Asocial, dysfluent, & unconventional - oh my
As someone who is autistic; in the 99.99% of all adhd measures; has had (at least) five concussions - one resulting in post-concussive syndrome that was declared malingering even though i needed to learn to talk, walk, think, and speak again all on my own; and all of the learning disabilities - all of the ‘ic(k)-s’, i believe that the words we USE matter - that when we speak & Write, we are weaving worlds - spell-ing.
The etymology of ‘Glamour’ (Magic) & ‘grammar’ is the same - collecting words - but latter colonized the former. Rhyme is largely declared juvenile for poetry and juvenile delinquent for rap.
Beyond this, the ways we move our bodies & the ways we create through ‘nonverbal’ means also have a language - gestures, expressions, the *im*pressions of doodles on a page and paint on canvas. This is what the mimes and clowns that broke free from the containment of entertainment and expression have to teach us.
Noticing these traces and tricksters, studying their notations in my own work, I learned they are notable. These impressions are how we leave traces on the world beyond the ink-soaked, black-and-white pages of disciplinary journals and textbooks that call us freaks, encircling us in the politics of representation and sending us off to sovereign/state/community-sponsored circuses. Such is the containment of entertainment.
Similarly, environment is, etymologically, just encircled ecology - like a circus ring. Ways that Lewin took what he learned on the battlefield and translated it into a field theory that resembled war. The performances of early circuses were based on horse-led battle choreographies.
Community psychology refuses to learn the philosophical lessons of post-modernism because it would have to cut ties with the lifeline of white supremacy (Berenstain, 2020; Ruíz, 2020) and eugenics - the lessons learned after we realized what science ripped from its entanglement with ethics did in the 1920s.
The psychological life space Lewin talked about - lebensraum - was a tenet of Nazi ideology. The geometrical concepts he (1934) proposed in “Der Richtungsbegriff in der Psychologie. Der spezielle und allgemeine hodologische Raum” may have “furnished us with the geometrical concepts for the beginning of an exact mathematics of psycho-dynamics and social dynamics,” but these concepts were based on Bourbaki’s colonial project of projective geometry and functionalist structuralism of the 1930s. They ultimately grounded a the conceptualization of community based on the ideology of Gemüt and Blood and Soil - the colonized subterranean, systems of reproduction and gender, the rhizomatic and mycelial where resources are abundant and shared in ways that nourish all ‘things’, where minerals are cherished and not mined in ways that stoke the flames of genocide - the chthonic.
I would love to make this more sensical and tell you more, like how this relates to Zoom Fatigue, the eugenics of community over the past five years and that of TikTok and its destruction, and how it is we can go about changing these fates, but I have to go figure out how to survive stuck in a broom closet situated smack-dab in the middle of this barren, ‘remote’ scorched earth, walled in by philosophies no one else wants to see.
But I do know one thing. I found a way to feel desirable as something desecrated. Survival is a promise. Not a sentence. We will one day help each other untie the strings of words with the lifelong aim of tying us up so tightly with shame - the banners of the occupied Flow State University that read, “We came, We saw, We conquered,” and we will consume (take together), consent (feel together), and conspire (breathe together) in anti-eugenic ways that sustain (-ten, meaning to hold) each other and the new suns we are co-creating together.