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How can you maintain yourself through a struggle that has no time? With a thinking and imagining that shapes times, and reimagines what counts as effective. Sustaining protest into whatever it will become (even as what it will become will still be likely to be protest) depends less on doubling down on determination or coherence than on allowing our necessarily wandering thoughts to feed it in alternating rhythms of engagement and distraction, free perplexity and tentative organization.
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The opposite of fetishized purity, “vagueness” is the chemical byproduct of combining positions."
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Rei Tarada. “Two Hundred Years of University “Reform” and How to Dream It”
Writing about the California student protests, Terada articulates beautifully how we respond to crises that seem overwhelming, against enormous and inexhaustible forces when our struggle “has no time.” We wander through “alternating rhythms of engagement and distraction,” both as a means to reenergize and to remain unmoored from the stasis we are fighting. For Terada, vagueness and distraction are as virtuous as their socially accepted twins, coherence and focus, because they feed and nourish each other. I read this as part political strategy and part life advice, spheres that are not separate in everyday conversations.
In ChickenSoup-speak, don’t burn out. Take time off. Let your mind wander. Come back to the problem with fresh eyes. Etc.
The very exhaustion and ‘alienation’ that cripple our energies can be resources for renewed insight and, weirdly, new energies. Despair is not only a trope but a visceral experience, a horrible darkness centered around a black gravitational core whose pull can be—must be—redirected into a push away. These personal experiences can animate political work and even provide frames for how to sustain and reenergize it.
