A practice needs constraints. Given that the internet and its stars; the police and the Israeli and Americans governments; the marketplace and the platforms and habits they promote, are organized by capital and brutality unbounded, and are therefore immoral and frightening …
An interval1 is bounded. Given that this is time and space in-between: suspended, confusing, open, connecting, and rife with danger and possibility …
I hereby establish my practice2, and its constraints, for one interval: all that is in the thick of it between election and inauguration.3
1. I need to go there. In person or online. This constrain asks for my attention as an act of care and co-presence: locomotion at a human pace.4
2. I need to join an audience. In person or online. This constraint asks me to think and feel alongside others: an interval.
3. I need to blog about it. On my computer, but always also in my body and a room. This constraint asks me to take time with response and witness as an act of connection: a sharing with effort and context.
4. I need to devalue “the audience.”5 On my computer, but mostly inside the habits of my own, sad 21st century brain. This constraint reminds me that impact is not about counting or growth; that writing, thinking, and inter-connection are not products; that an internet audience is a projection: a re-wiring of desire.
5. I need to choose my audience with care. This constraint reminds me that being together, online and off, can be a generous joining that might feed and be fed by my presence: a revaluation of the gift of time by way of participating bodies.
Notes:
- See æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, in the interval; Fred Moten, theory and practice of the interval; Cinema Interval by Trinh T. Minh-ha. ↩︎
- These constraints may change because my thinking about them is being written in real-time. ↩︎
- Only some steps into understanding this as a practice with constraints that I might commit to, did I realize I had done much the same when I pledged to blog once a day, every day, for the first 100 days of a previous catastrophic presidency. While it appears I have been and will always be myself—eager to act, to connect, to respond—it is interesting to see the differences and similarities between these two undertakings: yes, blog-bound, but the first larger, longer, and more goal driven; this new one, more aware of the horrors to come, less bold about my abilities to intervene, and thus, more committed to being with others as vital as is information shared. ↩︎
- My current work on Pandemic Technologies with Nishant Shah, and Long COVID with Pato Hebert, draws on the invaluable thinking, activism, and art of the disabled and chronically ill, teaching us that digital (and other) technologies provide access, inclusion, and interaction that are a part of a political practice. ↩︎
- For my purposes here, this is any activated group that includes listening within the encounter. ↩︎