Position @cultureposition-blog - Tumblr Blog

Laia’s Task: Be the distance, a year between us

Small thinking: For me, It is not the geographical distance that makes it far away, but the situation. For example, to visit my dad in Qingdao, I need to apply for Visa. Although Qingdao is the closest place among the others, including the process makes it further. For Taiwan, because I never been there, it is scarier than most of the place.

#moon

Laia’s Task- Completed by Roxanne on monday before the UK Lockdown - 23/3/20

Yuhzen’s task completed on monday before the lockdown in UK by Roxanne 23/3/20

Yuzhen in response to Laia’s task, 26th March, 2020

When I searched how to walk or drive back home on Google Map, the programme couldn’t calculate as a matter of long-distance. Only flights appeared at an overpriced rate during the pandemic. Home is untouchable not only considering the geography position but also the mental division.

Melissa in response to Laia’s task:

Total distance between family during quarantine = 18,107.08 km

‘What a small world,’ I often think in my head. Somehow with the borders closing between countries, states, and now even houses, the world seems larger than ever. More and more barriers stretching distances between loved ones; it leaves only you to be in the present because nothing else is accessible, for now.

#melissalu

Voyage Around My Room by Xavier De Maistre

The Virtue of the Virus

Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Sergio Benvenuto, Divya Dwivedi, and others, ‘Coronavirus and Philosophers’ <http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/> [accessed 19 March 2020]

However, if it is true that the virus displays the characteristic of an event (it would be difficult to deny this), then it must also possess its “virtue”. Events are such not because they “happen” or, at least, not only because of this. Events are not “facts”. Unlike simple facts, events possess a “virtue”, a force, a property, a vis, that is, they do something. For this reason, an event is always traumatic to the point we may say that if there is no trauma there is no event, that if there is no trauma, literally nothing has happened. What exactly do events do? Events produce transformations that prior to their taking place were not even possible. In fact, they only begin to be “after” the event has taken place. In short, an event is such because it generates “real” possibility. One must bear in mind that here “possible” merely means doable. Possibility means being able to do something. Possibility is nothing abstract, it is not the free imagination of other worlds that are better than this one. Remaining on a pragmatic level, without indulging in metaphysics, possibility is only “potency” and potency is nothing more than action, determined activity. The “virtue” of an event thus consists in rendering operational methods possible, methods that “before” were simply impossible, unthinkable. It follows that an event can only be thought of starting from the future it generates (and not from the past), because it transforms, because it creates that which is real, and with it possibility. Common sense is therefore right when an event is thought of as an “opportunity” to “make a virtue of necessity”.

#readings #references #moon