"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 <[email protected]> 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 > > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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