Fugitive Listening: Sounds from the Undercommons

The Dematerialization of the Voice

The voice is commonly envisioned as clear, pure, and fully individuated. Aristotle (2001: 572) famously remarked that the ‘voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice’. Aristotle’s formulation poses a number of problems for how we might hear and understand the voice, the most glaring of which is that it prefigures the listener as one who receives the soul via the voice. The complexity of this image of the voice is that it is both of the body and in excess of the body – it is perceived as both physical/material and transcending that physicality. When ascribed a position beyond the body, the voice becomes dematerialized, transformed into a static image of a sound that is both illusory and impossible. The corporeal noises of the body – stutters, coughs, inhalations, exhalations, hiccups, clicks, squeaks, and pops – are separated from the purity of vocalization by an appeal to the voice as the seat for the soul of the subject. The ‘pure’ voice that we are left with, paradoxically, no longer contains any trace of the body (Dyson, 2009: 23–4). Disconnected from the body of its production, the voice can only ever function as a projection – of both the metaphysical soul and an idealized subject. The disembodied voice that becomes a fixed sonic image can be understood as an example of what Jacques Derrida refers to as the ‘ideal object’:

The ideal object is the most objective of objects; independent of the hic et nunc (here and now) of events and of the acts of the empirical subjectivity who intends it. The ideal object can be repeated, to infinity, while remaining the same. (Derrida, 2011: 65)

Classical thought posited that inclusion in the demos was predicated on the possession of reasoned language. The foundation of political consciousness, as Elizabeth Povinelli (2016: 125) explains, ‘is defined by language: a movement from the attribution of noise to an entity’s way of speaking, and thus its exclusion from the Logos of the demos, to a comprehension of the excluded entity as being capable of articulate language and thus its inclusion within the Logos of the demos’. Put plainly, possessing a voice that speaks is the precondition for entrance into human community. Conversely, the dismissal of certain voices as noise is a crucial way of excluding certain subjects from the category of the human (Rancière, 2001). The notion of inclusion is established by those who consider themselves the listener, that is, in the tradition of political liberalism the listener is one who decides which voices are understood and which voices are dismissed as illegible, erratic, hysterical, criminal, animalistic (in other words, the gendered and racialized Other). Under such logic, the voice is assumed to function in the service of rational thought – it is oriented toward meaning, where meaning is located in speech.

The dominant notion of subjectivity in the tradition of political liberalism emerges then from twin exclusions: on the one hand, exclusion from a subject’s own corporeality; and on the other, exclusion of the racialized and gendered Other. This process of abstraction allows the subject to be constructed as transcendental rather than immanent, universal rather than particular, rational rather than embodied, singular rather than plural. Understood as a disembodied universality, the abstract subject of liberalism promotes an idea of freedom and equality that works to resubjugate actual subjects into the established socio-political order. Wendy Brown (1995: 106) articulates this circuitous logic: ‘the subject is […] ideally emancipated through its anointing as an abstract person, a formally free and equal human being, and is practically resubordinated through this idealist disavowal of the material constituents of personhood, which constrain and contain our freedom’. These constitutive divisions are reproduced in a ‘sonic’ norm befitting the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject. This sonic norm, steeped in Western post-Enlightenment values and aesthetics, is predicated on the eradication of messiness and fuzziness. Stripped of all extraneous noises, the voice becomes separated from that which conditions its possibility, emphasizing coherence and transparency as the primary functions of (uni)vocal expression.

The question and problem of who is afforded a voice – of which voices are heard as speech and which voices are heard as noise (if they are even heard at all) – is connected to an epistemological project rooted in the making of categorical distinctions, a project that brings with it the violent processes of racial categorization and racialization, as well as class stratification, gender binarization, and patriarchal heteronormativity. The post-Enlightenment codification of the world into distinct categories emerges from a desire to make sense of irreducible difference. ‘Racialization’, as Ashon T. Crawley tells us, ‘is but one modality of creating a purely distinct category as a means to confront and contend with difference. The difference that is racialization must be made to be pure, and must be made to be maintained by the very possibility of pure difference’ (2017: 11). Racialization emerges in a particular epistemological and political moment (one that is ongoing) in which the capacity for ownership becomes the determinant of sovereign subjectivity. The self-possessed individual – and therefore the individual that can also accumulate possession of property – is defined by those who lack the capacity to possess (either self or property). The self-owning, self-accumulating individual is based on an a priori formulation of the supremacy of whiteness, which is defined against the negation of Blackness. As Cheryl Harris (1993) has argued, whiteness, in relation to the racialized Other, takes on the status of property itself. This racialization is reproduced in the abstract and idealized voice that indexes the exceptional, autonomous subject.

At play in the production of racial categories and hierarchies is an ideology that links use to ownership and accumulation via the notion of improvement. Harney and Moten (2017: 84) offer us this succinct formulation: ‘from the outset, the ability to own – and that ability’s first derivative, self-possession – is entwined with the ability to make more productive’. Here the logic of possessive individualism is extended to a relationship with land. The capacity to improve both oneself and the land that one cultivates (according to a set of Western metrics) formed the criteria for understanding who does and does not constitute a proper subject. Within this nascent capitalist logic, those exceptional subjects and communities deemed to possess the ability for continual improvement find that identity and property relations are yoked together through the juridical concept of status. Those who fail to conform to this logic of improvement are deemed to be in need of improvement themselves, as is the land that they inhabit. The violent process of producing racial classification systems and the coercive management of the colonized and the enslaved are rationalized as systems of improvement that lead these subjects toward the ever unattainable category of Human.

Saidiya Hartman extends the notion of this foundational exclusion and subjection by showing us how dominant forms of representation produce a form of pastoralism that imagines the relationship between owner and slave, colonizer and colonized as both consensual and reciprocal. Writing about the continuation of slavery by other means in the postbellum period in the US, Hartman (1997: 52) argues that the ‘prostrate yet perky Sambo’ is a ‘figure that reconciles infantilized willfulness with the abject status of the will-less object’. While the lack of will provides a moral justification for enslavement, it is the projection of an infantilized willfulness onto the enslaved subject that gives rise to the idea that such a subject has consented to, and is dependent on, the condition of subjugation. The image of the contented slave that sings and dances for the master obscures the brutality of subjugation by ‘giving voice’ to the enslaved subject. The performance of enjoyment is taken as evidence of free will, disguising the fact that such a performance is yoked to terror, suffering, and domination. Hartman (1997: 53) expands:

The pastoral renders the state of domination as an ideal of care, duty, familial obligation, gratitude, and humanity. The ruthless use of labor power and the extraction of profit are imagined as the consensual and rational exchange between owner and slave. This is accomplished by representing direct and primary forms of domination as coercive and consensual – in short, by representing slavery as a hegemonic social relation.

The policing and disciplining of the voice continues in the afterlives of slavery and colonization, as the emancipated individual remains burdened in the transition from bondage to freedom. The liberal rhetoric of equality in the US in the 19th century was entangled in the construction and proliferation of systems for classifying and categorizing the body politic. As Hartman (1997: 179) writes, ‘the identitarian formula upon which equality is predicated encloses difference within an arena marked as inferior, irresponsible, immoral, and perverse’. This enclosure of difference reveals the liberal conception of equality as one that preserves the right to exclude, establishing a ‘gap between formal and substantive equality’ (Hartman, 1997: 179). Equality can be understood, then, as equality for individuals belonging to the same categorization of person.

The formal abolition of slavery in the US was marked by the cultivation of conscience and responsibility as racialized disciplinary modalities. Here the concept of self-possession was rescripted for the excluded Others in order to emphasize submission, docility, obligation, and duty as the flip side of autonomy and will. The moral quality of responsibility was deployed as a way of managing a racialized population within a dominant order and constitutes a transformation from external to internal forms of discipline. ‘The emphasis on correct training, proper spirit, and bent backs’, writes Hartman (1997: 140), ‘illuminated the invasive forms of discipline idealized as the self-fashioning of the moral and rational subject’. The racialized deployment of a rhetoric of responsibility continues to be reinforced by forms of affective policing – such as the policing of speech, tone of voice, eye contact, and movement – designed to uphold a white social order and its hierarchies of class and race. Hartman tells us that in the postbellum period, the opaquely worded ‘unbecoming conduct’ was developed as a catch-all legal category for the management of a racialized population recently incorporated into the body politic:

The majority of the violence committed against the freed in the aftermath of slavery was incited by charges of unbecoming conduct, which included one’s dress, demeanor, movement through public space, tone of voice, and companions. ‘Unbecoming conduct’ encompassed any and all possible affronts to racist mores and bared the ‘micro-penalties’ of disciplinary individuation, which policed and punished everyday expressions of freedom. (Hartman, 1997: 148)

Sounds that Mark the Flesh

While the construction of the Western political subject requires the dematerialization of the voice, this is not to say that these soundings do not leave material traces. As Stoever argues, the sonic color line is a marker of the im/material presence of race. The sonic event is vibrational, a physical occurrence that cannot be completely stilled. Even the speculative sound of the abstract voice produces vibrations that have material consequences. As we have established, this voice, when abstracted from the body that produces it, creates a sonic norm imbued with the ideology of political liberalism, and this norm is seared into the flesh of the racialized Other. The racialized Other can be understood not merely as a spatial relation but a sonic and temporal one too. Making an explicit connection between settler colonial ideology and noise in the US context, Mark M. Smith (2010: 10) writes:

If colonial elites agreed on what produced sound, they also agreed on who produced noise. Native Americans, African Americans (slave and free), and the laboring classes generally were among the greatest noise-makers in colonial America. Colonial African Americans ‘disrupted the acoustemology of English speakers in fundamental, frightening ways: they chattered like monkeys, they bellowed like beasts, they mourned in chants … they delighted in drumming, they spoke a language that was no language.’ African Americans, like Native Americans and other nonliterate groups, ‘defied the surveillance of writing’ and made sounds that threatened to fracture the acoustic world of English settlers.

The sonic norm I have been describing inscribes itself on the flesh of Black and other racialized subjects. This notion of enfleshment is indebted to Hortense Spillers, who makes a distinction between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ as ‘the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions’ (1987: 67). She goes on to say that ‘before the “body” there is “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography’. Spillers describes the way that Black subjects are reduced to ungendered and undifferentiated flesh. The analytic of the flesh is given by the body of the Black female slave who is stripped of gender and severed from the relation of motherhood as a necessary precondition for transformation into chattel. While bodies can signify (gender, full life, subjecthood), the flesh exists as undifferentiated matter. I am arguing that there is an aurality to this process of reduction; that is, that the failure to conform to sonic norms and standards confirms one as flesh. The noisiness of Blackness, its wayward and irreducible sonic expression, confirms preconceived categorical distinctions that circumscribe Black subjects to ‘the position of the unthought’ (Hartman and Wilderson III, 2003). This reduction to flesh or bare life transforms the body into a site that can be violated with impunity. The vibrations produced by this speculative sonicity mark the Black subject as an open site for inhumane forms of violence and brutality.

For Spillers, the flesh is not merely an analytic for understanding the brutality that Blackness is subjected to but also gives us a grammar for understanding subjectivity outside of the liberal conception of the Human. ‘The flesh’, writes Alexander Weheliye by way of Spillers, ‘is not an abject zone of exclusion that culminates in death but an alternate instantiation of humanity that does not rest on the mirage of western Man as the mirror image of human life as such’ (2014: 43). The fact that the flesh precedes the body marks it as open-ended, and this relation of precedence allows a conception of subjectivity outside of the tradition of political liberalism. The flesh is a relation of affectability and always contains a possibility in excess of the relation of constraint. Cedric J. Robinson locates the excess inherent to flesh in the hold of the slave ship when he tell us that the cargo of human commodities also ‘contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality’ (2000: 121–2). He continues, arguing that ‘these were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks—men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension’ (Robinson, 2000: 122). Noisy collective expressions and beliefs travel in the hold of the ship, expressions that shape the flesh and resist its reduction to an abstracted commodity form. The flesh then is always yoked between constraint and liberation.

The vibrational nature of sound marks it as that which cannot be contained. Sound leaks, refracts, echoes, surrounds, immerses. ‘Vibration is the internal structuring logic of matter’, writes Ashon T. Crawley (2015). ‘Because everything vibrates’, he continues, ‘nothing escapes participating in choreographic encounters with the rest of the living world’. Sound establishes a sphere of relational encounter, a zone of vibration that cannot be stilled. The flesh that precedes the body is full of noise – flesh pulses with a vibrational intensity that refuses the imposition of sonic norms. The enfleshed voice resists the operation of abstraction that transforms it into an ideal object; it is simply too full of noise to adhere to such logics. Crawley (2015) elaborates:

If everything moves with its own velocity and force, everything sounds out, every object participates in the ceaseless pulse of noisemaking. This embodied refusal to be stilled will have been a gift, the gift of flesh, the gift of otherwise possibilities for thinking, for producing, for existing. This refusal of stilling has its discordant and harmonic registers, its choreographic-sonic force.

Fugitive Listening

To think the sonic in relation to the flesh is to listen for a sonicity that might open toward a different conception of subjectivity, to listen for what Crawley (2017: 2; emphasis in original) refers to as ‘otherwise possibilities’, to listen for a fugitive impulse that cannot be contained. For Moten, fugitivity lies at the heart of Blackness. It is another way of conceptualizing Blackness in relation to the ‘scene of subjection’ (to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s (1997) phrase) and as a force of operativity that both precedes and exceeds such a scene. The concept of fugitivity speaks to the failure of colonizers to destroy and deculture Black and Indigenous subjects. It speaks to practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. And yet, as we have already established, fugitivity also speaks to a subjectivity defined by the yoking together of subjugation and freedom. The complexity of the concept of fugitivity is that it is both anti- and ante-, both an opposition to anti-Blackness and a force that exists before the emergence of anti-Blackness. Blackness itself can here be understood as something that structures anti-Blackness and exceeds that structuring: ‘If blackness will have never been thought when detached from anti-blackness, neither will anti-blackness have been thought outside the facticity of blackness as anti-blackness’s spur and anticipation’, Moten tells us (2017: viii). He extrapolates:

Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument. This is to say that it moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety. (2018: 131)

This notion of a wild and errant sociality that is shaped by collective production and steeped in irreducible difference can be found in Harney and Moten’s (2013) conception of ‘the undercommons’, a radical reimagining of the traditional concept of the commons that is indebted to the Black radical tradition and not bound by physical space. Moving through the public and the private, the undercommons describes an orientation toward a fugitive sensibility that is inherently collective. The undercommons is defined by an acknowledgement that the structures that we inherit are broken beyond repair – it describes a space where flesh reaches out to find other flesh, establishing a social relation defined by the incapacity to be stilled. It is a space of polyphony and noise, a space that moves toward an understanding of subjectivity that is always already predicated on a collective relation. The undercommons, as Harney and Moten put it, is where we can ‘plan to be communist about communism, to be unreconstructed about reconstruction, to be absolute about abolition’ (2013: 82). Developing this notion in relation to the contemporary university, Harney and Moten describe a radical modality of being in common that might exist within, and yet work against, structures that impose what they refer to as ‘the call to order’ (2013: 125).

What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. (2013: 28)

Listening is one way that we might attune ourselves to the vibrations that move in, and through, these undercommon spaces. Such a listening might be figured as a listening from below: a listening that attends to those sonicities that are always already in excess of the given grounds of representation. Fugitive listening strains to hear the vibration of vibration that both emanates from, and reverberates into, the flesh. Listening in this way is an active refusal to adhere to the distinction between noise and music or noise and speech. Noise possesses an affectivity that cannot help but resist categorical distinction, opening a space for not-yet-formed modes of being together. It is to listen to, and for, voices that interrupt the regulated flows of language; it is to listen to, and for, voices that refuse to become transparent and legible; it is to listen to, and for, an abolitionist imperative. Fugitive listening refuses the fixity of the idealized voice, laboring instead to listen to, and for, the movement of things and the forces of interruption. It is to reorient the ear away from the prevailing notion that political speech must take the form of a coherent and legible demand. Fugitive listening is a modality that embraces those voices – Indigenous, Black, femme, queer, trans, for instance – that have previously been dismissed as noise.

Sounds from the Undercommons

Frank Ocean’s scream – the sonic event that began this meditation on the voice – is such an expression of this fugitive vocality. It is a noise of excess that cannot be contained, a noise that moves relentlessly toward the edge of that which constitutes subject and object. But Ocean’s scream is also captured as a recording, and as such, is able to be reproduced ad infinitum. Some might say that the technology of sound reproduction performs an operation of abstraction akin to the transformation I have described above of the voice into an ideal object. This argument posits that technologies of mechanical reproduction sever the voice from the body that produces it, transforming it into an ‘acousmatic’ object that can be repeated, as well as bought and sold (Truax, 1984; Schafer, 1994). But the problem with this account is that it relies on a set of a priori assumptions that ‘hold human experience and the human body to be categories outside history’ (Sterne, 2003: 20). Such arguments appeal to a conception of the body as already coherent and whole, and an idea of technology that is abstracted from its embeddedness in the social sphere. Jonathan Sterne, in his deconstruction of the ideological assumptions behind such arguments, writes:

[T]hese authors assume that sound-reproduction technologies will have a disorienting effect on the senses that are otherwise grounded in coherent bodily experience. The assumption of sensory coherence requires a notion of a human body that exists outside history. For instance, the claim that sound reproduction has ‘alienated’ the voice from the human body implies that the voice and the body existed in some prior holistic, unalienated, and self-present relation. (2003: 20–21)

Of course it is not only in song that we may find voices that operate against the logic of improvement and accumulation. We can find such fugitive impulses in the murmur of a crowd, the noise of a riot, and, as I will elaborate, in the hushed tones of a gossip network. I am interested in gossip as a critical function of the undercommons, suggesting that it might constitute a useful medial modality in the ongoing project of breaking and building socialities.

Gossip has long been positioned as a diversion from the pursuit of true knowledge, characterized as a groundless form of feminized speech that trades in falsity and/or triviality. But this has not always been the case. ‘In its original meaning, gossip implied no gender; it meant “godparent,”’ a meaning derived from the etymological roots of the word as ‘godsibb’, which designated God’s kin (Spacks, 1982: 19). The evolution of the term sees it come to be used to refer to a drinking partner; a woman’s female friends invited to be present at a birth; and finally, in its modern connotations, to describe a woman who engages in idle talk, or, the idle talk commonly associated with women (Spacks, 1982: 19). Common to each of these definitions is the notion of an intimacy that is established via proximity. In each iteration gossip denotes a certain closeness – physical, social or familial – and in its original usage describes a relation of care connected to forms of kinship that foreground collective ownership and exchange. Silvia Federici (2004) expands on the conception of gossip as an intimate and feminized social relation, arguing that the term took on a derogatory connotation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this period, the coercive accumulation by dispossession of both resources and bodies also required the destruction of feminist forms of sociality and solidarity. Federici connects the dismissal of gossip to such forms of persecution as the witch-hunts and to biopolitical measures concerned with the regulation of family life, gender, and property relations.

Inherently multi-vocal and polyphonic, gossip evades capture and cannot be singularly owned. It is a form of radical knowledge that moves outside of official discourse, circulating noisy information across a social body. As such, we can make a historical distinction between modes of idle talk that affirm and uphold the dominant socio-political order – such as the locker-room talk of influential men – and gossip, a mode of speech that has evolved as a way to circumvent the dismissal of certain voices as noise. Indeed, the refusal to hear gossip as speech is, paradoxically, what gives rise to its interruptive potentiality. This circulation of speech under the guise of noise creates the possibility for a ‘discursive’ social body that may not be recognized as comprising political beings yet may nonetheless be practicing politics. Gossip serves as a productive mechanism, making possible the construction of alternative ways of knowing and socializing that place generative difference at their core.

As I have argued elsewhere (Brooks and Lorange, 2017: 39), ‘gossip both points to subjects, objects, events, and affects, and foregrounds points of view. This dual pointing is a gesture that is simultaneously internal and external, an index of the subject and their relation to other subjects, objects and events in the world.’ Gossip requires a mode of listening that, to recall Jean-Luc Nancy (2007: 6), ‘[strains] toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible’. To participate in gossip is to engage in feedback and feed-forward loops between speaking, listening, processing and recording/inscribing. This does not refer to linear feedback but rather to a complex dynamic of looping in which directionality is never stable. Feeding forward and backward, gossip involves the dual operations of capture and conversion in which speaking and listening fold into each other. Taken in this way, gossip suggests an active and relational mode of listening, a transversality that attends to social and cultural contexts and dynamics rather than simply the content of the speech. Gossip involves a listening with rather than simply a listening to. Listening with is a modality in which ‘a listener is always in movement, allowing the resonances to carry one off on the various lines of flight the sounds induce – toward other sounds and sound-making, into the mesh where one registers and attempts to comprehend how such sounds leave their mark – then back again to the event itself of listening’ (Nardone, 2015).

Fugitive listening attends not only to formal and informational content but also to the forces, relations, and contexts that code conversational exchange. Here we can think of gossip as a mode of speech in which affective forces and intensities are transmitted, in addition to conversational content. Gossip, writes Judith Butler (2018: 2) in relation to José Esteban Muñoz’s championing of this minor mode of speech, is ‘a way of passing along affect that makes it larger, letting it lift off from reality, where the affect is not a discrete bit of excitation, a quantity: it conditions and enters the collective crafting that augments its intensity; it is never quite separable from the scene of address that it transforms’. Participating in gossip requires a type of listening that attends to the extralinguistic affective aspects of speech that are produced by context and conveyed in tone. A fugitive listening attends to that which escapes and exceeds signification. It registers the forces and intensities that circulate within the social field and has the potential to point out what is actually going on at the register of the felt.

Gossip is speech that not only cannot be owned but can only be collectively produced. Of course, this is not to suggest that gossip is always virtuous – my intention here has not been to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of gossip, an established argument that attempts to elevate gossip from the status of inauthentic speech by redefining the distinctions between trivial and significant, positive and negative. Instead, I am interested in how fugitive speech acts like gossip might interrupt the disciplining of knowledge by foregrounding noisy and relational modes of speaking and listening. In such a communicative system, ‘bad’ sentiments might be as valuable as ‘good’ ones. As Butler (2018: 12) writes, ‘bad sentiments … can signal the capacity to transcend hopelessness … Feeling bad things, like anger and rage, and doing bad things, like being rude, can fulfill the editorial function of commenting upon the massive unacceptability of present reality’. This admittance of ‘bad’ sentiments into the structure of fugitive speech foregrounds the value that the gossip network places on the affective dimension of communication and the structures of feeling such exchanges produce.

Attending to both the affective and informatic dimensions of gossip requires a transversal listening and speaking practice that is similarly collective and collaborative. Gossip involves a dual movement between acquisition and dissemination, and is sustained by a community who contribute small fragments of information into a networked discourse that is constantly evolving (Ayim, 1994: 87). The test of informational validity is socially determined, not by an appeal to an a priori truth but by a consensus that emerges from collaborative inquiry. It operates according to an epistemological order outside of those that we inherit from liberal and Enlightenment traditions. Gossip refuses to adhere to, or to be curtailed by, the conventions of discipline or the demands of formal discourse, instead promoting an informal and collective mode of knowledge production. As a mode of inquiry it is speculative and imaginative, and yet the fear of gossip is that it contains and will reveal truths that might otherwise go unacknowledged. Taken in this way, we can think of gossip as producing a type of under- or counter-history.

While gossip promotes unrestricted inquiry, it also trades in the secretive. However, gossip’s relationship to secrecy is complicated as there is always a risk that gossip will spread beyond its intended recipients (with consequences that will vary depending on the content of the gossip and the political context of its capture). Never totally private, we might think of gossip as the speech of counterpublics, producing and disseminating what Moten (2010: 84) refers to as ‘the open secret’; that is, the freighting of sensitive information across the break, in the open. This information is never static and never fixed but rather in a continuous state of evolution – ‘the secret is only transmitted in transformation and transmutation’ (Moten, 2010: 105). For Moten, the secret presents itself as an obscurity that may not be decipherable via traditional interpretive strategies but that is nonetheless felt or known in some form or another – it is a relation of the flesh. The secret is engendered in the act of communication and so must be understood as an open secret. While the secret may be marked by a certain obscurity, it is never completely private or closed off from exchange. Animated by the circulation of open secrecy, gossip also always involves the production of collective social relations. It is a mode of speech that is conditioned by its contact with others, a mode of speech that refuses to be stilled and refuses to be disciplined. It inhabits an antagonistic relation to the proper and the proposed. Here I am thinking about gossip as a mode of speech that arises in the midst of collaborative activities such as study or ‘minor’ planning, returning here to Moten and Harney’s notion of undercommon modalities. Gossip’s continuous movement between the secretive and the open can be understood as just that movement that supports the threshold of a becoming-public of information.

Opposed to the practices of governance and policy, fugitive modalities of study and planning foreground multi-vocality, producing a cacophony of demands and practices that refuse to conform to the corrective demands put forward by policy and policy-makers. For Moten and Harney, policy comes to represent a mentality or disposition, and the mobilization of policy produces governance, which they define as follows:

Governance should not be confused with government or governmentality. Governance is most importantly a new form of expropriation. It is the provocation of a certain kind of disinterestedness, a display of convertibility, a display of legibility. Governance is an instrumentalisation of policy, a set of protocols of deputisation, where one simultaneously auctions and bids on oneself, where the public and the private submit themselves to post-fordist production. (2013: 80)

We can locate something akin to a gossip network in certain mediated environments that allow for participatory interaction, such as in the use of Twitter in the lead-up to, and duration of, the 2015 Baltimore riots that occurred in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of police. This networked discourse is captured in a chapbook produced by the collective Research and Destroy New York City, titled The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary, which forms an archive of the online activity of a sub-community of Black Twitter – Baltimore teenagers. Looking at this archive, it strikes me that the production and circulation of information on Twitter can function like a gossip network, working to produce counterpublics that have the potential to disseminate ‘news’ outside, or in excess of, the official channels (news media, statements from police and politicians). Of course, this is not to claim that Twitter is a radical political platform. On the contrary, it emerges from the corporatization of networks that configures the social as a mass of discrete individuals, a phenomenon that has given rise to the univocal blustering that is a hallmark of Donald Trump’s online presence, for example. Rather than ascribing an inherent radicalism or conservatism to the platform, we can understand Twitter as belonging to a diagram of contemporary power that is inflected by different kinds of subjectivations.

Against the violence of white supremacy, this collection of tweets indexes a collective voice that announces the existence of other possibilities, of forms of life that exceed the terms given by the modern subject. This gossip network is a chorus that is full of noise that: freights sensitive information across the break; indexes a fugitive public animated by an improvisational imperative; and documents Black performances that are mediated by a complex interplay between technocultural processes and structures (bodies, software platforms, algorithms, digital networks, data flows, affects). It is a set of operations that move, following Moten’s formulation, according to ‘the reality of escape in and the possibility of escape from’ (2008: 1745).

Thinking back through the logics of race and racialization, I want to suggest that we might understand those voices that engage in fugitive modes of speech such as gossip via Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of Black Feminist Poethics, which she describes as ‘a moment of radical praxis [that] acknowledges the creative capacity Blackness indexes, reclaims expropriated total value, and demands for nothing less than decolonization’ (2014: 85). Ferreira da Silva (2014: 86) proposes that we read and listen in order ‘to un-organize, un-form, un-think the world’, such that we might interrupt ‘the dominant fantasies of a kind of knowing that can only determine itself […] with iron hinges of universal reason’. Attending to those voices that belong to the order of the flesh might constitute a first step toward a process of un-organizing, un-forming, and un-thinking the world. In other words, we must listen to such voices not out of some desire to incorporate them into liberal conceptions of the public sphere, but rather to radically transform our very conception of the public sphere. Developing a listening practice attuned to these fugitive voices might be the first step toward a form of sociality that exists outside the epistemic violence of liberalism.