The Insane Secret is an art collective, production company, workshop series, running thought experiment, walking dialogue, methodology for critical analysis and lifelong collaboration of BFFs Max Lester and Chelsea Rozansky. ​
After meeting in kindergarten at age 5, Max and Chelsea have been walking and talking in circles for nearly 25 years. The scope of our wanderings has broadened from the steel-fenced perimeter of the recess playground to city streets worldwide. Our earliest collaborations began with imagination games on the playground, which later developed into stories, screenplays and other creative pursuits.
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As a collective, we strive to undermine individualist notions of authorship. We have been thinking together for so long that the ownership of ideas has become irrelevant, and at times even confusing. For as long as we can remember, we have been formulating our thoughts in constant dialogue, embedding each other’s opinions, experiences, and knowledge into our projects. The Insane Secret's mandate is to follow a thought to its logical conclusion, knowing that one thought always leads to the next.★ By blurring the lines between our authorship, we let go of the colonial impulse to possess ideas (and then some).This is a constant practice of letting go, which is radical collaboration. Given the logic of the logical conclusion, it is a trivial redundancy to dwell on who got to each plot point on an idea's journey to its realization. This is true of all thought. Thus, radical collaboration contributes to the liberation of ideas (which were out there before you, and will be after you). Remember: thought is always dialogical: it requires two fools in dialogue to get anywhere. You do not need a BFF to do the work of the Insane Secret, but you do have to be open to the opportunity for communion, connection, collaboration and revelation.
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(a word to the wise: disguised as comrades and collaborators, predators lurk. We urge you to use your discretion when sharing the Insane Secret, which cannot be commodified. As but one line of defence, note that the knowledge of the fool is protected because only those willing to listen will hear the fool’s wisdom.)
Our work is psycho-spiritual. We are dedicated to uncovering secrets: what happens behind bathroom doors and hermetic seals, beyond the limits and laws of language, underneath the reflective surfaces of cosmopolitan visages and the glitz of glamour. Drawing inspiration from negative theology (gnostic and messianic thought), queer phenomenology, disability justice and crip art, pataphysics, old hollywood, punk rock, razzle-dazzle, psychology, marxism, decolonial theory, experimental cinema, the inside of bathrooms and closets, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, whores’ knowledge and stoner thoughts, the Insane Secret dares to poke the rousing beast as it stirs in the underbelly of glamour, unearthing that which has been repressed in order to protect wealth, power and abuse. We take to task the simultaneous repression and representation of these forces, and its advocates—our noble enemies—which have formed us, and which dialectically dance within us to form a functioning symptom, a frenzied aesthetic, a sick sense of humour, a comedy of manners, a debased sensibility, a pathological drive to spill, and, especially, to traverse a train of thought to its logical conclusion, which is the limit of language and perceptible experience. Here, at the outer crust, which is both mythic and disappointingly mundane, we meet the demons we have been living with all along: patriarchy, capitalism, racism, ableism, technocracy, colonialism, fasc*sm, automation, narcissism, egomania and all that jazz: synonymous and symbiotic forms. We lean on a secret history: a thread of artists and thinkers who, like us, are involved in the counterforce, an alternate history that touches through time: the messianic project of redemption.
The Insane Secret looks back at traumatic memory (both personal and historical) as a portal into the unknown, and therefore derives a critical methodology for the analysis and production of art out of its symptoms. We reframe traumatic responses such as hypervigilance and dissociation, at least in consolation, as powers of perception and diligence. The Insane Secret acknowledges the double-entendre of dissociation, and the rich inner world of the imagination (a real world, as James Baldwin urges us to remember). We ask the question: when tuning out, what are you tuning in to? We acknowledge the power of hypervigilance as a receptivity and heightened sensory experience, making available the paranoid matrix of codified meaning, providing insight, fine tuning an aesthetic sensibility—an eye for the visual/an ear for language—a sharp mind, as Jiddu Krishnamurti puts it, and an ability to see through the veil: to see the motives of the oppressive class.
The Insane Secret does not take the veil for granted, nor does it write off the shiny surface as merely superficial. Indeed, faggotry informs our perspective and mission. The queer eye gives us the ability to appreciate and understand the mechanisms and machinations of power that are embedded within beauty.
We critique the visage as a form of class critique. Our expertise in the psychology of wealth, and the abusive structures that support wealth, and which wealth supports—an incestuous proliferation—allow us to recognize the way power and abuse are embossed onto the skin and encoded onto epigenetics.
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The Insane Secret does not take anything at face value, even though we believe in the value of the Face.
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The Insane Secret refuses to slip into the ease of dogma (easy answers).
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As insider/outsiders, we hover on the threshold of dichotomies both false and therefore real.
The Insane Secret is fundamentally dialectic and dialogical in its approach to uncovering meaning. We believe in exploring false dichotomies as much as we seek to dismantle them, following in the talmudic tradition of turning over the other hand.
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The Insane Secret dares to look twice: at the force of evil as it moves through human actors by way of traumatic repetition, and at the divine spirit that realizes itself through human agents by way of creation. We are bored of those who play the devil's advocate. We’re advocating for the angels.
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As a critical methodology, the Insane Secret can be applied to any and every object of inquiry: art—high, low, and in-between—literature, class conflict, history, politics, petty drama (is there ever such a thing?), street signage, advertisements, propaganda, department and grocery store aisles, that text from your ex…
(((THE WELLSPRING OF SUFFERING))) The unconscious realm and the spiritual realm are the same space (dream space; divine time). This is the well we draw from: where our symbols derive from: from dreams, hallucinations, and cosmic signs in the stars and on the streets.
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The Insane Secret draws its wisdom from laughing with the clowns, bedding the enemy, and listening to the knowledge of whores, who have always carried the world's secrets.
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Our sensibility is informed by both a pierrot pathology, in which being laughed at feels like love, and a flare for freak-showmanship, developed from the necessity of tightrope walking and beast taming.
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Our mission is to free and preserve imagination and spirit in defiance of technocratic automation. It requires a willingness to speculate freely, especially in the face of failure and given the impossibility of this task. As Fred Moten offers, language “appears to say something definitive, even when it can’t say something definitive.”
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★ Our project, like a train of thought, ends on a dissonant note. The dissonant note, as Moten explains, “needs to be followed by another note…that refines or undermines or defines the previous statement”, acknowledging that “everything needs to be refracted, amended, and [is] therefore unending.”
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(((The Streets are Talking To Us))) AND WE DO LISTEN. When we walk and talk, we pay close attention to the palimpsests of advertisements, trash (the only truly free beings under capitalism)/Vibrant Matter, stolen moments, hidden gems, markings, fallen cards, bird behaviour, and anything else that might render a clue, A SIGN, and source of direction to move/be moved. These signs stop us dead in our tracks.
In response to Moten’s suggestion that all statements ought to end with a question mark, the Insane Secret converses in girly-girl uptalk, a cadence which expresses the impossibility of language, and which (like all girly-girl philosophical modes, such as daydreaming) has been misrepresented by misogyny to signal stupidity when it actually represents something profound: in this case, an effort towards “the emancipation of the dissonance of every statement”.
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Our goal is not to be prescriptive, but to develop tools for creative resistance. In the face of a global rise in authoritarianism and technocracy, we understand it as our obligation to create ant-f*scist art and ways of being that elevate LIFE, bearing in mind Michel Foucault's call in his intro to D&G’s tome Anti-Oedipus:
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“do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.”
Fuck the death drive. We’ve been to the after party. We know where the story goes.
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We’re speaking with the storyteller’s borrowed authority.
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​​Through our friendship and our collaboration, we have saved each other, allowing our imaginations to develop dialectically, freely and safely. Inside this shared space, which we continue to foster, we preserve the youthful spirit of our imagination. Here, the creative locus of our art is Alive.
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We believe in Radical Friendship as a truly queer and anti-f*scist practice. Through practicing Radical Friendship, we have learned to lean on each other, cry with each other, become undone, unfixed and recenter, as Larry Mitchell puts it in The Faggots and Their Friends. Mitchell writes, "to become undone is our greatest gift to ourselves. It is truly our greatest path to being response-able—to feel our feelings authentically makes us able to respond to the conditions around us with an open heart.” In the battle against the alienation and loneliness of colonial power structures, we extend this friendship to those who know or wish to know the Insane Secret.
The Insane Secret follows in a queer tradition of citing our bodies, relationships, and lived experiences as genuine and legitimate sources of knowledge and expertise. As former girly-girls, tomboys, smart asses and class clowns, we are experts in performing gendered rebellion as a form of jester’s privilege, and promote the evolution of gender emancipation once broken out of the wound. OR: how to rebel and get away with it.
DISCLAIMER: What we are calling for is risky. We acknowledge the real danger of gender rebellion out in the world, the real threat of violence.
We take extremely seriously the dialectics of fashion and f*schism and the ethics of aesthetics.
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As autodidacts, armchair psychologists, and minds inside bodies, the Insane Secret encourages our comrades to take ourselves seriously as a valuable sites of meaning, in the face of granting bodies, institutions, power structures, curators, administrators, bureaucrats, and assholes that would like us to believe otherwise.
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In defiance of misogynistic aesthetic modes and assumptions of value, intelligence and rigour, which are based on shallow aesthetics—i.e. the performance of seriousness—the Insane Secret employs a feminine-as-feminist posture: specifically girly-girl disobedience; girly-girl modes of playfulness; the way girls bat their eyes at their abusers (in the batted eye, the life instinct and death drive collide); being a brat, talking back.
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We employ the feminine-as-feminist in all its expansive and creative expressions, and in critical solidarity with all marginalized movements, beyond any gender-essentialist misrepresentations of these terms.
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The Insane Secret was ignited in an acid trip, during which we had the realization that we are lifelong collaborators. We have always known that we saved each other from something, we just didn’t know what we had saved each other for.
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As such, the influence of the psychedelics—held alongside a sober look at the psychology of addiction, the communities that house addiction, the screen that addiction puts on the world, and the sometimes compensatory and competing drives towards drugs and art—is a reality that we cautiously honour. Specifically, we honour the metaphysical space of insight and communion that happens beyond the border of the spider-web-canopy or The Grid when engaging with psychedelics. The Insane Secret follows in a tradition of psychedelic philosophy, art, music, film and literature.
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The Insane Secret recognizes an enemy in powers that seek to cut off desire at its locus through anti-artistic representations such as pornography, artificial intelligence, hollow content, and other machine-implanted dreams, which keep us alienated, dissociated and isolated from ourselves and one another. Under the spell of automation, mobilization is impossible, since class-consciousness first requires consciousness.
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Automation kills the life drive and bills this murder as convenience. We urge our comrades to resist technocratic offerings of instant gratification, which foreclose the opportunity to think for oneself. Making decisions is life affirming: bringing awareness to the present moment, to one's actual wants and needs, to the body and, furthermore, to the insidious harm that lurks behind these mediators.
We instead seek to liberate libido—the life drive of desire and creative impulses—in order to connect to the world and to each other, for the sake of imagining and building better worlds. We hope to become conscious and critical of the complexities of desire. The conscious connection of libido to reality is an anti-f*scist practice.
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The liberation of the libido is not a call to rape and pilage, coerce, seduce, or abuse, since these impulses are solipsistic and rely on the isolation of others, the denial of intersubjectivity and collaboration, and are therefore enemy to the Insane Secret and our mission.
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In response to Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as a revelatory and revolutionary source of power and information, the Insane Secret pledges and practices reconnecting to sensuality, intimacy, laughter and gorgeousness.
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As Lorde writes:
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“In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change… For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
Since critiques of pornography are often misrepresented as “sex-negative” and puritanical, it bears stating outright that our criticism does not lie in dogma, but in a skepticism of technologically induced amnesia, and of powers that harness the manipulation of the moving image in its age of virtual reproducibility. We are NOT anti-sex, but anti-commodified representations of sex, and other images that pretend to be real experiences but are not.
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In fact, the Insane Secret is against all commodified representations of real experience, including, but not limited to: sex, love, protest, resistance, and life.
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F*scist aesthetics is the enemy of artists, for f*scist aesthetics use all the same tools as art, except the soul.
As philosophy nerds, we honour the language of philosophy as a pathway to meaning and to knowledge, with the understanding that philosophical language is but one language of many. This language is a spiral staircase to meaning. You can get there through many and any language-ladders.
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This is to say that while we respect philosophical traditions and the carefully considered terminological usages therein, we resent the efforts of gatekeepers (institutional, academic and otherwise) to weaponize language as an opaque wall that bars meaning inside, which is the opposite of its true function.
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As stoners, shopaholics, fashion-victims, and marxists, we honour Walter Benjamin's kaleidoscopic approach to unveiling and decoding language and the symbolic order, while simultaneously veiling and encoding in the very same breath; the necessity of writing in secrecy and in code under the threat of f*scism (which we, once again, find ourselves writing under); and his recognition of double-entendres—and therefore multiplicity of meaning—which always reveal and conceal simultaneously.
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We privilege the materialist revelations that arise when connecting art to experience. We respond to his call to oppose the f*scist manipulation of images, and other forms of representation, by combating it with real art.
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Often accused of exaggerating, as artists, the Insane Secret plays with scale, blowing up the minutiae of micro-f*scism, and honing in on the minute details of authoritarianism. We look at micro and macro-f*scism alike, and how they inform each other. Our project, in part, is a constant reminder and revelation of how f*scism and colonial conditioning function: the brainwashing tools of abusive regimes. We draw comparisons between the nuances of personal abuse dynamics, and political systemic machinations of power. Or, as Foucault says in his D&G intro, “the tracking down of all varieties of f*scism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.”
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We believe in true deviance and disobedience, especially in defiance of the commodification of aestheticized deviance and disobedience. AND we believe in doing it with style.
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As we strive to connect art to reality, we seek to enact substance through style and style through substance, and honour the mutually bolstering powers of form and content. We acknowledge that form without content, and style without substance is f*scist. At the same time, content without form is impotent and powerless, and substance without style is ineffective, inaccessible and impossible.
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As per our dialectics, the Insane Secret steers clear from the fundamentalism and funlessness of political correctness and edgelords alike.
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If we offend anyone, we sincerely hope it's only those we intend to.
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We operate within a zone of risk, leaning on friendship to do so:
★ Being kind to one another to establish a container for thought to flow freely; listening to one another in good faith to allow us to take thoughts to their logical conclusions(?)
★ Being kind to ourselves to protect and nourish us, laying down a strong foundation to do the hard work of exploring inner experience & embodied agency
★ Getting acquainted with our demons in order to battle them
★ Getting acquainted with our angels, as they direct us to the emancipatory power of Real Art.
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The Insane Secret operates from the principles of love and justice as guiding forces for all our endeavors. Taking seriously inner experience as a generator of symbols, connections, insights and meaning, we believe in turning inward to emancipate the self, with the hope and belief that the freedom of one contributes to the freedom of many.
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Anyone can be in on the Insane Secret. All you have to do is believe us.
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