On Nomadology

We dig tunnels.

 

There is no overarching plan for this superstructure known as The Unstitute, but we know there must be enough ways for us to get out quickly when the need for escape arises. Sure, this edifice takes on all the characteristics of a labyrinth, and it is uncertain who is trapped and who the trapper, but these concerns merely reinforce the idea that the plan must be going well, whatever it is. And though it might seem unlikely to go to such extreme effort to encounter the primordial fear of being trapped – a fear most underrated for its influence within the corridors and back-alleys of society – we are quite content to enmesh our efforts within such base fear. To be sure, we are never satisfied that the labyrinth has reached its state of perfection, inasmuch as each new improvement reveals at least a dozen new weaknesses which must be counteracted on the instant, strategic alterations are hastily drawn-up, construction begins afresh, new weaknesses and blind spots are revealed, plans are abandoned – and yet oftentimes it is these unfinished avenues that constitutes the greatest confusion for the intruder and thus the greatest pleasure for us. Indeed, there is no way to achieve a full satisfaction that the perfect escape should be at all possible, for one can only know such things when a situation of escape is needful, and even then one should hardly be content that the escape plan is perfect, for one cannot presume the intruder to act according to our script. And anyway, satisfaction is hardly our object. The escape itself is a by-product, an excuse for the architecture of escape.

 

Probably escape will never be needed – for who should attack us here? Who would be so egotistic to presume that we should become the object of the Other? But such questions are irrelevant, for we are building upon the possibility of fallible design, and this there is always much work to be done for the construction to be impregnable, or at least open to such a degree that there are manifold routes out to meet the occasion or the nature of the intruder. Every escape we should ever need, every escape out cunning can decide, must be on hand – which predicates that also we ourselves must be in readiness to put this supreme architecture to use without prior warning. Certainly this is not our home. Anxiety is built into the superstructure itself, and it is again uncertain that it’s corridors, chambers and exits constitute modes of escape or modes of capture. Who is trapped? Perhaps we ourselves are the invaders, and this confusing architecture is built around the presumption of occupation, or the arbitrary authority of Place?
We work therefore relentlessly, unceasingly, on our trap. Annexes, arcades, hatches, shafts: our Nomadology takes place within. This is no settlement, for not even the walls ensure our shifting purpose. The weaponisation of this architecture, which subjects our sense of place to such uncertainty as to our proper relationship to it, with such painstaking avoidance of comfort – for we should not wish the invader to be attracted by comfort or wish to stay – and such emphasis on the simulacra of there being no place here at all, elevated or plans to greater degrees of discontents. An escape cannot be perfected, and thus neither can it’s architecture. These discontents are our proper traps, and our further means to escape – not to freedom, for that is just a word – but to an exponential labour of movement through ourselves…