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Johannes et. al—
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<div class="">Thanks for your comments and thoughts! </div>
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<div class="">As to what “in our hands” might mean: I think one thing I am thinking of is how to resist a certain kind of “household” imaginary, where we conceive of our household as the maximum unit to which we can extend our care. It’s really almost impossible
to think around or beyond this when lock-down measures essentially force us to restrict our sense of the social to that small unit. But I’m bothered by the idea that we are blithely hiring gigworkers to expose themselves to risk in order to protect “our” family
from it. I also understand, of course, that <i class="">some</i> version of that is necessary—and even a public health good. But that only works in a system where those workers are protected and paid adequately, which they aren’t, especially in circumstances
where they rely heavily on tips (like Instacart). There are stores that use their own (unionized) employees to do that kind of work; there are other ways to get necessities besides Amazon; there are also ways to rethink what “necessities” might even mean.
This is the tiniest scale of action imaginable, but it seemed necessary to me just to stop thinking of risk as something that I might, in my privilege, simply chose to pass along to someone else. (I haven’t gotten there entirely—e.g. I really want to do work
with a local org helping So Cal’s massive homeless population, suffering terribly in this crisis, but I find myself unable to chose to put “my” family at modest risk even to help many other families.)</div>
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<div class="">Larger yet, I am thinking a lot about what it becomes possible to ask for or demand in these times. I think, for instance, about the fact that my campus is now offering free childcare to those who need it. Once things are back to “normal,” will
this just go away? Will services like Hathi trust and newspapers and academic publishers go back to their paywalls? Will we still accept a social welfare system that distinguishes between permanent workers and gigworkers once we’ve temporarily accepted that
the latter should receive unemployment compensation? (On the other hand: will we accept government privacy intrusion—probably enabled by tech companies as the price for personal or familial safety? Will we be willing to accept nationalism and fascist border
regimes just so that we can go back to business as usual?)</div>
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<div class="">Re: logistics, I have been very influenced by <a href="https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect" class="">this essay</a> by my comrade Jasper Bernes. In it, he thinks about logistics
as a mirror for the project of theory as such, in its capacity to dialecticize the view from above with the view from within or among. I think the rapid glance from thinking about supply chains to thinking about individual gigworkers does something similar,
which I find really powerful and useful.</div>
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<div class="">Solidarity,</div>
<div class="">Annie</div>
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Annie J. McClanahan<br class="">
Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies<br class="">
University of California, Irvine<br class="">
<a href="mailto:annie.mcc@uci.edu" class="">annie.mcc@uci.edu</a><br class="">
<a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26584" class=""><i class="">Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture</i> </a>(Stanford UP, 2016)<br class="">
Pronouns: she/her<br class="">
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<font face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt;" class=""><b class="">From:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><<a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>>
on behalf of Johannes Birringer <<a href="mailto:Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk" class="">Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk</a>><br class="">
<b class="">Sent:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sunday, April 26, 2020 2:08 PM<br class="">
<b class="">To:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>><br class="">
<b class="">Subject:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Re: [-empyre-] [empyre] COVID and circulation workers</font>
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<div class="PlainText">This message originated from outside the Ithaca College email system.<br class="">
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----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br class="">
dear Annie McClanahan, dear all<br class="">
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thank you for your wonderful posting on circulations and circulation work(ers), it was inspiring, with its critical edges and its drawing attention<br class="">
to the logistics business too, the circulation management. (I had never much thought about it until last year when working on a exhibition & book project on<br class="">
new materialism/dance, and a writer (Moritz Frischkorn) submitted a study about "The Choreography of Objects: Logistics vs Entanglement", and it made me think of Fred Moten's work as well as Donna Haraway's recent "Unruhig bleiben" (Staying with the trouble)).<br class="">
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In your last paragraph you speak of taking things into our hands -- could you elaborate how you imagine it?<br class="">
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>>We could carefully map and relentlessly survey the networks that connect us all, smoothing and equalize some of these flows and stopping entirely the movement of others. We could refuse to see our personal safety as our zero-sum due and instead see that inevitable,
unintentional connection—transmission, even—is another name for solidarity...>><br class="">
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I want to mention Moten's book on the undercommons here, as I have not fully grasped what it is after (the no-thingness he writes about), and I wonder<br class="">
how artistic action or a choreo-logistics might be shaped, as "repairs" for our current condition if such repairs are at all possible and it all remains broken; I found this from the first chapter (an intro by Jack Halberstam) of Moten's 'Undercommons':<br class="">
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"It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion,<br class="">
in between various modes of being and belonging, and on the way to<br class="">
new economies of giving, taking, being with and for and it ends with<br class="">
a ride ... on the way to another place altogether. Surprising,<br class="">
perhaps, after we have engaged dispossession, debt, dislocation<br class="">
and violence. But not surprising when you have understood that<br class="">
the projects of 'fugitive planning and black study' are mostly about<br class="">
reaching out to find connection; they are about making common<br class="">
cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness, I would venture to<br class="">
say, that is also blackness, that remains blackness, and will, despite all,<br class="">
remain broken because this book is not a prescription for repair."<br class="">
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I read this today after a friend from Switzerland sent me a poetic piece on bats, by<br class="">
Fanzun and Weidmann: "How Likely Is It to Be a Bat?" which examines shrinking collectives<br class="">
of the socially distanced, in the rear view mirror of John Rawls's "Schleier des Nichwissens"/ veil of ignorance, and<br class="">
his research student's Thomas Nagel's reflections on being a bat:<br class="">
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<a href="https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdelirium-magazin.ch%2Fsection%2Fcategory%2Fhome%2Fhow-likely-is-it-to-be-a-bat&amp;data=02%7C01%7Cpatty%40ithaca.edu%7C75e6cc1d88c042b71d6b08d7ea0dc01a%7Cfa1ac8f65e5448579f0b4aa422c09689%7C0%7C0%7C637235217121312954&amp;sdata=nyJwlmOD2Q%2F%2Fckq4KbUjkBmh4OdYRcC3I%2ByYJ6Z2gg8%3D&amp;reserved=0" class="">https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdelirium-magazin.ch%2Fsection%2Fcategory%2Fhome%2Fhow-likely-is-it-to-be-a-bat&amp;data=02%7C01%7Cpatty%40ithaca.edu%7C75e6cc1d88c042b71d6b08d7ea0dc01a%7Cfa1ac8f65e5448579f0b4aa422c09689%7C0%7C0%7C637235217121312954&amp;sdata=nyJwlmOD2Q%2F%2Fckq4KbUjkBmh4OdYRcC3I%2ByYJ6Z2gg8%3D&amp;reserved=0</a><br class="">
<br class="">
it's in German and makes for brilliant reading, at least for me it also connected so well with Annie McClanahan's commentaries on Marx, the labor of hands, machinic organisms, outsourcing of/and consciousnesses (..."the kind of theory that would give us an
alibi for our own unknowing: that would reject the idea that we see these conditions clearly..")<br class="">
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with regards<br class="">
Johannes Birringer<br class="">
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________________________________________<br class="">
From: Annie Mcclanahan <<a href="mailto:annie.mcc@uci.edu" class="">annie.mcc@uci.edu</a>><br class="">
Sent: 24 April 2020 18:35<br class="">
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