Iterable ciphers for insurrection

Abstract

This piece situates the project of critique in relation to the idea of library instruction as labor and the library as an organization. If the laborer can come to reflect on the conditions of their labor, thereby achieving a measure of autonomy even at the grindstone, it's also possible that the critical subject can be induced or coerced to labor on behalf of the organization. In the attenuation of organized forms of solidarity at the workplace, the organizations that employ us demand more and more of their workers' time, energy, and commitment. In this piece, I surface these tensions in the interest of a different kind of instruction: studying to learn from fugitive forms of solidarity that, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest, endure because of their refusal to be organized, keeping the commons alive around and beyond the frame in which the subject studies their own reflection.