What do you think?
Rate this book
All Incomplete
Building on the ideas Harney and Moten developed in The Undercommons, All Incomplete extends the critical investigation of logistics, individuation and sovereignty. It reflects their chances to travel, listen and deepen their commitment to and claim upon partiality.
All Incomplete studies the history of a preference for the force and ground and underground of social existence. Engaging a vibrant constellation of thought that includes the work of Amilcar Cabral, Erica Edwards, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Hortense Spillers and many others, Harney and Moten seek to share and understand that preference.
In so doing, Moten and Harney hope to have forged what Manolo Callahan, echoing Ivan Illich, calls a convivial tool that – despite the temptation to improve and demand, develop and govern, separate and grasp – helps us renew our habits of assembly.
All Incomplete features the work of award winning photographer Zun Lee, exploring and celebrating the everyday spaces of Black sociality, intimacy, belonging, and insurgency, and a preface by Denise Ferreira da Silva.
All Incomplete studies the history of a preference for the force and ground and underground of social existence. Engaging a vibrant constellation of thought that includes the work of Amilcar Cabral, Erica Edwards, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Hortense Spillers and many others, Harney and Moten seek to share and understand that preference.
In so doing, Moten and Harney hope to have forged what Manolo Callahan, echoing Ivan Illich, calls a convivial tool that – despite the temptation to improve and demand, develop and govern, separate and grasp – helps us renew our habits of assembly.
All Incomplete features the work of award winning photographer Zun Lee, exploring and celebrating the everyday spaces of Black sociality, intimacy, belonging, and insurgency, and a preface by Denise Ferreira da Silva.
182 pages, Paperback
First published June 19, 2021
14 people are currently reading
218 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 17, 2023
This book was a most welcome and radical love letter to partiality and a source of inspiration to renew our habits of assembly.
I was incredibly challenged by this book because of its density and use of language that initially felt inaccessible. It took me a year and many re-readings for me to start to make sense of it. Simultaneously, that is also the beauty of the book. The more time I spent reading it, the more I saw that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney managed so successfully to defamiliarize Western ideologies of sovereignty, logistics, management and individuation. Language is the playing field for this deconstruction.
Reading this book is an incredible musical experience. You feel the rhythm and pacing of the words when reading them. I don't think I will ever be done reading this book.
I was incredibly challenged by this book because of its density and use of language that initially felt inaccessible. It took me a year and many re-readings for me to start to make sense of it. Simultaneously, that is also the beauty of the book. The more time I spent reading it, the more I saw that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney managed so successfully to defamiliarize Western ideologies of sovereignty, logistics, management and individuation. Language is the playing field for this deconstruction.
Reading this book is an incredible musical experience. You feel the rhythm and pacing of the words when reading them. I don't think I will ever be done reading this book.
January 24, 2022
Some choice quotes from this excellent book:
"What one might call the social life of things is important only insofar as it allows us to imagine that social life is not a relation between things but is, rather, that feld of rub and rupture that works, while being the work of, no one, nothing, in its absolute richness. Such (social) work is no work at all but the madness remains; rub and rupture all but emerge, but in nothing like an emergence, as something imprecision requires us to talk about as if it were some thing, not just discrete but pure. More specifically, almost salvifcally, we want to call it a line, or a pulse, but it won’t come. Animaterial riddim cutting rhythm cutting method—microtonality’s overpopulation of measure, Zaum preoccupying Raum with an extrarational, hyperganjic, dancehallsanskritic, anachorasmiatic, al-Mashic, all mashed up buzz, the alternate groove we in, the devalued and invaluable local insurgency—disobeys our most loving invocation. This gift of spirit gives itself away and zero-one/one-two is left embittered."
"Study perverts instruction. Study emerges as the collective practice of revision in which those who study do not improve but improvise, do not develop but regenerate and degenerate, do not receive instruction but seek to instantiate reception. Study is our already given gift of the general dispossession of ourselves for each other, and our service to that dispossession. Study is the (im)permanently unformed, insistently informal, underperforming commitment to each other not to graduate but instead indefinitely to accumulate an invaluable debt to each other rather than submit ourselves to their infinitely fungible line of credit."
"With this instruction, the body is to become a means only for the smooth flow of transactions. It is to become a means for the interoperability of all things. Instruction is given in opening the body through such discourses and practices as customer service, prosumer behavior, and indeed in financialization of the self, as Randy Martin put it, but most of all endless availability, 24-hour access, to every aspect of the body. Even the exhortations to creativity, criticality, and entrepreneurship chiefly train the body for the extension of access into social life, imagination, and cultural knowledge. The body is instructed in becoming a means to these flows above and below the level of its integrity as body, to these connections that source new planes of intellect and affect. But always this training is in/as a means to the transaction, to accumulation, to the realization of private profit from social production. Capital seeks only the degradation of means and cannot abide what Malcolm X understood as an end when he uttered his famous phrase 'by any means necessary.' Not any means but only those that serve capital’s limited imagination, that is to say only those means that can be degraded through individuation, through placing freedom above necessity."
"This production of the subject reaction is the dematerialization and individuation of logisticality, which logistics effects. Our critical and creative efforts in the classroom, and our grading, are part of this dematerialization, and submit to its logistical demands, not because they do not begin well, but because they do not end well. They end with degraded means. Such a dematerialization has deep roots in the Western tradition of positing a subject and its mind. But today it is at work most frenetically and most (in)visibly in logistical capitalism, powered by the algorithm. Logistics today mobilizes and networks us as never before. It asserts us as means as never before. It opens access everywhere and in everything. And, at the same time, logistics degrades those means and denigrates this access by driving them always toward a single end through valuation. That end is surplus: stolen, accumulated, regulated. By tapping our invaluable means to do this, logistics also confronts what we have called our logisticality, our capacity to be a means for itself, in selfless, unplotted, non-local incompleteness. Indeed, we can read the rise of logistics and the subject reaction that it encourages and instructs as attempts to regulate our logisticality. Logisticality is more than a counter-logistics, a countering of logistics. It is our means of movement, and our movement as means. Logistics seeks to impose a position, direction, and flow on our movement, our pedesis, our random walk, our wandering errancy, to trap us in this oscillation, this neurotic pacing back and forth. Logistics wants to position us, to have us take a position, and fortify, and settle. And yet logistics itself also has to keep moving even in its degraded way. This is where the algorithm gets put to work."
"The African and Trans-Atlantic slave trade represented the great, hideous introduction of mass logistics for commercial rather than military or state purposes. It became the ghoulish lab of experiment in access for singular means of work and sex, worldmaking and subjectivization. Much would follow, including infrastructure projects for the circulation of people, goods, and information and, of course, more mass displacements, indentures and migrations in the brutal enforcement against indigenous peoples and the very idea and practice of indigeneity of the law of genocide and geocide. All of this logistics would not only bear this trademark of ‘continent of origin’ in the slave trade, but with usufruct the improvement of flow would become indistinguishable from racialization. Whiteness, as racialization origin and residuum, where access is imposition and submission in self-protection and self-determination rather than practicing incompleteness, is the self-improvement of flow. Blackness becomes what it already was, the prior interruption, the sabotage to come, the incapacity to breathe into the flow as the capacity for breath as means, for the breadth of means."
"What one might call the social life of things is important only insofar as it allows us to imagine that social life is not a relation between things but is, rather, that feld of rub and rupture that works, while being the work of, no one, nothing, in its absolute richness. Such (social) work is no work at all but the madness remains; rub and rupture all but emerge, but in nothing like an emergence, as something imprecision requires us to talk about as if it were some thing, not just discrete but pure. More specifically, almost salvifcally, we want to call it a line, or a pulse, but it won’t come. Animaterial riddim cutting rhythm cutting method—microtonality’s overpopulation of measure, Zaum preoccupying Raum with an extrarational, hyperganjic, dancehallsanskritic, anachorasmiatic, al-Mashic, all mashed up buzz, the alternate groove we in, the devalued and invaluable local insurgency—disobeys our most loving invocation. This gift of spirit gives itself away and zero-one/one-two is left embittered."
"Study perverts instruction. Study emerges as the collective practice of revision in which those who study do not improve but improvise, do not develop but regenerate and degenerate, do not receive instruction but seek to instantiate reception. Study is our already given gift of the general dispossession of ourselves for each other, and our service to that dispossession. Study is the (im)permanently unformed, insistently informal, underperforming commitment to each other not to graduate but instead indefinitely to accumulate an invaluable debt to each other rather than submit ourselves to their infinitely fungible line of credit."
"With this instruction, the body is to become a means only for the smooth flow of transactions. It is to become a means for the interoperability of all things. Instruction is given in opening the body through such discourses and practices as customer service, prosumer behavior, and indeed in financialization of the self, as Randy Martin put it, but most of all endless availability, 24-hour access, to every aspect of the body. Even the exhortations to creativity, criticality, and entrepreneurship chiefly train the body for the extension of access into social life, imagination, and cultural knowledge. The body is instructed in becoming a means to these flows above and below the level of its integrity as body, to these connections that source new planes of intellect and affect. But always this training is in/as a means to the transaction, to accumulation, to the realization of private profit from social production. Capital seeks only the degradation of means and cannot abide what Malcolm X understood as an end when he uttered his famous phrase 'by any means necessary.' Not any means but only those that serve capital’s limited imagination, that is to say only those means that can be degraded through individuation, through placing freedom above necessity."
"This production of the subject reaction is the dematerialization and individuation of logisticality, which logistics effects. Our critical and creative efforts in the classroom, and our grading, are part of this dematerialization, and submit to its logistical demands, not because they do not begin well, but because they do not end well. They end with degraded means. Such a dematerialization has deep roots in the Western tradition of positing a subject and its mind. But today it is at work most frenetically and most (in)visibly in logistical capitalism, powered by the algorithm. Logistics today mobilizes and networks us as never before. It asserts us as means as never before. It opens access everywhere and in everything. And, at the same time, logistics degrades those means and denigrates this access by driving them always toward a single end through valuation. That end is surplus: stolen, accumulated, regulated. By tapping our invaluable means to do this, logistics also confronts what we have called our logisticality, our capacity to be a means for itself, in selfless, unplotted, non-local incompleteness. Indeed, we can read the rise of logistics and the subject reaction that it encourages and instructs as attempts to regulate our logisticality. Logisticality is more than a counter-logistics, a countering of logistics. It is our means of movement, and our movement as means. Logistics seeks to impose a position, direction, and flow on our movement, our pedesis, our random walk, our wandering errancy, to trap us in this oscillation, this neurotic pacing back and forth. Logistics wants to position us, to have us take a position, and fortify, and settle. And yet logistics itself also has to keep moving even in its degraded way. This is where the algorithm gets put to work."
"The African and Trans-Atlantic slave trade represented the great, hideous introduction of mass logistics for commercial rather than military or state purposes. It became the ghoulish lab of experiment in access for singular means of work and sex, worldmaking and subjectivization. Much would follow, including infrastructure projects for the circulation of people, goods, and information and, of course, more mass displacements, indentures and migrations in the brutal enforcement against indigenous peoples and the very idea and practice of indigeneity of the law of genocide and geocide. All of this logistics would not only bear this trademark of ‘continent of origin’ in the slave trade, but with usufruct the improvement of flow would become indistinguishable from racialization. Whiteness, as racialization origin and residuum, where access is imposition and submission in self-protection and self-determination rather than practicing incompleteness, is the self-improvement of flow. Blackness becomes what it already was, the prior interruption, the sabotage to come, the incapacity to breathe into the flow as the capacity for breath as means, for the breadth of means."
September 25, 2024
Somehow even less intelligible than The Undercommons. Perfectly unintelligible at times.
I found it particularly interesting to see in the introduction as well as the chapters themselves that Harney and Moten actively invoke zen and dao poetics in how they delocate the subject in question, as any form of description and analysis that we can communicate is somehow not the thing itself, and that this space of disconnect remains essential in the project to exist in but not for systems of logistics and capital and empire. This was satisfying to me since that was a similarity in poetics I'd found fascinating in their previous work, and also in other writings in the field of black studies and aesthetics.
The discussion on logistics was particularly interesting in how it explores and details the variously interconnected systems of improvement, usufruct, access, and property as manifested through various systems of capital, labor and its preparation, flow, and teleology. The subchapter on synaptic labor was particularly notable in addressing confusion around the roles and concept of "bullshit jobs" which even the employees of said jobs often sympathize with. The role of these managerial and not directly productive jobs is to forever massage and improve flow and access to the employee (the self in this case).
The images were all wonderfully evocative of the chapters and writing and each photograph was a wonderful addition and treat within the text in explorations of the imminence and immanence in the surrounding text. The medium of the book was used quite effectively in general, images and text alike.
The moment that sent me on what at the time seemed an endless detour in pondering was the statement "The story of a traveling salesman's problems turns out to emerge from and as a variation on the Traveling Salesman Problem, about which more in exactly one minute"(p.107). In a cyclical and labyrinthine discussion of the traveling salesman and his task to perfect efficiency, it is proposed that we will elaborate more on his condition in EXACTLY ONE MINUTE. The capacity to reread and revisit and re-explore the text in that moment ruptures the promise of efficiency and linearity in that how could one ever know how fast or slow another would read? I could have put the book down forever, indefinitely postponing this elaboration on the traveling salesman's condition (a thought i did consider while on this diversion, though i did continue to read and finish this book). One certainly could arrive at the elaboration in that exact timeframe, or even sooner as the elaboration is offered in the following paragraph on the same page, but I was trapped in pondering the medium at that point. I then thought that it seems self defeating to utilize such a wonderfully efficient sentence clause to start this form of diversion, but perhaps that is a manner of the being "in but not for" the direct path and linearity of writing. The affect of the writing certainly wasn't linear for me.
On some level I recognize that there is not a singular easy analysis of this book and its tactics (or much anything for example), and that to desire such is one of the promises of logistics, but at the same time I don't know to what degree I fully believe that at this point. In being in but not for something, one is still in the thing nonetheless despite the general antagonism experienced. The later chapters Plantocracy and Communism and Who Determines if Something is Habitable and Suicide as a Class seem to partially address what I imagine are criticisms (and apparently calls or attempts for cancellation(I agree that cancelling is stupid, its the other stuff I was struggling with)) of Harney and Moten for their status as University professors. Their response is that the petty bourgeois will always defer and postpone their class suicide because that is the nature of the nature of that class, but that to expect the individual to commit said class suicide is to further the individuation that is axiomatic to the formation of the self and property. Instead somehow, in a manner that I definitely don't fully understand, suicide is committed as a class, in the collective. Part of that seems perfectly argued and indisputable, and part of that seems unbelievably convenient for the comfort of said class. They say to deepen the antagonism because something has to give, and supposedly what will give is capitalism. If I were somehow to give instead, that is an instance of individuation, which somehow breaks me away from the class at large? I don't follow. Once again I am considering that perhaps I should drop out of grad school. At the same time fleeing the site doesn't change the site, and so it makes sense to stay here and deepen the antagonism here, where I already have some understanding and capacity to navigate the unkinking and straightening methods. At the same time I don't know that I can actually do so without breaking. Perhaps I haven't broken until I leave, so I'm doing fine at the moment? But also this is awfully similar to reformist narratives around the police, the prison, the university, and other apparatuses of the state, which is something to have caution and skepticism towards.
While on this topic of the nature of deepening the antagonism and relationships to reformist narrative, many of the chapters felt mostly targeted towards a western managerial class. Synaptic labor doesn't apply nearly as cleanly to those that are working in factories or mines or similar sites of direct material production or extraction, and similarly suicide as a class is by nature targeted towards the interstitial classes between the labor and the management.
At least not getting it is part of the project this book is undertaking. And if it isn't then at least my misreading lets me think that it is.
I found it particularly interesting to see in the introduction as well as the chapters themselves that Harney and Moten actively invoke zen and dao poetics in how they delocate the subject in question, as any form of description and analysis that we can communicate is somehow not the thing itself, and that this space of disconnect remains essential in the project to exist in but not for systems of logistics and capital and empire. This was satisfying to me since that was a similarity in poetics I'd found fascinating in their previous work, and also in other writings in the field of black studies and aesthetics.
The discussion on logistics was particularly interesting in how it explores and details the variously interconnected systems of improvement, usufruct, access, and property as manifested through various systems of capital, labor and its preparation, flow, and teleology. The subchapter on synaptic labor was particularly notable in addressing confusion around the roles and concept of "bullshit jobs" which even the employees of said jobs often sympathize with. The role of these managerial and not directly productive jobs is to forever massage and improve flow and access to the employee (the self in this case).
The images were all wonderfully evocative of the chapters and writing and each photograph was a wonderful addition and treat within the text in explorations of the imminence and immanence in the surrounding text. The medium of the book was used quite effectively in general, images and text alike.
The moment that sent me on what at the time seemed an endless detour in pondering was the statement "The story of a traveling salesman's problems turns out to emerge from and as a variation on the Traveling Salesman Problem, about which more in exactly one minute"(p.107). In a cyclical and labyrinthine discussion of the traveling salesman and his task to perfect efficiency, it is proposed that we will elaborate more on his condition in EXACTLY ONE MINUTE. The capacity to reread and revisit and re-explore the text in that moment ruptures the promise of efficiency and linearity in that how could one ever know how fast or slow another would read? I could have put the book down forever, indefinitely postponing this elaboration on the traveling salesman's condition (a thought i did consider while on this diversion, though i did continue to read and finish this book). One certainly could arrive at the elaboration in that exact timeframe, or even sooner as the elaboration is offered in the following paragraph on the same page, but I was trapped in pondering the medium at that point. I then thought that it seems self defeating to utilize such a wonderfully efficient sentence clause to start this form of diversion, but perhaps that is a manner of the being "in but not for" the direct path and linearity of writing. The affect of the writing certainly wasn't linear for me.
On some level I recognize that there is not a singular easy analysis of this book and its tactics (or much anything for example), and that to desire such is one of the promises of logistics, but at the same time I don't know to what degree I fully believe that at this point. In being in but not for something, one is still in the thing nonetheless despite the general antagonism experienced. The later chapters Plantocracy and Communism and Who Determines if Something is Habitable and Suicide as a Class seem to partially address what I imagine are criticisms (and apparently calls or attempts for cancellation(I agree that cancelling is stupid, its the other stuff I was struggling with)) of Harney and Moten for their status as University professors. Their response is that the petty bourgeois will always defer and postpone their class suicide because that is the nature of the nature of that class, but that to expect the individual to commit said class suicide is to further the individuation that is axiomatic to the formation of the self and property. Instead somehow, in a manner that I definitely don't fully understand, suicide is committed as a class, in the collective. Part of that seems perfectly argued and indisputable, and part of that seems unbelievably convenient for the comfort of said class. They say to deepen the antagonism because something has to give, and supposedly what will give is capitalism. If I were somehow to give instead, that is an instance of individuation, which somehow breaks me away from the class at large? I don't follow. Once again I am considering that perhaps I should drop out of grad school. At the same time fleeing the site doesn't change the site, and so it makes sense to stay here and deepen the antagonism here, where I already have some understanding and capacity to navigate the unkinking and straightening methods. At the same time I don't know that I can actually do so without breaking. Perhaps I haven't broken until I leave, so I'm doing fine at the moment? But also this is awfully similar to reformist narratives around the police, the prison, the university, and other apparatuses of the state, which is something to have caution and skepticism towards.
While on this topic of the nature of deepening the antagonism and relationships to reformist narrative, many of the chapters felt mostly targeted towards a western managerial class. Synaptic labor doesn't apply nearly as cleanly to those that are working in factories or mines or similar sites of direct material production or extraction, and similarly suicide as a class is by nature targeted towards the interstitial classes between the labor and the management.
At least not getting it is part of the project this book is undertaking. And if it isn't then at least my misreading lets me think that it is.
February 23, 2023
I read this book to understand property rights. It was recommended by a former debate coach last year, and I just got around to it. It was extremely dense, and I spent a very long time on individual pages at a time. I thought it was extremely helpful for case construction for the topic.
Moten and Harney begin by describing that enlightenment thought entails property of the mind, creating a sense of ownership and logic instilled within that property. Enlightenment thinking and conceptions of the mind as property rips conceptions of sharing and replaces them with a hierarchal command of individuation, denouncing collectivity and group emotion to be held as values. Further, they consider how Whiteness manifests itself through the property, to take up land and differentiate yourself as owner. “This is mine, so it cannot be yours”. This speciation is driven by a need to separate the colonizers from the colonized, the white from the non-white. Engaging in property is engaging in whiteness and modes of speciation. The property now becomes a prison of whiteness, chaining the subject down, unable to escape the chains and live any other way. An expansion of property leads to the furtherment of the colonialist desire, and further development of the white grip on the subjects when they struggle against their boundaries.
I recommend this book to my classmates who were interested in the first period of APUSH. It talks about original colonialism and its ongoing effects of it, so it can help people understand settlement as an ongoing structure not an event. However, the book is very difficult and requires a decent amount of prior readings, thus I would also recommend it to the other people on my debate team.
demographics)
Moten and Harney begin by describing that enlightenment thought entails property of the mind, creating a sense of ownership and logic instilled within that property. Enlightenment thinking and conceptions of the mind as property rips conceptions of sharing and replaces them with a hierarchal command of individuation, denouncing collectivity and group emotion to be held as values. Further, they consider how Whiteness manifests itself through the property, to take up land and differentiate yourself as owner. “This is mine, so it cannot be yours”. This speciation is driven by a need to separate the colonizers from the colonized, the white from the non-white. Engaging in property is engaging in whiteness and modes of speciation. The property now becomes a prison of whiteness, chaining the subject down, unable to escape the chains and live any other way. An expansion of property leads to the furtherment of the colonialist desire, and further development of the white grip on the subjects when they struggle against their boundaries.
I recommend this book to my classmates who were interested in the first period of APUSH. It talks about original colonialism and its ongoing effects of it, so it can help people understand settlement as an ongoing structure not an event. However, the book is very difficult and requires a decent amount of prior readings, thus I would also recommend it to the other people on my debate team.
demographics)
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews