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QUARANTINE LETTER #6: Empty Plazas

Dear Friends,   

I’ve been inspired by letters circulated recently by Ill Will Editions, which have offered a helpful window for thinking through the current global pandemic. Reading them, it struck me that several have circled around something like a disjunction or asymmetry between two distinct yet overlapping lines of thought: on one hand, there is the understandable fear that the forms of social control presently implemented will be sustained beyond the pandemic (not unlike they were after 9-11), a concern that directs our attention to state power; on the other hand, there is the disruptive force of the virus itself, like a  non-human agency conducting itself across us, and operating beneath and beyond the waves of governmental and economic measures by means of which the elites in the political class scramble to maintain an increasingly tenuous veneer control and authority. Orion addressed the latter in his letter when he described the virus as a power that has “constructed its own temporality, which immobilizes everything,” a power “capable of extending beyond what the insurrections proved incapable of doing, and actually shutting down the economy.” Two types of agency, two asymmetrical lines of force—how are we to parse their peculiar overlap in this moment, those of us who have never been friends of their ‘normal time’? 

I write to you now from Chile, a place that has been in a state of unrest since October of last year. As it happens, the pandemic’s arrival within the context of an unfolding insurrection provides a moment to  reflect on the modalities of crisis politics and control in the current moment.

Our situation might appear quite the same as anywhere else these days: the Chilean government followed the example of governments around the globe, declaring a national emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In point of fact, this most recent state of exception is the third that the government has declared in the past decade, since it follows not only the uprising this past October, but also the catastrophic earthquake of 2010. In each of these cases, the maintenance of public order was handed over to the military, which did not hesitate to implement nightly curfews and military checkpoints  restricting and surveying movement. 

Have we shifted from one form of upheaval to another? If so, the relevant distinction would not be between normal and exceptional states, between the rule of law and emergency measures, but rather, in this shift, who is in control over the territory, and how are we inhabiting it? Under what conditions can this question no longer be answered? If it is possible to assess continuity and divergence in our present moment in Chile, one can do so only by looking at the experience of, and contestation over, collectively inhabited territory.  I’d like to share with you a few examples of such experiences, through several portraits of everyday life that capture the myriad of ways people and institutions have responded to the COVID pandemic amidst contestations over territory. 

Variable Enforcement 

On March 15th, 2019, in a televised, national press conference, the Chilean Board of Medicine (colegio de médicos) criticized the current Ministry of Health for improperly implementing its protocols. Since the government was failing to control the outbreak that started in Santiago, they asked everyone in the city to begin a full 14-day quarantine: no work, no school, no leaving the house. Many in the city followed this quarantine—bars and nightclubs owners closed their businesses in the name of social responsibility, and mall employees staged walk-outs and went on strike until the city closed the shopping malls.

It wasn’t until March 20th that the Chilean government finally implemented quarantine measures in Santiago, including full quarantine in territories with high rates of COVID-19, such as the rich neighborhoods of Santiago and the city’s downtown. Those who live inside the quarantine zone must now fill out a form on the police department’s website and download a “temporary pass” before leaving their house. On the form, we must select an option from the list of permitted reasons to travel from our homes, and declare where we are going. We can request a 4 hour pass 2 times a week for basic necessities, a 12-hour pass to go to a doctor’s appointment, and a 30-minute pass to walk their dog. Essential workers can request a salvoconducto, a permit to travel during military curfew or cross military checkpoint. At the beginning of the quarantine, police stations had lines around the block, with people waiting to apply for a salvoconducto.

Along the border of Santiago’s quarantine zones, only a dozen or so military checkpoints exist. We quickly realized we could walk past the handful of guards stationed there. Furthermore, city buses appear to be affected by these quarantine measures. In effect, those who opt to remain at home in the quarantine zone often do so because they are complying with the medical board’s recommendation, rather than the official quarantine measures.

Meanwhile, the official quarantine measures have not been extended to the combative poblaciónes, home to the greatest number of participants in the October 2019 Chilean uprising.  These neighborhoods at the periphery of the city were formed by massive squatter movements in the 1950s and 60s, when residents collaborated to build houses, defend each other from eviction, and negotiate with the government for city infrastructure, schools, and clinics. If you’ve seen videos of riots during the March 29th Day of Combative Youth (Dia del Joven Combatiente), the footage is more than likely from these neighborhoods. 

Back in October, the rebellious tendencies of the poblaciones were no longer confined to those specific areas but proliferated all over, as people circulated in the downtown, metro, supermarkets, pharmacies, and shopping malls. The attacks weren’t against the police and metro—the two obvious symbols of state power—but also targeted the formal economy itself. 

This year, despite the military curfews and fear of the pandemic, the poblaciónes celebrated the day of combative youth by taking the streets and confronting the police. Unlike in central Santiago, public space continues to be open in the poblaciónes. Although there are fewer protests and social life has diminished, the pandemic has not yet fully interrupted life in these areas. Initially, protestors who congregated in Plaza de la Dignidad feared that the government would use its official quarantine measures as an attempt to regain social control after months of Chile’s social uprising. In the end, no heavy effort was made to enforce quarantine measures in those spaces where they would anyway be contested: the boundaries of the quarantine zones and the rebellious territories of the poblaciónes. 

Control of public space

With the new norms of quarantine and social distance, the pandemic has interrupted the shared experiences of protests in the streets and neighborhood events in the plazas. Since October, upheaval has structured our everyday life where we live, rendering our neighborhood projects both possible and necessary. Neighbors formed assemblies in response to the upheaval of the massive street demonstrations. Through assemblies, we hoped to meet each other, and sustain the forces in the streets and life in the neighborhood. People used assemblies to organize and publicize new neighborhood events such as community kitchens, flea markets, children’s theater, and open-air concerts. Meeting in parks, our assemblies would be constantly interrupted by the life of the neighborhood: street dogs greeting us and playing in the middle of the circle, people asking for cigarettes, sitting with us and ranting, and old insurgents saying we should stop talking and start lighting barricades. 

The pandemic has radically interrupted this everyday life. Now, the neighborhood assembly is online. Assemblies, mutual aid, and online workshops are coordinated and announced in their corresponding Whatsapp groups. Uninvited neighbors can no longer drop in spontaneously. My capacity to write in a café was enabled by the possibility that I would be interrupted by an old friend walking in with someone new to meet, or that protesters would spill into the café from Plaza Dignidad to evade the spray of the guanaco (the police’s water cannon tank), interruptions that conferred sense of structure and situated meaning on my work. Could it be that all activity becomes meaningful only when conducted in the public? In any case, we were wrong to have ever looked upon the possibility of interruption as a nuisance or distraction. In fact, the more entangled they were with the lives of others who inhabit our world, the more meaningful our activities became. The quarantine signifies the interruption of this shared sensibility and with it, made all the other interruptions that followed from it impossible as well. 

Who imposes restriction of movement?

And yet, things are still happening in Chile: in other regions, residents have continued participating in the uprising by blockading the industries that destroy their territories. In Patagonia, for instance, several towns have been engaged in a decades-long conflict with the players in the salmon industry. By dumping antibiotics, feed, and waste, salmon farms have decimated the waterways on which local fishermen rely, while industrial freight trucks ravage the narrow country roads that connect towns to one another. 

When things kicked off back in October, the breadth and depth of the upheaval became apparent to us only after learning that, while Santiago was burning, rural communities were also erecting barricades on country roads and interrupting Chile’s major industries. These same towns blockaded the roads that brought workers and supplies to the Salmon farms. In those days, to get a reading of the situation within one’s city, it sufficed to walk down the street, and yet it was comparatively difficult to gather news of the protests elsewhere in the country. Despite this difficulty, “Free Chiloe” (Chiloe Libre) graffiti proliferated on buildings throughout Santiago. 

When the COVID outbreak began to spread outside Santiago, residents on the Patagonian island of Chiloe blocked ferries carrying salmon industry workers. Eventually, the government restricted transportation to the Island to prevent the spread of Coronavirus; yet, when a ferry arrived bringing additional police forces to enforce the quarantine, Chiloe residents attempted to block that ferry, too. 

A Determinate Ambiguity

In his recent reflection on Agamben and the legacy of the Chilean state of exception, Gerard Munoz offers some insight into why the state’s emergency measures ultimately failed to take any effective hold during the October uprising:

The Chilean debate is in a better position to arrive at a mature understanding of the state of exception, not as an abstract formula, but as something latent within democracies. The dispensation of Western politics into security and exceptionality is not a conceptual horizon of what politics could be; it is what the ontology of the political represents once the internal limits of liberal principles crumble to pieces (and with it, any separation between consumers and citizens, state and market, jurisprudence and real subsumption).

In order to function, the deployment of a state of emergency relies on the liberal distinction between market and state, citizen and delinquent. The Chilean government appealed to the “security of the state”, but the uprising had already disproven the liberal principles of the post dictatorship Chile, and to such an extent that a reversal of course had for a time become strictly unthinkable. 

In the months following the social explosion, we could not have conceived any event that could bring any swift conclusion to the life of the streets. There was no amount of heavy-handed police repression that could have convinced us of a self-evident need for law and order; no over-hyped constitutional assembly or impending financial crisis could convince us that there was a real, external force that would interrupt the social explosion.  

And yet, here we are: the pandemic has brought an abrupt halt to the uprising in ways we had thought to be impossible. From the first week of the COVID outbreak, Plaza de la Dignidad has been quiet. There has been no lootings, even despite the lack of supplies. Conflicts with the police remain confined to the poblaciones. 

To what does it owe this power? The pandemic interrupted the uprising because to many , it appeared as an external force. If it possesses a power that no governmental ordinance can rival, this is because its presence tends to shatter the various separations on which the administration of this world depends because it doesn’t recognize the gap between state and market, consumer and citizen, jurisprudence and subsumption. As a result, we know longer know if we are taking care of ourselves in resistance to the state, despite the state, or in subordination to the state. As the pandemic moves through this world, it interrupts the positive contact with which this world is based.  In the absence of such contact, we are left with scrambled claims of obedience and contestation, resistance and self-assertion. 

This is not the place to recall the extent to which the fictive ideals of liberal democracy depended on the growth of a fracture between interior and exterior realms of experience: public reason and private obedience, faith and confession, moral conscience and political right, etc. Where once there appeared a world, full and filthy with attachments, heresies, and allegiances, only a subject—a self-possessed and autonomous citizen—would be left to remain. Was this not the project of modern economic governance? 

Not only has the experience of space been re-liberalizing, but also the forms of care have followed suit. As the insurrection recedes, and with it, the bustling and rich horizon of shared attention and concern, the forms of care that now replace it already bear the stain within them of that absence to the world that defined the modern liberal subject. While we are moved with everyone with a conscience to care for others, we do not confuse the notions of care we are told to do within social distancing with the practices we developed that were only possible by fully inhabiting a shared territory. We are told this crisis threatens the vulnerable, the infirm, the elderly; that, in taking care of ourselves, we are taking care of others; that our role, as participants in a ‘shared world’, is to reduce the spread through social distancing and isolation. Yet, to be deprived of social life and the use of public space, is to be deprived of those very experiences that confer meaning on concepts such as care, support, and community action. After all, to experience a common world is to participate in the activities that make it not merely possible, but real; only through combination and encounter can our singular capacities reveal to us all that outstrips them, all that can only belong to anyone, to everyone. In quarantine, we risk being denied the conditions that make possible an awareness that we inhabit a shared world.  

– Emilio, Santiago de Chile. April 20th, 2020

QUARANTINE LETTER #5: UNRECONCILED
Ron Sakolsky

Stop blaming me, accusing me, stalking me. Working yourselves into an anti-viral paralysis. All of that is childish. Let me propose a different perspective. See me as your savior instead of your gravedigger. You’re free not to believe me, but I have come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find. I have come in order to suspend the operation that held you hostage. I have come in order to demonstrate the aberration that normality constitutes. Ask yourselves how you could find it so comfortable to let yourselves be governed. Don’t let those who’ve led you to the abyss claim to be saving you from it: they will prepare for you a more perfect hell, an even deeper grave. Thanks to me for an indefinite time you will no longer work, your kids won’t go to school, and yet it will be the opposite of a vacation. Vacations are the space that must be filled up at all costs while waiting for the obligatory return to work. I render you idle. Use the time I’m giving you to envision the world of the aftermath in light of what you’ve learned from the collapse that’s underway. The disaster ends when the economy ends. The economy is the devastation.

                          from “What the Virus Said”

Just when I was feeling most elated about prospects for the future given the strength of the Indigenous resistance sweeping Canada in early 2020, the coronavirus arrived on the scene with whiplash-inducing force to upstage everything in its deadly path unexpectedly shutting down whatever parts of the Canadian economy had not already been intentionally shut down by the Wet’suwet’en land defenders and those involved in solidarity actions that had immediately preceded the spread of the disease. Rather than framing The Virus exclusively within the kind of nightmare scenario that is typically associated with the mainstreaming of the term “surreal” (as if all there ever is to surrealism’s critique of reality is this dark side), I want to instead illuminate the surreal possibilities for social transformation that can be revealed by creating a surreal (rather than literal) analogy between the contagion of the virus and the contagion of revolt.

Starting in February of this year the appearance of a widespread Indigenous uprising on the stage of Canadian history swiftly moved the realm of the surreal from dreams of radical transformation to the direct action undertaken to bring it about. Railways, highways and ferries were blockaded, provincial legislatures, government administrative offices, banks and corporate headquarters were occupied. For many inconvenienced Canadians, such actions as these were considered to be unacceptable even though they would prove to be only a fraction as disruptive as the more authoritarian forms of state control that would later shelter under the legitimacy of saving us from The Virus.

Though the immediacy of the COVID-19 pandemic would quickly overshadow the earlier Indigenous revolt in the public eye, it is now evident to many that the smiley-faced mask of Canadian colonialism has been pulled off to reveal a state that in spite of its professed human rights and climate change awareness rhetoric continues to have no compunctions about invading Indigenous territory without consent to build pipelines for fracked natural gas and tar sands oil because of what it considers to be in the best interests of the almighty economy. As Tawinikay (aka Southern Wind Woman) has written, “If only one thing has brought me joy in the last few weeks, it began when the matriarchs at Unist’ot’en burned the Canadian flag and declared reconciliation dead. Like wildfire, it swept through the hearts of youth across the territories. Out of their mouths, with teeth bared, they echoed back: reconciliation is dead! reconciliation is dead! Reconciliation was a distraction, a way for them to dangle a carrot in front of us and trick us into behaving. Do we not have a right to the land stolen from our ancestors? It’s time to shut everything the fuck down”.

Just as Indigenous peoples have demanded their land back in rural areas while pronouncing the false hope of government-brokered reconciliation to be dead, the systemic dislocations to the economy brought on by the coronavirus have led urban anarchists to address fundamental land issues by calling for rent strikes. But why stop there? In response to the devastation associated with The Virus, we have heard calls for the cessation of not only rent, but mortgage and utility payments, even the cancellation of debt itself, the end of wage slavery, and demands for the cessation of arrests for minor offenses, the release of prisoners who have committed non-violent crimes, or flat-out prison abolition. As surrealists we might ask ourselves what other noxious aspects of reality might be called into question and transformed by beginning to imagine what might exist in their place.

Where I live in British Columbia, resource extraction has always been the name of the game, but the emergence this year of a widespread oppositional network ranging from “land back” Indigenous warriors to elder traditionalists and from Extinction Rebellion activists to anarchist insurrectionaries has been heartening. Together, this multi-pronged force disrupted business as usual in solidarity with Unist’ot’en and Wet’suwet’en land defenders, and threatened to bring the Canadian economy to a grinding halt. This time growing numbers of Indigenous peoples were not willing to be bought off by corporate bribes or mollified by a legal system that has never done anything but pacify, brutalize, or betray them in the process of stealing their land. This time people fought back in droves against the forces of colonial law and order. This time the air was alive with a spirit of refusal and rebellion with one action building upon another in a burgeoning movement that could not be stopped. When one railroad blockade would be busted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), another would spring up in its place elsewhere extending the frontlines of the battle all across the continent.

As I write, the wheel of change is still in spin. What the final outcome will be in relation to either the COVID-19 virus or the virus of revolt is unknown, especially in relation to the predatory nature of the times in which we live where the emphasis is often placed on the institution of statist forms of social control rather than grass roots mutual aid efforts in relation to the immanence of societal upheaval. Even though the pandemic has supposedly shut down the provincial economy with lightning speed, Coastal Gas Link’s pipeline construction efforts with their invasive industrial “man-camps” have still been allowed to continue to exist on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory with RCMP logistical support, thereby callously endangering the health and safety of the Indigenous inhabitants. It’s abundantly clear whose lives matter to the Canadian government and whose don’t. Consequently, it will remain very hard for the authorities to put the genie of Indigenous rebellion back in the colonial bottle in the future. In the meantime, we are mourning what of value we’ve lost from the past, celebrating what we’ve created in the present, and still demanding the impossible.

THE FUNERAL OF SALVATORE RICCIARDI: Celebrating a friend and comrade, while taking over public space again

WU MING

A final farewell to Salvo, to the songs of Su, communists of the capital! “This rebellious city, never tamed by ruins and bombings…”

Of all the measures taken during this emergency, the ban on funeral services is among the most dehumanizing.

In the name of what idea of “life” have these measures been taken? In the prevailing rhetoric of these past few weeks, life has been reduced almost entirely to the survival of the body, to the detriment of any other dimension of it. In this there is a very strong thanatophobic connotation (from the Greek Thanatos, or death), a morbid fear of dying.

Thanatophobia has permeated our society for decades. Already in 1975, the historian Philippe Ariès, in his landmark History of Death in the West, noted that death, in capitalist societies, had been “domesticated”, bureaucratized, partly deritualized and separated as much as possible from the living, in order to “spare  […] society the disturbance and too strong emotion” of dying, and maintain the idea that life “is always happy, or at least must always look like it”.

To this end, he continues, it was strategic "to shift the site where we die. We no longer die at home, among family members, we die at the hospital, alone […] because it has become inconvenient to die at home”. Society, he said, must “realize as little as possible that death has occurred”. This is why many rituals related to dying are now considered embarrassing and in a phase of disuse.

Even before the state of emergency we are experiencing, the rituality of dying had been reduced to a minimum. That is why we have always been so impressed by the manifestations of its re-emergence. Think of the worldwide success of a film like The Barbarian Invasions by Denys Arcand.

Forty-five years ago, Ariès wrote: “no one has the strength or patience to wait for weeks for a moment [death, Editor’s note] that has lost its meaning”. And what does the 2003 Canadian film depict if not a group of people waiting for weeks - in a context of conviviality and re-emerging secular rituality - the passing of a friend?

Eight years ago we undertook, together with many others, to set up an environment of conviviality and secular rituality around a dear friend and companion, Stefano Tassinari, in the weeks leading up to his death and in the ceremonies that followed. Much of our questioning on this subject dates back to that time.

If the rituality linked to dying was already reduced to a minimum, the ban on attending the funeral of a loved one had finally annihilated it.

Back on March 25th we shared a beautiful letter from a parish priest from Reggio, Don Paolo Tondelli, who was dismayed at the scenes he had to witness:

“And so I find myself standing in front of the cemetery, with three children of a widowed mother who died alone at the hospital because the present situation does not allow for the assistance of the sick. They cannot enter the cemetery, the measures adopted do not allow it. So they cry: they couldn’t say goodbye to their mother when she gave up living, they can’t say goodbye to her even now while she is being buried. We stop at the cemetery gate, in the street, I am bitter and angry inside, I have a strong thought: even a dog is not taken to the grave like this. I think we have exaggerated for a moment in applying the rules in this way, we are witnessing a dehumanization of essential moments in the life of every person; as a Christian, as a citizen I cannot remain silent […] I say to myself: we are trying to defend life, but we are running the risk of not conserving the mystery that is so closely linked to it”.

This “mystery” is not the exclusive prerogative of the Christian faith nor of those possessing a religious sensibility, since it does not necessarily coincide with the belief in the immortal soul or anything else, but something that we all ask ourselves, when we ask, ‘what does it mean to live?’ 'What distinguishes living from merely moving on or simply not dying?

That said, those who are believers and observers have experienced the suspension of ritual ceremonies - including funeral masses - as an attack on their form of life. It is no coincidence that among the examples of clandestine organization that we have heard about these days, there is the catacombal continuation of Christian public life.

We have direct evidence that in many parishes the faithful continued to attend mass, despite the signs on the doors saying they were suspended. One finds the “hard core” of the parishioners in the refectory of the convent, or in the rectory, or in the sacristy and in some cases in the church. Twenty, thirty people, summoned by word of mouth. In particular last Thursday, for the Missa in coena Domini.

The same can be said of funerals. In this case as well we have direct testimonies of priests who officiated small rites, with close family members, without publicity.

In the past few days, we have identified three types of disobedience to some of the stupidest and most inhumane features of the lock-down.

Individual disobedience

The individual gesture is often invisible but occasionally it is showy, as in the case of that runner on the deserted beach of Pescara, hunted by security guards for no reason that has any epidemiological basis. The video went viral, and had the effect of demonstrating the absurdity of certain rules and their obtuse application.

Continuing to run was, objectively and in its outcome, a very effective performance, an action of resistance and “conflictual theatre”. Continuing to run distinguishes qualitatively that episode from the many others which offer “only” further evidence of repression. As Luigi Chiarella “Yamunin” wrote, the video brings to mind,

“a passage from Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti on grasping, which is indeed a gesture of the hand but also and above all is 'the decisive act of power where it manifests itself in the most evident way, from the most remote times, among animals and among men’. Later, he adds - and here comes the part pertinent to the episode of the runner - that 'there is nevertheless a second powerful gesture, certainly no less essential even if not so radiant. Sometimes one forgets, under the grandiose impression aroused by grasping, the existence of a parallel and almost equally important action: not letting oneself be grasped”. The video […] reminded me how powerful and liberating it is not to let yourself be caught. Then I don’t forget that if you run away you do it to come back with new weapons, but in the meantime you must not let yourself be grabbed.“

Clandestine group disobedience

These are the practices of the parishioners who organize themselves to go to mass on the sly, of the family members of a dearly departed person who agree with the parish priest to officiate a funeral rite… but also of the groups who continue in one way or another to hold meetings, of the bands who continue to rehearse, and of the parents who organize themselves together with a teacher to retrieve their children’s school books. It’s an episode that happened in a city in Emilia, which we recounted a few days ago.

In order to retrieve the books from a first grade school that had been left at school for the last month, a teacher came to the school, took the books out hidden in a shopping cart, and entrusted them to two parents who live near a baker and a convenience store respectively, so that the other parents could go and pick them up with the "cover” of buying groceries, avoiding possible fines. The books were given to the individual parents by lowering them with a rope from a small balcony and stuffed into shopping bags or between loaves of bread, as if they were hand grenades for the Resistance. In this way those children will at least be able to follow the program on the book with the teacher in tele-education, and the parents will be able to have support for the inevitable homeschooling.

After a phase of shock in which unconditional obedience and mutual guilt prevailed, sectors of civil society - and even “interzone” between institutions and civil society - are reorganizing themselves “in hiding”. In this reorganization it is implicit that certain restrictions are considered incongruous, irrational, indiscriminately punitive.

Furthermore: at the beginning of the emergency, parental chats were, in general, among the worst hotbeds of panic, culture of suspicion, toxic voice messages, calls for denunciation. The fact that now some of them are also being used to circumvent delusional prohibitions - why shouldn’t a teacher be able to retrieve the textbooks left in the classroom? why should a dad or a mom have to resort to subterfuge, self-certification, etc. to retrieve those books? - is yet another proof that the “mood” has changed.

Provocative group disobedience

The performance of the trio from Rimini - a man and two women - who had sex in public places and put the videos online, accompanied with insults hurled at the police, is part of this rarefied case history.

The police have since held a grudge against the case, as exemplified by their official social channels.

The only thing missing from this catalog of disobedience is, of course…

Claimed group disobedience

Here we have in mind visible, and no longer merely clandestine collective disobedience.

For a moment we feared that the fascists would be the first to bring it into play. Forza Nuova attempted to leverage the dismay of believers in the prospect of an Easter “behind closed doors,” and without the Via Crucis. However, when leaflets circulated calling for a procession to St. Peter’s Basilica tomorrow (Sunday 4.12), accompanied by mottos such as “In hoc signo vinces” and “Rome will not know an Easter without Christ”, they were dismayed to find that it wasn’t the Fascists who were behind them. Instead, it was our comrades and friends from Radio Onda Rossa and the Roman liberatory movement who, this morning, in S. Lorenzo, greeted Salvatore Ricciardi with what in effect became the first political demonstration in the streets since the beginning of the emergency. 

Salvatore Ricciardi, 80 years old, was a pillar of the Roman antagonist left. A former political prisoner, for many years he was involved in fights inside prisons and against prison conditions. He did so in a number of books and countless broadcasts on Radio Onda Rossa, which yesterday dedicated a moving four-hour live special to him. He continued to do so until even a few days ago, on his blog Contromaelstrom, writing about imprisonment and coronavirus. 

Headlines about this morning’s events can already be read in the mainstream press. A precise chronicle, accompanied by some valuable remarks, can be heard in this phone call from an editor of Radio Onda Rossa [here]. Among other things, our comrade points out: “here there are rows of people standing in front of the butchers shop for days and days, yet we cannot even bid farewell to the dead? […] We’re in the open air, while in Rome there’s not even a requirement to wear a mask and yet many people had masks, and there were only a few people anyway”…Yet the police still threatened to use a water cannon to disperse a funeral ritual. The part of the district where the seditious gathering took place was closed and those present were detained by police.

During this emergency, we’ve seen so many surreal scenes - today, to offer just one example, a helicopter took to the sky, wasting palates of public money, in pursuit of a single citizen walking on a Sicilian beach - and even still, this morning’s apex had not yet been reached.

For our part, we say kudos and solidarity to those who run, and are out running great risks to claim their right to live together - in public space that they have always crossed with their bodies and filled with their lives - out of pain and mourning for the loss of Salvo, but also out of happiness for having had him as a friend and companion.

“Because the bodies will return to occupy the streets. Because without the bodies there is no Liberation.”

That’s what we were writing yesterday, taking up the “Song of el-'Aqila Camp”. We reaffirm our belief that it will happen. And the government fears it too: is it by chance that just today Minister Lamorgese warned against “hotbeds of extremist speech”? 

In her telephone interview, the Radio Onda Rossa editor says that the current situation, in essence, could last a year and a half. Those in power would like it to be a year and a half without the possibility of protest. They are prepared to use health regulations to prevent collective protests and struggles. Managing the recession with sub iudice civil rights is ideal for those in power.

It is right to disobey absurd rules

We should point out once again that, whilst keeping a population under house arrest, while prohibiting funerals, and de jure or de facto preventing anyone from taking a breath of fresh air - which is almost a unique phenomenon in the West, since only Spain follows us on this - and while shaming individual conduct like jogging, going out “for no reason”, or shopping “too many times”…while this whole little spectacle is going on, Italy remains the European country with the highest  COVID-19 mortality rate. Good peace of mind for those who spoke of an “Italian model” to be imitated by other countries.

Who is responsible for such a debacle? It is not a hard question to answer: it was the people who did not establish a medical cordon around Alzano and Nembro in time, because the owner asked them not to; it was those who spread infection in hospitals through an impressive series of negligent decisions; those who turned RSAs and nursing homes into places of mass coronavirus death; and lastly, those who, while all this was happening, diverted public attention toward nonsense and harmless behavior, while pointing the finger at scapegoats. This was blameworthy, even criminal behavior.

Everywhere in the world the coronavirus emergency has presented a golden opportunity to restrict the spaces of freedom, settle accounts with unwelcome social movements, profit from the behavior to which the population is forced, and restructure to the detriment of the weakest.

Italy adds to all this its standard surfeit of irrational ravings. The exceptionality of our “model” of emergency management lies in its complete overturning of scientific logic. For it is one thing to impose - for good (Sweden) or for bad (another country at random) - physical distancing as a necessary measure to reduce the possibility of contagion; it is quite another to lock the population in their homes and prevent them from leaving except for reasons verified by police authorities. The jump from one to the other imposed itself alongside the idea - also unfounded - that one is safe from the virus while “indoors”, whereas “outdoors” one is in danger.

Everything we know about this virus tells us exactly the opposite, namely that the chances of contracting it in the open air are lower, and if you keep your distance even almost zero, compared to indoors. On the basis of this self-evidence, the vast majority of countries affected by the pandemic not only did not consider it necessary to prevent people from going out into the open air generally, as they did in France, but in some cases even advised against it.

In Italy, this radius is, at best, two hundred meters from home, but there are municipalities and regions that have reduced it to zero meters. For those who live in the city, such a radius is easily equivalent to half a block of asphalt roads, which are much more crowded than in the open space outside the city, if it could be reached. For those who live in the countryside, however, or in sparsely populated areas, a radius of two hundred meters is equally absurd, since the probability of meeting someone and having to approach them is infinitely lower than in an urban center.

Not only that: we have seen that very few countries have introduced the obligation to justify their presence outdoors by authorizations, certificates, and receipts, even calculating the distance from home using Google Maps. This is also an important step: it means putting citizens at the mercy of law enforcement agencies.

We have recorded cases of hypertensive people, with a medical prescription recommending daily exercise for health reasons, fined €500; or people fined because they were walking with their pregnant partner, to whom the doctor had recommended walking. The list of abuses and idiocies would be long, and one may consult our website for further examples.

Legal uncertainty, the arbitrariness of police forces, the illogical limitation of behavior that presents no danger to anyone, are all essential elements of the police state.

Having to respect an illogical, irrational norm is the exercise of obedience and submission par excellence.

It will never be “too soon” to rebel against such obligations.

It must be done, before it’s too late.

Translated by Ill Will Editions

Against Pandemic Capitalism. An Interview with Milan’s Emergency Volunteer Brigades

Interview conducted March 21, 2020. 

1. How are you all? Are you managing to keep in touch virtually? Are you still managing to exist as a “group” or to keep to a “common position” despite the isolation?

We are fine. The situation here in Milan has been building into a crescendo. After February 23rd, there were weeks of uncertainty, during which there were contradictory orders from the government. During the first week the government closed some businesses, then they reopened them; later the awareness of the epidemic grew, and the more drastic measures were then applied. Now that everyone is pretty much isolated, although we are keeping in touch with each other frequently, it is more complicated to come up with  common positions and to exist as a group. At the same time, various communication channels and types of reflection and action have opened up,  yes. Some of us have focused more on the conditions in prisons, while others are engaged in translating or sharing thoughts. Some others converged in the local Solidarity Brigades, and others are looking for more contacts with comrades abroad to have a broader picture of the situation.

At the beginning everyone had their own perception of things; there were those who panicked and those who claimed that it was yet another way to instill fear in the population, since in any case politicians and medical experts seemed to espouse different opinions. From the governor of Lombardy, who published a selfie video locked in his house with a mask, to the mayor of Milan, who made a video entitled #milanononsiferma (#milanwillnotclose), in which he tries to show that the hyperproductive city would keep going; to virologists, who were insulting each other on various TV programs. Then the number of infected increased and the red zone was extended from Codogno (where the so-called “patient zero” was found) to the whole of Lombardy. People started to develop a different perception of risk: by that point, we all knew someone who had been infected. As I mentioned, nobody had really understood what was happening and we continued our everyday collective routines (collective football training, meetings, assemblies, and so on). From March 9th, the government took a unified national approach; the red zone was extended across the whole of Italy. Orders were given not to leave the house, unless you had a certificate provided by the authorities. The restrictions have been very strict: an evening curfew begins at 6pm is in place. Since then, all of Italy has been “online”.

Many initiatives were born, from tutorials about how to defend against COVID-19, to new radio and streaming sites, meetings (especially on Zoom) filled with people who often have never even met, some from all over the world. The absurdity of it is that we are experiencing a more conscious use of our devices. While before we perceived them as instruments of alienation and distraction, we now use them better as ways of sharing knowledge.

As for our group, we had been facing a period of great fragmentation. Ironically, the work of the brigades and the presence of a common but invisible enemy now involves everyone, since we are all touched by the same problem.

2. What is the situation in working-class neighbourhoods? How are the cops and the army behaving? In Milan, as we know, the police are generally very aggressive, but their attitude can change according to zone, acting civil enough and “teacherly” in more well-to-do neighbourhoods, and with the arrogant and violent “colonizing” approach in more working-class neighbourhoods. 

The situation in the working-class districts of Milan changes depending on the area. In the densely-populated areas, filled with small and overcrowded houses, and mainly inhabited by foreigners, life continues to take place in the streets. Walking around in neighbourhoods like Giambellino or via Padova, you might see smaller food shops still open, creating spaces to meet for people who seem unconcerned with the directions issued by the authorities to stay at home. The police patrol the streets, but not in an overly dominating fashion, mostly trying to limit these numerous gatherings. The army was already present in some areas with an anti-terrorist function. Since the 23rd of March we’ve seen their number increasing and they have begun to patrol as public officials with the possibility of stopping and asking for documents or ID. It seems that for now, they don’t seem particularly comfortable in this role, showing a certain reluctance in being aggressive. In neighbourhoods where the presence of the police is usually regarded with hostility, the discouragement of gatherings and “dangerous” kinds of behaviour becomes difficult to put into practice.

Other working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts, where people normally only go home to sleep, seem deserted. After the closing of the shops inside the shopping centres (the only places in these areas where social life takes place), life has died out, and everyone hides in their own apartments. In the last few days, media-induced fears of the dangers of walking and doing sports in parks have spread, with people looking out from their balconies and railing against neighbours who go out to take a walk in the yard, or even call the police.

And it’s obvious that the slogan #iorestoacasa (#Istayathome) is not considered relevant to everyone. Those who can afford to pay rent and have a job are locked in their homes, doing online shopping, while the rest of the population, either precarious or unemployed, working in logistics or infrastructure, experience a quite different situation. A very wide gap between the classes has opened. Confindustria (General Confederation of Italian Industry) forced workers to keep on working in factories without any health and safety precautions.

So in working-class neighbourhoods, many people are continuing to work. The increase of police and military in the streets is considerable but there isn’t a huge gap between neighborhoods: they are simply everywhere. We are seeing another phenomenon too, which is the becoming-policemen of normal citizens, which is perhaps stronger in bourgeois residential areas: there have been many episodes of people denouncing others to the police, or just people shouting “Go home!” to people walking in the street. Those who have been most affected by these severe measures have been homeless people and migrants.

3. How do the volunteer Brigades work? How do you handle the relationship between institutions (the state, local council, NGOs…)? How do you train those who participate? Where did the idea originate? How many people are involved? Are you trying to extend the idea to the whole of Italy?

The Brigades were born out of an idea that circulated as word of mouth on social media and it quickly became viral. The idea which came out of it is that we can obviously talk about who are responsible for all this, and they will have to pay the consequences, but in our current situation in which there is a diffuse sense of fear among people, we have to look out for the community, especially those of us who have experience with many different forms of organization, since we have learned in these years to manage with “extreme” situations, to act with courage, for the sake of everyone. We were inspired by several examples of mutual aid and organizations which worked throughout Italy after the earthquakes in the center of Italy (in the 2000s).

We understood pretty quickly that this situation was much larger than us, and that it wouldn’t be sufficient to do things autonomously or even on the national level, so that we would be vulnerable from multiple sides, especially vis-a-vis repression. If you’re found out of your house without any particular reason they can sanction you.

We looked for an organization that could give us the possibility of having an official status, and found Emergency, the humanitarian organization which provides aid in war situations and which has its offices in Milan. Through this we were able to construct an infrastructure which legitimates us and which mediates between us and the Milan local council. In the same way that we created the “Brigades” through our personal involvement, which began from social media and word-of-mouth, we also found individuals for each area to coordinate the groups. This structure has organized training sessions, first of all for the group leaders, who in turn started training the people in their own groups. The structure also allowed us to have passes in order to be able to move around the city freely. Currently we have more than 200 volunteers and many people on the waiting list to be trained and many others who continue to write saying that they would like to join. We are managing to cover all the 9 districts of Milan and the calls are increasing daily. In some areas we are connected to social centers or self-organized spaces which make up the base of the Brigades.

Our structures are being tested daily but it is still small and spread out, and we are being contacted by people from other parts of Italy who are beginning to organize themselves in the same way. Our goal is to create an infrastructure across the whole of Italy.

4. Can you update us on the situation in the prisons? Are there ways to stay in contact with people inside? (Here they gave a “bonus” of €40 for every inmate, which allow them to make more phone calls, and they gave free TV access to everyone, hoping in this way to placate unrest)

After the riots, and the deaths in prison, and the first case of Covid-19 in the Voghera prison, the “Cura Italia” (“Heal Italy”) decree established new orders on how to confront the pandemic in penitentiary institutions: house arrest and electronic tags for those serving less than 18 months; those under 6 months and minors are to be directly sent home, without tags.

Beyond this, it was established that those accused of having participated in the revolts of March 9th/10th will not be allowed to benefit from these alternative measures. Following the protests many sections were destroyed, and for this reason there has been a decrease of 2000 prison places, due to works that have to be carried out immediately.

News reached us (from allies and family members) of many reprisals in the Opera prison: the inmates report going hungry and fearing for themselves, they describe being denied TV, food, showers, phone calls; having only half an hour of air, and being beaten, hands and bones broken; “riot police entered the cells and beat us up in the dark”; the guards took away cooking materials and gave the inmates only water and cigarettes.

After the events of March many inmates were separated in order to put down the unrest; this was the case in Ferrara and Alessandria; 60 inmates in Melfi, 500 in Modena, 107 in Foggia, and 60 in Naples, were transported on a military boat belonging to the Italian navy to the correctional facility on the island of Procida; 650 from Poggioreale were separated and put into different jails in Brindisi, Messina, Bari, Lagonegro, Melfi, Potenza and Reggio Calabria.

Day after day the numbers of guards and inmates infected and testing positive increases.

At this link you can find the account of Nicoletta Dosio on the situation in the prison of Vallette in Turin here [in Italian].

5. Do you have any advice on how to manage – emotionally, psychologically – the fact of having to stay inside all the time? Here it is only the third day and many are still experiencing it almost as though it were a game. What are your reflections after ten days?

The first thing we believe is important is not to allow oneself to be infantilized, but to assume responsibility. Despite the state wanting the former, it is important to understand that this situation concerns us all, our loved ones, and the more vulnerable members of our society both on the social and physical level. Staying inside all the time with this awareness can really notably help our sense of self-discipline. Moreover, moments like these, which people who have experienced house arrests know well, are moments to keep oneself occupied to the utmost. It is almost redundant to say: study, train, reflect. In the end I maintain that it is important to treat it as a kind of “suspended time” when we can finally concentrate on our collective strategies (or the lack of these), also in the light of recent events, without the stress or the lack of time caused by the frenetic pace of our normal daily routines (work, militancy, etc.)

At first it seems like a game, especially for the many of us who have for a long time been trying to flee hyper-productivity. We have found ourselves obviously amused by the hysteria of people, who in the first hours became enraged at supermarkets and shops who sold face masks. Added to this is the sensation of living in an episode of Black Mirror – the streets are empty and the few people on the streets are walking around with masks on.

At first we passed the time reading, discovering things on the internet or having dinners restricted to a small number of friends, where obviously the main theme of discussion was the virus. Slowly as the days passed we began to understand the seriousness of what was happening: people are now all stuck at home and our contact with the outside world has been reduced to three or four people, which is, the people we were always in contact with. Further contact was avoided for good reason, and those with family over a certain age stopped all contact with others. For now, on the emotional and psychological level we keep struggling, perhaps because the Brigades give a practical sense to these days, and also because we are seeing the exasperating effects of the virus on capitalism: people fighting outside supermarkets in queues, or because social distancing is not being kept up, or other kinds of unrestrained egotism.

At this point the question has a global importance and we have the possibility to turn this into a potential and to grow the network we have been building for years, though, on the other hand, power also has this potential. It is not incidental that in these days we have been able to have virtual assemblies with comrades from many different places, where we have been able to discuss the experience of the Brigades.

The idea is that when our methods will have been tested a little we will also be able to go further than just helping out those who need it most. Maybe one day on the streets there will only be the brigades and the police and this could be an interesting scenario. We have to consider however that the state and global capitalism are using this moment as a kind of experiment on a massive scale and we cannot underestimate this; we have to remain attentive and to study the movements of power to try to understand what will happen afterwards. Perhaps certain things could enter into the daily lives of people, for example this question of sociality and work. The experiment that is happening is moving on different levels; from the repression of those who leave the house to “tele-working”, the many working from home. Schools are continuing to conduct courses online, thus in part people at home are being employed to “produce” in a new way.

Further, the virus, being immaterial and invisible, seems insurmountable and so it legitimates the state even more to project a voice that everyone necessarily listens to, keeping us all suspended since no one has any idea when this will end. There is an extreme pressure exerted upon individual responsibility so as to move away from all kind of social tension which might allow a realization of who the real people responsible for this are.

It’s a strange feeling leaving the house alone to go to the supermarket. Even if people don’t talk to one another, many people exchange complicit looks, since we all now have this in common, even if we’ve never known these people as friends, in the sense that they’ve never been this side of the barricade. This should make us reflect. We have to remain immersed in this situation and be strong in order to turn the situation in the right direction when the time comes.

6. Given that protests, demonstrations, and street presence are now impossible, what are ways of maintaining pressure on the authorities, in order to give voice to objections to the discourse that says “let’s save the economy at all costs”?

In this respect the most combative elements have been the militant unions such as SI COBAS (a small communist union operating on the national level), which are also the most directly involved given that, as we said, the majority of factories remain open undisturbed, in flagrant disregard of all the warnings to stay at home. So the voice of opposition has for now been principally represented by strikes, in which however, most of us don’t have the occasion to physically participate. The situation in prisons is different; groups of comrades are trying to get organised even if also here the difficulties are not at all few. After the first wave of protests in prisons, protests are continuing but they have been repressed with impunity, and the main task now is getting news out from inside, and to circulate it as much as possible.

We have to take account of people’s emotional reactions to what is happening, and acknowledge those people who have lost a relative or loved one to the virus. It’s difficult to imagine a movement exploding as yet, in this context. On top of this there is the fact that in Italy over the last years movements have suffered many setbacks and steps backward in terms of confronting power, and there is no united front, nor strong position from which to begin. Everything is very fragmented and so what we manage to bring forwards in struggle is a reflection of this pacification.

One practical example was the 8^th of March – the global trans-feminist strike. Already being in the period of the quarantine we had to think what actions people could do. Hundreds of initiatives came about around the city; a new radio program, and many actions, from banners and posters, to writing, to whatever other form of protest which allowed people to feel involved. But nothing that meant direct conflict.

It’s moreover clear that contradictions have emerged; from one side the politicians who have  made many gross errors, the public health system which is falling apart (as a result of the cuts over the last years), the fact of the middle class being at home, while delivery workers are in the streets delivering food, Confindustria deciding not to close down production and the larger unions which are playing around, the logistics workers who continue to work without any safety measures, the workers with unprotected faces who are risking their lives; on the other side, the campaign emphasizing individual responsibility of #iorestoacasa (#Istayathome) which is, of course, a way of concealing the truth of the situation.

Anger is coming to the surface, the autonomous unions have begun their strikes and are distributing provisions and masks to those in need, trying to impose a stop on production; the precarious workers have opened disputes in the hope of obtaining an income during the quarantine; and people are making appeals trying to stop online shopping because it puts those people who are making the deliveries at risk. The workers at the Amazon offices in Milan went on strike. As yet it hasn’t been possible to construct a strong position on how to give a positive sense to economic failure. 25 million unemployed people are expected once this is all over, and fear is high. For now it is very difficult but we think that with the work of the brigades it will be possible to construct a strong common position.

7. Have you noticed any new forms of solidarity among generations and in neighborhoods? What’s happening out of town? Do you have any updates from comrades in the countryside?

Our comrades living in the countryside describe a much quieter picture, free from the anxiety about contagion that one feels in the city. It’s easier for people to move around because controls are limited. You can buy food and any kind of “essentials” without difficulty, and farms that are still operating still receive the supplies they need. They’re dealing with labour shortages though.

8. Have there been moments of panic, people fleeing from big cities? Leaving Northern Italy to go south? (We had a huge flow of “bourgeois” migration here. Many people have left to be isolation in more comfortable conditions in their countryside or seaside holiday home – thus threatening remote areas, typically inhabited by the elderly, with the risk of contagion)

Yes, panic broke out on the evening of March 8th. A lot of people took trains from Milan and left Lombardy. All because of leaked news about the government’s decision to isolate the region. Obviously, having hundreds of people crammed into a train certainly didn’t help prevent the virus from leaving Lombardy. Sure enough it had the opposite effect, leading to an increasingly higher number of infected people in Southern Italy in the following days. This kind of panic-induced internal migration continued for some days, with such intensity that some Southern regions decided to close their borders. At the beginning many people perceived the quarantine as a holiday, rushing towards ski slopes, beach resorts and second homes.

Yes, as I said, it has been a crescendo. In Northern Italy, for example, the start of quarantine took place when lots of people were on holidays, so many were stuck in the mountains or in their country houses. We witnessed great panic when the government decided to quarantine the whole of Lombardy  – creating the so-called “red zone”. When the news came out, there was an exodus. Southern people who work or study in the North traveled back home en masse. This was a totally irresponsible thing to do, insofar as they risked bringing the virus to other areas, especially since young people can be healthy carriers with often no symptoms at all. The sheer selfishness of this gesture brought out all the counter-revolutionary power of the Italian family.

9. How does the contrast between the North and South feel now? Can we say that the tables have turned regarding the famous “Southern question”? Any thoughts?

This is not about the classic, even ironized, North-South opposition. The issue must be considered in relation to the different healthcare systems. Of course, we are not happy that the crisis broke out in the region where we live.  Still, Lombardy is the richest region, with the best healthcare system in Italy and probably Europe (despite a succession of administrations cutting its budget). So we can be kind of relieved that it happened here. The Southern healthcare system has many more issues. Some problems are related to the staff, but the biggest issue is the inadequacy of infrastructure. A crisis like the one we’re having in the North would probably have brought the South to its knees.

In the last few days, the number of new patients in other regions – mostly Puglia and Campania, respectively South and Central Italy – has been increasing. We don’t really know how they’re facing the crisis (I mean, whether there is a network of mutual aid organizations and how they work), we’d need to ask people and healthcare personnel in those areas to get a better picture of it.

Some friends and relatives told us they’re very afraid, as though the epidemic had broken out there, as though Bergamo were a Southern city, so they respect the “safety” measures carefully. I don’t think we can say the tables have turned on the “Southern question”. Many thought they could get away with leaving the North and going back home as soon as the lockdown was imposed – they proved to be very selfish and harmful to those who had a chance not to be as affected by the epidemic. Because of this grave error we risk having ten Codognos instead of one. People who left the red zones are likely to infect relatives in isolated areas.

There is still a great economic and social divide between the North and the South, we know that pretty well. In Sicily, in Calabria or in Basilicata, people are very aware that hospitals do not have adequate means and tools to face this kind of emergency. As long as people have to stay at home it will be impossible to discuss these issues – we’ll probably have to wait until everything is over.

The North is the new South! Or not. Originally, the North of Italy (great center of production on an international scale) was floored by the epidemic and showed its weaknesses. It became the laughingstock of countries all around the world – nobody accepted tourists or travelers from Northern Italy. A great blow that hurt the pride of the colonizers, who had always been free to roam around the world. For once they found themselves on the ‘not welcome’ list. Obviously the North-South relationship in Italy has changed and become an object of humor. But what is actually very worrying is that the healthcare system in Lombardy, which is despite all one the most efficient in the country, is collapsing. So if the virus were to reach the South, the situation would be truly dramatic.

10. What is the general feeling about what the government is doing? Is it considered partly responsible for the situation, or are its efforts to face the crisis appreciated?

For what our perceptions are worth, the government is generally receiving good support from the people. Prime Minister Conte is considered a wise politician, and the fact that Italy acted immediately and firmly made people forget many doubts they had at the beginning. In fact, until the first weeks of March, most Northern politicians were pressured by business leaders into keeping the borders open and letting Milan run at full capacity. Moreover, the government has taken strong measures concerning healthcare and movement of goods and people, but gave in to the pressure of Confindustria. So big cities are under great restrictions, whereas in the rest of the region industries and businesses, even the non-essential ones, continue their activities adopting only laughable safety measures. No decision has been made on the issue of overcrowded prisons, despite many judges and courts asking for new policies. But people have become more aware of the situation – the current climate of emergency makes everyone more sensitive, even past the issue of hospital capacity. The stern but inspiring campaigns in favor of prisoners have moved many people as well. We should consider in this respect the old nationalist cliché about Italians selflessly coming together during hard times to fight for the community, which has resurfaced in this situation. “Sovereignist” leaders like Salvini and Meloni, surprisingly, are at the moment managing to act under the radar. Their beloved game of finding someone else to blame for every single problem and identifying an enemy cannot be played so easily in times when there are these appeals to unity, so they’re clutching at straws. The feeling is that they’re preparing for the aftermath, when the emergency will be over and we’ll have to rebuild everything from the ground up.

As I said, the situation is controversial. At first the government made some incredible mistakes, and revealed that it wasn’t able to respond to this emergency adequately. We’ve seen this in every crisis that affected the country in the last decades, from the earthquakes in central Italy to the collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa. There are many issues we have to deal with, most importantly budget cuts to the healthcare system and the lack of protections for logistics workers. We are talking about people dying here not because they are crushed by a crane, but because they are attacked by a virus, which actually affects everyone without distinction. People are therefore intensely focused on the issue but are “waiting for instructions from above”.

Many political collectives have highlighted the link between the capitalist system and the virus, and how it is transmitted. But for the time being, unfortunately, this is all talk, with a kind of academic character, especially given that we can’t even leave our homes.

11. How are people reacting to the plans for generalized digital surveillance (as already implemented in Israel or Iran)? Is it perceived as a “necessary evil”? Are there any ideas to counter these policies? Is the issue being addressed or is the health crisis preventing it?

So far it is not being addressed that much, certainly not at the level of general public opinion. As far as activist groups are concerned, it’s a bit complicated because the debate is now quite mixed up. From the beginning, philosopher Giorgio Agamben focused on the measures relating to the “state of exception”, and their possible consequences. Maybe he did so with a certain smugness and without caring too much about being understood correctly, so he was accused of minimizing the health crisis. The result is that now most of the comrades have slipped into a somewhat sterile debate between supporters and critics of the imposition of the state of exception. The critics accuse the supporters of being too abstract in front of real emergencies such as safety conditions in factories or prisons. As a result, it’s not easy to focus on the whole picture and avoid ideological squabbles.

We can talk about what has been happening in the last weeks. On March 19th, AgCom (national regulatory authorities for Italian communication industries) issued a press release asking social networks like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter to remove videos reporting false information or information from unreliable sources. It is the first time in Italy since 1948 that some fundamental freedoms, such as the freedom of movement, of assembly, and of expression, have been suspended. We will witness the effects of this measure in the upcoming days. The risk is that, the state taking advantage of an “emergency” situation, we could emerge from the catastrophe in much worse cultural conditions than when we entered it.

Personally, I’m very worried about this question. Many people are working from home and online 24/7, and are wondering about the future of our society. We fear that our movements will be GPS-tracked to check who is respecting the quarantine and who is not. On the other hand, many people see this situation as a positive change for the environment – since traffic has slowed, we experienced a significant decrease in air pollution, which is a major issue in Milan. So many now believe that this could also solve other problems. For the time being we need our devices to remain connected, but this situation will certainly have a significant impact on our lives.

12. What’s the general opinion on how other countries are approaching the situation? Were people angry at the thoughtlessness of countries still untouched by the pandemic?

Surely one of the most widespread feelings is disbelief and amazement. Italy had watched from afar the Chinese government dealing with the pandemic, a country that seems far away but is of course not so distant in our globalized world. However, we can’t understand how it is possible that European countries did not act as soon as they sensed what was happening in Italy. The example was there, before everyone’s eyes, even sometimes just a few kilometers away. This highlights once again the inadequacy of our leaders as well as our lack of preparation, awareness and independent sources of information.

Anti-European and Eurosceptic feelings are as always resurfacing. Some see the EU as a mindless bloodsucker that refuses to support Italy during this emergency. The best thing is probably the general discredit that people like Trump or Boris Johnson are suffering. In the midst of the crisis, their bullshit now sounds dangerous and crazy even to those who previously admired them as strong and charismatic leaders.

This is significant. We were very angry at first, when we couldn’t understand why they kept the information about when the virus first appeared concealed. Many people were disappointed in how Germany and England responded to this emergency. There’s also fear that if the pandemic breaks out in a serious way in the US, a huge number of people will die as a result of the private healthcare system. The only positive news we saw was that Bolsonaro came into contact with someone infected with Covid-19. That could save many more lives! However, at the moment, attention remains focused on our country, with 900 deaths per day and new outbreaks.

13. Can you imagine things on a longer scale? Do you think it’s possible to predict how things will be in the longer term? It almost seems like there will be no return to normality. What do you think will happen in the next few months?

It’s hard to say. It’s very difficult to make predictions while all these different newspapers and media throw news at us. It’s hard to reflect while isolated. Everyone knows that the more you stay at home, the less fresh air gets to your head. One day we experience pessimism and the next day hope, or at least you see new chances for some unexpected turn of events. Surely the months to come will be harder and harder. We’ll have to be ready to go out again and see how this situation has changed things. But how they will have changed, as I said, is impossible for us to know.

It’s hard to imagine what will happen now because we don’t know how long the lockdown will last. The whole world will change for sure. It’s also difficult to express “cynical” or critical ideas as many people are very sensitive about the pandemic. Some issues will be affected – the Mediterranean geopolitical scenario, Italy’s alliance with China for the new ‘silk road’ in Africa, the war in Syria that brings millions of migrants to Europe. It is no coincidence that borders are now closed all over the world, this seems to us as well to be a form of experimentation. 10 years ago we were studying the NATO Urban Operations in the Year 2020 report, and now here we are.

An interesting scenario could open up for us. We spent years traveling the world to build networks wherever people tried to confront the government, often getting in trouble with local authorities. Now we are experiencing a worldwide scenario that unites us all, especially in the West. We have the opportunity to create a common model that can apply to many places in the world. Once the emergency is over, that can legitimize us to speak up against those who have created these problems. For the time being, we can’t say what our next steps will be. We know that some activist groups from all over the country are planning to mobilize, inspired by the Volunteer Brigades. In order to create a common trajectory, we will need to connect with this broader viewpoint.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CURRENT PANDEMIC FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF IVAN ILLICH

David Cayley

Last week I began an essay on the current pandemic in which I tried to address what I take to be the central question that it raises:  Is the massive and costly effort to contain and limit the harm that the virus will do the only choice we have?  Is it no more than an obvious and unavoidable exercise of prudence undertaken to protect the most vulnerable?  Or is it a disastrous effort to maintain control of what is obviously out of control, an effort which will compound the damage being done by the disease with new troubles that will reverberate far into the future?  I hadn’t been writing for long before I began to realize that many of the assumptions I was making were quite remote from those being expressed all around me.  These assumptions had mainly come, I reflected, from my prolonged conversation with the work of Ivan Illich.  What this suggested was that, before I could speak intelligibly about our present circumstances, I would first have to sketch the attitude towards health, medicine and well-being that Illich developed over a lifetime of reflection on these themes.  Accordingly, in what follows, I will start with a brief account of the evolution of Illich’s critique of bio-medicine and then try to answer the questions I just posed in this light..

At the beginning of his 1973 book Tools of Conviviality, Illich described what he thought was the typical course of development followed by contemporary institutions, using medicine as his example.  Medicine, he said, had gone through “two watersheds.”  The first had been crossed in the early years of the 20th century when medical treatments became demonstrably effective and benefits generally began to exceed harms.  For many medical historians this is the only relevant marker – from this point on progress will proceed indefinitely, and, though there may be diminishing returns, there will be no point, in principle, at which progress will stop.  This was not the case for Illich.  He hypothesized a second watershed, which he thought was already being  crossed and even exceeded around the time he was writing.  Beyond this second watershed, he supposed, what he called counterproductivity would set in – medical intervention would begin to defeat its own objects, generating more harm than good.  This, he argued, was characteristic of any institution, good or service – a point could be identified at which there was enough of it and, after which, there would be too much.  Tools for Conviviality, was an attempt to identify these “natural scales” – the only such general and programmatic search for a philosophy of technology that Illich undertook.

Two years later in Medical Nemesis – later renamed, in its final and most comprehensive edition, Limits to Medicine – Illich tried to lay out in detail the goods and the harms that medicine does.  He was generally favourable to the large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good food, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal etc.  He also praised efforts then underway in China and Chile to establish a basic medical toolkit and pharmacopeia that would be available and affordable for all citizens, rather than allowing medicine to develop luxury goods that would remain forever out of reach of the majority.  But the main point of his book was to identify and describe the counterproductive effects that he felt were becoming evident as medicine crossed its second watershed.  He spoke of these fall-outs from too much medicine as iatrogenesis, and addressed them under three headings: clinical, social and cultural.  The first everyone, by now, understands – you get the wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug, the wrong operation, you get sick in hospital etc.  This collateral damage is not trivial.  An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus – Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways, April 2012 – estimated 7.5% of the Canadians admitted to hospitals every year suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 die as a result of medical mistakes. Around the same time, Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggested that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is around 400,000.  This is an impressive number, even if exaggerated – Nader’s estimate is twice as high per capita as The Walrus’s – but this accidental harm was not, by any means, Illich’s focus.  What really concerned him was the way in which excessive medical treatment weakens basic social and cultural aptitudes.  An instance of what he called social iatrogenesis is the way in which the art of medicine, in which the physician acts as healer, witness, and counsellor, tends to give way to the science of medicine, in which the doctor, as a scientist, must, by definition, treat his or her patient as an experimental subject and not as a unique case.  And, finally, there was the ultimate injury that medicine inflicts: cultural iatrogenesis.  This occurs, Illich said, when cultural abilities, built up and passed on over many generations, are first undermined and then, gradually, replaced altogether.  These abilities include, above all, the willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality, and the capacity to die one’s own death.  The art of suffering was being overshadowed, he argued, by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved – an attitude which doesn’t, in fact, end suffering but rather renders it meaningless, making it merely an anomaly or technical miscarriage.   And death, finally, was being transformed from an intimate, personal act – something each one can do – into a meaningless defeat – a mere cessation of treatment or “pulling the plug,” as is sometimes heartlessly said.  Behind Illich’s arguments lay a traditional Christian attitude.  He affirmed that suffering and  death are inherent in the human condition – they are part of what defines this condition.  And he argued that the loss of this condition would involve a catastrophic rupture both with our past and with our own creatureliness.  To mitigate and ameliorate the human condition was good, he said.  To lose it altogether was a catastrophe because we can only know God as creatures – i.e. created or given beings – not as gods who have taken charge of our own destiny.

Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power – a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health.  According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power, though this character may be hidden by the claim that all that is being asserted is care.  In the province of Ontario where I live, “health care” currently gobbles up more than 40% of the government’s budget, which should make the point clearly enough.  But this everyday power, great as it is, can be further expanded by what Illich calls “the ritualization of crisis.”  This confers on medicine “a license that usually only the military can claim.”  He continues:

Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency.  He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human…Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts.

In a footnote to this passage Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation.  The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.”  There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.”  Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception - and rule in its place as the very source of law.   This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims…in an emergency.”  Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates.  But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich.  Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.”  Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped, or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies.  

Ten years after Medical Nemesis was published, Illich revisited and revised his argument.  He did not, by any means, renounce what he had written earlier, but he did add to it quite dramatically.  In his book, he now said, he had been “blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic effect: the iatrogenesis of the body itself.”  He had “overlooked the degree to which, at mid-century, the experience of ‘our bodies and our selves’ had become the result of medical concepts and cares.”  In other words he had written, in Medical Nemesis, as if there were a natural body, standing outside the web of techniques by which its self-awareness is constructed, and now he could see that there is no such standpoint.  “Each historical moment,” he wrote, “is incarnated in an epoch-specific body.”  Medicine doesn’t just act on a preexisting state – rather it participates in creating this state.

This recognition was just the beginning of a new stance on Illich’s part.  Medical Nemesis had addressed a citizenry that was imagined as capable of acting to limit the scope of medical intervention.  Now he spoke of people whose very self-image was being generated by bio-medicine.  Medical Nemesis had claimed, in its opening sentence, that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”  Now he judged that that the major threat to health was the pursuit of health itself.   Behind this change of mind lay his sense that the world, in the meanwhile, had undergone an epochal change.  “I believe,” he told me in 1988, “that…there [has been] a change in the mental space in which many people live.  Some kind of a catastrophic breakdown of one way of seeing things has led to the emergence of a different way of seeing things.  The subject of my writing has been the perception of sense in the way we live; and, in this respect, we are, in my opinion, at this moment, passing over a watershed.  I had not expected in my lifetime to observe this passage.”  Illich characterized “the new way of seeing things” as the advent of what he called “the age of systems” or “an ontology of systems.”  The age that he saw as ending had been dominated by the idea of instrumentality – of using instrumental means, like medicine, to achieve some end or good, like health.  Characteristic of this age was a clear distinction between subjects and objects, means and ends, tools and their users etc.  In the age of systems, he said, these distinctions have collapsed.  A system, conceived cybernetically, is all encompassing – it has no outside.  The user of a tool takes up the tool to accomplish some end.  Users of systems are inside the system, constantly adjusting their state to the system, as the system adjusts its state to them.  A bounded individual pursuing personal well-being gives way to an immune system which constantly recalibrates its porous boundary with the surrounding system.

Within this new “system analytic discourse,” as Illich named it, the characteristic state of people is disembodiment.  This is a paradox, obviously, since what Illich called “the pathogenic pursuit of health” may involve an intense, unremitting and virtually narcissistic preoccupation with one’s bodily state.  Why Illich conceived it as disembodying can best be understood by the example of “risk awareness” which he called “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  Risk was disembodying, he said, because “it is a strictly mathematical concept.”  It does not pertain to persons but to populations – no one knows what will happen to this or that person, but what will happen to the aggregate of such persons can be expressed as a probability.  To identify oneself with this statistical figment is to engage, Illich said, in “intensive self-algorithmization.”  

His most distressing encounter with this “religiously celebrated ideology” occurred in the field of genetic testing during pregnancy.  He was introduced to it by his friend and colleague Silja Samerski who was studying the genetic counselling that is mandatory for pregnant women considering genetic testing in Germany – a subject she would later write about in a book called The Decision Trap (Imprint-Academic, 2015).  Genetic testing in pregnancy does not reveal anything definite about the child which the woman being tested is expecting.  All it detects are markers whose uncertain meaning can be expressed in probabilities – a likelihood calculated across the entire population to which the one being tested belongs, by her age, family history, ethnicity etc.  When she is told, for example, that there is a 30% chance that her baby will have this or that syndrome, she is told nothing about herself or the fruit of her womb – she is told only what might happen to someone like her.  She knows nothing more about her actual circumstances than what her hopes, dreams and intuitions reveal, but the risk profile that has been ascertained for her statistical doppelganger demands a decision.  The choice is existential; the information on which it is based is the probability curve on which the chooser has been inscribed.  Illich found this to be a perfect horror.  It was not that he could not recognize that all human action is a shot in the dark – a prudential calculation in the face of the unknown.  His horror was at seeing people reconceive themselves in the image of a statistical construct.  For him, this was an eclipse of persons by populations; an effort to prevent the future from disclosing anything unforeseen; and a substitution of scientific models for sensed experience. And this was happening, Illich realized, not just with regard to genetic testing in pregnancy but more or less across the board in health care.  Increasingly people were acting prospectively, probabilistically, according to their risk.  They were becoming, as Canadian health researcher Allan Cassels once joked, “pre-diseased” – vigilant and active against illnesses that someone like them might get.  Individual cases were increasingly managed as general cases, as instances of a category or class, rather than as unique predicaments, and doctors were increasingly the servo-mechanisms of this cloud of probabilities rather than intimate advisors alert to specific differences and personal meanings.  This was what Illich meant by “self-algorithmization” or disembodiment.

One way of getting at the iatrogenic body that Illich saw as the primary effect of contemporary biomedicine is by going back to an essay that was widely read and discussed in his milieu in the early 1990’s.  Called “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” it was written by historian and philosopher of science Donna Haraway and appears in her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  This essay is interesting not just because I think it influenced Illich’s sense of how bio-medical discourse was shifting, but also because Haraway, seeing – I would claim – almost exactly the same things as Illich, draws conclusions that are, point-for-point, diametrically opposite.  In this article, for example, she says, with reference to what she calls “the post-modern body,” that “human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical.”  “In a sense,” she continues, “organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components.”  This leads to a situation in which “no objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; and components can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.”  In a world of interfaces, where boundaries regulate “rates of flow” rather than marking real differences, “the integrity of natural objects” is no longer a concern.  “The ‘integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the Western self,” she writes, “gives way to decision procedures, expert systems, and resource investment strategies.”

In other words, Haraway, like Illich understands that persons, as unique, stable and hallowed beings, have dissolved into provisionally self-regulating sub-systems in constant interchange with the larger systems in which they are enmeshed.  In her words, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…the cyborg is our ontology.”  The difference between them lies in their reactions.  Haraway, elsewhere in the volume from which the essay I have been quoting comes, issues what she calls her “Cyborg Manifesto.”  It calls on people to recognize and accept this new situation but to “read it” with a view to liberation.  In a patriarchal society, there is no acceptable condition to which one could hope to return, so she offers “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”  For Illich, on the other hand, the “cyborg ontology,” as Haraway calls it, was not an option.  For him what was at stake was the very character of human persons as ensouled beings with a divine origin and a divine destiny.  As the last vestiges of sense washed out of the bodily self-perception of his contemporaries, he saw a world that had become “immune to its own salvation.”  “I have come to the conclusion,” he told me plaintively, “that when the angel Gabriel told that girl in the town of Nazareth in Galilee that God wanted to be in her belly, he pointed to a body which has gone from the world in which I live.”

The “new way of seeing things” which was reflected in the orientation of bio-medicine amounted, according to Illich, to “a new stage of religiosity.” He used the word religiosity in a broad sense to refer to something deeper and more pervasive than formal or institutional religion.  Religiosity is the ground on which we stand, our feeling about how and why things are as they are, the very horizon within which meaning takes shape.  For Illich, the createdness, or given-ness of the world was the foundation of his entire sensibility.  What he saw coming was a religiosity of total immanence in which the world is its own cause and there is no source of meaning or order outside of it – “a cosmos,” as he said, “in the hands of man.”  The highest good in such a world is life, and the primary duty of people is to conserve and foster life.  But this is not the life which is spoken of in the Bible – the life which comes from God – it is a rather a resource which people possess and ought to manage responsibly.  Its peculiar property is to be at the same time an object of reverence and of manipulation.  This naturalized life, divorced from its source, is the new god.  Health and safety are its adjutants.  Its enemy is death.   Death still imposes a final defeat but has no other personal meaning.  There is no proper time to die – death ensues when treatment fails or is terminated.  

Illich refused to “interiorize systems into the self.”  He would give up neither human nature nor natural law. “I just cannot shed the certainty,” he said in an interview with his friend Douglas Lummis, “that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.”  This led him to reject “responsibility for health,” conceived as a management of intermeshed systems.  How can one be responsible, he asked, for what has neither sense, boundary nor ground?  Better to give up such comforting illusions and to live instead in a spirit of self-limitation which he defined as “courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community.”  

To summarize: Illich, in his later years, concluded that humanity, at least in his vicinity, had taken leave of its senses and moved lock, stock and barrel into a system construct lacking any ground whatsoever for ethical decision.  The bodies in which people lived and walked around had become synthetic constructs woven out of CAT-scans and risk curves.  Life had become a quasi-religious idol, presiding over an “ontology of systems.” Death had become a meaningless obscenity rather than an intelligible companion.  All this was expressed forcefully and unequivocally.  He did not attempt to soften it or offer a comforting “on the other hand…”. What he attended to was what he sensed was happening around him, and all his care was to try to register it as sensitively as he could and address it as truthfully as he could.  The world, in his view, was not in his hands, but in the hands of God.                    

By the time he died, in 2002, Illich stood far outside the new “way of seeing things” that he felt had established itself during the second half his life.  He felt that in this new “age of systems” the primary unit of creation, the human person, had begun to lose its boundary, its distinction and its dignity.  He thought that the revelation in which he was rooted had been corrupted – the “life more abundant” that had been promised in the New Testament transformed into a human hegemony so total and so claustrophobic that no intimation from outside the system could disturb it.  He believed that medicine had so far exceeded the threshold at which it might have eased and complemented the human condition that it was now threatening to abolish this condition altogether.  And he had concluded that much of humanity is no longer willing to “bear…[its] rebellious, torn and disoriented flesh” and has instead traded its art of suffering and its art of dying for a few years of life expectancy and the comforts of life in an “artificial creation.”  Can any sense be made of the current “crisis” from this point of view?  I would say yes, but only insofar as we can step back from the urgencies of the moment and take time to consider what is being revealed about our underlying dispositions – our “certainties,” as Illich called them.  

First of all, Illich’s perspective indicates that for some time now we’ve been practicing the attitudes that have characterized the response to the current pandemic.  It’s a striking thing about events which are perceived to have changed history, or “changed everything,” as one sometimes hears, that people often seem to be somehow ready for them or even unconsciously or semi-consciously expecting them.  Recalling the beginning of the First World War, economic historian Karl Polanyi used the image of sleep-walking to characterize the way in which the countries of Europe shuffled to their doom – automatons blindly accepting the fate they had unknowingly projected.   The events of Sept. 11, 2001 – 9/11 as we now know it – seemed to be instantly interpreted and understood, as if everyone had just been waiting to declare the patent meaning of what had occurred – the end of the Age of Irony, the beginning of the War on Terror, whatever it might be.  Some of this is surely a trick of perspective by which hindsight instantly turns contingency into necessity – since something did happen, we assume that it was bound to happen all along.  But I don’t think this can be the whole story.  

At the heart of the coronavirus response has been the claim that we must act prospectively to prevent what has not yet occurred: an exponential growth in infections, an overwhelming of the resources of the medical system, which will put medical personnel in the invidious position of performing triage, etc.  Otherwise, it is said, by the time we find out what we’re dealing with, it will be too late.  (It’s worth pointing out, in passing, that this is unverifiable idea: if we succeed, and what we fear does not take place, then we will be able to say that our actions prevented it, but we will never actually know whether this was the case.). This idea that prospective action is crucial has been readily accepted, and people have even vied with one in another in denouncing the laggards who have shown resistance to it.  But to act like this requires experience in living in a hypothetical space where prevention outranks cure, and this is exactly what Illich describes when he speaks of risk as “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  An expression like “flattening the curve” can become overnight common sense only in a society practiced in “staying ahead of the curve” and in thinking in terms of population dynamics rather than actual cases.

Risk has a history.  One of the first to identify it as the preoccupation of a new form of society was German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his 1986 book Risk Society, published in English in 1992.  In this book, Beck portrayed late modernity as an uncontrolled science experiment.  By uncontrolled he meant that we have no spare planet on which we can conduct a nuclear war to see how it goes, no second atmosphere which we can heat and observe the results.  This means that techno-scientific society is, on the one hand, hyper-scientific and, on the other, radically unscientific insofar as it has no standard against which it can measure or assess what it has done.  There are endless examples of this sort of uncontrolled experiment – from transgenic sheep to mass international tourism to the transformation of persons into communications relays.  All these, insofar as they have unforeseeable and unpredictable consequences, already constitute a kind of living in the future.  And just because we are citizens of risk society, and therefore participants by definition, in an uncontrolled science experiment, we have become – paradoxically or not – preoccupied with controlling risk.  As I pointed out above, we are treated and screened for diseases we do not yet have, on the basis of our probability of getting them.  Pregnant couples make life and death decisions based on probabilistic risk profiles.  Safety becomes a mantra – “farewell” becomes “be safe” – health becomes a god.  

Equally important in the current atmosphere has been the idolization of life, and aversion from its obscene other, death.  That we must at all costs “save lives” is not questioned.  This makes it very easy to start a stampede.  Making an entire country “go home and stay home,” as our prime minister said not long ago, has immense and incalculable costs.  No one knows how many businesses will fail, how many jobs will be lost, how many will sicken from loneliness, how many will resume addictions or beat each other up in their isolation.  But these costs seem bearable as soon the spectre of lives lost is brought on the scene.  Again, we have been practicing counting lives for a long time. The obsession with the “death toll” from the latest catastrophe is simply the other side of the coin.  Life becomes an abstraction – a number without a story.  

Illich claimed in the mid-1980’s that he was beginning to meet people whose “very selves” were a product of “medical concepts and cares.”  I think this helps to explain why the Canadian state, and its component provincial and municipal governments, have largely failed to acknowledge what is currently at stake in our “war” on “the virus.”  Sheltering behind the skirts of science – even where there is no science – and deferring to the gods of health and safety has appeared to them as political necessity.  Those who have been acclaimed for their leadership, like Quebec premier François Legault, have been those who have distinguished themselves by their single-minded consistency in applying the conventional wisdom.  Few have yet dared to question the cost – and, when those few include Donald Trump, the prevailing complacency is only fortified – who would dare agree with him?  In this respect insistent repetition of the metaphor of war has been influential – in a war no one counts costs or reckons who is actually paying them.  First, we must win the war.  Wars create social solidarity and discourage dissent – those not showing the flag are apt to be shown the equivalent of the white feather with which non-combatants were shamed during World War One.  

At the date at which I am writing – early April – no one really knows what is going on.  Since no one knows how many have the disease, nobody knows what the death rate is – Italy’s is currently listed at over 10%, which puts it in the range of the catastrophic influenza at the end of World War I, while Germany’s is at .8%, which is more in line with what happens unremarked every year – some very old people, and a few younger ones, catch the flu and die.  What does seem clear, here in Canada, is that, with the exception of a few local sites of true emergency, the pervasive sense of panic and crisis is largely a result of the measures taken against the pandemic and not of the pandemic itself.  Here the word itself has played an important role – the declaration by the World Health Organization that a pandemic was now officially in progress didn’t change anyone’s health status but it dramatically changed the public atmosphere.  It was the signal the media had been waiting for to introduce a regime in which nothing else but the virus could be discussed.  By now a story in the newspaper not concerned with coronavirus is actually shocking.  This cannot help but give the impression of a world on fire.  If you talk about nothing else, it will soon come to seem as if there is nothing else.  A bird, a crocus, a spring breeze can begin to seem almost irresponsible – “don’t they know it’s the end of the world?” as an old country music classic asks.  The virus acquires extraordinary agency – it is said to have depressed the stock market, shuttered businesses, and generated panic fear, as if these were not the actions of responsible people but of the illness itself.  Emblematic for me, here in Toronto, was a headline in The National Post.  In a font that occupied much of the top half of the front page, it said simply PANIC.   Nothing indicated whether the word was to be read as a description or an instruction.  This ambiguity is constitutive of all media, and disregarding it is the characteristic déformation professionelle of the journalist, but it becomes particularly easy to ignore in a certified crisis.  It is not the obsessive reporting or the egging on of authorities to do more that has turned the world upside down – it is the virus that has done it.  Don’t blame the messenger.  A headline on the web-site STAT on April 1, and I don’t think it was a joke, even claimed that “Covid-19 has sunk the ship of state.”  It is interesting, in this respect, to perform a thought experiment.  How much of an emergency would we feel ourselves to be in if this had never been called a pandemic and such stringent measures taken against it?  Plenty of troubles escape the notice of the media.  How much do we know or care about the catastrophic political disintegration of South Sudan in recent years, or about the millions who died in the Democratic Republic of Congo after civil war broke out there in 2004?  It is our attention that constitutes what we take to be the relevant world at any given moment.  The media do not act alone – people must be disposed to attend where the media directs their attention – but I don’t think it can be denied that the pandemic is a constructed object that might have been constructed differently.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remarked on March 25th that we are facing “the greatest health care crisis in our history.”  If he is understood to be referring to a health crisis, this seems to me a grotesque exaggeration.  Think of the disastrous effect of smallpox on indigenous communities, or of a score of other catastrophic epidemics from cholera and yellow fever to diphtheria and polio.  Can you then really say that a flu epidemic which appears mainly to kill the old or those made susceptible by some other condition is even comparable to the ravaging of whole peoples, let alone worse?    And yet, unprecedented, like the Prime Minister’s “greatest ever,” seems to be the word on everyone’s lips.  However, if we take the Prime Minister’s words by the letter, as referring to health care, and not just health, the case changes.   From the beginning the public health measures taken in Canada have been explicitly aimed at protecting the health care system from any overload.  To me this points to an extraordinary dependence on hospitals and an extraordinary lack of confidence in our ability to care for one another.  Whether Canadian hospitals are ever flooded or not, a strange and fearful mystique seems to be involved – the hospital and its cadres are felt to be indispensable, even when things could be more easily and safely dealt with at home. Again Illich was prescient in his claim, in his essay “Disabling Professions,” that overextended professional hegemonies sap popular capacities and make people doubt their own resources.  

The measures mandated by “the greatest health care crisis in our history” have involved a remarkable curtailing of civil liberty.  This has been done, it is said, to protect life and, by the same token, to avoid death.  Death is not only to be averted but also kept hidden and unconsidered.  Years ago I heard a story about a bemused listener at one of Illich’s lectures on Medical Nemesis who afterwards turned to his companion and asked, “What does he want, let people die?”  Perhaps some of my readers would like to ask me the same question.  Well, I’m sure there are many other old people who would join me in saying that they don’t want to see young lives ruined in order that they can live a year or two longer.  But, beyond that, “let people die” is a very funny formulation because it implies that the power to determine who lives or dies is in the hands of the one to whom the question is addressed.  The we who are imagined as having the power to “let die” exist in an ideal world of perfect information and perfect technical mastery.  In this world nothing occurs which has not been chosen.  If someone dies, it will be because they have been “let…die.”  The state must, at all costs, foster, regulate and protect life – this is the essence of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics, the regime that now unquestionably rules us.  Death must be kept out of sight and out of mind.  It must be denied meaning.  No one’s time ever comes – they are let go.  The grim reaper may survive as a comic figure in New Yorker cartoons, but he has no place in public discussion.  This makes it difficult even to talk about death as something other than someone’s negligence or, at the least, a final exhaustion of treatment options.  To accept death is to accept defeat.

The events of recent weeks reveal how totally we live inside systems, how much we have become populations rather than associated citizens, how much we are governed by the need to continually outsmart the future we ourselves have prepared.  When Illich wrote books like Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis, he still hoped that life within limits was possible.  He tried to identify the thresholds at which technology must be restrained in order to keep the world at the local, sensible, conversable scale on which human beings could remain the political animals that Aristotle thought we were meant to be.  Many others saw the same vision, and many have tried over the last fifty years to keep it alive.  But there is no doubt that the world Illich warned of has come to pass.  It is a world which lives primarily in disembodied states and hypothetical spaces, a world of permanent emergency in which the next crisis is always right around the corner, a world in which the ceaseless babble of communication has stretched language past its breaking point, a world in which overstretched science has become indistinguishable from superstition.  How then can Illich’s ideas possibly gain any purchase in a world that seems to have moved out of reach of his concepts of scale, balance, and personal meaning?  Shouldn’t one just accept that the degree of social control that has recently been exerted is proportionate and necessary in the global immune system of which we are, in Haraway’s expression, “biotic components?”

Perhaps, but it’s an old political axiom which can be found in Plato, Thomas More, and, more recently, Canadian philosopher George Grant that if you can’t achieve the best, at least prevent the worst.  And things can certainly get worse as a result of this pandemic.  It has already become a somewhat ominous commonplace that the world will not be the same once it is over.  Some see it as a rehearsal and admit frankly that, though this particular plague may not fully justify the measures being taken against it, these measures still constitute a valuable rehearsal for future and potentially worse plagues.  Others view it as a “wake-up call” and hope that, when it’s all over, a chastened humanity will begin to edge its way back from the lip of catastrophe.  My fear, and one that I think is shared by many, is that it will leave behind a disposition to accept much increased surveillance and social control, more telescreens and telepresencing, and heightened mistrust.  At the moment, everyone is optimistically describing physical distancing as a form of solidarity, but it’s also practice in regarding one another, and even ourselves – “don’t touch your face” – as potential disease vectors.  

I have said already that one of the certainties that the pandemic is driving deeper into the popular mind is risk.  But this is easy to overlook since risk is so easily conflated with real danger. The difference, I would say, is that danger is identified by a practical judgment resting on experience, whereas risk is a statistical construct pertaining to a population.  Risk has no room for individual experience or for practical judgment.  It tells you only what will happen in general.  It is an abstract of a population, not a picture of any person, or a guide to that person’s destiny.  Destiny is a concept that simply dissolves in the face of risk, where all are arrayed, uncertainly, on the same curve.  What Illich calls “the mysterious historicity” of each existence – or, more simply, its meaning – is annulled.  During this pandemic, risk society has come of age.  This is evident, for example, in the tremendous authority that has been accorded to models – even when everyone knows that they are informed by little more than what one hopes are educated guesses.  Another illustration is the familiarity with which people speak of “flattening the curve,” as if this were an everyday object – I have even recently heard songs about it.  When it becomes an object of public policy to operate on a purely imaginary, mathematical object, like a risk curve, it is certain that risk society has taken a great leap forward.   This, I think, is what Illich meant about disembodiment – the impalpable become palpable, the hypothetical becomes actual, and the realm of everyday experience becomes indistinguishable from its representation in newsrooms, laboratories and statistical models.  Humans have lived, at all times, in imagined worlds, but this, I think, is different.  In the sphere of religion, for example, even the most naïve believers have the sense that the beings they summon and address in their gatherings are not everyday objects.  In the discourse of the pandemic, everyone consorts familiarly with scientific phantoms as if there were as real as rocks and trees.  

Another related feature of the current landscape is government-by-science and its necessary complement - the abdication of political leadership resting on any other grounds.   This too is a field long-tilled and prepared for planting.  Illich wrote nearly fifty years ago in Tools for Conviviality that contemporary society is “stunned by a delusion about science.”  This delusion takes many forms, but its essence is to construct out of the messy, contingent practices of a myriad of sciences a single golden calf before which all must bow.  It is this giant mirage that is usually invoked when we are instructed to “listen to the science” or told what “studies show” or “science says.” But there is no such thing as science, only sciences, each one with its unique uses and unique limitations.   When “science” is abstracted from all the vicissitudes and shadows of knowledge production, and elevated into an omniscient oracle whose priests can be identified by their outfits, their solemn postures and their impressive credentials, what suffers, in Illich’s view, is political judgment.  We do not do what appears good to our rough and ready sense of how things are down here on the ground but only what can be dressed up as science says.   In a book called Rationality and Ritual, British sociologist of science Brian Wynne studied a public inquiry carried out by a British High Court Judge in 1977 on the question of whether a new plant should be added to the British nuclear energy complex at Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast.   Wynne shows how the judge approached the question as one which “science” would answer – is it safe? – without any need to consult moral or political principles.  This is a classic case of the displacement of political judgment onto the shoulders of Science, conceived along the mythical lines I sketched above.  This displacement is now evident in many fields.  One of its hallmarks is that people, thinking that “science” knows more than it does, imagine that they know more than they do.  No actual knowledge need support this confidence.  Epidemiologists may say frankly, as many have, that, in the present case, there is very little sturdy evidence to go on, but this has not prevented politicians from acting as if they were merely the executive arm of Science.  In my opinion, the adoption of a policy of semi-quarantining those who are not sick – a policy apt to have disastrous consequences down the road in lost jobs, failed businesses, distressed people, and debt-suffocated governments – is a political decision and ought to be discussed as such.  But, at the moment, the ample skirts of Science shelter all politicians from view.  Nor does anyone speak of impending moral decisions.  Science will decide.

In his late writings Illich introduced, but never really developed, a concept that he called “epistemic sentimentality” – not a catchy phrase, admittedly, but one that I think sheds on light on what is currently going on.  His argument, in brief, was that we live in a world of “fictitious substances” and “management-bred phantoms” – any number of nebulous goods from institutionally-defined education to the “pathogenic pursuit of health” could serve as examples – and that in this “semantic desert full of muddled echoes” we need “some prestigious fetish” to serve as a “Linus blanket.”  In the essay I’ve been quoting “Life” is his primary example.  “Epistemic sentimentality” attaches itself to Life, and Life becomes the banner under which projects of social control and technological overreach acquire warmth and lustre.  Illich calls this  epistemic sentimentality because it involves constructed objects of knowledge that are then naturalized under the kindly aegis of the “prestigious fetish.”  In the present case we are frantically saving lives and protecting our health care system.  These noble objects enable a gush of sentiment which is very hard to resist.  For me it is summed up in the almost unbearably unctuous tone in which our Prime Minister now addresses us daily.  But who is not in an agony of solicitude?  Who has not said that we are avoiding each other because of the depth of our care for one another?  This is epistemic sentimentality not just because it solaces us and makes a ghostly reality seem humane but also because it hides the other things that are going on – like the mass experiment in social control and social compliance, the legitimation of tele-presence as a mode of sociability and of instruction, the increase of surveillance, the normalization of biopolitics, and the reinforcement of risk awareness as a foundation of social life.  

Another concept that I believe Illich has to contribute to current discussion is the idea of “dynamic balances” that he develops in Tools for Conviviality.  This thought came to me recently while reading, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a refutation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s dissident position on the pandemic.  Agamben had written earlier against the inhumanity of a policy that lets people die alone and then outlaws funerals, arguing that a society which sets “bare life” higher than the preservation of its own way of life has embraced what amounts to a fate worse than death.  Fellow philosopher Anastasia Berg, in her response, expresses respect for Agamben, but then claims that he has missed the boat.  People are cancelling funerals, isolating the sick and avoiding one another not because mere survival has become the be-all and end-all of public policy, as Agamben claims, but in a spirit of loving sacrifice which Agamben is too obtuse and theory- besotted to notice.  The two positions appear starkly opposed, and the choice an either/or.  One either views social distancing, with Anastasia Berg, as a paradoxical and sacrificial form of solidarity, or one views it with Agamben as a fateful step into a world where inherited ways of life dissolve in an ethos of survival at all costs.  What Illich tried to argue in Tools for Conviviality is that public policy must always strike a balance between opposed domains, opposed rationalities, opposed virtues.  The whole book is an attempt to discern the point at which serviceable tools – tools for conviviality – turn into tools which become ends in themselves and begin to dictate to their users.  In the same way he tried to distinguish practical political judgment from expert opinion, home-made speech from the coinages of mass media, vernacular practices from institutional norms.  Many of these attempted distinctions have since drowned in the monochrome of “the system,” but the idea can still be helpful I think.  It encourages us to ask the question, what is enough? where is the point of balance?  Right now this question is not asked because the goods we pursue are generally taken to be unlimited – we cannot, by assumption, have too much education, too much health, too much law, or too much of any of the other institutional staples on which we lavish our hope and our substance.  But what if the question were revived?  This would require us to ask in what way Agamben might be right, while still allowing Berg’s point.  Perhaps a point of balance could be found. But this would require some ability to sustain a divided mind – the very hallmark of thinking, according to Hannah Arendt – as well as the resuscitation of political judgment.   Such an exercise of political judgment would involve a discussion of what is being lost in the present crisis as well as what is being gained.  But who deliberates in an emergency?    Total mobilization – total preoccupation – the feeling that everything has changed – the certainty of living in a state of exception rather than in ordinary time – all these things militate against political deliberation.  This is a vicious circle: we can’t deliberate because we’re in an emergency, and we’re in an emergency because we can’t deliberate.  The only way out of the circle is by the way in – the way created by assumptions that have become so ingrained as to seem obvious.  

Illich had a sense, during the last twenty years of his life, of a world immured in “an ontology of systems,” a world immune to grace, alienated from death, and totally convinced of its duty to manage every eventuality – a world, as he once put it, in which “exciting, soul-capturing abstractions have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.”  Such a view does not readily lend itself to policy prescriptions.  Policy is made in the moment according to the exigencies of the moment.  Illich was talking about modes of sensing, of thinking, and of feeling that had crept into people at a much deeper level.  Accordingly, I hope that no one who has read this far thinks that I have been making facile policy proposals rather than trying to describe a fate that all share.  Still my view of the situation is probably clear enough from what I have written.  I think this tunnel we have entered – of physical distancing, flattening the curve etc. – will be very hard to get out of – either we call it off soon and face the possibility that it was all for naught, or we extend it and create harms that may be worse than the casualties we have averted.  This is not to say we should do nothing.  It is a pandemic.  But it would have been better, in my view, to try and keep going and used targeted quarantine for the demonstrably ill and their contacts.  Close baseball stadiums and large hockey arenas, by all means, but keep small businesses open and attempt to space the customers in the same way as the stores that have stayed open are doing.  Would more then die?  Perhaps, but this is far from clear.  And that’s exactly my point: no one knows.  Swedish economist Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, made the same point recently in defence of Sweden’s current policy of precaution without shut-down. “The theory of lockdown,” he says, is “untested” – which is true – and, consequently, “It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.”  

But, to say it again, my intention here is not to contest policy but to bring to light the practiced certainties that make our current policy seem incontestable.  Let me take a final example.  Recently a Toronto newspaper columnist suggested that the current emergency can be construed as a choice between “saving the economy” or “saving granny.”  In this figure two prime certainties are pitted against one another.  If we take these phantoms as real things rather than as questionable constructions, we can only end up by setting a price on granny’s head.   Better, I want to argue, to try to think and speak in a different way.  Perhaps the impossible choices thrown up by the world of modelling and management are a sign that things are being framed in the wrong way.  Is there a way to move from granny as a “demographic” to a person who can be nursed and comforted and accompanied to the end of her road; from The Economy as the ultimate abstraction to the shop down the street in which someone has invested all they have and which they may now lose.   At present, “the crisis” holds reality hostage, captive in its enclosed and airless system.  It’s very difficult to find a way of speaking in which life is something other and more than a resource which each of us must responsibly manage, conserve, and, finally, save.   But I think it important to take a careful look at what has come into the light in recent weeks: medical science’s ability to “decide on the exception” and then take power; the media’s power to remake what is sensed as reality, while disowning its own agency;  the abdication of politics before Science, even when there is no science; the disabling of practical judgment; the enhanced power of risk awareness; and the emergence of Life as the new sovereign.   Crises change history but not necessarily for the better.  A lot will depend on what the event is understood to have meant. If, in the aftermath, the certainties I have sketched here are not brought into question, then the only possible outcome I can see is that they will fasten themselves all the more securely on our minds and become obvious, invisible, and unquestionable.

FURTHER READING

Here some links to articles which I have cited above or which have influenced my thinking:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/why-draconian-measures-may-not-work-two-experts-say-we-should-prioritize-those-at-risk-from-covid-19-than-to-try-to-contain

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/17/listen-cbc-radio-cuts-off-expert-when-he-questions-covid19-narrative/  (This story is misheaded – Duncan McCue doesn’t cut off Dr. Kettner – it’s because Kettner gets to make so many strong points that the item is valuable.)

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronavirus-panic/

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ (Agamben’s view can be found here along with a lot of other interesting material.)

Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness  (Anastasia Berg’s critique of Agamben)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-lockdown-please-w-re-swedish  (Frederik Erixon)

QUARANTINE LETTER #4

A fourth letter in our quarantine series, from our friend Icarus.

—–

EVERYTHING IS TRUE, NOTHING IS PERMITTED

“They’ve already destroyed everything, all the structures we believed in, trusted. Maybe we’re in a transitional phase, you know? There’s some sort of substitution going on. Meanwhile, we’re navigating in a tremendous vacuum, vaguely oriented by the stars but with no true reference point. Our compasses have gone wild, spinning madly, attracted by thousands of magnetic poles. We might as well throw them out the window, they’re obsolete. It’s just us and the night sky, like it was for the early explorers, while we wait for new, more advanced navigational devices to be invented. My only fear is that the stars have somehow gotten out of place and will be no help as references either.”

- Ignacio de Loyola Brandao, “And Still the Earth”

Dear friends,

It can be strange to intervene in someone else’s debate, but I don’t believe you’ll hold it against me if I do. Over the past weeks, I’ve rather enjoyed the commentary and exchange of letters between my friends, August, Kora, and Orion.  Something about the reflections of my friends is missing for me still, so I’ll chime in without wasting too much time, I hope.

QUARANTINE: INCOMPLETE—WHAT WE THINK IS HAPPENING IS ONLY SOMEWHAT ACCURATE

Today, millions of people are working. In warehouses, in offices, in fields, kitchens and storerooms; from the computer, the sorting room and at construction sites, millions of Americans are sharing the coronavirus with each other and with their neighbors. Many of them are asymptomatic, a portion are not sick yet, and certainly some of them are still hiding their symptoms from their families, employers, and coworkers. No zombie apocalypse is complete without the inconsiderate hot-head who insists, deceptively, that his injury is “nothing, it’s fine, let’s keep moving”. Orion wrote that the virus imposes “its own temporality, which immobilizes everything.” If only.  

   Logistics, shipping, freight, warehousing: these are some of the largest sectors of the 21st century workforce, and they are all on overtime. From Whole Foods to Old Dominion, these disposable workers are simultaneously killable - insofar as the market facilitates their endangerment via assured contact with the virus - and indispensable, insofar as they must not be allowed to strike, unionize, or cease working that this society may minimally function. In these industries, overwhelmingly, black men and immigrants are crammed into job sites without any protective equipment. In other words, they are proletarians in the classical sense, and they are still at work. A true quarantine, a dignified exodus from the commodity society and its extensive productive apparatus, would halt all forms of labor and toil, a circumstance as yet unrealized. If we can say we are living in a quarantine, we must say that it is still incomplete.

AUTONOMY OR AUTOMATA?—THE PANDEMIC AFFECTS ALL OF HUMANITY—WHICH NO LONGER EXISTS AS SUCH

What we once called “society” (an entity which now insists it can survive unity and distance simultaneously, even distance for the sake of unity), has been replaced by billions of apparatuses. These apparatuses constitute a vast ACEPHALOGRAM - a system of machines designed to trace and retrace the consciousness of a world that has definitively lost its head.

The period of real domination opened by the aggressive economic and political restructuring in the 70s, 80s, and 90s - “globalization” - has pushed a vast quantity of workers out of manufacturing and into service related industries. Services being overall less profitable then commodity manufacturing and heavy industry, other technological implements such as we see emerge from Silicon Valley have filled the gap, so to speak, of lost profits for the economy by allowing large advertising and analysis firms to mine directly the collective human ambitions in art, sex, politics, culture, and society. To open up this mine, which has produced an existential ruin comparable to the environmental ruin associated with mineral mining, the internet has developed as a global network of pseudo participatory information systems. The data thirst of these industries cannot be sated by the administration of facts from the center or top, they must be produced by the masses directly. But technology does not simply catch data falling naturally from the sky or running off the gutters of consciousness. It produces data by arranging relations such that they produce content that can be bought and sold. Under such conditions, the medical, political, technological and ontological crisis of a pandemic cannot help but be experienced as a video, a collection of tweets, graphs, memes, as background noise, as a conspiracy theory, as a genre in the endless relay of notifications.  

THE MIDDLE OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END—WHAT MAKES INDIVIDUAL INTERPRETATION POSSIBLE, MAKES COMMON UNDERSTANDING IMPOSSIBLE.

The truth is that social media has allowed billions of people to coordinate themselves into large and small containers of meaning and virtual energy. These containers, ecosystems of signs and signifiers, by dint of their polycentralized arrangement, function as an epistemological subversion of established truth-making infrastructures that require a certain amount of hegemony or global purchase: the scientific method, fact-checking, and debate. Occasionally, the understanding produced in these containers, theory-fictions more than anything else, incidentally conform to an intensity with physical correlatives capable of overpowering police infrastructures and seizing public space, as we saw across the world in 2019. More often, the echo chambers, as they are often called, curtail feelings of common dialogue and the perception of shared futurity that would be seemingly embedded in such a “global” sharing of information. This curtailing allows people of all “types” to be bundled together as data sets, insulated from the experience of true diversity of thought, of experience, of analysis. The polycentralized arrangement of the internet today may be even less participatory than previous eras of information sharing, even though it doesn’t feel that way.

Commentators and critics have used the ongoing crisis to delay the moment of our collective education with unwavering ideological entrenchment. At work, it is not uncommon for me to hear small business owners and day traders talk about the failures of socialized medicine in  Italy, implicitly endorsing greater privatization in the US. Among activists, liberals, and leftists, it is impossible to imagine a greater indictment on the privatized, decentralized, healthcare system than what is taking place. Apocalyptic Christian sects believe the government is going to repress churches for gathering, and social justice advocates believe the coronavirus crisis will be “the same, but worse” on every oppressive axis. It’s hard to imagine another reflex.

While they recognize that the internet has plunged billions of people into a pulverized simulacrum, some of my comrades would have us devote ourselves to the dissemination of real news, of verified and sober analysis, of scientific rigor, in order to combat the prevailing disarray. This warms my heart just as it saddens my intellect. We have always been machine-breakers, in a way, revolting against the forward and crushing movement of industry to preserve a less alienated experience of reality, labor, and community. We aren’t wrong for that. We should be reliable sources of information, but not because we will convince people with our reports — which may no longer be so possible online — rather because we believe it is the right thing to do, and because we can at least proceed on a clear and shared basis with each other. But what other strategies could we utilize for analyzing the world that would allow us to act within the protracted vertigo, without trapping ourselves or others in ideological camps, and without losing revolutionary aspirations in a world where global verification of facts seems impossible, but where universal need for a transformation, fascistic or revolutionary, feels like common sense?

EVERYTHING IS TRUE, NOTHING IS PERMITTED—THE SYSTEM REDUCES ITSELF TO A PURE FLUX OF DYNAMICS

“We dreamed of utopia and woke up screaming

A poor lonely cowboy that comes back home, what a wonder”

-Roberto Bolano, “Leave Everything, Again”

For millennia, the administration of public facts was the cornerstone of political power, and stamping out alternative readings the chief objective of the repressive machinery. The ruling bureaucracy has organized itself to prevent any global loss of control. They’ve always done that. What is surprising is how readily, since 9/11 at least, perhaps much earlier, they have abandoned many important methods for doing so. As the possibility of imagining its own future became increasingly stamped-out, the reigning order abandoned any pretense of pursuing the ideals it propped itself up on, its sole promise being to ward-off unforeseen eventualities. Without embarrassing myself with long-winded arguments about things I am ill-equipped to discuss - certainly less knowledgeable than my dear friends are on such matters as philosophy and critical works - I’d prefer to refer to an argument advanced by Brian Massumi in his essay “National Emergency Enterprise”. In this piece, he argues that a primary strategy of governance is to identify all possible causes of a scenario. The market refashions environments that submit the living tissue of relations one and all to technological “dataveillance”, information which, in principle, allows the administrators of such a system to model its every possible outcome, translating every action into a trans-action, while ensuring that every aberration meets a form of control. He utilizes the example of a forest fire, but we can just look at the pandemic and it’s consequences.

   The ruling class everywhere, has argued and governed as if the coronavirus is “merely the flu”, justifying late responses and insufficient care, while also closing borders and taking emergency measures as if we are living in a veritable plague. There are strategies attached to every discourse, interests silently advanced with each interpretation, and powers produced and mobilized by every kind of theory and operation. Anyway, we have been living in the fall out of multiple convergent strategies for controlling and responding to this situation.  The governors of the world, at least of the democratic countries, are basically throwing things against a wall and seeing what sticks.  We can imagine that modeling and predictions are conducted endlessly based on analytics produced through data mining and network analysis purchased from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. As technocratic governments subordinate welfare states to the “science” of neoliberalism, the nihilism of the powerful today subordinates everything to the “science” of control.

Anyway, who organizes oblivion today acts with no principles and can only speak in lies. What does this mean for the rest of us?

NOTHING IS EVERYTHING, TRUE IS PERMITTED—TRUTH DOES NOT REQUIRE A SUBJECT ONLY LIES DO. LET’S KEEP IT REAL, WHATEVER THAT IS.

   We can and are responding to this situation. The most important thing, from my perspective, is that we develop a vibrant enough ecosystem of strategies, corresponding to the largest possible interpretation of facts, without dividing our sympathies and concerns into rival fiefdoms and ideological sects. There are benefits to arguing that nothing of the situation is unique, that in fact the worst off before are the worst off now, that today simply represents an opportunity for us, etc. I am not among the comrades advancing this position, but I want to see the results of that framework as soon as possible, if it does not in fact raise the threshold for meaningful interventions. There are benefits to arguing that the quarantine is not deep enough, that the politics of mobilization have failed utterly to devastate the economy, but that a true lock down of the world could resemble the worlds first ever international wildcat general strike. I want to hear advocates of this position contend with the possibility of carceral interpretations of this argument. For those planting survival gardens, for those running autonomous rent strike hotlines, for those training in firearms, I want us to develop a shared enough perspective to see that there is a simple unity in our strategies, which is what is precisely, and incorrectly, attacked in Kora’s most recent letter to Orion: our autonomy. Beyond any individualistic misinterpretations, it is my perspective that the ability of human beings to self-authorize our activity, to determine our shared destinies, to control supply chains, vital infrastructures, and means of subsistence without the mediating factors of the market, are necessary prerequisites for a dignified life on earth. This is not to say, as Kora has intelligently argued, that anyone could come to control the unfolding course of history - a delusion that preppers, governors, and revolutionaries have all held - but precisely that autonomous, self-organized, structures are the only structures capable of responding quickly enough to the destabilizing, frightening, and uncertain futures lying in wait regardless of what we or anyone else do. We must utilize the current situation to repolarize the circumstances to the best of our ability around foundational concerns of power: on the one hand, there are all of the people of the world, some of them bastards we would not live with, and our shared need for dignified healthcare, housing, sustenance, and livelihood; and on the other hand there are all of the bastards waiting this out on yachts, manipulating public data for the sake of a geopolitical PR battle, utilizing the pandemic to pursue totalitarian power fantasies and clampdowns. We don’t need to steer the ship forward, we need to be able to swim in the wreckage.

Sorry, I wrote too much. Thanks for reading and I look forward to reading what others think soon.

– Icarus

04.11.2020

STATE OF EMERGENCY, DAY 40

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

SQUIRRELS ON THE LOOSE: ON THE CHILEAN STATE OF EXCEPTION
Gerardo Muñoz

First published on the Swedish site Tillfällighetsskrivande [Occasional Writings].

The series of articles published by Giorgio Agamben in the wake of the COVID-19 have received an unsurprising reaction by the night watchmen of liberal democracy. The misunderstanding arises as a coping mechanism comprised of two distinct requests: first, the demand that we abandon the conditions informing Agamben’s archeological project (Homo sacer, 1995-2015); and, on the other hand, the desire to make an exception out of the current situation, as if, this time, “immunity” or a “democratic biopolitics” will effectively redeem Humanity [i] . The nature of this desperate reaction speaks to the fantasy of a grounded ‘good politics for the right time’, as if the business of resurrecting principles of legitimation were a credible enterprise during a time of civilizational decay for our species. By this point we are accustomed to the tone of the university discourse and its strategic deployment as a compensatory measure for its inferiority complex. In fact, it forms the spirit of our time.  

It is not my intention to rehearse Agamben’s theses. These are well-known by all those who have encountered his work on “life”, the state of exception, and the consummation of the oikonomia at heart of Western politics. Rather, I would like to shift the discussion to the Chilean case, where I was surprised to see many intellectual voices tapping into Agamben’s premises, in particular in the aftermath of a recent letter by academics concerned with COVID-19 [ii]. For me it says a great deal about the Chilean experience and its current moment, which has been in a prolonged state of exception for over half a century. My thesis, then, is that the Chilean debate is in a better position to arrive at a mature understanding of the state of exception, not as an abstract formula, but as something latent within democracies. The dispensation of Western politics into security and exceptionality is not a conceptual horizon of what politics could be; it is what the ontology of the political represents once the internal limits of liberal principles crumble to pieces (and with it, any separation between consumers and citizens, state and market, jurisprudence and real subsumption).

Although President Sebastian Piñera has recently decreed a state of “exceptional catastrophe” in order to face the increasing threat of the COVID-19 in the country, his decision must be placed within the larger context of what we may call the long Chilean state of exception. There are at least three distinct historical segments of this exceptionalism. First, the criollo exceptionalism of the early republican period in which the relation between the state and the constituent power was unbalanced; second, the political dictatorial state of exception effectuated in the coup d'état against Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government in 1973; and finally, the so called “transition to democracy” of 1990, which served to juridically optimize what Tomás Moulian called the productivist-consumer matrix of society [iii]. One should not understand these temporal segments as a mere continuation of political instability or erratic juridical illegality, quite the contrary. The Chilean case brings to bear how the normalization of the state of exception could very well live under the veneer of effective legal borders of a subsidiary state that functions as the arbiter of accumulation and debt for societal dynamism. In a groundbreaking essay, “El golpe como consumación de la Vanguardia” (“The Coup as the consummation of the Avant-Garde”, 2003), the Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer argued that the Chilean coup of 1973 was the true avant-garde gesture, and thus, the ‘big-bang’ of globalization, since it blurred the inter-epochal passage from the dictatorship to that of the post-dictatorship. As Thayer argues in a decisive moment of his essay:

The repressed ground of the law – that is, what the law must repress in order to become itself – returns as a norm [in time of post-dictatorship]. The exception becomes the norm. The violence against the unlimited becomes violence against limitation. And if, before, the exception concerned the norms as exception from the norm; today, in the wake of globalization, what is understood as the exception has become the rule. The state of exception as factical proliferation of the norm is outside all generic norms: the market, the entrepreneurial freedom, the market’s anomie, or any specific norm, as well as any decision around what counts as a norm…Today, it is the Coup, more than artistic practices, that is outside of any frame and that destitutes not only the institution, the habits, and our presumptions about art; but that also alters the codes inherent to understanding. It is the Coup, and not the university, that brings about the reform of subjectivity and thought; it is the Coup that transforms art, the university, politics, and subjectivity itself. [iv]

The Coup introduces a new historical temporality, flattening its very nature as exceptional through the unlimited exchange of values between subjects and things. This takes place within a constitutional arrangement that blocks any ius reformandi and becomes preventively unwarranted. This was, after all, the ideal of legal theorist Jaime Guzmán, who tried to combine a Thomist conception of the state as “accident” with a hyper-personalism of the “persona” as a substance [v]. As if already prefiguring the demise of liberalism’s active social state, Guzmán incarnates the current drift of the nationalist right’s efforts to reconcile Aquinas with the market, corporativism with the U.S Constitution, and the ‘Common Good’ with the geopolitical battles against the rise of China [vi]. Of course, Guzmán was not a soothsayer, and he did not see this particular arrangement. However, he did see the normalization of the state of exception as a strategy to restrict any pull of ‘civil society’ against the structures of the subsidiary state. If Chile indicates one thing today, it is this: the problem of the political exception is not a problem of state form; it is a problem of the exhaustion of the boundaries between state and civil society, where autonomous social form is a zone of extraction for the exchange of value in the face of collective survival. The “tyranny of values” acquires a new meaning here: it is no longer a problem of moral discursivity, but rather an intensification of the war waged against life itself.  

We know the discourse around the ‘withering of civil society’ has been around for quite some time [vii]. But this withering once meant that a “political subject” could emerge to organize a new transformation. One might ask: is this, then, what happened during the October uprisings? Not really, I would argue. Unlike the previous protests of 2003 and 2011, October of 2019 was driven by what has elsewhere been called an ‘experiential politics’, in which the de-articulation between people and representation no longer attempted to translate its discomfort into ‘demands’, as is typical in populist moments [viii]. The Chilean October was a “parabasis” on the social stage, a movement against representation and ideal types, a form of errancy that cannot be equated with the modern pursuit of “freedom”. If freedom has always been hermeneutically grounded in an analogical relation to action, then the call for “evasion” in the Chilean October demonstrated clearly that human praxis is irreducible to human activity, and that there exists a form of life beyond biopolitical security. This is why today, any attempt at a ‘spiritualist’ defense of ‘this life’ is already fallen to biopolitical machination, and to the reproduction of a subjective vitalism in which survival is guaranteed only as an abstract, non-existential ‘Good’. This is the other side of Thomism. However, as Agamben reminds us,

 “Whoever has a character always has the same experience, because he can only re-live and never live. Etymologically, ēthos (’character’) and ethos (‘habit’,  ‘way of life’) are the same word…and thus both mean ‘selfhood’. Selfhood, being-a-self, is expressed in a character or a habit. In each case, there lies an impossibility of living” [ix]. 

The new Chilean state of exception is an attempt to combat this truth through a full deployment of the police, the market, the university, the intelligentsia, and the rule of law itself.

The destituent moment against the Chilean exception is waged against the reduction of existence to “life”. As Ivan Illich knew well, “there is something apocalyptic in searching for Life under a microscope” [x]. Obviously, this resonates clearly with Agamben’s concern about the political strategies’ concern with the “living” and the security of “life”. It is no surprise, on the other hand, how the intelligentsia of the Chilean status quo have refracted this assault on the vital fabric of human existence by developing new strategies of “order” to counteract what they have called the “party of violence” that seeks to destitute its reduction to the vitalist apparatus [xi]. Other more refined attempts in the restructuring of the Chilean political right, such as Hugo Herrera’s programmatic Octubre en Chile (2019), calls for a popular republicanism, which renews the mediation between society and state through a Schmittian conception of the political as both telluric and contingent. Inverting the terms (politics having primacy over the economy) drags into the open the dual machine of governance, where bipolar forces of relative weakness and optimal strength are woven together into an interface for social conservation [xii]. This strategy confronts the epochal crisis by mobilizing a fear of fragmentation and the general contention of the species. The same goes for the modernist proposals based on the supremacy of constituent power, with its ideal engineering of the “social” that accords a force of transformation to “passive devices” such as deliberative assemblies and communicative action (of which Chile has a long tradition, under the form of cabildos) that could canvas the true colors of democratic separation of powers and cohesiveness of a new social contract. Unfortunately, endless gatherings and assemblies are powerless against the contemporary mechanisms of power, which today consist in the management of flows, infrastructure, and the general system of extraction [xiii]. We can talk amongst ourselves all we want, but it does not get us anywhere. The call for an implicit “communicative unity” of the body polity runs in a circle, with life, production and value remaining intact.

Agamben is correct to observe how unsurprising it is to see citizens today be willing to accept a reduction of their form of life to bare life in the name of security, since “crisis” is the way in which governance administers the internal strife of this acephalous polity [xiv]. In a recent column, Hugo Herrera provides an image that captures this movement: the protestors in the streets are like ‘squirrels on the loose’ [xv]. The squirrels’ movements are a combination of rhythm and caprice; it is not clear where they are going, whom they are going to meet, nor what their destiny will be. Like Pulcinella, half human and half chicken, the scampering squirrel is what remains when the singular body enters in contact with another without any aspiration to create a self-destiny superseding [xvi]. There is something to be said of the encounter between animal and human that can potentially deprogram the metropolitan topoi, turning the exception into the gleaming transfiguration of another world. In the mere act of seeking, new possibilities emerge. And if the point is to create a different relation to the world, one in which all the “potentialities of the entire species can finally develop”, then every exception is a tool of domestication, a form of political atrophy [xvii]. The destituent possibility is not a realization; it is a questioning of the very disjointed presence of the Social as an ‘autonomous space’ for action. Here too, the Chilean exception offers us a mirror by which to flee the obstinacy of the present.

***

Gerardo Muñoz teaches at the Modern Language and Literatures department at Lehigh University. His most recent publications are Por una política posthegemónica (DobleA editores 2020), and the forthcoming edited volume La rivoluzione in esilio: Scritti su Mario Tronti (Quodlibet, 2020).

Notes

[i] For positions against Giorgio Agamben’s thesis, see Panagiotis Sotiris, “Against Agamben: Is a democratic biopolitics possible?”: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/14/against-agamben-is-a-democratic-biopolitics-possible/ , and Roberto Esposito, “Curati a oltranza”, https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/02/28/curati-a-oltranza/

[ii]The document of the letters of the Chilean academics about the COVID-19 can be found here: https://bit.ly/2IW7npd

[iii] Tomás Moulian, Chile Actual: Anatomía de un mito (LOM, 2002), p.81-119.

[iv] Willy Thayer, “El Golpe como consumación de la vanguardia”, El fragmento repetido: escritos en estado de excepción (ediciones metales pesados, 2006), p.24-25.

[v] See, Renato Cristi, El pensamiento político de Jaime Guzmán (LOM, 2011).

[vi] See in the latest issue of American Affairs (Vol. IV, Spring 2020), the articles “Common Good Capitalism: An interview with Marco Rubio”, and “Corporativism for the Twenty-First Century”, by Gladden Pappin. Also, on the reactivation of an economic Thomism, see Mary L. Hirschfield, Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2018).

[vii] Michael Hardt, “The withering of civil society”, Social Text, N.45, 1995.

[viii] See Michalis Lianos, “Une politique expérientielle”: https://lundi.am/Une-politique-experientielle-IV-Entretien-avec-Michalis-Lianoswell. Also, the dossier on the Chilean uprising, “Los estados generales de la emergencia”, Ficción de la razón, october 2019: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2019/10/29/vvaa-los-estados-generales-de-emergencia-dossier-en-movimiento-sobre-revueltas-y-crisis-neoliberal/

[ix] Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella or, Entertainment for Kids (New York, 2018), p.104.

[x] Ivan Illich, “The Institutional Construction of a new fetish: Human Life”, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses, 1978-1990 (Marion Boysars, 1992), p.223.

[xi] José Joaquin Brunner, “Violencia: el desquiciamiento de la sociedad”, November 2019, El Libero: https://ellibero.cl/opinion/jose-joaquin-brunner-violencia-el-desquiciamiento-de-la-sociedad/.

[xii] Schmitt taught as early as in the twenties this state-market duality. See, “Strong State and Free Economy", in Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism (University of Wales Press, 1998), ed. Renato Cristi. p.215.

[xiii] For the thesis on the control of social flows, see “Julien Coupat et Mathieu Burnel interrogés par Mediapart", Lundi Matin, 66, 2016: https://bit.ly/3bdRAOs . For the new form of power as extraction, see Alberto Moreiras, “Notes on the illegal condition in the state of extraction”, RIAS, Vol.11, N.2, 2018, p.21-35.

[xiv] Giorgio Agamben, “Chiarimenti", March 17, 2020, Quodlibet: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-chiarimenti. Denna text finns också på svenska här.

[xv] Hugo Herrera, “Crisis sobre Crisis”, March 17, 2020, La Segunda: https://bit.ly/2Wvc0i0.

[xvi] Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella or, Entertainment for Kids (New York, 2018), p.117.

[xvii] Jacques Camatte, “The Wandering of Humanity”, in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1995), p.71.

LA COMUNITÀ PANDEMICA 

di Nil Mata Reyes

1

Benvenuti nella comunità pandemica, una forma di appartenenza sociale strutturata dalla logica di partecipazione e profilassi delle macchine connesse in rete. Lo scopo della vita nella comunità pandemica è di essere intimamente “in contatto” e allo stesso tempo prudentemente fuori portata, per essere completamente connessi in isolamento igienico e dunque per essere completamente isolati ad opera delle connessioni igieniche.

2

Tutta la vita che è stata organizzata su scala dell’istituzione —l'università, la fabbrica, l'ufficio, l'ospedale, la prigione— è ora organizzata su scala di quanto definito dagli indirizzi di rete. Nella comunità pandemica la vita sociale, lavorativa e politica è interamente contratta nella vita domestica per poi esplodere nella vita in rete. Tutto ciò che è stato gestito per sfuggire furtivamente alla cattura digitale delle reti, con rammarico, si sottomette e si connette.

3

L'abbondanza di tempo appena non strutturato nella comunità pandemica straripa nell’abbondanza di notifiche, pubblicità, aggiornamenti, avvisi, messaggi, bip ed inviti al tempo della rete. Se prima della pandemia una vita poteva passare attraverso varie istituzioni nel corso di una giornata, diventando a turno un lavoratore, un consumatore, un paziente e uno studente, ora una vita può formalmente assumere tutte queste posizioni simultaneamente come le schede nei browser, le app sui dispositivi, il software sui network. Le soggettività lampeggiano algoritmicamente su on e off senza sosta, come voci di un database.

4

Nella comunità pandemica il rischio di contagio è delocalizzato sugli altri razzializzati e sessualizzati che non possono non lavorare. Magazzinieri, camionisti, custodi, commessi degli alimentari, staff ospedalieri, spazzini e lavoratori a progetto sono il fondamento materiale di una vita domestica il più possibile connessa e il meno possibile deambulatoria. Ciò che non può essere trasmesso in streaming è compensato da una classe mobile che è tanto precaria quanto il contatto è contagioso, tanto essenziale quanto sacrificabile.

5

La comunità pandemica reimmagina la domesticità come la sintesi di rete della sicurezza e dell'efficenza, un sito integrato e inter-operabile dove le divisioni spaziali e temporali tra lavoro produttivo e riproduttivo possono essere superate. In case confinate ma connesse, le vite possono dormire, mangiare, fare i genitori, lavorare, bere, cucinare, scopare, insegnare e trasmettere in ambienti controllati e disciplinati. Che sia svolto a casa o a sostegno delle case degli altri, tutto il lavoro è ora domestico. Quelle vite le cui case sono in se stesse ostili a causa di un affitto insostenibile, degli abusi domestici o del sovraffollamento, sono abbandonate come perdite statisticamente prevedibili ma in ultima analisi da scartare, mentre quelle senza casa nemmeno sono contemplate nell'equazione.

6

La comunità pandemica non è una comunità di corpi, ma di dati. Quanto più della vita diventa connesso, tanto più le reti sanno sulla vita, e quanto più della vita viene appreso dalle reti, tanto più potere le reti detengono sulla vita. Nella comunità pandemica la produzione reciproca di conoscenza e potere su cui sono state fondate le istituzioni disciplinari è completamente automatizzata. Tutte le azioni performate sui network producono un surplus di dati che – attraverso la loro accumulazione – ritorna infine come arma contro la vita. La politica è superflua, come un qualsiasi altro problema tecnico.

7

Prima della pandemia, la forma culturale privilegiata era ciò che eccedeva le reti. Tutto ciò che succedeva nelle “vita reale” e “lontano dalle tastiere” era feticizzato, anche se poi fosse finito a circolare sui network. Nella comunità pandemica il network in sé diventa il luogo privilegiato. Le istituzioni culturali di ogni sorta licenziano personale ed affittano server, cancellano spettacoli e commissionano contenuti. La vita sociale è traslata nella vita di rete, in una forma partecipativa e improvvisata. Sull’asse della convergenza di estetica e cibernetica, la comunità pandemica ricrea la cultura in base alla seguente ovvietà: “Tutti i network sono il bene, e tutto ciò che è bene fa network” e “La buona vita è quella connessa in rete”.

8

Nella comunità pandemica il capitalismo non può sostenersi e quindi viene simulato. Una caterva di pacchetti stimolo, mutui a interessi zero e sospensioni di pagamento rianimano l'economia in una forma virtuale, dove la sottrazione massiva di lavoro globale è bilanciata dalla moltiplicazione massiva del debito globale. La sospensione politica dell'economia capitalista e la simulazione tecnica delle relazioni capitaliste, sono avviate solo in preparazione dell'eventuale avvento di un mondo post-pandemico dove le contraddizioni del capitalismo possono di nuovo essere rese realtà. Fino a quel punto, la comunità pandemica vive la precarizzazione virtualizzata, la spoliazione e la privazione del capitalismo come parte di una prova generale di connessione, dove la simulazione dei mercati capitalisti simula anche la loro violenza.

9

Il linguaggio della comunità pandemica è il linguaggio dei protocolli. Lo scambio di dati sincronizzato e sequenziato tra indirizzi di rete, la cascata coordinata di impulsi binari è un mezzo tecnico di rappresentazione della vita numericamente determinata. Il linguaggio è catturato in caratteri leggibili dalle macchine per analizzarlo e monetizzarlo come comunicazione, mentre la coscienza è catturata in click e scroll per misurarla e manipolarla come attenzione. Nella comunità pandemica anche la morte può essere compresa appieno solo numericamente, catturata in statistiche e poi visualizzata in una serie pixelata di grafici, curve e mappe. Vivere e morire sono resi formalmente intercambiabili nella misura in cui sono entrambi catturati dall'astrazione e dalla mediazione dei network.

10

Le forze distruttive della comunità pandemica sono allo stesso tempo la condizione di possibilità di un immenso processo produttivo pandemico, e ogni cosa prodotta per difendere la vita dal contagio può essere ricondotta a fungere da modello per la vita post-pandemica in generale. Non appena saranno trovate terapie, si svilupperà l'immunità di gregge e arriverà il vaccino, l'economia globale sarà interamente riorganizzata e le nuove infrastrutture, i dispositivi e le reti messi in piedi per la pandemia saranno già stati istanziati a dovere. Tra gli esiti più conseguenti della pandemia non ci saranno solo le molte vite perdute a causa del virus, ma anche la totale reinvenzione delle forme reali nelle quali le vite sono vissute.

11

Qualunque cosa lavori nella comunità pandemica in ultima analisi lavora contro la vita. La pigrizia che caratterizza la potenzialità della vita è interpretata dalla comunità pandemica come un potenziale che, se non reso produttivo, minaccia in ultima analisi di distruggerla. In altre parole la comunità pandemica vede la potenzialità produttiva e quella distruttiva della vita come due espressioni dello stesso potenziale. La richieste di continuare a studiare senza pausa, di tornare virtualmente di corsa a lavoro, di mettere le nostre vite devono andare avanti (online) nella forma della connessione alla rete, sono articolate con così tanta urgenza adesso solo perché in una pandemia che ha privato la vita dei suoi usi sociali, la vita sembra minacciare totalmente la società. Il punto zero della vita oltre la comunità pandemica diventa quindi la vita stessa, la vita oltre ogni uso particolare.

12

Nella comunità pandemica la capacità di conoscere noi stessi è completamente mediata e strutturata dalle reti. Gli algoritmi e i protocolli che compongono i network non sono solo strutturati dalla mente dei programmatori, ma strutturano anche il pensiero che si presenta, insieme, con e sui network. In condizioni del genere, la vita esaminata può prendere forma solo come un esame di network che non sbaglia mai nel validare i suoi assunti più concretamente: la vita vissuta sui network riscoprirà sempre se stessa solo come vita di network. Se la forma network è in questo senso totalizzante, il nostro compito cambia dal sapere cosa siamo al rifiutarlo.

13

Mentre queste ultime parole sono battute sulla tastiera, una nuova attività ha iniziato a emergere nelle città attraverso diversi continenti, che suggerisce l'esistenza e la perseveranza della vita che eccede e fugge dalla comunità pandemica. Ogni sera, la gente dalle finestre, sulle verande e dalle terrazze ha iniziato ad urlare, a sbattere pentole e coperchi, a suonare o mettere musica per gli altri, una attività che a suo modo è diventata contagiosa. Questa gestualità collettiva è concepita per celebrare chi rischia la propria vita a sostegno di tutti noi, ma è anche un modo rumoroso per trovare l'altro nella cacofonia di una folla dispersa ma allo stesso tempo assemblata. Oltre la morte, la depressione e la disperazione che scorre densamente nel cuore della comunità pandemica, le persone reclamano l’una dall’altra ciò che non possono trovare da casa sui loro network, per la vita non solo vissuta ma che valga la pena vivere.

Tradotto da Internazionale vitalista

The Pandemic Community

Nil Mata Reyes

01. Welcome to the pandemic community, a form of social belonging structured by the participatory and prophylactic logic of networked machines. The aim of life in the pandemic community is to be intimately “in touch” yet safely out of reach, to be fully networked in hygienic isolation and thus to be fully isolated by hygienic networks.

02. All life that had been organized at the resolution of the institution—the university, the factory, the office, the hospital, the prison—is now organized at the resolution of network addresses. In the pandemic community, social life, work life, school life, and political life all contract into domestic life before exploding into networked life. Everything that had managed to fugitively escape the digital capture of networks regretfully submits and connects.

03. The abundance of newly unstructured time in the pandemic community rapidly overflows with the abundance of notifications, advertisements, updates, alerts, messages, pings, and invites of network time. If prior to the pandemic a life might pass through various institutions over the course of a day, becoming a worker, a consumer, a patient, and a student in turn, now a life can formally assume all of these positions simultaneously as tabs in browsers, as apps on devices, and as software on networks. Subjectivities algorithmically flicker on and off ceaselessly as database entries.

04. In the pandemic community, the risk of contagion is displaced by networks onto racialized and sexualized others who cannot not work. Warehouse stockers, truck drivers, custodial workers, grocery clerks, hospital staff, garbage collectors, and gig contractors are the material foundation for maximally networked and minimally ambulatory domestic life. What cannot be streamed is compensated for by a mobile class that is as precarious as contact is contagious, as essential as it is expendable.

05. The pandemic community reimagines domesticity as the networked synthesis of safety and efficiency, an integrated and interoperable site where the spatial and temporal division between productive and reproductive labor can be overcome. In confined yet connected homes, lives can sleep, eat, parent, work, drink, cook, fuck, teach, and stream in controlled and disciplined environments. Whether performed at home or performed to sustain the homes of others, all labor is now domestic. Those lives whose homes are themselves hostile due to unaffordable rent, domestic abuse, or overcrowded buildings are abandoned as statistically predictable but ultimately discardable casualties, while those who are homeless never even enter the equation.

06. The pandemic community is not a community of bodies, but of data. As more of life comes to be networked, networks know more about life, and as more of life comes to be known by networks, networks hold more power over life. The reciprocal production of knowledge and power upon which disciplinary institutions were founded is fully automated in the pandemic community. All actions performed on networks produce surplus data which—through its accumulation—ultimately returns as a weapon against life. Politics are dispensed with as another technical problem.

07. Before the pandemic, the privileged cultural form was activity that exceeded networks. All that occured “in real life” and “away from keyboards” was fetishized, even if eventually it also came to circulate on networks. In the pandemic community, the network itself assumes the place of privilege. Cultural institutions of every kind lay off staff and lease servers, cancel shows and commission content. Social life is translated into network life in a participatory and impromptu fashion. Following from the convergence of aesthetics and cybernetics, the pandemic community remakes culture according to the following truisms: “All that networks is good, and all that is good networks” and “The good life is the networked life.”

08. In the pandemic community, capitalism cannot sustain itself and so it is simulated. A deluge of stimulus packages, zero interest loans, and payment suspensions reanimate the economy in virtual form, where the massive subtraction of global labor is balanced by the massive multiplication of global debt. The political suspension of the capitalist economy and the technical simulation of capitalist relations are undertaken only in preparation for the eventual arrival of a post-pandemic world where the contradictions of capitalism can be made real again. Until then, the pandemic community lives the virtualized precaritization, dispossession, and privation of capitalism as part of a networked rehearsal, where the simulation of capitalist markets also simulates their violence.

09. The language of the pandemic community is the language of protocols. The synchronized and sequenced exchange of data between network addresses, the coordinated cascade of binary flips, is a technical means of rendering life numerically determinate. Language is captured as machine-readable characters in order to analyze and monetize it as communication, while consciousness is captured as clicks and scrolls in order to measure and manipulate it as attention. Even death can only be meaningfully understood numerically in the pandemic community, captured as statistics and then visualized as a pixelated series of graphs, curves, and maps. Living and dying are rendered formally interchangeable to the extent that they are both captured within the abstraction and mediation of networks.

10. The destructive forces of the pandemic community are simultaneously the condition of possibility for immensely productive pandemic processes, and everything produced to defend life from contagion may come to serve as a model for post-pandemic life generally. By the time treatments emerge, herd immunity develops, and a vaccine arrives, the global economy will have been entirely reorganized and the novel infrastructures, apparatuses, and networks constituted for the pandemic will already have been well instantiated. Among the most consequential outcomes of the pandemic will not only be the many lives lost to the virus, but also the total reinvention of the very forms within which lives are lived.

11. Whatever works in the pandemic community ultimately works against life. The idleness that characterizes the potentiality of life is understood by the pandemic community as a potential that, if not made productive, threatens to ultimately destroy the pandemic community. In other words, the pandemic community sees the productive and destructive potentials of life as two expressions of the same potential. The demand that we continue to study without pause, that we virtually rush back to work, that our lives go on(line) in networked form, are articulated so urgently now only because in a pandemic that has deprived life of its social uses, life appears to threaten society totally. The zero point of life beyond the pandemic community thus becomes life itself, life beyond any particular use.

12. In the pandemic community, our capacity to know ourselves and one another—to know our situation—is wholly mediated and structured by networks. The algorithms and protocols which compose networks are not only structured by the thoughts of programmers, but also structure thought that occurs conjunctively with and on networks. In such conditions, the examined life can only take shape as a networked examination which never fails to validate its own assumptions more concretely: life lived on networks will always only rediscover itself as networked life. If the network form is totalizing in this sense, our task changes from knowing what we are to refusing what we are.

13. As the last of these words are being typed, a new activity has begun to emerge in cities across several continents which suggests the existence and endurance of life that exceeds and escapes the pandemic community. Every evening, people outside of windows, on porches, and from rooftops have begun hollering, banging on pots and pans, and playing music to and for one another, an activity that in its own way has become contagious. This collective gesture is intended to celebrate those who risk their lives to sustain us all, but also is a way of sonorously finding one another in the cacophony of a dispersed but assembled crowd. Beyond the death, depression, and desperation that course so thickly through the heart of the pandemic community, people cry out to one another for what cannot be found on their networks at home, for life that does not just simply live, but is worth living.

-Nil Mata Reyes, 2020

A print version is available on the authors’ website. 

SOCIAL DISTANCING

Giorgio Agamben

April 6, 2020

“We do not know where death awaits us; let us look for him everywhere. Meditation on death is meditation on freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. To know how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.” — Michel de Montaigne

Because history teaches us that every social phenomenon has or may have political implications, it is appropriate that we register carefully this new concept that has entered the political lexicon of the West: “social distancing.” While the term probably arose merely as a euphemism for the cruder term “confinement,” it must be asked what would a political order that is based upon it be like? This is all the more urgent, given that it is not a purely theoretical question — if, as many are saying, the current health emergency should be seen as a laboratory in which new political and social frameworks are being developed for humanity.

Although as always, there are foolish people suggesting that the situation can without a doubt be considered in a positive light, that new digital technologies allow people to communicate happily from a distance, I do not believe that a community founded upon “social distancing” is either humanly or politically viable. In any case, whatever the perspective, it seems to me that this is the issue upon which we ought to reflect.

A first consideration concerns the truly singular nature of the phenomenon that these measures of “social distancing” have produced. Elias Canetti, in that masterpiece called Crowds and Power (in German, Masse und Macht), understands the crowd upon which power is founded through an inversion of the fear of being touched. While man typically fears being touched by the stranger, and all of the distances that men create around themselves arise from this fear, the crowd is the only situation in which this fear transforms into its opposite. “It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched…. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch…. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body…. This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is the greatest.”

I do not know what Canetti would have thought of the new phenomenology of the crowd that we are facing. What social distancing measures and panic have certainly created is a crowd, but an inverted crowd, so to speak, made up of individuals who are maintaining at any cost their distance from one another. Not a dense crowd, then, but a rarefied one, which is still a crowd, if this, as Canetti specifies later, is defined by its compactness and its passivity, in the sense that “it is impossible for it to move freely… it waits. It waits for a leader to be shown it…”

A few pages later, Canetti describes the type of crowd that is formed through a prohibition in which “a large number of people together refuse to continue to do what, till then, they had done singly. They obey a prohibition, and this prohibition is sudden and self-imposed.… But, in any case, it strikes with enormous power. It is an absolute command, but what is decisive about it is its negative character. Contrary to appearances, it never really comes from outside, but always originates in some need in those it affects.”

It is important not to miss that a community founded upon social distancing would not be based, as one might naively believe, on an individualism pushed to its extreme. Quite the contrary, it would be just like what we see around us today: a rarefied crowd founded upon a prohibition, yet particularly compact and passive precisely for that reason.

Translated by D. Alan Dean.  Excerpts from Crowds and Power follow the English translation by Carol Stewart (1962), with minor modifications.

MARGINAL NOTES ON THE AGAMBEN SCANDAL

Originally published in Italian here.  

“Soon afterwards, something else emerged – yet another justification for incorporating the ‘Children’s Songs’ into the ‘Poems from Exile’. Brecht, standing before me in the grass, spoke with rare forcefulness:‘In the struggle against them, it is vital that nothing be overlooked. They don’t think small. They plan thirty thousand years ahead. Horrendous things. Horrendous crimes. They will stop at nothing. They will attack anything. Every cell convulses under their blows. So we mustn’t forget a single one. They distort the child in the womb. We can under no circumstances forget the children.’ While he was talking, I felt moved by a power that was the equal of that of fascism – one that is no less deeply rooted in the depths of history than fascism’s power. It was a very strange feeling, wholly new to me.” 

- Benjamin on a conversation with Brecht, 1938

It seems that what irritates many and persuades few about Giorgio Agamben’s ongoing reflections, deep down, is his rendering of the image of passive consent to the state of exception imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. An image that manifests itself as a normalized adherence to the injunction of the absolute primacy of bare life, a life reduced to mere reproduction, deprived of any attributes of the experience of freedom. The image of this consent would suggest that bare life is revealed as the only horizon, or value, remaining of human experience, which is tantamount to saying that the human now denies itself any experience: it reveals itself as an intuited fact, a fact that emerges today in these circumstances, and which was therefore already present before.

Incidentally, it should be noted that something else is proven to be pre-existing or proemial to pandemic management—something that applies to the historical proletariat, i.e. the industrial worker, as much as to contemporary workers of all kinds; something that reveals itself in the mirror image of the majority of elderly people left to die alone under the legitimation of social protection from contagion, while the truth is that after years of state sanctioned austerity measures there are not enough hospital beds; something to do with the fact that Italy, “no country for young people”, is determined by the miserable distribution of income, ergo by the misery and predation of welfare—this pre-existing fact is that the injunction of biological reproduction is absolutely relative at a global scale according to different people’s privileges based on their geographical location, at a local scale, since social reproduction depends on the convenience of the economic machine, and finally at a time scale unique to each form of life with regards to the constant destructive forces of predation. So there is an experience of the thanatalogical power held by the present human society. 

Yet in the present situation, the image given by Agamben, that is to say the one in which it would appear that the social cement to which we objectively seem to adhere is revealed to be the command of bare life alone, is not inexact. At least, as long as a mass consent to the suspension or disembodiment of social relations, under threat of losing basic biological reproduction, persists. But what does this mean?

In an important passage from 1955, Georges Canguilhem argued against identifying human social organizations with living organisms. Canguilhem argues that while every human society or rather human society in general is a collectivity of living beings, this collectivity is neither an individual, since it does not obey the laws of homeostasis of a singular biological organism, nor a species, since it cannot be confused with “humanity” which is always open to the search for its specific sociability, while society is by definition closed. Society is a means, a tool, says Canguilhem. It demands rules but has no capacity for self-regulation, and thus disorder is its only presumably normal state. For this reason, regulation cannot be left to an apparatus produced by society itself; it must come from elsewhere—and here, again through Bergson, Canguilhem goes back even more surprisingly to Plato on the same question Walter Benjamin had returned to in order to arrive at his critique of sovereignty and the law by philologically revealing its fiction: justice. Canguilhem uses justice according to Plato, a supreme form of society that is at the same time irreducible to its bodies, to make the Bergsonian opposition between wisdom and heroism work: unlike in the living organism, there is no wisdom in society, and the proof is that its normal state of crisis constantly gives rise to the need for heroes and heroisms who emerge in the background of a crisis situation and are then called upon to give it a solution—all of this of course legitimized by a representation of extreme danger that is the mirror image of the permanent sense of threat perceived by society in its precarious nature.

It is clear that, in spite of some contrived and astonishing Marxian syncretisms, which have unfortunately run their theoretical course, we are dealing with social reproduction in its materialistically determined distinction from simple reproduction.

Let us try to make Canguilhem work in what appears to be Agamben’s contradiction: between him capturing the political truth on the state of exception and an aporia of his current discourse on normality, the rule of exception as taught by the tradition of the oppressed—to borrow from Benjamin’s 8th thesis on the concept of history. What particular kind of adherence to the formal exception are we seeing in the face of this pandemic? Or rather, why is it that the injunction of bare life displays itself in this circumstance?

This pandemic is not the dengue, which still causes more infections and victims than the coronavirus in Latin America, or the yellow fever, that has made new massacres in the last two years from South East Asia to Africa. This pandemic is global because it threatens the definitive global relations of capitalist society. The virus starts in the central metropolis of the global construction industry, a haven for capital in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and then impacts primarily in China, Europe and the US, with the addition of the oil states and those engaged in conflicts in the Middle East. This explains the representation of the danger, but not yet the social acceptance that it is gaining: in order to grasp it, it is perhaps necessary to question whether this same support is in fact illusory. This does not exempt us from ascertaining the force of the historical reification of this apparent image and therefore from ascertaining, as Agamben does precisely by capturing the truth of this moment’s image as it presents itself to history, that adherence to the guarantee of bare life is the foundation of the social pact. But we know, precisely with Agamben and Benjamin, that both this guarantee and the social pact are a pair of fictions—in other words, a false synthesis of opposites: such as, in close kinship, that of sovereign legitimacy in relation to justice and law. What does the experience of the oppressed teach us about the relationship between the life-form of capitalist society and simple reproduction if not that this relationship is simply null and void? That the mission of capitalist society, reversed through thirty years of globalization, is precisely exclusion, disinterest, the power or profit to command freely, independently from any guarantee of biological reproduction? It is this truth, affirmed in the practice of governance and introjected by the oppressed, that is now laid bare: the injunction to isolate and the suspension of social life are accepted precisely because it is at the moment in which society—and, coincidentally but separately, biological life—is most endangered that the whole experience of the divorce between the two finally condenses. In other words, individuals suddenly become conscious that it was power itself that laid down the fiction of the social pact in the first place: and therefore, it is the reality of society itself that is laid bare, its pure coincidence with power, and its powerlessness to produce any stability, any healing for the sick, any protection for life.

It is true that in this instinctive recording of the truth about society and power the injunction to cling to bare life as the sole horizon of social behaviour is reproduced: but it would be better to say that it is reflected in it. On the one hand, in fact, power enjoins the suspension of social life as a necessary condition for its own re-legitimization; on the other hand, this same suspension finds acceptance among people only as a condition consciously forced upon them by the evident fact that power and its social organization have no capacity to defend life effectively. In this dichotomy and beyond the instantaneous image of a forced convergence we can glimpse the crossroads between forms-of-life that are being prepared. On one side of this crossroads, there is an emergent form-of-life which, accepting the nakedness of society and power, secedes from it in order to affirm the value of life as an encounter and the mutual aid of bodies in their affections, thereby re-opening the horizon of a free experience, and on the other side a form-of-life imposed as a reproduction of society and its command, reconfigured exactly on the acceptance of the truth of their substantial powerlessness to protect life, bodies, and affections as what is common to us, and indeed on the acceptance of their destiny to separate us in the face of a distribution of death. And it is all the more so true—as seems to be the case in our present situation—that the reconfiguration of capitalist society and its general relations of power take the form of a predominance of digital capitalism, of data capture and of a predictive function of the devices of control: that is, of a total grip on the biological that at the same time mineralizes it.

In this sense, as shocking as the image used by Agamben, the anonymous article, “What the Virus Said,” published by Lundimatin appears to be a discursive operation with a different effectiveness and power: precisely in its address to the current form—captured at this moment—of the average social behaviour and to place itself ahead of that choice. A choice that seems to take on a global body in many different signs of conflictual life, which tend to dispel the crystallized image of a common decision on life itself paralyzed in the capture by the naked thanatocracy to which corresponds the automaton that we have come to call the Leviathan.

-Correspondence and Translation Committee - Vitalist International (Roman Section) 

Translated by the Vitalist International, Atlanta Section

The Economy or Life

First published in Lundimatin #236, March 30th, 2020.

Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyses our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.

—E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops” (1909)

Not every official transmission is fake news. Amidst so many disconcerting lies, today’s rulers appear genuinely heartbroken when detailing the extent to which the economy is suffering.  As for the elderly left to choke at home alone so they don’t cause a spike in official statistics, or clog up our hospitals…of course, a thought for them too. But that a good corporation might die: this really forms a lump in their throats. Just look at them rushing to its bedside. It’s true, people everywhere are dying from respiratory failure – but the market must not be deprived of oxygen. The economy will never be short on the artificial ventilators it needs; the central banks will see to that. Our rulers are akin to an aging heiress who sees a man bleeding out in her living room and frets over the stains on her carpet. Or like that expert of national technocracy who remarked in the recent report on nuclear safety that, “the true victim of any nuclear disaster would be the economy.”

Faced with the present microbial storm, one that we were warned of by every wing of government since the late 1990s, we are awash in conjecture about our leaders’ lack of preparation. How could it be that masks, hairnets, beds, caretakers, tests, and remedies are in such short supply? Why all these last-minute measures, all these sudden reversals of doctrine? Why all these contradictory injunctions – confine yourself but go to work, close the shops but not the large retail outlets, stop the circulation of the virus but not the goods that carry it? Why all these grotesque impediments to mass testing, to drugs that are so obviously effective and inexpensive? Why the choice of general containment rather than detection of sick subjects? The answer is simple and ever the same: it’s the economy, stupid!

Rarely has the economy appeared so clearly for what it truly is: a religion, if not a cult. A religion is, after all, no more than a sect that has taken power. Rarely have our rulers appeared so obviously possessed. Their mad cries for sacrifice, for war, for total mobilization against an invisible enemy, their calls for unity among the faithful, their incontinent verbal deliriums no longer embarrassed in the slightest by overt paradox—it’s the same as any evangelical celebration. And we are summoned to endure every single sermon from behind our glowing screens, with mounting incredulity. The defining characteristic of this brand of faith is that no fact is capable of invalidating it. Far from standing condemned by the spread of the virus, the global reign of the economy has made use of the opportunity to reinforce its presuppositions.

The new ethos of confinement, wherein “men derive no pleasure (but on the contrary great displeasure) from being in the company of one another”, wherein everyone appears to us in our strict separation as a potential threat to our life, wherein the fear of death imposes itself as the foundation of the social contract, only fulfills the anthropological and existential hypothesis of Hobbes’ Leviathan — Hobbes, whom Marx reputed to be “one of the oldest economists in England, and among the most original philosophers”. To situate this hypothesis, it’s worth recalling that Hobbes was entertained by the fact that his mother gave birth to him while terrified by lightning. Born of fear, he logically saw in life only the fear of death. “That’s his problem,” we’re tempted to say. No one is obliged to make such a sick worldview the basis of their existence, let alone of all existence. And yet here we are. The economy, whether liberal or Marxist, left or right, planned or deregulated, is the very illness now being prescribed for general health. In this, it is indeed a religion.

As our friend Hocart remarked, there is no fundamental difference between the president of a “modern” nation, a tribal chief in the Pacific Islands, or a pontiff in Rome. Their task is always to perform the propitiatory rites that will bring prosperity to the community, that reconcile it with the gods and preserve it from their wrath, that ensure unity, and prevent the people from scattering. “His raison d'être is not coordination but to preside over the ritual” (A-M Hocart, Kings and Courtiers): the root of our leaders’ incurable imbecility lies in their failure to understand this principle. It is one thing to attract prosperity, and another to manage the economy. It is one thing to perform rituals, and another to govern people’s lives. How much of power’s nature is purely liturgical is amply demonstrated by the profound uselessness, indeed the essentially counter-productive activity of our current rulers, who view the situation only as an unprecedented opportunity to excessively expand their own prerogatives, and to ensure no one tries to take their miserable seats. In view of the calamities befalling us, the leaders of today’s economic religion really are truly the last of the deadbeats when it comes to propitiatory rites. Their religion is in fact nothing but infernal damnation.

And so we stand at a crossroads: either we save the economy, or we save ourselves. Either we exit the economy, or we allow ourselves to be drafted into the great “army in the shadows” of those to be sacrificed in advance. The whole 1914-1918 rhetoric of the moment leaves no room for doubt: it’s the economy or life. And since it’s a religion we’re dealing with, what we’re facing now is a schism. The states of emergency decreed everywhere, the expansions of police power, the population control measures already enacted, the lifting of all limits to exploitation, the sovereign decision on who lives and who dies, the unflinching praise of Chinese governmentality—such means are not designed to provide for the "salvation of the people” here and now, but to prepare the ground for a bloody “return to normal”, or else the establishment of a normality even more anomic than that which prevailed before. In this sense, the leaders are for once telling the truth: the afterwards [l’après] is indeed being played out now. It is now that doctors, nurses, and caretakers must abandon any loyalty to those attempting to flatter them into self-sacrifice. It is now that we must wrest control of our health and wellness from the disease industry and “public health” experts. It is now that we must set up mutual-aid networks of autonomous supply and production, if we are avoid succumbing to the blackmail of dependency that aims to redouble our subservience. It is now, in the extraordinary suspension we are living through, that we must figure out  everything we will need in order to live beyond the economy, and all that will be required in order to prevent its return. It is now that we must nourish the complicities that can limit the impudent revenge of a police force that knows it is hated. It is now that we need to de-confine ourselves—not out of mere bravado, but gradually, with all the intelligence and attention that befits friendship. It is now that we must elucidate the life we want: what this life requires us to build and to destroy, with whom we want to live, and whom we no longer wish to live with. No care should be given to those leaders currently arming themselves for war against us. No “living together” with those who would leave us for dead. We will trade no protection at the price of submission; the social contract is dead, it is up to us to invent something else. The rulers of today know well that on the day of de-confinement we will have no other desire than to see their heads roll, and that is why they will do everything they can to prevent that day from coming, to diffract, control, and delay our exit from confinement. It is up to us to decide when, and on what terms it happens. It is up to us to give form to the afterwards. It is up to us to sketch technically feasible and humane routes out of the economy. “We’re standing up and walking out” said a deserter from Goncourt not so long ago. Or, to quote an economist attempting to detox from his own religion: “I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue: that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.” 

Translated by Ill Will Editions

QUARANTINE LETTER #3

In this third letter in our quarantine series, Kora responds to Orion’s “Interruption, suspended.”

—-

In spring, an interruption

I am grateful that Orion wrote— because when August and I spoke of destitution and revolt, I was frustrated that we used old concepts to describe a novel situation. I had hoped the crisis signaled our world had really broken with its past. If that were true, we should have been able to leave our old models of thinking behind. As both our own theoretical impulses and the projections of the Imperial College make clear, we have not. The question is still the extent to which we can.

Orion is correct to say that there is nothing “analogous” between the virus and a revolt. The idea is obviously silly. Nevertheless, the crisis and revolt have in common something imaginary— which is not at all to say unreal— namely, the dream we have shared for centuries of a world entirely out of control. That dream has in a limited and terrible sense been fulfilled. The vertigo of the first days, in which the evictions were suspended and the economy upended and the offices and universities closed, had me terrified and then relieved. The virus has taught us well that the future is decidedly beyond human control.

Yet we continue to talk of power in the terms of “us” versus “them.” “Destitution, Interrupted” worried that while revolt returns power to people on earth, the suspension that accompanied the coronavirus has rendered us without power. “Interruption, Suspended” worried that the virus demonstrates the same limit that we named two years ago— that we will not manage to make a break from the democratic party. It proposed that in this suspension, we institute our own ban. Are these not outdated concerns? The coronavirus demonstrates the futility of any one power asserting and maintaining social control. Again, the virus put everyone, rulers and ruled alike, into a position of reaction. Questions of power remain partially worthwhile, but the concern with “our autonomy” is a concern of the past.

Further, some of the institutions that have previously worried us no longer deserve our concern. The power that shapes our lives today lies not with national political parties but with science, or in, for instance, the ubiquity of computer screens and Amazon, and only secondarily with human actors. We must not take lightly the fact that some of the institutions we previously took to be fundamental to this world— like eviction, the economy, employment, and imprisonment for misdemeanors— are those that have been suspended.

On a different but related note: If we must go on chattering about destitution— and the concept is just common enough now for me to use it— Orion is correct to name an ambiguity in understandings of the term. But the tension is not precisely, as he frames it, between destitution understood as a dynamic intrinsic to constituted power and destitution understood as a political strategy to be accomplished. Rather, the conceptual tension lies between destitution understood as the exhibition of the arbitrariness of power and the somehow related and subsequent question of whether that exhibition restores a capacity to act. If  “to destitute” means to undermine an apparatus that previously shaped us, then every “destitution” restores an ideal (real but not actual) and subjectless capacity to act. The question that follows is how such a restored capacity to act will be used or deployed— that is, the question of what is to be done, or more precisely, the question of what will be done.

I propose that we abandon the outdated desire for autonomy. I propose that we grapple with the blurring of any neat distinction between rulers and ruled. We should not assume the battle lines of our past remain the same in our present: the world is darker and different, and we will find new friends just as we see the emergence of more determined enemies. And if these proposals seem to flirt with nihilism, let me be clear: I write none of this to eliminate the possibility of meaningful action. We live in an unprecedented mass demobilization. The fundamental arbitrariness of this world has been revealed. (Some rightly call this arbitrariness the an-archē of power. If destitution means the exhibition of the anarchic void at the heart of systems of control, then it has been done.) Politically, the way forward is simple. We should aim to forget the way things once were: organize and act to forget. In April, we cannot pay rent. In May or next year, we cannot resume work.

We live a dark battle between possible futures and irreconcilable pasts. The world is changing decisively, in painful demobilization and confusing slowness rather than a grand and joyous event. In the meantime, I hope the reigning uncertainty does not stop us from inhabiting our present— in what I can only hope will be an unprecedented and terrible bliss. If that sounds cold, it is only because our world is.

— Kora, 

April 4, 2020