BODY : The Freudian Spaceship Part Two

An image that can open up a space for thinking; a combination of ideas to produce new concepts from hybrid mutations; the name of a research project that combines schizoanalysis with the thought of Frantz Fanon; a space to develop a new practice of philosophy and psychoanalysis; a name for a new earth in which we might be at home.

Eric Harper and Matt Lee have been working, thinking and writing together for the last few years, producing a variety of essays, texts, and other materials around the theme of the Freudian Spaceship. This website marks a point at which we want to broaden our dialogues and actively involve others in conversation. The first step involves developing the podcast, Conversations about Concepts, as well as gathering together the work we have been doing into an easily accessible place on our research page.

The site is meant to be read. Like a book, and not like a book. This site has two aspects to it. On the one hand it presents the second part of the Freudian Spaceship project - BODY - which contains two elements - audio and text. These are found in the podcast and blog. These new incarnations of expression, the podcast and the blog, increasingly make up a body of work of collective thought, whether we like it or not. Despite their difficulties these web-forms enable both immersive style encounters (audio podcasts are often listened to like an ambient background) and fleeting textual moments (blog posts are almost by definition not long essays).

The second aspect to the site contains the first main text of the project (Breath) and various research papers that have developed from the project. This is the Research section. Alongside that there is a section for those who might be interested in adding to the project, so we have enabled a Contact page.

The structure of 'the website' as it has developed under capitalism is dominated by the need to harvest attention and so sites have infinite scrolls, constantly updated content and various other techniques that prevent any closure. Thus we encounter websites as endlessly reproducing objects that we are caught by. This website is part of a book-like project and so will at some point reach a closure state, where the only updates would be equivalent to a new edition of a book. As such it's intended for a reader to be able to spend a limited amount of time here. There's a dozen hours of audio and maybe no more than sixty to eighty thousand words of content intended. We want to encourage the non-linearity of engagement, drift and increasing familiarity so prevalent in our interaction with online material without removing the sense of closing the page that occurs at the end of reading a book.

The site has been going for a couple of years but we've moved away from using Wordpress and a commercial presentation platform to more experimental and direct engagement with the code that produces the site. We've also moved away from the commercial platforms that host audio content. This second version of the site is an 'Open Beta' in that the next stage is being done out in the open. The conversations in the podcasts and the blog posts that are part of the preparatory work of those recordings need to be supplemented with a reflexive moment, one that we hope will be a process of ongoing conversation with others who might be interested in the project.

We come from a place where the earth is in a state of crisis. We want to create a new earth, a new way of being on the earth, a new way of being with the earth. We want to create a new earth where we can be at home. Our contribution to this is to think the body, to think the breath, to think the earth, to think the new earth. We bring psychoanalysis, philosophy and revolution to the project and whilst we have developed within and against the academic, we hope to be able to find a way to go beyond that space in this work.

Both Eric and Matt are actively involved in political struggle as a practice, alongside the practices of psychoanalysis and philosophy. We both teach, Eric in a university and Matt in the community. But teaching is only one aspect of practice. Practice is a way of being in the world, a way of being with the world, a way of being with ourselves. To a large extent this work is about trying to find a way to be in the world, to be with the world, to be with ourselves, to be at home in the world.