Prolegomenon Day Two: A Manifesto of Tiny Machines

[Audio Recording, Mingus, 1964]

Mingus: I don’t think I should improvise, man. It’s not like sitting at home, I can tell you that. It’s not like playing at home by yourself.

Other man: Well, what can we do for you?

Mingus: [guffaws]

*

We have asked you all to speak here without provision, to associate, if not freely then at least under more foreign constraints, to improvise, as an association, an assemblage, an ensemble, a collection if not quite a collective, a coming and going, a here and gone, a Fort-Da. It’s not like sitting at home, I can tell you that. We have asked a lot of you. And this is especially true for some. To Roula, Safia, and Jordan, I asked even what perhaps should not be asked. And what you made of it was something remarkable. To say that I am proud is too paternalistic for the occasion, but I will say that I am honored by the speaking you’ve done here. Another person who has been asked a lot of and whom you might not know is Siena Froment. Siena is our Community Psychoanalysis Project Manager at the Greene Clinic. I think it’s quite safe to say that Loren and I would have lost our minds without Siena. She is steadfast and true, and I hope taking care of everything didn’t keep her from listening closely to the self-authorization panel, because I think I begin to sense her authorizing more of herself. I am very grateful for this and to you, Siena.

Thank you all for striking out from your homes, for casting off all that is heimish, “so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation,” as Blanchot (1993) said. This in his response to Pasternak’s question of what “being Jewish” signified, why it existed: “So that the idea of exodus and exile can exist as a legitimate movement.” He concluded that this movement of exodus and exile, of strangeness as relation is essential, “so that by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak” (Blanchot, 1993, p. 125). That this figure of Jewish exodus and exile and encounter with the absolute Other was the central ethical figure for Blanchot and his best friend Levinas, but did not dampen either’s Zionism, should raise questions for us.

And here this weekend, have we learned to speak? Have we spoken? Or has it been mere speech, idle chatter, the liberal speech of rights and dialogue, speech that shields us from decision and action, that refuses the step too far?

For this movement out from the known, from that which is soft and warm and enveloping, is never so straight and fixed as we imagine, and boldness and will and force will not take us far enough. As Freud observed, the un- in unheimlich is no straightforward negation, or perhaps, negation is itself always more slant or torsion or fold than hard stop. Fred Moten wrote in In the Break:

Improvisation is located at a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between feeling and reflection, disarmament and preparation, speech and writing. Improvisation – as the word’s linguistic roots indicate – is usually understood as speech without foresight. But improvisation, in whatever possible excess of representation that inheres in whatever probable deviance of form, always also operates as a kind of foreshadowing, if not prophetic description. So that the theoretical resources embedded in the cultural practice of improvisation reverse, even as they bear out, the definition that etymology implies and the theoretical assumptions it grounds. That which is without foresight is nothing other than foresight. And if improvisation is to be thought other than simply as action or speech without provision, you need to look ahead with a kind of torque that shapes what’s being looked at. (Moten, 2003, p. 63)

In our first meeting with the members of the chorus, Gabriel Tupinambá asked us a simple pair of questions that somehow had not occurred to me: Why are you adding this layer of the chorus? What didn’t work at the last conference that you are seeking to address? I think my answer to the second question would be that, following a week after October 7th, there was something very present that nonetheless remained unspeakable at the last conference, and this unavowed navel Emma, Roula, Safia, and Jordan have named Palestine.

… the Lady

of Earth,

mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called Palestine. Her name

later became

Palestine. (“On this Earth,” Darwish, 2013)

But what does one have to do with the other? What does adding a chorus (whatever that is?) have to do or say about the problem of the unavowed and the unavowable? Perhaps this is as close to a thesis on politics as I will come: I wager on the “deviance of form” and the “excess of representation” that inheres in it, on new forms and the formal; building machines and games and laboratories and subjecting ourselves—our names and their impossibles—to their machinations and transformations. Avgi Saketopoulou’s working (and unworking) of traumatophilia and bending the will and truth sadism speaks to the ethico-political exigency of coming to desire and comport ourselves towards unbinding, exodus and exile, the longing for justice that never coincides with the will and projects of the ego. Derrida, in the address to the IPA that Emma mentioned yesterday, also raised the question of the destiny of psychoanalytic transmission and institutionalization, of the urgency of a new psychoanalytic socius. We must find ways to institutionalize these initial gestures and leaps, not to memorialize and ritualize them, but to support fidelity to their effects, and this will require a movement out from statist and status institutes and associations, beyond the myth of the primal father and the fraternal social link.

This is my wager, and it isn’t lost on me that it will appear unserious and unsatisfactorily hardened for political intervention to most: I am staking my libidinal investment on a prefigurative politics of formal deviance and experimentation. This is not anti-institutional or de-institutional; it is an instituent praxis, as Castoriadis (1997) would have it. Fred’s studio practice (Moten, 2023), Meltzer’s (1994) atelier system, Lacan’s tourbillon (Badiou & Roudinesco, 2012). This conference and its various affinal formations – the Group for Independent Formation, the Greene Clinic, the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis —are all, I believe, implicated in this wager.