I’m talking about perversity as a concept, the quickest and classiest thing I could think to put up for this is the center panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”.

There’s a problem that I’ve been wrestling with lately, and – as is typical for me – I find that it echoes some topics that David Graeber covered but did not thoroughly explore. I might take things in an ultimately different direction from Graeber, but I think it necessary to look at what he’s written and start from there.

The problem that I am trying to deal with is something that I think of a “perversity”. Specifically, the relationship between perversity and creativity. There are, however, political and philosophical implications of the problem of perversity.

I don’t simply mean sexual perversity, though that is what is commonly intended by this word and I’m not ruling it out as a portion of what I am analyzing. That being said, I’m not terribly interested in it. What I am interested in is a particular attitude towards rules and patterns of behavior. That being said, it does share a certain relationship with the concept of consent, and the sexual element cannot be completely discarded.

Let us first consider Graeber’s work, contained in The Utopia of Rules, not just in the essay that gave the collection its title: “The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All” but also in the subsection that gave the essay its title.

I’m going to start by pulling out three paragraph-long quotes. Forgive me for this. I do this principally to create a low-definition summary of this section. First:

Bureaucracies create games—they’re just games that are in no sense fun. But it might be useful here to think more carefully about what games really are, and what it is that makes them fun in the first place. First of all, what is the relationship between play and games? We play games. So does that mean play and games are really the same thing? It’s certainly true that the English language is somewhat unusual for even making the distinction between the two—in most languages, the same word covers both. (This is true even of most European languages, as with the French jeu or German spiele.) But on another level they seem to be opposites, as one suggests free-form creativity; the other, rules.

Second:

This is also how we can understand the real difference between games and play. True, one can play a game; but to speak of “play” does not necessarily imply the existence of rules at all. Play can be purely improvisational. One could simply be playing around. In this sense, play in its pure form, as distinct from games, implies a pure expression of creative energy. In fact, if it were possible to come up with a workable definition of “play” (this is notoriously difficult) it would have to be something along these lines: play can be said to be present when the free expression of creative energies becomes an end in itself. It is freedom for its own sake. But this also makes play in a certain sense a higher-level concept than games: play can create games, it can generate rules—in fact, it inevitably does produce at least tacit ones, since sheer random playing around soon becomes boring— but therefore by definition play cannot itself be intrinsically rule-bound. This is all the more true when play becomes social. Studies of children’s play, for example, inevitably discover that children playing imaginary games spend at least as much time arguing about the rules than they do actually playing them. Such arguments become a form of play in themselves.”

And finally (this is a bit more than a paragraph, but bear with me):

What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.
For the social theorist, there is one obvious analogy to play as a principle that generates rules, but is not itself bound by them. This is the principle of sovereignty. The reader will remember sovereignty was one of the three principles—along with administration and politics—that ultimately came together in our current notion of “the state.” The term “sovereignty” is mostly used in political theory nowadays as a synonym for “independence” or “autonomy”—the right of a government to do what it likes within its own borders—but it originally emerged from very specific European debates about the power of kings. Basically, the question was: is it possible to say that the supreme ruler of a kingdom is in any sense bound by its laws?
Those who argued that sovereigns were not bound by those laws drew an analogy with divine power. God is the creator, and ultimate enforcer, of any system of cosmic morality.

In short, Graeber is putting forward the idea that “play” and “sovereignty” are the same thing in different contexts. Both are the ability and inclination to create systems of rules that guide behavior and structure experience – play does so (generally) at the temporary, intra-group level, and sovereignty does so (generally) at the indefinite, inter-group level.

Look, when I say that an American President cannot be charged with a crime, I want you to sit with the thought that Andrew Jackson probably should have been shot several times. — Look, when I say that an American President cannot be charged with a crime, I want you to sit with the thought that Andrew Jackson probably *should* have been shot several times.

Both are the same thing, occurring and behaving differently in different contexts. Each is prior to the system of rules that it creates, and can set it aside (a vestige of this is found in the fact that an American President cannot be charged with a crime – we might make a theater of doing so, but this has happened only once, despite just about everything about the office of President.) One might differentiate this in the fact that anyone can set aside and leave the game in a situation of play (Graeber points out that “Studies of children’s play, for example, inevitably discover that children playing imaginary games spend at least as much time arguing about the rules than they do actually playing them. Such arguments become a form of play in themselves”), whereas the people capable of doing so in a situation of sovereignty are generally placed on a much shorter list and are explicitly disallowed from doing so, despite being actually and implicitly enabled in the act.

One can see “sovereignty” and “play” as the same thing, just as the solitary grasshopper and the gregarious locust are actually the same insect, behaving differently – and looking distinct – in different conditions.

So, let us set aside play as something that happens in specific circumstances, and consider sovereignty. The people who cannot behave with sovereign authority – to whom the rule system applies – are the subjects of this sovereignty. Not subjects in the linguistic, this-is-what-we-are-talking-about case, but subjects as in subjects-of-this-or-that-sovereign sense. The peasants of medieval England were subjects of the King of England, the paysans of France were subjects of the King of France, so on and so forth.

To be made a subject is to have the capacity for exercising sovereign authority formally limited. Thus, you are subject to the system of laws, rules, regulations, ordinances, customs, rituals, and habits that are considered normal. The patriarch of a peasant family might have sovereignty over his family and property, and a mother might have it (within bounds) over her children, but everyone had access to the domain of play as an area for exercising sovereignty, even if it was only what game of dice to play in the alley behind the alehouse.

In the modern day, sovereignty and subjection function much the same way, but there’s a different fiction covering it up. In the United States we have what might be called “republican subjection”1 – the belief that sovereignty comes from the consent of the governed. Notably, though, this consent was given at birth and cannot be withdrawn – which means it isn’t exactly “consent”. If I’m misunderstanding, please let me know what the safeword to use with the cops is (I joke, but an unshaken belief that this is what the case is holds “Sovereign Citizens” quite tightly – and they’re mostly a punchline for law enforcement and the legal profession at this point. Weirdest handshake meme here.)

At the risk of quoting too much David Graeber, allow me to paraphrase a point he makes in this book about Constituent Power. Consider the following sequence of statements: Rioting is illegal. Legality is grounded in the Constitution. The Constitution derives its authority from the people. The people gained their authority by rioting.

This was illegal, but we tend to ignore that, because we went to war with the burgled parties shortly afterward.

It becomes a tautological sequence that falls apart when you look at it too closely. What becomes clear is that sovereignty has an inertia to it, and it may justify itself with theological-feudal subjection, or republican subjection, fascist subjection, or soviet subjection, but all of these are simply fictions, ways of justifying and explaining the subjection. Some are certainly more agreeable than others, but all are simply ways of explaining the operation of power.

I might write on sovereignty and subjection at greater length elsewhere. I’m simply setting the table to discuss perversity right now.

Perversity is what might be called “ectopic play” or “ectopic sovereignty” – sovereign authority deployed in a limited fashion without permission and in a place where it isn’t considered to belong. In some contexts this might be criminal or stupid. In others, it can be genius. This juxtaposition is what makes perversity so interesting to me. It is the willingness to creatively misuse a given system.

Geoff Manaugh - A Burglar's Guide to the City.jpg

Consider this description, from architecture critic Geoff Manaugh’s book A Burglar’s Guide to the City:

In one sense, burglars seem to understand architecture better than the rest of us. They misuse it, pass through it, and ignore any limitations a building tries to impose. Burglars don’t need doors; they’ll punch holes through walls or slice down through ceilings instead. Burglars unpeel a building from the inside out to hide inside the drywall. . . . They are masters of architectural origami, demonstrating skills the rest of us only with we had, dark wizards of cities and buildings, unlimited by the laws that hold the rest of us in.
Burglars seem to exist in Matrix space, a world where—to paraphrase that film’s own metaphysics—not only is there no door, but there are no walls, roofs, or ceilings. Burglary, in this sense, is a world of dissolving walls and pop-up entryways through to other worlds (or, at least, through to other rooms and buildings). . . . Burglars reveal with often eye-popping brutality how buildings can really be used—misused, abused, and turned against themselves—introducing perforations, holes, cuts, and other willful misconnections, as if sculpting a building in reverse, slicing open doorways and corridors where you an I would have seen only obstruction.
For the burglar, every building is infinite, endlessly weaving back into itself through meshed gears of fire escapes and secondary stairways, window frames and screened-in porches, pet doors and ventilation shafts, everything interpenetrating, everything mixed together in a fantastic knot. Rooms and halls coil together like dragons inside of dragons or snakes eating hteir own tails, rooms opening onto every other room in the city. For the burglar doors are everywhere. Where we see locks and alarms, they see M.C. Escher.

I feel there’s something vaguely Deleuzo-Guattarian about all of this – specifically, it evokes the reworking of Deleuze and Guattari that has been produced through the prism of IDF tactical doctrine, as described in several places (I thought Metamute had a good explanation of this, found here.) By viewing architectural space through the lens of A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of their “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” series, the IDF refined the use of “overland tunnels” – carving holes through standing structures, approaching the urban field of battle as a kind of solid mass through which a path must be carved.

This appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari is, I would argue not perversity, but is definitely a perversion. It takes the original text and reinterprets it in a way directly counter to the intentions of its authors. However, because it’s plugging back a bit of dissident knowledge into a dominant conception of the world, it doesn’t meet the definition of “perversity” that I put forward. Of course, this might simply be my desire to separate two of my favorite philosophers from a genocidal settler-colonialist state.2

Let’s end this aside and go back. Immediately after that prior passage, Manaugh presents the reverse – a sort of “best of times, worst of times” thing, but about breaking and entering:

In another sense, however, burglars are idiots . . . You’d be excused for thinking burglars have absolutely no idea how to use the built environment. It’s like a perceptual disorder in which certain people can no longer distinguish solid surface from open space, door from wall—so, lashing out against a world they don’t fully understand, burglars knock holes in the sides of buildings, or they rappel through skylights using tactical mountaineering ropes, instead of just opening the front door. They could just walk inside—but no.
Like someone who doesn’t know how to program a VCR, burglars fumble, curse, and hit all the wrong buttons, mistaking doorknobs for something they’re meant to avoid, breaking glass, crawling through doggie doors, and displaying incredible acts of spatial ignorance, as if they are somehow incapable of getting from one side of a room to the other without injuring themselves or others.

This description of “burglars” that Manaugh puts forward is, essentially, of someone who refuses to operate by the rules of the space which they are occupying. In this text – as mentioned, A Burglar’s Guide to the City, – he is essentially treating just the act of intrusion on its own, not the broader constellation of criminal transgressions. He simply wants to understand the architectural implications of this unlawful access, which makes it a fairly interesting lens to look through.

In many ways, Manaugh’s description makes me think of a burglary as a kind of immanent poetry of space. Burglars poetically reinterpret the built environment in a fashion that puts me in mind of the Lettrists and OuLiPo, who could, avant la lettre, possibly be thought of as linguistic burglars, creative misinterpreting and misusing the constraints of the system that they were engaged with.

It is here that I find the metaphoric connection that I’ve been looking for: as avant-garde poets relate to language, so to do burglars relate to the architectural environment. This relationship comes from the fact that both possess and apply this quality that I am searching for a definition and understanding of – perversity.

Generally speaking, I’m in favor of perversity as I define it here, though it isn’t universally good. Many harmful acts fall under the heading of perversity – as well as acts that, while not harmful, necessarily, are at the very least aesthetically cringe-worthy (as I defined it previously.) Let’s look at tabletop role-playing games. There is a tendency tendency of hobbyists to hack just about everything they can into the system built for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons (which is built to do some very particular things – it’s essentially a tactical game with a secondary breaking-and-entering component and a tertiary narrative component.) People have taken this and transposed the system into the horror, cyberpunk, and post-apocalyptic genres, as well as simulating the narrative tropes of a number of popular media products: there are Stranger Things hacks, as well as Star Wars, Pokemon, Dune, The Witcher, and His Dark Materials. Despite the fact that there are officially-sanctioned games for half of these, and well-designed indie games that emulate the feel of the others (and these generally cost a fraction of the amount needed to put together a solid library of books for Dungeons and Dragons.)

It seems that there is a certain pleasure in perversity. Some find it through breaking and entering, some find it in writing poetry, and some people find it in the game-design equivalent of forcing a square peg into a...not round, exactly, but perhaps spiral-shaped hole. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Perversity is the act of operating on a completely different set of rules when those around you are operating on a shared set of rules. This gives you the chance to break the rules of the original system, but oftentimes it requires that you accept limitations that they don’t.

While I would not say that this is the heart of creativity, I would say that it’s an important adjunct to creativity. By engaging in perversity, you can see the lacunae in the original system and insert something that draws the eye to it.

All things are contingent, and we are able to adopt new contingent positions. Doing so in a way that goes against the grain is the heart and soul of perversity. It is often considered wrong for any variety of reasons – whether it is the legal perversity of burglary, the sexual perversity of the fetish, the aesthetic perversity of the inaccessible poem, or the ludic perversity of hacking a not very good game into a slightly worse game – but in any condemnation that it summons will be the accusation that the person engaging in this act is, in some way, doing it wrong.

It is important to remember that, despite our romanticism about liberty and democracy and republican ideals that a significant portion of the population thought that they were a perversity, and one that had to be fought for — peasants had to hoist black banners with skulls emblazoned on them, bearing the slogan “Es Muss Sein” (It Must Be) before we could make woodcuts of lady liberty wrapped in a flag (pictured above.)

But as I’ve mentioned, I am generally in favor of perversity, as an abstract concept (I wrote about Mutant Epistemologies earlier this year, and what are they if not perversity?). When accompanied by the consent of those involved, it’s generally – at worst – neutral. When it comes to formal experimentation in the arts (something I’ve already characterized as being a fairly big tent) I think it is generally a positive thing, for example: without perversity, there would be no fusion cuisine or experimental literature, or – to point to examples like the United Dutch Provinces and San Marino – no contemporary republican system of government.

Perversity, I would say, is the genesis of both play and sovereignty. Until it has the consent of others – whether freely given or coerced – it remains perversity, but once consent has been secured it can evolve into one of the other two. Sometimes, an example of perversity remains sterile – as in the case of unpublished experimental poetry, for example – insofar as it doesn’t necessarily need the consent of others to continue. But it will never be anything more than this perversity until it secures that (in this case, in the form of an audience.)

It is, in short, the hopeful monster of behavior: something which doesn’t seem to fit at first, but which might spread if it finds its niche and is given a chance.

In the past, we used to have a place for the kind of person who regularly engaged in the less harmful sort of perversity, but, unfortunately, as Graeber notes (in his longer reworking of the piece “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, which I quote often on this website. The specific subsection is “Antithesis: Yet even those areas of science and technology that did receive massive funding have not seen the breakthroughs originally anticipated”): “There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.”

We can deduce from this a tendency in modern society away from allowing perversity to continue. It’s not practical, it’s not normal, why would we allow it to continue? Why would you go into English when you could study STEM? You can also see this in the way we are at play – the tendency away from the free-form and toward a more bounded, rules-oriented recreation. This is part of why I turn up my nose at hacks of D&D: while it’s morally neutral, I feel it to be a sort of aesthetic invasion of spaces properly reserved for other sorts of games (I almost used the term “colonization”, but given recent events, this seemed to be in poor taste.) Or, it could be a perverse repurposing of ill-fitting rules.

I can’t properly tell, but I’m not really interested.

What we really need to do is develop a greater tolerance for perversity. If an act is harming nobody, and all participants are willing participants, I think it best to focus on other things. We have so many other and more pressing things to worry about. However, if we engage in perversity – whether ludic, poetic, aesthetic, or whatever – we need to take a page from the BDSM enthusiasts and give those we include in our action an escape hatch. There needs to be a way to quickly and easily exit from a situation for consent to mean anything.

Which is something that the people who discuss America’s republican principles really need to remember.

What can be said, and what I feel needs to be said is that no culture – and thus no society – can survive without a certain measure of perversity. While it might be conceived of as a kind of decadence or rot by certain people, it serves a distinct purpose and prevents stagnation. The risk-averse, profit-seeking behavior that characterizes so many enterprises in contemporary Anglo-American society is the opposite of this, and as we can see it brings with it not just stagnation but a brittleness that prevents it from functioning properly, as we have seen so much over the past fourteen months or so.

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1. Note the small “r” – I’m not referring here to the Republican party (our institutionalized American death cult), but to the general principals of republicanism.

2. Notably, without directly referencing Deleuze and Guattari, Manaugh does mention this particular phenomenon. His primary source is Goldsmiths London – a school that Mark Fisher, Kodwo Eshun, and David Graeber all taught at – Professor Eyal Weizman’s paper “Lethal Theory”.

On Sovereignty, Subjection, and Play: A Theory of Perversity (Odd Columns, #13)