Would a Shaman Help?

Michael Taussig

 

A friend in the Midwest asks if a shaman could help in the present crisis?

Given presidential grandstanding and the run on toilet paper and guns, it seems like a reasonable question. But it all depends on what kind of shamanism and what kind of help.

Shamanism is no substitute for science as regards virology, but as performance art sparking the imagination, it could dampen panic, ease social isolation, and promote cohesion. As a Happening it may not have raised the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, but it emboldened the imagination that brought that war to an end. During Occupy Wall Street downtown NYC, you could smell burning sage learnt from Native American shamanism. Attempting to resist the white man from the Rockies to the Plains, the Ghost Dancers were massacred, but now the white man needs to form the magic circle, compose the songs, and start dancing too. And for sure it will be a magical circle seeing as we are now in strict isolation.

Giorgio de Chirico’s melancholy paintings of Roman arcades and streets without people are no less shamanic, capturing the aura Walter Benjamin found in Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris streets likewise without people. Being alone in cities with empty streets and piazzas is more shamanic than the “real thing.”

With his prescient focus on viral epidemics and on words as mutating viruses, William S. Burroughs would certainly be asking my friend’s question, especially as regards his notion of the “composite city” as a mosaic of fabulous forms. For him it all began in 1953 with his eye-opening encounter taking the hallucinogen yagé (ayahuasca) with shamans in the Putumayo region of southwest Colombia, which I visited annually from 1972 to 1999.

The phantasmatic properties of viral pandemics in the fiction that followed paralleled his yagé experience with shamans. His curiosity was writerly, becoming a few years later a conscious method of cutting up images and, with that practice, confronting “Control,” spiritual no less than political.

As with yagé, the cut ups were intended to connect language with the body in galvanic upheavals of subject-object relations for which the all-night wordless song is essential.

Shamanism is primarily a means for buffering rumor and paranoia. Yet it depends on that too. Who is bewitching (read infecting) who? Fox News and Trump are pretty good at this shamanic warfare. Hence our need for an alternative. It is not a choice but a necessity.

The yagé séance is a small-group unscripted theatrical exorcism of the malevolence the sorcerer projected into oneself. Relief depends on visions flowing into one like a blue substance, storytelling, and the fiercely visceral sensations that recur in wave-like rhythms with the divine hum of the shaman, the hum of the waking world.

But could anything like this be achieved in a situation of social distancing and lock-down? Can you on your lonesome cook up image and music repertoires, say like Alice Coltrane, so as to engage inner fear with global meltdown? Here’s the thing: due to the pandemic the gates of creativity swing wide open. We have to become our own shaman.

An important yagé trope for me and I think for my Putumayo friends was to see the shamanic experience as journeying through the “space of death.” Dante presented a version, but his is famously symmetrical and ordered. The yagè space of death is not.

Shamanic magic today owes much to colonial projections of magical power to the primitive. That, combined with the at times terrifying sensation of dying under the influence of yagé, made me think of the Iberian conquest of Latin America as bringing together the magical underworlds of Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and indigenous America. In my estimation, akin to the historiographic practices of Benjamin and Aby Warburg, this is alive as occult force today yet easily abused by people looking for the shamanic fix, including dime-a-dozen shamans themselves.

My friend’s question begs the big picture. How have we been looking at climate change?

One opinion is that we in the West long ago disenchanted nature.

But what the question opens up is the thought that with global meltdown we now live in a reenchanted universe for which the aesthetic of a dark surrealism is relevant. It is a mutating reality of metamorphic sublimity that never lets you know what is real and what is not. Born from WWI, there is a lot of Dada here too, with its shock effects and montage. We were told the bourgeoisie had gotten bored with that. But now, has not Dada and surrealism returned with a vengeance? Before it was avant-garde subsiding into history. But now with the reenchantment of nature, history is subsiding into Dada, and it’s not so boring, not with swans and dolphins being sighted (so it is said) in the now clear canal water of Venice where people are dying in quantities and “Death in Venice” recurs as if an Eternal Return while tourists flee in their pestilential cruise ships in a replay of Michel Foucault’s Great Confinement.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all are the masks of the medico della peste, the doctor of the plague, for sale until lockdown in the ubiquitous tourist curio shops in Venice. It is an unsettling mask with a long beak that I could never make sense of. Now I get it. The beak was the fifteenth-century equivalent to the surgical mask of today (and people think the germ theory of disease is modern!). It was filled with sweet smelling flowers. A drawing by Paul Hirst in 1721 is spooky in the extreme. It shows a beak-masked plague doctor with huge goggles and an overflowingly large gown so large it could encompass the universe. He is the epitome of the black plague and the Corona virus. That would be the sympathetic magic of like affects like as the fourteenth century meets today.

Of course they were a superstitious lot back then, not like today as people scurry for toilet paper and guns.

As people die the pope just announced that you can confess directly to God. Opera singers belt out arias from their balconies. It seems like the shamanism I was describing; lavish images in the space of death, as the divine hum like a candle in the night steadies the soul in our reenchanting world.

Shamanism coexists with allopathic medicine, with penicillin and dialysis machines, for example. It’s not one or the other. What the latter lacks, however, along with political economy, is the divine hum of the reenchanted universe that opens the doors of perception just as the virus does. That’s what I’ll tell my friend.

High Falls, NY

30 March 2020

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Michael Taussig teaches anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity (1993); Law in a Lawless Land (1993); and My Cocaine Museum (2004).

 

The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics: A Response to Bruno Latour

Joshua Clover

How swiftly do genres of the quarantine emerge! Notable among them is the discovery of the relation between the present pandemic and onrushing climate collapse. The driving force of this genre is not holy shit two ways for a lot of people to die but the realization, or hope, that the great mobilizations of state resources currently being unspooled to address COVID-19 prove the possibility of a comparable or greater mobilization against ecological catastrophe, an even greater threat if somewhat less immediate. There is to be sure a certain mixing of analogies: in the United States, confronting climate change is conventionally likened to the New Deal or Marshall Plan, schemes to hedge against the charisma of communism, while addressing the pandemic decisively takes the language of war itself, a “war footing,” “wartime president,” and so on. This is an interesting slippage, no doubt, though both analogies rely on a vision of preserving global hegemony. Insert rueful laugh.

Bruno Latour provides a recent example of this genre; it appeared dually in Le Monde and Critical Inquiry on 25 March, here under the title “Is This a Dress Rehearsal,” and in French under the more prosaic but imperative “Health Crisis Demands We Prepare for Climate Change.”[1] The short piece is filled with the author’s habits of mind such as the inevitable “Latour Litany,” a list of all the various actors human and inhuman in an “entire network,” enumerated with an insistent leveling of its contents where what matters is that all these actors stand in ratio with each other, mute equivalents. It is as if exchange value had taken up a side hustle as a theorist. The goal is to demonstrate yet again the indistinction of nature and society toward discovering the obvious truth that “The pandemic is no more a ‘natural’ phenomenon than the famines of the past or the current climate crisis.”

But here problems arise for the comparison, as the author himself admits. Writing from France, he notes that Emmanuel Macron’s capacity to confront the pandemic is not of a kind with even his least gesture toward (purported) climate abatement, recalling how his gas tax was met not with relief and a thirst for more but with the riots of the Gilets Jaunes movement. Per Latour, this is because Macron — and ostensibly other leaders — have not forged the kind of new state that climate collapse will require. Instead, “we are collectively playing a caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics that seems to have come straight out of a Michel Foucault lecture.”

He means Foucault’s final lecture on the theme Society Must Be Defended, describing a new kind of power. Whereas once “Sovereignty took life and let live,” he writes, we discover toward the end of the eighteenth century “the emergence of a power that . . . in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.” This is the famous formula of biopolitics: the sovereign power to make live and let die.

Latour notes that this power’s deployment in the present moment includes “the obliteration of the very many invisible workers forced to work anyway so that others can continue to hole up in their homes.” Rightly so — this is a peculiarly awful time to be a delivery worker, from the warehouse or restaurant to the driver anxiously tossing a box on your porch. Recent days have presented an even more devastating turn: recent pronouncements by various governmental figures who, noting the economic devastation of COVID-19, proclaimed that people would have to abandon quarantine procedures after a fortnight at the very most and return to work so as to avoid cratering the economy. This despite the medical certainty that this would lead to more transmissions and more deaths. Forty-four years and five days after Foucault’s lecture, Donald Trump tweeted, WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO! If this was in any way opaque, two days later Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick speculated, “are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that America loves for its children and grandchildren? And if that is the exchange, I’m all in.”

But this course of action is not speculative at all: rather it seems to be the express plan of the state, coming soon. Look, to save the economy, we’re gonna have to kill some folks. Like, a lot. Horrified humans immediately noted this was a blood sacrifice to capitalism and who could disagree? This is the most dramatic political development since the early hours of millennium if not very much longer. It must seem like the apotheosis of biopolitics: a crackpot sovereign deciding at national scale who will be made to live, who let die.

Except for the way in which this was, in the clearest manner, the reverse. By 22 March, Goldman Sachs was already predicting an unparalleled 2.5 million new jobless claims; this would prove optimistic.

Meanwhile the Senate tinkered with its relief bill. The massive transfers to corporations were a given, for which 2008 now appears as a dress rehearsal. The haggling endeavored to dial in the exact size of the direct payment to citizens. It would need to restore enough aggregate demand to keep the economy breathing (a ventilator of sorts) while taking care not to give a single prole the incentive to be, in the face of a global and terrifying pandemic poised to kill millions absent assiduous measures taken by all, lazy. And it is to this delicate measure that presidents must also dance, not the measure decided on by the legislature, but the measure of that abstraction “the economy.” Nothing could have thrown Foucault’s formulations about sovereignty and regimes of power, and especially the limits of these ideas, into clearer relief than this week’s pronouncements, provisions, and data.

This is not to say there is no such thing as biopolitics nor any power to make live and let die. Clearly there is; clearly it is this that is wielded by all the Trumps great and small. Nonetheless it is apparent that the sovereign is not sovereign. Rather he is subordinated entirely to the dictates of political economy, that real unity of the political and economic forged by capital and its compulsions. Make live and let die is simply a tool among others in this social order whose true logic, from Trump’s tweet to Dan Patrick to the Senate bill, is the power employed always as a ratio of make work and let buy.

Here we must take a final turn toward where we began and reenter the genre named at the outset. The link between coronavirus and climate is more direct than mere analogy, two threats that challenge our senses of scale and temporality and so seem to demand something like a state to address them. Rather it turns out that one shows us the character of the other with horrific lucidity. We should not be surprised to discover that, like the 2008 economic collapse, the pandemic has significantly reduced emissions globally. The reductions have been particularly marked in China and Italy, the two most devastated nations. We might expect, glancing at the rate of spread and those unemployment numbers, that we will see similar results from the United States. Maybe we will get right with the Paris Accords after all.

This is not to say that we should imagine the virus as a redeemer; that is a particularly grotesque fantasy. Its role in a temporary retreat of planetarily fatal emissions is nonetheless informative. Ecological despoliation is a consequence not of humans, as the name “Anthropocene” and Latour’s essay suggest, but of industrial production and its handmaidens, and only forces which can bring that to heel allow us to prepare for climate change. Capital, with is inescapable drive to reproduce itself, is not some actor in a network, equivalent to other actors, but an actual cause. The compulsion to produce, and to produce at a lower cost than competitors, in turn compels the burning of cheap and dirty fuels to drive the factories, to move the container ships, even to draw forth from the ground the material components of “green energy” sources. The Gilets Jaunes did not riot because they object to ecological policies but because the economy dictates that they find jobs in places they cannot afford to live, and to which they must therefore commute. As long as the compulsions of production for profit and of laboring to live persist, climate survival will be beyond the reach of any state.

We must take this fact with the utmost seriousness: that Foucault’s new regime of power appears in the late eighteenth century, which is to say, alongside the steam engine and the industrial revolution, which is also to say, alongside the liftoff of anthropogenic climate change. We need to stop fucking around with theory and say, without hesitation, that capitalism, with its industrial body and crown of finance, is sovereign; that carbon emissions are the sovereign breathing; that make work and let buy must be annihilated; that there is no survival while the sovereign lives.

29 March 2020

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Joshua Clover is a professor of English at the University of California, Davis.  He is also a faculty member in the Department of Comparative Literature and affiliated faculty in the French and Italian departments, Film Studies Program, and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. He is affiliated with the Mellon Research Initiative in Racial Capitalism. His most recent book is Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (2016).

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[1] This translation mine; the remainder come from the English text.

Is This a Dress Rehearsal?

Bruno Latour

The unforeseen coincidence between a general confinement and the period of Lent is still quite welcome for those who have been asked, out of solidarity, to do nothing and to remain at a distance from the battle front. This obligatory fast, this secular and republican Ramadan can be a good opportunity for them to reflect on what is important and what is derisory. . . . It is as though the intervention of the virus could serve as a dress rehearsal for the next crisis, the one in which the reorientation of living conditions is going to be posed as a challenge to all of us, as will all the details of daily existence that we will have to learn to sort out carefully. I am advancing the hypothesis, as have many others, that the health crisis prepares, induces, incites us to prepare for climate change. This hypothesis still needs to be tested.

What allows the two crises to occur in succession is the sudden and painful realization that the classical definition of society – humans among themselves – makes no sense. The state of society depends at every moment on the associations between many actors, most of whom do not have human forms. This is true of microbes – as we have known since Pasteur – but also of the internet, the law, the organization of hospitals, the logistics of the state, as well as the climate. And of course, in spite of the noise surrounding a “state of war” against the virus, it is only one link in a chain where the management of stocks of masks or tests, the regulation of property rights, civic habits, gestures of solidarity, count exactly as much in defining the degree of virulence of the infectious agent. Once the entire network of which it is only one link is taken into account, the same virus does not act in the same way in Taiwan, Singapore, New York, or Paris. The pandemic is no more a “natural” phenomenon than the famines of the past or the current climate crisis. Society has long since moved beyond the narrow confines of the social sphere.

Having said that, it is not clear to me that the parallel goes much further. After all, health crises are not new, and rapid and radical state intervention does not seem to be very innovative so far. One need only look at President Macron’s enthusiasm to take on the figure of head of state that he has so pathetically lacked until now. Much better than terrorist attacks – which are, after all, only police business – pandemics awaken in leaders and those in power a kind of self-evident sense of  “protection” – “we have to protect you” “you have to protect us” – that recharges the authority of the state and allows it to demand what would otherwise be met with riots.

But this state is not the state of the twenty-first century and ecological change; it is the state of the nineteenth century and so-called biopower. In the words of the late Alain Desrosières, it is the state of what is rightly called statistics: population management on a territorial grid seen from above and led by the power of experts.[1] This is exactly what we see resurrected today – with the only difference that it is replicated from one nation to the next, to the point of having become world-wide. The originality of the present situation, it seems to me, is that by remaining trapped at home while outside there is only the extension of police powers and the din of ambulances, we are collectively playing a caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics that seems to have come straight out of a Michel Foucault lecture. Including the obliteration of the very many invisible workers forced to work anyway so that others can continue to hole up in their homes – not to mention the migrants who, by definition, cannot be secluded in any home of their own. But this caricature is precisely the caricature of a time that is no longer ours.

There is a huge gulf between the state that is able to say “I protect you from life and death,” that is to say from infection by a virus whose trace is known only to scientists and whose effects can only be understood by collecting statistics, and the state that would dare to say “I protect you from life and death, because I maintain the conditions of habitability of all the living people on whom you depend.”

Think about it. Imagine that President Macron came to announce, in a Churchillian tone, a package of measures to leave gas and oil reserves in the ground, to stop the marketing of pesticides, to abolish deep ploughing, and, with supreme audacity, to ban outdoor heaters on bar terraces. If the gas tax triggered the yellow-vests revolt, then imagine the riots that would follow such an announcement, setting the country ablaze. And yet, the demand to protect the French people for their own good and from death is infinitely more justified in the case of the ecological crisis than in the case of the health crisis, because it affects literally everyone, not a few thousand people – and not for a time but forever.

It is clear that such a state does not exist — and maybe fortunately so. What is more worrying is that we do not see how that state would prepare the move from the one crisis to the next. In the health crisis, the administration has the very classic educational role and its authority coincides perfectly with the old national borders – the archaism of the sudden return to European borders is painful proof of this. In the case of ecological change, the relationship is reversed: it is the administration that must learn from a multiform people, on multiple scales, what will be the territories upon which people are trying to survive in many new ways as they seek to escape from globalized production. The present state would be completely incapable of dictating measures from above. If in the health crisis, it is the brave people who must relearn to wash their hands and cough into their elbows as they did in primary school, in the case of the ecological mutation, it is the state that finds itself in a learning situation.

But there is another reason why the figure of the “war against the virus” is so unjustified: in the health crisis, it may be true that humans as a whole are “fighting” against viruses – even if they have no interest in us and go their way from throat to throat killing us without meaning to. The situation is tragically reversed in ecological change: this time, the pathogen whose terrible virulence has changed the living conditions of all the inhabitants of the planet is not the virus at all, it is humanity! But this does not apply to all humans, just those who make war on us without declaring war on us. For this war, the national state is as ill-prepared, as badly calibrated, as badly designed as possible because the battle fronts are multiple and cross each one of us. It is in this sense that the “general mobilization” against the virus does not prove in any way that we will be ready for the next one. It is not only the military that is always one war behind.

But finally, you never know; a time of Lent, whether secular or republican, can lead to spectacular conversions. For the first time in years, a billion people, stuck at home, find this forgotten luxury: time to reflect and thereby discern that which usually and unnecessarily agitates them in all directions. Let’s respect this long, painful, and unexpected fast.

26 March 2020

[The post was originally published in French with La Monde]

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Bruno Latour is an emeritus professor associated with Sciences Po médialab.

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[1] Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning,  trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

 

When Movies Get Sick

Kyle Stevens

 

Space is never just space. Sometimes we think of it as the air around us. Sometimes we think of it as a thing in which to find a WiFi signal. Sometimes it’s what we need when we’ve had an argument with someone we love. Perhaps most often potentiality is the value assigned to it: What can be put here? Who can live there? Which plant can grow everywhere? Rarely is space treated as inherently dangerous, villainous (that is in part what makes the films of Fritz Lang or Kira Muratova exceptional), yet that is precisely one of the tectonic shifts wrought by living in the era of Covid-19. It has suddenly unfastened the values that traditionally attach to proximity, particularly regarding human bodies, as vocabulary focusing on the distance between them—social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine—become part of our quotidian language. Questions of what is close, what is far, and what is far too close have become matters of life, death, and illness. The space between bodies is a measure of harm, even violence. The embrace is no longer the signifier of core social values. Standing six feet apart is. Distance has become the sign of intimacy—of respect, care, concern, shared understand of a shared world, a sense of belonging to a form of life.

Within discussions of film aesthetics, cinephiles tout the value of cinema for inviting audiences to attend to bodies in space, referring to the composition recorded by the camera and whose projection is offered up for our pleasure. Adrian Martin provides an account of the traditional view of a film’s “mise en scène as the movement of bodies in space—a space constantly defined and redefined by the camera.”[i] This idea motivates a critical recommendation to see, at least to some degree, beyond characters situated within a narrative to the pleasures of graphic compositions and, perhaps from there, to aesthetic questions of scale, shape, line, and so forth.

But as the perception of space is reconditioned in life under Covid, our encounters with fictional spaces, and with what and how they express, alters. Even when we know stories are not set in the present, the new regimes of bodily organization affect how we might see onscreen space. When watching movies, I have lately found myself wincing ever so slightly at people dancing in clubs or of a friend running up to another in the street for a hug. So-called negative space between characters, traditionally construed as an aesthetic choice, now takes on a biopolitical urgency, a politicized and medical meaning. Space comes to the foreground as negative space, but is it properly called negative if we worry that it is full of contagions? Space remains unsubstantial but no longer quite so inert when the invisible has become urgently visible.

We might of course think about how we receive narratives overall during this new era. (When we are confined to our homes, will we be more sympathetic to Jeff in Rear Window [dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954], who is concerned with the well-being of his infirmed neighbor?) But I suspect that our perception of bodies in space will more subtly restructure, and that the situation of onscreen figures will strike us, not necessarily consciously, but affectively, differently. Consider a few examples.

The opening of The Sound of Music (dir. Robert Wise, 1965) has been a classic image of freedom, of joy. Away from, as we soon learn, the confines of a sexually and vocally repressive convent, the wide open space affords Maria sovereignty of expression. Now, however, that sense of release is bolstered by the perception that she is safe, away from the threat that other bodies bring. Perhaps this was always part of why the image registered as freeing, perhaps others are always a threat to one’s sovereignty. Yet what was once an affordance of nature begins to fade into an affordance structured by the lack of others.

Similarly, in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), the very openness of the field seemed to anticipate the possibility of threat coming from all sides. Hitchcock even shows us that there is nothing around our protagonist in shots that cover a full 360-degree range. However, now that field is also reassuringly devoid of people. Openness becomes safety.

But when another character shows up, but does not approach, do we now register this as a sign of tension, of awkwardness, or of propriety, caution, even care? Or the film may become even more Hitchcockian as the Cary Grant character is forced to confront the fact that there is no visible difference between a friend and foe. Is the man the savior he needs or enemy infector? The risk he takes in walking towards the other man is now more suspenseful as he may be thrusting himself upon the knife.

In Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Alain Resnais employed social distancing to solicit contemplation of social alienation, but now this configuration also transforms into an image of social responsibility. Not alienation, but care for others, of self-care and social care. It is an image in which love and duty meet, not a vision of postwar alienation, but a foreshadowing of future forms of being.

In How to Marry a Millionaire (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1958), a framing that emphasized the interval between two people previously suggested remoteness, that they were not destined for coupledom (if not to demonstrate CinemaScope). Now it seems more like a respectable span for two people getting to know one another.

How much more romantic has become a touch, especially a touch of the face? In Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2019) the borders of bodies are blurred such that a hand may belong to either lover, now overlaying our affective swoon with a frisson of anxiety. Perhaps it will no longer seem coincidental that we use falling to name the entry into both love and illness.

In Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999), the regimented, equidistant bodies—configurations often seen in musicals, too—suggested rigid conformity, fascism. Now it appears mass ornamental, an ideal arrangement.

For this reason, solitude registers anew. Baxter, in The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960), working alone in the office, seems lucky to have gotten out of the house. Loneliness is less available to visual signification as it once was.

As is friendship. In Tangerine (dir. Sean Baker, 2015), the distance with which two friends walk signals a latent hostility in their relationship. Alexandra is frustrated with Sin-Dee’s anger and impulsive behavior. But now it may not read that way. This may simply look like how two friends walk together.

Cultural minorities never needed Immanuel Kant to tell them that space is subjective and “not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation.” The registration of proximity as aggressiveness, menace, is well known to queer subjects who fear detection. It is in fact the default queer mode of inhabiting public spaces. Tea and Sympathy (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1956) understood this. Contrast the proximity of the cishet macho fellows on the beach with the world of women, in which a young, burgeoning homosexual tries to hide himself in plain sight. The women are social distancing, which allows him to, as well. Here, nearness means danger and distance means security. In this context, proximity has not only been a historical marker of intimacy but of privilege, of a confidence in one’s belonging with and around others.

I am reminded, too, of the 1938 jazz standard “The Nearness of You,” written by Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington: “It’s not the pale moon that excites me, that thrills and delights me, oh no, it’s just the nearness of you.” Once tender, were this sung to an unrequited love today, these are the words of a psychopath.

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Kyle Stevens is a visiting assistant professor of film studies at MIT. He is the author of Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism (2015), coeditor of the two-volume collection Close-Up: Great Screen Performances (2018), and editor of the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory. His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Cinema Journal,Critical Quarterly, Film Criticism, and World Picture, as well as in several edited collections.

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My thanks to Daniel Morgan for helpful feedback on this topic.

[i] Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (New York, 2014), p. 45.

To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and “I”

Catherine Malabou

In May of 1743, a vessel from Corfu carrying bodies of dead crew members who had died of a mysterious disease arrived in Messina.  The ship and cargo were burned, but cases of a strange new disease were soon thereafter observed in the hospital and in the poorest parts of the town; and in the summer, a frightening plague epidemic developed, killing forty to fifty thousand people, and then disappeared before spreading to other parts of Sicily. Rousseau was traveling from Paris to Venice and was forced to halt in Genoa because of the epidemic. He narrates his quarantine in the Confessions (1782):

It was at the time of the plague at Messina, and the English fleet had anchored there, and visited the Felucca, on board of which I was, and this circumstance subjected us, on our arrival, after a long and difficult voyage, to a quarantine of one-and-twenty days.

The passengers had the choice of performing it on board or in the Lazaretto, which we were told was not yet furnished. They all chose the Felucca. The insupportable heat, the closeness of the vessel, the impossibility of walking in it, and the vermin with which it swarmed, made me at all risks prefer the Lazaretto. I was therefore conducted to a large building of two stories, quite empty, in which I found neither window, bed, table, nor chair, not so much as even a joint-stool or bundle of straw. My night sack and my two trunks being brought me, I was shut in by great doors with huge locks, and remained at full liberty to walk at my ease from chamber to chamber and story to story, everywhere finding the same solitude and nakedness.

This, however, did not induce me to repent that I had preferred the Lazaretto to the Felucca; and, like another Robinson Crusoe, I began to arrange myself for my one-and twenty days, just as I should have done for my whole life. In the first place, I had the amusement of destroying the vermin I had caught in the Felucca. As soon as I had got clear of these, by means of changing my clothes and linen, I proceeded to furnish the chamber I had chosen. I made a good mattress with my waistcoats and shirts; my napkins I converted, by sewing them together, into sheets; my robe de chambre into a counterpane; and my cloak into a pillow. I made myself a seat with one of my trunks laid flat, and a table with the other. I took out some writing paper and an inkstand, and distributed, in the manner of a library, a dozen books which I had with me. In a word, I so well arranged my few movables, that except curtains and windows, I was almost as commodiously lodged in this Lazeretto, absolutely empty as it was, as I had been at the Tennis Court in the Rue Verdelet. My dinners were served with no small degree of pomp; they were escorted by two grenadiers with bayonets fixed; the staircase was my dining-room, the landing-place my table, and the steps served me for a seat; and as soon as my dinner was served up a little bell was rung to inform me I might sit down to table.

Between my repasts, when I did not either read or write or work at the furnishing of my apartment, I went to walk in the burying-ground of the Protestants, which served me as a courtyard. From this place I ascended to a lanthorn which looked into the harbor, and from which I could see the ships come in and go out. In this manner I passed fourteen days. [1]

Being told like the rest of humanity to “stay at home” because of the pandemic, I immediately remembered this passage from the Confessions. While all of his companions of misfortune chose to stay confined together on a boat, Rousseau decided to be locked up in the lazaretto instead. A lazaretto is a hospital for those affected with contagious diseases. A felucca, or Mediterranean sailing ship, could also be set apart for quarantine purposes. Obviously, the two possibilities were offered to travelers in Genoa, and Rousseau thought he had better leave the boat and stay on his own in the building.

One can read this episode by solely focusing on the idea of choice: What is best in a time of confinement? Be quarantined with other people? Or be quarantined alone ? I must say that I spent some time wondering about such an alternative. If I had had the choice between the two options, what would have I done? (I am on my own, by the way, sheltered in quasi total isolation in Irvine, California.)

There is something else perhaps more profound in this passage, which is that quarantine is only tolerable if you quarantine from it—if you quarantine within the quarantine and from it at the same time, so to speak. The lazaretto represents this redoubled quarantine that expresses Rousseau’s need to isolate from collective isolation, to create an island (insula) within isolation. Such is perhaps the most difficult challenge in a lockdown situation: to clear a space where to be on one’s own while already separated from the community. Being cooped up on a boat with a few others of course generates a feeling of estrangement, but estrangement is not solitude, and solitude is, in reality, what makes confinement bearable. And this is true even if one is already on one’s own. I noticed that what made my isolation extremely distressing was in fact my incapacity to withdraw into myself. To find this insular point where I could be my self (in two words). I am not talking here of authenticity, simply of this radical nakedness of the soul that allows to build a dwelling in one’s house, to make the house habitable by locating the psychic space where it is possible to do something, that is, in my case, write. I noticed that writing only became possible when I reached such a confinement within confinement, a place in the place where nobody could enter and that at the same time was the condition for my exchanges with others. When I was able to get immersed in writing, conversations through Skype, for example, became something else. They were dialogues, not veiled monologues. Writing became possible when solitude started to protect me from isolation. One has to undress from all the coverings, clothes, curtains, masks, and meaningless chattering that still stick to one’s being when one is severed from others. Social distance is never powerful enough to strip one from what remains of the social in the distance. Sheltered-in-place has to be a radical Robinson Crusoe experience, an experience that allows one to construct a home out of nothing. To start anew. Or to remember.

I wonder if Foucault, at the end of his life, did not turn to the ethics of the self—care of the self, technologies of the self, government of the self—out of the same necessity. The urge to carve out a space for himself within the social isolation that AIDS insidiously was threatening him with. Perhaps Foucault was looking for his island, his absolute (ab-solutus) land where he would have found the courage of speaking and writing before he died. Those who have seen in his late seminars a nihilistic individualist withdrawal from politics have totally missed the point.

We know that Karl Marx made fun of eighteenth-century robinsonades like Rousseau’s. Marx said that the origin of the social can by no means be a state of nature where isolated men finally come to meet and form a community. Solitude cannot be the origin of society.

This may be true, but I think it is necessary to know how to find society within oneself in order to understand what politics means. I admire those who are able to analyze the current crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic in terms of global politics, capitalism, the state of exception, ecological crisis, China-Us-Russia strategic relationships, etc. Personally, at the moment, I am on the contrary trying to be an “individual.” This, once again, is not out of any individualism but because I think on the contrary that an epochè, a suspension, a bracketing of sociality, is sometimes the only access to alterity, a way to feel close to all the isolated people on Earth. Such is the reason why I am trying to be as solitary as possible in my loneliness. Such is the reason why I would also have chosen the lazaretto.

23 March 2020

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Catherine Malabou is a professor in the philosophy department at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and of European languages and literatures and comparative literature at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity (2012) and Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2016), and most recently, Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains (2019).

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[1] Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. pub., 2 vols. (London, 1903), 1:273-74.

The Climatic Virus in an Age of Paralysis

Nikolaj Schultz  

The collective reaction following CoVid19 seems to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the state of exception continues to generate fear, panic, anxiety, in all of their respective differences. On the other hand, to more than a few people, the fear strangely enough seems to go hand in hand with a feeling of relief. If I am not wrong on this point, and even if the feeling of relief will pass as the crisis gets worse, then what are the origins of this dramatic, emotional division?

My hypothesis is that one can only explain this two-sided collective psychology if we understand the social reactions to the new coronavirus as related to the helplessness societies are experiencing in the face of another civilizational tragedy: climate change.

As already noted by many commentators, the enormous panic and action readiness that the virus has installed in both the public and the state make the political and social reactions to climate change look rather vague. Obviously, the paradox here is that despite the great tragedy that the virus is, the enormous consequences of climatic mutations will, in all probability, by far surpass those of the virus.

The actions taken against the virus are without a doubt necessary, but we are still experiencing a huge, paradoxical distance between consequences and action. Citizens and social scientists would perhaps explain this gap with an analysis underlining the relation between affect and abstraction. Here, the argument would be that climate change does not accumulate affect and action because it is abstract, while the danger of the virus is concrete, and thus affects people and provoke action. In other words, two different phenomena of different abstractions, and two different reactions, where only one of them creates the necessary affect and agency.

However, this alone cannot explain the panic, the action readiness, and the civil mobilization that the virus has accumulated. If we wish to understand the magnitude of this reaction, it is perhaps more plausible to imagine that the public and the state are indeed affected by the enormous, abstract climatic risk but that its affects, because of sheer helplessness, now is projected onto the concrete virus risk, which certainly is easier to grasp: “Finally – a tangible apocalypse.”

My point is not that the draconian interventions in the infrastructure of society are unreasonable or exaggerated. My point is simply that we do not understand the sudden panic, action readiness, or civil sacrifice in a hitherto paralyzed society if we do not – at least partly – see this reaction as result of a collective, psychic milieu that climate change has made neurotic. Two different phenomena but perhaps one and same reaction in the end.

At first glance, this analysis seems unrealistic; it is too speculative, too psychoanalytic, too hypothetical. However, what is really unrealistic is imagining that there are not mass psychological consequences when a civilization for fifty years consciously ignores the proof of the catastrophic consequences of their actions and moves forward unabatedly in the same direction.

How could it not create a collective-panic psychic environment, which can now finally be compensated for in facing the virus, when a civilization walks blindfolded beyond four out of nine planetary boundaries and continues directly into a sixth mass-extinction event?

Now, this is exactly why the panic goes hand in hand with the relief. Am I wrong to suspect that the virus has not only accumulated fear but also a certain peace of mind in at least some people? Does my intuition lead me astray, if I detect next to peoples’ anxiety almost a sense of balance? When we are not short of breath, these days, are we then not breathing even better than before?

As noted above, this doubleness seems difficult to explain. However, if we understand these affects as partly deriving from the climatic changes, then we find at least two reasons for it being a logical outcome: on the one hand, because the pandemic now allows for a concrete drain of the collective anxiety that the climate’s abstract risks accumulate; on the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, because we are right now exactly seeing how all the social systems that we thought made the ecological transition impossible – production, consumption, mobility, etc. – are not chiseled in stone but that they are in fact changeable.

If we today are relieved about the world taking a break for a while, then it is not just due to the vulgar banality that “people do not want to go to work.” If we feel a certain balance in the pandemic’s dramatic reorganization and short circuit of society’s social and economic systems, then it is due to sensing that the “acceleration society”[i] can be stopped and that its unimaginable consequences after all might not be inevitable.

Thus, the point is not only, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, that the virus is a strike at the heart of capitalism. He is probably right that it is, but if this heart flicker leads to a collective feeling of relief, then it is because the lurking climatic catastrophe no longer appears as an absolute necessity. The relief emerges because the concrete crisis has shown us that the abstract crisis might not be unavoidable.

So, as Karl Polanyi would say, society can still defend itself[ii]. And not only are we watching social systems change, we are even discovering how social values are changing accordingly. Sure, some people are reinventing themselves as Ayn Randian, sovereign individuals by hoarding toilet paper, and a few of the ultra-rich escapists that Bruno Latour and I have previously discussed as a geosocial elite have fled to New Zealand where they are hiding from the virus in their climate secured bunkers[iii]. However, as Rune Lykkeberg notes, in general, the panic seem to have generated practices of solidarity that were impossible to even imagine a few weeks ago.

This only makes the relief even bigger. Both our material and social destiny are still negotiable. And if this is an important realization, it is of course because of the hope that we – when the time is right – will be able to take advantage of the current, collectivist momentum and its political energy to create a realistic connection between the direction of civilization and its earthly, material conditions of existence. However, the possibility of this is much greateer if we understand that it might already be the absence of such a connection that we are reacting to, in panic as well as with relief.

This relief might very well disappear from the horizon within a few days or weeks, when the virus crisis reaches its ultimate point. Fear will be all we have left and we will unequivocally wish ourselves back to the days where everything was as it used to be. However, this does not necessarily make its insights any less important or valid – perhaps even the contrary.

It will be a strange spring and perhaps even a strange summer. However, maybe the concrete threat has given us a number of cognitive and practical strategies to counter the more abstract crisis that we are facing with climatic mutations. Despite its tragedies, the virus might end up as an emancipatory tool in an age of paralysis.

21 March 2020

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Nikolaj Schultz, sociologist, is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. He is currently a visiting scholar in Paris, where he is working with cosupervisor of his PhD thesis, Bruno Latour, on developing the concept of geosocial classes.

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[i] Hartmut Rosa 2013: Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press.

[ii] Karl Polanyi 1944: The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. See especially Part II, “Self-Protection of Society”, pp. 136-228.

[iii] See Rupert Neate 2020: : “Super-rich jet off to disaster bunkers amid coronavirus outbreak”, The Guardian, 11^th March, Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/disease-dodging-worried-wealthy-jet-off-to-disaster-bunkers and Edward Helmore 2020: ”Coronavirus lifestyles of the rich and famous: how the 1% are coping”, The Guardian, 13^th March, Available at:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/coronavirus-lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous-how-the-1-are-coping

 

Is Barbarism with a Human Face Our Fate?

Slavoj Žižek

These days I sometimes catch myself wishing to get the virus – in this way, at least the debilitating uncertainty would be over. . . A clear sign of how my anxiety is growing is how I relate to sleep. Till around a week ago I was eagerly awaiting the evening: finally, I can escape into sleep and forget about the fears of my daily life. . . Now it’s almost the opposite: I am afraid to fall asleep since nightmares haunt me in my dreams and awaken me in panic – nightmares about the reality that awaits me.

What reality? These days we often hear that radical social changes are needed if we really want to cope with the consequences of the ongoing epidemics (I myself am among those spreading this mantra) – but radical changes are already taking place. The coronavirus epidemics confronts us with something that we considered impossible; we couldn’t imagine something like this really happening in our daily lives – the world we knew has stopped turning around, whole countries are in a lockdown, many of us are confined to one’s apartment (but what about those who cannot afford even this minimal safety precaution?), facing an uncertain future in which, even if most of us will survive, an economic mega-crisis lies ahead. . . What this means is that our reaction to it should also be to do the impossible – what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing world order. The impossible happened, our world has stopped, AND impossible is what we have to do to avoid the worst, which is – what? (I owe this line of thought to Alenka Zupančič.)

I don’t think the biggest threat is a regression to open barbarism, to brutal survivalist violence with public disorders, panic lynching, etc. (although, with the possible collapse of health care and some other public services, this is also quite possible). More than open barbarism, I fear barbarism with a human face – ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy but legitimized by expert opinions. A careful observer easily noticed the change in tone in how those in power address us: they are not just trying to project calm and confidence, they also regularly utter dire predictions – the pandemic is likely to take about two years to run its course, and the virus will eventually infect 60-70 percent of the global population, with millions of dead. . . In short, their true message is that we’ll have to curtail the basic premise of our social ethics: the care for the old and weak. (Italy has already announced that, if things get worse, difficult decisions about life and death will have to be made for those over eighty or with underlying conditions.) One should note how the acceptance of such a logic of the “survival of the fittest” violates even the basic principle of the military ethics that tells us that, after the battle, one should first take care of the heavily wounded even if the chance of saving them is minimal. (However, upon a closer look, this shouldn’t surprise us: hospitals are already doing the same thing with cancer patients.) To avoid a misunderstanding, I am an utter realist here – one should even plan  to enable a painless death of the terminally ill, to spare them the unnecessary suffering. But our priority should be, nonetheless, not to economize but to help unconditionally, irrespective of costs, those who need help, to enable their survival.

So I respectfully disagree with Giorgio Agamben, who sees in the ongoing crisis a sign that “our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is obvious that Italians are disposed to sacrifice practically everything — the normal conditions of life, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections, and religious and political convictions — to the danger of getting sick. Bare life — and the danger of losing it — is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them.” Things are much more ambiguous: it DOES also unite them – to maintain a corporeal distance is to show respect to the other because I also may be a virus bearer. My sons avoid me now because they are afraid that they will contaminate me (what is to them a passing illness can be deadly for me).

In the last days, we hear again and again that each of us is personally responsible and has to follow the new rules. The media is full of stories about people who misbehave and put themselves and others in danger (a guy entered a store and started to cough, etc.) – the problem is here the same as with ecology where media again and again emphasize our personal responsibility (did you recycle all used newspapers, etc.). Such a focus on individual responsibility, necessary as it is, functions as ideology the moment it serves to obfuscate the big question of how to change our entire economic and social system. The struggle against the coronavirus can only be fought together with the struggle against ideological mystifications, plus as part of a general ecological struggle. As Kate Jones put it, the transmission of disease from wildlife to humans is “’a hidden cost of human economic development. There are just so many more of us, in every environment. We are going into largely undisturbed places and being exposed more and more. We are creating habitats where viruses are transmitted more easily, and then we are surprised that we have new ones.’”

So it is not enough to put together some kind of global healthcare for humans, nature should be included too – viruses also attack plants, which are the main sources of our food, like potato, wheat, and olives. We always have to bear in mind the global picture of the world we live in, with all the paradoxes this implies. For example, it is good to know that the lockdown in China saved more lives than the number of those killed by the virus (if one trusts official statistics of the dead):

Environmental resource economist Marshall Burke says there is a proven link between poor air quality and premature deaths linked to breathing that air. “With this in mind,” he said, “a natural – if admittedly strange – question is whether the lives saved from this reduction in pollution caused by economic disruption from COVID-19 exceeds the death toll from the virus itself.” “Even under very conservative assumptions, I think the answer is a clear ‘yes’.” At just two months of reduction in pollution levels he says it likely saved the lives of 4,000 children under five and 73,000 adults over 70 in China alone.

We are caught in a triple crisis: medical (the epidemic itself), economic (which will hit hard whatever the outcome of the epidemic), plus (not to underestimate) the mental health – the basic coordinates of the life-world of millions and millions are disintegrating, and the change will affect everything, from flying during holidays to everyday bodily contacts. We have to learn to think outside the coordinates of stock market and profit and simply find another way to produce and allocate the necessary resources. Say, when the authorities learn that a company is keeping millions of masks, waiting for the right moment to sell them, there should be no negotiations with the company – masks should be simply requisitioned.

The media has reported that Trump offered one billion dollars to Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac to secure the vaccine “only for the United States.” The German health minister, Jens Spahn, said a takeover of CureVac by the Trump administration was “off the table”; CureVac would only develop vaccine “for the whole world, not for individual countries.” Here we have an exemplary case of the struggle between barbarism and civilization. But the same Trump threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act that would allow the government to ensure that the private sector could ramp up production of emergency medical supplies:

Trump announces proposal to take over private sector. The US president said he would invoke a federal provision allowing the government to marshal the private sector in response to the pandemic, the Associated Press reported. Trump said he would sign an act giving himself the authority to direct domestic industrial production “in case we need it.”

When I used the word communism a couple of weeks ago, I was mocked, but now there is the headline “Trump announces proposal to take over private sector” – can one imagine such a headline even a week ago? And this is just the beginning – many more measures like this should follow, plus local self-organization of communities will be necessary if the state-run health system is under too much stress. It is not enough just to isolate and survive – for some of us to do this, basic public services have to function: electricity, food, and medical supplies. . . (We’ll soon need a list of those who recovered and are at least for some time immune, so that they can be mobilized for the urgent public work.) It is not a utopian communist vision, it is a communism imposed by the necessities of bare survival. It is unfortunately a version of what, in the Soviet Union in 1918, was called “war communism.”

As the saying goes, in a crisis we are all socialists – even Trump is considering a form of UBI – a check for a thousand dollars to every adult citizen. Trillions will be spent violating all the market rules – but how, where, for whom? Will this enforced socialism be the socialism for the rich (remember the bailing out of the bank in 2008 while millions of ordinary people lost their small savings)? Will the epidemics be reduced to another chapter in the long sad story of what Naomi Klein called “disaster capitalism,” or will a new (more modest, maybe, but also more balanced) world order emerge out of it?

18 March 2020

[CORRECTION. For clarification, the author has asked us to modify the following: “Italy already announced that, if things get worse, those over eighty or with other heavy diseases will be simply left to die” The sentence now reads: “Italy has already announced that, if things get worse, difficult decisions about who gets to live may have to be made for those over eighty or with underlying conditions.” Furthermore, President Trump did not “invoke the Defense Production Act.” The sentence now reads: “But the same Trump threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act that would allow the government to ensure that the private sector could ramp up production of emergency medical supplies.”-Ed.]

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Slavoj Žižek, dialectical-materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst, is codirector at the International Center for Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London.He is a frequent contributor to Critical Inquiry.