Chronicles – Museum for the Displaced

Dima Mabsout

Dwellarium: Blackout in Beirut

4 August

I invite you to dwell in a series of soundscapes—field recordings of the atmosphere in Beirut today—one year after the explosion that wiped out half the city and all its livelihood. Amidst the capital collapse of a mafia government that never cared for its people, a hungry people who, having taken to the streets, were silenced by a global pandemic and trapped between dense concrete. The scorching heat of a climate crisis cannot be soothed by the little resources everyone is fighting over. Blackouts every day and the rumbling is ever-present. Without it, there would be complete darkness.

Sound is all encompassing, you cannot look away, but you can grow so accustomed to it that it can cease to exist. This rumbling never stops, here in Beirut. It is the sound of diesel combustion, permeating every corner. It is the machine breathing—loud and consistent, so consistent that you forget about it completely. This has become our new neutral, a new kind of silence.

We are dominated by ears that refuse to listen, by systems that isolate us, detach us from the tools and means that keep us alive, keep us in place, in need, inept, hooked, always. We forget that movement is part of life, that silence can be sweeter than this, that another world order is possible. Lift with me, this rumbling from the unconscious, in a journey of play, with the dissonance of the global way of life as we know it.

—Dima Mabsout

Dwellarium: Blackout in Beirut

6 August

On hot days when the humidity is high, a thick smog hovers over Beirut. You can only really see it when from the nearby mountains, a greenish, brownish, yellowish density that makes a whole city fade out of sight.

The toxicity level is high. If you visit us, you might feel a tightness in your chest, you might lose your voice for a while, your body might ache. But bodies have adapted, like those of smokers, accepting the toxins with more ease incrementally with every puff. Gradually, the particles we breathe in have increased—particles of burnt gasoline in high traffic, of burnt trash because the dumpsters are full, burnt tires to block roads, burnt diesel because no one has electricity, burnt nitrate from our grand explosion, and lastly our souls.

We are kept alive. Breathing. Unable to breathe, but breathing. The machine needs its parts to function.

—Dima Mabsout

Dwellarium: Blackout in Beirut

9 August

It is said that 6000 years ago, states began to form. Settlements. Structures of existence that live off the domination of land, of nature, of people. They say that right here, in what was once the fertile crescent, is where civilization began. If that is true, then allow me to express my deepest apologies, dear earth, for this vicious creature we have created. It was a terribly destructive turn, to think that we can overpower the natural world. Through this quest we have lost ancient knowledge, ancient abilities from which we survived for millions of years.

The fertile crescent is no longer fertile. It is poor, war torn, polluted, in dregs. We have gotten so accustomed to these technologies man has made—these extensions of our bodies, psyches, and mind—that we have forgotten how to live without them. We are aliens of our own lands. Dependent, in stagnation.

Every house needs a generator, because our bodies’ energy reserves are no longer enough. Everyone needs to buy the diesel, pumped out of our ancestors’ remains, sold to us like energy with no soul or source. We are like dependent children, kept on all fours, forbidden to learn how to stand up and walk.

—Dima Mabsout

Dwellarium: Blackout in Beirut

12 August

DOWN WITH THE GARBAGE GOVERNMENT was written all over the walls in Beirut 2015. It was the trash crisis that ignited the first uprising that finally united people of all classes, religions, sects, and age groups against a corrupt government and system.

Uprisings create ripples. In 2015, the Arab spring swept out in the region, but quickly transformed into violence against its people. In 2018, uprisings sparked across the globe, but were suddenly halted by a global pandemic that pulled people back into their individual cubicles.

What are we demanding in our uprisings, and to whom? Are we calling out our own governments or the interconnectedness of a global system? How can we work together? Are we capable of imagining alternative ways? Are we willing to let go of what we already have gotten so accustomed to?

Like trash, for example. Trash is global, we all share it, and it is way more of a problem than we account it for. It is forming the new earth strata of this millennium, like the feces of all the garbage systems governing this planet.

—Dima Mabsout

Dwellarium: Blackout in Beirut

——

Stefano Harney and AWKNDAFFR

Conversation: Periodic Table Collective

A conversation with Stefano Harney and AWKNDAFFR, moderated by Ana Salazar Herrera

Over a period of a year and a half now, Stefano and AWKNDAFFR have been in conversation via email, with big and small gaps in between the writing. In this call recorded on 2 July 2021, they reflect on their ongoing exchange that has from the beginning been an experiment in being together as friends across borders, elongating time and space. Having met only days before Stefano moved out of Singapore, it was the end of something but the beginning of something new. Breaking with traditional ways of thinking about trust and relations, this conversation touches on the idea of “quantum sociality” (Denise Ferreira da Silva) to recognise how friendship is everywhere around us, to question how to exercise this collective responsibility, and to think about ways of reproducing forms of care from a distance.

Meandering through various topics such as the chemical bonds between atoms in molecular structures and the feeling of home in the space of the bond; the refreshing feeling of a friendship not based on productivity; difference without “otherness”; the dangers of scaling up; and the new transversal shapes that need to be created to avoid both deceptive horizontality and hierarchical verticality; the argument is made that our being is already social. What needs to be done is finding ways to satisfy our social and incomplete selves, and to allow people to freely associate and pursue their sociality. Every moment of socialisation is a moment of potential.

TL;DR: How to listen to those who are far away?

A conversation with Stefano Harney and AWKNDAFFR, moderated by Ana Salazar Herrera

Ana Salazar Herrera (AS): Hello, welcome to this conversation that is hosted by the Museum for the Displaced (Mf D). Mf D is a cultural para-institution addressing issues of forced migration, displacement, and statelessness. Today, we are really happy to be joined by Stefano Harney and AWKNDAFFR’s co-initiators Soh Kay Min and Wayne Lim. This conversation is part of a series of commissions for the Museum’s Listening Room, an online and offline platform that offers a common ground to meet and learn from each other, share views and experiences, and project lines of action together. We want to thank the Goethe-Institut Singapore for their support in making this first iteration of the Listening Room possible. Thank you for being here.

I’d like to briefly introduce everybody. Stefano, who is joining us from Boston today, is an interdisciplinary scholar and activist whose research spans social sciences, arts, humanities, and management. He has taught at the Singapore Management University and the European Graduate School, and currently teaches at the Royal Holloway, University of London. AWKNDAFFR, joining us from Singapore, is an artistic operation at the intersections of art, theory, and praxis with the aim of disentangling and deviating from complex contemporary conditions of capitalism and coloniality. They were part of The Substation’s Associate Artist Programme from 2020 to 2021. Kay Min is a curator working with theory, fiction and the linguistic interplays between speculative tenses and historical tensions. They graduated in Anthropology from the University College London, and completed their MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Kay Min worked until recently at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in the Research and Education department. Wayne is a visual artist exploring notions of aesthetics, economy, and ideology through topics such as logistics, decoloniality, and socio-military complexes. He graduated in 2017 from the Dutch Art Institute in the Netherlands and is now based in Singapore. He sees self-publishing, self-organisation and long-term collective projects as ways to perform or resist.

Stefano and AWKNDAFFR have been in conversation via email over a period of about a year and a half now, with bigger and smaller gaps in between. Today, they have kindly accepted to share a glimpse of this ongoing exchange. I would like to start by asking if you see this moment as a photograph of it, capturing what’s going on, or is it another element of this conversation that you’re having?

Who wants to start?

Stefano Harney (SH): I’m happy to start. Thank you Ana for having us here today. I’m very happy to be back with my friends Kay Min and Wayne for this conversation. I see today’s conversation as part of our experiment in this very strange and elongated space and time that we found ourselves in over the course of this last year. When reflecting on our relationship, one thing that I found startling and interesting is that despite not really having much time with each other, we are always able to fall straight into friendship and intimacy when we connect with each other despite these long absences and changes of geography. So, I’m interested in that because we tend to hold on to more traditional models— friendship and trust require proximity, time, and build up in a direction. Sometimes there’s a break or sometimes they just continue. In other words, we have these, I would say, Newtonian models of friendship. I think that whether we were entirely conscious of it or not, Kay Min, Wayne and I were ready to break with that model to some extent and experiment with other ways of thinking about friendship, collaboration, and communication. Without being too grandiose about it, it seems to me like a very small experiment in a different sociality, as what my friend Denise Ferreira da Silva calls a “quantum friendship” or a “quantum sociality”. That’s why today it’s great to be speaking together and to think a little bit more about what some of the implications are for our ways of living together. If we can slip the expectations of a certain kind of uniformity and progress in time, and a certain kind of definitive measure in geography and space, when it comes time to talk about friendship, intimacy, and trust. That’s how I’ve seen our correspondence. Of course we could also see the correspondence from a position of, rather than the platitude of this experiment, from all the lack, which allows us to also put ourselves back in with everybody else who’s been cut off; who feels they’ve lost some degree of human contact and sociality; who’s feeling distances more than ever; or who feels so mediated by Zoom or some other technologies. So, we’re also in that world too. I think by stressing a certain kind of refusal, that that’s all we’re in, we’re able to start to sense some other ways in which friendships can flourish, and some other ways that as a model of friendship we could start to think about our more general sociality.

Soh Kay Min (KM): Thanks so much Stefano. Thank you as well Ana, Canan, Samantha, and Mohammad for having us today here with Stefano. I think for us it’s very much similar to what Stefano has shared. It’s not really a photograph of an aesthetic moment because this conversation that we’ve been having with Stefano is so elongated as he says that I think there is no real way to zoom in or zoom out to capture a moment of it. But it’s certainly another element of what goes on. It’s very polyphonic in that sense, this conversation that we have. I think that’s why it’s interesting as well with the listening room initiative, how we sort of listen in other ways not necessarily through words or linguistically- or semiotically-coded language or ways of communication, but how we also are attentive to the gaps. In our initial conversations with you guys we’ve talked a lot about the gaps in the conversation that we’ve been having with Stefano and how somehow it feels—not so much insignificant or a sign of non-productivity or inefficiency—significant to even have those gaps.

Wayne Lim (WL): Yeah, I think that gap itself also speaks a lot. It communicates a different kind of relationship that may not appear like it exists but it’s always a potentiality. I think that it is always quite comforting to go back to despite it all. We have been having this email correspondence for a year and a half but sometimes our gaps were as long as three, four months. Somehow we were still able to ask about one another and how each other is doing. I think that is really important, to just pause. It does not always have to appear as if it’s supposed to be something that is extremely productive or anything like that. I think a relationship that is defined by these terms—sometimes words, sometimes gaps, sometimes pauses—is really essential to how we can relate with life today, as everyone around the world is affected by the pandemic. To just pause and take time—that’s really crucial at this point.

SH: I like what you’re saying, Wayne, about productivity because one of the things that we’ve been challenged with this year is this question of productivity. It’s become much more obvious to all of us that we’re called about to be productive, and that being productive doesn’t stop in a traditional wage relationship or with work but extends throughout life. We know there’s a lot of things written about how we turn the rest of our lives into support for that productivity. You go to the gym in order to be more productive at work. You’re constantly involved in forms of self-improvement. So, it seemed in some ways the mediation of Zoom and the requirements to keep working despite the pandemic through a lot of this turned into relief for us. It was refreshing to be in a friendship with the two of you that was not based on that productivity, one that could have these gaps and could sometimes involve—certainly on my side—correspondence that really wasn’t terribly meaningful or deep. I thought that was a useful part of what we were trying to do together, to not turn friendship into networking or into some sort of mechanism for constant improvement of myself. That I become a better friend or I look to you to become a better friend, for instance. I thought all of that was at play this year, whether we were conscious of it or not, and that was something that I really valued. That really may not have been an anti-productivity but a questioning of the role of productivity. And in the background maybe some understanding of the way in which productivity has never been just a neutral term of economy but always something very bound up with the history of colonialism; the history of slavery; the history of race; the history of patriachy, in which some things counted as productive and some things didn’t, and some people were considered productive and some people were not. It’s never been innocent. So it’s always worth calling into question but I felt this year in particular, and through our friendship, we had a chance to do that because productivity was on display. I think in a certain way we were refusing it at least as it’s given to us, and maybe trying to look for something else in its place that opened up new possibilities without subjecting itself to some sort of measure, especially a measure about improvement or progress. That was for me certainly one of the refreshing things about the correspondence and the connection so far.

KM: Definitely, that was also a relief for us in the sense that there is not to say any kind of defined productivity goal or measure that we were trying to hit in this conversation but rather it’s really a praxis and a practice of just constantly attempting to show up.That’s something that’s come up a lot in the emails that we send to each other—how do we continue to create spaces of appearance to each other? And in doing so with one another, very much so like you said, it’s an experiment in how you do that in a larger practice as well and in other areas of our lives. We have this friendship and we have friendships with other people, and we can create friendships across borders; across walls; across boundaries.

WL: Screens.

KM: Yeah, screens, that just keeps getting harder to overcome, it feels. You have so much conflict now going on globally that it’s hard to define what is the productive thing to do in such an extended moment of tension across many geopolitical situations. I think from our point of view, not sure if Wayne agrees, what we do is a very humble thing. As a singular being bounded in a singular body, there is only so much one can do and it’s more about finding ways to enrich that practice for yourself bodily. How do you connect to another struggle that is so far away from your physical being; your emotional landscape; your experiential body of knowledge that you accumulate in your life. While we can’t possibly stand in another person’s shoes completely and pretend to know their entire existence, how can we listen to them, and how can we practise that care better through the people who are close to us and people who remain close even though we have gaps in between us all the time? You’re going to have gaps in between everybody and everywhere.

WL: Personally, I read that as presentness. To simply be there is a symbolic act. To just be around, not so much always, and self interrogate every single strategy that we have. I think sometimes, perhaps more so right now, at least for myself, I’m taking a lot of time to not be too attached to things and at the same time just be around. To just be around the people that you know, people that you care for, even people you don’t know. Sometimes just simple acts of care and presentness are I think more important than ever. The act of care versus rushing for time and getting things done. It’s that sort of scale for me right now. That’s something we talked about through our email correspondence as well. We tried to have a go at it several times. I mean we started from talking about, what is it, “A full belly does not complain.”

KM: Yeah, we just started with asking Stefano, “What did you eat today? Are you well fed?”

SH: Yes. It’s also interesting that our friendship started, as we’ve said before, just as a certain time period was finishing for me, as I was finishing my work teaching in Singapore. I always found that very generative, that one thing is ending and something else is starting. I must have only been in Singapore for a very brief time after we met, went out and ate. Rather than that being an ending or something where you say, “Too bad we didn’t meet earlier”, or whatever the case might be, it became the occasion for an experiment in not thinking in such linear terms about beginnings and endings, and connections. At the same time, it started in this quite gentle way around food, and as you already know, in Singapore food is a big part of social life and the way people communicate. It’s even in Singapore’s greetings. It’s very common when you meet someone in Singapore for them to ask you if you’ve taken your lunch yet which you don’t get in most other places in the world. It is a moment of care, and pretty much everybody you run into is going out to lunch somewhere, at some point, often with other people. I felt in a way we were taking that as an opportunity to experiment about the kind of things that Wayne was talking about, or speaking about, these moments of care and taking time. I felt that stay with me ever since.

The other thing that I wanted to mention with regards to what you were saying, Kay Min, about us being sort of bounded and singular beings. Of course, when we say that we are not talking about individuals, we are talking about embodiment. I think everything you say is absolutely true. At the same time, I think the kind of things we are exploring are a challenge to some big categories like “self and other” and “friend and enemy”. These kinds of categories which still dominate most social and political theory are categories that we’ve tried to call into question when we reject the idea that someone can be interpreted so clearly in that way. When we open up the possibility of friendship and when we open up the possibility that there can be difference that doesn’t have to resolve itself into an identity called otherness, I think all of that is an experiment worth having and it has wider consequences. If we wanted to be more ambitious in the way we spoke about it, and I have to say I don’t think it’s really necessary, I think it makes more sense not to do that. We could say that if we were at all interested in what democracy would actually be, or what a freely associating society would be like, we would expect that everybody would be practising this. We wouldn’t be worrying about whether everybody was productive, or voting, or had free speech. We’d be interested in whether everybody was able to practise this kind of care that Wayne is talking about, and the kind of humility that you’re talking about when you’re talking about an embodied person who knows they have different kinds of limits, and yet at the same time who won’t accept perhaps that those limits are the same things as having borders and boundaries. That seems to me like, in some ways, a really ambitious programme. Maybe so much so that the key is not to get caught up in the ambition of it. I think we’ve been good at that. I think we’ve just done it for its own sake, as we would hope those around us would also do. So, yes, I think there’s something small about our practice, if you want to call it that, but I also think we’ve come to learn the dangers of people asking us to scale everything up. To tell us what the consequences are for what we are doing, and how it’s going to “make a difference”, and how are you really intervening in the worlds. I think we’ve come to learn that some of those are traps that bring us straight back into not only friend/enemy situations and self/other situations, but also all of the problems of productivity, efficiency, and accounting for your time. That rather than actually addressing the real struggles and problems in the world, it adds fuel to the fire, even if it’s not on purpose.

AS: Thank you. I just wanted to maybe comment a bit on what I’m hearing. And thank you so much for sharing your views and approaches to this experiment. I was sharing with Kay Min and Wayne earlier that I went to Vigo, Spain, last week because the Zapatistas are coming to Europe, actually arrived in Europe already, and more of them will arrive in July. In August, they will declare it’s been 500 years since Spain conquered Mexico. They will be in Madrid to say, “No, we are not conquered. We continue living dignified lives, we continue resisting.” This thing you’re talking about, this friendship and quantum sociality, I think it was very beautiful to experience there. I wanted to ask you if you think that this friendship that sparked with Wayne and Kay Min, does it have something of this feeling of home maybe, of something that has a familiarity to it not because you know it, the person, or the context, but because this person is maybe looking for something that you’re also looking for? How does it affect you for it to become a friendship later on? Also, in the way you speak there’s a big care in the words that you’re using, that also has to do with wanting to overcome hegemonic notions of time and space—how to come out of it, how to form new notions and new kinds of friendships.

SH: Thank you Ana. I’m interested to see what Wayne and Kay Min think about this. I feel that on the one hand home is something we feel like we need, but on the other hand we have a right to be suspicious of how a notion of home ends up getting tied into all kinds of other ideas that maybe we don’t feel that we ought to be stuck with. I’m only saying something obvious, like the way that home gets tied to nation, then nation gets tied to who belongs and who doesn’t belong, and then suddenly home is who belongs and who doesn’t belong. I’m only saying something obvious like home emerges out of the long history of heteropatriarchy and therefore certain ideas of how homes ought to be organised including the economies of homes. A certain idea that home is connected to some kind of essence; soil; ethnicity; that allows someone to say that this is my home and that this is not your home, all those kinds of things. At the same time we have a constant need and constant desire—I certainly feel it—to make families and to make places to be together that make you feel at home. Often when you talk casually to people about why they are staying where they are staying or why they are moving to where they are moving, friendships play a big role in it in a very everyday way. You hear people say, “Well, I have a lot of friends there. That’s why I’m in Barcelona.” or “That’s why I’m in Mexico City.”, or whatever the case may be. There’s something there that’s important, and are experiments too, because there are things we want. It’s not that we are social beings, it’s that in a sense our being is already social and so we have to satisfy that unless we believe in this idea of an individual who decides on a scale how social he or she wants to be, which I don’t believe. [laughs] Then, I think it’s more a question of how we satisfy our already social and incomplete selves. I can just add without claiming to be an expert about it, that one of the very interesting lessons that the Zapatistas have taught us is that their indigeneity and indigenous movements are not about a return to a timeless home, or to a way of life, or home is secured in a certain kind of way. Indigeneity, in a sense, helps us to learn about the contingency of home and the contingency of friendship. The Zapatistas have turned that experiment into art, and into an art form with all the ways that they experiment like this. I certainly feel that it can be a kind of inspiration for how you make families, how you make homes, how you make a place your own. I also recall a Guatemalan artist who told me that his practice was connected with making things sacred in the new places that he got to. He would say, “Okay, now I’m here, this now becomes the sacred mountain of my people.” Again, that notion of a kind of contingency, a kind of temporariness mixed with something that is abiding, sacred in this case, is something that I think we have to find and experiment in when it comes to the notion of home and friendship. Fortunately we have a lot of very good examples.

KM: Yeah, what you’re saying about home, Stefano and Ana, that’s really resonating in different ways as well for us. In terms of, how do you feel at home in a sociality instead of having a very fixed notion or embeddedness with nation states, territories lines, and borders, that are very often not things that are defined by one’s own agency. It’s something that’s defined for you. Whereas a connection with a friend is something that one has agency over, and it creates a space of feeling at home with one another that I think is so important as well. And just to connect that back to these ideas of singular bodies, and self and other, and friend and enemy kind of binaries that you talked about as well Stefano. In my head when you talked about quantum sociality I also started thinking about chemistry. This is very nerdy so I apologise, but in chemistry, you have the atom and the molecules. Something that’s very useful for me to think about is how we’re like molecular structures. There is no atom that is a free floating atom on its own. On its own it just loses its efficacy, because in the periodic table in Chemistry, they are all there. It’s a collective of sorts so they all form molecules with one another depending on different kinds of chemical reactions, they break, they form, and it’s very dynamic in that sense. What is always very interesting for me is the chemical bonds that are being formed between atoms. It could be an organic bond or an inorganic bond. It could be broken, it could be built by different things like temperature, or another chemical element coming into play. For me this space of feeling at home and making that sociality is in the space of the bond rather than the space of the atoms themselves and the molecular structure. So that’s really fascinating for me too when you start mentioning quantum sociality. That brings us across time in some sense but for me spatiality it helps to think of them like molecules. I’m sorry that went down a really nerdy tangent for a while. [laughs]

WL: I’ll go back to the whole idea of scalability of social relations. It was interesting for Ana to bring up the whole notion of home in relation to our correspondence. I think definitely there is this whole other chunk of things to consider when we think about home on a larger scale. Like this nation state that defines the family, the nuclear family, what forms and what defines people’s social relations. What’s also fascinating right from the beginning was the fact that we started the whole correspondence with the idea to speak over emails without thinking about how consequential the pandemic would become. But it is also at the end the form that kept us coming back to one another. I think that was quite important to sort of resurface. At the end of the day it’s really about the connection that you are in control over. Asking your friends how they’re doing is not something that your boss is going to ask you to do at the end of your work day. I mean you can take a break and binge on Netflix shows to look out for the people that are in the same kind of fight as you are. To link this back to the larger conversation on productivity and what is generative, in practice, I feel like we do have to pick and choose the kind of relations that work for us. Not so much whether this person will work the best for a project or a particular collaboration but rather, it’s about the continuity. That is something that is way more valuable than things that are quantifiable in the short term. For our context it’s elongating it but it is very much about the continuity later on when this conversation were to end one day, what’s next? How are we going to ask about one another in the near future?

SH: I think that is a good question. It’s related to this sort of, binary as you were saying Kay Min, that we were trying to work against. This organisational binary of having an organisation that is either hierarchical or an idea that an organisation could simply be horizontal. When saying this I’m referring back to Félix Guattari’s famous experiments with the psychiatric clinic La Borde in realising that he didn’t want the hierarchy of the doctor, patient and administrator. He saw that the horizontal had its issues too. That the horizontal, because of the way it stretched, could easily compartmentalise knowledge, health, and being itself but also could present itself falsely. That we could say things like, “we’re all in this together” or “everybody is facing the same thing.” When in fact, according to who you are and where you are standing you could face many more barriers, challenges and struggles than someone who’s standing next to you. Of course out of this came the idea of the transversal, rhizomatic, etc. The other day I was trying to explain the transversal to my nephew, and I said, “Well it’s sort of like a loopy line.” [laughs] It’s one that follows neither of those patterns but also returns on itself, revises itself, reaches out in one direction or another. It’s always reforming itself and often has to be recreated for the next gathering or the next task. It doesn’t become a new form in that sense.

When I’ve been thinking about our experiment and its relationship to others, I often think about it in those transversal forms. That if we avoid either seeking out connections in hierarchical forms or in deceptive horizontal forms then we have a chance of practising a kind of transversal where we suddenly make connections; new shapes and new forms; new diagrams of friendships; new diagrams of experiments. Which shows us just how extensive such experiments are in the world and how many people on the Earth are involved in them and are already one kind or another. It’s the kind of thing that Fred Moten and I used to talk about when we talked about study as something that is already going on all around us if we can start to recognise it. Of course the reason that I’m bringing all this up is that it’s not that easy. At one moment or another all of us are either working in the art world, the university world, or in the world of work, where organisations are essentially hierarchical. When we rebel against them, often unfortunately our rebellion takes this naive apolitical horizontal idea, that we all have the equal power to say yes or noto an institution. That we all have the equal ability to steal from it or to not steal from it, or cope with it or not cope with it, to have a strategy around it or not have a strategy around it. One of the things that I value about what we are trying to do is that we are not relying on either a vertical or a horizontal form of organisation or structure to encounter others, and that our encounters are operating instead through this cooperation and collaboration, with what Kay Min calls the periodic table collective. I think by doing that we encounter all the possibilities of new forms of physics, biology and chemistry that are thrown into question, our previous notions of human organisation as well as the organisation of material life. I guess I’ve put this in a more complicated way than I need because really all I’m saying is by doing this experiment with you guys, I can see other experiments around me that I couldn’t have seen if I weren’t doing this with you. Therefore I can also in some instances join them or appreciate them, or just feel good that they are there, depending on what’s going on. So there’s something very enabling about what we’re trying to do together.

KM: I guess it’s not to say reciprocal in the sense that this relationship demands a reciprocity from one another, but similarly it enables new imaginations for me, I don’t know about Wayne, to think about how as a node in the rhizome it extends into other nodes somewhere else in the shrubbery of this as well. I remember when we first had a chat with the folks at Mf D, we were talking about how this conversation should be something that extends. That it’s not just the three of us talking in this conversation, that we form a larger molecular chain in that sense, that we keep going. That’s why we wanted to have Ana as well here with us, not just to have an enclosed conversation between us but to keep the borders and things that separate kind of porous instead.

AS: I wanted to think a little bit about these dangers of scaling up. We have seen what happens when there’s centralisation and hierarchy, and well it is extremely dangerous and destructive, it’s equal with death basically. But at the same time these transversal organising and study that you’re talking about, it does need to scale up but it has to scale up in a very different way or with a very different notion of what scaling up means. It does need to scale up because it needs more people, it needs to be joined by more people. So, how to call more people in without creating a new hierarchy, and how to call more people in without centralising? When you’re organising, what often happens is that you build something and because you’re so horizontal, or this deceptively horizontal that Stefano was talking about, this just dissipates and dissolves.Then new people have to build it up again and very often you’re not building on top of what has been built before. That can happen easily when there isn’t this hierarchy that scales things up very quickly and very destructively. We do want this growth and scaling up but not a monstrous growth that is like a cancer but rather an organic growth that is a joining of different movements and different struggles. To be able to see and to appreciate the differences without this otherness.

WL: I can definitely relate to what you’re saying Ana. I think a huge portion of this is also about the sensibility to pace together and scale together. Our conversation with Stefano definitely has informed a lot for our publication as well, which essentially centres around work and pleasure as guiding principles of future work and presentness. That sort of sensibility needs to be extended, whether it’s in a manner that’s been scaled up or scaled across time and space. The most important thing is to have this sensibility to think together; to study together; to read together; to spend time together; to let things grow and grow organically like what you said. As much as a lot of this doesn’t sound like much, I personally have taken it as a methodology in the way I communicate with people. Definitely more recently and definitely the people we are working with as well. It’s really important to just sense things and see where that is, how that informs us and informs the relations that we form together.

KM: I guess when you think about verticality or horizontality it’s two axes of a graph but in fact life as we know it in this bodily world that we live in is very three-dimensional, or four-dimensional, or five-dimensional. We don’t know, it’s so full! It’s not just two-dimensional on a page and two axes, and how we grow is not necessarily about scaling up higher or scaling wider. You can grow in many directions, take whatever shape, but that doesn’t have to be determined by a scale one way or the other. What you said about building upon knowledge that has already been there, like with the Zapatistas for example, that’s a history that is so rich and amazing to draw upon. When we first started to think about AWKNDAFFR, something that brought us together was The Undercommons and the whole idea of fugitivity and finding this space of togetherness to study and steal from institutions where you can. To not necessarily be complicit in that sense but acknowledge that embeddedness and the implicatedness of life as we know it, and to take it and learn together with people that want to learn in the same way as you. So that’s not really about finding another in that sense, or identifying with one self or another self, but finding a collective—I don’t want to say purpose because it sounds too ambitious and too grand, it could change as well—rhythm.

SH: Yeah, I agree. I especially agree with this idea that the problem with even using the word “scale” is that it brings us back to these measurements and graphs, which often detain us from all of the ways that we might connect with each other. Of course on the one hand we can just be mindful of the failures of scale from the Left. If you think about the coming into power recently in Greece of the left government, or the coming into power in Spain of the left government, we lose so much in that moment of the scaling up, in that traditional sense. And again, the Zapatistas are always trying in some way to work with large territory and numbers without falling into the kinds of, you know— Well, essentially what we call scaling up is really a scaling down when it comes to equality and sociality. It’s a reduction, it’s not an expansion. I think what Wayne and Kay Min you’re both referring to is, how do we maintain the richness of our friendships and relationships in a way that we don’t have to sacrifice them in order to get more, in order to reach out further. I do think that there are lots of other ways to think about this that can make you feel like, actually maybe this is already much more widespread and common than we really give it credit for. Because so much of what happens under friendships and relationships doesn’t go under the name of scholarship or politics. But nonetheless, it seems to me that the attempts to build friendships and relationships are everywhere around us and it’s not our job to call for unity or organisation amongst that. If anything, if we have any job and maybe we don’t have any job at all, but if we have any it’s to clear out as a way to allow these things to happen. To allow people to pursue the experiments and sociality that they would naturally encounter. Here we just have to admit it’s always been the Right who has called for this. It’s on the Right that they say, “Well, just do what you want because the market will sort it out. We have no need for more organisation, we have no need for scaling up.” Now of course, that’ll all be fine if they weren’t lying [laughs] but that’s not what a market is, a market is a series of corporations and state interventions. But in a way the rhetoric is very appealing to people—just be yourself, do your thing. Of course, the rhetoric is also very selfish from the Right but how could we create a conversation amongst ourselves which also said, “You only have to do what you want to do.” Hopefully what you want to do is for relationships and friendships and not pursue self-interest, so we have a very big and important difference from how the Right talks about it. If we could get to the point where we were just able to say to each other, “Look, you don’t have to have some organisation, you don’t have to have a party, you don’t have to have those things.” It’s not that I think those things are evil, I just think that we should start our premise from the idea that we want to encourage a world where people are trying to make their own socialities, to realise the socialness of their beings, and to do that through friendships and relationships of all kinds. Family relationships, love relationships, all kinds of friendships, etc. That should be the primary task of something that probably at that point you wouldn’t even call it the Left but maybe that’s where you start and then you see what happens.

It seems to me that if you wanted anything that you would call scale, well that’s a massive scale! Because you’re basically saying to everybody, you should be able to make friendships, you should be able to make love relationships and families, and you shouldn’t be interfered with in trying to do that. That kind of care on a massive scale, Wayne, as you were talking about care, seems to me bigger than anything you could imagine in terms of scaling up a left political party, or scaling up a social movement or anything else. That’s why when I first had this chance to be back in conversation with you, the first thing I said to Kay Min is, “Yes, it is a very small thing and it’s a very humble thing, and that’s just as it should be.” It also is gigantic in the sense of how the sensibility, again to use your word Wayne, that runs through it, is one that everybody should be able to do this. Maybe it isn’t this, maybe it looks like something else. But if it is primarily about care and sociality, by definition it is not going to be about destruction, and brutality and oppression, then why shouldn’t everybody be able to do it, and why shouldn’t that be our goal? Amongst other things it’s better a political programme then like say, I want universal healthcare, something like that. So, anyway, now I’m ranting a bit. Sorry Ana.

KM and WL: [Laughs]

KM: Completely relatable, in the sense that so much you say about organising on the Right or Left, really we can also abstract to think about skills that can be learnt. Because undeniably in the present moment the Right while being unquestionably evil is also doing something right. They’ve gotten something right to be organising in the way that they can and on such a scale as well. For me, the question is always about how do you sort of steal that knowledge [laughs] out of there. About not necessarily organising but how to create that sense of agency within an individual or within a group of people, or a larger sort of scale of it to go back to that word for a bit. It’s also important to listen to what is being listened to. In a roundabout way, to also be tactical about what we’re doing on the Left, if we are still speaking of binary.

AS: I was thinking of going back to this idea that Kay Min was saying, if we want to learn together maybe we want to unlearn together all of these things and be outside of scale and linear time. Maybe this is something we could say sparked this friendship, or it’s this looking for something. And it’s not purpose like Kay Min was saying, it doesn’t have to be a purpose. It’s just a longing, a search, or an affinity with the other person that we are trying to build something similar. There is a potential for collaboration or for this collectivity to happen, maybe, when you have this encounter, or you meet the other person.

SH: Yeah, I think you’re right Ana. We start from this point in our lives now where most of us, including myself, are manufactured into being individuals by institutions. Through the schools, through the healthcare systems, everything. It’s like you are a self-contained, sovereign, responsible individual who either chooses or not chooses to develop or be productive. And then, because that is actually quite a burdensome and probably impossible task, to truly be an individual, we get as Kay Min says, there’s an appeal from the Right that says, “Well, since you are an individual, at least we can give you freedom.” So all these institutions that are now said to be— Even though they created your individualism, the idea of an individual, are now said to be oppressing that individual, the Right says, “Okay, we can let you be a free individual.” It seems to me that if we want to say anything to other people it’s, “Come be someone who doesn’t have to be an individual. Come be someone who doesn’t have to claim self-sovereignty. Come be someone who is incomplete, who’s dependent, who only really appears happy in relationships, who only really feels at home in friendship.” I think that is really very appealing to a lot of people and the reason I think it’s appealing is because I see people practising it all the time, even in the face of all the pressures to individualise from institutions, and even in the face of the call from the Right to enjoy your freedom because you’re an individual, and to get the most out of being an individual. I know this sounds a little naive but I feel very much like how Selma James used to put it, that organising is done and because we’ve reached such a heavy level of societal complexity in many places we don’t need any more development, we don’t need any more organisation. We need to find ways to practise our already given sociality.

Maybe it is “just me” but it seems a lot more appealing to practise something where you don’t have to show up as somebody who is like an individual, and somebody who is always improving, somebody who is always able to articulate her or his position, their position, etc. Somebody who has a defined set of taste, interests and talents, and ambitions, etc. I mean I am tired just thinking about that. On the other hand, what could be more lush, really? Where is the lush life but in the opposite of that, in allowing yourself to be dependent on someone. Allowing yourself to be used by someone in a good sense and allowing yourself to fade in and out of any kind of distinction; in and out of your embodiment; in and out of any kind of singularity that emerges; certainly at given moments and is practised at certain moments, but is never separable again as Denise would say. It’s full of difference but it’s not full of separation. That just sounds to me not only more relaxing but like I said, it’s the lush life, isn’t it?

WL: Yeah, I think what Stefano just said really made me think about the whole “drive for excellence” mentality. I mean, a lot of places are like that, a lot of societies are like that. It’s this very loud way of presenting that sort of value-addedness of a life that is well-invested. I think the opposite of that shows a lot of colours and variety to anything that is the opposite of that could be and yes, it sounds relaxing! I think it’s a good kind of relaxing, it’s healthy, [laughs] for one. I think it’s sort of therapeutic in its own ways.

KM: Yeah, I very much agree. Maybe the organising is done but knowledge has already been there all along, it’s just about seeing it for what it is. When this fight is over, what are you going to do? You do want to enjoy it, don’t you? You want to live life very colourfully, very vibrantly. You want to have something lush with people that you love around you, that care about you. You want your friends, your chosen family. Maybe it’s naive, maybe it’s idealistic, but I like to think about that moment instead of brutality.

WL: Quantifiable achievements. [laughs]

AS: Thank you. I just want to say we are approaching the end of this conversation, or of this quantum sociality mediated by the screen. Thank you really, for sharing all of these thoughts. Of course, we have seen that there’s no end. So, this is not an end, this is just the beginning of the rest of the exchange that you’re having at the moment and that you will continue having. I don’t know on which side the ball is now at, and who is supposed to email who, but maybe that also doesn’t matter so much.

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Essay

April 2021

Imagination and Post-Capitalist Alternatives: An Ongoing Inquiry into Decentering Power

Deesha Menon

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