Evan Calder Williams: The Honeyed Siphon
In many ways, diabetes is to the body as debt is to time. Neither was invented by capital but both expand within it, bloating tremendously in the most recent decades. Both turn around the mobilization of shame and the daily violence of living with what we are told are the fault of individual decisions. Both write themselves on and in the person: the frayed nerves of debt, the missing limbs of diabetes. Both are a quantification of the undecided and a winnowing of possibility, the constriction of the future by means of what has been consumed in the past. Above all, both will be permanent features of capital, slowly accumulating consequences of quick fixes made long-term plan, until the structure that demands them will be undone, by bodies and in time. As that happens, we’ll have to figure out anew what we even mean by body and time: how they work for us, and how to endure, together and without shame, when they refuse to, when sugar gathers around us like snow in summer.