The politics of adventure - part 1

 

 

It

 

It I have often encountered a problem, when talking or writing about anti-work politics. While busy producing my proclamations against the dictatorship of Work’s ‘activity of repetition’, the strangulating theism on which it lies, the unforgivable sacrifice of one’s life which it imposes, and so on, I found that the alternative which I was able to offer did not match the narrative and environmental qualities offered by the ideology I was opposing.

 

Although annihilating, the religion of Work (and, similarly, that of Dominant Abstractions such as Capitalism, Socialism, Humanity, Country, etcetera) is able to offer its adepts a frame of sense within which their lives can smoothly and easily unfold. How could I think of asking people to abandon the poisonous environment of the Work regime, if all I had to offer was the desert of a vague freedom, of a ‘fullness of life’ which I couldn’t even explain? If my struggle was for the liberation of individual lives from the state of minority imposed onto them by Work, I had to be able to present them with an alternative at least as functional and reassuring as that contained in the Work ethic.

 

At the same time, I was aware that, if I had fallen into the temptation of creating yet another normative Abstraction I would have simply replicated the very enemy against which I was willing to fight. I had to avoid making the mistake of opposing to the ethics of Work (or Capitalism et similia), another capitalized -ism. In particular, I found it hard to resist the temptation to find an answer within the -ism of Anarchism, which, despite all its merits, still remains a one-size-fits-all ideology. I needed to find an alternative which was flexible, customizable, humble and docile enough, so not to replicate the constricting grids of the currently existing, dominant Abstract systems.

 

Certainly, the alternative I was looking for had to have a name, for the simple reason that people pass from home to home, and from name to name. Only prophets venture into deserts, and prophets are usually more busy inventing their own words, than listening to those of someone else. This name had to be not as strong as another -ism, but not as weak as an adjective. A noun, then. But not every noun. Freedom, for example, is a type of noun which announces itself as a radical emptiness. Theoretically perfect, but practically unusable. When entering a new home, a person wants to find it empty, but not without a floor or a roof. I needed another noun, capable of being at the same time empty and present enough.

 

As one does when faced by a difficult problem, I looked into my own motivations for an answer. Friendship, then, felt like a good ground to start my investigation. When in friendship, I noticed, there was always something that allowed me to distinguish between the countless, unmemorable relationships and those who were to remain as good places to live in. In all my strongest friendships, in all the best relationships I have ever had, an element seemed to constantly recur. It was the feeling of a movement together with the other person, a tension towards something or somewhere, a common action, a sense of solidarity within the frame of a shared intent. The people I have ever felt closest to have been something more than friends: they have been comrades.

Of course, I accepted the political connotation of the word. But with a difference. Like political comrades, we were bound by a common desire and a common tension. Differently from them, however, our desires and tensions could not be limited by the normative dogma of some abstract ideals, let alone pre-existing ideologies. Between us, there was something which originated from us alone.

That still motion between us was exactly it, the noun I was trying to look for. Not an ideal, then, nor an ideology. Maybe a camp fire, but only as metaphor. Not a destination or a travel, as it would be too reductive a definition. What was it, then?

 

Apart from in my friendships, I have encountered it in other places, in which I never set foot but with my mind. In books, in films, in stories I have met it countless times. And it had a name, then. A name so common, so simple, and that we all have long known. In those books for children that I used to read, it was clearly stated, as a whole literary genre. Finally, I found it. It was adventure.

 

Adventure! With the exclamation mark few words deserve.

But what is adventure?

 

 

The Skeleton

 

It might seem pedantic to stress here, that the word ‘adventure’, in itself means nothing. Turning on its head the aphorism of Junayd of Baghdad (1), we could say that ‘the colour of a glass is that of the liquid contained in it’. Thus intending that words in themselves do not contain any ‘original’ meaning which one is due to discover, but are simply transparent containers to be filled as one may wish.

 

However, despite its transparency, the semiotic container ‘adventure’ has a shape of its own. While we may act freely within it, the moment we exceed it we enter another container, another word. In trying to describe adventure, then, two tasks are ahead of us: first, to trace the shape of the word, second, to fill it as we prefer.

 

Performing this first task will prove difficult, as doing so implies a certain desire for objectivity which could easily slip into the making of yet another Dominant Abstraction. Nonetheless, it is a risk we have to take, if we want to attempt to build a livable, narrative ‘home’. What we can do, in order to avoid this risk, is to stress the fictional tone of our exploration, which we wish to present as the unveiling of an imaginary landscape, rather than the definition of a set of laws.

 

Like the most evolved forms of life, the frame of adventure can be seen as the set of bones of an endoskeleton, rather than as the hard shell of an exoskeleton. The limits of this word shall be found in the barycenter of its inner functioning, rather than in the delimitations of its borders. What are the bones of adventure made of?

 

Urgency

 

Adventures always happen under time pressure. It is not the pressure of deadlines, or the anxiety of having to face fragments of hours and minutes, like hurdles in a race. It is rather an urgency from within, a pressure that resembles the awareness of one’s own mortality. The gut feeling that life is short, and time is precious. This urgent awareness motivates the refusal of the cruel sacrifices imposed by the Work regime, and it is the logical expression of a conscious atheism. At the end of an adventure, as at the end of one’s life, there is nothing expecting us but the end, our end. No post-life bonuses, no heavens or hells of eternal existence. The adventure is all there is, and it might come to a sudden conclusion at any moment.

 

In exchange for its obscene fragility, adventure enables a time regime which expands in depth more then in breadth. If the time of Work stretches out like a desert, that of adventure sinks like a pit. While the anxiety of Work encourages its extensive exploitation, the urgency of adventure allows its intensive exploration. Anxiety functions as an extension-machine; urgency as an intensity-machine.

 

Adventure doesn’t unravel time, but proceeds to its profound excavation, expanding it to its very limits. The urgency of adventure does not measure time by its orderly and productive succession, but by its density. It is the paradoxical density of air balloons: the expansion of emptiness to its extreme.

 

The time of adventure is not a chain of minutes, but an avalanche of events.

 

Risk

 

Connected to urgency and limits, like the third bone in an elbow joint, is risk. Risk is the measure of one’s proximity to danger, that is, to one’s own limits. Taking risks means running this distance, to the point of a radical investment in what one doesn’t know or master.

 

As with all investments, one’s exit from his/her limits coincides with the intrusion of what is external into oneself, just like the expansion of one’s credit coincides with his/her simultaneous invasion by debt. Risk reaches its peak when such reciprocal penetration with the ‘other’ acquires a permanent status, turning into a bond. Thus, under the pseudonym of ‘trust’, it is risk at the heart of all forms of contracts. This is particularly evident in the case of the most bonding type of contract: the social one.

 

As opposed to the Work regime, which imposes blind social interactions in pre-determined settings, adventure warns us of the risks involved in society-making. The diffused, low-intensity trust required for the creation and maintenance of any society, is, within adventure, the object of the most prudent consideration.

 

Adventurers approach the social process as a careful, slow, constant act of willing negotiation. On the basis of this attitude to risk, adventure is a particularly unsuitable ground for reckless enterprises such as the State, the ethnic group or the family, which completely escape the necessary filter of one’s free and attentive choice.

 

Against the celebration of self-sacrifice promoted by the Work regime, adventure invites us to always think twice before giving up parts of ourselves in the name of some ‘greater union’.

 

Movement

 

As an act of approaching others, or one’s own limits, risk-taking is a process of movement.

Movement is the cartilage that binds together all the different parts of adventure. Differently from the Work regime, in which motion is always ‘towards’ something, within adventure it is not necessarily bound to a final destination. This type of movement resembles that of the violin bow over the strings, more than that of a racing car shooting towards the finish line. Like the friction of the violin bow, it finds its sense in its consequences, rather than in its destination. In this, it is also similar to the movement of air in respiration.

 

Yet, it is not said that movement within adventure cannot be directed towards something. However, if it so, its direction should never be backwards. The movement towards the origins, the mythology of ‘return‘ or nostalgia, have no place here. Exploration, within adventure, is never a process of discovery, but of invention. A good literary equivalent would be Marco Polo’s The Million, or the endless list of travel books of the Middle Ages, in which the traveller’s inventions (or, simply put, lies) vastly overshadow his memories. The movement of adventure aims nowhere, but to a place which it is actively creating.

 

Unfulfilled Fullness

 

In most cases, at the origin of a movement there is a lacking. However, in the case of adventure, this lacking is structurally connected to its opposite, a fundamental fullness. We are talking, of course, of the dialectic between the emptiness of bones and the fullness of their marrow.

 

The experience of adventure is an experience of fullness. In exploring one’s own potential, reaching one’s limits coincides with the existential ‘filling’ of the space up until them. While the movement of Work is aimed at ‘satisfaction’ - that is, at making oneself perfectly fit within pre-existing shapes - that of adventure is part of an inventive exploration of one’s own limits. Through their movement, adventurers proceed to constantly expand themselves, until fulfilling completely their full potential. In other words, the fullness of adventure is what the practice of autonomous choice and creation feels like.

 

The structural emptiness of this fullness derives from its being the feeling of a practice, rather than the ecstasy of an accomplishment. Wu-wei, ‘action without action’, could be the name of this process, or the explanation of this emptiness. Furthermore, if, as we said above, the friction of adventure is aimed at producing ‘full’ sounds, yet, as with all sounds, these are destined to fade away shortly after their creation. Another sound, or possibly a mystical sound-silence, is required to follow. As diametrically opposed to the monotone chain of beeping fragments of Work, the existential sounds of adventure call each other from their depth. Not the forced inertia of the Work, nor the background noise of some Dominant Abstraction – nothing, in fact, but their active and willing creation by the adventurers themselves – will ensure that what follows will not be the absolute lack of any sound of the end.

 

Comradeship

 

Despite the primacy of the individual within it, any adventure performed in isolation is nothing more than an hallucination. The overall harmony of the skeleton of adventure, the complementarity of all its constituent parts, is the relationship of comradeship. Comradeship is what exceeds both the friendship based on shared interests or the forced ‘togetherness’ of most contemporary social contracts.

 

Its origins are of creative necessity. If the motion of the adventurer is what creates the landscapes which s/he encounters, the ability of creating a rich and complex world is only given by the convergence of more than one individual. Thus, the bonds of comradeship are the same that hold together a pantheon of gods.

 

Such bonds are also the limits to the individual’s tendency to power. A union of comrades is a federation whose members are at the same time equal to each other and deeply unique in themselves. The structure of comradeship does not leave any space for institutions or roles of dominion. The occasional leadership assumed by one member or the other is not defined in permanent terms, but simply resembles the alternative primacy of one leg over the other when walking.

 

The only flag under which a group of comrades serves is the irregular bunting of the shadows they cast when walking together. Their alliance is what avoids the necessity of creating an abstract entity or a fictional ‘public’, the gaze of which could legitimately insert their deeds within ‘reality’. Comrades are each other’s social legitimation.

 

The Protagonist

 

The denomination ‘protagonist’ describes the individual's role and self perception within adventure, and his/her autonomy from any abstract domination or belonging. It always refers to an individual, in flesh and bones, but it is not the exclusive prerogative of one or another of the comrades involved in the adventure. Each one of them is a protagonist to him/herself, thus being an engine of reality-making and a filter of judgment.

 

The role of the protagonist refers at the same time to the process of self-subjectivation performed by the adventurer, and to their creative approach to the world of adventure. In particular, the protagonist’s empathy is the source of ethics within adventure and is at the basis of their relationship with the comrades, the others, the surrounding environment and so on. Empathy, it must be remembered, is the ground zero of ethical utilitarianism: the immediate, intuitive understanding of what resonates to oneself as good or bad. Through empathy, the protagonist further expands themselves, to the point of virtually including others within him/herself. Empathy is the responsibility that comes with the active creation of the world of adventure by the hand of the adventurer: once they have created this world, they are responsible (and destined) to feel for it. To feel its resonance within him/herself.

 

Happy orphans of dead dominant abstractions, the protagonists recognize on their own skin the presence, feelings and worthiness of what surrounds them. They have no celestial table of laws to look at, in their dealings with others: only the feeling of their resonance with them. The experience of sex teaches us that this is the safest road to mutual pleasure, as opposed to the deadly paths laid down by the divine commandments of Work and War.

 

Happy Ending

 

Like the pristine whiteness of revealed bones, every adventure terminates with a happy ending. We could even say that the general scope of adventure, since its very beginning, is for the protagonist and his/her comrades to prepare themselves to meet their happy ending.

 

Happy ending doesn’t mean successful ending. Quite the contrary, as the ending is the end of the protagonist’s life. How can death be happy? The happiness of death is that of a ‘happy solution’, more than that of a happy moment. Its reference is to the felicitous realization of the adventure. A happy death is what drops ripe fruit off a branch – never too late, never too soon. It is a seal, not a guillotine.

 

The happy ending runs alongside every moment of the adventure, as its hidden potential. Because of its constant fullness, life within adventure is a state of perennial readiness to meet the happy ending. To the violence of death, adventure opposes the calm of a constant, active, non-resentful ripeness.

 

This readiness marks the triumph of the protagonist and his/her comrades over the paralyzing forces of fear. As opposed to the Work regime, in which people’s activity is mainly that of anxiously delaying meeting their end, adventure offers its protagonists a liberation from the fear of this encounter. While, in the world of Work, heroism consists in the stoicism of a painful sacrifice, within adventure heroism blossom’s in the protagonists’ testimony of their readiness for their happy ending.

 

Maps

 

What is left of an adventure, after its happy ending? Nothing, we might think, as we see its bones turning into dust under the grinding time. Yet, if we look closer, if we make ourselves so minuscule to be able to sneak through the web of tunnels that open inside rocks, we will find that, after all, something remains. As the skeleton dissolves, what remains is its fossil.

 

The fossil of adventure, differently from that of a cretaceous shell, is not the involuntary result of a corpse trapped within geology. Similarly to the language of burials, adventurers leave behind themselves a silent map of their journey. They don’t necessitate the reassuring stockpiling of paraphernalia of the ancient tombs, and behind themselves they only leave the immaterial trace of an existential language. In other words, a map.

 

As they prepare themselves to meet their happy ending, adventurers make sure to render the wake of their sail as understandable as possible for all future sailors. Thus, writing, in the widest possible sense, is as much a part of adventure as it is the movement through it. Above all other methods, writing is the tool of choice for the marriage of the selfish, individualist desire for immortality and of the shared, common necessity to explore the infinite universe of adventure. Most of all, however, writing is the egoistic act of love of a comrade towards the others, as the map of his/her adventure resounds to them, and in the centuries, to all, as the ultimate love song to an experience that could not have been but shared.

 

 

 

 

(1) “The water takes on the colour of the cup.”