The Incalculable: Thoughts on the Collapse of the Biosecurity Regime

 

Lydia H. Liu

It makes a world of difference where the novel coronavirus travels.

For the first time, I feel as vulnerable as my eighty-eight-year old mother who is locked down in another part of the world. Neither she nor anyone I know has ever, in living memory, been through a moment like this. Has the world woken up to a new catastrophe, or are we pretending that we do not know what we have always known?

This is a terrible thought, and it haunts me as my city, New York, succumbs to the COVID-19 outbreak. Sirens wail day and night on the streets as doctors and nurses struggle to keep critically ill patients alive while exposing themselves to the deadly pathogen. To the astonishment of the world, American society has not prepared itself for a disaster of this magnitude; and worse, many in Europe and America had initially been led to believe that the novel coronavirus might be one of those isolated, regional affairs, not unlike SARS (2003), MERS (2012), and Ebola (2014) or what gets reported from those remote, disease-prone countries of Asia and Africa.[1] Therefore, US travel restrictions on flights from China on 2 February and from Iran on 29 February should have taken care of the matter, but they didn’t. Recent genomic analyses suggest that the vast majority of coronavirus cases in New York came from Europe, not from Asia.[2] Blindsided by its own racism, the political calculus of the US biosecurity regime has misfired. It forgets to reckon with the incalculable.

Donald Trump’s remarks during a press conference on 19 March 2020 where “corona” was crossed out and replaced with “Chinese.” Source: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The moral balance sheet of the ruling caste in America is bankrupt. How would you weigh the losses and gains of human lives on the scale of a global pandemic? You simply can’t. People are dying, and tens of millions are suffering and faced with economic hardships. There are so many questions bearing upon the incalculable—and the possibility of a second or third wave of the pandemic in the coming months or years—that we must heed W.J.T. Mitchell’s call to reflect on the moment itself.

When I say that the incalculable escapes the political calculus, I do not mean to suggest that it falls outside of the calculating machine but rather, it penetrates the core of that machine by virtue of being excluded from its terms of reckoning. The incalculable contaminates the political calculus with its own shadow—in the manner of the return of the repressed—which is why we must be careful with our facile metaphors and comparisons. The analogies with the Spanish flu and with other plagues from the past may help us talk about the tragic consequences of a major public health fallout, but they are misleading if we let them guide our thought on the fallout itself. For such analogies often dissimulate what they simulate and, therefore, can do more to obscure the truth of the moment than clarify it. To return to the question I have raised: Are we pretending that we do not know what we have always known?

Take the most recent U.S. biosecurity exercises—code named Crimson Contagion— organized by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as well as Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This is a series of simulation exercises that ran from January to August 2019, involving Washington and 12 states including Illinois and New York.[3] During those exercises, the HHS asked its federal and local partners to imagine a fictional scenario where a global pandemic breaks out in China. What should we do to prevent the deadly respiratory virus from spreading to the U.S.? How would the federal government, state governments, hospitals and private stakeholders coordinate effective operations? Here is the HHS script as summarized by New York Times reporters:

The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.[4]

Call it prescience or extraordinary coincidence. Sometimes, fiction provides the kind of insights that intelligence or the facts on the ground cannot. But in this case, the fictional scenario bears uncanny resemblance to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus that would actually happen in Wuhan within three months of the conclusion of Crimson Contagion. Chicago, for instance, participated in the simulation exercises in the summer of 2019 and, according to Allison Arwady, commissioner for the Chicago Department of Public Health, “We actually did a preparedness exercise here in Chicago that, believe it or not, was actually written as an exercise for a new virus emerging from China with the first cases seen here in Chicago.”[5]

By contrast, the government officials in Wuhan, a city regarded as China’s Chicago for its central geographic location and its function as the nation’s transportation hub, wasted the summer of 2019 doing absolutely nothing to prepare its eleven million residents for the possibility of a SARS-like respiratory disease. Rumors abound as to how the virus—be it crimson or red contagion—got there in the first place; while we await the pending independent WHO investigation, all we can say at this point is that people of Wuhan became the first casualty of the pandemic. But here is the rub: Had the officials there adopted the same biosecurity regime as did those in Chicago or other American cities, would Wuhan have had a better chance of averting the initial catastrophe?[6] Sadly, the answer is “no,” if we look to New York for inspiration.

Not only was New York involved in the Crimson Contagion exercises last year but it was also the location of a high-level pandemic exercise code-named Event 201 that took place in October 2019, just four weeks before the actual novel coronavirus outbreak. Led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, this tabletop exercise partnered with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to simulate the outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus modeled on SARS. The fictional pathogen, originating from Brazil, is transmittable from bats to pigs to people and then becomes highly transmissible from person to person. One poignant detail predicted by Event 201 is that the coronavirus spreads more efficiently in the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods, and this is exactly borne out by New York, Detroit, and other American cities where African American and Latinx working-class communities have suffered the highest death rates. The close parallel with Event 201’s fictional scenario is so unnerving that it has prompted the Johns Hopkins Center to issue a statement to disavow its uncanny prediction of nCov-2019.

This is a shocking revelation. The political calculus of the world’s most advanced biosecurity regime has failed miserably. Bear in mind that the US is ranked at the top of the 2019 Global Health Security Index, with the United Kingdom running a close second, in the most recent worldwide survey of 195 countries conducted by the same Johns Hopkins Center and Nuclear Threat Initiative and published four weeks before the actual coronavirus outbreak in China.

With our best-funded research, farsighted preparations, carefully designed simulation exercises, and timely warnings, we are supposed to outperform all other nations in coping with a pandemic. Instead, we are currently ranked highest in the number of deaths and COVID-19 cases as of late May, when I last checked. It is not as if there had been no political will or that the biosecurity regime had not seen action until 2019, leaving the federal and state governments little time to fix the vulnerable links they identified, such as the stockpile of masks and ventilators.

Has knowledge failed to translate into action? This seems unlikely. We will have learned nothing from this fiasco if we think that COVID-19 is just another worldwide public health disaster like the Spanish flu, pretending that we do not know what we have always known since the HIV/AIDS pandemic.[7] The US imperial biosecurity regime, both before and since Trump, has been unusually active in leading the world in preparations, mobilizations, and simulation exercises like Dark Winter (2001), Atlantic Storm (2005), Clade X (2018), Crimson Contagion,  and Event 201, to name just a few. And then, how do we end up in a state of unpreparedness in the midst of advanced preparedness? The biosecurity regime is the key to understanding this, not the pandemic nor the virus itself. Driven by its imperial fantasy of world control, the regime has allowed itself to operate on a logic of racism in its conceptualization and implementation of the political calculus; yet it forgets to reckon with the unintended consequences of its own logic.

It is my hope that a safe and effective vaccine for SARS-Cov-2 (the virus responsible for the disease COVID-19) will become available and get us out of the mess in a year or so. Even so, will the scientists be able to put us back in control of our destiny by bringing uncertainty to tolerable levels as suggested by Lorraine Daston? I confess that I feel some trepidation: Is there the likelihood of SARS-Cov-3 or SARS-Cov-4 coming in the wake of SARS-Cov2? What if the incalculable—be it the infinitely small or the infinitely gigantic[8]—escapes the political calculus of the imperial biosecurity machine time and again?

26 May 2020

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Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (2010); The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004); Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995)    

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[1] On 3 February 2020 just as the ICUs in Wuhan hospitals were being overwhelmed by dying patients, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece under the headline “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.” The uproar on social media over the paper’s callous display of racist disregard for the suffering of nonwhites led the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to expel three WSJ journalists from China. Instead of taking urgent action to protect the lives of the American people when time was running out, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted: “mature, responsible countries understand that a free press reports facts and expresses opinions.”

[2] Carl Simmer, “Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show,” New York Times, April 8, 2020.

[3] “Crimson Contagion 2019 Exercise Draft After-Action Report,” Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, October, 2019.

[4] “Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded,” New York Times, 19 March 2020 and updated March 22, 2020.

[5] “Chicago Officials Held Exercise Last Summer Preparing for New Virus Emerging From China,” 4 March 2020, NBC Chicago.

[6] Under unprecedented lockdown measures, Wuhan’s pandemic was actually contained by the central government who swiftly moved in and implemented its military style campaign. According to South China Morning Post dated 17 March, the campaign was literally led by the PLA army, navy, and air force medical personnel who swooped down in full protective gear as if they engaged in a large-scale defense exercise against some bioterrorist attack.

[7] There are many academic studies on how this biosecurity regime came into being. See Andrew T. Price-Smith’s Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. 2008).

[8] “The gigantic” is an allusion to one of Martin Heidegger’s observations in “The Age of the World Picture.” See The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, Garland Publishing, 1977), p.135.

Net-munity, or The Space between Us … Will Open the Future

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

I write this during a time when we feel acutely the stakes and consequences of connection, polarization, infrastructures, models, and habits.  To many, it seems a world turned upside-down, in which the unimaginable has become possible: “socialism” and extensive surveillance within the US; the retraction of the Chinese economy and the negative price of oil; the invocation of Cold War shelter-in-place ordinances; and KKK masks worn as protective masks in California. This crisis has highlighted and augmented already existing divides: from white collar employees who seek the “perfect” gadget for working from home; to the mainly non-white and poor essential personnel who have had to balance daily financial and medical risks; from French dentists without proper protective equipment who posted naked pictures to protest back-to-work orders to Donald Trump supporters—compared to a “modern-day Rosa Parks”–who publicly demonstrate against orders by Democratic governors to stay at home.

It is a time of uncertainty and therefore responsibility—and something like community.  Scientific, economic, and political knowledge and models are constantly evolving.  Many of the first guidelines presumed similarities between SARS Cov-2 and SARS Cov-1, which were later proven to be untrue, such as the period during which a person is most infectious: in SARS Cov-1 it is when one is most symptomatic; for SARS Cov-2 it is just beforehand. Our current knowledge of Covid-19 is mainly correlational, with mechanistic-genetic explanations, as always, lagging behind observation and comparison. For example, SARS Cov-2 is widely assumed not to be airborne because it is far less contagious than airborne diseases such as measles. In desperation turned pharmaceutical opportunity, drugs are being approved, such as remdesivir, which were discontinued in early clinical trials due to debilitating side effects.  Most significantly, because of the lack and poor quality of existing tests and testing materials, the scope of the pandemic—necessary for modelling the basic reproduction number (R0)—is poorly known.  It is even unclear if “recovereds” are immune or for how long.

This uncertainty, however, does not undermine science or politics; it drives research and makes political decisions difficult and necessary. Intersecting this cloud of uncertainty are correlations and probabilities, which can guide our decisions, even if they cannot guarantee them, for the pandemic and its “cures” confront us with responsibility in the strongest sense of the word.  As Thomas Keenan has argued, we face responsibility not when we make decisions by following guidelines and rules but when we desperately want to but cannot: “when we do not know exactly what we should do, when the effects and conditions of our actions can no longer be calculated, and when we have nowhere else to turn, not even back onto our ‘self.’”[1] Not even back onto our self—because at these moments we realize that the individual is, to use Jean-Luc Nancy’s evocative phrase, “the residue of the dissolution of community.”[2]

Tellingly, although ostensibly about the human death toll, calls for communal responsibility are mainly framed in terms of infrastructure: things that ground and touch us, even as we strive not to touch too many others. The April UK motto of “staying at home to protect the NHS and save lives” encapsulates this perfectly (fig. 1).  By caring for infrastructure, we care for ourselves and others. In countries with national health services, the fear is becoming another Italy. In other countries, such as the US, the motto would seem to be “work, save businesses, and save your grandchildren’s livelihoods (and your pension, if you have one) (fig. 2). Or, more positively, “stay home/distant, flatten the curve, and save lives and the city.”

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

The “cures” proposed, emergency powers granted, and sacrifices demanded reflect and reveal profoundly different national, regional, and local perceptions of which curve matters—the number of “infecteds,” the stock market, national employment figures, GDP, the mortality rate—and which ties bind most strongly—capital, public health, taxes, national deficits, public transportation, and others.  These cures acknowledge that exit is impossible, even for the most nonessential wealthy, whose New Zealand bunkers and seasteading dreams still rely on the value of capital and the lives of “essential workers.”

The proposed cures and sacrifices reveal different diagrams of the social.  If the nation is mainly viewed as a network , the goal is to produce “safe” exceptional neighborhoods: to create/augment clusters so that the “infected” are separated from the “recovereds” and “susceptibles” (fig. 3).

FIGURE 3

Surveillance to track and manage contagion and contacts becomes the key to amplifying social distance.  In this worldview, community cases become mysteries to be solved via stalking and recording undocumented cases and silent spreaders.  Tracking “patient zero” becomes a national pastime, as does blaming other countries for viral spread.  Safety—resting as it does on inequality and dreams of emptying space—is precarious.  Think of everything that must be erased for an edge to represent a friendship: institutions, such as schools and bars; interactions with “nodding strangers” (which during pandemics turn out to be essential); social media prompts to say “happy birthday”; regular meetings and events. In order for there to be networks, there must be gaps. Networks hollow clouds of uncertainty—that is, infrastructure and in/difference—in order to foreground clean connections across empty space.[3]

Perversely, the logic of networks spreads the word neighbor everywhere, in order to impoverish it conceptually. Machine learning is filled with “neighborhood” methods used for pattern recognition and collaborative filtering, which create segregated clusters of agitated sameness. Networks presume and prescribe homophily—that birds of a feather flock together, that similarity breeds connection.  A banal and therefore dangerous notion of friend becomes a synonym for neighbor: segregation becomes naturalized and hatred becomes love.[4] How do you show you love the same? By fleeing when others show up. Hatred attracts and repels at the same time, creating angry clusters that need to hate:

if homophily == true

neighbor := self

self.love := other.hate

neighbor.love := self.love

ethics := narcissism

society := nul

endif

If the nation is mainly viewed as a community—what I’m calling “net-munity”—the onset of nontrackable cases demands treating everyone as “infected,” in order to suppress the disease (we have to remember that viruses, such as SARS Cov-1, have been eradicated without vaccines). The Vancouver Parks motto “the space between us will hold us together” encapsulates vision, for rather than treating the population as a series of nodes and edges, it attends to the spaces that enable community to emerge.  Community presumes community transmission—community is communication and space.  Once a virus is endemic to a community, neatly drawn graphs become impossible and the goal becomes widespread habitual changes to save others and public infrastructures: physical distancing, wearing facemasks, washing hands, avoiding mass gatherings, cleaning public spaces. Even as the disease and these changes affect “vulnerable” populations differently, there are no exceptions to the call for—if not the act of—sacrifice.  Friends and mobility become dangerous, and addressing the needs of those “at risk” populations becomes key.

At its best, net-munity follows the call made by the Combahee River Collective to treat everyone as “levelly human,” by engaging—rather than ignoring—identity politics and individual experience.[5] In British Columbia and elsewhere, houseless populations finally are being moved into safer shelters, such as hotel rooms and empty apartment buildings, after individual consultations.  Appallingly, Vancouver’s long-standing housing and drug crises are finally being addressed, not because of the dangerous living conditions of the houseless or the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women or the Overdose Crisis public health emergency declared in 2016, but because of the need to contain Covid-19 (tellingly, 113 people in BC died due to illicit drug toxicity in March 2020 ; in comparison, a total of 141 people have died of Covid-19 as of 15 May). This sheltering, however, can also destroy. The construction of spiked fencing to prevent tents from re-merging in Oppenheimer Park evokes other clearances: Japanese Canadians were removed from this area into Interior internment camps during World War II; Vancouver lies on the still unceded lands of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

We must engage neighbors and relations in all their rich ambivalence. Neighbors are not innocuous—the term neighbor literally recalls “boors.” They are nosy and noisy. They can provoke hostility, resentment and ambivalence. They intrude, even—and especially—when they are inert. They offer, however, a way to reside in/difference and to engage interactions that go beyond homophily: not just heterophily (heterosexuality, electromagnetism and other opposites that attract), but also ambivalence, compassion, and neutrality.

Neighbors space.[6] At their best they un-settle, for their spacing resonates with what Ariella Azoulay has called “potential history.”[7] Diverse worlds and lands persist despite being crossed out in official maps and graphs.[8] The task before us, as Kara Keeling has put it, is to “listen, with others, for the poetry, the refrains, and the noise a world is making.”[9]

So, let us shelter in space; let us care for the infrastructures that touch us, so that “we” might surface and endure, in/difference.

20 May 2020

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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and leads the Digital Democracies Group. Dr. Chun is the author of Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), as well as numerous articles and edited collections.  She has received fellowships from< various foundations and institutes, including the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She was Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades. Currently, Dr. Chun works with the Digital Democracies Group to undertake the proliferation of misinformation, abusive language and discriminatory algorithms. Through the investigation of natural language processing (NLP), political theory and critical data studies, the group aims to develop methods for creating effective online counterspeech and alternative models for connection. Her work has appeared in Critical Inquiry.

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I would like to thank Lynn Festa and Paul Moorcroft for their comments, suggestions, and conversations, and Hannah Holtzclaw for her editorial help. They have been invaluable.

[1] Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, Calif., 1997).

[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al., ed. Connor (Minneapolis, 1991).

[3] Wendy Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2016).

[4] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, 2014)

[5] Combahee River Collective, How We Get Free (Chicago, 2017).

[6] Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago, 2005).

[7] Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Brooklyn, N.Y., 2019).

[8] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1-25.

[9] Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York, 2019).

Arguments for a New Aesthetic of Presence

Chiara Cappelletto

Translated by Samuel Fleck

The dominant narrative of the COVID-19 illness plays into the most conservative iconic order. On the one hand, there is a widely circulated, glossy image of SARS-CoV-2 that makes use of the realist rhetoric of photography: the virus is this. It hardly matters that such an image is not a depiction of the pathogen but an illustration designed “to grab the public’s attention.”[1] On the other hand, the virus is “invisible” above all else, and its symptoms largely “mimic” those of the seasonal flu, which they resemble. It is therefore said to be unknowable. The lay observer is once again caught in a double bind between optical efficacy and the phantasmal quality of the image.

Apart from its well-known paradoxes, the logic of the sign—still applicable to AIDS, which has in fact been termed an “epidemic of signification”[2]—is completely inadequate for understanding the current pandemic. The “pestiferous bodies,” the carriers of contagion, cannot be detected because they are largely asymptomatic. The virus strikes without marking the sick person, as confirmed by the frantic search for a tracking system that will compensate for the dearth of symptoms, using geolocation data to make up for the lack of stigmata.

Indeed, since anyone could be sick without knowing it, we are all asked to maintain distance from one another. This policy might have been called “physical distancing,” so as to grant relevance to all the forms of attachment, care, and aid that we have mobilized during this time. The fact that it has been called “social distancing” clearly underscores the aesthetic-political implications of this extraordinary type of negative performance. Social distance is the suppression of gestures of contact. It entails not shaking hands with, hugging, or leaning in toward—much less slapping, hitting, or attacking—one another. It abolishes the affordances of the world, thus working like an anesthetic. If, as Adam Phillips writes, “attention seeking . . . is a form of sociability, an appeal to others to help us with our wanting,”[3] then social distancing inhibits our desire to give and receive attention.

We talk about the pandemic using surface codes, but we live it as bodies embedded in our homes, as though in a cultural version of locked-in syndrome. Are we a new kind of freak in a new kind of circus? It will be interesting to see to what extent future reflections about the transformation of public space into media space, the virtualization of private space through the systematic use of online platforms, and new codes of social representation where only the upper half of the body is displayed remain reliant on our culture’s privileging of the iconic, and to what extent they acknowledge that vision itself is situated. We are currently living a critical stalemate and paying for it in the flesh.

Suffering due to suspended sociality alone does not account for the profound sense of disorientation that we are experiencing. Are we not asked to stay in what is, by definition, the most welcoming space for us: our homes? Why then does this space appear so inhospitable to us? Coming from decades where being mobile was everything, home confinement suddenly becomes the cutoff point where our experience of near and far, neighbor and stranger, collapses. After living so freely, after having the very notion of open space shape our understanding of what living space is in itself, we all find ourselves confinable.

A different understanding is needed to account for the current state of human affairs. The latter calls for a new aesthetic of presence.

We know that our bodies are coextensive with the physical, social, and cultural environments in which goods, medicine, laws, and artifacts play a part; that emotions, thoughts, practices, and tools modify the neurobiological processes of individuals and of our species as a whole. Cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy use the term embodiment for the interconnectedness of man, nature, and technology: our bodies cut the world into a continuous reciprocal dynamic of action and reaction. We are all cyborgs. We have supposedly known this for decades, though we resist the idea and continue to observe this embodiment from the outside, as a notion to be put in perspective; we thus have a paradoxically disembodied understanding of it.

This critical inertia occurs at a time when COVID-19 has raised the question of embodiment to a higher level: an institutional level. The problem has been clear from the outset: by all getting sick at the same time we would have made it impossible for doctors and hospitals to care for us. Sick people make the system sick. We have thus acknowledged a link between the vulnerability of the individual and the vulnerability of the government infrastructure responsible for medical care. The moral imperative has been to “flatten the curve.”

The ongoing pandemic shows us governments as institutional actors whose power to lead lies unexpectedly in their capacity for care and protection. I am in favor of rethinking political action as an exercise in care because it would entail an ecological, feminist, and intergenerational agenda and would acknowledge that citizens are an aggregate of women and men, children and older people, with different potentialities, who make up networks of knowledge, affections, desires, and abilities. Nevertheless, while care as an active and mutual practice is a positive and productive engagement, being taken into care suggests an attitude of submissiveness that weakens personal initiative, the freedom to try and fail. If responsibility is the ability to respond, as Karen Barad has put it, then the political perspective of being cared for can weaken us to the point of making us nonresponsible.

We are at a crossroads. We have the opportunity to implement an ecological agenda and finally recognize that a butterfly flapping its wings can indeed cause a hurricane; to increase individual responsibility and inventiveness as a result; to overcome the ill-conceived alternative between social justice and freedom; and to build a fair and inclusive system of power. At the same time, we run the risk of turning our vulnerability into passivity; of assimilating individuals into two broad categories—reliable healthy people and socially dangerous sick people, each tagged with its own health code; of substituting the medical specialist for the political leader and the military, driven by a magical faith in science, which we are asked to believe in as we might a patron saint and whose praxis and verification system are unfortunately largely unknown to citizens.[4]

This choice, which calls into question the ultimate meaning of democratic citizenship, arises at a time of increased implementation of the prosthetic nature of the human body. Since sealing ourselves in our homes, we have never been so unbounded: with all of us connected 24/7, using privately owned platforms, whether for birthday parties, dissertation defenses, homeschooling, or work meetings, we are redefining the experience of our self and of the outside with a blind faith in the openness of the web and its democratic accessibility, both of whose shortfalls we prefer to ignore.

To pursue the best way forward we need to queer the dominant narrative and finally abandon the regime of “natural iconicity,” with its divide between presence and absence, which has unfortunately withstood decades of academic studies; we need to think about how embodied and gendered minds perform freely in spaces where the affective values of near and far have taken on enormous political relevance. We need to be able to be in touch and respond.

13 May 2020

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Chiara Cappelletto is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the Philosophy Department, University of Milan, where she teaches Poetics & Rhetoric and Contemporary Aesthetics, and heads the Performing Identities Seminar (PIS).Her work focusses on the fabrication of personal identity through public discourse and theatrical performance. Her books include Neuroaesthetics: Art, Braincentrism, and the Embodied Mind, forthcoming Columbia University Press.

Samuel Fleck earned his PhD from Columbia University with a dissertation on Antonio Fogazzaro and late nineteenth-century Italian literature. His experience as a translator of French and Italian texts into English spans more than twelve years. Among his recent works are translations of the poetry collection Valsolda by Fogazzaro, with selected poems set to appear in the Italian Poetry Review, and the book Neuroaesthetics: Art, Braincentrism, and the Embodied Mind by Chiara Cappelletto, forthcoming Columbia University Press

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[1] Cara Giaimo, “The Spiky Blob Seen Around the World: How C.D.C. Medical Illustrators Created the Coronavirus Pandemic’s Most Iconic Image,” New York Times, April 1, 2020,  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/health/coronavirus-illustration-cdc.html.

[2] Paula Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,” Cultural Studies 1, no. 3 (1987): 263–305.

[3] Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking (London: Penguin, 2019), p. 7.

[4] To complexify the question at hand, consider the notion of “therapeutic citizenship” coined by Vinh-Kim Nguyen. See Vinh-Kim Nguyen, “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship,” in Global Assemblages, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 124–44.

Groundhog Day and the Epoché

W. J. T. Mitchell

I thought that, by seventy-eight, I had seen everything.  Every epidemic from polio to AIDS to SARS. Every war from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan and the endless, stupid “War on Terror.” Every terrible president from Nixon to Reagan to Bush. Around the fall of 2016, with the election of Donald Trump, I was reminded of the old proverb, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Now, in the spring of 2020, we see how deep nothingness can be, a black hole in time that has sucked the entire world into its gravitational field. And so I began thinking about time, the present moment, and asking why and how it might provide a unique moment of insight.

Of course, since we are in a state of emergency, crisis, and exception, who has time to think about time? Nurses, orderlies, doctors are overwhelmed with sixteen-hour days of nonstop work; grocery clerks, immigrant fruit pickers, and meat processors are essential workers, while  the poor and people of color line up with millions of unemployed at food banks. Politicians scurry about covering their asses, or making up for the incompetence at the helm of the national government, and we watch as the richest, most technologically advanced country on the planet, with 2 percent of the world’s population, catches one-third of the cases of coronavirus at the latest count and boasts the worst record in the first world for mismanagement of the crisis.

Antony Gormley’s Clearing No. 1

So who has time to think about time?  The answer is stunningly clear.  We do.  I mean those of us who are paid to think, and write, and teach and who may be lucky enough to still be on the payroll of some academic institution.  Or those of us who are retired, drawing a pension, lucky to be sequestered at home rather than condemned to the petri dish of a nursing home.  As someone who is on the verge of retirement, in the process of stepping down from the helm of Critical Inquiry, a journal I have edited for the last forty-two years—the time of “theory”—I had already been thinking about time, numbering my days, and reflecting on the question of time itself.  Inspired by the maddest American political epoch in my lifetime, launched by the election of 2016, I had already plunged into the vast philosophical, historical, and scientific literature on time, trying to make sense of what makes this moment both unprecedented and utterly predictable, unique and yet exemplary, terrifying and yet filled with potential.[1] Above all I wanted to ask what makes this a teachable moment, one from which we could learn something together. And so I have found myself writing in the present tense about an extraordinarily tense present.

I have not been doing this alone.  On every side, pundits, essayists, poets, artists, intellectuals, novelists, historians, political theorists, and philosophers have been weighing in.  The present “Posts from the Pandemic” on the Critical Inquiry blog, “In the Moment,” have been pouring in from all over the world, crossing the screens of our editorial collective for debate and evaluation, and then reaching out to a readership much more numerous and far-reaching than the usual audience of a scholarly journal devoted to criticism and theory.

The result has been an enormous outpouring of thoughtful reflection gathered up in these posts.  They range from the personal and confessional (Slavoj Žižek noting that he finds himself hoping he will catch the virus) to the apocalyptic and prophetic (Bruno Latour and Achille Mbembe linking the pandemic to climate change, and Joshua Clover bringing it all back to capitalism).  Science (Norman Macleod urging us to “show some respect” for viruses and viral metaphors) and the history of science (Catherine Malabou and Lorraine Daston reflecting on how intellectuals have responded to plague).  Practical wisdom (Carol J. Adams on “anticipatory care-giving” and why we shouldn’t shake out clothes before washing them; Bill Ayers on the trials and dangers of Zoom teaching).   Virus-inspired reflections on biopower and biopolitics are everywhere as Michel Foucault’s prophetic writings continue to resonate (according to Daniele Lorenzini), and Jacques Derrida’s metaphorics of autoimmunity looms on the horizon. Katherine Hayles’s posthumanism relocates our bodies as the battleground between simplicity and complexity, viruses and the counter-virus of human intelligence. Affect theory and collective emotion go global in new forms of wonder and anxiety; the poetry of domestic immersion (Andrea Brady’s “Hanging in the Air”), ferocious tirade (Charles Bernstein’s “Covidity”), and John Wilkinson’s meditation on a time that has lost its legs to love. Mick Taussig’s shamanism finds a vocation, amid the “comic dimension” of self-isolating critical theorists, scholars, and poets laboring at their laptops, promoting their pet theories, predicting both u- and dys-topia, a new world of Green Socialism or a suicidal species hell-bent on authoritarian populism, nationalism, and racism.

Antony Gormley’s Clearing No. 2

Are these “end times”?  Trump’s favorite Evangelical minister, Robert Jeffress, pastor of the Dallas First Baptist Church, recently conjured with the possibility that the coronavirus is an apocalyptic judgment from God. Although he asserted with total confidence that “all natural disasters can ultimately be traced to sin,” he reassured his flock that this is not the Biblical plague that signals the apocalyptic end times. The reason: the Antichrist has not appeared yet.  Please excuse the uncontrollable laughter that follows this remark as I watch the Dear Leader pontificate on the medicinal virtues of Lysol. Just kidding, wasn’t he?

So, are we experiencing the onset of a New World Order? Peter Szendy’s “Viral Times” explores the temporal paradoxes of “hypervelocity and standstill,” the onset of a surprise that was unthinkable a few short months ago and utterly predictable after “decades of neoliberal dismantling of health and research infrastructures.” Emmanuel Alloa, on the other hand, finds himself “envying the confidence” of those who are “eager to explain to us that everything they have been saying for years has thus proved to be right.”  Meanwhile, Irina Dumitrescu and Caleb Smith comfort us with reminders of monastic life as a precedent for temporal stress and chances for the “care of self” produced by “social isolation.”  If Hans Blumenberg were still among us, he would no doubt remind us that the trope of “Shipwreck with Spectator” is a “metaphor for existence,” especially that of the philosopher who withdraws from the world to observe it from the solid ground of reason.  But he would then go on to note that Nietzsche launched an epoch in the history of philosophy by declaring (with Pascal) that “we have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us.”[2]

Let us agree, then, that we are “all at sea,” and even “all in the same boat,” Spaceship Earth drifting like a modern Titanic whose fate is still unknown, with first-class cabins protecting some of us from the chaos in the engine room and steerage, while the band plays on in the cyber salons.  We live in what historians call an “epoch,” a crazy, possibly revolutionary turning point in history in which old certainties collapse and science reveals its true nature as a discourse of contingency, uncertainty, and the incalculable.  At the same time, it feels like we socially isolated hermit scholars are trapped in the film Groundhog Day (1993), caught in a time loop in which every day feels like the last, but we are given one more chance for an imaginary do-over.  One prediction seems secure:  the dates of B.C. and A.D. will now designate the “before” and “after” of COVID-19 as a caesura in the time of our species on this planet.  A global pandemic coupled with a financial crisis on the scale of the Great Depression looms before us.  In the scale of cosmic time, this is a mere moment that will pass in the “blink of an eye,” what Germans call an Augenblick. In human history it promises to be a game changer.

The concept of epoch, the revolutionary turning point or “momentous moment,” is not the sole property of history.  Philosophy, especially skepticism and phenomenology are also grounded in the concept of the epoché, Edmund Husserl’s method of “bracketing” or “suspending” judgment in order to ponder our percepts and concepts for just a moment before getting back to work.  We lucky scholars thrive in “down times,”  “time-outs,” moments of suspension or bracketing of judgment, when we are compelled to meditate on both our objective perceptions and the “objectless representations” of collective hallucinations, dreams, fantasies, and ideologies.  The distinct scales of immediate, urgent, and microscopic “viral times” and the macroscopic planetary scale of climate change converge, as Achille Mbembe argues, and so with every breath you take, every move you make, CI will be watching you.

11 May 2020

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W. J. T. Mitchell is the editor of Critical Inquiry.

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[1] See also “American Psychosis:  Trump and the Nightmare of History,” Lecture at the University of Geneva, January 17, 2017.

[2] Shipwreck with Spectator:  Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 19.   

On Cooperationism: An End to the Economic Plague

Bernard E. Harcourt

Over thirty million Americans just filed first-time unemployment claims as a result of the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, pushing unemployment to its highest levels since the Great Depression. Despite that, the US stock markets recorded in April their best month since 1987; after an initial shock, the markets rallied steadily, rising over 30 percent since their lows in late March. Most economists sounded puzzled and offered fanciful daily explanations. Even Paul Krugman had little to say, suggesting that “Investors are buying stocks in part because they have nowhere else to go.”

But it’s no wonder the markets defied the economic crash. For the markets, there is nothing like a good crisis when the right people are in power. Philip Mirowski wrote tellingly about this during the last debacle—the financial meltdown of 2008—under the moniker “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Now too, the Faustian logic as to why institutional investors just put their bets on the market should not escape us.

First, Donald Trump and the Republican Senators have made it crystal clear that they have the backs of the large-cap corporations no matter how bad things get. By strengthening the largest corporations now, the bailouts will help them weed out their smaller competitors and facilitate monopolistic practices later. After the pandemic, the large-cap corporations will be poised to reap extractive profits, while most small businesses and mom-and-pop stores will be out of business.

Second, the sunset provisions on the bailout restrictions will allow shareholders and managers to enrich themselves when an economic recovery eventually happens, again without ever needing to build reserves because they know they’ll be bailed out next time as well. As Tim Wu details, these recurring bailouts have allowed wealthy managers to pillage in good times—through stock buy-backs and exorbitant executive pay—and get rescued in bad. This too enhances market value while extracting capital for the wealthy.

Third, Trump has sapped any momentum toward universal health care by promising financial exceptions for coronavirus-related health care costs. These COVID-19 carve outs will protect the Republicans from backlash in the November 2020 elections. After it’s all over, the less fortunate will continue to be ravaged by ordinary cancers and poverty-related diseases without any coverage, to the financial benefit of private insurance and corporate and wealthier taxpayers.

Fourth, the pandemic is disproportionately decimating the most vulnerable populations: the elderly, the poor, the uninsured, the incarcerated, and persons of color. The racial imbalance is unconscionable: the coronavirus mortality rate for African Americans is almost three times higher than the mortality rate for whites. The rates of infection in prison and jails are also horrifying. The populations at risk are disproportionately older and poorer, so on Medicare and Medicaid. Some refer to this as “culling the herd.” Market investors can expect that social security will be less of a drag on the economy in the future.

Fifth, the Republicans have been able to secret into the bailouts tax bonanzas for millionaires. One such provision temporarily suspends a limitation on the amount of deductions to nonbusiness income that owners of businesses established as pass-through entities can claim as a way to reduce their taxes owed. The nonpartisan congressional body, the Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates this will disproportionately benefit about 43,000 taxpayers in the highest tax bracket (over one million dollars in income) who will receive an average windfall of 1.63 million dollars per filer.

The markets have become the mirror of an ugly truth. Michel Foucault presciently observed, back in 1979, that markets are the touchstone of truth in neoliberal times. And the ugly truth that they reveal today is that the pandemic is a goldmine for large-cap corporations, institutional investors, and the wealthiest. I once overheard a New York real estate tycoon talking about the land grab in the Adirondacks in the 1930s and commenting “Wasn’t the Great Depression grand!” Institutional investors must feel the same way about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sadly, one can hardly expect that much difference in a Democratic administration, especially one that is equally beholden to Wall Street and wealthy donors. The last two—those of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—avidly embraced neoliberal policies such as workfare for the unemployed and welfare for the corporate elite. The Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner bailouts of 2008 were the model for today’s.

Mia Ruyter, Hank Paulson (oil on fake leather, 2008)

The only way forward—beyond a next Democratic administration—is a genuine legal transformation that replaces our existing corporate regime with cooperative, mutualist, and nonprofit enterprises. The many of us who create, invent, produce, work, and serve others need to displace the few who extract and hoard capital and put in place a new cooperationism that favors the equitable and sustainable distribution of economic growth and wealth creation.

The legal structure that enables the corporate form—what Katharina Pistor accurately calls the code of capital—has to be repealed and replaced with a new economic framework that circulates the wealth generated from production and consumption. These alternative legal forms, which have existed for centuries and surround us today, include cooperatives for producing and manufacturing, credit unions for banking, housing coops for living, mutualities for insuring, and nonprofit organizations for good works and learning.

This is also the only way to address head-on the global climate crisis. The logic, principles, and values of cooperative arrangements can serve to slow down our consumption-at-all-cost society. The goal of the cooperative enterprise is not to maximize the extraction of capital but to support and maintain all of the participants in the enterprise and to distribute well-being, which includes and depends on a healthy environment. By replacing the logic of capital extraction—the extractive logic as Saskia Sassen calls it—with an ethos of equitable distribution, we can prepare to address the climate crisis after the pandemic is over.

In hindsight, the term capitalism was always a misnomer, coined paradoxically by its critics in the nineteenth century. The term misleadingly suggests that capital inherently functions in certain ways, has a certain DNA, and is governed by economic laws. That’s an illusion though. Capital is just an artifact shaped by law and politics. Its code is entirely man-made. And as Thomas Piketty and others demonstrate, the current concentration of capital and increasing wealth inequalities today are nothing more than a political choice, not the product of any laws of capital.

In truth, we do not live today in a system in which capital dictates our economic circumstances. Instead, we live under the tyranny of what I would call “tournament dirigisme”: a type of state-directed gladiator sport where our political leaders bestow spoils on the wealthy in order to get reelected (and increasingly, to self-fund their own political campaigns).

We need to displace this tournament dirigisme with a legal and political framework that favors cooperation and collaboration between those who create, invent, produce, work, labor, and serve others. Rather than corporations that extract capital for the few shareholders and managers, we need cooperatives, mutuals, and nonprofits that distribute the wealth they create widely to everyone in the shared enterprise; and continually guard against the gross disparities in pay that now characterize our gladiator dirigisme. It will be the only way to tame our obscene and destructive consumerism.

It is not enough to increase progressive wealth taxes on the billionaires and invest more in public hospitals and public schools, as Piketty recently suggested. That won’t fundamentally change the Faustian logic and temptations. Instead, and urgently, it’s time to replace our system of tournament dirigisme with a new cooperationism.

Too many of us in this country are still entranced by the myth of American individualism—the idea that we can go it alone and invent and create and build things by ourselves and reap all the benefits. It is so ingrained in the public imagination, tied to the image of the pioneer gold digger and the shiny rewards of solitary hard work. The ideology undergirds the corporate form and the logic of capital extraction. But for the most part, we succeed in inventing, creating, and producing through mutual support, working together, and collaboration. It is these forms of cooperation that must ground a postpandemic economy.

This pandemic and economic crash must not prevent us from working together to place ourselves in a better position to deal with the other crisis—climate change—still looming on the horizon. On the contrary, these times call for a legal, political, and economic revolution to ring in a new epoch of cooperationism. This will demand political will. It will not come from our political leaders, so beholden now to corporate contributions. It will have to come from us all united.

5 May 2020

[A version of this post appears in French at AOC]

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Bernard E. Harcourt is a professor of law and political science at Columbia University in New York City and directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.  He is the author of The Illusion of Free Markets (2011) and The Counterrevolution (2018), and of the forthcoming book Critique & Praxis (2020).