I have always been prone to drifting. A few months ago, however, the circumstances were other and the motivation for drifts across borders different. As it happened, back then, before the virus outbreak, I published an overview of the discourse on translocality. Together with colleagues, I explored current spatial thinking across borders, and across the fields of migration, culture and urban studies (https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/publication/translocality-and-translocal-subjectivities-research-overview-across-fields-migration). Our aim was to shed light on emergent cultural and conceptual shifts – potentially also emergent controversies – of mobility and belonging. Two weeks ago, I even managed to submit a related research application on translocal poetics, similarly challenging what I and my artist colleagues have come to see as an increasing fixation with borders, origins, and grounds. The transversal, and in spatial terms, the translocal, we wrote, presents “a different idea of shared space; non-dualistic, non-categorical and non-hierarchical.” Furthermore, in a global political context, the translocal might offer “a new model of dissent” (Genosko 2009:18), prompting a recognition of more politically articulated localities and subjectivities. Translocality, we stated, occurs when attention to local circumstances is intensified and multiplied, co-created and distributed.
All of a sudden, the context has shifted and the entire idea of transversality and translocality is electrified. Crossing borders is now perilous and risky in new and highly ambiguous ways. And perhaps more importantly, reaching across whatever limits has now become a highly questionable practice, object to new forms of regulations and – suspicion. Sticking to one’s place is now not only either privilege or punishment, but a fundamental societal virtue.
There are indeed many different ways of understanding the new situation, the new state of emergency or the new confinement, and being embedded within does not make it easier. While the virus threat is only partly obvious, only palpable or concrete in some geographical locations, it still demands from all of us positioning and distancing. In a newspaper column this morning, a Swedish poet emphasised his conviction that despite involuntary isolation, it is possible “to care for distances.” Following this thought, I am thinking that paying attention to distances, developing a sensibility to distances, making distances matter, or through language establishing relations across distances, is what translocal poetics is about. Turning to quarantine, addressing the situation of spatial arrest, then means evoking a sensitivity as concerns the micro-locations of the everyday. While the current arrest appears out of coercion, it also draws attention to the intimate distances, or distancing intimacies, inherent to symbolic expression. The voyages of Xavier de Maistre comes to mind, his joyful travelling around his room in 1871, that year of unrest, while placed under house arrest somewhere in northern Italy:
“Of these joys, none, to my thinking, is more attractive than following the course of one’s fancies as a hunter follows his game, without pretending to keep to any set route. Hence, when I travel in my room, I seldom keep to a straight line. From my table I go towards a picture which is placed in a corner ; thence I set out in an oblique direction for the door; and then, although on starting I had intended to return to my table, yet, if I chance to fall in with my armchair on the way, I at once, and most unceremoniously, take up my quarters therein. By the by, what a capital article of furniture an armchair is, and, above all, how convenient to a thoughtful man.”
Looking out of the window, I follow the movement of obscuring clouds. While socially distanced, isolated, quarantined, cut off, what comes to mind is the “latitude and topography” that de Maistre was rambling about, the fundamental transversality of location; a quality that, despite dark skies, if taken seriously, can always become even further pronounced.