“…how much work and how many systems have been neglected over the last little bit — partly because of the ‘fuck it we’re moving’ bit, partly because of the three years of instability with jobs, and the questions about kids’ schools, and all of it. Maybe we’re out of that now (for five years). Won’t that be nice.
It will or it won’t. I’m trying to stay determined … to stay level and guard my time.”
January 3 2020
An aspect of this project is masochistic, and these early weeks of it are probably intensely so. At this time last year, so many things were new. My time at the GC had gone as well as possible first semester; we were settling in at the new apartment; S had started her job the very week I wrote the entry quoted above. Something I encounter as I move through these January entries is optimism, a foolish one that’s ready to be proven wrong not just by any year unfolding the way it does with its standard disappointments and puttering out. Obviously, what waits for me in this diary is the outbreak of COVID-19. There’s no point in exchanging optimism for the anxiety of another cataclysmic event that no one sees coming and for which no one is prepared. But it makes the optimism that much more cruel.
Of course that descriptor of optimism is not mine, but that of cultural critic Lauren Berlant. That optimism, in hindsight, reads cruelly when I understand what ordinary life will become, and what will become of ordinary life, in the pandemic. In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes the ordinary as “a zone of convergence of many histories” (10). Yet some of those convergences in the moment are avoided (evaded, to borrow the idea from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang–I first encountered these two pieces together and have had a hard time divorcing them). A year ago, what Berlant critiques as “the good life” seemed right there in front of my own family. (The New York City version of it anyway: an affordable two-bedroom down the block from the A train, huge park and several playgrounds just around the corner, a public school that we love, friends who make our kids laugh. I miss this with particular intensity writing from the Houston suburbs. Our good life was never a suburban one, and if it’s even possible for us we don’t know where to begin having that good life in a pandemic or even after, not when the one we’re most used to and trying to get back to is a good life of coexistence and combination that can only really happen in a city, especially one like New York, and especially a neighborhood like Inwood.
This week, like the one that prompted this entry, is also about the optimism that comes from making new routines, new habits, new structures. Among the great struggles of pandemic was building those from the ground up. The kids’ school has done a fine job of setting the structures, and we’re able, here, to supplement them. But care in crisis affects habits most of all. Berlant argues that the work of Susan Sontag and Gregg Bordowitz about the AIDS crisis serves to “catalogue the effect of the disease on the destruction of habit, and consider the proliferation of domains in which habituation has to be reinvented” (17). Ours was already a culture where “anxiety, contingency, and precarity” (19) have supplanted mythologies of “sacrifice, upward mobility, and meritocracy” (19). Now, it seems almost insensitively obvious to think that pandemic will likely affect all these things in ways that revise what Berlant calls at one point “a kind of proprioceptive history, a way of thinking about represented norms of bodily adjustment” as central to understanding “the present” as she presents it.
Speaking as someone who has spent the last twenty years without it, proprioception is a productive metaphor for cruel optimism: it means knowledge of the body’s placement in space in the present moment, with, I think, an emphasis on the present. To create a history our of proprioception requires a kind of disembodiment and disassociation–an extra ‘you,’ in a sense. But the decolonial project and logic have a long tail: “People born into unwelcoming worlds and unreliable environments have a different response to new precarities than do people who presumed they would be protected.” Maybe pushing an analysis of “the good life” one step further, is subscribing to its promises, to borrow Tuck and Yang’s phrase, “actually an investment in settler colonialism” (18)? Does their critique of Paulo Freire, who they say abstracts the relation between oppressor and oppressed, square with Berlant’s “good life” critique: does the good life “invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering” (20) as Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed? That is something my teaching half will need to pick up a bit down the line.
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