The only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one.

Firstly, I must confess I have not (yet) read this book in its entirety. It is not very readable; the language is dense at times, and quite fragmented. However, on almost every page I have read, I have found statements - almost truisms in Jenny Holzer style - that ring so true to me that I keep reaching for this book. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten reflect on the mechanisms of control - capitalism and by extension credit and management – that dominate our social life. They do this through thinking through five key concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. What Harney and Moten offer us is a scathing critique of the insidiousness of capitalist logistics in each of these five areas, as well as offer us ways to act together both within and beyond the institutional frameworks that bounds us.

In specific, the chapter on study has helped me a great deal in thinking about my role as an educator within the confines of an institutional fashion programme, as well as what my role is (or should be) outside of this context. I also helped me formulate my position as critical fashion practitioner and how I want to relate to the dominant fashion system of industrial fashion more clearly. When Harney and Moten say: “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one” I interpret these words to mean that we should always question if it is possible to be truly radical within the confines of the institute/industry (which ultimately always answers to capital rather than radical values such as solidarity), and if our radicality as educators/critical fashion practitioners is not just used by the institute to sell their education programmes, and as such, gain more capital.

Consequently, this book has led to me focus more explicitly on the “undercommons”, which Harney and Moten do not seem to define explicitly in the book, but of which Harney said in an interview: “...the undercommons is a kind of comportment or ongoing experiment with and as the general antagonism, a kind of way of being with others, it’s almost impossible that it could be matched up with particular institutional life. It would obviously be cut through in different kinds of ways and in different spaces and times…” I feel it is crucial to discuss this idea of the undercommons with students and co-practitioners, and stress the relevance of self-organising and coming together outside of the classroom.

Lastly, I would like to point out that Harney and Moten refer to thinkers such as Paolo Virno, Karl Marx, Jacques Rancière, Jacques Derrida, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Frantz Fanon. This would be my biggest point of critique; that Harney and Moten exclusively refer to male thinkers. While The Undercommons provides us with language for resistance within and against institutions, its citational practices are quite narrow. To truly practice the fugitive study it advocates, we must also look to those who have long been planning in the undercommons of gendered and colonial violence. They teach us that fugitive planning is not just intellectual but embodied, not just about refusal but about re-building the communal fabric that logistics seeks to shred. For a critical fashion practice, this means looking to the quilting circles, the knitting collectives, the salvage economies, the non-fashion spaces of making and mending led by women and communities of colour as living sites of the undercommons in action.