“They bring out the latent dreams and lost power that dwell within these silly details. Thus what I’d like to identify as perhaps the queerest commitment of my own book is also close reading: the decision to unfold, slowly, a small number of imaginative texts rather than amass a weighty archive of or around texts” (2). 

The task of the exegesis is to wear Elizabeth Freeman’s queering of close reading and Moten’s dissonant study as modalities and, while realizing a harmonics, or cacophony, between them (between the acts of attending and surrounding), approach the chapter, “Politics  Surrounded,” and refuse or inhabit its semantic doing and undoing as to employ a poetics of begetting and forgetting (and dancing with) its infinitesimal or nebulous imaginaries (in the fog of  the surround, the eye of the settlement, the spiral of the commons).

I am curious as to what is “the hard materiality of the unreal” (3). What does it constitute? What does it mean to be hard and material? We’re hard, as we are material, and suddenly so; they did not expect us, they did not expect to see us and encounter us, for us to be. i am thinking of being born, being and becoming a thing, or us, as a surround of things. Is this the false image? the image of the laager, surrounded by us, a hard-ass material? So, do my studies in materialism fail me, here, where we regard the settler’s encounter with alterity? Do they fail for the one thing purveyors of the false image do not wish to portray in the surround is a thing, for a thing, in a settler’s semantics, connotes or refers to an inertness, an object-hood (and nevertheless a material), meant to be seized, activated and exploited? Thus the thingness of the bodies that compose the surround is not a facet or proponent of the false image, as we were not things in that, we were agentic and antagonistic.

To occupy a state of thingness around the eye of the settlement, as a storm or a fog, is to ‘threaten’ and engender the advance of the wagons and thus, across half a geo-temporality, to have induced and inducted the false image of colonial settlement into Hollywood (for the alternative to the false image inverses the direction of the subjugation depicted). So, i want to be a thing, then… for they treated us like that—and to reclaim the thing is to reverse back the stature or disposition or exposition of the false image, for being (or burrowing into) the thing enables me to refuse its original colonial assignments and inhabit the Space (that had been sucked clean by these assignments, becoming nothing and absent yet excessive; a vacuum) in which i’ll listen for alternatives and possibilities and fail to hear some, so i must create some out of nothingness (a nothingness that i was granted when i became a body and lost my mind, a nothingness i must hold and bind to my ontology, for if not they will see emptiness, and attempt to fill it, fill me with mind).

I WANT TO REFUSE THE SEMANTICS OF THE THING AND STUDY ITS NOISE. For once i want to be in the dissonant wilds (and, as Moten tells me, i was in it all along, the surround, undergirded by the webbed, vacillating spiral of the commons). How have politics enabled me to go there? Perhaps, they've told me a few things. Perhaps, i would be challenging Harney, Moten by saying that my participation in collective “academic misery” has provided me the language to liberate myself (in some contexts) OR to wander or fall into the subversive, fugitive Space or Place of what they call the “undercommons,” because without attending to academia, and, in turn, submitting myself to the noise of illegibility (and the substances it encompasses and prevents me from grasping), i would not have known about that sort of revolutionary’s substratum. i would not have known that the dissonant study of the ‘fugitive academic’ constitutes the act of belying and observing (and falling into) the disorderly “music” of subversion through modalities beyond (or beside) the tactics of critique (3).

Harney and Moten say: “critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique” (3). Does critique, therefore, know itself to be a radioactive substance central to its political radiation? i close-read this with an image, which depicts critique emitting (or discharging) politics while witnessing politics as the site of its own emission (or discharge) in a mandalic relation:

While we may apprehend this observation as solely a metaphor, i am inclined to speculate more literally... If critique is radioactive, it must have a half-life, and therefore, a point at which its particles deactivate, causing critique to unbind from politics (whose efforts live on as mutations in bodies) and become a sort of artifact of the radiation-that-once-was. Therefore, if critique is a sort of object or substance, then politics is the object-field (to co-opt Butler’s terminology) that radiates, then permeates the substrata of the bodies that surround or dwell in it (1). Indeed, the reach of radiation is not contingent on human-scale proximities, and expands toward and onto “another world in the world,” and i “want to be in that ” (3). This other-world, in which ex-humans or things perceive this political radiation as no more than a slight shaking or rumbling (much like at the edge of an earthquake), is a Space and Place, an undercommons, perhaps, where “we inhabit and maybe even cultivate… absence” and “show up as” or radiate “absence, darkness, death, things which are not” back into the world. This world, in which we are subjected, from which we are abjected (3).