Even within this range of action, liberation and individual rights have been the cornerstones of disability activism from the 1970s onwards, and the academic discipline of disability studies that followed close behind. In the 2000s, however, thinkers such as Robert McRuer and Eli Clare took a more transgressive approach, reappropriating the figure of the “crip” or the “freak,” defying normative categories with a middle finger raised. In refusing assimilation to—or “accessible” amendments of—the status quo, the crip is revolutionary, avant-garde even. The crip wants a total reconfiguration of norms, not just ramps and closed captions.
The challenge for sabotage will be to erode the gap between unavoidable delay and avoidable delay, to make avoidable delays appear unavoidable, both as a threat to employers who pay poor wages and to enable the kind of unprovability that sabotage hinges on and weaponizes. (Did the power just happen to go out, causing everything to go quiet? Or did someone knock it out?) The tactic will try, again and again, to pass resistance and fatigue out from an individual body expected to work faster, more repetitively, or for less money, back into the system of production and circulation itself.
It can be difficult to see what is lost when loss is experienced. Freud described melancholia as a condition in which what is lost, beyond any particular object, is ultimately the subject’s relation to the world, which he then describes as a topographical withdrawal back into the self and narcissism, a state he called melancholia. In the process, the relation to the external world is severely compromised. But, Anders asked, could it be possible to start from the opposite premise—that the relationship to the world is never guaranteed a priori?
My point is not that the breakdown/insight model is fundamentally wrong. Those paralyses can provide a certain kind of epistemic gap for asking questions about what commonly comes as second nature. At the same time, it would be a mistake to rely on such an interval or space as a meta-structure for critical work. For example, a default move within the frame of contemporary art over the past two decades: defunctionalized objects pulled out of usual circulation or infrastructural location appear to offer a kind of freezing and deictic insight, as if a hunk of undersea internet cable on a gallery floor confronts us with the materiality of communication. Yet a moment of paralysis, or even of the decoupling of the informational from its material substrate or mechanism, does not automatically generate the kind of critical or political thought one might want to follow from it.
How exactly does “paralysis” as a term and trope get used, beyond reference to actual bodily paralysis? In its most basic sense, it names a condition of inaction that persists against any intention to act or react. More specifically—and counter to the way that corporeal paralysis is often experienced and culturally envisioned as permanent, marking a catastrophic shift in how a life will be lived from that point on—paralysis as a figure of political and social thought instead frames a distinct kind of reversible breakdown, one that is not understood as violence, or even damage, per se. Rather, it implies a temporary interruption of the expected connections between thought and action.
The cumulative process of “mulatto production” constructs various no-man’s-lands within otherwise emancipatory cinema, film, and visual culture, from which certain kinds of Black female subjectivity must remain absent. While Fanon waits for himself in the cinema, at first blush Fanon’s “woman of color” has nowhere to look for her own image. Losing Ground is radical in how it breaks with this model.
Even though Hija de Perra calls for the recognition of a culturally specific conception of what was called “queer” in Latin America, throughout her work she always remained sharply critical of nation-building perspectives. Indeed, she offered a framework for a hemispheric approach that maintained vigilance against the uncritical implementation of nation-based forms of theoretical and cultural knowledge.
It would be in our collective best interest to abandon old definitions. In the same way that you discovered the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, you now discover that there’s been a frame-up—a made-up history, an idealized version of all those things you never wanted to reflect on before and which you adored as if they were gods.