DEC13_SUPERDUPERFINAL

I proposed the modalities above as a way to deepen discussion on the
current atmosphere shaped by the everyday and the emergency. The
theorist Ben Anderson in a chapter for the book Time: A Vocabulary
of the Present has written an instructive essay on the relationship
between the temporalities of the everyday and of the emergency,
which are thought to be of opposite tendencies. We realize, however,
that increasingly the two inform each other more intricately. The
pandemic makes this realization starker. The structures and agencies
embedded in everyday life have laid bare the current lifeworld as
precarious and therefore deserving of the term emergency. The
lines between the everyday and the emergency may have been more
“osmotic” or have “broken down.”
According to Anderson: “The contemporary condition of human
life is life lived in uncertainty. Recalling the roots of the term
‘emergency’ in emergere (‘arise, bring to light’), the lines that surround
and demarcate emergencies become blurred.” A key concept here
entwined with emergency is exception, and Anderson continues:
“The category of emergency does not, however, name only an exception
that interrupts ‘normal life’ and issues in a time out of time. ‘Emergency’
is a term that is inseparable from a series of temporalities…the claim
is that action is necessary immediately in order to meet the exception.”
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