For Transmediale 2020–2021

Since this exchange started, I have increasingly felt put in a place of debt towards you, due to the amount of thoughtful, brilliant, joyful thinking each and everyone of you provided with care. Those are true, non poisonous gifts, given out of engagement and desire for justice as the kind of truth we strive for and around which we all unite, us, refusers. Never in my intellectual life have I encountered such generosity without any expectations of return on investment. It started within my group “Nothing Happening Here”. This generosity inscribes in our relationship an obligation to each other that cannot be neutralized, unlike in psychoanalysis, where the monthly, weekly, daily cash payment of what we owe to the therapist creates a moment of great alleviation: symbolic debts can be paid. 

But now, I am tied to each and everyone of you. And I wish for an even tighter tie. I do not want this to end, even if it is exhausting and I am exhausted and feeling guilty—ich fühle mich schuld—of all the debts—all den Schulden—that I haven’t properly acknowledged. 

To overlook your generosity would mean to become a worse reader. Yes, bad reading saves us, saves us time. But bad reading doesn’t mean, as the “Interface of Refusal” group insists, that we haven’t accepted the terms of a transaction. We have been forced into bad reading by the sheer amount of what we should have read, the daily obligation we should fulfill towards the institutional structures that allow us to survive. Because of that, we always end up losing the joy in and desire for intellectual and “critical technical practice” (quoting “Interface of Refusal”). But I do not like or accept being a bad reader. I always strive to read not more but better and to cite, cite, cite again, to acknowledge what I owe so as to tighten the ties that bind us even more—in this epistolary, ghostly, exchange where we are forceful bodies of text to and for each other. 

Will we refuse to reintroduce “extraction” and “condensation” in our exchange, to “shorten” it in order to make it more palatable in a world of infinitely long user agreements and extra short tweets? Will we refuse to start recycling our content, a resort taken out of exhaustion for our duties towards the structure, out of fear of becoming institutional refuse (with a wink to “Logistical (B)orders”)? Or, as proposed by the “Governance” group, will we refuse to show up and work? How is organizing different from collaborating? I notice that in english, to organize can be used intransitively, tying subjects together, without turning them into objects of organization.