Existential Movement Debuts on Campus Life

"We want to diverge as a new species," Dean Lukic tells the curious audience in the packed Wood Auditorium of Avery Hall Thursday night.

There is muffled laughter.

The Center for Broken Thought held its inaugural event last week, "Chaos, Delirium, and the Phantom Territories," marking the initiation of a new existential movement in the city. The Center, founded by Lukic, a Columbia Ph.D candidate, and Jason Mohaghegh, a visiting professor at Columbia, is a nonprofit organization that intends to offer seminars, host performances, and publish works.

"The Breaking" is the focal point for the Center. This movement, according to Mohaghegh, aims to revitalize and reawaken creative expression with the immediacy that once characterized manifestos and movements. At the event, the founders neglected to discuss operations of the center and instead focused on elements of the movement, which adopts a disjointed state of experience and blurs the line between the self and the world inspired by thinkers like Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, and Shamlu. The elements of the movement include cruelty, threat, irradiation, rage, abduction, abandonment, and illusion.

"We are liars, great liars, and storytellers as is every great writer, as is every great thinker ... we take the world as an illusion," Mohaghegh said.

Reaction from the audience was generally skeptical.

"I didn't understand what they were trying to get at," said Eva Carpenter, CC '09. "I am not sure what it's about. I saw it as really pretentious, and I think the whole thing was slightly ridiculous."

Mohaghegh himself admitted that the movement was "slightly elitist," adding that members are generally easy to spot.

"You can see it in their eyes," he said. "Not all have the taste or the thirst to want to push themselves to these outer banks. Many are very content with their constrained sense of reality. For those who like to trespass, for those who like to infiltrate, we look to form new alliances."

Despite their deliberately elusive nature, Mohaghegh insisted that the concepts of their movement are no abstractions.

"Ideas, if they are orchestrated correctly, are already actions. They are already currents, they are already impulses," he said. "These concepts are ... palpable and they inform existence at every level. They are not withdrawn, they're not escapist, they're not forms of fantasia or speculation. More than anything, we're concerned with speed and force. And that permits no luxury of abstraction."

Mohaghegh, known for his philosophical and sometimes bizarre teaching methods, invited his students to attend.

"It's basically a group of concepts. It's not a psychological or social or artistic experience so much as it is an existential movement. I'm anxious to see what it provides," Ryan Cornell, SEAS '08 and one of Mohaghegh's Literature Humanities students, said.

"It looks like a lot of people were uneasy sitting at the event. They felt what they had witnessed didn't live up to expectations," Eliseo Santos, CC '09 and another of Mohaghegh's Lit Hum students, said.

Many audience members left early and said they felt the event was absurd, some using the word "cult-like."

"We are oblivious and indifferent to those who can't find themselves somewhere within this. We provide such a multiplicity of existential possibilities," Mohaghegh said. "The ones who come and say this has nothing to offer me ... for us, they are condemned, they are lost." He adding that he welcomed challenges to his group's beliefs through active engagement and dialogue. "Critique is always the act of imposing limitations, which is why we reject it."