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It may sound weird to say, but I find the plainness of this dynamic comforting. There is no need for anxiety. All of the questions are answered up front. Will my company treat me fairly? No. Will the boss do the right thing and look out for us? No. Now that we have a union, can we take it easy? No. Now that we have a contract, can we assume the company will follow it? No. Won’t the company follow the laws that protect workers? No. Won’t the regulators and the courts enforce the laws that protect workers? No. Won’t the elected officials stand up on our behalf? No. Your employer will hold you down and drown you in a pool of the lowest possible wages unless you use your collective power to prevent that from happening. Better take care of yourselves, together. There will be times and places when things will go workers’ way, and that’s nice. There will sometimes be nice bosses and supportive politicians and Jennifer Abruzzos at the NLRB, and that’s something to be enjoyed. But none of that, I promise you, lasts forever under capitalism. The pendulum will swing. Right wing courts will wipe away your legal protections and greedy investors will install a cruel boss and racist voters will boot the friendly Congressman. No need to cry when it happens. We know it will happen. And we know, most importantly, that we still hold in our hands the power of our own labor. The one thing they can’t take away. We do the work. If they won’t do the right thing, we won’t work. And upon that foundation, we can build the whole thing over again. — The Hammer, Not the Handshake | Hamilton Nolan

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#maintenance art

Let me just say this about Homer. That part in the Odyssey, about the weaving and the unweaving, and the suitors. It cannot be true, not quite that way, and Homer, I think, never meant us to believe it. At home, the faithful wife, with their son, Telemachus. Weaving. On the road, Ulysses, fighting, all those years. Fighting, as it happens, to bring another man’s woman, Helen, back from Troy. But that is not the point. The point is that, through all the years Ulysses was away, doing battle in the Iliad, traveling and having adventures in the Odyssey, through all the years of the war and his return, his wife was faithfully at home. Weaving. Surrounded by suitors, it is true, but she explains the matter, or Homer does on her behalf, in this way: that she rejected the suitors, kept them all at bay, by constant daylight weaving, and the claim that she must refuse them all, until her work, this carpet, or blanket, or tapestry perhaps, in any event this piece of weaving, was complete. Then, at night, every night, she secretly unwove what she had woven by day. Unobservant, for some time, these suitors. Unobservant, too, Telemachus, a troubled child. It is hard to know, at this remove, whether the underlying situation was simply a conspiracy among the wife and suitors to conceal that she had been sleeping with one, or maybe all, of them. It is only clear that, as a faithful wife, she had two difficult circumstances to explain. The presence of the suitors, and how very little weaving she had done. Enraptured as he always was with cleverness, Ulysses believed the story. Or pretended to. After all, he slew the suitors all the same. But that his wife did not unweave by night, and therefore by implication hardly ever wove by day, we’ve known ever since we learned, not what love is, but what reporting is and what public figures are, and how much more than we were ever taught to expect is really lies.

Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

lizabeeee

new project from my good friends @jeancochrane @apidae and @sad-cow-disease abt the next Chicago mayoral election 🗳🗳🗳 read more at chano4mayor.com ✨

jeancochrane-deactivated2018121

really excited to launch chano4mayor.com today – it feels good right now to work with passionate people on developing our collective political imagination. (you could also call it fan art if you wanted to be less charitable.)

and who knows? maybe he’ll do it…

The concept of contagion evolved throughout the twentieth century through the commingling of theories about microbes and attitudes about social change. Communicable disease compels attention—for scientists and lay public alike—not only because of the devastation it can cause but also because the circulation of microbes materializes the transmission of ideas. The interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community. Disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic of human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact.

Priscilla Ward, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

Earthbound

Violence’s capacity to allow arbitrary decisions, and thus to avoid the kind of debate, clarification, and renegotiation typical of more egalitarian social relations, is obviously what allows its victims to see procedures created on the basis of violence as stupid or unreasonable. Most of us are capable of getting a superficial sense of what others are thinking or feeling just by observing their tone of voice, or body language—it’s usually not hard to get a sense of people’s immediate intentions and motives, but going beyond that superficial often takes a great deal of work. Much of the everyday business of social life, in fact, consists in trying to decipher others’ motives and perceptions. Let us call this “interpretive labor.” One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally speaking, they do not.

[...]

Is it accurate to say that acts of violence are, generally speaking, also acts of communication? It certainly is. But this is true of pretty much any form of human action. It strikes me that what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative. To be more precise: violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing. In pretty much any other way in which you might try to influence another’s actions, you must at least have some idea about who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities, and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, and all of this becomes irrelevant.

[...]

Most human relations—particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies—are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view. This is what I’ve already referred to as “interpretive labor.” Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind (“cross this line and I will shoot you,” “one more word out of any of you and you’re going to jail”). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.

Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

I understood that love is fragile, but I had nowhere to house this information.

New Rooms

The mind must set itself up wherever it goes and it would be most convenient to impose its old rooms—just tack them up like an interior tent. Oh but the new holes aren't where the windows went.

Tenderness and Rot

Tenderness and rot share a border. And rot is an aggressive neighbor whose iridescence keeps creeping over.

No lessons can be drawn from this however.

One is not two countries. One is not meat corrupting.

It is important to stay sweet and loving.

Kay Ryan

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again–not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Here's an exercise: go to the mirror, look yourself in the face, and say out loud: “To take care of you is not normal. I can only do it temporarily.”

Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time.

[...]

The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other's vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

Johanna Hedva, Sick Woman Theory

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