MOVEMENT 4. BREATH SIGH TEMPEST: On the Temporal Dimensions of Re‐arrangements

Abstract

The fourth movement explores the temporal relationship between arrangements and re-arrangements, addressing the question of how an obdurate and 'sticky' temporal order may give way to palpable re-arrangement of the ways in which subjects experience time. Eschewing a concern with linear homogenous time, it addresses the processes of rearrangement by understanding the dynamics of grave events, hauntings of the past, subtly changing rhythms of everyday life, and the force of potential futures in synchrony. Beginnings: Minneapolis and Atlanta 2020In the summer of 2020 and amidst a global pandemic, a wave of protests swept the USA in response to the police murder of George Floyd. The massive outpouring of crowds condemning police violence inevitably spread to Atlanta-the city of Martin Luther King Jr., the 'Black Mecca', styled (perhaps presumptuously) the 'city too busy to hate'. The crowd of protestors claiming their streets may not exactly have had hate in their hearts. There was nevertheless anguish, righteous anger and resentment. More deaths ensued, more destruction, with one site being burned to the ground by angry protestors.The fire this time was distributed across a crowd unprecedented in its diversity, tenacity and size (McAdam, 2020). Saturated in the affect of solidarity, it appearedbeing in that crowd, as one of us (Adeem) was-that the murder of George Floyd had propelled the world into a new temporality. In this new present, no longer would instances of racialized state violence go unnoticed, unanswered and unmourned. The fire spread. It unleashed sympathetic flames that burned to revivify movements with diverse but interrelated foci. Atlantans rose up, demanding that the tattered social safety net be patched and the ritual cultivation of violent anti-blackness redressed.Indeed, the death of George Floyd precipitated a thousand such movements the world over. The agonizing strangulation of a man's life-breath unleashed a storm of subaltern sighs globally. These sighs threatened to become a force of nature, a global tempest. What appeared as a moment in which the normalization of racial violence was supremely expressive of its murderous impunity paradoxically inaugurated a widespread rejection of that deadly prerogative. This time, the death of a black man, caught on tape and circulated globally, became an n-dimensional mirror in which folks in different situations of subjection around the world saw the reflections of their own trials and tribulations.Anthropologist Katherine Verdery has studied cases from post-socialist Eastern Europe, demonstrating how, under certain conditions, the materiality of the body of the murdered removes societal bars on re-casting the past. They render possible hitherto unimaginable futures (Verdery, 1999). Giorgio Agamben's (1998) homo sacer may be killed to maintain existing and embattled social relations, but this time, the case appears to be different. Some killings may unleash the genesis of new cosmologies, re-arranging rusty relations between objects (Nugent and Suhail,...