Meditation on X, the Self-Built
talk by Brandon LaBelle, presented as part of The Pirate Academy, November 2023, at Kunsthall 3,14 Bergen.
In approaching the concept of the self-built, I have been led into thinking around questions of self-organisation, DIY cultures, and what they seem to suggest in terms of “creating alternatives”: what does it mean to create alternatives? Is there a general “sensibility” that drives one toward alternatives, towards configuring alternative arrangements and styles of existence?
Here I want to focus less on an actual example of an alternative culture or project; less about specific case studies, rather, I want to bring attention to the self-built on the level of sensibility, subjectivity, even disposition – a tendency, a leaning, a gravitation.
*I would already say, that a gravitation toward “creating alternatives” may define the sensibility of the artist as well; it marks creativity itself, as what is always effecting the order of things; so to speak about the self-built, and the tendencies some might have for making things oneself, or with others, is to capture something of a “creative sensibility”, or better, “a creative life”.
To get further into these ideas and perspectives, I want to follow a rather eccentric or self-built path; this will be shaped by an overall focus on a single letter, that of: X.
I pose X as a essential figure of the self-built, as what can assist in mapping the creative sensibility behind self-organization; X helps us here, because X is neither a beginning nor an end;
X is a con-fusion, it is to be always already in the middle; it seems to me, the self-built is shaped by being in the middle: to work with what’s there; to grab hold of what can be found – already we can say that the self-built is a never-ending project; and it delays the obligation to finish;
Rather, it is to stay in the middle – we might even say: to stay with the trouble.
I understand X then, as a figure of the middle:
Two lines crossing; the putting together of things – X might be the basis of architecture, to create a support structure; it might also be the basis of fire, the placing of one stick or wire against another, to create a friction, a spark;
X as combustible, as what conducts the flow of energies: positive and negative coming into contact;
X as a primary image of creation:
Let us stay with the middle – what Clarice Lispector also calls “the instant”;
X may help us in approaching the self-built, because it names without naming;
As Clarice also says: “X is the unpronounceable instant” – it is simply a mark, a symbol, this X;
It is of language, while also being outside language;
It is a trouble-maker, this X;
It points, or rather, it designates something: I may call this, It:
To approach X, or to adopt X as a partner, is to stay with It: it is to move oneself always already elsewhere, to say: I am It, or better: I is It as It is I.
Two lines crossing; a flow of energy.
As you see, it has only been a few minutes, and we are already moving; con-fused;
We are on the run – we are runaways, here, in the middle, the unpronounceable instant, the self-built – this talking which is also making itself as it goes; figuring itself out:
A movement that hides or delays itself; that is hard to see;
How to orient ourselves?
What kind of space is this? the middle?
X marks a territory – it points, it names without naming, it says: there is something here.
I draw an X on the floor, to show that there is something beneath: a treasure? an electrical cable? a hidden world?
X already changes something of the space;
It is a warning – not to cross, not to trespass, but in doing so, it also invites and beckons;
By way of an ambiguous sign, X names the limits of the known;
It is a language of criminality, the secret;
It is erotic, stamping itself on the edge of the permissible: to enter this space of X is to enter the darkness, what Clarice also calls “a vibration”: what is it, this thing, this feeling and sensation – Clarice writes:
“I must interrupt to say that ‘X’ is what exists inside me. ‘X’ – I bathe in that this. It’s unpronounceable. All I do not know is in ‘X’.”
I’m writing these lines, following the X, to say something, without saying precisely;
To capture the self-built as a general sensibility, as a gravitation toward the creation of alternatives;
X might then become a type of methodology, shaped by “All I do not know”;
It takes “all I do not know” and makes of it a position, a scene, an environment, a doing;
It does not show precisely, rather it signifies while masking at the same time;
It casts a light only to produce a darkness;
X is therefore a destituent position: it does not gather, it does not constitute, it does not establish, rather, it destitutes; it flees, it withdraws while drawing as it goes – it leaves a trace, it gestures, it vibrates: can we read the signs? what does it mean? who knows?
By way of these traces, these vibrations, we might find something akin to what Agamben calls “whatever” – for Agamben, Whatever is a figure of the unexceptional, as what stands without standing out; Whatever frees us from being Someone or Something; rather, it is being such as it is; I do not belong according to a trait, an identity, or through particular values; rather, Whatever is belonging in itself; Agamben relates this to love – to love someone for the fact of who they are, rather than what they represent – these perspectives are facets of X and the self-built, as what honors and celebrates the fact of things, as what they are;
As some-thing, anything, us: never a project or a work – X as praxis, a style of existence, as Whatever we can do and doing it with Whatever;
X therefore interrupts Capital;
It is a thief;
It is maybe more along the lines of delay, to be unfinished;
A doing nothing;
I is It as It is I as Whatever;
Where are we again? O yes, we are already elsewhere;
In the middle.
It is by way of X that one also takes risks;
X names a risk-taking, taking all I do not know as the basis: for speaking, for being-in-the-body, for relations;
This risk is always coming into confrontation with power: to stay, to stay in the middle is to also be vulnerable;
It is a weak-strength, one that upsets and diffuses the power of the binary: to be neither beginning nor end, to be neither self or other; secret;
X is a threading, a commingling: two threads, two rhythms, two bodies meeting, con-fusing, splintering, going-nowhere – X does not suggest a future nor a past; it is not an arrow, it does not point ahead, leading us onward, nor does it throw us back, returning to a past;
As a marker, as a middle, it holds; it is a holding ofspace – it is pure reverberation;
It marks a point, a tapping, a percussion: followed by an array of invisible echoes, voices – X is a multiplier, an expander;
It takes space and it pulls it elsewhere, reverberating its lines with energy;
In that holding, in that vibrating, that fragile, steady maintenance of the instant, power may step in to also seize It:
I pause for a moment to share a story:
or more a family legend, something I remember hearing early on as a child, and which even now still re-appears, sometimes over dinner with uncles and aunts, when stories are told and retold, all these narratives that make of the family a history, a tree; the story tells of my great-grandmother, Margarita, and my great-grandfather, Vincenzo; and how following an accident at the steel factory where my great-grandfather worked, he subsequently passed away, leaving Margarita widowed with five young children. As poor, Italian immigrants living in the industrial environments of the US in the 1920s, they knew little about the law; in fact, Margarita did not know how to read or write; illiterate, she did her best to navigate any type of text or document. The story continues, that one day two men from the factory came to visit Margarita, bringing her a number of papers to sign – she was told that these would allow her to receive monetary compensation for her husband’s death; so, following their advice, she signed, leaving a shaky X on the dotted line. Only after did she and the family learn that the papers she signed, papers which she could not read, were legal documents relieving the company of any responsibility for the death of Vincenzo.
I share this story, to capture that sense in which X leaves one open, and how the self-built is always precarious, susceptible, open to appropriation, capture;
X comes to place oneself in the middle, exposed, vulnerable, where knowing and knowledge are always in touch and under the influence of all I do not know;
to not know is a risk, one that produces a range of frictions, where the law may also take advantage, or where it may step in to make of oneself an identity: to push one toward nameability, turning the X into a legal signature;
X is also signifying loss, to be without – it is the name of the missing; for instance, to have lost one’s name, and therefore, one’s right to exist within a certain system;
X as loss and empowerment at the same time: as with Malcolm X, whose X speaks to his lost African name, and which then becomes a symbol of reclaiming the right to exist, on his own terms;
if I am X, then it is by way of X that I will be;
Loss, to be without, to not know, and to be exposed to power’s reach;
X may designate not so much a limit of language, but an entirely different vocabulary;
To cross over, to trespass, past the do not cross X often signifies, might be to enter a no-man’s land, one populated by the missing, the dead, the lost;
Those who inhabit a condition of namelessness, that populate the dark realms of society, and as such, may traffic across worlds, to tap, tap, tap so as to sound out other passages, other routes and ways of speaking: to find partnerships with the ghosts, the forgotten, the overlooked by way of X.
Following these threads, crossing and holding, vibrating and echoing, X might come to designate the figure of the Fool, the Idiot, and more, the Poet;
These are X-figures, X-ontologies;
Like the runaway, they are fugitive, and what they may show is X as a poetic figure – as what defines the poetic fundamentally;
We can emphasize the poetic as “an event of language” – the endless becoming of language.
This finds expression in metaphor: if we think of metaphor as the creation of new meaning – metaphor is the continual birthing and storying of the world;
What is this event of language? What are its consequences or effects?
The poetic keeps us close to the edge of language; it turns us toward the sensuality of voice and the body, orality, song, the lyrical, as well as social ritual; and it produces a type of knowledge: what we might call, at least for today, the “knowledge of the idiot”: all I do not know.
Let us consider further this question of poetics, of a poetic knowledge –
Avital Ronell highlights stupidity as the essential condition of the poet: she says, the poetic is born from moments of being overcome, shaped by a state of over-sensitivity – to be in awe, for instance, encountering something: a scene, an object, a vibration; to experience a profound feeling, a sensation for which there is no name, this poetic moment, which can also be extremely small and fleeting;
And which leads to the invention of words: poetics is the naming of that which is unnamable; it pronounces the instant Clarice underscores as unpronounceable, it materializes it, bringing the experience of being “awe struck”, spellbound, amazed, enchanted, or “stupefied”, into language:
poetics smuggles into language that which is beyond language;
The poetic is an instance of expression aligned with the inexpressible;
It is always close to X.
*Here, I might suggest, that as artists what we come to produce, there in the studio, in the crafting of so many strange and mysterious forms, is nothing other than X – we are Xing ideas and things, crossing them into other forms of orientation, meaning: we take Whatever and turn it into more of itself.)
Ronell stages stupidity as the basis for understanding a type of knowledge production fundamentally at odds with the Enlightened Subject:
*the enlightened subject as the one driven by a will to know – as Enlightenment philosophy states: I think therefore I am. In contrast, the poetic staggers reason, upsetting the border between sense and nonsense:
“The Enlightenment stages stupidity, repeatedly casting brutality, prejudice, superstition, and violence as so many manifestations of the eclipse of reason”
Poetics grounds thinking within experience – of being in the middle; in the midst of things;
As Gaston Bachelard writes, poetics puts us on the downhill path of consciousness;
Bringing us into the darkness, a flickering, a shimmering, the con-fusion that is X:
In contrast to Descartes, the poet might say: I feel therefore I am. Or: I dream therefore I am.
I am touched.
This may find an echo in what Georges Bataille calls “nonknowledge”, or the limits of knowledge; maybe even a “negative knowledge”;
Bataille arrives at the notion of nonknowledge by way of laughter;
Like stupidity, laughter locates us on the peripheries of language, of knowing, leading us to confront “the unforeseeable.”
We laugh, in short, in passing very abruptly, all of a sudden, from a world in which everything is firmly qualified, in which everything is given as stable within a generally stable order, into a world in which our assurance is overwhelmed, in which we perceive that this assurance is deceptive. Where everything had seemed totally provided for, suddenly the unexpected arises, something unforeseeable and overwhelming.
We can return then to the Fool as a figure that relates us to laughter: mad laughter, a giggling. The Fool, the jester, the trickster, the clown – these are all figures that work through and with laughter as Bataille understands it: they are figures on the fringes of a social order, on the fringes of language – the Fool and the Clown are in fact often mute, they instead employ gesture – developing a set of practices through or of stupidity: they cultivate laughter; they carry us along the downhill path of consciousness, planting Xs here and there.
The poetic as an event of language, a con-fusion of sense and nonsense, is also a manifestation of nonknowledge:
Of relocating knowledge at the beginning, to bring us close to what Bachelard terms “childhood” – the original moment of play, the original instant of daydreaming; no longer the master in charge, of the enlightened subject, but the figure of play, make-believe, of imagination, animation, Xing a given scene into a set of possibilities, turning the world upside down.
As Bataille states, nonknowledge reminds us that life is a game.
From Ronell’s ideas on stupidity and not knowing to Bataille, laughter and nonknowledge, we arrive at a view of the poetic subject: X as sensibility; as a knowledge of the idiot, the one who knows how to make believe: to create alternatives.
A figure at home in the middle, where sense and nonsense are always commingling, crossed, upsetting what we know as reason and unreason, and which puts the name into crisis: the event of language that is poetics, that is X, puts identity on hold;
I is It as It is I as Whatever.
I hope we have arrived somewhere;
close to the middle, to con-fusion and the power of X;
and which might say something about the self-built, as a sensibility aligned with creating alternatives;
a methodology that takes the fool as a friend, as the one who places All I do not know at the center of knowledge, life, art, love – for the Fool is the ultimate lover: of the world, the animals, of life itself (the Fool is always falling….falling…. along the downhill path toward the hidden treasure).