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fragmentsdistro · 5 years ago

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Cinque domande al cuore della tempesta. Parte 2: Black Anarchy in the USA. Intervista ad @AfroVitalist

1. Negli Stati Uniti è stato calcolato che la polizia uccide una persona nera ogni 28 ore, un dato drammatico. Come mai ora, come mai questa volta, l'assassinio di George Floyd ha innescato un processo insurrezionale?

La sollevazione di massa in relazione all'assassinio di George Floyd ha determinato un processo insurrezionale. Ma ad essere onesti penso che il Covid abbia fornito un contesto nel quale le motivazioni per agire erano già presenti.

Negli Stati Uniti fino ad aprile, anzi direi prima del Covid, eravamo in una specie di periodo buio. Gentrificazione di massa, la classe lavoratrice nera cacciata via dalle città, spinta fuori, verso le periferie o come le chiamiamo qui le inner land. Credo che il contesto dell'insurrezione di George Floyd e tutto il processo abbiano devastato certe legittimazioni, come quella del Partito Democratico, o come quella del mito della Black leadership in America. Siamo su un terreno libero. Ma è veramente il Covid che ha fornito il contesto per la ribellione di George Floyd, per la sua diffusione in tutti gli Stati Uniti. Ma se torniamo indietro e la osserviamo come una continuità con Ferguson, vediamo che la risposta dei fratelli e delle sorelle fu piuttosto simile: i modi in cui si sollevarono, diedero vita spazi comuni, come la gente si coordinava, come venivano usate le auto… Sono le stesse cose che vediamo oggi ad Atlanta e a Chicago, fino agli espropri di massa.

Non credo che ciò sia venuto dal nulla, credo che la ribellione era già qui: questa società bianca negli USA è veramente repressiva.

C'è una sofferenza generalizzata causata dal Covid, non solo nella comunità nera ma per tutti, in tutto il mondo, e per quanto riguarda gli USA ha colpito davvero tutti: neri, bianchi, ricchi e poveri. Una spoliazione generale, un divenire nera (blackening) dell'America.

2. Parliamo delle manovre repressive. Sembra che la controinsurrezione abbia lavorato sulla narrazione degli “anarchici bianchi” e dei “provocatori venuti da fuori” e messo in atto teatrini quali i poliziotti che si inginocchiavano, attori pagati vestiti da Black Panther, ecc. Quale di queste tecniche ha funzionato maggiormente e quale ha fallito?

Per quanto riguarda la controinsurrezione credo che la tecnica più forte usata, a parte fisicamente il dispiegamento delle truppe, sia stata quella di agitare il fantoccio dei “provocatori venuti da fuori”. Si tratta della narrazione più efficace per lo stato, motherfuckers che vengono da chissà dove per fare casino, senza il “permesso della comunità”, ossia di quelli che si sono autoproclamati leader della piazza. Ma stiamo vivendo una nuova era, un tempo nuovo, questo è il tempo della black anarchy. Nessuno può controllare questa cosa, non c'è alcuna leadership nera. La leadership nera è un mito controinsurrezionale, sta solo nell'immaginazione dei liberal bianchi.

In alcune città ha funzionato in altre no, in alcune il livello della controinsurrezione coincideva essenzialmente con una ipermilitarizzazione del territorio e basta.

Se qualcuno prova a mettersi nella posizione di portavoce o leader del movimento, in quell'esatto momento viene delegittimato nella pratica, nel contesto della rivolta. Perché la rivolta non vede leader, non patrocina personalismi o individualità di sorta. Si tratta letteralmente di un'onda, un'onda nera, di rabbia e amore. I motherfuckers espropriano e cercano di capire come organizzare un mondo diverso. Perché hanno molto più tempo a disposizione adesso. Il sussidio di disoccupazione dovrebbe terminare il mese prossimo ma la gente ha ricevuto più di quello che avrebbe guadagnato con un lavoro. Queste contraddizioni sono difficili da sanare: puoi stare a casa e prendere 600 dollari a settimana, a fronte dei 400 che guadagneresti con un lavoro di merda che odi ed è sottopagato. Gli standard sono cambiati. Questa cosa va contestualizzata perché pare che Trump stia cercando di comprarsele queste elezioni.

3. Decolonizzare gli Stati Uniti. Le statue cadono. Un Paese fondato sulla guerra civile, sul genocidio e sulla schiavitù sta tremando. Nelle strade riecheggia il coro: “five hundread years” [cinquecento anni]. Questo discorso è diffuso ampiamente nella comunità nera e fuori di essa?

A un qualche livello, forse non allo stesso per tutti… Bisogna considerare che sul campo, nei primi giorni e nelle prime notti, diciamo dal 30 maggio al 5 giugno, i motherfuckers a migliaia espropriavano e non c'erano attivisti.

Da un punto di vista storico è chiaro che l'America è stata fondata sulla schiavitù e la polizia è direttamente connessa alle pattuglie schiaviste e alla colonizzazione da parte dei capitalisti europei, ai conquistadores. Tutto ciò è nella coscienza e nella memoria degli afrodiscendenti nelle strade. L'America non è una nazione, è un impero. Ed è giusto che i motherfuckers buttino tutto giù, simbolicamente il gesto di buttare giù una statua, un monumento razzista, è un modo con cui dicono: “L'America è la prossima”. Il sistema carcerario è un monumento: Mount Rushmore, o Stone Mountain ad Atlanta, Georgia [un monadnock, un rilievo montagnoso isolato, di adamellite di quarzo con il bassorilievo più grande del mondo situato sulla facciata nord, completato nel 1972, che rappresenta alcuni dei personaggi di spicco dei Confederati: Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee e Jefferson Davis]. L'idolatria dell'America è il suprematismo bianco. La decolonizzazione dell'America sarà l'abolizione dei “bianchi”, delle relazioni sociali capitaliste. Penso che ad un certo livello questi discorsi, l'America come colonia, come impero, buttare giù le statue razziste, siano diffusi nella comunità nera.

4. Definanziare la polizia. Vedi in atto una nuova ondata di abolizionismo? Possiamo dire: “non si può abolire la polizia senza abolire il capitalismo” non solo come slogan ma anche come indicazione?

Abolizionismo come desiderio, un tentativo di desiderare di abolire lo stato di cose presente negli Stati Uniti. Alcuni vedono il de-finanziamento della polizia come un processo molto pacifico nei confronti delle guardie, togliere loro i soldi per le operazioni di controinsurrezione nella comunità nera volte a reprimere la rivolta. Un convergenza di vari gruppi, in cui i discendenti razzializzati si uniscano ad altri gruppi di persone per creare un mondo nuovo, per stabilire un nuovo tipo di ordine, ritmo e forma di vita.

Credo però che il definanziamento della polizia non possa accadere senza la demolizione del mantenimento dell'ordine pubblico (policing) in generale: ma credo che per cominciare il definianziamento sia una buona cosa, perché buca lo schermo immediatamente. L'abolizione cambia le carte in tavola, alcune amministrazioni cittadine hanno effettivamente tagliato i fondi. Cosa succederà dopo ciò? Questo è tutto da vedere, non credo che potrà andare peggio, per esempio sul terreno della sorveglianza… ma la polizia è in rivolta, stanno protestando, alcuni di loro hanno fatto delle dichiarazioni. La polizia in America è una forza politica a sé, con i suoi sindacati. Sarà una sfida togliere i soldi ai dipartimenti di polizia, non sarà abbastanza, non senza un movimento che la circondi.

L'abolizione del mantenimento dell'ordine pubblico, la sua demolizione, le relazioni sociali senza la mediazione degli sbirri, come succede altrove fuori dagli Stati Uniti… Penso che ci sia effettivamente un terreno fertile per l'abolizione, per il desiderio di un nuovo mondo. Questo non ha niente a che fare con la sinistra istituzionale o con l'attivismo: è un “tiriamo giù tutto” (let’s tear the shit down) generale.

5. Prospettive. Un'insurrezione può durare settimane o mesi, può finire a causa della repressione, della stanchezza, della mancanza di obiettivi pratici o con delle elezioni. Cosa vedi all'orizzonte? Cos'è irreversibile?

L'economia continua a vacillare. Nel contesto del Covid e del cambiamento climatico, l'America è finita. Quella che chiamiamo America da un punto di vista territoriale subirà un processo di balcanizzazione. All'orizzonte vedo queste milizie bianche attive nella West Coast che cercano di guadagnare terreno e di prendere possesso di riserve o territori sotto tutela dello stato… Speriamo non proprio una guerra civile – ciò dipenderà anche da come andranno le elezioni e da cosa farà Donald Trump – ma senz'altro questo è solo l'inizio di una tempesta. Ciò che verrà dopo sarà addirittura più folle di quello che abbiamo visto. Perché non c'è modo in cui queste contraddizioni possano sostenersi tutte insieme. La ricerca di profitto, di ordine e di “benessere” è a discapito della vita umana, del benessere umano, della pienezza umana.

La gente ha provato con mano la propria potenza, il fatto che il denaro è un mito e che “i bianchi” sono dei demoni; e la delegittimazione del processo elettorale. Che Trump vinca o meno il Partito Democratico non ha alcuna risposta alla crisi. I giovani non cercano leadership in nessuno se non in loro stessi. Non la cercano nella Black Left o in chiunque arrivi in piazza con un cazzo di megafono.

Questo è quello che riesco a vedere all'orizzonte: la balcanizzazione dell'America, diversi gruppi e fazioni che controlleranno diversi territori. E probabilmente una sorta di secessione.

https://twitter.com/AfroVitalist?s=20

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fragmentsdistro · 5 years ago

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William C. Anderson es un escritor independiente. Su trabajo ha sido publica- do por The Guardian, Truthout, MTV y Pitchfork, entre otros. Es co-autor de As Black as Resistance.

Este artículo fue publicado originalmente por Internacional Progresista, June 2nd, 2020, progressive.international

zine diseñado por fragments distro, July 2020, Tucson, AZ fragmentsdistro.tumblr.com

en colaboración con Tucson Food Share tucsonfoodshare.org

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fragmentsdistro · 5 years ago

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William C. Anderson is a freelance writer. His work has been published by the Guardian, Truthout, MTV and Pitchfork, among others. He’s co-author of As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018).

This article was originally published by ROAR magazine, June 2nd, 2020, roarmag.org

zine layout by fragments distro, July 2020, Tucson, AZ fragmentsdistro.tumblr.com

in collaboration with Tucson Food Share tucsonfoodshare.org

Spanish translation forthcoming at a later date.

¡La traducción al español llegará pronto!

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fragmentsdistro · 5 years ago

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Rumor has it a friend here in the Southwest wrote this piece. Late sharing it

https://illwilleditions.com/quarantine-letter-10-irreversible/

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fragmentsdistro · 5 years ago

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QUARANTINE LETTER #6: Empty Plazas

Dear Friends,

I’ve been inspired by letters circulated recently by Ill Will Editions, which have offered a helpful window for thinking through the current global pandemic. Reading them, it struck me that several have circled around something like a disjunction or asymmetry between two distinct yet overlapping lines of thought: on one hand, there is the understandable fear that the forms of social control presently implemented will be sustained beyond the pandemic (not unlike they were after 9-11), a concern that directs our attention to state power; on the other hand, there is the disruptive force of the virus itself, like a non-human agency conducting itself across us, and operating beneath and beyond the waves of governmental and economic measures by means of which the elites in the political class scramble to maintain an increasingly tenuous veneer control and authority. Orion addressed the latter in his letter when he described the virus as a power that has “constructed its own temporality, which immobilizes everything,” a power “capable of extending beyond what the insurrections proved incapable of doing, and actually shutting down the economy.” Two types of agency, two asymmetrical lines of force—how are we to parse their peculiar overlap in this moment, those of us who have never been friends of their ‘normal time’?

I write to you now from Chile, a place that has been in a state of unrest since October of last year. As it happens, the pandemic’s arrival within the context of an unfolding insurrection provides a moment to reflect on the modalities of crisis politics and control in the current moment.

Our situation might appear quite the same as anywhere else these days: the Chilean government followed the example of governments around the globe, declaring a national emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In point of fact, this most recent state of exception is the third that the government has declared in the past decade, since it follows not only the uprising this past October, but also the catastrophic earthquake of 2010. In each of these cases, the maintenance of public order was handed over to the military, which did not hesitate to implement nightly curfews and military checkpoints restricting and surveying movement.

Have we shifted from one form of upheaval to another? If so, the relevant distinction would not be between normal and exceptional states, between the rule of law and emergency measures, but rather, in this shift, who is in control over the territory, and how are we inhabiting it? Under what conditions can this question no longer be answered? If it is possible to assess continuity and divergence in our present moment in Chile, one can do so only by looking at the experience of, and contestation over, collectively inhabited territory. I’d like to share with you a few examples of such experiences, through several portraits of everyday life that capture the myriad of ways people and institutions have responded to the COVID pandemic amidst contestations over territory.

Variable Enforcement

On March 15th, 2019, in a televised, national press conference, the Chilean Board of Medicine (colegio de médicos) criticized the current Ministry of Health for improperly implementing its protocols. Since the government was failing to control the outbreak that started in Santiago, they asked everyone in the city to begin a full 14-day quarantine: no work, no school, no leaving the house. Many in the city followed this quarantine—bars and nightclubs owners closed their businesses in the name of social responsibility, and mall employees staged walk-outs and went on strike until the city closed the shopping malls.

It wasn’t until March 20th that the Chilean government finally implemented quarantine measures in Santiago, including full quarantine in territories with high rates of COVID-19, such as the rich neighborhoods of Santiago and the city’s downtown. Those who live inside the quarantine zone must now fill out a form on the police department’s website and download a “temporary pass” before leaving their house. On the form, we must select an option from the list of permitted reasons to travel from our homes, and declare where we are going. We can request a 4 hour pass 2 times a week for basic necessities, a 12-hour pass to go to a doctor’s appointment, and a 30-minute pass to walk their dog. Essential workers can request a salvoconducto, a permit to travel during military curfew or cross military checkpoint. At the beginning of the quarantine, police stations had lines around the block, with people waiting to apply for a salvoconducto.

Along the border of Santiago’s quarantine zones, only a dozen or so military checkpoints exist. We quickly realized we could walk past the handful of guards stationed there. Furthermore, city buses appear to be affected by these quarantine measures. In effect, those who opt to remain at home in the quarantine zone often do so because they are complying with the medical board’s recommendation, rather than the official quarantine measures.

Meanwhile, the official quarantine measures have not been extended to the combative poblaciónes, home to the greatest number of participants in the October 2019 Chilean uprising. These neighborhoods at the periphery of the city were formed by massive squatter movements in the 1950s and 60s, when residents collaborated to build houses, defend each other from eviction, and negotiate with the government for city infrastructure, schools, and clinics. If you’ve seen videos of riots during the March 29th Day of Combative Youth (Dia del Joven Combatiente), the footage is more than likely from these neighborhoods.

Back in October, the rebellious tendencies of the poblaciones were no longer confined to those specific areas but proliferated all over, as people circulated in the downtown, metro, supermarkets, pharmacies, and shopping malls. The attacks weren’t against the police and metro—the two obvious symbols of state power—but also targeted the formal economy itself.

This year, despite the military curfews and fear of the pandemic, the poblaciónes celebrated the day of combative youth by taking the streets and confronting the police. Unlike in central Santiago, public space continues to be open in the poblaciónes. Although there are fewer protests and social life has diminished, the pandemic has not yet fully interrupted life in these areas. Initially, protestors who congregated in Plaza de la Dignidad feared that the government would use its official quarantine measures as an attempt to regain social control after months of Chile’s social uprising. In the end, no heavy effort was made to enforce quarantine measures in those spaces where they would anyway be contested: the boundaries of the quarantine zones and the rebellious territories of the poblaciónes.

Control of public space

With the new norms of quarantine and social distance, the pandemic has interrupted the shared experiences of protests in the streets and neighborhood events in the plazas. Since October, upheaval has structured our everyday life where we live, rendering our neighborhood projects both possible and necessary. Neighbors formed assemblies in response to the upheaval of the massive street demonstrations. Through assemblies, we hoped to meet each other, and sustain the forces in the streets and life in the neighborhood. People used assemblies to organize and publicize new neighborhood events such as community kitchens, flea markets, children’s theater, and open-air concerts. Meeting in parks, our assemblies would be constantly interrupted by the life of the neighborhood: street dogs greeting us and playing in the middle of the circle, people asking for cigarettes, sitting with us and ranting, and old insurgents saying we should stop talking and start lighting barricades.

The pandemic has radically interrupted this everyday life. Now, the neighborhood assembly is online. Assemblies, mutual aid, and online workshops are coordinated and announced in their corresponding Whatsapp groups. Uninvited neighbors can no longer drop in spontaneously. My capacity to write in a café was enabled by the possibility that I would be interrupted by an old friend walking in with someone new to meet, or that protesters would spill into the café from Plaza Dignidad to evade the spray of the guanaco (the police’s water cannon tank), interruptions that conferred sense of structure and situated meaning on my work. Could it be that all activity becomes meaningful only when conducted in the public? In any case, we were wrong to have ever looked upon the possibility of interruption as a nuisance or distraction. In fact, the more entangled they were with the lives of others who inhabit our world, the more meaningful our activities became. The quarantine signifies the interruption of this shared sensibility and with it, made all the other interruptions that followed from it impossible as well.

Who imposes restriction of movement?

And yet, things are still happening in Chile: in other regions, residents have continued participating in the uprising by blockading the industries that destroy their territories. In Patagonia, for instance, several towns have been engaged in a decades-long conflict with the players in the salmon industry. By dumping antibiotics, feed, and waste, salmon farms have decimated the waterways on which local fishermen rely, while industrial freight trucks ravage the narrow country roads that connect towns to one another.

When things kicked off back in October, the breadth and depth of the upheaval became apparent to us only after learning that, while Santiago was burning, rural communities were also erecting barricades on country roads and interrupting Chile’s major industries. These same towns blockaded the roads that brought workers and supplies to the Salmon farms. In those days, to get a reading of the situation within one’s city, it sufficed to walk down the street, and yet it was comparatively difficult to gather news of the protests elsewhere in the country. Despite this difficulty, “Free Chiloe” (Chiloe Libre) graffiti proliferated on buildings throughout Santiago.

When the COVID outbreak began to spread outside Santiago, residents on the Patagonian island of Chiloe blocked ferries carrying salmon industry workers. Eventually, the government restricted transportation to the Island to prevent the spread of Coronavirus; yet, when a ferry arrived bringing additional police forces to enforce the quarantine, Chiloe residents attempted to block that ferry, too.

A Determinate Ambiguity

In his recent reflection on Agamben and the legacy of the Chilean state of exception, Gerard Munoz offers some insight into why the state’s emergency measures ultimately failed to take any effective hold during the October uprising:

The Chilean debate is in a better position to arrive at a mature understanding of the state of exception, not as an abstract formula, but as something latent within democracies. The dispensation of Western politics into security and exceptionality is not a conceptual horizon of what politics could be; it is what the ontology of the political represents once the internal limits of liberal principles crumble to pieces (and with it, any separation between consumers and citizens, state and market, jurisprudence and real subsumption).

In order to function, the deployment of a state of emergency relies on the liberal distinction between market and state, citizen and delinquent. The Chilean government appealed to the “security of the state”, but the uprising had already disproven the liberal principles of the post dictatorship Chile, and to such an extent that a reversal of course had for a time become strictly unthinkable.

In the months following the social explosion, we could not have conceived any event that could bring any swift conclusion to the life of the streets. There was no amount of heavy-handed police repression that could have convinced us of a self-evident need for law and order; no over-hyped constitutional assembly or impending financial crisis could convince us that there was a real, external force that would interrupt the social explosion.

And yet, here we are: the pandemic has brought an abrupt halt to the uprising in ways we had thought to be impossible. From the first week of the COVID outbreak, Plaza de la Dignidad has been quiet. There has been no lootings, even despite the lack of supplies. Conflicts with the police remain confined to the poblaciones.

To what does it owe this power? The pandemic interrupted the uprising because to many , it appeared as an external force. If it possesses a power that no governmental ordinance can rival, this is because its presence tends to shatter the various separations on which the administration of this world depends because it doesn’t recognize the gap between state and market, consumer and citizen, jurisprudence and subsumption. As a result, we know longer know if we are taking care of ourselves in resistance to the state, despite the state, or in subordination to the state. As the pandemic moves through this world, it interrupts the positive contact with which this world is based. In the absence of such contact, we are left with scrambled claims of obedience and contestation, resistance and self-assertion.

This is not the place to recall the extent to which the fictive ideals of liberal democracy depended on the growth of a fracture between interior and exterior realms of experience: public reason and private obedience, faith and confession, moral conscience and political right, etc. Where once there appeared a world, full and filthy with attachments, heresies, and allegiances, only a subject—a self-possessed and autonomous citizen—would be left to remain. Was this not the project of modern economic governance?

Not only has the experience of space been re-liberalizing, but also the forms of care have followed suit. As the insurrection recedes, and with it, the bustling and rich horizon of shared attention and concern, the forms of care that now replace it already bear the stain within them of that absence to the world that defined the modern liberal subject. While we are moved with everyone with a conscience to care for others, we do not confuse the notions of care we are told to do within social distancing with the practices we developed that were only possible by fully inhabiting a shared territory. We are told this crisis threatens the vulnerable, the infirm, the elderly; that, in taking care of ourselves, we are taking care of others; that our role, as participants in a ‘shared world’, is to reduce the spread through social distancing and isolation. Yet, to be deprived of social life and the use of public space, is to be deprived of those very experiences that confer meaning on concepts such as care, support, and community action. After all, to experience a common world is to participate in the activities that make it not merely possible, but real; only through combination and encounter can our singular capacities reveal to us all that outstrips them, all that can only belong to anyone, to everyone. In quarantine, we risk being denied the conditions that make possible an awareness that we inhabit a shared world.

– Emilio, Santiago de Chile. April 20th, 2020

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fragmentsdistro · 5 years ago

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Plague journal.

April 4th, 2020.

Tucson AZ

My mom told me that a fox has been taking regular naps in the yard. She saw pictures in the news of deer laying down in the streets of major cities.

I take a walk, my heart won’t slow down, so I figure my feet should pick up. I pass a wedding at the church that gave us food boxes while wearing masks. There’s a bride, a groom, a person to document with a camera. They get in a car with streamers, “just married”. A wedding party of 1 cheers for them.

Marx said revolutions are the locomotive of history. Benjamin said revolutions are the people on the train pulling the emergency brake. The virus said “I’ve come to shut down the machine who’s emergency brake you could not find”.

Am I living in snowpiercer but In the desert?

The barista says she read an article that said the Ozone looks better than it has in 20 years. Scientists who monitor seismic activity say the lack of human activity has altered the way the earth moves.

My phones weather app says the air quality is good. There’s no haze on the catalinas. The barista and I agree that so much can be seen now.

“None of the ways we have been living make any fucking sense”

We both laugh.

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fragmentsdistro · 5 years ago

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This is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing epistolary exchange between comrades living through conditions of quarantine. Responses and other reflections on the present moment can be sent to: [email protected]

***

Destitution, interrupted

1. The theorists have agreed: the current interruption is the outcome of well-established logics of capital, crisis governance, and alienation. Giorgio Agamben writes, “humans have become so accustomed to living under conditions of perennial crisis and emergency that they do not seem to realize that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition stripped not only of all social and political dimensions, but likewise of its human and affective dimensions.” An article in Lundimatin on March 19 insisted that “the economy is the devastation”, but whereas this was “a theory before last month…now it is a fact.” Another article from the same issue reminded us that “the catastrophe is always already here”—from the floods and fires of California, to the atmospheric asphyxiation of non-human life, to the warming oceans and melting icecaps—and, if there is a difference today, it is only that “we are now obliged to open our eyes.” Finally, as if to carry this logic to its outer limits, a recent letter from Jacques Camatte proposed that “what we are now witnessing is the outcome of [a] vast phenomenon that has developed over thousands of years, stretched between the two great moments during which the threat of extinction asserted itself.” [1] The Coronavirus, it would seem, is nothing other than the protracted outcome of civilization itself.

While it is certainly right to insist that conditions of the present are an extension of the conditions of the past, this chorus of continuity misses something essential. Our world is certainly decomposing, but the song is not exactly the same.

Two years ago, a friend stated that, “the constitutive heterogeneity of the real is given to us under the mask of unity, homogeneous unity. To superficial perception, the mask is the real itself. To allow the mask to falter, is therefore to risk vertigo.” [2] In January, this mask still resembled the form it had assumed in recent years: a tumultuous but for the most part intelligible field of global political polarizations. The world, and our place within it, still felt within reach.

By March, the ruling institutions of our world had been forced into a roundly reactive posture. It is by no means clear that the Coronavirus can be compared to a typical economic crisis or natural disaster, nor has the response been limited to an ordinary state of exception. After all, at least for a moment, rulers and ruled alike were pushed on to the back foot, their certainties shaken, as the virus usurped the position of global antagonist. Institutions on which the reproduction of this world depends have been perfunctorily suspended: employment, imprisonment for misdemeanors, evictions; even the DOW Jones seems up for grabs.

The dislocation of the social fabric has been far deeper than anything we have known. The veneer of normalcy fell away at a shocking speed. Actions that were once the very substance of normalcy now feel like experiments. And if we are honest, the ethical and political lines are not exactly what they used to be.

2. Three months ago, what concerned us and much of the world was the tally of forty-seven countries: the newspapers announced “a new global wave of revolt.” From France to Hong Kong, riots, occupations and blockades erupted with a ferocity and longevity unknown in living memory.

Successful revolts do not only undermine existing powers— they also allow their participants a capacity to participate more fully in the world. If we have come to think of revolt as a destituent force, this is not only because revolt splinters and fragments the social fabric into asymmetrical camps, but also because it returns us to earth, placing us in contact with reality. Destitution is rightly thought of either as a double movement or as a single process with two sides. On the one hand, it refers to the emptying-out of the fictions of government (its claim to university, impartiality, legality, consensus); on the other hand, a restoration of the positivity and fullness of experience. The two processes are linked like the alternating sides of a Möbius strip: wherever those usually consigned to existing as spectators upon the world (the excluded, the powerless) instead suddenly become party to their situation, active participants in an ethical polarization, the ruling class is invariably drawn into the polarization and cannot avoid exhibiting its partisan character. The police become one more gang among gangs.

Needless to say, our situation today is different. We are living through a halfway destitution, a destitution interrupted. Every party has returned to earth– yet without entering a world. The advent of COVID-19 has drained standard narratives and roles of their force. The logics holding this world together have been revealed as the arbitrary and mechanical operations that they are. Yet because it was neither “we” nor “they,” who pulled the e-brake, but a perfectly inhuman virus, the standstill of historical time lacks the festival that usually accompanies it— the collective intelligence and confidence that comes with being the agent plunging normal time into disorder. In the absence of an agent, the truth of this moment remains stubbornly negative: our lives materially prostrate to supply chains as far flung as they are brittle, our world a conduit of reciprocally perilous immunity and disease.

3. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, participants in political events are never solely agents, but always also patients at the same time—we affect and are affected, we are changed by what we do and what is done to us, whether by police or one another. To have an active hand in our own deposition, to become anyone by participating in a common power with no name, is the mark of those movements and moments of eruption we’ve felt close to over recent years.

By contrast, our one-sided passivity in the face of this global event generates a vertiginous sense of being outpaced by the change around us. To be patients but not agents has meant that the dislocation of social life has occurred at a speed that makes it all but impossible to metabolize.

In their 1956 text, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Debord and Wolman observe that the subversive power of a détournement is “directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.” This dependency of subversion on the memory of the subverted is not limited to the case of art but is, they argue, merely “a particular case of a general law” applicable to all action upon the world.

If the radical interruption of normal life we are undergoing has been so disorienting, this is because it is unfolding like a botched détournement, one whose force or potential is neutralized by its very radicality. We are swept into the new with such disarming speed that we cannot recall what preceded it. The tissue of normal life has been punctured, yet the cancellation was so rapid that we have been unable to register the distance traveled between the “original contents” of normal life and the world we now inhabit: a violence too sudden, too terrible even to be liberating, numbs us to the subversive effects it nevertheless carries out. The upending of the world becomes pacified, reduced to a disorienting and disempowering experience: an inhuman velocity, less an event than a jump-cut, an excision of memory, a vertical severing of time itself.

In the long run, the vertigo will settle into more acute polarization. Our inability to recalibrate plays to the benefit of the ruling powers. It insulates them against the subversive shock of what the virus has compelled them to do—less by the so-called “Corona socialism” than by the radical demobilization of the labor force that has accompanied it. Meanwhile, we float in an empty time; unable to seize upon and decide it, we wait for the suspension of history to reach its conclusion.

As Furio Jesi understood well, suspended time often requires a “cruel sacrifice” before it can conclude itself. [3] If our only experience of this event is as a “blip” of confusion and panic amidst an unbroken chain of administered life, when the time finally comes for an imperial reboot, the reversion to normalcy (or worse) will find no argument or exteriority to oppose it. That we remain dazed and out of step with the world gives our enemies free reign to reintroduce historical time on terms amenable uniquely to them, as the recent murders of activists during the quarantine lockdown in Columbia have already begun to attest. [4]

For now— at least for a moment—we are all here on earth, in the desert solitude of collective uncertainty:

To have been on earth just once —that’s irrevocable. / And so we keep on going and try to realize it, try to hold it in our simple hands, in our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless heart. (Rilke)

However paradoxical, perhaps our task over the coming weeks is to slow down the pace of change, to impose a rhythm allowing us to participate once again in the subversion and reinvention of the world on our own terms.

-August and Kora

March 24, 2020

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[1] Giorgio Agamben, “Clarification,” published on the column Una voce, on Quodlibet.it website; (Anonymous), “Coronavirus: Apocalypse and Redemption,” Lundimatin #234, March 19, 2020; Anonymous), “What the Virus Said,” Lundimatin #234, March 19, 2020; Jacques Camatte, “Letter from Camatte to a Friend in the North,” 3.20.2020. English translations available here: ill-will-editions.tumblr.com

[2] Moses Debruska, “Preface,” in Josep Raffanel i Ora, Fragmenter le monde (Paris: Divergences, 2018), 19. Our translation.

[3] “Every true change in the experience of time is a ritual that demands…a determinate cruel sacrifice.” Furio Jesi, Spartakus. The Symbology of Revolt, Trans. Alberto Toscano (Seagull, 2014), 61-63.

[4] “Colombian death squads exploiting coronavirus lockdown to kill activists,” The Guardian, 3.23.2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/colombian-groups-exploiting-coronavirus-lockdown-to-kill-activists

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