Good afternoon, beloved —
I imagine the war stuff must be hitting you pretty hard at the moment, and if I imagine this it’s because, well, it’s definitely hitting me pretty hard. What makes it worse, I think, is the compulsion I have to center the fact that all of this is really happening to real people right now, which I do by forcing myself to watch images of that suffering, however graphic. It feels like a moral obligation, but it’s not great for my mental health.
I don’t know why it feels so much more obligatory to confront the facts of this war, as opposed to other wars, or any of the other ongoing (and in fact more or less permanent) conditions of great human anguish. I suspect it has something to do with the way in which it's being mediated to us, in all the intimacy and high resolution made possible by the current generation of smartphone cameras, with all the immediacy made possible by the fact that those cameras are connected to a network infrastructure that appears to be holding up even amidst the worst of the chaos. We see the destruction in great detail, in something very close to real time, and it feels like a genuine — almost a personal — betrayal of the people forced to endure these circumstances to look away.
And while I think there’s some truth to the idea that this conflict looms so large in Western media and consciousness because the protagonists are Europeans struggling on a terrain that is recognizably that of a developed European country, I don't think that's the whole story. This is just how war is going to be from now on. Its horrors will be narrated to us through a million-eyed multispectral awareness, manifesting anywhere there are smartphones and a network to bind them. Ukraine just got there first.
I have thoughts aplenty about all of this, about “what it means” for historiography and law and the conduct of military operations and so on, but frankly they're worth just as much as the thoughts of all the other armchair generals and master strategists weighing in from their barstools worldwide, which is to say nothing at all. What matters is the grief: feeling it, being present with it, and yet not letting it get in the way of doing something about it. (As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I think the best and really the only way of modulating your own feelings of anguish is to do something practical in aid of those suffering the pain and loss of displacement, and again, this will include people fleeing Afghanistan and Syria and Myanmar and Venezuela as well as Ukraine.)
The reality of millions of human beings in mortal flight, and the compound losses and difficulties they face in resettlement, will turn out to be the central drama of our time — a drama which will only intensify as the sacrifice zones multiply and the terrain on which anything like shelter can be found contracts. Worse still, the traumas of these past few weeks will unfold across generations, just like the pains of Partition and the Nakba are still being felt in the body, in the family, in the shape of the city and in the posture of the world. I do not believe any of our lives will be unchanged by this set of circumstances. It will alter the tenor of the neighborhoods we live in, bring new faces and minds and bodies into our ken as ours are presented to them. It will reshape the social, material and political choices available to us. We will all of us be harrowed. Some will bear the consequences more directly and more completely than others; I imagine, too, that human beings being what we are, not a few will blossom, find themselves anew, rise to the occasion and what it demands of us. But nobody will be unmarked. It's this that I'm trying to feel, think and ultimately write my way through right now.
§ On that note, actually: I'm making genuine progress on my upcoming book, for the first time since I signed the contract with Verso a few years back.
It took the transition from COVID straight into war to break whatever mental block had been damming up my energy, because it became crystal-clear to me that we'd already collectively embarked on an epoch I’m (cribbing from racist crank James Howard Kunstler) choosing to call “the Long Emergency,” and by the same token, that the decentralized processes of local political self-determination I was supposed to be writing about had entirely new relevance to in a time of sunderings.
What I'm essentially arguing for is something a lot like what Murray Bookchin called “libertarian municipalism” (and Abdullah Öcalan developed into “democratic confederalism”), not because it's more righteous or noble or a surer path to human emancipation than other political alternatives, but because it conduces more directly to the development of the kind of individual and collective human capacities we will need to call upon so acutely in the years ahead. This is an argument for this way of doing things on entirely practical, pragmatic and material terms, that is, moreso than one founded in the more usual ethical claims.
One of the things that's interesting to me about this framing is that it confounds some of the usual left/right dichotomies or hygienes, and brings the work into dialogue with currents of thought and practice a mere "book about municipalism" would never brush against, from Eugene Thacker’s thought-of-the-unthinkable to Rizoma Field School, the conversation around so-called Doomer Optimism, and Chris Smaje’s Small Farm Future project. To be clear, I do not 100% share any of these perspectives, and as you might have anticipated, you don't need to dig very far beneath the surface of Doomer Optimist discourse in particular before encountering viewpoints and expressions of belief that are (as the kids say) “problematic.” But that’s precisely what I’m trying to get at: while there are certainly some political commitments, in fact not a few, that are or ought to be non-negotiable, an absolute purity of influence is a luxury we cannot afford on a planet on fire. If we want to be tough like a tardigrade, we first have to be greedy like a magpie, ready to gather and make use of anything that we stumble across, whatever its provenance — this is what I preach, it is certainly what I practice, and I think it makes the final piece much more interesting than it would have been had it only confined itself to embroidering on debates current on the libertarian left.
As you can likely see from all this, I’m one of those people who needs to write in order to figure out just what it is that I think, and working through these ideas over the past few weeks has been the first time I’ve found the process even remotely enjoyable since I passed the hump of writing the thing that became Radical Technologies, and that feels like a pretty good sign; at any rate, I'll take it. I'm not far off from having big chunks of the book in reasonable enough shape that I'll want to share them with you, see what you think and (especially) where you think the argument can be improved. Keep an eye out, or drop a line if there's any aspect of the above you'd like to discuss further, most particularly if something I’ve said brushes up against your own bailiwick.
§ I'm reading Iris Marion Young on Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), as well as a wryly useful little manual on process for egalitarian collectives by Delfina Vannucci and Richard Singer called Come Hell or High Water; listening to Glenn Branca, real loud and hectic-like; and watching Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman, which is wonderful in about fifteen different dimensions, not least of which is its loving but never rose-tinted depiction of mid-1990s Philadelphia (right down to a namecheck of the White Dog Cafe, the restaurant I bussed tables at before upping stakes and moving to San Francisco).
Until next dispatch: please do remember to take care of yourself and those who need you, and to let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 117 of Sunday, 27 March 2022, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊