The purpose of the website
The Freudian Spaceship is an ongoing research projection at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanlaysis and politics. We’re interested in what some philosophers call ‘conceptual engineering’. In our case this is more specifically a conceptual re-engineering, involving us in taking various existing systems of thought and practice and attempting to re-organise how they work. The motivation is to try and re-tool ourselves in the face of contemporary life.
We are living in a moment that some have called a meta-crisis, an intersection of more than one problem, more than one catastrophic flow. Our current conceptual tools only seem to be able to be applied to distinct and seperate parts of this meta-crisis, breaking down or sezing up when encountering other aspects of life. In this situation, how do we develop a response that enables us to reach towards a new earth? This is one of the central problems that organises our work.
This project of thinking and writing together began almost a decade ago. At that time Eric Harper and I (Matt Lee) met at a Deleuze Reading Group in London. In conversation, after the academic discussions had finished, we found a common ground in the conjunction of responses to the world around us. Usually these conjunctions arose as the questions of practice came to the fore. It is fascinating to study the Deleuze book on Leibniz, for example, but how does this connect to those problems facing us when we switch on the news and watch the death of Eric Garner in 2014, or our frustration at the impotence of politics in the face of the climate crisis that was apparent in the bullshit of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015?
A series of moments that made up our own personal histories and identities became part of our conversations, and often there was something that felt worth saving in spite of all too apparent failures that also came with those territories. Eric, for example, was a South African growing up amidst the revolutionary upheavals in that country, becoming a member of the ANC and South African Communist Party during the later 1980’s. Trying to find a way to respond to the complexities of the human impact of such an explosive and violent revolution, he had moved into psychoanalysis as a way of adding something to the struggle. I had grown up, during a similar time period, as a revolutionary from a working class family under 1980’s Thatcher, part of the highly demonised ‘far left enemy within’. I had been sent to prison for two and half years folllowing the Poll Tax riot of 1990 and had fallen into philosophy after my release from prison and had found myself in an academic position teaching philsophy in University. Both of us came from working class backgrounds, had families that had to deal with often severe disabilities and mental health issues and both of us retained a sense that capitalism and its effects was a fundamental horizon in which to think through how to deal with the problems of everyday life just as much as problems of planetary or political scope.
As conversations developed and ideas began to fizz and ferment we decided to try and write together. It was important that such writing not be constricted and confined within an academic space, without denying or abandoning the lessons and insights encountered in academic work. We had both worked hard to achieve our doctorates and were both proud of ourselves for this whilst simultaneously finding the achievements brought as many problems as they did oppurtunities. The main strategy in attempting to think together the complexities of our current world was to think through the combination of colonisation and climate crisis, racism and ecology, as the crucial vectors of contemporary capitalism. This was inspired in large part by the problematic that had become named as ‘intersectionalism’. We encountered this problematic, however, not in terms of identity but by taking up these complexities in the context of thinking about what it meant to be ‘at home’. The concept of ‘homeliness’ was in many ways our first problem- what does it mean to be at home, how it could be possible, how it was actual, what does it involve and how it had seemingly gone so wrong. What would it be to begin to think ourselves as a species amongst other species, in a space, at home? What would such a home look like? What would be it’s name? It was from within this messy, exhilirating and exhausting conversational context that we began to form the image of the Freudian Spaceship, as a way to name a new earth as our home.
From there we developed a sense of a basic methodology which centred around the idea of what we call the threefold (our mutation of intersectionalism in many ways) and which first expressed itself in terms of three parts of a book – Breath, Body, Earth – as well as various other threfolds. We didn’t yet know quite what we meant by any of this but we worked on developing intuitons that seemed right or which felt like they worked. We began writing the first section, Breath, and developed a chaotic creative writing practice in which we produced texts collaboratively by writing over each others work, rewriting and reorganising our words, trying to learn from the practice of schizoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari had developed in the works on Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A number of theoretical tools developed as we shaped these words – phrases or formulas that began to arise and which called to us in some way, such as the sense that what we were developing was a hybridisation of the anti-colonial thinking of Fanon and the shizoanalytic thought of Deleuze and Guattari, which is why we describe it being a thinking towards a Fanonian schizoanalysis. At the same time we began to intensively study together, sharing texts, books, schools of thought and histories, as well as talking, lots and lots of talking. We began to try and bring our whole selves to the table, to speak and think from inside our lives rather than from the front of the room.
We produced a shit load of words. These were then mined for texts that could be sent out into the world, and out of this came some essays and a short text called ‘Breath’, the first part of the book project. We’ve continued to work on and refine ideas that developed early on but at the same we also wanted to develop further this sense of the overall project. That first text had a very specific voice, one that needed complementing and companionship with other voices and moments of thought. Eric, in particular, works in a highly collaborative manner with a wide range of people, and kept the role of conversation – amongst ourselves and with others – central to our practice. As we began to grapple with the ‘next phase’ of the work, the Body and the Earth, we found it increasingly important to find a way to make this central role of conversation a major mode of our methodology. In part this arose from practices that developed during lockdown when we realised that we could record conversations and organise conversations in such a way as to be able to record them. This recognised, in part, a central role that the voice has in the production of thought, whether that be in interviews given by philosophers such as Deleuze that reveal a different tone to his thought, or the central role conversation has, in some form, within psychoanalytic practices. The word, the voice and the ear operate in a complex interaction, never simply given to us beforehand and always part of a complex inter-relationship of contexts.
It was a relatively short step from recognising the need for such conversation to the idea of recording small groups of people talking about something, in our case conversations about concepts. The prevalence of podcasts suggested a format, the new tech that arrived after the lockdown such as Zoom and auto transcription offered a possible means and the need to find a way to explore this complex inter-relationship of word, voice and ear provided the drive. We both have a whole boat load of personal and professional commitments and so it’s taken us a while to begin to turn this idea into something concrete but we’re finally here, at the beginning of this next phase of our research and thinking. This website, the podcast and the blog are a way of gathering our work together and making it accessible, pushing it in some small way into the vague sphere of ‘discourse’ but more than that it is our invitation to the world around us to join us in a conversation about the future and the co-production of thought. It is through such conversations and through the practice of conversation itself that we can begin to develop a body that questions, a body that can only ever think as part of a process of producing together that which is more than the indvidual.