Those who found themselves invited had subsequently elaborated their invitation.

They had entered prepared; bundled, swathed, whispering listlessly. The original trauma took the form of an invitation, and subsequently, the ground swelled - felt from all sides - as close as something can get without collapse. They, guests, entering and commencing, never estranged nor alien, yet entirely a stranger, new, received as an oscillation. Crossing a set of asymmetrical in-betweens, of then and now, had they entered and been prepared, or had they left a state of unpreparedness toward yet another state? They, participants, birthed problematic, yet welcomed, invited. Caressed by invisible hands, a “massaging of singulars in view of their subordination… an equilibrium psychology”.[1] They had all felt, despite their preparedness, a lurking discordant presence behind the proffered equilibrium. A de jure asymmetry, conjured by some incommensurable break-event lacking even the mark of a cenotaph, had unaccountably striated the swollen ground and salted the trauma-wound. In a sense, they had understood the presence of this event amongst the burgeoning whispers of their invitation. It spoke of itself, cacophonous yet entirely available, reversible, revisable. Nonetheless, they were ushered within, invited to continuously enter; the invitation was then a white-rabbit event smeared horizon-ally. A set of motion doubly articulated always; B-A, BA.[2] The net was cast, the guests found themselves woven by an exterior milieu while only strictly furnished by what was ‘inside’. Dichotomous registers of possibility were employed, stroboscopically striating the guests in a quadrillage incessantly auto-producing guests-as-guests; strangers welcome, all welcome. Yet the contingency of breakage, of un-welcome lay stirring beneath the then near suffocating ground-walls-ceilings, pertaining to the possibilities of vacillation, fluctuation or disorganisation of the invitation and its arena.[3] The guests turned to what could be their host(s) and attempted to build an observation. But the difficulty was immense; the forms, or what could be forms, were evasive, gaseous, rapidly filling and coding the striated groundwork. The ever-emissive situation; invitation had then become naught but an auto-antonymic problem. They, the guests, begun to build a picture; firstly, Latin – hostis meaning ‘public enemy’, distinct from inimicus, reserved for the private foe (entering this event was an entirely public matter). They peered around, inhaling. They believed that if any antagonism was imminent it would surely manifest on their part, particularly if they begun to render themselves as parasites. However, the guests arrived from host the the Old French (h)oste, from the Latin hospit-, the root of hospes, and subsequently sounding the familiar English hospitable. However, without a moment of rest, the guests returned to the English host, now synonym of multitude. This word contains the chilling vapour of the Latin hostis, now echoing the hostility of the many, whispering the obscure etymon hostia – ‘sacrificial victim’. Turning their attention to the now partially legible picture, the guests knew their position as stranger-yet-welcomed. However, the welcome was not entirely welcome; the striations held portents, creeping along the vascular auto-produced sites that the guests then found themselves as. “There is something deeply wrong with this thing”.[4]

Carried into the next moment, the lungs of the guests deflated in relief; the skin of the guests released from the pressure, blushing; the eyes of the guests tracked the opening out of their previous walls. New – “[e]verything meets in contingency, as if everything had a skin. Contingency is the tangency of two or several varieties and reveals their proximity to each other”.[5] Floors and floors of more, not certainly a hypogea, but distributed were the attributes of necropoleis. Turning and turning, they rubbed their picture against the vinculum drawn overhead. The situation “is analogous to Theseus’ Ship ‘which the Athenians were always repairing’”.[6] Refraction - Opposed to the brink of suffocation experienced an indeterminable number of moments ago, a dynamic light crept into the scene. Multiplicitous up against a darkened voidal zone. Shadows, infinitely spongy, the lowest of lowered levels, a basement where all is reduced to almost-nothing. Ground above the vinculum (itself stalactite), vapour crawling along its blushed, nervous, expecting skin: “Clarity endless plunges into obscurity”.[7] They, still guests, frantically drew and made rubbings, eyes passing back and forth over the question who. Host(s) choired hospitably, hospiticide. Not a murder against life, but a murder of a death proper to a life. They, participating, stepped upon the many-surfaced floor: squelch. As they descended, they were drenched further by quasi-solidity; increasingly ‘no-where’ – but if I envisage the spasm of multitudes (whom one never takes in with a single glance) the flowing back – as I have said – cannot fail to reach the summit. And if it reaches it? They, annoyingly still continuously arriving, felt and saw their Mobian skins, gasping that one must “go immediately to the very limits of cruelty, perform the dissection of polymorphous perversion… [b]ut as for what turn the band is on, no-one knows nor will know, in the eternal turn”.[8] Coiling – each step into each skin takes each movement and its entire contingency, its whole variance; concatenation. They, the guests, began to notice that at some point asymmetry gives way to asymptotic construction, lines drawn taut. Alienation crashes upon the shore of ground-guest, host-skin. They, cooled and figures of ipseity, breathed a first breath. They, invited, stared down the horizon of new host(s); the coiling begun with the toes. The ground once again encased the guests. They, nauseous, found the shore of alienation to be yet another terrestrial dupe, “from which vomiting delivers us, encloses us on all sides. Yet it does not come from outside to confine us. We are revolted from the inside, our depths smother beneath ourselves, our innards heave”.[9] The cacophonous muttering voices of yet another invitation; ‘another’, however, lacking the capture needed here. They, perhaps the guests of earlier, poised now at vertiginous spires of levelled hospice complicate their now crumpled picture. The sickness of travel humming along with the dizziness of arrival – “what constitutes the relationship between nausea and us is nausea itself… the binding, or irremissible, quality of nausea constitutes its ground… despair over this ineluctable presence constitutes the presence itself”.[10] They, arriving prepared once more, felt as if the invitation was not as original as they previously understood, yet possessing nothing of what they once thought to be memory, doubting the murky return of fuzzy anamnesis that performed nothing but a coiling of toes, a squeezing of the stomach, four hundred thousand fingertips beginning the grasp upon their necks. Hostility – strangers are welcome, all welcome.

*

The words and phrases surrounding ‘craft’ and ‘design’ suspiciously trade their roles often. For Benedict Singleton, this has been a call to reconsider how we understand the intelligence of constructing traps:

Smithing, weaving etc., all are about finding ingenious ways of exploiting the behaviour of materials, and that can include human beings… The ancient Greeks called the kind of intelligence expressed in the construction of a trap mêtis, which labels a certain guileful ingenuity. As a shorthand, it’s the intelligence implied when extraordinary effects are elicited from unpromising materials.[11]

Here, a guest may begin to understand the structure of being-hosted with a renewed clarity; what exactly is our host, are we guests a material for its cunning? The host must always craft some kind of situation – this is hospitality. Speculate for a moment that the ground that begets our walls, terra firma, can be considered a host of sorts. Singleton, without giving entirely over to a notion of cosmism, similarly asks the reader to “consider the earth a trap, and to understand the basic project of humanity as the formulation of means to escape from it – to conceive of a jailbreak at the maximum possible scale, a heist in which we steal ourselves from the vault”.[12] However, escape does not have to be destructive – exit is perhaps not the prime strategy here. The intelligence of our planet’s design is an opening for our own brands of cunning – “the trap and escape from it exhibit a curious reversibility. To be free is to trap something else… trap begets counter-trap”.[13] Trap-craft, in this sense, reverses the roles of host and guest, of stranger and estranger. This reversibility can oscillate in many ways, by many designs. Amanda Beech: Mêtis yields a sort of aesthetics of ‘how to get things done’ [however] you’re locked into a system where the only way you can avoid being trapped is to engage this world on its terms i.e. the logic of the trap. The normative schema glimpsed in that escalation is, well, terrifying.[14]

Terrifying, but terror does not preclude activity and resistance, particularly given the potentialities of our cunning. The mythological weight of Mêtis, the Greek goddess who is noted by Hesiod for her specialised intelligence and wisdom, despite her elision by the masculine narrative of Zeus and Prometheus, echoes fervently in the historical understanding of cunning and of craft. Marilyn Metta has expressed a reading of mêtis “as bodily intelligence and cunning which exists and operates in multiples and in constant movement, shifting, oscillating, fluctuating, metamorphosing… making it a dangerous threat which is impossible to seize”.[15] Metta’s own metaphorisation of ‘cunning and messy bodies, and female bodily intelligence and power’ has meant she “can now name my body as a mêtis body”.[16] Metta’s expression echoes throughout the materials of feminist history – Sadie Plant’s rendering of weaving women, craftspeople intelligences that “make abundantly clear, nothing stops when a particular piece of work has been finished off”.[17] The cunning of counter-trap, the trading roles of guest and host in a performance of escape can be nothing but an embrace of alienation, terrestrial or otherwise. The verticality of exit dangerously mutates with the horizontality of escape; a cunning intelligence on the part of guests, of strangers that performs a riposte upon the dominant designs of our supposed “hosts”. In conclusion, what are the expectations for craft-oriented intelligences vis-à-vis trapping, escape in the spirit of mêtis? A question for ourselves, the many guests, surely.

[1] Châtelet, Gilles. To Live and Think like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies. Translated by Robin Mackay. London: Urbanomic, 2014. 42.

[2] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 40.

[3] Zourabichvili, François. Deleuze, a Philosophy of the Event: Together with the Vocabulary of Deleuze. Translated by Gregg Lambert, Daniel W. Smith, and Kieran Aarons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 175.

[4] Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: Re. press, 2008. 64.

[5] Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016. 81.

[6] Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, quoted by Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 110.

[7] Ibid. 32.

[8] Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Bloomsbury USA Academic, 2015. 20.

[9] Levinas, Emmanuel. On Escape. Stanford (California): Stanford University Press, 2003. 66.

[10] Ibid. 68.

[11] Singleton, Benedict. “Speculative Design” in Speculative Aesthetics, edited by Robin Mackay. London: Urbanomic, 2014. 25.

[12] Singleton, Benedict. “Maximum Jailbreak” in #Accelerate, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. London: Urbanomic, 2014. 498.

[13] Ibid. 501.

[14] Beech, et al. “Discussion” in Speculative Aesthetics, Op.cit, 2014. 44

[15] Metta, Marilyn. 2015. “Embodying Mêtis” in Outskirts: feminisms along the edge. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/17198 (Accessed April 2018). 2.

[16] Ibid. 12.

[17] Plant, Sadie. Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Techno-culture. New York: Doubleday, 1997.67.