boundary 2

Tag: COVID-19

  • Hannah Zeavin — Glasses for the Voice (Review of Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment)

    Hannah Zeavin — Glasses for the Voice (Review of Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment)

    a review of Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP, 2022)

    by Hannah Zeavin

    Somewhere between 500,000 and over 1 million Americans, and many more people worldwide, are now living with some form of post-viral symptomatology from COVID-19—or “Long COVID.” In a pandemic first and pervasively represented by elderly death or “mild” cases no worse than the flu, there are, in reality, three true outcomes after contracting the virus, one of which includes long-term illness, impairment, and disability. These “long haulers” are discovering what disability activists have long known and fought against: accommodation and access are not readily forthcoming, insurance is a nightmare, and people of color and women are much less likely to have their symptoms taken seriously enough to lead to a medical diagnosis. And medical diagnosis, if received, is fraught, too. If 1 in 4 Americans is already disabled, we have been and continue to be living through what some are calling a mass disabling event, akin to a war. This situation is not limited to the circulation of a virus and its aftermath in individual persons and bodies; it extends to the conditions past and present that have produced its lethality: capitalism and its attendants, including medical redlining, environmental racism, settler-colonialism.

    Jonathan Sterne’s Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment arrives then just in time to complicate that history via the experience of impairment (as well as its kin experiences and identities, illness and disability). As Sterne writes, “The semantic ambiguity among impairment, disability, and illness remains a constitutive feature of all three categories. They move through the same space and bump into one another, sometimes overlapping, sometimes repelling. All three are conditioned by a divergence from medical or social norms. All three are conditioned by an ideology of ability and a preference for ability and health.” Sterne’s book doesn’t just map the experiences of impairment, he also troubles the binary of disabled and able body/mind. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne upends our received notion that we, somehow, are in control of our senses (or our minds, our limbs). Instead, some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others present as problems. Sterne’s book is about many kinds of impairment, and their intersections in subjects who are understood to be normative nonetheless or even because they’re impaired; what we think of as normal (gradual hearing loss as we work, listen to music, age) versus what is marked off as different and constitutes an unquestioned disability (e.g., childhood deafness following viral illness).

    Early in the book, Sterne quotes the disability studies adage, “you will someday join us.” This definitive book is also Sterne’s personal story of living in the matrixes of illness, impairment, and disability, in the materiality of their experience as well as the cultures that contain and produce those experiences. Rather than presenting a work at the end of learning, deleting all the traces of theorization up until the point of arrival, Sterne fully tells the story of how he “joined”: from study groups to blog posts, across changes in understanding and bodily experience. Diminished Faculties therefore provides a rigorous, moving account of the experience of the normal and the pathological, the accounted-for body both disabled and abled, and the one shoved to the margins. Sterne also offers his reader the account of impairment via a political phenomenology grounded in his own story while moving slowly and responsibly beyond it to reconceive impairment theory as a theory of labor, of media, and fundamentally, of political experience.

    Sterne is a preeminent voice in Media Studies, and the author of The Audible Past (Duke UP, 2003) and MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke UP, 2012). Diminished Faculties is his first book in nearly a decade, the third in a series of works that have shaped and reshaped sound studies, and the first to center his own history.

    While in this way, Diminished Faculties is moving beyond his previous books to auto-theory, If The Audible Past begins with the “Hello” of the telephone, Diminished Faculties takes on another, amplified greeting. In 2009, Sterne was diagnosed with an aggressive case of thyroid cancer; the surgery to remove his tumor (the size of a pomegranate, as demonstrated in a drawing from S. Lochlann Jain) paralyzed one of his two vocal cords. Normal vocal cord functioning looks like, as Sterne puts it elsewhere “a monkey crashing cymbals”; a normative voice depends on that coordinated cooperation between halves. And as he tells us, his voice may sound better, whatever that really means, to his listener (smokey and rich) on one of his worst days. But Sterne also talks for a living—teaching and delivering research-and his voice blows out, he gets exhausted. As Sterne began vocal therapy, he started to use a personal amplification device that hangs from his neck, which he has termed his “dork-o-phone.” Staying with the example of what gets made visible as impairment, Sterne tells the story of someone coming to a house party, pointing to his chest and saying, “What the fuck is that?” Sterne replies: “Glasses for my voice.” This book tries, in part, to account for this importunate reaction, reconciling a moment of surprise or frustration or intolerance with the fact that impairment is everywhere, and tracking what that reaction does to the subject who is marked as other. As Sterne writes, “Think of all the moving parts in that scenario: a subject whose body cannot match its will; but also auditors struggling to align themselves with whatever techniques the speaker is using. Everyone is trying; nobody is quite succeeding.”

    This is one way of naming the book’s method: “think of all the moving parts.” Each of its chapters weaves disability studies, auto-theory, history of science, and media history, turning the levels up or down on any particular input and frame. Diminished Faculties ushers the reader through these interlinked hermeneutics toward a redescription of impairment in the long 20th century.

    The first chapter, “Degrees of Muteness,” offers a deep consideration of the uses of phenomenology, and its methods for describing experience, centered on Sterne’s diagnosis, surgery, and its aftermath. As Sterne writes, “this book begins with consciousness of unconsciousness (or is it unconsciousness of consciousness?)” Here he also introduces a media theory of acquired impairment, arguing that, “the concept of impairment is itself also a media concept. The contemporary concept of normal hearing emerged out of the idea of communication impairments and from a very specific time and place.” He moves from this study of a phenomenology of impairment into its deployment, to consider his own voice, or voices v (spoken, amplified, written, authorial). Via his personal amplification device, which he has named the “dork-o-phone,” Sterne takes this object to think with to give us a history and experience of assistive technology and design as it interacts with other infrastructures.

    Sterne then moves from political phenomenology to breaking the normative form of a book by inserting the written guide for an imaginary exhibition “In Search of New Vocalities.” The exhibition is accessible, designed for bodies coming from places imaginary and real, an act of care in the scene of art going, if only in the mind. The tone of the book shifts once more for the concluding two chapters towards something more familiar from Sterne’s earlier books, here centered more squarely in STS and Disability studies.

    Chapter four is a theorization of Sterne’s identification of “aural scarification” and what he calls normal impairments. In this chapter, Sterne joins recent accounts of the built environment—and here he focuses on our sonic environment—that argue that disability itself reveals aspects of society that hurt everyone, however unevenly. Sara Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? (Riverhead, 2020) shows how the curb on the sidewalk, for example, makes city infrastructures impassable for wheelchair users—but also say, mothers pushing strollers, travelers with suitcases, skateboarders and so on. Add a curb cut and suddenly movement is much more possible in urban spaces for many—not just the conventionally disabled. On the other hand, sometimes access for disabled users is granted almost by accident. Sterne provides another example: closed captioning. Initially, closed captioning was resisted by major broadcast networks precisely because it was expensive and obtrusive—and would only help a small minority. Then other spaces changed and hearing users needed to be able to see what they would otherwise listen to, in airport bars, in hospital waiting rooms, at the gym. Suddenly, D/deaf users got the captions they needed—but only because abled users wanted the same technology. Sterne calls this “crip washing”; the scholar and critic Mara Mills calls this an “assistive pretext.”

    Sterne adds to this account that we live in a physical world that is in fact designed for people who are a little bit hearing impaired. Our entire infrastructure is loud: airplanes, bathroom hand dryers, music, whether live or in ear buds. Sterne shows that it is better not to hear perfectly and we hear less well because we interact with this environment; being alive leads to impairment even if we start without it (“you will someday join us”). Throughout Diminished Faculties, Sterne troubles the binary of disabled and abled body/mind by putting disability into a constellation with impairment and illness. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne argues that some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others are marked as problems, which separates it as a term even as it overlaps with disability. What then is an impairment if we expect it, if it is normal, and it can be disappeared through design? Why are other impairments made visible through these same processes? Considering impairment and disability as a norm is a revision that Sterne requires of his reader, broadening our working understanding of the built environment.

    The concluding chapter of the book offers a deft theory and history of fatigue and rest. Opening with theorizations of how we manage fatigue in relation to labor, from Taylorism to energy quantified by “spoons” as theorized by Christine Miserandino, Sterne moves his account of fatigue through and beyond a depletion model. He asks whether we can think of fatigue as something other than a loss, a depletion of energy? He argues that rather than a lack of energy, fatigue is a presence. Sterne reminds his reader throughout that fatigue is so difficult to capture phenomenologically precisely because if it is too overtly present, he couldn’t write it down, if not present enough, he could not articulate the experience of fatigue from within. In this moment, Sterne returns to political phenomenology—including its limits. There are certain experiences, extreme fatigue being one of them—that are sometimes simply not accessible in the moment of writing.

    Impairment and fatigue are both concepts from media and the mediation of the body in society, and here are richly positioned within a history of technology and from disability studies. The two commingle, as Sterne deftly shows, to produce our lived experience of body in situ. Along the way, Sterne gives us additional experiences: an account of himself, an exhibition, and a theory to use (and a manual for how we might do it), turn to account, and even dispose of. Diminished Faculties is a lyric, genre-bending book, that is forcefully argued, rendered beautifully, and will open the path for further research. It is deeply generous both to reader and future scholar, as Sterne’s work always is. But additionally, this is a book that so many have needed, and need now, a way of situating the present emergency in a much longer, political history.

    _____

    Hannah Zeavin teaches in the History and English Departments at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021, MIT Press). Other work is forthcoming or out from differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Dissent, The Guardian, n+1, Technology & Culture, and elsewhere.

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  • Dominic Pettman — Netflix and Chills: On Digital Distraction During the Global Quarantine

    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 17th-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.

  • Anders Engberg-Pedersen — Covid-19 and War as Metaphor

    Anders Engberg-Pedersen — Covid-19 and War as Metaphor

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

    by Anders Engberg-Pedersen

    Within the past couple of months, war has emerged as the master metaphor of Covid-19. On March 16, President Emmanuel Macron, in an animated televised address to the French people, made “we are at war” into his refrain. Repeating the phrase no less than six times, he urged national support for the “battle” and moral support for the nurses on the “front line.” On March 17, across the Channel, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, before he himself contracted the virus, adopted the language of war during a press conference invoking the powers of a “wartime government.”

    A day later, on March 18, President Donald Trump tweeted: “I want all Americans to understand: we are at war with an invisible enemy, but that enemy is no match for the spirit and resolve of the American people…” Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, was quick to lend credence to the claim: “We are at war, and now by necessity he is a ‘wartime’ president.” Not one to miss a chance to play up his statesmanship, President Trump has since repeatedly cast himself in this role. Perhaps more surprisingly, leading Democrats have supported his line of thinking. Joe Biden has claimed that tackling the pandemic “is a national emergency akin to fighting a war” – thereby echoing Bernie Sanders’ statement that the crisis “is on a scale of a major war.”

    Not only has it proven expedient for the political leadership to speak of Covid-19 in terms of war; under the heading “Economic Policies of the COVID-19 War,” the IMF issued a series of policy suggestions both for phase 1 – “the war” – and for phase 2 – “the post-war recovery.”[i] From Nobel-Prize winner in economics Joseph Stiglitz to leading US immunologist Anthony Fauci, there is general agreement that “this is a kind of war” and we are currently “living through the fog of war.”

    If we turn to the media, the language of war is ubiquitous as well. “Invasions,” “attacks,” “defenses,” “mobilization,” “front lines,” “pandemic generals” etc. make up the preferred vocabulary in newspapers, in the radio, and on television. In short, across the board war has very quickly become the main trope for describing, understanding, and managing the Covid-19 pandemic. When George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published their book Metaphors we live by in 1980, one of their prime examples for an everyday metaphor was “argument is war.”[ii] By now, however, the “war on Covid-19” has been promulgated in so many ways that it has ceased to have much novelty as a metaphor. Within a few months, it has become a metaphor we live by.

    Declaring war on concepts and natural phenomena is hardly new. In his State of the Union Address in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” The following year, he began a “war against crime.” In the 1970s, Richard Nixon declared “war on cancer” along with a “war on crime” followed by Gerald Ford’s “war on inflation.” Obviously metaphorical, these linguistic military interventions mean something like a maximum collective effort to manage a significant large-scale problem. Hardly odious, we might think.

    Yet, the pervasive militarization of language in the midst of the most serious health crisis in modern times should give us pause. For the reframing of a pandemic by the language of warfare is more than a useful rhetorical trick to convey the gravity of the situation and mobilize the populace. It also profoundly misrepresents the phenomenon that countries across the world are currently scrambling to control. And if we don’t extricate ourselves from the rhetoric of war, we will be stuck in a false metaphor that hinders our ability to think and act in the most expedient manner.

    It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Long revered as the king of tropes, metaphor has a distinguished theoretical pedigree that expounds its crucial semantic and cognitive function. When Aristotle in the Poetics wrote that “to make metaphors well is to observe what is like something else,” he regarded metaphor not simply as a pretty linguistic embellishment or a slick rhetorical trick.[iii] He saw it as a source of genuine insight. When ordinary language comes up short, the well-wrought metaphor fills in the gap. A creative expression of language, metaphor articulates an insight that ordinary language cannot convey. What insights does the “war on Covid-19” offer, then?

    The overlaps between the pandemic and war are obvious. Hospitals are flooded, doctors must perform triage, morgues and cemeteries are overwhelmed to the extent that mass graves are now being dug in New York City. The state of emergency has become a default governmental measure and the basic mechanics of societies has been profoundly disrupted. For a crisis of similar scale and gravity, the comparison that comes to mind is indeed war. Here is David Frum in The Atlantic assessing the number of Covid-19 deaths in the US: “By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam.”[iv] Indeed, in the scope, seriousness, and immediate impact on our lives, a global war would seem an apt metaphor for Covid-19.

    Yet, speaking of a virus in terms of war comes with its own set of problems. In 1978 Susan Sontag published Illness as Metaphor. It is a wide-ranging book that traces the metaphors that have clustered around tuberculosis and cancer throughout the ages. But its main point is clear: illness is not a metaphor and metaphors do a great deal of damage both to the victims of tuberculosis and cancer and to our understanding of the illnesses themselves. Illness metaphors perform a radical simplification of complex etiologies and their redescriptions are anything but innocent. They carry moralistic meanings that ascribe blame to patients for contracting the illness or for not putting up enough of a fight to defend against the invasion and win the battle. Indeed, she writes, the most truthful way of regarding illness “is one most purified of, and most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”[v]

    In spite of the present popularity of the “war on Covid-19”-metaphor, the discrepancies are striking. In the current crisis, instead of mobilizing, people are demobilizing by sheltering in place; in spite of the invocation of the Defense Production Act of 1950 to ramp up production of masks and ventilators, general production has come to a screeching halt as workers are laid off; instead of secret intelligence gathering, there is widespread international cooperation and open sharing of information and statistics as countries test and implement effective measures to manage a common problem. All these key differences are glossed over every time the pandemic is articulated through martial metaphors.

    A more serious problem with the metaphor, however, is the very image of war it evokes. The mental picture that it triggers in our brains involves something like a spectacular violent struggle between nations that takes place within clearly demarcated spatio-temporal boundaries giving rise to sacrifice, heroic exploits, and strong emotions. In the US and in Europe, much of this mental imagery dates back to WWII, which in the wider imagination has become synonymous with the “ideal war” – victorious, reasonably swift, with clear distinctions between good and evil, and, in the end, spectacularly decisive. In the past few weeks, Macron, Johnson, and Trump have all been trading on this imagery.

    Yet, this image of war is thoroughly out of sync with the actual experience of war in the 21st century. Since 9/11, US foreign policy has been defined by global terrorism and the seemingly endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. The Afghanistan Papers published by the Washington Post amply demonstrated the lack of vision, strategy, purpose, and progress that has characterized the past nearly two decades of American-led war. In Afghanistan, the US remains “trapped in the forever war,” in Mark Danner’s phrase.[vi] As retired US army colonel, Christopher D. Kolenda has put it, recent US military efforts can best be described as the painful performance of a “slow failure.”[vii] Rather than conjuring images of glorious battles and swift victories that mobilize the population, these distant, pointless, non-spectacular wars with weary allies and elusive enemies and aims have failed to deliver the powerful imagery and emotions of the “ideal war.” Instead, the effect has been first boredom and finally indifference in a population tired of war without end.

    These are not the images and emotions that the war on Covid-19 are meant to activate. In the widespread use of martial metaphors today we might detect, therefore, a suppressed nostalgia. We long for the good old decisive war precisely because it does not fit the character of the pandemic. We declare war on the virus, because we want it to be something that it is not. The declaration of war, then, does not seek simply to describe our present situation. Rather, our daily feats of metaphorical magic function as speech acts that transform the epidemic into something more heimlich, something that we think we know and can relate to and that gives us comfort, something that used to be simple, manageable, and perhaps even heroic – war.

    This metaphorical transformation solves another problem by alleviating a hidden anxiety. The fear of Covid-19 stems not least from the fact that it is non-intentional and non-human. The virus has no mind and no will. It has no strategy, it makes no demands, it lays claim to no territories, to no natural riches, to no economic advantages. As a purely natural phenomenon, Covid-19 causes illnesses that, as Susan Sontag argued, are fundamentally meaningless. No longer do we trace the etiology of the plague back to the wrath of the gods or any other metaphysical intentional being. Without malice, for no greater reason or overarching purpose, the virus has to date killed over 100,000 human beings.

    Covid-19 thus confronts us with the frightening absence of meaning in nature. This is an uncomfortable fact that we would prefer not to think about. But by declaring war on the virus, we don’t have to. Transforming the virus into an enemy endows it with all the qualities of mind and intent that might give some meaning to what is otherwise a senseless loss of a staggering number of lives. The rhetoric of war – paradoxically – humanizes the virus by transforming it into a being on whom it is possible to wage war. Here the nostalgia for war results in a bizarre linguistic operation: the “war on Covid-19” locates meaning in the ability to mete out death, rather than in saving the lives of the population. And it recognizes nature only the moment it comes into focus as a target to be killed.

    The transformation of a virus into an enemy to be vanquished by a long-lost dream of good old-fashioned warfare can do little but offer a false hope. In the scramble to control the pandemic, the actual, non-metaphorical US military has been virtually useless. The Navy hospital ship, USNS Comfort, succeeded, in spite of social distancing measures, in attracting a vast crowd when it sailed into New York Harbor in late March. After a week, however, due to administrative snafus, it had received only 20 patients. Meanwhile, Captain Brett Crozier, commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, was sacked following his request to offload the virus-stricken personnel for proper quarantine accommodations on land in Guam. As he pointedly wrote in a long letter to his superiors published by the San Francisco Chronicle: “We are not at war. Soldiers do not need to die.” Since then conditions have only worsened. In spite of the fact that the US boasts a national defense budget of app. 649 billion dollars (2019) – more than China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany combined – its military is powerless when it comes to handling Covid-19.

    Shifting focus onto the imagined power of the US war machine, however, the rhetoric of war effectively directs public attention away from an inconvenient truth. When it comes to health care, life-span, access to education, security, infrastructure, the protection of minorities, and a fair distribution of wealth – all factors that determine the strength of the society to be defended – the US is lagging far behind other developed countries. Aside from the feeble attempt at grand statesmanship, President Trump’s self-fashioning as a wartime president serves to distract from the long history of misguided political priorities that make the current health crisis significantly more difficult to overcome for the US than it ought to be.

    The solution to the Covid-19 pandemic is not a military one–neither metaphorically, nor actually. After nearly two decades of interminable war, the American mind needs to be demilitarized. The first step is to abandon the rhetoric of war that has such a powerful grip on the political imaginary. The language of the future is not the reductive language of human aggression and destruction, but the language of protection, of caring, curing, nurturing, developing, organizing, cooperating, and building. Not war, but care could be the master metaphor for the coming decade. But as long as presidents, prime ministers, and the media keep framing the pandemic in military terms, we will all have to contend not merely with the worst health crisis in modern memory, but also with a powerful, false metaphor that clouds the mind and hinders appropriate action.

     

    Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature and an affiliate of the Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the author of Empire of Chance. The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Harvard University Press, 2015), editor of Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories, Genres (MIT Press, 2017), The Humanities in the World (U Press, forthcoming 2020), and co-editor of Visualizing War. Emotions, Technologies, Communities (Routledge, 2018). He serves as general editor of the book series Prisms: Humanities and War with MIT Press and as co-editor of the podcast series War and Representation at Oxford University. He is currently directing the collective research project The Aesthetics of Late Modern War sponsored by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Velux Foundations.

     

    [i] Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, Paolo Mauro, Antonio Spilimbergo, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer “Economic Policies for the COVID-19 War”. IMFBlog, 1 April, 2020: https://blogs.imf.org/2020/04/01/economic-policies-for-the-covid-19-war/

    [ii] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we live by: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 4-6.

    [iii] Aristotle, Poetics. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, p. 32.

    [iv] David Frum “This is Trump’s Fault”. 7 April, 2020: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/americans-are-paying-the-price-for-trumps-failures/609532/

    [v] Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978, p. 3.

    [vi] Mark Danner, Spiral. Trapped in the Forever War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

    [vii] Christopher D. Kolenda, “Slow failure: Understanding America’s quagmire in Afghanistan”. Journal of Strategic Studies, 42/7, 2019: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402390.2019.1663179

  • Tony D. Sampson and Jussi Parikka — The New Logics of Viral Media

    Tony D. Sampson and Jussi Parikka — The New Logics of Viral Media

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

    by Tony D. Sampson and Jussi Parikka

    Up until recently, work on a universal theory of virality seemed to always cut a somewhat marginal figure in media theory. In the early 2000s, when we first started to publish articles referring to digital contagions, immunology, epidemiology and viral networks, it was no surprise to us that although our claim to universality seemed significant, it would remain of ancillary concern to mainstream media theory. After all, media and communication studies were supposed to be about establishing connection; not the opposite of it!  We were regularly questioned about our use of a ‘viral metaphor’ and what it meant to the development of a new model of digital media. The hyperbolic focus on viral marketing did not make it any easier for us to argue that there were deeper material levels of virality that required immediate attention.

    However, now, all of a sudden, unpredictably, and rather shockingly, viral media stands at the centre of contemporary issues both materially, economically, and socially. In the wake of global uncertainty and anxiety caused by the uncontainable spread of Covid-19, there has been an abrupt move to the viral – from the margin to the middle. As we are all now discovering, Covid-19 is an epochal pandemic. The health and survival of massive scale populations are at stake, engendering panicked political responses and exposing the underlying impact of years of austerity in public policy, not least in healthcare. Virality is, as such, both entirely relevant and resolutely non-metaphorical.

    This outbreak has also, understandably, drawn urgent attention to the workings of a viral logics that criss-crosses from biological to cultural, technological and economic contexts. We can now all see how, through sometimes direct experiences, universal virality becomes a techno-social condition of proximity and distance, accident and security, communication and communication breakdown. Indeed, it is in the current context of Covid-19 that our understanding of the movement of people and messages is framed by the logics of quarantine and confinement, security and prevention. Furthermore, virality automates affective reactions and imitative behaviours that relate to different visceral registers of experience compared to those assumed to inform the logic of the market. Which is to say, the mainstream cognitive models that are supposed to support the failing economic model of rational choice (if indeed anyone really ever believed in Homo Economicus) are replaced by seemingly irrational and uncontrollable financial contagion. Moreover, recent outbreaks of panic buying of toilet roll and paracetamol, some of which have been sparked by the global proliferation of Instagram images of empty supermarket shelves, are spreading alongside the early scenes of isolated Italians, impulsively bursting into songs of solidarity and support from their balconies followed up by similar scenes in many other countries and cities. All of these are peculiar contagions because, it would seem, they are interwoven with contagions of psychological fear, anxiety, conspiracy and further financial turmoil; all triggered by the indeterminate spread of Covid-19.

    To think these contagions through in a media theory frame is, for a number of reasons, a complex task. We are, after all, dealing with an ecology of technological, biological, and affective realities moving about in strange feedback loops. Contagious agents are not simply biological; their agency always arrives in plurality.

    Future predictions are taking place against a backdrop of contested epidemiological models, reliant on, for example, the uncertain thresholds of herd immunity or total social lockdown. Certainly, following a sustained period of comparatively stable risk assessment, mostly based on known knowns and known unknowns, we have just entered a vital, possibly game changing phase in which unknown unknowns will prescribe the near future.

    We have to concede that, from the outset, the universality of our viral logics has itself been contested. There have been at least two other models of media virus that we know of. Whether or not it was the first to do seems rather inconsequential now, but Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus, published back in 1994, proposed an early viral model that could be harnessed to manipulate the new media. The information-virus, and latter concepts of spreadable media, perceptively challenged the assumed entrenchments of the old ideological state apparatus model of media, pointing toward a novel McLuhanesque participatory culture. We can, perhaps, in retrospect, trace the celebratory nature of this viral logics all the way to the fantasy of revolutionary social media contagions during the Arab Spring.

    The second media virus appeared in the early noughties. It was extracted from a few loose remarks made in the latter pages of Richard Dawkins’s neo-Darwinian Selfish Gene thesis of 1976. In Susan Blackmore’s neo-Darwinian Meme Machine, for example, we find a media virus which functions according to an evolutionary algorithm. The neo-Darwinian meme doctrine emerged in various millennial discourses, mostly those associated with the rhetoric of viral marketing and the computer viruses/antivirus arms race. As some viral marketers claimed, contagion may seem accidental, but the pass-on-power of a media message could be memetically encoded (and harnessed) to spread as determined.

    The universality of the third media virus – the one we proposed in the early 2000s – was intended to be more theoretically nuanced, certainly in regards to its approach to mechanisms and the question of whom or what does the harnessing. To begin with, our universal virus was more closely aligned to a viral event, or accident of contagion, than it was analogous to, or metaphorically related to, its biological counterpart. We could indeed learn more from the capriciousness of computer viruses than we would by merely looking for analogical relations. As follows, digital contagion provided insights into the modelling of the contagious behaviours of autonomous agents. Similarly, just as computer security became a core focus of digital media practices, the broader implications for virality in network culture also implied the shared legacy with epidemiology and its goal to simulate the spread of diseases. Multi-agent-based modelling was one context where contagions were initially allowed to spread, creating a bifurcated discursive formation between the burgeoning field of artificial life research, on one hand, and the tight link between measures of security and automation, on the other. Along these lines, then, early automated software processes were often grasped as artificial contagions that went beyond the human control of complex computational networks, requiring a further automated immunological response.

    Another aim of the universal virus was to reject biological or technological determinism in favour of a transversal contagion. In short, this meant that no one mechanism determined contagion since the relationality and accidentality of the viral event superseded deterministic thinking. Contagious behaviours are not solely  predetermined by an evolutionary code, as such. The universal virus also clearly relates to the complex array of unknown unknowns triggered by environmental interactions. Indeed, the vectors of contagion, and any subsequent security response to these environmental conditions, will prove to be effective only after the fact. These are paradoxical environments in which the mode of future predictions, based on existing models and reliant on historical data and assumptions, becomes at odds with the necessary open-ended nature of a shared communication network.

    Of course, the story of contagion modelling – either as epidemiological modelling or as conceptualising theoretical models – is not reducible to contemporary network culture. To better grasp the bizarre nature of the kinds of contagious loops we are experiencing with Covid-19, the universal virus also made significant references to nineteenth century contagion theory. Most notably we borrowed from Gabriel Tarde’s society of imitation thesis, which, like Paul Virilio, focused on the accidents of mechanism, rather than a mechanism’s logic. Moreover, Tarde’s imitative social subjects were not the victims, but rather the products of contagion. It is, indeed, in the accidental relations of contagion, that Tarde’s subjects are continuously made and remade.

    Like the inexplicable behaviours of crazed shoppers panic buying toilet rolls in recent weeks, the subjectivities that are produced in Tarde’s society of imitation are conspicuously rendered docile sleepwalkers. However, Tarde’s many references to social somnambulism must not be misconstrued as an understanding of society founded entirely on collective stupidity. Importantly, his references to sleepwalking were informed by the absence of a distinction he made between a biological nonconscious inclination and sociocultural tendencies to imitate. In other words, Tarde’s social subjects, including those that were supposed to be making rational economic judgements, are never self-contained. They are both, simultaneously, etched by the affect of others and leaking their own infectious affects. Again, following the logic of the universal virus, recent outbreaks of panic buying and seemingly irrational market trading, are examples of further unpredictable automations of bodies and habits.

    Back in early the 2000s, we argued for a universal virus that made a resounding, yet subtle break from established media theory analysis of contagion, doggedly couched in representation. Viruses were not solely metaphorical, figurative or indeed myths that covered up an underlying ideological reality. Following the Covid-19 outbreak, the universal virus can certainly no longer be considered as a conjured-up fantasy, projection, or for that matter, in the current context, a crude biopolitical invention  strategically placed to justify measures of containment. Although, for sure, there are multiple levels of political aims at play, not least in terms of the recurring question of immunological borders, the logic of this virus is now, for the time being, the overriding power dynamic. Far from providing a convenient allegory for action, the very real viral event of Covid-19 is currently producing its own reality according to which our habits and worlds must bend and adapt.

    Universal viruses are nonrepresentational in the sense that they make their own physical and metaphysical infrastructures of connectivity, while exposing the underlying social strata upon which – as epi–demos – they function. Along these lines, the legal theorist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos contends that Covid-19 presents a Spinozian contagion in terms of how bodies relate to each other and their environment. The “challenge of Covid” is, he argues, “monumentally ethical.” This is because the virus “demands of us to accept a quintessentially Spinozan ethics of positioning, of emplacing one’s body in a geography of awareness of how affects circulate between us and others.”[1] This viral patterning of habit and behaviour is no longer merely a question of homophilic identification (connecting to friends, parents, etc.), but radically expands to modes of connection and disconnection co-determined by collective bodies that are being positioned in relation to each other, to space, to borders, to containment, etc.

    The viral patterning of Covid-19 will continue to spur a range of actions, habits, behaviours and affects that might take a hold of bodies in more predictable or previously unimagined ways. Certainly, some of the pegs that fix the future of biopolitical movements of people and messages will no doubt produce more docile sleepwalkers. It is not surprising that the UK government initially opted for a neoliberal version of herd immunity in which collective obligation was pitched alongside business as usual. Even now, in its current state of belated lockdown, the UK’s unequal distribution of Covid testing sees leading political figures and royal family members prioritized over frontline health workers. In the US too, Trump’s reluctance to accept Covid-19’s utter disregard for capitalism seems to be making his country a deadly hub for infection. Indeed, what seems to unify the far-right at this moment is its propensity toward Covid-denial, exemplified by Trump and Bolsonaro’s regime in Brazil. Apparently, sales of guns and ammunition are soaring across the US as fears of Covid-19 prompt bunker mentality and self-protection. It is also the case that the reported spread of the virus has been coupled to an intensification and extension of population racism. In the UK, again, the spread of so-called maskaphobia has led to many Chinese students having to opt between what sociologist Yinxuan Huang calls “two bad choices – insecurity (for coronavirus) and fear (for racism).”[2] Ultimately, urban spaces may well be redefined by state controlled measures of social distancing, on one hand, or these kinds of fear-driven detachments, on the other; both of which clearly contrast with the themes of the classical sociology of cities, which grasped urban spaces as locales of dynamic collective density.

    The logic of the universal virus might also produce novel spatiotemporal realities for collective grassroots systems of care. In the wake of Covid-19, we are already witnessing more than the spontaneous emergence of songs of solidarity. Spain is currently nationalizing private hospitals; Iran is releasing political prisoners from jails. These are new spatiotemporal realities produced by Covid-19 that could counter the broader context of what Achille Mbembe has referred to as necropolitics. After the dark refrains of Trump, Brexit and subsequent intensifications of population racism, for example, the horror of Covid-19 might actually clear the way for some kind of large-scale radical reaction that addresses these recent corruptions of the global political scene and its role in quickening climate change and the biodiversity crisis. After the applauding of brave health workers and songs of the shutdown subside, painful social, economic and political struggles will inevitably follow the virus. How these struggles manifest against the shifting backdrop of disciplinary confinement and control by way of statistical inoculation and the abandonment of eradication are yet to be seen.[3] New political assemblages might be triggered, at least temporarily. The question we need to ask now is: what are you doing after the lockdown? We do not mean this to be a catchy social media meme, or indeed a misquotation of Baudrillard, but instead we propose it to be the looming political question we must all face.[4]

    The French version of this text is published on AOC. You can find it here.

    Tony D Sampson is a critical theorist with an interest in digital media cultures. His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (Hampton Press, 2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, coedited with Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). His next book – A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media – will be published by Polity in July 2020. Sampson also hosts the Affect and Social Media international conferences in east London and is co-founder of the community engagement initiative the Cultural Engine Research Group. He works as a reader in digital media cultures and communication at the University of East London.

    Jussi Parikka is Professor at University of Southampton (Winchester School of Art) and Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague where he leads the project on Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023). In 2019-2020, he is also Visiting Chair of Media Archaeology at University of Udine, Italy.  His work has touched on questions of virality and computer accidents in the book Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2nd. updated edition 2016, Peter Lang Publishing) and he has addressed questions of ecology and media in books such as Insect Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and A Geology of Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). The Lab Book, co-authored with Darren Wershler and Lori Emerson, is forthcoming in 2021 (University of Minnesota Press). Parikka’s site is at http://jussiparikka.net.

    [1] Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos “Covid: The Ethical Disease”. Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, 13 March 2020: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/13/covid-the-ethical-disease/

    [2] Sally Weale “Chinese students flee UK after ‘maskaphobia’ triggered racist attacks: Many say China feels safer than Britain amid coronavirus crisis and increasing abuse”. The Guardian, 17 Mar 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/mar/17/chinese-students-flee-uk-after-maskaphobia-triggered-racist-attacks

    [3] Philipp Sarasin “Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault?” Foucault Blog, March 31, 2020: https://www.fsw.uzh.ch/foucaultblog/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault?fbclid=IwAR0t0C9bY3D-j-gyjtxj1f6CDz-0kY0KtgnCUhj9LAuOwMc4r7CC0BxAjSc

    [4] See also Tuomas Nevanlinna “Poikkeustilan julistaminen on äärimmäistä vallankäyttöä, mutta ratkaiseva hetki koittaa kun se lakkautetaan (Declaring a state of emergency is an extreme exercise of power, but the crucial moment comes when it is lifted)”. Kulttuuricocktail, 26 March 2020: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2020/03/28/tuomas-nevanlinna-poikkeustilan-julistaminen-on-aarimmaista-vallankayttoa-mutta

  • Nitzan Lebovic — Biopolitical Times: The Plague and the Plea

    Nitzan Lebovic — Biopolitical Times: The Plague and the Plea

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

    by Nitzan Lebovic

    Related article: Christian Haines — A Lyric Intensity of Thought: On the Potentiality and Limits of Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” Project

    “Nous savions alors que notre séparation était destinée à durer et que
    nous devions essayer de nous arranger avec le temps.” (Camus, Le Peste)

     

    Addressing coronavirus disease 2019 is a struggle against time, perhaps the first warning of a future world, or the last our species is going to get before losing to global warming. It is a lesson that is meant to teach us the importance of time, how we’re running out of it.

    The spread of the virus and the global response have illustrated how growth and reduction, acceleration and slowing down, belong to the post-postmodern world. From the jet-speed global spread of the virus, with its exponential expansion, to the governmental and local top-down response—a coordinated effort to slow it down, defer its full effects, and stop it—both problem and solution seemed to move to the rhythm of industrialization and globalization. The attempts to contain this catastrophe resonate with biopolitical control: individual isolation, social separation, governmental control, police and medical surveillance. In short, we are living in a new age of catastrophes. Unlike catastrophic world wars caused by late industrialization and mass mobilization, now we experience the catastrophe brought by profit-based consumption and the destruction of our environment and our world, an existential threat imperiling the very idea of human time.

    A recent analysis by Tomas Pueyo gave a name to the desperate need for more time: by comparing different instances of the spread of the coronavirus and the effectiveness of the response, Pueyo showed that the single most important factor is the time between what he calls “the Hammer” of forceful suppression of the spread and the creation of an effective vaccine. He calls this interim period “the dance of R” and concludes: “What,” he asks, “is the one thing that matters now?” His answer: “Time.”

    Pueyo’s analysis emphasizes time because it looks, first and foremost, at life. Ironically, the philosopher of “bare life” (Zoë), Giorgio Agamben, disagrees with such estimates. A panel of experts headed by Agamben recently scrutinized the national emergencies (in Agambenian terms, the “states of exception”) declared by many governments in order to contain the spread of COVID-19. (For a better translation of Agamben’s “clarifications” see  here) In his remarks on the situation, published on February 26, Agamben chose to declare quite dogmatically that any state of emergency, even with lives at stake, was a violation of individual autonomy and the fundamental principles of civil society. After comparing COVID-19 to the flu, he argued that Italians were “faced with the frenetic, irrational, and entirely unfounded emergency measures adopted against an alleged epidemic of coronavirus” and that the “disproportionate response” grew out of “the tendency to use a state of exception as a normal paradigm for government” as well as a “general state of fear” encouraged by Western governments for populist and capitalist reasons. Agamben’s remarks were followed on March 17 by “Clarifications” that made explicit his assumption that “our society no longer believes in anything but naked life.”

    These admonitions are not unfounded; populist regimes, from Orbán to Netanyahu and Modi, have already taken to the emergency declarations in order to tighten the screws of control and anti-democratic measures. Yet, Agamben’s two statements also bring to light an unfortunate structural element that is embedded in his theory: a focus on bare life misses the temporality of life. After all, as Schmitt and Agamben have acknowledged, our understanding of bare life assumes the suspension in toto of democratic constitutions (Homo Sacer, 15. Emphasis in the original). Agamben’s recent attack on nuanced analyses such as Pueyo’s “dance of R” proves that his resistance to the idea of sovereignty has blotted out all consideration for life and politics, incidentally identifying an inherent blind spot within his theory. I mean the absence of temporality, or the lack of interest in living time as such. Without a temporal understanding of the biopolitical apparatus, we cannot estimate the dynamics of management and enforcement. We cannot separate a Merkel from a Modi. More specifically, without a temporal analysis of our reality, we have no way to estimate either the spread or the response of the virus. Furthermore, ignoring the temporal dimension causes Agamben to miss a crucial element for contemporary biopolitical critique: the fact that as we run out of time in our search for a better politea we tend to lose sight of our duty as a species to bring our temporal existence—as individuals and as a political community—in line with the planet, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown (in History & Theory and Critical Inquiry).

    Let me explain this by the use of a political and a historical case. The history of plagues is convincingly theorized, in a biopolitical vein, by the political philosopher Adi Ophir—an English version of its first half is expected next year from Fordham University Press. Ophir believes that disasters have gradually been secularized and biopoliticized. While the first half of the book engages with biblical disasters, the second half traces the modern biopolitical mechanisms accompanying crises such as bubonic plagues. Ophir goes back to Daniel Defoe’s Due Preparations for the Plague, as Well for Soul as Body (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Jean-Pierre Papon’s De la peste, ou Époques mémorables de ce fléau et les moyens de s’en préserver (The plague, or Memorable times of this pestilence and the means to prevent it, 1799). The texts are well known to historians of science and intellectual historians, who have used them to show a growing pressure to regulate the means of prevention. What is new in Ophir’s analysis is the attention he gives to the biopolitical means as a form of secularization. For him, plagues are a typical case of the secularization of divine authority, something quite different from the liberal presentation of the evolution of the state as a necessary, positive development. (This is in line with Walter Benjamin’s thinking about “divine violence.”) From this perspective, Defoe and Papon demonstrate that political authorities must rely on emergency decrees and a swift enforcement of isolation to manage and contain the spread of highly infectious diseases. Yet during the eighteenth century any effort of that kind triggered the flight of elites from infected areas, with the concomitant surrender of position and authority to the middle class, a power reclaimed once the danger passed. Ophir, following Michel Foucault’s analysis in Security, Territory, Population and Agamben’s in Homo Sacer and State of Exception, presents the typical management of a national population in troubled times as a coupling of governmental carelessness and abuse of power, usually in the service of the economic interests of the elites and the divine legitimacy of the ruler. As the evolution of such state institutions shows, it is often difficult to separate incompetence from abuse and procedural authority from divine one; both grew out of the abandonment and consolidation of power by emergency decrees. How does it help us understand the politics of the plague better? Looking at such governmental mechanisms from a nonliberal, nonprogressive point of view, one cannot help but note the practical importance of intervening to slow the spread of a dangerous virus by implementing “systematic territorialization.” Seclusion, closure, isolation, and surveillance in times of troubles enabled the court—operating from a safe distance—to save lives. From a different angle, the operative question asked by governments—these troubled Defoe and Papon in the eighteenth century—related to “proper abandonment.” “From the perspective of the state, it is clear,” writes Ophir, echoing those early plague chroniclers, “abandonment is a form of containment, and the seclusion of infected areas is . . . temporary and partial, an urgent need of the hour and aimed at saving the state as a whole.” The measures, in simple words, may help saving lives, but the we must be able to block emergency measures and divine-like authority from becoming the rule, once the elite decides it’s time to come back home.

    Back to the present, back to Agamben and the problem of leaving out temporality. If the most important question in the present moment is that of gaining time (vis-à-vis both earthly plagues and the environmental apocalypse), then a structural analysis of emergencies cannot suffice. A dogmatic insistence on bare life misses the need to take emergency situations seriously; at certain moment, the Hammer needs to fall, for the benefit of the public. Agamben misses, I believe, the real political point of this situation, which is the critique of “proper abandonment” and the temporary use of biopolitical measures. Simply put, our struggle should not be about an affirmation or a negation of the state of emergency as such, but an attempt to realize when such decrees diverge from the temporality of life, rejecting the temporal democratic principles that follow the logic of the public in toto (demos and ochlos, rather than a separation between the two). This need not be about sovereign territorialization, economic interest, or bare life. Yes, such analysis requires a history and an understanding of procedural processes, but where would we be if not for Foucault’s emphasis on the gradual shaping of the biopolitical apparatus? Without time, we are left with nothing but bare life.

    Nitzan Lebovic is an associate professor of history and the Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. He is the author of The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (2013) and Zionism and Melancholy: The Short Life of Israel Zarchi (2019) and the coeditor of The Politics of Nihilism (2014) and Catastrophe: A History and Theory of an Operative Concept (2014) as well as the editor of special issues of Rethinking History (Nihilism), Zmanim: Tel-Aviv University Journal of History (Religion and Power), The New German Critique (Political Theology), Comparative Literature and Culture (Complicity and Dissent), and Political Theology (Prophetic Politics).