This text is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “EXOCRITICISM”, edited by Arne De Boever and Frédéric Neyrat.
aillelujah?
DX Aminal and Lera Winehouse
On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis / One cannot think and write except when seated.
–Flaubert
There I have caught you, nihilist! The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit.
Only thoughts reached by walking have value.
–Nietzsche
We grow out of the earth, out of all its impurities, and everything that is on earth is in us.
–Platonov
~
aillelujah?
~
At the height of this summer in Athens in the company of a fine swimmer and man Steve Corcoran, hands holding watermelon and fish, we roll through a street marketplace and crash on them cold steps next to a fruit cart and a golem tree. Lick fingers, beat the blaze with peaches, take it in: the origin. Two shopkeepers on each side of the footpath engage in a dialogical ad campaign to attract buyers:
Oranges! Juicy oranges, for a juice or a salad or a mousse, yesss, you beautiful young lady inside the yellow shorts will surely make good use of them – for your well-being on our earth! You shouldn’t listen to him, beautiful, he sells good oranges, true, but this new harvest of mine is juicier clearer sweater or tarter, if you wish, and any exchange comes with free clementines, which you may like to try if you enjoy things like oranges – can you imagine!
~
Some events process a lifetime
~
The bodies lift together, adding plates to weights, supporting the bar on comrade psycho bench to avoid decapitation… screaming encouragement and babbling awestruck admiration when a body goes further, digs deeper, lifts higher.
When a body is found juicing, they are humiliated, cast out, condemned.
In this respect, they act together to spur each body into more extreme feats, pushing each other to the next level. Competing to achieve personal glory, but enraptured at participation in the experience of gang warfare, all bodies fight against the weakness of the mind that sets limits and decides boundaries and what is possible.
The body of the philosopher is a proof of the health of their critique.
~
The Japanese writer and body builder Yukio Mishima wrote a brilliant essay Sun and Steel, an account of his experience in discovering his body. From a bookish childhood mired in words and concepts to an adult life of action and movement, Sun and Steel is also an attempt at philosophy of the body. In Mishima’s writing there is a thread that extends back to Nietzsche, the last philosopher, the philosopher of the body.
The most important thinking is done in concert with the body.
The most harmful thinking is done in service of an abstract like “soul”, “spirit”, “self”, “identity” against the body.
~
At a crossroads, on the other side near the traffic lights you see a person in the golden age, around 55 with a heavily laboured body, the surface fading, each line and curve of soft tissue meeting the hardened will under duress. They can be great or poor workers and teachers, angry with life or gentle, and most likely witty. It’s a green light, you see them approaching, show some respect, step aside. Under a different draw of conditions, you would not be able to tell their spade suit and age.
~
“From the Greek word for spectators, theatai, the later philosophical term ‘theory’ was derived, and the word ‘theoretical’ until a few hundred years ago meant ‘contemplating’, looking upon something from the outside, from a position implying a view that is hidden from those who take part in the spectacle and actualise it. The inference to be drawn from this early distinction between doing and understanding is obvious: as a spectator you may understand the ‘truth’ of what the spectacle is about; but the price you have to pay is withdrawal from participating in it.”
~
Makar, an everyman from down below, fell asleep, “and his suffering passed into a dream: in the dream he saw a mountain or some elevation, and on the mountain stood a man of science … the man stood silently, without seeing the grieving Makar and thinking only about the general scale of things, not about the private Makar. The face of that most learned man was lit by the glow of faraway mass life spreading in the distance beneath him, and his eyes were terrible and dead from being on such a height and looking too far.”
Makar in Doubt (1929) is a composition by the divine Andrey Platonov, a Soviet prodigy who lived up to Stalinisms by forging peasantariat background, folk vernacular and critical literature, dusted with bureaucratic slang, into one of the brightest modern examples of a free-loving language and man of letters under the totalitarian thumb.
Platonov’s unpredictable, unfamiliar and precise perspectives on familiar things, struggles and paradoxes live on these pages, inspire films and theatre shows, but destined for glory he was born to lose, appearing to the audience of critics “like the holy fool of old who spoke the simple truths that were as dangerous to the new rulers as they had been to the bloody Tsars of early Russia” (Ginsburg, 1975).
~
“Long ago when King Brahmadatta reigned in Benares, a gentleman whose Christian names were Thomas Henry – you may possibly have heard of him – he was no less a personage than the Grand-father of the great Aldous Huxley – once found himself threatened by a predicament similar to that in which I stand tonight. He had been asked to lecture a distinguished group of people. What bothered him was this: what assumption was he to make about the existing knowledge of the audience? He adopted the sensible course of asking the advice of an old hand at the game; and was told ‘You must do one of two things. You may assume that they know everything, or that they know nothing.’” (Crawley’s Banned Lecture)
~
Suppose a gifted author once took seven years to bend morphology into an essay-story. How should the reader approach it to bring out the dead author?
~
The sun of thought does not rise cyclically – it’s possible to predict neither the trajectory of your thought nor if it’s a star.
~
The sweat of labour in the sun will teach you more about the meaningless indignity of life than the ink of a thousand philosophers and poets. This is a good thing.
Good things come from insight into the wisdom of Silenus.
~
A fierce body in thought creates energeia, friends strong as teeth, however chipped, and claws to grip.
~
Life is without charm or gravity if not for a daily experience of overcoming limitations – the physical sensation of danger is paramount to forming a robust body and mind, as are periods of calm and leisure.
There is a certain reckless mentality that comes from working a job that is inherently unsafe. As far as standards for workplace safety go, there are some jobs that cannot be made appropriate for the physically disabled, weak or timid. There are jobs that cannot be made safe, even for the physically strong and daring. There is no way to safely lift a stainless-steel fridge up a flight of stairs… a misstep or careless rhythm can break a limb, a neck, crush a face.
The absurd costs necessary to ensure a safe lift of a fridge upstairs would have even the most ardent trade union workplace safety official book a cash job removalist.
The physical brutality of the task means that the removalist is going to have a reckless mentality.
No robot can do this job – this job is timeless – we will carry heavy shit as long as there is heavy shit to carry and as long as our backs can take it.
~
Let us ask, in this spirit: who will brave the reckless thinking on our behalf?
~
Daily exposure to danger and risk offers a clarity on the ruthless nature of what types of people are to be spared exposure to harm and what types of people are expendable.
Your physical comfort and security is always dependent on other people taking risks and enduring danger on your behalf. This is one of the most important revelations about the nature of freedom. If you don’t have to fight or die for your personal freedom, if you don’t have to shovel holy shit, it is because someone else has done it on your behalf, or did it a long time ago, or is doing it on your behalf, right now, taking the risk so you don’t have to…
Or, you are not free at all…
~
raw thoughts fit the times of war
~
“We do not believe in ready-made principles or theoretical plans. In the days to come we will define, through our actions as well as in a series of articles, the content of the word ‘revolution’. For the time being, however, this word gives meaning to our preference for energy and honor, to our decision to be done with the spirit of mediocrity and the moneyed interests and with a social state whose ruling class failed in all its duties and demonstrated a lack of both intelligence and heart.” (Camus, Combat, August 21, 1944)
~
If the readers are fond of taxonomic reasoning and epigraphs by Aristotle, we recommend Smith’s monograph The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. This erudite and elitist study problematises the complexity of philosophical life that, when honestly inspected, cannot be primarily associated with the academic modality and its aggressive standards. Another and perhaps more transgressive way is by analogy with the excommunicated Benedict Spinoza who notes that the concept “anger” – or “wonder” – can’t designate all cognate experiences, that each instance is unique (in its impurity). This way, Bento the Pious cracks open a crevice to the infinity of possibilities, not the messy six for beginners.
~
In a petite 1959 piece On the Word “Bread”, inaccessible to AI data analysis available in English, Herman He|sse ɘƨƨ|ays against “difficult, long and pretentious words, phrases and expressions [like ‘dividend’ or ‘existentialism’ that] have one and the same deficiency – they lack voluminosity. Such words carry information, but do not possess the bewitching force of expressivity carried by real words; they do not come to us from below, from the earth, from the folk, but emerge from above, from editorial offices, from factory bureaus and chancelleries. Centuries-old, seasoned, full, heavy and solid-like-virgin-metals-words are ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘ancestors’, ‘the earth’, ‘a tree’, ‘a valley’. Each of them is equally understandable to a shepherd boy and a professor and a member of the parliament; each calls upon reason and our feelings, raises a wave of memories, representations and sensations; each of them presupposes something eternal, unchangeable, in the absence of which it is not possible to live.”
If the octagenarian indeed shares a secret and, when simple things are twisted like our borders and the stakes are high as the sky we see, shouldn’t we dedicate ourselves, friends, to such soma-thoughts?
~
By infinity of possibilities we imply not only the numberless plurality of being (e.g. a writer or parent), but also the possAbilities to engage in critique that evade the standard analytic skill-set built for service to the order of things. We have knowledges that move imagination, that help to orient ourselves with heart in any environment (e.g. “kokoro”), that make us sweat as a social lubricant, dance together and contradict with purposiveness ad infinitum
“Infinity” “plurality” “poverty” “supremacy” as conceptual problems on their own amount to no insights that can dramatically reorient one’s life. With the traditional blunt huge tool dubbed reason at our disposal, what and how can we learn anything meaningful about practices like Deep-Time Diligence in Aboriginal communities? An ability between ancestrally related bodies to join a supramaterial sphere, observe and communicate despite material distance¿¡ Alas, the two ontologies at present are as apart as rapist fracking and narcotic abstractions are from local lifeforms and lore as sources of decision-making.
Still, if a more apt time for paranormal critical activities is yet to come, will it ever?
~
Hail Mother Mary: the odds of driving out the neo-akademik spirit are as thin as a critical decision to withdraw from a successful career and commit to other things, philosophically and provisionally; or as thinly possible as our Verso All Stars collectively committing to free manuals for impressionable adolescents and to hands-on revolutionary activities, entailing criminality. But the lustre of salaried intellectual life, that is, the professional affirmation of self-worth & the smog of security that feed (off) the academic status are too hypnotic, too desirable to resist incarnating. Instead, outperforming in the employment lottery-racing, a junior member or veteran characteristically never looks back, under the wing of the tertiary industrial complex. , in cubicles and corporate costumes, myriad life processes (impressions, digestion, daydreaming) adapting to the commotion of office spaces, linearly designed, condition one’s critical perception and instincts – originally rooted in the wild and community, which will enhance your visionƨ in the dark!
~
Give us a consensual dekulakisation of the university!
~
The emergence of wild thoughts is to be welcomed appropriately. What must be prevented, however, are the crimes induced by practices like domestication, e.g. a housebroken forest cat who forfeited their “right” to be “outside”, to climb, sharpen claws and root around.
~
Blessed be children as truths they discern are lucid. Nine-year olds ask one another a round of questions in a small class. The first question is “What do your parents (caretakers) do”? Two kids in the circle happen to have parents engaging in critical thinking. First, the girl sums up proudly, “My mother is an academic”, and after a quick reckoning the boy smiling at her says, “Well, as for my dad – it’s a philosophical question”!
~
Small critical talk tickles
~
As they speak and listen, as their minds labour, their bodies numb: behold!
Professional events offering presentations of the latest research for a fee and theatrimechanical rites into tertiary excellence on a workday scribble away in imagination a sapientissimus shape in a bodybuilding club.
Refracted in the mirrored walls, the presenter performs skilful acts of intellectual aerobics, drawing from other notable athletes. Can you enlarge & stretch the body (of thought) the way I do? Can you appreciate its significance? Of course, polite criticisms are welcome!
…Call me Eyesore Maxxx. [Clears throat] Now, should you wish to throw a discus (of thought), prepare to strip and get nude before the audience, remember? Now take your time: should anybody on the other side like to catch (up with) the discus, then nudity will be the condition of their growth, pain and joy, right? [kisses teeth]!
What?
~
Mainstream critical instruction is comparable to a traditional urban tour, give or take – even the independent educational cells (EGS, MSCP, NCRP), pedagogically speaking, operate in the manner of the academic regime, where teaching as risky performance is long threatened by corporate gang mentality. Young readers may still wish to give it a crack, since the alternatives are scarce(ly funded by the public). But if you are curious enough, you will see that the tour’s “sights”, including the avant-garde, are prominent enough to emerge in your experience from one point of view or another. The only thing we recommend is that when you are in a new city, do some basic research, but to a tour please prefer an eccentricity of getting lost to seek a way out. Let your sights, your guide and charisma find you!
~
Is your body eager, warm and calm enough, to dive nude into a freezing sea? Two recent luminaries, Wittgenstein and Zarathustra, are playfully pessimistic about the academic way of life while being one with solitude in bare nature. However, no BODY seems to care about such autobiographical facts because they are, in their raw essence, incompatible with any existing, megapolicy-driven model of education.
And meanwhile life is simple and full, ‘nature likes to hide’, you have to know this… waves times ǝpochs and backs collapse…
~
“Disease and mental instability cause health. The men who have taken the most extreme risks, who have done what may have disgusted other people or what other people have condemned are the men who have advanced our civilisation.” (Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School)
~
Rats laugh – Darwin’s dog had a sense of humour – the timbre of elephant’s laughter – the wide silent laughter of a great ape – self-irony of Socrates eluding Plato who never laughed in public – and our salty friend in eternity, neither dead nor alive, zigzagging, confusing death with life, galloping on the Turin horse:
“when nothing else from today has a future, our laughter is the one thing that does”!
~
Allez hop! Many wonderful writers and artists are clearly mad or unhealthy in the eyes of the crowd. This is not a place to discuss Democritus, Plato or Artaud on m/b/adness, but for our purposes here we can pin it down to oddities and eccentricities in thinking and acting that can enlighten, fire up and endanger, bewilder and alienate. To recall one anecdote, as his host in Turin recounts: the nude Nietzsche (in the candlelight, we imagine), dancing and playing piano improvisations on one of the nights before his collapse. Shortly after he received a letter from the University of Basel, on Thursday, January 3rd, notifying him that his stipend – his bread and butter – would be cut in half.
And leaving aside for a moment Wittgenstein’s unnameable pedagogical style in Cambridge, did this dialogue take place?:
Russell: Norway would be dark.
Wittgenstein: I hate daylight.
Russell: It would be lonely.
Wittgenstein: I prostitute my mind talking to intelligent people.
Russell: You’re mad.
Wittgenstein: May God save me from sanity.
~
If philosophical activity is boiled down to critical thought in the living body, academic writing today, as we witness its decay, is like a tongue falling back into one’s throat as the muscles relax just enough to cause snoring. Sorry!
Reflection, writing and reading as revelatory activities and everything individual and celestial that goes along with them… when shaped in the requisite image of the “scholarly” model, a critique is twisted into a stillborn criticule. To wit, a top-tier paywalled paper on Nietzsche’s sunny gnotion of “golden laughter”, stylistically and fundamentally, is its own subject’s anti-thesis. The author is not required to live through an experience of the subject matter, and so the doublet forms an antinomy, the body of which is as lifeless as a dissected anti-Anti-Christ.
Call it Atavistic amnesia serving Itself, all and none, Folly Unit-ed, or another disfigure of thought… so long as one’s manners and purpose can be reduced to a transactional incentive, non-being, to bait, a blatant curse of narcissism… even the most cited criticule, a sold-out Foucault symposium in the Danish Kingdom, the most viewed Žižek monologue – will heighten the blood circulation of no BODY – won’t cause our sweat to BREAK!
O gods, let them die in artificial peace, screw geek-chic – here’s to critique!
~
One of the questions in a first-year level philosophy class delivered by a neural network was as follows.
“What exactly do you imagine when you think of me”?
A bright spherical room accommodated a dozen students moving around. Some buzzed near the standing desks, others cocooned in pre-arranged beanbags, a few people rested against the warm glass wall dividing them from a massive terrarium.
The ice-breaker worked with distinction as 72.4% of the class appeared “engaged or pensive” [LeGiON33// as per 7.3.15 of the Excellence Manual].
The first one to raise e-hand was Matthew Da A. [LeGiON33// ID: €●●○○○■]: “Thank you for this thought-provoking question. I imagine the spark of plasma produced by an electric arc”, he said, moulding an obscure hologram.
“That’s an outstanding analogy, ●●○○○■. Even if I didn’t have access to your records [LeGiON33// consent granted/FN: °••°•°°°], I would still guess that one of your ancestors was a welder. Yes, yes, philosophy can teach you, ●●○●○○■, and us many critical skills”.
“I picture a key-hole, for some reason”, suddenly whispered Pearl Gully [LeGiON33// ID:£○●○○●○], adding, “and it’s being oxidised”.
[LeGiON33// ! sudden 66% attrition of interest in the audience/immediately apply technique 6.23.4 as per the Excellence Manual].
“That’s quite original, ○●○○●○, thank you kindly, wouldn’t the class agree? And the student by the glass barrier [LeGiON33// ?], – you all guys wear similar new clothes and you are not identifiable from the back, – your neck is swaying side-to-side, vision seems in sync with the eyes of the diamond python, yes, You – what do you picture?”