Happy Tears – notes on party life

Brandon LaBelle

One arrives, moves into the scene, which is brimming with energy; there are the matters thrown here and there, others arranged according to an intuitive idea; the passing of bottles and other stuff, a passing from the kitchen to the living room, to the balcony and back, to the bathroom and bedrooms; a general flow of festivity, being jostled here and there, as the music (for there is always music) thumps and pumps, vibrating the scene, the skin, the neighbors; one arrives, enters this lively dance of commotion, the ebb and flow of laughter and longing, inebriation and hallucination, with the lights turned low, the walls splashed with shadows; it is hot, someone opens a window, the clothes are peeled away, shoes come off as the music kicks up a notch, to get us moving; within this strange collaborative situation things are pushed together, messed up, the life-force of bodily-being is given room, time for joyous as well as painful revelations.

I want to consider the party as a complex social scene which can contribute to manifesting forms of community as well as approaches to embodiment. There are a number of perspectives we might put forward as a way of getting into the scene of the party, including questions of the body (what happens to the body in the midst of the party?), of sociality (is the party proposing a type of social form?), and questions of knowledge (to think the party as an act of knowledge-making and learning). These lines of inquiry can help unpack the party and lead to an idea of Party Studies – understanding the party as something to study as well as a form of study in itself: that is, partying as an act of doing that is equally a type of experiment in living. To think the party as an organizational endeavor, as the making of a world. This finds echoes in what Dimitris Papadopoulos terms “ontological organizing,”[1] in terms of how individuals and groups come together to create specific conditions for a form-of-life or common world. Papadopoulos helps us appreciate how social movements, for instance, not only work at forms of political organizing, but furthermore enact gestures of ontological organizing. These are gestures aimed at reworking or devising particular material conditions of existence through which communities establish and sustain themselves (often in tension with dominant society). In the case of the party, ontological organizing can be said to express itself through establishing certain material conditions that allow for types of behavior and ways of being together. I’m particularly interested in how parties are both hospitable and inhospitable, welcoming and territorial, giving way to social, material forms which are always close to formlessness, a breaking down. The party is, on the one hand, socially acceptable (if we think of rituals of transition, from birthdays to weddings: parties mark the occasion), and yet, parties also act as scenes of rupture, excess, breakdown. Here, I’m thinking of those parties taking place at people’s homes, teenage parties for example, parties that appear suddenly, spontaneously, or are conceived from the start as invitations to let go. Such parties undo a given social order, where the party oversteps. It moves us toward a state of exhaustion, a going too far. From the expression of non-normative behavior, or that of a certain “nocturnal” identity, to the reshaping of a given time and space – in the making of a unique milieu – the party emerges as an aesthetic, social, ontological scene of invention, one that carries us somewhere else.

To party is to work at wreckage.

The wrecked body

We may think of the body immersed in the scene of the party as a wrecked body: a body gone too far. And in going too far, one somehow confuses the lines between life and death, between health and illness – these positions become less fixed or certain. The wrecked body commits itself to a certain suffering (it makes itself ill) which, at the same time, is an expression of celebration, a type of healing: one “recovers” by way of an experience of self-destruction. The wrecked body is not simply an expression of catharsis, an overcoming (though this may certainly occur), rather, it is an indulgence, a state of delirium, which is both joyous and violent at the same time.

The body takes on a trans-subjective, or even anti-subjective stance, where the “party-body” is a body continually displaced; it works against itself, drawing together passion and dejection, joy and self- destruction, intimacy and loss of control, into a profoundly unstable construct. This is precisely the logic of the party: holding together contradictory and conflictual forces. Where the body ends up is never so certain, but clearly it arrives near to oblivion. The party, after all, is often the very thing enabling escape from oneself and the imperative of self-management.

Here, I follow Catherine Clément and her philosophy of delirium, which she articulates through an elaboration of the musical concept of syncope. Related to syncopation and a medical term for fainting or loss of consciousness, syncope identifies “a note [that] lags behind and anticipates the rest of the movement”. It  “creates delay” – it staggers time, introduces gaps, hesitation: a suspension that gives way to what a body can become, an otherness within. Clément applies this to understandings of subjectivity, and importantly, processes of transition: “The difficulty of crossing from one body to the next, from one stage to the next, and from life to death, will always be a test: initiations, love at first sight, depressions, syncopes are used to resolve this.”[2] Syncope is a “coming out of oneself,” a pause that staggers temporality and the forward progression of a productive self; a syncope is a delay, a being- unproductive: uselessness.

If syncope is fundamentally a rhythmic process, where missed or dropped beats give room for an extended breath, a sensual intensity, a transition, it brings forward a pronounced relation to time. What does it mean to be in time or to keep time? These are ways of following a given pattern, aligning with a system or structure that shapes one’s movements and defines trajectories. Being-in-time is to be emplaced within a greater chronology – such is the dynamic of tempo, one that situates the body, its biological, social rhythms, within a given order or frame, and which gives way to interruptions, missed beats, detour and improvisation. These might be considered as breaths, rests, moments of over-excitement or rupture found in letting go or racing ahead. Even while patterns emerge across all types of times and spaces, environments and communities, to be in time carries with it an ongoing tension that turns tempo into a socio-affective construct.

This includes challenges around keeping up, where certain bodies may not have the ability to keep in time. Chronology is also chronopolitical, suggesting that syncope, as that instant of affirmative delirium, is also sometimes an issue of ability – one may veer off because one cannot go on. Syncope – and related syncopations – come to carve out a time of refuge, to give room for other temporal imaginaries and needs, for taking a break. Such a temporal interruption can be a reminder of how certain bodies or communities may be tensed or strained by given orders, from social to temporal, bodily to communal. This is certainly part of Clément’s philosophy of delirium, which calls for an appreciation of the living, organic and pluralistic nature of embodied experience and that integrates how it is one may keep up. “Syncope creates delay and accentuates it by prolonging time,”[3] figuring gaps for other ways of being in the body as well as in time. In lagging behind, or dropping the beat, syncope may not only figure a delirious instant, it moreover interrupts an overall system, inviting or demanding an alteration of a greater compositional order or socio-affective construct – it may, in fact, allow for breath precisely when it is most needed.

In this sense, the party is a lapse – a milieu of prolonged delay, and where syncope as a “dissonance” operates as a vehicle for reinventing precisely the logic of a temporal order. From such a view, the partier recovers something of the body: that which is often occluded by the obligation of control and self- management, of being on time. The wreckage of the party-body is, at the same time, a healing, a breath, a gesture or an act that places the body at the edge of itself so as to not only disorient, but to reappropriate and experience itself as pure vitality.

An impossible community

What is the party’s relation to questions of community? As the party is dramatically a social scene, how might we understand sociality, collectivity, and community by way of partying? Within the delirious commingling that the party incites, as a general state of wreckage and even revolt, what becomes of the relational and feelings for being-in-common?

I want to follow Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on community, or what he terms “the inoperative community,”[4] as a way of unpacking these questions and for thinking about the party as a unique framework for configurations of community. As Nancy outlines, community is to be understood as the “sharing of singularities” expressed by way of passion, where passion names one’s continual exposure to others, and is positioned in contrast to what he terms “communion.” While communion is defined by a notion of work, as a project of identification, centering persons around a myth of lost origins – a wholeness needing to be perennially recovered; in contrast, community is defined by way of a “social ontology” in which individuality is always already “interrupted” by others (leading instead to a notion of singularity). In this regard, community defines or even precedes personhood; by way of community one is unworked as an individual, leading less to an expression of communion. Rather, for Nancy, community is the anti-thesis of communion, because communion puts one to work by demanding alignment with a given figure or narrative of immanence: that one may find completion by way of an internal set of social, familial, national bonds for example. In contrast, community is defined by a transcendent force, as that which is external to itself – the otherness always surrounding and through which one is defined and even sustained. And which is expressed or given narrative by way of the sharing of singularities, a passion that exceeds or delays the imperative to work and which upsets the centrality of the self.

Nancy’s social ontology, and his “inoperative community,” is suggestive for approaching the social form of the party. While the party is certainly at times a scene of membership, a closed circuit that tries to reinforce itself according to a set of internal meanings and territorial rituals, it is also often constituted by its own undoing, whether by way of strangers who happen to enter, maybe brought in by an invited guest, or by the fact of its rapturous nature (the party as being aligned with excess, a breaking down and a leaking out). Within this scene of membership, things happen. Doors may be flung open, intruders may arrive, neighbors may slip in or complain; friends may suddenly become strangers, lovers may betray, bullies may interrupt the scene. Importantly: the party often pushes hospitality to its limit, where friends may suddenly break things, upset the order of the home, or turn against the host; hospitality is fundamentally strained by the party it creates. This is the risk one must take – if it is to realize itself, the party must be dangerous and inhospitable. It is never ruly (in terms of following the rules). In this way, parties manifest a breaking down not only of the body, but that of identity; it engenders a scene by which to lose oneself in the crowd.

Yet, the party holds together somehow; as a logic of wreckage, of holding contradictory tensions, the party works by unworking itself; it comes together by breaking apart – it forms around its own formless center, suggesting a path by which to experience the social as inherently delirious. The sharing of singularities that Nancy maps, as an expression of passion, seems to find a unique manifestation in party life. I want to suggest that the sociality of the party, even while tending towards inhospitality, does so according to a form of love: the commingling defining the party, and the inoperative passion shaping its dynamics, puts love into the crowd. I might call it a “polyamorous” scene whose criminal sensations and wild aggressions come to distribute love, shifting from the intimacies between two and toward a general social feeling. The party comes to act as a scene of loving each other, loving the party itself, a getting together that supports and nurtures friendships, as what interrupts us, remakes us – even wrecks us. As such, the party may teach how to love more generally, to figure love not only as what one may share through intimacy, as a closed form, but also as what one may bring into the crowd: to love for no reason. The community of passion Nancy outlines is suggestive for such an understanding, where bonds are not necessarily traced by way of heritage, ancestry, investment or history, but are found in the “nocturnal splendor” of the body, as the violent joy that sustains us, that makes and unmakes us in the same moment.[5]

The party gives expression to an impossible community, a community for and against itself, and may offer insight into the creative, erotic constitution of the common in general.

Erotic knowledge

What is the party’s relation to the production of knowledge? If the party is suggestive for a particular study, how does it relate itself to the field of knowledge – is there a specific knowledge path or epistemic framework engendered by way of partying, and if so, what might its impact be on the general dynamics of research and education? Can there be such a thing as a scientific view or approach to the party as a cultural form?

Questions of knowledge may be considered by way of notions of excess and the erotic – by what Georges Bataille calls “sovereignty.”[6] For Bataille, sovereignty is found less through an act of possession, production or labor, as a struggle for self-determination; rather, sovereignty, or what he terms the “sovereign life,” is articulated through forms of expenditure and a compulsion toward excess. Sovereignty exists beyond the necessities of life and the labor one often undertakes in order to fulfill them. Through such a view, Bataille aims at recovering the sovereignty that all persons may experience, steering us, by way of the pleasures of the sensual, toward the “miraculous.” As he argues, sovereign life is grounded in the moment: it is a taking leave of the directive to produce, to be operative, in service of a future to come. Instead, sovereign life is consciousness of the moment and, as such, it is never a work of knowledge, for “to know is always to strive” (for truth, for use, for an end or goal). For Bataille, the miraculous instead resides in a state of “unknowing”: a nonknowledge that finds expression in what he calls “happy tears,” as the intensity of ecstatic being.

Is not the party a scene of happy tears? Where pain and pleasure, suffering and joy overlap, leading to all sorts of sudden, unknowing expressions: of love and betrayal, of joy and misery, rapture and breakage – one that firmly situates one within the moment (the partier loses track of time…). The party turns the moment into a world of sensation, a common or, rather, uncommon life that requires an intensification of presence, a deep hanging-out – giving way to an “erotic knowledge.” This is a miraculous knowledge, one that, like the wrecked body, the impossible community, undoes itself.
            In terms of elaborating the party as a scene of study, it can be said to enact what Jan Masschelein terms “poor pedagogy.”[7] In contrast to the notion of a “rich methodology,” and the relaying of knowledge by way of a hierarchy of expertise, poor pedagogy grounds learning, “impoverishing” the tower of knowledge in order to stay close to a process of shared discovery. Poor pedagogy locates us as a collective body gathered by way of curiosity, improvisation, and the joy of finding out together, where one must attend to what is found along the way, rather than what is given, stated, handed down. Poor pedagogy is about getting lost; it is about allowing for a lack of control, and a lack of “intention,” as a suspension of the plan. This finds echo in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s notion of study as a “fugitive gesture” that explicitly counters the valorization of knowledge as a commodity.[8] For Harney and Moten, to study is to upset the classroom as what “calls to order.” Study, instead, is posed as that which we do as a “speculative practice” and which involves a range of activities, from cooking, cleaning to walking and dancing – and partying. To study, in short, is to draw out “intelligence in motion.” In fact, to study might be to party: with ideas, with each other, with things, and with what we may create from nothing. Learning by way of the party is always already unlearning.

The Pirate Academy (happy tears in the classroom)

I’m interested to think in what ways the party, and its given experiences and dynamics, can be carried elsewhere. In what ways do the lessons the party offers inform other situations and enactments, where the party may help guide in terms of being in the body and with others? Or in contexts that call one into particular orders? For myself, this found a particular manifestation as part of my work as a professor at the Bergen Art Academy, which I offer as an example or expression in which party life shapes a relation to an institutional setting. And in this case, became the basis for a pedagogical approach.

Following the Covid-19 lockdown, where meeting in person was greatly restricted from spring 2020 through to fall 2021 (I was teaching entirely online over this period), I felt I wanted to do something special when returning to gathering in the classroom – to celebrate the fact of being able to meet again. This led to launching the Pirate Academy in September 2021(which ran until December 2022). I conceived the Academy as a night school that could provide an alternative time and space for gathering with students, and for approaching studying as well as how it is the institution comes to function as a community (what defines such a community, what are its practices, its affordances as well as limitations?). The Pirate Academy sessions took the form of “research parties” held over 2 or 3 nights, once per month, where each session focused on a particular theme, such as Common Space, Animism, Night, Listening, Love, the Unfinished, among others. These sessions included presentations and performances by invited guests, explorative activities often involving movement and embodied workshops, as well as creative approaches to reading, discussing, discoursing. Generally, the gatherings took guidance from an idea of pirate practices, giving way to a more horizontal situation of co-learning, as well as suggesting a para-institutional approach or position. I also tried to set the scene by providing an opening presentation or soft lecture, mapping the given topic through a rather free and playful approach to theory. I felt it was important to give students an entry point into the ongoing turn to “artistic research,” showing how research and what we know as “knowledge production” can be experimental, embodied, creative, emotional, and not something alienating or overly scientific.

Key to the Pirate Academy was an idea of partying, and over time the nightly gatherings took on an increasingly festive tone. The party functioned as a guiding principle or ethos, supporting ways of being together and what it means to study: through inciting an informal, horizontal, generous and open situation within the increasingly rigid environment of the Bergen Academy (through its integration into the University of Bergen), I felt joy and pleasure, as well as having fun, increasingly present in the room, which trickled out into the day to day life of the institution. The Pirate sessions stirred the waters of the institution, creating new flows and conversations, new feelings and creations, and which enlivened the educational environment.

In putting festivity at the center, I wonder if educational environments in general can become a place where one may learn not only one’s craft, or even ways of discoursing, but also how to contribute to a shared world – to learn a practice of freedom, with its given responsibilities and dreaming, its struggles and improvised movements, its spiritual life and affective materiality. Fostering such skills in students by creating situations that actually manifest or perform this freedom seems at the heart of education as a project. I come to understand festivity as an embodied form of criticality, as serious play, where ideas are put into motion, identities are tested, friendships made and strangers encountered – festivity as what invites the emergence of new directions, new imaginaries and conversations, to learn ways of holding space for others; it is to keep joy at the center and to fight on behalf of life itself: as I’ve tried to suggest, the wrecked nature of the party signals its ultimate vitality (to be the life of the party is to celebrate festivity as life’s fundamental expression). It might also be about laughter and the capacity to feel interdependency. To let oneself be touched, as Isabelle Stengers suggests,[9] may be what is so needed within today’s overly strained and stressed environments. To turn education into a party may do much to foster a culture of interdependency, supporting a knowledge of how to breathe freely.

[1] Dimitris Papadopoulos, Experimental Practice: Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social Movements (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

[2] Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 119 - 120.

[3] Ibid., 81.

[4] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

[5] Ibid., 34.

[6] Georges Bataille, “Knowledge of Sovereignty,” in The Accursed Share, vol. II & III (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

[7] Jan Masschelein, “E-ducating the gaze: the idea of a poor pedagogy,” in Ethics and Education, 5:1 (2010): 43-53.

[8] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).

[9] Isabelle Stengers, “We Are Divided.” e-flux journal #114 (12/20): 1-5.

The Pirate Academy