A non-representational autoethnography of protoacademic desire in the 3rd-century Industrial Society
An installation by Alessandro Graciotti and Alessia Derudas
Introduction ↔ Conclusion: Droplets of an event
Italy is the country that I love. Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons (Berlusconi, 1994)
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Instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it (Deleuze, 1994: 28)
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This is the paratactic story of a PhD student’s rite of passage in what we (tentatively) define as the 3rd-century Industrial Society (ca. 1950-2050), which we (tentatively)^2 define as follows (e.g., Adorno, 1968):
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I disappeared with Harley Warren in the Big Cypress Swamp of central Italy (Lovecraft, 1925), and came out of it a PhD candidate on benefits. A Kafkaesque trial in a Kafkaesque burrow. Not as predator, but prey, lost in castration. “You can do whatever you want when you grow up” (Goldsmith, 2017): a Millennials’ version of the Cthulhu mythos, a cosmogony of specialisations, the structural postponing of all things stability on €500 PM of fixed-term internships and short-term postdoc positions – the kernel of meaning lurking within your LinkedIn network and dreams. A bourgeois desire for an academic career or the pursuit of happiness? “The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” (Lacan, 1992: 319).
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This is how I became ‘nomadic subject’, a self-contagion ambushing the ‘othering’ space of current protoacademic subjectification. Every power-lifting rite of passage starts with deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) – a presubjectifying spatial landslide (e.g., Brighenti, 2010). And so did mine. My doctoral conatus sought ‘academicness’ in what was an oppressive present actualising the bleakest future.
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Academicness requires movement, and movement towards/within/away from precarity is a traumatic encounter with the Real – which we (tentatively)^3 define as the encounter with metaphysical nihilism, making us feel oh, so strange – “I and I/In the reality/I feel so strange/Reality comes” (DAF, 1981 – translated by the authors). De/territorialising nihilism is not fun, nor is going ‘beyond the pale’ (Experimental Audio Research, 1996) in the 3rd-century Industrial Society. But this is how I escaped the abyss – at least for the time being: the time of the following event: meeting a Nietzschean trickster at Rubik on a rainy night in June in Bologna, with stone mushrooms in my pockets, gifted to me by a Yoruba deity while sleeping on a sofa, exploring movement out of the throat of Jonah’s big fish (Jonas, 2025).
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“Travel always gets me” (My Bloody Valentine, 1988) – and so I travelled. Not necessarily ambulating. A fast and furious protoacademic-desire-machine (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), constantly on the move, dancing the synthome (Lacan, 1976) to the rhythm of actions folding my ‘self’ against new (yet familiar) reactions – relocating desire in new (yet familial) spaces of life affirmation: Scottish/Mancunian togetherness and Welsh synchronicity. A-chronologically ‘there’, making every temporal dimension present, I am still droplets of that event (Deleuze, 1988): dominant, dysfunctional academic codes and conventions are treated as foreign as I integrate allies and alloys – creating new modes of (proto)academic behaviour in the 3rd-century Industrial Society.
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Should I really always be on the move? Again, the only thing one can truly be blamed for is compromising or abandoning one’s own desire (Lacan, 1992). I found that, for academicness to follow, ‘I’ had to become ‘someplace else’ (Cheval Sombre, 2012); a subject-in-process continuously regenerating alternatives to the experience and consumption of “unconscious investment[s] of a fascist or reactionary type” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 105) characterising many spaces of protoacademic subjectification in the 3rd-century Industrial Society.
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​Not merely to confront, but also to exceed "the immediate conditions we inhabit” (Braidotti, 2022: 7), I understand that I must keep moving – becoming the object of a life-affirming desiring-production, shaped by a concept or image that defuses “psychocosmic catastrophe[s]”(Battiato, 1998 – translated by the authors), decoupling the ‘self’ from “fitter/happier/more productive” territorialising refrains (Radiohead, 1997).​
Unsafe European homes { The burrow-норка^i
That small, interior world widened as I learned its names and its boundaries; as I discovered new refuges and ambushes in its miniature woods and jungles (Thomas, 1943)
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As of December 2024, there are two recorded wins for the blue dog; one done through an extremely rare glitch and the other done through intentional mix-maxing (Zelda Wiki, 2025)
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When confronted with the Real (sbam!), one should strive to furnish a space devoid of desire, guided by the rhythm of life-affirming (re-)creation. For nomadic subjects, this means (tentatively)4 actualising a virtual space where a new ‘self’ might reassemble into ‘someplace else’. Protoacademic desire becomes revolutionary for a (proto)academic life long repressed: “it ain’t no fiction what I believe!” (Alec Empire, 2001).
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Protoacademic desire, seize the burrow of 3rd-century Industrial Society ‘academicness’, dig multiple entries and exits, and keep re-creating new enclaves – other-burrows whose rooms and landmarks are always on the move. For if “the executioner disappears without my reprisal, always on the verge of presence” (Uochi Toki, 2010b – translated by the authors) my direction’s undetected.
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Thus, the burrow becomes the норка, which is itself a burrow – but an Ohm Sweet Ohm (Kraftwerk, 1975), the electrical resistance against the denial of life affirmation, that which - for instance - seeks to unrestore control over the immigration system (Home Office, 2025).
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We will not provide instructions on how to experience the норка. But we will tell you how we imagine it. Hopefully, you will not get the reference. Think of this as the bonus level in some video game. Bonus levels are usually hidden, concealed from the linear execution of the plot. You typically navigate through the matrix of the gameplay (i.e., the gaming experience) as imposed by algorithms and developers. However, they may have (more or less) intentionally left alternative (magical) objects or paths here and there – small anomalies that, often after repeating the game multiple times, could be discovered as difference. And when this happens, it is always a breakthrough – the new, the surprising other-world, opening up unexpected anti-main-plot side quests or outcomes enriching the ‘I’ of the game-player.
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​Sometimes, the possibility of such possibilities can only be discovered by talking to someone or stumbling upon an anonymous post on an online forum. We like to think of ourselves as that anonymous user, and of this installation as that bonus level – the anti-main plot of the 3rd-century Industrial Society, a gateway to nomadism, the affirmation of the (proto)academic minor (Braidotti, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) – the blue dog in Zelda: Majora’s Mask (Zelda Wiki, 2025), destined to lose, yet capable of overcoming its structural design.
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Just like in video games, we include a soundtrack. The music (i.e., ‘.exe’ – named after that file extension that desires to make changes to your computer) was composed during my PhD, and it speaks about that experience. It expresses it, including my suffering and nomadic desiring-production simultaneously. The infrastructure in which you will find it is the норка we built as a shelter in my rite of passage – a shelter we carry with us wherever we go.
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Someone – perhaps someone of us – has given you a flyer with the text you are reading right now. Inside, you have found a QR code where you can anonymously submit the title (and artist) of a song you would like to share with us, expanding this норка-discourse. Maybe it is the music that has supported you during your own rite of passage – perhaps you are living through it right now. We will create a playlist from all your song suggestions, including those referenced in this text, so we can playlist our protoacademic desire together and initiate a bottom-up placemaking movement that produces ‘someplace else’ for – and through – all our nomadic (proto)academic ‘I’s.
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Now that you have entered the норка, find the CD player, sit down, press play, and enjoy the music. The melted-CD simulacrum will remind us of the always-present bullying, reactionary threat of becoming a crystallised, obsolete object, yielding to the desire of becoming (happy) academics in a fleeting trajectory away from the 3rd-century Industrial Society
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​This is not music; it is the spontaneous artifice of someone who sees beyond the human. Little by little, it furnishes the void. ‘But you can’t furnish the void!’. Come on, doe-eyed, let me say my wizardly nonsense! (Uochi Toki, 2010a – translated by the authors).
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i We prefer writing норка instead of ‘norka’ because we appreciate the poetic power of ambiguity in using symbols that are unreadable to some – including ourselves.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​