Category: _interventions_blockhover

Res Nulla Loquitur: A Multimedia Essay in Seven Parts

by Sora Han

Res Nulla Loquitur: A Multimedia Essay in Seven Parts is an experiment in the study of how sound decomposes the words of law. The sound recordings used here were taken from evidence collected during investigations into the deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Jamar Clark, Terence Crutcher, Samuel Debose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling. While legal interpretation of these recordings strip them of self-evidentiary meaning, their recomposed repetition here force an encounter with a form of evidence I call, res nulla loquitur, ‘the no-thing speaks.’ Their indestructible questions refuse to settle for and in whatever the law offers as justice.

Click on the image below to use the essay:

Photo of the interactive sound sculpture, American Monument, by lauren woods, the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine, October 5, 2019 to March 16, 2020. Image credits: Photo by Will Yang; courtesy of lauren woods, the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irivne, and the University of California Regents

Res Nulla Loquitur is a prelude to the article, “North County Jail,” forthcoming in boundary 2.

Sora Han is Chair of the Department of African American Studies, and Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society, the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program and the School of Law at UC Irvine. She is the author of Mu: 49 Lines of Flight (forthcoming) and Letters of the Law (2015), and a co-author of Lacan and Mahayana Buddhist Thought (2022) and the law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, 3rd Edition (2020).

February 1, 2022
Aamir R. Mufti — Qadri and I: A Personal Remembrance

by Aamir R. Mufti

~
Sometime during the last week of May, 2021, my dear friend Qadri Ismail “shuffled off this mortal coil” in his apartment in Minneapolis. He was 59 years old and Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Shuffled off this mortal coil—this strained and irreverent Shakespearean diction would have, I think, pleased and amused him, because he (like me) had received an early education anchored in a colonial concept of English literature, a concept each of us had learned to revile and treat with heavy irony. But his love of John Donne and the Metaphysical poets, and mine of George Eliot and the Victorian novelists, was abiding. To be willing to love what you also hold in contempt—we recognized this strange cultural attitude in each other more or less instantaneously.

We met at Columbia University in 1989. I was a first year graduate student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature after abandoning a graduate career in anthropology, and Qadri had just started an MA in international studies as a Fulbright scholar, which he himself abandoned two years later to move to English. Each of us recognized a kindred spirit in the other. We had grown up in different parts of South Asia, fifteen hundred miles and more away from each other and in very different cultural contexts—he in Colombo, me in Karachi. But we shared an almost physical revulsion for the nationalisms and nation-states of our region. As a political reporter and columnist in Sri Lanka, he had lived through the brutal civil war between militants of the Tamil-Hindu minority and the Sinhalese-Buddhist dominated state. And my entire life had been shaped by the partition of British India along religio-national lines many years before my birth, my family having been part of the accompanying transfer of populations.

I don’t think I’ve known anyone to take writing as a responsibility as seriously as Qadri did, with the possible exception of Edward Said. Soon after we met in New York, the editor of a locally based academic journal (which I later joined) asked Qadri and me to contribute essays concerning the so-called Rushdie Affair, the Islamic protests worldwide against the novelist for writing a novel, The Satanic Verses, which the protestors, and ultimately Ayatollah Khomeini, believed to be blasphemous toward the Prophet of Islam. (The invitation came at the post-midnight tail-end of a party—many of the most memorable experiences involving Qadri came at that witching hour.) I had an MA essay on the topic I could further develop. Qadri wrote from scratch at journalist speed and produced a hard-hitting piece defending Rushdie against his Islamist detractors, but I procrastinated in my usual way, taking months to sort out what I wanted to do with the essay.

One evening Qadri came for dinner to the Victorian rowhouse in Harlem where I rented a room and, on his way out, stopped in the dark hallway and started berating me for taking so long with the essay. “Why should I bother with you,” he said, “if you’re not going to do your work?” (The definite article and an expletive separated the first two words in that sentence.) It was not a casual remark. It was pointed, meant to have an effect, and effectual it certainly was: it shook me to the core. I returned to the essay with an almost panicked sense of urgency and completed it in a few weeks. It was my first academic publication—so, at the very beginning of my writing career, there was Qadri.

I was so traumatized by the brutal directness of his chastisement, it took me some time to realize that it was a gesture of friendship, a slap to the back of the head of a friend, an admonition to get my act together for my own sake. Qadri was equally legendary for making new friends with remarkable ease as he was for “abiding by” old ones. I take this phrase from his own writing, where he turned it into a concept of the complex political and ethical responsibilities of Global North scholarship concerning Global South societies.

This first academic book of his, Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality (Minnesota, 2005), examined the ways in which disciplines like history and anthropology conceive of “ethnic conflicts” in postcolonial societies like Sri Lanka and argued that in one way or another, they reproduce and enforce the dominant nationalist approaches to the question of identity and social cohesion. His second work, Culture and Eurocentrism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), takes as its focus the concept of culture as it appeared and became established in Anglo-America in the course of the long nineteenth century. Nationalisms worldwide have based their claim to represent society as a whole on the basis of a supposedly shared and uniform culture. Qadri’s work exposed this claim to reveal the colonial origins of the very concept of culture. His death left two more book projects at various stages of completion: one, a study of the U.S. Declaration of Independence as (fascinatingly) an immigrant document, and the other an extended essay, inspired by C.L.R. James’s magisterial book, Beyond a Boundary, on the relation of cricket to Sri Lankan culture and society.

Despite teaching in the U.S. and publishing his books with American publishers, Qadri seemed to care not a fig about the protocols of professional development in this country. Consequently, I suspect that most gatekeepers of the profession in America are largely unaware of his corpus of writing. But, for the Sri Lankan reading public he addressed often directly in both his journalism and the scholarship, and for a wider group of Global South humanities scholars in many parts of the world—India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa—his death means the premature removal from our midst of a first class and uncompromising critical mind.

He and I never explicitly discussed this, but I like to think that our academic writings constituted something like a shared project: a critique of the cultural claims and hierarchies of majoritarianism and the nation-state, a critique, in fact, of all identitarian logics, and an insistence on honoring the secular and worldly nature of human life. “Minority” was for Qadri, as it is for me, not the affirmation of this or that sectional identity but rather a space for the questioning of dominant ideas and narratives of social life, a space which, in principle, anyone can come to inhabit. Of course we had strong intellectual differences, expressed freely and often, in robust arguments. I felt that his enthusiasm for theoretical critique was not always accompanied by a skepticism about the lack of historical and political self-reflection in the institution of Euro-American theory. And he thought that I was sometimes hopelessly naive in the manner of my continued attachment to questions concerning the aesthetic, the philological, and the historical.

In our shared New York years, Qadri’s generosity was a fabled thing. Late evenings routinely gravitated toward Qadri’s tiny student apartment. Typically, sometime after midnight a group of us regulars would stagger in, Qadri having also picked up a straggler or two along the way. Then, in no time, after putting on some music, which, in my recollection, was often Bob Marley or Miriam Makeba, he would disappear into the kitchen and eventually produce a beautiful Sri Lankan meal for five, six, seven—a fiery curry, steamed rice or “string hoppers,” yellow “milk daal,” accompanied by a range of sambol and pachadi condiments. Somehow, he managed to do this without missing out on the many conversations going on at once in the apartment. From time to time, he would stomp out of the kitchen and, right arm pointedly raised, forcefully declaim to the entire company his position on the topic of the moment, before returning to work on the meal just as abruptly.

Qadri Ismail (R), Aamir R. Mufti (L), and others, Colombo, Sri Lanka, Jan 2012 (Photo: Saloni Mathur)

He repeatedly told me and others over the years that he loved my beef nihari, a strangely alluring dish tied to the traditional culture of the historical, walled city of Delhi. And I adored these beef, lamb, fish, or chicken curry meals from Sri Lanka. Food was central to our friendship. For someone to “eat my food, machang,” as he often put it, using the beautiful Sri Lankan word for friend, mate, or companion, which he popularized among us—it is used by both Sinhala and Tamil speakers, I believe—was an almost sacred commitment to all the ties and obligations of friendship. At the center of his life, there was this ethics and politics of friendship. If there was anything truly sacred, that was it. It is not an accident that the one word all his non-Sri Lankan friends associate most with him is this (for us) foreign word meaning “friend.”

The conversations that took place in Qadri’s apartment were addictive and transformational. Funny though it may seem to those who were present, I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that he presided over a salon, but a sort of counter-salon, where discussion took “contrapuntal” form, in Edward Said’s sense of that word, restless and international, ranging across vast distances, histories, cultures. It seemed like we talked about the politics and culture of every nook and cranny of the world. The living room often resembled the forecastle deck of the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, different regions of the U.S., France, England, and many other places—it was as if every corner of the world had sent its representatives.

I met extraordinary people in that apartment—many, who were simply passing through, only once. As for our cohort of graduate students in different disciplines at Columbia, we were, as I see it, lasting influences on each other’s intellectual lives. These new friends and colleagues were some of the most brilliant people I had ever met, and Qadri brought us all together regularly through his extreme form of conviviality. I think it was an extraordinary and perhaps unrepeatable moment in the history of the English department and the humanities sector of the university. In later years, Said used to speak of this period that way—“when the graduate students started coming,” he would say. Each of us who came up through that period bears a responsibility to live up to its expectations. Qadri certainly did.

This entire experience of encounters in Qadri’s living room provided a remarkable education about the world, one for which you cannot but be grateful for the rest of your life. I learnt at least as much in these discussions and arguments as I did in the formal graduate seminars, and possibly more. The arguments could be fierce, even ruthless. Everyone had opinions. Of course there was competitiveness, and sometimes, feelings could be hurt. We also had to put up with the overflow from the toxic, baronial conflicts between some of the senior faculty. I personally didn’t care much about any of that and wasn’t affected by it, though that wasn’t true for all of us. In any case, Qadri’s apartment, and our other gathering places, were to a great extent a respite from that silliness. The point of the conversations was to challenge each other, test our ideas, share our bits of knowledge. One evening I flippantly said to a South African visitor I was meeting for the first time, “Afrikaans is the oppressor’s language.” (This was sometime during the transition from the apartheid regime.) The person was of the mixed-race community of Cape Town, and Afrikaans was his native tongue. What I got in response was a fiercely delivered lesson in the politics of language in South Africa, and by implication the colonial politics of language as such, that still informs my thinking on the subject. Qadri was amused by the thrashing I received.

Despite the accident of naming—to stay with the Moby-Dick analogy—Qadri was almost certainly the Ahab of this motley crew of women and men, than its Ishmael. We always joked about the hint of monomania to his personality, but that singularity of focus was directed toward the possibilities for joy in companionship, the creative energies and drives of human lives. When I met him, I was a bit at sea in the world and had, in particular, lost a creative relationship to my origins in South Asia. It was Qadri and another new friend of this period in my life, of Indian origin, who led me back bit by bit to a critical engagement with the question of origins. It was an incalculable gift for which I shall never stop being grateful to either of them. Like Qadri and I, many of us were displaced from our places of origin and struggling to recalibrate a relationship to home without succumbing to national sentimentality or aspiring to American cosmopolitanism.

A friend recently said to me that Qadri and I both affected each other’s lives in significant ways. But the truth is that he affected mine profoundly. I don’t know if I ever said that to him directly, though I doubt it. It feels so ridiculous now that we didn’t speak to each other that way, but I desperately hope that he knew it.

No doubt there was an element of the Rabelaisian about Qadri—big appetites, forceful rejection of primness, propriety, or pomposity, a raucous sense of humor, a fantastically foul mouth. The most baroque cuss involving one’s siblings or parents would leave his lips transformed into a profession of affection, even love. In all these years I didn’t once see anyone whose relatives were being thus maligned not smile or even grin and feel loved. It was commonplace in our relationship that one of us would start laughing in anticipation the very moment it was apparent that the other was about to make a funny remark or start telling an amusing story. Qadri’s spectacularly incongruent nickname for Said was Eddie Baby.

I mourn my friend, I rage at his absence, I am remorseful for all the missed opportunities. But no one who wishes to honor Qadri’s life can allow themselves to wallow in grief or self-pity for very long, as a mutual friend from Ireland rightly reminded me. Qadri’s real legacy for his friends is his profane love of life, love of friendship and conversation, love of food and the sharing of food. These were, as I see it, at the core of his being and inspired his writing. It is for this I want to remember him.

I shall never again be able to cook nihari without thinking of Qadri.

June 29, 2021
George Shulman — Interregnum not Impasse

by George Shulman

Since the 2016 election, and during Donald Trump’s Presidency as well as its violent aftermath on January 6, commentators on the left have engaged in two related debates. One has concerned the danger posed by Trump’s rhetoric and policies, by his base, and by the extra-parliamentary right. This debate involves contrasting assessments of the future of the Republican Party, and of the durability of the hegemonic center that has ruled American politics from Reagan to Obama. Running parallel is a second debate on the left, and intensified since the summer, about the meaning of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and the massive inter-racial protests it organized last summer, but also about the potential of the Democratic Party as a vehicle of social change. These debates involve judgments of the character of American political culture and claims about the fluidity or rigidity of its manifest polarization. At stake are contrasting visions of our political moment. One vision, influential if not dominant, implicit if not always explicit, circulates through Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin, and has been articulated by notable commentators like Samuel Moyn and Corey Robin in The New York Times and The New Yorker. Since 2016 it has depicted our political moment as both reflecting and continuing an ongoing impasse in politics and ideology. I support a contrasting vision, which also circulates through activist and academic circles on the left, and which depicts our moment as a fraught interregnum bearing both a real danger of an authoritarian or fascist turn, and, incipient possibilities of radical change. While the trope of impasse presumes the reconstitution of the hegemonic center ruling American politics since the 1980s, the trope of interregnum imagines both breakdown and transformation.

I would begin by noting the elements of the orientation I am trying to capture with the trope of impasse. First, it has criticized ‘alarmism,’ and consistently minimized the sense that Trump’s presidency, his base, and the Republican Party posed dangers beyond historic patterns of harm. Second, it has minimized the extent and grip of racism, misogyny, and polarization in the political culture of whites and in general it discounts the power of political language and the potency of irrationality, in order to defend the premise that ‘common material interests’ (and demographic change) can and will underwrite a multi-racial, progressive, majority coalition. On the basis of that organizing fantasy, third, it attributes the character of the Democratic Party only to cowardice and corruption, bred by neoliberalism and elite complacency, and it has discounted how the party, as currently constituted, could undertake change more radical than tinkering. Fourth, it has imagined each party absorbing its radicalizing elements, thereby sustaining the hegemony of established elites. It expects that an ideological political center will be reconstituted, and that American politics will remain trapped in the deep structural impasse that it claims Trump merely manifested and never ruptured. The overall effect of such arguments, over the last five years, is to emphasize the undeniable inertial power of historical patterns and institutions, but diminish their contingency, fragility, and mutation. Such arguments minimize our sense of both danger and possibility, and magnify our sense of historical stasis. Though we hear an assumption that demographic change promises a brighter future, if only the Democratic Party supported truly progressive candidates, the repeated conclusion over five years is that the Trump moment and Biden’s election only continue the “interminable present”—the structural intractability and discursive paralysis—depicted by the academic left since the early 1990s.

We cannot definitively validate, or decisively disprove, these claims and anticipations, both because “evidence” also warrants contrasting interpretations, and because assessments of the strength or weakness of a president, a movement, or a party concern objects whose character and power depend on actions that can and do remake political reality, whether by unexpectedly shattering a consensus, contesting entrenched power dynamics, or mobilizing unforeseen support. By foregrounding that sense of contingency, I would raise questions about each element or step of the “impasse talk” I am trying to identify, and propose instead how the trope of ‘interregnum’ better grasps the danger and the possibility in our recent history.

My avowedly arguable premise is that politics cannot return to the neoliberalism and racial retrenchment of the last fifty years, and that post-Reagan conditions of political impasse cannot continue, either. Instead, I would propose that American politics has entered what Antonio Gramsci called an interregnum, in which the old gods are dying, the new ones have not yet been born, and we suffer ‘morbid symptoms.’ Though his Marxist teleology assured him which was which, we cannot be so confident about what is dying and what is emergent. For the last year manifested indigenous forms both of fascism, and of radical possibility, as enacted by M4BL and the multi-racial protests it organized and led. Each was incipient or inchoate, and each was amplified by COVID-19, one by the gross racial disparity and state abandonment, the other by manic denial of its mortal impact and political implications. Each rejected neoliberalism, each overtly named the centrality of race, each bespoke the extent to which liberal democracy has been hollowed out, each scorned the party system as failed representation, each refused the idiom of civic nationalism and its narrative of incremental progress, each depicted conditions of crisis and decisive choice. But the crystallization—or cooptation—of each emergent possibility is contingent, not only on organizing by white nationalists and abolitionists on streets, in localities, and by elections, but also on fate–ful choices by the Democratic Party about its policy and rhetoric.

To anticipate, I propose that changes in both cultural landscape and party politics preclude reconstitution of the impasse that has arguably characterized American politics at least Reagan, and instead have opened an interregnum in which mobilized and antagonistic political constituencies—70% of whites, in one party, increasingly committed to minority and racial rule, facing a party increasingly committed to multi-racial democracy—see decisive choices shaping antithetical futures. If the question posed by the developments on the right is how to distinguish the danger of fascism from minority rule committed to white supremacy, the question posed by developments on the left is whether the radicalization on the streets since last summer, and danger from the right, engender a significant modification of liberal nationalism on the order of a third reconstruction. I would thus intensify both danger and possibility by amplifying the contingencies—and the rhetoric—that can interrupt, inflect, or transform inertial patterns.

On the one hand, Trump was not repudiated in the 2020 election; he achieved a historic mobilization of working class, rural, and non-college educated voters to forge a coalition with explicit evangelical and capitalist elements, a long-sought Republican Party project, but he did so by disavowing creedal or civic nationalism, which had been the hegemonic rhetorical center that has long contained partisan difference. An explicitly anti-democratic and racially exclusionary Republican Party, no longer even evoking universalistic language, consistently won down ballot, protecting control of most states and redistricting, while retaining domination of the Supreme Court and the advantages bestowed by the constitution in the Senate and Electoral College. Roughly 70% of white voters, 40% of the electorate, deny legitimacy to the 2020 election, support the capitol invasion, and endorse not only voter suppression but overturning elections that Democrats win. Given the institutional grammar controlling elections, it is likely that a radicalized Republican Party will retake the Senate and perhaps the House in two years, and then win the Presidency in four years–unless the Biden administration produces tangible benefits clearly linked to electoral campaigns in states and nationally. Though a huge majority in public opinion polls support ‘bipartisanship,’ a default politics of ‘return to normal’ only allows the parliamentary obstruction that assures Republican electoral success. In turn, that success would cement an anti-democratic project of avowedly minority rule to protect authentic Americans from displacement, i.e. the native form of fascism that Du Bois and de Tocqueville–both seeing the imbrication of class rule, racial caste, and nationalism–called ‘democratic despotism.’ The newest iteration will amplify those inherited patterns, but in unprecedented ways it will abandon the universalist (creedal or civic) language that has both justified historic forms of domination, while also authorizing and yet containing protest against it.

On the other hand, experience of COVID-19 and last summer’s massive protests fostered notable shifts in how whites view both endemic racism and state action, opening unexpected and perhaps unprecedented possibilities for progressive politics. What some call a third reconstruction or new New Deal is now spoken of in ways that no one could have imagined even 6 let alone 12 years ago, and yet, importantly, it is also a political necessity. For the democratic coalition that elected Biden must address the suffering and rancor, as well as the political infrastructure and constitutional bias, that sustains its adversary, or it will become an ever-losing minority party despite its majority support. But given the polarization in American political culture –around race and gender, membership and immigration, the meaning of “America,” citizenship, and freedom, how can and should an openly social democratic and race-conscious approach be legitimated and narrated? That is the question of rhetoric, as Aristotle defined it: what are the available means of persuasion? Working through recent debates on the left will clarify possible answers.

The impasse argument

The first point of debate has been how to understand Trump’s electoral appeal and presidency, which has involved contention about naming -was Trump continuing conventional Republican goals (tax cuts and judges), or was ‘the F word’—fascism—appropriate to signal a mutation or intensification of inherited cultural and political patterns? These questions required judging the ways in which Trump simply repeated, or also modified, the white supremacy–and patriarchy–foundational in American history. One position feared the effects of ‘exceptionalizing’ Trump, which made him seem an anomaly in our history, rather than credit the racial and misogynist roots of his rhetoric and style, and rather than anchor his appearance in the failures of liberalism. The other position feared that ‘normalizing’ Trump would protect the ways that he represented a significant mutation of those historic patterns.

Against those who used the F word to signal those departures, two different kinds of claims were made, each normalizing Trump. One claim called Trump an inherently ‘weak’ president, as evidenced by his policy failures, whereas a contrary view traced how he was repeatedly thwarted by massive political mobilization. Likewise, by defining power only by what we “do” and not also by what we “say,” Trump’s actions were cast as conventional and ineffective, whereas a contrary view traced how overt racial rhetoric, performative misogyny, and the practice of the Big Lie were transforming inherited political culture and party politics. Anxiety about ‘fascism’ was thus dismissed on the grounds that Trump did not govern like European fascists and autocrats, rather than see him in relation to recurring but also mutating forms of what Alberto Toscano called “racial fascism,” entwining cultural mobilization, popular terrorism, and state violence.

The prevailing orientation, therefore, cast the “real” danger not as Trump or the right he was authorizing and mobilizing, but as the “alarmism,” even “hysteria” of those who used the F word. Why? Because the effect of “inflating” danger was to push the left to protect the regime of liberal democracy, as if it were the only and necessary alternative to fascism, whereas (and I agree) the failures and deep racial structure of liberalism in fact made Trump both possible and appealing. To reverse this argument’s logic, though, what is its effect? It dismisses those who see danger and precludes taking (the idea of) danger seriously. What is thereby being protected? If there really were danger from a growing and militantly anti-democratic right increasingly occupying an established political party, and if the U.S. had entered a version of a ‘Weimar moment,’ what would that mean? The left would have to re-imagine the cultural landscape (and working class) it has fantasized, and, it would have to decide if defending even the minimal terms of liberal democracy is a necessary to protect the possibility for radical possibilities. It would have to rethink the working class subject it is invested in sanitizing, rethink its assumption that hegemonic impasse will continue, and thus rethink its relationship to the loathed liberal object on which its future may depend.

The second point of debate involved the danger in the mobilization by the right, in increasingly networked and armed militias, in the alternate reality created by social media and FOX news, and in state and national sites of the Republican Party. The dangers have been consistently minimized by influential voices on the left, on the grounds that the extra-parliamentary right is not formally organized, and thus will be contained by the Republican Party. The capitol invasion and certification vote might have tested these claims, but influential judgment remains that the occupation ‘failed,’ as if that proved both the weakness of the right and the durability of the established order. Though the worst possible outcome did not materialize, that doesn’t mean the threat is not real and ongoing. The left faulted Biden for his fantasy of returning to normal that includes bipartisanship, but it has not traversed its own fantasy of the center holding until a progressive movement captures the Democratic Party and gains overt political power. Dramatizing a contrasting view, Richard Seymour responded to the capital invasion by inverting Marx: an “inchoate” and “incipient” fascism” has indeed appeared, as farce first; it can then reappear as tragedy. A first step has already occurred as the mobilized right has taken over and radicalized the Republican Party.

It is not consigned to irrelevance by demographics, as too many on the left assume; rather, Trump created a template for its resurrection. Indeed, his defeat further radicalized the party, even as it retained its grip on state and local governments. Given the electoral college, the rural bias in the Senate, voter suppression, and the composition of the Supreme Court, there is every reason to expect the party to remain committed to minority rule, and to electoral viability on terms that include overturning elections that Democrats win. No establishment element in the party is available for bipartisan consensus; every incentive encourages the party to obstruct Biden’s initiatives, diminish economic recovery, and prove that government is ineffective, thereby to feed the despair and rage that enable Republican majorities in Congress in two years, and a successor to Trump in four. Autocratic rule has been averted for the moment, but merely postponed, not forestalled. Alarm seems at the least prudent, and I would argue that prudence requires defending electoral (and so, liberal) democracy, not as an idealized alternative or revered object to defend against an alien form of despotism, but as a grossly flawed framework whose declared rights and recent advances nevertheless can authorize and enable emergent radical projects of democratization to develop further.

This broaches the third broad area of debate, concerning the character of public opinion and political culture. In simple terms, the election revealed that 72 million people, mostly white, across class lines, voted to reelect Trump–3 million more than in 2016, enough to have beaten Hillary in the popular vote and not only the electoral college. After the election, 80% of those voters remain convinced the election was stolen, a claim based on ‘disinformation’ that was taken as plausible because it confirmed prior racialized judgments about who is a legitimate citizen. Some of those voters were transactional, making a judgment on the basis of taxes and judges, but nevertheless, they knew they were voting for a candidate who refused to accept the peaceful transfer of power if he lost, as if Democrats could win only by fraud, i.e. by people of color voting. At issue is not only ‘denial of reality’ by enclosure within an alternate one, but mass investment in protecting white supremacy and patriarchy. The prevailing view of DSA and Jacobin would salvage this situation, to protect the vision of a class politics oriented by “material interest” rather than divided by the “identity politics” of race, gender, and nationalism. But for whites, class in the U.S. is lived through codes of race and gender, and by deep investments in both propertied individualism and nationalism. Indeed, a huge majority of whites has been wed to the death drive by the discourse of racial capitalism, aligning whiteness, work, and worth to masculinized self-reliance. Blocked grief at real losses has produced both the suicidal and manic features of melancholy. Rather than undergo mourning, many white men and women embraced death in the name of liberty, but they also are enraged, feel legitimized in their sense of victimization, and they are armed. The material realities of disease, precarity, and racial disparity must now include the invented reality of a stolen election, as well as the denial of reality embraced by the millions who voted for Trump. But the historic rationalism of the left, presuming the effectiveness of what Freud called the reality principle, prevents apprehension of the desires and fantasies–and so of the images and symbols–that constitute what class means in particular places and times.

I would call our historical moment an interregnum, therefore, partly because the historic marriage of citizenship and whiteness is being regenerated, not only as militias enact historic forms of popular sovereignty and local civic power, but also as the Republican Party increasingly recruits men and women of color into a newly emergent, multiracial and not only ethnic, form of whiteness. This anti-democratic form of ‘American democracy’ defensively asserts the individualism, popular sovereignty, and nationalism once taken for granted in the civic language that wed whiteness and citizenship, but now it is severed from even the pretense of universalist ideals and appeals. This zombie politics of the undead, this resurrection of American greatness may be dismissed as farce, but it will thrive and not truly die unless its premise—in gendered and racialized forms of individualism and resentment–is addressed, and unless its constitutional scaffolding is dismantled. This challenge has also prompted debates on the left about the Democratic Party.

The prevailing view, articulated by DSA and Jacobin, imagines a culture that is center-left in a readily accessible way, which implies that the only obstacle to a winning majority coalition is Democratic Party timidity, linked to the corrupt neo-liberalism of its established elites. If we recall that refusal to accept electoral norms has occurred before–when southern states seceded and then rejected open elections during reconstruction–it seems more plausible to say we have shifted from ‘polarization’ to a condition more like civil war, albeit so far a cold one, over antithetical visions of democracy and the future. Even if parliamentary stalemate persists, it reflects not so much structurally dictated foreclosure, as a condition of civil war whose outcome we cannot predict, because it is contingent on our action now.

In these cultural circumstances, the Democratic Party mobilized 8 million more voters and created the basis for a multi-racial coalition with some 30% of whites, more affluent and educated than not, and people of color across class lines. DSA and Jacobin still claim that Bernie Sanders could have won the election, despite the fact that even in the primaries he could not cross the 30% threshold, because he could not gain significant support from Black and Latinix constituencies (except in Nevada). The base of the Democratic Party, Black women, rescued Biden in the primaries because they credited the depth of racism and anxiety among whites across class lines, because they valued his appeal to competence, and, I would argue, because his profound (Catholic) understanding of grief linked mourning to public service in ways that really resonated with the Black church tradition. But in turn progressives and millennials still mobilized (in ways they did not for Hillary Clinton) because so many accepted Bernie Sanders’ dire judgment that we had indeed entered a Weimar moment in which the choice was really between Trump and democracy.

One incredible irony of our moment is thus that Biden’s reputation for moderation, his personal proximity to suffering, and his performance of a ‘common man’ version of a whiteness wed to decency not supremacy, were crucial to recruiting enough (suburban) whites to create a winning coalition with affluent progressives and people of color. Moreover, his first 100 days suggests that this persona may allow him to advance more progressive policies, perhaps a democratic version of Nixon going to China. Given our political culture, constitutional bias, and gerrymandering, the Democratic Party still needs both its moderate and its progressive wings if it is to fly, to use Cristina Beltran’s great metaphor, though this creates enormous parliamentary difficulty for progressive projects. And to complete the double bind, unless it produces benefits tangible to masses of people in the next two and four years, it is likely to be defeated electorally, but the actions that produce such benefits are likely to contradict the promises that are crucial to moderate voters.

Interregnum and Rhetorical Possibility

Rather than depict a durable center containing threats on the right as well as radical energies on the left, and rather than presume the readiness of working class Americans (across racial lines) to adopt a pointedly progressive political agenda, I see a darker and more dangerous situation in which a likely outcome is the victory of an openly anti-democratic Republican Party, anchored in an increasingly organized militia movement and a conspiratorial popular culture among the vast majority of whites, and recruiting enough people of color to appear nationalist rather than racist. Rather than moralize the character of the Democratic Party, I would emphasize that political culture among whites supports only some specific elements of the progressive or radical vision offered by the left, though to an uncertain degree some whites (across class lines) may be open to shifting affiliation. But tangible benefits are not self-evident in meaning and do not suffice to generate allegiance; rather, inferences from those benefits—that government can be effective for the many not the few, and that democracy is not a fraud—depends on the available means of persuasion. What are they? Which idioms might resonate, and with whom?

The symbiosis of Trump’s presidency and his base was made possible by the conjunction of defensive nationalism, racial retrenchment, and neoliberal precarity, the dominant strands in American politics since Reagan, which set the limitations of Obama’s self-defeating and disappointing presidency. But in ways the left has not credited, this conjunction reflects the failure of prior populist and progressive projects to address how citizenship is racialized standing and capitalism is always-already racial. The repeated failure of American social reformers to sever citizenship from whiteness, to show the price that whites and not only blacks pay for white supremacy, and thereby to join a class politics to an abolition project, is the ongoing condition enabling this iteration of American-style fascism. Conversely, a politically effective and durable response to Trump and his white base must address both precarity and structural racism, as twinned not separate. Progressives must show that separating whiteness and citizenship brings tangible benefits to those disposed by zero-sum racial logic to see only loss. But we also must explain what those tangible benefits mean–narrate their meaning–in ways that reattach profoundly alienated people—not only working class whites but millennials across class and race lines—to democratic ideals and practices they understandably deem fraudulent and/or exclusionary. Those ‘values’ are not manifestly valuable in a time of rampant cynicism, but must be turned from empty nouns into active verbs by political poesis and praxis that vivifies and enlarges their historic (and limited) meaning. Politics has entered an interregnum, though, not only because of danger on the right, but also because the conjunction of COVID and M4BL organizing has created just that possibility, by linking precarity and race in democratizing ways.

How might different ways of politically and rhetorically linking precarity and race address the danger of an emboldened and increasingly organized right? Aziz Rana, Robin Kelley, and many M4BL advocates have argued that the crisis in liberal nationalism and its creedal narrative, witnessed on the right and the left, is an opportunity to conceive a democratic politics no longer defined and contained by the nation-state. M4BL, drawing on traditions of black radicalism, is thus seen as a model of how social movements should sever projects of social justice even from a progressive version of civic nationalism and its redemptive narrative, to assemble instead coalitions that shape politics locally and influence policy nationally. On this view, radical social change requires not an over-arching national narrative, but a movement of movements, coalitions forged by transactional and strategic relations around intersecting issues, contiguous interests, and regional projects. The great benefit of this approach is to contest the settler colonialism presumed and erased by progressive versions of civic nationalism, and to instead foreground the patiently prefigurative politics that slowly but surely builds another world, a durable and vibrant res publica, within and against this one. Such ‘horizontalism’ may also offer a resilient practice of survival under conditions of a cold civil war, when political persuasion seems impossible, and mutual aid and mobilization seem paramount.

These arguments are credible and appealing, but I fear they cede state power to a mobilized right intent on crushing sanctuary cities, anti-racism insurgency, climate change activism, queer politics, and critical race curricula, let alone social democratic attempts to increase social equality and address racial disparity. They cede state power because they relinquish a large-scale (say national) effort to seek a majoritarian hegemony on behalf of a democratic horizon of aspiration, to legitimate equality, popular power in participatory practices, and through elections and truly representative institutions. I would argue that social transformation requires more than a coalition of constituent movements, which are always at risk of acting as narrowing interest groups; it requires hegemony, to denote the symbolic legitimation and organization of political power that at once advances and protects the constituencies it brings into relation as a majoritarian formation. Such hegemony requires symbolic or figurative language, an organizing vision and historical narrative, to explain circumstances, invoke a ‘we,’ and stipulate ‘what is to be done.’ For democratic ideas and participatory practices are not self-evidently desirable or legitimate; by praxis and imaginative poesis we turn empty nouns into embodied verbs, visible realities, rhetorically compelling objects, and durable affective attachments.

On the assumption that radical social change requires a persuasive idiom with broad appeal, my avowedly arguable proposition is for progressives to articulate a “third reconstruction” that, in Baldwinian terms, publicly reckons with the historical legacy, institutional features, and cultural meaning of white supremacy, while in Gramscian terms, symbolizes democratic renewal through a ‘national-popular’ idiom aspiring to hegemony. Because the toxic character of civic life and prevailing devaluation of public goods is inseparable from endemic racism, a third reconstruction is not only a program of ‘reparations’ directed to the ‘wealth gap’ suffered by Black communities, but is also the means and the signifier of a broadly democratic reconstitution of social life. That reconstitution requires the use of state power and public programs to break the grip of oligarchy and caste, but its democratic integrity depends on ongoing ‘movement’ in every locality and across of range of issues, to bear witness to historic injustice and present injuries, to sustain non-state infrastructures of mutual aid, to pressure elites, and to create stages on which people can see themselves assembled, enjoying civic life and public things. But as the freedman bureaus during the first reconstruction indicate, the survival, let alone vitality of any ‘democracy-from-below’ requires a state that challenges local tyrannies and supports insurgencies, which in turn requires a ‘national-popular’ idiom that shows the relevance of democratic ideas to people rightly cynical about them, and that recruits (some or enough of) those who inhabit the “non-intersecting” reality that is the legacy, not only of Trump, but of the failed liberalism that made him possible.

Rather than recuperate the tired teleological narrative of progress, the trope of a “third” reconstruction emphasizes two prior but “splendid” failures, as Du Bois put it, to suggest a revolutionary experiment to make anew, the contingency of any victory or accomplishment, and the necessity for ongoing popular struggle with entrenched forms of power. We cannot know if such language could achieve hegemony until and if it is genuinely attempted. In this interregnum, when we do not know what is in fact dying–is it white supremacy or democratic possibility?–drawing on ‘national-popular’ or vernacular idioms seems necessary to reckon finally with the past, project a potentially common horizon, and thereby protect the very idea of a democratic, multi-racial politics. Failure does not mean a return to neo-liberal impasse, but an opening for an aspirational fascism to shift from incipience and farce to resurgence and tragedy.

George Shulman teaches political theory and American Studies at the Gallatin School of New York University. In 2010, his second book, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Politics, won the David Easton Award for best book in political theory. He is currently working on a book entitled Life Postmortem: Beyond Impasse.

June 16, 2021
Arne De Boever — The End of Art (Once Again)

by Arne De Boever

~

Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.
—Heinrich Heine

You Morons

In early March 2021, a group of “tech and art enthusiasts” who make up the company Injective Protocol[1] burnt Banksy’s work Morons (White) (2006), which they had previously acquired from Tagliatella Galleries for $95,000.[2] At first sight, the burning could be read as performance art in the spirit of Banksy’s Morons (White), which shows an art auction where a canvas featuring the text “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MORONS ACTUALLY BUY THIS SHIT” is up for sale (and going for $750,450). As such, the performance would take further Banksy’s own criticism of the art market, a market whose dialectic has easily reappropriated Banksy’s criticism as part of its norm and turned it into economic value. The burning of the Banksy would then seek to more radically negate the value of the work of art that Banksy’s Morons (White) challenges but cannot quite escape as long as it remains a valuable work of art.

However, such negation was not the goal of the burning. As the tech and art enthusiast who set the Banksy aflame explained, the burning was in fact accomplished as part of a financial investment, and to inspire other artists. In other words, the burning in fact confirmed the art market’s norm rather than challenging it, and it encouraged other artists to make work that does the same. You see, before Banksy’s Morons (White) was burnt, Injective Protocol had recorded the work as what is called a non-fungible token or NFT in the blockchain. This means that for the work’s digital image, a unique, original code was created; that code—which is what you buy if you buy and NFT–is the new, original, NFT artwork, henceforth owned by Injective Protocol even if digital copies of Banksy’s Morons (White) of course still circulate as mere symbols of that code.[3] Such ownership, and the financial investment as which it was intended, required the burning of the material Banksy because Injective Protocol sought to relocate the primary value of the work into the NFT artwork—something that could only be accomplished if the original Banksy was destroyed. The goal of the burning was thus to relocate the value of the original in the derivative, which had a bigger financial potential than the original Banksy.

The Banksy burning was perhaps an unsurprising development for those who have an interest in art and cryptocurrencies and have been following the rise of cryptoart. Cryptoart is digital art that is recorded in the blockchain as an NFT. That makes cryptoart “like” bitcoin, which is similarly recorded in the blockchain: each bitcoin is tied to a unique, original code that is recorded in a digital ledger where all the transactions of bitcoin are tracked. As an NFT, a digital artwork is similarly tied to a unique, original code that marks its provenance. The main difference between bitcoin and an NFT is that the former, as currency, is fungible, whereas the latter, as art, as not.[4] Now, NFTs were initially created “next to” already existing non-digital art, as a way to establish provenance for digital images and artworks. But as such images and artworks began to accrue value, and began to comparatively accrue more value than already existing non-digital art, the balance in the art market shifted, and NFTs came to be considered more valuable investments than already existing works of non-digital art.

The burning of Banksy’s Morons (White) was the obvious next step in that development: let us replace the already existing work of non-digital art by an NFT, destroy the already existing work of non-digital art, and relocate the value of the work into the NFT as part of a financial investment. It realizes the dialectic of an art market that will not hesitate to destroy an already existing non-digital work of art (and replace it with an NFT) if it will drive up financial value. The auction houses who have sold NFTs are complicit to this process.

Crypto Value = Exhibition Value + Cult Value

The digital may at some point have held the promise of a moving away from exceptionalism–the belief that the artist and the work of art are exceptional, which is tied to theories of the artist as genius and the unresolved role of the fake and the forgery in art history–as the structuring logic of our understanding of the artist and the work of art. The staged burning of the Banksy does not so much realize that promise as relocate the continued dominance of exceptionalism—and its ties to capitalism, even if the work of art is of course an exceptional commodity that does not truly fit the capitalist framework—in the digital realm. The promise of what artist and philosopher Hito Steyerl theorized as “the poor image”[5] is countered in the NFT as a decidedly “rich image”, or rather, as the rich NFT artwork (because we need to distinguish between the NFT artwork/ the code and the digital image, a mere symbol that is tied to the code). Art, which in the part of its history that started with conceptual art in the early 1970s had started realizing itself—parallel to the rise of finance and neoliberalism–as a financial instrument, with material artworks functioning as means to hedge against market crashes (as James Franco’s character in Isaac Julien’s Playtime [2014] discusses[6]), has finally left the burden of its materiality behind to become a straight-up financial instrument, a derivative that has some similarities to a cryptocurrency like bitcoin. Art has finally realized itself as what it is: non-fungible value, one of finance’s fictions.[7]

Although the video of the Banksy burning might shock, and make one imagine (because of its solicitation to other tech enthusiasts and artists) an imminent future in which all artworks will be burnt so as to relocate their primary value in an NFT tied to the artwork’s digital image, such a future actually does not introduce all that much difference with respect to today. Indeed, we are merely talking about a relocation of value, about a relocation of the art market. The market’s structure, value’s structure, remain the same. In fact, the NFT craze demonstrates how the artwork’s structuring logic, what I have called aesthetic exceptionalism,[8] realizes itself in the realm of the digital where, for a brief moment, one may have thought it could have died. Indeed, media art and digital art more specifically seemed to hold the promise of an art that would be more widely circulated, where the categories of authorship, value, and ownership were less intimately connected, and could perhaps even—see Steyerl; but the argument goes back to Walter Benjamin’s still influential essay on the copy[9]—enable a communist politics. Such a communist politics would celebrate the copy against the potentially fascist values of authenticity, creativity, originality, and eternal value that Benjamin brings up at the beginning of his essay. But no: with NFT, those potentially fascist values are in fact realizing themselves once again in the digital realm, and in a development that Benjamin could not have foreseen “the aura” becomes associated with the NFT artwork—not even the digital image of an artwork but a code as which the image lies recorded in the blockchain. Because the NFT artwork is a non-fungible token, one could argue that it is even more of an original than the digital currencies with which it is associated. After all, bitcoin is still a medium of exchange, whereas an NFT is not. In the same way that art is not money, NFT is not bitcoin, even if the NFT needs to be understood (as I suggested previously) as one of finance’s fictions.

What’s remarkable here is not so much that a Banksy is burnt, or that other artworks may in the future be burnt. What’s remarkable is the power of aesthetic exceptionalism: an exceptionalism so strong that it can even sacrifice the material artwork to assert itself.

Of course, some might point out—taking Banksy’s Morons (White) as a point of departure–that Banksy himself invited this destruction. Indeed, at a Sotheby’s auction not so long ago, Banksy had himself already realized the partial destruction of one of his works in an attempt to criticize the art market[10]—a criticism that is evident also in the work of art that Injective Protocol burnt. But the art market takes such avant-garde acts of vandalism in stride, and Banksy’s stunt came to function as evidence for what has been called “the Banksy effect”[11]: your attempt to criticize the art market becomes the next big thing on the art market, and your act of art vandalism in fact pushes the dollar value of the work of art. If that happens, the writer Ben Lerner argues in an essay about art vandalism titled “Damage Control”,[12] your vandalism isn’t really vandalism: art vandalism that pushes up dollar value isn’t vandalism. Banksy’s stunt was an attempt to make art outside of the art market, but the attempt failed. The sale of the work went through, and a few months later, one can find the partially destroyed artwork on the walls of a museum, reportedly worth three times more since the date when it was sold. For Lerner, examples like this open up the question of a work of art outside of capitalism, a work of art from which “the market’s soul has fled”,[13] as he puts it. But as the Banksy example shows, that soul is perhaps less quick to get out than we might think. Over and over again, we see it reassert itself through those very attempts that seek to push it out. One might refer to that as a dialectic—the dialectic of avant-garde attempts to be done with exceptionalist art. Ultimately they realize only one thing: the further institutionalization of exceptionalist art.

That dialectic has today reached a most peculiar point: the end of art that some, a long time ago, already announced. But none of those arguments reached quite as far as the video of the Authentic Banksy Art Burning Ceremony that was released in March: in it, we are quite literally witnessing the end of the work of art as we know it. It shows us the “slow burn”, as the officiating member of Injective Protocol puts it, through which Banksy’s material work of art—and by extension the material work of art at large—disappears (and has been disappearing). At the same time, this destruction is presented as an act of creation—not so much of a digital image of the Banksy work but of the NFT artwork or the code that authenticates that digital image, authors it, brands it with the code of its owners. So with the destruction of Banksy’s work of art, another work of art is created—the NFT artwork, a work that you cannot feature on your wall (even if its symbolic appendage, the digital image of the Banksy, can be featured on your phone, tablet, or computer and even if some owners of the NFT artwork might decide to materially realize the NFT artwork as a work that can be shown on their walls). But what is the NFT artwork? It strikes one as the artwork narrowed down to its exceptionalist, economic core, the authorship and originality that determine its place on the art market. It is the artwork limited to its economic value, the scarcity and non-fungibility that remain at the core of what we think of as art. This is not so much purposiveness without purpose, as Immanuel Kant famously had it, but non-fungible value as a rewriting of that phrase. Might that have been the occluded truth of Kant’s phrase all along?

In Kant After Duchamp,[14] which remains one of the most remarkable books of 20^th-century art criticism, Thierry de Duve shifted the aesthetic question from “is it beautiful?” (Kant’s question) to “is it art?” (Duchamp’s question, which triggers de Duve’s rereading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment). It seems that today, one might have to shift the question once again, to situate Kant after Mike Winkelmann, the graphic designer/ NFT artist known as Beeple whose NFT collage “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was sold at a Christie’s auction for $69,346,250. The question with this work is not so much whether it is beautiful, or even whether it is art; what matters here is solely its non-fungible value (how valuable is it, or how valuable might it become?), which would trigger yet another rereading of Kant’s third critique. Shortly after the historic sale of Beeple’s work was concluded, it was widely reported that the cryptocurrency trader who bought the work may have profited financially from the sale, in that the trader had previously been buying many of the individual NFTs that made up Beeple’s collage—individual NFTs that, after the historic sale of the collage, went up significantly in value, thus balancing out the expense of buying the collage and even yielding the trader a profit. What’s interesting here is not the art—Beeple’s work is not good art[15]—but solely the non-fungible value.

It seems clear that what has thus opened up is another regime of art. In his essay on the copy, Benjamin wrote of the shift from cult value, associated with the fascism of the original, to exhibition value, associated with the communism of the copy. Today, we are witnessing the anachronistic, zombie-like return of cult value within exhibition value, a regime that can be understood as the crypto value of the work of art. That seems evident in the physical token that buyers of Beeple’s NFTs get sent: in its gross materialism—it comes with a cloth to clean the token but that can also be used “to clean yourself up after blasting a hot load in yer pants from how dope this is!!!!!!111”; a certificate of authenticity stating “THIS MOTHERFUCKING REAL ASS SHIT (this is real life mf)”; and a hair sample, “I promise it’s not pubes”–, it functions as a faux cultic object that is meant to mask the emptiness of the NFT. Assuaging the anxieties, perhaps, of the investors placing their moneys into nothing, it also provides interesting insights into the materialisms (masculinist/ sexist, and racist—might we call them alt-right materialisms?) that reassert themselves in the realm of the digital, as part of an attempt to realize exceptionalism in a commons that could have freed itself from it.[16] As the text printed on the physical token has it: “strap on an adult diaper because yer about to be in friggn’ boner world usa motherfucker”.

NFT-Elitism

It’s worth asking about the politics of this. I have been clear about the politics of aesthetic exceptionalism: it is associated with the politics of sovereignty, which is a rule of the one, a mon-archy, that potentially tends abusive, tyrannical, totalitarian. That is the case for example with exceptionalism in Carl Schmitt, even if it does not have to be the case (see for example discussions of democratic exceptionalism).[17] With the NFT artwork, the politics of aesthetic exceptionalism is realizing itself in the digital realm, which until now seemed to present a potential threat to it. It has nothing to do with anti-elitism, or populism; it is not about leaving behind art-world snobbery, as some have suggested. It is in fact the very logic of snobbery and elitism that is realizing itself in the NFT artwork, in the code that marks originality, authenticity, authorship and ownership. Cleverly, snobbery and elitism work their way back in via a path that seems to lead elsewhere. It is the Banksy effect, in politics. The burning of the Banksy is an iconoclastic gesture that preserves the political theology of art that it seems to attack.[18] This is very clear in even the most basic discourse on NFTs, which will praise both the NFT’s “democratic” potential—look at how it goes against the elitism of the art world!—while asserting that the entire point of the NFT is that it enables the authentification that once again excludes fakes and forgeries from the art world. Many, if not all of the problems with art world elitism continue here.

With the description of NFT artworks as derivatives, and their understanding as thoroughly part of the contemporary financial economy, the temptation is of course to understand them as “neoliberal”—and certainly the Banksy burning by a group of “tech and art enthusiasts” (a neo-liberal combo if there ever was one) seems to support such a reading. But the peculiar talk about authenticity and originality in the video of the Banksy burning, the surprising mention of “primary value” and its association to the original work of art (which now becomes the NFT artwork, as the video explains), in fact strikes one as strangely antiquated. Indeed, almost everything in the video strikes one as from a different, bygone time: the work, on its easel; the masked speaker, a robber known to me from the tales of my father’s childhood; the flame, slowly working its way around the canvas, which appears to be set up in front of a snowy landscape that one may have seen in a Brueghel. Everything is there to remind us that, through the neoliberal smokescreen, we are in fact seeing an older power at work—that of the “sovereign”, authentic original, the exceptional reality of “primary value” realizing itself through this burning ritual that marks not so much its destruction but its phoenix-like reappearance in the digital realm. In that sense, the burning has something chilling to it, as if it is an ancient ritual marking the migration of sovereign power from the material work of art to the NFT artwork. A transference of the sovereign spirit, if you will, and the economic soul of the work of art. For anyone who has closely observed neoliberalism, this continued presence of sovereignty in the neoliberal era will not come as a surprise—historians, political theorists, anthropologists, philosophers, and literary critics have shown that it would be a mistake to oppose neoliberalism and sovereignty historically, and in the analysis of our contemporary moment. The aesthetic regime of crypto value would rather be a contemporary manifestation of neoliberal sovereignty or of authoritarian neoliberalism (the presence of Trump in Beeple’s work is worth noting).

Art historians and artists, however, may be taken aback by how starkly the political truth of art is laid bare here. Reduced to non-fungible value, brought back to its exceptionalist economic core, the political core of the artwork as sovereign stands out in its tension with art’s frequent association with democratic values like openness, equality, and pluralism. As the NFT indicates, democratic values have little to do with it: what matters, at the expense of the material work of art, is the originality and authenticity that enable the artwork to operate as non-fungible value. Part of finance’s fictions, the artwork thus also reveals itself as politically troubling because it is profoundly rooted in a logic of the one that, while we are skeptical of it in politics, we continue to celebrate aesthetically. How to block this dialectic, and be done with it? How to think art outside of economic value, and the politics of exceptionalism? How to end not so much art but exceptionalism as art’s structuring logic? How to free art from fascism? The NFT craze, while it doesn’t answer those questions, has the dubious benefit of identifying all of those problems.

_____

Arne De Boever teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and is the author of Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis (Fordham University Press, 2017), Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and other works. His most recent book is François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

Back to the essay

_____

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Alex Robbins, Jared Varava, Makena Janssen, Kulov, and David Golumbia.

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Notes

[1] See: https://injectiveprotocol.com/.

[2] See: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/financial-traders-burned-banksy-nft-1948855. A video of the burning can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4wm-p_VFh0.

[3] See: https://hyperallergic.com/624053/nft-art-goes-viral-and-heads-to-auction-but-what-is-it/.

[4] A simple explanation of cryptoart’s relation to cryptocurrency can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlgE_mmbRDk.

[5] Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image”. e-flux 10 (2009). Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

[6] See: https://www.isaacjulien.com/projects/playtime/.

[7] I am echoing here the title of my book Finance Fictions, where I began to theorize some of what is realized by the NFT artwork: Boever, Arne De. Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.

[8] See: Boever, Arne De. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

[9] See: Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction” In: Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217-251.

[10] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxkwRNIZgdY&feature=emb_title.

[11] Brenner, Lexa. “The Banksy Effect: Revolutionizing Humanitarian Protest Art”. Harvard International Review XL: 2 (2019): 35-37.

[12] Lerner, Ben. “Damage Control: The Modern Art World’s Tyranny of Price”. Harper’s Magazine 12/2013: 42-49.

[13] Lerner, “Damage Control”, 49.

[14] Duve, Thierry de. Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT, 1998.

[15] While such judgments are of course always subjective, this article considers a number of good reasons for judging the work as bad art: https://news.artnet.com/opinion/beeple-everydays-review-1951656#.YFKo4eIE7p4.twitter.

[16] The emphasis on materialism here is not meant to obscure the materialism of the digital NFT, namely its ecological footprint which is, like that of bitcoin, devastating.

[17] See Boever, Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism.

[18] On this, see my: “Iconic Intelligence (Or: In Praise of the Sublamental)”. boundary 2 (forthcoming).

March 29, 2021
Étienne Balibar — Politics and Science: One Vocation or Two?

by Étienne Balibar

~

One might find it alarming (as I do) that the Ministers of Education and Higher Education, encouraged from the top, have dug out of the ideological gutter an epithet with sinister resonances to justify a purge of French Academia.

One might be worried (as I am) by the speed at which publicly-funded independent research is being dismantled, both through financial austerity and the widespread use of targeted and monitored funding.

One might feel disheartened (as I do), to see self-proclaimed spokespersons for the “excellence of French research” seeking to prevent our students from taking part in major international currents of innovation and critical thinking, deemed incompatible with our republican values, and thereby isolating us in a chauvinistic provincialism.

One can, even while defending, as I do, the legitimacy of the study of race, gender, class, postcolonial studies and all of their intersections, be aware of, and denounce simplistic and historically unfounded arguments and sectarian censorship that exist on the margins of academia.

And one can be disappointed (as I am) to see historians and social scientists who, after contributing landmark studies to the critique of inequality and forms of social or national exclusion, have joined, with bitterness, the camp of intellectual conservatism and corporatism.

But these feelings don’t address the epistemological question at the heart of the matter. In the domain of the said human and social sciences, what is the relationship between the necessity of taking a stand and that of knowledge for knowledge’s sake (the only form of knowledge that indeed merits the name)? We are brought back to the question posed by Max Weber in his 1919 lectures: what is the “vocation” of science? How is it different from the “vocation” of politics?[1] It seems that the solution that he proposed at the time—that of “axiological neutrality,” the separation of ethics into two dimensions, “conviction” and “responsibility”—turned out to be impracticable.

I see four reasons for this, and they form something like a unity of opposites, through which we must trace our path without sacrificing our exigence.

First, universities and research centers can no longer afford to speak only to themselves. More than in the past, they must open their doors and their ears to the rest of society, or even better, to the polity. No one is contesting that it is essential to produce and transmit verified and verifiable knowledge and to practice rational argument. All of this takes place in the classroom. But the object of study, that which we try to make intelligible, can only be found outside of the classroom and it is unavoidably conflictual, because we do not live, nor will we live anytime soon, in a peaceful society. In order for us to grasp and understand this conflict, it cannot simply be studied and investigated from afar. It must enter into our spaces of learning and knowledge through the presence of its real actors, unless researchers venture out to find them (for example in a “jungle” or in a “neighborhood”).[2] As Foucault might have put it, we must bring the teachers, students, and researchers out and let the protesters, with or without gilets, and the activists or active citizens in. They must be given a chance to speak in the same places that have, until now, been reserved for magisterial discourse. However difficult it may be, we owe it to ourselves to experiment with ways of doing this.

With conflict comes ideology. This is obvious. The problem lies in the fact that ideology does not just come from outside, it is always already there in more or less dominant forms. To state that the foundation of economic knowledge is the rational anticipation of market actors; that sociological knowledge is the constant interplay of methodological individualism and organic solidarity; that psychology and pedagogy share the adaptation of subjects as their common object of study; or that the trajectory of historical modernity tends to the secularization of religion, is not simply to state, it is to take an ideological standpoint, indissociable from relationships of power. Obviously, there are alternative positions to those outlined here, more or less visible depending on the period. An institution dedicated to learning that is alive, one that is capable of making space for the unknown, must pursue as its main goal the systematic questioning, including in national boards of evaluation, of every “incontestable” paradigm, to make sure that it becomes a subject of discussion. Let us not forget the disastrous episode that saw the elimination of the “Economics and Society” section within the CNU (National Council of Universities), and the price we’re paying for it now in the midst of the crisis.[3]

But the conflict between what Canguilhem called “scientific ideologies” and what Althusser named the “philosophies of scientists” may not be the heart of the problem. One could again be led to think that the conflict only resides in the object, in the intrusion of the personal interests and commitments of the practitioners of knowledge, but not in the concept, which is the real heart of knowledge. Yet, nothing is less accurate. Knowledge does not come to a concept by avoiding conflict. On the contrary, it does so by intensifying conflict around big ontological alternatives, forcing us to choose between irreconcilable understandings of the nature of things or beings. The history of truth is not to be found in synthesis, even if it is provisional, but in the polemical ascent towards the points of heresy of a theory. This is evident in many fields, from the humanities to economics and environmental science, and perhaps even beyond – in biology, for instance, with the theory of evolution.

Lastly, and more deeply, we cannot forget that knowledge does not exist without subject(s). This is not a shortcoming of scientific inquiry but its very condition of possibility, at least in any science that has an anthropological dimension, and perhaps in others too. In order to know we must venture as subjects into the field in which we are already “situated”, with all the baggage of “characters” (as Kant would call them), that make us “what we are” (through processes of historical and social construction, of course). There is no “transcendental subject” of scientific knowledge. Or better still, we must venture towards that point of identity “trouble” where every subject resides, with more or less difficulty, with/in their “difference”, whether it be masculinity, femininity, or another “gender” ; blackness, whiteness or another “color”; intellectual ability or inability, or “religious” belief or disbelief, in order to make that very point the analytical lens through which we read the social forces that imprison, exclude, and direct us. For even if no one can freely choose their place in society, by virtue of the power relationships that construct and traverse it, no place is assigned once and for all. The goal, then, is to turn our lived and recognized anthropological difference in all its uncertainty into the instrument with which we dissect our collective body politic, and to make the analysis of the mechanisms that produce and reproduce it, the means of countering its normative effects. This is perhaps not the royal road of scientific inquiry, but it is certainly a necessary step. I think here of what Sandra Harding called “strong objectivity” that includes knowledge of one’s own position as subject, and of how badly positivisms tend to miss the point.

The road ahead of us is very difficult. I have been a professor in an era which we could in retrospect describe as “golden”. Conflicts could be violent at times, but the cold-war era bans and institutional prohibitions were behind us. The “value of science” was rarely contested. May 68 and its desire to shake the foundation of academicism and take down barriers left widespread disappointment in its wake, but also a fervor and furor that have nourished a large number of “programs” in which the young scholars of today, half of whom are living from one short-term contract to the next, were trained. We realize now that our ruling class is no longer a bourgeoisie in the historical sense of the word. It does not have a project of intellectual hegemony nor an artistic point of honor. It needs (or so it thinks) only cost-benefit analyses, “cognitive” educational programs, and committees of experts. That is why, with the help of the pandemic and the internet revolution, the same ruling class is preparing the demise of the social sciences, humanities and even the theoretical sciences. To accelerate the process, why not have the victim become the culprit (“Islamo-leftism”, “activism”, “ideology”…)? It will make things easier.

As citizens and intellectuals we must oppose with all our strength this destruction of the tools of knowledge and culture. But our success is conditional on our awakening to the revolutions that the academy needs, and on discussing them among ourselves without being too reticent or holding back our opinions.

Translated from the French by Tommaso Manfredini. b2o would like to thank Étienne Balibar and Libération for permission to publish this translation. We would also like to thank Madeleine Dobie for her help in arranging the translation.

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Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at Université de Paris X–Nanterre; Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; and Visiting Professor of French at Columbia University. His many books include Citizen Subject (Fordham, 2016); Equaliberty (Duke, 2014); We, the People of Europe? (Princeton, 2003); The Philosophy of Marx (Verso, new ed. 2017); and two important coauthored books, Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Verso, 1988) and Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser and others, Verso, new ed. 2016).

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Notes

A version of this article appeared on March 9 2021 in the French newspaper Libération under the title: “Le conflit fait partie des lieux de savoir.” It is a contribution to the debate that followed the announcement made by Frédérique Vidal, French Minister of Higher Education, on February 16 2021 to the National Assembly, to signal the launch of an official investigation of the presence of research programs inspired by “Islamo-leftism” in French universities. Even though the statement was immediately rejected by the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research, France’s – and Europe’s – largest research body) and, among others, by a group of 200 researchers affiliated with American institutions who, in an editorial published in the newspaper Le Monde on March 4 2021, pointed out the chilling echo of “Judeo-bolshevism” in the Minister’s words, neither the French Government nor the President have officially condemned the use of the phrase. One may thus suspect that they approved it.

[1] Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (1917) and “Politik als Beruf” (1919).

[2] The original French words, “jungle” and “quartier” respectively, have social and political meanings in addition to their seemingly plain ethnographic sense. “Jungle” refers to the camps that regularly spring up – and are periodically dismantled by the French police – in various places around Calais, and in which find shelter and sometimes humanitarian assistance persons who are trying to cross the Channel without papers. Similarly, “quartier” also defines are the poorest neighborhoods in the banlieues of Paris and other great cities where the majority of the young generations, often of African and North-African origin, and heavily unemployed, are concentrated [Translator’s note].

[3] In 2015, the CNU (National Board of Evaluation of Qualifications for Positions in Higher Education) was considering the creation of a special section called ‘Economy and Society’, which would create a space in Universities for economists working outside the ‘mainstream’ neo-classical school. It was abruptly cancelled, through the direct intervention of the Government, after intense lobbying from the establishment, especially from Jean Tirole, ‘Nobel’ Prize in Economics in 2014.

March 15, 2021
Johannes von Moltke — Comment on the Draft Report of the Commission on Unalienable Human Rights

by Johannes von Moltke

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Author’s Note: In the summer of 2019, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo announced the formation of a “Commission on Unalienable Rights.” Headed by Harvard Law Professor and former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, Mary Ann Glendon, the group was composed largely of academics and charged with “providing the U.S. government with advice on human rights grounded in our nation’s founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights.” I am on record along with many others as having been skeptical of the Commission since its founding. I consequently followed its proceedings and results with attention and interest, and I certainly learned a great deal during that period and from the Commission’s Draft Report. Unfortunately, little of what I learned softened my skepticism – or that of others: when the report was released earlier this summer, 230 human rights organizations, religious groups, activists, and former U.S. government officials objected to the Commission’s findings in a forceful joint letter. Meanwhile, citizens were invited to comment on the Draft Report during an exceedingly short comment period of approximately two weeks. I did so, submitting for the record my account, largely reproduced here, of why some of the commission’s findings roundly confirmed the reasons for my initial skepticism. Whereas the Commission by its own admission chose to disregard such public comments in submitting its barely revised Final Report, I find there is reason for continued and increasing concern as we watch the Commission’s recommendations translate into U.S. policy, both domestically and in the international arena.

Upon learning last year of the appointment of two colleagues in my academic field to Mike Pompeo’s newly minted “Commission on Unalienable Rights,” a group of fellow faculty members gathered to voice our concerns in an open letter that was subsequently signed by over 200 scholars in various fields of literary and cultural studies. In the letter, we expressed our worry over the work of a group commissioned by an administration whose record on human rights was already abysmal at the time and has only worsened in the intervening year. We also questioned the viability of a nation-centered approach to human rights based on the strictly limited review of founding documents of the United States and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The notion of human rights, we argued, “cannot be grounded in a national tradition, much less in the political agenda of a hyper-partisan administration. Pretending otherwise risks further undermining the already fragile international consensus of the post-war era.” Our letter implored our colleagues to use their voices to call out the Trump administration’s poor record on human rights at home and abroad, to speak up for the inviolability of human dignity, and to protect that dignity no matter the specific identity markers of any particular human being.

On this last point, the Draft Report delivers, in the sense that it repeatedly centers the notion of human dignity in its approach to unalienable rights, correctly pointing to the importance of this concept for the UDHR and harping, less persuasively, on the latter’s parallels with the founding documents of the United States. As the Report points out, the UDHR refrains from specifying the source of that dignity. But the Commission had no qualms doing so, offering natural law and God as the only two possible fonts of unalienable rights. It does so in the context of an argument that privileges religious freedom, along with the right to property, above all other human rights.

God and Nature or the Right to have Rights

This narrow construal of two rights as more fundamental than, and (theo)logically preceding, any others was to be expected – and was expected by many observers. It is as flawed now that it appears within the reasoned argument of the Report as it was when critics expressed concern and worry about the way this commission was primed to generate precisely such a result. More on this below; for now let us just note what a slanted notion of the freedom of religion underpins a government document that appeals to a single religious tradition and anchors the notion of human dignity in the “beautiful Biblical teachings” that equate the human to the image of the Christian God. By contrast, it was entirely in keeping with the narrow political and ideological purview of the Commission that the public presentation of the report should have been blessed by Cardinal Dolan. In his opening prayer, Dolan clarified for all where those unalienable rights come from. Addressing himself to God, he invited the assembled audience to praise “the creator who has bestowed upon and ingrained into the very nature of his creatures certain inalienable rights, acknowledged by the founders, enshrined in our country’s normative documents, defended with the blood of grateful patriots. You – you, dear Lord – have bestowed these inalienable rights.”

But it wouldn’t even have required this objectionable mix of religious and nationalistic registers to make the point. Clearly, this Report advocates a theologically anchored world view, to which the derivation of unalienable rights from natural law is hardly a serious alternative. Both God and Nature are metaphysical categories as sources of rights, allowing the Report to insist that every human being always has such rights, because they are universal, ahistorical, acultural. As such, they are posited to be uncontestable (here “unalienable”) – but of course, contestation merely moves one slot over. Now what is contested is either God or Nature; and although the Report does not even entertain the possibility of such contestation, there has been, to put it mildly, little agreement on the nature of either God or Nature.

In the context of the Report, these two metaphysical categories are not only closely aligned but also treated as allowing no further alternatives. Unalienable rights, according to the Report, derive either from Nature or from God, or else the very notion of such rights is meaningless. This is a willful misrepresentation of human rights discourse as it has developed over the centuries, including at the time of the American founding. For alternative accounts exist – but to engage them and thereby offer readers a fair and full accounting of the human rights tradition would have required entertaining a kind of anti-foundationalist thinking that is integral to the history of human rights theory but is entirely elided by the Report. This thinking finds a key expression in Hannah Arendt’s oft-invoked notion (though her name is never mentioned in the Report) of the “right to have rights” – a right that depends for its existence not on God or nature but on recognition by others. “We are not born equal,” she asserts for example; “we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.” Rather than the appeal to first principles, what is at stake here is the assertion of a community that can be counted on to uphold certain rights and prevent them from being abrogated. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is precisely such a speech act, which is why it needs to precede the positing of rights as unalienable in the Declaration of Independence.

In this line of thinking, unalienability can never shed its contingency – a point Arendt experienced personally and formulated forcefully in her chapter on the “End of the Rights of Man” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). A few years later, Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court employed identical terminology. Though there is no evidence that he was aware of Arendt’s prior formulation, he, too, defined citizenship as a basic right “for it is nothing less than the right to have rights. Remove this priceless possession and there remains a stateless person, disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his countrymen. His very existence is at the sufferance of the state within whose borders he happens to be. … [H]e will presumably enjoy, at most, only the limited rights and privileges of aliens, and like the alien he might even be … deprived of the right to assert any rights.”

Both Arendt and Warren came to similar conclusions, asserting the importance of basic human rights such as citizenship while recognizing that these are always fundamentally, literally alienable. The very assertion of the “right to have rights,” in other words, opens onto a conceptual abyss that the Commission refused to confront. To consider it seriously would have involved recognizing rights claims for what they have been, from the Declaration of Independence onward: “declarations that involve the invention and disclosure of a new political and normative world” (Ayten Gündogdu).

Sticking to Founding Principles or Picking from the Partisan Menu

The Commissioners might counter that Arendt and other critiques of human rights discourse were beyond their remit, for they had been tasked explicitly to confine themselves to a limited set of sources. Originally charged with “provid[ing] fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights,” the Commission was at first asked to decant old wine (founding principles) into new bottles (fresh thinking). But then even such specious renewal was further curtailed as the official Charter told Commissioners to stick to “our nation’s founding principles and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights” while taking care “not to discover new principles.” In other words, here was an advisory commission staffed with intellectuals told to put on blinders to intellectual history. It remains difficult for me to understand how any self-respecting scholar could accept such conditions. That the group was nonetheless formed and complied, then, speaks to its partisanship – not only on matters of politics, but also on matters of theory. As is evident in the omission of entire swaths of human rights discourse from consideration, the blinkered derivation of human rights from natural law and theology seems to have been all but agreed in advance. For to entertain any alternatives would have thrown open the notion of “unalienability” to time and politics, from which the Commissioners appear to have been keen to protect it in the name of God and nature.

The omission is not, I stress, for lack of knowledge; there were plenty of Commissioners, our two colleagues among them, who would have been familiar with anti-foundationalist political theory and philosophy. At one point, in the discussion of democracy and human rights, the authors do articulate the insight that “it is through democratic deliberation, persuasion, and decision-making that new claims of right come to be recognized and socially legitimated.” Even Mary Ann Glendon herself, the Commission’s chair, noted during the proceedings that “there can never be a closed catalogue of human rights because times and circumstances change.”

One is left to wonder, then, about the political motivations for leaving such insights behind, if not actively sequestering them, in formulating the Report’s conclusions. For their inclusion would have messed up the tidy, essentializing findings of the Report, which ultimately – and shockingly – manages to assert that the protection of human dignity boils down to two foundational rights: religious freedom, and the right to own property. Adopting the founders’ perspective, the Commissioners state: “Foremost among the unalienable rights that government is established to secure, …are property rights and religious liberty. A political society that destroys the possibility of either loses its legitimacy.”

How to square the sheer arbitrariness of this assertion, its essentializing reduction of a rich 18^th century discourse to two principal rights plucked from a present partisan menu, with the undeniable erudition that suffuses this report? Why these two, as opposed to the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, just to pick the most proximate? The claim seems downright ludicrous, further weakened by the flagrant contradictions that it draws in its wake: how on earth can one hold that the founders meant “property” to “encompass life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” when this flies in the face of even the most well-meaning historical semantics, and when other documents such as the Fifth Amendment, which the Report also quotes, clearly distinguish property from life and liberty?

The most disturbing contradiction, however, concerns the assertion of a hierarchy of human rights per se. The Report spends considerable time refuting such a hierarchy, pointing to the “integrated character” of rights in the Universal Declaration. The authors cite the Vienna Declaration’s important phrasing that “all human rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated.” According to the Commissioners, it “defies the intent and structure of the UDHR to pick and choose among its rights according to preferences and ideological presuppositions while ignoring other fundamental rights.” But such insights are reduced to lip service in view of the fact that the Draft Report does exactly that, endorsing “a sort of human rights cafeteria plan,” as Elisa Massimino and Alexandra Schmitt put it in a recent assessment. The Report picks and chooses property rights and religious freedom according to the preferences and ideological presuppositions that went into the appointment of the Commission itself, as numerous commentators pointed out already a year ago.

America First or the Decline of Empire

At the time, they also questioned the U.S.-centric scope of Pompeo’s brief, a concern we raised in our open letter as well. The Draft Report reflects an awareness of this issue, going to great lengths to outline a position on national sovereignty, democratic governance, and the international rights regime. While there is undeniable nuance in these reflections, they ultimately amount to a rationalization of the America First doctrine that runs from Lindbergh to Trump. Commissioned by the Secretary of State, the Report leaves it to U.S. foreign policy – and not to the instruments of any international human rights regime – to determine “which rights most accord with national principles and interests at any given time.” Like other passages that emphasize the role of national sovereignty in promulgating rights, this opens the door not only to establishing a hierarchy of rights, but also to their arbitrary invocation and application based on national (self-)interest. By contrast, a robust international human rights regime would be robust precisely by virtue of its ability to curtail such arbitrariness as well as limit national sovereignty.

Although the Report appears briefly to recognize this intentional aspect of international human rights in the Introduction (where it notes that, in the wake of Nazism and the Nuremburg trials, “a nation’s treatment of its own citizens would no longer be regarded as immune from outside scrutiny and repercussions”), it soon loses this perspective from view. Instead, the Report repeatedly harps on the importance of national sovereignty and displays little to no interest in the instruments and treaties – including those ratified or signed by the U.S. – that place it in an international framework. Attempts to finesse this issue in terms of foreign policy prerogatives and enforcement concerns notwithstanding, the testimony by invited experts who “showed outright disdain for the international human rights system” and downplayed the importance of [international] treaties” still resonates in the draft.

In light of this overall tone of the document, the claim that “after [the UDHR], no state may reasonably claim that the treatment of its own citizens in matters of human rights is solely a question of its own domestic affairs” rings hollow. For on the contrary, the report insists over and over again on the right of the United States to do just that – a normative claim that is buttressed by ample empirical evidence: the current administration tramples refugees’ rights with seeming impunity (here, too, the report provides normative cover, by broadly redefining refugees as migrants and impugning their motivations for flight). America, which Pompeo demands we think of as fundamentally “good” and “special,” is to stand as the beacon of freedom while it incarcerates children apart from their parents, eviscerates the right to asylum, undermines the human rights of trans people serving in the military, and doesn’t even manage to ensure the basic right to vote. But of course none of those rights have to be construed as basic – that’s a priority reserved, we recall, for property and religious freedom.

Empirical failures, the Commissioners might retort, do not undermine or invalidate normative claims. The Report stresses at several strategic points that the United States has fallen short of its own standards: it spends time discussing the stain of slavery on the Constitution, reconstructing women’s fight to see their rights recognized as human and unalienable, and acknowledging the ways in which the U.S. still falls short of enacting those rights for all. It even makes up-to-date reference to the continued murders of black people by the police, here reduced to “social convulsions” after the “brutal killing of an African-American man” – George Floyd – who remains unnamed. The Report implicitly acknowledges that the human rights it reconstructs from founding documents and the UDHR are aspirational more than anything else. “We are keenly aware,” the authors aver, “that America can only be an effective advocate for human rights abroad if she demonstrates her commitment to those same rights at home.” But the Report manages to imbue even that acknowledgment with a distinctly jingoistic ring: “One of the most important ways in which the United States promotes human rights abroad,” the authors write in their Prefatory Note, “is by serving as an example of a rights-respecting society where citizens live together under law amid the nation’s great religious, ethnic, and cultural heterogeneity. Like all nations, the United States is not without its failings. Nevertheless, the American example of freedom, equality, and democratic self-government has long inspired, and continues to inspire, champions of human rights around the world.”

This strikes me as the language of a declining empire. In its decline, it seeks out and clings to new antipodes. And thus it is no accident that this Report zeroes in on China; given the events that have transpired in the weeks since its release – the shuttering of the Chinese consulate in Houston (and the Chinese retaliation in Chengdu), the renewed focus on China’s intellectual property rights infringement, and a “quad of bellicose speeches” from top administration officials, Pompeo among them – one could be forgiven for thinking that one of Pompeo’s key goals in commissioning the Report was to generate a founding document for a new Cold War. To point out this issue is not to engage in false moral equivalencies, as the new hawks like to claim and as the Report implies. Referring to China, Iran, and Russia, the authors warn that “There can be no moral equivalence between rights-respecting countries that fall short in progress toward their ideals, and countries that regularly and massively trample on their citizens’ human rights.” But this is beside the point. To question the administration’s China policy does not require us to overlook Chinese human rights infringements, let alone to equate them to American failings in this regard. On the other hand, it is impossible to reconcile the State Department’s tough stance on China with the President’s encouragement for Xi Jinping’s Uighur policies.

Just as China and the refusal of “moral equivalences” serves as a useful foil abroad for keeping up morale and keeping our eyes off America’s shortcomings, so does an influential piece of journalism offer an unlikely domestic antipode for the Commission’s and Pompeo’s self-congratulating rhetoric. In his remarks at the Report’s unveiling, the Secretary singled out for public shaming the “1619 Project,” spearheaded by Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones for The New York Times. Describing the project as driven by “Marxist ideology,” Pompeo claims that the New York Times “wants you to believe that our country was founded for human bondage. They want you to believe that America’s institutions continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding.” Anyone who has even cared to glance at this pathbreaking project will recognize the absurdity of this claim: while the “1619 Project” does powerfully re-center the American narrative on slavery, its story-telling is driven, in the published piece and the influential podcast alike, precisely by the aspirational quality of America’s founding principles – only that these are now measured far more consistently against the lasting realities of its historical founding on slavery. But instead of the pristine American flag that Hannah-Jones’s father routinely flies even in the face of his enduring oppression, Pompeo sees only the red flag of Marxism – and manages to tie America’s newspaper of record to China, just for good measure: “The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology.”

“Faithful, Quiet Citizens” or the Rollback of Rights

Though this is no longer the language of the Report, it is an expression of the political stance that led to the formation of the Commission, which was designed to buttress it in turn. While the Report is undoubtedly more muted, measured, and nuanced than the brash commissioning Secretary, it is nonetheless strident in its political posturing, its blinkered notions of natural rights, its celebration of armed, self-reliant citizens (“the right to self-defense, in the American tradition, provides opportunities for citizens to develop habits of self-reliance”), and its strenuous derivation from the nation’s founding documents of limited government as the ostensible precondition of a democratic, rights-respecting polity. Translated back into Pompeo-speak, this amounts to a deeply regressive and partisan world-view, pitched with barely veiled disdain against the protestors who were marching for the recognition of their rights even as the Secretary delivered his remarks: “Free and flourishing societies cannot be nurtured only by the hand of government. They must be nurtured through patriotic educators, present fathers and mothers, humble pastors, next-door neighbors, steady volunteers, honest businesspeople, and so many other faithful, quiet citizens.” Faithful, quiet citizens, indeed. Rest in Peace and Power, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, John Lewis.

For all its historical detail and theoretical erudition, the Commission on Unalienable Rights has licensed bare-faced propaganda, directed alternately abroad and at the administration’s domestic constituents, whose free speech it happily impugns. Our colleagues on the commission either allowed themselves to be instrumentalized for this propaganda project, or actively signed up to support it – at this point, the difference hardly matters anymore. Anyone who thought this report would outrun its intended effects, or that it would seriously nuance the debate, was mistaken and will be disappointed. By contrast, the Draft Report amply confirms the concerns of those, including myself, who worried about the Commission’s “general skepticism toward international human rights, that there are too many rights, that rights protections should be rolled back, that there is a hierarchy among rights, and that religious freedom is one of the most important rights, if not the most important.” The resulting document is a pseudo-intellectual fig leaf for a Secretary of State who blithely talks about the US role in leading a new international order even as the administration he represents is actively withdrawing from that order where the environment, public health, and arms agreements are concerned (not to mention that they never even signed on to the international court). Meanwhile, the Report advances the government’s religious agenda and helps legitimize a belligerent disengagement from China through its erudite and patriotic historical narrative. The Commission’s Report could be described as a consummate form of ideological window dressing if it didn’t also pull back the curtain for all to see this administration going about its work.

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Johannes von Moltke is Professor of German and Film, Media & Television at the University of Michigan, where his research and teaching focus on film and German cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is the author of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America (2015) and No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (2005).

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September 25, 2020
Belinda Kong — Recovering First Patients

This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff.

by Belinda Kong

In the penultimate chapter to Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong (2020) pays belated homage to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. “For a while,” Hong writes of her own development as a poet, “I thought I had outgrown Cha. I’d cite modernist heavyweights like James Joyce and Wallace Stevens as influences instead of her. I took her for granted. Now, in writing about her death, I am, in my own way, trying to pay proper tribute” (171). In researching Cha’s life, Hong was perturbed by the silence around her death. Though Cha is a canonized figure within Asian American literature with much critical attention devoted to her experimental novel Dictee, Hong found to her surprise that “no one wrote anything about the crime” around Cha’s death (155). Cha was raped and murdered in November 1982, in the sub-basement of Manhattan’s historic Puck Building, newly acquired by Kushner Properties and undergoing renovations at the time. Her killer was a serial rapist who worked as a security guard there, hired simply because “he knew English.” Cha, on the other hand, was initially called “an Oriental Jane Doe” in the police report (164-65). This was a week after the publication of Dictee. Those who have written on Cha’s work but circumvented the subject of her death cited the desire to protect her family and to avoid reducing the significance of the former to the sensationalism of the latter. But what Hong discovered, when she contacted Cha’s relatives and friends, was that they were eager to talk. “Why hadn’t anyone reached out to Cha’s relatives earlier? Why hadn’t anyone looked at the court records?” she muses. “They’re not hard to find. In fact, they’re readily available online….” (172).

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In researching the 2003 SARS global epidemic and the cultures of epidemic life that sprang up at its epicenters, I found myself on a parallel path as Hong but walking it in reverse. I too began by looking at literature and culture, at novels and then, more adventurously, films and digital media, partly because those realms constitute my relative comfort zone as a literary scholar, but mostly because I assumed that the history and real-life stories would have been told by others before me. I first started researching SARS around 2014, over a decade after the epidemic’s end, so I took it on faith that the facts were well-documented in the voluminous body of writing already published on the topic, and that even early cases in mainland China and Hong Kong would have been properly archived by then. Moreover, since English, as the World Health Organization itself acknowledges, remains the dominant language of global public health information and “the lingua franca of scientists—including those working in public health” (Adams and Fleck 2015: 365), I also took it on faith that knowledge about specialized epidemiological matters such as index cases and early outbreak clusters would be firmly in place in the anglophone public record. In short, I took the epidemic’s first patients and their stories for granted, as things that were already told and known, things that I did not have to bother to investigate for myself. I was content to stay in my disciplinary lane and focus on fictional texts and fictional lives, venturing into historical and empirical sources only for context and self-education. It took several years of writing and reading, until the last chapter of my book project, for me to fully realize my misplaced faith.

What I discovered, when I started digging into accounts of the global index patient, was the opposite of what Hong observed with Cha: that much has been written on this Chinese patient’s death but not his life—even though he did not die. If the story of Cha’s death is full of gaps and silences, those of SARS’s first patient are chockfull of inaccuracies, distortions, and prejudices.

*

If one were to do an internet search on SARS in English today, one of the top hits would likely be the Wikipedia entry on “Severe acute respiratory syndrome” (2020b). There, under the section “Epidemiology,” under the first subheading “Outbreak in South China,” the disease’s animal and human origins are narrated as follows:

The viral outbreak can be genetically traced to a colony of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in China’s Yunnan.

The SARS epidemic appears to have started in Guangdong, China, in November 2002 where the first case was reported that same month. The patient, a farmer from Shunde, Foshan, Guangdong, was treated in the First People’s Hospital of Foshan. The patient died soon after, and no definite diagnosis was made on his cause of death.

A separate Wikipedia entry on “2002-2004 SARS Outbreak” (2020a) offers this companion timeline and profile:

On 16 November 2002, an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) began in China’s Guangdong province, bordering Hong Kong. The first case of infection was traced to Foshan. This first outbreak affected people in the food industry, such as farmers, market vendors, and chefs. The outbreak spread to healthcare workers after people sought medical treatment for the disease.

Other websites on the anglophone internet, not surprisingly, have replicated this narrative over the past decade, sometimes verbatim (see Zolli 2012; WordPress 2013). In the months of COVID-19, anglophone news outlets spanning the US, the UK, Europe, and Asia have retrospected on SARS by repeating this very story of its first index case as an anonymous dead farmer from Foshan, Guangdong (see Martin 2020; Moura 2020; Ma 2020; Gopalan 2020; Nelson 2020; Stanley 2020). Given the widely accepted thesis on the zoonotic origins of SARS, readers are left to connect the dots between the coronavirus’s animal hosts and the rural farmer who first contaminated himself by living in proximity to them. In line with what anthropologist Mei Zhan (2005) highlighted in international media coverage of SARS in 2003, the dead farmer story subtly implies a “deadly filthiness” to Chinese “strange entanglements of human and animal bodies” (37).

Nor is this narrative restricted to online sources. Print references to SARS’s primal farmer have long appeared in English-language scientific and academic venues, from a 2005 Pediatric Annals article on animal viruses (Lee and Krilov 2005: 43-44) to a 2006 Urban Studies journal article on infectious disease and global cities (Ali and Keil 2006: 497) to a 2007 Lancet book review of a McGill-Queen’s University Press anthology on SARS (Bugl 2007: 710). By now, the notion that the world’s first SARS patient was a Foshan/Guangdong farmer has entered into anglophone pandemic lore, dispersed across, among other things, a virology textbook (M. Taylor 2014: 386), a guide on sustainability and corporate responsibility (Kao 2010: 113), a crisis management reference work (Penuel et al. 2013: 771), a mathematical engineering study (Hu et al. 2016: 1), a political science analysis (Wang 2018), as well as myriad mass market books on climate change, emerging viruses, and pandemic outbreaks (Marsa 2013: 46; Zimmer 2015: 85; Khan and Patrick 2016: 165). Even Ali Khan, the former director of the US CDC Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, affirmed this version of events in his book The Next Pandemic (2016):

The official narrative for the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that swept through Asia and grazed North America traces the first reported case to Guangdong Province, China. This was mid-November 2002, and the patient, a farmer, was treated in the First People’s Hospital of Foshan, and then promptly died. (165)

What further unites all these anglophone sources is the allegation, sometimes explicit, other times strongly insinuated, that the farmer not only infected himself and those around him but initiated a nuclear chain infection that ultimately culminated in a catastrophic global epidemic.

*

The problem with this “official narrative,” however, is that it is replete with egregious errors and orientalist biases. In reality, SARS’s first known patient was not a peasant farmer, he was not at the center of an explosive outbreak cluster, he did not kill anyone, and above all, he did not die from the virus. In reality, he was an elected local official with an administrative office job, he directly infected only two family members but no healthcare workers, this was a contained cluster with five infections total and no fatalities, and he lived on to tell his tale even ten years later.

*

His name is Pang Zuoyao. In November 2002, he was the deputy chief of Bitang Village. Though labeled a village, Bitang was in fact a thriving industrial town in the heart of Foshan, a city of three and a half million (approximately the size of Los Angeles). “The people in this village are quite wealthy,” according to migrant workers who came here looking for factory jobs, “and you can earn a lot just with annual bonuses” (quoted in Wu and Li 2013). Pang’s was an elected position, one that he would continue to hold for at least another decade. At the time, he was also assistant chair of the local shareholding economic cooperative (Wu and Li 2013). By the early 2000s, most local enterprises had been privatized, so Pang’s work consisted mainly of managing real estate and sometimes overseeing family planning issues (Hu and Ma 2006). He was relatively well-to-do, living with his wife and four children in a four-story house (Leu 2003a). His oldest son was applying for college that year, his daughter was about to enter high school, and his youngest child was a fifth-grader-to-be (Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003). By all indications, he was a low-level government cadre leading a comfortable middle-class life in China’s liberalizing economy.

It was also this set of personal circumstances that afforded Pang and his family access to advanced healthcare and that led to their surviving SARS. On November 16, Pang developed a high fever, headache, dry cough, and weakness and was rushed to the hospital closest to his house, the second-tier Shiwan People’s Hospital. After nine days, his fever persisted, so he was transferred to the top-tier Foshan No. 1 People’s Hospital. There, he was promptly admitted to the isolation ward and then transferred to the intensive care unit, where he was put on a ventilator—all treatment options available only to those with financial means (Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003; Hu and Ma 2006; Wu and Li 2013). Throughout that period, Pang’s family visited him at the hospital every day, and since no one knew to take precautions, he infected both his wife and his maternal aunt, and the latter in turn infected her husband and daughter. All five family members were hospitalized, but in the end, all recovered, and Pang himself was discharged on January 8, 2003 (Zhou et al. 2003: 599; Xu et al. 2004: 1033; Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003; Hu and Ma 2006). None of his children at home caught the virus, nor did any of his Bitang neighbors or any hospital worker who cared for the family. According to two early epidemiological studies on SARS, this Foshan outbreak, the first one known to us, was an intrafamilial cluster with only five patients, and the transmission chain ended there (Zhou et al. 2003: 598; Xu et al. 2004: 1033). So, despite being SARS’s first known cluster, it was not the spark that ignited a global infection chain. As one of Pang’s physicians commented afterward, this case could be considered a “miracle” (quoted in Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003).

Later on, Pang would be identified as the world’s first known SARS patient, the epidemic’s global index case. At the time, though, no one knew this was a new virus, least of all Pang himself. Even the ICU director at the Foshan hospital who oversaw Pang’s case remembered calling it simply a “respiratory infectious disease of unclear cause” (quoted in Hu and Ma 2006). Pang was never formally diagnosed with SARS, and in fact, according to his wife, the hospital’s initial diagnosis was food poisoning (Leu 2003a).

Pang’s own processing of the experience was protracted and traumatic. A few months after his discharge, after the coronavirus had been identified and as the epidemic raged worldwide, Pang and his family still found it hard to believe that what they had suffered was SARS. “I don’t even know if I am related to what happened elsewhere,” he told Ching-Ching Ni, a staff writer for Los Angeles Times, over the phone in April 2003. “The day I left the hospital, they said they didn’t know what I had” (quoted in Ni 2003). Likewise, Mrs. Pang told South China Morning Post journalist Leu Siew Ying in person that same month, “I find it baffling [that people say we had SARS] because no one in my family has the illness. My husband’s parents and his seven siblings and my parents and my own four siblings spent time with him during the day or visited him regularly. None of them fell sick.” Pointing to the town traffic, she speculated, “I think it is the air pollution that is making us ill” (quoted in Leu 2003a). To reporters from the province’s 21st Century Business Herald, Mrs. Pang pleaded, “[My husband] is very busy with work, and he has a stress prone personality … so please don’t bother us anymore” (quoted in Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003). Another few months later, Pang himself remained terse with reporters both domestic and foreign. “I have completely recovered,” he declared to Leu on her follow-up visit, with an emphasis on recovery that had become a refrain for him. “If you are concerned about sick people go to the hospitals. You are wasting your time with me” (quoted in Leu 2003b). “Let the past be the past,” he implored the journalists from Guangzhou’s Southern Weekend who tracked him down in 2006. More resigned now to the SARS diagnosis, he told them, “I don’t want to think about it anymore. I myself have no idea why I caught SARS. When I got sick, there wasn’t yet the term ‘atypical pneumonia.’ Properly speaking, I was only retroactively labeled a SARS patient” (quoted in Hu and Ma 2006). One oft-cited comment by the respiratory specialist and “SARS hero” Zhong Nanshan is that 96% of mainland China’s SARS patients had no clear contact history, so for them, the whole episode was like “bafflingly having a nightmare” (quoted in Yang 2012). For Pang especially, the virus must have struck like something utterly out of the blue, supernatural and uncanny. And if the disease itself left, the stain of it lingered, branding him the world index case—a designation he had no power to reject. He had little time to narrate the experience for himself and to give it personal meaning before the external world descended to take over his story.

*

For much of the decade after the epidemic, Pang kept a low profile, dodging all media attention (Wu and Li 2013). For a period that summer, his family even vacated their Bitang house and went into hiding (Blackwell 2003). What little we know of his actual post-SARS life comes from a handful of articles based on the few interviews he and his family granted over the years, primarily to reporters from southern China. One significant impact of the disease episode on him and his family, as he related to Southern Weekend, was economic. The medical bills for his family had come to 400,000 yuan (almost $60,000), a not insubstantial sum for a village-level official, even a well-off one like Pang. “At the time I thought, out of nowhere came this strange disease, and just like that, 400,000 yuan gone. What a waste,” he said. “But then I thought, if you lose your life, what’s the point of mourning the loss of money?” (quoted in Hu and Ma 2006).

Indeed, SARS had a deep and lasting impact on Pang’s lifestyle and value system. In the half-year following his hospitalization, he remained physically weak and would gasp for breath after climbing a few flights of stairs (Hu and Ma 2006). He became much more health conscious as a result, quitting smoking and giving up alcohol, taking up regular tai chi and long-distance jogging instead. He also stopped dining out, and every day at noon, he unfailingly drove home from work to eat a lunch prepared by his wife, meticulously washing his hands before every meal (Yang 2012). Ten years on, he kept up these habits. Now in his mid-fifties, he continued to serve as Bitang’s deputy chief. As he remarked to a reporter from Blog World in 2012, “I take my work seriously every single day, and I intend to work hard until my retirement. If there’s a change in me, it’s that I give greater importance to health and family now” (quoted in Yang 2012). SARS also made him more fastidious about hygiene. Two reporters from the Information Times noted in 2013 that, after receiving guests in his office, Pang would wash all the cups by hand and then sterilize them in a disinfecting cupboard next to the sofa (Wu and Li 2013). All these routines grew out of Pang’s brush with SARS, the small residual effects of his disease experience and the enduring transformations of his everyday life thereafter.

At the same time, these self-care practices may have embodied Pang’s coping mechanisms for the physical trauma of the ordeal and its various side effects. One Hong Kong study (Lee and Wing 2006) found that 45% of recovered SARS patients developed one or more mental illnesses within three weeks of discharge: 13% suffered from organic mood syndrome, 11% from major depression, 11% from adjustment disorders, 7% from PTSD, 5% from generalized anxiety disorder, and 2% from transient delirium or psychosis. Those who had been in ICU had a higher likelihood of developing one of these illnesses, and many survivors additionally “complained of profound lethargy and disturbing forgetfulness” (144). There is no public record of Pang ever seeking professional therapy, but the person who emerges from these published accounts fits the profile of someone struggling with posttraumatic stress.

In his case, disease survival was compounded by the stigma of being the world index case. When the WHO investigative team to Guangdong visited Pang’s house in April 2003, word got out and “it was clear to everyone in his neighborhood that it was him,” according to Robert Breiman, the leader of the WHO team. “He told me that this created many problems” (quoted in Ang 2003). As some of Pang’s neighbors admitted to reporters later that summer, “At first, we didn’t know who [the SARS patient among us] was. After we knew that he got SARS, we didn’t want to have any connection with him” (quoted in Blackwell 2003). Years later, the family still remembered how their neighbors gossiped and blamed Pang for unleashing a global plague. In one workplace dispute, Pang’s SARS record was brought up against him, an incident that put him on guard ever after for political rivals weaponizing his disease history against him (Yang 2012). In the post-SARS decade, then, Pang rarely spoke of his medical past and hid it from most coworkers, even deliberately distancing himself from the doctors and nurses who had treated him and his family. His attending physician at the time sympathized with this evasion: “Foshan people are very practical and low-key. Besides, this isn’t something anyone would want to grab the limelight for,” the doctor commiserated (quoted in Wu and Li 2013). Over time, to Pang’s longtime colleagues and relatives, it seemed as if SARS never happened, as if it had been wiped clean from his memory, whether by design or repression (Yang 2012). These, then, were also things that lived through SARS and trailed Pang for years: ostracism and stigma, uncertainty and suspicion, forgetting and self-silencing.

Perhaps what gnawed at Pang the most was the accusation, and the possibility, that his own dietary habits did in fact cause a new deadly human virus. Like many of his neighbors, Pang used to enjoy eating wild animals, or yewei. About a month or so prior to falling sick, he had traveled with a friend to Guangxi Province and brought home some game meat (Zhou et al. 2003: 598; Wu and Li 2013). And about a week before his hospitalization, he had dined on “wild cat meat” with a friend twice and again brought some home for his family (Zhou et al. 2003: 598; Hu and Ma 2006). During that period, he also prepared meat dishes at home, including “chicken, domestic cat, and snake” (Xu et al. 2004: 1033). But, significantly, none of those who shared these meals became infected. “My husband ate mutton and cat meat before he fell ill,” recalled Mrs. Pang. “He said cat meat was good for his backache, so sometimes he has cat meat outside and sometimes I cook it at home. Most people here eat cat meat, but nobody has SARS” (quoted in Leu 2003a).

What no media report mentions is the possible sociohistorical link between Pang’s generation and the contemporary trend of wildlife banqueting. Being forty-five in 2002, Pang would have been born around 1957, a year before the start of the 1958-61 Great Famine. Mrs. Pang was forty-two in 2002, so she would have been born in the middle of the famine years, around 1960. While we do not know whether they or their families suffered from starvation during those winters, a history of hunger and mass death defined much of the national landscape of their infancy, especially in rural areas. Without pathologizing either the Pangs or their generation, we can nonetheless conjecture, following Judith Farquhar’s (2002) “anthropology of the mundane,” that commonplace bodily appetites can register collective historical experiences and postmemorial traumas. In the case of postsocialist China, Farquhar suggests, acts of eating often operate within “a politics of restitution in which people are intent on ‘getting rich’ (facai zhifu) and ‘enjoying themselves’ (zhaole) as a way of making up for the poverty and misery many associate with their collective history” (129). Thus, consumption practices in the reform era, particularly by the rising urban middle class, often entail an ethical calculus tied to Maoist history, whereby eating itself becomes a set of economic and historical reckonings about “excess and deficiency”: “How much enjoyment or bulk is justifiable for the fortunate in a world where starvation is all too real for some of their neighbors? Is there value in ‘high’ civilization (gourmet food, for example) if many of the socially ‘low’ have no access to its sophisticated pleasures? Can past famine justify indulgence in present and future gluttony?” (122).

The Pangs and their appetites, too, would have emerged from this history, with SARS as the latest event in an ongoing national dialectical grappling with lack and surplus. Maybe, to some degree, the epidemic interrupted their psychohistorical reliance on that calculus and helped redefine well-being from endless consumption to equilibrium upkeep. In any event, the Pangs abandoned their wildlife diet after their infection, opting instead for healthy dishes such as plain steamed fish (Yang 2012). According to their daughter, though, Pang never accepted the zoonotic thesis about SARS, despite mounting scientific consensus. In the ten years after, he never ceased searching for an alternative cause for the coronavirus. Like his wife, he pointed to environmental factors such as industrial pollution as the root of his illness. He often suspected that the exhaust gas from a funeral parlor near his workplace was the true culprit, and he repeatedly campaigned to have the funeral parlor relocated, even enlisting for help the press he so avoided otherwise (Yang 2012). This, too, merits consideration as a small act of local eco-activism, as epidemic experience bred skepticism toward the state’s economic development goals and an awareness of the human reverberations of environmental contamination.

*

I patch together this reconstruction of Pang Zuoyao’s story in order to highlight that, even for its global index patient, SARS infection and survival can be narrated in the terms, not of perpetual emergency and pandemic crisis, but of ordinary resilience. Medical authorities and experts might reach for the magical or the occult to explain the scientifically inexplicable aspects of SARS and Pang’s case—a “miracle,” a “nightmare”—but Pang himself seemed to want nothing more than a restoration of the normal and the prosaic. Elsewhere, I have analyzed Wuhan writer Hu Fayun’s 2004 novel Ruyan@sars.come (Such Is This World@sars.come) through a framework I call pandemic ordinariness (see Kong 2018). Not so unlike Hu’s eponymous protagonist Ru Yan, Pang lived beyond SARS by turning to aspects of his domestic life that allowed for small and everyday agency, such as quitting risk-raising old habits and initiating new self-nourishing routines. Indeed, his reformed lifestyle resonates with western biomedical paradigms that emphasize personal health regimens such as diet, nutrition, and exercise. In the process, he reoriented himself away from the raw accumulation of economic, political, and social capital toward bodily self-care and familial preservation. These mundane changes in Pang’s daily life did not carry any noticeable impact on the national or global stage, nor did they amount to any grand gestures of resistance. As a whole, Pang’s story does not lend itself so easily to either prefabricated cautionary tales of disastrous contagion or geopolitical critiques of communist totalitarian biopower. In a much quieter but not quietist way, his story bespeaks a rebuilding of personal world, a form of autopoetic resilience, where survival is not a passive condition but a process of corporeal emergence, to be continually enacted through everyday embodied practices. These in turn facilitate a transfer of sentimental attachment, an affective shift away from the rationales of both the communist party-state system and the postsocialist neoliberal market, toward a self-valuing ethics and deeper kinship intimacies.

Rather than interpret these living practices cynically, as a naïve buying into the false promises of the good life in an individualist capitalist society, or what Lauren Berlant (2011) would call the slow death of cruel optimism, we might see in Pang a conscious embrace of a nonelitist biopolitics of care, salvaged from the post-crisis space of epidemic illness. If Anna Tsing (2015) glosses “conditions of precarity” as “life without the promise of stability” (2), then a nonexceptionalist ethics and self-organizing biopolitics such as Pang’s testifies to a desire for postprecarity, a faith in the possibility of everyday life’s meaningful continuance, after disease catastrophe, through small acts of recreated stability. Moreover, similar to Ru Yan’s decision to not resume her internet writerly persona at the end of Hu’s novel, Pang’s post-SARS life was marked by his decision to eschew media attention, which was also an act of not relinquishing his right to live beyond his illness on his own terms, of not ceding his epidemic story over to those already endowed with an inordinate share of power in constructing macro pandemic narratives.

While numerous scholars have analyzed the racist and orientalist dimensions of global media representations of SARS (see Hung 2004; Zhan 2005; Keil and Ali 2008; J. Lee 2014; Lynteris 2018; Lynteris 2020), few have heeded the Chinese index patients themselves, particularly how surviving first patients such as Pang went on to embody new practices and reshape their own living relations to animals and consumption, thus modeling the transition to post-epidemic renewal at disease epicenters. These modifications in bodily conduct toward self and others, both human and nonhuman, deserve attention also as reemergent forms of life. Unlike Michael Fischer’s (2003) notion of “emergent forms of life” at the frontiers of cybernetics and biotechnology, here we observe precisely a retreat from translocal hybrid networks both human-social and human-animal. We observe a foregoing of participation in anthropocentric cultures of species extraction, displacement, and incorporation, and a deliberate return to smaller scales and more proximate relations of life. Even micro decisions and inner commitments—such as a determined letting go of one’s appetite for certain foods, or of one’s involvement in certain toxic networks of mediatized social community—can in themselves represent profound ethical responses to human-nonhuman pandemic assemblages and crises. Withdrawing from one’s neighboring regimes of ingestion and refocusing on the locality of one’s household, leaving be and dwelling alongside the creatures deemed ingestible, releasing the attachment to limitless wealth concentration and historically compensatory pleasure, and carving out the parameters of what one considers actually livable togetherness—these, too, constitute performances of Tsing’s “collaborative survival,” the ordinary and minute navigations of personal “living-space entanglements” (2, 5). In the wake of pandemic ruin, these too instantiate means of recovering life, of rethinking living.

*

Perhaps most of all, I insist on reconstructing Pang’s life because it is startlingly absent in English. So far as I can tell, this narrative arc of Pang’s encounter with and survival of SARS—though fragmented and mediated, and slim by any serious biographer’s yardstick—is missing from the anglophone archive altogether. Of course, anglophone discourse is not homogenous, and I am not suggesting that no writer in English has given an accurate and good-faith rendition of Pang’s story. (In my book’s final chapter, I go into detail about the larger anglophone archive on three SARS index patients, including medical records and epidemiological studies as well as other popular writings both within and outside of China.) One might expect that, as the world index patient, Pang Zuoyao would be a familiar name in the annals of SARS, or in the very least, that the outlines of his experience would have been documented by someone, whether through direct investigation or translation, for an anglophone readership. Yet the exact opposite is true. On a most basic level, Pang’s name has largely vanished from the anglophone public record. This erasure may have come about through a well-intentioned assumption that anonymity protects the patient and his family, though in practice it has only enabled the replication and recirculation of false narratives about him. More insidiously, this erasure feeds contemporary orientalist assumptions about communist China and its totalitarian terror state. One bestselling and critically acclaimed mass market book (Quammen 2012) on animal infections and human pandemics, for example, intimates that “his name goes unmentioned” because of the Chinese government’s censorship of Pang’s story (170-71), when the sinophone sources I draw on are readily available on the Chinese internet. Indeed, in the months during and after SARS, in addition to the dead farmer template, a set of wildly erroneous and deeply orientalist stories emerged about Pang—including fabricated accounts of him as a businessman or salesman (see for example Grady 2003; Rosenthal et al. 2003; Ang 2003; Altman 2003; Abraham 2003; Chao 2003; C. Taylor 2003), a wild animal trader or dealer (see Luck 2003; Bradsher and Altman 2003; Zhan 2005: 37; Jackson 2008: 283), and an exotic game restaurant chef (see Chiu and Galbraith 2004: xv; Seno and Reyes 2004: 7; Goudsmit 2004: 141; Lee and Wing 2006: 135; J. Lee 2014: 18). These stories were told and retold—even by politically committed scholars who set out to critique the racism of SARS discourse—taking hold of the popular anglophone imagination until they bore almost no resemblance to the real Pang, who lived on as if in a parallel universe.

*

Meditating on the possible reasons for the silences around Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s death, Cathy Park Hong (2020) ultimately turns the question on herself:

… But why hadn’t I bothered to find out about her homicide earlier? Didn’t I also type and then delete the word rape before murder when I wrote the review where I mentioned Cha? Rape burns a hole in the article and capsizes any argument. There is no way to continue on with your analysis, no way to make sense past it. You can only look at it or look away—and I looked away. But it’s not just because her death was so grim. I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don’t want to care that no one else cares because I don’t want to be left stranded in my rage. (172-73)

Even more fundamental than the traumatic effect radiating out from Cha’s gruesome death, Hong suggests, is the racialized exhaustion of confronting, yet again, an instance of Asian suffering that goes unheeded, uncared for, the very invisibility or trivialization of which breeds a second-order inattention and indifference. It is not simply the underlying racial anger that one must then manage but the concomitant feeling of certain abandonment, of knowing that one will be “left stranded” in one’s rage by a white majoritarian society that continually challenges and undermines the legitimacy of Asian affect. Following Sianne Ngai’s argument in Ugly Feelings, Hong calls the racialized forms of these affects “minor feelings”: “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed” (55). The difficulty of looking at Cha’s killing is compounded by the gendered nature of the crime, and perhaps precisely so, she has come to be conceptually bracketed in yet another way, “as this tragic unknowable subaltern subject” that presumably no one can ethically write about (172). Minor feelings overlaid by poststructuralist schooling can “get in the way of documenting facts” (171).

In confronting the anglophone unwriting/rewriting of Pang Zuoyao, I found myself in a similar affective landscape. Like Hong, I wondered with incredulity and anger: Why hadn’t more writers in the anglophone world tried to spotlight Chinese index patients? Why hadn’t more researchers bothered to reconcile contradictory reports rather than simply echo one or two supposedly authoritative and sometimes obviously questionable accounts? Why didn’t more anglophone researchers and writers look into the medical records and epidemiological studies, some of which are in English and readily available online, or seek out translators for widely accessible Chinese-language sources? And most of all, why didn’t more people care about the actual patients themselves, rather than the big stories and big critiques that their small lives could be instrumentalized to stage? One staggering epiphany I came to was that, the more humanistic the anglophone piece—that is, the more an author explicitly set out to tell a story or analyze stories about SARS or pandemics—the more likely it was to recycle errors and slants, to retell the wrong and often offensive stories about first patients. Scientific studies and medical documents, by contrast, provided a trove of empirical tidbits from which to reconstruct index patients’ disease experiences and social lives.

In a core way, my book’s final chapter has become a reckoning on two levels. The first involves scrutinizing the global power of English as the language of public health knowledge production vis-à-vis pandemic narratives. In keeping with the larger thesis of my book, I believe we can gain positive models for thinking about pandemic experience by recovering, from a largely racist and orientalist archive, the ordinary dimensions of epidemic survival or nonsurvival by Chinese index patients. The second involves probing certain reflexive assumptions and pieties embedded in anglophone humanistic disciplines that are also entangled in the production of knowledge about global public health and global pandemics. In regarding ourselves as important, principled writers and scholars who make macro sociopolitical arguments and broad cultural critiques, perhaps also as savvy poststructuralist critics who are too sophisticated to be burdened by empirical truthseeking, do we end up reinforcing the marginalization of the marginal, the trivialization of the trivialized, and sanctioning the very ideological structures and effects we think we are tearing down?

For the anglophonization of SARS and SARS index cases has been largely a process of humanistic storytelling where real humans disappear, replaced by corpses and zombies. In belatedly arriving at these gaps and distortions, did I too look away, not only out of misguided faith but because I wanted someone else to pay attention instead, to free myself from the menial task of charting small stories and small lives so I could pursue higher-order intellectual critiques and stake the latest field-changing claims? As I finish writing my book’s final chapter, I am frequently aware of my own minor feelings of racialized dysphoria, disbelief, and fury at the anglophone archive with its silences, oversights, blunders, and disfigurements. And by chapter’s end, I too will be left wondering: Would I become isolated in these emotions, invalidated away by a language and a set of writings that have demonstrated over and over again their inattention and negligence toward Chinese subjects? Would writing that emerges from these emotions succeed in overcoming the affective fissures and engender care rather than alienation or defensiveness? However imperfect, this is an attempt to navigate the anglophone terrain amid those affects, and to make more possible alternative stories in which first SARS patients can finally be seen as neither orientalized infrahumans nor tragic unknowable subalterns but just ordinary people. In the time of COVID-19 and beyond, this task, this reorientation, seems more vital than ever.

I want to thank Elina Zhang for soliciting this piece, and for offering a sympatico model of engaged storytelling in her own writing.

Belinda Kong is associate professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College. Her research focuses on contemporary literature by Asian American and Asian diasporic writers, with focus on the Chinese diaspora. She is the author of Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture (Temple University Press 2012, Asian American History and Culture Series), and her work has appeared in Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Ariel, and Journal of Narrative Theory. Her current book project, What Lived Through SARS: Chronicles of Pandemic Resilience, explores cultural expressions of epidemic life at the epicenters of the 2003 SARS outbreak.

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August 27, 2020
Muneeb Hafiz — What is a Key Worker?

This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff.

By Muneeb Hafiz

In the UK, Black people across England and Wales are more than four times as likely to die from Covid-19 as white people; Bangladeshi and Pakistani people around three and a half times more likely; and those of Indian origin two and a half times as likely. Two thirds of British Bangladeshi men over the age of sixty have a long-term health condition that puts them at particular risk from infection, while underlying health conditions are also especially prevalent among older people of a Pakistani or Black Caribbean background. “Minority” groups are over-represented by as much as 27% in the overall Covid-19 death toll and 63% of the first 106 health and social care staff known to have died from the virus were Black or Asian. Around a third of all working-age people from Black African backgrounds, and over a fifth from Indian backgrounds are employed in “key worker” roles (Office for National Statistics, 2020; Siddique, 2020).

Body-Capital-Breath

Across the long night of capitalism, embodiment – skin, flesh, colour, labour – and the struggle to breathe have constituted its fundamental questions (Alcoff, 1999; Weheliye, 2014). Is it not true that in one way or another, in the end, everything brings us back to the body? That whatever our descriptive statement of the human (Wynter, 2003), whatever substance or hue is its form, the absorption of oxygen and release of carbon dioxide, the resuscitation of muscle and tissue, the creation of energy (to live and, more importantly, to work) through a series of dynamic exchanges, is what it all comes down to? Is life not at least in part an essential question of embodiment, and embodiment a question of what constitutes proper life? (Spillers, 2003).

And, thus, does its opposite, death, not become both an immanent question of how to dispose of the body that has ceased to breathe, and a transcendental question of what happens to the body in the time after it is no longer kept alive? Surely any assault on the body – saying nothing of the many wars on life which plague, and have constituted our modern moment – must have breath as both its affect and effect. Pain, grief, loss, anxiety, exhaustion, disease each having discernible if shifting consequences for one’s breathing.

What has capitalism – work and its faceless workers, labour and its mystification, multiplying services and its veiled supply chains – been founded upon if not the attempt to master the breath of countless hordes, to mobilise the metabolic and reproductive energies produced, and life sustained by their exhalation? (Hartman, 1997). Taking the long view, with the advent of the New World and the constitutive excrement of its discoveries – genocide, (trans)plantations, ecological catastrophe, disease, psychic, spiritual and familial alienation, human-wood, human-metal – to the appearance of the so-called “industrialised races” (of Europe) some several centuries later, the struggle to breathe of some, and the will to suffocate of others has been a world-founding dialectic (Wallerstein, 2011).

Capital’s Other

This back and forth between breath and its suffocation, between beings and those who would spit at them, between peoples simultaneously denied their humanity and put to work precisely on the basis of human creativity, has cleared the terrain, both physical and symbolic, for the assembly-line Products of “Liberty,” “Welfare” and the “Rights of Man” (Lowe, 2015). These gifts of progress are weighed down with the unanswered, unaccounted – though never completely invisible – subjects of the marked; the breath stifled, the beings told that they are not. For the conditions of their possibility (or, production) at home, among those who delegated to themselves sovereign will and the space to breathe, have required whole economies of silhouetted peoples denied their own, and industries of death elsewhere that have been modern Capital’s nuclear power plant.

There were always Others with whom nothing could be shared or owed, peoples turned into ghosts of an inaudible, imperceptible, delimited condition, despite the essential relation of dependence – or indebtedness – others have to them, and through whom their own lives are sustained. These people have been made to work for another who refuses to see her as such, who, in truth, could never allow cognition of the uneliminable fact of their shared embodiment. While both, ‘human’ (Man) and ‘labourer’ (ghost), require the space to exert energy and breathe, the spectre of the Other becomes also a vehicle for contamination who everywhere – in schools, in hospitals, in custody – challenges the sacred, but always already provincial, boundary of proper life due a share of the world, of the genre of the human constituted under regimes of capital. It is only he who is truly of here that becomes signatory to a contract of care and (re)cognition as an entity owed certain obligations. Those unfortunate Wretcheds over there, or indeed here, that is, the half-subjects of Capital’s bloody service supply chain, whose existence is registered as mere happenstance or as singular function, must instead be spoken for and kept clocking in (Fanon, 2001).

Despite the work they do and the forms they must fill, with bodies that move and hands that write and feel as well as work, these transients are the subjects par excellence of the application clause, or its internal logic of the exception: If you insist on being here then you must not be seen. If you insist on being seen then you must not be heard. If you insist on being heard then it must be in a tongue and with sentences of our choosing. And if you do indeed pick up this new language of ours then you would do well to forget your mother’s.

Dark mortalities

Our moment of mass death and the makeshift morgue, more corpses than we are willing to bring ourselves to count, drives home the inescapable limit of the body and breath. This despite the principle of unequal shares through which certain lives become disproportionately superfluous or at risk, and others naturally secured. To be sure, this virus has brought with it notions of a great levelling (Alexander, 2020). The reality that anyone, anywhere is vulnerable and, thus, its attack on our shared embodiment speaks to a planetary predicament in which each and every human is caught It is this reason that today death is measured as being in excess.

But just as the breathing or gasping body lives and labours in the midst of certain historical, social, political and economic tendencies, this levelling, which has brought on an hour of autophagy – bodies devouring themselves of the capacity to draw breath and live on – also shares in those tendencies. “Disease is never neutral,” Anne Boyer (2019) has told us, “treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics.” This longstanding politics of mortality, which draws a great separation between the visible person and invisible worker, and has been instituted through industrial progress, its colony, outpost, and tax haven, is the systematic legislation of death and an all-out war on life. The freedom to live and breathe is made possible by many more who cannot.

It is not clear that this fundamental relation of my life to the death or murder of an Other has left us (Mbembe, 2003). Before the arrival of this virus, humanity – as both physical subject and ethical concept – was already threatened with suffocation (Mbembe, 2020). Entire segments of the earth’s population, entire races caught and mobilised in an intense struggle to breathe when others would have them disappear, or more fittingly under the reign of capitalism, die at work.

The sharing of tendencies between virus and the worldly context of its transmission, a world not so much of a great levelling but one built on a great separation (Fanon, 1967); of my body, breath and labour kept a world- and time-apart from the Other’s, thus speaks to and amidst certain regimes of erasure. Because of the industries of strangulation upon which the modern world was founded and continues to proceed, that the makeshift morgue has already been a central logic of capitalism, we were always already haunted by the supposed excess (death) of the Other long before this virus’s eruption.

This disproportionate risk, exposure and perishing to the virus is among peoples already marked, as Black, brown, poor, jobless, homeless, unsettled, resident with no recourse to public funds. That is, names which sanction the deaths of Others whose work sustains life elsewhere, a haunted exchange that should be set in the larger contexts of, and intimacies between, breathing, labouring bodies across time and space.

The relation of my life to the disproportionate death of an Other, a worker whose ‘key’ status is contingent on his/her ability to labour but whose humanness as worthy of protection has long been in question, speaks to a profound emergency that could never be recognised as such. This is a loss not merely of Black and brown life, of the marked person’s ability to breathe freely. It rather amounts to an exit from a confrontation with the scale of mass death, mapped yesterday onto faraway frontiers and processes of extraction, accumulation, settlement and repopulation, with all the skeletal and geologic spikes that were their castoff, and that today is right here, seeking answers.

A day after

The body of the Other has long been drawn as a vehicle for contamination, a haunting figure, who is there but not, who must be kept at bay, locked down but productive, one whose own suffocation or deportation allegedly spells safety for those unmarked. In this negative relation of my body to the breath of the Other, we have never learned how to die, never mind how to live, in a world that was always and remains the only one we have, and which we must share with everything that breathes.

The contingency of my breathing freely on the stifling of an Other (what is that if not at core a definition of freedom as it arose from colony), bespeaks the pathogenic quality of capitalism. The great levelling of this new virus that is transmitted and kills indiscriminately does its work in a world of deep discrimination. The profound unmooring of untimely death and grief drift through an earthly condition in which the premature death of its simultaneously marked (hypervisible) and neglected (masked) peoples is proposed as the natural order of things.

It is not a question, then, of pre- and post-COVID. There must be a more expansive notion of the day after. It must be one in which to have a body – at the level of species-being – is to be owed the space to breathe. The delimiting terms of the political sphere, of law and state, capital and its endless abstractions will no longer suffice if we are to learn how to live and die in-common, as occupants of ultimately transitory but visible life (Glissant, 1997). These are questions biospheric in nature and planetary in scale. We are from the very beginning “given over” (Butler, 2004) to the world of an Other – human and natural, this distinction can no longer be allowed to hold – however much their presence is denied. Each of us must now answer to our own names, and are to be held responsible for an Other’s share, for their right to breathe clean air, if this earth is to survive.

Now it is true that the day after may herald an even greater separation than before, that the relation of the body who lives and breathes to the many more who suffocate and die is deepened as a logic of our world, and given renewed legitimacy through euphemisms of economic recovery, (bio)political security and national integrity.

Living and dying together, breath and its expiration, however, is an, if not the unassailable surplus of being. Hard as some might try to graft the ephemeral and elementally vulnerable nature of our embodiment to the machine – the birth of the new synthetic-body or object-body or digital-body – living and dying together will remain our lot as beings on this earth-not-of-our-making. At least for now.

A proper day after will only come through today’s and yesterday’s reckoning, of both its light and dark faces, its breathing and gasping bodies. Until we bring ourselves to confront premature death’s relation to the manmade, though no less extrahuman, factors of race, gender, labour, wealth, citizenship and much more, our existence will be forever haunted by the lives and death of Others; our own bodies weighed down by the breathless who may well be gone but whose body-the-same-as-mine can never truly be denied.

Muneeb Hafiz is an Associate Lecturer in International Relations at Lancaster University, UK. His current research concerns the intersections between race, subjectivity and ecology.

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July 1, 2020
Adrian Parr — Pandemic Urbanism

This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff.

by Adrian Parr

On December 31, 2019 an unknown case of the flu that had infected a group of people in Wuhan, China was first reported to the World Health Organization. The source was traced back to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Seven days later the Chinese identified the virus as a novel form of coronavirus, the same kind of virus that triggered Sars and Mers. On January 11, 2020 the first person died from Covid-19 in China. The first cases of Covid-19 in both South Korea and the United States were both confirmed on January 20, 2020. By the end of that month the entire city of Wuhan was placed under quarantine. On January 30, 2020 the World Health Organization announced Covid-19 to be a global health emergency; by 11 March it had moved to the status of a global pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020). Unlike an epidemic, which refers to a disease impacting a community or region, a pandemic is a disease that has spread across several countries and continents. Scientists now believe the virus was transmitted to humans from bats through an intermediary species, perhaps pangolins. As of April 15, 2020 there were 2,034,887 confirmed cases of the virus in the world, with 129,960 deaths spread out over 210 countries and territories (Worldometer, 2020).

The rapid spread of the coronavirus throughout the world has dramatically changed the use of public and private spaces, as well as the way everyday life is understood and practiced. With the spread of Covid-19 urban space is being produced through a variety of contradictory forces working in tandem. The city is both a weapon to be wielded in the “war” on Covid-19 and the casualty of viral ubiquity; it is the real and imaginary threat urbanity presents; and it has splintered into a multiplicity of socially contained spaces that simultaneously depend upon widespread social cooperation to come into effect. This essay will articulate a concept of pandemic urbanism in an effort to study the production of urban space under Covid-19. How, under pandemic urbanism are people inhabiting spaces, navigating other bodies, and adapting to the restrictions being placed on the movement of people? How in turn does the rise of pandemic urbanism expose imbalances of power and reinforce asymmetrical urban spatial systems?

Pandemic urbanism transforms the everyday physical proximity of people into an existential threat. There exists both the very real threat of contamination, as well as an imagined threat of an invisible enemy pervading all social life and public space. Physical distancing enforces very real separation barriers and imposes invisible barriers of containment. When combined, these real and imagined threats intensify covert inequities and racisms. In what follows I begin by describing the spatial and temporal production of zoonoses conditioning pandemic urbanism. I then examine the urban response to the current pandemic, highlighting the biopolitical production of space. I conclude by presenting the paradox of pandemic urbanism: it poses both a threat to and an opportunity for the realization of inclusive and equitable urban futures. Arriving at either outcome all depends on how pandemic urbanism is put to work.

Zoonotic Territories

Zoonosis refers to the movement of diseases, or infections, from non-human vertebrate animals to humans. Approximately 60% of emerging infectious diseases from 1940 to 2004 came from animals, with the majority of zoonoses deriving from wildlife (Jones, Patel, Levy et al., 2008). There are several reasons why infectious diseases transfer from animals to humans, but regardless of the specific epidemiological conditions, all cases involve spatial proximity. Whether we are speaking of humans living in close quarters to domestic or agricultural animals such as dogs or pigs, or more recently the growing trade and consumption of wild animals as wilderness zones decline, all amplify the epidemiologic conditions for the rate of animal borne infectious diseases in humans to increase.

There is nothing new about zoonoses impacting human health. The bubonic plague that struck Europe and Western Asia back in the early 1300s, killing approximately 50 million people, was originally transmitted to humans from rats, fleas, and ticks. The uniqueness of the current pandemic situation is that zoonoses are increasing. This situation is directly connected to human land use patterns. Human population growth and urbanization, resource extraction, the demand for more agricultural land, and infrastructure developments such as the building of roads and dams, have resulted in greater human access into, and activity in remote natural landscapes. From 1990 to 2015 over 129 million hectares of the world’s forests were lost leading to greater soil degradation, drought, flooding, desertification, biodiversity loss, and the disappearance of natural habitats (World Bank, 2016: 32).

Whilst reducing global deforestation is an important ingredient in curbing global warming, it can also assist in slowing the growing number of zoonotic pandemics (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018: 70). In so far as deforestation contributes to water scarcity and climate change, it presents an indirect danger to human beings. That said, wildlife habitat degradation and disappearance also pose a more immediate threat to human health because these result in people coming into closer contact with zoonotic hosts, amplifying pandemics such as severe acute respiratory virus, HIV, Ebola, bird flu, and more. As David Quammen cautions in his magnificent study of spillover diseases the “recent outbreaks of new zoonotic diseases, as well as the recurrence and spread of old ones, are part of a larger pattern … we should recognize that they reflect things we’re doing, not just thing that are happening to us” (Quammen, 2012 515).

Despite their obvious differences, wilderness, rural, and urban landscapes are inextricably imbricated in each other. Simply put, in the context of global capitalism the boundaries between urbanity and its non-urban “Others” is not so sharp. Indeed, zoonotic territories are a symptom of global capitalism. A landscape in the way that I am using the term refers to the economic and cultural production of the earth. A landscape is both a pragmatic resource with a use value and an aesthetic representation of inherent value. Both treat the earth as an object involving human management and consumption. On the other hand, a territory is a relation formed through the connection of forces, matter, and bodies. It is both a spatial and temporal production that generates striated – the State, a sovereign, property ownership, and the hierarchies of order and fixed social organizations – and smooth spaces – nomadic, open, and fluid (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 474-500).

Within this conceptual schema, a zoonotic territory is formed through the epidemiological forces of animal to human spillover; the economic forces of deforestation; the political forces of social inequity leading to the capture and consumption of wild animals from informal food markets (Wuhan’s wet markets) and the exploitation of wild bodies in the growing international market of exotic animal trade; the materiality of viral shedding and the circulation of infectious excretions; along with the ever increasing proximity of human bodies with other than human animals. This assemblage of forces, matter, and bodies combine to form zoonotic territories that extend throughout wild, rural, and urban landscapes. When a zoonotic territory proliferates throughout urbanity, as is currently the case with Covid-19, the public health crisis this prompts in the urban centers around the world catalyzes into a new form of urbanism: pandemic urbanism.

Pandemic Urbanism

Covid-19 is a respiratory virus and as such it spreads from an infected person through respiratory droplets, such as coughing and sneezing (Center for Disease Control). A person can catch the disease by touching an infected surface and by inhaling coronavirus contaminated mucus. Urban areas, where people come into close contact with each other and a variety of shared surfaces on a regular basis, present a very real and high threat of contamination. Unsurprisingly then, Covid-19 has impacted how people use and view the urban environment.

Suffice it to say everyday urbanity under the conditions of a global public health crisis, such as Covid-19, has dramatically changed. In an effort to contain the spread of the virus, shelter-in-place orders have brought urban economic and social life to a near standstill. Bars, cafes, restaurants, and gyms have temporarily closed. People are working from home. They no longer gather in large numbers. Learning has moved online, as schools and universities close. The use of shared forms of transportation, such as taxis, trains, buses, and airplanes have significantly decreased and almost halted altogether. Public movement for the purposes of conducting essential activities – purchasing food, medical supplies, visiting a doctor, or those who are working as part an essential activity are exempt.

People have begun using the empty streets to move throughout the city by walking, biking, and roller blading. Social life for the healthy has shifted from in-person modalities to video chats, texting, or telephone calls. As the pace of urbanity has slowed, wildlife ventures more and more into metropolitan areas. There are reports of bobcats visiting the front porches of homes in Dallas; marine life, never seen before in Venice, now swim through the pristine waters of the canals; deer are nudging their way into the urban core; urban parks and gardens are home to many more rabbits, birds, and ducks. Highways and bridges once bustling with cars, trucks, and motorcycles are near empty. Urban life has become quieter as the drone of peak hour traffic has vanished, the air is cleaner, and the skies appear bluer than before. Pandemic urbanism has certainly been great for the environment, providing much needed relief from escalating global greenhouse gas emissions.

Emergency management and preparedness measures have led to the erection of new urban physical borders. To ensure people keep their distance at supermarkets lines placed at 6 feet intervals on the ground at grocery store entry points are spatial markers used to both control the space between people waiting outside the store and the number of people shopping inside. The elderly are allocated specific days and times to shop to help ensure their medical safety. People move through urban areas dressed in protective gear wearing masks and surgical gloves to further stop transmission in shared spaces. As people try to stay active, streets and parks have become important public spaces for walking pets, taking a stroll, and exercise. With the six feet physical distancing rule, these spaces have quickly reached a tipping point. Police are fining people who break the order to not gather and stay inside and checkpoints at state border crossings survey travelers, administering quarantine orders for potential cases of disease transmission.

The spaces of pandemic urbanism are reorganized to maximize the distribution of public health services across multiple scales in both actual and virtual space. At the individual level more hand sanitizing stations are provided. At a larger collective level, pop-up medical centers are quickly infilling empty spaces. The image of healthcare workers in hazmat suits is the prevailing symbol of pandemic urbanism. Hotels in New York City in close proximity to treatment facilities are converting empty guest rooms to house medical staff. Telemedicine platforms are being used to diagnose the healthy and sick. Hospital emergency rooms are reconfigured to separate suspected Covid-19 patients from other patients into spaces exhausted from the outside so that air from infected spaces does not mingle with air in other parts of the hospital. As hospitals begin to overflow, many cities around the world have taken to converting stadiums, parks, closed factories, and convention centers into makeshift hospitals. In London the National Health Services and armed forces transformed an exhibition and convention center into a makeshift hospital in a few weeks. China built new hospitals in a matter of days to treat patients with Covid-19, going so far as to use robots in place of humans to treat the sick. Clinics have been converted to treat the sick, drive through testing stations have started, and ambulance bays are being converted into triage areas.

Pandemic urbanism is organized around three distinctive extraterritorial spatial practices: social distancing, quarantine, and isolation. Social distancing, which would more appropriately be coined “physical distancing”, is a matter of maintaining a six-foot distance from another person when in common spaces. The irony is, the mandate requiring individual behavioral changes to keep society as a whole safe, rests upon extensive social cooperation to work. A two-week quarantine period conducted in a person’s home is recommended practice, and sometimes enforced, if a person has travelled to a highly infected area or has been in contact with an infected person. Anyone who becomes sick from the virus is ordered to isolate and to go to the nearest emergency room if they experience difficulty breathing. All are premised upon interrupting the collective sensory experience of the city, placing the inter-connectivity and experimental play constitutive of urban life on hold.

The bodies of Covid-19 patients and the spaces they are isolated to and treated in are extra territorial urban islands fracturing the continuity of urban infrastructure, neighborhoods, and economic life. Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman describe extra territorial spaces as ones where the “old political order has splintered into discontinuous territorial fragments set apart and fortified by makeshift barriers, temporary boundaries, or invisible security apparatuses” that are “externally alienated and internally homogenized” (Franke and Weizman, 2003).

In addition to the new spatial relations and configurations that the islands of Covid-19 testing and treatment sites have instituted the pandemic is exacerbating prevailing socioeconomic disparities. It is now common knowledge that health insurance inequities in the US intersect with racial and ethnic disparities creating a differentiated experience of disease and contamination (Coleman, 1982; Rosenberg, 1962; and Sohn, 2017). A shelter in place mandate places a prohibition on venturing outdoors unless absolutely necessary. It therefore assumes all urban residents have a permanent home they can stay indoors at. In the US, millions of people, many without the financial means to weather the economic storm suddenly lost their jobs as restaurants and other non-essential businesses were forced to close when stay at home orders were issued. During the early stages of the pandemic in the US the nearly 30 million uninsured encountered challenges in gaining access to testing and treatment. At the same time, large numbers of those uninsured tend to work in the service and construction industries; all environments that carry a higher risk of exposure to the virus (Berchick, Barnett, and Upton, 2019). Uninsured people also find it harder to navigate the complexities of the US medical system, presenting further challenges to medical access. The pandemic accentuates sociospatial inequities between rural and urban spaces. Rural residents have fewer doctors and medical treatment options and they have to travel much farther for treatment than their urban counterparts.

As the global economy begins to tank, businesses are forced to close, unemployment lines grow, and governments dip into their reserves to prop up national economies, the economics of global health re-enter political discourse as both a political subject and the object of political strategizing. Just as much as the rapid spread of the pandemic around the world marks an instance of biological life escaping management techniques of the state and private sector, power returns and is reasserted biopolitically. To paraphrase Foucault, pandemic urbanism does this by reintegrating life back into “techniques that govern and administer it”, becoming a “regulatory and corrective mechanism” that participates in the distribution of “the living in the domain of value and utility” (Foucault, 1978: 143-144). People are dying alone in hospitals from Covid-19 as the risk of contagion is too high to allow family and loved one’s to say their goodbyes in person. In Italy, as the state’s medical system is overrun doctors are forced to choose between who is given intensive care and who is not. The mounting number of unclaimed bodies in New York are unceremoniously buried at mass burial sites on Hart Island outside New York.

Conclusion

In a globalized world the localized scale of an epidemic quickly transforms into a pandemic. Covid-19 has been one such scenario. Pandemic urbanism offers one way to understand how the urban environment is produced and in turn produces urbanity under the conditions of global disease. On one side of the equation, social behaviors in the city dramatically change as people attempt to remain six feet apart from each other to avoid contamination, sanitization stations appear, mechanized transportation grinds to a halt and is replaced by foot traffic and bicycles, the pace and sound of urbanity slows and quietens, buildings and roadways are vacated, and air quality improves. On the other side of the equation, the burdens vulnerable urban populations bear increase, infected bodies are assigned to the archipelagos of tent hospitals, the spontaneous movement of urbanity becomes a variable to be administered, other bodies are abandoned and left to be colonized by infection, and mass burial sites on the edges of urban centers dispose of the growing number of dead without ritual. The stark differences between the two form a nexus around the production and reproduction of biological life, a life that it is structured and managed by asymmetrical socio-spatial relations of power.

What now? How might cities be designed differently to mitigate the spread of disease? This is a question that could lead to turning current provisional measures into permanent urban features. Future commercial and public buildings might have many more antimicrobial surfaces and finishes. Sanitizing stations and temperature screening zones, such as the mass temperature testing that took place at the Venice airport when Covid-19 first began to gain ground there. The design and placement of pandemic specific structures could lead to the reorganization of urban space around pandemic zones. The once popular open office environment, now viewed as a major hurdle for pandemic containment, may be replaced with collaborative and isolated working zones. In an effort to curb direct physical contact with shared surfaces, robotic and automated elements become more frequent in public and shared commercial spaces, for example, navigating urban towers using voice activated elevators.

At the same time, those who participate in and advance the design and planning of the built environment will need to be cognizant of the darker biopolitical underbelly of producing design and policy knowledges of the built environment under pandemic scenarios. Pandemic urbanism can both legitimate and be deployed in strategies that establish population health as the ultimate end goal of urban life. Moving forward the design and planning professions and research disciplines will need to navigate these biopolitical waters with criticality and caution so as to ensure Covid-19 does not become the Trojan Horse of our common right to the city, to paraphrase David Harvey (Harvey, 2008). The moment urbanism is a tool through which states can regulate and administer the health of populations is the moment in which human agency and creativity are switched with population control, and urbanity is politicized.

The reinterpretation and re-representation of urban form and life through the lens of health and hygiene confronts our shared understanding and collective experience of urban spaces and times. The biopolitical interpretation of urbanity that pandemic urbanism could very well end up instituting, will require deeper critical engagement because it means that treatment isn’t just administered in specific spaces, like medical centers and hospitals, it is also administered urbanistically, whereby the built environment could be turned into a means through which disease is contained.

The manner in which design, planning, and public health policy coalesce to form a pandemic urbanism sheds new light on how urbanism can quickly become an instrument for biopolitical governmentality. Without minimizing the importance of caring for the sick and averting the further spread of a vicious virus, the shadows of biopolitical control lurking in the urban corners of overflowing and adhoc medical facilities needs to be brought into the open and honestly addressed as we recover, move forward, and plan for the next iteration of zoonotic territories. As people work together to rebuild their lives, heal from economic losses, and basically repair the serious sociopolitical deficits Covid-19 has exposed the world over, urbanism is presented with a tremendous opportunity to ultimately embrace the idea of healthy cities, not as governing the biological life of urban populations and materializing these in a series of formal elements; rather a city that welcomes different people and environmental attributes configured in dialogue with climatic conditions and topographical constraints, all materialized around imaginatively bringing people together and spurring a variety of social interactions.

Adrian Parr is the Dean of the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington and a UNESCO Chair of Water and Human Settlements. In her capacity as a UNESCO water chair, Parr was selected by the European Cultural Center to curate an exhibition for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale on Watershed Urbanism where she will feature DFW and its current and future relationship to the Trinity River system. She has published extensively on environmental politics, sustainable development, and design in the public interest. She is the author of the trilogy Hijacking Sustainability (MIT Press), The Wrath of Capital (Columbia University Press), and Birth of a New Earth (Columbia University Press) in addition to other books of cultural theory. She is the producer and co-director (with Sean Hughes) of the multi-award winning documentary, The Intimate Realities of Water, that examines the water challenges women living in Nairobi’s slum face. She has been interviewed for her views on climate change by The New York Times, television news, and other media outlets, and is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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June 16, 2020
Dominic Pettman — Netflix and Chills: On Digital Distraction During the Global Quarantine

This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by the b2o editorial staff.

by Dominic Pettman

My wife is in love with a bear.

Specifically, a Russian bear, who was rescued as an orphaned cub three years ago, near a rural airfield, and who has since grown into what I must admit is a most handsome and charming creature. She watches him all day, between all her various doings, through a live-cam, as he slumbers, cavorts, or daydreams. She has learned all his different moods – from pensive to mischievous – and she knows who are his favorite, and least favorite, of the humans who arrive periodically to bring food and clean the enclosure. One thing I have gleaned, from the raw footage I have seen, is that this bear is incredibly intelligent and resourceful. Bored with his limited surroundings, he has still managed to create games for himself; pushing a large flat rock around the compound like a toy truck, or twisting a log into a hammock so that it becomes something resembling a row-boat. He loves resistance from the world, and is visibly smiling when life pushes back against him in surprising ways; whether in the form of a large tire, hanging from a tree, or his favorite of all the humans, Andre.

If a bear plays in the forest, does anyone see him? In this case, yes. Even at 3am, he might be swimming in his pool, making intricate games with his giant paws, and the physics of water. Other times, he becomes exhausted by the lack of existential push-back, and lies on his giant furry paws, reflecting rather glumly on his plight – locked in a cage about half an acre square. At these times, a deep melancholy can descend on his large, charismatic head; the same head which swayed back and forth with such joy, just the day before, while playing with a sapling, and trying to turn it into his own private, flexible jungle gym.

Even before COVID-19 hit New York hard, I felt there was something allegorical about this bear’s life, and the fact that we have access to it, via new digital tools that simultaneously seem to open and close worlds. But now, as we move into the second month of stay-at-home orders, and “social distancing,” it’s impossible not to feel a strong kinship with this sensitive, trapped animal, on the other side of the world. In some sense, we could not ask for a better quarantine coach or mentor in this bear, who, in an act of imaginative alchemy, manages to transform the base materials of a bleak Russian winter into a playground for his own fancy and delight. But the effort involved is clearly immense, and the come down can be hard. Between the self-fashioned entertainment lies long stretches of what Walter Benjamin called “empty homogenous time”: a form of temporal measurement that the philosopher felt was an illusion, compared to the full textures of historical experience. And yet the boredom of individual experience can indeed feel hollow and monotonous.

Quarantine time is strange and queasy. Some days go fast, while the weeks seem to take months. Each day bleeds into the next, like a punctured bottle of cough syrup, sopped up by a bag of cotton wool. Apparently we did not fully appreciate the extent to which daily routines, and social interaction, structures and recalibrates our sense of duration. (Although the incarcerated, the unemployed, the aged, the monastic, the scholastically entrapped, and the addicted understand this brute fact instinctively.) What shall we call that feeling when the general structure of feeling begins to lose its structure?

Boredom was considered a threshold experience, by Martin Heidegger, the controversial German philosopher. He believed it was shot-through with potential to wake us up from the numbing comfort of our distractions, and deliver us into a more authentic relationship with the vertiginous miracle of Being. Modernity, for this same thinker, represented nothing more or less than “the forgetting of Being,” thanks to the inoculating efficiency of modern technologies, automatized habits, alienating impulses, and existential disavowals.

Well, the sudden collapse of our social and economic system has jolted us out of this zombie-like daze. The remembering of Being, however, is no picnic. Especially for creatures who have dedicated at least the last few centuries to repressing the full force and feeling of its fragile and fleeting nature. We are “thrown” into the world, without asking to be. So we must contend with being wrenched into existence, out of the rather smug continuum of lifeless matter. (Which is why Georges Bataille calls us “discontinuous beings,” forever attempting to simulate some kind of continuity, especially through erotic pseudo-fusions.) The battle between (soothing) distraction from, and (painful) acknowledgement of, the conscious burden of being individuals – along with our own lonely trajectories and fates – is ongoing, however.

Netflix is one of the most popular strategies we have against smashing our bug-like faces against the onrushing windscreen of personalized finitude. And as such, it embodies a new kind of digital cogito: “I watch, therefore I am (not).” Indeed, I am beginning to suspect that Netflix itself has become sentient, and is trying to communicate with us, and perhaps even warn us against further dangers to come.

Take for instance the new reality TV show, The Circle. This franchise – which began in the UK, but has since mushroomed into the US, Brazil, and France – features contestants who isolate themselves in separate apartments in the same building, only able to communicate with each other via text. Essentially a cross between Big Brother, Survivor, and Black Mirror, the viewer enjoys a sense of voyeuristic access and omnipotence, as the contestants talk to themselves; narrating their thoughts in a self-conscious, no-doubt contractually obliged, form of mental extrusion. Like the Russian bear on YouTube, they are mostly left to their own devices to keep themselves entertained, while food arrives periodically at their door. But in this case, they are competing for a cash-prize, by participating in a socially-mediated popularity contest.

Consider also, Love is Blind, which also premiered on Netflix just a couple of weeks before the virus infected our media ecology, as much as our bloodstreams. Here again, contestants were mostly relegated to isolated pods, and obliged to talk to each other in highly mediated ways; again, not even seeing each other’s faces, but relying on the spoken or written word to make conversation, diversion, judgements.

Was Netflix preparing us for an imminent world of radical separation, and the simulation of company or community? Moreover, did the CEO of Netflix, along with Jeff Bezos, engineer COVID-19 in his evil lair, so that we would all be one-hundred percent reliant on their commercial vectors to eat and stay even vaguely entertained?

Being a college professor, suddenly obliged to move my classes online, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the experience of trying to simulate some sense of togetherness, in “real time.” (It’s like we had a premonition when we named the next generation Zoomers, isn’t it?) The Zoom room may be a “reasonable facsimile” of a seminar, but it lacks the palpable textures – material, mental, emotional – that only sharing an intimate sphere, carved from the analog curves of the space-time continuum, can provide. Indeed, this is another thing we have lost, at least in the medium-term: the synchronicity of co-presence; the potential to be bored together, and then leap across this boredom into a kind of infectious intellectual epiphany. The seminar is a privileged space, where we are attuned to each other’s moods on various registers, and navigate these affective landscapes with the aid of social graces and conceptual compasses. As a result, few things are as depressing as a bad class. Conversely, few things are as exhilarating as a good one.

I have several friends, it must be said, who have expressed pangs of guilt about enjoying the stay-at-home order, and having an alibi to be introverted, anti-social, “remote.” Indeed, some of these same people complain about the new burden on “checking in” with each other, and enduring Zoom “happy hours”; occasions that they no longer have an excuse for flaking on. Hence the irony of the moment: social distancing has led to increased socializing (albeit through the screen). For some, this is a kind of worst-case scenario – losing the mammalian immediacy of mingling in the same actual space, while still obliging one to endure the worst aspects of inter-subjective choreography. As the 17^th-century socialite, Madame de Sévigné, wrote, “How tedious those gatherings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company.”

Personally, I miss all those tiny, random, asymptotic encounters that inspired me to move to New York in the first place. This great city, already significantly hollowed out by neoliberal policies and the black-mold of global capital, is now uncannily quiet, except for the sirens which serve as a constant reminder that things are rapidly becoming medieval, here in the Plagueopolis. Suddenly, even the most rote, phatic, and alienated of daily exchanges seems utopian to me. Or rather, Arcadian. Lost, like the Garden of Eden.

From out of my living room window, I can see the El Dorado, which along with the Dakota, the San Remo, and the Beresford, is one of the most expensive and exclusive apartment complexes in this part of the city. There are about twenty floors, and at least a hundred different dwellings. Judging by the lights, only one apartment is currently occupied. The rich have fled the city, for their Hamptons retreat, Caribbean getaway, or New Zealand bunker. I say, we don’t let any of them back in.

Due to my own (now common) paranoia about enclosed, potentially infected, spaces, my apartment has suddenly become a nine-story walk-up. Good exercise at least. Although I have been doing my part to “flatten the curve” by staying inside my one-bedroom apartment as much as possible, only scurrying to the park once or twice a week, around dawn, to remember what The Outside world looks, feels, and smells like. The last time I went downtown was to retrieve some items I needed from my office, after being told that all university buildings were being closed for an unspecified amount of time (perhaps to be converted into make-shift hospitals). This was only a few days after New York City officially went on “pause,” closing all restaurants, cafes, bars, and other “inessential” establishments. As long as my neurons hold out, I will not forget the epic, apocalyptic flavor of this walk. (Seventy blocks south, and then back again, since I was not willing to risk the subway.)

It was like a cross between The Odyssey and I Am Legend. The streets were eerily deserted, except for the occasional homeless person, or stranded tourists, wandering about dazed. I could stroll down Seventh Avenue no problem. Everything was shuttered. Even Times Square was empty, except for an illegal gathering of thirty or so religious zealots, punctual as always, declaring the End of the World through a megaphone, and the subsequent need to repent. One of these modern-day millenarians even had a crucifix over his shoulder, that he was dragging along the pavement. The scene felt especially pathetic, as it was clear that any heaven-bound souls had already been raptured, and we were all the remnants, left to fend for ourselves on the streets; no matter how devout we may feel ourselves to be. Watching this scene, I caught the eye of a homeless man wearing a WW1 gas-mask, and we both shrugged in a moment of bleak amusement.

Meanwhile, the giant billboards continued to play slick and fashionable commercials around us. Models the size of skyscrapers beckoned the now-vanished crowds to a Shangri-La of perfectly tussled hair, designer jeans, and callipygian promise. While I have read almost every book by J.G. Ballard, nothing prepared me to be standing almost alone in the sudden ruins of an already indecipherable culture. Enigmatic, shimmering Gods and Goddesses beckoned to me with a kind of sadistic – or at least uncomprehending – glee. I wanted to stay there for a while, in the belly of this evacuated beast, in order to absorb the full effect of a pantheon now abandoned by Man, whose solicitous smiles and flirtatious gestures were now moot and unseen. Like an aurora borealis, shimmering over the valley of death.

Of course all pronouncements of the end of Capitalism are premature. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the forces of capital outlive humanity. (Insert over-used Fredric Jameson quote here.) As long as Instagram is still functioning, along with wifi, the children of these avatars of consumption will persist, finding new ways to drape their lithe bodies in the invisible garments of the economic emperor. (Also known as “brands.”)

Nevertheless, the whole world has a real Fyre Festival vibe right now.

The virus has infected my dreams, so I’m even afraid to socialize oneirically. Clicking around online, it seems I’m not the only one. Even in the creative, compensatory theaters of the slumbering unconscious, we are practicing metaphysical distancing, just to be safe. What an incalculable loss.

Last night I had a dream where I was wandering through a field-hospital at night (i.e., hundreds of beds, literally out in a field, full of patients struck down by the virus). For some reason I wasn’t scared of being infected, wandering between the beds, in the moonlight. I soon noticed that the heart-monitors were displaying stock market surges and drops, rather than the pulse of the sick ones. One patient started to try to say something to me, short of breath. I leaned closer, and heard the old man wheeze: “Coming soon to Netflix, the new season of Stranger Things.” I looked at the doctor nearby, puzzled. He wearily explained that in order to satisfy the requirements for health coverage, patients had to make regular sponsored announcements, up to their last dying breath.

I suppose this is obvious, but one reason we all feel so weird right now is because we’re scared, and thus our “fight or flight” reflex is activated. And yet we are obliged to stay put, neither fighting nor fleeing. So we marinade in our homemade, homeopathic adrenaline drips.

As a result, the 7pm whooping and hollering in support of medical workers hasn’t yet failed to make me misty. There’s a couple of adorable kids who clamber up on the roof opposite, with their young father, and bang some pots like gongs. It’s a collective tonic, after all the isolation and disquieting quiet, punctuated increasingly frequently by sirens. Is it too much to ask a new sense of “the people” will arise from this?

That shameful feeling, when you can feel a personal essay, coalescing in one minds, like an unwanted ovum. Or rather, like a hairball, that you need to cough up. As if the world needs yet another middle-class person, commenting on the coronavirus! And yet, what else are we supposed to do? Highly trained word-processors, trapped inside, with access to little more than keyboards and caffeine.

Of course, I’m currently one of the lucky ones – the equivalent of a contestant on The Circle, who is more likely to suffer from cabin fever than anything else, while the Desperate Ones deliver groceries to my door, unseen. (Though, truth be told, the supply chains in the city have collapsed, and I can no longer count on deliveries.) The writing on the wall speaks of pay cuts across the board, as a best-case scenario. Truth be told, I was always pessimistic enough to never take tenure for granted, as a job for life. My eyes have been open enough to know that this exotic category was on the verge of extinction, and just another economic stumble away from being abolished altogether. The real question is whether C19 (as people are starting to call it), will prompt a Jenga-like collapse, including the billionaires, whose vast and unthinkable fortunes cannot withstand the breakdown of the banking system? Or will sanity eventually prevail, and new safety nets will be installed, including the long-overdue win-win scenario of a Universal Basic Income? (As being currently phased-in in Spain).

Depressingly, however, the US seems hell-bent on belligerently belly flopping into its new global role as Failed State #1. Indeed, as I write, the White House has just refused to bail out the USPS. Can it be a coincidence that this is our last chance to communicate with each other, free of corporate surveillance and interference?

Twitter, Facebook, and so on, make us feel more connected to those we’ve now been decisively estranged from. But they also magnify and amplify this estrangement; clumsily reinforcing the profound gulf between tele-communication, and the kind fostered by physical proximity. My point is not to simply insist on the superiority of the latter, but to bemoan the lengths to which our political managers are actively trying to banish it.

The Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has, justifiably, caught a lot of flak for his commentary on the crisis; especially his comments playing down the horrific fatality rate of the virus. (In this sense, he is speaking in concert with despicable figures like Bolsanaro, and our own orange menace.) Nevertheless, he is also not exactly off-the-mark, when he foresees the ways in which our current technocratic managers will seize on this opportunity to introduce new draconian surveillance measures and systems; policing our every move, and even monitoring the contents of our bloodstreams in real time. He writes:

the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition. There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought for that reason to declare a state of emergency like the current one, which prevents us even from moving. People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition and has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity.

Deleuze was, astonishingly, too optimistic, when he wrote: “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” Turns out, he – and, of course, she – is now both enclosed and in debt.

Looking out my kitchen window, at 9pm on a Friday night, the streets are empty. Normally, a throng of people would be crisscrossing my vision; on foot, on bikes, in cars. But now, I see only the occasional delivery guy or emergency vehicle. Even the 24-hour bodega on the corner, which has always been my beacon in the dark – my “well-lighted place” – is closed.

But then, suddenly, a swarm of people flurry past. A renegade group of cycle-punks are taking advantage of the empty roads, and going on a nocturnal joy-ride, complete with skull masks and pirate flags. My heart skips a beat. I know that I should be “tut-tutting” these youngsters, high on adrenaline and Mad Max movies. But the truth is, my spirit flies out to them; with them. Somehow they are different to the libertarians, brandishing machine guns on the steps of state parliaments, demanding we “reopen the economy.” These steamless steampunks seem to me more like angels or valkyries of a post-carbon future; even as they risk spreading the infection in their wake. “The great god Pan is dead!” announced the Egyptian sailor Thamus, two thousand years ago. “Long live Pan!” I whisper to the window, embarrassed at my fey references, in a time of real crisis.

To be clear, I confess this moment of romantic transport not to question the importance of social distancing at this moment, but to also register the detrimental effects on our spirits, our bodies, and our sense of sensual potential.

For while it is to be applauded that great cultural institutions and esteemed archives are putting almost infinite hours of entertainment, distraction, and edification online for free, this won’t compensate for the losses of naïve gatherings, contact, closeness. People are already noting how they watch a TV show from last year, and are appalled at how closely the characters interact. Moreover, we’ve had access to exponential zettabytes of human output for years now. That’s not where the vitality of our existential potential adheres.

Truly, we are living, as Jean Baudrillard noted, “after the orgy.” (With the exception of the one-percent, presumably, who are still having Eyes Wide Shut sex parties on their private islands, with Ukrainian escorts who have all been medically pre-screened.)

My sister, a Buddhist monk, is trying to figure out the technology to enable her to upload some videos on “Turning Self-Isolation Into Self-Actualization.” This reminds me of the old Zen saying: “Don’t just do something. Sit there!” Certainly, this is a lesson we could all learn at this time; still tyrannized, as we are, by the compulsion to be productive.

Agamben was previously famous for redefining the classical notion of “bare life,” or zoe, which is an ontological condition preceding all biopolitical codings. In simpler terms, it is a naked form of existence which has not yet been captured, processed, and sorted into the various categories on which society depends: “citizen,” “barbarian,” “slave,” “alien,” and so on. Refugees are a specter haunting this bureaucratic system because they threaten to overwhelm it. In their fleshy striving to persist, they are a form of bare life that disturbingly reminds all of us that we are all potentially, literally, “in the same boat.” And if there is one crucial lesson the coronavirus has taught us, is that the whole world is an infectious, claustrophobic cruise-ship.

All the neoliberal economic policies and structures that enabled “just-in-time capitalism,” are what also set the perfect conditions for this “just-in-time apocalypse,” since there was no contingency planning, no stock-piles, no emergency backup resources. There was merely the ongoing plundering of bare lives, barely able to make a living, because the rich are, stupefyingly, somehow not rich enough yet.

We all knew this, in our bones, as we watched the planet itself gasping for breath. The Amazon forest – “the lungs of the world” – have been on fire, with the economic equivalent of Covid19, fanned by the corporate logic of Amazon.com. And yet we wrung our hands impotently, hoping the next generation, or preferably the one after that, would have to deal with the real consequences. (“First world problems,” of course, since most of the world has been dealing with these consequences for years, decades, centuries.

Which brings me back to my Russian bear.

In some ways, he is “one of the lucky ones,” since he is alive and healthy, albeit bored and in captivity. Given the ways in which humans have monopolized and decimated the ecological world for our own ends, animal life has been dragged almost completely inside our own biopolitical apparatus. There is no longer any “outside” the anthropocene. No beyond the toxins we have created, the plastics we have produced on such a mind-boggling scale. We have, for instance, created a new type of “bear life,” for the life of bears, that are obliged to endure their existence inside our own cages, or, at best, the perimeters of our own national parks. Instead of catching salmon in living streams, too many of them now frolic in tiny pools, on livestreams. Perhaps it’s ironic, however, that I’m feeling sorry for a bear that enjoys more room to roam than I do. Human delusional pathos forever wins the day.

Heidegger notoriously claimed that animals are “poor in world.” This in comparison to humans, who are, at least on a good day, “world-building.” Nevertheless, I’m grateful to have a lockdown coach like this Russian bear. When he devises a new toy from the sticks and stones that litter his compound, I swear he laughs to himself. And who knows what flights of imagination he goes on, while I sit in a Zoom office hour, awaiting students that never “arrive.”

Dominic Pettman is University Professor of Media and New Humanities at The New School. He is the author of numerous books on technology, humans, and other animals; including Creaturely Love (Minnesota), Sonic Intimacy (Stanford), and Metagestures (Punctum, with Carla Nappi). His most recent book, Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire, will be published by Polity, later this year.

April 29, 2020