Professors are always late. If there’s one lesson I should have learned during my abortive attempt at graduate school, or from my chronically tardy academic friends, that should have been it.
I trace the circumference of the Thompson Center in the drizzle, wondering why I can’t find anybody. Were the organizers too depressed to show up at their own event?
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“Well, it’s against everything,” Gould deadpans. The officer laughs. “No, not really everything,” she says, correcting herself. “It’s about the fact that a lot of people feel pretty hopeless given what’s going on in the world.”
“And we thought, we experience that as an individual feeling, but in fact there’s something quite political about it,” Gould continues, serious now. “So instead of becoming apathetic, we should politicize our depression. Do you know what I mean?”
The wheels of my tape recorder spin as Patten and Gould take turns giving long, detailed explanations as to what they’re trying to accomplish. “We need to provide some space for multiple, contradictory emotions in the face of what’s happening politically–to be able to offer space that allows for a politics of negativity,” says Patten. “We’re trying to combine humor with expression of multiple feelings, including despair, to acknowledge this is how we feel. The first step towards recovery is acknowledgment that there’s a problem, right?”
Finally Lauren Berlant and Rebecca Zorach arrive with a motley collection of multicolored, hand-lettered placards stapled to wooden sticks. The cheerful police officer returns to advise the group that if they want to go inside the Thompson Center, they can carry the signs but not the sticks.
“Then what are you demonstrating for?” the cop persists.
