Samuele Collu's "Into the Loop"

Samuele Collu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, and reported the following:

I was kind of hoping the test would work when I went to page 99 of Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition. And… Yes! This page definitely captures something crucial about the book’s spirit, rhythm, and conceptual ambitions. Page 99 is more or less two thirds of the way into “Compulsive Repetitions,” which is the third and my favourite chapter of the book. The chapter explores, in a playfully obsessive tone, how repeated refrains, returns, and circular rituals sustain our affective attachments (in particular, compulsive attachments to romantic others but also to all sorts of dispositifs). The chapter is built around my own compulsive return to the final minutes of a filmed therapy session I observed, in which the couple in therapy decides to separate. The central idea of the chapter is to describe repetition in its (paradoxical) double affordance of thwarting psychic transformation as well as becoming the very medium through which psychic change becomes possible. In the chapter, I turn to anthropological theories of ritual as well as psychoanalysis to make this point.

At the very center of page 99 there is a short section that I loved writing and always makes me smile when I re-read it:

Some repetitions keep you exactly where you are; others could untether you from your own self. Compare binge-scrolling on TikTok for one hour to doing deep, intense, circular breathing for one hour. Both repetitions can get you high, but the kite will fly across different skies.

The idea here is, to put it simply, that repetition is the pulsing beat of psychic rituals, and that it can have radically different impacts on our lives depending on the types of cosmologies you get “wired into.” Repetition has the capacity to promote affective states of openness or to reinforce the boundaries of our own psychic patterns. Page 99 also explains this process, moving into quick conversations about ego dissolution, the subjectifying role of dispositifs, as well as my own reading of the Freudian death drive, which I provisionally describe here as a force that pushes against psychic transformation—and the infinite motions of becoming. This chapter captures the type of book I was trying to write, at least aspirationally. Sometimes it lands; sometimes, a little bit less.

Learn more about Into the Loop at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue