2004
I.
The term “experimental living” many, if not most, of the times, fails to properly carry my point across. People hear in it “experimental lifestyle,” the normalization of an abnormal practices or praxes, in the same pocket as Hare Krishnas and the San Fran gaykink scene. Weird personal customs customized to weird personal tastes.
But experimental living, as I mean it, demands greater concentration than this, a demand that even the most dedicated cannot meet everywhere, every hour, at full tilt. Luke Krafft once remarked that me and my friends were good at “things that could be done in a second,” things achieved by usurping the “absolute sovereignty of the instant,” to borrow words from Lefebvre. And there is valid reasoning in this (perhaps because Luke himself is pretty talented at these things).
I do not consider our penniless, carnivalistic, warehouse lifestyles as equivalent to the radical pragmatist outlook I canalized into “experimental living.” Not really, that is; though its weightlessness and strange parameters do keep things in a pretty “experimental mode.” I measure most experiments as action rather than praxes or practice; having a beginning and an end, being episodic in nature, following the arc of an anecdote. Hopefully, a very clever anecdote. Usually these experiments interfere with praxes— including the fucked-up, out-of-step customs of our circle of friends. I am less enthused philosophically by things we do with already well-worn history, like dumpster diving and medical experiments. I don’t mention them much; they are only a means to various, otherwise impossible, ends. I do not philosophically endorse either employment or unemployment for instance; both are fertile “fields of action.” It is even somewhat of a failure on my part to have not offered greater tricks and data on “the Employed Being,” a dossier I have many times planned out but never executed. Not with sufficient panache, at least. This is perpetually on the horizon. And something— I mean it this time— you’ll probably be seeing more of later on this year, when the invernal depression has given way to new life.