I wake up. The birds are chirping.

Poster Image - Seeking the darkness for its own sake

Hello. I hope you are well. This week we have a double feature: a story and a response to last Friday’s post from Michael Thomas. I’m going to let his essay speak for itself, but it’s fucking awesome to see post-liberal bullshit taken on so seriously. Thank you all for reading!

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I wake up. The birds are starting to wake up. My daughter is still sleeping. I start the morning coffee. It is rich, single origin, quite fair trade and aspirationally branded. It is a silly bougie thing, but I like it. I will go to work soon. I will greet my colleagues, attend meetings and lay-off Kevin (he has been a poor fit since the merger). After work, I will have cocktails with friends while we all wait for take-out then meet my husband and daughter at home to eat. We will cuddle together on the couch and watch one hour of 'Spirited Away' then we will all go to bed.

I wake up. The birds are starting to wake up. I check on my sleeping daughter. I start the morning coffee. I check my phone, I have a message from Dan. "Stay home today, check your email." I wonder if Kevin threatened me or the office. But it says that the tiny earthquakes and fissures that were releasing toxic gas in Australia have started happening all over the world. And as a result our office is closed and we are working from home until it ends. If we must go outside be sure to wear a gas mask. Young people should be ok, but not to take any risks. It says call in for a conference call when works starts. I look in the fridge and we have plenty of leftovers. This seems like it may last a few days. I'll put in an order for grocery delivery.

I wake up. The birds are chirping. I make coffee. The delivery driver brought us coffee the other day, but it’s not as good as the single origin. I will order more online today. They told me Kevin got sick from the gas while waiting for me in the parking garage yesterday, they found him dead in his car with his hand in his jacket, he was clutching a picture of his kid. It is sad, but that's also exactly why he didn't fit, so melodramatic — everything was so life and death with Kevin. I've decided to wear workout clothes today to I can do aerobics while on mute. Tonight we will eat BBQ chicken from the place down the street and “camp” in the living room.

I wake up. The birds are chirping. I make coffee. If I use slightly fewer grounds robusta coffee beans taste fine if slightly bitter. All of my favorites roasters are closed right now because it’s too dangerous for their distributors and staff to come into work, they say everyone is on paid leave until further notice. They are such nice companies. HR told me I'm spending too much time worrying about Kevin and that I should just focus on my own family. They told me our conversations were confidential. I sure hope so.

I wake up. It’s raining outside. I make coffee. We're running low on grounds and filters and we're limited to one grocery delivery every two weeks and all of the take out places have been ordered to close. We've thought about having potlucks with our neighbors but we don't know them. Tonight we'll have chili with the last of our beef for awhile. All the workers started dying at the processing plants, just like the delivery drivers did last week. Our friend says his tenants stopped paying rent and he sent them an eviction notice. He's a good man, but what can you do?

I wake up. The birds are chirping. I make coffee. I check my phone, I have a message from Dan. He says we're going back to work Monday. I text him back that I think that's great. He says he thinks so too. But I tell him I'm worried about the gas, is it gone. He says it isn't but I shouldn't worry. I like Dan. I'm excited to go back to work. I tell my family the good news. My daughter is excited she might get to go back to school. I tell her maybe so, but I don’t think school is starting yet. That makes her sad but she smiles and says “just a little longer”. We laugh. Tonight we eat the pizza we have been saving.

I wake up. The birds aren't chirping. I reheat the coffee that's left in the pot. I check my phone. I have no messages. I stare out of the window at the coroner van picking up a neighbor. We haven't gone back to work. They postponed the reopening order again. They tell us everything is fine, and we'll open soon, that we need to open soon. Denialists are protesting and dying. Police are arresting people for waiting in lines for food outside grocery stores. Work has been so slow they've told us just to check our email throughout the day but not to worry about working. They say we'll just restart once we hear more from the state about reopening.

I wake up. The birds are almost done chirping. I heat up some water. I check my phone. I have a message from Dan. Apparently I've been laid off along with my team, the company is out of money. I ask if he's ok. He says oh yeah since he's upper management. He thanked me for my help and that he wanted to let us all go at the beginning of the month so our health insurance would go as long as it could before we needed to pay for COBRA. Since the company was broke they didn't have any severance for us, but we could apply for unemployment like everyone else. I told him we had savings and thanked him. I tell my family the bad news. My daughter cries and won’t let me touch her. My husband puts her to bed.

I wake up. The birds have stopped chirping. My husband is dead and lying in the car port. Our daughter ran out the door the other day and he ran outside without a mask (not that we have any filters left) to make sure she didn't run in the road. She is safe, but he got sick and passed out and never woke back up. I texted "dead husband" to 611 and the cellular helpline instructed me to put him in the garage and verified that the pickup address was my billing address. I said yes. Everything is so efficient. I love her but I don't want to look at her right now.

I wake up. My daughter is crying. She has been crying all night. She says she is having nightmares. I say we all are. Can she go back to sleep. She's not tired. She's hungry. We are all hungry. She keeps crying. I go back to sleep.

I wake up. The birds won't chirp for many more hours. My daughter is asleep. I drink rust flavored tap water. I make a pot of rice. I drink a spoonful of laxative. I check my phone. Dan made a joke online about how they're having homemade pizza 'again' and how he can't wait for the quarantine to be over, he's so excited to get back to the office. I cry in the kitchen and hope I don't wake my daughter.

I wake up. It's hazy and dark. The house smells like smoke. My daughter is standing at my door staring at me. She is holding a box of matches. She says she wants to go outside and see daddy. I try to put out her mattress but I can't so we run downstairs. I call the fire department. They say they can't send anyone right now. I fill up buckets of water and keep trying to put it out. I still can't. I grab her and run outside to the car and sit in it. We watch the house burn. I tell her I am going to die and that I'm sorry for everything she is going through and will go through and to take anything she needs from the house after it has stopped burning and try to find someone to help her and not to let anyone touch her unless she has to for food and to kill them when they're sleeping but don’t antagonize scary people and that she'll do well and I love her.

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Resisting Post-liberal Affect

Adaptation to U.S. normalcy requires an ongoing process of desensitization that either numbs you or makes you psychotic.

by Michael Thomas

The recent piece “When you saw only one set of footprints,” frames centrism as being both anti-liberal and anti-everything. That's the move. In it’s current professional-bureaucratic articulation, American liberal philosophy can juxtapose any concrete positions or beliefs to “both sides” an issue into non-existence. This strategy is consistent with the move to surveillance capitalism as a protectionist measure that operates through additional power granted to state and economic (corporate) control. In the absence of a position to take, you borrow the tools of the techno-capitalist structure that enrich their role in your lifeworld. This relation is what's missing in public discourse about our next steps in COVID-19 (or was before we slide into “open or else”). We don't open and close an economy, we are starting and ceasing enterprise. The economy is a set of ongoing relations with certain outcomes, it only stops and starts relative to the motion of it’s moving parts. The solution to the problem is having the right management to make sure nothing breaks. At the heart of post-liberalism is death by political stasis against violence and death and an acceleration of labor for a sense of movement in the vacuum. Right now, schools (and everything else for that matter) can't stop because they would fail economically. We're working out of a human generated necessity treated as an economic law of nature. With that in mind, I'm trying to think about how to reframe what's happening to keep our eye on the violence and strangeness without being quickly overtaken by the neutrality of post-liberal bourgeois class consciousness. 

Post-liberalism responds to problems by making them sites for the exercise of capital, technology, and resources that leaves all the conditions that led us to immanent collapse in first place. After both financial crises, 9/11, Y2K, etc, the myriad forms of ongoing instability, oppression, and violence that constitute America continue unabated. In the wake of each we have a shift in power and social control that acts as a "responsible response" to these events. Ongoing crises are treated as noise relative to the signal of the ideals of American life and their manifestation in liberal capitalist nationalist culture. 

And lest we think I protest to much against US Liberal Democrats, their role as stewards of techno-social management is only really problematized by the fact that it facilitates the path for deregulation and an influx of capital that serves both parties’ interest in economic growth through corporate expansion and the socio-political benefits that come from it. Remember, selling stock when they were briefed about the crisis was bipartisan. When democratic neutrality opens a space for discourse, Republican tactics fill that space with nationalist capitalist power. Thus, the cycle continues.

On the ground level, consider the professional middle class, whose access to service is limited to neighborly relationships, social organizations, and is capable of working from home. If these folks are relatively healthy, they can limit social engagement and access the majority of consumer pleasures and needs through local services. They have the finances to save due to the halts on debt repayment. For these folks, you just need a functioning commercial infrastructure, supply chains, and a flow of capital to keep them moving in place from home so that abstract profit machines keep moving. The expendable (what liberals now call the vulnerable or essential) are replenished as an active reserve army of workers who can keep the system running as long as there are machines to run and enough folks to step in when those in place are furloughed, sick, or fired. Isn't this the endgame of the current approach?  

I'm thinking about this from the perspective of an early career black academic who, unlike in 2008, has a stable job and can actually use this moment to step out of debt. From this position, class consciousness has become concrete. It's a matter of the risks you have to take and move through the world and the level of precarity you experience relative to your economic security. Between my class politics and research and experience as a Black person in the U.S., I'm finding it hard to square that sense of middle class security with my ongoing sense of black precarity and vulnerability. This tension is consistent with the kind of "survivors guilt" and "alienation" present in historical narratives of the black middle class and passing. Black Consciousness and Class Consciousness intersect and the borderline between those intersections of consciousness and reality becomes clear. 

That feeling of impotence appears in white liberals as well due to their distance from precarity in the presence of a clear and present overwhelming danger. Kant called this distance from danger the feeling of the Sublime. This connection with the aesthetic helps demonstrate how that impotence can be re-coded into a validation of one's personal safety and use the distance from danger to engage in forms of symbolic solidarity that soothe us from feeling responsible or like the world is fundamentally uneasy. This is the purpose of "thoughts and prayers," "salute for the valuable work of others," and self-flagellation for one's privilege. We can acknowledge the danger of what's happening, respond symbolically, and take satisfaction in that relationship. To return to race for a second, this type of symbolic evasion is at work in Alfred Frankowski's account of "post-racial sensibility." 

Rather than think about "solutions," I want to think about the Marxist idea of crises  exposing the contradictions of systems that can be as the sites for action. The virus isn't an evil force punishing us for our dense proximity each other. The suffering we're seeing is a failure of institutions to prepare themselves and have the infrastructure to anticipate its impacts and deal with the effects. As a result, racism, health care disparities, class distinctions, and other social problems come to the fore as clear “American” realities. It's glib to say “Society” is the crisis, but it's close to the truth. The crisis is the collapse of the veneer of societal infrastructure that we gloss over through discussion of national prosperity, liberty, and individual responsibility. Thinking with Du Bois, I would argue that our social problem (defined as “the failure of an organized social group to realize its group ideals, through the inability to adapt a certain desired line of action to given conditions of life”) is, in a sense "America", which continuously fails to generate conditions of life that produce the ideals it uses to justify its action.

If we focus on this direction, there are points of solidarity with activist organizations who are ramping up as they can to fulfill the needs of people in their communities. Debt strikes and Rent Strikes are being organized, but require solidarity, which most bourgeois responses to these problems avoid. In addition, there's an ongoing critique of the post-liberal US-idealist framework manifested in the death, violence, and poverty that will characterize global life this year. We can do the work of putting these pieces together to be specific about the mad fractures of the social structure of the US and its participation in global neo-colonial exploitation. I'm honestly not optimistic since the reactionary energy in the US is strong enough to generate an intellectual movement that claims the libidinal investment in anti-blackness is so deep that black people can never cross the bounds to be considered as ontologically (read: essentially or by definition) human.

My focus is on linking up these spheres of “identity”/positionality, social conditions, and values that our ideologies exploit by isolating them from one another. One of the cornerstones of Black Feminist politics was the emphasis on seeing how socio-political conditions play themselves out in personal life. The personal is political insofar as the effects of politics are more directly seen in the experience and effects of citizens than in broader demonstrations of stability that exclude those folks from their range.

The dominant frames of US political discourse feed on a sense of normalcy and wellbeing in a state of chaos. When “America was Great,” that greatness was performed in the same theater as Jim Crow, lynchings, the ongoing extermination of Native Americans, and Anti-Communist show trials. These evils were whitewashed in the mythology of Greatness in World Wars and increasing industrialization. That moment we became Post-racial was met by racist protestors in 18th century cosplay, ongoing drone strikes in Iraq, a resurgence of Black Activist Movements fighting our current form of lynching, and a financial crash solved by bailing out the banks.

We can resist the performance by learning to see violence and inequality as features of these dreams that prey parasitically on promised hopes. That kind of vision requires a disposition that refuses to be soothed in the context of suffering. Adaptation to U.S. normalcy requires an ongoing process of desensitization that either numbs you or makes you psychotic. Pay attention to people. It’s not about what’s happening to the African American community, it’s about what the United States does to poor black people. Those conditions support a sense of safety for non-black people relative to their class status. We have yet to make it to Rural white folks yet, but I worry that seemingly isolated places may see problems arrive soon enough. This focus on the specificity of what’s going on, how systems operate between ideals, should make the absolute horror of GrubHub reminding you to save your local restaurants so that they can take their cut vivid and stark. Feel disgust, and say No. When you’re asked to sacrifice lives for the sake of Mammon, say No. When you can see that someone is wedging your sense of safety against the lives of other, say No. There are people braver than many of those of us in doors who have no safety. Their sacrifice isn’t a sublime manifestation of the unbelievable power of COVID, it is necessitated by people who believe the Economic Gods have reign over Humanity and even their own Christ. It’s a reminder to say Yes to building a world that removes the need for human sacrifice by fulfilling the need of human life.

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