[-empyre-] [empyre] COVID and circulation workers

[Johannes Birringer]

dear Annie McClanahan, dear all

thank you for your wonderful posting on circulations and circulation work(ers), it was inspiring, with its critical edges and its drawing attention
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
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)).

In your last paragraph you speak of taking things into our hands -- could you elaborate how you imagine it?

>>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...>>

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
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':

"It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion,
in between various modes of being and belonging, and on the way to
new economies of giving, taking, being with and for and it ends with
a ride ... on the way to another place altogether. Surprising,
perhaps, after we have engaged dispossession, debt, dislocation
and violence. But not surprising when you have understood that
the projects of 'fugitive planning and black study' are mostly about
reaching out to find connection; they are about making common
cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness, I would venture to
say, that is also blackness, that remains blackness, and will, despite all,
remain broken because this book is not a prescription for repair."

I read this today after a friend from Switzerland sent me a poetic piece on bats, by 
Fanzun and Weidmann:  "How Likely Is It to Be a Bat?" which examines  shrinking collectives
of the socially distanced, in the rear view mirror of John Rawls's "Schleier des Nichwissens"/ veil of ignorance, and
his research student's Thomas Nagel's reflections on being a bat:

https://delirium-magazin.ch/section/category/home/how-likely-is-it-to-be-a-bat

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..")

with regards
Johannes Birringer



________________________________________
From:  Annie Mcclanahan <annie.mcc at uci.edu>
Sent: 24 April 2020 18:35
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