A peculiar situation occurred to me on my last visit to Kyiv early this April. I was walking by the Golden Gates, where in a little park in front of the metro station a young man was playing his portable Yamaha keyboard. His repertoire was a mix of classic piano pieces with some contemporary pop compositions – a selection that was clearly intended as sentimental, and it worked. It was soon after my arrival, meaning I was walking around, wanting to touch the air – everything in that space was sacred. I thought I could read the people around me, their exhaustion, perseverance, a whole spectrum of pain that is shared and the pain that is private, and something else.
There is always something else there… What is it?
Like writing a postcard, I took my phone to record a voicecard for my friend, an Austrian musician, thinking that it was a good moment to deliver an oblique representation of the war, by means of something that, in that moment, could do what words could not: a soundscape of tender vulnerability – a tiny rupture for the mind of anyone who can only know the war via a set of premeditated linguo-affective constructions far away. As I was recording it, the air raid began. A distant siren had entered the sonic field, gently overlaying the melody, forming an elegy of its own, adding an aesthetic quality to the message I was about to send. She loved it.
I moved on, and kept walking in what appeared to be a direction of the source of the sound – a house, which hosted on its rooftop a piece of WWII infrastructure that had been reactivated in 2022 and now produces civil defence sirens. A classic electromechanical setup made of a simple electric motor spins a slotted rotor inside a stationary housing called a stator. It looks and sounds analogue: spinning at high speeds, the rotor draws air in and pushes it out through ports, ‘chopping' the air into rapid pulses that generate high-decibel sound. Once you are closer to it, the distance that allowed for a poetic interpretation just half an hour earlier collapses. There is nothing else in the space that is so intensely physical – only this omnidirectional and omnipenetrating extreme sound. I used my phone again to record voicecard #2, which I annotated as ‘explicit and potentially triggering', while adding ‘but we are safe.' A day or two later, my friend wrote to me that she had made a decision to not open the message.
This innocent moment, with its spontaneous precision, encapsulates a problem that has preoccupied me for several years. Namely, the problem of representation, mediation, and, what I want to propose here: a geopolitical mode of communication. My approach is a topographical one: within the perimeter of the war, there is no space outside of the war. There can be degrees of kinetic and affective intensity, there can be moments of quiet, moments of distraction, but one is never outside of the martial law and its cybernetic logic, never outside of a statistical probability to be hit by a piece of artillery while casually walking, and never outside of ‘the air', which you have to learn how to listen to – it is pierced with information. One can only reach the outside by crossing the border. Or – here it becomes topological – by touching the outside via a screen, through which to communicate this ruptured reality to somewhere else. All while there is no outside to the loss, even if it is technically not yours (what is the ‘you' in this air, anyway?). The loss that is in the past and the loss that is acutely in the future – everyone knows it's unavoidable. This knowledge and its temporal stretch are entrenched in every present moment making grief imminent. Neither borders, nor screens can ever fix that.
Eventually, my friend and I found it peculiar that, while it is me who is in the situation of no outside, it is also me who is preoccupied with considerations: at which point to share, what and how – how do I wrap a fragment of my reality in a way that it is not too disturbing for her wellbeing, while still being recognized. And I take this one little decision to share, and she takes this one little decision to not receive. One reality is defined by the violent removal of the choice to step out, the other by the choice of whether to open a tiny, mediated window that will nevertheless be carefully examined as potentially too unsettling. I called this episode ‘innocent', for there are way harder things that do not leave the perimeters of the war, its bodies and lands, the things that they and I do not pass on to you, our reader. There are labours involved: the one of witnessing, the one of containment and the one of mediation.
I first thought of the geopolitical mode of communication as this register of speaking, when a person is urged ‘to tell everything all at once'. Not as a personality trait but as a function of geological and geopolitical inscriptions of land in one's body. A body as a land is rendered through the act of equation between a human life and its materiality. It is this inseparability that differentiates the subject of this land from a subject as they are understood in, say, Western liberal democracy, whereby the design of its politico-economical project grants an individual her privacy. Whereas the precondition of the subject of a land is ‘legibility'. First, through the way her complex environment is flattened into a homogenized space through colonial and geopolitical logic that approaches this land, before anything else, with a prerequisite that this land and its bodies have something to give. They have to be legible both as the table of periodic elements that defines the value of the soil, and as biometrics that will define the value of her movement and thus, the labour that this body can perform.
Second, they have to be legible if they choose to resist all of the above, otherwise their struggle will not exist. They have to find words to convey the worlds that are not too much and not too little. The geopolitical mode of communication is then a mode in which we are compelled to make ourselves legible. Compelled not in a form of explicit command or governance but as profound, conscious or not, resistance to obliteration and erasure. We cannot mourn in private; our joy must be justified. This mode is performed through the translation of the despicable (by its sheer scale) into the legible – into terms that can be recognized, processed and validated within global narratives, as well as advanced discourses, as well as within private media choices – all becoming the sites which might or might not extend their presence, recognition and solidarity for a bit longer.
What I'm doing now is a geopolitical mode of communication too. I explain, I differentiate, I use ‘I' as a timestamp, a map to index a territorial regime whose subjects are always less than an ‘I' as they are also a land, and more than an ‘I' as their voices are not about the singularity of their own lived experiences. It is, again, about the plurality of inscriptions – the geological and geopolitical encodings that make every ‘I' environmental in a place where the notions of public and private have long been blurred through collectivization, resistances and, yes, the air.
There is always something else there, I say. What is it?
Language begins with speechlessness. Words come from another space that is not language.
The relationship between language and war is a tender matter. The underlying function of language is to structure the world, while the logic of war is the complete disruption of any given order. It is a total rupture of reality as we knew it, a sudden estrangement of names and meanings from their objects.
When you cross the border to Ukraine, you notice that the air gains this peculiar material quality. It holds de-automation of life and de-signification of its registers through parallel contingent processes that reconfigure and animate non-life for deadly ends – a geontological space-time of modern warfare. This space and all it contains still resists representation. For years now we thought that finding the most accurate means to communicate the violence that this space is subjected to would be the way to avert it. We still go on, even if, at times, it feels like we are talking to ourselves.
Now I enter that space, it feels sacred. The continuous struggle here makes every aspect of life existential. This total rupture of reality – this space that opened up through de-automation of social and semantic fields – is construed of experiences of life through death in ways that can be known only when you enter them, or, rather, when they enter you. It is a crosspermeability that you only know when you pass that threshold. What this touch of life outside of premeditated meanings teaches you is something that other peoples and places in such long struggles have long known: the translation of radical proximity to projects of distances can leave you depleted. I deliberate further how much of translation I would like to withdraw. It feels risky, for we have responsibility for those who hold the line as I speak. Yet this is where I start thinking about a different form of recognition: the one of sharing the air and what it transmits, the one of presence, not language.
