Study
Fred Moten | Stefano Harney
Quoted from The Undercommons
When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, “oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to be have been studying.” To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.
Study is already going on, including when you walk into a classroom and before you think you start a class, by the way. This is equally the case with planning. Think of the way we use ‘policy,’ as something like thinking for others, both because you think others can’t think and also because you somehow think that you can think, which is the other part of thinking that there’s something wrong with someone else – thinking that you’ve fixed yourself somehow, and therefore that gives you the right to say someone else needs fixing.
Planning is the opposite of that, it’s to say, “look, it’s not that people aren’t thinking for themselves, acting for themselves together in concert in these different ways. It just appears that way for you because you’ve corrected yourself in this particular way in which they will always look wrong for you and where therefore you try to deploy policy against them.”
The very deployment of policy is the biggest symptom that there’s something you’re not getting in thinking that you need to do that – and it seems to me, really, the same with study. I think it’s also fine for people not to use it or to find something else. But, equally, I think that the point about study is that intellectual life is already at work around us. When I think of study, I’m as likely to think about nurses in the smoking room as I am about the university. I mean it really doesn’t have anything to do with the university to me, other than that, as Laura Harris says, the university is this incredible gathering of re- sources. So, when you’re thinking, it’s nice to have books.
学习 Study
by Fred Moten | Stefano Harney
潜共体（undercommons）
当我思考我们使用“学习”一词的方式时，我认为我们秉持着这样一种理念：学习就是与他人共同进行的活动。学习是与他人交谈、漫步，工作、跳舞、受苦，是这三者不可分割的融合，并以思辨实践（speculative practice）的名义进行。排练（rehearsal）的概念——在某种工作坊中，在乐队中演奏，在即兴演奏会和舞酱中，或与坐在门廊上的老人共处，或与在工厂里的人们一起工作——其中都包含着各种各样的活动模式。称之为“学习”的意义在于，它标志着这些活动本身持续不断且不可逆转的智性（intellectuality）已经存在。这些活动并不会因为我们现在说“哦，如果你以某种方式做了这些事情，你就可以被称为在学习”而变得更加高尚。做这些事情就是参与一种共同的智性实践。重要的是认识到这一点——因为这种认识能让你接触到一部完整、多样、另类的思想史。
学习一直在进行，包括你走进教室，甚至在你以为要开始上课之前。规划也是如此。想想我们运用“政策（policy）”的方式，就像替别人思考一样，既因为你认为别人不会思考，也因为你以某种方式认为自己可以思考，你认为别人有问题，换另一种说法——你认为你已经以某种方式解决了自己的问题，因此你有权说别人需要改进。规划与此相反，它说：“你看，并不是人们没有独立思考，没有以不同的方式协同行动。一切之所以看起来如此，只是因为你用某种特定的方式纠正了自己，从这个角度来看你认为别人总是错误的，因此你试图用政策去限制别人。”政策的部署本身就是最大的症状，表明你在思考时忽略了某些东西，在我看来，这是你需要学习的东西。我认为人们不用学习或者去寻找其他学习方式也是可以的。但同样地，我认为学习的意义在于，智性的知识生活已经在我们周围运作。当我想到学习时，我很可能想到吸烟室里的护士，就像想到大学一样。我的意思是，在我看来，学习与大学真的没有任何关系，除了劳拉·哈里斯（Laura Harris ）所说的，大学是一个令人难以置信的资源聚集地。所以，当你思考的时候，有书是很好的。
