Along the Fold

One of the indelible images of Manhattan in late March 2020 was the archive of horror accreting daily on my neighbor’s doormat. Above the fold, the New York Times reported on so many thousand lives lost one day, so many million jobs lost the next. No one who was in New York City in spring 2020 will forget the ambulances wailing nearly nonstop—an awful, inescapable sound that could shatter any numbed state of abstraction in relation to the daily numbers.

Yet, after the sheer terror of the first weeks, it became clear that the true horror recorded in the Times lay along the fold: that is, in the stark divide between those most at risk, as reported above the fold, and those able to shelter at home, whose needs were tended to, below. The Times created a robust new “At Home” section, full of tips for what to listen to, watch, cook, make, or otherwise do to pass the endless time, chez vous. “At Home” was (and is) pitched at readers like me: those fortunate and privileged enough to be able to retreat to our cocoons, order in our groceries, and tend our own gardens (or sourdough starters). Those gardens weren’t even entirely metaphorical: my partner started growing lettuce and arugula from seed on the windowsill, while others regrew their scallions in little jars. Although I’ve certainly picked up some helpful tips, I’ve never been able to read “At Home” without a sense of nausea.

Fully cognizant that no one, not even me, needs another “My Pandemic Year” narrative, I nonetheless want to think about the pandemic-era newspaper fold and the social relations limned by it. Specifically, how does the fold intersect with the slash in in/habitable, and with the echoes and contradictions and traces of meaning between English and French, as outlined by Thangam Ravindranathan in her evocative meditation on Georges Perec in this issue? If we have learned anything in these months, it is perhaps that this one-word, two-language oxymoron might name the pandemic accommodation to inhabiting a new normal, a mode of living which, in the “old world” or the “before times,” would have seemed (un) inhabitable.¹

This particular notion of in/habitable is a below-the-fold structure of feeling. Although I cannot not grieve all that has been lost in this tough-yet-tattered city and beyond, I also cannot speak for those who must grieve all of theirs who have not lived. Even before the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the awakenings that followed, one could look to the coronavirus maps of New York City—where racial and class marginalization and COVID-19 positivity rates overlapped to a shocking-yet-not-surprising degree—to see how very little had changed, even as so much had changed, so quickly. In my household, the sheer terror of the first weeks—the fears that we might fall very ill, that the hospitals might be full, that we might die—receded as it was replaced by what I describe above as the along-the-fold horror: the awful knowledge that we’d probably be just fine, our Zoomable jobs still intact, and therefore able to afford to pay others to expose themselves on our behalf. We tipped everyone, all the time, scattering twenties like talismans. And there was even a public health rationale for this outsourcing of risk: we could do our part to flatten the coronavirus curve by staying home, and to flatten the economic catastrophe curve by spending and donating as much money as possible. And yet, how vast is the gulf between sound public health advice and the project of social justice. The capacity of the affluent to stay home and order in was dependent precisely on the continuing itineration of “essential workers,” the very people whom the real estate market had long pushed to margins of the city, those outer-borough neighborhoods now ravaged by the virus. In this, the pandemic only laid bare and exacerbated the untenable inequalities of the old world, the before times.

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For several years, I found myself collecting anecdotes about a recurrent experience: I’d be giving talks or sitting on discussion panels about climate change and the Anthropocene, and the ambient conditions of the academic event in some way allegorized the predicament we were gathered to discuss. These mise-en-abyme circumstances usually involved extreme weather and/or infrastructural failure: wind howling so fiercely it seemed the windows might break as you strained to hear anyone talk; getting oneself ‘up’ to give a lecture after a sleepless night with no electricity to run the fan (or, a different time, no heat) and no running water to shower in the morning. In the Day Zero days of early 2018, an ecocritic colleague in Cape Town reported on the new routine of queuing up for water before heading to campus to teach her class. A rare and ill-timed tornado ripping across upper Manhattan forced me to Zoom-teach my Spring 2020 Anthropocene seminar while sitting on the floor outside my bathroom, the spot in my apartment most protected from the windows. These moments felt like an anticipatory allegory: this is not really how things are (here) (most of the time) now, but it’s a hint of how they might be. Perhaps the most unlikely of these experiences was a 2017 MLA roundtable on “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene,” which was held in a large ballroom, with seven or eight speakers sitting up on a raised platform. The platform, as it turned out, had been poorly assembled, so that every time someone got up to walk to the podium, it wobbled and shifted, with increasing force as each of us moved—to an alarming degree that, nonetheless, was probably not visible to the audience. The ground is literally shifting beneath our feet, I said in extempore remarks when it was my late turn at the microphone, in order to explain the panel’s growing consternation.

My point is that these brief, allegorical glimpses of extremity—anticipations of how different things might be, either in the future, or already for other people right now—have given way to a sense of just being in it, now: the ground is shifting beneath our feet. This is another way of saying that the pressing urgency of cascading and overlapping crises over the past few years has made me increasingly cognizant of the inadequacy of a move I’d honed in my Q&A schtick: to insist on the vital role of environmental and energy humanities in posing fundamental questions about what “the problem” might be, rather than rushing headlong toward “solutions.” It’s hard to argue for the necessity of dilatory reflection when each season (each week, each day) brings a new catastrophe. The current global pandemic is the result of a pathogen having made at least one species jump—a new mode of habitation for the virus—which in turn catalyzed social and economic transformations across human habitats worldwide. But the species jump also affected something like a phase shift, a figure/ground reversal. For those of us working on questions of social inequality, environmental precarity, the politics of futurity—in a word, in/habitability—the relationship between these issues and the conditions of our intellectual labor can no longer be merely allegorical or metaphorical, as if it ever were. This is another sense of living along the fold, rather than a verso/recto either/or. We’re all in it now; we know we’re in it; and we should also know that we’re not all in it in the same way.

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The first text on my “Novel in Africa” syllabus after spring break in mid-March 2020 was Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981), a novel that imagines a near-future revolutionary upheaval in apartheid South Africa. Gordimer’s future projection of racial apocalypse is focalized through a suburban white woman who makes a sudden decision to flee Johannesburg with her family and to hide out in the Bantustan village of her domestic servant, July. It’s a difficult novel to teach in ordinary times, partly because of Gordimer’s merciless use of free indirect discourse to stage through her flawed protagonist, Maureen, the inadequacies of white liberalism. Without careful attention to formal questions of narrative rhetoric and focalization, students often mistake the protagonist’s sometimes troubling thoughts and desires for Gordimer’s own.

This was the novel my students were assigned to read over what passed for “spring break” in the early weeks of the pandemic, after they were all suddenly expelled from campus and the administration scrambled to transform Columbia University in the City of New York into what some Wikipedia pranksters briefly described as “an Ivy League university, located on Zoom.” At first, I couldn’t bear to contemplate teaching this book, as my partner and I faced several long days of wrenching indecision about whether to stay in Manhattan or run to Florida. Columbia couldn’t evict faculty from their University-owned apartments as it had the students from their dorms. However, we did receive an email, sent inexcusably late at night on 17 March, warning of likely staffing shortages, suspended janitorial and maintenance services, and the possibility of irreparable elevator or laundry machine breakdowns, or the necessity of enlisting tenants to staff janitorial or security brigades—a clear, if unstated, lawyer-approved attempt by the University to empty out its residential buildings for the imminent crisis. This high-rise may soon feel (un)inhabitable. If you can, run. (All of the neighbors on our hallway did.) The causes of our dilemma were not at all like Maureen’s in July’s People—and yet the resonances were there.

That’s what my students had found, too, when we finally reconvened on Zoom nearly two weeks later: that this narrative of sudden displacement and disorientation spoke to their experience and to their present unexpected circumstance in ways that surprised and troubled them—and captured their attention and curiosity.

Eventually finding my feet on this new ground, and resolving to stay in our apartment for the duration, I recognized that I very much did want to teach July’s People in that moment, because of passages like this one, in the novel’s opening pages:

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.… The circumstances are incalculable in the manner in which they come about, even if apocalyptically or politically foreseen, and the identity of the vital individuals and objects is hidden by their humble or frivolous role in an habitual set of circumstances. (6)

I often find myself reaching for this passage in thinking about how to think about uncertain futures: how history erupts into the everyday, and the impossibility of knowing in advance exactly how that will happen or how it will feel. These sentences are characteristic of Gordimer’s difficult, dense, and clinically distant narratorial style in July’s People. That stylistic restraint is crucial to the novel’s depiction of the Gramscian interregnum: the time between the dying certainties of apartheid rule and whatever unknowable conditions are coming next. (The novel’s epigraph is taken from the Prison Notebooks: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”)

I worked with my students in teasing out these broad political and historical implications of Gordimer’s novel in the context of apartheid South Africa, but I also asked them to think about what “objects and individuals” had “turned out to be vital” in their own recent flight from campus. For me, I told them, it was a pair of overpriced, oversized ballet flats that I never wore in the old world, but that “turned out to be vital” because I could easily put them on and take them off without using my hands when I ventured out of my apartment to pick up packages or do laundry.

I draw from this vignette a number of observations about the experience of being compelled to radically rethink the in/habitable. The first observation is about the importance of literary form and the power of narrative mediation. July’s People is a difficult novel to read and to teach: risky and charged in ‘normal’ times. If, however, students can grasp what Gordimer is doing in the novel with focalization, point of view, and caustic irony as a solvent of ideology, I cannot not believe that they will be better equipped as humans to live with other creatures in the world, particularly in this not-quite-new world we’ve been jolted into, with the long dyings of the old and the obstructed emergence of what cannot yet be born.

The second observation is about the complex power of analogy, as opposed to identity: not sameness but similarity. This experience in the classroom was a powerful example of the unpredictable ways that novels can grab our attention through unlikely sparks of recognition and improbable similarity. My class worked through an extraordinarily productive tension and ambivalence in relation to Maureen. Obviously, none of us was a middle-class white woman amidst the collapse of the apartheid order. And yet, those analogical moments of recognizing some aspects of the experience of flight and sudden change seemed to hail us all into a better understanding of July’s People than I’ve ever achieved in class before. In other words, we grappled in sharp and specific terms with what students often call “relatability”—but also with its limits—in making sense of a literary text. This relation might be another form of living along the fold: to be drawn out of the inert givenness of one’s own experience and point of view, drawn toward but not occupying fully that of another. In this sense, we might recognize analogy itself as an enabling tool that can “turn out to be vital,” as an aid to thinking in nonlinear, nonarithmetic ways. This does not need to be identical to that in order for me to think with it, learn from it, be troubled by it. In this sense, analogy is a distant cousin of another aspect of the literary that’s vital for me: the multivalent power of the as-if; the counterfactual; what is not that yet might be.

The third observation from my experience of teaching July’s People is about the unexpected insights for thinking about environmental crisis that are to be found in anticolonial liberation movements in Africa and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. These resonances are not limited to the histories that underwrite environmental injustice, by which I mean the uneven planetary distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. The connections also work by way of analogy, as a source of conceptual tools for thinking about commitment, temporality, and contingency. How long can one live in a state of cultural revolution? is a question that I borrow from the South African literary critic David Attwell, to consider how reckoning with radical change is necessary and life-giving, but also confusing and exhausting (163). These questions of endurance amidst prolonged upheaval and unsettlement echo Sarah Jaquette Ray’s recent observation that tending to one’s own well-being can be a form of resistance in times of extremity like those we are living through now: stamina itself is a resource that must be protected. “How to offer one’s self?” is a question I borrow from Nadine Gordimer—for her, it was a question of commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle (“Living in the Interregnum” 264); for me, a question of knowing what kinds of intelligence I can offer to the uncertain present and near future of cascading crisis. This commitment has driven my work in environmental and energy humanities. And yet, for many months, my mind and spirit recoiled at the thought of trying to be a pandemic public intellectual; outside of what now passed for the “classroom,” I could not contemplate having big thoughts or hot takes about what was happening.

The complex temporality in the passage from July’s People quoted above involves an ethics of anticipation and retrospection. What exactly is going to turn out to be vital: where are the indispensables that lurk unpredictably, imperceptibly, within the everyday? (I’ll never forget my secret, sheepish elation at discovering a long-forgotten bottle of hand sanitizer in the medicine cabinet.) Gordimer asks us to confront the unknowability-in-advance of what radical change will feel like and the humble objects that you’ll turn to, even when you have lived in certainty that change will come, must come. This unknowability-in-advance is what the theorist of utopia Ernst Bloch has in mind with his insistence that a “real future” is one that cannot be extrapolated from the present. To be circumspect about what lies around the corner involves not only a conventional sense of emergency and how it impinges on our notions of what’s in/habitable, but also an openness to the emergent, in the evolutionary sense of what cannot be predicted in relationship to prior conditions. As the South African literary critic Tony Voss wrote in 1990, after several years when all or part of South Africa was under a State of Emergency declared by the apartheid state: “The emergency maneuvers to forestall or crush the emergent, since the emergency must prevent the expression of the hitherto unexpressed” (28). What I take from this reflection on how emergency can be the enemy of the emergent is the question of how to be alert and alive to what may be emerging despite a state of emergency: what in our present could not have been predicted?

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For a month and a day² in March and April 2020, I did not set foot outside my apartment building. I gave up my heretofore near-daily walk in the park routine all at once, cold turkey, with hardly a craving. An exigency of the emergency and of the emergent, both: precisely because I never would have anticipated that I would or could do such a thing, it was startlingly easy. But within the confines of my building and its shared spaces, I developed what I came to think of as a carapace of habit: the new series of actions that, if followed faithfully and in the correct order, might protect my organism from disease. Propitiating ritual, magic, science: what’s the difference? Put on oversized hallway shirt, wash hands, put on mask, put on hallway shoes, grab laundry, leave apartment, use shirt sleeve to open hallway and machine doors, clear dryer filter, roll up sleeve, insert laundry and mesh bag (carefully!), close machine with foot, use shirt sleeve to open hallway doors, enter apartment, take off hallway shoes, take off hallway shirt, wash hands and arms up to the elbow, wash hands, remove mask, wash hands.

The notion of a carapace of habit collapses multiple meanings of habit: as garment, as unthought routine, and as dwelling. Repeated actions accrete into a kind of protective surface, like a textile, that hardens into a shell, or a wall. Yet I also think this notion of habit along the fold, to consider the enforced improvisations of people who have long forged habits of self-protection and survival precisely because they lack adequate shelter. Why do the facts that some prisoners lack access to soap, or that some school buildings lack functional sinks or effective ventilation systems, become a public scandal only during the acute timescale of the pandemic?

The necessary corollary to a carapace of habit would be something like what Fredric Jameson has described in startlingly evolutionary terms, as “an imperative to grow new organs.” About the perceptual challenges posed by postmodern architecture, Jameson writes:

I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism. The newer architecture therefore--like many of the other cultural products I have evoked in the preceding remarks--stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.

(80)

This image has always struck me as grotesque: humanoid figures barely recognizable, with outsized eyes or ears or noses, and with some as-yet unimagined organs to sense the unknown dimensions of a new world. In pandemic time, Jameson’s evolutionary metaphors are all too literal, as scientists and public health professionals race to outrun the proliferation of virus variants created by random mutations that make the human body a more habitable host. The imperative that I struggle to articulate here is for new perceptual and social capacities that far exceed the ability to measure with the eye six feet of distance or to know from behind whether or not the person walking ahead is wearing a mask.

As a New Yorker, I grieve the suffering and the loss of the tens of thousands who have died here this year. I grieve the profound blows to the city’s economic fabric, and to the very logic of urban density and conviviality: the social comfort and thrill of what Salman Rushdie memorably describes in Midnight’s Children as “people people people” (340). But I also grieve the extreme structural violence of what had passed for “normal” in the before times: the insatiable churn of real estate development, which, combined with the dependence on low-wage service workers, reproduces apartheid’s spatial logic in de facto economic terms, even if without its machinery of legislated racism. I grieve the stubborn hegemony of a certain kind of historical innocence, along the lines of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called “sanctioned ignorance” (274): what the powerful can get away with not knowing. What I grieve is not any pandemic-induced loss of innocence, but instead the structural necessity of innocence in the first place: the ways in which the status quo demands blindness to the suffering that subsidizes one’s existence. Against this innocence, the imperative to grow new organs.

Alongside the new routines that have seeped even into our dreams, the task for this pandemic interregnum is to forge a life-sustaining carapace of habit that is not a mere retreat into the shell of the self, but instead an orientation toward another possible world within this present, “a fold in temporality that opens it up from within to the possibilities of an existence that could rectify the deficiencies of the present” (Terdiman 238). This image of convoluted time as a site of potentiality offers one more way to think along the fold: the challenge to “feel forward into the next world” (Boyer) from the shifting ground of the present, rather than leaning back into the twinned comforts and cruelties of the old one.