As you like it: the movement is the moment.
| Author | Flexer, Michael J. |
The Black Lives Matter movement, or moment if you like... Keir Starmer, 30 June 2020 This is not a moment for not standing with the Black Lives Matter movement Keir Starmer, 2 July 2020 (1) Scratch that, this is not a moment, it's the movement. Where all the hungriest brothers with something to prove went? 'My Shot', Hamilton: An American Musical (2) Aquick look in the dictionary might have alleviated some embarrassment for the new leader of the Labour Party, attacked by critics on the right and left for his 'misspeaking' about the global Black Lives Matter protests that had taken on renewed momentum in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade and Dion Johnson between the months of February and May 2020. The concepts of movement and moment are closely connected: the word moment comes from the Latin momentum meaning: (i) movement, moving power (ii) importance, consequence (iii) moment of time, particle. (3) The moment and the movement are unavoidably bound up in each other; the moment of time is required for movement, but similarly it is the movement that may constitute the moment. Importance and consequence, as the definition suggests, are what make otherwise empty time somehow momentous. Unless you are interested in a purely technical model of time - breaking the continuous into discrete measurements -from this perspective it is action that gives time its sequence.
Movements, in other words, give motion to the moments of time. Medieval European standards of time reflected this: miniscule, essential, yet unusable 'atoms' of time comprised 'moments' and ten such 'moments' made up a 'point', with four 'points' in turn making up the hour. A 'moment', then, as a measure of time was somewhere between one and two minutes, depending on the time of year. It's an anachronistic pun, but it's fair to say that true moments always build towards a point.
Movement or moment or both, Black Lives Matter mobilised after the murder of George Floyd on a greater scale than after the shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The murder by police of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York on 17 July 2014, resulting from a strangulating chokehold similar to that which killed George Floyd, had already led to the adoption by protestors and activists of the slogan 'I can't breathe'. The chokehold itself has been identified as a murder and restraint technique used by police forces all over the US, since the 1970s. In a five-year period in the 1980s, the LAPD murdered 14 black Americans using this method. (4) Tracing this brief history illustrates the dynamic relationship between movements and moments, and helps us to understand how the temporal qualities and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have acted to throw political issues into startling and sudden relief.
Black Lives Matter, as a movement, existed prior to 2020. So too did the slogan 'I can't breathe'. And prior to and contemporaneous with this is the long history of murder, incarceration, enslavement and exploitation of black Americans; the equally long history of British colonialism and imperialism; and, within Britain itself, the ongoing disproportionate incarceration and mistreatment by the police of people of colour, which ultimately led to the symbolic toppling of Edward Colston's statue into Bristol Harbour in July. What then brought these together to form an historical moment? What was there in that moment that made events move, and form a more extensive movement, in ways and places they hadn't in 2014? And will this moment and movement last? How might we apprehend the undertow that will pull this movement back towards stasis, a form of temporal suspension in which moment and movement become uncoupled once more?
COVID time
Obviously, there was a remarkably powerful resonance that couldn't have occurred at another moment. The murder by strangulation of a black American in the midst of a deadly global illness that disproportionately took the lives (and the breath) of the working classes, people of colour and those suffering from structural health inequalities (not three discrete groups) resonated in each area of the globe. George Floyd's breath was taken from him - physically forced out of his body - at the same moment that much of the world was holding its breath, caught up in a mighty pause of social and productive relations thanks to SARS-CoV-2 and the varying state reactions to the illness it produced. It was a moment simultaneously of excess time and stolen time: people lost events that mark time - weddings, birthdays, funerals; while the differentiated, meaningful moments in which they were supposed to occur were also swallowed up into a larger, all-encompassing mass of lockdown time, a time without real moments, it seemed.
A moment to catch your breath can mean the difference between life and death, literally and figuratively. COVID-19 doesn't just obliterate breath; it obliterates the moment of breath, the time it takes to breathe. As the pandemic arrived, and the virus transformed from a dangerous metabolic reaction between some errant strands of viral RNA...
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