The pause is a useful metaphor to create a framework for what is currently not available to us. It appears to be an attempt to determine the status quo, the here and now. A pause is always temporal, it represents an interruption in time, divided into a before and an after. In the usual sense, a pause does not just occur, it is determined, it is introduced and ended by means of a character code that has to be read. A pause is situated between something. Usually, it also has a specific purpose. For example, a pause can be a period of rest (recovery), a lunch break (nourishment), an intermission (sustaining an illusion on stage, springing a surprise), a break in a relationship (severing all contact in order to start over). In the theater, but not only there, as an audience member, I physically move somewhere for the intermission, I don’t choose to take a break; a space is provided that enables the audience to assure themselves in a special way within a larger context, to explore their own position without, ideally, completely detaching themselves. In this respect, the pause plays with the potentiality of a location in a superimposition of distance and connectedness.
In music, the fermata (coronata) describes a point of rest, an expansion that enables a brief detachment from a fixed tempo. It is represented by a dot above which there is an arch, an arch that does not have a precisely determined length of time, but which is a question of interpretation, reading and taste. In its imagery, the arch unlocks a specific spatiality beyond time, which has external boundaries, but cannot be exactly determined in its length. The possibility of lengthening sound is thereby transferred into what we can understand as our own creative space, as a brief moment of freedom, but something that is always connected to its before and after.
In German language, the term ‘Pause’ also translates to ‘tracing’ and thus describes the product of an imaging process. In the broadest sense, it is something that is superimposed onto something else in order to transfer it. In the Middle Ages, the ‘Pause’ described an accurate image of botanical elements which, by means of color and a press, brought the delicate structure of the respective object, for example a leaf, onto paper in order to preserve the detailed copy in another medium. In the medium of film, the ‘Pause’ – the contact sheet – transforms the negative into a positive. And in the most general sense, the process of ‘abpausen’ (to trace) is used to transfer the structure of one surface onto another.
In this sense, a pause is not only an interruption in space and time but is also a process of visualization and conservation. A ‘Pause’ preserves and allows the viewer a certain temporal and spatial distance while gazing at something that used to exist and lives on in the image. While the leaf of the plant will wilt, the ‘Pause’ of it physically remains, is accessible and, like photography, refers to the past. And who says it isn’t possible to paint over such a ‘Pause’, thus resuming the relationship between before and after?
One of the central, most widely used terms in current debates during the last few weeks is ‘solidarity’. The versatileness and complexity of this term is particularly evident when the relationship between distance and connectedness is melded into the discussion on solidarity. A few weeks ago, for a brief moment it seemed as if everyone in our society was somehow interrelated. However, this relationship was based on an experience of a virus that seemed to affect everyone, each individual. As if the virus had finally identified and conceded a common wholeness, an overarching act of solidarity, sensibility and encouragement became the social tool of a new ‚we‘ in many places and mainly started to unfold along occupational groups and social roles, a (problematic) catalog that grew rapidly and, if nothing else, drew attention to existing inequalities.
In this brief moment, two assumptions on a basic concept of solidarity emerged: a concept that on the one hand claims “that loyalty, connection and mutually experienced pain form the basis of a lived closeness that does not leave the self to its own devices”[1] and describes solidarity “as help, as humanity, as siding with those that labor and are heavy laden”[2] on the other hand. But, above all, a solidarity that supposedly includes society as a whole as an acute strategy of social crisis management within a certain „comfort zone“[3]. This kind of solidarity may be important and helpful for many and understandable as a response to collective insecurity. However, it overlooks the privileges that underlie it – it does not remove social boundaries, but the ‘same’ remain ‘equal’ by taking care of ‘the others’. The attempt to form a large community particularly exposed the specific mechanisms that produce exclusion from the community. It is cynical to speak of mutually experienced pain.
“The fact that the virus, which can also be transmitted from person to person across national and social borders, does not make us more equal, but rather reinforces historically existing social and global inequalities”, was recently pointed out by sociologist Vanessa Thompson in a posting on Black Feminism.[4] Who gets a chance to speak in public? Who is seen, who is excluded? Who fits into the concepts, who doesn’t? Which bodies are in the focus of aid and which are not? Who identifies and addresses which person in which way and doesn’t let that person have their own say? Racism, ableism, hegemoniality, sexism, normativism – all of this (and so much more) not only pervades the public discourse but is also generated and underlines the boundaries imprinted on our social maps, often even where a part of society feels safe within a communal sense of solidarity. Even in collective uncertainty, a space localizing the ‘we’ appears as an area of exclusion. Philosopher Ludger Schwarte elucidates that the question of the effects of the virus is also an architectural question – a deliberation that is primarily bound to the physical space.[5] But it also presents itself, in a different and broader sense, in relation to an architecture of the social sphere, which implicates different mechanisms of access and exclusion, actively producing distances and determining locations.
“The catastrophic effect of the corona virus is (…) particularly evident at the borders. And in a form which is intensified by the border.”[6] Philosopher Robin Celikates is referring to national borders and, currently, specifically to the European borders. At the same time, the logic (and non-logic) of a border also includes a more complex notion that borders are equally directed inwards, that they are not simply crossed and left behind and that they are selectively permeable. Borders as instruments of power, which on the one hand may produce a feeling of belonging but on the other hand are based on a logic of exclusion, complicate the (social) space as they are ever-present and everywhere. “It can be concluded that a border is never just a border, the border regime does not only consist of lines between clearly definable territorial states, and this is especially true when we perceive borders in conjunction with exceptional situations such as a pandemic.”[7]
Breaking down borders as a practice of solidarity. However, breaking down borders as a practice of solidarity also signifies a different kind of solidarity. Sociologist Stephan Lessenich recently described this as “queer solidarity”, a solidarity where acting for one another is replaced by acting with one another, thereby calling the issue of distribution into question.[8] Acting with one another also means reflecting on one’s own location, becoming aware of it, repositioning oneself within the social space without staying in one position. As mundane as the distinction between for and with one other may sound, the difference is remarkable. And the urgency does not refer to an urgency of a before that was silenced by pressing pause but to something that has noticeably reappeared in the deceptive feeling of an equality that was triggered by a virus.
In this sense, a localization refers to much more than the self, it includes space and time and oscillates between a before and the prospect of an indefinable after, it looks for a point in the present. It superimposes. “We have discarded the unexpected,” as social scientist Felwine Sarr recently emphasized, “armed with a psychology of the established, a time that is organized by goals and purposes, by availability.”[9] And, as it seemed correspondingly, a few weeks ago Carolin Emcke noted in her Corona Journal: “Perhaps this crisis is like a contrast medium that makes visible what is missing in our societies, what we have negligently destabilized.”[10] The same way one would regard the traced surface of a before, one has to take a critical look at the superimposition of distance and connectedness on numerous levels and, hopefully, continue to paint over it in a different way – under the urgent premise to take responsibility for the perception of one’s own positioning.
In her text “Karten, Kartieren, Kartografie” (maps, mapping, cartography), media philosopher Sybille Krämer deals with the mediality of maps and describes the complex process at the moment of reading and using maps, a medium that on the one hand registers borders and distinctions (height, ground conditions, material) and, depending on the user, connects the intention of an orienting clarity with a certain disoriented confusion, thereby superimposing a before (capturing a landscape on a map) onto the after (where do I want to go, where will I end up?). Based on the moment of using a map, looking at the outline (‘Pause’) of a structure at a distance, she describes the multiplication of perception and viewpoint: “If we have a map of the territory on which we are standing, walking or driving, we become present in a dual way. When reading a map, the ‘I am here’ becomes the ‘I am there’: a peculiar deictic gesture that points away from the body at the map and at the same time back at the body itself. With this indexical identification of the own position, the user of the map becomes part of the map.”[11] And further: “The user of the map has to transform his or her individual location in the world into a generalizable position within the map. ‘Located’ on the map in the third-person perspective, the user takes on the role of an external observer of him or herself. The determination of one’s own position with the help of a map is often tedious and requires the constant comparison between what is actually seen and what is shown on the map.”[12] Especially in the multiplication of the view from above (distance) and the movement in space (connectedness), which the contrast medium, the ‘Pause’ create, not only can a specific architecture be discerned and lines be traced, but one can experienced precisely what the map omits. The map can “be utilized to refer to a ‚reality‘ which exists outside of the map, but that we are practically included in as a user of the map.”[13]
Experiencing, aligning, shifting, examining positions. Creating alternative spaces.
Nora Niethammer, June 2020 (Translation: Jen Whigham)
[1] Heinz Bude, Solidarität. Die Zukunft einer großen Idee (Solidarity, The future of a great idea), Munich 2019, p. 55
[2] Stephan Lessenich, Grenzen der Demokratie. Teilhabe als Verteilungsproblem (The Limits of Democracy. Participation as a problem of distribution), Stuttgart 2019, p. 98
[3] Stephan Lessenich, Grenzen der Demokratie. Teilhabe als Verteilungsproblem (The Limits of Democracy. Participation as a problem of distribution), Stuttgart 2019, p. 96.
[4] Vanessa Thompson, “Black Feminism”, contribution to the series “Kritische Theorie in der Pandemie” (critical theory during the pandemic), Frankfurter Arbeitskreis, March 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkLpkLCYF74
[5] https://berlinergazette.de/staat-als-klinik-architektur-pandemie-und-politik/
[6] Robin Celikates, “Grenzen” (borders), contribution to the series “Kritische Theorie in der Pandemie” (critical theory during the pandemic), Frankfurter Arbeitskreis, March 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWm58feLF4s
[7] Robin Celikates, “Grenzen” (borders), contribution to the series “Kritische Theorie in der Pandemie” (critical theory during the pandemic), Frankfurter Arbeitskreis, March 29, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWm58feLF4s.
[8] Stephan Lessenich, “Die Demokratie ist ökologisch nicht unschuldig” (Democracy is ecologically not innocent), in: Magazin der Kulturstiftung des Bundes, spring/summer 2020, p. 2 et seqq.
[9] Felwine Sarr, “Die Zeit okkupieren, bis zum Gehtnichtmehr” (Occupying time, ad nauseam), in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 14, 2020, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/coronavirus-felwine-sarr-sengal-welt-im-fieber-1.4875023
[10] Carolin Emcke, “Journal in Zeiten der Pandemie” (Journal in times of the pandemic), entry on March 25, 2020, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, https://projekte.sueddeutsche.de/artikel/politik/corona-krise-journal-in-zeiten-der-pandemie-e584987/
[11] Sybille Krämer, Medium, Bote, Übertragung. Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität (Medium, messenger, transmission. Metaphysics of mediality), Frankfurt a.M. 2008, p. 310.
[12] Sybille Krämer, Medium, Bote, Übertragung. Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität (Medium, messenger, transmission. Metaphysics of mediality), Frankfurt a.M. 2008, p. 310.
[13] Sybille Krämer, Medium, Bote, Übertragung. Kleine Metaphysik der Medialität (Medium, messenger, transmission. Metaphysics of mediality), Frankfurt a.M. 2008, p. 300.