For want of an Apocalypse: Thoughts on the Covid-19 Timewarp
“I reflected that we were, as always, at the end of time...”
I
Three months into quarantine, I began to dream of the end of the world. One particularly vivid night, I was “on a bus, or a train, but also sometimes a bicycle, going through the Columbia River Gorge, and there were clouds in the shape of fish skeletons, and on the back of the first big hill (coming down from the desert to the East)...you could see a window into the night sky.” The view there was “too alive,” hot with galaxies and nebulae and raw, uncut darkness like an acid-stained Hubble image, and “everywhere else it was sunrise, and the fish skeletons were like they were on fire” (My personal records, May 15).
II
In early March, back when I still naively assumed that this whole pandemic business would be over within a couple of weeks, I re-watched the movie Slacker (1991). It seemed relevant then and seems more relevant now. Specifically, it captures something about how some people have been experiencing time during this Time of Covid, a semi-articulate feeling expressed by various friends and people on the internet: that time has gotten weird, that time passes both more slowly and more quickly than Before, that it all runs together, that it has no meaning, that it doesn’t exist. And since the point of this essay is for me to pick my way through recursive tangents, nightmare postulates and other such anti-questions—all as part of an effort to get myself to write, just write, even if it’s half formed and awkwardly contextualized—I guess Slacker, for want of a framing device, is what I’m talking about.
III
…it’s a movie about...conspiracy theorists and speculative philosophers, poets and terrorists, deviant scholars and unapologetic potheads. It’s about what it’s like to live under the sweltering heat of capitalist realism, about having missed the last bus to Revolution…
If you haven’t watched Slacker, you should. Perhaps in the future I’ll write about my thoughts on the political theology of copyright law, but for now, suffice it to say that it can be accessed for a non-non-zero price at youtube.com.
That said, I don’t think reading this essay will particularly spoil the film. It isn’t really the kind of film you can spoil. Slacker has no plot—or, it has two dozen plots, connected tangentially and thematically, narrow wedges of time afforded introduction or closure. It’s a movie about the city of Austin in the early 90s, conspiracy theorists and speculative philosophers, poets and terrorists, deviant scholars and unapologetic potheads. It’s about what it’s like to live under the sweltering heat of capitalist realism, about having missed the last bus to revolution.
Nothing strictly happens in Slacker. Not in the narrative sense, at least. People run into each other, they flirt, they comment, they critique, they get on each others’ nerves. A mismatch of risks and rewards and tragi-comic punchlines unapologetically thrown together. Conflict is not absent, but it’s always implied, deferred, sublimated or ignored.
Viz. A guy bullies his friend into throwing a typewriter off a bridge as part of a homemade, self-serious post-breakup ritual.
A kid comes across a woman hit by a car. Maybe the woman has been killed. We don’t hang around to find out.
An elderly anarchist comes home and accidentally interrupts an armed robbery in flagrante delicto. He offers coffee to his anxious would-be thief, who is then made to listen to his victim’s life story—a story which so happens to be utterly fictitious even within the context of the film.
IV
I wonder if there’s a productive dialectic there, anxiety and fiction. Something representative not only of the film but of the logic through which it is working itself out. (A logic transmitted, perhaps from socio-material conditions as concrete as the city of its placement?)
Anxiety is like time, of course. Both seem to pile up as you pay attention to them, or try to not pay attention to them. Freud distinguishes between fear, which has an object, and anxiety, which does not. Lacan responds that anxiety is “not without an object (n'est pas sans objet)”—specifically, Das Ding, The Thing.
(Full disclosure, I don’t think I really understand much about psychoanalysis. I bought a bunch of books at the beginning of summer, but even before quarantine it’s been hard to focus. I feel guilty even making references about it, like I’m bullshiting an essay on a book I didn’t read. However, last month I left the apartment where I was staying in Philadelphia and I drove for three days, alone in a car, to eastern Washington. To pass the time, I alternated between listening to a podcast about the Mexican Revolution and a podcast about (mainly Lacanian) psychoanalysis. And so that too is part of this now.)
Fiction: a refusal of anxiety which doubles as an affirmation of it. For so many, the primary use of narrative is a means of escape, a distraction. A refusal to acknowledge the object of their discomfort. The annihilation of the object. Yet fiction falls apart if its not driven forward by some conflict or contradiction, some unstable tension wanting to be worked out. The introduction, then, of an alternative object—a self avowed false, “not real,” object. Presto-Chango. Gone and back again, but not the same. A fire escape that wraps right back around to your own front door.
Consider. Even in the anarchist’s creative autobiography, the one repeating theme is failure. He places himself in the Lincoln Brigade at Catalonia, a failed revolution. He was in the wrong part of town when Charles Whitman commenced his massacre at the University of Texas, and thus “in this town’s finest hour” he was unable to participate. No need to get into “participate how?” That’s the fantasy behind the fantasy--not only that you would do something, but that you’d know what to do when the opportunity comes in the first place.
Even his casual proclamation that he’s long dreamed of pulling “a Guy Fawks on the Texas Legislature Building” (he “has maps in his room, [he’ll] do it someday!”). This very declaration reads as a kind of self-disavowing disavowal, an acknowledgement that this is the kind of thing you say you’re going to do precisely to ease yourself of the compulsion to actually do it, something to be put off and looked forward to until you realize that it's already too late, has been too late for a long while.
V
In my nightmares knowledge of the end of the world mostly is more context then event, more form then content. I find myself fleeing, trying to get ahead or get out or catch up. To actually dream about The End is never to place yourself precisely at the End. Dreaming yourself dead is just another word for dreamless sleep. Removal, perspective, temporal immanence yes but not immediacy are constitutive of the subject-object relationship, nowhere more so than a dream about subject’s own annihilation.
In one of the more satirical scenes (can dreams be politically satirical? Better question: can they not be so?) I was part of a revolutionary cadre in Washington DC (which was in a cornfield). We were trying to stop a war. Or start one in order to stop a different one. We made an assault on a federal building. I’m not sure what kind. Maybe a prison. Maybe a mind control center. But I repeat myself.
The assault failed, the public turned against us. In my dream, there had been some kind of societal breakdown, the current regime was out of power, the congressional Democrats had seized power, all elections had been canceled. Nancy Pelosi astride the Capitol balcony was even now ordering that tactical nuclear weapons be launched at the guerrilla fighters in our various camps. I went with the cadre to our last stronghold, high in a sequoia canopy. We knew the veil of fire was coming for us, like the heel of an angel, like a sunset but everywhere.
VI
Does Time itself have an object?
Would we say that time passes in a universe empty of movement, of objects? Is time an emergent property, or a fundamental building block of reality which exists regardless of there being anyone in the proverbial forest for it to act upon?
Is the present moment ontologically privileged; more real than the mere virtualities of the past and potentials of the future? Or do the past, present, and future all exist on equal footing strung out across temporal space?
In the later case, is time (specifically the sense of movement, of the intercourse of not-yet and no-longer) simply an illusion, a product of conscious observation?
Does time itself have a speed? From what vantage point might we clock its velocity?
If everything (the decay of particles, the construction of planets, the rate of our conscious minds and of our lives as well) were to speed up, or slow down, if the heavens and their luminance were hurried in their courses, clearly no one within the system would be able to notice.
You’d have to be a god to answer questions from outside the question—if such an outside is even meaningful at all. Most of it is probably just language games, a way for the erudite members of bourgeoisie to entertain themselves. Certainly it’s not relevant to me, to the kind of philosophy in which I’m invested, philosophy which demands to be written in the streets.
The premise of critical theory is that such broad sweeping dismissals, when applied not simply to this or that work or theorist, but an entire philosophical project, will tend to be too critical, or rather, more nihilistic than critical. It insists if we cannot access the question from the Outside, we’ll answer it from within. That even our basic framework for constructing reality—especially those basic frameworks—can be, must be, transformative fields of political struggle.
VII
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
I have nightmares pretty often. Most nights, I think. I don’t really like to keep track. The exquisite thing about nightmares is the way they just annihilate your conception of time. I had one recently in which I got Covid. However, in my version, the primary symptom of the virus was an infection of “throat-spiders.” It was exactly what it sounds like. Hundreds—thousands—of mostly miniscule, freshly hatched arachnids emerging from infected flesh and filling my windpipe with an itching, crawling mass, a dripping froth. I kept discovering for the first time that if I coughed without a mask (I kept losing the same mask without finding it between losses) then I would cover whoever was standing next to me in spiders. Then they’d likely get infected with the disease as well.
This was right around the time I got a job working at the local S*feway, thinking it might keep me busy. Help me structure my mind better, be more productive during my off hours. Mostly it just gave me something to dread on the days when I didn’t have a shift and something to escape from after.
Grocery store time yawns and snaps according to the flow of customers and the gaze of managers. You feel more acutely the temporality of capital about six hours in when your knees just want to buckle. The grind of seconds when a customer refuses to wear a mask, the looming weeks of a potential infection. (Not long after learning that my supervisors were explicitly discouraging staff from getting tested following a coworker’s positive diagnosis, I found a part time job at my college and quit. I got laid off a week later.)
Now I’m back to the repetition. Re-treading the same mental hallways I did yesterday and the day before. Likewise with nightmares. The smokey dread of knowing its potential and knowing I’ll probably waste it—waste it on my phone, waste it staring at the wall, waste it feeling anxious about the likelihood that I’ll waste it.
The first scene in Slacker involves a young man (played by the director, Richard Linklater) getting off a bus and into a cab, and telling the driver about a dream he just had. He was riding the same bus, reading a book which speculated that every thought you have creates a new reality, that every choice produces not only its result but it’s opposite result, so that in the grand total of multiverses every road is taken by every person.
Linklater’s character further speculates that the dream-events themselves would, by extension, also be real, as real to that Linklater as the cab conversation is to this one. Perhaps in that version, he didn’t get into a cab but stayed at the station. Perhaps there he meets a beautiful woman, and perhaps they fall in love, and live a life (this singular Linklater, by definition always following the best of all possible forking paths) of perfect bliss.
In a very practical way, that’s precisely how my mind seems to work now. Every Now contains the distorted residue of an Unreachable Past, heavy with radiation of unstable and mutually exclusive futures. Every self-disavowing choice makes Profane Time out of these possibilities, Time that haunts, Time that stalks, Time that wakes you up at night.
…I am a bleeding ulcer of days…
I spend most of my days not so much doing nothing as feeling bad about doing nothing. I started writing this essay off and on at least half a dozen times this summer. I’ve forgotten which books I’m currently reading. Without social interaction to mark the days or the strength to erect our own signposts, of course everything runs together. We live the same days in the same house or apartment, thinking the same thoughts, marveling at how much time there is and about time and how cheaply it can be spent, each day a copy of a copy falling from a printer that’s running low on ink.
VIII
There is no dream structure/a dream is nothing but structure. No one taps you on the shoulder of Slacker when the film is “really” about to start, when its time to pay attention. No, we aren’t just now transitioning to the actual plot —there is no plot. Or, if you need a plot so badly, take this--the cut between scenes, the moment of rupture. The confusion right now. That’s your plot. Why do you need one? Scene by scene, your life progresses, and God has clearly not done the assigned reading on the three act structure. No sir, we’re winging it.
I had that dream near the beginning of the Uprisings following the lynching of George Floyd. The handful of us living together, were outraged and depressed and numb. The privileged position of Liberal White America. But in the coming days, something else. The riots weren’t ending. They were spreading. The people had burned down a precinct. They were declaring autonomous zones. Police seemed scared. Had a hair-trigger flux of a historico-chemical process just been released?
Slacker. Uprisings. Time itself. Everyone of them a Text. And like all texts, they have no secret blueprint, an authoritative plan asserting how it will all fit together. Temporality understood in this way, as a subjectively interpreted collectively experience, is not so much a discrete property or mechanistic process, but a Becoming-Object. A riot of phenomena. An revolution of the soul.
By this framework, it becomes clear that Time has not lost its meaning; rather, it has been inf(l)ected with a very specific meaning. Namely, it has become a statement about formlessness, about the fragility of connection, about what happens to spaces neither filled up with purpose nor sanctified in their emptiness. It attains this signification not by my fiat on my part or yours, but organically somewhere in the space between us two. Thus we find that the Author has been dead all along, even avant la lettre. As goes the Author, so with Audience. So the Text has nothing to do but grow wild and fecund on our decomposing bodies.
IX
…the performative awareness-of-performativity…
There’s a character named Guy, probably in his early twenties. In this very emotive, visceral way I can’t quite articulate, Guy has always struck me as transcendentally Gen-X. Something about how he wears his sad smile, eyes which look simultaneously too young and too old for his face.
Anyway, Guy runs into his friend, a character named Stephanie, on the sidewalk. Stephanie just got back in town from Dallas. She “was in the hospital for a while. It was really awful.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Parents, probably…?”
“Yeah you could say they put me there.”
“Yeah.”
Nothing more is said. There’s nothing more to say.
“So what have you been up to?”
“Same old same old. Just...lollygagging around. Still unemployed.” The simultaneous performative disinterested calm, the performative shame. The performative awareness of this contradiction. The performative awareness-of-performativity. A guy could get lost in spirals like these.
Fortunately for us, then, a third character quickly arrives on scene, approaches her two—acquaintances? not-quite-merely-acquaintences? The iconic Madonna Pap-smear Girl.
“Man I am freaking out so severely. Did you hear about what happened on the freeway? You didn’t see the local news today? Oh its beautiful! Man this old man driving to town from San Antonio like this old man about 40 or 50 years old going about a hundred miles an hour down the freeway waving a gun at people, laughing, like doing fucking chicken squacks at people out the window and showing them his gun and going like ahhaha-ha ahhaha-ha hahaha, things like that--people were freak—they didn’t know if he was just a lunatic ya know with like a squirt gun, and then, check it out the guy started firing, on the freeway, randomly, through his windows. He shot one bullet up through the roof of his car and it just riccachet around inside with him for a while. He was like out of his mind. Everyone was trying to get off the freeway. Some chick who had a bullet lodged in her ponytail called the pigs in San Marcus and they had six or seven pig cars chasing him into the southside of town. He was still swinging the gun around man and laughing, fucking laughed all the way. Finally his car spun out and spun into the grassy knoll, you know, the median? Soon as his car came to a halt he just put the gun to his head and just—blamo! Offed himself man. Just blew himself away right there. I don’t know he had, had enough, enough, its like—”
“Do you know Stephanie?”
We don’t get a good view of the original couple during this monologue, neither now nor later in the scene when she attempts to sell “a Madonna pap-smear,” fenced through a gynecologist in Hollywood, replete with a pubic hair (when it originally came in the mail there was a second, but she “showed it to this asshole and he stoled one of them” [sic]).
Neither are interested in buying, but nor are they interested in bluntly rejecting the advances of their more enterprising acquaintances. The man listens politely, but he’s pretty broke, and the woman just stares at nothing and shakes her head. She gets the hint and makes herself scarce. the man and woman make tentative and not-quite-non-committal plans to see his band perform, then the scene shifts, without explanation, into an encounter with a revolutionary agitator selling shirts, a pair disaffected twentysomethings considering expatriation, a fortune teller, and so on.
X
The three unchangeable marks of existence in Buddhism: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and inessentiality. You change, you suffer, and you aren’t. Taken together, you also have a tidy philosophy of time: you suffer, and then you continue to suffer. But it’s different suffering, and it’s happening to a different you.
(I particularly like this formulation because of where it places Nirvana--i.e. the absence of suffering, literally “gone-out” or “no-fuel,” that which is accomplished by the cessation of desire, including the desire which generates the illusion that the “self” as such exists. That is, it places Nirvana outside of time--precisely where the Buddha’s teachings place it. I also like it because it deals with time spent dissociating, being there without being there, in the same way.)
Obviously this is not to say that capital-T time (i.e. the physical process of the universe unraveling in irreversible trajectory towards total heat-death and the culmination of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) doesn’t occur if there is no one around to suffer. But that’s not the phenomena of time, the facet of time we experience. And because we suffer the repetitious and undramatic suffering of boredom, of loneliness, of internet addiction, of mass anxiety, of the shame of being so accomplished at being able to pass so many days while doing so little, our suffering warps and clouds and grasps half-heartedly after itself, caught up in a labyrinth of its own forgetful design.
XI
Regardless of what Lord Buddha says, we live under a convention in which we assume a throughline between Us-Now and Us-Then. Stephanie reads to me as a character who would prefer to shrug off her recent hospitalization, but is acutely aware that you can’t shrug off knowledge for another person. Not that this tension gets worked out. Not that it can get worked out (worked out?). Just awkwardly step to the side. Stand there and listen. Or don’t listen. Or leave. Or don’t leave.
Quite apart from the ability to objectify us, the Other also subjectifies us. Makes of us a subject. Forces an awareness upon you: awareness that you (if only “you” as a social-construction in the minds of others) are not simply as the site of the uninterrupted succession of Time, but as a Thing, containing its own histories and futures.
…a letter encoded in the folds of is its own envelope, and which is destroyed and rewritten differently by each recipient…signs in search of signifiers…ghosts who do not believe in ghosts. What am I talking about anymore?
It’s so easy when I’m alone to trick myself into thinking that I have achieved Moksha, that I have set aside illusions of the self, to fall into the faux self-anonymity of the unreflecting self. A universe of sensation. Not unlike conceptualizing the numenal properties of time: pretending at the mind of a god.
But a god finds it hard to engage in a conversation, which is why awareness of the Other breaks such immediacy, such freedom, and substitutes for it a whole system of signifiers and values and meanings and meta-awarnesses. Suddenly one is forced to reveal your thoughts, or obscure them. Forced to represent yourself one way or some other way. Around others the realization that you can decide to refuse, but cannot refuse to decide becomes more salient. The realization that we live in a world hungry with implications, a world trapped in the process of meaning, a world of Never Neutral.
Anyway, I think this fracturing of the subject also fractures our sense of time, breaks it up from a line of sensation into something more recursive.
Pulls us rudely from the passive flow of sensation to awareness of yourself as something that can be, inevitably will be, perceived, and which will cause others to be aware of themselves as being perceived and perceiving.
Makes us aware, by triangulating us around the other’s awareness, of our own awareness, our own histories and agency and limitations.
Forces us to calibrate our personally-experienced time to the Neutral and Objective “Real Time,” which of course is simply one of the many guises worn by the Self-Interested and Ideological phenomena of Social Time.
I wish I could write it clearly. I wish I could think it clearly. But anyway, quarantine seems to exacerbate the feeling of immediacy, self-forgetting, the feeling of being the mind of a god, which I alluded to earlier. And in sufficiently excessive doses, that kind of headspace can be as dangerous as any virus.
XII
…the Author has been dead all along, even avant la lettre…
Immediately preceding Guy/Stephanie/Madonna Papsmear Girl Scene is a scene in which Guy’s housemates discover that their roommate Paul has moved, “he’s split...he’s like disappeared, nobody knows where he is. But his room is like totally empty, everything’s moved out, and on the floor is these postcards [sic], just sitting there, really bizarre.”
The postcards have typewritten messages on the back, which tell the story of “Juan Apagoto,” whom the housemates implicitly assume to be Paul’s self insert, while taking the character’s housemates to represent themselves.
Juan himself is a slacker. “All his days are about the same. He wakes up at eleven or twelve, eats cereal or toast, reads the newspaper, looks out the front door, takes a walk, goes to a movie matinee, listens to the radio, watches sitcom reruns till one, and usually falls asleep about two. He likes to sleep. Sometimes he has good dreams.”
XIII
I don’t know if I can remember my last good dream. I have to try hard to remember any good dreams at all. I’d settle for no dreams.
About a month in, I noticed something weird/banal. Namely, that my unproductivity wasn’t the result of spending my time pursuing hedonistic pleasure. Not only was I not pursuing pleasure, I didn’t want to.
Pleasure, without ceasing to be pleasure, had become unpleasant.
Quarantine depression is a particularly lonely depression, a particularly passive loneliness. It’s not just that we can’t spend time with the people we used to. Its that, in my case at least, I’m ceasing to want to.
Getting enough socialization to maintain, if not mental wellness, then at least mental stability, has largely shifted from an escape to a chore. I want to want to be around people. I feel like I should want it. I want to remember how to want it. But what I wanted much more was to blot things out. To muffle the static.
No. Even that wasn’t quite it—though that is the theory of affect on which capital depends would have us believe. A theory which sees experience as a simple linear progression, where emotion can be understood quantitatively, as degree and duration of negativity or positivity. According to the economy of affect, all human behavior can be understood as the working and trading of (dis)comfort. According to the economy of affect, if I could not achieve a positive emotional state, I was bound by the Law of Rationality to cut my losses and go numb, so as to minimize a negative one.
But I was not after a kind of knock off aponia, a false neutral, pleasure defined as the simple absence of suffering. No, in a substantive, dialectical way, the appeal of getting drunk was for me positively negative. The appeal is that it allows me to feel properly sad. Not just sad, but really dejected. Bad enough that I am a bleeding ulcer of days. Shall I be numb as well?
Thus most of the work I’ve done during quarantine has been the work of not doing things, not falling into bad habits, or not falling too deeply. For the most part I spend my time sitting on my bed, a blanket over my feet, the fan whirling across the room, the shallow tightness in my chest which is disinterested in doing anything but also disinterested in doing nothing. Nothing but lethargy’s anchor to cling to.
If we need a new verb for to pass time, maybe instead of to suffer, it should be, to fail to suffer. To refuse to suffer. To forget to suffer.
Because it’s so banal, isn’t it? More than worry, you want to spare the people around you from the utter boredom of it all?
In the penultimate scene, a young man with a gravelly, slightly manic voice drives slowly around the blocks as he croons into a loudspeaker that he is starting a “free weapons giveaway program,” in which “we’re [whose we?] gonna give away all the...side loaders, clip loaders, shoot em backs, special coalt 45s, shotguns, anything you want, chains, knives, straight razors, bottles, bricks, bats, baseball bats, and big kinda-slanted jagged-kinda things...that’s right, a free fuckin’ weapons giveaway program. That’s right, I see it, I’m gonna solve all these goddamn problems.” There’s something almost meditative about his ramblings, his offers of liberation, burning inside his crudely Idealistic faith in the power of violence.
And so there’s something vulgarly Buddhist about Slacker, and about time under quarantine. It has to do with the relationship between suffering and desire, and between people, with having intuitions about the workings of these relationships, and with not acting on those intuitions.
XIV
“Everyone’s running around here wondering when the bombs are gonna fall and the fact of the matter is that the bombs have already fallen. People are running around here dwelling in eleventh hour concepts and it’s well after noon.”
It was a meme for a while to refer to the pandemic, to uprisings, to the Trump administration, as “living at the end of the world.” People worry, quite rightly, about the next big crisis, the next recession, the next spike in infections, the next fire season/hurricane season/other climate disaster. We tell ourselves everything is going to come crashing down, but I think our fear is precisely the opposite:. That even as COVID-19 gives way to other viruses, other disasters, climate catastrophes and economic collapses, the isolating and destabilizing logics it helped to calcify will only continue to turn their gears tighter. (In an earlier incarnation of this essay, I focused heavily on comparing Slacker with the film Wristcutters, a tour through the afterlife of suicides where the world and the people in it are their same depressing selves, only marginally moreso.)
Certainly that’s the fate I’ve learned to fear coming out of the Marxist tradition: that “late capitalism” was an overly optimistic term; that Fukuyama nightmare, if not correct in its details, will more-or-less be proven accurate as the great productive and regulative forces of society gather together into a stable-state conflict between Terminal Liberalism and Eco-Fascism. But no one wants to believe that things are going to continue heating up and wearing for the foreseeable future—least of all the people whose profits depend on the continued state of affairs.
So we call it an apocalypse. And our worry about the end of the world does really subtle, critical work at the level of the psyche. If we disavow the very thing we want, then in a perverse way we get the satisfaction of possession precisely by accusing it of already being here, or almost here.
Zizek remarks somewhere that everyone wants to talk about the day of the revolution, but no one wants to talk about the day after the revolution. I can’t decide whether Slacker shares this disinterest. Certainly most of its overtly political scenes either constrain themselves to mere critique. Alternatively, in the case of the elderly anarchist, disavow his more combustive mode of praxis precisely in his affirmation of it. But at a more thematic level, I get the sense that the film is deeply, materially invested in grappling with very forces of loneliness, alienation, and uncertainty which I’ve been circling throughout this essay at the level of experience if not their material causes.
Socialize/Suffer. Not the cheeriest of dialectics (least of all for a socialist). Nor does it constitute a program all on its own. But I’m beginning to suspect that a project which centers this kind of angst might be precisely what the left needs to affirm.
XV
…so the Text has nothing to do but grow wild and fecund on our decomposing bodies…
A couple weeks ago I had a dream in which I began to cry, then I woke myself up crying. I can’t remember many of the details, but I was surrounded by a huge crowd of people Without Masks, and I felt very alone. The unease left me quickly after waking, leaving me hollow, like a nutritional tablet taken in substitution of food.
Here too we have the beginnings of a political critique. Namely, that what’s so disgusting about capitalism is that after it makes us hurt, or tired, or curious, or traumatized, it doesn't even permit us to feel their full effects. The menial, mind numbing jobs many of us currently work have alienated us from our own alienation, leaving us too exhausted to do anything but push aside our discomfort in order to continue to fulfill our (dys)function.
Our employers are more than fine with this; the logic of capital is one of appearance and signal, against ontology. In this case, there is a compulsion to appear happy in a way that forecloses both direct happiness and direct unhappiness. After all, you don’t want your people to get the idea that something has gone seriously wrong, after all. That might incite some kind of radical rethinking of things.
In place of this Dystopia-with-a-smile, the left must challenge even the logics which shape what it means to be happy. In place of a flat, individualistic-linear logic of happiness-as-quantity, we must affirm a Politics of Rupture: a new order which recognizes the always-already-social nature of joy and suffering alike. A politics in which everything is received but nothing is, a priori, given.
We shall become worthy of this project, the Project of Time itself, precisely at the moment when we realize that we have never-not been caught up in this very work, this communal thing, this Res tempora, of receiving, reconstructing, organizing and recognizing within the mass nightmare. In doing so, we do not seek to eradicate the source of all suffering, or even every source of all alienation. Our goal is more pressing: the possibility to experience even our own sadness directly, and in doing so transform every component of the relationship between ourselves and it.
Slacker ends with a movie inside a movie: a rowdy group of high school age kids commit a drive-by filming of Weapons Giveaway Program™-man with a bulky 80’s camcorder. The camcorder film is much granier, colors accented with rainy-day understatement. Peak nostalgia-core. Audible dialogue ceases, replaced by upbeat jazz. They race off, shoving each other, laughing, drinking, making out. Drive out to some hike, they film themselves running up a trail, throwing bottles and kicking cans off a cliff ledge. Close ups on dancing feet, irregular angles, a wheeling shot of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. A pause in the song. Someone throws the camcorder off the cliff. Then a wash of trees and sky.