Intimacy is a mess,[1] familiarity sheds formality. As we make kin and tighten bonds, lines are not only extended, but crossed. For this very first issue of Passage, we wanted precisely to break a line of thought into a mesh of attachments, inheritances, and boundaries. And we wanted to do so by mixing reflections on personal lived experiences together with theory. Which is to say, we wanted to do so from an autotheoretical perspective.

Autotheory picks up the thread of existential phenomenology, very much invested in the embodied, singular relation to the everyday world. Just like the existentialists, autotheorists acknowledge one’s situatedness and intimate involvement as a researcher, making clear that it is a form of bad faith to pretend otherwise.

But what autotheory does, and does more explicitly than existential phenomenology, is explore these modes, or moments, of existence that deviate from the so-considered default, neutral position of an ideal, impossibly steady, subjectivity. Taking seriously the affectedness of a body also means including affects that are disturbing, overwhelming, and sometimes too close for comfort.

Arianne Zwartjes beautifully articulates this contamination between the academic and the bodily in her essay (for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies) called “Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory”:

theory has long been a perfect, elite curation of the finest moments of the function of a brain, while hiding all the real lived experience of one particular set of causes and conditions which created that brain’s patterns of thinking—thus both disingenuously disguising the origins of the theorizing, but also creating an exclusive facade that tells those outsidered by academia, you can’t do this kind of work.

Autotheory steps in and intentionally contaminates all that theoretical purity with the messy, the wet, the dank of the hidden: of sex and of body.[2]

From façades to skin, a mingling of surfaces. A text that touches the world, the writer, the reader, a sensorial transmission. In other words, a mess: Autotheory breaks through both the academic limitations and the line that is the “I.” 

This mingling definitely describes the four texts that make up our first issue: They deal with experiences of loss and mourning, lust and loneliness, sickness and addiction. There is an implicit sense of urgency in these texts, a need for sense-making. And there is, too, an effort to shape a language that can articulate a complex and subjective truth that prods beyond the self. Which works of art, which philosophical concepts, help to make sense of these experiences? How do they help me to deal with what is happening to me, to others? Can my curiosity embed me into a tradition? How do I weave others and their works into my quotidianity?

We are convinced that the “auto” in autotheory can be misleading (the term still feels like a necessary evil – useful, descriptive, but still, deceptive). It seems to suggest a centering on the self, narcissistically indulging in private issues, an academic counterpart to social media’s flattened self-fashioning. But this kind of writing, if done properly, is precisely a way out of the navel – it splinters the line of the I into a net. And while a net is not a synonym for safety, it is likely at least to expand wider than the self. Autotheory is a way of reckoning how intimacy is affected, shaped by events that go beyond one’s particularities, formed with and against events and forces that go beyond the confinements of the ego. It can “unfashion” it, make it other, strange, even alien.

Jeweller Patrícia Domingues, specializing in stone cutting, debuts with a text that evidences the lines that crack past the self, plotting the materiality of geology and history. Patrícia’s text shows the impact and wide reach of processes that shape and transcend the frame of a human life.

Anthropologist and cultural researcher Pinelopi Tzouva writes an essay that escapes into poetry, in which she plays both observer and observed. In this text, Tzouva deals with an ambiguous relation to the body and the impact of a rare auto-immune system disease on one’s own body image.

Architect and film researcher Marilia Kaisar demonstrates how the amorous subject in the age of Tinder not only is created by a discourse on love, as with Roland Barthes, but also emerges from the physical, addictive gesture of swiping as the digital equivalent of going through a stack of collectible cards.

Finally, film writer Shauni de Gussem treats the reader to a text in which the pangs of personal mourning resonate with computer glitches and melancholic, otherworldly fictions of absent aliens and of ghosts haunting a small Belgian dürüm bar.

The I that speaks in these texts is ultimately aware of this impossibility of being truly oneself, of fully coinciding with a body, a history, an identity. Yet it is precisely this gap, this crack, and – well – this mess that make an autotheoretical exploration possible. An exploration in which fracturing a stone, going through a set of pictures, reflecting on a philosophical concept, looking in a mirror, watching a movie all invite the exploration of new lines of being such an I. 

With these texts,[3] we want to present what is hopefully just a beginning. For us, the idea behind Passage is to create a connective space between communities, disciplines, genres. To take a text’s lines and use them as scaffolding to understand better how to live. In the coming years, we want to continue presenting voices that explore the complexity of lived experiences and their resonances with art, artistic practice, and theory, while finding new hybrid forms in which to express it, cast them wide, and catch others with it – like a net.

[1] “La confianza da asco,” as fellow Spanish speakers will know.

[2] Arianne Zwartes, “Under the Skin: An Exploration of Autotheory,”Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies 6, no. 1 (Fall 2019), https://www.assayjournal.com/arianne-zwartjes8203-under-the-skin-an-exploration-of-autotheory-61.html.

[3] Which were written and gathered between the COVID-19 years of 2020 and 2021 – talk about messes, contaminations, and lines that escape the individual experience into the collective.