“how shall I say love … ”: Reimagining a non-relational geopolitics of love in the time of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The pandemic as a portal has deeply changed life as we know it, including our homes. While countries continue to strengthen their health systems and policies, marginalized groups in local communities are absorbed, reassembled, and transformed in everyday ‘portals' which generate mutually entangled and composite forces of unification and healing as well as forces of division and wounding. In this commentary, I argue that these forces can be taken as embodying a geopolitics of love already subsumed by intimate, proximal, and mediated relations, therefore leaving out aspects of love that are populated by voids, hollows, and liminalities. Here, I reflect upon Massey's spatial politics vis-a-vis Harrison's notion of non-relationality in order to puncture the representational limits of the geopolitical as a way to transform ‘bad' love (i.e. love that eclipses pains, sufferings, and otherness) while simultaneously not succumbing to a desire for sameness underpinning ‘good’ love (i.e. love that promotes unification and healing). Specifically, I suggest that the nonrelationality of place making and its geographies of nowhereness may lead us back home to love as always already there.

‘They knew they were going home to potentially slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.’

(Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’, April 4, 2020; emphasis added)

The spatial imaginary of the COVID-19 pandemic embodies a seemingly unending netherworld that is at once spectacular and mundane, spectral and futural, as well as, real and imagined. While countries continue to strengthen their health systems and policies, marginalised groups in local communities are absorbed, reassembled, and trasnsformed in everyday ‘portals’ realised through creative modes of solidarity and resistance, ‘bottom–up’ approaches to community (re)engagement, as well as, maintaining social connectedness, hope and resilience amid loss (Bentley et al., 2020; Gilmore et al., 2020; Ortega & Orsini, 2020). These ‘agentic’ and communal responses; however, should not be mistaken for naïve romanticisation of pain and suffering magnified by media spotlighting. Quite the contrary, these politically affirmative responses are inherently rooted in enduring systemic oppressions and intersecting inequalities of gender, sexuality, race, social class, age or location, while being reconstituted and rescaled in the precarious geographies of COVID-19 (Rose-Redwood et al., 2020).

Taking a pause from the immediacy of public health reforms and government restructuring due to managing the immediate effects of the pandemic, I offer a critical commentary on reimagining geopolitics of love – a generative and creative force – in order to cultivate its radical promise of personal and social transformation (Carabelli, 2019; Ferguson & Toye, 2017). In this space writ small, I do not intend to repeat the vibrant philosophical and reflexive discussions on the politics of love written elsewhere (e.g. Nash, 2013; García-Andrade, Gunnarsson, & Jónasdóttir, 2018). Furthermore, I do not wish to delve into examining specific empirical cases of pandemic-related violence (e.g. Ekzayez et al., 2020; Mazza et al., 2020) because these studies may need a separate space to unpack its fuller complexity (e.g. Döring, 2020). Instead, I aim to rethink a geopolitics of love that hinged upon my reflections of Roy’s metaphorizing of the pandemic as a ‘portal’ which depicts a ‘time-warping’ crisis producing distorted or ‘blended’ spatialities (Bolander & Smith, 2020). Specifically, I argue that this portal has left marked bodies in media res wherein the ethico-political possibilities of these bodies being ‘throwntogether’ and ‘held toward-another’ always fall short (Harrison, 2007; Massey, 2005).

In the sections below, I first broadly sketch the two composite forces of unification and division shaping the global and local response to managing COVID-19. Here I recast these forces in light of Wilkinson’s (2016) suggestion to interrogate spaces ‘that do not feel like love, that anger us, disappoint us and that make us desire distance rather than togetherness’ (p. 1). Second, I forward a geopolitics of love that is equally attentive to the relational and non-relational encounters of the body, representation, and intersubjectivity. I achieve this by drawing insights from Massey’s (2005) concept of ‘throwntogetherness’ and Harrison’s (2007) discussion of being ‘held toward-another’ as falling short for us to generate possible horizons and minor futures of living together despite the enduring spatial, structural, and social inequalities.

Love is not enough: in search of justice and redemption

Pandemics bring a different kind of atmosphere carrying mutable forces and mutated intensities that inspire personal and collective action. Upon a cursory look in the currently saturated COVID-19-related literature, we can quickly observe two salient ‘themes’ that project composite forces of change, namely: a force of (re)unification and healing and a force of division and wounding. The first force surrounds the urgent call to collective solidarity, mutual care and engaged citizenship across communities – local and global – to combat the spread of the virus (Branicki, 2020; Kokudo & Sugiyama, 2020; Provenzi & Barello, 2020). Furthermore, this force motivates positive change and enables connections of caring for those geographically isolated, socially aggrieved, and economically marginalised (Holmes et al., 2020; Rose-Redwood et al., 2020). Studies that imbibe this force aim to nurture and sustain healing while fostering mutual cooperation across individuals, groups, communities, regions, nations, and continents.

Whilst forces that unite and heal ‘overflow’ at this time, ‘darker’ forces also amalgamate a destructive, exploitative and corrosive chain of contemporary bio-necro-neoliberal practices which further divide and inflict deeper wounds into existing systems of inequality marked by gender, sexuality, race, abledness, ethnicity, location and so on (Bowleg, 2020; Laurencin & McClinton, 2020; Pellicano & Stears, 2020). In some countries that are continuously plagued by heated political conflicts and local wars, steep economic strife, and nested practices of state–nonstate corruption, the most marginalised sectors of society are often wedged in-between these fatal couplings of power. For example, most local communities in countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Philippines, Afghanistan or Nigeria are disproportionately overwhelmed and struggle to stay afloat while navigating endemic factors such as local epidemics, weak governance and authoritarian leadership, intensification of gender and sexual-based violence, strong populist anti-scientism sentiments, and the widening digital divide (Azubuike, Adegboye, & Quadri, 2020; Mietzner, 2020; Ortega & Orsini 2020; United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific, 2020).

Here, I view these composite forces as mirroring the complexly entangled ‘life-giving’ and ‘life-robbing’ qualities of love. Unlike related concepts of ‘care’, ‘compassion’ or ‘desire’, studies on love as a political force have had an intellectual reemergence in the last decade across disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences (e.g. Biana, 2021; García-Andrade, Gunnarsson, & Jónasdóttir, 2018; Wilkinson, 2016; Wright, 2016). Taking multiple resonances in critical and radical feminist work on affect, psychoanalysis, and posthumanism to name a few, love as a political force show the productive, generative, and creative energies of human and non-human encounters in and of the world (Ferguson & Toye, 2017). At a glance, love as a political force may have strong affinities to the force of unification and healing I described. This observation is quite intuitive because previous studies often highlight the more positive or enabling aspects of the ‘good’ kind of love. However, as we also know, in spite and despite of people's purest intention, the promise of good love does not always result to positive outcomes. For example, Wilkinson (2016) has forwarded a strong critique in relation to the often 'soft' and uncritical treatment of the ‘unconditionality’ of loving someone (i.e. enacting ‘good’ love), which assumed the de facto willingness of people to receive and accept the love of another without question. Specifically, she pointedly asked, ‘what happens when you continue to love us, even though we did not want your love to begin with?’ (p. 11). Among the other crucial points she raised, Wilkinson’s main contention was that ‘love is not just a generative power for good; love can also close down dialogue, narrow our worlds and limit our imaginaries.’ (p. 11).

Taking a step back, a critical standpoint towards good love makes sense, and is most especially true, in relation to understanding the intimate context of gender-based and sexual violence. Previous findings have already showed how violence is perpetrated and even legitimised by discourses related to romantic love, marriage, and trust (Donovan & Barnes, 2019; Ofreneo, Canoy, & de Guzman, 2015; Wood, 2001). Thinking with Wilkinson, hidden forms of violence enacted in the name of good love may induce feelings of ambivalence among grassroots feminist and justice-oriented scholars in apprehending love (by contrast to violence as a concept or event) as a ‘serious’ concern that merits substantial theoretical inquiry and renewed political action. In terms of the latter, a critique towards the promotion of good love is also propelled by a pragmatic scepticism against the ‘transformative’ impetus or ‘liberatory’ promise of love to address historically entrenched inequalities as well as its ‘soft’ power to sustain collective political action. (Good) Love is simply not enough. In particular, Wilkinson further asked ‘how loving is it to not take into consideration the pain, trauma, and anger that makes self-love and identity politics a vital part of social justice?’ (p. 6). I see this line of questioning as a way of ‘putting back the 'ache’ in the experience and act of loving not to support the veneration of martyrdom, but as a way to actually recuperate good love from the realm of individual affection or suppressed libidinal desire by unleashing its bare intensities into the world as a raging and disquieted force that haunts and seeks justice. Situated in the uneven flows and staggering rhythms of living in ‘pandemic time’, love as a political force, therefore, operates in a contested and hybrid space that interrogates the (in)visibility and (dis)continuity of everyday (non)relationalities, performative identities, and body politics. Specifically, I posit a geopolitics of love that arrests and problematises marked bodies – human and non-human – in order to recapitulate the ethico-political possibilities of ‘throwntogetherness’, and being ‘held toward-another’ as always falling short (Harrison, 2007; Massey, 2005).

Geopolitics and ethics of ‘Throwntogetherness’ and of falling short

Living together assumes both a political and an ethical imperative. Massey (2005) refers to a condition of being ‘throwntogether’ in space–place wherein people engage with one another in order to stake their personal claims in a relationship. In this context, ‘place, in other words, does – as many would argue – change us, not through some visceral belonging … but through the practising of place; the negotiation of intersecting, trajectories; place as an arena where negotiation is forced upon us’ – (Massey, 2005, p. 155; emphasis added). Similar to Massey, the key idea of place as a process and a differentiated arena of negotiation (i.e. who is allowed to negotiate or not) is strongly articulated in other key texts by geographers like Lefebvre, Soja or Harvey (Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 2003; Soja, 2010). For these scholars, the concept of space–place, and by extension the concept of cities, the urban or the metropole, are sites of reproduction, contestation, and transformation. In this context, we can view cities as embodying an unequal arena of negotiation wherein good love qua ‘love of the same has resulted in many forms of discriminatory and hateful political projects’ (Wilkinson, 2016, p. 4).

Reverting back to Massey’s ethico-political project of place making, ‘imaginations of place and space are both an element of and a stake in those negotiations’ (p. 155; emphasis in the original). While Wilkinson's critique reminds us about the risk of dismissing ‘bad’ love as ‘narrow’, ‘parochial’ and about ‘desiring sameness’, conversely, I argue that in the same vein there is also a great risk of losing the ‘good’ in good love, that is, the politically affirmative intensity of love to live on despite of through a world in and of pain. As such, I posit that it is useful to extend our reflection to the material or embodied force of love as encounters enfolded in radical openings or ‘hollows’ (Burke, 2017; Ferguson & Toye, 2017; Gregoratto, 2017). In this view, the point of my critique is not to endorse or reject a particular love. Rather, I attempt to reconceive the notions of the ‘political’ and the ‘force’ of love as always already ‘falling short’. And so the question becomes, how shall I say love … ?

Harrison’s (2007) article entitled ‘How shall I say it … ?’: Relating the non-relational examines the limits and possibilities of social analysis (i.e. overreliance on words or representations) and relationality (e.g. being as always subsumed by relation). In the article, Harrison argued that the non-relational is at the ‘heart of the relational’; it is an ‘interval between us, on the spacing of what we all too easily call “intersubjectivity,” and on the nonrepresentable and unspeakable “foundation” of the speakable, storyable, narratable, or thematisable’ (p. 593). Following this logic, normative categories like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are understood by default as limited products of relations of power. However, this limitation or inadequacy should not be viewed ‘in terms of failure but rather as falling short – as derived from ‘ellipsis’ … these three points of suspension which punctuate a text and interrupt articulate discourses; three dots to mark a resistance to translation, to entering into a correspondence’ (p. 603). Furthermore, Harrison posited that (aspects of) suffering like sorrow or affliction, are also non-relational and cannot be fully reduced to any relation, that is, ‘suffering [in this case love] is not contained by or within the expansive, assimilative proliferation of vital life nor is it redeemable within the ecstatic structures of being-in-the-world, to which it stands as a tear and a termination’ (p. 595; emphasis added).

In light of strengthening the notion of love as a political force, I posit that the non-relationality of love offers a differentiated and differential politics of love beyond the limiting view of forces of unity and/or division. On the one hand, I suggest that scholars mobilising geopolitics of love to challenge existing oppressive structures must first recognise and accept the real limits of the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural’ in grasping the complex reality of human and non-human lifeworlds (Harrison, 2007). On the other hand, we also need, to a certain extent, resist the quick negation, latent anxiety or jaded cynicism which may implicitly or unintentionally sabotage the search for compelling ‘evidence’ to rationalize healing, justice, unity or transformation in our own communities. And while we choose to commit ourselves to a strong sense of personal or social justice, I suggest that the possibilities of a non-relational geopolitics of love are more than (not beyond) the search for reliable and ‘valid’ evidence as determined by principles of sufficiency, adequacy or morality. Through Harrison’s (2007) reading of Derrida, the language of ‘evidence’ cannot fully ‘represent’ or encompass the non-relationality of suffering (of love) and instead locates suffering (love) within the ambit of testimony. In this context, ‘ … it is possible for testimony to be corroborated by evidence, but the process of evidence is absolutely heterogeneous to that of testimony, which implies faith, belief, sworn faith, the pledge to tell the truth [ … ] (Derrida & Steigler, 2002 as cited in Harrison, 2007, p. 605). Here, I suggest that the notion of testimony in terms of a nonrelational geopolitics of love means being openly held toward-another without dissolving relational difference, a negotiation of space–place without guarantees of redemption, and an invitation to an everyday practice of justice and faith.

Coda: non-relationalities of love in the pandemic

Against the riptides of the pandemic, when bodies demand reprieve and release, our sense of being-at-home-in-the-world is diminished to a (non)relationality of being held toward-another by a cosmology of chaos, if not, by love. When existing relations are marked by inequality, discrimination, and censorship, we are almost always compelled to lean unto the difficult, and more loving questions:

When we offer love, care, and justice for the aggrieved, who is/are (still) left out? What are the costs of fleeting and enduring representations and forms of love? What (non) places and spaces in the world do extreme hate, non-caring practices and deepening injustices remain obscured? In what ways do ‘acts of love’ exist and aid to transform the emotional void left by pain, sorrow, and loss? Asking these questions, albeit non-exhaustive, recognize, the conditions of being and becoming ‘throwntogether’ that are marked by debilitating factors such as irreparable distance, precarious labour flows or forced migration. This shared and socially differentiated condition of ‘throwntogetherness’ in framing the COVID-19 pandemic implies the need to recalibrate politico-ethical relations based on categorical sameness or even ‘intersectional’ difference. Specifically, I suggest the importance of mobilising a transversal politics and relational ethics situated in unanticipated encounters, hollows, voids, and liminalities produced through multiple logics of power (e.g. mobilising vertical and horizontal relations of power). Of course, this is not to say, however, that these confluent, politically saturated, and ‘morphing’ relations did not occur pre-pandemic. Rather, we can view these relations as unevenly mutating, re-distributed in unpredictable directions, in often misrecognised forms, and made more real by diffracted conditions of an unfolding pandemic.

So how do we begin to shape and mobilise a non-relational geopolitics of love in order for us to reimagine the existing and emergent relationalities afforded by the COVID-19 pandemic? First, we need to recognise that the current pandemic has already exacerbated and (re)produced brutal and uncaring landscapes, which are unevenly experienced by different communities (Grundy-Warr & Lin, 2020; Liebman, Rhiney, & Wallace, 2020; Lopez & Neely, 2021). However, it is also undeniable that our sense of place and practices of place making are deeply defamiliarized and reassembled by unpredictable everyday disruptions, disenfranchised loss and meaninglessness, and protracted experiences of suspension, while actively waiting for the ‘next normal-to-come’. Whereas border control mechanisms of many cities around the world inevitably proliferated precarious geographies of otherness, makeshift infrastructures and interconnected systems within a city (e.g. vaccination centres, public hospitals, transport routes, etc.) also produced haunted geographies of nowhereness accompanying the sense of ‘placelessness’ of non-places (Augé, 1995; Arefi, 1999). Here, we can characterise non-places, by contrast to an anthropological sense of place, in different ways such as those places considered highly functional yet transitory, ‘lost’, ‘forgotten’, restricted, mediated or imagined (Gebauer et al., 2015).

Furthermore, I suggest that approaching the production, critique, and transformation of non-places through non-relationality can generate sharper insights by drawing closer attention to the ‘bad’ elements of loss, severance, and non-representation as constituent conditions of co-existence and collective resistance, rather than of passive integration or assimilation, between place and non-place. Arefi (1999), through Marx analogy of ‘double life’, postured to this dual spatial logic by examining the nature of how people experience and inhabit varying spatiotemporal scales of everyday urban geographies that are punctured by loss of meaning. The critical sensibility afforded by thinking through non-relationalities enables future inquiry to advance the concept of non-places as embodying vertical and horizontal coalisions against the late capitalist codification of life and death, a ‘flattening’ of urban surface shaped by the neoliberal discourse of ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ techno-management, and the extremizing of political polarisation between state and nonstate actors. As such, non-relational geopolitics of love as an act of loving without the anxiety or compulsion to call its name, cannot only accommodate tensions between different ‘solitary’ and ‘collective’ sets of social obligations in unpacking urban relationalities (Arefi, 1999), but can also bring into light the affective force of human–non-human bodies in reconstituting the possibilities and limits of place–non-place encounters.

Lastly, these (non) relational encounters have ethical repercussions in cities everywhere. On the one hand, non-relational geopolitics of love ascertains that any encounter implies an ethical disposition of extended responsibility ‘with others which forces more prosaic ethical responses, of generosity and hospitality towards others, not wedded to a sense of wider connections, but rather enacted through the negotiation of everyday life’ (Darling, 2009, p. 1949). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the affordances of non-relationality is crucial in forging communal solidarities (e.g. rise of community pantries; online social movements) that can challenge culturally dominant representations of what it means to help and how by disrupting the conventional framing of political cleavages (i.e. pro vs. anti) which are ‘registered within a language of accountable connections’ (Darling, 2009, p. 1950). Moreover, the nature of such ethical encounters exceeds and transgresses any meaning dictated by human intention or memory as well as those imposed by structural surveillance. What is carried through these encounters impresses upon the surface of the body by penetrating its rigid and codified contours which lay to bare all that is ‘unspeakable’. In the nowhereness of these encounters, forces multiply and collide while always being reproduced elsewhere. The skeptic, feeling unworthy, and broken-hearted traveller might wonder and ask, where else does standing by love's abyss lead us? Well, without a dose of courage, mutual respect and forgiveness, laughter and improvisation, or clean water, I don't know how shall I say home. And yes, it is safe to love.

Acknowledgements

Thank you for the generous comments and suggestions of the three anonymous reviewers as well as the editors in providing me the opportunity to contribute to the journal’s special issue.

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