be, what new kinds of things might emerge out of the capacity to refuse to issue the call to order.”
“What emerges is a form, out of something that we call informality. The informal is not the absence of form. It’s the thing that gives form. The informal is not formlessness.”
“the first act of management is to imagine that what’s informal or what’s already going on requires some act to organize it, rather than to join it, rather than to find ways to experiment with this general antagonism.”
“You need to elaborate the principle of autonomy in a way in which you become even less of yourself; or you overflow more than what you’re doing right now. You just need to do more of the shit that you’re doing right now, and that will produce the scale.”
“So, that with and for, the reason we move into more autonomous situations is that it grows, and we spend less time in the antagonism of within and against.”
“The first thing I made everyday when I went to university was myself, and the university these days is not necessarily the best place to make yourself.”
“I owe everything to my mother, I owe everything to my mentor. That stuff also becomes very quickly repressive and very moralistic. There has to be a way in which there can be elaborations of unpayable debt that don’t always return to an individualisation through the family or an individualisation through the wage laborer, but instead the debt becomes a principle of elaboration. And therefore it’s not that you wouldn’t owe people in something like an economy, or you wouldn’t owe your mother, but that the word ‘owe’ would disappear and it would become some other word, it would be a more generative word.”
“But I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.”
“I think and I concur, is an abolition of credit, of the system of credit, which is to say, maybe it’s an abolition of accounting. It says that when we start to talk about our common resources, when we talk about what Marx means by wealth - the division of it, the accumulation of it, the privatization of it, and the accounting of it - all of that shit should be abolished. I mean, you can’t count how much we owe one another. It’s not countable. It doesn’t work that way.”
“People were telling us, ‘she owes her son a hundred thousand dollars.’ And me and Laura, driving back, we were like, ‘how you gonna owe your son a hundred thousand dollars? How do you owe a parent a hundred thousand dollars?’ That’s some crazy, barbaric shit. You have to be a barbaric monster to even be able to think of some shit like that. You know what? It’s no more barbaric than owing Wells Fargo Bank a hundred thousand dollars. You think at first glance that it’s barbaric because it appears to violate some sort of notion of filial, maternal relation. But, it’s barbaric because it’s a barbaric way of understanding our undercommon-ness.”
“What I’m really saying when I say that is: anybody who’s breathing should have everything that they need and 93% of what they want - not by virtue of the fact that you work today, but by virtue of the fact that you are here.”
“So, you want to figure out some way that that wealth can be enjoyed. And that’s not by managing it, because managing it is the first step to accounting for it, attributing it or distributing it. It’s about developing some way of being with each other, and of not thinking that that requires the mediation of politics. But, it requires elaboration, it requires improvisation, it requires a kind of rehearsal. It requires things. It’s just that it doesn’t require accounting or management. It requires study.”
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