Remember this, or against the conference paper on day 273 of Israel’s genocide in Gaza
For TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium, on Friday 5th July 2024.
Preface
Remember that declarations are things men make from their podiums, shuffling their papers whilst the world is bright red and orange, aflame. When you ask these men, with their thoughts and brains where they were when the world burned and when the conference hall windows smashed, they would simply look at you confused and say: “I was concluding.” When they run to the University for cover and lock the office door behind them and leave you on the floor with a million shattered things, maybe then we can talk about the politics of The Academy, or where they keep the matches.
Beginnings
The following is an extract of an imagined conversation I fear, between an imagined group of activists and dreamers from some new generation, and myself, my peers and colleagues:
THEM: Where were you when the world was burning?
US: At a conference.
THEM: Why did you stand still in the middle of history?
US: We had deadlines.
THEM: What about when the students set up tents on your lawn?
US: (looking ahead) We opened a bottle of red in the boardroom and sighed.
I begin here to acknowledge the inevitable failure of the conference paper in a context of overlapping crises, in an environment so resolutely hostile to liveable lives. This context, of course, is not abstract or theoretical - today is day 273 of Israel’s current genocidal campaign in Gaza, which is being decimated in front of our eyes.
Remember that the chorus of neoliberal violence sounds like wailing, the crush of boots on the cold ground, the gun cocking, the mouse clicking, the white phosphorus gas seeping, and the olive trees thumping to the ground. We know that liberal democracy will not save us but remember that the conference paper will not save us, either, at least not the one penned whilst clinging to the desk, at the top of the tower, with the noise-cancelling headphones on. Do not forget that the material conditions of liveable lives cannot be peer-reviewed. Love, or whatever kinds of social arrangements persist in a world sunk by capital, demands the kind of solidarities that cannot be contained in the edit margins, or confined to discursive terrains. They need to be touched, felt, heard and tasted. The conditions of a life in which our demands for living are the fuel and the balm all at once, in which we come up from the granular to kiss the capacious, this life demands that we see each other so that we may see the conditions of our freedom, if not only to cast light on its fictions.
Afloat in the middle of history, embedded in the world’s promise to render us unknowable, we face a call – refuse extraction. Be engulfed by a relational horizon. Remember that the apolitical fantasies of academia will crawl under your skin like mites. Do not let them tell you that the library is more life-affirming than the front line. Your job is not to write, or to make art - take flight from the studio! Leave and join the huddle like everyone else. I am advocating here not just for devotion, or some kind of other embodied revolutionary sentiment, but for tight enmeshing, diffusion, something sticky. Read this as a desire for any formation in which we are uncontainable in our efforts to bring the world into view - so that we may inhale the promise of a different one entirely, so that we drink up hope like nectar, so that it coats our throat with a battle cry.
Here is an extract of an imagined conversation I hope for, between an imagined group of activists and dreamers from a new generation, and myself, my peers and my colleagues:
THEM: Where were you when the world was burning?
US: So close to the flames that we felt our eyeballs heating up. We were wrapped and bound together, all bodies and desires enmeshed. Come to think of it, we lit the matches. And when it all went up, we stayed together.
Fragments
If we can surrender to this contention, even just for a moment, that we might refuse extraction from social relations to produce art and research, then fragments are all that we have. If we are to contend that tight, sticky relation is some kind of unwieldy, uncontainable mode, then the labour of research production will necessarily find itself consigned to the gaps between all the marching, encamping, chanting, eating and other affirming forms that mark out this vast space as the terrain of living.
This is where the fragments could live:
You spend twenty minutes on the Piccadilly line on a Saturday afternoon on your way back from the Palestine march, holding the flag, with sweat crusted on your brow. You accidentally open your front camera on the way to your notes app and you see your face up close, a black, red and green flag has softened into one crayon square on your cheek. You take a photo.
&
Outside the supermarket you pull out the shopping list on your phone, drawn up before your friends come over for dinner, in which they will bring their salacious gossip, abundant love, and many dietary requirements. You list: gluten-free carbs of any kind, vegetables, and wine.
&
Your notes app is a botanic garden, and all the long groupchat messages you send are the flowers. Between the latest message for the Solidarity Collective in the Signal group and the email address of someone who might run a teach-out - you write the name of a poetry collection you were recommended. (When they ask you about citational politics - read them this)
&
In the Yard Theatre for Pecs Pride, glitter in all the cracks, all bodies in the cracks of other bodies and you are approached by someone beautiful. They ask if they can give you their number and you readily hand over your phone – in bed the next morning you recall reading something by a writer you like, about the preconfiguration of revolutionary desires and you wonder about all the things that were written when people should have been having sex.
&
Outside Wood Green Police Station, early in the morning on the day after London Pride, you turn up for your arrestee support shift and you are sent to the corner shop. One of the people inside likes crisps, salt and vinegar, and the other one likes Irn Bru. Your phone is dead and you borrow a pen, noting this down on your hand around the arc of the club stamp. When the folks are released there are smiles and crumbs around the edges of mouths and little drops of orange liquid fall onto the pavement like neon raindrops. In the shower later that morning, you scrub your hands. You are, for a moment, glad.
Fragments are not broken things. The fragment speaks: “I was there, and I chose feeling.” How robust a thing is that! A hope then, that if we must write, let us write in fragments - because we had a job to do, which was not to seal a moment in time but to participate in the revolution, to re-organise our desires, to let some go, to muscle in, to go forth, with everybody else.
From Mariame Kaba, “everything worthwhile is done with other people”. The rest flows. Remember this.
Bibliography
Mariame Kaba and every face I have held across dinner tables, under club lights and at Collective meetings. We could have everything!