thinking with: is a series of conversations rooted in study as a collective practice that exceeds institutional forms even as it moves through them. Engaging questions of collapse, abolition, solidarity, and survival, the series foregrounds thinking as something done together, in the midst of constraint and struggle. Conversation here is not a platform for positions, but a practice of holding open ways of instituting otherwise.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney are renowned scholars, poets, and collaborators, known for their influential work on Black studies, critical theory, and performance, particularly their co-authored books like The Undercommons and All Incomplete, exploring fugitive planning, Black radical tradition, and collaborative existence beyond conventional institutions; challenging capitalist structures and institutional norms through theory, poetry, and practice.
Meenakshi Thirukode (MT): In The Undercommons, you write of study as what happens in the breaks, in the underlife of institutions. A decade later, how do you see study evolving as institutions collapse—whether through capital, bureaucracy, or internal implosion?
Fred Moten & Stefano Harney (FM & SH): Reading through your questions, we quickly come to see that we are already studying together with you, and we are grateful for this, and moreover we see that together we have come to discover some of the same problems we face, and the same hope that endures.
We might begin by asking more about what we mean when we use the word institution and when we consider our position, or apposition, or preposition with regard to that word and what it’s meant to signify. We have tended to think of them in an old-fashioned way in our writing, as what Althusser called Ideological State Apparatus (ISA’s). And we might even say we follow him in following Pascal to say that in an ISA if you kneel down and pray, you will begin to believe. Where we might differ in emphasis is on what that kneeling and praying entails. For us, it is centrally about the encouragement and when necessary, enforcement of individuation, where what it is to kneel and what it is to (take a) stand or to claim standing or to claim the capacity for understanding are all tangled up in delusional completeness. All ISA’s, all institutions share this primary mission statement, whatever it says on their mission or vision webpage about education, or health, or security, or environment, or for that matter spirit. Their job, the end of their interpellative work, is to let the would-be subject know who and that he is.
Another way to put this is that institutions have as their primary mission the job of de-instituting us, our study, our thing. This is something more than and less than institutionalizing us. Because it turns out that institutions don’t institute. They break up our constant instituting, our loitering constituting, and they break it down into the individuation, into a prohibition called the individual. The atrophy you identify and have experienced in alternative or explicitly Left organisations flows from this hidden primary mission of the institution. We are not saying this hidden institutional mission is inevitable, but unless it is confronted and countered directly as the true mission of institutions, there will be mission creep.
MT: How might “study” become not only a refusal of institutional logics, but also a way of building institutions otherwise?
FM & SH: What if study is intrinsically, and even formally, linked not only to informality, but also to deformation? This would likely make it basically antagonistic to institutions, perhaps even most alternative organisations. But it would really be more accurate to say that institutions are antagonistic to study, whether that study finds itself in the cracks (but also in the labour) of the university or the hospital, or in being chased ‘outside’ the institution by the institution, a city government pursuing a community garden, or police squad car chasing a party, or in having found itselflessness to have been surrounding the institution all along. But this is also an antagonism that we have produced through what Sartre called the practico-inert.
Because we must be aware of the central premise of bourgeois sociology, that societies must be organized by institutions and measured by the health of those institutions (in their various derivations from the church). And unfortunately, this prescription is called into being precisely by study which resists such ordering not after that fact but as a conjuring practice producing the institution in the first place. And so, although study is our primary form of existence – or, in echo of Gorgias + Vourloumis & Ruiz, the formless formation of our inexistence – sociology and politics posit the institution as primary, and leadership a mark of that primariness. As Marx said, the criminal produces the criminal justice system. Fanon joins the institutional family he so despises when he pronounces the singular criminal act a disorganized forebearer of the revolution. But we happily and gratefully join him, too, when he emphases the problematic of the criminal’s ‘loneness.’
This is the contradiction. Or the problematic at least – what form of entanglement can we practice that does not turn into the ruse of the institutional and its mission statement? It is for this reason that even figures we love and admire on the Left from Lenin to Cabral have tried to produce a party form and a state form to counter forms of individuation produced by colonialism, underdevelopment, and predatory extractive capitalism, first with liberating results but later with liberal failure, held in the very homology they were set against. But equally, others we love have questioned the limitations and betrayals of the institutional for projects of the Left, figures like Grace Lee Boggs and the Guyanese revolutionary intellectual Andaiye, for instance.
MT: Across decades, many of us have watched progressive and left institutions collapse—not for lack of ideals, but because of the everyday difficulty of sustaining relationships, sharing power, imagining how to endure together. How do you think about the fragility of these spaces, and the possibilities for something else?
FM & SH: We have partly addressed this in our conversation with you above. But it is worth adding that the main enemy of alternative organisations, besides the internal contradiction of their hidden mission statements, is that there is, as the Zapatistas repeatedly teach us, a war against them, against us. This is as our friends Manolo Callahan and Annie Paradise would list it: a war of oblivion, a war of counterinsurgency, but also a war on subsistence. They are in many ways inseparable, but they are distinguishable. So, we think it is important to be aware of what study brings down upon itself. It is much more than a problem of internal contradiction, though those are there.
MT: If the university was once a site you theorized against or beneath, what does it mean to think institutions anew in this moment, where even “outside” spaces collapse under their own contradictions?
FM & SH: This answer may surprise you, but we are not particularly interested in the university and have not been for twenty years, when twenty years ago we helped each other not just to see (it’s obvious) but to believe (it’s an ISA) that the university is just a workplace. It is our workplace, when we have work, but it is like any other workplace in that we must work there for a wage while also working for its abolition, and this requires deepening and heightening that contradiction, as our mentor Cedric Robinson would say, quoting Cabral. And we have been taught by abolitionist scholars like Joy James, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Angela Davis, in and through their divergences and convergences, that abolishing means creating conditions for a kind of (p)redundancy of institutions.
MT: You’ve both spoken in solidarity with Palestine. Today, as we witness scholasticide—the deliberate destruction of schools, libraries, archives—what does it mean to speak of “study”? How might we imagine forms of Black Study and Palestinian study not only in relation, but in entanglement—histories that touch, carry, and sustain each other across geographies? Do you think the destruction of spaces of learning clarifies, in some sense, how dangerous study is to structures of domination?
FM & SH: As you well know those in the Black Liberation Movement from Huey Newton to Yuri Kochiyama from June Jordan to Maurice Bishop have always been knowledgeable and vocal in their practical solidarity with Palestinian struggle. There is nothing for us to do but join this history, which is to join the recognition, which they all share, that study is irreducible to the school, the scholar, and the scholarly. Nevertheless, and without minimizing, by trying to enumerate, the horrific and incalculable genocidal destruction, it must still be said that the IDF ‘sees like a state’. This bloody vision wants to destroy all forms of rival institutional life. But this is also its weakness. Yes, sometimes in its blind weakness it begins murderously to portray what it cannot see and the consequences are apocalyptic for Palestinian people (and Syrians and Lebanese); like a state apparatus, this time not at all an ideological one of course, it sees what it is, not what it is not. Because it cannot see it therefore cannot kill Palestinian struggle, in/and Palestinian study, which defy portraiture, which is the very coin of individuation. La lucha y el estudiar continua.
Beyond this, it may be that one of the ties that bind the two struggles for liberation is that they may not be now, nor ever really have been, struggles for the liberation of a nation as much as struggles for the liberation from nation, always fought with a degree of nationalism but also with a contrary, not complementary, degree of internationalism and anti-nationalism and ante-nationalism.
MT: Technology has reshaped the terrain of study: the same infrastructures that let us gather also facilitate propaganda, surveillance, even genocide. How do you think about digital study, AI, and the future of knowledge circulation in this context? Is there a way of inhabiting these tools fugitively—using them without being consumed by them?
FM & SH: Of course we are faced with a very old question here. Can the machinery, the actual machines, of capitalism be taken over for socialism, for revolution? Marx really answered no, but the communist movement mostly answered yes, with modifications. We know what Audre Lorde famously said. For our part, we regard these technologies as part of our workplace. We use them while working for their abolition. They really don’t let us gather but we keep on gathering anyway. Fugitivity will have been given in how and in that we pay attention to what we do before and despite what they do and what their tools, in fact, don’t really let us do.
MT: I often return to the idea that resistance is not always spectacle, but lives in the everyday: conversations, gestures, continuities. How does that resonate with your own sense of what sustains study?
FM & SH: Here we wish simply to agree with you. These things are also our archive, our history, and our wealth. Their future is in the present, as our indeterminate presencing.
MT: What kinds of practices, mundane, fragile, ongoing, feel most vital to you right now as ways of keeping study alive?
FM & SH: Fragile might be the place to start. Individuation produces fragile being. Some react by going to war to prove their impossible sustainability. Others are open to study, to helping each other fall apart, deform, and this practice may also be a form of instituting without institution, of constituting against constitution, in a way that is – Levinasian, more and less – otherwise than being.