[PAUSE. C19.]
Pause. Now. On the discourse of isolation. On the populist myth of isolation as a completely collective experience, unselective, uniquely tied to this crisis and this moment in time. Isolation is not a structural phenomenon that rationally ensues from a temporary consensus on what constitutes crisis. Isolation just is, for a myriad of reasons, key amid these the continuity of crises most won’t recognise as such. Crisis of belonging, crises of being, crises that place the literal meaning of survival into sharp relief. Crises of the body, of the will, of the material resources for living.
There are those who have experienced isolation out of necessity, by circumstance, or as the correlate of the convergence of a number of different forms of political violence. There are those who know isolation as a structure of lived experience to such an ingrained, unmediated extent that the experience of the communal constitutes its own exception; its own transient disruption of the habitual.
There are those who have had to keep up, to keep quiet, and fundamentally, to keep at it.
We have been placed in these circumstances, and we will continue to try and make sense of them on our own terms, unaided by the discursive devices of universality, of totality, or of objectivity.
Folks living with impairment and forcibly removed from the public sphere and the spatial conditions for togetherness and community building. Folks living with mental illness — and distinctly: mad folks — whose very structures of understanding and acting upon the world are unrealised by that world, thus remaining unrecognisable as the recreation of language, labour, or love. Queer folks whose disruptive disjuncture from the convened networks of familial care and recognition is not repaired by the tentative (and often tenuous) promise of queer community and queer kinship. Trans folks whose very bodily experience, discernibly marked or otherwise, usurps them of the capacity to render themselves meaningful through collective language or cooperative implements for understanding. Poor folks — radically impoverished folks — whose own capacity to even begin to consider the equation of belonging is already precariously seeded in the motility of lack, urgency, need.
Isolation is transversal. It is not universal.
Fuck the notion that this does not bear repeating. Fuck the notion that these are ancillary phenomena, or auxiliary descriptions of social totality. Complementary portrayals of the world in its failure. Fuck the notion that to know of this and to name it suffices as an act of empathy, of solidarity, or of political intervention. Some misrecognitions should not be forgiven.
Things are fucked up and cruel and impossible because they were made to break in the first place. This system — historical, political, economical…—produces solitude, punitively administrated solitude, to ensure its fictions of personhood remain steady and safe, and that none suffer except those already in suffering, at the expense of whom the normal attains its richness, its vastness, and its abundance.
This crisis cannot break what has already been broken, let alone what has always been broken and meant to stay in that state. It can only break it further. It can only break it different.
There is no new normal. The normal is always old, as soon as it starts to be so. It is always anterior, and it is always usurping us of the conditions for the rightful reclamation of its existence, of its functional intelligence, of its instrumental rationality, of its historical specificity. Ultimately, of our means to call it by its name.
The continued sanctification of bourgeois, white supremacist, colonialist, imperialist, eurocentric, cissexist, heterossexist, ableist, sanist meaning and means of making oneself meaningful. The selective reach of the politics of community, agile when and only when it works to uphold an economy of unbelonging that is never, finally, at stake. The programmatic constitution and assignation of life, concomitant with the concerted production and actualisation of death as a governable social variable. This is the normal. And it is very, very old.
Don’t romanticise isolation. Don’t ignore it either, by inflating the rhetoric of this exceptional time and these exceptional stakes. You do not get to overwrite histories that are still confronting the definitive limits of their futures and their dreamings, only to make sense of your now. You do not get to comprehend by analogy what has not even touched the edges of possibility of your being. You don’t get to master this narrative by synthetic reduction, and to retrieve from it the means to perpetuate the disingenuous consistency of your recourse to violence.
You don’t get to disappear us. And you sure as fuck don’t get to disappear our dead. We have been at this longer, wiser, and stranger. And we will be here when you’re done.
