The words ontological and phenomenological have always amused me. Ever since I finished my doctorate at the University of Patagonia in comparative philosophical investigations across Maori, Htupsi and the Western Canon, I concluded that these two terms were entirely utilised by balding white men who had no clear understanding what they meant, using them only to score points on their own publications; suffice to say, my own professor failed me, and I decided to hold the first Annual Conference for Ontological Thinkers in a Phenomenological Space to show him what academia is really about. Entirely intended to be a practical joke, a Situationist Prank, I was surprised to find philosophers from across the globe quite intent on arriving. I write here of what occurred during that first event.
Held in Lisbon – I was seeing a Portuguese musician at the time, who was a member of the industrial electro-jazz ensemble Juxtaposition, who I would go on to invite to perform at my little (big) festival – the Annual Conference For Ontological Thinkers in a Phenomenological Space pulled philosophers, academics, artists, and bon viveurs from many corners of the globe (a phrase which still makes me chuckle); I booked only a small space, but as each inventor, thinker, and anti-eloquent speaker built their respective booths & micro-festivals, it seemed, much like Caden Cotard’s own theatrical project, the room enlarged to correspond to the guests I had absolutely no idea would be turning up. Of course, I sold tickets, but these were mostly scribbled on the backs of napkins and left in caffeine-laden haunts of ill-repute or proto-philosophical historical report: the idea these doodles would amass the crowd I saw before me that (un)fateful day seemed as ludicrous as the very non-adjectives my conference elected to (not) explore.
In one corner, the micro-festival Limbic set themselves up in a pop-up miniaturised circus tent, the interior comprised of an artist collective who painted directly onto film reel, four dreammachines of the Burroughsian mode, and an Orgone Chamber which leaked all over the floor; Limbic intended to explore the arts from a purely instinctive perspective, arguing that ontological and phenomenological were in direct contradiction to lizard brained artistic exploration, and hence why they had booked the corner space. I never received any bookings; they simply turned up.
Amongst the other booths were academics thrown out of their institutions. A young Hanzi Freinacht pulled a soap-box from out of his briefcase and held court over the benefits and evils of post-modernism, although none of the crowd could entirely determine which points he regarded as good, and which he regarded as malignant. Jordan Peterson briefly made an appearance, whining obscenely at a mirror on how his chin did not quite align with modernist interpretations of masculinity, realised his mistake, and scrambled up the wall into the air vents to build a nest. The ghost of Foucault, wrapped in Dickensian chains, turned out to be a hologram brought by Grant Morrison, who smelled a little too much of pine tree sap. When I discovered the lead singer of Juxtaposition shacking up with a student of the University of Krakatoa in the unisex bathrooms, I was almost ready to close the entire event down.
At the point where I believed my conference had summoned the very white men, replete with chips on their shoulder as big as the word phenomenological when printed on the banner over the motorway, rather than the antithesis of such intellectual vacuums, there arrived a particular group who gave me a jolt of hope. Although similarly founded by two straight white men with chips on their shoulder, Die Spezielle Bruderschaft der Ontologischen Zerstörung held a special place in my heart. My comparative studies included the Peruvian Htupsi Tribe, and it was the man wobbling through the door who brought their philosophies into the foray of fringe essayism. The Htupsi survived the Spanish invasion by simply erasing themselves from reality in the first place: it is speculated that when the leader of the tribe discovered Conquistadors were coming to colonise the lands, he began the steady process of erasing all words from their language, including person, man, woman, child, house, me, you, I. By doing so, the Htupsi – like Alouette if performed by Bolaño – ceased to exist, and thus could never have been colonised, and so survived any inquisitions. The counter-argument is that this founder of the SBOZ simply invented the Htupsi, but this proved the very point of how they survived: through fiction.
Ricard St. Jassœmein stood approximately 4’11’’ – approximately being the operative word, because much like the Htupsi, his height was slowly being erased into non-existence, much to his Napoleonic chagrin – wearing a stuffy cardigan, somewhere between looking for a fight or a futon to nap on. Beside him, the elm-like Sévère Jérémy Kerr Foster Quincy, a Swiss National hopping between campuses with the deft of a gazelle escaping the maw of a lion. Both men were disregarded as fools in their respective fields – equally as erased and/or forgotten (accidentally or otherwise) – and manifested the SBOZ. The exact history of its formulation can be found in the article SBOZ: une rétrospective sur l'intelligence incontestable d'un homme essayant de nouer sa chaussure, as written by Quincy, but the general purpose of the sect was to create anti-fascist & anti-academic treatises to benefit left-wing momentum through, as they named it, silliness. By shirking the idea of “truth” and “reality” – not in the sense of my Portuguese lover remarking it wasn’t true I found him pressed into the thighs of the Krakatoan socio-thereminist – one could begin to construct new methods of benefiting anti-fascism. Fascists, they remarked, had the upper hand, in that they could “make anything up” as they went along their path of destruction: the left, forced to reside in bubbles of truth, fact, and honour, could rely on no myth-making to save themselves from the tides of iniquity. The SBOZ were creating academic texts which performed none of the duties of academia. Referencing articles which did not support the argument. Creating arguments based entirely in fiction. And most importantly, being entirely fictional themselves. Both Ricard St. Jassœmein (who also went by Marc Gandweil) and Sévère Jérémy Kerr Foster Quincy (whose passport was printed on bible paper with a photo of a British colonel prit-sticked upon it) existed as much as The Htupsi, or Harry Potter, Jesus to the atheists, atheists to the radical Christian. Their motto, as I came to learn it when we sat in the food court eating charcoal burgers and drinking melon tea, was an inversion of the common phrase of Douglas Adams. That a garden is beautiful because it has fairies at the bottom of it, and that it doesn’t matter if the fairies are factual or not, only that they are true.
After speaking with the founders of the organisation on their papers on The Htupsi (which can be found in the Digitised Library of the SBOZ, currently in steady upload to academia.edu), their members began to hold talks, open booths, and bring excitement back into the mix. For all the untruths rollicking about until that point – bands cheating on their academic girlfriends; Burroughs fanboys trying to trance people into onanistic dreamscapes; old balding tutors declaring all indigenous writings inconsequential – the SBOZ turned tables on what such a phrase could even mean. For the first time, I could see the power behind truth-bending, a post-truth exploration that did not result in Trump, but in performance art: the hippies and their drum circles may have angered Ricard Jassœmein to the point of turning purple (he never really did comprehend what his own organisation accomplished), it was this high folkloric joyousness that combatted the cruelties emerging at my conference. I intended my situationist joke to be a titter in the dark, a brief exhalation against all these boring philosophisers saying absolutely nothing at all, speeding up colonial university praxis, accidentally (or purposefully) bolstering fascistic enterprise through ignorance, unthinking, and bland writing, but I found it had attracted the very fools I wished to mock. The SBOZ showed a second way.
Gwenaël Insufflateur introduced me a second time to Marc Gandweil, even shorter than I last remember seeing him, his beard vaster, his cardigan mustier, his short fuse shorter, in Miami. Insufflateur, as we were anti-academics, was an anti-private investigator. His agency, Bluefin, found people who did not exist. And thus I was happy to finally be able to meet Marc Gandweil again, who left my conference as quickly as he arrived with his entourage of pan-global performance artists, academics, sociologists, and free-thinkers. I spoke to him on what had happened at the conference, how if it was not for the SBOZ, it would have devolved into a nationalistic irrationality I have spent my every waking moment trying to combat. We both, I remarked to him over dry scones and mojitos painted lime blue, believed irrationality could not be defeated with rationality: it could only be subsumed by a kinder version of its own unrealism. He remained quiet for a time, before leaving in a grumble: the SBOZ was no more. He and Quincy had fallen out at a conference in Belgium, and the Lodges of the SBOZ set up across the globe had ceased in pumping out treatises, essays, articles, dissertations and experiments. The library dried up like the dead sea in the distant future. Trump, he said, had won the war on silliness.
I write this for three purposes. The first is to say that if you meet a Portuguese electro-jazz industrialist going by Juxtaposition (a word that means as much as ontological and phenomenological) who says things like “honey badgers are actually very dangerous creatures” as if this is an interesting fact, then please flick him on the nose or throw him into the nearest large body of water. The second is to thank those who came to the first Annual Conference for Ontological Thinkers in a Phenomenological Space who did not arrive with boring, outdated modalities in the fields of culture, politics, sociology, anthropology, and the like: I thank the stilt-walking trio of chaos witches who served iced tea to our guests; I thank Kindsstandler and their three-hour talk on para-psychological wellbeing and the mental health of the undead; I thank Ida Berant for her investigations into Conceptual Materiality & Soul-Bonding; I thank Francis Fukuyama for giving up his time, to arrive, stark naked, wearing a sandwich board reading “the end was nigh”. I thank our guests, yoga instructors, mime artists, and dream-weavers who came and discussed the importance of thinking outside of prescribed boxes, especially those prescribed boxes which are proffered by those who deem prescribed boxes to be iniquitous. I thank the fictions and tulpa who discussed what it was like to exist without ontology, to exist in spaces of pure consciousness, and for Samuel Vessière for rounding up the multicoloured ponies which escaped from one particular plural self-system after they went to the Limbic micro-festival, met an oneironaut by the name of Bernie Rothson, and accidentally gave their headmates corporeality.
But finally, I want to write this to revitalise the SBOZ. There are, as said before, some places where there are remnants of this organisation; they played with the fire of turning unreal, and it appears there is less and less in the world purporting to their existence. I can say, without a shadow of doubt, that Ricard St. Jassœmein and Sévère Jérémy Kerr Foster Quincy were real. The former died some years ago, and Quincy is the last surviving member of this order. You can contact him at severe.sboz@gmail.com and he is trying, through paralytic arthritis, to upload the Runic Library of the SBOZ to the internet for prosperity. But in fictionality, many of the papers have ceased to have been written. Members have dissolved into novels, films, and unlogged dreamscape. The SBOZ deserves a second chance at combatting the evils of the world with rampant, silly irrationality. I remark here, if you read such, to start your own Lodge, to ask Quincy which papers need rewriting, re-manifesting, and to try and recreate this organisation out of the dredges of having never existed in the first place.
A K Threnody currently lives in Wales with her three dogs, Marzipan, Twix and Qwerty. She retired from teaching and academia to keep bees and parasitic wasps.
Dr. Quincy is currently living in exile from the academic community in Switzerland. After the loss of his friend, he has used his remaining years to publish SBOZ texts, to digitise their library. He requires your assistance. To help write, manifest, recreate, and publish SBOZ works, and to form your own Lodge, please contact him at severe.sboz@gmail.com.