b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Rizvana Bradley — The Vicissitudes of Touch: Annotations on the Haptic

    Rizvana Bradley — The Vicissitudes of Touch: Annotations on the Haptic

    Rizvana Bradley

    The late queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is known for her tenacious commitment to the indeterminate possibilities that nondualism might offer sustained inquiries into minor aesthetics, politics, and performance. In the introduction to Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Sedgwick turns to touch and texture as particularly generative heuristic sites for opening the book’s avowed project, namely the exploration of “promising tools and techniques for nondualist thought and pedagogy.”[1] Moving through psychoanalysis, queer theory, and sexuality studies, the text probes entanglements of intimacy and emotion, desire and eroticism, that animate experience and draw social life into the myriad folds of material and nonlinguistic relations. As Lauren Berlant asserts of Sedgwick’s text, “the performativity of knowledge beyond speech – aesthetic, bodily, affective – is its real topic.”[2]

    One of Sedgwick’s most important and enduring legacies is a radically queer heuristic that endeavors to make theorizable the imperceptible and obscure relationships between affect, pedagogy, and performativity, without reproducing the limits and burdens of epistemology (even antiessentialist epistemology), with its “demand on essential truth.”[3] For Sedgwick, texture and touch offer potential instances of sidestepping or evading the foreclosures of structure and its attendant calcification of subject-object relations, a pivot towards antinormative pedagogies of reading and interpretation. Following Henry James, Sedgwick suggests that “to perceive texture is always, immediately, and de facto to be immersed in a field of active narrative hypothesizing, testing, and re-understanding of how physical properties act and are acted upon over time,” to become engaged in a series of speculative departures rather than analytical arrivals.[4] Similarly, Sedgwick finds in the sense of touch a perceptual experience that “makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity.”[5] Particularly relevant for our purposes is Sedgwick’s turn to the registers of difference between texture and texxture as a guide for thinking about forms of desire, perception, and interpretation that exceed normative modalities of belonging in, being with, and making sense of the world.

    Teasing out the implications of Renu Bora’s taxonomy of textural difference, Sedgwick tells us that

    Bora notes that ‘smoothness is both a type of texture and texture’s other.’ His essay makes a very useful distinction between two kinds, or senses, of texture, which he labels ‘texture’ with one x and ‘texxture’ with two x’s. Texxture is the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantively, historically, materially, it came into being. A brick or metal-work pot that still bears the scars and uneven sheen of its making would exemplify texxture in this sense. But there is also the texture – one x this time – that defiantly or even invisibly blocks or refuses such information; there is texture usually glossy if not positively tacky, that insists instead on the polarity between substance and surface, texture that signifies the willed erasure of its history.[6]

    Though one might be tempted to singularly assign to texture’s “manufactured or overhighlighted surface” the properties and pitfalls of “psychoanalytic and commodity fetishism,” in fact,

    the narrative-performative density of the other kind of texxture – its ineffaceable historicity – also becomes susceptible to a kind of fetish-value. An example of the latter might occur where the question is one of exotism, of the palpable and highly acquirable textural record of the cheap, precious work of many foreign hands in the light of many damaged foreign eyes. [7]

    Paradoxically, it is precisely the failure of texture to erase the internal historicity that would appear to be self-evidently registered on the surface of texxture, which allows Sedgwick to effectively grant the former an elusive depth, declaring that, “however high the gloss, there is no such thing as textural lack.”[8] Meanwhile, texxture’s presumably inescapable depth seems to recede across the surficial “scars and uneven sheen” that are read as the signatures of its making. For Sedgwick, one of the primary implications of these phenomenological variegations and perplexities is that texture, “in short, comprises an array of perceptual data that includes repetition, but whose degree of organization hovers just below the level of shape or structure…[the] not-yet-differentiated quick from which the performative emerges.”[9] In this way,

    texture seems like a promising level of attention for shifting the emphasis of some interdisciplinary conversations away from the recent fixation on epistemology…by asking new questions about phenomenology and affect, [for what]…texture and affect, touching and feeling…have in common is that…both are irreducibly phenomenological.[10]

    On the one hand, Sedgwick’s turn to texture divulges extra-linguistic affiliations that performatively surprise, facilitating an erotic retrieval of subjective and aesthetic non-mastery that continues to resonate with ongoing critiques of the aesthetic. And yet, while Sedgwick’s assertions about affectivity and touch facilitate an opening for a theoretical re-evaluation of notions of agency, passivity, and self-perception, they are also deeply problematic. For what does phenomenology, which takes the body as our “point of view in the world,”[11] have to say to those who, following Frantz Fanon, have never had a body, but rather its theft, those who have only ever been granted the dissimulation of a body, “sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning[?]”[12] What of those whose skin is constantly resurfaced as depthless texxture, a texxture whose surficial inscriptions are read as proxies for the historicity that the over-glossed surface would seek to expunge? In other words, Sedgwick’s ruminations disclose an undeclared, but nevertheless central, conceit that has significant implications for thinking about the bearing of form on ontology: namely that, for Sedgwick, the texturized valences of touch are implicated in, rather than a violent displacement from, the symbolic economy of the human.

    In theorizing touch, might we trouble the presumption that aesthetics, subjectivity, and desire – or more precisely their entwinement – are necessarily embedded within the normative regime of the human? I am interested, in other words, in how Sedgwick’s observations on touch might occasion, even as they displace, a different set of interrelated questions regarding ontological mattering and the fashioning of aesthetic subjectivity. Calvin Warren’s assertion that “[q]ueer theory’s ‘closeted humanism’ reconstitutes the ‘human’ even as it attempts to challenge and, at times, erase it,” demands we reconsider any theory (about the queerness) of touch that has yet to grapple with its universalist underpinnings. It would seem that queer theory, even one as vigorously attuned to the textured rediscovery of minor forms as Sedgwick’s, nevertheless conceives desire, sexuality, and gender as co-extensive with the erotic architecture of the (queerly differentiated/differentiating) human subject. Suffering may be aestheticized, but it is not reckoned with as an ontological imposition – as a “grammar,” to use Frank B. Wilderson’s language[13] – out of which an aesthesis necessarily emerges.

    Insofar as texxture bears the inscription of its material conditions of possibility, it should direct us toward a genealogy of substance at odds with surface appearance. At stake is what film scholar Laura Marks theorizes under the rubric of the haptic[14] – the tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive dimensions of touch, the irreducibly haptic valences of touch that pressure prevailing distinctions between substance and surface, inside and outside, body and flesh. A question at once animated and omitted by queer theory’s inquiries into touch: how to theorize texxture with regard to a history of bodily wounding occasioned by touch, when it is texxture that is seized upon by the various proxies for touch that willingly or inadvertently redouble racial fantasies of violation? Thinking the haptic irreducibility of the aesthetic requires constant re-attunement to the violence touch occasions and to the violations which occasion touch. If touch is ultimately inextricable from the aesthetic economy of worldly humanity, then, apropos Saidiya Hartman, we are compelled to think about the violence that resides in our habits of worlding.[15]

    Without even addressing the massive implications that attend the frequent conflation of being with body, what cleaves to being within the context of critical theory’s alternately residual or unapologetic phenomenology, is a corporeal subject whose situatedness within and for the world is not only predetermined, but whose predetermination is taken for granted as the condition of possibility for sentient touch. Such unwitting Calvinism, which would seem to take Merleau-Ponty at his word when he declares that “every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and being taken,”[16] inevitably reproduces and rubs up against a foundational schism: being taken, where the traces of an inflective doubling disclose a morphological distinction at the level of species-being.[17] Just as the tectonics of touch – their quakes and strains, fractures and fault lines, accretions and exfoliations – can hardly be taken for simply surface phenomena, neither can they be assumed to unfold upon a universal plane of experience, or to obtain between essentially analogous subjects within a common field of relation (a fact betrayed by the nominative excess which threatens to spill from the very word, “field”). Touch cannot be understood apart from the irreducibly racial valences and demarcations of corporeality in the wake of transatlantic slavery.

    In her landmark essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers theorizes one of the central cleavages of the modern world, wrought and sundered in the cataclysmic passages of racial slavery: that of body and flesh, which Spillers takes as the foremost distinction “between captive and liberated subjects-positions”:

    before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies – some of them female – out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.[18]

    Flesh is before the body in a dual sense. On the one hand, as Alexander Weheliye stresses, flesh is “a temporal and conceptual antecedent to the body[.]”[19] The body, which may be taken to stand for “legal personhood qua self-possession,”[20] is violently produced through the “high crimes against the flesh.” On the other hand, flesh is before the body in that it is everywhere subject to and at the disposal of the body. The body is cleaved from flesh, while flesh is serially cleaved by the body. As Fred Moten suggests, the body only emerges through the disciplining of flesh.[21]

    This diametric arrangement of corporeal exaltation and abjection is registered, as Spillers emphasizes, in “the tortures and instruments of captivity,” those innumerable, unspeakable brutalities by which flesh is irrevocably marked:

    The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose – eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol; the bullet.[22]

    The unspeakability of such woundings, however, is not merely a function of their terror and depravity, but rather a consequence of the ways flesh has been made to bear the conditions of im/possibility of and for a semiotics which takes itself to be the very foundation of language, at least in its modern dissimulations.[23] In Moten’s illumination, “[t]he value of the sign, its necessary relation to the possibility of (a universal science of and a universal) language, is only given in the absence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech— its essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an immaterial border or by a differentializing inscription.”[24] Thus, when Spillers writes that “[t]hese undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural by seeing skin color[,]”[25] we may surmise that what Frantz Fanon termed “epidermalization” – the process by which a “historico-racial schema” is violently imposed upon the skin, that which, for the Black, forecloses the very possibility of assuming a body (to borrow Gayle Salamon’s turn of phrase) – is, among other things, a mechanism of semiotic concealment.[26] (R.A. Judy refers to it as “something like [flesh]…being parenthesized.”)[27] What is hidden and rehidden, the open secret alternately buried within and exposed upon the skin, is not merely a system of corporeal apartheid, but moreover what Spillers identifies as the vestibularity of flesh to culture. “This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside.”[28]

    Speaking at a conference day I curated for the Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy in 2018, entitled “There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude,” Spillers revisited her classic essay, drawing out its implications for thinking through questions of touch and hapticality.[29] For Spillers, touch “might be understood as the gateway to the most intimate experience and exchange of mutuality between subjects, or taken as the fundamental element of the absence of self-ownership…it defines at once, in the latter instance, the most terrifying personal and ontological feature of slavery’s regimes across the long ages.”[30] To meaningfully reckon with “the contradictory valences of the haptic” is to “attempt an entry into this formidable paradox, which unfolds a troubled intersubjective legacy – and, perhaps, troubled to the extent that one of these valences of touch is not walled off from the other, but haunts it, shadows it, as its own twin possibility.”[31] Spillers follows with an unavoidable question: “did slavery across the Americas rupture ties of kinship and filiation so completely that the eighteenth century demolishes what Constance Classen, in The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, calls a ‘tactile cosmology’?” If so, then the dimensions of touch which are understood as “curative, healing, erotic, [or] restorative” cannot be held apart from the myriad “violation[s] of the boundaries of the ego in the enslaved, that were not yet accorded egoistic status, or, in brief, subjecthood, subjectivity.”[32]

    Touch, then, evokes the vicious, desperate attempts of the white, the settler, to feign the ontic verity, stability, and immutability of an irreducibly racial subject-object (non-)relation through what Frank Wilderson would call “gratuitous violence”[33] as much as it does the corporeal life of intra- and intersubjective relationality and encounter. If even critical discourse on these latter, corporeal happenings tends to assume the facticity of the juridically sanctioned pretense to self-possession Spillers calls “bodiedness,” then “flesh describes an alien entity,” a corporeal formation fundamentally unable to “ward off another’s touch…[who] may be invaded or entered or penetrated, so to speak, by coercive power” in any given place or moment. It is, in other words, precisely “the captive body’s susceptibility to being touched [which] places this body on the side of the flesh,”[34] a susceptibility which is not principally historical, but ontological, even as flesh constitutes, to borrow Moten’s phrasing, “a general and generative resistance to what ontology can think[.]”[35] Spillers brings us to the very threshold of feeling, where to be cast on the side of the flesh is to inhabit the cut between existence and ontology. Black life is being-touched.

    How might we bring such knowledge to bear upon our understanding of different aesthetic practices, forms, and traditions? What if Theodor Adorno’s conception of the “shudder” experienced by the subject in his ephemeral encounter with a “genuine relation to art,” that “involuntary comportment” which is “a memento of the liquidation of the I,”[36] must be understood as the corporeal expression of a subject whose conditions of existence sustain the fantasy of being-untouched? How might such an interpretation serve not simply to foreground an indictment, but also aspire to linger with the political, ethical, and analytic questions that emerge from the entanglements of hapticality, aesthetics, and violence, questions which are unavoidable for those given to blackness? “The hold’s terrible gift,” Moten and Harney maintain, “was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a new feel in the undercommons.”[37] And, as Moten has subsequently reminded us, violence cannot be excised from the materiality of this terrible gift, which is none other than black art:

    Black art neither sutures nor is sutured to trauma. There’s no remembering, no healing. There is, rather, a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the metaphysics upon which the idea of redress is grounded.[38]

    Black art promises neither redemption nor emancipation. The “transcendent power” that Peter de Bolla, for example, finds gloriously manifest by an artwork such as Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, that encounter with a “timeless…elemental beauty” which constitutes “one of the basic building blocks of our shared culture, our common humanity,”[39] is a fabrication of a structure of aesthetic experience that is wholly unavailable to the black, who, after all, has never been human. If Immanuel Kant, as the preeminent architect of modern European aesthetic philosophy, understood art to emerge precisely in its separation from nature, as “a work of man,”[40]then it is clear his transcendental aesthetic is not the province of black art. For, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, modernity’s “arsenal of raciality” places the black before the “scene of nature,” as “as affectable things…subjected to the determination of both the ‘laws of nature’ and other coexisting things.”[41] Black art, in all its earthly perversity, emerges in the absence and refusal of the capacity to claim difference as separation, as that which instead touches and is touched by the beauty and terrors of entanglement, “a composition which is always already a recomposition and a decomposition of prior and posterior compositions.”[42] Whatever its (anti-)formal qualities, black art proceeds from enfleshment, from the immanent brutalities and minor experiments of the haptic, the cuts and woundings of which it cannot help but bear. Black art materializes in and as a metaphysical impossibility, as that which, in Moten’s words, “might pierce the distinction between the biological and the symbolic…as the continual disruption of the very idea of (symbolic) value, which moves by way of the reduction of substance…[as] the reduction to substance (body to flesh) is inseparable from the reduction of substance.”[43] Hapticality is a way of naming an analytics of touch that cannot be, let alone appear, within the onto-epistemological confines of the (moribund) world, a gesture with and towards the abyssal revolution and devolution of the sensorium to which black people have already been subject, an enfleshment of the “difference without separability”[44] that has been and will be the condition of possibility for “life in the ruins.”[45]

    _____

    Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching focuses on the study of contemporary art and aesthetics at the intersections of film, literature, poetry, contemporary art and performance. Her scholarly approach to artistic practices in global black cultural production expands and develops frameworks for thinking across these contexts, specifically in relation to contemporary aesthetic theory.  She has published articles in TDR: The Drama Review, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, and Film Quarterly, and is currently working on two book projects.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1.

    [2] Ibid., back cover.

    [3] Ibid., 6.

    [4] Ibid., 13.

    [5] Ibid., 14.

    [6] Ibid., 14-15.

    [7] Ibid., 15.

    [8] Ibid.

    [9] Ibid., 16, 17.

    [10] Ibid., 21.

    [11] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012), 73.

    [12] Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986).

    [13] See, in particular, Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

    [14] Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). My reading of Marks is in turn inestimably shaped by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s elaboration of hapticality in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013), 97-99; see also the special issue I guest edited for Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, “The Haptic: Textures of Performance,” vol. 24, no. 2-3 (2014).

    [15] This was a formulation made by Hartman in our conversation during my curated event for the Serpentine Galleries, London. “Hapticality, Waywardness, and the Practice of Entanglement: A Study Day with Saidiya Hartman,” 8 July, 2017.

    [16] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 266.

    [17] Cf. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964).

    [18] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, Volume 17, Number 2 (Summer 1987), 64-81, 67.

    [19] Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 39. For a contrasting interpretation, see R.A. Judy’s brilliant, recently published, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), xvi, 210: “flesh is with and not before the body and person, and the body and person are with and not before or even after the flesh.”

    [20] Weheliye (2014), 39.

    [21] Fred Moten, “Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy” (Part Two), b2o: An Online Journal (6 May 2020).

    [22] Spillers (1987), 67.

    [23] R.A. Judy takes up these questions surrounding flesh and what he terms “para-semiosis,” or “the dynamic of differentiation operating in multiple multiplicities of semiosis that converge without synthesis[,]” with characteristic erudition in Sentient Flesh (2020), xiiv.

    [24] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 13.

    [25] Spillers (1987), 67.

    [26] Fanon (1986). Gayle Solamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and the Rhetorics of Masculinity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

    [27] Judy (2020), 207.

    [28] Spillers (1987), 67. For one of Fred Moten’s more pointed engagements with this formulation from Spillers, see “The Touring Machine (Flesh Thought Inside Out),” in Stolen Life (consent not to be a single being) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 161-182.

    [29] Hortense Spillers, “To the Bone: Some Speculations on Touch,” There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude, Stedelijk Museum of Art and Studium Generale Rietveld Academy, 23 March 2018, keynote address.

    [30] Ibid.

    [31] Ibid. Emphasis added.

    [32] Ibid.

    [33] Wilderson, 2010.

    [34] Spillers (2018). As these quotations are drawn from Spillers’s talk rather than a published text, the emphasis placed on the word being is inferred from her spoken intonation.

    [35] Moten (2018), 176.

    [36] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1997), 333.

    [37] Moten and Harney (2013), 97.

    [38] Fred Moten, Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being), (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), ix.

    [39] Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 28.

    [40] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), 184.

    [41] Denise Ferreira da Silva, “The Scene of Nature,” in Justin Desautels-Stein & Christopher Tomlins (eds.), Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 275-289, 276. For an important study of modernity’s “racial regime of aesthetics,” see David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

    [42] Denise Ferreira da Silva, “In the Raw,” e-flux, Journal #93 (September 2018).

    [43] Fred Moten (2018), 174.

    [44] Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Difference without Separability,” Catalogue of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo – INCERTEZA VIVA (2016), 57-65.

    [45] Cf. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

  • Margaret Ferguson — Doing Some of the Work: Grief, Fear, Hope

    Margaret Ferguson — Doing Some of the Work: Grief, Fear, Hope

    by Margaret Ferguson

    Throughout the long first months of the pandemic—from March to November 2020—I volunteered as a phonebanker for “Indivisible Yolo,” the local chapter of a national movement devoted to defeating Trump and electing Democrats up and down the ballot. We partnered with a group called “Sister District CA 3,” which focuses on electing progressives to state legislatures including those shaped by Republican gerrymandering efforts. I was able to devote quite a lot of time to this volunteer effort because I am retired from teaching and no longer have children at home.

    The Indivisible movement began in an informal “grief counseling session”—a meeting of friends in Austin, Texas in November 2016 attended by two former congressional staffers, Leah Greenberg and her husband Ezra Levin, when they were in Austin for Thanksgiving.  Returning to their home in Washington, D.C., they and nearly three dozen thirty-something friends collaborated in an effort to turn their grief about the election into action. They composed a 23-page Google Doc handbook called “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda”; Levin tweeted a link to the document with this message: “Please share w/ your friends to help fight Trump’s racism, authoritarianism, & corruption on their home turf.”[1]

    Adapting ideas drawn both from their own experiences with members of Congress and from tactics used by the Tea Party in its successful efforts to block Barack Obama’s agenda in 2010, the Indivisible guide went viral, and was shared by people with Twitter followings much larger than those of the document’s authors: among the amplifiers were Robert Reich, Jonathan Chait, George Takei, and Miranda July. Less than two months after its publication, more than 3,800 local groups called “Indivisibles” had formed to support the movement. It developed a website where the Guide was continuously updated in Spanish and English, and only a few weeks after Trump’s Inauguration, the fledgling movement became a 501(c) organization. Levin drily remarked that “The last thing the progressive ecosystem really needed was yet another nonprofit,” but in this case, the organization thrived.  The protests it organized at the local level have been credited with, among other things, making it hard—and eventually impossible—for the Republican party to pass a “replacement” for the Affordable Care Act.[2]

    Different Indivisible groups have focused on different—and multiple–actions during the Trump era, frequently collaborating with other groups such as the Working Families Party and the Women’s March. What drew me to the local group in my Northern California town was its slogan of “Do the Work”—an alternative to watching TV news and wringing one’s hands—and the congenial community of activists it had created.  Like others, I was excited when we were able to rent office space near Interstate 80 in March as we geared up for work during the election year; many of us had written post cards since 2016 and had canvassed in person for Democrats in 2018, but in early March this past spring, we would finally have our own space for organizing.  I went to one meeting to be trained in texting potential voters, and I spent one Saturday morning cutting sheets of paper for postcards in the communal space. But then all organizing efforts had to move online as the virus swept through California and the lockdown began. The idea of not being able to knock on doors or set up registration tables—as we had done in 2018—at sites such as the Woodland Community College seemed incredible. One of my Indivisible friends, a woman with whom I had carpooled when our kids were in middle school and whose organizational skills I respected greatly because we had served as co-leaders of the garbage squad for our children’s high school graduation party, asked me if I would be willing to consider phonebanking. I said no.  I told her that I am much too much of an introvert to do that kind of work. Plus I hate it when strangers call me out of the blue, so how could I make calls to strangers myself?

    My friend, a scientist at the University of California at Davis, suggested that I read some of the research on the effectiveness of different methods of communicating with potential voters. With the help of other Indivisible members, I did that work,  starting with the valuable article “Lessons on GOTV Experiments” published by Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy Studies, with further bibliography.  The authors give their highest mark of certainty—3 stars—to research studies finding that “personalized methods and messages work better” and that, after canvassing, with its face to face encounters, phone calls by humans (as opposed to robots) and also by volunteers (as opposed to paid operatives) are most effective. Though I’m still perplexed about what exactly the evidence is for this conclusion (exit polls? follow up calls?), I did come to believe that I should add phoning to the other things I was doing, namely postcarding and texting. The former action was boring but also satisfying: I found myself enjoying the mild challenges of fitting the words of a script into the allotted space and using different colored pens for my best grade-school handwriting efforts. But of course one never got any response to a postcard. Our campaigns were carefully chosen for maximum impact and I had really enjoyed writing cards with other volunteers before the pandemic forced us to write at home by ourselves. I had also enjoyed sending texts, which I learned to do for the Environmental Voters Project at the Indivisible-Sister District office just before it shut down. Texting brought a few positive responses including requests for further information; and it was incredibly fast: I could send 50 texts in less time than it took me to write one postcard. But most of the text responses told me just to STOP –or to do something bad to myself or to my mother, who is dead. I continued to text and write postcards, but I decided I should at least try to make phone calls too. Naively, I thought I could conquer my fear of calling strangers if I called as a member of a group of volunteers who shared information about best practices and stories about “memorable” calls—good and terrible—during Zoom meetings.

    I’m deeply grateful that I was able to phonebank during meetings which included training on issues, tech support, and hosts who sent email reports after every session detailing the number of calls we had collectively made and which we reported (another small pleasure) in daily tallies—over 106,000 by November 3. But I never did get over my fear of phoning—a fear that became enmeshed with my larger and darker fear about the possibility of a Trump victory. My stomach tightened every time I lifted my cell phone for manual dialing sessions, and my stomach was even more upset when I attempted to use the “hub dialing” system that Indivisible and allied groups such as “Flip the West” considered to be the most efficient way of reaching potential voters. When you login to a hub-dialing system, a distant computer does the dialing for you and you get many fewer wrong numbers, busy signals, and disconnected phone lines than you do when you are dialing voters directly from a list supplied by a campaign. The downside of hub dialing, for me, is that the caller is not in charge of the timing of a connection; it could take many minutes (during which some supposedly calming piece of music would play again and again); or it could come just seconds after you had completed your previous call. This meant that there was no time for the psychic loin-girding I needed, and there was often not enough time to compose my face into the smile that experienced phone bankers recommend that callers wear (as it were) for every new connection. Voters can hear you smile, I was told. And although  each campaign we participated in gave us scripts that came up on our computer screen for us to follow as the call unfurled, we couldn’t follow the scripts slavishly. The voter’s tone of voice and specific concerns (including sometimes strong concerns about being contacted at all) shaped what we might say from the first seconds of the call through the farewell.

    Our phonebanking team was supporting several Senate races, and I was particularly invested in Theresa Greenfield’s in Iowa. Her staff provided excellent (and frequently updated) scripts for both manual and hub dialing, and I learned enough about her positions to be able to engage in substantive conversations with some Iowa voters. I also learned a good deal about the progressive candidates our group was supporting in Georgia (Jasmine Clark for District 108) and in Arizona (Doug Ervin for State Senate and Judy Schwiebert for State House in Legislative District 20). Clark and Schwiebert won last week; Ervin alas did not, and has modeled adult behavior by conceding to his opponent. I hope he runs again.

    The first campaign I joined involved manual dialing for California Congressman Josh Harder. He was running for re-election in the 10th District, and his campaign was what veteran callers considered an easy one for neophytes. We were mostly calling registered Democrats and the script was good: it directed us to ask about what the Congressman could do for the constituent during the COVID pandemic before we asked the voter to support or volunteer for Harder. There was no request for money, to my great relief, and it turned out that a number of people I called did indeed have problems that they hoped the Congressman could solve. One man in his mid thirties (the information on the screen gave us the voter’s age and party affiliation) was having a terrible time getting a bank loan for his small business from the CARES Act. I got his email address, called Indivisible’s liaison with Harder’s office, laid out the problem, and learned that Harder, who had taught business at Modesto Junior College after working for a venture capital firm in San Francisco, would brainstorm with his staff about helping this constituent get a loan from a smaller (and evidently more flexible) bank. I called this voter back later in the day and he said he’d heard from Harder’s staff and had hope, for the first time in weeks, that he wouldn’t have to let his fifteen employees go.  People I called for Harder did hang up on me and a few swore at me for interrupting their day, but a goodly number of people I spoke to described problems to me that I then relayed to the Congressman’s staff. One woman, in her 80s, needed groceries delivered; another, much younger, wanted to be put in touch with other parents who were trying to home school their elementary school age children.  Some of the people I called didn’t support the Congressman at all or disagreed with his position on some issues, but if the voter didn’t hang up on me within the first ten seconds, we often had civil conversations; in many cases the person on the other end of the line thanked me. Josh Harder won his race on November 3.

    The most rewarding phoning work I did during this long (and still unfinished) election season was for Reclaim our Vote, a non-partisan voting rights initiative founded by an African American woman, Andrea Miller, as part of the non profit organization “Center for Common Ground.” ROV collaborates with many other groups including Black Voters Matter, the Virginia Poor People’s Campaign, Mi Familia Vota, Religious Action Center for Reformed Judaism, and the American Ethical Union. ROV aims to counter the “[o]ngoing voter suppression and voter list purging [that] have been disenfranchising millions of eligible voters — especially voters of color.” As the organization explains on the page of its website that encourages new volunteers to join, the focus is on “voter suppression states” in the south. The campaigns, designed county by county, seek to “inform and mobilize voters of color to make sure they are registered and they know how to get a ballot and vote.”  Volunteers join a ranbow coalition and are welcomed from around the country. The training materials include an interactive video especially for introverts and note that shy people may be especially good at this work because it involves listening as much as speaking. The trainers gently remind middle class white people like me that not everyone shares the sense of time (and self importance) that regards phone calls from strangers as an annoying infringement of personal space. Dialing manually to people on the ROV lists was, for me, both satisfying and unnerving.  So many phones were disconnected, so many people simply didn’t answer, that I could and did make 30 calls in an hour with no human contacts at all.  (My Indivisible colleagues interpreted such sessions as “cleaning the phone lists” for the campaign.) The scripts were straightforwardly informational; this was not a “persuasion” campaign but an effort to help people who might want to vote do so as easily as possible during a pandemic in a state where they might have been dropped from the rolls even though they believed they were registered. We could and did direct them to websites that would tell them if they were registered or not, but the ROV scripts acknowledged that the person being called might not have access to a computer. In that case, we gave them phone numbers for their county’s Voter Registration office. I imagined that giving someone that information might lead simply to long waits and frustration. But in at least three cases where I made the call to the Registrar on behalf of someone I had talked with, the official picked up right away and was extremely helpful.  After talking to a young woman who wanted to vote but who didn’t know her polling place in Navajo County, Arizona, for instance, I spoke with an official who said she could get me that information if I had the would-be voter’s date of birth. I hadn’t thought to ask for that information. But then the official said she’d do some further research and get back to me.  She did, within fifteen minutes, telling me not only the address of the polling place but also suggesting that the voter could get a free ride from LYFT since the distance was substantial. I called the young woman back and we had a conversation—surprising but intense–about our mothers. Both of them had been ardent Democrats.

    I often thought about my mother as I learned to do the work of phonebanking during these months of being isolated at home. She died in 2015, and the only good thing about that is that she didn’t have to know about Hillary Clinton’s loss of the presidency. I talked about Clinton with an 81 year-old voter in Georgia with whom I spoke on the last weekend before the election when our Indivisible group was having a 45 hour call marathon (7 a.m. to 8 p.m for 3 days) to oust President 45. The person I reached through the ROV list wanted to vote and had asked for an absentee ballot. It hadn’t come, or she didn’t think it had come, but she was pretty sure that she had requested it. She had voted for Hillary and she wanted to vote for Kamala and Biden. I asked her for her mailing address and had just taken it down when we got cut off (that happened not infrequently in my phoning experience). I was very upset about losing her voice.  I called the Registrar of her county (Cobb) and explained that I was calling on behalf of a voter who hadn’t recevied her absentee ballot.  The official, like the one from Navajo County with whom I’d spoken earlier, picked up right away and said she would try to help.  Again, I had failed to get a crucial piece of information—again, the voter’s birth date. Nonetheless, the official said she would track the voter down and she did, in short order; she called me back to say that there was no record of a request for an absentee ballot, but she would call the voter herself to tell her where she should go for early in-person voting or for voting on election day. I was moved by this official’s willingness to go above and beyond what I imagine her duties are; and I dearly hope that my elderly interlocutor was able to cast her ballot.

    I’ll never know for sure (I lost her number when we got cut off).  But I do know that I’ll be volunteering for Indivisible Yolo, Sister District, and Reclaim our Vote again, attempting to participate in one form of the non-violent work of civil resistance that some scholars such as Erica Chenoweth—the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School—have recently been tracking and beginning to theorize.[3]  As part of the effort to reclaim our future, I’ll be calling this week for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia.  I fear that the road for them is uphill, but I have hope that by electing them from a state that has already turned blue because of massive grassroots efforts inspired in part by Stacey Abrams, voters will allow a genuinely progressive Democratic agenda to see the light of day, despite the current Administration’s efforts to keep that possibility shrouded in dusk.

    [1]Charles Bethea, “The Crowdsourced Guide to Fighting Trump’s Agenda,” The New Yorker, December 26, 2016, retrieved 9 November 2020.

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indivisible_movement and David Wiegel, “Left out of AHCA fight, Democrats let their grass roots lead — and win,” Washington Post, ch 24, 2017, retrieved November 9, 2020.

    [3]For an account of Chenoweth’s contribution to the recent civil resistance work, see Andrew Marantz, “How to Stop a Power Grab,” The New Yorker, November 16, 2020; retrieved 15 November 2020. 

     

  • Bruce Robbins — Return of the Plague

    Bruce Robbins — Return of the Plague

    by Bruce Robbins

    The period of intense anxiety that did not begin with Joe Biden’s undeclared electoral victory on November 3, 2020 and that has now (on November 15th) been stretched to the breaking point by the incumbent’s refusal to concede and by fears that he is preparing a coup attempt—this is not the ideal sort of moment for humanist academics to weigh in about. On the whole, we tend to write on a slower and more reflective timescale. We wait for the dust to settle. At least I do. I talk about books for a living, most of them books that weren’t published yesterday. When big news is being announced hour by hour and even minute by minute, each item potentially big enough to alter the political landscape and even to make it unrecognizable, my impulse is to shut up and listen.

    I will match my personal disgust for the incumbent with anyone’s, blow for blow, round for round, point for point. But the spectacle would not be edifying. About the 70,000,000 who voted for him despite knowing what they might not have known about him in 2016 but had ample chance to find out over the past four years, I am no longer willing to bend over backwards, as so many of us did four years ago, putting most of the blame on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee for going to Wall Street instead of to Michigan and Wisconsin. Yes, that’s what they did, and odds are they’ll do it again, just as the pollsters will undercount the Trump voters of Michigan and Wisconsin again. Where racism and sexism and xenophobia are concerned, when those who are privileged by their whiteness and maleness and Americanness continue to translate equality as oppression, we are in for a very long haul.

    Still, my own privilege has occasioned one small qualifying thought about the 70,000,000. I am cushioned both from the coronovirus and from its economic consequences: I can work from home, and my income has been unaffected.  I am not threatened with eviction. I do not own a small business that could very well go under for good. I am imagining, not having consulted such figures as are no doubt available, that a certain percentage of these Trump voters, and perhaps especially the slightly higher proportion of people of color who voted for him this time over last time, were inspired to do so by the pandemic. Not, of course, because they think Trump has dealt with it competently and responsibly, but because they have been rendered so economically desperate that they simply can’t take any more. Under those circumstances, I can conceive that Biden’s nuanced position on the pandemic would read simply as “lockdown” and Trump’s open-up-the-economy position would read as their only hope, in spite of the health risks to themselves and their loved ones. This thought helps me avoid falling into the “deplorables” trap, which this go-round has become harder to steer clear of.

    While awaiting January 20th and the vaccine, relatively optimistic about both, I read books, think about them, teach them remotely.

    The June 2020 issue of Harper’s includes a letter written by Albert Camus in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of France. Camus, whose novel The Plague (1947) has been enjoying a large and easily understandable revival since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, says what he is called upon to say on behalf of the Resistance: “the only chance we have of improving our fate is to act, organize, and stay vigilant.” But the letter’s most striking words are “anguish” and “uncertainty.” For “we are watching history run its course, and know nothing about the intentions of those in charge.” You can see he feels that the intentions that matter, the intentions that dictate the course history will run, are the intentions of “those in charge,” not our intentions, and this is one reason for all the uncertainty and doubt, even about joining the Resistance. This also holds for the fictional plague-ridden Oran he was then inventing, which seen in retrospect takes some of its emotional too-bigness from the French occupation of Algeria (something Camus notoriously didn’t know what to do with) as well as the Nazis, and for that matter also from the historical plagues he was researching in order to write the novel. When the plague struck in the past, as he was learning, very little useful knowledge was available as to where it came from or what to do about it.

    In today’s plague, however, useful knowledge is available. Actions and consequences have been pretty well aligned. Places whose leaders have done the right thing have reaped the benefits of their actions—a flattened curve, a drop in infections and mortality, the availability of equipment and hospital beds for when a next wave hits. Europe, where people got complacent and got hit by a second wave, is now locking down and already seeing the benefits of doing so. Places whose leaders haven’t done the right thing, like the US, have reaped the whirlwind, and will keep reaping it. To our vast surprise, history has made sense.

    Is there a larger moral here? Acknowledging the absurdity or existential meaninglessness of things always makes you seem smart, and in a time of pandemic that disabused tone may even be inevitable. Who wants to sound dumb? But maybe intentions and consequences are not always mysteriously fated to misalign. Maybe the times demand that we read not just Camus, but H.G. Wells (see the NYRB July 23, 2020). Maybe we have underestimated the extent to which history, pace Camus, does after all have some meaningful outlines.

    Camus is not wrong, on the other hand, when he suggests at the end of The Plague that plagues always come back. His plague is not just pre-modern, in the sense of being inexplicable; it is also metaphorical. It is inside all of us. That’s why it repeats and repeats, rendering history absurd. Wrong conclusion, but I am a little more inclined to forgive Camus for striking that “myth of Sisyphus” note even here, even about something as unfunny as a plague, because like many others I have also been re-reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and Atwood makes more sense of the return of the plague. People forget that the immediate cause of the Christian reactionary coup in The Handmaid’s Tale is another plague, a plague of infertility caused by environmental toxicity. From this environmental perspective, Atwood’s pre-coup past doesn’t look so very good after all. She allows us to feel a certain subtle ambivalence even toward the austerity of the post-coup present, despite its hypocrisies and its violent authoritarianism. These are signs of a novel’s greatness. Like the MaddAddam trilogy that followed it, The Handmaid’s Tale is a prep session for the future plagues that have to be expected, after the inevitable relief that will follow the arrival of a vaccine and having an adult in the White House, as long as we keep steamrolling biodiversity and, more generally, mistreating the planet as we have been in the bipartisan habit of mistreating it.

  • Anthony Bogues — Chaos and the Trumpian Project

    Anthony Bogues — Chaos and the Trumpian Project

    by Anthony Bogues

    Chaos. Authoritarian political figures thrive on manipulating events creating grounds in which liberal normality seems to be one which invites disaster from which the authoritarian can intervene to steady the ship even if heads have to be cracked. But there is a twist to Trump’s political practice, authoritarian figure that he is, his political project now requires constant chaos. Not in order for him and his ruling regime to intervene with any steady hand rather it is about enacting permanent chaos as a tactic of rule first to erode the liberal state and establish the illiberal democratic project and then secondly to create the new political ground after his electoral defeat. Permanent chaos creates situations where the balance of social forces is in constant flux. In a period of crisis, it consolidates and energizes a section of the population that is committed to the authoritarian figure.

    Trump has been defeated electorally but Trumpism has not been and there is in Trump’s political eyes the need to reorganize and give it a new lease on life. In enacting this kind of political activity, Trump’s narcissistic personality becomes a political force. Trumpism is a political configuration that is a mosaic of ideas and American political practice. At its foundation is the idea of exclusive  white citizenship based upon  an interpretation of the 1790 naturalization act, white patriarchy, the reinterpretation of some  Christian ideas (for example one Trump supporter proclaimed that  the election represented the partial victory of the Great Satan) as well as a long discursive American history in which conspiracy explains all  events. This mosaic  of ideas rests upon a notion of individual liberty rooted in self-possession untethered from  the social (which is why  the wearing of masks became  a political statement) unless it is an imagined community which can occasionally be called into being, hence  the  MAGA rallies and  their centrality  to the Trumpian project. Of course, that imagined community itself is based upon whiteness.

    The Trump mantra that “We won but the election was rigged“ fits neatly within the realm of conspiracy theory and calls upon supporters to redouble their efforts the next time.  It prepares them for other moves to create chaos. The main purpose of this mantra is not to delegitimize an electoral result but to create the ground for a more protracted struggle based on chaos. The purpose is establish political obstacles for the Biden regime in an effort to unsettle it. There are other actions as well, ones which spell out the character of the Trump regime and the ways it deepens neoliberalism. Thus, for example there is a proposal to fast track a new set of regulations which would speed up lines in the poultry industry and another that would turn workers into independent contractors. All these are efforts to deregulate the liberal state under the guise of unbridled market freedom. We are into unknown political waters in American politics. While many of us focus on the unconventional ways in which the transition is proceeding or not, and fear a coup, Trump and his political friends are seeding the ground for a longer-term struggle in which they will politically further unsettle the American liberal state. So as we think about Trumpism and the current moment where what Stuart Hall calls “class democracies” attempt to stabilize themselves  to resume a liberal normal we must be careful  not to be carried away with the noise of the tweet, but pay attention to the overall Trumpian political project and how it might unfold in the near future.

  • David Simpson — About “Bedwetting Democrats”

    David Simpson — About “Bedwetting Democrats”

    by David Simpson

    The phrase is James Carville’s. It slipped by without comment during an MSNBC interview just before the election results began to come in. Carville blustered that only “bedwetting Democrats” would doubt the upcoming Biden landslide, already in the bag. The remark is offensive in any number of ways, not least to those many people who suffer from incontinence. The posture of aggressive masculinism fits well with Carville’s dogged good-old-boy self-projection. A one-time Bill Clinton warhorse, Carville never appears on TV without a US Marine Corps cap or sweatshirt, sometimes both. Perhaps he has anxieties of other sorts than election results. Anyway, I felt like punching him out for suggesting that anyone with doubts about the election had to be some sort of psycho-physiological failure, a wimp. It brought back memories of “pointy-headed intellectuals.”

    He was, of course, completely wrong. It was a very close election in a number of key states, notwithstanding Biden’s massive victory in the popular vote. But some seventy million people voted for Trump. If they are being fooled—and some surely are—then they have been fooled twice, and after relentless and seemingly unignorable evidence that Trump himself has proved completely deficient and deplorable in almost every way. Others, it must be assumed, are getting exactly what they want.

    Like many of our sort, I have been depressed since the 2016 election, not least about the evidence that there is little if anything I can do to change things. I took some grim solace from looking back at Richard Hofstadter’s wonderful 1962 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which reminds us that Trump can be seen as just one more scoundrel in a tradition of con-men, self-merchandisers and reactionaries who have on a pretty regular basis captured popular support by denouncing expertise. But this is hardly consolation. Nor is it cheering to be made aware once again that the American tradition is one founded from the very first in an apparently intractable racism, and that every step away from it has been bitterly and violently contested by reassertions of white suprematism. Intellectuals have pointed this out over and over again, and are still doing so. It seems not to matter much to the march of history. Even charismatic leftist intellectuals like Chomsky and Said, known and listened to all over the rest of the world, get no exposure in the mainstream American media. There seem to be even fewer opportunities for most of us to contribute in a professional capacity, except in the classroom, to the redirection of a fundamentally unjust world.

    And yet . . . giving in to the too-much-TV syndrome has brought me to the wonderful MSNBC daily show, The Reidout, where host Joy Reid has produced a whole string of superbly gifted and mostly black politicians and commentators, including the amazing Stacey Abrams, who seem to know exactly what is happening and why. They are the talk-shop wing of the Black Lives Matter movement, but some of them are also on the streets, and they leave little doubt that if the votes can be assembled there is a deep pool of talent, many of them women, standing ready to redirect national politics. A few already hold office. But can the votes be assembled? What will it take for a realignment large enough to put enough such persons into significant governmental power?

    On good days I think that this may already be happening. Events in Georgia are hugely encouraging. The nonwhite vote, and especially the black vote, is going to be at the heart of any future for the left. But even in white majority Maine, one Green Party candidate for State Senate, Chloe Maxmin, won in a rural district that otherwise went for Republican Senator Susan Collins, attributing her own success to “deep canvassing,” talking at length to voters instead of just leaving leaflets at the door and ticking boxes. Would I know how to talk to “them,” getting beyond the Trump signs and American flags on the porches in search of some sort of common ground? Is Trump’s base dominantly made up of ugly white racists with a desire for violent acting-out? Are there seventy million of such people? I don’t even know what to say to the Evangelicals who make up a large segment of Trump’s base, or to the “hundred percenters” (as Hofstadter calls such types) who see no complexity whatsoever in their commitment to banning abortion. But I could perhaps find some common ground with those who want to pursue an isolationist foreign policy, even if my reasons for considering it have less to do with the exceptional sacredness of American lives than with the conviction that American interference has as or more often been malign than positive. And there is surely a discussion to be had about climate change, or about protectionism and free trade, even if it will not resolve the incremental loss of traditional manufacturing jobs.

    The fact is, of course, that I don’t know any Trump voters; or, to wax Rumsfeldian, I don’t know whether I know any. I’ve had loud disagreements with my British relatives about Brexit, but I’ve known them forever, I grew up with them, and I know they won’t pull a gun. During the run up to the election, there were fewer signs in our suburban college-town neighborhood than I have ever seen before on similar occasions. People were keeping their heads down. My wife was spending hours on the phone banks but she was calling out of state—Georgia, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas and so on, on behalf of down-ballot progressives who seemed to have a chance. When one of her voters told her to fuck off, it was over the phone and a thousand miles away. Our town and our state are overwhelmingly Democrat, but I have to think that the parsimonious signage was both self-protective, a fear of Trump’s goon squads who were rumored to be in the area from time to time, and also a refusal to participate in a spectacle that had been so wholly adopted by the nasties: the honking, flag waving, paintballing convoys and assemblies that appeared on the national news.

    One thing seems clear: we should not give much credence to those pundits and politicos who are intoning a reverence for “the American people” as driven by core values of decency and peaceable decision-making. At this point I don’t see a traditional coup in the offing; I don’t think Trump has the support of the military (though some police departments might well pull more triggers at his beck and call than they are pulling already). But I can imagine a subversion of the deeply troublesome and vulnerable electoral college vote by a cabal of state legislatures. Or a manufactured crisis of some kind, a Reichstag Fire event, between now and January 20th. Nothing probable, perhaps, but definitely conceivable. Enough so to suggest that we must all be on maximum alert and be prepared at the very minimum to take to the streets. Another of Richard Hofstadter’s important contributions was a study of the paranoid style in American politics. But that does not mean they’re not out there. Indeed, the recent history of gerrymandering and of voter suppression stand as an examples of what amounts to a de facto coup by a thousand pseudo-legal cuts, one taking years to put into place.

    Meanwhile, one of the besetting conditions of Covidworld is loneliness. More of us are spending more time without more others than before. Sociability itself, with the Trump rallies, has been captured by the right and celebrated as a rebuttal or rebuke of scientific expertise. At such a time, I am more grateful than ever for the spirit of the collective embodied in the boundary2 effort. Not in our name sounds so much better than just not in my name.