^{This room sets me on edge like fingernails on a blackboard. 
Or like a dentist’s waiting room, or the room 
where you wait for a job interview, 
for a job you didn’t want to get.}

^{Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood, 1988}

Who goes there?

Here’s what you have to do.

Announce yourself. 

To do this, you must not only be aware and knowing of your condition and long and short history, but also name it, find place for it in the ranks of present epistemologies, find a framework of how to discuss it, becoming a scholar and narrator of a personal customized ailment, inserted within the identities and area studies. That is unless you rather be auto-defined by the system, or are comfortable with getting on a bandwagon of popping hot topics.

So here is me, announcing a new name for my (art?) practice. I’m going to experiment with calling myself an epistemic doula. And (continue to) work with lingual transcription of yet to be articulated threshold emotions and moods. 

The term doula, introduced by Dana Raphael, and globally exported from the US, and presently trending in the para-academic New Age-y socio-art sphere, takes its name from a female slave in Aristotelian times. A doula is not someone professional or of technical training, but rather, a presence. A fellow traveller assisting through (health, but we could also think of it as existential) transitions: birth, illness or grief. There’s something about entrapment, restricted agency, and about being needed or desired as a company, and yet, dis-qualified from holding serious, societally recognized, hierarchically respected stature, in this descriptive that feels about right. 

As an epistemic doula, I bring body and meaning making processes onto a single page. I work with meanings because they’re in the air, free and open source, and this work requires the bare minimum of the retail space of an internet page. It’s what I can afford and access. Tired of pitching, and passing through gates of sheltered arbitrators, largely concerned with ratings, so far I still get to have my minimum of breath count, can eat, sleep, and get to share my thoughts on the internet. Let’s see how soon the oligarchy will tank this set up too. 

In the below essay I will discuss biopolitics of appearing, or terms of participation in public and cultural discourse; the unreflected adoption of technocratic tools by artists and activists; and the way these modes of categorizing influence the notion of crip/queer space. In other words, the social weather in the left-leaning cultural network, within the ascending techno-fascist global order.

Diagnostics 

I’ve been thinking about the value of a neurodivergent diagnosis, as one drawn from the same lineage as the rest of the contemporary penchant for taxonomies. An off-shoot belief that bad, old categorizing can be repaired—if only we find the right categories and place the right people into the right slots. In the name of equity! Where relational adjustments are presumed as non-option, naturally legalese becomes the adequate response.

Considering going through the ropes of getting a diagnosis for invisible disability, I’ve been imagining how much easier my life may have been, with an official paper, a candidate for which I never considered myself to be. At this stage, I am not sure I qualify, and if I do — if I want the label.

I imagine what it could have been like decades ago, if I didn’t have to battle gatekeepers, dead set on defending the interface because their life depends on it. If not genuinely, at least performatively, the various bureaucrats, technocrats and admins would have had to deliver respectable communication, or face public shunning and structural reprimands for mistreating a card-carrying person with a proven disability (otherwise invisible). Or maybe that’s not true, it would have changed nothing, and everything would have been exactly the same, and that’s precisely the problem.

Let’s acknowledge the system across Euro-Americas, into which I entered at 18, in 1998, is disabling in itself, even more so back then. The effects of it accumulate in your body, and at some point you have no more resources left to rebound. The amount of energy spent on base survival in my teens, twenties and thirties, means I have nothing left to deal with perimenopause, and for re-imagining life in a risky career, as a middle aged artist. That’s besides multiple local and global crises.

Until the current disrepair, despite bouncing off the firewall, I kept gathering myself, hacking my way through it. What’s worse, I spoke back, and for a while, seemed like a run over cat with endless lives. It is assumed my risk-taking is easy, sheerly because I do it. This assumption is made because resilience threatens, upsetting the status quo. “People don’t know how to do this, but you are still here” says my therapist, impressively missing the cue of how this comes across. 

On the moring of the new year I listen to equally tone-deaf LARB podcast that launches the 2025 with a title “On giving up”, in which suicide is casually discussed as an option. Now that at last, I feel fully disabled and have no more resources to reboot myself, is diagnosis—the only cure?

As Trump bulldozes over DEO policies in the US, it might seem a particularly crawl-out-of-the-skin uncomfortable and yet, ripe moment, to talk about how over-reliance on tables and categories of privilege and victimhood, have led us here. I am thinking about Margaret Atwood’s auto-fictive character in Cat’s Eye, a female artist judged by the younger journalist with a righteous sparkling new feminist vocab. Atwood’s avatar keeps repeating to herself:  “I’m on thin ice here…”, — as she tiredly attempts to deflect projections, and avoid being reduced, simplified, classified. In other words, this is nothing new as a topic.

Closer to our time period, in the era before COVID, in her novel Oval, Elvia Wilk had already diagnosed Berlin (and more broadly, the moment) with an acute neoliberal symptom: monetizing ethics. One start-up develops a pill to increase empathy (Oval), another biotech experiment birthes a miniature version of high-speed natural evolution (or parallel reality?), which eventually and, expectedly, implodes. But the funniest characters in the book were binders. The binders of bills and documents that the German-American (or was she Swiss-American?) main character pets with love. She shakes her head at less organized humanity, some of them—her best friends, who just can’t seem to get on with choreography of bureaucracy and embrace the erotics of form-filling and filing.

A body of data

The most egregious pie chart I’d had to self-assess myself on this past year—and boy there were many! —was at the self-organized “anarchist” art centre (image above). Intended to assist with placing oneself on a sliding scale to calculate the cost of stay, the borrowed pie chart was later added to the art center’s website, as the newly adopted official methodology for self-assessment. Inexplicably they left the Canadian-specific original category, of English-to-French privilege scale, and added for balance, a slice of Marginalized Global North. 

When the norm does not need to change, more and more sub clauses, and cases of exception are piled on as a remedy for the major epistemic and relational problem. Late stage capitalism sneaks up on you, and before you know it an anarchist center is using identity pie charts.

Let me ask some questions as a way of orienting ourselves here:

Is there a difference between an art center and a refugee council (from which said pie chart is borrowed)? What kind of visitors pass through a self-organized art-center, and does this public really need instruction for their place in the world? Will a genuinely cynical/oblivious person be swayed to pay more by a pie-chart? Will they even want to go to an anarchist center in a decrepit old school in the woods? Who is this for, then? 

In other words:

Can we form our own thoughts? What will we do in the absence of streetlights, or instruction manuals, telling us where to go, or what to do?

“This is not a peacetime threat assessment.”

Time and again I find myself having to push back on the inviation—in conversations, in applications, on social media—to enage in pitting groups against each other. Might it be that all this datification is doing is helping fragmentation across communities who would have benefitted from getting to know each other’s respective histories and struggles—better?

Would you want to be the one to grade the urgency of military conflicts and grade dictatorship on a scale from bad to worse?

What identity pie charts do best is normalize rigidity of thinking, and mistrust. Like what bolsheviks did to the ideas of communism—created a centralized system of pie-charts, which far from represented reality.

Nevertheless, nostalgia for the Soviet, East German and Yugoslav communist past is abundant in Berlin’s leftist discourse. Often these nostalgic projections are made by generations already distant from the situated lived experiences they seem to miss. This recursive current, merging with protests against genocide in Palestine, feel like a particularly ill-conceived conjuncture.

In other words, what is evident is that identitarian discourse can be easily co-opted by politeker-ing on all sides, but identity is not all that determines our choices. Identities can and have provided an easy alibi where accountability is missing. We seem to know that a medical label cannot justify Elon Musk’s support for the AfD, don’t we?

Nice people

A newly arrived friend “from the East” tells me she feels alienated by the queer scene in Berlin. The dating apps are a dead zone for her. She’s a forties lipstick and updo babe, and I know exactly what she means, against the backdrop of Berlin’s Matrix-inflected body-negative fashion regime.

The anarchist art center and its pie charts, in retrospect, seems to have been somewhat of a metaphysical space: a life-size rendering, or an experimental live performance, of all that ails the left. Despite being in a remote location in Estonia, it was predominantly filled with people from Rotterdam, London and Berlin— another outpost of the globalitarian art sphere.

Inside its walls was an atmosphere of cuteness and cuddliness, that disagreed with me, but seemed expected. It was clearly mixed with anxiety and suspicion, which began with mild things like a blackboard with pronouns, hugs as general measure of friendliness, and morphed into questionable use of tinctures and foraging practices, ending with hard drugs. I’d seen this before, the peer-inflicted ideas of agreeableness indicating the measure of nice, and acting as that same old firewall for the inner circle—of a given institution or a group (i.e so-and-so was so nice, she gave everyone hugs!). And never had this positivity had not read as a distortion, an inheritance of patriarchy. 

The side-effect of formulaic or shorthand-politics and thinking (helped by social media-induced brain rot) is the emergence of sacrosanct subjects: people, topics and institutions that seem beyond critique.

This brings me to use the terms decolonial, feminism, crip and queer as demarcation of necessarily progressive and positive social intent. When these terms are used as mere calling cards, or an excuse to pontificate, whether by institutions or by artists, the reparative intention of these terms as host spaces becomes overburdened, and with it, entirely evacuated of meaning. 

The to do list

Similarly to mis/over use of the terms above, the anarchist theory was never intended to justify chaos, although it gets interpreted as such often enough in various organizing schemes. Rather anarchist thinking highlights the need to invest, build-in, time by all parties, to facilitate space and practice of renegotiation of collective agreements as part of the course. It presumes no final destination, no absolute rule, no right way to do things, but temporary agreements. 

Which takes us to the next area of tension: overwork. 

Who should do the—emotional labor—of all the negotiations! The professor with a round salary, or the admin with a lesser paycheck? A twenty three year old library assistant, an unpaid organiser? Everyone is claiming to be overworked, and everyone has learned their terminology and how to talk about it. ‘Tis the burn out season. But it’s giving: busy-making.

The precocious burnouts in particular, reveal a problem of not only accelerated general precarisation, but also of an epistemic and behavioral shift. People-pleasing is trending on Instagram as an algorithmically ready excuse. Hannah Proctor has written an excellent book on the history of the leftist struggle and narratives, alongside analysis of the emotional toll the activism takes. But, your epistemic doula wants to know more: what else leads, or dare I say, motivates, pushes us into burn out, some so young, and in such large numbers? 

What I am really asking is: Who should be accountable for the workload, if not the person themselves? Because we are not talking here about survival work to pay bills, or resistance, which is an act of protesting immediate conditions you live in, or are forced into and intimately affected by. Activism—for causes you elect to support, is distinctly—a choice. 

And a choice—to oversubscribe. To be everywhere and nowhere. In every Telegram group, everyone’s friend on Instagram, at every reading group, every protest, curating every show and syllabus, putting yourself center front in everyone’s private business, saving every lost soul, being everyone’s mother, organizing this and that, you are a savior-warrior solving the world. This self-flagellating exaltation appears to be driven by a strange form of peer pressure adjacent to the ideals of collectivity. I met many afflicted with the symptoms in Berlin, and fell under the spell myself for a brief period. What we were looking for, in all these busy-making activities, I concluded, was ourselves. 

FOMO, when it becomes interchangeable with the burn out, breeds flakiness and surface engagement with heavy subjects that require dedication. In my books, you don’t have to be a pious ascetic, with no desires to be seen or recognized. One can want attention and to contribute to collective causes, both. These desires do not exclude each other, but paying attention, which takes precedence, is important. It helps no one when we are stretched thin, and all but a hologram in the flesh. 

Next to FOMO-as-burnout, I want us to consider whether a guilty conscience is the best framework for inspiring change in masses, be it top-down or peer-imposed, as opposed to an emphatically felt desire that comes from the position of wanting to be engaged with any given subject. 

(In)activism, or spectrum of presence, or spectrum of availability are, indeed, realistic. We need to talk about staying active by doing less and better, and for reasons other than ambition, obligation and vanity. In the aggressive ideology of staying active and performing engagement at all costs, is yes, built-in exhaustion, but also an overbearing degree of knowing, and therefore foreclosure of meaning. Dogmatism is a stifling atmosphere to live in, and counterproductive to actually forming a collective resistance to the incoming very real challenges.

(In)activism I imagine, is not passivity, but rather an invitation to varied forms of participation, where taking pause, or focusing on yourself will not be equated with individualism, selfishness, and indifference. 

Missing David

I hope I am not the only person concerned with what the use of technocratic pie-chart epistemologies by artists and activists will do to our relational future. This is the epistemic area —of control, management and efficiency— from which originates algorithmic thinking. Another reason why not all artistic activity must become activism, because we apparently live at the end of times. I’ve lived through the end of times once before, and we needed artists to provide an off ramp to the weird and unknowable, believe me.