WANGERT, Devin
Dead Time

Banality is a style of experience often indicated by variations of the statement, “nothing is happening.” When you are “doing nothing,” the life you are living appears as both ordinary and impassive. In the present moment, these qualities also come to describe the endurance of structures of impoverishment, disenfranchisement, criminalization, and environmental destruction that form the background and backbone of the current political-economic system, so that “doing politics” often comes to mean interrupting banality. Offering new ways of conceiving the notions of inactionability and intractability that attend to these structures, Devin Wangert forwards banality as a concept capable of both adequately describing those structures as inactionable or impossible situations and of identifying affinities between forms of livelihood that go on living in and responding to those situations. He suggests that repertoires of thinking and acting which were historically posed in opposition to banality and understood as responsible for creating change come instead to actively produce impossible situations as banal and posit banality as an obstacle to political subjectivity, thought, and action.

[publisher's note]

Published by Documents - Centre for Expanded Poetics, 2018
Poetry