Statement
please note: this statement is a condensation of the ICIS Hoc Est Corpus manifesto project. The Hoc Est Corpus manifesto is an ongoing, aleatoric, collaborative experiment based on the methodologies of the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse.
There is no time to sleep. The planet needs saving, fascism and political violence increases, racial injustice rages. We need to wake up and get busy being rational to save the planet, save democracy. There is no room for error, we need truth and clear thinking.
Or so they say.
We reject that this precarious moment calls for more clarity, more wakefulness. We embrace obscurity, murkiness, ambivalence, chance, erotics—we aspire to “malpractice” theology. We eschew definitions of theology other than what we put into practice. Like art after Marcel Duchamp, anything can be theology—a bicycle wheel on a stool or a urinal. Anyone can practice it, a stream, a worm, a horse, a mole.
We advocate a theology that gets it wrong, a theology that sleeps, a theology that plays, a theology of chance. Unlike Einstein’s, our God plays dice, she uses tarot cards, she attends séances.
We advocate a suspended “theology”—a “theology” clasped between double claws of contradiction in the form of quotation marks that are also double hooks from which the carcass of theology is hung; two-pronged horns sprouting from the unheralded demon’s head of theology; double eyestalks protruding from the mucus-secreting mollusk of a slippery theology; metonymic tendrils of the star-nosed mole issuing from a sniffing, rooting, grubbing, delving, burrowing theology.
A “theology” without being, a “theology” without theology. Almost nothing, in other words. Infrathin “theology.” Or theology as infra-thing (infra-thingie?). A slip of a thing, a slip beneath a thing. The ghost of theology: what’s left in the space where theology used to be. “ . . . . ”
Infratheology.
The International Congress for Infrathin Studies announces itself as a permanently incomplete experiment, an “infinite conversation”. It is the antithesis of duty, the enemy of utility. Its function is to malfunction. A mal-praxis. Against the rationalism that prevails in academic theological discourse, the International Congress for Infrathin Studies practices surrealist theology as the impassioned instantiation of the free play of thought, in “previously neglected associations” (Breton).
To the degree that the Congress of Infrathin Studies is a dream, it is a dream of the impossible. It works alongside but against academic theology, as its enemy from within, as the seducer who arrives after dark and enters through the back door.
Why?
Because the arche upon which our civilization is built is rotten, the civilization that built us, that gave some of us the place of a woman, a noman, a nogodman along with the other species and colors. The civilization that built its parasitic being on the lower half of the chain of being is archaic and needs convulsion. Its parasitic existence is devouring the planet, and non-convulsive Theology and its God-Man are in on it. (Poopin is in on it.)
The very grammar of human language is in on it. The great oneness that gave the right to ownership of the earth for ever and ever to white men is in on it, right there upheld by the oneness of theology.
Grammar and God are in collusion.
It’s in language’s nature to turn multiplicity into singularity, to turn this thing, and that thing, and this other thing, and that thing over there, into one and the same thing: “woman”, “worm”. It’s how knowledge is formed, human languages swallow becoming and shit out being.
That is why we, the International Congress for Infrathin Studies are reconstructing things like mad. Dancing at the far end of the discourse, at the far end of making sense.
We’re not talking a return to the fine arts prison that swallowed some surrealist art in the 1900ds. With Suzanne Césaire (1915-1966) we claim that surrealism is about us. We who are here today.
We are surrealist theology’s living presence; ardent and revolutionary.
We are full: full of love, hopes, desires and dreams (especially dreams, dreams that undermine our best ideas). We work to build recklessly playful, subterranean constructions that horizontally grow and tunnel below the plane of established discourse, underneath the stock floor of bourgeois intellectual exchange.
These constructions of ours are not grand temples that represent a supreme deity or even a triumphal humanism. They are earthy and horizontal constructions that represent nothing because below the surface (underground), there is only change and event flows, rupture and transitions, love, hope, and desire. This constructive work refers to nothing other than the work, the affirmational work of building together a thing that will surely collapse, that has perhaps already collapsed.
This collective and affirmational work is the work of Infrathin artwork. Infrathin Congress work.
Or so they say.
We reject that this precarious moment calls for more clarity, more wakefulness. We embrace obscurity, murkiness, ambivalence, chance, erotics—we aspire to “malpractice” theology. We eschew definitions of theology other than what we put into practice. Like art after Marcel Duchamp, anything can be theology—a bicycle wheel on a stool or a urinal. Anyone can practice it, a stream, a worm, a horse, a mole.
We advocate a theology that gets it wrong, a theology that sleeps, a theology that plays, a theology of chance. Unlike Einstein’s, our God plays dice, she uses tarot cards, she attends séances.
We advocate a suspended “theology”—a “theology” clasped between double claws of contradiction in the form of quotation marks that are also double hooks from which the carcass of theology is hung; two-pronged horns sprouting from the unheralded demon’s head of theology; double eyestalks protruding from the mucus-secreting mollusk of a slippery theology; metonymic tendrils of the star-nosed mole issuing from a sniffing, rooting, grubbing, delving, burrowing theology.
A “theology” without being, a “theology” without theology. Almost nothing, in other words. Infrathin “theology.” Or theology as infra-thing (infra-thingie?). A slip of a thing, a slip beneath a thing. The ghost of theology: what’s left in the space where theology used to be. “ . . . . ”
Infratheology.
The International Congress for Infrathin Studies announces itself as a permanently incomplete experiment, an “infinite conversation”. It is the antithesis of duty, the enemy of utility. Its function is to malfunction. A mal-praxis. Against the rationalism that prevails in academic theological discourse, the International Congress for Infrathin Studies practices surrealist theology as the impassioned instantiation of the free play of thought, in “previously neglected associations” (Breton).
To the degree that the Congress of Infrathin Studies is a dream, it is a dream of the impossible. It works alongside but against academic theology, as its enemy from within, as the seducer who arrives after dark and enters through the back door.
Why?
Because the arche upon which our civilization is built is rotten, the civilization that built us, that gave some of us the place of a woman, a noman, a nogodman along with the other species and colors. The civilization that built its parasitic being on the lower half of the chain of being is archaic and needs convulsion. Its parasitic existence is devouring the planet, and non-convulsive Theology and its God-Man are in on it. (Poopin is in on it.)
The very grammar of human language is in on it. The great oneness that gave the right to ownership of the earth for ever and ever to white men is in on it, right there upheld by the oneness of theology.
Grammar and God are in collusion.
It’s in language’s nature to turn multiplicity into singularity, to turn this thing, and that thing, and this other thing, and that thing over there, into one and the same thing: “woman”, “worm”. It’s how knowledge is formed, human languages swallow becoming and shit out being.
That is why we, the International Congress for Infrathin Studies are reconstructing things like mad. Dancing at the far end of the discourse, at the far end of making sense.
We’re not talking a return to the fine arts prison that swallowed some surrealist art in the 1900ds. With Suzanne Césaire (1915-1966) we claim that surrealism is about us. We who are here today.
We are surrealist theology’s living presence; ardent and revolutionary.
We are full: full of love, hopes, desires and dreams (especially dreams, dreams that undermine our best ideas). We work to build recklessly playful, subterranean constructions that horizontally grow and tunnel below the plane of established discourse, underneath the stock floor of bourgeois intellectual exchange.
These constructions of ours are not grand temples that represent a supreme deity or even a triumphal humanism. They are earthy and horizontal constructions that represent nothing because below the surface (underground), there is only change and event flows, rupture and transitions, love, hope, and desire. This constructive work refers to nothing other than the work, the affirmational work of building together a thing that will surely collapse, that has perhaps already collapsed.
This collective and affirmational work is the work of Infrathin artwork. Infrathin Congress work.