It’s not just a plaything for our performances of forward movement. It stakes its claims to agency and power – qualities we usually reserve for ourselves. Now we must also acknowledge that we will not save the world. To attempt to save the world is to render it – strange it seems – eminently disposable. For in the attempt, however well-intentioned the effort, we simultaneously position ourselves ‘outside’ of material rhythms of transience that mobilises all things in fluid comings and goings.
We perpetuate the myth of complete repair, the very storyline of colonial progress that encourages us to look past foreclosures, past endings, past lingering oppressions, into a promissory future where everything is set right. Moreover, our previous efforts at trying to save the world are part of what brings us here.