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The arrival of the disaster disrupts the ordinary and creates an intense, if temporary, feeling of living through history, scary but at the same time exhilarating. This affective peak, though, is quickly replaced by a boring new normal, as the crisis once again becomes ordinary. These affects appear particularly flat against the emotional social... See more
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the pandemic and the sense of a bend in history, contrasted with the following return of the sense of stasis, the boredom, which in this article is an affect
The glitch in the ordinary shows us that many stable structures of our life are fragile at best: ‘we are compelled to understand that noth-ing from above or on the outside is holding the world together solidly’ (Berlant, 2022: 24). This in turn forces us to focus less on structures and more on the infrastructures of living, the daily routines that... See more
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could relate to ideas of the network, changing ideas about structure? Losing sight of the larger structures governing our lives? relates to the network being offline in Nelson?
Switching on a light, buying a friend a coffee, pulling on a T-shirt, driving to school pick-up, buying raspberries out of season, watching a panel show with no black people – with almost every daily action I contribute to world misery. If good is not to harm others, then I live within a system that has made goodness impossible. (Pollard, 2022: 25)
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‘She muses on how the Internet has replaced religion, a panoptic god that surveils us:’
Many of the routines that surround the situation tragedy are realised through the con-sumer economy. Pollard’s narrator is aware of the manufactured nature of her desires, but in a Berlantian vein, she hoards hopeful images about how the family’s lives add up to something: ‘like every girl brought up to be a good capitalist, I want to be the... See more
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Although people are isolated in The Fell , they are most willing to make small personal sacrifices for others.
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This novel gives most space to the frictions of the everyday. Yet it also has more human contact and nonsovereign relationality.
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Pollard’s Delphi
She still tries to muster sufficient cruel optimism to go on: We have to live with this rising tide of future, leaking and sopping over everything, claiming cities and sectors, until we’re in the future, already – that dystopian future of surveillance, video calls and VR headsets, and viral epidemics spread by globalization, and the 24-hour news... See more
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People maintain their unrealisable fantasies to be able to believe that ‘they and the world “add up to something”’ (Berlant, 2011: 2). This fantasy, in other words, is both false and vital.
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Narrative fragmentation is cre-ated less by descriptions of fever than by ancient divination practices. As the narrator puts it, they ‘are a form of daydreaming, of dragging the future a little closer’ (Pollard, 2022: 4). Yet the narrator dreads what is to come, because of the almost apocalyptic atmosphere of uncertainty that characterises today’s... See more
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link between narrative fragmentation and imagining futures amidst crisis