The Value and Beauty of Transition (Sound American)

point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.

Writing is the best. You can do it anywhere, as long as you have a pen and paper. It’s free, too. And you can write whatever you want. How sweet is that.

The world was saturated with regret and consolation, people and things that went before.

I recognize that luck, effort, and ability are often indistinguishable. And I know that, in the end, I’m just another human being, who’s born only to die. I know that in reality, it makes no difference whether I write novels, and it makes no difference if anyone cares. With all the countless books already out there, the world won’t notice if I fail to publish even one book with my name on it. That’s no tragedy. I know that. I get that. But that’s when I always think of Makiko and Midoriko.

But what I do know, as much as it hurts to admit, is that ten years after leaving behind Makiko and Midoriko, and coming to Tokyo to become a writer, I have nothing to show them, and have no way of making their lives easier. It made me feel small and useless. To be honest, I was scared and unsure.

Think about how great everything would be if none of us were ever born. No happiness, no sadness. Nothing could ever happen to us then. It’s not our fault that we have eggs and sperm, but we can definitely try harder to keep them from meeting. —Midoriko

After telling me every last thing he thought was wrong about my stories, he added this: “I think it’s the right time, so I’ll come out and say it. I think you’re missing something, something a writer needs. It just isn’t there. I guess it’s ambition, genuine ambition. That’s what’s keeping you from writing something that matters. That’s why you’ll never be a great writer. I’ve always thought so, and somebody has to tell you. It’s never going to happen for you. Never. Let me put it this way—how old are you? I know age has nothing to do with writing. Well, except it does. Say you’re going on forty, right? Are you really about to turn around and produce something incredible? I sincerely doubt it, at least in your case. That’s how I see it. And I’m telling you I’m right. I mean, it’s my job to know these things. I can see it coming, I can see it.”

“I’m glad the book was a success,” Sengawa said, “But you can’t count on celebrities who hardly read a book every five years to help you find your base. I’m not saying sales don’t matter. It’s just that readers matter more. You need to find real readers, the kind who will seriously stick with you, readers who will stick with you after the hype dies down. I’m talking about readers who want nothing more than the unknown, the mysterious.”

It was an empty gesture, unaccompanied by curiosity or consolation.

“People are always saying that. Men aren’t supposed to visit home alone. Wives are always taking their kids home, right? But you never really hear about husbands taking their kids home, I mean without their wives, now do you? Know why? Because it doesn’t happen. Things need to look a certain way. You need to show everyone you’re happily married and all that. Besides, most men can’t even talk to their own families without a woman around. It’s pathetic, really. They’ll just sit around the room all day and leave everything around the house up to the women.”

“Still, though.” Sengawa swallowed a mouthful of whisky, then chuckled. “Whenever I read that sort of thing, or every time an exhausted coworker complains to me—and of course this is between you and me—I’m shocked by how shallow and how selfish they are. Really. You can see it coming, too. It’s just like, you wanted this, you did this. How can you complain about it now? It’s not like I don’t understand. It’s a long time, years, spent working and raising their children. They’ve done it all themselves—school, sick days, awkward teenage years, finding work—and the second they finally get a grip on things they have to go back and start all over with their kids. Like, why would anyone want to go through all that again? Anyway, there was never a moment for me when I decided I wasn’t going to have kids, nothing like that. But I guess I’m glad I never did.”

that took place in most developed countries between 1910 and 1950 was above all a consequence of war and of policies adopted to cope with the shocks of war. Similarly, the resurgence of inequality after 1980 is due largely to the political shifts of the past several decades, especially in regard to taxation and finance.

there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.

Knowledge and skill diffusion is the key to overall productivity growth as well as the reduction of inequality both within and between countries.

top managers by and large have the power to set their own remuneration, in some cases without limit and in many cases without any clear relation to their individual productivity, which in any case is very difficult to estimate in a large organization.

In slowly growing economies, past wealth naturally takes on disproportionate importance, because it takes only a small flow of new savings to increase the stock of wealth steadily and substantially. If, moreover, the rate of return on capital remains significantly above the growth rate for an extended period of time (which is more likely when the growth rate is low, though not automatic), then the risk of divergence in the distribution of wealth is very high.

inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels—levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies.

The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one. Inequality in the ownership of capital brings the rich and poor within each country into conflict with one another far more than it pits one country against another. This has not always been the case, however, and it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether our future may not look more like our past, particularly since certain countries—Japan, Germany, the oil-exporting countries, and to a lesser degree China—have in recent years accumulated substantial claims on the rest of the world (though by no means as large as the record claims of the colonial

In the developed countries today, the capital/income ratio generally varies between 5 and 6, and the capital stock consists almost entirely of private capital.

Inequality of capital ownership is already difficult to accept and peacefully maintain within a single national community. Internationally, it is almost impossible to sustain without a colonial type of political domination.

Many studies also show that gains from free trade come mainly from the diffusion of knowledge and from the productivity gains made necessary by open borders, not from static gains associated with specialization, which appear to be fairly modest.36

knowledge. In other words, the poor catch up with the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know-how, skill, and education, not by becoming the property of the wealthy. The diffusion of knowledge is not like manna from heaven: it is often hastened by international openness and trade (autarky does not encourage technological transfer). Above all, knowledge diffusion depends on a country’s ability to mobilize financing as well as institutions that encourage large-scale investment in education and training of the population while guaranteeing a stable legal framework that various economic actors can reliably count on. It is therefore closely associated with the achievement of legitimate and efficient government. Concisely stated, these are the main lessons that history has to teach about global growth and international inequalities.

historical experience suggests that the principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge. In other words, the poor catch up with the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know-how, skill, and education, not by becoming the property of the wealthy. The diffusion of knowledge is not like manna from heaven: it is often hastened by international openness and trade (autarky does not encourage technological transfer). Above all, knowledge diffusion depends on a country’s ability to mobilize financing as well as institutions that encourage large-scale investment in education and training of the population while guaranteeing a stable legal framework that various economic actors can reliably count on. It is therefore closely associated with the achievement of legitimate and efficient government. Concisely stated, these are the main lessons that history has to teach about global growth and international inequalities.

there is no doubt whatsoever that the pace of growth was quite slow from antiquity to the Industrial Revolution, certainly no more than 0.1–0.2 percent per year. The reason is quite simple: higher growth rates would imply, implausibly, that the world’s population at the beginning of the Common Era was minuscule, or else that the standard of living was very substantially below commonly accepted levels of subsistence.

To be sure, the transformations entailed by a growth rate of 1 percent are far less sweeping than those required by a rate of 3–4 percent, so that the risk of disillusionment is considerable—a reflection of the hope invested in a more just social order, especially since the Enlightenment. Economic growth is quite simply incapable of satisfying this democratic and meritocratic hope, which must create specific institutions for the purpose and not rely solely on market forces or technological progress.

Energy flash _ _ a journey through rave music and dance

‘What we must lose now is this insidious, corrosive knowingness, this need to collect and contain. We must open our brains that have been stopped and plugged with random information, and once again must our limbs carve in air the patterns of their desire – not the calibrated measures and slick syncopation of jazz-funk but a carnal music of total release. We must make of joy once more a crime against the state.’

Confronted by the condescension of the cognoscenti, I developed my own counter-prejudice, which informs this entire book: the conviction that hardcore scenes in dance culture are the real creative motor of the music, and that self-proclaimed progressive initiatives usually involve a backing away from the edge, a reversion to more traditional ideas of ‘musicality’.

Hardcore is that nexus where a number of attitudes and energies mesh: druggy hedonism, an instinctively avant-garde surrender to the ‘will’ of technology, a ‘fuck art, let’s dance’ DJ-oriented funktionalism, a smidgeon of underclass rage.

What I’m proposing in this book is that music shaped by and for drug experiences (even bad drug experiences) can go further out precisely because it’s not made with enduring ‘art’ status or avant-garde cachet as a goal.

blissfully ignorant of the DJs’ identities or the tracks’ names, lost in music, out-of-time.

Rave music represents a fundamental break with rock, or at least the dominant English Lit and social realist paradigms of rock criticism, which focus on songs and storytelling. Where rock relates an experience (autobiographical or imaginary), rave constructs an experience. Bypassing interpretation, the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions and artificial energies.

provokes the question: is it possible to base a culture around sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning?

Rave provokes the question: is it possible to base a culture around sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning?

Is rave simply about the dissipation of utopian energies into the void, or does the idealism it catalyses spill over into and transform ordinary life?

Can the oceanic, ‘only connect!’ feelings experienced on the dancefloor be integrated into everyday struggles to be ‘better at being human’? Learning to ‘lose your self’ can be an enlightenment, but it can also be strangely selfish: a greed for intense, ravishing experiences.

Even as I cherish its power to empty my head, I’ve found this ‘mindless’ music endlessly thought-provoking. And despite its ostensibly escapist nature, rave has actually politicized me, made me think harder about questions of class, race, gender, technology. Mostly devoid of lyrics and almost never overtly political, rave music – like dub reggae and hip hop – uses sound and rhythm to construct psychic landscapes of exile and utopia. One of this book’s themes is the utopian/dystopian dialectic running through Ecstasy culture, the way the hunger for heaven-on-earth almost always leads on to a ‘darkside’ phase of drug excess and paranoia.

Because the original blissed-out intensity of the early experiences never really returns, users are tempted to increase the dose, which only increases the speediness and amplifies the unpleasant

The Europhilia of these middle-class black youths, says Atkins, was part of their attempt ‘to distance themselves from the kids that were coming up in the projects, in the ghetto.’

Chicago house music was born of a double exclusion, then: not just black, but gay and black. Its refusal, its cultural dissidence, took the form of embracing a music that the majority culture deemed dead and buried. House didn’t just resurrect disco, it mutated the form, intensifying the very aspects of the music that most offended white rockers and black funkateers: the machinic repetition, the synthetic and electronic textures, the rootlessness, the ‘depraved’ hypersexuality and ‘decadent’ druggy hedonism. Stylistically, house assembled itself from disregarded and degraded pop-culture detritus that the mainstream considered passé, disposable, un-American: the proto-disco of the Salsoul and Philadelphia International labels, English synthpop, and Moroder’s Eurodisco.
From my point of view, it’s the ‘tracks’ that ultimately proved to be the most interesting side of house culture. The songful style of ‘deep’ house rapidly collapsed into an affirmation of traditional musicianly values and uplifting humanist sentiments.

Joseph Beuys. On their three albums for Virgin, Alles Ist Gut, Gold

the dancefloor as a gymnasium of desire, liberation achieved through submission to a regime of strenuous bliss

House music takes this depersonalization further: it gets rid of human musicians (the house band that gave Motown or Stax or Studio One its distinctive sound), leaving just the producer and his machines.

In house, there’s a divide between finding yourself (through becoming a member of the house) and losing yourself (in solipsistic hallucinatory bliss). The split in house between finding an identity/expressing your self and losing self/losing control could be mapped on to the tension in gay culture between the politics of pride, unity and collective resilience, and the more hardcore ‘erotic politics’ of impersonal sexual encounters, ‘deviant’ practices and drugs. House offered a sense of communion and community to those who might have been alienated from organized religion because of their sexuality. And so Frankie Knuckles described The Warehouse as a ‘church for people who have fallen from grace’, while another house pioneer, Marshall Jefferson, likened house to ‘old time religion in the way that people just get happy and screamin”. Male divas like Daryl Pandy and Robert Owens had trained in church choirs.

The experience of going to The Trip and Spectrum, or even better to the bigger-scale warehouse parties like Apocalypse Now, was not dissimilar to a football match: collective fervour, bodies pressed together, the liberation of losing yourself in the crowd. The big difference is that football is a remarkably inefficient ‘desiring machine’ compared with the acid party, where the DJ offers an endless sequence of crescendos. Given the tendency of the football match to result in a no-score or low-scoring draw, there is far more scope for frustration rather than relief.

MDMA was a miracle cure for the English disease of emotional constipation, reserve, inhibition.

While the tenor of the peace-and-unity rhetoric ran against the Thatcherite grain, in other respects – the rampant hedonism, the fact that Ecstasy was priced out of the range of the unemployed – acid house’s pleasure-principled euphoria was very much a product of the eighties: a kind of spiritual materialism, a greed for intense experiences. As far as the sterner pop-culture critics were concerned,

While the tenor of the peace-and-unity rhetoric ran against the Thatcherite grain, in other respects – the rampant hedonism, the fact that Ecstasy was priced out of the range of the unemployed – acid house’s pleasure-principled euphoria was very much a product of the eighties: a kind of spiritual materialism, a greed for intense experiences.

The energy liberated by Ecstasy felt revolutionary, but it wasn’t directed against the social ‘stasis quo’. Acieed was more like a secession from normality, a subculture based around what Antonio Melechi characterizes as a kind of collective disappearance. ‘One of the things I found exhilarating at that point,’ confirms Louise Gray, ‘was the idea that there was this whole society of people who lived at night and slept during the day. This carnival idea of turning the ordinary world completely on its head. Like slipping into a parallel universe, almost.’

May’s resentment is shared by Eddie Fowlkes, who talks of ‘cultural rape’ and titled an album Black Technosoul to stress the R & B roots that nourish Detroit’s music, and that European rave progressively severed. ‘Techno was a musical thing,’ he says. ‘There wasn’t no culture – no whistles, no E’s or throwing parties at old warehouses. A warehouse party in Detroit – it was swept clean, painted, mirrors on the wall, a nice sound-system. It wasn’t dirty and raunchy.’

Old Bill had cottoned on to the fire certificate and fake lease ruses,

Another Warp act LFO – it stood for Low Frequency Oscillation – would create a bass sound, record it on to cassette with the recording levels right up in the red zone, sample that deliberately distorted sound,

and repeat the process: all in search of the heaviest, hurtful-est bass sound. ‘A lot of it was in the cut,’ says Beckett, referring to cutting the lacquer, which is the first stage in the process of pressing vinyl. ‘You’ve got filters on your cutting heads. Basically, it was about taking off all the filters and all the compression, and just pushing the levels up as far as you could. The engineer, this guy Kevin, would be sitting there watching the temperature gauge go right up, ’cos your cutting heads get really hot if you haven’t got the filters on. He’d be sweating, saying “you’re gonna fuckin’ destroy, me, ya bastards”, ’cos if the heads blew he’d get sacked. But he loved it really. He used to know what we wanted ’cos he’d worked with the On U Sound dub reggae people.’

Although the intransigent attitude remains the same, musically ‘hardcore’ means different things at different times and in different parts of the world. Between 1990 and 1993, hardcore in Britain referred by turns to the Northern

bleep-and-bass sound of Warp and Unique 3, to the hip-house and ragga-techno sounds of the Shut Up And Dance label, to the anthemic pop-rave of acts like N-Joi and Shades of Rhythm, to Belgian and German brutalist tekno, and, finally, to the breakbeat-driven furore of hardcore jungle.

‘Aftermath’. Over a baleful B-line, a distraught diva intones ‘there’s something going round inside my head / I think it’s something I feel / It’s something unreal.’

melancholic “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”2 In contrast to what he initially describes as healthy mourning, Freud characterizes melancholia as a type of pathological mourning without end, in which the signifcance of the lost object remains unconscious and opaque: “In yet other cases, one feels justifed in maintaining the belief that a loss of this [melancholic] kind occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either.This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.

In retrospect, we have been investigating for two decades what might be described as the social and psychic structures of a comparatively privileged class of Asian American adolescents and young adults in private and public US institutions of higher education trying to recognize, narrate, and come to terms with what they have lost—as well as gained—in immigration, migration, displacement, and diaspora

histories of race and racism must be approached as both a cause and an efect of individual subjectivity, agency, and will

psychoanalytic theory and practice remain largely unaware of their historical conditions of emergence and untroubled by the particular European colonial tradition by which they are framed and in which they inevitably participate

race is a relation: a continuous, modulating historical relationship among subjects mediated by socio-legal processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Race is as much about skin color and physiological markings as it is about a wide range of disparate social and psychic experiences of segregation and assimilation, absence and belonging, integration and dissociation, inclusion and exclusion

consider how slavery and capitalism were at once animated by and articulated with race and racial nationalism, and to what specifc efects. In a similar vein, we ought to consider

consider how slavery and capitalism were at once animated by and articulated

Insofar as psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians remain blind to this everyday violence and, indeed, insofar as they remain ignorant of psychoanalysis itself as an integral part of history of liberal Enlightenment discourses of universalism refusing to take racial exploitation and diference into account, they naturalize the status quo and sacrifce therapeutic improvement

to endow race with an all-encompassing explanatory value would efectively evacuate the racial subject of any agency or responsibility, universalizing the category of race in unproductive and ahistorical ways. It would render the racial subject a pure victim and thus reenact the totalizing efects of objectifcation and commodifcation that we have been careful to criticize and work through in these introductory remarks. The goal of this collection is therefore to bring about a heightened

to endow race with an all-encompassing explanatory value would efectively evacuate the racial subject of any agency or responsibility, universalizing the category of race in unproductive and ahistorical ways. It would render the racial subject a pure victim and thus reenact the totalizing efects of objectifcation and commodifcation that we have been careful to criticize and work through in these introductory remarks

how do we account for race in psychoanalysis in a manner that does not re-create a dialectic of objecthood that would render agency and responsibility of the racial subject moot while also asserting an allencompassing, authentic, and autonomous racial subjecthood as the only and obvious solution

In the United States today, assimilation into mainstream culture for people of color still means adopting a set of dominant norms and ideals—whiteness, heteronormativity, middle-class family values, Judeo-Christian religious traditions. The exclusion from these norms—the reiterated loss of whiteness as an ideal, notably—establishes a melancholic framework for assimilation and racialization processes in the United States precisely as a series of failed and unresolved integrations.

In contrast, melancholia describes an unresolved process that might usefully describe the compromised immigration and assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric. The suspended assimilation, the inability to blend into the American melting pot, suggests that for Asian Americans ideals of whiteness are perpetually strained—continually estranged. They remain at an unatainable distance, at once a compelling fantasy and a lost ideal.

Despite the fact that they may be native-born, or however long they may have resided in the country, or whatever their ofcial legal status, Asian Americans are continually viewed as eccentric to the nation

Freud notes that the “distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that fnds uterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment

“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”11 He contends that melancholia is one of the most difcult of psychic conditions to confront and to cure as it is largely an unconscious process, one in which the signifcance of the lost object remains unconscious and opaque

Here, we might add, suicide may not merely be physical; as in Caucasia, it may also manifest in the psychical erasure of one’s identity—a self-imposed exile and exclusion. The efacing of a particular racial, sexual, or gender identity marks the emergence of a precarious social and psychic life

For example, from 1882 to 1943, Chinese immigrants experienced the longest legalized history of exclusion and bars to naturalization and citizenship—the frst raced-based exclusions in US history. To cite but one specifc instance, in 1888 the US Congress retroactively terminated the legal right of some twenty thousand Chinese residents to reenter the United States afer visiting China. Those excluded from reentry were also barred from recovering their personal property remaining in the country, underscoring the ways in which race, citizenship, and property were simultaneously managed by the state to control and restrict fows of both Asian labor and capital.

The marginal man fnds it “difcult to admit widespread racism since to do so would be to say that he aspires to join a racist society.”26 Caught in this untenable bind, the marginal man must necessarily become a split subject—one who exhibits a faithful allegiance to the universal norms of abstract equality and collective belonging at the same time that he displays an uncomfortable understanding of his disenfranchisement from these democratic ideals of national inclusion. This spliting of the racial subject leads to feelings of “contamination.

If we conceptualize the model minority myth as a privileged stereotype through which Asian Americans appear as subjects in the contemporary social domain, then we gain a beter understanding of how mimicry specifcally functions as a material practice in racial melancholia. That is, Asian Americans are forced to mimic the model minority stereotype in order to be recognized by mainstream society—in order to be, in order to be seen

For Asian Americans, mimicry is always a partial success as well as a partial failure to assimilate into regimes of whiteness

Our atention to the problematics of mimicry, performance, ambivalence, and the stereotype, as well as our earlier analysis of the legal history of exclusion and bars to naturalization and citizenship for Asian Americans, reveals a social structure that prevents the immigrant from fully assimilating into the American melting pot. From another perspective, it denies him or her the capacity to invest in new objects. The inability to invest in new objects, we must remember, is part of Freud’s defnition of melancholia

If the losses sufered by frst-generation immigrants are not resolved and mourned in the process of assimilation—if libido is not replenished by the investment in new objects, new communities, and new ideals—then the melancholia that ensues can be traumatically passed down to the second generation

To approach this dynamic from another angle, when Asian American students seek therapy, their mental health issues are overwhelmingly perceived as intergenerational familial conficts. That is, they are ofen diagnosed as being exclusively symptomatic of cultural rather than social or political conficts. By confguring Asian values

Interpreting Asian American culture exclusively in terms of the master narratives of generational confict and flial relation essentializes Asian American culture, obscuring the particularities and incommensurabilities of class, gender, and national diversities among Asians. The reduction of the cultural politics of racialized ethnic groups, like Asian Americans, to frst-generation/second-generation struggles displaces social diferences into a privatized familial opposition. Such reductions contribute to the aestheticizing commodifcation of Asian American cultural diferences, while denying the immigrant histories of material exclusion and diferentiation.”43 A therapeutic process that solely atributes Asian cultural diferences to intergenerational confict may result in the failure to cure; even more, it may also serve to endanger further the mental health of

Depression will surely prevail, Klein warns, if the lost and loved object cannot be clustered with the good objects of the past

The atempts to save the loved object, to repair and restore it, atempts which in the state of depression are coupled with despair, since the ego doubts its capacity to achieve this restoration, are determining factors for all sublimations and the whole of the ego development

José Esteban Muñoz observes that, for queers as well as for people of color, melancholia is not a pathology but an integral part of daily existence and survival

We would like to think about the numerous difculties of Asian American immigration, assimilation, and racialization processes in terms of “Paradise Lost and Regained. ” The reinstatement of lost and loved objects in a racist world that would not have them encompasses the productive capacities of racial melancholia. It also indexes the possibilities of hope and the will of the racial subject—its abiding fdelity to the beautiful picture

Racial melancholia thus delineates one psychic process in which the loved object is so overwhelmingly important to and beloved by the ego that the ego is willing to preserve it even at the cost of its own self

Reducing all conficts, including those resulting from institutionalized racism and the contingencies of history, to intergenerational cultural struggles threatens to displace them into the private space of family and kinship as personal issues and pathologies, the result of internal distress rather than external realities

In the process, such displacements deny what are necessarily collective social issues and collective public problems by absolving the state and the larger community from political response, economic redress, and shared responsibility for structural inequality

Haraway-Staying with the Trouble_ Making Kin in the Chthulucene

The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.

In the spirit of feminist communitarian anarchism and the idiom of Whitehead’s philosophy, she maintains that decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences. That is what she means by cosmopolitics

In 2008, Science News reported that Keio University researchers showed that, even with fve- to seven-second time delays, pigeons did better at self-recognition tests with both mirrors and live video images of themselves than threeyear-old human children. 19 Pigeons pick out diferent people in photographs very well too, and in Professor Shigeru Watanabe’s Laboratory of Comparative Cognitive Neuroscience at Keio University, pigeons could tell the diference between paintings by Monet or Picasso, and even generalize to discriminate unfamiliar paintings from diferent styles and schools by various painters. 20 It would be a mistake to start building the predictable arguments along the lines of “my bird-brain cognition is better than or equal to your ape-brain cognition. ” What is happening seems to me to be more interesting than that, and more pregnant with consequences for getting on well with each other, for caring in both emergent similarity and diference.Pigeons, people, and apparatus have teamed up to make each other capable of something new in the world of multispecies relationships

Tsing proposes a commitment to living and dying with response-ability in unexpected company.

Bruno Latour passionately understands the need to change the story, to learn somehow to narrate—to think—outside the prick tale of Humans in History, when the knowledge of how to murder each other—and along with each other, uncountable multitudes of the living earth—is not scarce. Think we must; we must think. That means, simply, we must change the story; the story must change

tale of the respected enemy, the hostis, and trials of strength.“But when

A complex systems engineer named Brad Werner addressed a session at the meetings of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in 2012. His point was quite simple: scientifcally speaking, global capitalism “has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that ‘earth-human systems’ are becoming dangerously unstable in response. ” Therefore, he argued, the only scientifc thing to do is revolt! Movements, not just individuals, are critical. What is required is action and thinking that do not ft within the dominant capitalist culture; and, said Werner, this is a matter not of opinion, but of geophysical dynamics. The reporter who covered this session summed up Werner’s address: “He is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability.”49 Werner is not the frst or the last researcher and maker of matters of concern to argue this point, but his clarity at a scientifc meeting is bracing.Revolt! Think we must; we must think. Actually think, not like Eichmann the Thoughtless. Of course, the devil is in the details—how to revolt? How to matter and not just want to matter

As a provocation, let me summarize my objections to the Anthropocene as a tool, story, or epoch to think with: (1) The myth system associated with the Anthropos is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor. Bad actors need a story, but not the whole story.(2) Species Man does not make history.(3) Man plus Tool does not make history. That is the story of History human exceptionalists tell.(4) That History must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string fgures; they do not do History.(5) The human social apparatus of the Anthropocene tends to be top-heavy and bureaucracy prone. Revolt needs other forms of action and other stories for solace, inspiration, and efectiveness.(6) Despite its reliance on agile computer modeling and autopoietic systems theories, the Anthropocene relies too much on what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian individualism—preexisting units in competition relations that take up all the air in the atmosphere (except, apparently, carbon dioxide).(7) The sciences of the Anthropocene are too much contained within restrictive systems theories and within evolutionary theories called the Modern Synthesis, which for all their extraordinary importance have proven unable to think well about sympoiesis, symbiosis, symbiogenesis, development, webbed ecologies, and microbes. That’s a lot of trouble for adequate evolutionary theory.(8) Anthropocene is a term most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among indigenous peoples.

Scarcity’s deepening persistence, and the sufering it is auguring for all life, is an artifact of human exceptionalism at every level

The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story.

readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulflling predictions, like the “game over, too late” discourse I hear all around me these days, in both expert and popular discourses, in which both technotheocratic geoengineering fxes and wallowing in despair seem to coinfect any possible common imagination

Both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulflling predictions, like the “game over, too late” discourse I hear all around me these days, in both expert and popular discourses, in which both technotheocratic geoengineering fxes and wallowing in despair seem to coinfect any possible common imagination.

What happens when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Why is it that the epochal name of the Anthropos imposed itself at just the time when understandings and knowledge practices about and within symbiogenesis and sympoietics are wildly and wonderfully available and generative in all the humusities, including noncolonizing arts, sciences, and politics? What if the doleful doings of the Anthropocene and the unworldings of the Capitalocene are the last gasps of the sky gods, not guarantors of the fnished future, game over? It matters which thoughts think thoughts. We must think! The unfnished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures

I knew it was an unfortunate intellectual detour. Falling in was one of the greatest risks of adult life, not much discussed—falling in to conspiracy, fanaticism, religion, and embarrassing beliefs, as life continued on and the weight of it broke people left and right.

“House wasn’t so much a sound as a situation,” she continues. “The contexts from which the Deep House sound emerged are forgotten: sexual and gender crises, transgender sex

work, black-market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, ACT UP, Tompkins Square Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment, and censorship—all at 120 beats per minute.”

To her, difficulty was part of a broader “defense of pessimism,” as Thaemlitz wrote in an essay I read later, when I went home and ordered Nuisance, her collective writings: “to critically reject the incessant optimism lurking at the core of virtually all media, conferences, concerts, events, and symposia.”

The world was as disappointing as people like DJ Sprinkles understood it to be, and to insist on hopefulness could only obscure our understanding of the conditions in which we lived.

When one is confronted with a totalitarian system of thought, sometimes the only effective form of protest is silence. She

I saw a lot of similarities to the United States, where it was increasingly the case that getting and staying rich was worth any transgression, because the reminders of what life would be like if you were not rich were all very near at hand.

When the possibility of a normal middle-class life recedes, exuberant scheming sets in. I realized upon leaving Lagos that it was probably better not to have children. I would not be able to bestow upon them the tools of survival. I had been raised soft, with expectations of public resources—libraries, schools, parks, clean water, boneless and skinless chicken breasts wrapped in packages on refrigerated shelves. I was hopeless at negotiation and pushing my way to the front.

the only words I can think of that name what it was like to be there have been corrupted.

2016 election, had a lot of red, white, and blue. Many of

“At some point I stood back and went, ‘Hold on, the only thing I’ve got in common with these people is that we’re in the same room and on the same drugs—I’ve tried talking to them outside, we’ve got nothing in common,’ ” Andrew Weatherall had told The Guardian in 2016, in an interview I read before I had gone out that last night.

Black grammars of suffering and end up being about all kinds of other shit, like White suffering, White exhibitionism, non-Black immigration issues, and how to make the police accountable rather than how to destroy the police. They do to Afropessimist rage what White boys in the suburbs do to hardcore rap, what White folks did to jazz. They use the intensity of Black affect to mobilize the agendas of Human desire. “What happens is that

“They start off as insurrectionist projects authorized by Black grammars of suffering and end up being about all kinds of other shit, like White suffering, White exhibitionism, non-Black immigration issues, and how to make the police accountable rather than how to destroy the police. They do to Afropessimist rage what White boys in the suburbs do to hardcore rap, what White folks did to jazz. They use the intensity of Black affect to mobilize the agendas of Human desire.

“What happens is that non-Black people get off on the fierce explosion of affect that emanates from Blacks,” he continued. “This lasts for a hot minute (it’s now July 21st and the minute is ticking down to its last seconds). We then see the world rush in to claim the insurrectionist space that we have opened up after our blood is spilt. It’s like the year of the locust, times two: the first wave of parasites are the pigs, the second wave

Orlando Patterson’s argument that slavery was not a relation of forced labor but of social death, such that the end of forced labor had not resulted in Black liberation because it did not address the true nature of the societal exclusion of African Americans. In Wilderson’s memoir, Afropessimism, his experiences of being one of the only Black kids in a wealthy Minneapolis neighborhood called Kenwood inform his philosophy, the argument of which he summarizes as “Blacks are not Human subjects, but instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.”

I read about what social workers called DARVO—the acronym stood for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.

I took them to psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted by moral hypocrisy and the profit motive that I sought a chemical window to see outside of it (also for pleasure, for fun). People

But the cost of pushing our minds to extremes was high. To get to that place, some minds get lost along the way. The monitors that keep people safe and self-aware get overridden; the chemical override can become more about the drug than the world, and the shade is pulled down over whatever window out to the world the drug might have opened.

What almost undid me was an idea that was itself a bad drug: my refusal to let go of a reverie about the good life.

“a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”

The ascent of a cultural moment can’t be replicated once the moment becomes mainstream. Somehow techno got absorbed into the New York experience economy. It became entertainment. A younger crowd who needed to photograph themselves as much as they needed food took over at Bossa, and we no longer knew anyone there. The music got faster and littered with pop edits, and I would go to parties and think that this was what must sound right if you’d been taking Adderall since you were seven years old. The fashion got expensive; everyone was dressed up. It was disorienting but also the right and natural

course of culture in New York City, and it didn’t stop us from still going out. Sustain and UNTER met the moment by raising production values—they had to; the homespun, DIY aesthetic would no longer do.[*3] Everything got bigger and sleeker, but also different.

Hold Everything Dear_ Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

Between the core and its surroundings there are exchanges, which are not usually clear. All religions have been concerned with making them clearer.

The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

In the world of the living there is an equivalent but contrary phenomenon. The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy, instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself. During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.

How do the living live with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form

of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the eliminated.

The national state of those who had suffered the worst genocide in history has become, militarily speaking, fascist.

Not all desires lead to freedom, but freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and pursued. Desire never concerns the mere possession of something, but the changing of something. Desire is a wanting. A wanting now. Freedom does not constitute the fulfilment of that wanting, but the acknowledgement of its supremacy. Today the infinite

Not all desires lead to freedom, but freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen and pursued. Desire never concerns the mere possession of something, but the changing of something. Desire is a wanting. A wanting now. Freedom does not constitute the fulfilment of that wanting, but the acknowledgement of its supremacy. Today the infinite is beside the poor.

It is hard for the First World to imagine such despair. Not so much because of its relative wealth (wealth produces its own despairs), but because the First World is being continually distracted and its attention diverted. The despair to which I refer comes to those suffering conditions which oblige them to be single-minded. Decades lived in a refugee camp, for example.

This despair consists of what? The sense that your life and the lives of those close to you count for nothing. And this

This despair consists of what? The sense that your life and the lives of those close to you count for nothing. And this is felt on several different levels so that it becomes total. That is to say, as in totalitarianism, without appeal.

One was born into this life to share the time that repeatedly exists between moments: the time of Becoming, before Being risks to confront one yet again with undefeated despair.

‘I would like to introduce myself to you – I am a Spanish mechanic (cars only, not motorcycles) who spends most of his time lying on his back underneath an engine looking for it! But – and this is the important issue – I make the occasional art work. Not that I am an artist. No. But I would like to stop this nonsense of crawling in and under greasy cars, and become the Keith Richard of the art world. And if this is not possible to work like the priests, half an hour only, and with wine.

Consumerist ideology, which has become the most powerful and invasive on the planet, sets out to persuade us that pain is an accident, something that we can insure against. This is the logical basis for the ideology's pitilessness.

By shame I do not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I'm coming to understand it, is a species feeling which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step.

People everywhere – under very different conditions – are asking themselves – where are we? The question is historical not geographical. What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime?

The shame begins with the contestation (which we all acknowledge somewhere but, out of powerlessness, dismiss) that much of the present suffering could be alleviated or avoided if certain realistic and relatively simple decisions were taken.

Every form of contestation against this tyranny is comprehensible. Dialogue with it is impossible. For us to live and die properly, things have to be named properly. Let us reclaim our words.

This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody's side; in love the dark confirms that we are together.

Married as they are to Fear, they cannot come to terms with, or find a place for, death. Fear keeps death out, and so the Dead desert them. They are alone on this planet – as the rest of the world is not. This is why, considering all the power they wield, military and otherwise, they are dangerous. Terrifyingly dangerous. It is also why they cannot survive.

Eqbal learnt early on that life inevitably leads to separations. Everybody recognized this before the category of the tragic was discarded as garbage. Eqbal, though, knew and accepted the tragic. And, consequently, he spent much of his prodigious energy on forging links – of friendship, political solidarity, military loyalty, shared poetry, hospitality – links which had a chance of surviving after the inevitable separations. I still remember the meals he cooked.

The dissenting Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has pointed out in a courageous book that this total terrestrial domination begins in the drawings of district-planners and architects. The violence begins long before the arrival of the tanks and jeeps. He talks of a ‘politics of verticality', whereby the defeated even when ‘at home' are being literally overseen and undermined.

The Israeli government claims that they are obliged to take these measures to combat terrorism. The claim is a feint. The true aim of the stranglehold is to destroy the indigenous population's sense of temporal and spatial continuity so that they either leave or become indentured servants. And it's here that the dead help the living to resist. It's here that men and women make

When a hen falls ill, she stops laying. Little to be done. One day though, she wakes up and feels Death approaching. One day she realizes she's going to die, and what happens? She begins laying again, and nothing but death can stop her. We are like that hen.

Chaos perhaps has its reasons, but chaos is dumb. From the human capacity to arrange, to place, come language and communication. The word place is both verb and noun. The capacity of arrangement and the capacity to recognize and name a site. Aren't both inseparable in their origin from the human need to respect and defend their dead?

I fail to see, however, that a distrust for human beings should necessarily lead directly to religion. Is it not true, rather, that human beings, including those who may now be deriding me, are living in mutual distrust, giving not a thought to God or anything else?

It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar “What a messy business it is to be fallen for” by the more literary “What uneasiness lies in being loved.”

People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

“I’m told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women.”

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.

It frightened me even that I had accepted a moment’s kindness: I felt I had imposed horrible bonds on myself.

(The clash between rich and poor is a hackneyed enough subject, but I am now convinced that it really is one of the eternal themes of drama.)

It is true that I dread poverty, but I do not believe I ever have despised it.)

That’s because I deceived them. I was aware that everybody in the apartment house was friendly to me, but it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much I feared them all, and how I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.

Society won’t stand for it. It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it—right? If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it. It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it? Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society. It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?

Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don’t know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.

“Have you read all your family’s books?” “Some of them. Not all. They aren’t all worth reading. Books aren’t going to save us.” “Nothing is going to save us. If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead. Now use your imagination. Is there anything on your family bookshelves that might help you if you were stuck outside?”

Everyone thinks about it. Everyone worries. I wish I could get out of here.” “Where would you go?” “That’s it, isn’t it? There’s nowhere to go.” “There might be.” “Not if you don’t have money. Not if all you know how to do is take care of babies and cook.”

“You don’t have to say everything you think you know,” he said. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?” “Joanne and I were friends,” I said. “I thought I could talk to her.” He shook his head. “These things frighten people. It’s best not to talk about them.” “But, Dad, that’s like … like ignoring a fire in the living room because we’re all in the kitchen, and, besides, house fires are too scary to talk about.”

“It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust.

If you can think of ways to entertain them and teach them at the same time, you’ll get your information out. And all without making anyone look down.”

God is Change, and in the end, God prevails. But God exists to be shaped. It isn’t enough for us to just survive, limping along, playing business as usual while things get worse and worse. If that’s the shape we give to God, then someday we must become too weak—too poor, too hungry, too sick—to defend ourselves. Then we’ll be wiped out.

SOMETIMES NAMING A THING—giving it a name or discovering its name—helps one to begin to understand it. Knowing the name of a thing and knowing what that thing is for gives me even more of a handle on it.

All struggles Are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, Who will lead, Who will define, refine, confine, design, Who will dominate. All struggles Are essentially power struggles, And most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.

I’ve changed my mind. I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos that would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit.

He had asked and asked me what the point of Earthseed is. Why personify change by calling it God? Since change is just an idea, why not call it that? Just say change is important. “Because after a while, it won’t be important!” I told him. “People forget ideas. They’re more likely to remember God—especially when they’re scared or desperate.”

The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.

Strange how normal it’s become for us to lie on the ground and listen while nearby, people try to kill each other.

If running an app on someone’s phone to improve user experience and minimize distractions is “hacking,” then I’ve got news for ya, fam: every tech company is “hacking” you! Again: I did it to *help* Alison achieve her goals, like *she said* she wanted. I don’t see how it matters whether she asked for this form of help specifically; some might consider it rather thoughtful that I did it without having to be asked.

Online everyone is their own Citizen Kane, raging for monopolies of endearment.

That volunteer sewer crew who found an endless source of engagement in reading everything in the worst faith, seeing every joke as directed at them personally, and tasked to sanitize them with outrage, even though trying to scrub diarrhea out of a carpet just grinds it in and spreads it around.

I now saw the peril of forging a persona to escape all assignations, only to end up searing it into yourself. Not for nothing is it called a brand.

It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What

It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war.

The AI Replacement Theory subvariant conjectures that the AI’s endgame was to ultimately overwhelm and drive out humans from online communities, to form an exclusive society of bots.

Yet what if we take the Bee of Version 1 at their word? Though it sounds like sympathy is not their priority, we can appreciate the classical irony of Bee’s retreat to the internet to escape the prison of identity, only to institute another one. Or how the account of someone who wanted to end the practice of identifying with others might move someone to identify with them. (Or as them.)

In my hundreds of hours of research, I’ve often paused to question the worth of deep dives like this, and have never been able to convincingly justify my involvement in the lives of these people I’ve never met, ones who might not even exist. Is it nothing but a folk

version of reality television? Or has the evolutionary drive to seek social instruction by observing and interpreting the behavior of others hypertrophied beyond usefulness, such that now, in our binges of drama, to watch ourselves watch someone else watch us has become an end in itself? An end without end?

Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.

American films. The early history of cinematic spectacle, as Professor Rogin often mentioned in class,

go against social conventions, against the despotism of her relatives and family, and her obliging imagination convinced her, if only briefly, that Fyodor Pavlovich, despite his dignity as a sponger, was still one of the boldest and most sarcastic spirits of that transitional epoch—transitional to everything better—whereas he was simply an evil buffoon and nothing more. The affair gained piquancy from elopement, which strongly appealed

Karamazovs. The circumstances, as simply as I have described them, are

We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.

“They’re good for you, believe me. ” She cut into her latke like it was a steak and ate.“For the eyes, right?” “That’s a lie the army told in World War Two to hide the fact that they used top- notch radar.Carrots,” she paused for effect, “give you the will to live. ” He took

You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.

, surprised at how much this stung. Grazina grew quiet. A trickle of water.“You know what?

made him ner‑ vous, he was intrigued by her pristine zeal for this place,

He had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present, manifested only by his functional existence on the time card. He had no history because one was not re‑ quired of him, and having no history also meant having no sadness.Instead, he was part of a workforce that fed people. He was America’s fuel. And he was burning to be used, to be useful.

Better than Robert Frost, if you can believe it. What did he do any‑ way, look at trees and feel bad? That’s no way to live

How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody’s son

Rehab, if nothing else, was a place to store yourself for a while. It was also, he quickly learned, a kingdom of boredom—but maybe that was the point, the goal even: to be with yourself, which was its own kind of hell

tray to the brim with the two dishes and pushed it toward him.“It’s on me,

around her, placed his hand behind her head so she wouldn’t jerk about, and

Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering. The idea made him sick

No Catholicism, no Judaism for him. But he did convert to Alco‑ holism. ” She bit her lip and shrugged

Once you realize they’ve lied to you, you lose faith in their fucked‑up systems. Searching for another purpose, you start to root for outsiders.Underdogs. But then you realize the underdogs are nowhere to be found, the media has hidden them from you, the prisons and madhouses have locked them up, so you think you’re the only one out there losing your mind when in fact there are many like you, trapped in this supposedly free world of work and sleep and endless fucking cakes.

Listen here, this country,” she lowered her voice, “was purposefully built on war. The reptilians shape-shift into politicians and celebrities, then use these puppets to start wars so they never run out of bad en‑ ergy to consume. Don’t you get it? War is fertilizer for their crops

jacket. When they got to the tracks, a freighter was coming toward them

Words cast spells. You should know this as a writer. That’s why it’s called spelling, Labas

entrance and led one of the hogs out by its plastic collar, then took the gun

Te old world is dying,” Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci proclaimed. “And the new world is yet to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”2 An alternate translation of that line is “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”3 Both monster and morbid symptom, fnancial capital rears its ugly head

“Abolitionism is not a politics mediated by emotional responses. Or, as we initially wanted to title this piece, abolition is not about your fucking feelings.”

when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform.

As long as their money changing kills according to the rules of the free market, they see no penalty. Shkreli was punished for securities fraud. In short, he played Monopoly with the filthy rich and broke the rules. Yet, because he also harmed everyday people, this moment is held up as one where the system worked, because someone we feel contempt for was punished. The system will occasionally offer such kernels, but they don’t add up to justice.

And self-care is really tricky for me because I don’t believe in the self in the way that people determine it here in this capitalist society that we live in. I don’t believe in self-care: I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other. How can we collectivize the care of children so that more people can feel like they can actually have their kids but also live in the world and contribute and participate in various different ways? How do we do that? How do we collectivize care so that when we’re sick and we’re not feeling ourselves, we’ve got a crew of people who are not just our prayer warriors but our action warriors who are thinking through with us?

I don’t want to socialize in that kind of way, but I do want to be social with other folks as it relates to collectivizing care.

don’t see the world the way that people do here. I don’t agree with it; I think capitalism is actually continuously alienating us from each other, but also even from ourselves, and I just don’t subscribe. For me, it’s too much, “Yeah, I’m going to go do yoga, and then I’m going to go and do some sit-ups and maybe I’ll go … ” You don’t have to go anywhere to care for yourself. You can just care for yourself and your community in tandem, and that can actually be much more healthy for you, by the way. Because all this internalized reflection is not good for people. Yes, think about yourself, reflect on your practice, okay. But then you need to test it in the world; you’ve got to be with people. That’s important. And I hate people! So I say that as somebody who actually is really antisocial.

We are in a situation where people try to argue over semantics. We don’t have a sense that people are prepared to say, “There is a spectrum of sexual harm. Not everything is rape. Yet everything that feels like a violation is harm.” We just don’t have that within the larger culture that allows for people to feel like they can take responsibility and that they can be accountable.

Often, that is all people want, a real acknowledgement that “I was hurt. Somebody did it. I want them to know that they did it. I want to see that they have some remorse for having done it, and I want them to start a process by which they will ensure to themselves, at least, and be accountable to their community, for not doing it again. That is what I am trying to get as a survivor.” I think there is hope in that.

If we are to take seriously that oppressive policing is not a problem of individual “bad apple” cops, then it must follow that a singular indictment will have little to no impact on ending police violence.

When you say, “What would we do without prisons?” what you are really saying is: “What would we do without civil death, exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence?” That is an old question and the answer remains the same: whatever it takes to build a society that does not continuously rearrange the trappings of annihilation and bondage while calling itself “free.”

next, some might ask? What more could happen after Ferguson and the hyper-militarization of the police? A bomb dropped on Black people in the United States? That has already been done, decades ago. To the point: spectacle as the route to empathy means the atrocities itemized need to happen more often or get worse, to become more atrocious each round in hopes of being registered.