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I don’t think you did get it wrong--I’m also not sure what I mean myself, at least not yet! :) The thing about stopping some movements referred to the idea—present in Bernes’ writing about logistics (I think I didn’t link properly before—it’s here <a href="https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect" class="">https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect</a>) and
also articulated by Joshua Clover in <i class="">Riot Strike Riot</i>—that the labor movement of the future will be about “circulation struggles” (Clover) or “counter-logistics” (Bernes). Bernes and Clover use those terms to describe things like building occupations,
general strikes, port shutdowns, and highway, pipeline, or railway blockages. What’s interesting to me is that today's “lockdown” is a kind of dystopian inverse of those circulation blockades—perhaps one that could be seized upon: what if we put our fascist
immigration system, or our oil pipelines, or the entire Amazon logistics network on “lockdown”?
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<div class="">And yes, you’re also getting at exactly what I had in mind re: solidarity. My idea there—one I was trying to work out more clearly in my reply to you—is that solidarity requires that we see ourselves as intimately connected to lots of people we
don’t know—it requires that we think not just outside the narrow orbit of the family or the household but also outside of the elective affinities that (neo)liberalism cherishes. Solidarity means understanding connections that aren’t by choice, that aren’t
immediately visible, that aren’t bounded by affective affinity per se but require broader forms of imagination. Here again, the virus is a kind of horror-movie image of that solidarity—yet if we don’t think in terms of that broader, wider, more complicated
solidarity (the solidarity of transmission, say), we will too easily accept the risk “trade off” where those of us with privilege and security allow others (“essential” workers, i.e.
<i class="">exposed</i> workers) to take on the risk for “us." <br class="">
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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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<div class="">On Apr 28, 2020, at 12:40 PM, Johannes Birringer <<a href="mailto:Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk" class="">Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk</a>> wrote:</div>
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thank you , Annie, for your response, <br class="">
I can see now I got your earlier sentence wrong, when you wrote about stopping some movements, and not others.<br class="">
(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..) - that last sentence confused me, as it seemed to imply transmissions, the inevitable
ones, are an expression of solidarity. I tried to link it to the idea of blackness as unrepair, and unreconciled solidarity. I see now there is so much more to ask ("about what it becomes possible to ask for or demand in these times") and to hand over.
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Junting, can you tell us more about the "noise" you have worked on, and how noise aesthetic and political discourse on “noise” intersects or converges between media, writing, performance (did you see "Formosa" by Lin Hwai-min?) and autobiography? and what
so many here, in this provocative debate, have talked about, or written/painted, as the personal as political?<br class="">
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Writing, I feel, now, having looked at the language blur image and Alan's brilliantly evocative " Confusion entanglement: etymological impulse, poetics rooted in<br class="">
roots", is also an ethical choice for dialogue (not the "new normal" which as Annie correctly assume will be the old normal) and the way one listens to the vibrations.<br class="">
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regards<br class="">
Johannes Birringer<br class="">
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________________________________________<br class="">
[Junting Huang schreibt]<br class="">
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Thank you, Luca. A quick note on your last point, Eric Hayot’s The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain traced that whole tradition to the Enlightenment period, when European philosophers often used the Chinese in their thought experiments
on ethics. At its core, it asks us again and again what we should do about the suffering from afar.<br class="">
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I also tried to follow the debates originated from Agamben, and I do feel the remarks he has made are a bit out of touch with reality, even though he may have some valid points in China’s context—considering civil liberties in the state of exception (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/the-new-normal-chinas-excessive-coronavirus-public-monitoring-could-be-here-to-stay" class="">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/the-new-normal-chinas-excessive-coronavirus-public-monitoring-could-be-here-to-stay</a>),
etc. However, his deliveries read more like an ideological commitment than a theoretical guidance.<br class="">
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Junting<br class="">
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Junting Huang<br class="">
Department of Comparative Literature<br class="">
240 Goldwin Smith Hall<br class="">
Cornell University<br class="">
Ithaca, NY 14853<br class="">
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empyre forum<br class="">
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" class="">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><br class="">
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu<br class="">
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