Enduring COVID-19, nevertheless

ABSTRACT

This pandemic is a season of nevertheless; we are exhausted from all kinds of labour, but keep labouring nevertheless. This labouring, I suggest, takes three forms: doing (the productive and reproductive labour required to sustain life through a pandemic), undoing (the tedious processes of postponing and cancelling plans, or abandoning the process of planning altogether), and not-doing (passing the time left over between doing and undoing). Of course, the particularities of our doing, undoing, and not-doing will vary by our circumstances even as we operate within these general patterns of behaviour. I want to think through these neverthelesses as a way of mapping orientations toward the future fractured by the pandemic, and our collective persistence despite those fractures. Under normal circumstances, doing is an expression of optimism about the future, but the pandemic has quickened the tempo and increased the frequency of disappointment and continually forecloses possibility. Undoing is tiresome and painful, the necessary labour that amounts to less than nothing, begetting a collection of losses that often remain private and invisible. Not-doing is an intensified experience of boredom, with no obvious end or relief. Against the calls, which abound in the public culture of the pandemic, to treat COVID-19 as an opportunity to cultivate resilience, I posit endurance as an alternative framework. Resilience implies a better future if only we would learn how to suffer more productively. By contrast, endurance makes no such promises but fully acknowledges all the ways we might hurt, even as it functions as the nameless capacity that carries us through our doing, undoing, and not-doing – nevertheless.

KEYWORDS:

• Boredom
• endurance
• exhaustion
• labour
• loss
• optimism

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Further information

This Special Issue article has been comprehensively reviewed by the Special Issue editors, Associate Professor Ted Striphas and Professor John Nguyet Erni.

Notes

1 There was a certain satisfaction in that process, the comfort of having purchased security, or the sense of security that lasted as long as our inventory of consumables remained comfortably high. Marita Sturken’s (2006, 2007) work on the purchase of security, and the imperative that citizens provide security for themselves, is instructive, even though it preceded the current crisis.

2 See Anderson (2014, pp. 119–121) for a reappraisal of Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’, which Anderson describes as a common affective orientation that organizes ‘otherwise disparate practices, events, or processes’ (p. 119).

3 As Rushing (2020, p. S-54) notes, ‘perceptions of risk and threat’ have become ‘factionalized.’

4 On the importance of recognizing shared vulnerability in COVID times, see Rushing (2020).

5 Anderson’s (2014, p. 41) definition of ‘morale’ as mobilized by states bears some similarities to this. He describes morale as the property that ‘enables bodies to keep going despite the present – a present in which morale is either targeted directly or threatens to break.’ See also Sara Ahmed (2010). For a critique of hope, see McManus (2011).

6 On the collision of care with the demands of capital, see Micki McGee (2020).

7 As Armstrong (2015, p. 181) notes in his work on the etymology of ‘precarity’, the Latin precārius ‘refers to something requested or obtained by entreaty or favor’, which means that a ‘precarious situation depends on the will of another to concede to a request, an uncertainty in the sense of a person or another situation on which one cannot fully depend.’ In the case of coronavirus, we are dependent not just on a sovereign authority, but also on one another, which leaves us all in a doubly precarious position.

8 I’ve always appreciated critiques of futurity, like Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). But then I ran out of things to look forward to, and I suddenly found myself hungry for something that would anchor me to a time beyond this one.

9 In an attempt to give these losses a place to live, I created a public archival project called Coronavirus Lost and Found (pandemicarchive.com), a site where anyone can log anything they’ve lost – or, more happily, found – during the pandemic.

10 On the political potential of ‘resting in sadness’, see Thelandersson (2018). She writes (p. 17), ‘But the mere act of resting in sadness … might function as an impasse, where the refusal to move forward becomes a protest of the neoliberal demands of becoming a labouring and ‘happy’ subject.’

11 For an analysis of the politics of waiting, see Sharma (2014).

12 On the trends that arose in the first weeks of the pandemic, see Marcus (2020) and Jung (2020).

13 ‘Time’, Arthur (2019–2020, p. vi) writes, ‘feels caught between aftermath and looming recurrence: impasse, interruption, repeat’.

14 According to Ngai (2007), these ugly feelings arise at the site of blocked or suspended agency.

15 As Bracke (2016, p. 59) notes, when threats themselves become resilient, the difference between a threat and resilience collapses.

16 Connecting resilience to cruel optimism, Bracke (2016, p. 65) argues, ‘resilience becomes a symptom of the loss of the capacity to imagine and do otherwise, and cruelty is one of the more politically cautious names for such a condition’.

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Notes on contributors

Rebecca A. Adelman

Rebecca A. Adelman is Professor and Chair of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She is the author of Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America’s Global War on Terror (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War (Fordham University Press, 2019), and the co-editor of Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).