NOTES ON CONTINUING

1. Why do citizens not rise up? Why do the stateless not rise up? Why is there no mass refusal of surveillance and nationalism?

The silence is not accidental. Fear, division, and broken promises form the baseline condition. Solidarity does not spontaneously emerge from this; it cannot be demanded of those already exhausted by survival. If it is to exist, it must be constructed.

2. Why is critique so often directed toward those closest to us, who are equally constrained, rather than toward the structures that shape those constraints?

I observe this tendency and feel its pull. I try to resist it.

At the same time, I refuse the logic of total guilt-the idea that because I am enmeshed in these systems, I am disqualified from opposing them. This logic functions as paralysis disguised as accountability. I acknowledge my position without accepting that it renders me futile.

3. Conflict is displaced sideways. When power feels too abstract to confront, it becomes easier to police the behaviour of peers. This is reinforced by a political language that speaks endlessly of belonging while avoiding questions of ownership.

Disputes over who belongs are easier to sustain than disputes over who holds power.

This keeps the gaze horizontal.

4. Power has changed its form. Resources concentrate, while the mechanisms of that concentration remain distributed-networked, opaque, everywhere and nowhere.

We are left arguing over entitlement and recognition while extraction continues through interfaces designed to be frictionless.

5. This logic extends into culture.

A separation between aesthetics and politics has narrowed what is recognised as political action. The vote and the law are treated as the primary sites of agency. Other forms of world-making are dismissed as symbolic.

But reality is also shaped in the domain of perception-through the organisation of what is visible and what remains unseen.

6. To make images or sculptures is an action. Like any action, it has consequences. Overtly political art is no more or less political than art that claims neutrality.

Reactionary movements understand this. They do not need their images to be true; they need them to be adhesive. Memes and symbols are used to weaponise the desire for belonging, bypassing argument in favour of visceral response.

While others critique the concentration of wealth and power, these movements work to colonise the imagination.

The task requires both. It requires the solidity of the fact and the resonance of the myth. One without the other is either a lecture no one hears, or a story that demands belief.

To claim neutrality in this context is not to step outside the game. It is to leave the field uncontested.

7. This raises a tension I cannot resolve alone.

How does one speak of plurality without demanding uniformity? A multitude cannot exist if everyone is required to dream of the same life.

But plurality does not mean the absence of boundaries. The task is to distinguish between the limits I choose to defend and those I have inherited without reflection.

8. It is easy to associate power only with domination. This has become the dominant discourse. As a result, I have often mistaken powerlessness for moral safety. In trying to avoid becoming oppressive, I have avoided becoming capable.

Yet there is power in refusal. Power in creation. Power in care.

None of these are pure. To act is to close off other possibilities.

What must be refused is the belief that weakness is a virtue-or a strength.

9. To imagine other worlds requires openness to theory alongside ethical commitment. It requires holding uncertainty without succumbing to two familiar forms of paralysis:

The grief that immobilises. And the detachment that masquerades as realism.

Acknowledging the severity of the situation is not a reason to withdraw. It is a reason to continue.

10. I make attempts where I can. To maintain attention. To refuse the immediate reaction. To make things that hold space for complexity.

I try not to wait for permission, or for the promise that these efforts will be enough.

11. I live with a contradiction I cannot solve: the desire to dismantle what harms us, and the suspicion that I might not live to see it dismantled.

12. I act without imagining I am saving anything. I continue without expecting a breakthrough.

I do not know if there is a we. I write these notes to see if one might appear.

13. There is no finale. Just the daily attempt not to go numb. A provisional sanity. And the tentative effort to simply keep going.

#stuffiwonderabout #tingjegspørgermigselvom