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In other work (1995), I move forward through a century--to contemporary fields in which embodied distinctions are established and contested on frontiers on which the boundaries of the nation are still very much at stake. Struggles over publicity engaging the trademark "take place" in hybrid sites of national contention. Given the historical focus upon the "frontier" as defining the space and the possibility of American democracy, I focus on the frontier as liminal spaces in which nations, citizens, and their differential embodiments are negotiated. The trademark, I suggest, functions as one idiom in which such negotiations are expressed.

Owners of trademarks must always cope with the presence of the Other in the cultural spaces they attempt to colonize. Allegiances to Indian nations, other nation-states, and transnational migrant communities often provoke resistance by capitalism's Others to the bodily imagery by which they are othered in contemporary consumer society. One area of recent activism will suffice to illustrate. In the late twentieth century, we witness renewed struggles in the spaces where mimesis and alterity occupy the commercial terrain. Today, many Indian peoples find that Americans are primarily aware of their presence as the stereotyped images that circulate in sports team mascots, tomahawk chops, and old cartoons. The contemporary conditions of their lives and their political struggles are totally obscured by representations of them that are owned by others. The ubiquity of "Trader Vic's,,R Hawaii in North American commerce makes the contemporary realities of indigenous Hawaiian peoples invisible, so completely have their identities been subsumed (and consumed) by this mythic imagery.

Counterfeits harm consumers, governments, and intellectual property holders. They accounted for 3.3% of worldwide trades in 2016, having an estimated value of $509 billion in the same year. Estimations in the literature are mostly based on border seizures, but in this paper, we examined openly labeled counterfeits on darknet markets, which allowed us to gather and analyze information from a different perspective. Here, we analyzed data from 11 darknet markets for the period Jan-2014 and Sep-2015. The findings suggest that darknet markets harbor similar counterfeit product types to those found in seizures but that the share of watches is higher while the share of electronics, clothes, shoes, and Tobacco is lower on darknet markets. Also, darknet market counterfeits seem to have similar shipping origins as seized goods, with some exceptions, such as a relatively high share (5%) of dark market counterfeits originating from the US. Lastly, counterfeits on dark markets tend to have a relatively low price and sales volume. However, based on preliminary estimations, the equivalent products on the surface web appear to be advertised for a multiple of the prices found for darknet markets. We provide some suggestions on how information about darknet market counterfeits could be used by companies and authorities for preventative purposes, showing that insight gathering from the dark web is valuable and could be a cost-effective alternative (or compliment) to border seizures. Thus, monitoring darknet markets can help us understand the counterfeit landscape better.

Introduction Counterfeits are illicit goods that violate intellectual property (IP) rights such as copyrights, trademarks, design rights, or patents, and they can exist physically or digitally (OECD/EUIPO, 2019; WTO, 1994). The purpose of a deceptive counterfeit is to make a monetary profit by deceiving a customer that the product is of a higher value than it is (e.g., by selling it as being genuine) (OECD/EUIPO, 2019). Deceptive counterfeits can be sold directly to consumers or mixed within supply chains of genuine products to reduce costs and increase profits (Hollis & Wilson, 2014). Counterfeits can cause a variety of problems, such as physical (e.g., through foods or pharmaceuticals) and monetary harms to the consumer, the IP holder (e.g., through damages to the brand value, loss of sales), or the government (e.g., through the loss of tax income) (EMCDDA-Europol, 2017; OECD/EUIPO, 2019). In turn, the sales of counterfeits can support organized crime groups financially and facilitate other illegal activities, such as money laundering (EMCDDA-Europol, 2017; UNICRI & ICC BASCAP, 2013; UNODC, 2014). OECD/EUIPO (2019) estimated that counterfeits made up 3.3% of worldwide trades in 2016, worth USD 509 billion. Furthermore, the proportion of counterfeits seems to be elevated within developed regions, such as the European Union (EU). However, estimating counterfeit goods' trade (value) is difficult and is mostly achieved through auditing goods seized at borders (OECD, 2018; OECD/EUIPO, 2019). Thus, current estimates often exclude domestically traded counterfeits or digital products, and since not all counterfeits will be seized at ports, estimates of what is traded may be incomplete. For example, the number of routinely checked containers at major ports in Genoa (Italy), Melbourne (Australia), Montreal (Canada), New York (USA), and Liverpool (UK) together only account for 2–5% of all traffic (Sergi, 2022). Since only a limited number of containers can be checked, the selection procedure can strongly impact possible finds. A theoretical and empirical understanding of how counterfeiting occurs is currently not well developed, perhaps due to the complex involvement of various stakeholders, which results in difficulties for researchers to obtain reliable data (Sullivan et al., 2017). For example, many companies affected by counterfeiting operate across nations, affecting the ease with which authorities can monitor and combat counterfeits. Moreover, the definition of counterfeits varies across nations, further complicating how counterfeiting is measured. However, theories provide perspectives as to why counterfeiting occurs and how it might be addressed. The Rational Choice perspective considers the offender's choice to commit a crime (e.g., counterfeiting a product) and influencing factors of the offenders' decisions, such as the perceived risks and rewards (Clarke & Cornish, 1985). The perspective informs us that while changing the perceived risks and rewards of the offender, the likelihood of offending can be altered and reduced, for example, by increasing the perceived risks of detection or by increasing the general efforts needed to commit a crime. Within the context of counterfeits facilitating the traceability of genuine products within a supply chain (e.g., through watermarks) seems to be a possible approach to increasing the efforts to counterfeit (Gayialis et al., 2022). Another perspective, such as the Routine Activity Approach (RAA), discussed by Spink et al., (2013, 2014), states that crime is more likely when a suitable target (e.g., a product that can be counterfeited) and a motivated offender converge absent a capable guardian (Cohen & Felson, 1979). Capable guardians can include those involved in security at country borders or those involved in inspecting goods at other stages of the supply chain (Marucheck et al., 2011; Tang, 2006). For example, when manufactured products are transported, transport personnel and employees could also act as guardians (Hollis & Wilson, 2014). However, effective guardianship requires a clear understanding of the problem and processes to monitor it, such as reporting procedures. Absent this understanding, guardianship will be less effective. With this in mind, risk assessments are often conducted to aid decisions made by authorities at borders based on intelligence from federal and local authorities and custom officer experiences (Sergi, 2022). However, these are likely to be imperfect. Furthermore, border checks can be random or may only be informed by the country of origin, or how the delivery is labeled, as in the case of parcel shipments (Männistö et al., 2021). Another source of possible bias present in check-selection procedures are large differences in the estimates of counterfeit product types produced by different agencies (IP Crime Group, 2015; OECD/EUIPO, 2019). For example, estimates strongly differ across agencies for footwear (20 percentage points) or for electronics (11%) and clothing (10%). For other products, estimations may be missing entirely, as in the case of Tobacco, which was estimated to make up 28% of all counterfeits by the IP Crime Group (2015) but was not identified as a counterfeited product by OECD/EUIPO (2019). Since different agencies use different data sources (e.g., border or inland seizures), some measurement differences are to be expected, but they also illustrate how inconsistently seizures reflect the true prevalence of counterfeits. Thus, additional data sources to estimate counterfeit affected products would be helpful to better understand the counterfeit landscape and aid efforts at prevention.

In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the poet John Keats asserts “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.” Indeed, the enormous popularity of the arts and antiquities market speak to its ability to immortalize beauty and impart knowledge. Yet, underneath its ornate paintings and gilded treasures, the art world hides an ugly secret. Global kleptocrats have leveraged portions of the art and antiquities trade to launder money, subvert sanctions, and fund their malign activities. Transactions can be conducted amid high levels of secrecy. Due to a lack of rigorous safeguards, the true identity of buyers and sellers (i.e. beneficial ownership) is often difficult to discern, and oligarchs often rely upon shell companies or intermediaries to conduct transactions. Despite this weak link within rule-of-law frameworks, democracies can respond by closing loopholes within counter-kleptocracy safeguards, empowering law enforcement to combat this challenge, and supporting civil society to address knowledge gaps.

Despite its artistic and historical value, the arts and antiquities trade has emerged as a veritable playground for malign actors. In 2021, the market was valued at $65 billion. Its enormous potential and a lack of sufficient anti-money laundering (AML) requirements incentivize kleptocrats to launder money by purchasing, storing, or selling art and antiquities. For example, financier Jho Lo—who siphoned billions of dollars from Malaysia’s state investment fund to enrich himself and his cronies—used his ill-gotten gains to buy $200 million worth of artwork. Even transactions at prominent auction houses can be conducted via intermediaries who do not disclose beneficial ownership, enabling sanctioned individuals to access the market. Russian oligarchs Arkady and Boris Rotenberg were able to circumvent sanctions enacted in 2014 by purchasing art via a U.S. intermediary and a network of shell companies. The funds generated from such activities are often used to bolster repressive actors via elite capture, SLAPP suits, and other kleptocratic activities.

Income tax evasion and money laundering are both widespread and costly. Feige and Cebula (2011) estimate that tax evasion costs the US Treasury approximately US$500bn in lost revenue per year. Murphy (2012) and Schneider et al. (2015) estimate the cost approaches US$1tn per year in the European Union alone. This lost tax revenue strangles services, swells budget deficits, places an unfair burden on honest taxpayers and hurts the general welfare by distorting economic competition. In regard to money laundering, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2011) estimates that approximately US$1.6tn in criminal gains were laundered in 2009, equal to 2.7% of global gross domestic product (GDP). These illicit funds distort resource allocation by crowding out licit sectors, while successful money laundering foments more criminal enterprise.

Policymakers have long recognized that an overlap exists between tax evasion and money laundering. Both crimes are often concurrently committed and both crimes often rely upon similar techniques. Corporate shell companies and fraudulent business records/ accounting journal entries are often the tools of both offenses. Further, both tax evasion and money laundering commonly use opaque offshore tax havens where offenders hide assets, estimated at 10% of global GDP (Alstadsaeter et al., 2018). Given the interrelated nature of tax evasion and money laundering, prosecutors in many nations frequently initiate legal action by levying both charges (as well as fraud) for a single offense. To some degree, this array of charges reflects the ill-defined judicial boundaries between tax evasion and money laundering, which is at least partly because of an uncertain understanding of the fundamental nexus between the two crimes.

Several attempts have been made to qualify and quantify the risk. Hearings held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services in 2011 and 2012 identified more than 1800 cases of counterfeit electronic parts and one million individual suspect parts in 2009 and 2010 (U.S. Senate, 2012). A U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) survey of counterfeit parts in the electronics industry noted an increase in incidents from 3,369 in 2005 to 8,644 in 2008 (U.S. DOC, 2010).

Of course, counterfeiting is not limited to electronics. Various counterfeit parts have been identified involving various weapon systems and other equipment. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) cited 19 different counterfeit parts used in over 100 different military systems, including aircraft and missile defense (U.S. Senate, 2012). Other examples include fasteners, titanium used in engine mounts, Kevlar® used in body armor plates, seatbelt clasps, oscillators for navigation systems, and part packaging (U.S. GAO, 2010).

Product counterfeiting is a serious transnational crime with staggering impacts on public health and safety, economic stability, innovation, and national security. Hundreds of billions of dollars are lost from consumers, companies, and governments on an annual basis. Recent estimates have identified the international trade in counterfeit goods to be high as $461 billion USD, or 2.5% of world trade (OECD and EUIPO 2016). Although the extent of the problem is notoriously difficult to measure (Wilson et al. 2016; Chaudhry and Zimmerman 2009; U.S. GAO 2010b), a variety of factors indicate that product counterfeiting is a growing global problem, including the emergence of counterfeits in a broader range of industries (UNICRI 2007; OECD 2008) and the persistent widespread availability of counterfeit goods in both physical and online marketplaces (Satchwell 2004; Phillips 2005; Heinonen et al. 2012; Wilson and Fenoff 2014). Another important factor is an upward trend in seizures by customs agencies, as the number of border seizures has increased dramatically from 3586 in 2000 to 19,959 in 2010 to 31,560 in 2016 (U.S. CBP 2017).

The IP Theft Commission further notes that Chinese entities rely on shell companies both to obscure their involvement in IP theft and to shield themselves from potential US sanctions.7 As the China Economic and Security Review Commission has warned, even a strengthened Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States will be unable to detect and properly scrutinize Chinese investments in US technology firms if their ownership is masked by shell companies.8 Chinese entities have also acquired valuable American IP and technology by using shell companies to conceal their participation in US bankruptcy proceedings.9

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) study of 1,406 high-security US federal leases could not identify the owners in about one-third of cases because many of them were shell companies. In cases where the GAO did identify the owners, nine out of fourteen government agencies working on sensitive national security issues were unaware that the buildings in which they were housed were ultimately owned by companies in China and elsewhere.10

Counterfeit microelectronics have been a persistent threat for the last twenty years. Counterfeit electronic parts pose serious risks to human health and safety, harm the economy, and jeopardize national security. Although the Lanham Act provides potent civil remedies for trademark counterfeiting, an analysis of trademark filings from 2009 through 2022 reveals that manufacturers of electronic parts almost never pursue civil actions against counterfeiters. The ”material alteration theory” encompasses many types of activity engaged in by counterfeiters, including the sale of used, refurbished, and remarked parts. As a result, the lack of civil enforcement must be attributed to factors such as the cost of filing suit, concerns about the impact on stock values, and the inability to reach anonymous counterfeiters (often in other countries) who sell fake products through online marketplaces. Congress must amend the Lanham Act to recognize contributory liability by intermediaries, including ecommerce platforms and others, that facilitate infringement when they have actual or constructive knowledge that infringing activities are taking place on their sites. Ultimately, however, an enhanced enforcement of criminal penalties may be an even more essential part of the solution to counterfeit microelectronics. Debugging the Trademark Laws II: Criminal Penalties for Trafficking in Counterfeit Microelectronics will explore the apparent underutilization of criminal sanctions against counterfeiters, and it will propose amendments to the federal criminal code that intend to circumscribe their activities.

Robin Kelley’s essay encourages us to resist the seductive comforts of the academy and to be ever vigilant about the role it plays in the larger unjust system of racial capitalism. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney urge us to become outlaws, to steal from the university: not pencils or laptops, but skills, ideas, and space, repurposing them for more egalitarian ends. And legendary Black Freedom organizer Ella Baker insisted that the only way to do radical work inside hierarchical organizations and established institutions is to function as an “outsider within”—to seek one’s frame of reference and source of affirmation and comfort beyond the bounds of such organizations and institutions. How do these cautions and contradictions translate into praxis for today’s student activists? First of all, we have to applaud students for coming together and saying “no” to what they experience everyday as a racist environment. But, as we know, it is much easier to state the problem than to formulate an agenda that reflects what we are for. This is true on campus, in communities, and in large-scale revolutionary movements: oust the dictator, depose the tyrant. Then what? As my colleague Roderick Ferguson reminds us in his book The Reorder of Things, even the seemingly major reforms—such as the establishment of black studies and other interdisciplinary programs—are co-optable. The best demands, still to be formulated, will be for “non-reformist” reforms. This notion, advanced by philosopher André Gorz and re-inscribed in the work of scholar and abolitionist Ruth Gilmore, describes activism (in Gorz’s words) as “conceived not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands.” We need such an agenda for higher education, one that demands not just responses to individual trauma, but also a radical recalibration of what universities owe—and not only to students and faculty, but also to campus workers and to communities beyond the campus. As Kelley says, all major campus uprisings have been fueled by community-based struggles for change. Martha Biondi’s The Black Revolution on Campus underscores this point in elegant detail. The concessions that colleges and universities have made to the demand for radical inclusion amount to a “some of y’all, not all of y’all” formula. Institutions agreed to take the so-called “best and brightest,” the “most deserving,” the “truly exceptional” students of color. The price of entry has often been for those students to accept the notion that they are different and better than their cousins, neighbors, and even siblings who are either excluded from entry or—worse—tracked into the parallel prison industry. Truly transformative demands have to reject that divisive formula, shrouded in the myth of meritocracy. The demand for open admissions and free tuition strikes at the heart of the matter. Most working-class black people never set foot on college campuses, but many do. In fact, universities are full of black non-professional employees who do groundskeeping, housekeeping, catering, and clerical work. Their concerns have to be our concerns too. Making the demand that all campus workers be paid a living wage would be an enormous statement of solidarity by student activists. Some are doing just that. The recently published Agenda to Build Black Futures of Black Youth Project 100, the far-reaching and hard-hitting demands of the students at UNC, Chapel Hill, and the successful Prison Divest campaign at Columbia are all models for what non-reformist reform platforms might look like. The undercommons is both an appealing and necessary site for insurgent collaboration, but we cannot overly romanticize it. It is not the only place we must do our work. While we labor to create alternative and ulterior spaces for critical collective thought and planning, we have to simultaneously fight for a greater margin of justice in the public square of the academy, to try to hold institutions accountable as best we can to what they say they represent, and to support black students’ right to self-defense through protest against physical and psychological injury. In the long run their well-being requires building a liberation movement that extends beyond the borders of the university.

As I read Kelley’s essay, I often asked myself, “What is he most afraid of?” He presents a clean dichotomy: campus organizers are either in the university or of it, seeking university inclusion or building their own institutions to challenge the university’s legitimacy. Cautioning black students against seeking affirmation within institutions that use black bodies to delegitimize black life, Kelley holds civil rights–era Freedom Schools and UCLA’s Undercommons as ideal models of student activism. He charges students to engage in “fugitive” political education from a place of love, rather than a narrative of trauma, and to recognize themselves as involuntary agents of white supremacy. But student organizers must determine approaches to organizing that reflect the needs of their movement. During the civil rights era, the nation witnessed black students risk arrest, face jail time, endure violence, and suspend their university study to protest segregation in the South. The most recognizable forms of their organizing transcended university spaces. Freedom Rides, Freedom Schools, and lunch counter sit-ins facilitated a movement that was open to students, activists, and all community members. Is it not possible for students to reject the ideology of inclusion and demand reform from their universities? Many black student activists today are blending methods of accountability both in and out of university spaces. While occupying university buildings, students at Brandeis created a syllabus and reading group accessible to members of the public who were interested in their activism. Law students at Harvard conducted a flash teach-in on critical race theory in their dean’s office and are developing a political education reading group. Activists in Johannesburg and Cape Town have developed reading groups, lecture series, and education task forces during their #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall movements. Each group partnered with university staff workers, but these demonstrations simultaneously put pressure on university administrations to eliminate their role in facilitating institutional and external oppression for marginalized groups. Though Kelley’s dichotomy could read as a false one, still student activists should beg, borrow, and steal much from his reflections. First, we must regularly engage in serious political education. University movements should be about making all stakeholders more critical of their institutions, not just making marginalized students more comfortable. Consequently, we should become smarter as a result of our demonstrations. Otherwise, we risk becoming radical event planners. We should locate, debate, and ultimately subscribe to a particular set of politics that grounds our movements. Kelley’s essay should also inspire us to consider multiple narratives to confront white supremacy. As we become politically educated, we must choose strategic yet honest narratives. For many black student demonstrators, returning to classrooms was extremely difficult after two years of unlawful arrests, tear gas, police assault, and vigilante armed resistance. Our professors chose to use the movement to debate policy, justify non-indictments of police officers, or play police shooting videos in class without trigger warnings or ways to opt out. Trauma is real. We are victims and agents of a deadly, odorless, and colorless dominance, too normal to create urgency, and too amorphous to deflate. Our collective trauma is indicative of a constant oppression that we must always name and fight. Finally, student organizers must rally behind causes that genuinely transcend university spaces. Reclaiming spaces, reshaping curricula, renaming buildings, and replacing school crests serve as means to spark debates, not as ends in themselves. Additionally, colleges are not shielded from the racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and ableism in society at large. We must therefore resist the thought of graduating from these problems. What are our commitments as graduate students? As alumni? How are we connecting to local communities? Activism ought not be a fling of our youth, but a lifelong practice committed to building black futures.

If governmentality studies exaggerate the trope of economic action, thus ignoring the possibilities of capture that lurk behind our efforts to resist a cold and callous version of capitalism, autonomist Marxism suffers of the opposite problem. It shares a naturalist belief in the self-destructive capabilities of late capitalism precisely because it recognizes that the battle for the social reproduction of capitalism is being fought on territories which were once ornamental or external (if not outright inimical) to value production.64 The communicative and affective competencies (what autonomists call "general intellect") required by the "new economy" are the very same dispositions that will allow us to short-circuit biopolitical production and "become common" again. It is just a matter of time until workers realize that capital, especially in its cognitive guise, has lost its productive function of ensuring cooperation and circulation to become a purely parasitical structure that serves no other purpose than to expropriate our common laboring efforts.65 Once this injustice is recognized nothing will stand in the way of emancipation. It seems to me that this overly optimistic celebration of the subjective potential of labor, which fits in with the greater "turn to affect" that has emerged in cultural studies, mystifies the inherently duplicitous character of affect. To place trust in the self-destructive capabilities of late capitalism seems excessively optimistic seeing how the communicative and affective competencies demanded by the "new economy" have done more to solidify the stronghold of neoliberal ideology than erode it.

Autonomist Marxism tells roughly the same story as Foucauldian governmentality critique, albeit with a few modifications: neoliberalism is replaced with post-Fordism, subjectivity with living labor, and governmentality with biopolitical production. Where Foucault talked of neoliberalism as a general philosophy that takes the market into the guiding principle for all human action, the Marxian master-category of post-Fordism grounds the neoliberal ethos in the history of 1960s and 70s labor struggles and economic shocks. In operaismo66 (workerist) terms, post-Fordism is defined as a neoliberal tactic deliberately trying to fragment the relatively firm class alliances of the postwar period through technological innovation and economic globalization, and restore the power of managerial and political elites. Technological automatization, large-scale outsourcing, non-standard employment relations, and the overall state of economic precarity (in work, housing, finance, education, citizenship practices, and affective relations) that followed these waves of neoliberalization sought to respond to shop floor disaffection over tedious and repetitive jobs, but also discipline the "revolt against work" of earlier decades.

It is easy to be seduced by the language of the undercommons. Embodying and enacting it, however, is difficult indeed. Being within and against the university, refusing the call to order through insolent obstructive unprofessionalism, is almost impossible to sustain. Halberstam (Citation2009, 45) describes the undercommons as “a marooned community of outcast thinkers who refuse, resist, and renege on the demands of rigor, excellence, and productivity.” A romantic and appealing notion for sure but refusing and reneging on “the university of excellence” will cost you your job. When Moten describes subversion as a “series of immanent upheavals” expressed through “vast repertoires of high-frequency complaints, imperceptible frowns, withering turns, silent sidesteps, and ever-vigilant attempts not to see and hear” (Citation2008, 1743), one is reminded instantly of Thomas Docherty, disciplined and suspended for his negative vibes. Footnote7 Being with and for the maroon community is difficult too. First of all, “Where and how can we find/see the Undercommons at work?” (Ĉiĉigoj, Apostolou-Hölscher, and Rusham Citation2015, 265). Where and how can one find those liminal spaces of sabotage and subversion, and how does one occupy them in a spirit of hapticality, study, and militant arrhythmia that brings the utopic underground to the surface of the fierce and urgent now? Beautiful language, but how does one live it? Networks do, of course, exist—the Undercommoning Collective, the Edu-Factory Collective, the International Network for Alternative Academia, to name but a few. These are promising spaces for bringing together and harboring the maroons and the fugitives. But networks are typically short-lived, and—as Harney and Moten warned—there is a danger of institutionalization, of taking institutional practices with you into alternative spaces “because we’ve been inside so much” (Harney and Moten Citation 2013, 148). And so, predictably, meetings of the fugitives come with structure, order, an official agenda, and circulated minutes. The outcasts convene in conventional academic conferences, with parallel sessions, panels of papers, lunch breaks, wine and nibbles (e.g., Edu-Factory Citation2012). These spaces offer time out, welcome respite, a breathing space, a trip abroad, and then one returns to work. If hapticality, the touch of the undercommons, is “a visceral register of experience … the feel that what is to come is here” (Bradley Citation2014, 129–130), then this seems elusive. It is hard to detect a sense of the utopic undercommons rising to the surface of the corporate-imperial university. Moten describes the call to disorder and to study as a way to “excavate new aesthetic, political, and economic dispositions” (Moten Citation2008, 1745). But this notion of excavating is highly problematic. It is common within the discourse of “everyday utopianism”—finding utopia in the everyday, recovering lost or repressed transcendence in “everydayness” (Gardiner Citation2006)—to describe the process of utopian recovery in terms of excavating: excavating repressed desires, submerged longings, suppressed histories, untapped possibilities. But the fundamental questions of where to dig and how to identify a utopian “find” are never adequately addressed (see Webb Citation2017). Gardiner defines utopia as “a series of forces, tendencies and possibilities that are immanent in the here and now, in the pragmatic activities of everyday life” (Citation2006, 2). But how are these forces, tendencies and possibilities to be identified and recovered? For Harney and Moten, it is through study, hapticality and militant arrhythmia. These are slippy concepts, however, evading concrete material referents. What is it to inhabit the undercommons? Those who have written of their experiences refer to “small acts of marronage” such as poaching resources and redeploying them in ways at odds with the university’s designs and demands (Reddy Citation2016, 7), or exploiting funding streams “to form cracks in the institution that enable the Others to invade the university” (Smith, Dyke, and Hermes Citation2013, 150). For Adusei-Poku (Citation2015), the undercommons is a space of refuge which is all about survival (Citation2015, 4–5). We who feel homeless in the university are forced into refuge. We gather together to survive. We may gain satisfaction from small acts of marronage, but this is less about bringing the utopic common underground to the surface as it is a form of “radical escapism” (Adusei-Poku Citation2015, 4). Benveniste (Citation2015, v) tells us that: “The undercommons has no set location and no return address. There is no map for entering and no guide for staying. The only condition is a living appetite. Listen to its hunger for difference.” We need more than poetry, however. And we need more than a series of minor acts of resistance. As Srnicek and Williams rightly emphasize, resistance is a defensive, reactive gesture, resisting against. Resistance is not a utopian endeavour: “We do not resist a new world into being” (Srnicek and Williams Citation2016, 47). The undercommons, when one can find it, is a bolt hole, a place of refuge, a breathing space in the system. We need something more.

The current sociopolitical context has seen a vigorous crack down on public dissent and acts of civil disobedience. Understanding the legal and civil rights afforded by local and federal laws is an important first step for protesters challenging, through video activism and publicity, structural racism and socio-economic inequalities. Equally crucial is to recognize how racialized political rhetoric undergirds reactionary state policies for managing networked protest and digital activism. For example, in August 2017, the Trump administration announced the rolling back of an Obama administration policy from 2015, following the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, that limited the transfer of military equipment such as armored vehicles and grenade launchers to local law enforcement agencies (Jarrett, 2017). A few months later, in October 2017, leaked documents from the FBI counter-terrorism division revealed the agency labeled black activists “Black Identity Extremists (BIE)” who pose a significant threat to law enforcement safety (Levin, 2017). Policy revisions and racist discourses that criminalize black dissent compound the historical challenges black activists have faced in their opposition to state violence and their demands for a radical reorganization of social and political life. Analyzing the political language that criminalizes black citizens and critiquing the neoliberal law enforcement strategies that aggressively surveil black activists reveal how strained relations between law enforcement and communities of color do not stem from and will not be solved by video activism; rather, they are structural political-economic problems that require long-term organizing for change. The current social and political context demands activists make injustices and inequalities visible, but the intricate layers of surveillance that permeate online and offline communications foster a culture of fear and intimidation, particularly within the black community, which makes activists hesitant to speak out. Penney (2016) provided the first empirical evidence to support the claim that surveillance has a “chilling effect” on speech and dissent. Following the 2013 NSA revelations by Edward Snowden, Penney noted a statistically significant decrease in traffic to Wikipedia pages containing terms such as “terrorism” and “infrastructure security,” and concluded that citizens avoided associating themselves with language that may appear threatening to national security. Glenn Greenwald (2016), the investigative journalist who reported on and broke the Snowden story, reacted to Penney’s findings this way: “There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of authority crave surveillance. It’s precisely because the possibility of being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior. Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective conformity” (para. 11).

While Robinson’s thought demonstrates that there are more productive ways to construct emancipatory knowledge systems, ones that do not revolve around disciplined categories for knowing the world, there is still more to be said about why the latter resonate: They are recognizable. We are all trained to think and categorize reality in this way. Breaking up is hard to do. But there is more, even for those committed to unthinking. There is the methodological concern that these projects by constructing different ways of knowing, if approached haphazardly, could end up replicating other forms of silence. How do we imagine, as Hortense Spillers does, the kinds of instruments we might use to “play” these sorts of tunes?54 First, we might address other attempts to play. Many Black studies compositions have been uncommitted to the playing of instruments imagined as necessary by Spillers and others and have thus been insufficiently attuned to the ways that racial subjectivities necessarily incorporated sexual ones, to the detriment of truly liberatory sounds. Not only were these initial compositions insufficient, but they also misread the Black radical tradition through a particularly Western “bodily” framing—ones that reified male identity as normative. Black thought in its most freeing manifestations might create a model that undoes projects of race, undoes projects of gender, so that what Wynter called “the human” might emerge. 55 There, too, is the conceptual concern that revolves around how expansive these models might be and/or how closed they should be. Does antidisciplinary work require permeable boundaries, and if so, where would we mark their conceptual limits? These are critical issues to be resolved. As a consequence, Black studies— insofar as it seeks to claim for itself the goal of emancipation—remains undone, unfinished. And depending on how one resolves the above concerns, it might be conceived as perpetually incomplete, if the task is to consistently comprehend the real. What remains to be seen is whether we can take the energies consumed by projects of inclusion and diversity and the impulse to frame intellectual work as contributing to silences at the core of Western traditions of knowledge, and replace them with a project that does not require such silencing, even as it engages these knowledges, à la Robinson. Part of that requires unearthing the deep philosophical basis of the need to respond to silences. Lewis Gordon writes of African philosophers and their approach to the question of erasure, not as a project of addressing silences, but from a deeper need to address the “disappearance” of ancestors who must remain in view, as they must inhabit our present as much as our past: For the African philosopher and intellectual historian, the narrative is about ancestors and their deeds and thoughts and their suffering. If part of their suffering was their “disappearance,” which may be in effect similar to the wrong of an improper burial, then the act of getting the past right is also a corrective act of justice through the resources of truth. It makes the role of the African philosopher, whether that philosopher likes it or not, more than secular notions of method and procedure, and it poses a challenge that transcends aspirations enmeshed in the dialectics of professional recognition.56 The way from here to there is less a question of intellectual capacity than it is one portending other kinds of concerns. Creating proper ways of correcting centuries of Africans subjected to “improper burials” has been sacrificed at the behest of the “academic” concern of professional viability. Disciplines have made “realizing ourselves” a professional liability. And thus the kind of reimagining that Gordon, Robinson, Wynter, and others suggest is deeply political and vivifying them requires resistance.57 The tools necessary for this reimagining require different kinds of training and modes of knowledge that resist the formations in which we find ourselves. As Lisa Lowe suggests, and as responses to our often misplaced desire to address silences reveal, there are many “matters absent, entangled, and unavailable” to practices founded under the rubric of formations devoted to academic study.58 One possibility for another formation comes from the oft-cited work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. In their reading, those committed to Black radical praxis should take our locations in the academy and convert them into “the undercommons.” Harney and Moten’s framing of fugitive Black study resonates as a place committed to the unthinkable and to the unthinking of disciplinary silences that, absent an undoing, will perpetuate the role they have played in the power structures that enslave us. It is only by creating refuge for those whose life was “stolen by the Enlightenment”—by creating a space to think that is free of the academic and disciplinary justifications for that Enlightenment knowledge project—that we can develop a sort of foundation to think anew.59 This must become the only meaning, the only relations of our presence in the university. The academy is nothing to us if not a site to perpetuate the tradition of spaces like the Communiversity, the Centre for Black Education, the New School of Afro-American Thought, and other, more recent formations.60 Yet it must be remembered that there is a danger to institutionalizing the undercommons. The undercommons is the space for thinking about the formation and connecting to existing spaces that animate other ways of being and existing; it is not the formation. The formation requires a different world.We do not simply oppose the silences. We recognize they constitute a reality. A reality we would like to change. But we do not need to address these silences, on terms set by the silencers, to change our realities. A new reality only requires us to take what was never here, in those silences, to enliven what is always there, in our consciousness of what is possible; our song.

Increasingly, “power” grasps the subjects of algorithmic governmentality no longer through their physical body, nor through their moral conscience – the traditional holds of power in its legal discursive form [13] [13] As well as its disciplinary form – to use Foucauldian models of… – but through multiple “profiles” assigned to them, often automatically, based on digital traces of their existence and their everyday journeys. Algorithmic governmentality is quite close to what Foucault already had in mind with his concept of security apparatuses: 14The fact of power having a digital rather than a physical “grasp” in no way means that individuals are ontologically and existentially reducible to networks of data that can be recombined by apparatuses, nor that they are totally under the grip of these apparatuses. It simply means that, irrespective of their capacity for understanding, willpower and expression, “power” approaches them no longer on the basis of these capacities, but rather on that of their “profiles” (as a potential fraudster, a consumer, a potential terrorist, a student with high potential, etc.). Algorithmic governmentality further exacerbates the ambivalences of the time regarding the question of individualization. Our era is often considered as that of the victory of the individual, in the sense that an individualization of services is observed, due to the possibility afforded by statistical practices to closely target the needs and dangers specific to each individual. At the same time, it is also seen as an era in which individuals are jeopardized, as their intimacy, privacy, autonomy and self-determination are threatened by those very practices. Some even write about the risks of pure desubjectification. Both hypotheses – that of the individual at the centre of everything, and that of desubjectification – are, in our opinion, equally wrong. Let us see why. Is personalization really a form of individuation? 15IBM presents “individualized” marketing – “smart marketing” – as a revolution that is turning marketing and advertising into “consumer-oriented services”, sounding the great return of the customer-king who, placed at the heart of companies’ concerns, no longer has to even conceive of or express his or her desires, which are commands. In the words of Éric Schmidt, the CEO of Google: “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are [in other words we know your ‘school of fish’] the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them” (in other words a seemingly individualized prediction would be possible). In fact, this form of individualization resembles more of a hyper-segmentation and a hyper-plasticity of commercial offers than comprehensive consideration of the needs and desires specific to each person. In fact the aim is of course precisely not so much to tailor the offer to individuals’ spontaneous desires (assuming such a thing exists), as to adapt those desires to the offer by tailoring sales strategies (the way of presenting the product, of pricing it, etc.) to each person’s profile. Thus, “dynamic pricing” strategies or the adaptation of certain goods’ or services’ price to each potential customer’s “willingness to pay” appear to already be in place on certain airline ticket sales websites. This is not only about individualization: it is indeed market segmentation. Here is a rather trivial example: you go onto the website of an airline whose name we shall not mention (call it Company Y) and find out about the price of a flight to Pisa from Brussels, leaving in three days. Say that the price shown is €180. As this is a bit too expensive for you, you go onto another company’s website (Company Z), or you look elsewhere online, to find a cheaper ticket. Suppose that you do not find better. You return to Company Y’s website and – surprise surprise – you realise that the ticket price has increased by €50 within less than half an hour, just the time for you to do your research. This is simply because you have been attributed a “captive traveller” profile: based on your online browsing and your desired departure date, the website has detected that you really need this airplane ticket and that you will therefore be prepared to spend an extra €50 to get it, especially since you will have the impression that if you do not hurry up to buy it, the price will only increase. If, instead of reacting “logically” and buying the ticket as fast as possible, you change computer and IP address and visit the airline’s website once again, your ticket will cost you €180 instead of €230. Why? Because the vendor relies on your first reflex being to buy as soon as possible following the “alert” raised: the price is increasing, and fast. In this case, the consequences are relatively trivial. But this example clearly shows how, rather than scrupulously respecting each singular consumer’s individual desires, the approach automatically detects certain (purchase) propensities and the (in)elasticity of individual demand regarding a price variation to trigger a purchase. The latter will then be based on a reflex response to an alert stimulus short-circuiting individual reflexivity and the formation of singular desire. 16The aim is therefore to prompt individuals to act without forming or formulating a desire. Algorithmic governance thus seems to signal the culmination of a dispersal of the spatial, temporal and linguistic conditions of subjectification and individuation. These are being replaced by objective, operational regulation of possible behaviours, based on “raw data” that carry no meaning on their own and whose statistical processing is primarily designed to accelerate flows – avoiding any form of “detour” or subjective “reflexive suspension” between “stimuli” and their “reflex responses”. The fact that what thus “flows” is a-signifying is of no importance [14] Because digital signals “can be computed quantitatively irrespective of their possible meaning” (Eco, 1976: 20 cited by Genosko, 2008), everything happens as though meaning were no longer absolutely necessary, as though the universe were already – independently of any interpretation – saturated with meaning, as though it were therefore no longer necessary for people to connect to one another through meaningful language, nor through any symbolic, institutional or conventional transcription. It consequently seems that the apparatuses of algorithmic governmentality consecrated both signifiers’ emancipation from the signified (quantification, algorithmic recombinations of profiles) and the substitution of signifiers with the signified (production of reality within the world itself – the only reality that “counts” for algorithmic governmentality is digital reality) (Rouvroy, 2013b). This assignation of human action to a preconscious stage has everything to do with what Bernard Stiegler calls proletarianization: 17 “Historically, proletarianization was the loss of workers’ knowledge to machines, which absorbed this knowledge. Today, proletarianization is the standardization of behaviours through marketing and services, and the mechanization of minds through the externalization of knowledge in systems, such that these ‘minds’ no longer know anything about these information processing devices, of which they merely set the parameters. This is precisely what the electronic mathematization of financial decision making shows, and it affects everyone: employers, doctors, designers, intellectuals, leaders. More and more engineers take part in technical processes whose functioning they know nothing about, but which are ruining the world”. (Stiegler, 2011) 18Maurizio Lazzarato sums up quite well how a-signifying semiotics, exemplified by digital behaviourism, produce machinic enslavement rather than subjective alienation: 19 “If signifying semiotics have a function of subjective alienation, of ‘social subjection’, a-signifying semiotics have one of ‘machinic enslavement’. A-signifying semiotics synchronize and modulate the pre-individual and pre-verbal elements of subjectivity by causing the affects, perceptions, emotions, etc. to function like component parts, like the elements in a machine (machinic enslavement). We can all function like the input/output elements in semiotic machines, like simple television or Internet relays that facilitate or block the transmission of information, communication or affects. Unlike signifying semiotics, a-signifying semiotics recognize neither persons, nor roles, nor subjects. […] In the first case, the system speaks and generates speech; it indexes and folds the multiplicity of pre-signifying and symbolic semiotics over language, over linguistic chains, by giving priority to its representative functions. In the second case, however, the system does not generate discourse: it does not speak but it functions, setting things in motion by connecting directly to the ‘nervous system, the brain, the memory, etc.’ and activat[ing] the affective, transitivist, transindividual relations that are difficult to attribute to a subject, an individual, a me.” (Lazzarato, 2006) The paradoxes of personalization: an algorithmic governmentality without subjects but compatible with contemporary hyper-subjectification phenomena 20However “impressive” it may be, the hypothesis of desubjectification, of “the jeopardization of the individual”, of the individual diluted in networks, is in no way self-evident. One could even say that social networks and so on produce “hyper-subjects” – probably because for their users, they are full of signifying semiotics –, that many people have become obsessed with producing subjectivity, and that it has even become some individuals’ reason to live. It therefore seems too simplistic to us just to claim that the transformations underway produce desubjectification only, on the grounds that they weaken the bastions of intimacy (even this is debatable: certain devices in the information society, on the contrary, reinforce individuals’ isolation, sparing them from interacting with others…) and of privacy, and that they perhaps affect the conditions of autonomy and free choice (how this happens remains to be seen: intelligent environments sparing us from constantly having to make choices in perfectly trivial areas of life can also free our minds, make us available for more interesting intellectual tasks, make us more altruistic, etc.). Yet laws protecting privacy and personal data, essentially motivated by risks of personal, private or sensitive information being revealed, of inappropriate disclosures, of individuals losing control over “their” profiles and of infringements of the principles of individual autonomy and self-determination, have focused on erecting a series of essentially defensive and restrictive “barriers” around the individual. 21Without considering this as pointless, we would like to strongly emphasize this “algorithmic governance’s” indifference to individuals, insofar as it simply focuses on and controls our “statistical doubles”, in other words combinations of correlations, produced automatically and using big data, themselves constituted or collected “by default”. In short, what we are, “roughly”, to use Éric Schmidt’s term, is precisely no longer ourselves (singular beings) in any way. And that is precisely the problem, a problem which as we shall see is more the result of a rarefaction of subjectification processes and opportunities, of a difficulty to become subjects, than the product of a “de-subjectification” or jeopardization of the individual. With this in mind, let us return to the question of the subject, or rather of “avoidance” of the subject in the three-stage normative process described above. The first thing to point out is the difficulty to produce algorithmic subjects who conceive of or think about themselves as such. First of all, as we have seen, the subject’s consent is weak when they share information (these data can often be used while still remaining anonymous, but this could just as well no longer be the case, as the meaning of their anonymity has become relative). That is not to say that this information is “stolen”, which would allow the subject to oppose it, to stand as a subject resisting such theft. Rather, we are witnessing a considerable decline in the “deliberate” nature of information disclosures – most of the time trivial, insignificant, segmented and decontextualized information –, of these “traces” whose subsequent trajectory and uses, for the “subject”, are unpredictable and uncontrollable, even if significant research investment is currently going into developing technical tools to allow computer service “users” to better control “their” data. Second, in terms of its processing, the main characteristic of the “knowledge” produced is that it appears to emerge directly from big data, without the hypothesis leading to this knowledge being pre-existent: the hypotheses themselves are “generated” from the data. Finally, the normative action deriving from these statistical processes will always be closer to action on / and therefore by the environment than to action on the individual themselves. The latter’s action no longer arises in direct confrontation with an external norm – law, average, definition of normality –; their realm of possibilities is directly organized within their environment. 23For these three reasons, we argue that both the force and the danger of the generalization of the statistical practices that we are witnessing lies not in these practices’ individual nature, but on the contrary in their autonomy or even their indifference to the individual. To put this as clearly as possible, our problem is not being stripped of what we considered as our own, or being forced to give up information that would violate our privacy or our freedom. Far more fundamentally, it stems from the fact that our statistical doubles are too detached from us, that we have no “relationship” with them, when at the same time contemporary normative actions are directed towards these statistical doubles in order to be effective. The confessional constructs the subject of the introspection which probes his/her soul, virtue, desires and deepest intentions, for through the process of confession “he who speaks promises to be what he affirms himself to be, precisely because he is just that” (Foucault, 2014: 16); the law produces subjects of law intent on their equality and the impartiality of procedures; and the average man once seemed too average compared to the singular subject likely to contradict this average. Algorithmic governance, however, neither produces nor provides an affordance for any active, consistent and reflexive statistical subject likely to lend it legitimacy or resist it [15] [15] Our analysis claims a more nuanced stance regarding the trends…. That is precisely what we must now be attentive to, essentially through knowledge (even technical) and recognition of the discrepancy, the difference between these statistical representations and what constitutes individuals in their individuation processes, with the moments of spontaneity, the events and the sidesteps from possibilities anticipated that prevail in these processes.

The current sociopolitical context has seen a vigorous crack down on public dissent and acts of civil disobedience. Understanding the legal and civil rights afforded by local and federal laws is an important first step for protesters challenging, through video activism and publicity, structural racism and socio-economic inequalities. Equally crucial is to recognize how racialized political rhetoric undergirds reactionary state policies for managing networked protest and digital activism. For example, in August 2017, the Trump administration announced the rolling back of an Obama administration policy from 2015, following the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, that limited the transfer of military equipment such as armored vehicles and grenade launchers to local law enforcement agencies (Jarrett, 2017). A few months later, in October 2017, leaked documents from the FBI counter-terrorism division revealed the agency labeled black activists “Black Identity Extremists (BIE)” who pose a significant threat to law enforcement safety (Levin, 2017). Policy revisions and racist discourses that criminalize black dissent compound the historical challenges black activists have faced in their opposition to state violence and their demands for a radical reorganization of social and political life. Analyzing the political language that criminalizes black citizens and critiquing the neoliberal law enforcement strategies that aggressively surveil black activists reveal how strained relations between law enforcement and communities of color do not stem from and will not be solved by video activism; rather, they are structural political-economic problems that require long-term organizing for change. The current social and political context demands activists make injustices and inequalities visible, but the intricate layers of surveillance that permeate online and offline communications foster a culture of fear and intimidation, particularly within the black community, which makes activists hesitant to speak out. Penney (2016) provided the first empirical evidence to support the claim that surveillance has a “chilling effect” on speech and dissent. Following the 2013 NSA revelations by Edward Snowden, Penney noted a statistically significant decrease in traffic to Wikipedia pages containing terms such as “terrorism” and “infrastructure security,” and concluded that citizens avoided associating themselves with language that may appear threatening to national security. Glenn Greenwald (2016), the investigative journalist who reported on and broke the Snowden story, reacted to Penney’s findings this way: “There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of authority crave surveillance. It’s precisely because the possibility of being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior. Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective conformity” (para. 11).

The interregnum we have entered represents a time of war over fundamen-tally different ways of living, being, and relating. One can see such processes playing out in the realm of formal education in places like the United States where schools and universities have become focal points of the new civil war. Schools, universities, professors, teachers, and school board members are under relentless attack from neofascist forces. Laws are being passed in many US states that ban books and restrict teaching history and social issues related to slavery, native genocide, racism, sexuality, and colonialism. Yet the desire for commons and for modes of life based on difference, reciprocity, and mutuality remain and can never be fully enclosed. The emerging post-neoliberal enclosures represent a war over the future. They can be deconstructed and understood through grounded analysis of political economy and culture in a time of speed, fragmen-tation, and escalating war and ecological disaster. That part is easy. Yet our predicament often feels too big, too abstract, and too complex to effectively challenge or transform. This is precisely why, we would argue, that struggles over educational commons are so vital in the struggle over the future. Some like Jordi Collet-Sabé and Stephen Ball (2023) suggest we should abandon schools and universities. Rather than seeing them as vital sites of antag-onism and contestation over the present and future, their position effectively hands these public spheres over to the most nihilistic and regressive forces in the social body. Moreover, this kind of pseudo-radical posturing detached from pol-itics and material concerns, performs disrespect to countless teachers and stu-dents, who, despite the imperial legacies of schools and universities, struggle to find and create moments of community, engagement, and inspiration that can never be fully enclosed by the logics of capital or liberal modernity. The daily labor, work, interactions, and relations of teachers and students, in countless schools, universities, and communities, actually matters for politics and the future. Ideas matter. Kindness matters. Compassion matters. Joy matters. Edu-cational commons are real and are enacted whenever we gather together to teach, to learn, and to study (Harney and Moten 2013). This includes schools and universities, but also exceeds these institutions, encompassing broader con-testation over formative cultures, meaning, subjectivities, and modes of identi-fication crucial for reviving a sense of radical possibility grounded in democratic relations and aspirations. Commons are a tremendous storehouse of collective wealth, which includes knowledge, language, and culture. This is precisely why educational commons are such a rich site of radical possibility.

Scenes and sights and sounds that recede into the normative and quotidian, that recede into memory, recede because of current moments of unfamiliarity. But they are unfamiliar only insofar as they mark what we have allowed to recede, what we have allowed to go unnoticed. It is easy to think of white supremacist rallies on campuses—in Charlottesville, or protests in Berkeley, or the racial terrorizing in Boston, campuses all—as spectacular because they are unfamiliar. Yet, the unfamiliar is the spectacular such that the division between— the categorical distinction of—the spectacle and the mundane are disoriented, undone. Disoriented and undone like the (non)distinction between the inside and the outside. The counterintuitive is intuitive for someone else. Disorientation, in other words, names orientation for others, orientation otherwise. The distinction between the two is not categorical, not constant, certainly not about being, not about existence. But disorientation does, at the moment of feeling, mark connection to pasts, connections to that which could be otherwise. This themed issue of Critical Ethnic Studies slips between the presumption of safety that the supposed distinction between outside and inside is thought to provide, that the distinction between the spectacular and mundane is supposed to hold. We seek, in this themed special issue, to interrogate knowledge production in academia, to consider the ways disorientation is what is necessary, disorientation as a kind of making of the mundane spectacle, allowing the quotidian and ordinary to flash before us, in haptic force, as a perpetual moment of crisis. Disorienting first, then slipping between the space, diving in the break, the essays consider what is possible, which alternative structures and logics can be practiced and performed, what otherwise modality of thought, enfleshed, collective, improvisational action can emerge from the space of the neoliberal university. To extend conversations about the efficacy of Black studies, Indigenous studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, women and gender studies, critical ethnic studies, to extend and enlarge the conversations to a material practice of thinking and breathing and performing the plural possibility of alternative logics is urgent in these times. Such plural possibility would be boldly irreducible. Such plural possibility would be the grounds of operation. The neoliberal university is a choice that vivifies the political economy, a choice that the political economy thus in reciprocity vivifies for the university. But as a choice, it is but one of an infinite range of choices that could be made. The university is a site of struggle and contestation. And what the university attempts is against the flourishing of survivance and abundance. The line and root of the word “abundant” marks relation to an overflowing quantity, a large number, marks an exorbitance of sufficiency, an exorbitance of plenty. The university thrives in the antithesis to abundance, thrives in producing knowledge as a limited resource and good, a limited supply and store. The university is as much a place of inhabitation and dwelling for neoliberal logics of privatization and financialization as it is an idea, a concept, a way to think antisociality as the grounds for relation. The university is a gathering of resources but in our neoliberal world, such gathering is at the expense of the intensification of displacement and degradation through settler colonial logics of land acquisition, privatization of knowledge production and the adjunctification of faculties, the making students into customers, and the financialization and profitability of research projects. In its normative function and form, then, the university exists to make some knowledges major and others minor, and then to shortcircuit and extinguish minor knowledges, minor epistemologies, because they constitute an ongoing, thoroughgoing, and unceasing variation around a theme: the performative force of the critique of Western civilization. The university, in its normative function and form, is against the flourishing of abundance. Of course, in music at least, major and minor scales mark a relation to normative Western knowledge regimes, such that the very concept of the major and minor would be interrogated by otherwise music epistemologies. The minor knowledges the university attempts to extinguish, in other words, are only minor insofar as they mark relation to otherwise modalities of thought and practice. So we turn to what minor knowledges do to the university, what such epistemological displacements produce as a disruption within and without the university, minor knowledges as a meditative practice of collective improvisation as a knowledge project of the commons. So we write and think and imagine otherwise possibility, the as if of Derrida. The as if that Derrida describes imagines that what the university is and what it could be is a space of distinction. Riffing on Derrida, the university professes the truth, and that is its profession. It declares and promises an unlimited commitment to the truth. No doubt the status of and the changes to the value of truth can be discussed ad infinitum . . . But these are discussed, precisely, in the university and in departments that belong to the humanities. These immense questions of truth and of light, of the Enlightenment . . . have always been linked to the question of man, to a concept of that which is proper to man, on which concept were founded both humanism and the historical idea of the humanities.1 We are always struggling, in other words, over the conceptual object that allows to cohere the thought related to such an object. To think about the academy and what can be done is to interrogate what—no, really, who—is supposed to occupy the space of the university, who is its pedagogies and plans created to satiate, who is its imagined audience, who is its imagined thinker that would come to learn, and in the service of what kind of world is such learning, such audience, such pedagogy, created? We are precisely always at the concerns that critical ethnic studies elaborates as an interdisciplinary field, as a way of thought, a way of life. We must now interrogate and make disoriented the very man that is considered to occupy the space of thought and action from within the university. But we must now also interrogate and make disoriented the man who produces the conceptual possibility of a hermetically sealed place of thought as well. Turns out, it’s the same concept, the same subject, dancing around and producing itself, thinking itself into being. Derrida wants to treat the university as if it is what it says it is, as if it is a space of flourishing thought, as if it is a place of critical inquiry. And this against its modernization, its corporatization, its militarization. How to work within, think within, practice poetics of peace and equity from within the space while also remaining critically aware of how the space would attempt to exploit the very projects against the university in the service of the flourishing of the neoliberal logics of the university? This is the challenge. It is also the opportunity. It is a gap to which we must be mindful, a space and break of possibility. It is in that space that the flourishing of radical thought and mood and movement can occur. I follow Cedric J. Robinson’s line and root, his theorizing of the Black Radical Tradition as the thinking that charges my imagination for imagining what can be done with the university. Robinson, in The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership, offers that though myths exist that order the normative world, because they are mythical, they can be changed. What he offers, in other words, is a way to consider otherwise possibilities for thought, that the myths that order the normative world are but a choice made. And there is hope insofar as we can choose differently, choose alternatives.2 In this way, the essays collected are not just about what the university has excluded, what it has produced in terms of pain and suffering—though the university as concept and as a space of operation certainly has produced pain and suffering—but they are also about what can be done, how we can think, what we can be by utilizing the university as a site of inquiry and object of knowledge. We attempt ways to reimagine, to recast, to think myth differently of the university. This is a practice and process of imagination. And we can do this imagining as practice and process because the university that emerges from within Western knowledge regimes, epistemologies, and mythologies lacks the capacity to make impossible, to make a connection. We can reimagine and create otherwise mythology because connection as possible remains with us, is that which we seek and desire and outpour and extend. It is this failure, the failure to produce severance, a failure that produces the occasion for flowering in which we find joy, pleasure, knowledge as a collective project and practice. And, following the theorizing and thought Robinson made available for my own thinking, the essays collected here are not to exhaust the possibilities of discussing the problems or potentials of the modern university, but simply to suggest that therein is a potential for otherwise, for alternatives, to what is known and conceded as normative. We are not exhausting the conversation but suggesting that otherwise possibility has already been realized, is already there. 3

I hear a sound. The sound I hear is made possible by what I’ve backgrounded, what I believe is not there. Silence is a quality but not a reality, at least not in space-time wherein humans must breathe. Silence only exists in vacuums, so when we speak of silence, we speak of a certain inattention to a certain ceaseless pulse and noise. To attend to silence and its being backgrounded, to attend to sound that foregrounds itself, Joshua Myers offers a meditation on the music, the sound, the collective practice of black thought in “The Order of Disciplinarity, the Terms of Silence.” Meyers’s essay excites because he stages an intervention against the conventional wisdom, the sort of anectodal narrativity, of Black studies. He offers that it is “reductionist and misleading to conceive of the whole of Black intellectual history as a corrective to the silences that make Western knowledges.” So if Black studies, if Black intellectual history itself, is not simply a corrective, is not simply attempting to fill silence that makes Western knowledge, what is such a history and tradition? In another register, then, Myers is asking the question, is wrestling with the concern, that each of the authors are in their own ways thinking with and through and against: how to take the occasion of failure, constraint, or here, silence, and make something otherwise? These authors do not assume the finality and totality of such “bad” things but think their occasion as absolute—though not pure—possibility. In mathematics, absolute values are considered to be the value’s distance from zero. It is about relation, about space-time possibility then, about the way value and distance codetermine each other. These essays in this issue of Critical Ethnic Studies are each about absolution and the absolute; they each are in the direction of finding a ceremony, a ritual and performance, a collective improvisational intellectual practice and mode of life that is produced by life in the flesh, by the resistance of the object, life otherwise, life produced in and as minoritized knowledges. Sharon Stein cuts to the heart of the chase in her essay, “Higher Education and the Im/possibility of Transformative Justice.” Can we do anything from within this space? What is the purpose of even this issue if it is only a filler for curricula vitae and not for thinking about how we might inhabit worlds otherwise? Are these just rhetorical exercises? Stein’s essay is concerned with these questions. She notes the “colonial elisions in accounts of the neoliberal present that rest on nostalgia for a prior commitment to higher education as a state-sponsored means of educating enlightened citizens and ensuring social mobility” and cautions that the modern university is constructed with a genre-specific student in mind: “they are different versions of the same base modern subject, who is educated to rationally pursue affluence, maximize utility, and enact seamless progress and development through the supposedly universal governing architectures of the nation-state and global capital.” The work we contend against, in other words, is varied, textured, difficult. If we are about the unsettling of the university, the becoming disoriented within the academy, it would have to be by way of a force that works on the university as it works on us, a force that works on the university as if it works on us. Who is this “us”? Who would nominate oneself for such a status and position and station? And in the service of what, exactly, would such a nomination occur? This brings me, finally, to the conversation between Robin D. G. Kelley and Fred Moten, moderated by Afua Cooper and Rinaldo Walcott. They begin their conversation by responding to a question about a meditation on Black studies and Black politics, what they are and what they might be. When we begin to think about what something might be, we are in the terrain of the as if, we are in the hopes for the failure of the what is, we are desiring and imagining and sensing otherwise possibility. Moten thinks of Black studies as “not so much as an academic discipline or confluence of disciplines but as the atmosphere in which I grew up. And I love that atmosphere. I love the way that it felt, and I love the way that it smelled, and I love the flavors, and I love the sounds, and I love the movements.” And Kelley comes on down the line, offering, “social movements have always been the catalyst for Black studies. When Fred was talking about Black studies as kind of a way of life, as an atmosphere in which he grew up and which I grew up and many of us grew up, that’s so true. I never thought of it that way, but that is so true. In fact, if anything, Black studies is not a multidiscipline but a project, a project for liberation, whatever that means, and liberation is an ongoing project.” Can you hear it as you read? Have you sensed the sound from which my thinking emerges? Can you tell that I think with Fred Moten and Robin D. G. Kelley? Can you get a sense for the fact that what is offered in the pages to come has already worked on me, has already helped me practice life and the way I live it otherwise? Moten and Kelley key in on the sensuality of Black studies, which is to say the sensual experience the university seeks to harness only insofar as it transforms it into a knowledge object for its own existence, not a way to sense worlds, not a way to practice justice and equity and love. What these authors in their complexity, each of them, offer is the fact that we have to have a sense for this thing, a sense for otherwise possibility, have to make ourselves open and vulnerable to otherwise possibility while also protecting from harm the violence that attends being open and vulnerable. Can we fail to live up to the university while showing up for each other? How can we go about an intentioned failure to produce the politics of the neoliberal academy while concurrently practicing a poetics of relationality, sociality, fundamental connection, and disorientation and unsettlement? It’s felt in the music, in the poetics, in the forms minor life takes. To ask, in other words, what can be done with the academy is to question if we might currently be, what we might have been, what we might otherwise be. We displace linear time and space for a different relation to temporality. This difference would reconceptualize relation and sociality such that the genre of human’s thoughts are allowed to flourish and, then, the knowledge production of otherwise genre-specific humanism would be taken as a way to practice, to perform, the joy and pleasure and liberation of thought otherwise

The suffering induced by racism compels Black Buddhists to interpret teach- ings on non-self in nuanced ways. Many practitioners spoke of the impor- tance of bringing lived experience—including suffering due to racism—to the cushion. These practitioners spoke of the trauma endured by African ancestors and a need to honor the cultural heritages within African traditions, as well as to remember the agony of being dislocated from families, land, traditions, and languages. The Black Buddhist teachers and practitioners interviewed for this study are keenly aware that they stand on the shoulders of those who have paved a path to social and institutional access; they are also deeply in touch with the anguish that they themselves feel. Black Buddhist practitioners feel the weight of oppression in predominantly white sanghas as well as the larger social environment. They note that white practitioners will notice dark skin color without acknowledging their own discomfort and myopia. The hegemonic whiteness of American Buddhism can feel alienat- ing and isolating; whiteness perpetuates suffering in an environment that is, paradoxically, actively focused on alleviating suffering. As Black people become liberated, it is critical that white practitioners who possess privileged bodies—within white hegemonic contexts that privilege them—be compelled Racism and Anatta95 to interrogate their assumptions, their social power, and their tendency to individualize suffering. As white people “do their work,” it is important that Black people be vis- ible and affirmed in predominantly white spaces: in sanghas, workplaces, and in a society that aggressively polices people of color. In addition to promoting the value of Blackness, it is important to promote queer identity: to embrace the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. For many Black Buddhist teachers, finding a spiritual home in which queer identity is welcomed is as paramount as finding a sangha that grapples with race, racism, and privilege. In short, promoting Blackness and queerness allows for a social ease in a broader culture that suffers from white myopia, microaggressions, and systemic injustices. The ability to be honest about the origins of suffering facilitates exhaling, taking off masks, and cultivating of authentic pres- ence. Practitioners feel that they are showing up for their own lives, in their entirety; that they can embrace Black identity and also let it dissolve; and that race does not have to be the central facilitating aspect of their relationships with themselves. They can be whole people who possess dark skin, and at the same time, they do not have to focus entirely on their embodiment, even as skin color mediates their experience in predominantly white social spaces, including sanghas. In being able to take off masks and establish an authentic presence, Black Buddhist practitioners see themselves as being able to embrace two truths: conventional and mystical; relative and absolute. They can be “in the world, but not of it.” They acknowledge the importance of embodiment, but in the practice of silence, can also transcend the messages and norms that are relied upon in the social world. This is often a progression: Black practitioners grapple with their social identity while sitting on the cushion. Over time, the mind settles and a state of non-thinking is accessible. As Black practitioners access a psychological state of emptiness, not thinking, they can eventually hold together two ways of being: a self in the social world, and a non-self in a state of impermanence and constant change. The ability to reach this internal state is psychologically liberating. The Black Buddhists who participated in this study assert that psychological liberation is a precursor for social liberation: Black people must be able to acknowledge, transcend, and transform the degrading constructs of Blackness in order to achieve political freedom. Sitting with racially induced suffering is essential for seeing the depth of it, allowing these messages to loosen their grip on the mind, and deconstructing the damage that has been wrought. Meditation practice facilitates liberation. The foundation of liberation is self-love. Herein, Black practitioners come full circle: they start with the self—damaged, degraded, suffering—and even- tually transcend that self. In the state of non-self, they dissolve the outdated ideas that have perpetuated suffering. As they strive to hold the self and non-self in tension, they evoke an energy of love toward all beings, including themselves. Sitting with one’s internalized messages of degradation, rather than rejecting oneself, is a process of self-love. Challenging white supremacy and whiteness, in sanghas and broader US society, is self-love. In these par- allel contemplative and activist practices, Black Buddhist teachers and long- term practitioners are liberated.