💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › george-sotiropoulos-gene-ray-pandemic-dystopias.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:41:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Pandemic Dystopias Author: George Sotiropoulos & Gene Ray Date: April 4, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19, Greece, anarcho-communism Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-05 from https://voidnetwork.gr/2020/04/04/pandemic-dystopias-biopolitical-emergency-and-social-resistance/
“I didn’t think the Apocalypse would have this much admin”
– A teacher from Hastings
Setting aside the more technical and delicate issues of agency and
intentionality, a virus, like the by now notorious Coronavirus (aka
SARS-CoV-2), has a certain mode of being, with its peculiar rhythms and
refrains. To a substantial extent, in a modernized society, the
comprehension of the ontic structure of a virus, of its “being” or even
better of its becoming (indeed quite a dynamic one, with a marked
capacity to mutate)falls within the cognitive domain of the natural
sciences.One of the lessons that the pandemic should have brought home
to social and political theorists is that reducing scientific discourse
to its aspects of power and control or to its formal structure as a
“language-game” can become a recipe for a Black Death-level of disaster.
This is not to deny the intricate and institutionalized links between
scientific knowledge and capitalism or the modern state, which go much
deeper than a simple misuse, nor their occasionally catastrophic
consequences. Science, like any other system of knowledge, is a social
practice, that cannot be entirely disembedded from the sociopolitical
relations within which it operates. Nevertheless, the contents of
scientific knowledge are not simply reducible to the wants and needs of
capital, nor would the abolition of capitalist relations of production
immediately make defunct quantum physics, thermodynamics, evolutionary
biology etc.For the case at hand, that systems of scientific knowledge
have developed a capacity (far from complete to be sure) to delineate
the composition and behavior of pathogens is a major break through in
terms of their containment and treatment. If a leftist politics is to
challenge the dominant administration of the crisis, it must be able to
take the “hard sciences” into consideration, and to build channels of
cooperation and mutual feedback –which can be critical and
transformative in its scope – as well as provide spaces for their
fruitful advancement.
Then again, from the perspective of critical theory this (if left to
stand on its own) is an inadequate inference, since it tends to yield
skinless and arbitrary comparisons between different social-historical
periods, effectively reproducing a naĂŻve liberal progressivism a la
Steven Pinker,which amasses statistics and graphs to assert how much
better things are today(whilst drowned and encamped bodies pile up at
the borders of enlightened Europe).A virus’ epidemiological journey is
not only a biological process, it is a social phenomenon, which in fact,
as the recent pandemic reveals, may well reach the status and intensity
of an event. This generic proposition holds true whether the site of a
virus’appearance is a local ecosystem somewhere in the Amazon or an
industrial megacity like Wuhan.In fact, the distinction is mainly
analytical, for “nature”as sentient materiality is already social, in
that it contains structured forms of community as one of its main
determinations,just like “society”, from a hunter-gatherer tribe to the
most technologically advanced social formation,never stops partaking in
the physical strata of the world, the microbiological substrata
included–yet another painful reminder of the coronavirus pandemic.The
task of critical theory therefore must be to sublate– which is not quite
the same as to abolish – the distinction between the natural and the
social in order to study the material environment within which SARS 2
has emerged and which the latter subsequently affects in its various
dimensions.
“The bug, whatever its point of origin, has long left the barn, quite
literally.”
– Robert Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu
That the material environment of today’s world, hence the spread of the
viral strains it breeds, is conditioned to an unprecedented scale by
human agency,in particular by the systematic activity of the
techno-industrial complex, is not a distinctly Marxist claim, being
registered also by scientific research funded and conducted within
mainstream institutional channels. Nor is there anything leftist or
radical in asserting that the coronavirus pandemic would be impossible
without the forms and processes of social and economic connectivity and
integration that go by the term “globalization”. What critical theory
can add(among other things) is a delineation of the social force that
acts as a singular and potent determination of the material environment
on a global scale, and which can consequently be legitimately considered
a key catalyst both of macro-historical processes, like climate
change,and short-term yet recurrent phenomena like epidemics;and this
social force is none other than capital.
To be sure, “Capital”(especially when writ large) can be used in an
entirely abstract manner, explaining everything and nothing, which can
be at the same time a pretty vulgar and moralistic manner, which turns a
complex process into the grand villain of history. Yet, there is nothing
abstract, simplistic or moralizing when theoretical analysis attends to
the ways the production and circulation of viruses is conditioned by the
forms of mass production, circulation, exchange, and consumption through
which capital actualizes itself today.Intensive monocultures and huge
concentration of live-stock, systematic contacts between humans and
other animals, unsanitary working and living conditions (chiefly in the
industrial peripheries), expansive markets, incessant flows of goods and
humans, crowded megacities; in brief, the real movement and spatialized
actuality of capital valorization and accumulation, embedded as they are
into distant social formations and a world-market that brings them
together,do not only facilitate zoonotic transfer and the rapid spread
of viruses, they create evolutionary pressures for the development of
its more virulent forms. To quote from the brilliant text of Chuang:
“the basic logic of capital helps to take previously isolated or
harmless viral strains and place them in hyper-competitive environments
that favor the specific traits which cause epidemics, such as rapid
viral lifecycles, the capacity for zoonotic jumping between carrier
species, and the capacity to quickly evolve new transmission vectors”.
Although much more unpacking is certainly required, the parallel with
neoliberal forms of subjectification and financialization – which also
require flexibility, adaptability, rapidness, transferability (and quite
often virulence) as key capacities for thriving in the hyper-competitive
environment of the world market – is too attractive not to be
highlighted. Nor should we avoid drawing the provocative inference: the
material environment of late capitalism fosters the development of
highly self-assertive forms of individuation, which are potentially
damaging to the communities that host them. How far this analogy can be
drawn should be left open. It certainly must not be taken to mean that
entrepreneurs are parasites or financialization a viral strainn or
conversely that viruses are driven by the “spirit of capitalism”, much
less by anything like ambition.But it cannot go unnoticed how among
different life-forms or, more generically, forms of being,homologous
patterns of behavior are developed as a response to the pressures
exercised and the opportunities provided by current socioeconomic
conditions. To this extent, regardless how we tackle it theoretically
and philosophically, we are not dealing here with a superficial
resemblance but with a substantial analogy: similar to the way
individual entrepreneurs or enterprises tend to stand out in the“free
market”precisely because of their competitiveness, viral strains “tend
to stand out precisely because of their virulence”.
Following this materialist line of thought, Chuang astutely conceives of
the coronavirus pandemic as a social contagion, whose various contours
need to be mapped out. The more immediate of these contours is of course
the one that concerns health. That the outbreak is serious in an
out-of-the-ordinary way cannot be measured simply by the death toll –
even though, as numbers increase exponentially, the mortality rate of
Covid-19 weighs heavily as a potent factor – but by the outbreak of a
virus for which there is neither herd-immunity nor vaccines or medicine
and which consequently has a high degree of penetrance. In this respect,
as Wallace remarks, statistical comparisons with the influenza (when
they are made for the purpose of explaining away the pandemic as an
“exaggeration”, driven by ulterior motives and interests) are an
entirely misplaced “rhetorical device”.Then again, that the epidemic
journey of a viral strain morphed into a worldwide health crisis is not
irrelevant to social context, specifically to the condition of health
care systems in countries where the outbreak has spread. It is unlikely
that any healthcare system would not be strained by a sudden and
exponential increase of people in need of hospitalization. Yet, as it
has been widely argued,e.g. by Mike Davis and David Harvey, neoliberal
policies (with their consistent devaluation of public health care
systems and their“just-in-time”management) combined with the near total
domination of the pharmaceutical sector by corporations (driven by
profit and underfunding research aimed at prevention) has made states
ill-prepared for a potential pandemic, despite warnings to the contrary.
Coupled with the initial underestimation of the threat by governing
authorities, the lack of discipline on the social basis (again mainly at
the eastly phases) and sprinkled with good doses of anti-Chinese
propaganda and orientalism, many factors came together to ensure that a
health crisis with global reach would break out. Alain Badiou is adamant
that, virulent as the viral strain may be, there is nothing novel or
worthy of critical thought in the pandemic, save its spread to the
“comfortable” West. Even this fact should not be underestimated though,
for the outbreak of a lethal and rapidly transmitting viral strain to
the center of today’s hyper-connected world, inevitably gave rise to the
specter of a crisis that we have been accustomed to see on screens.
Infecting our dystopian imaginary as much as our bodies, Covid-19 has
elicited an affective mass transmission of vulnerability and insecurity.
Serious as the health-crisis may be (and it looks quite serious), what
makes the social contagion sufficiently disruptive to pass the threshold
of an “event” are its wider consequences.In these terms, it hardly takes
a Marxist to realize that, having emerged within and circulated through
the worldmarket, the coronavirus was bound to affect the extensive and
intensive circuits of production, exchange and consumption that
constitute today’s globalized economy. Some in fact have been quick to
pinpoint in economic interests and calculations the true cause behind
the façade of global epidemic, confidently exclaiming (in the words of
an autonomist’s poster in Athens) that the coronavirus “is not a flu but
a commercial war”. For sure, against vacuous invocations of an
international community standing together in solidarity, it is sensible
to expect that the pandemic will aggravate existing economic and
geopolitical rivalries. Reductions of the pandemic to economic interests
however actually mar this issue by soaking it in a conspiratorial logic,
which assumes an impossible intentionality and control over a torrent of
events – even more so, events involving nonhuman factors. Factories,
businesses, shops, industries have ceased operating or started operating
far below their usual velocity, while,receiving the vibes of the
shutdown, the stock market commencedits own free fall; the overall
result has been a major shockwave affecting all the key domains of the
capitalist market: supply, demand and finance.This surely does not stop
individual enterprises, even entire economic sectors,from profiting or
profiteering (the line between the two being blurred as the mechanism of
“supply and demand”receives input from the spreading social
contagion).There is nothing novel here: in all major social crises, be
it wars, natural disasters or even popular uprisings, some find an
opportunity to make“big bucks”. Yet, just like the fact that during the
Second World War some companies profited does not alter the equally
recorded fact of widespread economic devastation in whole continents,
neither the increased profit of individual companies nor even the
accelerated activity of economic sectors to day excludes the occurrence
of an unexpected “great deceleration”.
“Unexpected” does not mean “out of the blue” or “ex nihilo”. Pretty much
like national healthcare systems, even the more robust economy would be
put to the test by a shutdown of such scale,much more so a global
economy that was having enough troubles to allow predictions of a new
cycle of recession and crisis to achieve wide circulation. In this
respect, even though multiple scenarios can still be made, depending on
the standpoint of the speaker,SARS 2, a true “agent of chaos”, is going
to reveal and aggravate the chronic problems and systemic weaknesses of
the current economic system, both on a global/international and on a
national level – something that clearly allows for diversity in form and
intensity. Granting the open nature of the events and the different
outcomes they may yield, the salient point is that, along with a health
crisis, the social contagion the coronavirus has spurred takes the shape
of an economic crisis of potentially gigantic proportions. And since by
“economy” we refer not only to some figures on a balance sheet but to
the social (re)production of life, just like “health” refers not only to
the well being of individual bodies but to the smooth operation of a
structured yet vulnerable collective assemblage, we can ultimately grasp
why the unfolding social contagion marks the epigenesis of a generalized
social crisis. Expectedly, faced with the reality and,no less
important,the specter of disruption that such an extensive crisis
necessarily entails, the state as ultimate guarantor of the smooth and
proper functioning of contemporary societies has been called upon.
“Build Babylon, the task you have sought. Let bricks for it be moulded
and raise the shrine”
– Enuma Elish, 57–58
There is a veritable assumption– a true “myth” in the Barthian sense –
among advocates of the free market that the forms of competitive
interaction composing this institution are structured by a mechanism of
self-regulation,capable of achieving and maintaining in the long-run a
certain homeostatic balance. The committed evangelists of this idea are
willing to embrace the “creative destruction”necessarily entailed in the
process– after all they are rarely affected personally by it. Moreover,
with the exception of the true zealots, free-market advocates (those
widely regarded as apostles of neoliberalism included) acknowledge the
need of public law as a safeguard to property and capital accumulation,
as well as some form of state regulation and intervention, which may not
be restricted to the role of a “watchdog”, as it extends to
institutional and legal facilitation, but which, if need be, can become
considerably intensive and repressive, e.g. establish a military
dictatorship that makes “commies” disappear. Why should the principle
change when the threat posed to the market comes not from communists and
unruly workers but from a viral strain? After all, historically,
communism has been depicted as a “bacillus”, leading a century ago to
the establishment of a “sanitary zone” meant to contain the epidemic in
Russia, which had already fallen victim to the disease.“Biopolitics”,
and the intermingling of medical and political discourse that it
entails, can be a component of international relations and foreign
policy as much as of domestic policies directed to the population living
inside a given territory.
The inference to be drawn from all these is that the extensive state
intervention which we are witnessing, and which seems to follow the
exponential growth rates of Covid-19, in no way spells the sudden
“death” of neoliberalism, even less so of capitalism. In sharp contrast,
even if it is accepted that the “normal” political form of a capitalist
society is that of a liberal state (a contested claim), highly
authoritarian forms of statism are still not just a digression but a
condition for the reproduction of the capitalist market, either at a
national or even at a“world-system” level. To put it schematically, the
crisis of reproduction of capitalist social relations, and by extension
of parliamentarism as a form of political mediation, generates an
objective tendency towards authoritarian regimes of regulation.
Moreover, since we are dealing with mutations of the state form, a
formal antithesis between authoritarianism and democracy can be
misleading, for it fails to comprehend how the two intermingle and morph
into each other. The transition from a liberal democracy to an
authoritarian regime (or vice versa)is usually crisis-laden, yet it
still takes place within the state form; which is to say, the latter
absorbs the interplay between the two as moments of its own reproduction
and history. There is thus a certain duality or to be more precise a
two-in-one operating in times of crises of social reproduction: what
from one perspective is an act of preservation, of dominant social
relations,constitutes also an act of re-composition, unified in a
singular process of restructuration, where the dissolution of identity
is prevented only through its self-differentiation– thus, self-negation.
How far have we moved towards such a direction of regime change
today?The recent self-suspension of Parliament in Hungary is certainly
something to take note of, as it shows how the social contagion enables
an immunological re-composition of the state towards more authoritarian
forms. Nevertheless, talk about a “new totalitarianism” or “fascism” may
look premature or even forced by a gaze predisposed to see them.What can
be said with certainty is that most affected states have responded to
social contagion by declaring a state of emergency and since then
managing it through a varied mix of sovereignty and governmentality. The
aspect of sovereign power is not hard to grasp, it is the very capacity
to declare emergency and any measures that follow thereafter. This is
the key point of Carl Schmitt’s infamous definition: no matter if the
emergency is“real” or simply a fabrication, sovereignty is the power to
declare it and thus assume the responsibility of its administration and
resolution. That said, even sovereign power, insofar as it is exercised,
has a dimension of relationality; and although its form is vertical and
mainly defined by imposition, the exercise of sovereign power still
requires a degree of acceptance. Therefore, while during an emergency
the normative aspects of the state recede in favor of its prerogative
dimension, normativity does not disappear, it is rather invested in the
sovereign, who does not simply do what is “needed” but also what ought
to be done e.g. save lives, businesses and jobs. The obvious problem
here, highlighted virtually by everyone who has engaged with the
phenomenon, is that in the process the forms of sovereign power that
appeared during the state of emergency can be entrenched, completing the
dialectic of preservation/ re-composition/ restructuration highlighted
above.
Picking up on this fact, at an earlier phase of the pandemic,
commentators on the left, like Giorgio Agamben, have criticized the
emergency declared as a disproportionate, hence unwarranted, act, whose
real purpose was to enhance the grip of government on citizens, taking
one more (big) step towards an authoritarian state. In retrospect, it is
easy to say that this was a very hasty assessment of the Covid-19
epidemic. In fact,such an indictment is not enough; what needs to be
added, going back to a point made at the beginning, is a deeply worrying
tendency in critical theory to undermine as a matter of principle the
veracity of scientific discourse,or worse the materiality of the
physical world, in the name of a sweeping critique of power and a vulgar
social constructivism, which end up seeing everywhere domination and
machinations meant to entrench it. As suggested earlier, this attitude
can lead to dangerous paths,which start from seemingly innocuous claims
that Covid-19 is simply a “heavy flu” and all that is needed is to wash
your hands(!) but which can then arrive at a total disregard for science
under a pose of radical resistance.On the other hand, this “critique of
the critique” also risks missing a key point, which concerns the
political effects and affects of the pandemic, namely the affirmation
and justification (in a substantial sense) of the state’s capacity to
adopt authoritarian measures and hence assume more authoritarian shapes.
Although it is quite unclear when the pandemic will end, we can be
relatively assured that the more severe emergency measures will not
outlive it, since no state can possibly aim at empty cities with highly
reduced economic activity as the norm. Whatever valid critique can be
made on the curfews that states have imposed, and there are criticisms
even from the World Health Organization about their efficacy, it is
exceedingly naĂŻve to reduce all such measures taken to a sinister ploy
by “state and capital”. One is hard-pressed to seriously imagine any
collective form that would not have to implement some restrictions in
face of an epidemic, which politically means to give its invested powers
an authoritarian twist. Equally difficult is to see how hierarchy can be
entirely replaced with horizontality, on an institutional level, without
at the same time reducing scientific knowledge to opinion. This is not
to say that people lack the capacity to discipline themselves without
patronizing or appreciate expertise without imposition (though in our
era of social media it is astonishing how much obscurantism if not plain
idiocy circulate asknowledge).It is only to stress that in times of
emergency the institutional forms mediating communal existence are
pressed to adopt and develop more authoritarian lines of
operation.Yelling“power”or “state of emergency” does not constitute a
political event and the axiomatic assumption that “horizontality” is
preferable in all possible situations, along with its underside
assumption that hierarchy is on principle an expression of injustice,
are ideologemes that can be as dogmatic and damaging as
authoritarianism. How would it be possible to respond to the epidemic
and stop the rapid escalation of the viral strain if some institutional
organs (either composed by scientists or receiving input by scientific
committees) were not invested with a real power to swiftly decide and
act, but instead such power was diffused in a meshwork of local
assemblies in thrall of voices declaring with passionate conviction that
the virus is a heavy flu or a commercial war (not to mention assemblies
in thrall of other voices declaring that the holy communion does not
disseminate the virus)?
Yet from a materialist viewpoint, it is precisely the objectivity of
authoritarian measures in times of crises which makes them more
dangerous, for it creates an affectively fertile situation for the
suspension of critique and the immunization of sovereign power. To
assert that not everything can be decided during an emergency –perhaps
also in ordinary times, but this is another issue – through mass popular
assemblies requiring unanimity or consensus is one thing; to claim that
democracy is a luxury and, instead of fostering public dialogue and
accountability of representative organs, to join calls from the right
for uncritical public obedience is wholly another. Moreover, no matter
how deeply periods of emergency suspend the normal temporality and
spatiality of a community, they always leave traces on collective memory
and the institutional forms that retain it and manage it. The
administration of the unfolding social contagion is not going to be
washed away like an antiseptic, it instead produces a certain
experience, upon which states will be able to build in case of another
emergency. This is no dystopian speculation, for states always (try to)
absorb a crisis as a moment of their history, so that even when a
re-composition is performed, the continuity of the state-form will be
affirmed. The administration of the unfolding social contagion itself,
no matter how exceptional some of the measures may be, falls within a
well-established process of securitization, that has been defining of
state policy for decades. Riots, mass migration flows, extreme climatic
phenomena, financial bubbles, indebtedness, epidemics and now a global
pandemic; from the perspective of the existing capitalist order, hence
of the state that sustains it, these phenomena share a key feature, they
are sources of instability and factors of disruption to the smooth
functioning of society; hence they are necessarily experienced as
security threats – “security” being precisely the condition whereby a
being can feel comfortable persevering in its current state. This is the
backbone of the shift from the rule of law to a state of security, which
takes it upon itself to constantly declare emergencies and suspend
rights that are constitutional, hence theoretically part of a state’s
normative structure. Security also provides the necessary affective
basis for social acceptance and mass support, as it leads individuals or
entire social groups affected by insecurity to desire the presence of
more state, even in full militarized form. From this angle, the
coronavirus pandemic may radicalize the historical trend of
securitization that has been underway, and the authoritarianism it
breeds. Given that the duration of the social contagion is indefinite,
the critical notion of a state of emergency becoming the norm needs to
be taken seriously, although its contours require further unpacking.
The overall process is buttressed by the second facet of the
biopolitical emergency currently in operation, which pertains to
governmentality. Alongside a staggering show of sovereign power, all
affected states have in one way or another incorporated personal
responsibility in their policy,stressing the duty of citizens to perform
social distancing and “#stay home”. There is no need again to evoke a
masterplan devised and executed by an omnipresent Power in order to
grasp the tendency at work and the wider process it is embedded. The
whole idea of “governmentality” was to conceptually grasp forms of power
that do not operate through the vertical diagrammatic lines of a
sovereign power that commands, but in a more diffused and horizontal
way, integrated to the autonomous activity of individuals. Towards this
end, a key mediating role has been played by new digital technologies,
which individuals carry as an integral part of their own social and
personal identity: cards and their pins, mobile phones and their
tracking devices(either physical or preference tracking), social media
and their accounts;these are only the more obvious manifestations of a
technology that, the very same moment it is said to facilitate
individual autonomy, enhances the capacity of political power to keep
individuals accountable – by making them (keep an) account– of their
actions. Recognizing the role of technology, we must still not be
carried away by the dystopian version of techno-fetish, since even in
states like Greece where biopolitical emergency is not as high-tech,
similar (if less effective) patterns and forms of governmentality have
emerged, blurring the boundaries between discipline, control and
autonomy. For sure,the insistent stress on the role of personal
responsibility in the “battle” against the coronavirus, may well be a
policy calculated to displace discussion from the shortages of national
healthcare systems or from other governmental policies – e.g. the
scandalous tolerance shown to heavy industry in Italy and big call
centers in Greece where all major tech-companies outsource their
customer service, which have been allowed to operate without even
ensuring that they keep the necessary measures of protection for
workers. Moreover, the point here is not to dispute that people do have
a responsibility to practice social distancing or that the latter is
actually an act of solidarity towards other people, rather than an
expression of petty bourgeois survivalism. Nevertheless, the consistency
of the discourse of personal responsibility as a governmental policy,
alongside the unspecified time horizon of the quarantine,carries a
long-term dynamic of adaptation that can act as a catalyst for the
systematization of a state of affairs where tracking and surveillance
are not experienced as infringements but as a civic duty and a condition
for the exercise of individual freedom, the boundaries of which will
have been of course determined in advance.
While important to recall that we are mapping out tendencies, not
finalized actualities, an overall picture still emerges: the
biopolitical emergency that the unfolding crisis has generated raises
the specter of a “new normal”, which among other features will contain
recurrentrestrictions to movement and association, partly imposed from
above partly accepted as an act of self-responsibility. While the regime
that will embody this new normality will surely be authoritarian,there
is much more involved than an increase in the levels of state
repression, that is, a quantitative change; there is rather a
qualitative re-composition underway (tentative, open and still fragile,
to be sure)through which the spatial domains of the state and of
individual autonomy are reconfigured. From a left wing perspective there
is something unsettlingly dystopian in this path,heading towards a
future that only science-fiction has visualized: a fully administered
society that has effectively collapsed the distinction between
heteronomy and autonomy, servitude and freedom, that is, the key
distinctions upon which our politics has been premised.Yet this is not
entirely accurate as a critical anatomy; for in their very novelty,
these biopolitical spatializations are evoking political images and
landscapes that are age-old and that, moreover, are not figments of a
dystopian imagination but expressions of a veritable, utopian imaginary.
The notion of the Urstaat, proposed by Deleuze and Guattari , is
possibly problematic as a genetic account of state-formation, but grasps
compactly a key characteristic of the state-form, highlighted also by
other, more historically nuanced, analyses: states may be structures of
domination, yet from its earliest appearance the state-form and, more
specifically, the cities that stand as its political, administrative,
economic, cultural and ideological epicenter have a markedly utopian
dimension, not standing as an ideological superstructure but overcoding
the state’s everyday activities. At the heart of this utopia –every
state’s essence, dream and fetish, is Order: in distributing rights and
duties, in keeping records, in setting boundaries and limits, in caring
for the needy and punishing trespassers, state is ordering a territory
to assume its proper form. Needless to say, there is hardly any state
that has lived up to its self-image, with phenomena like corruption,
nepotism and clientelism being typical of states, past and present; so
typical indeed that they can be considered endemic to the hierarchical
structures and mechanisms of the state-form. Yet even the most corrupt
and ruthless state needs to maintain at least the institutional skeleton
of a normative order. It follows that, although states will tolerate
their own corruption (always promising to improve),they need to
eliminate or at least contain and control every autonomous source of
disorder, either internal or external. But while every state loathes
disorder, it also requires it and invites it as a condition for its
consolidation; which is to say, states see reflected in disorder not
only their Other, but the reason and righteousness of their own being.
This is precisely what Foucault has grasped in his analysis of the
disciplinary measures taken on the occasion of a plague outbreak in the
17^(th) century; as an embodiment of disorder, the plague fed into a
“political dream”, “the utopia of the perfectly governed city”.
That similar measures are taken currently by states may well have to do
with their instrumentality for an effective containment of epidemics;
yet, in its very necessity, the biopolitical emergency of today may
nourish a similar political imaginary,of a well-ordered, hence rational,
society in which the state ensures that we all stay where we must and
only act for identifiable reasons. From this point of view, the specific
set of measures taken by governments and their debatable character is
secondary – though far from unimportant; what chiefly matters is that
the state appears as the necessary guarantor of order, hence, as the
absolute condition of justice and right: “I the State, I am Order, I am
Justice”. At a time of intensive securitization and growing
authoritarianism, a flaring up of such a political imaginary is
considerably dangerous, since at its endpoint stands the fantasy of
total territorialization – the most potent historical form of which in
modern times is none other than fascism.
It is necessary to insist here that the Urstaat, in its historical
actuality as well as utopian proclivity, does not concern the
realization of a homogeneous substance, but the reterritorialization of
heterogeneous externalities in a hierarchical field of interiority,
externalities which serve to give to the state its historical form.
Yet another thing that the coronavirus pandemic has served to remind is
that even at the time of the so-called “Anthropocene”, where humankind
is supposed to have become the chief macro-historical agent, there are
numerous nonhuman externalities, from the climatic to the
microbiological levels, invading states, affecting their civic body,
subverting their stability, creating leaks and short-circuits. Point
granted, equally arguable is that, today, the most powerful and potent
externality is capital, which the state needs to integrate, regulate and
ensure its valorization as a condition for its own stability. A relation
of codependence is thus formed, yet the relation never reaches a full
identity, either logical or historical;there remains an excess from the
side of capital, whose global spatiality puts pressures to the
territoriality of states (even the most powerful ones), and an autonomy
from the side of the state, which allows it to take initiatives – even
if these are to serve the interests of capitalists, as it happens in
Greece currently with many of the measures taken by the government,
aiming to ensure that businesses will not simply remain viable but will
sustain or quickly recapture their profitability.
What all these points concretely mean is that the (re)composition and
(re)structuration of a new normal is necessarily mediated by the
effective immunological management of the spreading social contagion, in
its twofold valence as a health and economic crisis.As far as the first
is concerned, policies more sophisticated and targeted than the current
quarantine should be expected to appear sooner or later. Nevertheless,
as long as a vaccine is not available and no herd-immunity exists,
Covid-19 will carry on being a haunting presence, a threat to public
health and a source of anxiety and insecurity affecting social
relations. It is hard for a state, even more so states evoking human
rights and popular sovereignty as key legitimizing principles, to
totally disregard the affective imprint of mass insecurity, anxiety,
fear or the pain of regular loss that a pandemic brings. Moreover,
irrespective of whether we use biopolitics as a catchword, no state can
ignore public health, since it is a necessary feature of order hence a
potential source of disorder; what will indeed happen if healthcare
systems collapse? Panic, fear and insecurity can creep into the state
machine as much as to the individual psyche, hindering its calculating
rationality. Yet it increasingly becomes clear that the looming economic
crisis starts to preoccupy authorities as much as the health crisis, nay
it becomes their center of concern. To be sure, the two crises, being
precisely the salient expressions of a social contagion, are connected
even in terms of their administration. For the chief response of states
and relevant agents, notably the EU, is to pour large sums of money in
order to halt the effects of the great deceleration, whilst allowing
systematic social distancing to continue. In the long run however, this
tactic is unviable and bound to aggravate the economic crisis, by
soaring deficits and turning private insolvency into a huge public debt.
Simplistic as it sounds, at some point some will be called to pay the
bill.
Expectedly, a growing number of voices, even in more tactful ways than
Trump and the republican Right of the United States, begin to openly
state that the economy needs to start running again in more regular
velocities, which in capitalism of course can only mean constant
acceleration. The trouble here is that a relaxation of social distancing
in order to re-stimulate economic activity will most likely lead to
another spike in viral infections. No clearly worked out plan exists for
this quandary, and it is more than likely that states will adopt
different policies, depending also on the political outlook of their
government and the configuration of social powers reflected therein.
Whatever its details though, the response will have to amount to nothing
less than a reboot. As a matter of fact, the latter may have already
been initiated and current configurations could move from being
exceptional to become a component of the new normal: a working-force of
“connected/domesticated”subjects working from home while another mass of
“mobile/disposable” subjects working to provide for them, the result
being a division of labor where roles are complementary but the
immediate interests antagonistic. Point granted,many more sectors of the
economy need to resume their regular velocities in order for the global
market to be back on its feet; amidst a pandemic which may have not yet
peaked this is far from easy. To an even greater extent probably than
the health crisis, the climax of the economic crisis lays ahead of us.
In this context, the tension that is already operating today will
escalate its intensity: namely the tension between health and economy or
in other words between the value of life and the objectified value that
is capital. Even if the health crisis is overcome the tension will
continue, because we can be certain that amidst an unraveling economic
crisis the ruling class will attempt to shift the burden to the plebeian
masses. Possibly this will entail a reaffirmation of neoliberal
orthodoxy and a new round of austerity; perhaps a deeper re-composition
and restructuration will have to transpire, even some revamped
Keynesianism may have its window of opportunity. In either case, the
first moment of the dialectic will be always operative, the preservation
of the current order of things – for the Order that the state maintains
concerns concrete social relations and their identifiable hierarchies
and privileges. The wager here for the state will be to maintain the
full initiative so that it can block experiences of injustice (along
with the accompanying despair, anger and resentment) passing from the
affective level to that of organized critique; repression of dissent and
muting of criticism through the control of media outlets will be one
means to this end,state benefits coupled with organized charity by the
wealthy can be another. In all cases, the utopia of the Urstaat, that
is, the apotheosis of the state-form as the embodiment of Order, will as
much depend on the successful management of the crisis as it will be
boosted by its escalation. In such a scenario, biopolitical emergency
will frequently resume as a way to deal with another expression of the
social contagion, which will be all the more likely to break out as the
tension between the two other expressions, health and economy, grows to
become a proper historical contradiction: mass insurgencies from below.
“It’s time to build the brigades”.
– Commune
The streets of Athens, as of so many other cities in the world, are
empty, offering at times a truly post apocalyptic imagery, filled with
silent fear, hidden trauma and sad beauty.And yet,behind this serene and
terrifying stillness, there is movement on the social basis: much of it
is unfolding in digital space, but a significant part erupts and flows
in excepted institutional spaces: in prisons, camps and workplaces. It
is no sign of Marxist stubbornness to insist on the significance of the
strikes that are taking place in various countries after the pandemic
broke out. Struggles in the workplace at a time such as this are crucial
for a number of related reasons: they pierce the ideological crust of
national unity to unveil a material reality of exploitation and the
class nature of (a significant part of) the governmental measures; they
mark out the essential role of labor for social reproduction in any
given situation as well as the significance of the body as a source of
social value; last but not least, they are practical reminders that a
state of emergency does not suspend the class-struggle and that even
during the Apocalypse justice will play out as a contentious
practicality. Who must work? Why and for whom do we work? How long and
where do we work? What is the value of work? Who is to decide on such
issues and on what criteria? Ongoing working-class struggles block the
reduction of these questions to their functional and technical aspects
(real at these may be) and unveil their irreducible political character.
Working-class struggles will most likely intensify in the coming months.
And there should be little doubt that if these struggles infringe
seriously on the economic reboot underway, the biopolitical emergency
can be invoked to quell them. In such a context, it will be vital to
build bridges of solidarity between the different segments of the
working class: the mobile precariat, the domesticated cognitariat and
the proletarian mass of unemployed that is expected to skyrocket. Such a
unity is difficult and painstaking to achieve, requiring among other
things a set of concrete demands that can be shared and a common
political vision to bring them together. As far as practical demands are
concerned two will stand out: universal healthcare for sure and possibly
a basic income disconnected from market performance. These demands can
be plausibly expected to contribute in a concerted challenge to the
neoliberal gospel that has waxed lyrical in recent decades and lend
support to a reconstruction of the social state, since without the
latter it is hard to see how they can be realistically satisfied.But
would they not then join the orchestra that signs of the state as the
necessary guarantor of a well-ordered society? Which is to say, has the
pandemic painfully revealed that, if we want today proper healthcare and
descent living conditions for everyone, we need to depose the vision of
a stateless society,which has fed the utopian imaginary at least since
the 19^(th) century,to the altar of the Urstaat and become the apostles
of its left wing version?
If demands for large scale reforms seem to be irresistibly pulled
towards the state, the other major form of grassroots activity to have
emerged during the pandemic attempts to maintain a critical distance
from centralized power and invest on the powers of social
self-organization. Despite the objective difficulties that social
distancing and extensive quarantine pose, a whole array of practices and
infrastructures has been flourishing on the social basis, having as
their common buzzword “mutual aid”.
Regardless of their specific content, these practices and
infrastructures have a twofold valence: first, they resist the
atomization that dominant forms of governmentality advance and negotiate
with the acceptable forms of social distancing, beyond the familial
bond. As such, apart from the concrete aid they offer to people in need,
they provide outlets for an affective discharge of anxiety and
depression as well as conduits for the development of more positive and
politically fertile affects. Second, horizontal self-organization offers
a version of biopolitical emergency that makes the restriction of
individual autonomy an occasion for fostering common responsibility,
collective action and active participation in mutual well being. Which
is to say, responding to the pandemic, a type of alternative biopolitics
has emerged, which,instead of administering from above the well being of
individual lives under a statistical concept of public health,
proliferates activities from below that see in the active, mutual care
for individual members of the community an essential facet of the
collective good.
On account of their difference, this grassroots biopolitics has been
politically invested with an antagonistic valence vis-Ă -vis the dominant
management of the pandemic and its mix of sovereignty and
governmentality. Could we indeed regard the practices and
infrastructures of mutual aid in operation today as fulcrums of dual
power, capable of breaking the spell of the Urstaat that encroaches
societies? Unfortunately, affirming as much would be an exaggeration.
All these infrastructures and practices quite simply lack the resources,
know how and institutional means to adequately respond to the
requirements of the pandemic on a mass, non-local, scale. Moreover, they
lack representative power, which could allow them to issue effective
calls and injunctions. Without such a capacity to mobilize the masses it
is hard to see what “dual power” they have. To this extent, although
they may provide an alternative diagrammatic form of operation to the
vertical administration of the state, at present they can only be at
best complementary to the latter. Thus, while their significance in
breaking the state monologue should not be underestimated, their
limitations testify at the same time to the necessity of demands
directed at the state, such as those concerning healthcare and a basic
income.
It should hardly be a surprise thus that many anarchist and far-left
groups embrace these demands. Equally necessary though is not to shy
away from the political inference such support implies: at the current
conjuncture, social struggles cannot simply be “against the state”,
still conceived as an 19^(th) century Leviathan with high-tech gear, but
about improving vital aspects of social reproduction that the state has
integrated.How can this be done without fueling the political imaginary
of the Urstaat and its looming authoritarianism? An answer would be to
insist on the democratization of the state mechanism as a parallel
process to the reconstruction of the social state.Yet, the last cycle of
struggles suggests that current states, not to mention interstate and
international institutions like those composing the EU, have become
immune to democratic flows coming from below. Under conditions of
expanding crisis and securitization the trend towards an entrenched
authoritarianism should be expected to grow not recede its intensity,
absorbing popular demands born out of the experience of the pandemic as
a moment of its further consolidation.
In this context it seems all the more necessary to maintain the autonomy
of grassroots forms of activity and strengthen them towards the
direction of a real dual power, even if this entails articulating
demands that require state mediation – broaching in turn the issue of
the collective form(s) of transversal between these two political
domains. Without pressing this point too far, the following seems a
sensible strategy at the moment: cultivating collective forms that can
intervene in the intermittent system failures that lie ahead, helping
overcome their worst aspects while at the same time preparing for and
being ready to carry the wave of systemic collapse.
Ultimately, the forms of struggle that are going to appear or more
prescriptively need to be forged in the coming cycle of events cannot be
separated by the broader question of what type of society and what type
of world we want to live in. Massive as they sound, these questions are
being forced upon us. The escalation of the economic dimension of the
social contagion will tend to link even more clearly and painfully with
the environmental crisis. Given what was said at the start about the
conditions fostering the outbreak of viral strains, the pandemic must be
indeed seen as a “dress rehearsal”. More than one dystopian path is
thereby opened up, one of them being what Christian Parenti has named
the “politics of the armed lifeboat,” or climate fascism, which will
complete the current trend of securitization and authoritarianism and
establish its statist utopia, the Urstaat of the 21^(st) century.
Yet, there is also the pathway of a radically different, sustainable
form of symbiosis with the world and amongst us, which will transform
the crisis laden and crisis ridden material environment of today. No
system failure will bring such large-scale change automatically and even
less does it make sense to think of SARS 2 as a political “ally” or even
worse as a blessing. Still, the social contagion and social crisis
generated unintentionally by the long journey of a microscopic pathogen
have made the necessity of thinking and naming such an alternative form
of symbiosis all the more urgent. Disaster communism? Yes please…
---
George Sotiropoulos is Doctor of Political Theory and author of A
Materialist Theory of Justice: the One, the Many, the Not-Yet.
Gene Ray is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and author of Terror
and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima
to September 11 and Beyond.