(An) Allegory of the Undercommons: A Rhetorical Slipstream into the Fugitive Temporal Horizon

ABSTRACT

To survive the unfolding civilizational crisis will require thinking/feeling (sentipensar) across discordant struggles and systems of thought and breaking the repetitions of diagnostic criticism. To these ends/beginnings, I offer a Counterallegory of the Cave to revision The World by listening to those “strange prisoners” Plato stripped of voice/agency. What might The World, or discipline, look like if its origin stories were grounded in the cave’s pluriversal shadows rather than in the light/dark, master/slave, reason/emotion, and other/ing dualisms of Plato’s allegorical cosmovisión? I follow the cave dwellers into the shadows through a rhetorical slipstream—a speculative “weird rhetoric” where genres, temporalities, epistemologies, peoples, cultures, struggles, histories, contexts, and ontologies overlap, collide, and collude with one another—and move horizontally across the radical space-times where the undercommons of Black Study meet the epistemic south. I perform this rhetorical slipstream in the spirt of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call for refusing the order of discipline and Louis Maraj’s Black Feminist-inspired undisciplined scholarship, Katherine McKittrick’s “method-making” approach to Black Studies and her subversive/nonlinear use of Footnotes, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Raka Shome, and others’ demand for delinking from the modern/colonial episteme.

KEYWORDS:

• Abolition
• allegory of the cave
• Black studies
• decolonization
• epistemic south

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ This essay moves horizontally and nonlinearly through a rhetorical slipstream by embracing a subversive speculative blending of sorts where genres, temporalities, epistemologies, peoples, cultures, struggles, histories, contexts, and ontologies overlap, collide, and collude with one another toward creating openings for radical ends/beginnings. I am riffing on/crossing between the slipstream genre in literacy fiction with Indigenous slipstreams in time as a radical alternative to sense- and meaning-making. As for the former, as Bruce Sterling, who coined the genre describes it, literacy slipstream is “a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange (Smith 1989 par. 16).” Isabel Yap elaborates, ’

‘To me [slipstream] has some relation to writing that is weird or uncanny, but I also feel like a slipstream story is necessarily tethered to our world in a distinct way … The word slipstream itself calls to mind something thin and permeable, darting in and out of a body of water, or drifting from one world (ours) to something else. That slippery, delicate quality sets it slightly apart from other pieces that might also be classified under weird fiction' (quoted in Manusos).

Indigenous writers have often employed slipstreams in time as rhetorical, performative vehicles for subverting the violences of universal time. Through such native slipstreams, Grace Dillon observes, historical and cultural time no longer appear as linear or even cyclical, but instead manifests along a complex ontic-epistemic plane where time is simultaneous and fractured, wherein past-present-future exist in a single moment, all of which “models a cultural experience of reality” (4). The allegory as a genre has also long populated aboriginal and indigenous expressive cultures, whereas allegories and queer temporal re/figurations have been employed within speculative fiction to challenge heterotemporalities and dominant narratives. Tethered to this pluriversal world but not of it, I dive into the cave’s shadows to offer a thin and permeable (speculative) drift within/against multiple discordant reals, performing a weird rhetoric: non-linear, non-prescriptive, subversive, and yet full of potentials for making connections across this entangled world. Diagnostic criticism, running around in circles in repetition of the same, has ran out of steam; we need thinking-feeling for the world to come.

² In reading this slipstream, I encourage the suspension of disciplinary common sense for what an essay “ought to” look like. Organizationally, the counterallegory is broken into fragments (Parts 1–7) which are at times interrupted by theoretical/citational/methodological notes like this one—notes one might typically expect to see in the body of the text. At other times these notes come to the foreground but are interrupted by new Parts of the counterallegory that burst through such disciplinary modes of knowing/writing as a methodological insurrection. Following Indigenous slipstreams, this piece is also cyclical; that is, the end is also a/the beginning, and there’s a couple “quantum footnotes” that exist in two places at once. With Louis M. Maraj and Black feminist writers/thinkers, I also embrace the use of slashes (/) to gesture to a “semantic denotation of the space in which meaning fractures polysemically with/in, in-/out-/side, across, and between terms involved in such an equation” (149). In short, there is an order to the disorder and a (counter)logic to the (disciplinary) illogicality. I credit the editors, reviewers, and my coconspirators, Bryan McCann and Lou Maraj, for being supportive of and helping to push the boundaries of this experimental work. Citation for representation is a good start, but I have tried to embrace an ethos of citation as transformation—letting the words, thoughts, worlds, and epistemologies of the elsewhere and otherwise animate my authorial choices and guide me through the “the pandemic is a portal” (Roy) into otherwise worlds and different ways of being in/as/with the pluriverse. In all, this slipstream dips in and out of several disciplinary and social contexts and is indebted to many Black, brown, and queer voices in rhetorical studies who paved the way for and inspired me to embrace such alternative/subversive/affective forms of expression/knowledge production, from Maraj, Jo Hsu, E Cram, and Aja Martinez, to Robert Guiterrez-Perez, Chuck Morris, and many others cited herein. For sometimes, the feeling is the argument, the method is the theory, the poiesis is the point—and the refusal to define one’s terms is a politic.

³ If the commons are where ideas, resources, experiences, voices, and knowledge is intended to be generally accessible as a public good, the undercommons is that (ontic-epistemic) underground space inhabited/performed/cocreated by those who have been barred access to such goods—and who, in refusing “the call to order”—find community and affinity therein (Harney and Moten 125–34). The undercommons is marked and re/produced by the radical felt space-time of the dispossessed: Black people, brown people, poor people, queer folx, trans folx, Indigenous peoples, and the precariat class. In the context of the university, one place the undercommons manifests, it shows up within the “maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers” (Harney and Moten 30). In this underground space, “life and love flourish, community and collectivity thrive, practice and thought prosper, subversion and hope blossom” (common-interest sec. 4), and all of which together bear the lightning of possible storms, of ruptures waiting in the shadows, yet always already here as an unfolding possibility. For Zach Ngin, the undercommons

is not so much an excavation of resistance or a primer for revolution as a celebration of their inescapable, improvised fact. The undercommons are ineluctably other but never elsewhere. This is the enlightenment’s shadow archive, its flights of fantasy, its maroon community, the fugitive commons just beyond its blind underpass. And the things we’ve been waiting for: they’ve been here, if you listen; they are here, we are here; just listen (par. 2).

⁴ (Part 5) And in breaking through the quantum plane and reflecting back on their slipstream journey, they whispered together: What if the concepts of citizenship, freedom, liberty, democracy, dignity, and equality were grounded in the Haitian Revolution as an origin point (if one can claim “origins” at all) rather than with the French Revolution and so-called “American” Revolution that preserved the institutions of colonialism and slavery even while championing such concepts? And what if, as rhetorical scholars have similarly wondered (Chávez; Johnson), the discipline’s origin story started elsewhere and with different voices at the center—or, what if there was no disciplinary “center” at all, but rather an in/coherent multitude that broke free from the lies and dualisms of The Canon to better reflect the pluriversal worlds and “radical rhetoric” (Aswad) that surround? And what if that undercommoning non/discipline, that abolitionist rhetorical studies, that decolonial rhetorical studies, was already here in fragmented and piecemeal forms in the fugitive anti/canon—one partly reflected in the voices the cave dreamers discovered along their journeys, partly reflected in the citations herein?

⁵ The undercommons speaks to and through those who live it and bring it to life through mutuality, study, and relation. The undercommons is “located” in that fugitive space-time at the world’s end—in “the wild beyond”—wrought by enduring legacies of colonialism, modernity, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism. At the end of the world, in that nonlocality that disrupts ontology and subverts knowledge as such, one can locate and tap into that unstable (under)ground of subversive praxis, refusal, and affirmation—and join together with those communities-of-feeling toward a radical form of being/together otherwise. The Revolution is here, now, as an unfolding horizon.

⁶ These latent possibilities are always present in the here and now despite the forces that seek to en/close their potentials at every turn. As Federici remarks, “without indulging in any optimism, which would be irresponsible given the unspeakable devastation unfolding under our eyes, I would affirm that a worldwide consciousness is taking shape—more and more translated into action—that capitalism is ‘unsustainable’ and creating a different social economic system is the most urgent task for most of the world population” (Federici, Re-Enchanting 22–23). Trading one economic system for another would be wholly insufficient without abolishing the interlocking systems that define modernity’s dualist ontic-episteme, just as trading one set of citations for another means little without letting such voices and thought transform disciplinary assumptions/methods/foundations. For Harney and Moten, locating and embracing such embodied/copresent/fugitive practices/affective orientations calls for cultivating forms of relations with “maroon communities” of like-minded rebels, outcasts, the dispossessed, and subversives that are already here and now as an unfolding presence/tness. As Halberstam remarks, “The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things or die. All of us. We must all change the things that are fucked up and change cannot come in the form that we think of as ‘revolutionary’—not as a masculinist surge or an armed confrontation. Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine” (10–11). It is not the outcome that matters for Harney and Moten, but rather the collective productions/disruptions/interruptions produced within the break, the sharing in space and time, the feelings and feelings-in-common it all generates—for there is no guarantee what the revolution will look/feel like.

⁷ Preamble. Plato’s allegory planted the seeds for the dualist ontologies that define the One World Order while stripping voice and agency from the so-called strange prisoners in one of Western history’s most enduring stories of epistemic violence and gaslighting that is regularly taught to our students without questioning how the “rhetorical tradition” perpetuates these same dualist legacies by default. Thus, in recognizing the otherwise—irrational, illogical, pluriversal— ways these “stranger prisoners” speak, I ask: what would it mean to speculate about a world beyond this one from where the epistemic south meets the undercommons, and where, with Andre Johnson and Karma Chávez (“Beyond”), we might imagine an alternative rhetorical tradition? What would it mean to heed Amber Johnson’s call for “radical imagination” that goes beyond the hollow repetition of diagnostic criticism to create space for liberatory futures and otherwise ways of being/becoming? What would it look like to take up Lore/tta LeMaster and Amber Johnson’s call for “communication scholars to imagine worlds beyond disciplinary constraints” (281) and consider possibilities for hope, joy, and being/becoming? To begin moving toward the im/possibility of such unfolding endings/beginnings, please join me, take a deep breath, close your eyes, and (…).