Valuing, sorting, stopping, taking

"We are in a state of proleptic mourning for the planet," Kyla Wazana Tompkins wrote. Her book is Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot. I read it last year.

She says in Chapter 4:

"The photography that caught me posed natural objects in illuminated white light and made deities of them. It preserved them in time and against time forever. And I felt intuitively that this could only be about the deep feeling lying underneath and between us all, that our ecologies were in peril and the reality of that was something that could not yet be believed. ... I think that, on the one hand, the West's unconscious is preparing itself for a time when there may not be anything left and all we have is pictures of what those things were. ... But at the same time, because capitalism, that vampire machine, is always ahead of us ... [it's] a way of making sure that what we crave, because and before it is going to disappear, has even more of an elevated exchange value."
Chapter 4, "Rot." p. 134.

Tompkins mentions Sylvia Wynter's essay "Rethinking 'Aesthetics'," which describes aesthetics as an instruction for perceiving people and objects — especially in a context of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism — and thus how to classify people and what people produce. Structurally, people often withdraw aesthetics from the spaces where others will be left to wither or actively exterminated.

"And I, like many of us following behind the steps of the Black radical tradition — and here I am learning from Cedric Robinson, Rod Ferguson, Grace Hong, Eric Williams, and Sylvia Wynter — see capitalism as fundamentally intertwined with the sorting of humans, matter, objects, spaces, language, and nonhuman species into the social and animacy hierarchies and cross-species assemblages from which, in Neel Ahuja's terms, the idea of the human would be abstracted. ... I also want to be attentive to the idea that the taxonomizing of humans ... are not outside this history [of how Western social values are organized] but are in fact central to it — as the colonial history of science shows us."
Chapter 4, "Rot." p. 132.

Valuing, sorting...

I saved those passages a year ago, and I remember them today, reading Sarah Kendzior's new essay ("The Shutdown"). She's writing from Missouri during the longest full federal government shutdown ever.

"I’m old enough to remember seasons. The way colorful leaves crunched under my feet: the satisfying sound of the reliable march of time. Autumn leaves scattered like crumpled drafts of a chapter near completion. They were absorbed into the soil, and in a few months’ time, earth’s story would begin anew.

Green leaves on the ground are empty pages. They did not get the chance to dazzle and die. They were shut down, like Congress.

I look at the leaves and resent the stolen season: resent it like my generation’s stolen social security and stolen retirement and litany of impending thefts. Stolen country, stolen time. The taking tree.

I look at the leaves and wonder what could have been. I don’t wonder that about Congress. The answer is nothing. When you decide to be nothing, to do nothing, to change nothing, you become nothing. You take everything and you are nothing.

Congress takes bribes, they take vacations, they take offense — they take everything but the heat. They save that for us, so it can scramble our seasons and kill our trees. The heat makes leaves fall too early and ignites fear for our children’s future: This is as much as you will see, this is as far as you will go."

Stopping, taking...