tl;dr part 2

  • Editorial

How is it that the only ones responsible for making this mess got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk?
—Tom Waits, “Hell Broke Luce”31

… continued from SDUK 07: TILTING (1).

In the first half of this editorial, we described some of the motivations for TILTING and developed a series of conceptual, biological, and political points of departure for our current thinking and action; we’re grateful for the warm reception of our new platform and the generous circulation of SDUK contributions from part one.32 As we continue to follow the vicissitudes of the situation—maintaining our social distancing even as the egregious realities of economic distancing led us to FFS murmurs and exclamations of RUFK—at times the imbecility of certain political leaders left us shouting STFU at the pixels on our screens; at other moments, we were buoyed by #GADFE memes shared by our grandparents, each a pointed reminder of the indefatigable humour conjured by our elders, and the need to both fight back and laugh back.33 Now, we’re back in part two to take up a number of additional matters of care and concern at stake in the increasingly kaleidoscopic crisis and its many ricochets reverberating across mental, material, and social sites and scales.

Among the many observations that have preoccupied the last weeks in collective self-isolation, one is especially revealing as we do the work of a public art gallery from home. In 2013, Anthony Townsend noted that the most common message over internet-connected mobile phones was: “Where are you?”34 As billions of people across the planet lock down, we’ve been wondering if the most frequent question asked online these days might now be: “Can you hear me?” As we solicit from our digitized interlocutors this simple prefatory confirmation, there is a deeper meaning that we must also bear in mind: Who is being heard in this crisis? Who is de facto muted? Who is eligible for these conversations, however stuttering and glitched out, as we learn to collaborate otherwise? In “The Masked Philosopher,” Michel Foucault remarks: “One is in single file because of the extreme meagreness of places where one can listen and make oneself heard.”35 As lineups proliferate online and on the street, we ask: Where and when are we able to speak of our suffering, sorrow, pain, and anxiety if social communication now relies on access to bandwidth as a prerequisite to participation?

After winning the Palme d’Or in 2019, director Bong Joon-ho betrayed the Cannes media scrum with the following delocalization: “When I made Parasite, it was like trying to witness our world through a microscope. The film talks about two opposing families, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.”36 Capitalism: the definitive, global pre-existing condition that has (again), through this crisis, self-explicated its complete and utter failure as a logic for social organization. There is no going back from such an unnerving planetary unveiling. As Benjamin Bratton contends, “The sense of emergency is palpable and real. But instead of naming this moment a ‘state of exception,’ we see it more as revealing ‘pre-existing conditions.’ The consequences of poor planning (or no planning), broken social systems, and isolationist reflexes are explicit. Vigilance should be held not against the ‘exception’ on behalf of familiar norms, but against the return to those dysfunctional norms after the coast is declared clear. We must keep the focus trained on the pathologies revealed and in doing so willfully inhabit the difficult ramifications of change.”37 As the number of deaths from COVID-19 passes 260,000, we do well to remember that many of the inequalities described as “pre-existing conditions” are, in fact, the result of structural patriarchy and racism.38 When even air pollution was described recently as a possible vector for transmission, this scientific confirmation only reaffirmed our sense that racialized capitalism and gender inequalities are the causes of the crisis and not accidental side effects.39

According to Elizabeth Grosz, “The biological body, if it exists at all, exists for the subject only through the mediation of an image or a series of (social/cultural) images of the body and its capacity for movement and action.”40 Among the images of the body rendered through forms of speech, the conditional tense conveys what might have been. The conditional tense is the otherwise of language, its inherently political power. As Achille Mbembe suggests, “Community—or rather the in-common—is not based solely on the possibility of saying goodbye, that is, of having a unique encounter with others and honouring this meeting time and again. The in-common is based also on the possibility of sharing unconditionally, each time drawing from it something absolutely intrinsic, a thing uncountable, incalculable, priceless.”41 What values enable and sustain unconditional worlds? Where will we rediscover them?

In Potential History, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay develops a political analysis of “differential citizenship,” which confers on some subjects exclusive rights, access, or privileges at the expense of other groups of subjects within the same polity. Azoulay contends that the interpellation of citizen-perpetrators is a necessary feature of imperialism and settler colonialism.42 How can these differential processes be contested? In her essay “Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender,” Françoise Vergès argues that “capitalism is a global regime of vulnerability to death.”43 This is a radically asymmetrical vulnerability. According to Vergès, “The time for decolonial caring/cleaning (for reparation), for caring and cleaning what has been laid to waste in the past, clashes with the accelerated time of neoliberalism. As we try to clean/repair the wounds of the past, we must also clean/repair the wounds that are being inflicted today [...] As we repair the past we must simultaneously be repairing the current damage that increases the vulnerability to death of millions of people. The past is our present, and it is within this mixed temporality that futurity can be imagined.”44 To grasp the consequences of Vergès’s analysis, we must connect the disproportionate number of deaths from COVID-19 in Black and brown communities, as well as on Indigenous reservations, to the preceding five hundred years of structural racism and settler colonialism.45 As Eryn Wise explains: “What’s happening right now, what I feel, is a continuation of genocide that’s existed against Indigenous peoples in this country since its inception.”46

Such claims are necessary because, as Michel Serres insists in The Natural Contract, “There’s nothing weaker than a global system that becomes a single unit. A single law corresponds to sudden death. [...] Here, then, is the form of contemporary society, which can be called doubly worldwide: occupying all the Earth, solid as a block through its tightly woven interrelations, it has nothing left in reserve, no external place of withdrawal or recourse on which to pitch its tent. [...] Crises tear contracts.”47 As both imagined and unfulfilled social contracts are torn asunder, improvisation—which we noted in part one as the gallery’s new watchword—also requires rethinking. What modalities of experimentation are possible and which are becoming foreclosed within the framework of emergency and the narrative of crisis?48 How can improvisationality engender careful forms of redistribution, eligibility, and networks of solidarity, not as a representation of participation but as lived, embodied repertoires of commoning? As Gilles Deleuze remarks in an interview with Foucault, “Representation no longer exists; there’s only action—theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks.”49 To rebel in a crisis: relay and reactivate. In Women Who Make a Fuss, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret contend: “There are stories that need to be ceaselessly reactivated in order to be relayed with new givens and new unknowns.”50 Stengers suggests, in another text on the legacy of Félix Guattari, that one of the relays that can help address current political aporias is cartographic imagination. She writes, “the operative constructs Guattari crafted [...] are meant to work and produce, to activate a machinic freedom of cartography. [...] The point (again and again) is not to feel guilty, unworthy, or ashamed. The point is—as it is everywhere—not to fake but to reclaim.”51 Can these cartographic reclamations also shape the contours of a recovery?

With a massive global economic contraction as the horizon of capitalist progress, the question now is clearly: Recover to what? Or, more precisely: How will we know we’ve recovered? What numeracy will be required to quantify our understanding?52 If, as Vandana Shiva has noted, GDP is a deceptive measure that fails to take account of what is truly valuable (and invaluable), what metrics and indices should we look to, or create, as measures of social health or financial well-being?53 In an interview with Zoe Williams for the London Review of Books, Danny Dorling asks, with reference to his prescient thesis that further economic acceleration is impossible, “The question is: what kind of a stable world do you want to live in? [...] When there was growth, you could always promise people that it might be a bit crap now, but don’t worry, your children or grandchildren will do better. But as soon as you begin to look at stability, people aren’t going to settle for that kind of hope.”54 As the crisis reveals the cracks in an indefensible system of violence and inequality, demanding the impossible must become the new normal.55 Indeed, Mark Fisher already taught us how: “Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order,’ must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”56

And yet, as we noted in tl;dr part 1, the shadows of imperialism and colonialism haunt both the present and the future.57 While populist manias are unbecoming-civil as they metastasize around the globe, the so-called leader of the so-called free world insisted that “the horror of the Invisible Enemy [...] must be quickly forgotten.”58 How quickly, though, should we forget this crisis? Will it not haunt our best efforts to forget it? “If we want a future,” writes Frédéric Neyrat, “we need the help of ghosts.”59 For Neyrat, rather than forgetting, we need to intensify the transient legitimacy of vengeance in order to “conjure up right now, without a delay, a communism of revenants, urging us ‘to act as a spectre by refusing to follow capitalism’s emphasis on rational development.’ […] Without a communism of revenants, fear and anger will be captured, capitalized, and exploited by neo-nationalisms and ecologically-blind populisms.”60 How can we tilt our practices toward a revenant hospitality? According to Vijay Prashad, “We are at a moment of transition, where openness to experiment and willingness to learn from and to teach each other is paramount. [...] In the explosion of creative activity against neoliberalism, there is always the possibility of a breakthrough to something different.”61 Are we seeing the beginnings of a breakthrough to another world of many tomorrows, or the reification of hierarchies and asymmetries by other means? How will our collective observations and narrations of these trajectories alter their outcomes? In the words of Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, “My list of theories of change: haunting, visitations, Maroon societies, decolonization, revenge, mattering.”62 Perhaps alongside these vagaries, we are also now witnessing—and participants in—a global theory of solitude.

It is precisely for this reason that, as Catherine Malabou suggests, “quarantine is only tolerable if you quarantine from it—if you quarantine within the quarantine and from it at the same time, so to speak.”63 She adds a profound reading of isolation and COVID-19: “I think it is necessary to know how to find society within oneself in order to understand what politics means. Personally, at the moment, I am on the contrary trying to be an ‘individual.’ This, once again, is not out of any individualism but because I think on the contrary that an epoché, a suspension, a bracketing of sociality, is sometimes the only access to alterity, a way to feel close to all the isolated people on Earth. Such is the reason why I am trying to be as solitary as possible in my loneliness.”64 How does solitary life engender solidarity and being-in-common? And, can solitarity help us participate in an unbecoming-community, especially as a means to become social and ethical otherwise, by other criteria?65

In the first half of the editorial, we concluded with an anecdote about reading Camus’ The Plague. In his incredible memoir, “How and Why I Wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude,” Mexican poet Octavio Paz describes his first meeting with Camus, who was about to publish The Rebel, noting their respective visions of solitude: “He was a true writer, an admirable artist and, because of this, enamoured of form. He loved ideas in an almost Platonic sense: as forms. But living forms, inhabited by blood and passions, by the desire to embrace further forms. Ideas made from flesh and men and women’s souls.”66 As we remain at home, the embrace of form is one of the few modes of sensuous contact we are left. Paz continues, “Forms dreamt up and thought out by a solitary man seeking communion: a solitary solidarity. His philosophical and political ideas well up from a vision that combines modern desperation with ancient stoicism. Much of what he said about revolt, solidarity, the continuous struggle of man faced with his absurdity, remains alive and actual. Those ideas still move us because they were not born from speculation but from a hunger that the spirit sometimes suffers when it seeks to become embodied in the world.”67 The hunger—or hungers (plural), to acknowledge both material and conceptual—of this solitary solidarity lead to suffering, and thus to desire, and, as a matter of course, to revolt. Paz continues, tipping over any reading of Camus from a singular, spontaneous revolt to forms of collective, militant moderation:

Revolt, like summer storms, quickly dissipates: the very excess of its avenging fury makes it explode and dissolve into air. In the final pages of The Rebel, Camus defends moderation. In a world like ours, that has made of excess its rule and ideal, to dare to propose moderation as an answer to our evils demonstrated a great independence of mind. A great touch was to unite moderation with revolt: moderation or measure gives a shape to revolt, informs it and makes it permanent. To glimpse the meaning of this moderation is to begin to recover physical and political health. [...] I would add: moderation consists in accepting the relativity of values and political and historical acts, on condition that this relativity is inserted into a vision of the whole of human destiny on earth.”68

How, then—whether in isolated or collective acts—can we initiate the permanent revolt of moderation, tilting the measures of value otherwise, toward many tomorrows?

Of course, the socially essential practice of self-isolation—solitude—is receiving unfamiliar attention as the pandemic continues. In contrast to the excruciating platitudes about sacrifice in news media, we believe there is an especially valuable heuristic that enlivens the generosity of solitude in the Borgesian tale about the lottery of inheritance, wherein a wealthy Babylonian cartographer bequeaths to his three daughters a set of invaluable maps. Before he dies, he instructs them as follows: I give half of these treasured maps to my eldest daughter, a quarter to my second, and, to my youngest, I give one sixth. After his death, the daughters were unsure how to proceed, for their father had left them only eleven maps. Contentious propositions and acrimonious disputes ensued. The controversies would not abate, so they travelled to a remote village to solicit the advice of an elder renowned for her ability to justly adjudicate quarrels about distribution. The old woman listened, reviewed the maps, and shook her head: I cannot solve your problem. The daughters gasped, for they believed she would finally put their disagreements to rest. Then the woman left the meagre room and returned with a small scroll. The parchment revealed an incomplete map of lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, beautifully drawn but with no practical value for surveyors or scribes. She gave it to the daughters then sent them home. Now—with the addition of this fragmentary drawing to their father’s lot—they divided their inheritance: the first took six, the second three, and the last two; this left unclaimed the old woman’s map, which they graciously returned. We share this concluding parable not as some moral tale, but instead as an ethical provocation: what maps, however incomplete (or drawn in solitude), can we create and share today to help others navigate the inheritance of worlds coming undone? Which is also to ask, with Arundhati Roy, how is the pandemic a portal?69 Can we invent and proliferate other values as a means of undermining and rerouting both the economic fractions and political factions that we inherit today? What modes of artifice and sharing are possible and necessary in this untimely moment of confounding abeyance?

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