Re: <nettime> 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'

"adjust our frame of reference to
understand the dislocations caused by the pandemic as an instance of
more dramatic things to come. Not all of them need to be bad." - felix s.

I, for one, am glad to learn of this condition of the medieval monks...there is no harm in pointing out some psychological features some may be experiencing during lockdown, quarantine, or "essential work." It has become the new normal to talk about myriad experiences under covid. I don't mind having another mental health name for what I might be feeling. It's somewhat helpful to put a name to some of it. I could call the new urban condition "the park-letting of the street" - I would be pointing to a new set of conditions arising in my city.

Mustn't grouse at each other...Must consider what we are doing, how we are doing, and hope for theory to dig us out of our predicament. Either the theory of a vaccine, or a theory of right, or a theory of alternative power and meatless existence. There will be new architectures for human existence - and on higher ground.

molly

molly hankwitz - she/her

http://bivoulab.org

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 1:54 AM <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk> wrote:

Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce
Schneier's
'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed we
are more likely be suffering from the condition of Acedia. A malady of
medieval monks described as no longer caring about caring, a feeling of
dislocation when all the normal future contexts that give our lives
meaning are suspended no longer providing stable temporal horizon. Here
is an extract. At the bottom is a link to the full essay.

"Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been
feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It’s a
nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice
things we regularly do.

What’s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown
adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones — real
though those worries are. It isn’t even the sense that, if we’re really
honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty self-indulgent when
held up against the urgency of a global pandemic. It is something more
troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go on
doing much of what for years we’d taken for granted as inherently
valuable."

"It’s here, moving back to the particular features of the global
pandemic, that we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and
dislocation so many have been feeling. The source of our current acedia
is not the literal loss of a future; even the most pessimistic scenarios
surrounding Covid-19 have our species surviving. The dislocation is more
subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on
which just going on in the present relies.

Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons.
Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on,
even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the economy
will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be
changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or
local commerce will survive.

What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no
longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant,
retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a
future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This
fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right
now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the
value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed,
such as education or institution-building. That’s what many of us are
feeling. That’s today’s acedia." Full essay here...

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/opinions/unrelenting-horizonlessness-of-covid-world-couldry-schneier/index.html

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