[-empyre-] [empyre] COVID Sonata, Movement 1, Allegro

Wed Apr 29 03:13:22 AEST 2020

Johannes et. al—

Thanks for your comments and thoughts!

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 some 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.)

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?)

Re: logistics, I have been very influenced by this essay<https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect> 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.

Solidarity,
Annie

Annie J. McClanahan
Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies
University of California, Irvine
annie.mcc at uci.edu<mailto:annie.mcc at uci.edu>
Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture <https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26584> (Stanford UP, 2016)
Pronouns: she/her

________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>> on behalf of Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk<mailto:Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>>
Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2020 2:08 PM
To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] [empyre] COVID and circulation workers

This message originated from outside the Ithaca College email system.

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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://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

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<mailto:annie.mcc at uci.edu>>
Sent: 24 April 2020 18:35
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