How do you study liveness ?
And what does school have to do with it ?

Love these questions. To answer them, I woke up and opened some books and turned to a few pages I've turned to many times before. I'm with Rebecca Schneider: At any second or third look the live shatters into complications. To study liveness is to give oneself over to that shattering.

If at first glance, liveness seems to suggest a fetishistic attachment to presence, we keep learning that liveness is always, per Fred Moten, more + less than here and now. To study liveness is to give oneself over to that insistent shattering of presence, of the present ... to commune with and within the unholy ghostliness of liveness.

Shattering, shards, I'm thinking of Julie Tolentino and the cut. Harry Burke describes their 108-hour performance-exhibition "Repeater": Every hour, a camera documents the room, and Tolentino cuts the same spot on her inner thigh to smear a slide with a throb of blood. Liveness is that open wound and the immanent response of the flesh. Cutting, healing, scarring, repeating. 

We study liveness by attending to this endless iterativity. We study liveness by rehearsing the difficult embrace of what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls difference without separability. It takes practice to keep refusing the "I". As Ethan Philbrick reminded us so beautifully: Why worry about preaching to the choir? We need choir practice.

When I write we, I am already thinking like a school, and maybe not like school as institution (rage against the university) but more like a school of fish. And I remember a photo AJ Wilmore sent me from Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowned. Gumbs is writing about striped dolphins, for which the primary unit of life is school ... What if school was the scale at which we could care for each other and move together. We study liveness through our indefatigable swarm; it catches us, pulls us in, spits us out, let me throw it back to you:

How would you describe the school we are making? 
And what does liveness have to do with it?

I wonder if we’re even making a school ; or always , always caught in the terminological limits and our desires ( poetic and logistic ) to labor within the usefulness and uselessness of school as a location , a continuum , a frame . We’re making something that on a number of levels tends to our complexly specific and individual ( but not singular ) on-going histories with growing up and working in and with school and its many symptoms . Pre-School . Elementary School . Sunday School . Middle School . Vacation Bible School . Dance School . High School . High School Dropout , but not quite . College and more college and even more college . In a continual process of living through and forming responses to school’s tendencies to categorize , confine , discipline , & outlaw ways of being ; considering its tendencies and missions to provide real access to material and immaterial resources that do offer an otherwise , a something else , a gorgeous detour .. . as much as it expropriates its constituents' labors & dreams of potential futures / potential worlds that deepen unpayable and unavoidable debts . Maybe the school we are working on now , the fourth iteration , a deconstruction or an aberration , is aligned with Kunci Study Forum & Collective’s School of Improper Education , but perhaps also in a kind of irregular accord with Pope L.’s Hole Theory as we make and tend to the living gaps breaks ruptures * holes that demand something like a school to incite re/assembly and to “ to confront the nothingness, to touch its fullness … over and over again with one’s body ” ( Barad, Troubling Time/s ) . 

“Can you feel it?”

So - when I say
Holes are conduits or a 'means to'
Or a space or an intersection -
I mean holes are occasions -
Opportunities which can take
Many forms, materials, and durations
(imagine a hole that is only duration).

The form, material and durational
Aspect of a hole can affect
Its nature (imagine a hole
That is only aspect or affect).

When I imagine a hole
That is only this or only that
I am not after purity -
But hilarity.

Holes are not the point.
Holes are empty theory.
– Pope.L

We are building a new school. The school is an experiment on the sustainability of (both material and immaterial) economies of organization. We want to test the idea of school as a garden of ideas, a laboratory of affects, and a space where new ideas clash and coalesce. We are not yet sure about what can be learned in this school. But we are absolutely sure about not starting from the premises that specify what needs to be learned and not learned. We want to study together, while interrogating the meaning of togetherness.
– Kunci Study Forum & Collective

Hmmmm , what does liveness have to do with any of this ? This is certainly why we’re doing this , a commitment in asking and reasking this question together and with others , and to locate the ask in our doings .  I’m not entirely sure of what it is or where it is or how to explain it but maybe a question to ask regarding liveness , similar to Kodjo Eshun musings on dance music’s rhythmic psychedelics in Abducted by Audio, might be “ can you feel it ? ” And then , what kind of work are we doing and what kind of formulation of place and collective is emerging as we move from , with and toward senses of feeling . 

So maybe liveness is about intensities, how we study a variety of
im/material intensities
and how those intensities create thresholds ( Eshun ) ,
unwatchable places we make 
when we watch with one another ( Moten and Harney ) ,
that we meet at to devise ways of entering , being with & passing thru . 

& Toni Morrison , too !

I’m sure you’ve seen or heard the clip numerous times but I have to include it because liveness is also an ongoing series of longings to endure , to persist , to survive and to die , beautifully under life’s impossible circumstances . Toni says ,  “ Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in parts . But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. .. survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between . ”  https://www.tiktok.com/@thekrisbliss/video/7293226786748402986

Lauren !
What feels strikingly different or new
about the planning and making
of Volume 4 
compared to
Volumes 1, 2 & 3 ?