Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will consider individual vertigo —which gives the appearance of movement to the subject who remains still— in collective terms, with the aim of understanding how abysmal scenarios are generated in situations of collective expectation.

Paper long abstract:

After twenty years waiting for a thorough renewal plan for their neighbourhood, residents of La Paz —in Murcia, south-eastern Spain— received with exhaustion and unease the news that the City Council was using European funds to paint a few facades. ‘I fear the worst: another make-up operation’, said an activist in the neighbourhood WhatsApp group; ‘and it is only justified by the Gattopardo:’ —he continued— ‘“Change something so that everything stays the same”’. The reference to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel was not fortuitous. Previously, the city council had also painted the facades of four blocks in the neighbourhood in what politicians claimed would be a comprehensive plan to renovate the neighbourhood.

Against this background, in this paper I will think individual vertigo —which gives the appearance of movement to the subject who remains still— in collective terms, with the aim of understanding how abysmal scenarios are generated in situations of collective expectation. I will show, on the one hand, how my interlocutors can't help but yearn for an otherwise; but on the other hand, how they experience the vertiginous repetition of events as an anticipation (Bandak and Coleman 2019) that nothing will change, ‘exhausting the emergence of an otherwise’ (Povinelli 2016, 21). I will argue that this tension generates a practice of meanwhiling, which operates in the tension between ‘teleological waiting’ (the uncertainty of what might happen in the future) and ‘nihilistic waiting’ (the certainty that ‘nothing will happen’) (Frederiksen 2018, 174).