From “IS THE SOCIAL ANTIPOLITICAL?” Ilaria Possenti. 2017. At this point it is worth noting that the concept of “society” derives from Latin, but its foundations are Greek: Aristotle speaks of koinônia politike (political community), an expression in which the second term is linked to to koinon (the common), and which in Latin is normally translated as societas civilis (civil society, an expression I use here in the premodern sense). From this perspective, political life as such –that is, the life of citizens (politai), those who are “free”– cannot be extricated from social life: the community is political whenever it is organized in such a way as to make political freedom possible (an organization that also comprises the economic sphere, in the antique form of the domestic economy involving women and slaves). In the era of the Greek polis Aristotle refers to, this meant that “citizens” were men (not women), indigenous (not foreign), and masters (not slaves, servants or basic workers). Each of them was free, that is, he was able to participate on an equal footing with others in managing certain aspects of community life (such as the primary military and civil issues) because he ruled over women and slaves who took care of the other aspects (reproductive and productive). It was only in the age of modern revolutions that the idea of “equaliberty” (Balibar) was developed: in that period, and not before, we began to see the “egalitarian” idea of including all humans in the polis, that is, of liberating the actors and activities of the reproductive and productive sphere from a politically secondary, subordinate and dominated role. This goal was not exactly achieved, however. Rendering the political sphere autonomous as state, that is, as a space for exercising sovereignty, led to the transformation of the community sphere into a “society” (“civil society” in the modern sense of bürgerliche Gesellschaft) with space for civil liberties but not the experience of political freedom10. In other words, it is specifically the liberal perspective that frames community life in a way that neglects this kind of freedom and conceptualizes “the social” in a way that begins to be anti-political. Modern and contemporary social history has also envisaged and narrated different stories, however. The claims made by “women” (the adaptable and performative subject Zerilli writes about) have often viewed welfare and work differently than the liberal state, promoting socially oriented initiatives and cooperatives –empowering, not “charitable” ones– for managing common resources and public services. According to such an approach, social life is and remains a site of political freedom. In demanding that they be paid the salary of specialized workers, the seamstresses of We want sex seek to obtain recognition for their “concrete labour” with its history of learning processes and relationships, work that is not merely “abstract human labour”. This is why they show the manager their pieces of cloth, pieces he would not know how to arrange or sew together. These working women know that there is logos in each person’s work and that enhancing the logos inherent in work is another way of making community into political community –a domain in which animal laborans is always already zoon politikon, a political and social animal From "Social Reproduction and the Pandemic, with Tithi Bhattacharya", Sarah Jaffee. 2020. Tithi Bhattacharya: The best way to define social reproduction is the activities and institutions that are required for making life, maintaining life, and generationally replacing life. I call it “life-making” activities. Life-making in the most direct sense is giving birth. But in order to maintain that life, we require a whole host of other activities, such as cleaning, feeding, cooking, washing clothes. There are physical institutional requirements: a house to live in; public transport to go to various places; public recreational facilities, parks, after-school programs. Schools and hospitals are some of the basic institutions that are necessary for the maintenance of life and life-making. Those activities and institutions that are involved in this process of life-making we call social reproduction work and social reproduction institutions. But social reproduction is also a framework. It is a lens through which to look at the world around us and try to understand it. It allows us to locate the source of wealth in our society, which is both human life and human labor. The capitalist framework or the capitalist lens is the opposite of life-making: it is thing-making or profit-making. Capitalism asks, “How many more things can we produce?” because things make profit. The consideration is not about the impact of those things on people, but to create an empire of things in which capitalism is the necromancer reigning supreme. Most of these activities and most of the jobs in the social reproduction sector—like nursing, teaching, cleaning—are dominated by women workers. And because capitalism is a thing-making system, not a life-making system, these activities and these workers are severely undervalued. Social reproductive workers are the worst paid, they are the first to go, they face constant sexual harassment and often direct violence. Sarah Jaffe: We are in a moment where we have ghouls like Glenn Beck saying that they would be happy to die if capitalism could keep functioning, making this all so clear. Bhattacharya: The coronavirus crisis has been tragically clarifying in two respects. Firstly it has clarified what social reproduction feminists have been saying for a while, which is that care work and life-making work are the essential work of society. Right now when we are under lockdown, nobody is saying, “We need stockbrokers and investment bankers! Let’s keep those services open!” They are saying, “Let’s keep nurses working, cleaners working, garbage removal services open, food production ongoing.” Food, fuel, shelter, cleaning: these are the “essential services.” The crisis has also tragically revealed how completely incapable capitalism is of dealing with a pandemic. It is oriented toward maximizing profit rather than maintaining life. [Capitalists argue] that the greatest victims in all this are not the countless lives that are being lost, but the bloody economy. The economy, it seems, is the most vulnerable little child that everyone from Trump to Boris Johnson is ready to protect with shining swords. Meanwhile, the healthcare sector has been ravaged in the United States by privatization and austerity measures. People are saying that nurses have to make masks at home. I have always said that capitalism privatizes life and life-making, but I think we need to reword that after the pandemic: “Capitalism privatizes life, but it also socializes death.” [...] Jaffe: What it shows us is not that emissions go down without people—because most people are not dying. What it shows us is that the world is a lot healthier without so much work because people are doing—as you were saying—only the life-making work. Bhattacharya: This argument that coronavirus is a reset button for the earth is an eco-fascist argument. What it should be is a reset button for social organization. If the virus passes and we go back to life as before, then this has taught us nothing. Because it has become necessary to stay at home, we are able to find beauty and time to enjoy those whom we share our homes with. But we cannot forget that homes under capitalism, while they provide safety and security, are also theaters of incredible violence. Two days ago, I got an email from a local domestic violence shelter where I used to volunteer, asking if I would consider coming in again, because they anticipate a spike in cases. My feminist comrades in Brazil, Sri Lanka, and India are all reporting the same: a spike in domestic abuse because of the pressure cooker of everybody staying in the house. We don’t need social isolation. We need physical isolation and social solidarity. We cannot ignore the elderly neighbor who is living across my street; it may not be safe for them to go to the grocery store. We cannot ignore our coworker who comes to work with way too much makeup around their eyes and says that they’ve hit their head on a door. We need to check in on them regularly.
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From "Thinking about feeling historical", Lauren Berlant. 2009. ‘‘These are not ordinary times.’’1 If this essay were a polemic, it would argue that our current view of the communication of affect and emotion is too often simply mimetic and literalizing, seeing their transmission as performative rather than as an opening to all sorts of consequences, including none at all. It would aim to counter the unfortunate tendency in much contemporary affect theory to elide the difference between the structure of an affect and the experience we associate with a typical emotional event. If one determines that an event or a relation is traumatic--that is, endowed with the capacity to produce trauma--does it follow that it communicates trauma to anyone who encounters it? If one determines that an event or a relation is shameful, must it produce shame in the subjects it impacts? Is the absence of this transmission a sign of some distorting or unethical defense? Is the presence of this transmission evidence that a subject or a society knows itself profoundly? Of course not. To impute a mirroring relation between affective activity and emotional states underdescribes the incoherence of subjects--their capacity to hold irreconcilable attachments and investments, the complexity of motives for disavowal and defense--and the work of the normative in apprehending, sensing, tracking, and being with, the event. So, where trauma and shame are concerned, many states can be engendered when the elastic snaps back on the subject who no longer finds traction in the ways of being that had provided continuity and optimism for her (that’s the structure). Maybe the subject stops, just to let things sink in. Or to query: ‘‘What just happened?’’ Maybe the event disorganizes her, which means that she may feel strongly or messy or distractedly about it. The structure of an affect has no inevitable relation to the penumbra of emotions that may cluster in the wake of its activity, nor should it. To adapt Jean-Luc Nancy’s version of love: I may desire to break my own heart to become open to your capacity to repair it to a state better than what it was when I met you. But as I experience that relation, I may sense it as love, desperation, bitterness, ambivalence, a drive to competence, anxiety, spaciness, and/or simply as a pressure in my body that I need to discharge.2 What follows is another way of tracking affective intensities politically without presuming their status as dramatic or, indeed, as events. It imagines the affectivity of the social in registers alongside melodrama: it rethinks the sensing of history, and of the historic. [...] Hicok’s ‘‘A Primer’’ also tells the story of the present organized by flatness: the atmosphere and tone of his US Midwest is so gray that you want to ‘‘kill the sky’’ when you look around for and receive no relief from the landscape of ‘‘corn corn corn.’’ But, overwhelmed by finding itself amidst the multiple middles of so many emerging, ongoing histories, this poem sees resignation to flatness as a ‘‘backup plan.’’ Plan A: to reroute the present situation, where ‘‘we’’ move along without getting along, into a condition of ongoing collective liveness fueled by riding the wave of collectively recycled affective knowledge. This new pathocartography uses emotional mapping to tap into the exuberance, the non-mereness, which radiates from the activity of surviving. It rides the release of energy in sociality that comes from finding someone and telling her what happened. It may be a low bar, but it’s humming. I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go to be in Michigan. The right hand of America waving from maps or the left pressing into clay a mold to take home from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan forty-three years. The state bird is a chained factory gate. The state flower is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical though it is merely cold and deep as truth. A Midwesterner can use the word ‘‘truth,’’ can sincerely use the word ‘‘sincere.’’ In truth the Midwest is not mid or west. When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio. There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam, which we’re not getting along with on account of the Towers as I pass. Then Ohio goes corn corn corn billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan. It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing. The Upper Peninsula is a spare state in case Michigan goes flat. I live now in Virginia, which has no backup plan but is named the same as my mother, I live in my mother again, which is creepy but so is what the skin under my chin is doing, suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials are needed. The state joy is spring. ‘‘Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball’’ is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April, when February hasn’t ended. February is thirteen months long in Michigan. We are a people who by February want to kill the sky for being so gray and angry at us. ‘‘What did we do?’’ is the state motto. There’s a day in May when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics is everywhere, and daffodils are asked by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes with a daffodil, you know where he’s from. In this way I have given you a primer. Let us all be from somewhere. Let us tell each other everything we can. ‘‘A Primer’’ is both a lesson book and what makes paint more likely to adhere to a wall. The whole poem primes us for the final couplet ‘‘Let us all be from somewhere./Let us tell each other everything we can.’’ This is a couplet because of how the line begins (‘‘Let us’’) and not how it ends, and so too it is a poem about where to begin, now, making connections. We learn to begin being in the life through which we are already moving by absorbing new phrases into our stock observations: ‘‘When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio./There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life/goes.’’ Life goes when events change things. This reconception of a seriality that cannot be taken for granted but is crucial to catching up to the historical present has been forced on us ‘‘on account of the Towers.’’ On account of the Towers the corn is newly punctuated and the landscape intimacy of ‘‘we’’ with ‘‘Islam’’ is just technical, a statement about proximity. The landscape absorbs what he has not yet. ‘‘There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque’’ is accordingly all grammatically unsubordinated, for the American English speaker. It is not a harmonious time, as ‘‘we’re not getting along.’’ But while not getting along, we are still moving along. Now the old landscape is new as we pass through it, ‘‘Then Ohio goes corn corn corn/billboard, goodbye, Islam.’’ It is impossible to read the tone of this list. Goodbye Islam? Goodbye Ohio? The politics of the plural ‘‘we’’ is not left unsaid, and for the better. But it is changing as and because we speak: we have the US produced by the Towers, the ‘‘we’’ produced by association with Islam; the ‘‘we’’ produced by pooling and spooling what we have seen and what we know; the ‘‘we’’ of the speed of movement; the ‘‘we’’ of trying to catch up with life as it is happening. By the end the poem reveals its desire for the ‘‘we’’ to be other things than the effect of an event, enjambment turning each phrase from the referent to a fishing line. We used to know how to live as well as we knew the landscape. Yet on reconsideration, what did we know? Some version of that ‘‘we’’ was from Michigan. We carry deep bodily knowledge of how to fish, too. The weather made us so regularly crazy, though, that when it released us from just getting by, we became all kinds of disregulated, ruled by whim and whimsy. But that crazy man-daffodil love spurred by the sudden sun is continuously supplemented and transformed in the new post-traumatic landscape that forces us constantly to re-find and re-tell the story of where we are from. Meeting the present is like meeting a new lover: telling the story of how you got to be this way in the present moment suddenly changes its usual cadences because of the occasion of the telling. Where you are from is suddenly a different ‘‘somewhere’’ else, underdescribed or even hidden by the idiom of nation or state: the state’s name becomes a ridiculous sound that reminds you of where you were ridiculous and unsound. It is a handle on something historical barely yet experienced. It used to matter, where you came from, because you felt akin to the other people who lived there, since they knew what you knew---the landscape that the highway skims and random facts associated with patriotism. But now the enmeshing of global power and ordinary life has turned the scenic route into a situation. However, unlike Simic, Hicok refuses to see the gathering of the old and new knowledges as regression, attrition, or a flat recitation of ongoing losses. The view seems to be that the social never made sense, that the cycles of the seasons were always affectively laden by crazy magical thinking and elated interruption of the exhaustion produced by the atmosphere of the present we live in that is the sum of history and the weather. The right hand did not know what the left hand was doing, which was both uncanny and ok. He sees a potential solidarity wrought from narrating the confusions and stacking the irreconcilables. The solidarity of talking and listening requires only affective consonance with the mere contract to show up and participate in the couplet or coupling that ends and begins. ‘‘Let us.’’ Is ‘‘Let us’’ an order in the imperative or something softer, like a plea? Is it the desperate good manners of ‘‘Let us go then, you and I?’’ Let us now tell something: we don’t have to think about it, we don’t have to feel anything, we don’t have to express our deepest self and wait for a recognizing response. This nascent solidarity is solipsistic first, and not performative. Telling is a state of bodily practice whose performance opens intuition to surprising rehabituations, though, by making where you are from into something you can rely on only if you tell about it to someone who hears it and produces your thereness as a warmth of presence in the historical present. Solidarity happens prior to intimacy or the contents of your auditor’s subjectivity. This is not about recognition, letting in the other, etc. But in fantasy there will be transactions of telling and hearing, in the genre of sound, streaming. ‘‘A Primer’’ teaches a history of the present that is in the idiom of normative bodily and factual life recast as a mode of tourism and curiosity that acknowledges how out of our native element ‘‘we’’ all now are. ‘‘The state joy is spring,’’ aspiring to sprung rhyme. The present is all mixed-up and intense; its emotional map is lightly manic and surreal; it does the best it can to narrate what it doesn’t comprehend while sensing so much that’s coursing through it. But this is the new realism that absorbs grief not into wars of emotion or the imaginary end of sexual self-abandon or flat seriality but into love and fishing and daffodils and the register of an affective optimism about the sharing of whatever. It’s post-event. ‘‘A Primer’’ is a dreamy poem, performing affectively a world as a magnetic space ruled by a reliable absentminded rhythm. It is as though the fact of circulation can produce a present that interrupts the atomizing flatness of mass not mattering by gently folding the political words into the other ones without the intensities of sentimental transmission that have for so long provided refuge for scoundrels and their wounded. From "What our contagion fables are really about", Jill Lepore. 2020. Reading is an infection, a burrowing into the brain: books contaminate, metaphorically, and even microbiologically. In the eighteenth century, ships’ captains arriving at port pledged that they had disinfected their ships by swearing on Bibles that had been dipped in seawater. During tuberculosis scares, public libraries fumigated books by sealing them in steel vats filled with formaldehyde gas. These days, you can find out how to disinfect books on a librarians’ thread on Reddit. Your best bet appears to be either denatured-alcohol swipes or kitchen disinfectant in a mist-spray bottle, although if you stick books in a little oven and heat them to a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit there’s a bonus: you also kill bedbugs. (“Doesn’t harm the books!”) Or, as has happened during the coronavirus closures, libraries can shut their doors, and bookstores, too. But, of course, books are also a salve and a consolation. In the long centuries during which the plague ravaged Europe, the quarantined, if they were lucky enough to have books, read them. If not, and if they were well enough, they told stories. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, from the fourteenth century, seven women and three men take turns telling stories for ten days while hiding from the Black Death—that “last Pestilentiall mortality universally hurtfull to all that beheld it”—a plague so infamous that Boccaccio begged his readers not to put down his book as too hideous to hold: “I desire it may not be so dreadfull to you, to hinder your further proceeding in reading.” The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal. “Farewell to the giant powers of man,” Mary Shelley wrote in “The Last Man,” in 1826, after a disease has ravaged the world. “Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence.” Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute. But, then, the existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading. Reading may be an infection, the mind of the writer seeping, unstoppable, into the mind of the reader. And yet it is also—in its bidden intimacy, an intimacy in all other ways banned in times of plague—an antidote, proven, unfailing, and exquisite. From "Love One Another or Die", Amy Hoffman. 2020. For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riot in June 2019, I received all sorts of invitations to speak—on panels, as a keynote. Suddenly I was the 2,000-year-old lesbian. But I was seventeen in 1969, still in high school, not out, not even considering it, just figuring I was a freak. Like most people, I never heard of the Stonewall riots until years later. Even ten years on, and despite editing a special issue about them, I was still not entirely certain whether they constituted the key moment in queer liberation that they have come to signify. Nevertheless, thanks to what I have experienced and written over the decades, it seems I am now an expert. Often, having AIDS was seen as a crime. When I started to visit weekly with a sick friend, our mutual friend warned me, “If you have to call an ambulance, don’t tell them what he has or they won’t come.” Strangely, or perhaps not, during all of the celebrations of Stonewall 50, there was little discussion of the most crucial, and traumatic, event to befall the queer community since the riots: the AIDS epidemic among gay men during the 1980s and ’90s. In hindsight, and with regret, I was guilty of this myself in my remarks at various commemorations, even though I had written an entire book (Hospital Time, 1997) about the epidemic and what it meant to me and those around me. I spoke about the LGBTQ movement as though it started in 1969 and then sort of jumped into the twenty-first century. But if we want to understand where we are today and how we got here, of course we need to talk about the epidemic. As a community, we lost a generation. As individuals, we lost partners, friends, colleagues, and comrades. I’m not sure why the Stonewall 50 celebrations so often left out AIDS. Maybe it was all just too painful. Perhaps it was because they were meant to be joyful. Balloons, parties, parades—AIDS does not fit easily into all that. Instead of cute pictures of long-haired men and women smiling, fists raised, it evokes images of young men disfigured by lesions, gasping for breath, emaciated, vomiting, while we who loved and cared for them attended two or more funerals in one day, day after day. We demonstrated too, of course. We had die-ins. Unlike earlier commemorations of Stonewall—the tenth, and even the twenty-fifth—Stonewall 50 grabbed the attention of the general public, well beyond the queer community. News anchors reported it; magazines ran features; my parents knew about it. Were the organizers too young to remember or, aware of their audience, reluctant to dwell on those terrible days? After all, straight people did not acquit themselves particularly well during the crisis (with, of course, exceptions, including Mathilde Krim, founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research and movie star Elizabeth Taylor, who became an outspoken fundraiser). Often, having AIDS was seen as a crime: people with HIV/AIDS were accused of spreading their disease to “innocent” citizens and arrested—by police wearing bright yellow protective gloves. Even some health care personnel would not touch people with AIDS—originally called GRID, “gay-realted immune deficiency”—if they treated them at all. When I started to visit weekly with a sick friend, Gay Community News staffer and AIDS Action Committee founder Bob Andrews, our mutual friend Roberta Stone (now my wife) warned me, “If you have to call an ambulance, don’t tell them what he has or they won’t come.” Some sufferers had to sue dentists and doctors in order to receive care. People with AIDS were evicted from apartments, fired from jobs, ejected from their families, expelled from schools, and ostracized by their communities. Friends and lovers were excluded from family funerals. Never mind, we created our own. At Bob’s, his tricks extolled him at an open mic. A cliché about the AIDS epidemic is that it finally brought gay men and lesbians back together after they parted ways after Stonewall, as lesbians cared for their dying gay brothers. I suppose this is true to some extent, but at least in Boston—where Gay Community News, equally women and men (at least aspirationally) shaped much of the organizing—LGBTQ folks had been working together and caring for each other for years. We already knew how to do it. And many of us lesbians had considerable expertise in community-led health initiatives from years of being involved in the women’s health movement. We had learned that we could not always trust our doctors and that we had to fight for decent care. When gay men awoke to the horror that the medical system didn’t care about them, they drew on our expertise in making trouble, and creating alternative avenues to care. Many lesbians had expertise in community-led health initiatives from being involved in the women’s health movement. We knew we had to fight for decent care. When gay men awoke to the horror that the medical system didn’t care about them, they turned to us. Perhaps more significantly, though, is the way the AIDS crisis vindicated and reinforced the insights of the liberationist wing of the movement. AIDS simply could not be contained within a narrow “gay” focus. Because AIDS was defined early as a disease of homosexuals, Haitians, and junkies, nobody in the political, medical, or social service establishments felt obligated to do anything about it. We had no choice but to do all of it ourselves—the caregiving, the treatment, the research, the public education. Our organizing, to be effective, had to take on the epidemic from all sides: the racist, homophobic way it was framed; the challenge it posed to the health care system; the indifference of politicians; the scientists who saw people with AIDS as juicy experimental subjects; the religious leaders who saw the disease as divine retribution for sin, a blessing in disguise. At the same time, as the disease disastrously spread to additional populations, treatments eventually emerged that made the disease chronic and survivable—at least for those who could gain access to and afford them. And it occurs to me that at that point the traumatized LGBTQ movement went into a kind of retreat, focusing more and more narrowly on the single goal of same-sex marriage, which it fought for in statehouses and courts. Many liberationists—myself included—criticized this focus as an accommodationist attempt to join an oppressive institution that had only harmed us. What had happened to the feminist critique of marriage as a foundation of patriarchy? What had the family ever done for queer people except condemn and reject us? Yet, as the movement for same-sex marriage had victories in the courts and legislatures, and finally became the law of the land, things began to look a little different. For one thing, even some of the most outspoken queer critics of same-sex marriage got married. Myself included. I still want to reject the regulation by the state of our intimate relationships—but marriage afforded protections that we’d never dreamed of. We could keep our kids and be recognized as their parents. We could be covered by our spouse’s health insurance. We could inherit a deceased partner’s pension and Social Security. We could visit our loved ones in the hospital and demand information from their doctors: I never used the word “wife” so much as when Roberta was hospitalized with a stroke. Some people were welcomed back into their families, sinners no longer. Even marriage turns out to be intersectional, with implications for family, health care, labor, and many other aspects of daily life. So here we are, “socially isolated” in our homes, if we are lucky enough to have homes and health, washing our hands and our groceries. Worrying. My own parents are in their nineties, frail and confused—I hope they are still alive when this article appears and not dying for the lack of services or ventilators. Meanwhile, our country’s leaders are running around like chickens without heads, while squawking daily that everything is fine, great. Perfect! Along with a distressingly substantial proportion of our fellow Americans, they trample and reject the humanity of ever-expanding categories of people—including immigrants, people of color, transfolk, disabled people, Muslims, Jews, women. More than ever, the lessons of queer liberation over the past fifty years are crucial. Stonewall demonstrates the power—the necessity—of creative rebellion against oppressive structures and of working together for justice and peace. Without that, we and our planet won’t survive. As queer poet W.H. Auden wrote, on the eve of another disaster, in “September 1, 1939”: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. From "Moving from Abstinence to Harm Reduction in the Age of Physical Distancing", Amanda Wilson. 2020. But, at a certain point I think we need to shift from a discourse of “don’t go outside and interact with others” to a discourse of “how can we interact with people in a way that minimizes risk and potential harm?” I’m not suggesting we throw caution to the wind and hold that dance party fundraiser or march as normal on May Day; but that we start to re-think and re-imagine how we can organize together, build and sustain community, support one another, in addition to (not instead of) internet-based interactions. An abstinence-based approach to physical distancing says here is a list of things you shouldn’t do; if you are doing those things you are bad, the only way to be good is to not do those things. A harm-reduction approach to physical distancing asks what are the things that are important to us, and how can we conceive of doing those things in ways that minimizes the harm and risk. The idea that we should abstain from a long list of activities needs to evolve to a set of guidelines, practices, and adaptations that enable us to live together while reducing the potential for risk and harm. This doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do all the things we used to, but it acknowledges that people have different needs and different circumstances and we need to find a way to work with those. Only interacting with people in your household is easy (or perhaps easier) if you live with someone else (whom you like spending time, and who is healthy and safe for you to be interacting with), and if you live in a situation that has enough space for those interactions to be comfortable. If you live alone, if you live in a cramped or unsafe household, that becomes much more difficult, and potentially much unhealthier. Similarly, interacting online with friends and family is easy if you have access to the right technology, a strong internet connection, and if the people you are seeking to connect with also have those things. All of us need to do different things to maintain our mental and physical health – exercise, meditation, eating particular foods, accessing certain services and support. Our ability to do these things under the current protocols varies greatly, and we need to think of ways of living, collectively, that enable all of us to do those things. From “It’s all just beginning”, Justin E.H. Smith. 2020.
[...] So I’m going have to rethink that particular book project. But that follows from the much more general point that we are all going to have to rethink everything. One thing that is certain is that you are now free to put down whatever cool theorist your peers once convinced you you had to read. None of that discourse is any more germane to thinking about the present situation than, say, Robert Burton, or Galen, or St. Theresa of Ávila. Read whatever you want to read now, and don’t be distracted by those writers who are so set in their ways that they know no other strategy than to recover formulae devised back in the old world, and to retry them in the new one, like stubborn Norsemen struggling to graze cattle in Greenland, when the world they find themselves in demands they learn to hunt seals. Thus Slavoj Žižek is now blogging for RT, the Russian state propaganda network, about how the virus puts him in mind of Tarantino films, while Giorgio Agamben is pushing a species of Trumpian doubt-mongering by claiming that the “disproportionate reaction” to the pandemic is nothing more than an assertion of authoritarian biopolitics. Honestly, at this point whoever’s left of the vanguard of continental philosophy should probably just start hawking men’s vitamin supplements on late-nite TV. These are not the end times, I mean, but nor are they business as usual, and we would do well to understand that not only is there room for a middle path between these, but indeed there is an absolute necessity that we begin our voyage down that path. To the squealing chiliasts and self-absorbed presentists, indulging themselves with phrases like “the end of the world,” I say: “Did it never dawn on you that all of human history has just been one partial apocalypse after another?” And to the business-as-usual mandarins I say: “Thank you for your service in the glorious battles of the past.” From "April 2 Rising Majority Teach-In: Movement Building in the time of Coronavirus", Angela Davis. 2020. I think that we should seize upon this as an opportunity to do the kind of organizing that enhances the sense of a need for international solidarity. This has the capacity to perhaps bring us out of our US-centric slumber, and to recognize that that we can take leadership from people who are organizing in other parts of the world, domestic workers all over the world who are now losing their job, of course, because of the stay at home orders, those who care for people in the for-profit nursing industry, the nursing home industry such as the outbreak that happened in Washington. And and I just want to say one thing about gender violence and and child abuse. Because it seems, it seems that the whole notion of staying at home is assumed to imply that we can retreat to this kind of nurturing environment of this refuge. But for many, they're being forced to spend 24 hours a day with their abusers, unable to connect with those who have been their lifelines. Children and women who are abused. I think that this isn't something we should seize upon as an opportunity to do the kind of organizing that is going to have our sense of belongingness to the world and enhance our sense of the possibility of moving Beyond capitalism. From "The Pandemic is a Portal", Arundhati Roy. 2020. The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered. At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party. The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament. The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time. Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”. It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed. Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser. March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”. Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers. He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals. Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers. On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed. He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted. Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve. The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles. As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering. The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual. Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way. Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love. As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray. A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave. Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view. When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties. Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border. “Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said. “Us” means approximately 460m people. — — — Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. From "Irreversible Shift", Robert Omar Hamilton. 2019. On the plane I thought I would be touching down in a country primed for a revolution. Or, at least, a city with a little excitement. But London has always been a dark, quiet, private city. That never changes. What greeted me at the airport was BP, its generous, green advertising vista reassuring us that the fossil fuel giant has renewables in the pipeline. Journeying into London the constant advertising sings a happy chorus of a green city of upcycled art, biodegradable plastic, low-emissions cycling, sustainable fashion, recycled Coca-Cola, and renewable energies. In Cairo, the drive to the airport had been an altogether lazier advertorial experience. An overpass cuts through the city under billboard after billboard. Billboards squatting on top of crumbling buildings, billboards craning up from destroyed neighborhoods, new billboards erected on top of old billboards: all with the same offer of verdant gated housing compounds for the elite to flee the multiplying masses of the collapsing city. In both cities, the advertisers are selling salvation. [...] LONDON, WHICH BUILT ITSELF by prying open protectionist territories to its products, is now being hollowed out by an internationalized world market of its own creation. Londoners, today, are the ones being forced from their homes as a new city grows of buildings built not for living in, but, in Boris Johnson’s words, as “safety deposit boxes in the sky.” What happens to a city when it is not built for living in? Growing up in London, the discovery of new slang was a weekly thrill. As I ventured farther from home and later out into the night I would absorb the new language of the city at parties, bus stops, and nightclubs. Prang, cotch, safe, blud, dark. We would pass weekend nights on train platforms, learning to inhale in dark parks and looking for house parties. Bare, fit, tonk, peng, chirps. Words from hip-hop, from Jamaica, from UK garage music, words that became central to the style of the city, to being young in public in the strange drift of the early Blair years. Jack, chat, step, fine. It felt, then, that were we to remain teenagers, we would soon have our own distinct language, entirely incomprehensible to the adults. I thought, too, that when I grew older I would no longer understand the city’s language. That the beats of the future would be as incomprehensible to me as drum ‘n’ bass to my mother, that the city would wear a new lexical snakeskin—shiny, fresh, full of charm and warning. But, the strange thing is, nothing really changed. Garage became grime, dubstep went mainstream, and techno conquered the world while the words of the ’90s became fixtures in the language. Cinema became a looping carousel of fantasy and superheroes, fashion froze, television peaked then turned to classic reruns. The dominant cultural mode became one of kitsch and self-reference, while the commercially avant-garde was confined to technology. Between 1950 and 1999 the Oxford English Dictionary added 53,417 new words. Between the year 2000 and today, only 593 neologisms have been officially recorded—a notable deceleration. Oxford’s English is growing at about 20 percent of its previous speed, with wholly one third of the language’s expansion from the world of tech. Is it any wonder that in a century dominated by surveillance, paranoia, terrorism, rendition, financial collapse, and hard borders our language has retreated? Our reality, for years now, has been of individual survival under austerity; the erasure of the public in a city of stagnating wages that in eight years lost half its youth centers and half its nightclubs and saw them replaced with sterile glass towers. One by one London’s houses, monuments, newspapers, and artworks are being eaten up by the searching, liquid capital of Indian steel tycoons and Arab petrolords and Russian disaster capitalists. Of course the language has stopped growing: where are we even supposed to talk to each other now? Between 1950 and 1999, 148 new words officially arrived in the dictionary from the Caribbean (though, of course, many more actually took root). That’s an average of three a year. Between the years 2000 and 2019 only one new word was registered. [...] “We are not here to make life easy for you,” said an official in an immigration reporting center to a man facing deportation. “It’s a challenging environment we have got to make for people. It’s working because it’s pissing you off. Am I right? There you go. That’s my aim at the end of the day, to make it a challenging environment for you. It’s pissing you off. You’re telling me it’s pissed you off. There you go, I’ve done my job.” Capitalism, they used to say, is a tide that lifts us all. They don’t use that metaphor anymore, in our age of drowning. [...] Ten days before the election a new London bank vault announced itself to the public. “We won’t deal with millionaires” the director proudly declared. “Only billionaires.” International Bank Vaults, which is owned by South African multimillionaire Ashok Sewnarain, said it was opening the London vault owing to increased demand from the world’s wealthiest people fearing a possible reaction against rising inequality . . . The wealthy also fear the possible impact of the climate crisis, and are increasingly storing their wealth in gold bars. In 2004 there was one food bank in the UK. In 2019 there are 2,040. Sixty thousand children were given charity food supplies in London last year. Around them, international finance flows. The world capital pulls in dirty money looking for a safe home and pulses out exploratory capital hungry for risk and profit. Active money leaves the city and dormant money arrives. Investigation by Guy Shrubsole, map by Anna Powell-Smith. Beginning in the late 1950s, the British Overseas Territories of the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, and Montserrat were developed by London’s bankers as sites through which to run offshore trades. The Empire lives on in the capital, as dark money loops back into politics and property, often disguised in the language of nationalism. [...] THE IRAQ WAR BEGAN when I was 17, and as I emerged into adulthood in London I found myself circling questions of narrative and experience. I remember thinking that if people were as culturally familiar with Arab or Palestinian or Iraqi lives as they were with American suburban ones, then wars would be much harder to wage. Later I would learn the word for that idea is “representation.” In 2011 I settled in Cairo, where the revolution’s politics sidelined questions of identity and culture in favor of mass mobilization, macro-economics, and geopolitics. At the time, it felt obvious: first the regime would be defeated, then a new culture would be built. In hindsight, these absences created crucial weaknesses: questions of gender were deprioritized, so when sexual attacks began on protesters the Left was deeply divided as to both cause and response; nationalism and patriotism were never challenged, which maintained the emotional bridge for the military coup to come; minority concerns were bundled into a One Nation fervor and forgotten, mutating later into a full-scale insurgency in Sinai; meaningful international solidarity was sidestepped to avoid accusations of being unpatriotic, and our national struggles remain divided to this day. Two years after the military coup my partner and I were living in New York, where the issue of representation was in full force. We watched #OscarsSoWhite in a gentrifying bar in Bushwick and debated the position of class in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing and held our breath as the city fell silent on the night of Donald Trump’s election. The next night, sitting with two friends with tears in their eyes, I recognized their feeling exactly from post-coup Cairo: what is this place? Who are these people that we live among? So here we are, back at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre, listening to the moving, personalized narrative of the brave imam of Finsbury Park Mosque. Generations of effort to elevate the experiences of migrants and minorities have built to this moment, to the possibility of these narratives taking over government, to a political manifesto that promises to “conduct an audit of the impact of Britain’s colonial legacy.” And, yet, it is a bitter pill because this one experience is either being held up—in the best case—to the exclusion of another or—in the worst—in competition with it. When I leave the event I feel at a loss. I wander around Tottenham for hours, working it over. Was the event just tone deaf? After four years of attacks? After years, as Muslims, as Black people, as the ones who watched Tony Blair and George Bush returned to power, who have watched our people drown in the Mediterranean, who have been so collectively vilified for so long that we sometimes struggle to recognize ourselves—are we now supposed to do the same thing to British Jews—to ignore their fears, to denarrativize them, to sideline them as political opposition? [...] The neoliberal consensus, Third Way capitalism, post-Thatcherism—however we define our economic chapter, it is clear that it is collapsing. We are in the interregnum—but what will rise in its place? Further concentration of wealth at the top, massive expansion of surveillance, police powers, and population-control technologies as the earth is strip-mined for its final generations of resources? Or something new? A future in which we harness our technological capacity, drive our political will, and expand our empathetic abilities to take on financial, racial, gender and energy inequality? Parliamentary politics is just one part of a change that will require all of our commitment. To build a world free of inequality will not come about through Acts of Parliament only, but through acts of collective will as we fundamentally re-shape the way we live together. From “Against productivity during quarantine”, The New Republic. 2020. ...[I]n a literal pandemic, as millions of us are trying to practice home isolation while also attending to the needs of our families and communities, the obscenity of pretending that work and “the self” are the only things that matter—or even exist—becomes harder to ignore. You can see this happening in all kinds of contexts, some of it in the form of smiling mandates from employers about “business as usual” while working from home. Managers at The Wall Street Journal instructed newly remote workers to answer work chat messages “within just a few minutes” and to leave cameras on during videoconference meetings, as if there’s some productivity or accountability benefit to letting your boss see what the shitty couch in your apartment looks like. The “good worker” during a pandemic is the good worker during any other time: always available to management. (“Now is not the time to screen calls.”) The crux of these kinds of posts and newsletters and articles and mandates from work is rooted in the same misguided mindset: Yes, this pandemic is bad, but how can you improve yourself with all this solitude? And more to the point, how can you continue to prove your worth as a hard worker? This isn’t a normal time, from the spread of the virus itself to the pathetic response from Congress to the quarantine and long-term economic peril staring down millions of people. Not much of what preceded it was really normal, either, but it’s fair to say that when the world is slowly descending into the unknown, any semblance of familiar routine can be a welcome reprieve: Staying in phone contact with loved ones and friends. Finding time to go for a (socially distant) run. But more work, maybe the single most constant feature of American adulthood, is not the answer. Neither is more needless productivity. This is not a time to optimize or stoically pretend nothing has changed. As Jenny Odell wrote of the drive toward growth in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, “In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative.” This is a time to sustain. To find ease where we can in a world rapidly placing us into chaos. “We do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way,” Odell wrote. But we should. [...] That is normal, now. That is the experience I am sharing with my friends and cousins and family and neighbors. While I’m still reading emails and scanning my drafts for revisions, my mind is miles away with the people that matter most to me. For those with the privilege and ability to conduct their work from home, the coming weeks should be a time to focus on ourselves, our communities, and our loved ones. It should be a time to do nothing and produce little without the accompanying feeling of guilt or panic caused by a ping from a higher-up that you should be doing more as the rest of your world slowly cranks to a halt. The work of care, of real meaning, is what we should be concerning ourselves with now. It is not optimized, or “disrupting,” or any of that. It is just essential. Reaching out to offer support to the soon-to-be overworked nurses in our communities, contributing to local funds and efforts to feed and adequately compensate grocery workers, restaurant workers, and others who are working at great risk and may be struggling to put food on the table. We should be offering to make shopping runs for our elders and other at-risk neighbors. This is the essential work that demands our attention now, too. For all the other stuff? The nonessentials? It will not vanquish your fears and stressors to churn out a spreadsheet any faster than usual. Some of us, the fortunate among us, have a kind of time now that may feel new. It can allow us a second to be true to ourselves and our emotions, or to turn away from ourselves and toward care for others, or both at the same time. You don’t have to write your novel. You don’t have to reorganize your closet. Burying yourself in mindless busywork is not the solution. So, go ahead, turn the video function off when your boss calls. from How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell. 2019. Part I - the case for nothing (intro & ch1) Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We submit our free time to numerical evaluation, interact with algorithmic versions of each other, and build and maintain personal brands. For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate. On a collective level, the stakes are higher. We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process. In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other. [...] The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive. My argument is obviously anticapitalist, especially concerning technologies that encourage a capitalist perception of time, place, self, and community. It is also environmental and historical: I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community. From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm. I am not anti-technology. After all, there are forms of technology—from tools that let us observe the natural world to decentralized, noncommercial social networks—that might situate us more fully in the present. Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live. […] The Rose Garden is a public space. It is a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project from the 1930s, and like all WPA projects, was built by people put to work by the federal government during the Depression. I’m reminded of its beginnings every time I see its dignified architecture: that this rose garden, an incredible public good, came out of a program that itself was also a public good. Still, it wasn’t surprising to me to find out recently that the Rose Garden is in an area that almost got turned into condos in the seventies. I’m appalled, but not surprised. I’m also not surprised that it took a concerted effort by local residents to have the area rezoned to prevent that from happening. That’s because this kind of thing always seems to be happening: those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified—despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides. Currently, I see a similar battle playing out for our time, a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency. One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to the rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, “‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”14 The way that Berardi describes labor will sound as familiar to anyone concerned with their personal brand as it will to any Uber driver, content moderator, hard-up freelancer, aspiring YouTube star, or adjunct professor who drives to three campuses in one week: In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine…The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary.15(emphasis mine) The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries—eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will—so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles. In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from “what we will.” [...] BUT BEYOND SELF-CARE and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way. This is the place to mention a few regulars of the Rose Garden. Besides Rose the wild turkey and Grayson the cat (who will sit on your book if you’re trying to read), you are always likely to see a few of the park’s volunteers doing maintenance. Their presence is a reminder that the Rose Garden is beautiful in part because it is cared for, that effort must be put in, whether that’s saving it from becoming condos or just making sure the roses come back next year. The volunteers do such a good job that I often see park visitors walk up to them and thank them for what they’re doing. When I see them pulling weeds and arranging hoses, I often think of the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Her well-known pieces include Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, a performance in which she washed the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Touch Sanitation Performance, in which she spent eleven months shaking hands with and thanking New York City’s 8,500 sanitation men, in addition to interviewing and shadowing them. She has in fact been a permanent artist in residence with the New York City Sanitation Department since 1977. Ukeles’s interest in maintenance was partly occasioned by her becoming a mother in the 1960s. In an interview, she explained, “Being a mother entails an enormous amount of repetitive tasks. I became a maintenance worker. I felt completely abandoned by my culture because it didn’t have a way to incorporate sustaining work.” In 1969, she wrote the “Manifesto for Maintenance Art”, an exhibition proposal in which she considers her own maintenance work as the art. She says, “I will live in the museum and do what I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition…My working will be the work.”25 Her manifesto opens with a distinction between what she calls the death force and the life force: I. IDEAS A. The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct: The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change. The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.26 The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.” That brings me to one last surprising aspect of the Rose Garden, which I first noticed on the central promenade. Set into the concrete on either side are a series of numbers in the tens, each signifying a decade, and within each decade are ten plaques with the names of various women. As it turns out, the names are of women who were voted Mother of the Year by Oakland residents. To be Mother of the Year, you must have “contributed to improving the quality of life for the people of Oakland—through home, work, community service, volunteer efforts or combination thereof.”27 In an old industry film about Oakland, I found footage of a Mother of the Year ceremony from the 1950s. After a series of close-ups on different roses, someone hands a bouquet to an elderly woman and kisses her on the forehead. And for a few days this last May, I noticed an unusual number of volunteers in the garden, sprucing everything up, repainting things. It took me a while to realize they were preparing for Mother of the Year 2017, Malia Luisa Latu Saulala, a local church volunteer. I’m mentioning this celebration of mothers in the context of work that sustains and maintains—but I don’t think that one needs to be a mother to experience a maternal impulse. At the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the stunning 2018 documentary on Fred Rogers (aka Mister Rogers), we learn that in his commencement speeches, Rogers would ask the audience to sit and think about someone who had helped them, believed in them, and wanted the best for them. The filmmakers then ask the interviewees to do this. For the first time, the voices we’ve been hearing for the past hour or so fall silent; the film cuts between different interviewees, each thinking, looking slightly off camera. Judging from the amount of sniffling in the theater where I saw this film, many in the audience were also thinking of their own mothers, fathers, siblings, friends. Rogers’s point in the commencement speeches was made anew: we are all familiar with the phenomenon of selfless care from at least some part of our lives. This phenomenon is no exception; it is at the core of what defines the human experience. Thinking about maintenance and care for one’s kin also brings me back to a favorite book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, in which Rebecca Solnit dispenses with the myth that people become desperate and selfish after disasters. From the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, she gives detailed accounts of the surprising resourcefulness, empathy, and sometimes even humor that arise in dark circumstances. Several of her interviewees report feeling a strange nostalgia for the purposefulness and the connection they felt with their neighbors immediately following a disaster. Solnit suggests that the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor. And as my familiarity with and love for the crows grows over the years, I’m reminded that we don’t even need to limit this sense of kinship to the human realm. In her essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Donna J. Haraway reminds us that relatives in British English meant “logical relations” until the seventeenth century, when they became “family members.” Haraway is less interested in individuals and genealogical families than in symbiotic configurations of different kinds of beings maintained through the practice of care—asking us to “make kin, not babies!” Citing Shakespeare’s punning between “kin” and “kind,” she writes, “I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word.”28 Gathering all this together, what I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human—including the alliances that sustain and surprise us. I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit. In Becoming Animal, Abram writes that “all our technological utopias and dreams of machine-mediated immortality may fire our minds but they cannot feed our bodies. Indeed, most of this era’s transcendent technological visions remain motivated by a fright of the body and its myriad susceptibilities, by a fear of our carnal embedment in a world ultimately beyond our control—by our terror of the very wildness that nourishes and sustains us.”29 Certain people would like to use technology to live longer, or forever. Ironically, this desire perfectly illustrates the death drive at play in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art” (“separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change”)30. To such people I humbly propose a far more parsimonious way to live forever: to exit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity. As John Muir once said, “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment.” Of course, such a solution isn’t good for business, nor can it be considered particularly innovative. But in the long meantime, as I sit in the deep bowl of the Rose Garden, surrounded by various human and nonhuman bodies, inhabiting a reality interwoven by myriad bodily sensitivities besides my own—indeed, the very boundaries of my own body overcome by the smell of jasmine and just-ripening blackberry—I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable detail of the real. from How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell. 2019. Part II - the impossibility of retreat (ch2) A lot of people withdraw from society, as an experiment…So I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you’re supposed to do is stay in the midst of life. –AGNES MARTIN If doing nothing requires space and time away from the unforgiving landscape of productivity, we might be tempted to conclude that the answer is to turn our backs to the world, temporarily or for good. But this response would be shortsighted. All too often, things like digital detox retreats are marketed as a kind of “life hack” for increasing productivity upon our return to work. And the impulse to say goodbye to it all, permanently, doesn’t just neglect our responsibility to the world that we live in; it is largely unfeasible, and for good reason. One very early example of this approach was the garden school of Epicurus in the fourth century BC. Epicurus, the son of a schoolteacher, was a philosopher who held happiness and leisurely contemplation to be the loftiest goals in life. He also hated the city, seeing in it only opportunism, corruption, political machinations, and military bravado—the kind of place where Demetrius Poliorcetes, dictator of Athens, could tax the citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars ostensibly because his mistress needed soap. More generally, Epicurus observed that people in modern society ran in circles, unaware of the source of their unhappiness: Everywhere you can find men who live for empty desires and have no interest in the good life. Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they possess, but only lament what they cannot have.9 Epicurus decided to buy a garden on the rural outskirts of Athens and establish a school there. Like Felix, he wanted to create a space that functioned both as an escape and a curative for people who visited, although in Epicurus’s case, the visitors were students who lived there permanently. Articulating a form of happiness called ataraxia (loosely, “absence of trouble”), Epicurus found that the “trouble” of a troubled mind came from unnecessary mental baggage in the form of runaway desires, ambitions, ego, and fear. What he proposed in their absence was simple: relaxed contemplation in a community that was turned away from the city at large. “Live in anonymity,” Epicurus enjoined his students, who rather than engage in civic affairs, grew their own food within The Garden, chatting and theorizing among the lettuces. In fact, so much did Epicurus live by his own teachings that for most of his life he and his school remained relatively unknown within Athens. That was fine, since he believed that “[t]he purest security is that which comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the many.”10 Quite contrary to the modern-day meaning of the word epicurean—often associated with decadent and plentiful food—what the school of Epicurus taught was that man actually needed very little to be happy, as long as he had recourse to reason and the ability to limit his desires. It’s no accident that this sounds similar to ideas of non-attachment in eastern philosophy. Before founding the school, Epicurus had read Democritus and Pyrrho, both of whom are known to have had contact with the gymnosophists, or “naked wise men,” of India. One can certainly hear echoes of Buddhism in Epicurus’s prescription for the soul: “The disturbance of the soul cannot be ended nor true joy created either by the possession of the greatest wealth or by honour and respect in the eyes of the mob or by anything else that is associated with causes of unlimited desire.”11 The school of Epicurus sought to free its students not only from their own desires but from the fear associated with superstitions and myths. Teachings incorporated empirical science for the express purpose of dispelling anxieties about mythical gods and monsters who were thought to control things like the weather—or, for that matter, one’s fortune in life. In that sense, the school’s purpose might have been similar not only to Camp Grounded but to any addiction recovery center. At the school of Epicurus, students were being “treated” for runaway desire, needless worry, and irrational beliefs. Epicurus’s garden was different from other schools in important ways. Since only an individual could decide whether he had been “cured,” the atmosphere was noncompetitive, and students graded themselves. And while shunning one type of community, the school of Epicurus actively constructed another one: The Garden was the only school to admit non-Greeks, slaves, and women (including hetaera, or professional courtesans). Admission was free. Noting that, for most of human history, schooling has been a privilege restricted by class, Richard W. Hibler writes: Nothing was traditional about the Garden in comparison with most schools of the time. For instance, anyone with the zeal for learning how to live the life of refined pleasure was welcomed. The brotherhood was open to all sexes, nationalities, and races; the wealthy and the poor sat side by side next to “barbarians” such as slaves and non-Greeks. Women, who openly flaunted the fact that they were once prostitutes, assembled and joined men of all ages in the quest for Epicurean happiness.12 Epicurus was neither the first nor the last to seek a communal refuge in the countryside. Indeed, the Epicurean program—a group of people growing vegetables and focusing on chilling out, with vaguely Eastern influences—will sound familiar to a lot of us. Although similar experiments were repeated many times throughout history, the garden school reminds me the most of the commune movement of the 1960s, when thousands of people decided to drop out of modern life and try their hand at liberated country living. Of course, the flame of this movement burned brighter and shorter than the school of Epicurus. But in a time when I’m often seized by the urge to move to the Santa Cruz Mountains and throw my phone into the ocean at San Gregorio—without having really thought that through—I find the varying fates of the 1960s communes to be especially instructive…. First, as relatively recent versions of this experiment, the communes exemplify the problems with any imagined escape from the media and effects of capitalist society, including the role of privilege. Second, they show how easily an imagined apolitical “blank slate” leads to a technocratic solution where design has replaced politics, ironically presaging the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley’s tech moguls. Lastly, their wish to break with society and the media—proceeding from feelings I can sympathize with—ultimately reminds me not only of the impossibility of such a break, but of my responsibility to that same society. This reminder paves the way for a form of political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind. |
Moderators & PrologueSara Mugridge and Daniel Neilson Links to Source Material
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