1We set out from the Tuscan port of Livorno where the Raj, the 16-meter sailboat that would take us on a two-day voyage to the Island of Capraia, is usually docked. Although a self-declared marine lover with a background in marine biology, I was initially apprehensive and even timid to embark and cross the Northern section of the Tuscan archipelago with a crew of fourteen unorthodox fellow travelers I was about to meet for the first time. Among these were maritime historians and anthropologists of oceanic practices, activists who respond to migrant distress calls and participate to rescue operations in the Mediterranean, cultural workers from different walks of life, and graduate students with a wide range of geographical and intellectual interests. Ermenautica’s core members were trained and seasoned navigators, especially Matteo Aria, the “author supervisor” – to retake an expression describing avant-garde soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s role within the 1920s Kinoks collective – of this decidedly intriguing experiment. Nonetheless, the crew’s collaborative mode of labor, inspiring talents, and wide set of skills cultivated to the point of excellence, could not calm a mounting sense of eagerness and un-tranquility.
2The uneasy feelings preceding the crossing had nothing to do with issues of safety. Nor did these have to do with the kind of malaise certain academics experience when they are exposed to de-familiarizing experiments and creatively designed mise-en-scènes. Indeed, Ermenautica is clearly one of those innovative, collaborative, and polyvocal venues that both belonged to and pushed beyond the Writing Culture tradition which grew out of the «experimental moment in the human sciences» (Fisher, Marcus 1986; Clifford, Marcus 1986), and that had inspired many of us who trained on the heels of the 1990s. Something else was therefore stirring my sense of apprehension since I too was intellectually groomed in and comfortable with this tradition. Moreover, the experience and experiment I was about to embark on appeared quite different from the hyper-curated participatory events, community art interventions, or so-called relational aesthetics characteristic of the global art world I had been critically observing during the past twenty years. Ermenautica was not in the business of providing guests with easy frissons of togetherness by abolishing spectatorship through entertaining, full-immersion strategies. Aboard the Raj, I would later realize, another kind of exploration of marine environments and appreciation of complex seascapes were at work. This re-orientation of participant observation towards its existential default mode was quite appealing.
3Indeed, being on board the Raj evoked another side of curation, one that activates a poetics of space and an aesthetics of existence decoupled from the “exhibitionary complex”, that is to say, from the institutional imperative to exhibit contemporary visual arts (Smith 2021). This existential mode had more to do with the ‘incurable’ and un-curatable register of curation (Elhaik 2016). By un-curatable I am referring to those contemporary ethical practices and spiritual exercises that test the world through untimely «curatorial designs» (Elhaik, Marcus 2020) often discordant with majoritarian practices of care and forms of being together. And, I hasten to add, within and without both academia and the global art world. Ermenautica was a peculiar kind of curatorial design and practice of freedom anchored in the creation of an intriguing way of life, as well as a kind of republic in which both the human and inhuman forces shaping marine environments resonated with and composed one another. The apprehension, I came to discern after the fact, had therefore to do less with the activity of sailing itself than with the political nature of the experiment, the form of togetherness, albeit ephemeral, I was getting into. And, more importantly, in the company of strangers attracted to the political, ecological, and aesthetic dynamics of marine environments. The apprehension caused by the crossing was not only different from the feelings of anonymousness one gets when taking a ferry from one port to another. It also had to do with a certain feeling of contourless comradery I could feel in my stomach, an excitement to have met fellows who feel more at ease at sea than on terra firma, fellows whose sense of flourishing is often interrupted by long periods of docking on land.
4Guest travelers and speakers, like myself, are regularly invited to join Ermenautica. The duration of the journey usually lasts from two to several days. The covered distance and geographical range vary accordingly. The nature of the invitation is two-fold. First, guests are expected to participate to onboard conversations and contribute their reflections on the experiential, experimental, and politico-ethical implications of Ermenautica as a practice of freedom in the Mediterranean and with a base in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Second, they are asked to present material from their individual inquiries, published or unpublished, that connects in some fashion with the kind of maritime and marine imagination animating Ermenautica’s aesthetics of existence. Upon our return to Livorno, I was to present, in the company of three respondents, my recently published book Aesthetics and Anthropology: Cogitations (Elhaik 2022), with an extensive conversation on the last chapter given its focus on contemporary art practices inspired by the marine sciences and oceanography. At first, the name “Ermenautica”, a conceptual and experiential neologism composed of hermeneutics and the nautical imagination, made me pause. After all, my intellectual ancestors are a duo of anthropologists and philosophers who convincingly had taught me to think «beyond hermeneutics and structuralism» (Dreyfus, Rabinow 1982). The challenge was then to engage Ermenautica and the maritime imagination of my hosts with less reliance on the tools of deconstruction, phenomenology, and the science of the concrete. The “hermeneutical” in their nautical practice, I told myself, had to do more with the aesthetics of existence afforded by the mise-en-scène of our itinerary and the encounters that would take place along the sailing: an encounter with a spiritual and political body of water located between islands that historically had served as penal colonies or monastic retreats (Gorgona, Capraia); an encounter with rapidly changing sea states and wind forces in which composites of air and water transform into intense elemental reveries, what Gaston Bachelard (1964) had called a «phenomenology without phenomena»; and finally, an encounter with sea creatures placed under protection status in the conservation entity known as The Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals, a large marine protected area placed under a tri-national juridical arrangement (Italy, France, Monaco) and located in the north-western Mediterranean Sea between Italy, France and the Island of Sardinia, and including Corsica and the Archipelago Toscano. Unlike in whale watching tours, however, we were never promised to see cetaceans. And this did not take anything away from the lessons learned from this experience and experiment.
5Our sailboat was equipped with state of the arts digital instruments indicating nautical charts, maritime routes, depth of the sea floor, and navigation coordinates to be readjusted in accordance to changes in the force of the wind and the state of the sea. Of course, the reliable equipment did not exonerate the crew from the occasional bricolage in order to attend to unexpected glitches. All of this took place under the detached guidance and cool dexterity of our captain, the anthropologist Matteo Aria who was at the helm on and off, depending on weather conditions. A helm some of the guests, including myself, would learn to handle while simultaneously keeping our attention focused on the chart plotter. The aim of the exercise is to continuously readjust the navigation course according to the whims of the weather and through a careful choreography of tactile and visual cues.
6We passed alongside the former insular penal colony of Gorgona, with stunning seascapes at times verging on a cosmic sublime that would render futile current trends that have moved too easily “beyond” modern forms of experiencing and conceptualizing aesthetics. The soundscapes and sights were indeed beautiful. They could be intuited and felt from an intermediary zone between the imagination and perception. This peculiar beauty enabled both lay participation to and technical understandings of the sea and its states. «The sea goes through “states” that give an account of sea surface conditions», Aria lectured in his characteristic charismatic ethos and intellectual sharpness. «And a sea state», he immediately added with a touch of dark lyricism, is different «from wind conditions which are measured by their “force” on the Beaufort 12-unit scale». The Raj and the Ermenautica crew, of which I was momentarily a member, had turned into a floating classroom led by a dedicated teacher whose ethical work consisted in de-coupling leadership from pastoral power. An arduous task for an academic and educator responsible for the lives of fourteen souls sailing through an archipelago and often through moody sea states (Picture 1).
7Sessions were organized with rigorous discussions about our disciplines, the oceanic turn in anthropology, the relation between activism and scholarship concerning the participation and deployment of the Raj in the service not only of on-board seminars but also to rescue operations of sinking ships lethally carrying migrants across the Mediterranean. While anchored in a creek protected from the wind, we also swam (often by avoiding jelly fish that have been recently causing blooms across the Mediterranean), ate copiously, and took short visits on the land surrounding our anchor site. After a long (and rather heroic!) hike around a series of cliffs overlooking Corsica and the Island of Elba, we visited the stunning site of a former Cenobite monastery (Picture 2). The ruin of the lone-standing “Zenobito Tower”, we were told by our host, was built in the sixteenth century by the Genoese and is one of four, no-longer extant towers formerly located on Capraia Island’s coast. It owes its name to an ancient monastery called “cenobio” located nearby during the Middle Ages. Etymologically, I would later inquire, “Cenobio” comes from the Old French cenobite or Ecclesiastical Latin coenobīta, from coenobium, from Ancient Greek κοινόβιον (koinóbion, “community life, convent”), from κοινός (koinós, “common”) + βίος (bíos, “life”). Cenobite monks lived communally, i.e., in religious communities, rather than in solitude. The Cenobite tower from our visit also served as countercultural haven for Italian hippies during the 1960s of which San Francisco, the city I had lived in for thirty years, was an epicenter. Flower power communal life meets medieval monastic life, I told myself with a kind of wistfulness for the city by the bay that is no longer what it used to be. Some of the guests courageously climbed the tower on precarious steps and acrobatically sneaked through the tower openings and windows. Others paused to survey the stunning combination of sea and landscape, often covering their ears with their hands to prevent the strong wind from blowing through them.
8Back on the Raj, the hike to the Cenobite tower elicited a lively conversation. It invited a meditation both on monastic life and the model of collectivity and togetherness Ermenautica was experimenting with. Was this a throwback to the 1960s, perhaps even a certain kind of nachleben or enduring form, according to Aby Warburg’s expression, reminiscent of ways of life cultivated in San Francisco during the 1960s? Was the visit a wink to a certain kind of acephalous or horizontal mode of leadership characteristic of anarchist anthropology, one inspired, for instance, by David Graeber and his disciples? Were the ruins of the cenobio at once a gesture to a bygone form of contemplative life and to the vita activa of current politico-ecological activism? Questions abounded, specific to and beyond the marine and maritime imagination that was animating us on and around the Island of Capraia. However, we were not yet able to harvest convincing answers. Regardless, Ermenautica can be provisionally welcomed as an experiment with «the contemporary» (Rabinow 2008) that cultivates a way of life and marks its political time – the time of its togetherness – by reanimating ancient and medieval existential modes that do not distinguish so rigidly between the ethical, the spiritual and the cosmic. Given our immersion in the Tyrrhenian imagination, it surely begged the comparison with the reveries and meditative states afforded by other splendidly located monasteries that dot the Mar Tirreno: from the Monastero di Santa Maria dell'Isola perched on a rock in Tropea to the Monastero Santa Rosa located between Amalfi and Positano. But literal comparison – and perhaps comparison in general – can only go so far. Transcendence is far from being the ethical substance animating Ermenautica’s creation of a way of life adequate to our contemporary lives. Rather, the two-day sailing experiment called for conceptual interconnections with philosophical traditions that too had experimented with forms of togetherness escaping the distinction between “philosophy as a way of life” and “philosophy as Teoria”. It also de-territorialized a certain kind of social contract-based political philosophy that distinguishes between individualist solitude and communal life. Ultimately, it could not be encompassed by both the Kantian notion of “asocial sociality” and Rousseau’s romantic reveries d’un promeneur solitaire.
9Rather, Ermenautica called for conceptual analogies with schools of thought that united philosophy as way of life and as contemplation (Teoria): the Epicurians, the Peripatetics (Arabs and Latin), the Stoics, the Cynics, and so on. I became more convinced that their core members and us – guests with different backgrounds who were invited for different reasons – were creating another kind of difference. We were invited to participate to (and observe when possible) an ethical experiment that drew its singularity from knotting together the ways of life of various precursors: the proto-anarchist style brewing in Diogenes the Cynics’ Republic (radical flouting and “falsification” of conventions, including academic ones); an Epicurian kind of floating garden (pleasure among friends); and Avempace’s Rules of the Solitary (far from being a subtraction from our decidedly imperfect cities). While the mode of governance and division of labor on board was imagined as collective and rotating, it was nonetheless distributed according to individual abilities. Moreover, certain activities were taught to us and learned during the trip. For instance, we took turn to help handle the sails and mast (during calm or agitated seas) or to make nautical knots (while thinking of Tim Ingold’s reflections on knotted practices), or simply contribute to more familiar chores we all practiced on land, such as cooking and cleaning dishes.
10Ermenautica’s singular nautical hermeneutics is therefore more than an application of the pedagogical, interpretative, and narrative experiments with form inaugurated by the New Ethnography of the 1990s. It offered something else: a decisive reacquaintance with and cultivation of those “spiritual exercises”. Pierre Hadot (1995) had poetically drawn our attention to. These exercises are spiritual in that they are repetitive and index existential options one commits to only by means of being radically transformed by them. These exercises are both physical and discursive, and are anchored in concrete practices that recruit various areas of life: from observing certain dietary habits to meditating on death and the cosmos, from writing to console oneself to seeking out the company of friends. And, by extension, one can consider a spiritual exercise any activity that consists in the following: mindfully cleaning dishes; meditating on the cosmic nature of life at sea alongside other creatures; making nautical knots; cooking for an entire crew; and taking care of guests on a boat named Raj sailing across an archipelago. Under the light of this existential and practical tradition, Ermeneutica can be seen as a creative practice of freedom that sketches the contours of a way of life between land and sea, and between scholarly rigor and essayistic play. It is a practice that imagines another kind of republic by treating the malaise of academic life through the combined antidote of ethical work and cosmic reverie. Ermenautica’s way of life, it can be said formulaically, comes into existence when the nautical and the spiritual are underwritten by a “hermeneutical” mode adequate to the concrete exercises taking place on board of the Raj.
11Ermenautica’s reanimation of spiritual exercises resonates with and reconfigures those of ancient and medieval schools of thought. With the Peripatetics, including the Averroists and Avempacists, Ermenautica shares a dedication to excellence and to cultivating practical habits characteristic of scientific inquiry. They study, write, think, are attentive to the world that surrounds them, and observe. They have a vocation. Unlike the Peripatetics, however, their pact with institutions is complicated. Unlike Averroes with his protector the Sultan Al-Mansur or Aristotle with the emperor Alexander the Great, they do not have powerful patrons. They might be employed in academic institutions or other kinds of cultural institutions, but their way of articulating a stable relation between «the private and public use of reason»(Foucault 1984) is fraught. Unlike the Cenobite Monastics whose ruins we had visited and meditated on, and unlike twelfth century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Tufayl’s fable of escape to an island far from corrupt cities (a precursor to the Robinson Crusoe trope), Ermenautica is not insular in the sense of advocating evasion from society. On certain occasions, to be sure, they seem to flirt with this ethical option. At times, indeed, the Raj can feel like a ship of fools peopled with scholars, artists, activists, and so on. Yet, it is far from being a venue where anything and everything goes. It is a practice anchored in certain rules, the rules of the dual game of navigation and scholarly production.
12With the ancient Cynics, Ermenautica shares a certain kind of rupture with academic conventions. More problematically, perhaps, they share with them a certain kind of naturalism, a valorization of (although certainly not a return to) to the state of nature based on a distinction between art and nature. Inspiringly, patriotism, like for the Cynics, is not part of their value repertoire, and Ermenautica is therefore profoundly cosmopolitan in the older sense of the term: citizens of the world. With a maritime base in Livorno and an academic foot in the University of Rome-La Sapienza, Ermenautica is a venue that offers hospitality to guests who bring with them experiments and experiences from latitudes that have long ceased to be mere geographies.
13True, a certain form of horizontalism on board the Raj might provoke misunderstandings during the course of training those graduate students who are core members of the collective. The critique of verticality and transcendent entities is certainly welcome. Yet a critique of hierarchy ought not be framed necessarily in terms of horizontal forms of togetherness. I am convinced that the ancient Cynics have provided us with a “diagonal” mode of escape useful in the current academic and educational order of things. Cynics distinguished themselves not only from their con-citoyens, but also from other philosophical ways of life.
- 1 Author’s translation from «Le mode de vie cynique s’oppose d’une manière spectaculaire non seuleume (...)
The Cynic mode of life is opposed in spectacular fashion not only to that of non-philosophers, but also to that of other philosophers. Indeed, other philosophers distinguish themselves from their fellow citizens only within certain limits, for instance by devoting their lives to scientific inquiry, as do the Aristotelians, or by leading a simple and withdrawn life, as do the Epicurians. The Cynic rupture with the world is radical1.
14Ermenautica is a venue not without a “city”. Although animated by the maritime imagination, its ethical substance is not to lay the foundation of a thalassocracy. Instead, it is a search for another kind of republic whose name is hidden in plain sight.