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Title: On the Coronavirus Author: NEZUMI Date: March 25, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19 Source: Retrieved on 2020-03-29 from https://anarchistnews.org/content/coronavirus Notes: via HAPAX blog, translation from anarchist news
The following are tentative thoughts written on the 9^(th) of March, the
least we can be sure of in considering the current state of affairs.
According to Scott’s Against the Grain, what made epidemics a menace to
humanity was agriculture and the simultaneous sedentarization that came
through the raising of livestock. In the same book, Scott explains that
the origin of the state lies in the enslavement that came through grain
production. In other words, epidemics are the other side of the nation
as enslavement. Since then, infections have broken out as the mirror of
civilization. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, epidemic is
civilization’s decideable.
We needn’t go so far as to quote Foucault on history since then. Modern
history was formed as a defense against riots and infections. The prison
and the hospital are symbols of this. Prisons were created with the
division of the working and non-working, the criminalizing of the
latter, and the mobilization of the former as the cornerstone of
primitive accumulation, the city was reorganized as a base for the
reproduction of this labor, and “social medicine” was born. This was
also the birth of governance through biopower.
Neoliberalism is the upgraded version of this, and goes hand in hand
with advancing “anzensei” (security) to its upper limit and making
people completely responsible for themselves (the total
entrepreneurization of the individual). Militarily, this corresponds to
dronification.
That governance is entering a new stage through domination by algorithm
by way of AI. Its forerunner was China as a “happy surveillance state”
(Kajitani Kai, Takaguchi Kouta). This is exactly what Deleuze called a
“society of control.” It’s exactly because the coronavirus was born from
the future of this governance that it’s destructive to civilization.
According to Ishikawa Yoshimasa, what distinguishes things this time is
the extreme equilibrium between the pathology of the epidemic itself and
the reaction to it. What laid the grounds for this was the maximizing of
“anzensei” (security) in society, the transformation into a “control
society.” Thus an unbelievable spectacle has arrived in which the state
itself is halting production, consumption and exchange. Right now,
society is collapsing society, civilization is collapsing civilization.