Destituent Life: It Will Be What It Will Be

Concluding the Rituals of Exit Series

I was no more than four years old when I first witnessed a Ritual of Exit. Or at least, it's the first I can remember. I walked with my mother and siblings round the corner to the shabby little build where our small free church met. As we entered the hall, I was astonished to see my father at the far end of the room up to his thighs in water.

I had no idea that there might be pools of water mysteriously hidden beneath the floorboards of the world. It would turn out that many churches do in fact have these small tiled pools hidden under the floor from which the preacher would ordinarily deliver oracles and addresses.

The scene was stranger still because he was in there fully clothed. The water was lapping about his brown trousers turning them glossy soil-black to the crotch. I had never seen anyone stood in deep water fully clothed. Not on purpose anyway. This was all very unhinged from the norm. And of everyone I knew my father was not one for wilfully subverting the norm.

There were proceedings. Someone else entered the pool. They stood prayerfully for a moment. My father and another man plunged this soul under water and pulled them back up again, drenched in sodden clothes. The adult world had forgotten itself completely.

Of course, I have raised questions about the domestication of a ritual that rightly belongs to the wilderness, and the recasting of rituals of exit into rites of entry into religious institutions of one sort or another. Even so, at four years old I witnessed this happening as a mad hatter's tea party, a departure from the rule of norms. There were other realms hidden under the carpeted floors. Whatever it was it seemed to be a matter so serious that ordinary life was torn aside to reveal some wild drama that ran secretly beneath our feet. My father had a playful look about him. He knew that some of us had not seen him like this before.

To reflect on personal experiences, I don’t recall encountering the Ritual of Solidarity — of breaking bread — in any fashion resembling what I've described in these posts. Not in a church setting at least, where it has tended to resemble something like a pious breadline doled out by an archaic public service. But have I experienced this elsewhere? Yes I have. Mostly it has taken me by surprise, but the Ritual of Uncitizenship and the Ritual of Solidarity are dramas of exit. It's only natural they would appear in various forms, out beyond their religious enclosures.

Having worked over this series to redraw rituals of initiation and inclusion as performances of exodus and outering, I'd like to conclude by making some of the implications explicit, at least as I see them.

If immersion and the breaking of bread are not thresholds of entrance into a religious institution, then what? To what do they depart? What's out there? In a sense, it’s hard to say. That space is defined in these explorations by a series of negations — things that are not to be found. No debts. No masters. No laws. No Caesars. The old taunt always rings out: What then? What do you propose instead? What plan? What manifesto? What is this new thing called?

Who is the God of the exodus? Ched Myers says, “the deity cannot be named.” When Moses asks, he receives the strange reply: “I will be who I will be.” Every instinct that wishes to manage life and order the world recoils from an indeterminate open. How can there be purity without walls? How can there be safety if we cannot say what is in and what is out? To those who build them, institutions are creations of purpose, but from a distance they look more like compulsive and anxious reactions against time and death. Afterall, what's the alternative? If it's not a thing then it's a no-thing. The deity who is, but who cannot be named, begs to differ. It is what it is. It will be what it will be. The nettles and the badgers don’t have legal status. They don't need to know the names we've given them, in order to be.

Giorgio Agamben is a great inventor of words. As counterpoint to the institution he has spoken of destituent life: a form of life that unmakes and remakes itself continuously, that remains open to the living ecology of context and resists being ossified into law. How? By what logic? Emphatically, by relationships good enough to trust. By remaining small and finding balance in mutuality and reciprocity within the web of relations.

To a world guaranteed by power this is rather disempowering. But there we go. No one looks more powerless than Moses. He has no plan. He has no idea what will happen. The community must encounter something beside Moses, at the mountain beyond the harsh embrace of imperial civilisation.

There is a finer implication here to the Modern understanding of religion. It would obviously be ironic were these rituals to remain the enclosed property of religious institutions. This is, of course, exactly what has happened. There is probably no version of the story where this is not how things play out. No good thing can remain un-institutionalised. It commonly goes unnoticed that, in the first century, these rituals were both in play across boundaries of social, cultural, ethnic, and religious difference. These were open happenings for all kinds of people looking for the back door of an enclosed imperial dystopia. Rituals of Uncitizenship mark a threshold wherever debts, masters, laws and political strongmen are renounced. Rituals of Solidarity are hubs for alternative political bodies in all kinds of places. I'm sure this will appear to some as a secularisation of sacred things, but I acknowledge no such distinction. Messianic life habitually gathers round the unlikely tables, outside the sanctioned circles of piety. I believe there are well known parables to this effect. If there is shock and alarm about that sort of thing, it's worth noting that there was also shock and alarm about who could participate, and under what terms, in those archaic messianic texts. Who can claim to own rituals that dismantle ownership? Who can enclose rituals of exit? I consider these to be open-source messianic forms. Will they be misconstrued and misused out here? I'm sure they will, but no more than they have been in there. If you believe the meaning of these things could be destroyed by misuse, perhaps you disbelieve these things have any autonomy or existence of their own.

The last job here is to be true to form and unmake what has been made. There is some complexity that must be re-introduced to these visions of exodus. I have said much in favour of the open against the enclave, but only because the former has been so forgotten, in favour of the latter. The two have no disagreement of their own. In the broken middle of the world there is really no way of fruitfully holding one without the other. Alterity must be performed in the midst of the norm, as an outlaw's carnival. And the outlaw must stake some part of their heart outside the city walls, lest they become a cheap-shock rebel or a mobster: that is, a petty reflection of the world they would like to overthrow.

The way is a walk that passes weight between one step and the other: between open-world dreaming and gatherings in the enclaves, between necessary madness and shrewd savvy. The open and the enclave are reflections of one another. They call to each other, hilltop and mountain, the feral and the wild.