Puar's "Paranoid Temporality" and the Occupy Movement

I had the choice to continue devouring Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times or to watch the coverage of Occupy Wall Street and (gasp!) maybe even check into some regional meetups this weekend. For once, television seemed like the more productive option. It feels useful, though, even important, to personally situate her work in this present. Puar describes:

Paranoid temporality is. . . imbedded in a risk economy that attempts to ensure against future catastrophe. This is a temporality of negative exuberance -- for we are never safe enough, never healthy enough, never prepared enough -- driven by imitation (repetition of the same or in the service of maintaining the same) rather than innovation (openness to disruption of the same, calling out to the new).

A paranoid temporality therefore produces a suppression of critical creative politics; in contrast, the anticipatory temporalities that I advocate more accurately reflect a Spivakian notion of 'politics of the open end,' of positively enticing unknowable political futures into our wake, taking risks rather than guarding against them. (xx)

My entire recollection of an American political landscape has been characterized by this paranoid temporality that Puar introduces here. Fear-based everythings. Fear-based politics, fear-based consumerism, fear-based loving, eating, education, walking, traveling. Fear-based everythings that characterize actions of inactivity and paralysis. And I can't help but feel a sense that this could be the rare, expansive breach of that? I have to admit that I initially approached the Occupy movement with a dose of skepticism, an embarrassingly bourgie level of skepticism. Surely this wouldn't go anywhere. Surely this would be a bunch of hipsters and hippies that would give up after a weekend, and it would gradually dissipate until it was a funny little joke that only Democracy Now! covered.

Alas, this appears not to be the case. It's galvanized. It's spreading. It's laced with uncertainty and growing excitement. I don't have the energy tonight to address the relationship between Puar's work and the description of these protests as an "American Autumn," but there is much to be said and explored there, for sure.

More tomorrow. Now, bed.