💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anonymous-it-has-to-come-out.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:09:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: It Has to Come Out Author: Anonymous Date: Autumn 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19, daily life, pandemic, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #6 Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 6 Notes: Previously appeared as separate texts in Faut qu’ça sorte !, brochure, May 2020
With this virus and its management, I saw a haze of fear descending
suddenly and contaminating everything. I searched where mine was, to
look it in the face, to distinguish it among the self-evident and the
commotion, and to better understand that of others.
First of all, I wasn’t afraid of the virus. I saw it as an unknown among
others, one that arrives and belongs to the world of scientific experts
and all other categories of managers, politicians, economists and cops.
I was not afraid of being exposed to the disease, nor of the death that
roams around. I didn’t hope to avoid it, I was sick, it was annoying and
long. I am actually quite confident in my immune system and I felt able
to be careful for other people’s relationships and needs, without
believing in the idea of “zero risk”. I did had to fight against my fear
of the cops, of their “carte blanche”, of the fines that add to the
daily misery of so many people, of the prison sentences even. In short,
of the repression and control that are only getting stronger, with all
the “fragile” people by other criteria who are even more ignored than
usual.
All around, these two particular fears were the most visible, and
difficult to disentangle. They created a powerful shock and complicated
reflection, by confusing or opposing each other in clichés. As if
choosing to take precautions was to submit, or to rebel was murderous.
It concealed the many other reasons and ways of reacting. Whether it is
fear of social judgment and stigmatisation if you don’t appear at the
window for the holy ceremony of applause, or if you are often seen
outside to find something to survive, or because you don’t have a home,
or because you don’t want to go crazy inside, or on the contrary,
because you needed to stay inside out of fear of going out in the
nightmare of the outside.
The government measures have also created two false categories of
people, those who respect them and those who refuse them. It all seems
far too binary and simplistic to me. No, not all the “fragile” ones were
“freaked out”. Not all the “disobedient” were “able-bodied”. Not all the
“responsible and caring” people were “good confined citizens”. Not all
the “confined” had the same privileges to do so. Neither did all the
“rebels”...
And “deconfinement” brings new questions. Why are people going out now?
What has changed? Is it suddenly less dangerous, or are the police, or
the neighbours? I want to look for complexity, and others to share it
with. That we don’t tell ourselves that there is only one right way to
deal with this kind of “sanitary putsch”, and on this scale. But neither
should we tell ourselves anything other than the real choices we made
during this period. That we assume strengths and weaknesses, both
individual and collective, and that we try to find out how to deal with
what comes afterwards, which is likely to be worse.
illegality?
Walking around in a park, accidentally on the first day it reopened, it
made me feel super weird to pass openly through the front gate, as if
something was missing, something that after almost two months of
confinement had become a habit: a daily practice of illegality.
Fortunately, I quickly found, in the company of my friend, a forbidden
door to push that allowed me to fill the lack. This is where it seemed
to me that, in times of confinement, of excessive control and
repression, due to the fact that most of our actions, our needs, our
desires had become outside the law, crime could, more than ever, appear
as self-evident, a way out, a means to reconnect with oneself, to regain
one’s autonomy, to breathe.
Moreover, and paradoxically, it seemed that for some, the shear amount
of prohibitions made “crime” more accessible, the barrier easier to jump
over. To be in fact breaking the law when you are walking for more than
an hour or more than a kilometre from home, to be a criminal when you
cross the street without a certificate or when you hang out with a
friend outside less than a metre away, seems profoundly absurd; so much
so that it tends to create a new context in which illegality can
potentially be taken for granted, more easily experienced, and finally,
as a daily practice being an integral part of this life.
And so it was that within a few weeks, while the state boasted of being
able to declare falling crime rates all over the country, new
delinquency, new practices outside the law, infinite and innumerable,
diffuse and incalculable, exploded everywhere, as the expression of a
new closeness to crime.
The complicity in crime also became more obvious, more recognisable: to
meet people walking in a park in broad daylight, to glimpse here with a
smile groups standing in a dead-end street without a camera, there
people carrying full bags at dubious hours lol, to share in passing
little “tricks” or an itinerary to get around avoiding running into a
roadblock of cops, to exchange amused glances with strangers doing
forbidden things, in a forbidden place at a forbidden time.
Far from saying that all these people, in the facts outside the law,
were my accomplices, it still made me very happy to see, in times of
confinement and repressive mania, the apparent multiplication and
diffusion of outlawed practices, of criminal intentions.
At a time of a so-called “deconfinement” or a “phase 2” of confinement,
it seems important to me to keep in mind this small movement on the
slider, to keep fresh the memory of the multiplication of these moments
of transgression, to take care of these new relations with crime, in
order to be more at ease, more confident, and why not dare to imagine
more in our moments of mistrust towards and against the state, its
machinery and its supporters.
“This culture has branded us as criminals, and of course, in turn, we
have dedicated our lives to crime.” - MNG.
Well, in the end, the “Crisis” is neither economic, nor climatic, nor
nuclear, nor even terrorist. No, it is “sanitary”. “We are at war”
against a virus. Looks like the apocalypse has gotten a new mask in its
collection. Surprise! The old idea of The Great End is right under our
noses again. Somehow it’s even a bit reassuring, because it’s still one
of the foundations of our civilization. We’re back to the traditions,
the last judgment all that, and the genesis too. In short, a nice
straight line, a beginning, an end, and an immense perpetual progress on
the way, the History, the Past, the Future. And it allows us to say to
ourselves that, in any case, it is going to collapse by itself, God
willing, and that all we would have to do is wait while eating a cone
with chocolate ice-cream.
In the meantime, our daily discussions are populated by The Crisis and
its newspeak, which describes the extreme narrowing of our horizons,
geographical, social, emotional, temporal. At the same time, we lose our
grip through the contradictory injunctions to think of ourselves on the
giant and distant scales of a “planet”, a “nation”, a future of a
“humanity”. Shit, after all, we can say that we are out of our depth,
can’t we? Already we don’t know how to deal well with what is at hand?
“Barrier gestures” transform simple logical precautions into supposedly
impassable ramparts against the outside world. The old fear of the Other
was already well-nourished by piles of nationalist, racist, identitarian
shit. Now here is “social distancing” which puts everyone in the
dangerous category, even without intention or sign of hostility. But
fortunately, the hydro-magic gel makes the dirt clean in one push. Plus
it’s fun for children, and sanitizing everything is promising of a
future market for immune disasters.
Then there is the next phase, the “deconfinement”, which they have been
careful to call by a new name, between the reassuring of the end of one
thing and the worrying of the unknown of the next. It’s fuzzy enough to
keep us in doubt about what’s next, and it’s probably quite handy to
manage without too many reactions. Deconfinement is therefore
accompanied, unsurprisingly, by the maintenance of a state of health
emergency. In parallel with new rules and repressive devices, we are
entitled to a kind of weekly national mass, like a new weather forecast
of red and green zones, which are the places where we live (it already
looks like a mutation of the orange weather alert, crossed with the
nuclear accident protocol that was waiting for its time in the boxes,
isn’t it?).
As a lot of grafters, nomads, make-doers, trespassers, misfits,
tinkerers, and other rascals, my horizon is quite reduced, with
navigation at limited sight in the fog of changing restrictions at short
notice. If I wasn’t distrustful by experience, I would probably say that
our dear managers are doing a difficult job, for our own good. But the
idea comes to my mind that their question is perhaps not so much about
good or bad management as about keeping their function as managers,
among those who generally rather profit from the capitalist system.