To suspend the philosophical imagination at the borderlines of solitary confinement: an experiment with thought-in-isolation.
We have placed eight authors in eight soundproof rooms. Each has selected a single philosophical companion; each must devise their own careful strategy for entering and exiting the cell, with a critical-stylistic approach to the crossing of paths; each must decide on their own techniques of orchestration, manipulation, and survival. The clichéd speculative question of asking what book one might bring if stranded on a desert island finds its more grave methodological execution here in the invitation to form a soundproof room: for this gesture, in essence, also asks what specific figure one might drag alongside oneself into the desolate world, and more particularly what hallucinatory conversations one might entertain in order to kill time (as time kills us).
More specifically, the ruse of the “soundproof room” would imply staging an intimate philosophical encounter with a single obscure figure (from whatever period or cultural territory, though presumably outside the dominant boundaries of knowledge). This would conceivably yield a dialogic space based on principles of seclusion, captivation, and visionary trade; it would take the form of a conceptual conversation with a lone literary, philosophical, mystical or artistic personage and follow whatever chosen patterns or trajectories drift therein. The main operational constraint is to avoid citations, jargon or referentiality beyond this confrontation with the selected figure (that is, no explicit names or quotes derived from anyone outside the immediate circumference of exchange). Rather, the entire constellation of ideas generated should emerge from whatever unique strata of primary source passages one extracts in order to stage the “soundproof room” experience. Once again, the endeavor here is neither pure scholarly analysis nor historical contextualization but rather the design of eight esoteric hollows; eight sites of provocative intersection with another consciousness across time-space – untimely (in meaning), disturbing (in tone), and deploying closure (of certain realities) to induce improvizational complexity.
We seek four transfigurative victories here:
The soundproof room’s first intent is to turn the philosophical exercise into a force of atmospheric and architectonic will. This requires both a radical obliviousness to pre-existing settings and a radical concentration on building makeshift edifices in wasteland environments (the desert, jungle, forest, ocean or chasm of thought), striking that long-standing paradoxical balance between forgetting and vigilance that makes all trances possible. Within the shack’s disorienting radius, one sees nothing beyond the intended object of infatuation, mesmerism, delirium. At these far-off distances, the four walls of a single room begin to rise slowly, awaiting the guest’s arrival.
The soundproof room’s second intent is the establishment of an anti-archetypal universe (vague origins and futurities). From the most miniscule vantage of remoteness, from the exterior straits of the gone-too-far, these small compartments are meant to oppose all mythic structures bound by established symbolic figures (the evil king, the wise sage, the everyman) and figurations (creation, apocalypse, flood). Instead, the interlocutors of the soundproof room are caught in their own non-archetypal elsewheres, inventing rare specimens and mad prototypes that offend the hierarchies of creation/reality, sealing careful alliances with the nameless, the irreproducible, the irreplaceable, the convoluted, and the unforeseen.
The soundproof room’s third intent is to test three successive modalities of breaking: (1) breaking from the world (moment of strandedness); (2) breaking against the companion (moment of combat/collusion); (3) breaking from the companion (moment of abandonment). This tripartite practice allows us to advance a theory of the fragment’s intricacy over all reigning models of totality or even assemblage, for it displays the fine grooves and edges that are shaped by acts of shattering. There were certain medieval mystics said to rotate among various masters and then sever themselves abruptly from them, repeating a process of immersion and violent departure with the knowledge that their own potential singularity would be sculpted by such precise fractures alone. Here thought enters a prism of jagged becoming that mirrors the elaborate geological processes of erosion or crystal formation (namely, the particularity of the shards).
The soundproof room’s fourth intent is to entertain a style of necromantic conspiracy: that is, to summon the apparitional figure from whatever nothingness in order to solidify bonds of the secret, the pact, the rumor, the whisper, and the plot. Language thereby becomes an instrument of the henchman and the suspect, speaking in codes and cryptic intervals, communicating through silences, voids, and textual omissions. The soundproof room embodies this very headquarters of pre-meditated disappearance or intrigue, a stronghold with locked doors to aletheia (revealing while concealing) and trap-doors to lethe (concealing while revealing), such that all confidantes herein must descend into shared treachery, machination, sabotage or confabulation of some kind.
In the final stride, it is not a surprising outcome that the apparent rigidity of the soundproof room’s parameters would yield a vastness of creative formulations, for there is often a hidden relation between the suffocation of cramped quarters and the fresh air of ingenuity. It is also the ever-present link between asceticism and excess: epistemologies of ruination; aesthetics of debris. Accordingly, the eight authors of the soundproof room have selected everything from medieval saints, anchoresses, and monks, to avant-garde writers, to the close watchers of revolution and war. Moreover, the texts included here hover across multiple genres of the philosophical, the poetic, the revelatory, the confessional, the journalistic, the epistolary, the computational, and the theatrical; just as their subjects traverse concepts of enigma, sorcery, vegetality, aridity, inexistence, darkness, rest, vulnerability, choreography, theology, resistance, calling, strangeness, history, and torture; just as their moodscapes approximate everything from curiosity to despair, rapture, confusion, aloneness, aggression, desire, envy, devotion, and even terror. Each soundproof room is a testament to the great modularity and expanse within seemingly narrow spheres: here each will ascend/perish in their hills, on their own terms, a thousand times or more, to devise their own distinctive rules for their own distinctive game. The faint accents of hermetic insularity (air-tight perception), resounding in an echo-chamber: enough to place everything in harm’s way.