Sharing Resources Against Common Sense

A syllabus for ways of knowing, creating, and orienting during the pandemic

We have an attention problem. A problem of scale. What we consider to be worthwhile, and what we don’t, separates sensation from intellectual work. Scale (by which we mean art history and literature and philosophy—the ways we’re conditioned to see the world) confuses our most intimate selves, convincing us that we can’t (or ought not to) do politics in our day-to-day lives. Scale is a force that keeps us doing things that suck.

In trying to pay attention differently, we’re following our more irrational impulses. Cultural workers remind us that the sensation of togetherness/freedom/struggle is often glimpsed in moments of creativity. Desire, speculation, and imagination are born out of glitches and in static. Within ineffability, we find music and poetry—sensory language that has the capacity to break familiar grammars. 

We are wondering how the virtual might let us traverse time/space. The gap between what we allow ourselves to seek out and how we transform our now is at the forefront of our minds. What would it do for our survival to turn to everyday modes of resistance? To love like children? To refuse invincibility? What might happen if we start taking performance—on the stage and the streets—as seriously as the charades of the senate floor?

This is a syllabus against common sense, by which we mean it is a syllabus against aesthetics, truth, and beauty: the hierarchy of the sensorium. However honest they might seem, our tastes and sensibilities are not ours. How often do our supposedly separate senses merge? How quickly does touch become taste? How is sound not material, when it has vibrations and waves? When music holds memory and nostalgia better than words?

This is a search for secret codes—hairpins. If survival is considered to be the dying/birth of good health, a constant cure that relies on the very structures that make us sick, then we don’t need cultural texts to make it through. But we know that survival is not only about enduring—it is about a connection to the divine, about orienting towards the beginning of life as much as we orient towards the end of it. This understanding of art is a tension that the poet Anne Boyer, by way of Fred Moten, points us to: you can’t survive on bread alone.

Sometimes, dance does the work that poets search for in language. In its social, sensational, somatic form, dance brings us together, both within ourselves and as a collective. Movement allows for a new form of tumbling: melting rationality and exposing the edges of established networks of communication.

Still, a desire to keep on living, to support one another while confronted by such immense devastation, is too great a hunger for theory, poetry, and art to sufficiently feed. This is where we turn to cash: to rent strikes, to bail outs, to prison abolition; to doula and birth services, to hospice; to making sure that historic bookstores and gathering places stay alive; to supporting a culture of redistributing resources that will thrive past the pandemic.

The texts and funds below are arranged perhaps in a peculiar fashion. We link them together in hopes of a more embodied expression of life than we have now. At the same time, we feel that these texts might be useless. Crisis demands futurity: that we rewrite our imaginations in order to usher in large-scale changes we’ve been pining for. But death demands that we focus on the present: that we slow down enough to weep, grieve, scream, and keel over. While the state fails to attend to the dead, loss requires we give up on use and form a personal relationship to the living.

A hope for a more embodied expression of life, then, is also an attempt to build cultural scripts that grapple with grief/despair. What do we have to deposit and withdraw that will not run dry? How might redefining “resource” expand our definition of “survival”? In the face of such fucked up hoarding, mutual aid actualizes a sustaining structure from the ground up—one that operates in solidarity rather than relies on its own fixed agreements. 

Supporting our defined circles—sharing money, memes, empathy, and links—is an instinctual element of non-individuated being. It always has been. These acts have also always been gravely political. This syllabus is an attempt to link the political and instinctual. A reminder that the branches breathe too.