The government “shut down,”
and where are we? Not in the streets. My Twitter and Facebook feed are filled
with people puzzling over this fact. We know the effects of the shutdown could
be devastating for precarious populations—the poor, the food insecure, the
sick. We know that the worst effects of the shutdown will be absorbed by raced,
gendered, and classed subjects. We know that we’re angry. And we know that we’re
not in the streets.
We’re being scolded for not
being in the streets. We’re being told that Millennials aren’t serving their
world-historical function of maintaining the liberal-capitalist state. We’re informed
that we “should be vigorously protesting as the House GOP holds the state and
the economy hostage.” We’re even offered a script: “It’s our government, they
ought to declare.” We’re told
that we are making “it harder for the progressives who do hold public office to
do their jobs.”
But what if our puzzled
self-descriptions index a political consciousness that all these pious
prescriptions can’t want to think? What if we know something, we who don’t go
out into the streets, what if we know something that we ourselves almost can’t
let ourselves know, a knowledge that we can only become conscious of in the
form of a half-shocked self-assessment: “We’re not in the streets?!”
What if we know that we
Millennials were born into an already abandoned world? What if we only know the
welfare state of yesteryear as a myth? What if we can only laugh when someone
encourages us to declare, “it’s our
government”? What if we only know a world of de-pegged dollars, of flexible
production, of fast-moving finance? What if we only know a world in which the
state at every turn functions to stack the world against us? What if we only
know a world in which the state’s primary mode of being is as an agency
dedicated to the proposition that black and brown people around the world
should be incarcerated or killed? What if we only know a world in which our
most “progressive” president was the one who gave us the horrible, racist Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act? What if we only know a
world in which liberals justify the maintenance of the state by rhetorically
gesturing to the very raced and gendered populations that the state only cares
to fuck over? What if we know that the devastating abandonment to which
precarious populations are now subject as a result of the “shutdown” is simply
the agonizing materialization of an already established fact?
What if we’re not cruel
optimists because we were never optimistic in the first place.
We want to be in the
streets. We showed that. We want nothing more. We want to be in the streets.
Dancing, laughing, arguing. Feeding one another, caring for one another,
defending one another against the organs of the state that never shut
down. Shattering windows, tearing
down fences, making the world our commons. We want to build worlds where the
hungry can eat, where the sick can repair. Where black skin isn’t a marker of disposability
and where bodies can embody as they like. Where the forms of ableism at times implied
in the political shorthand of “the streets” are annulled.
For us, the streets are an
impossible actuality. The streets are a place where the fantasy of contact and
care becomes concrete. A place where we realize that we are abandoned to one
another. Where we hold on and hold
together and, in so doing, get in touch with something new.
Why aren’t we in the
streets? We’re already there, already in them, in and through our very
withdrawal from them. We’re in them in our recognition that the state has always
already abandoned us, that it has created a world in which speech cannot become
act and our presence doesn’t matter. We’re in them in our decision to abandon
the state in turn, in our refusal to participate in the statist scenography
that congregates a crowd in order to re-ground itself.
We know this—vaguely,
hazily, inchoately. The question, then, is not, “Why aren’t we in the streets?”
It is, rather, “What will happen when we realize we’re already there?”
And we know this, too.
