[-empyre-] - noise of contagion

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all:
thanks Annie for your good response, making us think ever harder about the challenge of understanding solidarity as "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."  

I wish I could respond to this via the paintings and poetic writings we've received, or Patricia Zimmermann's musical writings about closed nursing homes and her mother, or her rescuing of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, or her description of teaching, now, through "migrating" courses to "remote instruction" (Sean Cubitt just added to this in an illuminating way, regarding the physical arts and why this does not work, and Kathy High already had voiced her concerns over the disabling of everything, health, wellness, job security, the students' future).

It's hard to find a way in now, after such weeks; I had wanted go to back to Christina's paintings and read the visual-sensual against what Alan writes on truth as nonvisual or entangled with language, that "plague of truth functions... & commandments"... 
The idea of "resonance of truth in sound" (music as anything listened to from any sources mirrors the world in an uncanny way") also made me think how one unlinks music from those plagues, perhaps? yet how rigidly grammatical and terrible is this Mozart Sonata in A Minor) - how one accepts negation ("an etymological impulse that places a- as negative or negation in Sanskrit")..... Alan what are you after?  Would it make any sense to have further dialogue, for another week or two, and hear some more commentaries or conversations?  Alan, the "a - as negative"  -- I thought about your etymologies and the new commandments we have now, lockdown, socialdistancing, dissocial, "Verordnung" to wear masks in public ('ver' is the most common prefix in German and there seems to be no logic to it). "ver"  often refers to partition, tearing, a separation, a cutting. A cut-up of orders.

So I come back to Annie's reference to “circulation struggles” -- could we elaborate?  You cite "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".  Hmm, I like this; here is much talk in my region about lock-up (meaning exit lockdown), but our french/german ARTE channel also this week, ominously, showed a terrific documentary, "Les temps des ouvriers"/"Nicht länger nichts" (Arte)

https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/082189-001-A/nicht-laenger-nichts-geschichte-der-arbeiterbewegung-1-4/

which dramatized, in the last section, the workers' strikes and also the lockouts. The doc depicts the workers' movement and the history of labor in Europe (England, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, since 18th century, the weavers, the mills, the factories, the coal mines, steel and then the fade out, plants as ruins, rotting), also glancing at plantations and slavery and the colonial frameworks. What would it mean for the economy as we knew it, it there were sustained solidarity transmissions and blockades, Annie, how do you imagine seizing those?

 Patricia, you say: "All to keep it ALL THE SAME, as though nothing had happened and as though the Zoom screen did not flatten our affect and transform our images into postage stamps." 
Small question:  you took us through the brave, elaborate rescue operations you made, quickly and cooperatively, to move the film festival from the cinema to online. In your next posting you bewail that this very same maneuver, this shift or relocation, is happening in education and in your college teaching? is this not a contradiction?

And finally, Premesh Lalu -- you wanted to tell us more about the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects - "share some of the thinking around the art interventions planned for the new facility and to learn from you", you said,"  about how we might set to work on crafting an aesthetic education for our times"  - this would interest me 
a lot.  Last night, having watched the Segal Center conversation between Frank Hentschker and Tunisian playwright Jalila Baccar (https://howlround.com/happenings/segal-talks-jalila-baccar-tunis), I was struck that, as in all talks, the invited guests first give us an autobiographic setting (of their self isolation), a self dramatization now predictable, then they comment on their work and its disablement. Baccar said: "This pandemic shows us how fragile we are; it has turned the dial back to zero".  At the end, Baccar said she did not have any answers, then quoted a Tunisian song about "la volonté de vivre". Her advice was resist, love, hope, continue to dream.

This song does not resonate with Jonathan Basile's plantation thesis: "Viruses are able to use us as machines because we are machines to
 ourselves. We are able to live because we can rely on the functioning of our own cellular machinery. Without the hospitality that makes us
 vulnerable to viruses, our own life would be impossible."

respectfully,
Johannes Birringer
________________________________________
Annie Mcclanahan <annie.mcc at uci.edu>
Wed 29/04/2020 18:11
[...]
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. exposed workers) to take on the risk for “us." 
Annie J. McClanahan