[-empyre-] Fwd: Bubbles and bodies

[Dr Melinda Rackham]

Renate:
> Others are finding themselves needing to suspend their art projects and critical pursuits in other areas to dwell on the suddenness, danger, loss, and peril wrought globally by COVID-19.

I am an other.
Thank you for having me sit with and feel through this cluster fuck as it unfolds, which in Australia comes immediately after the emotional, environmental, financial, species and spiritual devastation of bushfires. 
And thank you everyone for your poetic and thoughtful posts on soft skin and shape shifting as the small and simple novel corona virus restructures our lives.
And for the back channel hellos from old friends and comrades. 

Ive pulled a knobbly thread through some words of the week to try to shape sense and sensation:

Christina:
> Contentious, paradoxical, and perverse, Sor Juana presides, saint-like, over this strange realization at the exact moment that the current contagion spreads. She matters now because her writing grapples with the paradoxes of speech and community in a time when many sense the capacities for horror in the 'failed state.’ 
Tim:
> It’s strange to watch the sun shining on the bucolic setting in which we are sheltering at home while health and economic darkness looms over the world.
Cengiz:
> More importantly, I hope this reflection allows us to reevaluate precisely how our valuation of certain forms of life often come at the expense of others 
Junting:
> The problem with our “porous borders” is that it often gives us a false sense of security
Aviva:
> As stimulating as porous boundaries maybe (and are in so many ways), they have also literally caused the present zoonosis throwing the entire world into a state of chaos
Brett:
> Cicero Silva (S.P. Brazil)... a digital media artist so close to the eye of the storm in terms of public health response, however I feel like his story may not be able to be shared in real time due to his current 25 hour work days
Simon:
> A community to come... of the same... promises the same... when communicability--whether through the transcendental frame or through the porosity of borders and bubbles and bodies--reveals itself to be, is the problem, or question?
Gary:
> "I have decided to refrain from writing on events as they are unfolding”... Interestingly, Wendy Brown quotes this passage from Merleau-Ponty in her chapter on ‘Moralism as Anti-Politics’ in Politics Out of History. To the ‘trap of the event’ and the ‘terms of “the event”’ she adds the ‘trap of existing discourses’.


If I conceptualise porosity as a border, a way through, a penetration, I don’t really get to feel it as a transitional dimension, as constant action, as multi temporal, as simultaneity, inside+outside, us+them, beach+ocean, virus+human+dog+tiger, always adding and subtracting from its conglomerations.

But is conglomeration just a big brown undefined blob renderd obsolete by a collapse of objectivity? Again and again I come back to that prophetic truism that a faked artwork, text or relic, appearing authentic in its own era, is easy to spot once fashion has moved on. Why would I even consider the pretence that I can be extracted from the events and discourses that fashion my life?

I have friends who are infected and in precarious situations, for whom I am genuinely concerned, however also I'm questioning from my privileged bubble:

Will the mass deaths of the poor, starving, under resourced, already ill, high density populations with little access to advanced health care affect me?  Transition into my schema? Or are the just numbers that I already ignore?

Why does "doing more" suddenly look so #pathetic? Renew my donation to Medicines Sans Frontiers? Become vegan? Stop flying? Or will I say something whip smart, point out others complicity and, as we say in Australia, throw another steak on the barbie (BBQ)?

Can I placate my unease by justifying I am not one of the ones who can make difference like those billionaires riding this out holed up on private islands with attendant staff? 

Why do I act like I am not all part a whole.. moral outrage is a fickle as public attention, and about as reasonable. If I am not going to alter my behaviour, adapt to a different reality why should I even contemplate that those with skin in the game would?

But in the near future will contemplative luxury even exist?  

Over to our next guests >>>

Melinda



warm regards,
                    Melinda

Melinda Rackham
Artist & Author, PhD
Adjunct Research Professor
Art, Architecture and Design
University of South Australia

a	P.O. Box 1109
	North Adelaide 
	South Australia 5006

e	melinda at subtle.net
m 	+61 410 596 592
w	http://www.subtle.net