Other Instrumental Subjects (A Script in Stanzas)
05/17/20
By Josh Rios
I.
I bought a clarinet in the weeks after we were ordered to stay home. I imagine my downstairs neighbors found it unpleasant at first. I hope their patience grows less strained as my tone modestly improves. The instrument brings me joy, even if everything I play is forlorn: a series of requiems for an empty city, for an uncertain future, for a distant family, for cancellations, for lacking resources, for those experiencing far worse, for an old political climate recast in starker disparity. On occasion my desolation gives way to devotion, and I dedicate my reverent song to the vast expanse of imagination that living requires and has always required.
II.
Coincidently, I asked my students to read “Panopticism” this semester, the third essay in Foucault’s widely-parsed book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). We were set to discuss it as courses went remote. Normally people think of carceral architecture when they think of the Panopticon. Indeed, the circular-shaped prison features heavily as a central image. However, the essay starts far from the materiality of the prison. Instead we get an accounting of medieval state orders designed to stem the plague’s reoccurring devastation of Western Europe. We get a written description of quarantine in the Early Modern Period. Foucault summarizes, “[o]n the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors” with the added instruction that “[i]f it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting.” Even food factors into the equation of plague contagion: “meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets.” Not only was “it forbidden to leave [one’s home or city] on pain of death;” a government agent assigned to surveil a particular section of the city also faced death if found derelict in duty. Predictably, such orders were “similar to a whole series of others that date from the same period and earlier.” Movement is caught up in the balancing act of risk, life, social space, contagion, and punishment.
III.
We have groceries delivered weekly. They get hoisted up three flights of stairs: sparkling water, vegetables, dried goods, and cleaning supplies. Not having a car, which had been mostly an inconvenience until now, intensifies the stratification of daily life and further politicizes the ability to move freely in a time of self-isolation. New patterns of circulation and consumption have emerged. I fantasize about driving, but never about leaving. It is an indulgence to imagine life without public transportation.
IV.
I text for the arrival time of the bus that stops across the street from my apartment: 74 TO Grand/Nordica 22 MINUTES. The stop is not heavily trafficked, but it is indispensable. Imagine an homage for clarinet to the simple city bus, the warmth of the overtones mixed with the hiss of hydraulic air as the bus humbles itself to the curb. It is a minor song for the least romantic way of moving north and south in a city with subway lines drawn in diagonals from the periphery to the center of the financial district–more gothic web than modern grid. Regardless, I used public transportation almost daily: to get to the classroom, the grocery store, the cultural event. In the end it would be irresponsible to ignore how the harsh realities of subordinated and working class experiences are habitually reimagined through the hazy self-serving focus of creative class sentimentality.
V.
I worry that learning to play the clarinet in the midst of a quarantine will read as the obnoxious theater of lock-down time used well. Fortunately, the clarinet is a modest instrument widely associated with public education and school band programs across the country. The threshold for making a sound is low, which only emboldens the beginner. And the quality of that sound progresses quickly with practice. It is an unpretentious middle-class cultural object: inexpensive, forgiving, lightweight, and self-effacing, even if it is sometimes referred to as the violin of the winds.
VI.
The window is an important part of Foucault’s essay, especially regarding segmentation, shadow, visibility, and power. His seventeenth-century quarantine instructions famously include a section describing how the inhabitants of each household had to display themselves in front of a specifically assigned window. From the street, a government agent dutifully witnessed each person’s condition and reported it to a magistrate. Each person in a household, upon pain of death, made themselves available to the gaze of the state, to the observation of the pathologist, their bodies translated and inscribed into a registry of infection. Foucault described this daily bureaucratic routine as “the great review of the living and the dead.”
VII.
“Looking out the window is my kind of cinema,” I recall jesting to a small group of friends gathered in our previous apartment. The statement meant as mere banter has become a new reality as I reflect on my last few visits to the theater before the lockdown: a documentary about an aging Estonian composer and the sacred minimalism of spiritual music, an art film starring a champion sharpshooter in the winter landscape of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. Now, I catch glimpses of couples, children, people in small groups, lawn workers, and delivery drivers going up and down the street, some in masks, others without. They navigate the space of the avenue and the frame of my screen. I have permanently perched my camera at the window. When I notice a person coming up the street I record them passing. An audience of plants situated on the sills thrive, not by my hand or thoughtfulness. I shoot through them like an ornithologist hidden in some domestic canopy. It is a heterotopia of private and public space. I am here and there, making a collection of passersby, an archive of public movement without public life.
Josh Rios is faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses in visual critical studies and research-based practice. As a media artist, writer, and educator his projects deal primarily with the histories, archives, and futurities of marginalized social groups as they are constituted through late capitalism, globalization and neocoloniality.
Josh Rios worked on this piece with Stella Brown, the Quarantine Times Sunday editor. Every week, Stella selects a member of the Co-Prosperity Sphere Programming Council to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.