Slow Death vs a Crisis

“Often when scholars and activists apprehend the phenomenon of slow death in long-term conditions of privation they choose to misrepresent the duration and scale of the situation by calling a crisis that which is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given population that lives it as a fact in ordinary time. [...] Of course this deployment of crisis is often explicitly and intentionally a redefinitional tactic, a distorting or misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon appear suddenly as an event because as a structural or predictable condition it has not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis seems already to have called for.”

-Lauren Berlant, 2007 (“Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency.” Critical Inquiry 33.  P. 760)

Reading with care

“At some level we have not demanded even of ourselves that we ascertain whether we believe this hypothesis to be true; we have felt that there was so much to learn first by observing the automatic nervous system of a routinized dismissal of it in terms of today’s Theory.  The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions.  How provisional, by contrast, how difficult to reconstruct and how exorbitantly specialized of use, are the tools that in any given case would allow one to ask: What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment  of the past that it no longer is?  And how are those possibilities to be found, unfolded, allowed to move and draw air and seek new voices and uses, in the very different disciplinary ecology of even a few decades difference?”

-Eve Sedgwick, on reading Silavan Tomkins, 2003 (Touching Feeling. Durham NC: Duke.  Pgs 117-8.)

Reparations

…”it’s often the ludicrous anachronisms within a given object or practice that operate as portals to other uses [...] like what Sedgwick means by reparative criticism: that because we can’t know in advance – we can know only retrospectively, if even then – what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically and idiosyncratically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around with us and stacking it in eclectic piles [... A]esthetic objects – especially outdated ones – ‘make time appear’ in ways that contest dominant modes of writing and feeling properly historical: they demand that we read, and they themselves write, historiographically aslant.  The apprehension of thus requires a certain stillness.”

-Elizabeth Freeman, 2007 (“Still After.”  South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3). Pg. 497-9.)

Dialectic of Conjuring-Obfuscation

“The fact that the 18th century failed to note any connection between the critique it practiced and the looming crisis – no literal proof of an awareness of the link could be found – this very fact led to our thesis: that the critical process of enlightenment conjured up the crisis in the same measure in which the political significance of that crisis remained hidden from it.  The crisis was as much exacerbated as it was obfuscated in the philosophy of history.  Never politcally grasped, it remained concealed in historico-political images of the future which caused the day’s events to pale – events that became so much less inhibited in heading for an unexpected decision.”

-Reinhart Koselleck, 1959 (Critique and Crisis.  Cambridge MA: MIT. Pg. 9)

A million-dollar-question

“How, then, does one live when the time to die has passed, when it is even forbidden to be alive, in what might be called the experience of living the ‘wrong way around’?  How, in such circumstances, does one experience not only the everyday but the hic et nunc when, every day, one has both to expect anything and to live in expectation of something that has not yet been realized, is delaying being realized, is constantly unaccomplished and elusive?”

-Achille Mbembe, 2001 (On the Postcolony.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  P 201)

Country ways

“Once I would have been content to fill my days with musings; but now, having been through a carnival of incident, I am quite seduced.  Like the daughters in the boarding-houses I sit tapping my fingernails on the furniture, listening to the tick of the clock, waiting for the next thing to happen.  Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it.  Now I kill time and time kills me.  Country ways! How I long for country ways.”

-JM Coetzee, 1976.  (In the Heart of the Country.  Pg 80.)