Enduring COVID-19, nevertheless

Abstract

ABSTRACT This pandemic is a season of nevertheless; we are exhausted from all kinds of labour, but keep labouring nevertheless. This labouring, I suggest, takes three forms: doing (the productive and reproductive labour required to sustain life through a pandemic), undoing (the tedious processes of postponing and cancelling plans, or abandoning the process of planning altogether), and not-doing (passing the time left over between doing and undoing). Of course, the particularities of our doing, undoing, and not-doing will vary by our circumstances even as we operate within these general patterns of behaviour. I want to think through these neverthelesses as a way of mapping orientations toward the future fractured by the pandemic, and our collective persistence despite those fractures. Under normal circumstances, doing is an expression of optimism about the future, but the pandemic has quickened the tempo and increased the frequency of disappointment and continually forecloses possibility. Undoing is tiresome and painful, the necessary labour that amounts to less than nothing, begetting a collection of losses that often remain private and invisible. Not-doing is an intensified experience of boredom, with no obvious end or relief. Against the calls, which abound in the public culture of the pandemic, to treat COVID-19 as an opportunity to cultivate resilience, I posit endurance as an alternative framework. Resilience implies a better future if only we would learn how to suffer more productively. By contrast, endurance makes no such promises but fully acknowledges all the ways we might hurt, even as it functions as the nameless capacity that carries us through our doing, undoing, and not-doing – nevertheless.