When I decided a year ago on “persistence” as the theme of this year’s MLA, I had no idea that the pandemic would expose the frailty of persisting so clearly, the prospect of suddenly not persisting at all. At that time, none of us could have seen that the current president of the United States would be voted out of office, and that so many people around the world would flood the streets and take to the media to oppose white supremacy, and that Black people in particular would lay claim to the power and the right to persist in the face of lethal police violence. So persistence has become timely, but perhaps it belongs to every time.

There is with persistence always a question of grammar. Does one persist in something, or despite it, with others or alone? There is also, in English, a grammatical expectation that “persistence” is what a subject does. But perhaps it refers to ongoing forms of life as well as the conditions living creatures require to continue to live and even thrive. Although persistence characterizes what a subject does—someone persists, she persists!—that doing is not always constrained by the subject form. Further, persistence in life is less a goal than a precondition of achieving any goal, often assumed to be the unspoken force driving both survival and action. But sometimes persistence itself is an achievement, especially when forces exist to thwart that possibility. Persistence seems to imply a field of obstruction, something to get through or over, a block or barrier to dismantle. It attaches only tenuously to selves and subjects in their singularity. I suggest that persistence is not the same as self-preservation conceived as a stubborn drive residing in each individual as their own proper life force. I find myself asking, What version of the self is presupposed by self-preservation? Who can claim self-preservation in a court of law, and whose claim is more regularly dismissed? Whose self is considered worth preserving, and whose has been considered dispensable? If the police can kill in the name of their self-preservation or self-defense, what does that say about the kind of selves they are assumed to have, and the living selves they are entitled to destroy? And if any number of Black and brown people do not have access to that same legal rationale, does it really follow that they do not have a self that is entitled to preserve itself? It may be that persistence names a power beyond singular selfhood, a collaborative and collective power to lay claim to life, to equality, to a future horizon; it asserts the value of a life precisely when the conditions for self-preservation (the social condition in which lives are differentially valued) are frail or absent. But it also suggests that persistence may involve moving beyond the categories that are most familiar to us. Fred Moten’s amazing trilogy draws from Glissant, and operates under the citation “the consent not to be a single being” as a way of thinking about Black life in particular, in relation to “the murmur of submerged, impossible social life” (Moten).

To persist as a living creature requires opposing those powers that would undermine or eradicate the living character of one’s life. Thus, there is a link between persistence and resistance, but also, a rethinking of the singular self. To live, to desire to live, to live in the mode of desire, all draw on networks and relations among the living that exceed and support our singularity. Did we need the pandemic to show us that our lives are bound up with one another and other living processes in ways that challenge individualism fundamentally? The pandemic has, as it were, let us know that my health depends on yours, that we each depend on strangers who in turn depend on us, that supply chains link and divide lives in ways that can be thought only within a global framework of inequality, that a human-centered earth implies its destruction, privileging as it does human life and its productive imperative over the persistence of all other life forms.

So perhaps persistence sets the individual into a productive crisis. Persistence lets us know that what we call “one’s own” is already interlaced with the lives of others, with a living world, and that to live we must breathe the same air that others breathe, that we share the surfaces of the world. A pandemic, pan demos, is a contagion that moves across the people, beyond national boundaries, illuminating as well the porous character of the bodily boundary. It is confounding to move toward greater proximity in order to feel alive again, the feeling that takes form in relationship, only to discover that these forms of intimacy we may treasure most now threaten us as well. The ethical bind we are in has no easy name. What figure relays this situation in which I wear a mask not just from self-interest or for self-preservation, but also from a desire not to do you harm, whoever you happen to be, you whose name I probably do not know. It is not just that I calculate that I should not harm you so that you do not harm me, so it is in my self-interest. We seem rather connected by these elements and passageways that exceed and touch on our bodies. The first person “I” is disoriented as I realize that what I call my life is over there, with you. The objects and elements articulate a mediated form of reciprocity and anonymity that for the most part remains latent in social exchange. We do not stand as parallel and discrete beings. We are too porous for that; we have too many openings, and they all designate potential relations to the environment and to others. The object, the surface, even the air are all elements that establish this chiasmic structure between us as an ethical bond. This life, it seems, is already bound up with the lives of strangers, prior to any explicit contract we may deliberately enter. The matter of living and persisting is never just about calculating self-interest or even self-preservation, for that self I sought to enclose and defend is unbound and undone in its relations to others, displaying a new sense of sociality and disorientation. The present conditions of living and dying show us just how lethal or life-giving it can be to be in one another’s hands, breathing the air that another breathes, moving in proximity with other bodies carefree in a populated world.

I am trying to describe something different from resilience, which is bound up with older versions of individual or collective heroism. The term resilience often implies that people just bounce back from violence, trauma, injury, and loss, and that it is all a matter of good cheer, stiff upper lips, entrepreneurial innovation, or pivoting in another direction at will. Resilient people and institutions are apparently those tough enough to emerge from hard times with renewed powers; it names the ability not to be felled, not to be damaged in an irreversible way. All steel and glint, resilience fails to name the market or capitalism and its death drive, systemic powers such as racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that subject or destroy life, often with righteous glee, nor does it direct our attention to the shattering of lives that cannot always be patched together to become livable again. It focuses on the exemplary forms of surviving loss, deflecting attention from preventable loss and the structures responsible for that.

No reason to tarry long with grief. No reason to learn how to lose or to find the language required to acknowledge loss. Perhaps resilience belongs to a larger cultural mandate that grief be cut short, that life resume quickly, and that we all demonstrate that we are tougher than anyone thought we would be. Those who counsel us not to grieve or to keep it short, for those who say to quit grieving and start fighting, forget that grieving can be public and powerful, an invaluable form of protest, as we have seen in the Black Lives Matter movement and in Ni Una Menos, the feminist, queer, and trans protests against femicide. What forms of expression do we seek when we grieve? Ones recited by others, those in which the voice of grief is matched and lifted by a chorus. Why do we grieve in song, poetry, recitation, and prayer if not to move closer to another voice or sound? Even the soliloquy and the choreography of silence or stillness can move grief beyond this one self. Grief can open us to the question, For what are we living? And so give rise to a radical form of imagining that would establish the grievability of all those who are losing their lives without a memorial, all those who are at greater risk of being vanquished by this virus because they have been deprived of affordable health care, or discriminated against by the health care system for decades, treated as if their vanishing from the earth would count as no loss. So how might we now in the face of preventable loss insist on the equal value of lives where that value in every instance is immeasurable? Can we move the institutional imagination past calculation and self-interest to insist on the immeasurable value of equality, of living in equality?

Perhaps such a question should be posed to those institutions that seek to reopen under pandemic conditions to keep their tuition monies and fees, calculating what level of illness and death is acceptable in order to make a profit. They know full well that some number of workers, students, faculty members will take ill, and that their illness may well lead to their deaths or to the deaths of those with whom they come into contact, and that number is acceptable to them. It is not an overstatement to say that they are in the business of death dealing as they calculate their profits. Thus, to assert, “these are lives” or “this is a life” is meant to counter a lethal calculus with the notion of incalculable value. We who work in language, for whom language gives us a world, know that it matters when we say, “this is or was a life” (as Primo Levi said) in the context of a set of social powers that deny the living character of some lives way before they actually take that life. “These are lives,” “this is a life”—none of these assertions create a life, but they do seek emphatically to secure its status and value as living. The “indexical” matters; life depends on that indexicality, someone or something pointing out a living being, the senses funneled in the direction of a life whose existence is predicated. The pronouns matter, for they mark our social existence and legibility. The name matters for both the living and the dead. Such operations of language are both part of mourning and part of protest, crucial for rethinking who counts—who can count—as “the people.” In Palestine, the ever-present phrase can be seen and heard on literature and in life: “we exist!”—an emphatic existential declaration. Mahmoud Darwish, the great poet, writes, “Standing here, staying here, permanent here, eternal here, and we have one goal, one, one: to be.”

When we say “this” life, the “this” never belongs to me—the indexical wanders off, could be used by anyone, and marks the existence of others as easily as it marks my own. At the very moment in which even the lyrical “I” seeks to establish its indisputable singularity, it is also someone else’s singularity, so this first-person pronoun disperses into an anonymous sociality. Who and what speaks when this “I” speaks? Claudia Rankine asks the question this way: “If I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves? Is ‘I’ even me or am ‘I’ a gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it? What does my subject mean to me?” (54).

So language matters, graphic and musical forms matter, and performance also registers life, committing it to the registry of the living and so already reverberating with lives both proximate and distanced: even in solitude we are more accompanied than we know, perhaps more overwhelmed by a litany of voices than we can enumerate. And this indexical, even as it perpetually misses its mark, marking more than was intended, never naming only one, eluding every property claim, connects our lives beyond market value and exchange, both anonymously and indispensably. You are already in the language by which I point to myself: I am already in your hands and taken in by your breath, you whose names I do not know, who share the air and the surfaces of the world, requiring shelter and food that carries with it the labor of so many whose names are never known.

Of course, we are all trying, when we can, to find agency, connection, and creative powers under conditions of duress, even as those conditions are not the same for all of us. In finding the capacity to act, to make, and to connect, we draw on powers that come from elsewhere, from a world in which we are hopefully nourished and supported enough to write and act. And that is why, as we think about what it means for the humanities to persist, for our students to carry on with their studies, or for any of us to persist in and beyond this pandemic, we are always asking about the institutional and social conditions under which persistence becomes—or fails to become—a possibility. Persisting in the academy is less the prerogative of individuals who demonstrate spectacular will than the direct consequence of conditions of work that let life be livable: a livable wage for staff members, adjuncts, and graduate student teachers; decent and equitable fellowships at the graduate level; the forgiveness of debt for all those students who have taken loans to study and to secure a degree; new forms of graduate training that affirm the wide range of positions open to PhDs in the humanities, even if that means that humanities professors have to retrain to help guide students along those pathways. Those who are working in adjunct positions without health care are living proof that our institutions are not yet humane, that we have not seen clearly what we ask of those on whom we depend, who are for us essential workers.

During the pandemic, we are through Zoom and other platforms suddenly transported into one another’s homes or houses or temporary shelters; the partitions erected between home and university do not easily hold. Apart from all the difficulties brought about by this unwanted exposure and transport, there is something we can learn. The bodies that made their way to the classroom were always coming from some other life that faculty members could not easily see or understand. It is assumed for the most part that they are fed and housed adequately, fortified enough to read and discuss the texts of the week. Did we think their physical and emotional welfare was none of our business, the job of some student service office, or did we rather always know that it is the obligation of faculty members to fight for a living wage for graduate students and for the adjuncts they increasingly become? Given that departments now depend overwhelmingly on adjuncts to teach, is it not also their responsibility to make sure that part-time workers have health care along with a living wage? What does it mean to expect more labor from a group of people who are increasingly unable to find the means to reproduce their own physical existence, to secure their own health and future, for whom the very conditions of persistence are jeopardized? How often does adjunct work come with heightened anxiety, psychic and somatic suffering, the slow destruction of the sense of being valued? Persistence is not just a passing theme for a passing conference, but the recurring ethical question at the heart of the university, one that we cannot afford not to know.

If there is now a new ethical demand to transform our institutions, if we have the power to act from within our locations, it follows from the understanding of the unlivable conditions of living and working that affect so many people working in institutions of higher education. What about the inequalities of income between administrators earning half a million a year working at a distance from students, on the one hand, and adjuncts and graduate teachers, on the other hand, who work with students most closely under conditions of duress? The measures we use to justify such inequalities are taken for granted as the way that corporations run. But what if we called that into question?

The pandemic has made painfully clear that our task is to evaluate not just the performance of workers in the workplace but the conditions of the workplace itself and, in turn, the conditions of life that are so badly damaged by debt, poverty, exploitation, food scarcity, and economic anxiety. We turn to our texts and academic work, as we surely should, but why not also include for our consideration the conditions of work on which study, collaboration, research, and teaching depend? All these questions belong to a broader set of problems that are now ours to rethink: the relationship of the university to the publics it serves; the place and power of the arts, literature, and language to address the conditions of life itself, or persistence and its cessation. For the most part, we are neither social scientists nor social policy makers in our writing and our professions, and as a group, MLA members are not necessarily activists, though some surely are. And that is their right. And yet in nearly every aspect of teaching, mentoring, research, and service—that is, our profession—all of us find ourselves up against a social and economic world that provides, or fails to provide, the infrastructural conditions for both life and work. If we are full time faculty members with tenure, we work with, and rely on, those whose work is poorly compensated and whose lives suffer from ever-intensifying precarity. How do we live in such proximity to inequality? Do we lend our support? Do we support the strikes and the unions, and the efforts to unionize? Or do we look away, assuming that that is someone else’s business or that inequality is a fact of life, as our outgoing president is fond of saying, or that concern about inequality is not in our job descriptions.

I raise these questions neither to browbeat nor to scold, but to remind us of an obligation we already know we have, one that we have every reason to cultivate and affirm, as we seek to renew the world in a more just way. The process of understanding what we have not seen, and why, and what is there for us to acknowledge and transform, is one that involves stumbling and making errors. Entrenched institutional logics and justifications have surely obscured the truth of this situation for too long. As I hope you know, the Delegate Assembly undertook the extensive task to study power relations in graduate education, and their task force report on ethical conduct in graduate education is available on the MLA website (Report). It summarizes their findings and makes an excellent set of recommendations. What began with a survey on sexual harassment widened into a more general consideration of the exploitation of graduate student work as reflected in poor wages, as well as various ways faculty members have exploited the dependency of graduate students. Exploitation includes both harassment and the demand for unpaid personal services. Further, the failure of some faculty members, dedicated to reproducing academics in their own mold, to prepare students for a new job market and a different university. All this, and more, culminates not only in a general loss of dignity and regard for graduate students, but in the undermining of their livelihood and future prospects.

It may be that some faculty members in graduate schools were simply used to seeing others act in this way, demanding personal services from graduate students, looking away from their unlivable wages, exploiting their need for professional support from their mentors. Their conduct reproduced social structures and norms that have remained unchallenged in many institutions for too long. I found myself in a situation all too common: a colleague complains that they have been falsely accused of harassment and, like others, I think I know this colleague, rush to make alliance and defend their name against an attack that seems unfair. At such a moment, we put the collegial friendship before the obligation faculty members have to students to secure a safe environment for them to thrive without threats or coercion, even when we do not have the facts or know the file. Only a solid procedure can furnish an exoneration in such cases. We have every reason and right to make sure those procedures are just. And yet, I certainly erred, as many have erred, and reproduced through my act a social structure I am committed to dismantling. A wretched self-division, but as I reflect on the history of this error, highly consequential for the MLA and for me, I do not cancel myself, because this error gives me a chance to take responsibility, even, I hope, to help illuminate the unthinking habits of conduct and rationalization that perpetuate exploitation of various kinds.

Harassment, as we know, stops or destroys the pathway toward completing a degree; it debases students and workers who are already underpaid and facing an ever more precarious future. It is something all of us should now stop whether we have engaged in it directly or rationalized its operation, wittingly or unwittingly. But more than that, we should be supporting students and adjuncts as they seek to secure a livable wage and training for jobs inside and outside the academy, which, in turn, ought to be treated as equally valuable. I do not know whether faculty obligations to graduate students can be called a “sacred trust,” but we do take a vow to remain trustworthy, respectful, supportive, and present as students depend on us to help them acquire the knowledge they need, become the scholars they have every right to be, and move into the worlds of work prepared by their graduate education. And when we cannot help them, it is our task to find someone who can. Many of us have thought that our job is to prepare students for an academic job market even though that market is shrinking and their chances are narrowing or vanished. As tenured faculty members, we sometimes say that we are not trained to prepare graduate students for nonacademic jobs, but what keeps us from retraining ourselves so that we do not usher our students off a cliff, thinking that that is our job? My point is not to moralize, but to show that errors that appear at first quite singular and personal are facilitated by cultural and institutional norms that do not give priority to students who deserve an environment in which they can flourish. Yes, we stumble and we err, but none of us is fully defined by our error or even our crime. Our stupidities do not suddenly reveal the essence of who we are, only our profound fallibility. If we persist then as fallible creatures, there may yet be a path to repair, a renewal to undertake in common, and these last define one of the most urgent tasks for the humanities today, a task larger than any one of us, and one that requires all of us.

How do we then approach the question of whether the humanities will persist, and if so, in what forms? In these times when the pandemic exposes our frailty and interdependency, the powers we have to shape community and expand practices of care beyond the strictly domestic sphere, we can no longer look away from the quotidian ways that white supremacy, gender discrimination, exploitation, and abandonment are reproduced in the university and the world. We have to ask how we can rebuild and renew in the face of institutional histories of error we no longer deny. Where and how do we move out into public worlds without the power to physically gather to recraft its newer form, to press open the potentials of transformation, to repair and regenerate the earth, to affirm the ideals of justice outside the carceral framework, opposing violence and discrimination against women and trans and queer people, rebuilding as well our infrastructures so that those physically challenged are full participants, and to think equality beyond the boxes that are checked and tallied. Diversity and inclusion are indispensable but they will never quite name our utopia. We are in search of those names.

Many students and recent PhDs are asking how they can bring their humanities backgrounds into public service, how they can overcome the rigid divide between academic and public cultures, and to show how important the humanities are for understanding the world in which we live, making judgments, interpreting words and deeds, imagining ways to live together that manifest the very ideals of equality, freedom, and justice we wish to make manifest in the world. That task of the public humanities is already there in the classroom, in the way that a course opens to the community, in the multiple languages we offer for understanding who we all might be. One reason we could not cancel this MLA conference is that so many are eager to create conditions for conversation, creative and critical work on why languages, literature, performance and the visual arts, history, and science are important for understanding our world, and for creating conditions of persistence, for the living of our lives.

Our public and private institutions would do well to help us now think through the fundamental questions of persistence and loss, of living on as we keep company with those who have passed, to help us understand what connects and divides humans across communities and environments, languages, and regions, and what role collaborative and critical imagination has during times in which crisis and futurity are clearly the issues. We teach language and translation, literary form and technique, but what if we are, as we do this, also developing together a poetics for the living, a technique for persisting, that does not deny the loss, the history of violence, and the recurrent error, but moves through and with all of them to establish a more truthful transformation, one that moves us to move others toward that goal? So often in a literature class, we open a novel or start to read a poem, and the first question is, Where are we? Or, Who is speaking? In other words, we begin with a disorientation that allows us to reimagine a world anew. We interrogate and leave the space-time of that fictional world only to return with that other world illuminating our own. The poetics of life, the techniques for living, that emerge from our collaborating worlds give us the value of language and life in their vital intersection, as something that happens in relations, what Glissant called “a poetics of relation.” The poetics of relation for our time, a time ripped up and divided against itself, is not only to make the value of the humanities known to a wider public, but to answer the needs emerging from so many publics for a collaborative imagining. For we can hear those questions as a public cry and demand: Where are we? Who is speaking? Who longs to know that they exist, who cries in a language the rest of us have yet to learn?