For a poetics of rage in the business school undercommons

The business school undercommons: Relating beyond critique or reform

The business school is arguably the most archetypal representation of the technocratic and managerialist model of ‘Global academia’ today (McCann et al., 2020; Münch, 2014). As Laura Colombo rightly describes it, “the business school systematically fails to care about those who care, narrowly focused as it is on producing outputs to achieve high levels of performance, measured through research outputs, journal rankings, employability rates, etc.” (Colombo, 2023: 135). Indeed, fierce competition for resources and symbolic status, obsession with metrics, struggles to find and keep employment positions for recent graduates, overexertion of faculty, pay freezes, staff cuts, crippling student debt, insidious practices of discrimination against minorities, sexual misconducts, increased feelings of isolation and anxiety, and a profound loss of faith in a better future, are all constitutive of the business school experience today (Parker, 2018). With every new day surfaces a new account of wide and multilayered mistreatment, mismanagement, mishandling or abuse targeting racialized and/or financially overburdened students and faculty, chronically overworked staff, and a generally overextended system of ‘total administration’ (Dar et al., 2021; McCann et al., 2020; Ozturk and Berber, 2022; Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021). This litany of crises big and small has been described at length in the recent years with various degrees of bleakness (Fleming, 2021). However, following Dar’s recent intervention to “unsettle, contaminate and challenge [. . .] the linearity of white masculine despair” (Dar, 2022: 149) of Fleming’s book and its accompanying universalizing assumptions, I would like to foreground the existence and the political transformative potential of a generative minoritarian mode of angry relationality to the business school’s oppressive institutional realm. By minoritarian, I refer to Cindi Katz’s definition of the minor as the expression of “a particular and undermining relationship to mastery” (Katz, 1996: 492; Katz, 2017) not as a numerary entity. Here, minority is an oppositional standpoint not a number. If the major is the source of enunciation, the minor is a category that opposes it and constantly questions and unsettles it. In other words, “the ‘minor’ is not so much a stable form existing in opposition to something major” but is “relentlessly transformative and inextricably relational.” (Katz, 1996: 489). A number of minoritarian initiatives have emerged in recent years from the folds of the academy and have created multiple pockets of action that, for the most part, are driven by angry reactions toward the many injustices of the neoliberal academic machine. These ‘minor gestures’ (Manning, 2016; Vachhani et al., 2024) vary in levels of formalization and organizing but constitute various strata of reluctance toward the dominant practices. Some recent examples of these minoritarian engagements are the creation of Tim-adicals, a self-proclaimed ‘timid but radical’ writing collective of academics whose “goal is to tease apart the injustices, vulnerabilities and complicities of our workplaces” (Tim-adicals Writing Collective, 2017: 692), or the emergence of communities supporting women of colour managing their career and wellbeing in an increasingly hostile academia like the Women’s Café ² in the UK, or the recent creation of Ekstasis, a collective whose goal is “to collaboratively re-think management research and education through promoting experimental, philosophical and critical thought” (Ekstasis et al., 2025). These collectives are often carried by a powerful shared anger aimed at the multiple systemic injustices within the university’s symbolic, intellectual and material confines. In Tim-adicals’ words, “we choose to work from the simple principle that injustice is perpetuated when the work, lives, and dignity of certain individuals and groups are valued less than others” (Tim-adicals Writing Collective, 2017: 692).

I argue here that an organic critique of the business school has always existed in its own separate realm: a minoritarian, oppositional stratum of relating to the institution that is neither drawn to a professional mode of critiquing and despairing, nor to a reformist hope of ‘improving’ the business school. To do so, I am beholden to the idea that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call the undercommons (Harney and Moten, 2013). Reluctant to offer a strict definition of it, they refer to it as composed of “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. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional.” (Moten and Harney, 2004: 104). The undercommons refuse the logic of assimilation into the university as a site of professionalization, academic capture and capitalist extraction. The undercommons is the idea that for those who never feel at ease within the institution, there is always an alternative, a possibility of refusal to be coopted. For the Undercommoning Collective, a network of radical academic organizers mostly centered in North America, the undercommons are “networks of rebellious solidarity that interlace within, against and beyond dominant institutions and power structures” (Undercommoning Collective, 2016). In the undercommons, shared practices of non-belonging and dissent, shape a constantly reinvented sociality of being “in the university but not of it” (Moten and Harney, 2004: 101). In other words, to be in the undercommons is to be driven by a fugitive spirit and a “fugitive convivial praxis” (Rashid et al., 2023) that needs to escape the institutional symbolic, material and epistemic enclosure ³ .

I would like to build on those ideas to offer the undercommons as a possible mode of conceptualizing an alternative relationality to the business school, an unfaltering presence-in-anger to its unhospitable nature. The undercommons is not an alternative space or location of critique but an uncomfortable relationship to the business school. Harney & Moten talk about the undercommons as a dis-location (2013: 91), a break from locating oneself, a break from established structures. In Fred Moten’s opus In the Break (2003), he theorizes the break- amongst other conjectures- as that moment in Jazz or Hip-Hop music when musicians step out of the rhythmic structure to improvise and explore other modes of relating to the music. The dis-location or break of the undercommons are another way of being in but not of the business school. The undercommons are a mode of relating to the institution that is driven by a resolute and tenacious resistance to and refusal of the crushing neoliberal machine. It is a shared inimical orientation to the business school that refuses to settle for the academy of misery (Halberstam, 2013). In other words, the undercommons recognize the power of the oppressive institution but make do with it and try, day in and day out, to collectively create pockets of escape, or fleeting moments of shared freedom and reinvented practices. Being in the undercommons of the business school is being in a permanent state of theoretical, epistemic, and practical displacement; it often entails finding enclaves that constitute “where we have come to understand ourselves as second-shift workers engaging in fugitive planning so that we might survive ‘academic capitalism.’” (McCann et al., 2021: 115). The feminist concept of second shift (Hochschild and Machung, 2012) is akin here to a parallel history of academic life, one that structural injustice makes inevitable. However, second shift work also incidentally capacitates an undercommon oppositional relationship to institutional enclosures as Bryan McCann and colleagues explain: “second-shift labors performed in what we call undercommon enclaves are constitutive of oppositional narratives that help render our first shifts more livable and productive, and, at times, mobilize strategies of resistance.” (McCann et al., 2021: 114)

The undercommons characterize the particular relationship that people who face daily oppression and intersecting discriminations on the basis of their gender status, sexual inclinations, racial assignation, body ability, class alignment, or even visa status, enact toward the business school. It is the specific subversive and minoritarian relationality that results from what Iris Marion Young called ‘structural injustice’ or a categorical assignment that reproduces and maintains inequality (Young, 2008). That relationality is constituted by “the (implicit or explicit) expression of material and discursive relations, not an objectively or subjectively measurable condition” (Hoover, 2022: 146). The undercommons are a presence-in-anger relationship to an oppressive institutional enclosure but they are also a presence-in-resistance and a presence-in-dissent that are manifested by a motley crew of racialized, minoritized, excluded, invisibilized, discontented academics that are often the most impacted by academia’s precarity and symbolic violence (Abreu-Pederzini and Suárez-Barraza, 2020; Bourabain, 2021; Dar et al., 2021; Grier and Poole, 2020; Settles et al., 2021). Building on my own professional experience, the many conversations with colleagues and students over the years as well as the springing of varied initiatives that I’ll discuss further in the essay, I propose that there is a collective minoritarian anger within the business school that stands against the many injustices and inequalities resulting from its neoliberal ethos (Fotaki and Prasad, 2015) and that it is a specific type of anger, close to what is termed Lordean rage, that is at play (Cherry, 2021). I’ll describe Lordean rage below and show how it is a powerful tool of affective self-defense for those who have not much power left in the system. Lordean rage, is ultimately an affective mode of survival in the business school undercommons.

A genealogy of Lordean rage: Audre Lorde and the poetics of anger

Historically, collective anger has been the source of profound societal transformations. From the fights for decolonization around the world to the movement for Civil Rights, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. Meaningful action against oppression has always been the result of anger and indignation channeled collectively. Today, the dominant point of view on anger is a liberal one that places consensus at the heart of societal functioning and abhors antagonism and conflict (Contu, 2019; Nussbaum, 2016). The systematic rejection of anger as negative, counterproductive, and irrational is often advocated by proponents of the liberal status quo for whom ‘shaking the boat’ is unrequired. This vision of society is that of the powerful, those who are displeased with the demands of those on whose backs the established order is maintained and consolidated. In academia, examples of the silencing of dissident voices abound. Amongst them blatant practices of dismissal and exclusion of angry minoritized and racialized academics (women and people of colour) from centers of power (Corbin et al., 2018; Rodriguez and Boahene, 2012), practices of silencing through tone policing or tone vigilance (Bailey, 2018), racially driven hiring practices (Grier and Poole, 2020) or what has been deemed ‘subtle racism’ (Mandalaki and Prasad, 2024). These practices of domesticating anger act as techniques of subjugation aimed at keeping the peace and refusing any questioning of the established order. They softly nudge individuals to swallow their pride and to move on for the sake of ‘caring’ for others. A great illustration of those practices is given by Audre Lorde when she recalls the way a white woman reacted to her reflections on anger at an academic conference: “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you” the white woman said, to which Lorde answered: “But is it my manner that keeps you from hearing, or the threat of a message that [your] life may change?” (Lorde, 2007: 125)

There is an extended genealogy of anger studies in feminisms of colour that stretches from the powerful interpellation of Sojourner Truth in her Ain’t I a woman? speech at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Ohio in 1851 to the vibrant determination of Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga to put women of colour at center stage in their remarkable anthology This Bridge that is my Back (1983); and from Ida B. Wells’ indefatigable campaigns against lynching and for women suffrage to bell hooks’s hopeful determination in Killing Rage: Ending racism (1996). Many Black feminists and feminists of colour have given a particular attention to anger and rage (often taken as synonymous) against an unjust sexist, racist, homophobic society. In MOS, recent engagements with Black and decolonial feminisms have also discussed the critical role played by anger against racial and gender inequalities even if anger was not central to that work (Bell et al., 2021; Fotaki and Pullen, 2024; Liu, 2019, 2022, 2024; Manning, 2021; Paludi et al., 2019). Interestingly, the recent work on caste also denotes an important implied level of rage and anger even if it is not explicitly addressed in the papers (Bapuji et al., 2024; Chrispal et al., 2021). However, despite the relevance of that literature, more work in MOS needs to address anger within a broader social context rather than relying on individualized psychology-driven approaches (Elfenbein, 2023).

In order to understand the concept of Lordean rage developed by philosopher Myisha Cherry and that I center in this essay, an important detour via the work of Audre Lorde is crucial. In The Uses of Anger, Lorde proposes that anger has a particular form of energy and force she calls ‘erotic’ that transcends the “tyrannies of silence” (2007: 40). She proceeds to develop- amongst many poetic gems- three main arguments about anger. First, Lorde articulates how anger is born of the deep-seated injustices resulting from racism and sexism. Focusing particularly on racism, she shows how that “belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance” (2007: 124) is rooted in a very specific understanding of ‘difference’. She discusses the three ways ‘difference’ is usually dealt with in American society: It is either ignored, tolerated or destroyed. When it is tolerated, it is in fact considered inferior and its eradication tends to be an irremediable corollary. Tolerance becomes a tool of ordering society, of keeping ‘difference’ in its place, in sum, a mechanic of oppression. The subsequent work of Wendy Brown on tolerance builds on the ideas developed by Lorde and shows how tolerance, lauded as the only possible way of co-existence in a pluralist society by classical liberal thought (Murphy, 1997), works to depoliticize, naturalize and culturalize ‘difference’ without any concern for the material and historical conditions that produced and maintained that ‘difference’ in the first place (Brown, 2006). For Lorde, the superiority over ‘difference’ is at the source of social injustice and results in a profound anger for the oppressed or the ‘different’.

The second axis developed by Lorde is that anger can be a radical tool to destroy the Master’s house ⁴ and that radical tool consists of a powerful energy, an erotic force. The erotic for Lorde is not to be amalgamated with the sexual or the pornographic. The erotic is a lifeforce, a vital spirit that is in all of us that has been wrongly reduced and restricted to the sexual sphere. The pornographic for her, characterizes an objectifying gaze that simultaneously negates to the person the possibility to look back (Palazzi, 2023). It is a particular regime of visuality that is “a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling” (Lorde, 2007: 54). In other words, the pornographic is a regime of power that reduces an object or a person to what they are determined to be in the eye of the power holder, it is a tool for oppression not liberation for Lorde. The erotic is what liberates because it comes from feeling and not sensations, which for Lorde is the source of a creative energy: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” (2007: 55). Out of that raw vitality, we can express ourselves fully and limitlessly. Its vibrancy irradiates every aspect of our interactions with the world. The erotic for Lorde has to do with touch, with the haptic, with being-in-touch with oneself and the universe. It is a radical expansive mode of being that determines a new type of relationality, one that channels a variety of affects (amongst them anger) toward action and transformation.

Finally, Lorde defends the idea that rage, if connected to that erotic lifeforce can lead to action and lead to change rather than destruction and self-hate. This ‘productive’ dimension of rage is critical for Lorde who seeks to develop a poetics of anger, an ecology of rage (Palazzi, 2023) that thrives on love rather than hate. For Lorde, those whose anger is driven by hate “believe they have nothing to learn from the people whom they hate” (Lorde, 2007: 124) whereas the erotic anger she offers is driven by love and transformation. In her poetic engagement Lorde asserted that “Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.” (Lorde, 2007: 127). It is this sense of wonder and possibility that years later feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed also sees in anger when it is not silenced but transformed into collective action. Anger at systemic injustice she says, is not anger against but also anger for, leading to something that has yet to be articulated. In that sense, anger is never fully determined and can be visionary (Ahmed, 2003).

The term Lordean rage coined by philosopher Myisha Cherry in her book The Case for Rage (2021) was developed from her close reading of Audre Lorde’s articulations of anger that are described above as well as from her precise and informed reading of Black feminist thought. Alongside what she terms rogue rage (‘me against the world’ rage), wipe rage (rage at a specific ethnic group or at minorities), resentment age (anger at being disempowered), and narcissistic rage (anger determined by egocentric self-entitlement), which all share an inward looking, person-centered anger, Lordean rage is for Cherry “metabolized anger—the virtuous channeling of the power and energy of anger without the desire to harm or pass pain” (Cherry, 2021: 24). Lordean rage is transformative anger; it is very different from anger that seeks revenge or retribution. It has a collective dimension, and it seeks to energize into actions that can be small but are always altering oppression in one way or another. Myisha Cherry extends the reach of Audre Lorde’s thinking about anger to more recent iterations of the fight against racism and sexism (alongside other social injustices such as homophobia, ableism, and a variety of other discriminations). Cherry conceptualizes Lordean rage essentially as a liberating collective practice and defends its powerful political nature (Cherry, 2022). It is important to note that Cherry never defends Lordean rage as virtuous, or irreproachable, but she discusses it is a ‘non-ideal emotion in a non-ideal world’, and she argues that it is critical and essential because, Lordean rage is not itself the issue, but it is “a clarifying response to the problem of injustice” (Cherry, 2021: 8).

Lordean rage is rooted in oppression, or rather, in the realization of one’s own oppression. For philosopher Céline Leboeuf “anger is revealed to be a political emotion in the sense that it enables members of oppressed groups to reaffirm themselves under oppressive conditions” (Leboeuf, 2018: 24). The concept of Lordean rage builds on Lorde but also on a long tradition of feminist philosophy and Black studies scholarship that argues for the inherent value of anger to fight oppression (Chemaly, 2018; Frye, 1983; Lugones, 1995; West, 2016). Lordean rage was articulated more recently by Brittany Cooper as an ‘eloquent rage’ (2018), not a problem per se but an appropriate response to a problem (Srinivasan, 2018) by those who usually bear an “evidentiary burden” (Cherry, 2021: 45), an obligation of justification of their anger which in itself, constitutes a form of epistemic injustice. For Cherry, Lordean rage builds on a “triple emotional burden of oppression” (2021: 45): experiencing the injustice, carrying an emotional response to it, and being constantly asked to convince others of the legitimacy of that emotional response. Interestingly, on the question of anger’s legitimacy, Lugones (1995) brilliantly shows that anger of the oppressed is always de-legitimized by the powerful who set the realm of legitimacy in which that anger is received in the first place. For her, anger has two orders: a first order, that is essentially communicative and needs to be expressed and heard, but she suggests that there is a second order to anger of the oppressed that rejects norms around what is deemed acceptable or legitimate in their anger. She goes on to offer that the oppressed change the frame of intelligibility of anger and posit it as a refusal of the hegemonic terms of order always already decided by the center of power. Lordean rage is close in meaning to that second order anger that shifts the focus from a reading of anger as an individual affect, reacting to a specific ‘trigger’, to a complete reconfiguration of one’s relation to what made that ‘trigger’ exist in the first place. In other words, Lordean rage is a rage against what made racial and social injustices possible, it is a structural rage, one that aims less at ‘pacifying’ society and more at radically transforming it. Lordean rage within that framework can therefore do without the approval or rejection of its aptness by the powerful (Srinivasan, 2018). It does not seek legitimate recognition from those who are in power but wants to change the legibility of the world imposed by the powerful. As such, Lordean rage comes to embody an inherent form of sovereignty and dignity to those who channel it. It is an energy, a breath of life, a vital spark that generates its own transformative spirit. Lordean rage is not pathological anger but a path to salvation for those who stand in opposition to an oppressive machine.

In the context of business school, Lordean rage is not a person-centric rage, it constitutes something akin to a collective emotional and relational energy (Baker, 2019). It is that energy that also holds the undercommons and that creates affective solidarity (Vachhani and Pullen, 2019). It is perfectly illustrated by the Ekstasis collective created by a group of angry business school academics who also organized a workshop at the 2023 Critical Management Studies Conference entitled Fifty shades of Rage: Prefiguring a school for organising. The paper published in Ephemera in 2025 in the wake of that workshop (Ekstasis et al., 2025) discusses how Ekstasis initiatives echoed with a surprisingly large number of business academics at all career stages who feel increasingly alienated and enraged by ruthless practices such as the reliance on unattainable metrics, gendered invisible work, unfair promotion and tenure practices, increased precarity, silencing of dissenting voices, and a lack of collective action to tackle broader issues such as climate change and systemic racism (Blell et al., 2023; Bourabain, 2021; Dar et al., 2021; Jashnani, 2025; Pyke, 2018; Rodríguez, 2018). Their Lordean rage stems from the continuous deterioration of their working and living conditions and more poignantly for some of them, it is fueled by the ‘evidentiary burden’ (Cherry, 2021) that they are asked to carry to constantly provide illustrations and concrete examples of the way they are being discriminated against. Lordean rage is reignited every time these claims are doubted or questioned or gaslighted and every time a call for more justice is expressed. Lordean rage in the business school is not only a collective transformative energy that comes from sharing outrage against the many injustices experienced and witnessed, but also a way to exist in anger together in an increasingly atomized and atomizing context. For those who feel Lordean rage, the goal is not retribution or revenge, it is to stand together in solidarity and help each other reclaim dignity in a crushing context. Lordean rage fuels a collective energy of survival in hostile contexts that acts both as a generative force for change and a way to refuse a well-established system of domination that uses soft technologies of subjugation to incessantly tame and discipline people into compliance and renunciation. What being moved by Lordean rage offers for instance, is a collective subversive answer to the calls for more ‘ontological empathy’ in the research field (Prasad and Śliwa, 2022) that posit anger as pathological and antithetical to thriving and that offer forgiveness and letting go as appropriate caring practices. Lordean rage is an apt response to the hegemony of discourses of benevolence and empathy that nourish the status quo and end up silencing those they were supposed to stand in empathy with whilst constantly reminding them to be nice to each other and swallow their grievances ⁵ . Disregarding anger as inappropriate and labeling it ‘unhealthy’ misses the point. It psychologizes it and leads to a pervasive ‘hush culture’ that perpetuates the existing dominating order under the guise of care and implicitly delegitimizes any manifestation of anger toward the system as unpleasant, unhelpful, and unproductive. I argue in what follows that delegitimizing Lordean rage, rather than invalidate it, reaffirms its aptness, and in so doing, cements it as an affective mode of preservation and survival.

Lordean rage as affective self-defense

In her book Self-defense- A genealogy of violence (2022), philosopher Elsa Dorlin demonstrates that there always was a double genealogy to defending oneself: one that was considered ‘legitimate’ and that stood for the protection of privileges (wealth, whiteness, masculinity) and the other that was deemed ‘rogue’, illegitimate, unlawful and that originated in subalternity and oppression (enslaved peoples uprisings, anticolonial fights, feminists movements and, in academia, Rhodes Must Fall, Decolonize my Curriculum, #MeToo, etc.). This double genealogy also applies to Lordean rage. In other words, some are allowed to be angry and manifest it whereas others are pathologized, silenced, gaslighted because of it. Indeed, depending on who it is attributed to, anger can be welcomed as a healthy youthful and rebellious mindset like it is depicted in this laudatory portrait of the Business School Dean at Bentley University titled “The ‘Angry Young Man’ Who Became A Business School Dean” (Damast, 2015), or that same anger becomes an ‘intellectual bondage’ that ‘Angry Black women’ academic are consistently reduced to and are still made to carry (Doharty, 2020).

The double genealogy of anger carries at its heart the indignation and injustice that Audre Lorde’s writing so poetically depicts. It is what feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan calls ‘affective injustice’ (2018), the unequal access to legitimate rage, or as she explains it, “the injustice of having to negotiate between one’s apt emotional response to the injustice of one’s situation and one’s desire to better one’s situation” (Srinivasan, 2018: 13). The impossibility of that feeling of injustice runs parallel to the historical impossibility for racialized and minoritized subjects to defend themselves. Historically and as shown in Dorlin’s work (2019), there were always two polarized conceptions of ‘the self’ to be defended: a juridical-political tradition of legitimate defense articulated to various practices of biopower, and a ‘dark’ fugitive resistance to those practices through a continuous struggle to reclaim bodily integrity and dignity that she calls a “martial ethics of self” (2019: 8). The ontological question is key here: who are the selves that are legitimated in their anger and those who are not?

I came to reflect upon these questions as I realized that I was taken by an immense and overwhelming feeling of rage that lasted for years. I was, as the expression goes, beside myself with anger on multiple instances in which I realized that my anger was never seen as legitimate but always approached as either ‘unjustified’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘extreme’, or even ‘ridiculous’. Interestingly, to be ‘beside oneself’ is how Frantz Fanon (1963) defines the state of being colonized. To be outside of your body, alienated, in a position of exteriority that whilst suspended in time and space allows for a better general view. There is lucidity in anger – Lugones (1995) talks about the “clear-headedness of anger” - and the paradox of being beside oneself is that it is only by experiencing it that you give body to that anger. Collectively, angry bodies are powerful, they march, they protest, they build encampments, but they also constitute themselves politically. By being together in Lordean rage, we also become political subjects. For Fanon, the only way to liberate the colonized was to liberate their anger and welcome it as a new act of subjectification. In his radical view of anger, you become a subject when you embody your rage. By becoming a subject, one recognizes oneself and is recognized as such and therefore, can act. The anger shared by those who are not legitimated to express it can become a source of recognition, care and self-respect if used in the Lordean sense. It becomes a form of affective self-defense against an unjust world. In situations where the double-bind of being wronged and not being allowed to manifest any emotional reaction to it, Lordean rage, the erotic life-driven energy of rage becomes the only form of affective self-defense available to those who are never really recognized as legitimate angry subjects. It is an anger that propels collectives forward (Contu, 2018, 2020; Ekstasis et al., 2025) and serves as a conduit to self-respect and dignity.

A few hopeful calls were made recently to ‘civilize the business school’ (Colombo, 2023) and to collectively take action to make academia better and more livable (Contu, 2019; Korica, 2022). These engaged critiques and reflections are useful and welcome. Yet, I would like to push further in this essay and not call for more traditional critical modes of resistance in the business school (Alvesson and Szkudlarek, 2021; Rintamäki and Alvesson, 2023) or for more proposals for change. My aim is not to offer another ‘professional’ critique of the situation that would seek institutional validation and reinforce institutional norms without really contributing to the transformative change Lordean rage calls for. Today, the neoliberal business school “tolerates criticality to the extent it can domesticate and commodify such work in ways that reflect the norms of civil society” (McCann et al., 2021:115); this essay itself arguably contributes to the reinforcement of these institutional norms by appearing in a well-established critical journal. However, in line with the spirit that animates it, it is fugitive in the sense that it does not hope to improve or ‘fix’ the current situation or to offer advice to the powerful on how to achieve progress based on the multiple instances of past dissent. This is a non-reformist engagement that can be understood as a speculative practice or an ongoing rehearsal (Harney and Moten, 2013).

Through the idea of the undercommons, I would like to think and imagine a fugitive critique, an otherwise relation to the world (King et al., 2020), an alternative modality to being either a sycophant or an adversary of the university. It is a modality of critique rooted in refusal, not in disengagement; an active refusal to be coopted affectively by the neoliberal machine. I would like to suggest that there is another mode of relating to the business school that has to make do with the situation but that is also not interested in offering superficial improvements to an unjust and dysfunctional system. Adjacent to the master narratives of decline and deterioration, there was always an alternative oppositional dissenting narrative, one that existed outside the official borders of the knowledge enclosure, a narrative of escape, of circumvention, of sidestep. This is illustrated in the words of the Undercommoning Collective, a self-described “North American network of radical organizers operating within, against, and beyond the (neo)liberal, (neo)colonial university.” In their founding essay, they state the following: “We refuse to suffer silently the depression and anxieties the university-as-such and its constant crises instill, trigger and exploit. We will not relinquish the senses of radical wonder, passionate curiosity, and critical integrity we create together. We insist that the splendor of the university is not to be found in the mahogany or the oak of its aristocratic chambers but in the tapestry and grain of insurgent collaborations” (Undercommoning Collective, 2016). This undercommoning spirit can be found in other initiatives through which minoritarian academics have built common bonds toward finding a way of surviving institutional hostility such as the creation of independent outsider community gatherings like Ekstasis, or the launch of the Peer Community in Organization Studies initiative ⁶ - an open access community that reviews, recommends and publishes papers in a collaborative and transparent manner. There always was a collective shared experience of anger born of marginalization, invisibilization, gendering, exclusion, de-legitimation, a “space of minor knowledges and experiences that do not seek to become a major or representative form, instead forming tools from discarded refuse and remains” (Shukaitis, 2009: 167) that led to enact/embody the notion of survivance. In the words of indigenous poet and scholar Gerald Vizenor “Survivance is not just survival but also resistance, not heroic or tragic, but the tease of tradition, and my sense of survivance outwits dominance and victimry” (Vizenor, 1999: 93). Survivance is a modality of being outside the traditional dichotomies of adherence or critique. It is based on an understanding that refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the system that delegitimizes and crushes you and simultaneously refusing to be seen as solely a victim of it, is a strong act of reclaiming your dignity.

For a poetics of rage in the business school undercommons

In business schools, where ostentatious demonstrations of dissent are rare, multiple forms of mundane, daily micro-resistances outside of the established social normative structures are happening (Parker, 2021). Recently, MOS scholars have drawn attention to the role played by business in the deep-seated social injustices that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated further. They challenged the ideological foundations of racial, gender, environmental, and labor regimes of inequality globally, and through that, they are also openly embracing their anger toward an indefensible system (Peredo et al., 2022). This anger, akin to Lordean rage, is to be welcomed and embraced. In fact, it is salutary in a burning world.

Here, the use of time is key. Today, how we employ our time is implacably determined by the institution (Means, 2021). We are entrapped in neoliberal time in the business school. Worse, our relationship with time is fraught. Indeed, Shahjahan (2020) shows that neoliberal time in academia functions through a shame logic that subordinates and disciplines academics whose various socializations are based on integrating that dominant conception of time. However, the spirit of the undercommons subversively reminds us that “in the face of these conditions, one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can” (Moten and Harney, 2004:), what we can steal is time. Changing our mode of relating to the institution by fugitively reinventing ways to escape institutional time is profoundly subversive because time is the shape of capitalism today. Time is the ultimate power and the institutional assemblages that construct, (re)produce and solidify time, hold the system together.

Some of us create new paths, new modes of teaching and learning and some play with the rules, slightly bending them, and by doing that, help others in various unruly ways. The forced reliance on virtual platforms following the recent global pandemic despite its cost for academics and students opened several fugitive paths from the policies of relationality imposed by the institution in the form of cross-disciplinary study and writing groups, collective online spaces, mentorship initiatives, support systems, informal seminars, etc. From Barbara Grant’s systematically muting her microphone against her department’s injunctions as an act of refusal of the post-pandemic normalization of problematic teaching policies (Grant, 2021: 539), to the recent polyphonic autoethnographic collective engagement of a group of self-described minority academics entitled Acting with intentional dissent (Bennett et al., 2023), new modalities of academic refusal are emerging and flourishing. Examples of collective subversive and oblique responses to assaults are numerous. They are all animated by anger against an unjust system and all share the same spirit of refusal and the same reliance on esthetic modalities of being and resisting. Recently for instance, three women of colour academics From the University of Oregon who sought to develop a sense of self-worth and to find purpose amidst the assaults they experienced regularly, described how by creating a writing group and relying on a method they termed collective biography, they started to inhabit a specific realm of ‘academic becoming’. The collective biography meant to be a work read and performed collectively, is what they call an act of survivance or an active act of creation “of a collaborative space that is simultaneously outside and within the neoliberal settler colonial academy” (Brooks et al., 2018: 139).

The undercommons is a messy idea. I am aware of its ambiguities but rather than joining the sad chorus of those who judge it at best unpractical and at worst unreasonable and foolish, I welcome the idea of the undercommons as a sideways, quasi-anarchistic oppositional relationship to the oppressive structures. In the words of philosopher Marquis Bey, the undercommons is not a place you enter but a groove that enters you (Bey, 2019). The undercommons is a position where everything is shared, and everything is owed. We share Lordean rage born of ignominies big and small, and we share the knowledge that collectively there was always a way to escape the symbolic enclosure. But we also owe each other to always have one another’s backs. Being in the undercommons is a particular positionality in the business school which entails neither adhering nor playing the expected assigned role of ‘critic’. It means reclaiming a space of escape and freedom. This is not a new idea. These eclectic collectives of those who refuse the exclusionary and carceral logic of the neoliberal postcolony (Abdallah, 2025; Mbembe, 2001) have always found a way out of it. They are inside but out at the same time. They feel anger that it is neither destructive nor hateful but generative and hopeful. That anger is erotic and poetic in the Lordean sense, it is a lifeforce, a sustenance, a form of affective self-defense that is critical for survivance.

Being in the undercommons is also being in debt to one another, a debt that can never be paid off. In the undercommons, we give another sense to what is owed. It is the incalculable debt toward those who lift us, who teach us, who feed us, who stand with us. It is a reinvented relationality where individualized notions of performance and success lose their meaning because it is impossible to think and live on one’s own. In the undercommons, we are not so much ‘against’ the business school but in fugitive presence-in-anger to it. We are with other people in defiant presence to a system whose false meritocratic logic is based on flawed unquestioned assumptions of individual sovereignty (Harney, 2020) and whose foundations are built on the systematic eradication and invisibilization of alternative modalities of being and knowing. What we strive for is to not be enclosed or settled within the limits of a logic of critique that plays by the rules and never questions the established terms of order (Robinson, 1980). The undercommons are not a metaphor for a symbolic location of resistance but they are a mode of being and relating to the institution outside of the confines of what is already thought.

In her book The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (2015), anthropologist Anna Tsing uses the poetic image of ‘patches of life’ to think how in disturbed landscapes and ecosystems like abandoned industrial sites or managed forests, multispecies life persistently emerges, in a complex web of interdependent relations, despite damaged environmental conditions. Anna Tsing shows how it is ultimately collaborative survival that enables life in capitalist ruins. Throughout the book, there is a determined insistence on the need to learn to notice the ‘unruly edges’ and pay attention to often-overlooked spaces where life continues in unexpected ways. The undercommons are ‘patches of life’ in the business school messed-up ecosystem; they offer us to stay with the unruly edges. They are a form of poetic ongoing re-enchantment, one in which we can reinvent the terms of engagement, and which is moved by a collective energy, a constant rage, an esthetic, what Lorde called a lifeforce.

There are many ways to be angry but also many ways to generate something from that anger. In Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde urges women to use poetry to invent a new language to channel their rage and to reenchant their world. In all her work, she calls for a reinvestment of the erotic and the poetic. The energy of life and the beauty of life. For her, “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought” (Lorde, 2007: 37). To Audre Lorde, poetry was not only an art, but a way of life (Hall, 2004). In the undercommons of the business school, a lot is still unthought, still to be birthed. The poetic force of anger toward a harmful and implacable institutional setting is what holds us together and what propels us forward. We need to forget about the master discourses of despair and decadence and invent our own fahlawa of existence (Yousfi, 2021), our own collective liberatory practices and language. “And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives” (Lorde, 2007: 37). We need to find our own poetic language of survivance, our ‘patch of life’ in the business school. The poetry of a mode of being and relating that is present to the violence and miseries yet refuses to be crushed by them.

This essay offers to consider that Lordean rage, “a non-ideal emotion, in a non-ideal society” (Dege, 2024: 602), can channel an alternative minoritarian collective modality of being within and against oppressive social structures like the business school, into a fugitive politics of embodiment and refusal. It is not a plea for rage in/at the business school but a call to give existing rage its due and recognize it as more than an unfortunate, pathological affective state but as a collective energy of survival. To live with anger is an ongoing challenge and is never easy. It is also an ambiguous emotion that carries its own limits (Lorde, 2007: 126). However, it is also a powerful energy that carries struggles forward and creates collective generative capacities. The collective nature of Lordean rage is ultimately what makes it fruitful. For feminist writer Sara Ahmed collective becoming is “based not on the possibility that we might be reconciled, but on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning to live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one” (Ahmed, 2014: 39). Being collectively in Lordean rage in the undercommons of the business school is being fully aware of what the collective is: an ongoing production of antagonism.

Yet, to exist collectively in the undercommons of the business school is also to be held together by the erotic, “the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person” (Lorde, 2007: 56), and held together by the poetic, the ability to see beauty but feel collective anger toward injustice at the same time. Being in the undercommons of the business school is being present in full acknowledgment that the neoliberal institution might never be overcome, but it is also knowing that our collective rage against it is our gift to survive it. This presence-in-anger and presence-in-refusal, held by the lifeforce of collective rage and its poetic capacities, is a relationality that doesn’t seek to master or extend power over anything but whose main aspiration, in the business school and elsewhere, is to stand in dignity in an increasingly undignified world.