tl;dr part 1

After reading countless articles and essays detailing the impacts of COVID-19, we wanted to add an additional description of this pandemic as an affective planetary attention disorder that quickly evolved from a generic WTF to an alarming OMFG. Then, because GTFO is no longer advisable, or permissible, or even possible for many, we swiftly built an online platform to host the SDUK.22tl;dr = too long, didn’t read; COVID-19 = Coronavirus Disease 2019; WTF = What The Fuck; OMFG = Oh My Fucking God; GTFO = Get The Fuck Out; SDUK = Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. As we continued to assemble this publication and work through the editorial text, the myriad ways in which the pandemic has helped to explicate a seemingly infinite list of social, economic, and environmental failures, across innumerable scales, became increasingly apparent and extremely disconcerting. Thus, in the first part of our editorial, we consider a preliminary group of concepts, strategies, and other persistent refrains that have tilted our efforts and operations as a public university art gallery; in the second part of the editorial, we’ll be back to work on some additional concepts and practices that we believe will continue to shape the next phase of this asymmetrical planetary crisis.

Stuck at home, our team has been fortunate enough to be working and reading. We returned to Félix Guattari, who reminds us: “A child that sings in the night because of his fear of the dark tries to reestablish control of events that are too quickly deterritorializing for his liking and that begin to proliferate in the cosmos and in the imaginary. Each individual, each group, each nation thus equips themselves with a range of basic refrains for conjuring.”33Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 107. See also Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). For Guattari, the refrain is a modality of semiotization that allows an individual (a group, a people, a nation, a culture) to receive and project the world according to reproducible and communicable formats. It is a process of conjuring that also corresponds to the act of thinking because all thought unfolds in relation to its constitutive refrains. Thought, in this sense, is not merely ideational and cannot be designated as an entirely theoretical enterprise; thinking is at stake in every sensuous, aesthetic, and artistic practice and production. And, in this sense, we are certain of one thing: this is not the time to stop thinking.

Among the emergent lexicon of new epidemiological terms made ubiquitous by our compulsion to repeat them (aren’t these also refrains with which we attempt to manage our fear?), we think it is especially important to pause and pay attention to communicability.44The remarks that follow depart from John Paul Ricco’s description of the incommunicable. "This would be to speak and think and write in terms of our common virality, contagion, and collective contamination—those ‘vectors’ that are the forms and modes of undetectable or anonymous commerce and communication. This would, at the same time, not lose sight of the incommunicable that always persists at the limits (but, again, perhaps also at the heart) of the known and the communicable. It is this that makes any community worth living, unbecoming. It is to this that Jean-Luc Nancy recently gave the name 'commonovirus.'" See John Paul Ricco, "Risks and Pleasures of Bodily Abandonment and Freedom," March 30, 2020, https://unbecomingcommunity.wordpress.com/. According to its etymological origin by way of the Late Latin term communicabilis, the verb communicare means “to share.” The communicable is that which can be or has been shared, communicated, or transmitted; straddling an imaginary that is simultaneously informational and biological (in the sense of contagion and infection), the adjective tends to precede the noun “disease” in descriptions of COVID-19 as a “communicable disease.” Yet it strikes us that many other heterogeneous communications have also been shared; indeed, the becoming-communicable of planetary hyperconnectedness and hypersynchronization, of indefensible social and environmental injustices, and of the absurd yet brutal reality of basing access to healthcare on one’s job or prior capital accumulation resound in concert. If the maniacal sounds of racialized capitalism have buzzed noisily in the ears of the dispossessed since Western civilization began committing its foundational genocides in Africa and the Americas, it seems that the maddening planetary soundtrack of viral communicability is making the racket of inequality intolerable even for those who, until only weeks ago, had imagined themselves well insulated from the subaltern clamour.55On the foundational genocides of the West, see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

Of course, we are aware that the most devastating impacts of the crisis will affect the most vulnerable communities and individuals. We also insist that none of these connections are particularly new for all those struggling against the violence of capitalism. However, the irrefutable intrusion of the pandemic has forced even the mainstream media to call into question geopolitical borders, species distinctions, and social classes (and much else besides)—in certain moments it appears these categories could collapse altogether, while in other instances, they are overcoded with even greater brutality to reinsure the inequalities they help maintain.66This is especially the case for communities living under settler colonial occupation. See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). In the incontestable words of Saidiya Hartman, “The plot of her undoing begins with his dominion. It begins in the fifteenth century with a papal bull, with a philosopher at his desk, pen in hand, as he sorts the world into categories of genus and species.”77Saidiya Hartman, “The Plot of Her Undoing,” (Feminist Art Coalition: Notes on Feminism), 1, https://feministartcoalition.org/essays-list/saidiya-hartman. “The undoing of the plot,” Hartman continues later in the essay, “does not start on bended knee, it does not begin with ballots or bullets, or with an address to the court, or with a petition, or with the demand for redress, or with the slogan: no justice, no peace. It begins with the earth under her feet. It begins with all of them gathered at the river and ready to strike, with all of them assembled in the squatter city, with all of them getting ready to be free in the clearing. They don’t say what they know: all things will be changed.”88Hartman, “The Plot of Her Undoing,” 5–6.

The planetary pre-existing condition of oppression and injustice under globalized capitalism has been laid bare by the contingent spread of a zoonotic virus that has now infected human beings living in nearly every country on Earth. What figure can bear such a transition, when “all things will be changed”? Again, we turn to Hartman, who, in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, enlivens the following figuration: “The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within an enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure?” She then explains: “The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution. The chorus propels transformation. It is an incubator of possibility, an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.”99Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2019), 347–348. To embolden and realize these dreams, we also need to consider how we can reimagine the relation between the chorus and the infrastructure that it appropriates, repurposes, and inevitably alters toward other means and ends.

Because infrastructure, as Susan Leigh Star defined it, is the kind of stuff that only appears when it breaks, the virus and its attendant medical, logistical, and unemployment crises have allowed a lot of infrastructure to appear in full view.1010See Susan Leigh Star, “The ethnography of infrastructure,” in American Behavioural Scientist 43 (1999): 377–391, and Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces,” in Information System Research 7 (1996), 111–134. It is clear that these breaks were not simply results of the pandemic; that is, it was not necessary that these extensive systems would lie broken for the world to see.1111Charles Yu, “The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction,” The Atlantic, April 15, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/charles-yu-science-fiction-reality-life-pandemic/609985/. Instead, as Michelle Murphy notes in an essay on earlier cholera and Ebola outbreaks, “emergency remediation [...] is an achievement of the politics of infrastructure; it is the result of the purposeful building of some infrastructures and not others, of funding emergency medicine to save from death and not durable systems to protect health.”1212Michelle Murphy, “Infrastructures Built and Unbuilt,” http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/infrastructures-built-and-unbuilt/. With remarkable prescience, she adds, “In our contemporary historical conjuncture, history seems to repeat, where infrastructures to secure the global logistic chains that maintain resource extraction are protected while the task of affirming human health remains the concern of temporary infrastructures of emergency humanitarianism.”1313Murphy, “Infrastructures Built and Unbuilt.” With the real costs of such arrangements now laid bare across the globe, it is imperative to consider struggles regarding infrastructure investment and maintenance from an intersectional perspective that also attends to the long shadows cast by imperialism and colonialism.1414Hamid Dabashi, Europe and Its Shadows: Coloniality After Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2019).

In his recent essay “The Universal Right to Breathe,” Achille Mbembe reflects on the asymmetries of the crisis and the various material dependencies that it unveils and perpetuates. “In Africa especially, but in many places in the Global South,” Mbembe explains, “energy-intensive extraction, agricultural expansion, predatory sales of land and destruction of forests will continue unabated. The powering and cooling of computer chips and supercomputers depends on it. The purveying and supplying of the resources and energy necessary for the global computing infrastructure will require further restrictions on human mobility. Keeping the world at a distance will become the norm so as to keep risks of all kinds on the outside. But because it does not address our ecological precariousness, this catabolic vision of the world, inspired by theories of immunization and contagion, does little to break out of the planetary impasse in which we find ourselves.”1515Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” Critical Inquiry, April 13, 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/. Breaking out of this impasse demands that we first irreparably break our image of the market as a viable system for social organization and reproduction. As Andrea Muehlebach contends: “Rather than pay tribute to the market, society should pay tribute to that which holds it together, socially and materially—its infrastructure—and translate that tribute into maintenance and care.”1616Andrea Muehlebach, “Toward a Social Infrastructure,” e-flux: Liquid Utility, October 23, 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/liquid-utility/259663/toward-a-social-infrastructure/. Not only do we agree, we also believe that maintenance and care require getting organized.

Few moments in recent history provide such a clear distinction between the work of criticism and the practice of coordination. In a recent episode of Democracy Now!, Juan González asserted: “I firmly believe it is not enough for radicals and progressives to rail against the situation […] we also have to promote grassroots efforts. [...] I urge others, across the country, in your own neighbourhoods, to do what you can—don’t depend on the private sector or some promised government assistance programs, which may or may not materialize—we’ve got to pull together as much as we can, with our own neighbours, the ninety-nine per cent, and support each other and keep fighting to preserve and defend people in our local communities.”1717Democracy Now!, April 14, 2020, https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2020/4/14. For all its virtues, criticism can’t feed, shelter, or heal our neighbours in this crisis; the intelligence of critique must also attend to the moment as it is and instaurate the requisite practices demanded by the situation.1818In the words of Noam Chomsky, “Principles have to be understood in connection with the human reality of the existing circumstances.” See “Deconstructed Special: The Noam Chomsky Interview”, The Intercept, October 31, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/10/31/deconstructed-special-the-noam-chomsky-interview/. It is in this sense that The Invisible Committee contend: “we propose paying careful attention to situations and to the forces that inhabit and traverse beings, in conjunction with an art of decisive assemblages.”1919The Invisible Committee, Now, trans. Robert Hurley (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2017), 157. When they go on to claim that our only recourse to “transversally uniting all the elements deserting this society” depends on our fidelity to the “intelligence of the situation,” we vehemently agree. They continue, with an attention to tilting: “It is everything that makes the situation gradually understandable, everything that tracks the movements of the adversary, everything that identifies the usable paths and the obstacles. Based on that intelligence, an occasional vertical expedient needed to tilt certain situations in the desired direction can well be improvised.”2020Ibid., 158; our emphasis. As we attempt to tilt, lean, and tip our situation—namely, as a public art gallery whose facilities are closed for the foreseeable future to the public—into unknown and untested directions, improvisation is fast becoming our organizational watchword.

Within the public arts sector in Canada, countless long-form impact surveys on emergency aid measures are being conducted by private research companies in the hope of finding cures and remedies in data. That is all well and good, but we know the impact of the crisis cannot be measured by technocrats in search of efficiencies and numbers alone will not propel transformation. In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy discusses how practices of quantification have worked to “install economy as our collective environment, as our bottle, as our surround. How does capitalism know and dream its own conditions through numbers and data?” She also asks how we might assemble life differently toward other futures.2121Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 1. The pandemic has also directed much attention to questions of accountability; in this regard, our Blackwood Gallery team is not immune to self-reflection and reorientation regarding how we can remain accountable to our community. We recognize that for many, time is tight, resources are scarce, and struggles are intense. Here we evoke triage as one mode of doing.2222See Greig de Peuter and Christine Shaw, “Gathering Arrows: Deleuze’s Return,” in TOPIA, Vol. 16 (Fall 2006): 150–153. With TILTING we have endeavoured to create an expedient means to support those who have been unmoored from their sources of financial resources, while simultaneously thinking about how to respond at scale. Our mandate remains the same: “We support and activate artists, curators, and writers who incite us to be responsive, cooperative, critical, and answerable.”2323See “Mandate” in “Archived Site” at http://www.archive.blackwoodgallery.ca. Fortuitously, the Blackwood is in the midst of building a new website to hold together living research, creation, inquiry, interaction, and conversation. As of April 20, 2020, the gallery’s website has been archived in order to make space for SDUK and that which is to come.

Again, and still emphatically: now is not the time to stop thinking. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault considers the persistence of thought and culture in his discussion of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote—whose eponymous protagonist introduced to the world the credulity of “tilting at windmills”—with the following remarks: “Generally speaking, what does it mean, no longer being able to think a certain thought? Or to introduce a new thought? Discontinuity—the fact that within the space of a few years a culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up till then and begins to think other things in a new way—probably begins with an erosion from the outside, but which it has never ceased to think from the very beginning. Ultimately, the problem that presents itself is that of the relations between thought and culture: how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases, in this place or that, to begin anew?”2424Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1989), 56. In this bewildering moment of discontinuity, what thoughts are no longer thinkable? What thoughts are emerging, now just barely discernible in their fledgling first moments? How can we care for them? How can we foster their flourishing in anticipation of a world still to come? In their exemplary book Women Who Make a Fuss, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret are unflinching: “Think we must.”2525Isabelle Stengers, Vinciane Despret, et al., Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, trans. April Knutson (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014), 26.

As a public gallery in suspension for an indeterminate duration, Mbembe’s remarks on cessation also feel compelling and pertinent to the shared experience of our current condition. He writes, “At this juncture, this sudden arrest arrives, an interruption not of history but of something that still eludes our grasp. Since it was imposed upon us, this cessation derives not from our will. In many respects, it is simultaneously unforeseen and unpredictable. Yet what we need is a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption. Without which there will be no tomorrow. Without which nothing will exist but an endless series of unforeseen events.”2626Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Caught as we are between a 24/7 news cycle intent on capturing as much of our attention and imagination as possible and the horrifying slow violence of a crisis still unpredictably unfolding, we require new collective refrains to conjure many tomorrows that can provide respite from unnecessary morbidity and hunger, generalized anxiety, and a hybridized psychosocial and economic depression at the scale of the planet.2727See Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2014), and Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

In a letter to the New Yorker, New Jersey teacher Kaya G. Morris responded to a chronicle of contagion fables by recounting a story of reading Albert Camus’ The Plague with her high school class. Morris writes,

In countless, unprecedented ways, the pestilential life of a virus is now making communicable much of what globalized capitalism tried to keep separate and unshared. Perhaps the question is less whether or not we can recover from the pandemic, but instead whether or not the pandemic can push humanity to recover from capitalism. As Georges Canguilhem makes clear in The Normal and the Pathological, “No recovery is ever a return to biological innocence. To recover is to establish new norms of living for oneself that are occasionally superior to the old ones.”2929Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 187. How can we establish new and superior social norms and expectations while learning to share otherwise through the intertwined processes of unbecoming-innocent and unbecoming-perpetrators that accompany COVID-19?3030On involuntary perpetrators, see Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s magisterial rethinking of differential citizenship in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York and London: Verso, 2019). We will return to this concept again in part two of TILTING.

… continued in SDUK 07: TILTING (2).