This video was originally composed for a session of the “shadow conference” held by the Religion, Affect, and Emotion Unit at AAR in 2023. The goal of those sessions was to “highlight the below-the-grid content of the AAR’s usual formal presentations and content,” by exploring the subjective conditions of academic life post-pandemic. Presenters were asked to address questions of labor, exhaustion, and creativity. I decided to run wild with the permission I was given in the Call for Papers to stretch the boundaries of typical academic discourse with “the playful blending of usual presentation norms and forms.” This video expresses multiple layers of burnout (ADHD, academic, creative, and political), while holding out hope for sparks of creative potential.
“Happy Little Accidents” also approaches philosophy as a practice of creating scenes of desire, staging a vision of a future, a way of being, a mode of relation – as attractive and worthy. Those desires generate the necessary conditions to ask questions like, “How do we get there?” or “How do we make this real?” These are qualities it shares with theological and spiritual discourses. Those who – by various points of entry and to varying degrees – come to share the same ideal, refine their collective understanding of that ideal through discussion and debate, successes and failures, experience and experiment. Philosophy emerges as a playbook, or tactical manual. So St. Bob’s line toward the end of the video (“How do we make all that happen? I don’t know, I’m an ideas guy.”) is not quite accurate.
What remains true, however, is that the philosophical tactical manual must be made through collaboration with those actually conducting social experiments, practicing strategies for social change, creating networks of care, and so on. Diversity of tactics. The work we can do relies on the work of others. This is true, whether our interlocutors are challenging the political status quo or picking food in the fields, passing legislation or producing a music video. So in a very real sense, anyone engaged in philosophical critique or construction cannot incorporate the aleatory nature of life, the “happy little accidents” of day to day living, “in this economy.” It’s hard to “follow your bliss” or fall down conceptual rabbit holes when you’re collapsing under the weight of student loan debt, eternal adjunct status, and the rising tides of fascism.
Erring:
to ask the Question “What’s going on?”
is to vocalize an insistence,
an energized, potentialized vector
That opens onto an otherwise –
pulsing and driving toward
different, new,
but never alone,
Never without counter-pulses, insurgencies.
This is the ceaseless
busy-becoming-as-agony
of the Event,
wherein insistences affect breathing beings –
as compulsions, intransigences, and freedoms.
The Question (improperly) names the insistence
that generates the desire
for intimacy:
philo + sophia
