— A Pedagogy of Celebration and Liberation
“Study is what you do with other people.”
— Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013)
1. The Club as Classroom
There are moments in the club when the music speaks straight to you. When emotions sync. The crowd moves as one. In that mix of feeling and motion, bodies learn. This is study.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write, “Study is what you do with other people.” It’s a simple definition, and a useful one. I think about it often — in the club, on the way home, in the quiet work of writing and archiving. Most of what I’ve learned has come from clubs. From people who never thought of themselves as teachers: DJs, organisers, sound engineers, light designers, dancers, friends. Together they form a kind of school without buildings or books. It teaches through proximity, through the ways people listen and respond.
COMMUNE grows from these experiences and from a question: what if celebration itself is a form of learning? What if the dance floor, the DJ booth, the radio show, the gathering, the group chat, and the after-hours all act as classrooms — places where freedom is rehearsed in real time?
From Amsterdam to Kampala, from Mexico City to London, from Helsinki to Shanghai, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat: gatherings where rhythm becomes method, and care travels through sound. Here, study doesn’t start in theory. It starts with timing, with bodies in motion, with attention shared across a floor.
“But ecstatic rituals are also good, and expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity.”
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History Of Collective Joy (2006)
2. Celebration as Method
If the club night is a classroom, then celebration is its method — a way of learning that begins with the body. Celebration teaches through movement and encounter. It gathers people, lowers defences, and builds relation. It treats life as an experiment in how to want the world differently. Like study, it is collective improvisation: a rehearsal of freedom not yet here. What we can do, we do with others.
For Baruch Spinoza, joy is the affect through which a body increases its power to act — a movement from limit toward possibility. Joy changes through relation; our capacities widen when we meet others. It turns solitude into company, isolation into exchange. To feel joy together is to build strength together. The body stops being a border and becomes a bridge. Celebration makes that change real. It teaches how collective motion becomes a form of thought.
Joy is not a flash of intensity. It needs maintenance. In COMMUNE, I think of this as joy in practice. Practice means the daily, shared work of staying open to change. It is how joy learns to last. Through rhythm, repetition, and reflection, celebration turns into study — a way of listening and composing life together. In that process, joy moves quietly into the small and hidden spaces where study gathers and survives.
“We demand the right to opacity for everyone.”
— Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990)
3. Club Culture as Fugitive Pedagogy
The dance floor, the DJ booth, the dark room — all temporary shelters, and also points of pressure where the social contract loosens. The rhythm may be four-four, but what moves through it is fugitive.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call this the undercommons — a space of study, refusal, and invention that lives within and against the institution. In COMMUNE, this becomes the undercommune: the backstage pause, the after-hours drift, the conversation that continues on the night bus home. It is a lived and sonic version of Moten and Harney’s idea, not a departure from it. In the undercommune, knowledge moves differently — through sound, presence, and proximity. It is learning through what is felt but not seen: solidarity, opacity, freedom.
Thinking with Jarvis Givens, this can be read as part of a longer lineage of fugitive pedagogy — the Black traditions of teaching and learning carried out within and against domination. Givens traces how generations of educators and students built lessons that could survive the violence of the classroom: knowledge shared in secrecy, gesture, and passing. Teaching became protection; learning, resistance. To study under such conditions is to move like sound through a wall — unheard, but registered. Study as escape.
Édouard Glissant calls this the right to opacity — the choice not to be fully seen or known inside systems that demand visibility. For Glissant, opacity is a way to stay alive, to keep complexity and difference intact when the world wants to flatten them. What cannot be translated is kept instead. On the dance floor, opacity becomes physical — a language made of vibration, gesture, and rhythm. Knowledge moves this way when it needs to protect itself.
COMMUNE approaches opacity as collective protection — a precondition for studying freedom. It gathers the practices that form when people organise through sound: a DJ’s set as reading list, a workshop as rehearsal for abolition, a gathering as site of unlearning. Here, pedagogy reverberates and becomes a sustaining frequency. This is what makes it fugitive: learning that avoids capture, extraction, and appropriation. You see it in soundchecks, group chats, and shared rides home — small acts of care that keep people linked through the night. In those moments, study takes on rhythm. Relation offers cover. The night teaches.
These practices of learning are fragile but continuous. They stretch from Kingston to Kampala, from Detroit to Helsinki, from Amsterdam to Mexico City. The undercommons is a pattern — a relational rhythm maintained through music, memory, and movement.
The undercommune, then, names the lived form of fugitive study that COMMUNE seeks to trace and sustain: a collective practice of becoming that endures against erasure.
"We do this 'til we free us."
— Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021)
4. Building Counter-Power
Capitalism is killing us. Governments speak of transition while deepening the extraction that makes life unlivable. This system will not save us. We build the infrastructures of care we need to survive outside it — through the daily work of mutual aid, cooperation, and shared creativity.
COMMUNE begins from this fact: survival has become a collective creative task. It calls for imagination, solidarity, and composition under pressure. It draws from anarchist, Indigenous, and abolitionist traditions that show how to organise without permission — to build the social and material infrastructures that states neglect or destroy. In these practices, politics turns material: cooking, housing, repairing, and healing together in the ruins of extraction. What emerges is not charity but counter-power — a shared capacity to live differently.
COMMUNE’s pedagogy is experimental and grounded. It studies how people already rehearse other futures in the present — through sound systems, community kitchens, mutual aid networks, and local assemblies. These are fugitive infrastructures: provisional systems for survival that point beyond the world as it stands. They are not built only in opposition to the state, but as living alternatives to it.
The project learns from Dean Spade, who argues that mutual aid is a foundation for survival, not an addition to politics; from Mariame Kaba, who reminds us that hope is a discipline; and from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who teaches that land and relation are forms of learning. From Barbara Ehrenreich’s history of collective joy to adrienne maree brown’s idea of emergent strategy, these lineages show that celebration and organisation rise from the same force of collective life — the one that insists on continuation and freedom.
To build counter-power is to nurture that force: to turn exhaustion into rhythm, despair into coordination, and energy into refusal. Abolition, like celebration, is a rehearsal for a world without domination. Within the undercommune, this rehearsal takes sonic and social form — the weight of care carrying us toward another horizon of freedom.
"Transition is not a journey from one identity to another. It is the invention of a form of life that escapes all capture."
— Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus (2019)
5. Queer Futurity, Abolition & Mutual Aid
COMMUNE draws on queer futurism, understood with José Esteban Muñoz, Kara Keeling, and Tavia Nyong’o as a politics of the not-yet. Following bell hooks, queer here is “not about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
Queerness, in this sense, is less an identity than a temporal practice: the ability to imagine and inhabit futures the present denies. The dance floor becomes a queer chronotope — a space where bodies step out of linear time and glimpse what Muñoz calls “the not-yet-here.” In these moments, celebration becomes study in anticipation: a way of sensing freedom before it takes form.
This futurity runs on labour and love. Dean Spade defines mutual aid as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we live under will not.” Mariame Kaba describes abolition as an everyday practice — the ongoing work of building relations strong enough to replace the state’s failed supports. Read together, their work treats affinity as the emotional and material basis of survival.
Every celebration also mourns — for lives, for worlds, for possibilities. To gather in joy is to insist on survival amid destruction. To move together in time is to practise the coordination collective life requires. These gestures also draw on trans understandings of transition as a shared experiment in living beyond what was imposed.
Queer futurity, abolition, and mutual aid meet here as a single pedagogy of survival — a discipline of hope enacted through anticipation, invention, and shared possession. Fugitive infrastructures move beyond endurance toward collective ownership. The rehearsal becomes the claim.
"The music travels through diasporic circuits, assembling environments that extend beyond the dance floor."
— Dhanveer Singh Brar, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century (2021)
6. Transglobal Underground
These fugitive pedagogies refuse capture. They travel like the music itself — diasporic, indirect, and persistent. The undercommune moves through ports and servers, across sound systems and encrypted networks, wherever people make space for listening, learning, and care. In these movements, COMMUNE finds kinship with a wider ecology of practice: cultural workers and communities shaping collective life from Kampala to Mexico City, from Helsinki to Lisbon, from Shanghai to Amsterdam.
As Édouard Glissant writes, relation is not fusion but exchange. The undercommune moves through relation — connections that hold difference while creating solidarity.
Progress Bar (2015–2020) was one such node — “a club night devoted to communal desire and collective joy,” where conversation, screening, and performance merged into study. It taught me that the club could be an assembly, a syllabus, and a political party. Each line-up, each scenography, each season was a lesson in being together otherwise. The work of those years continues through COMMUNE — in the attention to atmosphere, the ethics of invitation, and the choreography of generosity. What began as an experiment in club culture became a method for building transglobal infrastructures of learning and liberation.
Across these connected ecologies, study takes the form of relation and adaptation. Each gathering — at Nyege Nyege in Kampala, NAAFI in Mexico City, Príncipe in Lisbon, Genome 6.66 Mbp in Shanghai — rehearses freedom in the present tense. These are not scenes but lineages: temporary institutions where futures are tested and sustained. The undercommune endures through circulation and exchange — its rhythm keeping life in time beneath the world’s noise.
“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” —
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
7. Rehearsing Liberation
To rehearse is to prepare for change. It means listening, coordinating, and adjusting with others — practising ways of working together. Every rehearsal is an act of trust: people holding together long enough to imagine another world.
In COMMUNE, rehearsal is the form liberation takes before it is realised — a freedom practised in advance.
This practice appears everywhere. It unfolds when a crowd holds the line between ecstasy and calm; when a community organises care; when competition gives way to generosity. It teaches that liberation begins now — that world-making is learned in the act of doing, and teaching in the act of learning.
COMMUNE operates as a temporary undercommune: a working space where rehearsals for freedom can be observed and shared. The club is one site among many — alongside studios, record stores, and radio stations.
To rehearse liberation is to act as if transformation is possible — to create conditions for what does not yet exist, and to do so with joy.
“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.”
— bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003)
8. A Total Ecology of Practice
COMMUNE is a total ecology of practice — a living system where art, pedagogy, and politics sustain each other. It draws on Spinoza’s ethics of joy, the fugitivity of the undercommons, the hope of abolitionist pedagogy, and the movement and connection of the dance floor.
COMMUNE asks what it means to celebrate as a way of surviving together. It begins in sound but extends beyond it — into joy, relation, and care.
To celebrate is to rehearse liberation: to build the conditions for collective freedom, not as theory but as practice.
This ecology remains unfinished. It depends on those who keep listening.
—
Note on Sources and Lineage
With gratitude to the lineages that sustain this practice:Baruch Spinoza, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jarvis Givens, Édouard Glissant, Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Paul B. Preciado, José Esteban Muñoz, Kara Keeling, Tavia Nyong’o, bell hooks, Barbara Ehrenreich, adrienne maree brown, Alexander Dunlap, Nkisi, Rosa Pistola, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Jam City, Elly Vineyard, Yves Tumor, Philip Jeck, Michael Oswell, Gideon Kiers, Manique Hendricks, Lucas van der Velden, Stefan Wharton, Pim Sem Benjamin, Karl Klomp, George Knegtel, Amie Galbraith, Pieter Kers — and to all the collectives, crews, and comrades named within.
Note on the Sound
This is an unreleased recording of Philip Jeck performing live at the Bimhuis in January 2008. Its presence here is an act of gratitude and continuation.