I decided to throw myself into the fray and deepen my intellectual commitments by actually getting off my ass and doing the work around the same time that many of us felt that same pang in our hearts. That’s when we realized that now is the time for commitments—maybe even extremes. And how that’s playing out looks differently across this city, but a whirlwind has been kicked up, for sure.
These are three separate but interconnected rallies that happened on the same day, #IWD2025, representing the broad and messy “fight back” that many of us are participating in.
I stood with a group of revolutionary communists this year, but I stand by everyone engaging in anything right now.
My map of the Severance metaphor covers more than my transatlantic dislocation; it also corresponds to a tendency towards ‘boundary-walking’ that I’ve been accelerating as of late. I’ve talked about this concept before; the Mearcstapa, or border-stalker, a word lifted from Beowulf and interpreted by the artist-theologian Makoto Fujimura for contemporary times. Boundary walkers “were individuals who lived on the edges of their groups, going in and out of them, sometimes bringing news back to the tribe,” a liminality, he argues, that artists can embody today.
Fujimora writes: “Mearcstapa is not a comfortable role. Life on the borders of a group—and in the space between groups—is prone to dangers literal and figurative, with people both at home and among the “other” likely to misunderstand or mistrust the motivations, piety, and loyalty of the border-stalker. But mearcstapa can be a role of cultural leadership in a new mode, serving functions including empathy, memory, warning, guidance, mediation, and reconciliation. Those who journey to the borders of their group and beyond will encounter new vistas and knowledge that can enrich the group.”
I’ve felt affinity with this concept as a natural expression of my default way of being in the world, whether in the gaps between friend groups or social scenes or even political ideologies. I’ve even put myself through “exile” many times, wandering through foreign lands out of intense curiosity, as in what I’m now calling my “inconjunct era.” There’s something effortless in that for me, even given all the anxieties of mistranslation, an ease rooted in my personality, my family lore (“little strangers”), migrant experiences, and the postmodern condition that encouraged eclecticism in my generational milieu.
What I’m doing now feels new. It feels more like—SPOILER ALERT—the many rooms a secret someone is forced to navigate between over and over in a recent episode of Severance. This isn’t boundary walking; this is something different and potentially more “prone to dangers” in Fujimora’s sense.
Back when I stalked the borders of weird philosophy twitter, I’d see the name “DeLanda” thrown around a lot; he doesn’t seem to be in vogue much anymore, but that could just be a shift in my perspective since I’ve stopped stalking. But in those years, I read a few of his thinkpieces and watched a couple of his YouTube lectures and even asked my dad to print out a PDF of one of his dense texts that I’d pirated off of AAARG or some place; I didn’t get very far into it, but read enough to learn the term “strange attractor.”
DeLanda considered himself a radical materialist; his materialism was so radical that he denied the existence of anything like “capitalism” or “society” in the abstract; those were ‘molar’ reductions of ‘molecular’ processes, the only really-real. I might be butchering his ontology, but that was the gist of it for me, a commitment to a form of process philosophy that ended up making him sound very hostile to Marxists, even though his “rabbi” in the tradition, Deleuze, saw himself as a partisan of the left. Funnily enough, as I read Lenin and Trotsky today, I see resonances between them; there never was a “capitalism as such” to the Bolsheviks. Heck, there wasn’t even a futurism as such to Trotsky, but always a project following general tendencies in specific places and times.
But I don’t bring this up to flex or argue anything in particular; most of this is from memory. I just wanted to mention a story I remember from DeLanda who was fond of psychedelics as a means of “deterritorializing,” or, I guess, see beyond fixed conceptions (to be honest, I never understood that word). He was asked about that in an interview and he warned that one should always “keep a piece of land” when engaging in this practice to keep one’s sanity; a reference point, a center, a narrative thread.
I don’t know where Apple’s ‘Severance’ is going, but my theory is that love is that land in the story. Love is what keeps them from going insane, despite everything. Love will ultimately defeat Lumon. That’s my hope, at least.