That Which Will Have Had to Happen. Mutual Training for/by Portal Workers

Abstract

Under fossil-fuel driven racial capitalism today, life takes place in-between the continuation of deadly Modernity and a yet unknown set-up. The everyday happens in juxtaposed and contradictory portals, suspended in their pre-conditional determination of how a collective future should be or will have had to be. We understand portals as spacetimes of and for transition and change. But how these transitions take place, and what modes of existence they carry along, expand or reproduce, is one of the biggest contemporary controversies. Ecocidal, genocidal, epistemicidal tendencies are normalised in the monocultural reality project of tech capitalists and supremacist states, which of course leave no room for imagining how to transition, or maybe rotate otherwise. In such reality project, imaginaries of and for transition are predominantly being shaped as the so-called twin-transition: an unsurprising knot of computational infrastructures and greenwashing practices that at best tend to reform, keeping close to the values of the liberal order. The twinning of the so-called green and digital transitions keeps the green colonial worldview intact, limiting the perception of transition as if their skinny isthmus was the only possible threshold to cross. We find ourselves surrounded by a landscape of contradictory Green New Deals, or what Jose Iglesias García-Arenal calls 'green-and-chrome transitions', full of thinly veiled propaganda for business as usual, top-to-bottom as usual, contentious as usual, harmful as usual. And precisely because of that, we are committed to conceptualize, study and test what kind of solidary practices, analytics and theories it might take to transition otherwise. As our contribution to the multilateral and tentative process of abolishing the worldview that is contained by the twin transition regime, and therefore propose a mutual training ground for and by portal workers. Portal works are modes of doing and thinking for transitioning, and they can happen otherwise. They enact change on a daily basis, reckon with the massive world order rotation and persistently operate along it. We consider portal works to be sets of intentional acts of saying, showing, remembering, moving, projecting and imagining towards liberation. They are aesthetic operations because they engage with the redistribution of the sensible. We count on the politicization of aesthetics as a powerful attuning to complex realities. Learning from Romi Morrison's work on Black computational futures that haven’t yet happened, but must, we wonder how to radically inhabit transitions as key technocultural struggles; we consider discomfortable, opaque, disobedient, unapologetic, ambiguous and demanding modes of doing and thinking significant as portal work, and in need of our collective attention, reflection and documentation. The mutual training ground for/by portal workers will be an occasion for taking three days together with known and to-be-known comrades, to practice with thresholds, impasses and their 'tenses of possibility'.