Fred Moten

Fred Moten (b. 1962) is an American poet and critical theorist whose work develops a sustained engagement with the Black radical tradition, fugitive thought, jazz, the relation between aesthetics and politics, and the conditions of Black study. He teaches at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His collaborations with Stefano Harney — especially The Undercommons (2013) — have been some of the most generative interventions in contemporary critical theory and university studies.

¶Core ideas

• The undercommons. With Stefano Harney: a maroon space within and against the university, where the work of subversive intellectual labor happens in the cracks of the institutional apparatus. The undercommons is not a place to colonize the university but a site of fugitive practice — study without institutional credentialing, scholarship without disciplinary capture, intellectual life that refuses the apparatus’s ratification.
• Black study. Distinguished from Black studies (the institutional formation): black study is the ongoing intellectual-political-aesthetic practice of the Black radical tradition. Study as a form of life, prior to and continuing alongside any institutional credentialing.
• Fugitivity. A mode of being that refuses the institutional capture-and-recognition that forms of resistance within institutions presuppose. Drawn from the historical practice of fugitive enslaved persons; extended into a general analytical category for thought and practice that cannot be brought back into the institutional grammar.
• The break. The space-time of Black aesthetic-political production where the dominant categories break down and other modes of being become available. The break is jazz’s improvisatory moment, the slave song’s moment of refusal, the underground railroad’s moment of departure.
• Sentimental disposition. The feeling-mode — sociality, generosity, refusal of the proper — that characterizes the Black radical tradition’s aesthetic-political-existential practice. Distinguished from the sentimentality the dominant culture markets.

¶Key works

• In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
• Hughson’s Tavern (poetry, 2008)
• B Jenkins (poetry, 2010)
• The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney, 2013)
• Black and Blur, Stolen Life, The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being trilogy, 2017-2018)
• All Incomplete (with Stefano Harney, 2021)

¶Where his work figures in this library

Moten is foundational for the black-radical-tradition subdomain and is upstream of cybernetic-postliberal critiques of industrial-intellectualism — Moten and Harney’s undercommons names what is structurally lost when intellectual labor becomes industrially organized for the academic-corporate apparatus.