Eva Illouz / Seven Lessons of an unprecedented Crisis

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Eva Illouz

With the number of coronavirus cases surging in the US, the country is now advising people to wear face masks when out in public [Stephanie Keith/Getty Images/AFP]

When she wrote Eichman in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt used a method of analysis which we may characterize as anti-historical: she refused to understand the present with analogies drawn from the past; she rejected used and worn philosophical categories to make sense of something entirely new. The book was a prelude to an inquiry which did not leave until the end of her life: How should we judge the present? Her thought led her to agree with Tocqueville’s claim that in a time of crisis the mind ‘errs in darkness.’ The Corona crisis is unprecedented in many ways, but we can already draw a few simple lessons in the ‘darkness’. 

Lesson No 1. We live in the shadow of a powerful state 

4.6 billion people throughout the world have stopped their mobility, work, and ordinary socializing, willingly, without much and significant protests. These billions of people have willingly abandoned the most fundamental aspects of their freedom, while in fact, we still lack some key information (for example how many are actually contaminated and thus what is the real percentage of deaths). They were confined to their homes (assuming they had one), confirming Thomas Hobbes (and others’) view that fear of death is the most powerful political passion and that we will always be willing to sacrifice our freedom for our security. What the confinement of these billion people showed was the extraordinary power of the state all over the world and the extraordinary capacity of obedience of citizens to the state all over the world. How do we know the state was extraordinarily powerful? Because of the easiness with which it issued and implemented absurd decrees and decisions. Israel forbade its citizens to walk no further than 100 meters (while France with 8 times more contaminated people were allowed to walk 1 km); Modi confined more than one billion people overnight, without giving them any time to prepare themselves, sending millions of poor people scrambling on the roads of India, sometimes dying on these roads. Israel allowed prayers in public but not yoga lessons in public. All these absurdities and inconsistencies show the tremendous power of the state and the obedience of citizens. 

Neo-liberals had been trumpeting for the last 40 years that the state was too strong, inefficient, inflated, and superfluous many of these people were forced to change course overnight. After decades during which endless economic growth appeared as the inescapable condition of human beings and guided all policies,  the political and moral dimension of human affairs came back in full force to the forefront of our societies.  But the politics that has come back to us is a new and unprecedented one:  it will be a politics of the conditions of life, which will increasingly have to deal with natural catastrophes --ecological and biological. The Corona is a preview of what a politics whose aim will be to guarantee the conditions for life will look like as the environment and climate collapse. 

But – and this is Lesson number 2—all states did not exercise their power in the same way. The Corona crisis showed nations and countries in all the strengths and dysfunctions of their political regimes. Israel proved to be what we always knew: one in which civilian problems are cast as security issues. The secret services used tracking anti-terrorist technology effortlessly, showing Israelis have been all under its scrutiny for a long time. The USA showed how extreme its notion of freedom is: Some states  (like Kansas)  rejected orders of lockdown in the name of their right to gather in churches (which bears a strong analogy to the recent call in Israel of Rabbi Kaniewski to reopen Torah studies) while other Americans vociferously demanded their right to shop.  The libertarianism which has been cultivated by the radical right for the last decades profoundly contradicts the management of a sanitary crisis. Israel closed frontiers when there was not a single dead while France left its frontier with Italy open out of solidarity even when Italy was hemorrhaging deaths.  Illiberal democracies as Israel, Poland, Turkey, and Hungary handled the Corona crisis as a Reichstag-on-fire moment, as an opportunity to suspend civil liberties and dismiss the power of parliament and of courts. But even strong democracies like the USA are teetering on the verge of anti-democratic authoritarianism. Other countries, like Sweden, Holland or Germany preferred to use social trust and counted on their citizens’ discipline to care for themselves and for others, and handled the crisis with a combination of civic-mindness and freedom. The virus is anything but biological: it is first and foremost a political event, deeply reflective of the relationship between the state and the citizens. The lesson we may derive from this for the future is that only the combination of strong democracies and welfare states have the luxury to defend the life of their citizens in a way that balances their freedom, economic survival, and their health. Semi-liberal or illiberal democracies will use crises (health or otherwise) for undemocratic power grabs and further trampling of citizens. 

Lesson 3. Neo-liberalism is really bad for your health. Neo-liberalism has steadily eroded public resources and even plundered the state for the benefit of the rich. It is unsurprising that most neo-liberal leaders were the slowest to respond to the crisis. Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Johnson, the industrialists of Northern Italy, initially promoted biological Darwinism –let’s the strong survive – which reflected their social Darwinism – whoever can fight and struggle will get ahead; whoever cannot fall on the side. But, as they quickly found out, the modern state has formed a sanitary pact with its citizens: even in the USA ( where health care is privatized and inaccessible to the poor and the working-classes), citizens expect the state to be responsible for the management of a health crisis. Neo-liberalism has undermined this sanitary pact.  The businessmen who are increasingly running politics think and act like businessmen:  investments in non-profitable sectors (like epidemics prevention) increasingly contradict a benefit-oriented mind-set (Trump canceled the federal agency responsible for the management of epidemics and is now cutting funding in the fight against pandemics). In viewing the social field as a balance sheet in which benefits must prevail over costs, it brutalizes social relations and leadership. Neo-liberalism has been very good to the rich and to the politicians who serve them; but it is very dangerous to the rest of us as it erodes public resources, the very notion of the public good, and the social contract between the state and its citizens. If the management of the crisis follows the 2008 model (helping and bailing out the rich) rather than the New Deal (helping all social classes, and especially the unemployed), we will collapse into a neo-feudalism which will lead to massive social unrest.   

Lesson 4: Trust is hard hit Most countries around the world were extraordinarily unprepared and lacked the most basic medical equipment to deal with the epidemics. This is first and foremost because globalization and delocalization of the economy made most countries depend on China for their medical equipment. But leaders broke the trust of citizens systematically beyond the question of equipment.  Netanyahu blatantly used the crisis to shamelessly evade the law. Trump called his white supremacist base to break the rules of confinement in Minnesota or Michigan. Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro attended an anti-lockdown rally. Last but not least, the Israel Health minister Yaakov Litzman became a universal laughing stock when he violated basic rules of social distancing his ministry issued and predicted with glib certainty that the messiah would save us from the pandemics by the month of April. The same Litzman is currently suspect of bribery and breach of trust and is likely to face trial. Yet,  Netanyahu seems to have accepted to now put him at another portfolio, critical for economic recovery. In many countries around the world,  large parts of populations feel deeply betrayed by their leaders. We can thus say that the worst-hit places in the world will be those (like Israel) where the sanitary crisis generates both an economic and political crisis. Will the sanitary question be the ground for citizens’ revolts around the world? The question remains open but there is no doubt that mass unrest is a likely outcome of the crisis. 

Photo: @odalisvaldivieso / Pedestrian in Queens, NY on April 4, 2020

Lesson 5: The home is not sweet after all. In a time of war, the fear of death exists but we usually and normally confront it with other people, we know who the enemy is, and we can draw on the large symbolic repertoire of heroism to fight or hide.  Yet, in the current case of fear of Coronavirus, we are reduced to very small units, and sometimes entirely isolated from the rest of the world, there is no action to take, and we have very few known symbolic repertoires to draw from. The deadly bomb may not be the one the enemy shells at us, but what we, unknowingly, carry inside ourselves and cause to someone else. This is why we have all become agglutinated in and around the home, in fear of something invisible which has suspended in the air our relationships to others. But if we have learned something it is that the home cannot repair the absence of a public world: production and consumption have become the main ways in which contemporaries create their own sense of value, socialize, and even forge intimacy. Work is where we exercise our skills and derive a sense of purpose and value. Leisure is where we experience pleasure, play, and the possibility of seeing and being seen by others. In confinement, we have thus learned that the home is bearable only when the public world is embedded inside the home through television, the Internet or delivery services. Short of that, sweet home becomes bitter, especially for the many who live in the cramped housings that were conceived for the working and middle classes in urban and peri-urban areas. 

Lesson 6: The value of work and of production becomes entirely inversed in such a crisis. There was a joke on social media about Ronaldo making millions of dollars and nurses making a grim salary. The joke instructed: Now go to Ronaldo for help and relief. The joke pointed to the inversion of value and prestige we are the witnesses of. We owe our survival to people who work in supermarkets, in hospitals, people who clean the streets, people who deliver food, people who maintain electricity, these are the people who became meaningful for our survival. Celebrities or financial wizards appeared in all the splendor of the emptiness of their work as the occupations normally invisible and devalued sustained all of us. If there is a lesson to learn it is that our “normal” world has a deeply distorted and inverted scale of values.  The people who helped us keep and maintain the social order are at the bottom of the scale while those who stand at the top of that scale have been, by and large, entirely useless. 

Lesson 7.  The relationship between secular and religious will never be the same again. Rarely have the differences between religious and seculars been so profound as they have been in the reaction and handling of the crisis. Evangelicals in the USA and ultra-orthodox in Israel, have little knowledge and respect for science, they hold insular lives and listen only to the recommendations of their priests and rabbis.  The secular public behaved with extraordinary civic sense: the young followed injunctions from the Ministry of Health and made enormous sacrifices in terms of freedom and economic survival to help avert deaths. In the Israeli context, there has always been a kind of smugness toward the “empty cart” of the seculars. If anything, we have had a live experiment showing that the extraordinary sense of civicness displayed by the secular public in the discipline they displayed and in the networks of volunteers they put in place. This must remain a milestone in the self-consciousness and self-identity of secular people. The behavior of secular people during the crisis certainly suggests religion can no longer claim any moral superiority. 

Many leaders around the world should not sleep soundly. Throughout history revolts and revolutions have occurred for much less.

Eva Illouz is a sociologist. She is the Director of studies at EHESS and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studies the development of capitalism from the perspective of subjectivities. She has recently published "Happycratie" (2018), "Les Marchandises émotionnelles" (Premier Parallèle, 2019), “The End of Love,” (Oxford University Press, 2019), and "La Fin de L'amour," (Le Seuil, 2020).

Cleo NH / Perpetual Peace

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Cleo NH

Untitled, 2019. Woodcut on cotton, 8x10 In.

Day Spring, 2020. Woodcut on cotton, 8x10 In.

As Fall Semester's Spring Break 2020 comes to a close we reflect on the shared ideas presented by the participants of this project. How, as global citizens, do we shape the world to represent values of autonomy, mutuality, sustainability, and peace? Sometimes, engaging in these types of thought exercises can be emotionally and mentally straining.  

In order to uphold productive dialogues and creative pursuits in the face of adversity, it is necessary to find ways to maintain internal balance and focus. Music has a unique ability to comfort, console, energize and motivate. With that in mind, I put together the following collection of songs to capture attitudes of relaxation, humor, joy, compassion, and resistance. While the conditions of the current situation can be anxiety-inducing, I agree with Sean in the song "Sorry Bro"; you've got the charm and the skills to rise above. 

— Cleo NH —

Perpetual Peace

Eva Illouz / Coronavirus Reveals What Really Makes the World Go Round, and It's Not Money

/ SPRING BREAK /

The bluff of neo-liberalism must be called out

Eva Illouz

"Melancholia" final scene

Article originally published by HAARETZ on April 3, 2020

In Lars von Trier’s movie “Melancholia,” the viewer comes to grasp, slowly, with a mix of terror and powerlessness, that the world is about to come to an end, colliding with the planet Melancholia. At the film’s end, the audience indeed watches, mesmerized and paralyzed, as that planet travels on a course to crash into Earth. Initially just a faraway point in the sky, it becomes an expanding disc, ultimately filling the screen, as it collides with our planet.

Today, as we are all engulfed in a world event whose full magnitude we have not yet grasped, and as I reached for appropriate analogies, I remembered the closing scene of von Trier’s movie.

I first read about a strange virus appearing in China in the American press during the second week of January, and it caught my attention because my son was due to travel to that country. The virus was still far away, like the distant disc of a dangerous planet. My son canceled his trip, but the disc continued on its inexorable course, slowly crashing into us in Europe and the Middle East.

We now all watch, transfixed, as the world as we knew it has shut down and the pandemic continues to unfold.

The coronavirus is an event of a magnitude that we struggle to grasp, not only because of its planetary scale, not only because of the speed of the contamination, but also because institutions whose titanic power we never previously questioned have been brought to their knees in a matter of few weeks. The primitive world of deadly plagues erupted into the sanitized and advanced world of nuclear energy, laser surgery and digital technology. Even in wartime, cinemas and bars have continued to function, but the normally bustling cities of Europe have now become eerie ghost towns, with their residents all in hiding. As Albert Camus put it, in “The Plague,” “all these changes were, in one sense, so fantastic and had been made so precipitately that it wasn’t easy to regard them as likely to have any permanence.”

From air travel to museums, the pulsating heart of our civilization has been shut down. Freedom, the modern value that trumps all others, has been suspended, and not because of a new tyrant, but because of fear, the emotion that overrides all others. The world has become, overnight, unheimlich – uncanny, emptied of its familiarity. Its most comforting gestures – shaking of hands, kissing, hugging, eating with others – have turned into sources of anxiety and danger.

In a matter of days, new categories used to make sense of a new reality emerged: We all became specialists in different types of masks and their filtering power (N95, FPP2, FPP3, etc.), in the amount of alcohol deemed necessary to sanitize hands, about the difference between “suppression” and “mitigation,” about the different fatality rates suffered by St. Louis and Philadelphia during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and of course, we became familiar with the odd rules and rituals of social distancing.

Crises foreground existing mental and political structures, and at the same time they challenge them. A structure, whether economic or mental), is usually hidden from view, but crises have their own ways of exposing their patterns to the naked eye.

Health, according to Michel Foucault, is the epicenter of modern governance (he called it bio-power). Through medical and mental health services, he claimed, the state manages, watches and controls its population. Although Foucault would not have put it this way, we may say that there is an implicit contract between modern states and their citizens, based on the capacity of the former to ensure the physical security and health of the latter.

The crisis highlights two opposite things: that this contract, in many places in the world, has been gradually breached by the state, which has seen its mission instead as enlarging the volume of economic activity, lowering the costs of labor and facilitating the transfer offshore of production (among other things, of such key medical products as masks and respirators), deregulating banks and other financial institutions, and generally responding to the needs of corporations. The result has been, whether by design or by default, an extraordinary erosion of the public sector.

The second obvious thing, visible to all, is that only the state can manage and overcome a crisis of such scale. Even the mammoth Amazon can do little more than ship parcels, and even that only with great difficulty in times like these.

According to Dennis Carroll, a leading world expert in infectious diseases, who for 15 years led the pandemic department at the U.S. Agency for International Development, this epidemic is not the first of its kind, but it is something we can expect with greater frequency in the future. The reason is what epidemiologist refer to as “zoonotic spillover” – the increasing transfer of animal pathogens to humans – itself caused by the increasing penetration of humans into ecozones formerly inaccessible. These incursions are driven by overpopulation and by intensive exploitation of the land (in Africa, for example, there is more oil or mineral extraction in areas that typically had few human populations).

Carroll and many others (including philanthropist Bill Gates and epidemiologist Larry Brilliant) have been warning for more than a decade that previously unknown viruses will increasingly threaten human beings. But in the industrialized West, no one paid attention. In fact, in 2018, President Donald Trump closed down the National Security Council department responsible for dealing with pandemics.

Trump also famously derided the danger of the coronavirus, suggesting it was a Democratic hoax, and describing it as a “foreign virus” to bolster his trade war with China. The United States now has the highest number of people sick with the virus worldwide, paying the price for Trump’s criminal lack of attention to the importance of rapid action in combating the epidemic. But Trump was not alone: To some degree or another, both American and European societies lacked imagination, in that they were too busy, pursuing profit and exploiting land and labor whenever and wherever they could.

Haunted by ‘economism’

In a post-corona world, zoonotic spillover and Chinese “wet markets” will have to become the concern of the international community. If Iran’s nuclear arsenal project can be closely monitored, there is no reason why we should not demand international monitoring of the sites and sources of potential zoonotic spillovers. The business community all over the world may finally realize that in order to exploit the world, there will need to be a world.

But what is new about this crisis is how much it is haunted by “economism.” The British model for responding to the medical threat initially embraced (and subsequently abandoned) the least intrusive path of intervention, for the sake of maintaining regular economic activity. It opted to let nature take its course, according to the model of auto-immunization (that is, contamination) of the younger 60 percent of the population, even though that would mean sacrificing an estimated 2 to 4 percent of its population (this model was also adopted by Holland and Sweden).

In the Italian city of Bergamo and its environs, industrialists and governing officials demanded that workers keep working, even when the virus was already present. In Brazil, the courts ruled against President Jair Bolsonaro’s claim that the health of the economy could not be sacrificed for an imaginary threat to the health of the populace.

Germany and France, too, initially responded in a way that was similar to the United Kingdom, ignoring the crisis as long as they could, until they couldn’t anymore. As commentator Giuliano da Empoli put it, even China, which has an appalling human rights record, did not use “economism” as a yardstick for its fight against the virus as overtly as European nations did (at least initially and until it was almost too late).

The choice that has been laid in front of contemporary societies is unprecedented. Which do we choose to risk sacrificing: the lives of the vulnerable or the economic survival of the young? While the moral questions raised by this dilemma are genuine and profound (how many lives is the economy worth?), it also points to the ways in which public health has been neglected and been relegated to a place of lower priority than the health of the economy.

Trust as currency

It is with no small irony that the world of finance, usually arrogant and so often unaccountable, was the first to collapse, showing that the continued and unfathomable circulation of money in the world relies on a resource we all took for granted: the health of citizens. Markets feed on trust as a currency to build the future, and trust, it turns out, rests on the assumption of health.

Modern states have traditionally guaranteed citizens’ health: They built hospitals, trained doctors, subsidized medicine and built welfare systems. This health-care system was the infrastructure that made possible trust in the future, which was in turn a requirement for continued investment and financial speculation. Without health and a healthy public, economic transactions become meaningless.

Health was taken for granted, so much so that, in recent decades, politicians, financial institutions and corporations in the West converged in pushing for policies that severely decreased public budgets for services ranging from education to health care, ironically ignoring the ways in which corporations had been enjoying the fruits of public goods they never paid for. All of these depend on the state and are the indispensable public resources without which economic growth and profits could not occur. Yet, in France, as just one example, 100,000 hospital beds have been eliminated in the last 20 years (at-home care does not compensate for lost hospital beds).

In June 2019, emergency room professionals in France protested budget cuts that they claimed were pushing a world-class health system to the brink of collapse. At the time of this writing, a group of French doctors are suing Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and the former minister of health, Agnes Buzyn, for their gross mismanagement of the crisis (as late as March 14, it was business as usual in France).

In the United States, the wealthiest country on the planet, doctors are currently scrambling to obtain face masks to protect themselves (The New York Times has reported that paramedic workers are improvising masks out of coffee filters).

In Israel in 2018, the ratio of hospital beds to population was at its lowest level in three decades, according to a Ministry of Health report: 1.78 per thousand, down from 2.224 in 2000 and 2.68 in 1988 (in Germany it was 8.0).

Spectacular neglect

The successive governments of Benjamin Netanyahu have spectacularly neglected the health system. There are at least two reasons for this: For one, Netanyahu is in his heart and soul a neo-liberal who believes in the redistribution of money from the public sector, via tax cuts and the selling-off of public assets to private interests. At the same time, he has channeled precious public resources to population groups that support him at the polls, contributing to massive shortages in the health care system.

The massive depletion of the public sector budgets are visible for all to see: Israel has the lowest levels of unemployment benefits in the industrial world. Behind the mixture of drastic measures and amateurism with which the corona crisis has been managed in Israel is a health care system that has been sorely neglected.

Netanyahu, and hordes of other politicians worldwide, have treated the health of their own citizens with an unbearable lightness, failing to grasp the obvious: Without health there can be no economy. The relationship between our health and the markets has now become painfully clear. In the Israeli context we may add the obvious: Without health there can be no army either. The security of the country is predicated on the health of its citizens.

The capitalism we have come to know in recent decades – which is deregulated, which penetrates all state considerations, which benefits the rich, which creates abyssal inequalities (among others in the health system itself) – will have to change. The pandemic is going to cause unfathomable economic damage, massive unemployment, slow or negative growth and it will affect the entire world, with Asian economies possibly emerging as the stronger ones.

Banks, corporations and financial firms must be made to bear the burden, along with the state, of coming out of the crisis and become partners in the collective health of their employees. They will have to contribute to research, to emergency preparedness, and to massive hiring drives, once the crisis passes. They will have to bear the burden of the collective effort to rebuild the economy, even at the price of lower profits.

Capitalists have taken for granted resources provided by the state – education, health, physical infrastructure – without acknowledging that the resources they were squandering from the state could, in a situation like this, ultimately be responsible for withholding them from the world which makes the economy possible. This must stop. For the economy to have meaning, it needs a world. And this world can only be built collectively, by the joint efforts of corporations and the state. While only states can manage a crisis of such scale, they will not be strong enough to get out of the crisis alone: Corporations will need to contribute to the maintenance of the public goods from which they have taken so much benefit.

Public fear always puts institutions in danger (the political monsters of the 20th century all used fear to strip democracy of its institutions). In Israel, despite the relatively low toll in human lives (so far), the coronavirus crisis has exerted a profound shock on its governing institutions.

As writer-activist Naomi Klein has relentlessly argued, catastrophes are often opportunities for elites to grab bounties and exploit them. Israel provides a striking example. Netanyahu has de facto suspended basic civil rights, closed down the Israeli courts (postponing for at least two months his own criminal trial). On March 16, the government approved the use of technological tools developed by the Shin Bet security service for tracking suspected terrorists for following the movements of virus carriers. It circumvented approval of the Knesset in the process and took measures that no other democratic country, has taken.

But Israeli citizens are used to obeying quickly and sheepishly orders from the state, especially when security and survival are at stake. They are used to security serving as the ultimate justification for erosions of the rule of law and democracy.

Fear of death

In the 5th century, B.C.E., Thucydides wrote about the plague that ravaged Athens during the second year of the Peloponnesian War: “[T]he catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.”

In Thucydides’ eyes, the fear of death is stronger than any other emotion, including other types of fear. Certain fears contribute positively to culture and society – fear of God, fear of the law – while other fears can sabotage the social order, as can occur during a mass outbreak of disease. In the latter type of situation, he maintained, people can discard conventional restraint and the social order collapses. However, in Israel the public is displaying impressive restraint, while it is the leaders who have abandoned the basic norms of respectable conduct.

Crises of this kind can generate chaos, and it is in the management of such chaos that tyrants often emerge. Dictators thrive both on fear and chaos.

In Israel, such respected commentators as Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev see in Netanyahu’s handling of the crisis an example of just such cynical exploitation of chaos and fear. Thus, Israel is going through a crisis that has no parallel elsewhere in the world: Its crisis is at once a medical one, an economic one and a political one. In times like this, trust in public officials is crucial. Unfortunately, a significant part of the public has lost trust in its officials, whether in the Health Ministry or in any other branch of the executive.

What compounds the sense of crisis is the fact that the pandemic requires a novel form of solidarity, by way of “social distancing.” It is a solidarity between generations, between the young and the old, between someone who does not know he may be sick and someone who may die from what the first person does not know, a solidarity between someone who may have lost his job and someone who may lose his life. But it is also a terrible solidarity, one that lets people die alone, as we have seen in reports from Italy and the United States.

Fragmented body

I, like millions of other Israelis, have been in confinement for many weeks now, and the love my children have showered on me has consisted of leaving me alone. This solidarity demands isolation, and thus fragments the social body into its smallest possible units, making it difficult to organize, meet and communicate, beyond the endless jokes and videos exchanged on social media.

Social intercourse has become vicarious. The use of the Internet has more than doubled; social media has become the new living room, the number of coronavirus jokes circulating on social media across continents is unprecedented, the use of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video has doubled, students of the world are now meeting with teachers and classmates via Zoom.

In short, this epidemic, which has made us revise all known categories of intimacy and care, has been a high holiday for virtual technology. I have no doubt that in the post-corona world, virtual and long-distance life will assume new significance, now that we have been forced to discover its potential.

We will survive this crisis, thanks to the heroic work of doctors and nurses and the resilience of citizens. Some countries are already tentatively emerging from it. But citizens will have to ask questions, demand accountings and draw the right conclusions. The bluff of neo-liberalism must be called out. The era in which each economic actor need worry only about filling his or her pockets with gold must end. It is the state that, again and again, has proven to be the only entity capable of managing such large-scale crises.

The public interest must return to the center of public policy. And corporations must contribute to this public good, if they want the market to even remain a frame for human activities.

This pandemic is a preview of what we may expect in the future with more dangerous viruses, and when climate change makes the world increasingly unlivable. Short of changing the relationship between private and public interest, there will be neither a private nor a public interest to defend. Contrary to some predictions about the resurgence of nationalism and borders, I believe that we have become aware of how distressingly interconnected we are, economically and in terms of health.

We will need international coordination and cooperation of a new kind, international monitoring of zoonotic spillovers, possibly new international methods for controlling and sanctioning the way nations handle such crisis (China’s silencing of the crisis until January was criminal, given that in December it was still possible to stop the virus from spreading). New international bodies have to be established to innovate in the fields of medical equipment, pharmaceuticals and epidemic prevention. Mostly, we will need a part of the vast wealth amassed by private entities to be reinvested in public goods. That will be the condition for having a world.

Eva Illouz is a sociologist. She is the Director of studies at EHESS and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studies the development of capitalism from the perspective of subjectivities. She has recently published "Happycratie" (2018), "Les Marchandises émotionnelles" (Premier Parallèle, 2019), “The End of Love,” (Oxford University Press, 2019), and "La Fin de L'amour," (Le Seuil, 2020).

João Enxuto + Erica Love/ Sketches from a Secession

João Enxuto + Erica Love

A health care worker stands in the street Sunday to counter-protest hundreds of others that are demanding the end to stay-at-home orders in Denver. Alyson McClaran / Reuters

America was bitterly divided by the time Covid-19 struck in early 2020. The rupture had been triggered by political indifference, the wealth gap, crackpot conspiracies, the 9/11 attacks, Bush v. Gore, the Civil War, chattle slavery, and so on... Over the first two decades of the 21st century the breaches to civil society had become particularly acute and persistent. Volatility, which fueled the finance and media industries, simply became too intense and debilitating. The endless churn of viral proxy wars battered whatever was left to prop up the Union. Once the pandemic blew through, the house of cards collapsed decisively.

At this point you have been staying in place for over a month, in some cases longer. If you are among those fortunate enough to be at home with a reliable internet connection the view of the United States through your computer terminal has, at times, been terrifying. We can assure you, however, that the quarantines will end and that something good and meaningful is waiting on the other side.

The “Liberate” media events that you recently witnessed launched open conflicts between the states and federal government which became irreconcilable. Demonstrators delivered demands for the right to work at the door of state houses occupied by Democratic governors. These events, to a large degree, were cases of astroturfing boosted by the President on Twitter. “Operation Gridlock” was designed for maximum exposure. Handmade signs read: “Trust in Jesus not the New World Order,” "Don't Tread on Me,” and “I need a haircut.” Photographs of brave hospital workers blocking the paths of menacing Dodge and Ford trucks have become iconic: an American knock-off of the Tiananmen Square standoff.

With distance, reckless demands and deplorable tactics by protestors could be boiled down to a struggle for human rights. In America basic provisions were tied to a job. A business lockdown, in effect, cut access to social safety. Work continued nonetheless. As high-earning cognitive labor struggled with screen fatigue, essential workers (who were disproportionately people of color) continued to risk their lives on the front-lines. As Jordan Flowers, an Amazon warehouse worker put it, “How can we be ‘essential’ and ‘disposable’ at the same time?” [1] On March 30 of 2020 Flowers, with 50 of his co-workers, staged a walkout at their Staten Island facility. America had promised jobs as a cure; they became the disease instead.

Record unemployment led millions to lose their healthcare in the middle of the pandemic. Strikes, walkouts, and sickouts intensified as the summer wore on. Covid-19 cases surged and remained persistently high as gridlock in the federal government prevented a financial stimulus from reaching businesses and individuals. Outrage, dulled by prolonged isolation, turned into existential rage once it was given space in the streets. Social justice struggles took center stage and “Black Lives Matter” became the largest movement in the nation’s history.

As public health and other essential professionals worked tirelessly to limit the scope of the disaster, others tempered anxieties by mapping possibilities beyond what was imminently knowable. This tendency was certainly evident in the art field, where cooped up imaginations fluctuated wildly from the most dire endgame scenarios to vital expressions of solidarity that extended well beyond the arts.

In the early weeks, speculation about the future of Contemporary Art in the U.S. was generally grim. Countless, deeply-felt reflections circulated across publishing platforms. There was time to read. The takes were wide-raging but even among those who shared cultural affinities differences could be plotted mostly along generational lines. Some of the older commentariat who came of age in the 1970’s, during New York City’s bad old days, imagined that by having borne witness to one period of bust and boom, prosperity would gradually return to those who could wait it out with “Passion. Obsession. Desire.”[2] A devotion to cyclical history helped in no small way to confirm fools in their faith. The economic unraveling of the 1970s was not a reboot event but the conjuncture of a new regime known as neoliberalism.

Difference and density were impediments to the recasting of New York City in the aseptic modernist mold that was favored after the World Wars. The city proved not to be a pliable enough medium for the “master builders” and after decades of neglect by white elites the city was left for dead. And, so, it was with passion, obsession, and desire that a small community of artists in the 1970s resettled the wasted metropolis and delivered great American art from out of the deprivation. The scrappy bunch which occupied abandoned lofts in Lower Manhattan were the germ for an expansion that by 2020 had mushroomed into a multi-billion dollar global industry. In its final years the old art market became so bloated with ancillary prestige events (galas, fairs, etc…) staged in fealty to oligarch patrons that these satellite affairs ended up swallowing the planet which they orbited. In those days much vibrancy, critical energy, and transformative potential was squandered in beating back influencers, sorting through outrage, and paying the rent. Even now, 18 years on, we can’t help but indulge in a bump of recollections drawn from your lurid milieu.  

Let’s continue with the fallout: Museums, theaters, and galleries that closed in mid-March remained shut for months. In all, the infrastructure that furnished live public spectatorship went dark for longer than most could have anticipated. Contemporary art galleries attenuated by market strain for too long, staged mergers or simply folded. Hopes for a sustainable market rebound sparked by an ascendant patron class of conscious-capitalists that would source locally-grown artists from emerging galleries never materialized.[3] The human compulsion to possess singular commodities is a difficult force to regulate.

The dominos continued to fall when it became clear that there would not be a federal bailout of the nonprofit arts sector. In the years leading up to Covid-19 there was very little public provision to shore things up to begin with; the National Endowment of the Arts had been threatened with elimination four years running. What had been starved for decades would be the first to perish. For their part arts foundations joined together to provide relief, but the economic impact of the virus was too widespread and too sustained. Payments were furnished for immediate support—a bridge, it was hoped, to somewhere.

Young Americans subsisting on a precarious creative economy before the pandemic were quickly forced to redirect their energies to the fundamentals of survival. These abrupt introductions to urban immiseration prompted a hunt for alternatives. The Great Depression was the obvious historical precedent and texts covering the New Deal’s Federal Arts Project (FAP) began appearing on Zoom reading group lists. In sustained examinations of bygone post office mural paintings advocated by federal administrators named Holger Cahill and Rexford Tugwell, the fog of 85 years became all the more dense. Artists of the Great Depression had made concessions to decorate and propagandize for a wage – to bear the yoke of social realism and the remit of FAP administrators to update the conventions of Americana. In those years – for the sake of self-preservation – American artists were forced to redefine their output as craft. As your contemporary Dave Beech notes, the Euro-American artist since the Renaissance had couched their exceptionalism within the “aristocratic project of the eradication of labour within labour itself.” He explains further, “This is how it was possible for art to pass itself off from the outset as unteachable, immeasurable, spontaneous, and free from rules.”[4] It would follow that a demand for a subsidy in times of economic crisis would require that the artist again shed their claim to exceptionalism.

With a measure of historical perspective some in the art field recalibrated their approach to movement politics. Allegiances between art workers and broader labor movements were cultivated like never before, but the internet had forever muddied the waters of what constituted creative labor. To this day unruly armies of humans and bots push out countless disintermediation schemes, deep fakes, and shit posts: All of which became tactically valuable when the time came for the secession. However, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s messianic return never came.

What we now call the Soft Secession was not a single revolutionary event but rather an escalation brought on by the collapse of the U.S. and global economies after Covid-19 and the 2020 election which was plagued with irregularities, lawsuits, protests, and bloodshed. As the Joe Biden campaign engaged in reclaiming a disputed election, a New State confederation was seeded as an informal alliance between East and West coast states. A definitive plan for secession was rolled out shortly thereafter by governors and other elected officials from so-called donor states – those contributing more tax money to the federal government than they receive. These states tended to be Democratically-led and were initially hit the hardest by Covid-19. For their part, Republican senators continually blocked federal financial bailouts for states and municipalities. Meanwhile multinational corporations were profiting from billions of stimulus tax dollars. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes charted all-time highs. For many states a secession simply made economic sense.

With the help of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General, Trump declared his re-election at the close of 2020. In a concession speech Joe Biden echoed Al Gore from 2000, "for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession." Decades of incompetence finally broke the Democratic National Committee and progressives grabbed control from the moderates. A party coup would prime the secession.

While most of the secessionist planning took place via back-channel negotiations, a brazen media war was waged in support of the cause. After Trump’s illegitimate claim to victory, secessionist leaders made no effort to conceal their intentions. They reasoned that the President and his circle would interpret the strategy as an appropriation of their own tactics – all hot air and bluster. In the first few months of 2021 the word “TREASON!!!” was included in Presidential tweets more than two dozen times, but no significant response was taken other than the threat of lawsuits.

New State independence was declared on April 15, 2021, following a coordinated effort by millions of residents and businesses based in the original 20 secessionist states to suspend payments to the U.S. federal government. The original states were: Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Shortly thereafter South Florida liberated itself to join the New State. The District of Columbia followed after sorting out a series of complications related to its status as a former national capital. In the end, the New State map closely followed boundaries established when states decided to expand Medicaid in the 2010s.

On that tax independence day residents of the New State were told that they would be protected from the non-payment of federal tributes to the United States; a decree which went a long way towards quieting dissent in the countryside. Days of celebratory street manifestations were to follow. In the Soft Secession the scales of Federalism were tipped toward regionalism.

Hard boundaries were not raised immediately to mark New State territory. Migration was permitted and new citizens registered their affiliation with the New State through an online portal which was an early component in a vast network architecture that would be designed to provide access to basic government services. Claiming a New State identification number would immediately trigger the revocation of U.S. citizenship and furnish guaranteed monthly income payments.

The New State is not a country in the manner of a typical modern nation state. Governance is decentralized, local, and participatory. There is a President who is elected by ranked choice vote but she can only serve one four-year term with strictly limited executive powers. It was also decided through a plebiscite that the New State would retain its generic name, have no national flag, no anthem, and no police force, but it did need its own currency. An injection of new money would quantitatively ease the difficult challenge of coordinating and building out a social infrastructure. Inflation was a worry to be left for another time. Executing plans for a new government apparatus was a massive undertaking, particularly during an economic depression. But let’s not get tangled in policy details, these are just sketches from a secession.

It is worth noting that the New State benefited from serendipity. A vaccine to stop Covid-19 was discovered and approved by a group of researchers at Oxford University in May 2021. By June it was widely available. Having California in the New State was an immense benefit because of its advanced research and technology sectors. We can characterize the secession as “soft” because a vast majority of the military-industrial complex was absorbed in the break up. The revolution was bloodless and bureaucratic.

For some years the Pacific States, and California in particular, had been facing off against the federal government to maintain an adherence to stricter emissions and climate regulations. Reducing and capturing atmospheric carbon became a top priority for the New State under the direction of Californian policy makers. Parallels were frequently drawn between the Pacific secessionist block and the breakaway nation described in Ernest Callenbach’s 1974 novel Ecotopia. In the book, the Pacific Northwest states (Washington and Oregon) join California in a bioregional movement that separates from the United States in 1980. Ecotopia contains various proposals that are unworkable in the New State, but it does offer useful sketches for a large-scale plan which is oriented towards an ecological horizon – the only horizon that really matters in the end. It remains a popular title in the New State to this day. From an ecological standpoint, the most significant plan adopted by the New State was the Green New Deal.

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and cover art by Mark Harrison. Color image can be found here

The political foundations for the New State assembled from unfulfilled promises gathered from the ill-fated campaigns of Bernie Sanders. His Democratic Socialists party helped to transform the New State from a version of Keynesianism to a multi-party socialist system. A guaranteed income, climate action, universal healthcare, and free college were adopted over time. Legislative priorities hewed closely to Sanders' 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights. His portrait is now on our digital currency.

In the first years of the New State there was massive economic and personal suffering. There was social unrest and real doubts about whether our statecraft would succeed. But as difficult as that period was, it created the conditions for artists to act politically alongside other workers towards a common cause. There were no means to build an individual practice; no market. The guaranteed income was just enough to get by. But what’s slowly emerging is the framework to support creative work under the terms that we've long wished for.

A recounting of the fate of the United States will be left for another time.

1. Sam Adler-Bell, “Coronavirus Has Given the Left a Historic Opportunity. Can They Seize It?,” The Intercept, April 14, 2020, accessed April 26, 2020, 

   https://theintercept.com/2020/04/14/coronavirus-mutual-aid-worker-organizing-left-movement/

2. Jerry Saltz, “The Last Days of the Art World … and Perhaps the First Days of a New One Life after the coronavirus will be very different.” New York Magazine, April 2, 2020, accessed April 25, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/how-the-coronavirus-will-transform-the-art-world.html

3. Magda Sawon, “This Is the Toughest Challenge My Business Has Ever Faced. But Here’s Why Small Galleries Like Mine Will Come Out Alive,” Artnet, April 27, 2020, accessed April 27, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/magda-sawon-postmasters-op-ed-1845471

4.  Dave Beech, Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labor, Automation and Value Production. (London: Pluto Books, 2019), 41.

João Enxuto and Erica Love are artists based in New York City. Their work can be found at www.theoriginalcopy.net

Alenka Zupančič / Stand Up for Comedy

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Alenka Zupančič

This paper was written for the conference “Beyond the Joke: Psychoanalysis and Comedy”, which took place at Freud Museum, London, in May 2019.

Photo: Fer Gregory / Shutterstock

We live in times when comedy—and especially comedy with an edge—is often threatened from the right and from the left. Maybe even more so from the left: as Angela Nagle has pointed out, we’ve been witnessing lately a curious turn in which the new populist right is taking the side of transgression and rebellion, traditionally associated with the left: they talk about breaking the taboos (of speech, but also of conduct), they dare to speak up, say the forbidden things, challenge the established structures (including the media) and denounce the “elites”. Even when in power, they continue with this “dissident” rhetoric of opposition and of courageous transgression (for example against European institutions, or against the “deep State”). This general turn from simple conservativism to transgression on the right also has its comedic moments. For example, even the disregard for the most benign social norms of civility can be sold off as a courageous Transgression. I insult someone, and then I claim I’m defending the freedom of speech. Transgression seems to be “sexy”, even if it simply means no longer greeting your neighbour, because, “Who invented these stupid rules and why should I obey them?” In this constellation and after giving up on the more radical ideas of social justice, the left has paradoxically ended up on the conservative side: defending the rule of law, conserving what we have, and responding to contradictions, excesses, and even catastrophes generated by the present socio-economic system (crises, imminent ecological collapse, wars, huge economic differences, corruption, the rise of neo-fascist ideas) by means of introducing more and more new rules, regulations, and adjustments that are supposed to keep that “anomalies” at bay. This growing—and the often impenetrable corpus of rules and sub-rules, which are usually easily disregarded by the big players, but tend to drastically complicate lives of smaller players and individuals—includes “cultural” rules and injunctions that have become in the past decades, the main battlefield between the “left” and the “right”, particularly in the US. When the question of obeying and supporting or not the rules of political correctness (and identity politics) becomes the principal and exclusive field of social struggle, something has gone very wrong. Or very right, that is certainly much to the right. The right has won not simply because more and more people subscribe to its ideas, but because of how the very thing that makes the difference (between right and left) has shifted and became thoroughly redefined as a cultural war. 

Related to this, but more specific in its functioning and its ideological role is the accent on affect, victimhood, vulnerability, hurt feelings, offence, and the appeal to the social authorities to protect us from this. A kind of massive “infantilization” of our societies. We are encouraged to behave like children: to act primarily upon how we “feel,” to demand—and rely on—constant protection against the “outer world,” its dangers and fights, or simply against the world of others, other human beings.

Important social movements (such as #MeToo) are often channelled exclusively into the logic of “joining the club” (of the victims) and demanding that the Other (different social institutions and preventive measures) protect us against the villainy of power, instead of aiming at empowering ourselves and becoming active agents of social struggle and change. Valorisation of affectivity and feelings appears at the precise point when some problem—injustice, to say—would demand a more radical systemic revision as to its causes and perpetuation. Social valorisation of affects basically means that we pay the plaintiff with her own money: Oh, but your feelings are so precious, you are so precious! The more you feel, the more precious you are. This is a typical neoliberal manoeuvre, which transforms even our traumatic experiences into possible social capital. If we can capitalize on our affects, we will limit our protests to declarations of these affects—to say, declarations of suffering and hurt. I’m of course not saying that suffering should not be expressed and talked about, but that this should not “freeze” the subject in the figure of the victim. The revolt should be precisely about refusing to be a victim, rejecting that position on all possible levels.

It is rather obvious that this turn to feelings, affects, sensibility, and their consideration/protection (as opposed to being equipped to fight, retort, and deal with things) is a very unfriendly environment for comedy (and jokes). In times when we need trigger warnings to be able to read certain passages in Shakespeare without getting hurt, comedy has very little space to breathe.  

I knew a girl once who became rather obsessed with the idea of avoiding all possible bad, unhealthy food, and with establishing a perfect harmony within her body. At some point, she was telling me how close she has come to achieving that goal. As proof, she told me that if she eats as much like a small piece of chocolate, she throws up. Her body has found perfect harmony and is now able to detect and immediately reject the slightest foreign or bad element.  

And we can ask, with Nietzsche, what the “great health” is all about? Is it about being able to digest and deal with some amount of “bad” food and other “foreign” elements, or is it about collapsing and violently throwing up at the slightest sight of something “bad” or “foreign”? 

Comedy clearly sides with the first option and is indeed an interesting phenomenon in this respect: it demands great feeling and sensibility when it comes to scanning the social structures and detecting its paradoxes, contradictions, and neuralgic points, but it also demands some degree of bluntness and insensitivity when presenting these points in its own specific (comic) way.

Source: Netflix / Dave Chappell “Sticks and Stones” Netflix special.

Also, some degree of blasphemy and of a possible offence, of “crossing the line”, are almost constitutive elements of comedy (and of jokes). Not simply because comedy favors transgression, but because it essentially works with what is on the other side: with impulses and ideas that we tend to have, but won’t allow ourselves to express them, or simply don’t (want to) think about. And we could say that from the civic and civilized point of view it is often good that we don’t allow ourselves to express these impulses. But what is, or would be, also good from the civic point of view, is that we didn’t simply repress them, but confront them and deal with them in by means other than repression. What is presently going on in this respect is gigantic repression, accompanied by the necessary return of the repressed. (And comedy is a social form that allows for other ways of dealing with it.)

In the classical Freudian account, most of the jokes (the so-called tendentious jokes) work with and because of our resistance. There is something in ourselves that resists the content, or the point of the joke—if expressed in a plain, non-joke form. The technique of a joke circumvents this resistance or breaks through it, thanks to an additional, unexpected pleasure derived from this technique itself. The opposition is not simply that between a direct and an indirect way of saying something (this would rather constitute the form of politeness): a joke says things very directly, but with non-standard, unexpected means. Its technique allows for a direct point to surprise us, catch us off guard. 

But let’s go back for a moment to the question of resistance. We can further complicate this account by distinguishing between two kinds of resistance. There is a simple configuration that could be described as follows: I (more or less secretly) agree with the point the joke makes, but resist it because of external “cultural” rules (“one shouldn’t say such things aloud”). And then when somebody finds an ingenious way of saying it, I can find pleasure in it and laugh.

Then there is another form of resistance which is more interesting because I resist the content itself: it is the content, and not just its expression, that I find disturbing or inadmissible. Here we are usually dealing with the configuration where something like repression (in the strict Freudian sense of Verdrängung) concerning a specific content of our desire has taken place. Here the configuration changes, it is no longer that of “I would like to say it, but cultural norms, considerations of respect, politeness, etc. prevent me from doing so”. No, I would not like to say it or hear it, for that matter. When repression (of a certain content-specific impulse) takes place, this does not imply that I secretly very much want to do it, just wouldn’t admit to it; it rather means that I’m profoundly repulsed by it (I have very strong feelings about the matter, or against the matter). There is an old saying according to which all the most zealous, fervent, fanatical anti-gay people are “repressed homosexuals”. This is probably true in some cases at least, yet it does not mean that they are secretly gay, but just wouldn’t publicly admit it. No, they genuinely hate this impulse in themselves, which is why they tend to react so violently when they perceive it in others. This is not simply about duplicity (public/private), it is about the fact that our most authentic feelings can already involve some form of repression which manifests itself precisely in our immediate, spontaneous feelings. 

Now, again, this does not involve a culturally or morally clear-cut, unambiguous stance. The structure of some other reactions of repulsion (other than homophobic ones), reactions that we find good and worthy, is no less “pathological” and has a similar origin. For example, it is following the same mechanism that we can find cannibalism, or torture, repulsive, and deeply disturbing. Because these impulses are not simply unknown to us but have become unfamiliar, “foreign” in the process of our dealing with them in a “civilized way” (mostly by means of repression). 

Traditional conservative moralists hated Freud for revealing and pointing to a non-moral source of all morality, which would allegedly lead to the latter’s utter relativisation and abandonment. Yet Freud’s point was that this was a much more powerful and resilient source of morality than its grounding in abstract principles, in (Divine) Good or “pure reason” could be. The claim that the source of morality is not itself “moral” does not undermine its efficiency, but rather explains it. This is what led Freud to famously say that “the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows.”[1] Morality or conscience are themselves not fully conscious. Moreover, morality and moral censorship are not simply performed upon the id, but in complicity with it – hence the affects of “genuine” repulsion or attraction involved in different moral stances. (The Superego, or conscience, literally feeds on the renounced/repressed drives and their pressure or “energy”.) So, and to put it very simply, we could say that from the social point of view there are many “good repressions”, in the sense that they can be very efficient, immediate ways of dealing with various anti-social (or socially destructive) impulses. 

Yet, as Freud has also insisted, morality based on repression comes with a price. This price can be seen and felt in symptoms or, more generally, in what he termed das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Discontent in civilization). The more we progress in our civilized ways, and the more morally sophisticated we become, the more we experience the weight of this discontent.[2] This Freudian stance was and still is, sometimes perceived as implying that liberation would come with the abandonment of all morality; or as implying that we should return to some simpler and more spontaneous stage of social interaction. Yet Freud’s point was different, and Lacan picked it up in a form of the explicit, simple, yet difficult question: Could there be a morality, or ethics, not based on and fed by repression? And if the answer is yes, what would these ethics be, how would it function? As clinical practice psychoanalysis is supposed to go a long way in lifting or dismantling the mechanism of repression. Do we become immoral as a result of it? Yes and no. It is certainly not that we become without restrains in respect to our impulses and defy others by simply following them. We deal with them by means other than repression (for example sublimation). And we do need to deal with them, because these impulses are (and remain) contradictory and conflictual already in themselves, and not simply in view of or because of the cultural and social norms inhibiting them. In other words, it is not by ‘lifting’ or abandoning our cultural regulation that we could expect the malaise, the discontent to simply disappear and life becomes harmonic. Culture is a solution to the inherent contradictions of impulses, but it is also a solution that produces new contradictions and new levels of problems. And it does not exist simply in the opposition to impulses, but in complicity with them.

Photo: Masses / Royalty Free Image

Now if we look from this perspective at our current social and political landscape, what do we see?

The main-stream left (the so-called “cultural” or “liberal” left) mostly insists that discontent in Kultur can only be managed by more Kultur, by a denser and denser network of rules and regulations, and that any problem that occurs can be solved or dealt with by means of coming up with another (even more specific) rule. (This leads, among other things, to the exclusion of all manifestations of enjoyment and desire from the social space, because enjoyment and desire as such already involve a transgression, an invasion into the space of the other.)

The “populist” right, on the other hand, operates by means of performing a cut between two kinds of laws/rules: between, on the one hand, what they claim to be eternal, natural (or divine) laws—such as embodied for example in our “Christian tradition”, national identity, “natural sexuality”, and, on the other and, the mere (multi-)”cultural” laws which are all “artificial” and inhibit our freedom and natural spontaneity. In other words, the right exempts some laws as sacred and diverts all the popular rebellion and discontent produced by maintaining the repression that also these laws are based on, towards the other laws, which it deems “cultural”. This explains the stunning surplus investment which is clearly there for the right when it comes to attacking certain rules of political correctness. I’m the first to say that political correctness is a rather insufficient and actually “politically incorrect” strategy, because it avoids the source of the problem, and replaces the task of dealing with it with more additional rules. But the surplus investment with which the right receives some of these rules clearly indicates that there is much more going on here – a genuine Freudian Verschiebung, displacement.

What both these strategies have in common is that they completely ignore or avoid precisely the difficult, vexing question of repression; they don’t want to know anything about what we can all “systemic causes” of the trouble. The centrist “left” is busy attending to the symptoms, using the signals and expression of the discontent. The strategy of the right, however, is proving to be much more efficient, because—to put it very simply—it allows people to show discontent, and to rebel at certain regions, without diminishing the levels of repression, and its cost, involved in the sustaining of the “fundamental” laws that define its world-view and its world-economy. Moreover, by increasing the number and complexity of rules and sub-rules the liberal left tends to increase the levels of repression, Verdrängung, and the right directly profits from this increase, channelling the outlet of pressure in the direction that suits it in concrete circumstances. This is true both on “personal” and “social” levels, which are deeply connected anyway. 

It is here, in this configuration, that the political importance of comedy today comes in, even when its content has nothing to do with politics. Obviously, this is not to say that comedy can replace politics. The claim is simply that comedy is a cultural form that can work on repression, do something to and with it, and that this is also where it political dimension lies. “Comedy” is obviously a very general term. Things that we list under comedy (all things that make us laugh) can have very different political effects, including very reactionary ones. But the fact is that comedy does have at its disposal techniques which, combined with thinking and the right talent, can make us deal with these impulses by means other than repression, and in this way make them useless as unconscious food or fuel of our actions. Comedy can lure us out of our well consolidated (moral) chair, expose us to considerations and ideas that we would normally tend to resist. It lures us out of this comfort not by means of awakening enlightenment, but by means of a (different kind of) pleasure. (Freud compared this Vorlust to the effects of intoxication, alcohol). We could also say that it invites us to think by way making us discover thinking as possibly pleasurable, as a joy. Nietzsche made the expression “gay science” largely know and popular with the title of one of his books (die Fröhliche Wissenschaft), but the term originates in the Provencal troubadour poetic tradition (gai saber). Lacan writes on this tradition extensively in the context of “sublimation” (defined already by Freud as “satisfaction of the drives without repression”), and invokes a possible emancipatory potential of “gay science”. I think good comedy is something very much like gay science.

It’s been argued—by myself among others—that comedy can have both reactionary and emancipatory effects, it can both disarm the power and consolidate it, empower the people or just entertain and divert them. This double way of comedy has little to do with the comedian’s a priori political choice and preferences (the latter rather follow from a certain way of understanding and doing comedy). In the last part of my talk, I would like to propose a few points to help us navigate in the often muddy area of this distinction, with the help of what I’ve said so far. 

As the terms that could name this difference, I propose “stand up comedy” and “sit back comedy”. Both terms are meant as metaphors, and not as referring to postures in which one does the comedy (standing up or sitting down), nor – in the case of “stand up” – simply referring to the style of performing known as stand-up.  The main difference between them consists of what they do, or not, to and with the individual and social repressions that feed any current “state of affairs”. Do they tackle them, shift them, dismantle them, or mostly just use and perpetuate them?

“Sit back comedy” typically cashes in on our repressions, further consolidates us in our beliefs and, more importantly, in our righteousness, our (moral or intellectual) superiority. It can involve strong elements of irony understood as drawing, and playing upon, the line between ourselves (who get it and are on the right side), and others (who don’t get it). James Harvey made this point very nicely: 

“Where a successful joke connects you to an audience, an irony may do just the opposite. Mostly, an audience ‘gets’ a joke or else it falls flat, as we say. But an irony … may only confirm itself, may begin to seem richer than it did even at first if half the audience misses it.”[3]

This may behalf of the audience present, but it may also refer to the others “out there” who don’t (or wouldn’t) get it; yet this place of “the (stupider) other(s)” is structurally built into irony, and into the gliding differentiation it implies.

I’m not simply identifying “sit back comedy” with irony, only suggesting that it often contains this particular element of irony.  If you side with irony, you can never be on the wrong side, it’s always the others, the “naive believers”, the “fools” who are wrong.

Photo: Screenshot of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert / CBS

For example, I would qualify much of what Stephen Colbert does on The Late Show in relation to Trump as “sit back comedy” (even when he is standing up doing it): you fill the audience with democratic voters, and then you make fun of Trump, week after week after week, with more or less funny jokes. There is no risk taken there; you play against the background of general consensus (which you take care to never disturb), laughing at the stupidity of other(s). The effect of this is, even if progressive in content, largely conservative. We get to “enjoy our Trump”, as well as enjoy not being Trump, being on the right side of the divide, being right. (I guess this could be a very good definition of the mainstream left today: it is all about being right, with all the ambiguity that this way of putting it can have in English. So I’m tempted to ask: Why not be wrong for a change?) A few minutes of ridiculing Trump per day seem to be enough to fulfill our political agenda or duty.

There is no real (comic) questioning hear about what makes Trump possible and sustains him, on the contrary; he is presented as the main and only problem. Without him, America would become great again, to borrow his own slogan. 

What I call “stand up comedy” does not overlap with stand up as performance category, but it does contain some of its elements. To begin with: you don’t perform in a controlled environment or address your act to those who already think exactly like you, share your views and convictions. Clearly, you prepare well for your act, but you do not simply perform, play out your script. You do it, in part, by responding to the response of the audience, and not necessarily by simply playing into its hands. By this I mean: say your joke is making a point which doesn’t go down too well with the public. I imagine you then have a choice between abandoning that point and moving on to something else, or rising the stakes, insisting and finding a yet funnier way of saying it, which convinces the public to take the point in and consider it.

Convincing the audience, “winning it over” (also there where it isn’t already “yours”), attempting to leave no one out, is a very important element of “stand-up comedy”, which involves both taking some risk and engaging in the art of convincing. But above all, the crucial element of what I call “stand up comedy” is that it makes the audience stand up (in their head), walk around, and dwell in spaces outside their consolidated area and well-established divides. And even enjoy this. 

Let me conclude with an example, which is interesting for my purposes because it includes both “stand up” and “sit back” comedy, and it actually uses the “cultural sit-back” comedy to bring in the stand-up, and with it the question of systemic causes (of repression).

What I have in mind is one of the more famous episodes of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who is America, called ‘Building a Mosque in Kingman Arizona’. Cohen (in one of his characters) addresses the assembly of local people in Kingman Arizona. He first asks them if they want to see “huge economic growth” in town, coming from an investment of 385 million dollars. Everybody says yes. Then he tells them what the investment is about – their town has been chosen as the location for building a “brand new, state of the art mosque” – not just any mosque, but the world’s largest mosque outside of the Middle east. People’s enthusiasm quickly dies out, they start protesting and uttering all kinds of objections. From very reasonable ones (Why would they need a mosque like this?) to various islamophobic versions of objections (mosque equals terrorism). At first sight, the episode may look simply like Cohen’s (successful) attempt at provoking a display of collective islamophobia in a small town in Arizona. But I don’t think this “liberal” agenda (we feel good laughing at prejudiced locals) exhausts the interest of this episode. I think the quite predictable “islamophobia” is actually being used here as means of exposing (or at least pointing to) a much more general, subtle and mischievous form of liberal blackmail. The way Cohen presents this project is coined upon a classical “liberal” manipulation: if you want people to accept something, say A, you introduce A as a given background in which they have the choice between different versions of A. You don’t ask: “Do you want A or not?” You ask: “Do you want a green A, or a blue A, or some other version of it perhaps? Whatever you want, you’re free to choose.” And the moment they start considering different choices, people are hooked, they’ve already accepted A. 

Photo: Sasha Baron Cohen, Who is America / Showtime

So, in his speech, Cohen starts by telling the local people that they “will have the choice between two different designs” of the mosque, design 1 and design 2, which he shows them on slides. Then he asks, “So who here supports design one?” Nobody, they all protest, and he immediately concludes: “So, you are all for design 2.” People are outraged, they don’t want either one, they say. Cohen continues with his corporate salesman strategy: “Let me ask you something. You don’t like this construction: so tell me about your dream mosque.” In other terms: just keep thinking about the alternatives within the choice that I’m imposing on you. At that point, one of the locals cuts the debate by energetically crying out: “There IS no dream mosque!” We should think twice before simply dismissing this response for its ‘islamophobic’ prejudice, and rather take it as a model of what should be our principled response to any of this kind of “free choice” blackmail situations. 

In other words, perhaps we should complicate a bit the causality with which we usually “explain” these things, and say: the man is not saying this because he is islamophobic, he turned “Islamophobic” (or homophobic, or….whatever-phobic) because subjected to this kind of subtle, invisible blackmail and its consequences for decades.  

The accumulating yet impotent frustration generated by this seemingly neutral liberal framework of choices is being canalized, in contemporary populist politics—which fully supports the economical side of this blackmail—against designed groups of enemies (Muslims, immigrant workers…), precisely so as not to be directed against its systemic causes. 

The episode of “Who is America” is quite ingenious because it manages to expose, at the same time, both islamophobic prejudice and the liberal capitalist framework with its blackmail. It uses one to expose the other, and vice versa.

Alenka Zupančič is a philosopher and social theorist. She works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Notable for her work on the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, she is the author of numerous articles and books, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions; The Odd One In: On Comedy; and, most recently, What is Sex?

1. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Stachey, Hoharth Press, London 1953-1974, vol. 19, p.52. 

2. Shift from external authority to the constitution of the Superego (conscience): in the case of simply external authority one renounces one’s satisfactions (of the drives) to avoid punishment. ‘If one has carried out this renunciation, one is, as it were, quits with the authority and no sense of guilt should remain. But with fear of the superego the case is different. Here, instinctual renunciation is not enough, for the wish persists and cannot be concealed from the superego. Thus, in spite of the renunciation that has been made, a sense of guilt comes about. (…) instinctual renunciation now no longer has a completely liberating effect; virtuous conscience is no longer rewarded with the assurance of love. A threatened external unhappiness – loss of love and punishment of the part of external authority – has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.” S. Freud, SE 21, p. 127-128.

3.  James Harvey: Romantic Comedy in Hollywood. From Lubitsch to Sturges, New York: Da capo Press 1998, p. 672.

Paul B. Preciado / Aprendiendo del virus

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Paul B. Preciado

Permiso de re-publicación otorgados por el autor. Originalmente publicado en Tribuna / El País / 28 Mar 2020 — English version here

Royalty free image

Si Michel Foucault hubiera sobrevivido al azote del sida y hubiera resistido hasta la invención de la triterapia tendría hoy 93 años: ¿habría aceptado de buen grado haberse encerrado en su piso de la rue Vaugirard? El primer filósofo de la historia en morir de las complicaciones generadas por el virus de inmunodeficiencia adquirida nos ha legado algunas de las nociones más eficaces para pensar la gestión política de la epidemia que, en medio del pánico y la desinformación, se vuelven tan útiles como una buena mascarilla cognitiva.

Lo más importante que aprendimos de Foucault es que el cuerpo vivo (y por tanto mortal) es el objeto central de toda política. Il n’y a pas de politique qui ne soit pas une politique des corps (no hay política que no sea una política de los cuerpos). Pero el cuerpo no es para Foucault un organismo biológico dado sobre el que después actúa el poder. La tarea misma de la acción política es fabricar un cuerpo, ponerlo a trabajar, definir sus modos de reproducción, prefigurar las modalidades del discurso a través de las que ese cuerpo se ficcionaliza hasta ser capaz de decir “yo”. Todo el trabajo de Foucault podría entenderse como un análisis histórico de las distintas técnicas a través de las que el poder gestiona la vida y la muerte de las poblaciones. Entre 1975 y 1976, los años en los que publicó Vigilar y castigar y el primer volumen de la Historia de la sexualidad, Foucault utilizó la noción de “biopolítica” para hablar de una relación que el poder establecía con el cuerpo social en la modernidad. Describió la transición desde lo que él llamaba una “sociedad soberana” hacia una “sociedad disciplinaria” como el paso desde una sociedad que define la soberanía en términos de decisión y ritualización de la muerte a una sociedad que gestiona y maximiza la vida de las poblaciones en términos de interés nacional. Para Foucault, las técnicas gubernamentales biopolíticas se extendían como una red de poder que desbordaba el ámbito legal o la esfera punitiva convirtiéndose en una fuerza “somatopolítica”, una forma de poder espacializado que se extendía en la totalidad del territorio hasta penetrar en el cuerpo individual.

Durante y después de la crisis del sida, numerosos autores ampliaron y radicalizaron las hipótesis de Foucault y sus relaciones con las políticas inmunitarias. El filósofo italiano Roberto Espósito analizó las relaciones entre la noción política de “comunidad” y la noción biomédica y epidemiológica de “inmunidad”. Comunidad e inmunidad comparten una misma raíz, munus, en latín el munus era el tributo que alguien debía pagar por vivir o formar parte de la comunidad. La comunidad es cum (con) munus (deber, ley, obligación, pero también ofrenda): un grupo humano religado por una ley y una obligación común, pero también por un regalo, por una ofrenda. El sustantivo inmunitas, es un vocablo privativo que deriva de negar el munus. En el derecho romano, la inmunitas era una dispensa o un privilegio que exoneraba a alguien de los deberes societarios que son comunes a todos. Aquel que había sido exonerado era inmune. Mientras que aquel que estaba desmunido era aquel al que se le había retirado todos los privilegios de la vida en comunidad.

Roberto Espósito nos enseña que toda biopolítica es inmunológica: supone una definición de la comunidad y el establecimiento de una jerarquía entre aquellos cuerpos que están exentos de tributos (los que son considerados inmunes) y aquellos que la comunidad percibe como potencialmente peligrosos (los demuni) y que serán excluidos en un acto de protección inmunológica. Esa es la paradoja de la biopolítica: todo acto de protección implica una definición inmunitaria de la comunidad según la cual esta se dará a sí misma la autoridad de sacrificar otras vidas, en beneficio de una idea de su propia soberanía. El estado de excepción es la normalización de esta insoportable paradoja.

A partir del siglo XIX, con el descubrimiento de la primera vacuna antivariólica y los experimentos de Pasteur y Koch, la noción de inmunidad migra desde el ámbito del derecho y adquiere una significación médica. Las democracias liberales y patriarco-coloniales Europeas del siglo XIX construyen el ideal del individuo moderno no solo como agente (masculino, blanco, heterosexual) económico libre, sino también como un cuerpo inmune, radicalmente separado, que no debe nada a la comunidad. Para Espósito, el modo en el que la Alemania nazi caracterizó a una parte de su propia población (los judíos, pero también los gitanos, los homosexuales, los personas con discapacidad) como cuerpos que amenazaban la soberanía de la comunidad aria es un ejemplo paradigmático de los peligros de la gestión inmunitaria. Esta comprensión inmunológica de la sociedad no acabó con el nazismo, sino que, al contrario, ha pervivido en Europa legitimando las políticas neoliberales de gestión de sus minorías racializadas y de las poblaciones migrantes. Es esta comprensión inmunológica la que ha forjado la comunidad económica europea, el mito de Shengen y las técnicas de Frontex en los últimos años.

En 1994, en Flexible Bodies, la antropóloga de la Universidad de Princeton Emily Martin analizó la relación entre inmunidad y política en la cultura americana durante las crisis de la polio y el sida. Martin llegó a algunas conclusiones que resultan pertinentes para analizar la crisis actual. La inmunidad corporal, argumenta Martin, no es solo un mero hecho biológico independiente de variables culturales y políticas. Bien al contrario, lo que entendemos por inmunidad se construye colectivamente a través de criterios sociales y políticos que producen alternativamente soberanía o exclusión, protección o estigma, vida o muerte.

Si volvemos a pensar la historia de algunas de las epidemias mundiales de los cinco últimos siglos bajo el prisma que nos ofrecen Michel Foucault, Roberto Espósito y Emily Martin es posible elaborar una hipótesis que podría tomar la forma de una ecuación: dime cómo tu comunidad construye su soberanía política y te diré qué formas tomarán tus epidemias y cómo las afrontarás.

Las distintas epidemias materializan en el ámbito del cuerpo individual las obsesiones que dominan la gestión política de la vida y de la muerte de las poblaciones en un periodo determinado. Por decirlo con términos de Foucault, una epidemia radicaliza y desplaza las técnicas biopolíticas que se aplican al territorio nacional hasta al nivel de la anatomía política, inscribiéndolas en el cuerpo individual. Al mismo tiempo, una epidemia permite extender a toda la población las medidas de “inmunización” política que habían sido aplicadas hasta ahora de manera violenta frente aquellos que habían sido considerados como “extranjeros” tanto dentro como en los límites del territorio nacional.

La gestión política de las epidemias pone en escena la utopía de comunidad y las fantasías inmunitarias de una sociedad, externalizando sus sueños de omnipotencia (y los fallos estrepitosos) de su soberanía política. La hipótesis de Michel Foucault, Roberto Espósito y de Emily Martin nada tiene que ver con una teoría de complot. No se trata de la idea ridícula de que el virus sea una invención de laboratorio o un plan maquiavélico para extender políticas todavía más autoritarias. Al contrario, el virus actúa a nuestra imagen y semejanza, no hace más que replicar, materializar, intensificar y extender a toda la población, las formas dominantes de gestión biopolítica y necropolítica que ya estaban trabajando sobre el territorio nacional y sus límites. De ahí que cada sociedad pueda definirse por la epidemia que la amenaza y por el modo de organizarse frente a ella.

Pensemos, por ejemplo, en la sífilis. La epidemia golpeó por primera vez a la ciudad de Nápoles en 1494. La empresa colonial europea acababa de iniciarse. La sífilis fue como el pistoletazo de salida de la destrucción colonial y de las políticas raciales que vendrían con ellas. Los ingleses la llamaron “la enfermedad francesa”, los franceses dijeron que era “el mal napolitano” y los napolitanos que había venido de América: se dijo que había sido traída por los colonizadores que habían sido infectados por los indígenas… El virus, como nos enseñó Derrida, es, por definición, el extranjero, el otro, el extraño. Infección sexualmente transmisible, la sífilis materializó en los cuerpos de los siglos XVI al XIX las formas de represión y exclusión social que dominaban la modernidad patriarcocolonial: la obsesión por la pureza racial, la prohibición de los así llamados “matrimonios mixtos” entre personas de distinta clase y “raza” y las múltiples restricciones que pesaban sobre las relaciones sexuales y extramatrimoniales.

La utopía de comunidad y el modelo de inmunidad de la sífilis es el del cuerpo blanco burgués sexualmente confinado en la vida matrimonial como núcleo de la reproducción del cuerpo nacional. De ahí que la prostituta se convirtiera en el cuerpo vivo que condensó todos los significantes políticos abyectos durante la epidemia: mujer obrera y a menudo racializada, cuerpo externo a las regulaciones domésticas y del matrimonio, que hacía de su sexualidad su medio de producción, la trabajadora sexual fue visibilizada, controlada y estigmatizada como vector principal de la propagación del virus. Pero no fue la represión de la prostitución ni la reclusión de las prostitutas en burdeles nacionales (como imaginó Restif de la Bretonne) lo que curó la sífilis. Bien al contrario. La reclusión de las prostitutas solo las hizo más vulnerables a la enfermedad. Lo que curó la sífilis fue el descubrimiento de los antibióticos y especialmente de la penicilina en 1928, precisamente un momento de profundas transformaciones de la política sexual en Europa con los primeros movimientos de descolonización, el acceso de las mujeres blancas al voto, las primeras despenalizaciones de la homosexualidad y una relativa liberalización de la ética matrimonial heterosexual.

Medio siglo después, el sida fue a la sociedad neoliberal heteronormativa del siglo XX lo que la sífilis había sido a la sociedad industrial y colonial. Los primeros casos aparecieron en 1981, precisamente en el momento en el que la homosexualidad dejaba de ser considerada como una enfermedad psiquiátrica, después de que hubiera sido objeto de persecución y discriminación social durante décadas. La primera fase de la epidemia afectó de manera prioritaria a lo que se nombró entonces como las 4 H: homosexuales, hookers —trabajadoras o trabajadores sexuales—, hemofílicos y heroin users —heroinómanos—. El sida remasterizó y reactualizó la red de control sobre el cuerpo y la sexualidad que había tejido la sífilis y que la penicilina y los movimientos de descolonización, feministas y homosexuales habían desarticulado y transformado en los años sesenta y setenta. Como en el caso de las prostitutas en la crisis de la sífilis, la represión de la homosexualidad sólo causó más muertes. Lo que está transformando progresivamente el sida en una enfermedad crónica ha sido la despatologización de la homosexualidad, la autonomización farmacológica del Sur, la emancipación sexual de las mujeres, su derecho a decir no a las prácticas sin condón, y el acceso de la población afectada, independientemente de su clase social o su grado de racialización, a las triterapias. El modelo de comunidad/inmunidad del sida tiene que ver con la fantasía de la soberanía sexual masculina entendida como derecho innegociable de penetración, mientras que todo cuerpo penetrado sexualmente (homosexual, mujer, toda forma de analidad) es percibido como carente de soberanía.

Volvamos ahora a nuestra situación actual. Mucho antes de que hubiera aparecido la Covid-19 habíamos ya iniciado un proceso de mutación planetaria. Estábamos atravesando ya, antes del virus, un cambio social y político tan profundo como el que afectó a las sociedades que desarrollaron la sífilis. En el siglo XV, con la invención de la imprenta y la expansión del capitalismo colonial, se pasó de una sociedad oral a una sociedad escrita, de una forma de producción feudal a una forma de producción industrial-esclavista y de una sociedad teocrática a una sociedad regida por acuerdos científicos en el que las nociones de sexo, raza y sexualidad se convertirían en dispositivos de control necro-biopolítico de la población.

Hoy estamos pasando de una sociedad escrita a una sociedad ciberoral, de una sociedad orgánica a una sociedad digital, de una economía industrial a una economía inmaterial, de una forma de control disciplinario y arquitectónico, a formas de control microprostéticas y mediático-cibernéticas. En otros textos he denominado farmacopornográfica al tipo de gestión y producción del cuerpo y de la subjetividad sexual dentro de esta nueva configuración política. El cuerpo y la subjetividad contemporáneos ya no son regulados únicamente a través de su paso por las instituciones disciplinarias (escuela, fábrica, caserna, hospital, etcétera) sino y sobre todo a través de un conjunto de tecnologías biomoleculares, microprostéticas, digitales y de transmisión y de información. En el ámbito de la sexualidad, la modificación farmacológica de la conciencia y del comportamiento, la mundialización de la píldora anticonceptiva para todas las “mujeres”, así como la producción de la triterapias, de las terapias preventivas del sida o el viagra son algunos de los índices de la gestión biotecnológica. La extensión planetaria de Internet, la generalización del uso de tecnologías informáticas móviles, el uso de la inteligencia artificial y de algoritmos en el análisis de big data, el intercambio de información a gran velocidad y el desarrollo de dispositivos globales de vigilancia informática a través de satélite son índices de esta nueva gestión semiotio-técnica digital. Si las he denominado pornográficas es, en primer lugar, porque estas técnicas de biovigilancia se introducen dentro del cuerpo, atraviesan la piel, nos penetran; y en segundo lugar, porque los dispositivos de biocontrol ya no funcionan a través de la represión de la sexualidad (masturbatoria o no), sino a través de la incitación al consumo y a la producción constante de un placer regulado y cuantificable. Cuanto más consumimos y más sanos estamos mejor somos controlados.

La mutación que está teniendo lugar podría ser también el paso de un régimen patriarco-colonial y extractivista, de una sociedad antropocéntrica y de una política donde una parte muy pequeña de la comunidad humana planetaría se autoriza a sí misma a llevar a cabo prácticas de predación universal, a una sociedad capaz de redistribuir energía y soberanía. Desde una sociedad de energías fósiles a otra de energías renovables. Está también en cuestión el paso desde un modelo binario de diferencia sexual a un paradigma más abierto en el que la morfología de los órganos genitales y la capacidad reproductiva de un cuerpo no definan su posición social desde el momento del nacimiento; y desde un modelo heteropatriarcal a formas no jerárquicas de reproducción de la vida. Lo que estará en el centro del debate durante y después de esta crisis es cuáles serán las vidas que estaremos dispuestos a salvar y cuáles serán sacrificadas. Es en el contexto de esta mutación, de la transformación de los modos de entender la comunidad (una comunidad que hoy es la totalidad del planeta) y la inmunidad donde el virus opera y se convierte en estrategia política.

Inmunidad y política de la frontera

Lo que ha caracterizado las políticas gubernamentales de los últimos 20 años, desde al menos la caída de las torres gemelas, frente a las ideas aparentes de libertad de circulación que dominaban el neoliberalismo de la era Thatcher, ha sido la redefinición de los estados-nación en términos neocoloniales e identitarios y la vuelta a la idea de frontera física como condición del restablecimiento de la identidad nacional y la soberanía política. Israel, Estados Unidos, Rusia, Turquía y la Comunidad Económica Europea han liderado el diseño de nuevas fronteras que por primera vez después de décadas, no han sido solo vigiladas o custodiadas, sino reinscritas a través de la decisión de elevar muros y construir diques, y defendidas con medidas no biopolíticas, sino necropolíticas, con técnicas de muerte.

Como sociedad europea, decidimos construirnos colectivamente como comunidad totalmente inmune, cerrada a Oriente y al Sur, mientras que Oriente y el Sur, desde el punto de vista de los recursos energéticos y de la producción de bienes de consumo, son nuestro almacén. Cerramos la frontera en Grecia, construimos los mayores centros de detención a cielo abierto de la historia en las islas que bordean Turquía y el Mediterráneo y fantaseamos que así conseguiríamos una forma de inmunidad. La destrucción de Europa comenzó paradójicamente con esta construcción de una comunidad europea inmune, abierta en su interior y totalmente cerrada a los extranjeros y migrantes.

Lo que está siendo ensayado a escala planetaria a través de la gestión del virus es un nuevo modo de entender la soberanía en un contexto en el que la identidad sexual y racial (ejes de la segmentación política del mundo patriarco-colonial hasta ahora) están siendo desarticuladas. La Covid-19 ha desplazado las políticas de la frontera que estaban teniendo lugar en el territorio nacional o en el superterritorio europeo hasta el nivel del cuerpo individual. El cuerpo, tu cuerpo individual, como espacio vivo y como entramado de poder, como centro de producción y consumo de energía, se ha convertido en el nuevo territorio en el que las agresivas políticas de la frontera que llevamos diseñando y ensayando durante años se expresan ahora en forma de barrera y guerra frente al virus. La nueva frontera necropolítica se ha desplazado desde las costas de Grecia hasta la puerta del domicilio privado. Lesbos empieza ahora en la puerta de tu casa. Y la frontera no para de cercarte, empuja hasta acercarse más y más a tu cuerpo. Calais te explota ahora en la cara. La nueva frontera es la mascarilla. El aire que respiras debe ser solo tuyo. La nueva frontera es tu epidermis. El nuevo Lampedusa es tu piel.

Se reproducen ahora sobre los cuerpos individuales las políticas de la frontera y las medidas estrictas de confinamiento e inmovilización que como comunidad hemos aplicado durante estos últimos años a migrantes y refugiados —hasta dejarlos fuera de toda comunidad—. Durante años los tuvimos en el limbo de los centros de retención. Ahora somos nosotros los que vivimos en el limbo del centro de retención de nuestras propias casas.

La biopolítica en la era ‘farmacopornográfica’

Las epidemias, por su llamamiento al estado de excepción y por la inflexible imposición de medidas extremas, son también grandes laboratorios de innovación social, la ocasión de una reconfiguración a gran escala de las técnicas del cuerpo y las tecnologías del poder. Foucault analizó el paso de la gestión de la lepra a la gestión de la peste como el proceso a través del que se desplegaron las técnicas disciplinarias de espacialización del poder de la modernidad. Si la lepra había sido confrontada a través de medidas estrictamente necropolíticas que excluían al leproso condenándolo si no a la muerte al menos a la vida fuera de la comunidad, la reacción frente a la epidemia de la peste inventa la gestión disciplinaria y sus formas de inclusión excluyente: segmentación estricta de la ciudad, confinamiento de cada cuerpo en cada casa.

Las distintas estrategias que los distintos países han tomado frente a la extensión de la Covid-19 muestran dos tipos de tecnologías biopolíticas totalmente distintas. La primera, en funcionamiento sobre todo en Italia, España y Francia, aplica medidas estrictamente disciplinarias que no son, en muchos sentidos, muy distintas a las que se utilizaron contra la peste. Se trata del confinamiento domiciliario de la totalidad de la población. Vale la pena releer el capítulo sobre la gestión de la peste en Europa de Vigilar y castigar para darse cuenta que las políticas francesas de gestión de la Covid-19 no han cambiado mucho desde entonces. Aquí funciona la lógica de la frontera arquitectónica y el tratamiento de los casos de infección dentro de enclaves hospitalarios clásicos. Esta técnica no ha mostrado aún pruebas de eficacia total.

La segunda estrategia, puesta en marcha por Corea del Sur, Taiwán, Singapur, Hong-Kong, Japón e Israel supone el paso desde técnicas disciplinarias y de control arquitectónico modernas a técnicas farmacopornográficas de biovigilancia: aquí el énfasis está puesto en la detección individual del virus a través de la multiplicación de los tests y de la vigilancia digital constante y estricta de los enfermos a través de sus dispositivos informáticos móviles. Los teléfonos móviles y las tarjetas de crédito se convierten aquí en instrumentos de vigilancia que permiten trazar los movimientos del cuerpo individual. No necesitamos brazaletes biométricos: el móvil se ha convertido en el mejor brazalete, nadie se separa de él ni para dormir. Una aplicación de GPS informa a la policía de los movimientos de cualquier cuerpo sospechoso. La temperatura y el movimiento de un cuerpo individual son monitorizados a través de las tecnologías móviles y observados en tiempo real por el ojo digital de un Estado ciberautoritario para el que la comunidad es una comunidad de ciberusuarios y la soberanía es sobre todo transparencia digital y gestión de big data.

Pero estas políticas de inmunización política no son nuevas y no han sido sólo desplegadas antes para la búsqueda y captura de los así denominados terroristas: desde principios de la década de 2010, por ejemplo, Taiwán había legalizado el acceso a todos los contactos de los teléfonos móviles en las aplicaciones de encuentro sexual con el objetivo de “prevenir” la expansión del sida y la prostitución en Internet. La Covid-19 ha legitimado y extendido esas prácticas estatales de biovigilancia y control digital normalizándolas y haciéndolas “necesarias” para mantener una cierta idea de la inmunidad. Sin embargo, los mismos Estados que implementan medidas de vigilancia digital extrema no se plantean todavía prohibir el tráfico y el consumo de animales salvajes ni la producción industrial de aves y mamíferos ni la reducción de las emisiones de CO2. Lo que ha aumentado no es la inmunidad del cuerpo social, sino la tolerancia ciudadana frente al control cibernético estatal y corporativo.

La gestión política de la Covid-19 como forma de administración de la vida y de la muerte dibuja los contornos de una nueva subjetividad. Lo que se habrá inventado después de la crisis es una nueva utopía de la comunidad inmune y una nueva forma de control del cuerpo. El sujeto del technopatriarcado neoliberal que la Covid-19 fabrica no tiene piel, es intocable, no tiene manos. No intercambia bienes físicos, ni toca monedas, paga con tarjeta de crédito. No tiene labios, no tiene lengua. No habla en directo, deja un mensaje de voz. No se reúne ni se colectiviza. Es radicalmente individuo. No tiene rostro, tiene máscara. Su cuerpo orgánico se oculta para poder existir tras una serie indefinida de mediaciones semio-técnicas, una serie de prótesis cibernéticas que le sirven de máscara: la máscara de la dirección de correo electrónico, la máscara de la cuenta Facebook, la máscara de Instagram. No es un agente físico, sino un consumidor digital, un teleproductor, es un código, un pixel, una cuenta bancaria, una puerta con un nombre, un domicilio al que Amazon puede enviar sus pedidos.

La prisión blanda: bienvenido a la telerrepública de tu casa

Uno de los desplazamientos centrales de las técnicas biopolíticas farmacopornográficas que caracterizan la crisis de la Covid-19 es que el domicilio personal —y no las instituciones tradicionales de encierro y normalización (hospital, fábrica, prisión, colegio)— aparece ahora como el nuevo centro de producción, consumo y control biopolítico. Ya no se trata solo de que la casa sea el lugar de encierro del cuerpo, como era el caso en la gestión de la peste. El domicilio personal se ha convertido ahora en el centro de la economía del teleconsumo y de la teleproducción. El espacio doméstico existe ahora como un punto en un espacio cibervigilado, un lugar identificable en un mapa google, una casilla reconocible por un dron.

Si yo me interesé en su momento por la Mansión Playboy es porque esta funcionó en plena guerra fría como un laboratorio en el que se estaban inventando los nuevos dispositivos de control farmacopornográfico del cuerpo y de la sexualidad que habrían de extenderse a la a partir de principios del siglo XXI y que ahora se amplían a la totalidad de la población mundial con la crisis de la Covid-19. Cuando hice mi investigación sobre Playboy me llamó la atención el hecho de que Hugh Hefner, uno de los hombres más ricos del mundo, hubiera pasado casi 40 años sin salir de la Mansión, vestido únicamente con pijama, batín y pantuflas, bebiendo coca-cola y comiendo Butterfingers y que hubiera podido dirigir y producir que la revista más importante de Estados Unidos sin moverse de su casa o incluso, de su cama. Suplementada con una cámara de video, una línea directa de teléfono, radio e hilo musical, la cama de Hefner era una auténtica plataforma de producción multimedia de la vida de su habitante.

Su biógrafo Steven Watts denominó a Hefner “un recluso voluntario en su propio paraíso.” Adepto de dispositivos de archivo audiovisual de todo tipo, Hefner, mucho antes de que existiera el teléfono móvil, Facebook o WhatsApp enviaba más de una veintena de cintas audio y vídeo con consigas y mensajes, que iban desde entrevistas en directo a directrices de publicación. Hefner había instalado en la mansión, en la que vivían también una docena de Playmates, un circuito cerrado de cámaras y podía desde su centro de control acceder a todas las habitaciones en tiempo real. Cubierta de paneles de madera y con espesas cortinas, pero penetrada por miles de cables y repleta de lo que en ese momento se percibía como las más altas tecnologías de telecomunicación (y que hoy nos parecerían tan arcaicas como un tam-tam), era al mismo tiempo totalmente opaca, y totalmente transparente. Los materiales filmados por las cámaras de vigilancia acababan también en las páginas de la revista.

La revolución biopolítica silenciosa que Playboy lideró suponía, más allá la transformación de la pornografía heterosexual en cultura de masas, la puesta en cuestión de la división que había fundado la sociedad industrial del siglo XIX: la separación de las esferas de la producción y de la reproducción, la diferencia entre la fábrica y el hogar y con ella la distinción patriarcal entre masculinidad y feminidad. Playboy acató esta diferencia proponiendo la creación de un nuevo enclave de vida: el apartamento de soltero totalmente conectado a las nuevas tecnologías de comunicación del que el nuevo productor semiótico no necesita salir ni para trabajar ni para practicar sexo —actividades que, además, se habían vuelto indistinguibles—. Su cama giratoria era al mismo tiempo su mesa de trabajo, una oficina de dirección, un escenario fotográfico y un lugar de cita sexual, además de un plató de televisión desde donde se rodaba el famoso programa Playboy after dark. Playboy anticipó los discursos contemporáneos sobre el teletrabajo, y la producción inmaterial que la gestión de la crisis de la Covid-19 ha transformado en un deber ciudadano. Hefner llamó a este nuevo productor social el “trabajador horizontal”. El vector de innovación social que Playboy puso en marcha era la erosión (por no decir la destrucción) de la distancia entre trabajo y ocio, entre producción y sexo. La vida del playboy, constantemente filmada y difundida a través de los medios de comunicación de la revista y de la televisión, era totalmente pública, aunque el playboy no saliera de su casa o incluso de su cama. En ese sentido, Playboy ponía también en cuestión la diferencia entre las esferas masculinas y femeninas, haciendo que el nuevo operario multimedia fuera, lo que parecía un oxímoron en la época, un hombre doméstico. El biógrafo de Hefner nos recuerda que este aislamiento productivo necesitaba un soporte químico: Hefner era un gran consumidor de Dexedrina, una anfetamina que eliminaba el cansancio y el sueño. Así que paradójicamente, el hombre que no salía de su cama, no dormía nunca. La cama como nuevo centro de operaciones multimedia era una celda farmacopornográfica: sólo podría funcionar con la píldora anticonceptiva, drogas que mantuvieran el nivel productivo en alza y un constante flujo de códigos semióticos que se habían convertido en el único y verdadero alimento que nutría al playboy.

¿Les suena ahora familiar todo esto? ¿Se parece todo esto de manera demasiado extraña a sus propias vidas confinadas? Recordemos ahora las consignas del presidente francés Emmanuel Macron: estamos en guerra, no salgan de casa y teletrabajen. Las medidas biopolíticas de gestión del contagio impuestas frente al coronavirus han hecho que cada uno de nosotros nos transformemos en un trabajador horizontal más o menos playboyesco. El espacio doméstico de cualquiera de nosotros está hoy diez mil veces más tecnificado que lo estaba la cama giratoria de Hefner en 1968. Los dispositivos de teletrabajo y telecontrol están ahora en la palma de nuestra mano.

En Vigilar y castigar, Michel Foucault analizó las celdas religiosas de encierro unipersonal como auténticos vectores que sirvieron para modelizar el paso desde las técnicas soberanas y sangrientas de control del cuerpo y de la subjetivad anteriores al siglo XVIII hacia las arquitecturas disciplinarias y los dispositivos de encierro como nuevas técnicas de gestión de la totalidad de la población. Las arquitecturas disciplinarias fueron versiones secularizada de las células monacales en las que se gesta por primera vez el individuo moderno como alma encerrada en un cuerpo, un espíritu lector capaz de leer las consignas del Estado. Cuando el escritor Tom Wolfe visitó a Hefner dijo que este vivía en una prisión tan blanda como el corazón de una alcachofa. Podríamos decir que la mansión Playboy y la cama giratoria de Hefner, convertidos en objeto de consumo pop, funcionaron durante la guerra fría como espacios de transición en el que se inventa el nuevo sujeto prostético, ultraconectado y las nuevas formas consumo y control farmacopornográficas y de biovigilancia que dominan la sociedad contemporánea. Esta mutación se ha extendido y amplificado más durante la gestión de la crisis de la Covid-19: nuestras máquinas portátiles de telecomunicación son nuestros nuevos carceleros y nuestros interiores domésticos se han convertido en la prisión blanda y ultraconectada del futuro.

Mutación o sumisión

Pero todo esto puede ser una mala noticia o una gran oportunidad. Es precisamente porque nuestros cuerpos son los nuevos enclaves del biopoder y nuestros apartamentos las nuevas células de biovigilancia que se vuelve más urgente que nunca inventar nuevas estrategias de emancipación cognitiva y de resistencia y poner en marcha nuevos procesos antagonistas.

Contrariamente a lo que se podría imaginar, nuestra salud no vendrá de la imposición de fronteras o de la separación, sino de una nueva comprensión de la comunidad con todos los seres vivos, de un nuevo equilibrio con otros seres vivos del planeta. Necesitamos un parlamento de los cuerpos planetario, un parlamento no definido en términos de políticas de identidad ni de nacionalidades, un parlamento de cuerpos vivos (vulnerables) que viven en el planeta Tierra. El evento Covid-19 y sus consecuencias nos llaman a liberarnos de una vez por todas de la violencia con la que hemos definido nuestra inmunidad social. La curación y la recuperación no pueden ser un simple gesto inmunológico negativo de retirada de lo social, de cierre de la comunidad. La curación y el cuidado sólo pueden surgir de un proceso de transformación política. Sanarnos a nosotros mismos como sociedad significaría inventar una nueva comunidad más allá de las políticas de identidad y la frontera con las que hasta ahora hemos producido la soberanía, pero también más allá de la reducción de la vida a su biovigilancia cibernética. Seguir con vida, mantenernos vivo como planeta, frente al virus, pero también frente a lo que pueda suceder, significa poner en marcha formas estructurales de cooperación planetaria. Como el virus muta, si queremos resistir a la sumisión, nosotros también debemos mutar.

Es necesario pasar de una mutación forzada a una mutación deliberada. Debemos reapropiarnos críticamente de las técnicas de biopolíticas y de sus dispositivos farmacopornográficos. En primer lugar, es imperativo cambiar la relación de nuestros cuerpos con las máquinas de biovigilancia y biocontrol: estos no son simplemente dispositivos de comunicación. Tenemos que aprender colectivamente a alterarlos. Pero también es preciso desalinearnos. Los Gobiernos llaman al encierro y al teletrabajo. Nosotros sabemos que llaman a la descolectivización y al telecontrol. Utilicemos el tiempo y la fuerza del encierro para estudiar las tradiciones de lucha y resistencia minoritarias que nos han ayudado a sobrevivir hasta aquí. Apaguemos los móviles, desconectemos Internet. Hagamos el gran blackout frente a los satélites que nos vigilan e imaginemos juntos en la revolución que viene.

Paul B. Preciado es un filósofo transgénero, destacado por sus aportes a la teoría queer y la filosofía del género. Ha sido discípulo de Ágnes Heller y Jacques Derrida.

VISUAL ARTIST: Suzanne Goldenberg / Before / Antes / Hostage Series

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Suzanne Goldenberg

Hostage Series_O1, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O2, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O3, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O4, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O6, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O7, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O8, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O9, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O13, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O18, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

Hostage Series _O19, ink on file folder, 9” x 12”, 2020

HOSTAGE SERIES

Asked to write about these drawings, I felt the need to revisit the script of Dog Day Afternoon.  On day 8, I identified with Sonny, the film hero trying to leverage funds for Sal’s operation. We’re taking hostages and we have demands. 

Now, day 31 of this plague, which reveals itself daily to be nothing short of a massacre, I see I had it all wrong. Before the pandemic, we thought we were free. And now we are missing our freedom. But we are not (were never) free. We thought we were the bandits/ bank robbers, but we are the hostages.

Suzanne

Before, 2020. Video. 1:05 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

Antes, 2020. Video. 1:05 minutos. Courtesía de la artista.

Suzanne Goldenberg is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and activist. She hosts the CRUSH reading series at  the Woodbine collective in Ridgewood, NY.  She is the author of HELP WANTED and her forthcoming book GOING PRO. Her work can be found at https://www.instagram.com/golden_suz/

Suzanne Goldenberg es una artista interdisciplinaria, educadora y activista. Ella organiza la serie de lectura CRUSH en el colectivo Woodbine en Ridgewood, NY.  Es la autora de HELP WANTED y su próximo libro se titula GOING PRO. Su trabajo puede verse en https://www.instagram.com/golden_suz/

VISUAL ARTIST: Cornelia Herfurtner / Never relinquish the Streets

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Cornelia Herfurtner

Cornelia Herfurtner, 2020. LEFT: Freedom and control of others (including myself) Sefu 1 / RIGHT: Freedom and control of others (including myself) Vote SPD [5]. Images: Courtesy of the artist.

This text is an attempt to look at what's happening as the crisis of access to health care, the artificially produced lack of means to protect oneself and authoritarian measures against the public sphere unfold and to start from here in an emancipatory way. The US-American context is new to me (I just arrived in New York City in January) and I find it oftentimes difficult to understand the societal conditions and the injustices they produce. So part of my making sense happens in comparison to the social conditions in Germany, that I know better, in listening to and in reading others. The text will hitchhike through different observations and thoughts and is accompanied by a series of photographs under the title 'freedom and control of others (including myself).'

Similar to the US, the months December to March were not used in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to prepare for the pandemic. Then suddenly everything went very fast. Extensive restrictions of democratic rights were implemented: a ban on contact, which forbids meeting more than one other person and which privileges family members and married people, a ban on assembly, and in Berlin also a (now withdrawn) ban on lingering in the public.

These measures are accepted and supported by large parts of the population. The measures themselves are perceived as politically neutral. But they follow the logic of capital: while educational and cultural institutions close, wage work continues in the factories and warehouses. Until June it is in fact possible that essential workers work 12 hours a day (daily work hours are otherwise restricted to 8). The right to demonstrate is suspended, but wage workers continue to use public transport to go to work. In Germany, BPOC is overrepresented in essential jobs (that is care work, construction work and in the food industry) and earn less than their white colleagues which makes them more vulnerable to becoming ill.

Contrary to what I perceive in New York, the emphasis in Germany lies in strong control within the population. The police, for example, encourages to report people who do not obey contact restrictions. This shifts the focus: instead of focusing on the social conditions that create the current sanitary crisis, responsibility is individualized and ultimately depoliticized. This is in line with the widespread acceptance of identifying oneself as a consumer: with different health insurance, retirement arrangements and as part of different risk groups.

Cornelia Herfurtner, 2020. LEFT: Freedom and control of others (including myself) Sefu 2 / RIGHT: Freedom and control of others (including myself) 'In a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.' [6] Images: Courtesy of the artist.

The idea of triage, i.e. the classification and treatment of people according to the health condition, must be rejected. At the same time, our capacity for analysis is needed: Triage is not something that threatens to be used just as the Sanitary Crisis unfolds here in the central capitalist countries but is globally constantly present: access to food, clean water, housing, etc. already determine who lives and who dies. In the US, allowing triage according to health is a continuation of racism[2] where the unequal socialization of the effects of capitalist production: air and environmental pollution, poverty and so forth, create health conditions like diabetes that produce high mortality among those who are the most vulnerable: poor, Black and Brown people, incarcerated people, refugees, people in nursing homes and the houseless.

What is already being discussed in the FRG after only 4 weeks in the state of exception: how to retract the cost of the crisis through austerity against the own population as well as within the EU where austerity has dismantled the health care systems in Italy and Spain so much, that they suffer the most from the crisis. Here in New York, austerity (or let's call it politics against the interest of working people) is also applied in the crisis: The cut back of Medicaid (2.1trillion), hospitals (400million) and the stop of bail reform harm New Yorkers that already suffer most[3].

Here as in Germany and the EU one of the most vulnerable populations are refugees. The omission of help and the imprisonment in camps gets now justified by the regime of quarantine. In the case of Germany, the ideological character of quarantine becomes clear, when we look at the action to return German tourists from all over the world to Germany. Until now 200.000 tourists have been brought back to Germany without being held in quarantine after arrival. In order to sustain the German food industry which is heavily dependent on foreign workers' cheap labor, the government agreed to fly 80.000 temporary workers into Germany to harvest asparagus and strawberries. Meanwhile, 40.000 refugees that are captive in Lagers in Greece are not evacuated under the guise of disease control.

Quarantine activates thinking in terms of national identity and constructs an outside or beyond the border. Those who are excluded are left to die. The spectacle of quarantine also functions as a distraction and prevents the discourse on effective methods to contain the virus: tests, case isolation, a sufficient and accessible health care system for all, availability and distribution of masks and other PPE, the practicing of physical distancing.

Cornelia Herfurtner, 2020.: Freedom and control of others (including myself) Matha. RIGHT: Freedom and control of others (including myself) Leor. Image: Courtesy of the artist.

I find it interesting to see how fast mutual aid structures built up – both here and in Germany. Communication takes place in app groups and on social media and through multi-lingual printouts. These structures take over an important part in supporting vulnerable people, a responsibility that the state has to fulfill, not as mercy, but as an obligation. I think it is important to not only fill the gap (and prove, btw, that the people are better capable of organizing their needs than the state is) but to insist on the fulfillment of human rights to health care, food, housing, education, freedom of movement, etc. for all people.

Meanwhile, what can be done in order to radicalize these spaces of practical solidarity? One thing I learned here in the US was the importance that education played in the progressive movements, for example in the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. We know that class consciousness is not something that is just there, it is something that constitutes itself in understanding one's position in society, through defining and negotiating one's interests with and against other interests. It is necessary to use the spaces that mutual aid creates to bring people together, think about and analyze the conditions under which we live, combined with education about historical movements, forms of unrest, strike (worker's self-defense) and organization. We can map popular demands and then go beyond them. An example of this is the criticism of the authoritarian government in the crisis. Because, yes, curfews are repressive. But this also applies to wage labor or, in fact, any form of labour. Another example is the demand for Universal Basic Income (UBI). Can we imagine a UBI that does not sedate us as consumers (a necessary work to keep economy running), is not exclusive (e.g. bound to citizenship) and that ultimately goes against the system from which it arises?

Another point that is crucial to me is the right to demonstrate, the necessity to insist on the street. In the current crisis, we have seen a de facto abolition of the right to demonstrate. In the FRG where demonstrations must otherwise only be registered, they must now be approved. And, once again, they are not allowed under the guise of disease control. However, the right to demonstrate does not contradict physical distancing. Protest can be carried out with distance to each other, wearing masks and conforming to other protective measures. Who hoped that the side effect of wearing a mask would serve the concealment of identity is mistaken. People attempting to demonstrate in Berlin, for example, had to give their identity to be police and will become subject to newly introduced and repressive fines. The attempt to stop protest also takes on absurd features: a comrade from Germany told me, for example, that after their demonstration was stopped and their personal data were taken in, the fire brigade was called to remove the chalk-written demands to 'evacuate Moria[4]' from the street. The two examples clearly show that the goal is not to protect the population from infection but to render protests invisible.

So, what does that mean for the left? I think we have to reject the fear of contagion by simultaneously caring for each other and practice physical distancing. We have to focus on sites, that calculate death: poor neighborhoods, nursing homes, refugee camps, ICE camps, prisons, sites of precarious labor on so on. The global character and the simultaneity of the sanitary crisis offer a chance for solidarity as an internationalist practice. Here in NYC I think we have to notice the obscenity of people starving in a first world country without causing looting and to continue working so that obedience becomes forever incompatible.

1. I took this title from an interview with Mike Davis: 'I don't see a contradiction between social distance and protest. I mean, it's one of the ten commandments of the left. Maybe it's the first commandment. You never relinquish the streets.' https://www.thedigradio.com/podcast/mike-davis-on-coronavirus- politics/

2. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/9/camara_phyllis_jones_coronavirus_race_disparities

3. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/6/headlines/gov_cuomo_slashes_medicaid_as_new_york_struggles_to_get_ handle_on_covid_19_cases

4. Moria is an refugee camp on Lesbos in Greece. The camp is notorious for lacking hygiene and inhuman conditions of living. The report of a resident can be found here: https://twitter.com/LeftvisionClips/status/1247577312679297027

5. The SPD is the German Social Democratic Party and well known to act against the interests of the wage working population both nationally and internationally. Known for nearly a century but only widely in discussion since the 1990s is the fact that the party was also involved in the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In English see for example https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/rosa- luxemburg-murder-waldemar-pabst-germany

6. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology

Cornelia Herfurtner is a visual artist an activist based in Berlin and currently staying in NYC. She is organized in the Interventionistische Linke [interventionist left] and works in the alliance Rheinmetall entwaffnen [Disarm Rheinmetall] against Germany’s biggest arms exporter. As an artist she works under her given name as well as in the artist group Michelle Volta and the publishing collective b_books. Her last projects were a series of photographs published under the title, freedom and control of others (including myself)‘ in starship magazine #19, some of which accompany this text as monochromes, the video essay, Frauen verlassen das Museum‘ [Women leaving the museum] in collaboration with David Polzin and the collectively taught seminar, Self-organizing and university‘ (together with Ernest Ah and Anastasio Mandel) at University of the Arts Berlin.

Diego del Valle Ríos / Notas errantes de un maricón en calzoncillos

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Diego del Valle Ríos

Mis días son una continua oscilación entre la ansiedad y la emoción de ser parte de un letargo que podría suscitar cambios sociales en múltiples dimensiones. ¿Qué cambios? No estoy seguro. Creo que por eso he aceptado escribir este texto, para tratar de encontrar un poco de sentido a las ideas que me quitan el sueño o suscitan pesadillas y fantasías. Reconozco que ponerse a escribir hoy, en una dimensión, es un privilegio pues se cuenta con la suficiente libertad física y tranquilidad mental para permitirse hacerlo, lo cual, refleja que es mínima la urgencia por conseguir las necesidades básicas para sobrevivir al día a día que apremia. Sin embargo, cuando uno tiene privilegios tiene la responsabilidad de cuestionar (traicionar) las estructuras que los han otorgado. ¿Es este un intento de auto/cuestionamiento? Dicho lo anterior, no me interesa participar en la retórica de aquellos textos que de forma casi inmediata se escribieron proyectando alternativas universales y unidireccionales de normalidad, predicciones, urgencias y opiniones para reforzar el valor individual de tesis, discursos y conceptos académicos guiados por la pulsión colonial de la razón que todo quiere abarcar y entender. Me parece insensible. Ya lo decía Engels: “el oportunismo honesto puede resultar el más peligroso de todos los oportunismos.”

°°°

HELLO

Recuerdo el día que leí en Artforum el texto The Losers Conspiracy de Paul Preciado. En él, nos dice que si no habíamos encontrado pareja antes del confinamiento, nos olvidáramos de esa posibilidad de cariño y compañía. Irónico fue leer que apelara a la heterorreproducción del amor, pensé. Pero bueno, todxs estamos confundidxs. A pesar de otorgarle el beneficio de la duda, me lleno de angustia su advertencia: carajo, hace pocas semanas había conocido a un chico que me emociona. Con él hay largas e interesantes conversaciones y qué decir sobre la delicia de los besos y su linda sonrisa. ¿Me olvido de eso? ¡No! Además, ¿donde deja su texto a la potencia del amor de manada, aquella integrada por amantes, amigxs, familiares, mascotas y seres de otras dimensiones? Me rehusé entonces a escucharle pues creo que si hay algo ha defender más que nunca hoy, es la posibilidad de la fantasía, misma que él trata de aniquilar cuando escribe posteriormente en el mismo texto que la impredecibilidad de la pandemia hace que todo sea inamovible. Falacia. Justo es esa lógica colonial la que hay que eliminar en un momento que permite imaginar amplias y radicales posibilidades. Algo que sin duda se revela difícil, contradictorio y confuso. A pesar de ello, fantasear es una potente estrategia de resistencia ante el peligro de políticas totalitarias escondidas en los reforzamientos de fronteras y las políticas para el control del contagio que normalizan la paranoia y el miedo a “un enemigo invisible” bajo el lenguaje de la retórica de guerra. Vale la pena parafrasear a Jota Mombaça: la blanquitud, como espíritu elemental del sistema, en circunstancias de crisis solo es capaz de imaginar distopías que refuerzan la normalidad pues no tiene la necesidad de fantasear con la huída de la misma para sentir el regocijo de la libertad y la felicidad fugitiva a lo hegemónico. Necesitamos rabiosas rutas y testimonios de posibilidad que mantengan viva la llama de la disidencia. 

Posteriormente, el texto de Paul presenta un giro narrativo: escribe una carta a su ex, sale de casa a tirarla a la basura, regresa al interior, lava sus manos, abre su computador y encuentra un correo de esa persona comunicándole que le extraña. Fin del texto. ¿La respuesta está en las pantallas? Se profundiza mi soledad: extraño a mis amigxs; quisiera pasar más tiempo IRL con ese chico que conocí; me arrepiento de errores que terminaron amistades antes de estos espesos días. Lloro. Siento el peso de las palabras. Mi amigx Manu alguna vez escribió con crayón en un muro de mi casa: las palabras son conjuros. Muchxs parecen creer que el confinamiento es una fórmula mágica para una revolución idealizada. Que ilusxs. Durante los últimos 500 años luchas anti-coloniales han estado encarnando resistencias a la lógica necropolítica para dibujar horizontes de posibilidades, experiencias y narrativas potentes que conocen perfectamente los límites vitales de un sistema de explotación, extracción y consumo por el dolor que ha infringido en sus comunidades. ¿Hemos escuchado con atención esas luchas? ¿Nos permitimos sintonizar con ellas? Yo qué sé. ¡Soy un blanco más! ¿De qué formas estoy traicionando mi blanquitud? Ojalá habitará en mí un espíritu de jauría en donde no penetrará tan fácilmente el individualismo que las redes sociales refuerzan día a día del confinamiento desde la incesante banalidad de tuits, stories, posts o memes. ¿La micropolítica de la clase media educada es un live de Instagram? ¿El reto es lograr un #TrendTopic para conseguir la atención de los medios ante las urgencias que la pandemia no interrumpió pero que si agudizó? ¿Cuáles medios? ¿Los que controla la burguesía a la que alimentamos? ¿Qué es hoy la conciencia de clase desde una perspectiva anti-colonial? ¿Cómo abolimos las clases sociales? Ante la interdependencia entre las mismas, ¿de qué formas vamos a dinamitar las estructuras y hábitos que nos hacen cómplices de la mierda de la que tanto soñamos “escapar” cómodamente desde nuestros celulares recostados en el sillón? La tibieza ante la urgencia, para preservar comodidad, es el hábito favorito de la blanquitud que nos habita.

WHITENESS

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La tarde de hoy recorrí junto a dos amigas, con las debidas medidas de precaución, una pequeña parte de la enorme Ciudad de México donde vivimos. Necesitábamos socializar y caminar un poco. Esta ciudad tiene dos dimensiones arquitectónicas evidentes de vida económica: la llamada formal, que habita locales comerciales, y la llamada informal, que ocupa banquetas con puestos, mantas o de forma ambulante. Dado que la gran mayoría de la población vive de los ingresos que generan del día a día, las medidas de cuarentena oficiales han tratado de mantener un cierto flujo con el fin de contener el impacto de la contracción económica. Este es un país de mucha pobreza y de una endeble clase media que sin duda se está por encoger drásticamente. ¿Me tocará a mí o mis seres queridxs atravesar esa línea? ¿Cómo salir del ritmo de alienación constante al que estamos (auto)sometidxs? ¿Cómo garantizamos ciclos de vida digna para todxs las personas? Distraigo mi confusión. El atardecer comienza a tintar la noche. Hablamos sobre nuestras fantasías capitalistas. Durante nuestro recorrido, la gran mayoría de los locales comerciales del giro alimenticio trabajaban a puertas cerradas. Cartulinas fluorescentes informan que el servicio solo es a domicilio haciendo pedidos vía Wh*tsApp o a través de aplicaciones como R*ppi y Ub*r Eats. Cortinas entrecerradas, cumbias susurrando al anochecer, personal en las banquetas fumando mientras esperan la solicitud de algún pedido que ayude a mantener el negocio a flote. Los puestos de tacos, garnachas y postres se mantenían abiertos, la gran mayoría sin clientes; los vendedores de flores, dulces y demás objetos y mercancías trataban de vender lo que fuese, pero las calles prácticamente están vacías. Alguien nos pidió dinero, nos sentimos mal por no traer algo que compartir. En las esquinas, repartidores de las mencionadas aplicaciones de servicio a domicilio, descansaban usando sus grandes y cuadradas mochilas como almohadas mientras se distraían conectados a sus celulares a través de sus audífonos. Dos personas sin techo duermen dentro de un cajero automático. El edificio justo a lado es un hotel cerrado, vacío. La pesadez del silencio prevalecía como prevalece la falta de una respuesta gubernamental en forma de renta básica universal, suspensión de pago de impuestos o de alquileres. La mayoría de los rostros de todas estas personas comunicaban angustia, una que entiendo al haber crecido en una familia que muy pocas veces pudo disfrutar de la tranquilidad que acompaña a la despreocupación económica. No le deseo ese estado de desorientación por estrés a nadie, conozco las formas en que marchita a la gente. Mi madre y padre pocas veces compartían la carga de esa angustia con mis hermanos y conmigo, sin embargo, sentíamos su peso. Recuerdo a mi madre llorando en silencio en la habitación mientras trataba de encontrar cobijo en una oración católica o a mi padre durmiendo largas horas gracias a pastillas y chochos homeopáticos para escapar un rato en sueños. Siempre tuve la impresión de que creían que cualquier dificultad tenían que enfrentarla y superarla solos, sin ayuda, pues después de transitar la crisis del 94 sin mucho éxito, pedir ayuda era deuda: no era una opción, era vergüenza pues fracasábamos a la nueva regla emprendedora del régimen neoliberal que acababa de ser impuesto. ¿Cuántxs de esxs comerciantes y empleadxs estarán viviendo la angustia y la urgencia en soledad? ¿Cuántxs de mis amigxs y colegas estarán también angustiadxs sacando cuentas y pensando en préstamos o posibles objetos de valor a vender o empeñar? En un país forjado durante los últimos 30 años bajo el neoliberalismo, la imaginación política en las urbes en cuanto a economías comunitarias, es muy limitada. Desde hace varios días, personalmente, me he aferrado a la idea anarquista del “apoyo mutuo” para abrir brechas de posibilidad en mis fantasías. Mi intuición me dice que tengo que pensar de forma más radical respecto a la tibieza de la normalidad que tanto se ansía que regrese. ¿Qué les comunica su intuición?

°°°

May You Live in Interesting Times. Ugh, fucking art world.

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Habitamos un letargo generalizado. En el mundo de algunos insectos a ese letargo se le conoce como diapausa. Un retraerse al interior de la espiral de la caracola que nos acoge. Un cese, una hibernación. Un repliegue para el cuidado propio en sincronía con una sensibilidad al entorno estacional. Sobrevivir, no bajo la lógica darwinista de competencia can base al más apto o fuerte (heterosexualidad), sino bajo la lógica de la sincronización y la reciprocidad. ¿Lo sienten? 

MY DEAR

Cohabitar en este momento significa canalizar conjuntamente —humanos y no-humanos— ser una corriente más de fuerza planetaria dirigida por el esfuerzo enfocado en garantizar una digna evolución de la vida que incluye naturalmente a la muerte como parte de su movimiento cíclico. El derecho planetario a la vida y la muerte dignas sin condición alrededor de constructos sociales como la especie, la raza, el género, el sexo, el capacitismo… Flujo esféricamente magnético que en este momento se revela ante nosotrxs a través de la sintonía que se suscita al encontrar un común en la vulnerabilidad y fragilidad de nuestras existencias ante un minúsculo virus. Sensibilidad de cosquilleo intuitivo que nos conecta como manadas. Nos reconocemos en la angustia de contraer el virus, ante la posibilidad de la quiebra financiera o el estrés de garantizar necesidades básicas como lo son el techo, la comida y la salud para nuestrxs seres queridxs. La pandemia del coronavirus recuerda una sensibilidad planetaria que como sociedad humana hemos a(m)nestesiado: somos un organismo más entre muchos otros, todas nuestras partes están vinculadas a otras en donde un cambio en una conlleva necesariamente un cambio correspondiente en las demás. Un entramado de latente común: el transcurrir de la vida. Sin embargo, como sabemos, los flujos y ritmos que nos conectan están condicionados por intereses de acumulación obsesiva, viagra narcisista que estimula la avaricia de un sistema que todo cosifica siguiendo lógicas de explotación: masturbación capitalista. Replico una pregunta que se hace Donna Haraway: ¿cómo podemos pensar en tiempos de urgencia sin los mitos autoindulgentes y autoconcluyentes del apocalipsis, cuando cada fibra de nuestro ser está entrelazada, es cómplice, en las redes de procesos que de alguna manera deben ser ocupados y reorganizados? A partir de la misma, me pregunto, ¿qué dislocaciones narrativas pueden proponer las prácticas y pensamientos artísticos en estas circunstancias para el entrelazamiento de sentidos fracturados por la lógica colonial que amenaza con el totalitarismo? Ante el presente, ¿qué implica una lucha por el digno ciclo de las vidas (humanas y no-humanas)?

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Micropolítica del ahora: defender la reunión de unidades mínimas de colectividad ante las medidas biopolíticas de la pandemia (con sus debida higiene (a veces, #EstornudaSobreUnRico) siempre cuestionando la eugenesia que implícitamente está siendo instrumentalizada en el tejer de nuestros hábitos).

¿De qué formas toda esta situación está afectando al deseo y el erotismo? 

°°°

Hoy escuché conversar a una cucaracha y un mosquito.

—¿Qué es ser radical hoy?

—Apoyo mutuo, redistribución de recursos, planeación en pequeños enjambres, colecta de víveres para satisfacer necesidades alimenticias. 

—¿Qué es más radical aún?

—Organización de huelga de rentas, toma de medios de comunicación a través del hackeo, ocupación del espacio público para huertos comunitarios, la toma de museos y la irrupción en hoteles cerrados por medidas de seguridad para convertirlos en hogares y escuelas de saberes para quienes que se han quedado sin techo, asalto de supermercados para la repartición de despensas a comunidades olvidadas sistemáticamente, destruir todos los monumentos (mas no los anti-monumentos).

—¿Y aún más radical?

—La quema de bancos y franquicias transnacionales que despidieron a empleadxs o que se rehúsan a pagar sueldos completos durante la crisis. El desmantelamiento de obras públicas que han despojado territorios para continuar con lógicas extractivistas y de sobreexplotación de recursos naturales.

—¿Más radical?

— El fortalecimiento de auto-defensas que luchan por una vida digna en la defensa de sus territorios.

—¿Más, más radical?

—La organización comunal para garantizar el derecho planetario a respirar (siguiendo a Achielle Mbembe) a través de los principios de la ecosofía anti-heteropatriarcal y anti-colonial: correspondencia, complementariedad, reciprocidad y ciclicidad.

—¿Y de qué es parte esa imaginación radical?

—Un movimiento por la abolición del Estado.

Bbbzzzzzzzzzz

(voló)

FRIEND

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Ayer soñé con la provocación que mi querido amigo, Lucas, lanzó en su tuíter hace unos días a propósito de la incertidumbre económica que impacta a trabajadores del arte y la cultura en México por la contracción económica que se agudiza. En territorio onírico, formaba parte de un grupo de encapuchadxs moviéndonos cautelosamente a lo largo de lo que parecía ser el Museo Tamayo en el Bosque de Chapultepec en la Ciudad de México. La poca iluminación revela vagamente el brillo de muchos ojos que asomaban de capuchas de vivos colores. Cual luz blanca atravesando el prisma, con herramientas silenciosas penetramos el gran cristal que encuadra una vista del bosque. Éramos un grupo de asalto en forma de arcoiris. El objetivo era irrumpir en el museo, robar tres cuadros del Señor Tamayo para los cuales ya teníamos compradores en el mercado de la Deep Web. El dinero se destinaría a fondos comunes para solventar necesidades de comunidades abandonadas por las políticas públicas debido a estilos de vida que faltan a la moral del Estado o porque estorban a intereses político-económicos. Desperté. El museo no ha sido robado ni se ha pronunciado ante la incertidumbre que aqueja al gremio. 

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Alguna vez escribí en algún texto de opinión: “La centralización nos responsabiliza a reorganizarnos auto/críticamente en relación a otras luchas que se suscitan en el territorio conocido como México. Un territorio despojado y organizado por la violencia colonial.”

°°°

Repitamos juntxs: no hay futuro, no hay futuro, no hay futuro…

¿Cómo se enciende un cerillo? 

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Hoy mi deambular virtual me llevó a un poema. Escribí este pequeño extracto en un papel que conservo en mi buró. Así lo leeré cada noche al quitarme los lentes antes de dormir:

“Who misses the feel of a flower

when you can touch the texture of a dream?”

[Gonzalo Hermo, Everything, Georges de la Tour. From A vida salvaxe (PEN Club Galicia, 2018)].

via GIPHY

Diego del Valle Ríos acciona desde la autodidaxia y la auto-gestión educativa trabajando como editor de la revista Terremoto y estudiando como miembro del Círculo Permanente de Estudios Independientes (CIPEI) como parte de sus programas Menos Foucault Más Shakira y Lenguajes de la indigestión.

Emanuele Coccia / Reversing The New Global Monasticism

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Emanuele Coccia

Image: Rem Koolhaas, Asian City of Tomorrow, SMLXL, 1995, © Image courtesy of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)

1.

As if in a fairy tale, a tiny being has invaded all the cities of the world. The most ambiguous of beings on Earth, one for whom it is difficult even to speak of "living": it inhabits the threshold between the "chemical" life that characterizes matter and biological life, without it being possible to define whether it belongs to one or the other. It is too lively for the one, too indeterminate for the other. In its own body, the clear opposition between life and death is erased. This aggregate of genetic material in freedom has invaded the village squares and suddenly the political landscape has changed shape. 

As in a fairy tale, the cities, to defend themselves from an invisible yet powerful enemy, have disappeared: they have gone into exile. They have declared themselves banned, outlawed, and now they lie before us like inside an archaeological museum  or a diorama. 

From one day to the next the schools, cinemas, restaurants, bars, museums, and almost all the shops, parks, and streets have closed, deemed uninhabitable. Social life, public life, meetings, dinners, lunches, work moments, religious rituals, sex, everything that opened once we closed the doors of our house became impossible. They  survive  only as  a memory or as something that has to be constructed through  complex and sometimes painful efforts: the calls, the direct GIS (geographic information system), the applause or the singing on the balcony. They all sound like mourning. We are mourning the disappeared city, the suspended community, the closed society along with the shops, the universities, the stadiums. 

From one day to the next, the city—that is, literally, politics- is a self-portrait, as in the kabbalistic myths that would like creation to be an act of retraction (tzimtzum) of divinity. To defend the lives of their members, cities have banned and killed themselves. This very noble sacrifice has rendered more than half of the human population  politically defunct, of thinking politically about the present and the future. 

Sars-Cov-2,this tiny fairy-tale creature (indeed a  trinity of creatures, since there are apparently three strains) has not only cost  us tens of thousands of  lives.  But it also  brought upon  the suicide of political life as we have known and practiced it for centuries. It has forced humanity to begin a strange experiment of global monasticism: we are all anchorites who retreat into our private space and spend the day murmuring secular prayers. In a world where politics is the object of prohibition and impossible reality, what remains are our houses: it doesn't matter whether they are actually apartments or real houses, it doesn’t matter if they are small apartments or large estates. Everything has become home. And this is not at all good news. Our homes don't protect us. They can kill us. You can die of too much home. 

Photo: Empty apartment / CC BY 2.5

2.

We've always been obsessed with houses. Not only do we live there and spend a lot of time there, but we see houses everywhere. We even pretend that everyone outside the human species has houses / dwellings like our own. 

This is one of the most incredible examples of an obsession with home as ecology understood not only as the science of the mutual relationship of all living beings with each other, what exists between them, their environment, and their space but also as a set of practices trying to have a better, fairer, equitable relationship with non-human life. Since the name that ecology bears (literally meaning science of the house) is inhabited with this metaphor or image,  when we try to find a more 'ecological' image of the earth we tend mechanically to think of it as the home of all of us. 

Now, where does this obsession come from? Upon reflection it appears abnormal. Why should the relationship that the living has with each other be similar to our domestic sociality? Why, for example, is the metaphor, the image, the key concept not that of the city? Or that of a town square? Or that of friendship? When we try to think about how all living people relate to each other we inevitably conclude: as if they were members of an immense house, as big as the whole planet. Do we need to be taught by Ibsen and Tolstoy that houses are not particularly happy places? 

Why have we been so cruel to our non-human friends? The answer to that question is a bit long and I'll try to give you a short version. The person responsible is Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist to whom we owe the biological classification system of living beings. In 1749 one of his students, Isaac Biberg, published what is the first great treatise on ecology, and called it De economia naturae, which translated into modern language would sound something like: of the natural domestic order. Now, why did they think of nature as a huge domestic order ?  At that time most biologists did not believe in the transformation or evolution of species. All species were supposed to be immutable over time. In a similar context the only way to know if there is a relationship between an Arizona buffalo and an Australian fly and understand this relationship was to put yourself in the position of the creator of both: God. He certainly thought and established a relationship between these two species, as well as between all living species. Now in the Christian sphere, God relates to the world not so much as governor, political leader, but as Father: God is the one who created  the world and if he exercises power over it it is only because he created it. On the contrary, the world does not relate to God as a subject relates to the sovereign, but as a son relates to the father. The world, all life on earth is, therefore the home and the family of the only Father who is God. It is for this reason that Biberg and Linnaeus call this science the economics of nature. It was Haeckel, a 19th-century German biologist who shifted from using the word economics to ecology to distinguish it from mercantile economics. Now this image was useful because it immediately expressed the evidence and the need for a mutual relationship between all living people: they are all members of an enormous house and an enormous family. However, it is a problematic image. First of all, it is patriarchal in nature. Ecology doesn't know it, but at its core , despite everything feminists have done to get rid of it, remains a patriarchal  mythology. 

Why? Because the house—in antiquity today—is a space in which a set of objects and individuals respect an order, a disposition that is aimed at the production of utility. To say that life on a planet builds a large house, means that it respects this order and  each part of it produces a form of utility thanks to this order. After all, biology continues to  demonstrate this every time it  shows  that the evolution of one species or the emergence of another corresponds to the affirmation of the fittest. We perpetuate this notion every time we conclude, for example, that the introduction of a so-called invasive species (the Robinia for example) is harmful to the natural balance of the ecosystem. In reality, we know absolutely nothing about what is useful or not useful for nature: it is already difficult for us, let alone for nature. And as Mark Dion once wrote, « nature does not always know what is best ». 

Thinking ecologically means thinking that there is an order that must be defended, thinking that there are borders that must not be crossed. If, on the one hand, this idea suggests to be less destructive towards our non-human brothers and sisters, unfortunately, it projects on them an order that has nothing natural about it.  It’s become perfectly apparent these days. After all, to think that the Earth is an enormous house means, literally, to think of all living things except the human being under house arrest. We do not recognize the right of other living beings to leave home, to live outside the home, to have a political, social, non-domestic life. They are always at home and can only be there. Their natural state is a state of quarantine for the course of their entire lives. 

In the end, the reaction to the crisis produced by Sars-Cov-2 has been a radicalization of ecological thinking: now even humans must respect their own ecosystem and they must stay at home. If men, through the cities, had  once arrogated to themselves the right to travel everywhere, to live freely, now everything that lives is forced to live anachronistically. Today, we—humans and non-humans—are all monks of Gaia. 

Nobody can go out anymore. No one can escape: locked in the house, it is from home and especially at home that we will have to rebuild society. The change will have to take place in the confused concrete rectangles that separate us from others and the world. It will be necessary to dig out from this space a series of invisible corridors that allow us to overturn domestic space into a new political space. If there will be a revolution it will be a domestic revolution: it will be necessary to get rid of the patriarchal, patrimonial, and architectural definition of our houses and homes and transform them into something different. It is not certain that the road will be long: if the death of the city has happened from one day to the next, the non-patriarchal home could be born in a few weeks. 

Photo: Home shell / CC BY 2.5

3. 

What do we call home? We usually identify our home with its architectural shell: the house —the walls, the mineral form with which we separate a space from the rest of the world. We usually describe it according to the form and functions of the spaces that this envelope chisels, collects, broods, guards: there is the bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, the bedroom. We name the different parts according to the type of life we lead. And yet the house is above all a large container, a huge trunk in which we mainly collect objects, things. It's something that seems absolutely counter-intuitive, and even a bit ideological, as if we wanted to emphasize the patrimonial and therefore consumerist aspect of the house, and yet that's exactly how it is, and it has nothing to do with its political orientation. The house begins with objects: the walls, the ceiling, the floors. Yet each is not enough to serve its function separately. I understood this, literally, a few years ago,  through a strange experience that helped me to learn something important. I had  confirmed my first position as a  professor in Germany, in Freiburg, and upon arrival   I started looking for a place to live. I found one.  I was able to sign the contract immediately and a few minutes later I had the keys in my hand. Yet  once I entered the apartment, my credit card—for mysterious reasons—was blocked. Not the worst situation, you might say, after all you’d already entered the house, you had a roof over your head. But in fact the apartment was completely empty. There was nothing there: not a bed, not a mattress, no chair, not even a plate or fork. Nothing. Nothing of the objects that populate our houses or even hotel rooms. I was stuck there for a week, without any  means to furnish it (I had just enough cash to buy food) and already had to start teaching at the end of the week. I quickly realized that such a space is physically uninhabitable. Impossible to sleep in, because the floor is too hard, too cold.  You need blankets, a pillow,  and pajamas. Paradoxically it would have been easier to sleep in a forest, or out in the garden: less uncomfortable and less disturbing (but it was September and it was already too cold in Germany). 

It was impossible to work there because to work you need a table, a chair, a computer or a notebook. Impossible to eat there for similar reasons. Above all, it is impossible to stay there for a long time: contemplating the void is obscene, unbearable, deafening. That's when I realized something important - well, a few things 

First of all: the house as such, as pure shell, pure idea of space, architectural idealization is uninhabitable. It is not what allows us to inhabit a space, it is what makes the space - which is always occupied by things, living, a pure uninhabitable desert until someone takes possession of it and begins to populate it with things of objects, - the most disparate. 

Secondly: that the idea of space is an abstraction, something that does not exist. We never encounter space. We inhabit  a world which is always populated by other humans, plants, animals and the most disparate objects. These objects do not occupy space, they open it, they make it possible; in a forest, trees do not occupy space, they open the forest space. It is the same thing in houses: the bed, the dishes, the table, the computer, the fridge are not objects that occupy space, they are not decoration. They are which makes real a space that is otherwise only imaginary and  abstract— the mental projection of others in which it is forbidden to enter. After all, it is the bed that makes the bedroom, the dining table that makes the dining room. It is dishes, an oven and pots that transform an abstract rectangle into a kitchen. The house-box is technically a form of the desert, purely mineral space, a sandcastle. Translated into political terms that means: a home is where things give us access to space. They make space habitable. We never have a relationship with space, or with walls. We have a relationship with objects. We only ever inhabit things. The objects house our body, our gestures. They attract our glances. The objects prevent us from clashing with the square, perfect, geometric surface. Objects defend us from the violence of our homes. 

Precisely for this reason, the domestic space is not Euclidean in nature: to move around inside the house does not possess the geometry we studied at school, the trigonometry, or orthogonal projections. In fact, things are magnets, attractors or sirens that call us with an irresistible song and capture our body often without us noticing. Things magnetize the domestic space making it a field of constantly unstable forces— a web of sensitive influences that sets  us free only when we have closed the door of the house. This is why, in reality, on days of prolonged stay inside the house we feel fatigued. Staying at home means suffering, supporting, resisting all the forces that things exert among themselves and on us. Life at home is always about resistance, in the electrical and not mechanical sense of the term; we are the tungsten wire that is crossed by the forces of things, and we turn on or off. 

So where does this force come from? Why are things at home so powerful? 

Once you cross the threshold of the house, things come alive, better they acquire something of us, of our soul. The clothes, the cards in which we left a number or a little doodle on the phone to a friend, a painting, our daughter's game exist almost as subjects, are like minor selves who look back at us and dialogue with us. The use, the daily grind, repeated, prolonged over days, weeks, months, years, and the friction of our body on their bodies leaves traces, magnetizes them, transfers to them a part of our personality and subjectivity. Inside the house, therefore, objects become subjects. Here is a beautiful new definition of home: a home is called that space in which all objects exist as subjects. It is exactly the opposite of slavery. It means to say that each home is a space of unconscious and voluntary animism. What does animism mean? Since the end of the 19th century, anthropology used this word to characterize the attitude of some cultures to attribute to certain objects (first of all the fetishes, the artifacts that represented the gods) qualities that are usually recognized exclusively in men: a personality, a conscience and even a capacity to act. Now our culture says it is based on the absolute rejection of this attitude, and on the clear, irreparable separation between things and people, objects, and subjects. And yet it's not that simple. Dolls, things of the house par excellence, are objects towards which we tolerate, at least on the part of children, an animistic type of relationship. There is more. At the end of the last century, Alfred Gell revealed something absolutely revolutionary in  writing his extraordinary book, ‘Art and Agency’. He posited that what we call art is only the sphere in which our culture recognizes things to exist in almost the same way that human beings exist. Every time we enter a museum, when we encounter pieces of material—an assemblage of linen, wood, and pigments of various colors—that which we call painted, we are certain that we can recognize in it the thoughts, attitudes, and feelings of a man we have never seen, met, and know absolutely nothing about. We see the Mona Lisa, and we are sure to meet Leonardo. Here, we have an animistic relationship with every work of art. Gell stopped here. But if we could go on and consider that at home, each of us has an animistic relationship with the vast majority of the objects we surround ourselves with—specially the older ones. Each one of them not only carries something of us but becomes like an older version of our ego. That's why we can't separate ourselves from them, or we grieve for their loss.  

This is the starting point of the domestic revolution: to be able to think of the house no longer as a space of the property and economic administration, but as the place where things come alive and make life possible for us. It is not geometry and architecture that should define this life but this capacity for animation that passes from human beings to things and from things to human beings.

Photo: published by Eater, The 1953 KinchenAid “Television Kitchen”

Stay at home should from now on just mean: stay where you give life to everything and everything gives life to you. Home should be a common kitchen, a sort of common laboratory in which we try to concoct ourselves, to find the right point of fusion and to produce common happiness. The new city should be a sort of enormous chemical recipe / formula (?) in which we try, by mixing things and mixing ourselves together and ourselves with every kind of object, to find an elixir of life.

To redesign cities from our kitchens: such a proposal might sound extremely trivial and even vulgar. Yet the kitchen is the place where we show that the city is not just a collection of humans. As William Cronon and Carolyn Steele have shown, from the point of view of cuisine the city has different boundaries than we imagine: all the non-humans we usually exclude must be part of it. Without wheat, corn or rice plants, apple trees, pigs, cows, lambs, human cities are impossible. It is mainly the non-humans who make our cities habitable. It is time to give each of them citizenship. Freeing the home from patriarchy and architecture also means beginning to think that the city is not the home of men. We are used to imagining that since all non-humans have a home away from the city, in 'wild' spaces, cities are the legitimate space for human settlement. So we forget that every city is the result of colonization of a space occupied by other living beings and a consequent genocide that forced other species (apart from a few rare exceptions, dogs, cats, mice, and some ornamental plants) to move elsewhere. A kitchen is, after all, the black hole of our homes, the place where their monastic essence is overturned into spaces of mixing: the frontiers between things and people are suspended and the opposition between humans and non-humans is overturned into festive fusion. It will be always impossible to be a monk in a kitchen.

Considering  the house and the city as if they were great  kitchens means overturning the patriarchal and patriarchal relationship into a space of care and not just under the form of nourishment. The act of cooking is just the basic form of the act of care: the form in which it is impossible to separate the care of oneself from that of others. 

Home is only where there is care for something and someone.

1.

Como en un cuento de hadas, un pequeño ser ha invadido todas las ciudades del mundo. El más ambiguo de los seres de la Tierra, aquel para el que es difícil incluso hablar de "vivir": habita en el umbral entre la vida "química" que caracteriza a la materia y la vida biológica, sin que sea posible definir si pertenece a una u otra. Es demasiado viva para una, demasiado indeterminada para la otra. En su propio cuerpo se borra la clara oposición entre la vida y la muerte. Este agregado de material genético en libertad ha invadido las plazas y de repente el paisaje político ha cambiado de forma. 

Como en un cuento de hadas, las ciudades, para defenderse de un enemigo invisible pero poderoso, han desaparecido: se han exiliado. Se han declarado prohibidas, proscritas, y ahora yacen ante nosotros como dentro de la ventana de un museo arqueológico. 

De un día para otro las escuelas, cines, restaurantes, bares, museos, pero también casi todas las tiendas, parques, calles han sido cerradas, se vuelven inhabitables. La vida social, la vida pública, las reuniones, las cenas, los almuerzos, los momentos de trabajo, los rituales religiosos, el sexo, todo lo que se abría una vez cerradas las puertas de nuestra casa se hizo imposible. Existe como un recuerdo o como algo que tiene que ser construido a través de esfuerzos muy duros y a veces dolorosos: las llamadas, las indicaciones directas, los aplausos o los cantos en el balcón. Todos ellos suenan como un luto. Estamos de luto por la ciudad desaparecida, la comunidad suspendida, la sociedad cerrada junto con las tiendas, las universidades, los estadios. 

De un día para otro, la ciudad, es decir, literalmente, la política, es un autorretrato, como en los mitos cabalísticos que quisieran que la creación fuera un acto de retracción (tzimtzum) de la divinidad. Para defender las vidas de sus miembros, las ciudades se han prohibido y se han matado a sí mismas. Este noble sacrificio ha puesto a más de la mitad de la población humana en la imposibilidad de hacer política, de pensar políticamente en el presente y el futuro. 

Sars-Cov-2 esta diminuta criatura de cuento de hadas (o esta trinidad de criaturas, ya que aparentemente hay tres cepas) no sólo ha causado la muerte de decenas de miles de vidas humanas. Sobre todo, ha causado el suicidio de la vida política como la hemos conocido y practicado durante siglos. Ha obligado a la humanidad a iniciar un extraño experimento de monacato global: todos somos anacoretas que se han retirado a su espacio privado y se pasan el día murmurando oraciones seculares. En un mundo donde la política es objeto de prohibición y realidad imposible, lo que queda son nuestras casas: no importa si son apartamentos o casas reales. Todo se ha convertido en hogar. Y esto no es para nada una buena noticia. Nuestra casa no nos protege. Puede matarnos. Puedes morir por tener demasiada casa. 

2.

Siempre hemos estado obsesionados con las casas. No sólo vivimos allí, pasamos mucho tiempo allí, sino que vemos casas por todas partes. Y pretendemos que todo el mundo, incluso fuera de la especie humana, tiene casas. 

Uno de los ejemplos más increíbles de esta obsesión por el hogar es la ecología, entendida no sólo como la ciencia de la relación mutua de todos los seres vivos entre sí y lo que existe entre los seres vivos y su entorno, su espacio, sino también como un conjunto de prácticas para tratar de tener una relación mejor, más justa y equitativa con la vida no humana. Dado que el nombre que lleva la ecología (literalmente ciencia de la casa) está obsesionado con esta metáfora o imagen. Incluso cuando intentamos encontrar una imagen más "ecológica" de la tierra tendemos mecánicamente a pensar en ella como el hogar de todos nosotros. 

Ahora, ¿de dónde viene esta obsesión? Porque si lo piensas, no es tan normal. ¿Por qué la relación que los vivos tienen entre sí debe ser similar a nuestra sociabilidad doméstica? ¿Por qué, por ejemplo, la metáfora, la imagen, el concepto clave no es el de la ciudad? ¿O el de una plaza? ¿O el de la amistad? Porque cuando intentamos pensar cómo se relacionan todos los vivos entre sí, dimos como respuesta: como si fueran miembros de una casa inmensa, tan grande como el planeta entero. ¿Necesitamos que Ibsen y Tolstoi nos enseñan que las casas no son lugares particularmente felices? ¿Por qué hemos sido tan crueles con nuestros amigos no humanos?

Ahora la respuesta a esa pregunta es un poco larga y trataré de decírselo en breve. El responsable es Linneo, el biólogo sueco a quien debemos el sistema de clasificación biológica de los seres vivos. En 1749 uno de sus estudiantes, Isaak Biberg, publicó lo que es el primer gran tratado de ecología, y lo llamó De economía naturae, que traducido al lenguaje moderno sonaría: del orden doméstico natural. Ahora, porque el orden doméstico. En aquellos días la mayoría de los biólogos no creían en la transformación de las especies, en la evolución. Estaban convencidos de que todas las especies eran inmutables a lo largo del tiempo. En un contexto como éste, la única manera de saber si existe una relación entre un búfalo de Arizona y una mosca australiana y entender esta relación era ponerse desde el punto de vista de quién creó ambas: Dios. Ciertamente pensó y estableció una relación entre estas dos especies, así como entre todas las especies vivas. Ahora en la esfera cristiana Dios se relaciona con el mundo no tanto como gobernador, líder político, sino como Padre: Dios es el que crea el mundo y si ejerce poder sobre él es sólo porque Él lo creó. Por el contrario, el mundo no se relaciona con Dios como un sujeto se relaciona con el soberano, sino como un hijo se relaciona con el padre. El mundo, todos los vivos son, por lo tanto, el hogar del único Padre de la familia que es Dios. Es por esta razón que Biberg y Linneo llaman a esta ciencia la economía de la naturaleza - fue Haeckel, un biólogo alemán del siglo XIX que cambió la economía a la ecología para distinguirla de la economía mercantil. Ahora esta imagen fue útil porque inmediatamente expresó la evidencia y la necesidad de una relación mutua entre todas las personas vivas: todos son miembros de una enorme casa. Pero es una imagen problemática. En primer lugar, es de naturaleza patriarcal. La ecología no lo sabe, pero en el fondo su imaginario, a pesar de todo lo que las feministas han hecho para deshacerse de él, sigue siendo un imaginario patriarcal. 

¿Por qué? Porque la casa, en la antigüedad hoy en día, es un espacio en el que un conjunto de objetos e individuos respetan un orden, una disposición que está dirigida a la producción de utilidad. Decir que los vivos son una casa grande significa que respetan un orden, y que cada uno de ellos produce una forma de utilidad gracias a este orden. Al fin y al cabo, la biología sigue pensando esto cada vez que dice que la evolución de una especie o el surgimiento de otra corresponde a la afirmación de la más adecuada. O seguimos pensando esto cada vez que pensamos, por ejemplo, que la introducción de una especie llamada invasora (la robinia por ejemplo) es perjudicial para el equilibrio natural del ecosistema. (En realidad, no sabemos absolutamente nada sobre ello que sea útil o no para la naturaleza: ya es difícil para nosotros, y mucho menos para la naturaleza). Y como Mark Dion escribió una vez, la naturaleza no siempre sabe qué es lo mejor para ella. 

Pensar ecológicamente significa pensar que hay un orden que debe ser defendido, pensar que hay fronteras que no deben ser cruzadas. Y si, por un lado, esta idea nos sugiere que seamos menos destructivos con nuestros hermanos no humanos, desafortunadamente proyecta sobre ellos un orden que no tiene nada de natural. Lo percibimos perfectamente en estos días. Después de todo, pensar que la Tierra es una casa enorme significa, literalmente, pensar en todos los seres vivos excepto en el ser humano bajo arresto domiciliario. No reconocemos el derecho de los demás seres vivos a salir de su casa, a vivir fuera de ella, a tener una vida política, social, no doméstica. Todos están en casa y sólo pueden quedarse allí. Todos están en cuarentena durante su vida natural.

Después de todo, la reacción a la crisis producida por Sars-Cov-2 fue una radicalización del pensamiento ecológico: ahora incluso los humanos deben respetar su propio ecosistema, quedarse en casa. Si los hombres, a través de las ciudades, se habían arrogado el derecho de viajar a todas partes, de vivir libremente, ahora todo lo que vive está obligado a vivir anacrónicamente. Hoy en día, nosotros -humanos y no humanos- somos todos monjes de Gaia. 

Ya nadie puede salir. Nadie puede escapar: encerrados en la casa, es desde casa y sobre todo en casa que tendremos que reconstruir la sociedad. El cambio tendrá que tener lugar en los confusos rectángulos de hormigón que nos separan de los demás y del mundo. Será necesario excavar desde este espacio una serie de pasillos invisibles que nos permitan convertir el espacio doméstico en un nuevo espacio político. Si habrá una revolución será una revolución doméstica: será necesario deshacerse de la definición patriarcal, patrimonial y arquitectónica de nuestras casas y hogares y transformarlas en algo diferente. No se dice que el camino será largo: si la muerte de la ciudad se ha producido de un día para otro, la casa no patriarcal podría nacer en pocas semanas. 

3. 

¿Cómo llamamos a casa? Normalmente identificamos nuestro hogar con su envoltura arquitectónica: la casa - las paredes, la forma mineral con la que separamos un espacio del resto del mundo. Solemos describirla según la forma y las funciones de los espacios que esta envoltura cincelan, recogen, crían, vigilan: está el baño, la cocina, el comedor, el dormitorio. Nombramos las diferentes partes según el tipo de vida que llevamos. Y sin embargo, la casa es sobre todo un gran contenedor, un enorme baúl en el que principalmente recogemos objetos, cosas. Es algo que parece absolutamente contraintuitivo, e incluso un poco ideológico, como si quisiera enfatizar el aspecto patrimonial y por lo tanto consumista de la casa, y sin embargo es exactamente así, y no tiene nada que ver con su orientación política. La casa empieza con cosas, las paredes, el techo, el suelo no son suficientes para hacer una cosa. Lo entendí, literalmente hace unos años, por una extraña experiencia que me ayudó a aprender algo importante. Había ganado mi primer puesto de profesor en Alemania, en Friburgo y cuando llegué a la ciudad empecé a buscar una casa. La encontré, pude firmar el contrato inmediatamente y unos minutos después de tener las llaves en la mano y entrar en el apartamento mi tarjeta de crédito - por razones misteriosas - fue bloqueada. No está mal, dices, habías entrado en la casa, tenías un techo con el que cubrirte. No es así porque la casa estaba completamente vacía. No había nada allí: ni una cama, ni un colchón, ni una silla, ni un plato, ni un tenedor. No había nada. Nada de los objetos que pueblan nuestras casas o incluso los hoteles. Estuve atrapado allí durante una semana, sin dinero (sólo tenía dinero para comprar comida) y ya tenía que empezar a enseñar al final de la semana. Así que me di cuenta de que ese espacio es literalmente inhabitable. Imposible dormir en él, porque el suelo es demasiado duro, demasiado frío, y entonces necesitas mantas, una almohada, pijamas. Y la paradoja era que habría sido más fácil dormir en un bosque, o en el jardín: habría sido menos incómodo y menos molesto (pero era septiembre y ya hacía demasiado frío en Alemania). 

Era imposible trabajar allí porque para trabajar se necesita una mesa, una silla, un ordenador, un cuaderno. Imposible comer allí obviamente, por razones similares. Y sobre todo imposible permanecer allí durante mucho tiempo: contemplar el vacío es obsceno, insoportable, ensordecedor. Fue entonces cuando me di cuenta de algo importante. 

Primero: la casa como tal, como pura cáscara, pura idea del espacio, la idealización arquitectónica es lo inhabitable. No es lo que nos permite habitar un espacio, es lo que hace que el espacio - que siempre está ocupado por cosas, viviendo, un puro desierto inhabitable, hasta que alguien toma posesión de él y comienza a poblarlo con cosas de objetos, - sea el más dispar. 

Segundo: que la idea del espacio es una abstracción, algo que no existe. Nunca nos encontramos con el espacio. Habitamos el mundo que siempre está poblado por otros humanos, plantas, animales, los objetos más dispares. Estos objetos no ocupan el espacio, lo abren, lo hacen posible: en un bosque, los árboles no ocupan el espacio, abren el espacio del bosque. Es lo mismo en las casas: la cama, la vajilla, la mesa, el ordenador, la nevera no son objetos que ocupen espacio, no son decoración. Son lo que hacen real un espacio que sólo es imaginario, abstracto, la proyección mental de otros en los que está prohibido entrar. Al fin y al cabo, es la cama la que hace el dormitorio, la mesa del comedor la que hace el comedor, los platos, el horno y las ollas que transforman un rectángulo abstracto en una cocina. La casa-cuadro es técnicamente una forma de desierto, un espacio puramente mineral, un castillo de arena. Traducido en términos políticos eso significa: el hogar es donde las cosas nos dan acceso al espacio. Hacen que el espacio sea habitable. Nunca tenemos una relación con el espacio, o con las paredes tenemos una relación con los objetos. Sólo habitamos las cosas. Los objetos albergan nuestro cuerpo, nuestros gestos, atraen nuestras miradas. Los objetos evitan que choquemos con la superficie cuadrada, ideal, geométrica. Los objetos nos defienden de la violencia de nuestros hogares. 

Precisamente por esta razón el espacio doméstico no es de naturaleza euclidiana: para moverse dentro de la casa no es suficiente o no es necesario en absoluto la geometría que estudiamos en la escuela, la trigonometría, las proyecciones ortogonales. De hecho, las cosas son imanes, atractores o sirenas que nos llaman con un canto irresistible y capturan nuestro cuerpo a menudo sin que nos demos cuenta. Las cosas magnetizan el espacio doméstico, convirtiéndolo en un campo de fuerzas constantemente inestables, una red de influencias sensibles que nos deja libres sólo cuando hemos cerrado la puerta de la casa. Por eso, en realidad, en los días de estancia prolongada dentro de la casa sentimos fatiga. Permanecer en casa significa sufrir, apoyar, resistir todas las fuerzas que las cosas ejercen entre ellas y sobre nosotros. La vida en casa es siempre una resistencia, en el sentido eléctrico y no mecánico del término, somos el alambre de tungsteno que es atravesado por las fuerzas de las cosas y nos encendemos o nos apagamos. 

Ahora, ¿de dónde viene esta fuerza? ¿Por qué las cosas en casa son tan poderosas? 

Una vez que cruzas el umbral de la casa, las cosas cobran vida, mejor que compren algo de nosotros, de nuestra alma. La ropa, las cartas en las que dejamos un número o un garabato en el teléfono a un amigo, un cuadro, el juego de nuestra hija existen casi como sujetos, como pequeños yoes que nos miran y dialogan con nosotros. El uso, el roce diario, repetido, prolongado durante días, semanas, meses, años, la fricción de nuestro cuerpo sobre el de ellos deja huellas, los magnetiza, les transfiere una parte de nuestra personalidad y subjetividad. Dentro de la casa, por lo tanto, los objetos se convierten en sujetos. He aquí una nueva y hermosa definición de hogar: el hogar se llama ese espacio en el que todos los sujetos existen como sujetos (es lo contrario de la esclavitud). Esto significa que la casa es un espacio de animismo inconsciente y voluntario. ¿Qué significa animismo? Desde finales del siglo XIX la antropología ha caracterizado con este nombre la actitud de algunas culturas para reconocer ciertos objetos (en primer lugar los fetiches, los artefactos que representaban a los dioses) cualidades que suelen ser reconocidas exclusivamente por los hombres: una personalidad, una conciencia e incluso una capacidad de actuar. Ahora bien, nuestra cultura dice que se basa en el rechazo absoluto de esta actitud y en la separación clara e irreparable entre las cosas y las personas, los objetos y los sujetos. Y sin embargo no es tan simple. Las muñecas, cosas de la casa por excelencia, son objetos hacia los que toleramos, al menos por parte de los niños, una relación de tipo animista. Pero hay más. A finales del siglo pasado Alfred Gell reveló en un libro extraordinario (Arte y Agencia) algo absolutamente revolucionario. Lo que llamamos arte es sólo la esfera en la que nuestra cultura reconoce que las cosas existen casi de la misma manera que los seres humanos. Cada vez que entramos en un museo, cuando nos encontramos con piezas de material -un conjunto de lino, madera y pigmentos de varios colores- que llamamos pintado, estamos seguros de que podemos reconocer en él los pensamientos, actitudes y sentimientos de un hombre que nunca hemos visto, conocido y del que no sabemos absolutamente nada. Vemos la Mona Lisa y estamos seguros de que encontraremos a Leonardo. Aquí tenemos una relación animista con cada obra de arte. Gell se detuvo aquí. En realidad deberíamos seguir diciendo que en casa, cada uno de nosotros tiene una relación animista con la gran mayoría de los objetos de los que nos rodeamos, especialmente los más antiguos. Cada uno de ellos no sólo lleva algo de nosotros, sino que se convierte en una versión más antigua de nuestro ego. Es por eso que no podemos separarnos de ellos o lamentamos su pérdida.  

Este es el punto de partida de la revolución doméstica: poder pensar en la casa ya no como un espacio de propiedad y administración económica, sino como el lugar donde las cosas cobran vida y hacen posible la vida para nosotros. No son la geometría y la arquitectura las que deben definir esta vida, sino esta capacidad de animación que pasa de los seres humanos a las cosas y de las cosas a los seres humanos.

Quedarse en casa debería significar desde ahora: quedarse donde se da vida a todo y todo te la da a ti. El hogar debería ser una cocina común, una especie de laboratorio común en el que tratamos de mezclarnos, de encontrar el punto de fusión adecuado y de producir felicidad común. La nueva ciudad debería ser una especie de enorme réplica química en la que intentamos, mezclando cosas y mezclandolos con todo tipo de objetos, encontrar un elixir de vida.

Rediseñar ciudades desde la cocina: podría sonar extremadamente trivial y vulgar. Sin embargo, la cocina es el lugar donde mostramos que la ciudad no es sólo una colección de humanos. Como han demostrado William Cronon y Carolyn Steele, desde el punto de vista de la cocina la ciudad tiene límites diferentes a los que imaginamos: todos los no humanos que solemos excluir deben ser parte de ella. Sin trigo, maíz o arroz, manzanos, cerdos, vacas, corderos, las ciudades humanas son imposibles. Son principalmente los no humanos los que hacen nuestras ciudades habitables. Es hora de dar a cada uno de ellos la ciudadanía. Liberar el hogar del patriarcado y la arquitectura también significa empezar a pensar que la ciudad no es el hogar de los hombres. Estamos acostumbrados a imaginar que como todos los no humanos tienen un hogar lejos de la ciudad, en espacios "salvajes", las ciudades son el espacio legítimo para el asentamiento humano. Así que olvidamos que toda ciudad es el resultado de la colonización de un espacio ocupado por otros seres vivos y el consiguiente genocidio que obligó a otras especies (salvo algunas raras excepciones, perros, gatos, ratones y algunas plantas ornamentales) a trasladarse a otro lugar. Pensar en las ciudades como cocinas multi-específicas significa pensar que todo se verá obligado a mezclarse.

Pensar la casa y la ciudad desde la cocina significa volcar la relación patriarcal y patriarcal en un espacio de cuidado. El acto de cocinar es la forma básica del acto de cuidado, y la forma en la que es imposible separar el cuidado de uno mismo del de los demás. El hogar es sólo donde hay cuidados para algo y alguien.

Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher who teaches at the EHESS in Paris. He wrote extensively on nature, art and fashion. His last books are The Life of Plants (2018, Polity translated in 10 languages) and Métamorphoses (Paris 2020) In 2019 he co-organised the exhibition Nous les Arbres at Fondation Cartier, Paris.

Humberto Valdivieso / La Tragedia de la (in)perfectibilidad humana

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Humberto Valdivieso

Foto: ©verseando

En el Libro del desasosiego Pessoa afirma: “La libertad es la posibilidad de mantenerse aislado”. Y luego bosqueja con perspicacia la naturaleza de semejante condición de vida: “Eres libre si puedes apartarte de los hombres, sin que te obligue a recurrir a ellos la falta de dinero, o la necesidad gregaria, o el amor, o la gloria, o la curiosidad, cosas que ni del silencio ni de la soledad pueden alimentarse”. El 2020 ha forzado al planeta entero a lidiar con el aislamiento y a pensar de nuevo la esencia de la libertad. Ser libre pareciera algo más complejo que cuidar una conquista dada por la historia o saberse lejano al conflicto de un “otro” en desventaja. 

El debate sobre la libertad está hoy abierto al infinito. Circula, sin detenerse en una razón específica, a través de las redes sociales y los medios de comunicación. También, logra colarse sin ser esperado en el lugar más lejano y frágil de la intimidad: la conciencia individual. Ahí incomoda y puede llegar a ser doloroso porque confronta las ilusiones. Sobre todo las de quienes, hasta hace poco, estaban seguros de vivir en sociedades más justas y avanzadas. 

 La libertad para Pessoa responde a una abstinencia consciente. Ser autónomo reside en la posibilidad de elegir. El silencio y la soledad afirman. Su ascetismo poético repite entre líneas esta idea como si fuese un mantra: “No rocemos la vida ni con la punta de los dedos”. Una incisiva labor espiritual, para desengañarse de la curiosidad por la vida, le aproxima a estas palabras de Gurdjieff: “Únicamente el sufrimiento consciente tiene valor”. Algo desconocido para la humanidad contemporánea cuya búsqueda de libertad no está definida por la negación del sí mismo sino por su desbordamiento y un insaciable deseo de abundancia.

Es imposible, y quizá inútil, saber con certeza si la contención del poeta es una respuesta más adecuada a la necesidad de vivir en libertad que la estresante desorientación contemporánea en los días de la pandemia. Alguno pudiese señalar la diferencia entre estar asediado por la muerte y las disquisiciones íntimas de un escritor. Y aunque él no dudó en afirmar que “La muerte es una liberación”, tendría razón quien lo cuestiona al observar la desemejanza entre una cosa y otra. Aceptar que la muerte te hace libre de este mundo no es equivalente a ser sorprendido por la muerte cuando te sientes en un mundo libre. 

La serenidad y el poder elegir con lucidez nunca han sido opciones colectivas. La emergencia, el despertar despavorido frente al desengaño y el impulso violento sí. El alma del poeta tiene recursos negados a la vida del ciudadano común. Posiblemente la crisis actual conducirá al mundo hacia conquistas científicas y tecnológicas, incluso hacia formas de organización social hasta ahora desconocidas. Pero, el temor y la sospecha de haber descubierto una libertad simulada y frágil no van a desaparecer. 

El desasosiego global desatado por la pandemia tiene antecedentes. Ha estado precedido de una creciente insatisfacción ante las categorías y modos de organización de la modernidad. Las conquistas del humanismo están siendo revisadas por las corrientes posthumanas y transhumanas entre otras. El aislamiento, la muerte y carencias desconocidas en el “primer mundo” han incrementado las sospechas hacia la relevancia de la razón humana y fomentado el revisionismo. En este breve ensayo voy a ponderar los efectos de dos condiciones emergentes en nuestro tiempo de crisis: la desmaterialización y la liviandad. Y aunque ellas son comunes al ámbito global las pensaré desde preocupaciones cercanas. Sin embargo, lo haré trazando líneas lo más amplias posible.     

Ai Weiwei, Soleil Levant, 2017. Vista de la instalación, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2017. Chalecos salvavidas frente a las ventanas de la fachada. Cortesía del artista. Foto de David Stjernholm.

Ingravidez

La liviandad es una condición de nuestro arduo presente. El mundo tiene una complexión distinta a la del siglo pasado, ha perdido solidez y tiende a lo ingrávido. Los seres humanos habitamos un planeta más etéreo desde principios del milenio. La tecnología digital y la miniaturización han contribuido a ello: menús y ventanas flotantes en interfaces en constante actualización, aplicaciones cada vez más ligeras en dispositivos móviles y una cultura popular fascinada por lo ligth. Con todo, esto no significa que hay más espacio o más aire disponible. 

Lo acumulado durante la modernidad sigue con nosotros, ha sido incorporado al ambiente electrónico al menos como dato o experiencia. En la cultura del aún nuevo milenio nada desaparece, todo es incorporado. Lo anterior flota junto a lo actual, lo visible junto a lo invisible. Esto afecta el modo de vida global y la relación del ser humano con el ambiente es más escrupulosa y conflictiva. Peter Sloterdijk encuentra que “Después de que Pasteur y Koch descubrieran e impusieran científico-publicistamente la existencia de microbios, la existencia humana tiene que acostumbrarse a habérselas con medidas explícitas para la simbiosis con lo invisible”. Desde marzo de este año las mascarillas miniaturizaron el encuadre del rostro, la firmeza del tacto fue sustituida por gestos etéreos y distantes, el aire entre los cuerpos cobró mayor importancia y la solidez del espacio comercial cedió ante la ligereza del delivery. El peso del dolor quedó desvanecido por el volátil y veloz efecto de los datos, y la carga de una edad avanzada es la víctima más frágil del virus.  

El mundo está congestionado y difícilmente algo se mantiene sólido, aferrado a la tierra o amarrado a un origen preciso. Y, aunque no podamos percibirlas, infinidad de partículas flotan en el aire junto a todo lo demás. El cuerpo es cada vez menos compacto y le cuesta estar situado, definido y estable. Categorías como género, raza, nacionalidad o identidad solo mantienen algo de peso en las instituciones y leyes heredadas de siglos anteriores. Pero, son vistas como un anclaje o un fardo inútil. La liviandad individual es el resultado de irse despojando del peso de las definiciones colectivas y arbitrarias, de ahí que el avatar sea el signo privilegiado de nuestra cultura “trans”. Para Sloterdijk, “Donde todo podría estar latentemente contaminado y envenenado, donde todo es potencialmente falso o sosechoso, la totalidad y el poder-ser-total no pueden deducirse ya de circunstancias exteriores. Ya no puede pensarse más tiempo la integridad como algo que se consigue por entrega a un envolvente benéfico, sino sólo ya como logro propio de un organismo que se preocupa activamente de su delimitación con respecto al entorno”.  

Un terreno puede ser caótico pero ahí los objetos están fijos, tienen gravedad. También lugar, pues un volumen colocado marca. No importa si coincide o está unido a otros objetos: todos hacen tierra y de esa forma permanecen estables. La tradición necesita superficie para asentarse, marcar, fundar y hacer sentir su consistencia. Esto ocurre en un modelo del tiempo que avanza para depositar algo contundente del pasado en el futuro. Por eso, los signos analógicos le pertenecen. Ellos eran una promesa fiable ante la deuda de la imagen con el objeto, del sonido con el significado de las palabras y de la plasticidad con la materia. Lo digital transformó esa condición y desmaterializó los objetos, las imágenes y los significados. Todo devino en información y esa información en liviandad. Hoy podemos cargar la historia de la humanidad hecha datos en diversas aplicaciones flotantes en la interfaz de nuestro móvil. Sin embargo, no podemos limpiar el aire, protegernos de lo que flota alrededor, confiar en otros cuerpos, mantener unidos nuestros afectos o evitar la invasión del espacio individual por los algoritmos invisibles de la inteligencia artificial. Esto no quiere decir que estamos en desventaja o en un mundo peor, simplemente habitamos un ambiente distinto al generado por el humanismo. 

Imagen: Dominio Público / El Greco, El entierro del Conde de Orgaz, 1586-88. Óleo sobre lienzo, 480 x 360 cm.

El fin de los fantasmas

La muerte de Pedro Páramo es una imagen prodigiosa. También útil para ponderar la relación entre la tierra y el peso, y para ilustrar el temor del cuerpo ante lo liviano-invisible. Él y la tierra en ruinas eran una misma cosa. Así lo expone el ritual de su decrépito fin: el cuerpo le fue dejando de responder, las piernas lo retenían en un mismo punto, su mano cayó al suelo despacio. Luego fue desmoronándose “como si fuera un montón de piedras”. Ni el apoyo de los brazos inmateriales de Damiana Cisneros detuvieron el desplome. Pedro Páramo era la tierra, como corresponde al ethos latinoamericano, con todas sus deudas y rencores. 

La desmaterialización que he asomado al inicio de este escrito es el efecto contrario al desplome. Lo corporal pesado cae y se une a la tierra ⎯polvo que vuelve a su lugar de origen desde tiempos inmemoriales⎯. De forma contraria, lo inmaterial flota y queda incorporado al ambiente. La piedra cae y marca ⎯“sobre esta piedra erigiré mi iglesia”⎯. Los datos invisibles llenan pero no tiene un lugar fijo, su única permanencia es el movimiento. Por eso, los fantasmas de Pedro Páramo son inmateriales pero no ingrávidos. No pueden abandonar Comala, ellos buscan la tierra: tratan de cobrarle, penan por ella y hablan desde el fondo de sus tumbas. 

En Latinoamérica hubo fantasmas mientras las cosas estaban fijas a la tierra: casas viejas, antiguos cementerios ⎯aún no convertidos en parques temáticos o desvalijados⎯ y tesoros enterrados por nuestros ancestros ante el temor de una revuelta política. Poco de esto queda, el ambiente inmaterial de la globalización cambió los espectros por avatares y eso ha tenido consecuencias inevitables. Entre otras, ya no sólo veneramos ciertos mitos disparatados o padecemos a los brutales y recurrentes titanes políticos. También, nos infointoxicamos con el resto del planeta, respiramos el aire infectado de las pandemias globales y nos desvanecemos en el devenir del presente junto a los otros seres humanos.

No es un asunto baladí el repliegue de nuestra cultura hacia lo inmaterial. Sobre todo por la presencia del cuerpo entre nosotros y el carácter orgánico de la arquitectura popular en las ciudades. El barrio ⎯favela o chabola⎯ está hecho de contactos y lugares de encuentro. No hay espacio aquí para un análisis minucioso de este asunto. Tampoco es posible predecir el destino de la crisis del coronavirus en Latinoamérica. Pero podemos poner el oído sobre un antecedente, sobre los efectos de otro enemigo inmaterial. 

Willie Colón expone en la letra de El gran varón un drama recurrente en los 90 del siglo XX. En esta historia un chico trans latinoamericano muere olvidado, anónimo, en un hospital. Es víctima de un agresor invisible, el HIV. La enfermedad acaba con su vida nómada. A diferencia de Abundio o Juan Preciado él no busca castigar o perseguir a Pedro Páramo, no le es dado volver a la tierra a cobrar la deuda. No porque la crueldad conservadora de su padre fuese distinta a la de este arquetipo brutal delineado por Juan Rulfo, sino porque su identidad ya no tenía peso. La exclusión lo desmaterializó y esa pandemia de finales del siglo pasado lo hizo invisible como ella. Al igual que el virus, Simón era algo raro a lo cual nadie quería voltear a ver.      

Carlos Cruz Diez, Chromointerferencia de color aditivo, 1974. Aeropuerto Internacional Simón Bolívar, Venezuela. Footo: David Hernandez Aponte / CC BY-SA 3.0.

El piso de Cruz-Diez

La línea secuencial continua y la división racional del espacio, las especies y el conocimiento pertenecen al humanismo. La expansión del mundo, el ámbito público y el método científico son consecuencias de él. La contemporaneidad no ha suprimido esto pero ya no sabe dónde ubicarlo. Diversas corrientes del pensamiento como el posthumanismo, el transhumanismo, el antihumanismo y conceptos emergentes como el antropoceno están tratando de ofrecer alternativas teóricas y, quizá, políticas. Pero la pandemia no ha hecho más que aumentar la desorientación. Las promesas de la tecnología y el sueño mismo de la inmortalidad digital han sucumbido frente al virus.

La enfermedad le ha mostrado al ser humano que aún no sabe cómo cuidarse. No estamos preparados para aceptar nuestra condición frágil. Esto nos devuelve al conflicto de la libertad. Las respuestas inmediatas han sido la reclusión y el llamado a la guerra contra lo invisible. El tiempo es una incertidumbre pues solo tenemos un presente sin respuestas, el problema fundamental es el espacio. El mundo actual, cuya promesa inmediata ha sido la superación de las dicotomías real/virtual, humano/no humano, hombre/mujer, heterosexual/homosexual, residente/inmigrante entre otras, está erigiendo barreras de protección para frenar lo imperceptible. El espacio exterior es una amenaza ⎯por eso la pared, los guantes, las mascarillas⎯ y el interior no da sosiego. La amenaza es ingrávida y por ello ningún espacio es un lugar de libertad. 

El humanismo se aseguró de dividir el mundo simbólicamente para tener siempre a donde acudir. La trascendencia ofrecía la libertad última, el descanso final y estaba bien delimitada. La pintura El entierro del conde de Orgaz del Greco da cuenta de ello. El descenso del cuerpo a la tierra se corresponde con el ascenso al cielo. Tierra y aire forman parte de una secuencia de divisiones codificadas y explícitas. Todo tiene un peso específico en el orden del mundo. En general, las figuras alargadas del pintor de Toledo no son ausencia de materia sino su deformación por estar tensada entre dos ámbitos que se corresponden: uno arriba y otro abajo. 

Esa seguridad espacial ya no está. En un mundo ingrávido donde lo visible y lo invisible deambulan en un mismo caos, lo fragmentario y lo contingente dominan. En semejante escenario, la libertad no depende de la ubicación porque no hay un contexto simbólico capaz de organizar el espacio. La obra Cromointerferencia de color aditivo de Carlos Cruz Diez en el Aeropuerto de Maiquetía en Venezuela nos ofrece un ejemplo de ello. 

Este trabajo era el símbolo de entrada y salida de un país abierto a la inmigración. Hoy ha adquirido un inesperado uso político que lo transformó de símbolo de la nación petrolera a máquina de desmaterialización. Venezuela es ahora un país de emigrantes, miles han salido por el aeropuerto. Casi todos se detienen sobre la obra del maestro cinético para tomarse una fotografía de los pies. Están posando sobre una ilusión óptica y política. Esa acción, ese ritual de despedida, hace que el peso desaparezca y el viajero, desplazado de su tierra, salga expulsado por el aire y por las redes sociales hacia atmósferas donde ya ningún lugar es estable. Emigrar dolorosamente es ir de lo incierto a lo incierto.  

En la obra del Greco, la aparición de la gloria sostiene simbólicamente el cuerpo que pesa. En la obra de Cruz-Diez, la desaparición del territorio y la desmaterialización de la persona en datos hacen que el peso desaparezca: abandono, desarraigo, imposibilidad de renovar la identidad y derechos conculcados. El mundo del cinetismo quedó en la modernidad y, aunque los trabajos mantienen su vigencia,  el espectador contemporáneo cambió. La interacción hoy implica subvertir la intención y el significado desde el infortunio de la emergencia. El arte contemporáneo está dando cuenta de esto. 

Ai Weiwei utilizó 3500 salvavidas de los refugiados sirios en su obra Soleil Levant. Con ello representó los cuerpos ingrávidos de miles de personas que floraron hacia Europa tropezando con los obstáculos de las viejas estructuras modernas. Así dejó claro que la salida, como el encierro, no es garantía de libertad. Los cuerpos sin peso del siglo XXI son empujados de un lugar a otro. Ese ha sido el destino de miles de venezolanos que deambulan en su ingravidez por las carreteras de Sudamérica. 

La pandemia terminará y quizá el encierro no. El problema no serán los muros sino otras formas de confinamiento más bien aéreas e invisibles. La libertad no deja de ser un problema porque siempre está bajo asedio y cada vez sus enemigos son más sofisticados. Sobre todo cuando, paradójicamente, lo no-visible genera opacidad. Voces afamadas están anunciando la muerte del capitalismo. Quizá esta sea la estocada final al humanismo. El mundo no responderá con el hermoso desdén poético de Pessoa por la vida y sus ilusiones exteriores. Pero quizá pueda guardar para sí estas dos líneas de su Diario del desasosiego: 

“¡Qué tragedia no creer en la perfectibilidad humana!...

⎯ ¡Y qué tragedia creer en ella!”.

Humberto Valdivieso es Doctor (PhD) en Humanidades. Magister en Comunicación Social. Licenciado en Letras. Investigador del Centro de Investigación y Formación Humanística de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello. Línea: Cultura digital. Curador del Centro Cultural UCAB. Profesor del Postgrado en Filosofía de la UCAB. Coordinador académico y profesor del Diplomado en Diseño e Innovación Social UCAB-Prodiseño. Miembro del grupo de investigación Epistemología y Cultura de la Universidad Católica de Valencia "San Vicente Mártir". Miembro del equipo editorial de las revistas Comunicación del Centro Gumilla y Anuario ININCO. Miembro de AICA Capítulo Venezuela. Consultor de cultura y comunicación del Centro Venezolano Americano. Aliado del proyecto Cultura Digital de Fundación Telefónica. Miembro de la junta directiva de Espacio Anna Frank. Autor de libros sobre arte y estéticas contemporáneas, articulista en revistas nacionales e internacionales, curador independiente y consultor de proyectos relacionados a imagen y estrategias culturales. 

Jan Ritsema / Falling-Apart-Together

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Jan Ritsema

PD-US

Some people think that after Covid we are ready to create a better world.

Under the pressure of the pandemic they see it emerging already: people show to be helpful, to take care, to recognise the pain of others and to help to relieve it. They say: we are solidary, empathetic, together. They see us gratefully clapping hands to thank the heroes who risk their lives, of which many literally lost it. They say we are all in the same boat in the same war, dramatically called as such, fighting and sacrificing. And that we behave accordingly: supportive, generous, helpful.

We are praised. They say: we showed the real stuff we are made of: we are touchingly and intrinsically a good and helpful human specimen. It is in our national DNA, they say.  It is what lives deep inside the nature of us humans.

They say: the world, dominated by the virus, is ill and we will heal it, together we can. And if necessary, they say, we will sacrifice ourselves for it, give our lives for to show, as a nation, that we are good in our deeds and in our hearts. As, after all we are  human.

I always learned that when all insects die, everything else in the world would die, but when all humans die everything else in the world would blossom. 'Human', my ass.

But apparently there is hope. Covid, they say, will change us, Covid will reveal all that is good in us. Covid will be the trauma that will change us forever to be better. Yes, there is hope. Hope made of the hope we hope. A fata morgana, an illusion of hope. Franklin D.Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, both operating in times of a real war, taught that for hope to be realised we have to work for it, we have to do something. Hope needs to be helped. Its realisation does not fall for free from heaven. Illusions fall for free from heaven.

How solid and sustainable will all this 'good' be that emerges from us now, as we got it for free from Covid, from the killing threat of Covid, the invisible, supposedly endangering all of us equally? It invaded us, it threatened us, and through this, it ties us together. It binds us against the common enemy.  We feel all in the same boat (which is obviously not the case, as, the elderly, the differently abled, those with no or low wages and the systemically marginalised are by far the most vulnerable). 

Changes in behavior, induced from the outside, won't last. As soon as the circumstances change back to normal, exit Covid, we will change back to normal. We did not change the circumstances, the circumstances changed us.  As soon as the threat is over, circumstances will flip back to how we knew them. As soon as the doors are open again, society will return to the rat-race in the competitive, over-consumptive, usurping society and will reproduce old behaviors and habits. This, despite, normal life becoming too heavy, too horrible, too stressful, too painful, too unhealthy for too many. 

How can we ever change this? Impossible it seems. We are split apart, fundamentally. We think we are too small to implement change. We think, we think too differently from one another, we disagree fundamentally about what is right and the right way to do. We are convinced, stubborn, resistant. Some think even that individualism is in the DNA of being a human.

What we forget here is that we are also able to change, adapt, repair, learn and be social.

But for society to change sustainably, we need to infect it, we need to do something,  work for it, struggle, try. We need to be the agent of change ourselves. 

Behavior is not something that you freely choose, also ethically induced behavior not. It is not that you wake up and think let me do something good. You want to do something good because you slept well, you got tea in bed, awoke with a feel for energy, you have no other priorities, you want to feel good and what is a better way than to do good. What a person thinks and does is a product of circumstances.

When circumstances change, people change. The way they think and the way they organize life, changes.

People behave differently, even against their basic values, when a cinema starts to burn or a plane crashes, we run over each other to safe our own lives, then, when we feel in paradise, in a world full of abundance of everything for everybody, we will act differently and if you want it or not, we will think differently, differently about ourselves and about our relation to others. 

Abundance of everything is available when people are able to share resources instead of appropriating them and make them exclusively for their use only: my car, my bike, my mirror. These people are surrounded by a cemetery of dead (not used) objects. And that creates scarcity, scarcity of the available resources. And scarcity leads to competition and competition leads to suspicion and to fear of the other(s). L’enfer c'est les autres, Sartre, the others are the hell. Not you yourself, not you are the cause of scarcity, the others are, you think. We easily swift from perpetrator to victim and back again, turning effect into cause and back again. Mentally supple acrobats. Jugglers of the mind.

Plastic elastic. Changeable, modulable. We know, and at the same time we are scared of it, of this, in principle, wonderful elasticity. It induces a desperate need for solidity and stability and where do we find this better than in convictions?

Political parties are based on ideas, principles, abstracted representations of different strategies of how to divide the common cake and how to deal with what we are scared of. These political parties are grosso modo organized around two different strategies. Those who think that we-the-people and the ways we cooperate and share are the best shield against the fears of life, socialists, the more social-oriented people. And those who do not trust the other, most probably neither themselves and who opt for shields to protect people from people,  through walls, police, prisons, differences in wealth, the individualists. More oriented towards the creation of structures, organizations and organisms to execute separation between people, because, 'I can only trust myself and my family’, (as long as they are loyal to me).

•

These different political strategies are based on strong convictions, which are deeply engraved in experience, proven by the practice of living. And that practice produces habits and addictions, which solidify the convictions, no longer, easy, if not impossible, to change. The practice of living engraved convictions in the bodies and souls of the people. Just like the medium, the structure is the message. 

When ideas of people, are born from the way the same people practice life, then changes in the practice of life can change the way people think about life and living.

Given the presumption that practicing the way we do things between us differently could change the souls and minds of people, then, only experiments that lead to another practice might be relevant to aim for. This means to restructure, rethink, rebuild the instruments of life, like the way we school, hospitalize, imprison, live in homes, entertain ourselves,  hierarchize, submit, etc. 

But how do we get there? 

Not by asking people to share, not by convincing them to do so, but by the creation of other circumstances, by building changes in the physical structures we live in, as these structures implicitly direct how we organize life among us.

An example is the creation of the roundabout. Before the roundabout we used traffic lights for every more or less busy crossing point. The traffic lights decided for us and we could put our brains on zero. A reductive tool reduced us. But operating the more efficient and complex roundabout forces us to cooperate in order to make the flow of traffic go smooth. We are addressed not as stupids but to share the common space intelligently, playfully. We are not asked to behave differently, we behave differently, if we want it or not,  because the circumstances are different.

The roundabout, a common space with very little rules, offers us to manage its function all together. On the roundabout we change from policed individualists to complex cooperators. Not because more operating freedom was offered, but instead, an instrument, a smart tool, easy to operate for everybody together. And no need for policing.

•

Question is if we can imagine, design, structure, build more of such tools? Yes, we can. We can think every function, every instrument in society differently. Take a school, which we can imagine not made out of little separated boxes, classrooms, but as a marketplace, full of clusters of information, tools and mobility. Imagine the different, independent, inventive, cooperative people it will produce. And not because we implemented a set of values but just because we structured and build the concept 'school' differently. From a teaching factory to a marketplace of knowledge exchange, experience and experiment.

The same is thinkable for prisons, hospitals, stadiums, factories, offices, theaters, parks, public swimming pools, entertainment parks, bars, town halls, post offices, traffic, transport. We all can imagine them no longer structured for to serve a repressive top-down society, the traffic lights, but on the contrary, for to support intelligent cooperation, the roundabout.

But how do we get us to go for the construction of such instruments? For sure not by talking and discussing and fighting about the principles and values. Not by political power games, but just by building them, with the help of some friends. It is in our immediate power to create small-size examples. Many are done already, Some show their advantages in a way society can not say no to them anymore. Like the roundabout.

The many small-size experiments in organising life together differently have local influences. But for to change the world we need many more of them. And for this to happen there is no need that we think all the same, all noses in the same direction, to all agree, in order to induce change. We can celebrate differences, and realise different models for different strategies for the same functionality (school, hospital, etc.). We can assess, evaluate, discuss them through how they function. Not a clash of ideas, but an exchange and comparison of different tangible experiences. What is needed is just to start, to do, work, build, create, again: with the help of some friends.

And it is there where change has a chance. 

Not Covid, the external enemy, but we-the-people can change and create instruments that change and preferably radicalize our social practices, whether the instruments are schools, hospitals, prisons, stadiums, factories, offices, theaters, parks, public swimming pools, entertainment parks, bars, town halls, post offices, roads, airports, railway stations.  We can change them from efficiently operating factories to parks, to forests even, to stroll and exercise, imagine and develop, change and exchange, between us, with us, among us.

What we need is what we have already, the stuff we are made of: imagination, perseverance, resilience, elasticity and endurance.

Imagine we build situations differently that make us, if we want it or not, act differently, think differently.

Hope's only chance to be realized is there where you work for it, preferably work together, as you get more things done, the rest is illusion.

But first we will fall apart. 

They lost control, those in power and will want that power stronger back. They will exit the elderly, the differently abled, those with no or low wages and the systemically marginalised. Too expensive and economically useless. Soon we will all feel under threat, ready for protection, for more protection. Economy is not some objective structure as they want us to think it, economy became the art of how to fill your pockets. Those in power, will tighten the control over us, under the disguise of taking care of the people, of to protect them, with the help of the use of big data, 

And living will be reduced to functionality and functions, to the life of traffic lights not that of roundabouts.

And I? I will continue building alternative structures, with the help of many friends.

And I think, not hope, we can win. The world is there for all of us and for all that is in it, not just for a couple of egoists narcissists, greedy thieves full of fear for others.

St. Erme, April 8, 2020

Jan Ritsema is founder and director of PAF, Performing Arts Forum, situated in an old convent in the North of France and since four years also of MASSIA, both, alternative residencies for artists, scientists and (media-)activists. Jan Ritsema is a theatre director, contemporary dancer, as well as active in the political scene of the sixties in Amsterdam. His theatre and dance performances are defined by the notion of empowering the people to not let them dream away in illusions but on the contrary to trust them to rely on their observations in order to keep their observation-apparatus sane and reliable. Ritsema wrote numerous articles on these subjects all available on academia.edu. www .pa-f.net / www.massia.ee

VISUAL ARTIST: Cleo NH / Sensible Life

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Cleo NH

@2020 Sensible Life. Digital drawing. Image: Courtesy of the artist.

@2019 I don’t think I get it. Ink on paper. 8x10 In. Image: Courtesy of the artist.

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@ 2020 I only play the games I win at. Ink on paper, 8x10 In. Image: Courtesy of the artist.

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@2019 End of history pizza party! Ink on paper, 8 x 10 In. Image: Courtesy of the artist.

This collection of songs represents the attitudes and messages created by musicians responding to the conditions of humanity in the 21st century. While facing the current global health and economic crisis along with the mounting social problems that have lead up to it, creating visions of a more free and equitable world through art and music is a necessity. Embodying the energy and anticipation of Spring Break 2020, the music I present today is hopeful, impassioned, insightful, satirical, and bursting at the seams for societal intervention and reorganization. In a time where the issues we have created for ourselves through over-consumption and purposeful ignorance come knocking at our doors, creators and thinkers of all kinds must lead to charge in defining who we are and what we want our world to look like.

Cleo NH

Cleo NH is philosopher, artist, and musician. They work through traditional and digital graphic mediums to create content depicting and analyzing contemporary social and political struggles, specifically regarding identity, class, and consumer media.

VISUAL ARTIST: Iris Cäzilia / Moving Sensibly

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Iris Cäzilia

Iris Cäzilia / Moving Sensibly from FallSemester on Vimeo.

It is easy to be consumed by the bleakness of the news and overwhelmed by the waves of social media as one adjusts to a more screen heavy lifestyle. But to what end? The predictability of a monotonous day can create soulless routines. Perhaps nothing has changed in that respect, but normalcy in confined spaces has amplified the tediousness of its maintenance. Adaptation is necessary, not only for survival in its literal forms but to create a sense of mindfulness in the midst of change. What is regular should be challenged. The body and its relationship to space and the regular can be used to challenge it. To live sensibly in a time of uncertainty with an outdated mindset, does not allow space for breath or exploration or change.

As one of the many college students who has had to move from their academic setting to a more confined domestic space, i.e. my childhood home, the transition has been strange. The places, people, and practices that gave me peace of mind and allowed me to question myself and surroundings are no longer accessible to me. I hoped the cancellation of events and reorganization of classes would provide me with the time I wanted to be more active with my art practice; but the lack of structure, the constant use of my phone or computer, and the comfort of my bedroom have been more of a challenge to overcome than just an adjustment of place and routine. I have had to be more intentional than ever with my mind and body, not only to finish assignments but to ensure the stability of my mental health. I break the idleness and distractions through dance. If I sit all day at my desk I risk sinking into depressive oblivion. I must move, even if it’s only five or ten minutes. Breaking my routine is necessary. My parents and sister are now accustomed to my odd activities throughout the house, and even join in on rare occasions. I have more empathy, patience, and awareness toward my family members and the space we share. I laugh at myself and get joy out of doing more than just walking and sitting. It is a challenge every day, but one that I look forward to because it is not perfect, it adapts and breathes with me.

Do not conform to predictability, allow the mind and body to break out of routine and cut the nets of negligence. Move with empathy towards yourself and your space. Move without restraining or worry for how it will be perceived; there are no real rules for how to move the body, act and react as the body pleases. By allowing the body to question normalcy and routine, the mind can question states of normalcy further. In the face of quarantine and uncertainty for what may happen after, now may be the perfect time to allow yourself a moment of offline exploration. Turn off the news, put down your phone, try something new. Who knows, the break might even be fun.

Iris Cäzilia

Iris Cäzilia is a visual and performing artist in her final year at Luther College in Decorah Iowa. Since 2018, she has been one of the presidents of the Luther Artist’s Collective (LAC), a group dedicated to connecting Luther students outside of class through the arts and with the greater Decorah community. She is also the leader of KPROJECT, a contemporary hip-hop dance club that provides a space for students to teach, learn, perform, and connect through pop choreography. Her visual work has been featured in the SEA Juried Art Competition (2112, 2019), and frequented shows in Gregerson Gallery at Luther College (MINIS in 2020, MONOCHROME in 2019, and ​Phenomena​ in 2019). Her 2020 senior solo exhibition was cancelled due to precaution for COVID-19. In 2019 she performed in ​What Would Love Do? ​a contemporary production exploring the nuance of love in relationships through dance. A reprise was planned in March of 2020 at the North-Central ACDA Conference at Iowa State University, but was cancelled due to precaution for COVID-19. She is currently finishing her studies at home, using this time as an incubation period for growth, questioning, and planning for the artistic shift thereafter.

Mareike Dittmer / Models of social recombination after COVID_19

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Mareike Dittmer

Garden of Rockets, Aleksandra Mir and Sarah Gavlak, John F. Kennedy Space Center, Florida, 2004. Photo courtesy of the artist.

CLOUDS OF THOUGHTS AT THE HORIZON

‘Memories seem to be the last resistance to arrange with reality. Though maybe it is rather wishful thinking to believe in the possibility of building barricades inside our heads that cannot be conquered.

The past is alien territory. Sometimes I think we might fall back into the ‘old’ present at every moment. And I'm not sure if I would fear or hope for that to happen.

When imagination becomes rampant, when it goes on thinking on its own terms, covering up facts and delivering its own truth then, almost unnoticed, memories start to return. Details keep jumping at me, out of forgotten corners of my brain, sometimes resisting, insisting on expectations I cannot understand any longer.

The songs of the monks have the colour of a grey autumnal sky. Clouds of thoughts at the horizon. Invading my mind, before I could even think of erecting barriers. The wildest dramas are not staged in theaters but rather in our heads and our hearts.’

Snippets from an attempt on a theatre play started long ago, unfinished, the remains now unearthed from the backlog on my computer I like to refer to as a quarry in waiting; like many others I have suddenly started to dive into abandoned projects, a repository of imagination, a landscape of wishful thinking. Looking backwards as a prologue to the actual task, for imagining a future after COVID_19. What is before and what is after and when will afterwards ever begin? Or did it already start, with Zoom and co. and the digital content avalanche streaming into our digitized living rooms?

We experienced the slow down and now in many places a full stop to public life as we knew it, while the forced acceleration of digital substitutes set up a racing schedule for academic curricula, working models, private communication. Emergency braking restart. Simultaneous standstill and acceleration. If we look at this as a choreography, we can see an arrested development that is charged with the current motion put on halt and the next movement yet to come. To hold the motion for moving on. Tacet. Dancers and musicians play with these tensions, this in between, being on hold. A distinct suspended bothness. Are we able to conceive our present situation within these simultaneously co-existing while still mutually exclusive certainties? Can we think playfully, embracing ambiguity?

If you once experienced the world, your world, the very structure of society, falling apart and life still going on; it is a lesson in ambiguity. Since 1989 – when within weeks my teenage world view was opening up and narrowing down at the same time, when the Iron Curtain came down and the German Democratic Republic, I was born into, fell apart while being integrated into the Federal Republic of Germany – ambiguity was a state of mind I curiously accepted and explored. As in: a dynamic inspirational ambiguity rather than a vacillating obfuscation.

Official papers - exams, certificates, money – considered worth less, even worthless, within weeks. Suddenly, I can visit my half-brothers. I pass my A-levels 2 years later as the first year in the reunited Germany with the red Eagle of the federal State of Brandenburg topping the certificate. Later I need to submit to the Berlin senate to devalue my grades for applying to university. Because in the former East, with new Western curricula, the grades where too good, compared to the former West. Because what must not be cannot be. All official papers relate to an official structure and once this structure is crumbling into pieces, they turn back into the printed paper they were before, waiting for a new agreement to attach a certain value to them. Or not. But that an official structure in power would feel the need to devalue their own certificates – that was another lesson in ambiguity. Imprinted and likely to fade over time, but to never fully leave.

When seeing the images of empty shelves and reading about rationed toilet paper sales these days, I remembered the days of the monetary union and the D-Mark replacing the Ost-Mark, and my teenage me returning from the supermarket, empty-handed, trying to explain to my mother that there was no way I could (ever) spend precious Western money on something as banal as toilet paper. The righteousness of teenagers can be fascinating. And our adult reactions encountering change are not necessarily rational.

Since then, the assured notion of ‘How things are’ or ‘How things should be’ seems not so easily available – the lesson is learned: we are walking on unsteady grounds, ready to fall apart and potentially to reassemble, or perhaps we won’t fall apart since we had never been put together in the first place – nothing is to be taken for granted and there is no ‘one size fits all’. This is not due to COVID_19.

Right now, we don’t even know if we are facing permanent change – we are in between, again, maybe thus my initial tendency to think in dualities, in opposites that are not opposed. Are we just looking for (financial) band aids to return to the status quo ante? Can we? Do we want to? Do we need less market, and more state intervention? State-ownership? Are we going to lament a world that was? Can I opt out? How much change are we honestly prepared for, and not only to facing this change, but to embrace it, to turn it into something meaningful? How to avoid landing in another ideological sandpit? And finally, as in most historical situations, when there are suggestions presented as solutions, soon, we shall not forget to ask: Cui bono?

Writing this, more questions are raised than answered. And I’m finding myself (again) in-between, leaving behind the idea to conceptualize the events and moving forward to engaging with them in a continuous dance, with breaks, lapses, backward jumps and forward moves, thoughts whirling around, and one thing for clear: in the near future I don’t want to be dancing with myself. Not that I was truly asking for solitude in the first place. But now that it is here, it creates a new sense of community. Being apart together. As re-reading Hannah Arendt reminded me that it is only through conversation that the world is created as something we have in common. (On humanity in dark times. Talk about Lessing. Munich 1960). Dance with me.

Since summer 2018 Mareike Dittmer is director of Art Stations Foundation CH / Muzeum Susch. Before she was the associate publisher of frieze magazine. Trained in cultural studies and communication at UDK Berlin, Mareike started working with frieze in 1999 and founded, together with Jörg Heiser, the frieze Berlin office. Since 2011 she is also part of the editorial team of mono.kultur, a Berlin based interview magazine. Over the years Mareike has been involved with several exhibition and book projects, most recently, together with Julieta Aranda, she became a chairperson of the 9th Futurological Congress 2016 - 2018. Since 2019 Mareike has been a lecturer at the Zurich art school ZHdK. She lives in Susch (CH).

Sandra Sánchez / Drawing the Coronavirus — Dibujando al Coronavirus

/SPRING BREAK 2020/

Sandra Sánchez

Fernanda Magallanes. Dibujando al coronavirus, 2019. (Drawing Coronavirus, 2019) Cortesía de la dibujante (Courtesy of artist).

In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), Sigmund Freud explains anxiety in terms of a reaction reproduced as a distress signal when one is faced with a dangerous situation. Anxiety is reproduced—not produced—because this reaction stems from a previous experience of uncertainty and pain. “The ego, which experienced the trauma passively, now repeats [wiederholen] it actively in a weakened version [Reproduktion], in the hope of being able itself to direct its course.”[1]

Since anxiety is a reaction stemming from previous experience, it is linked to expectation: one does not know for certain what the final outcome will be, one hangs between, at a familiar threshold. “The signal announces: ‘I am expecting a situation of helplessness to set in,’ or: ‘The present situation reminds me of one of the traumatic experiences I have had before. Therefore I will anticipate the trauma and behave as though it had already come, while there is yet time to turn it aside.’” Freud elaborates, “Anxiety is therefore, on the one hand, an expectation of trauma, and on the other, a repetition of it in a mitigated form.”[2]

This expectation bears “a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object;”[3] it is not known what will happen, but it is known that something is coming, just around the corner. The lack of object is a condition for the possibility of anxiety because once the ego distinguishes the object before it, it stops feeling anxious and begins feeling afraid. 

*

I live in Mexico City and teach art classes at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. I recall receiving an email on Saturday, March 14, announcing that the school would be closed until further notice. The instructions dictated teaching online until the restoration of a certain past that is now longed-for as the future. You already know the reason: the coronavirus, the pandemic. However, the word did not quite enter my body. As much as I repeated in my head “coronavirus,” “coronavirus,” I could not render what it was; no signifier came into place that could symbolically order the experience in which I was immersed. 

In the midst of this vertigo, I felt enormous pressure and urgency to understand the situation as quickly as possible, not so much for myself as for my students. How would I carry outclass the following Monday? What countenance would I maintain in front of people who likely felt just as disoriented as I did? How to show tranquility in the face of the apparent absence of meaning?

Like many of you, I turned to the news, to articles, to scientific knowledge. I checked the dictionary to make sure that its definition of the word “pandemic” coincided with mine. I looked for images of the virus, I read about its paradoxical nature, about the notion of life created around him—or is it her? Inhabiting that uncertainty, I realized that I was feeling anxiety. I remembered my graduate classes and the voices of my professors of psychoanalysis speaking about Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan: anxiety is without an object; anxiety is not without object petit a. If science wasn’t helping me to tie things together, I thought I should go to my own field: art. 

I wondered: how might one arrive at an aesthetic encounter that would produce a reflective judgment in which one could experience (at least for a moment) a particular as if it were universal, in order to catch something of oneself and of the event?

Lucía Vidales. Dibujando al coronavirus, 2019. (Drawing Coronavirus, 2019) Cortesía de la dibujante (Courtesy of the artist).

*

On Sunday, March 15, Eric Valencia, Adriana Kong, Bruno Enciso, and I (all of us members of the art collective Zona de Desgaste) took on the task of devising a drawing contest. We decided to invite people to trace their own version of the coronavirus. The call for entries is rather simple, taking as its title the question: How do you imagine the coronavirus? 

The announcement (which we distributed on Instagram and Facebook) displays basic information: an email address for entries, a list of the rules of play, and the prize. We decided to offer the winner a symbolic payment (about $25) in order not to contribute to the unpaid production chains reported in the pandemic. We would have liked to offer more, but like many of you, we too are in crisis. As they arrive, we upload the drawings to @zonadedesgaste, our Instagram account. We include the artist’s Instagram handle and the hashtags #dibujandoalcoronavirus and #covid19.

Although we didn’t mention in the announcement the Freudian elaboration on anxiety, we thought it would be an interesting wager: to invite our close friends and the people following our account to take time to draw and work through an image of the virus, something that up to now has been foremost represented by science. Maybe if we produce our own images, we can reduce our anxiety: objectifying the event in order to bring a signifier to earth. We cannot be sure—nor can we verify—that drawing effectively reduces anxiety; we assume that we are sufficiently different that what works for one person will fail for the other. Still, it was worth a try. 

On the other hand, “drawing the coronavirus” poses a form of collective participation, transforming our role from that of citizen-receivers of information to that of producers of the very same. The aim is to switch on a mechanism that would allow us to witness the gaze of others upon the circumstances we all find ourselves in. Up till now (Friday, April 10) we have received 108 collaborations, from fellow artists as well as from those who take the time to sit down and do what we could all do since childhood: draw. We don’t know how, but the announcement even got into the hands of a middle school teacher who invited her students to participate. In addition, several mothers received the invitation and got down to work with their daughters. The call for entries closes on April 15 and we will come to miss seeing the collaborations. 

Like many of you, our collective has followed a certain philosophical conversation about the pandemic currently afflicting us. The truth is that we were quite enticed by Paul B. Preciado’s proposal that we disconnect and turn off our machines.[4] We believe that sitting down to draw implies giving presence to a nebulous signifier while turning off the screen (or at least social media) in order to be left alone with the blank surface. However, we decided to return to the online grid in order to share how, from there, other ways of communicating and imagining are also possible. We know that the exercise continues feeding the apps and algorithms, but within this sinister scenario, we propose an inclusive disjunction: drawing in order to elaborate visually a common problem and, thus, to push momentarily beyond business, self-exploitation, and the cognitariat.

After seeing the drawings, and before closing this text, I can tell you that many faces and personifications of the virus have manifested: eye, nose, and mouth. This pleases me because it opens the door to an imaginary hermeneutical relationship in which we can talk with it. There are also many circles with tiny balls stuck to the edges or elements orbiting around: an appropriation of the scientific image. There are versions that present it as happy, dancing, making pleasant and funny gestures. Some even find it bearing a family resemblance to celebrities like Will Smith and characters like Shrek, the Care Bears, and The Simpsons. We imagine a modest consequence derived from drawing the coronavirus: the participants had an enjoyable moment in the midst of uncertainty and confinement; maybe the anxiety was interrupted, for every person who traced out an object. 

Translated by Byron Matthew Davies

1. Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Hogarth), Volume 20: An Autobiographical Study; Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety; The Question of Lay Analysis; and Other Works (1925-1926). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. p. 167.

2.  Ibid, p. 166.

3.  Ibid, p. 165.

4.  In his article “Aprendiendo del virus” (“Learning from the Virus”).

Sandra Sánchez is an art critic that writes for magazines, newspapers and blogs such as Letras Libres, La Tempestad, Confabulario and GasTv. Her articles are included in books like Postneomexicanismos (ESPAC, 2018), Dispersión (Fundación Alumnos47, 2016), Manifiestos mexicanos contemporáneos (Taurus, 2017) and Monolito (2019). She is currently the editor of Onda Mx, a bilingual website dedicated to reviewing contemporary art exhibitions in Mexico City. In 2015 she founded Zona de Desgaste, an artist run space dedicated to teaching, writing and producing a critical reflection on issues related to contemporary art, theater, aesthetics and politics, nowadays she collaborates in the space with Adriana Kong, Bruno Enciso and Eric Valencia. At this time, her main interest consists in how art writing can go beyond academic and journalistic canons, for this reason she founded the Program for Writing around Contemporary Art (PEAAC). She practices schizoanalysis in a device called Listening and Text, in which she works with different artists and cultural agents to dialogue about their practices and productions.

Israel Urmeer. Dibujando al coronavirus, 2019. (Drawing Coronavirus, 2019) Cortesía de la dibujante (Courtesy of the artist).

En Inhibición, Síntoma y Angustia (1926), Sigmund Freud explica que la angustia es una reacción que se reproduce como una señal de socorro ante una situación de peligro. La angustia se reproduce — no se produce — porque la reacción parte de una experiencia anterior en la que se experimentó incertidumbre y dolor. “El yo, que ha vivenciado pasivamente el trauma, repite {wiederholen} ahora de manera activa una reproducción {Reproduktion} morigerada de este, con la esperanza de poder guiar de manera autónoma su decurso”.[1]

Dado que la angustia es una reacción que parte de experiencias anteriores, se vincula a la expectativa: no se sabe a ciencia cierta el desenlace, pero se está en un entre paso, en un umbral familiar. “Esto quiere decir: yo tengo la expectativa de que se produzca una situación de desvalimiento, o la situación presente me recuerda a una de las vivencias traumáticas que antes experimenté. Por eso anticipo ese trauma, quiero comportarme como si ya estuviera ahí, mientras es todavía tiempo de extrañarse de él. La angustia es entonces, por una parte, expectativa del trauma, y por la otra, una repetición amenguada de él”[2], elabora Freud. 

La expectativa conlleva “un carácter de indeterminación y ausencia de objeto”[3], se desconoce qué sucederá, pero se sabe que algo se avecina, a la vuelta de la esquina. La ausencia de objeto es condición de posibilidad de la angustia porque cuando el yo define el objeto ante el que se encuentra, deja de estar angustiado y comienza a tener miedo. 

*

Vivo en la Ciudad de México y doy clases de arte en la Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. Recuerdo que me llegó un correo el sábado 14 de marzo que anunciaba que la escuela cerraba hasta nuevo aviso. La instrucción dictaba enseñar en línea hasta que se restableciera cierto pasado que ahora se añora como futuro. La causa ya la saben: el coronavirus, la pandemia. Sin embargo, la palabra no acababa de entrar en mi cuerpo. Por más que repetía en mi cabeza “coronavirus”, “coronavirus”, no lograba dimensionar qué era; no caía ningún significante que pudiera ordenar simbólicamente la experiencia en la que estaba inmersa. 

En medio de ese vértigo, sentía una enorme presión y urgencia de entender lo más rápido posible la situación, no tanto por mí, sino por mis alumnas. ¿Cómo iba a llevar la clase el siguiente lunes? ¿Qué semblante iba a sostener frente a personas que probablemente se sentían igual de desorientadas? ¿Cómo mostrar tranquilidad ante la aparente ausencia de sentido?

Como muchas de ustedes, fui a la prensa, a los artículos, al conocimiento científico. Verifiqué en el diccionario que el significado de la palabra pandemia coincidiera con el mío. Busqué imágenes del virus, leí sobre su paradójica naturaleza, sobre la definición de vida que se produce alrededor de él, ¿o será ella? Habitando esa incertidumbre, caí en la cuenta de que estaba angustiada. Recordé mis clases de posgrado y la voz de mis profesores psicoanalistas hablando sobre Sigmund Freud y Jacques Lacan: la angustia es sin objeto, la angustia no es sin objeto a. Si la ciencia no me estaba ayudando a anudar algo, pensé que debía ir a mi propio campo: el arte. 

Me pregunté: ¿cómo ir al encuentro de una experiencia estética que produzca un juicio reflexivo en el que se pueda vivenciar (al menos por un momento) un particular como si fuera un universal para atrapar algo de uno mismo y del suceso?

Martina Henaro. Dibujando al coronavirus, 2019. (Drawing Coronavirus, 2019) Cortesía de la dibujante (Courtesy of the artist).

*

El domingo 15 de marzo Eric Valencia, Adriana Kong, Bruno Enciso (integrantes de Zona de Desgaste, el colectivo de arte del que formo parte) y yo, nos dimos a la tarea de idear un concurso de dibujo. Decidimos convidar a la gente para que trazara su propia versión del coronavirus. La convocatoria, bastante simple, tiene como título una pregunta: ¿cómo imaginas al coronavirus? 

El cartel (que distribuimos por Instagram y Facebook) despliega información básica: un correo electrónico para enviar la propuesta, un listado con las reglas del juego y el premio. Decidimos ofrecer un pago simbólico al ganador (25 dólares más o menos), con la finalidad de no contribuir a las cadenas de producción no remunerada que la pandemia reporta. Nos hubiera gustado ofrecer más, pero como muchos de ustedes, también estamos en crisis. Conforme van llegando, subimos los dibujos a @zonadedesgaste, nuestra cuenta de Instagram. Incluimos la arroba del dibujante y el hashtag #dibujandoalcoronavirus y #covid19.

Aunque en el cartel no mencionamos la elaboración freudiana sobre la angustia, pensamos que era interesante llevar a cabo la apuesta: invitar a nuestros amigos cercanos y a la gente que sigue nuestra cuenta a darse un tiempo para dibujar y elaborar una imagen del virus, que hasta ahora ha sido representado más que nada por la ciencia. Quizá si producimos nuestras propias imágenes, podamos aminorar la angustia: darle objeto a la peripecia para dejar caer un significante. No estamos seguras — ni podemos comprobar — si dibujar efectivamente disminuye la angustia; asumimos que somos tan distintas que lo que funciona para una, fracasa para la otra. Aún así, valía la pena intentarlo. 

Eric Valencia. Dibujando al coronavirus, 2019. (Drawing Coronavirus, 2019) Cortesía de la dibujante (Courtesy of the maker). Imágenes originales en full color pueden ser vistas en Instagram @zonadedesgaste y en @fallsemester (Original images in full color can be seen on Instagram @zonadedesgaste and @fallsemester)

Por otro lado, “dibujando al coronavirus” propone una forma de participación colectiva que cambia nuestro rol de ciudadanos receptores de información a productores de esta. La intención es echar a andar un mecanismo que nos permita ver la mirada de los demás sobre la situación en la que nos encontramos. Hasta ahora (viernes 10 de abril) hemos recibido 108 colaboraciones, tanto de colegas artistas como de personas que se dan el tiempo para sentarse a hacer eso que todos podemos desde niños: dibujar. No sabemos cómo, pero el cartel llegó a manos de una maestra de secundaria que invitó a sus alumnas a participar. También varias mamás recibieron la invitación y pusieron manos a la obra con sus hijas. La convocatoria cierra el 15 de abril y vamos a extrañar las colaboraciones. 

Al igual que muchas de ustedes, nuestro colectivo ha seguido cierta conversación filosófica en torno a la pandemia que nos aqueja. La verdad es que nos sedujo bastante la propuesta de Paul B. Preciado de desconectarnos y apagar las máquinas[4]. Creemos que sentarse a dibujar implica dar presencia a un significante nebuloso, al tiempo de apagar la pantalla (o al menos, las redes sociales) para quedarse a solas con la superficie en blanco. Sin embargo, decidimos volver a la retícula online para compartir que también desde ahí otros modos de comunicarse e imaginar son posibles. Sabemos que el ejercicio sigue alimentando a las apps y a los algoritmos, pero dentro de ese escenario siniestro proponemos una disyunción inclusiva: dibujar para elaborar visualmente un problema en común y, así, rebasar momentáneamente el negocio, la autoexplotación y el cognitariado. 

Después de ver los dibujos, y antes de cerrar este texto, les cuento que han aparecido muchos rostros y personificaciones del virus: ojos, nariz y boca. Esto me alegra porque abre la puerta a una relación hermenéutica imaginaria en donde podemos hablar con él. También hay muchos círculos con bolitas pegadas en los bordes o elementos orbitando alrededor: una apropiación de la imagen científica. Hay versiones que lo presentan feliz, bailando, haciendo gestos placenteros y chistosos. Algunos incluso le encuentran un parecido de familia con celebrities como Will Smith y personajes como Shrek, los Ositos Cariñositos y los Simpson. Imaginamos una consecuencia modesta derivada de dibujar al coronavirus: los participantes pasaron un momento agradable en medio de la incertidumbre y el encierro; tal vez se interrumpió la angustia, cada uno le trazó un objeto. 

1. Freud, Sigmund. Obras Completas de Sigmund Freud (Amorrortu), Volumen 20: Presentación autobiográfica, Inhibición, síntoma y angustia, ¿Pueden los legos ejercer el análisis?, y otras obras (1925-1926). 2ª ed. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1986. p. 156.

2.  Ibid, p. 155.

3.  Ibid, p. 154.

4.  En su artículo “Aprendiendo del virus”. 

Sandra Sánchez writes about contemporary art in magazines, supplements and blogs such as Letras Libres, La Tempestad, Confabulario and GasTv. Her articles are included in books such as Postneomexicanismos (ESPAC, 2016), Dispersión (Fundación Alumnos47, 2016) and Manifiestos mexicanos contemporáneos (Taurus, 2017). She is currently the editor of Onda Mx , a bilingual website dedicated to reviewing contemporary art exhibitions in Mexico City. In 2015 she founded Zona de Desgaste, a space dedicated to teaching, writing and critical reflection on issues related to contemporary art, theatre, aesthetics and politics. Nowadays, she collaborates in a space with Adriana Kong, Bruno Enciso and Eric Valencia. At this time her main interest is in the ways in which art writing can go beyond the academic and journalistic cannons, which is why she founded the Writing Around Contemporary Art Program (PEAAC). After studying a postgraduate course in psychoanalysis at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, she practices schizoanalysis in a device called Listening and Text, in which she works with different artists and cultural agents to dialogue around their practices and productions. 

Sandra Sánchez escribe sobre arte contemporáneo en revistas, suplementos y blogs como Letras Libres, La Tempestad, Confabulario y GasTv. Sus artículos se incluyen en libros como Postneomexicanismos (ESPAC, 2016), Dispersión (Fundación Alumnos47, 2016) y Manifiestos mexicanos contemporáneos (Taurus, 2017). Actualmente es editora de Onda Mx , una web bilingüe dedicada a reseñar exposiciones de arte contemporáneo en la Ciudad de México. En 2015 fundó Zona de Desgaste, un espacio dedicado a la enseñanza, escritura y reflexión crítica de temas relacionados con arte contemporáneo, teatro, estética y política, hoy en día colabora en el espacio con Adriana Kong, Bruno Enciso y Eric Valencia. En este momento su interés principal consiste en los modos en que la escritura de arte pueden desbordar los cánones académicos y periodísticos, por ello fundó el Programa de Escritura Alrededor del Arte Contemporáneo (PEAAC). Después de estudiar un posgrado en psicoanálisis en la Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, practica el esquizoanálisis en un dispositivo titulado Escucha y Texto, en el que trabaja con distintos artistas y agentes culturales para dialogar alrededor de sus prácticas y producciones. 

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee / On the Rationale of Pure Mutualism: An Intervention into the Debate between Slavoj Žižek and Byung-Chul Han

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Youngmean Kang, World Flag, Untrachrome ink printed on white velvet, 117x85cm, 2012 (Image modified for this publication. For original, click here)

A virus cannot move by itself, even COVID-19. It needs a host, i.e., animals. In Latin, an animal means a being with breaths. The symbolic system of human signification already inscribed the secret of the viral epidemic within its cultural origin. An animal transmits a virus to another animal. When animals did not contact each other so often like today, there were not many variations of the viruses. Each virus stayed within each territory; it had an individual host animal belonging to a specific species. Each animal could abide in its terrain, and each virus lingered each animal horde. 

What changed the principle of the “territorialization” was human mobility. The Silk Road brought the Black Death from Asia to Europe, and the European expansion and competition effectuated the pandemic of the Spanish flu (the virus did not originate in Spain, though). Not surprisingly, it is the human mobility of global capitalism to generate the worldwide spread of COVID-19, which we are witnessing in the 21st century. No doubt, one of the earliest reports says that the outbreak of the epidemic took place in China; however, the reason for the pandemic is not because the infection outburst happened in China, but Wuhan, one of the most globalized cities in China, is the place where human-to-human viral transmission occurred.  

Many journalists and critics pointed out the Chinese culture to eat wild animals like a bat as the mainspring of the plague, but such customs have remained not only in China, but also in other South-East Asia such as Indonesia, and yet the daily exposures to zoonotic infection never whip up the pandemics as quickly as did COVID-19 in those countries. The human mobility of the globalized city such as Wuhan precipitated the pervasive dissemination of the virus beyond the borderlines. According to one of the recent medical reports, in the case of COVID-19, novel coronavirus infected pneumonia (NCIP), there was “the apparent presence of many mild infections” and “limited resources for isolation of cases and quarantine of their close contacts” which challenged to the control of the situation.[1] This moderate symptom makes a difference between COVID-19 and other viral cases like SARS.

It is clear that the Chinese government ignored the early alarms from the region and did not listen to the experts in the city. The authority repressed the public circulation of information about what happened in Wuhan. Many criticisms focused on the authoritarian attitude, in other words, the inefficiency of the non-democratic system, of the Chinese government. For instance, Steven Lee Myers in The New York Times claims that the lack of transparency in China was the main reason for the failure of efficient quarantine. After the contagion of SARS, as he states, the Chinese government proudly announced that China had set a world-class infectious disease reporting system. However, the system did not work. To support his presupposition, Myers quoted one study, which argues that, if the Chinese government implemented more aggressive action a week earlier on the stage of the epidemic, the ratio of infections could have dropped much lower.[2] However, this quotation arouses a paradox in his argument.   

What should be questioned here is the meaning of the “aggressive action,” defended by Myers. Does it mean that the Chinese government should have responded to the alarming system and been permissive to the public circulation of the information around journalists and social media? Does it mean that the local authority recommended people to stay home in Wuhan for the prevention of the epidemic and asked them kindly to report their symptom to the medical centre if they have infections? Ironically, “aggressive action” does not indicate such “democratic” quarantine. Myers’ argument is an attempt to square the circle in this sense. If the Chinese government immediately responded to the warning system, what then would have happened?  

There might be many political reasons to have forced them to hesitate to do action aggressively. We can count some now, but it does not seem that the insufficiency of freedom is one of the reasons, unlike what Myers assumes, because freedom is not necessarily compatible with quarantine. It is undeniable that China’s accomplishment to redeem the early failure and settle down the situation today seems to lie in its extreme shutdown of human mobility. On the contrary, Europe and the US, which did not follow the Chinese way, face up with the uncontrollable burst of the epidemic. Not only the Chinese case but also other cases like Taiwan, Singapore, and even South Korea seem to prove that freedom is not an ultimate solution for the spread of the virus but instead an obstacle for the control of the human-to-human transmission. 

The problem is not that China did not open the information of infections transparently to the public, but an absent cause by which the Chinese government halted the “aggressive action” in the early stance of the plague. What would it be? I would say that it is an economic cause. As a gigantic factory for the global market, Chinese politics is closely related to its economic growth, appeasing the demand of the middle class, which seems to support the current political regime. Wuhan is a highly globalized city and the hub for the transport and industry for central China. The city is the thoroughfare of global capitalism located in the heartland of the country, and its shutdown will bring out a significant impact on China’s economy.[3] Therefore, China’s miscarriage in the early outbreak of COVID-19 resides neither in the absence of democracy nor in the systemic inefficiency, but rather in the very aspect of global capitalism, a destructive system sustained by sacrificing local community for the hyper-mobility of capital. This fact is nothing to do with a question as to whether China is democratic or not. 

The pandemic of COVID-19 is the consequence of globally mobilizing capitalism and jeopardizes the globalists’ belief in the market universalism imposed by the same trading rule, i.e., the dream of the neoliberal paradise across the world. The debate between Slavoj Žižek and Byung-Chul Han revolves around this issue. Žižek writes that “the coronavirus epidemic is a kind of ‘Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique’ attack on the global capitalist system – a signal that we cannot go on the way we were up until now, that a radical change is needed.”[4] Referring to Kill Bill, Žižek takes on the term of a martial art fantasy, the deadly blow of “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique,” for describing the COVID-19 effect which facilitates the fundamental crisis of global capitalism. For him, this pandemic of the biological virus brings forth the epidemic explosion of ideological viruses latently hidden in the paradise of global capitalism such as fake news, conspiracy theories and racism. 

Žižek concludes that today’s pandemics invites us to re-thinking the radical change of global capitalism and the re-invention of communism. For him, the rebooting of communism at this moment is the only solution to the urgent demand. He fleshes out this argument further and tries to convince us by clarifying his initial concept of communism.[5] Žižek’s point is that the communist task is already undertaken by those who have never been communist like Boris Johnson, the prime minister of England, to solve out the economic crisis caused by the global pandemic. For him, communism is not a hazy dream, but a “name” for what is already going on, i.e., a new master-signifier to call what has no place in the current stance of politics, but always already co-exists as the void of global capitalism. Against Žižek’s appeal for the re-invention of communism, Byung-Chul Han declares that Žižek is wrong because global capitalism will be restored vigorously soon after this crisis and the virus cannot give us to “think” or “re-think” politics.[6] Drawing on Naomi Klein’s theory of shock doctrine, Han argues that the state of an emergency always serves as an excuse for the more enhanced system of government. Han warns us that even Europe will regard the Chinese model as a successful system against the pandemic and import the digital police state for its security after this turbulence. 

Han’s position here seems to come along with Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, those who describe the use of emergency as a pretext towards the exceptional enaction of the authoritarian regimes, and further both Han and Esposito share views to see China as the future of Europe. Similar to Han’s concern, Esposito claims that the drift to a state of exception “tends to bring the political procedures of democratic regimes into conformity with those of authoritarian states, such as China.”[7] What is missing in their ideas is the reflection on the fact that China is not the future of Europe, but instead the real face of global capitalism in which Europe has already participated. The reality of this pandemic proves that the European exceptionalism no longer exists. 

Susan Watkins’ analysis of the EU delineates how today’s Europe has come to exist. There were a set of structural torsions, encircling with three dimensions, i.e., “civic-democratic relations, between the rulers and the ruled; inter-state relations, between the member countries; and geopolitical relations, characterizing the bloc’s external role,” in the European polity since the 1970s.[8] The pressures from the outside, e.g., “the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early seventies, the fall of the Soviet bloc in the nineties, and the world financial crisis that exploded in 2008,” enforced these structural distortions upon Europe. 

The transformations of Europe each, in turn, correspond to the neo-liberal reformation of labour, globalization with the rise of China, and the debt-logged stagnation after 2008. Europe is already the part of global capitalism, not exceptional to the high-speed economic system. The decline of European values seems obvious: 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks marked the disturbing truth that Europe’s privileged sense of freedom of expression is not any more self-evident. As Étienne Balibar states, the shooting teaches Europe that it must cost one’s own life. In short, Europe can no longer enjoy watching the conflicts between two parties as sitting on the fence today. 

Han’s problem lies in something more than this ignorant confusion. His diagnosis of the reason why China and other Asian countries, such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, have succeeded in decreasing the speed of the viral spread has no ground to support his arguments. He marks out the advantages of Asia as “authoritarian mentality.” As maintained by his analysis, Asian people are more obedient to the state power, and then their daily life is strictly disciplined by digital surveillance. He underlines the Confucian tradition embedded in these Asian regimes for his explanation of such Asian compliance with the panopticon authority. However, his logic betrays the weak point quickly when considering the South Korean case of the viral epidemics. 

What his observation lacks about South Korea’s success to manage the infections is the invisible hand behind the scenes of the government’s propaganda. As a person living in the country, I have found out that not all people obey the government’s directions, even tricking against digital surveillance. If the rate of the infection is not such high, it is not because of a Confucian tradition and the digital Big Brother but of low-waged public health workers and civil servants, mobilized by the government. The way to control COVID-19 in South Korea relies on not cutting-edge technology, but the very primitive exploitation of labour-power. Those workers check one by one each person who is supposed to be in self-quarantine. They even have a responsibility to search for those who violate the rule of self-quarantine. Digital technology serves as a useful supplement for manual labour, not the central platform to admin the people. 

Ironically, the South Korean “authoritarian mentality,” which Han points out the backdrop of the South Korean achievement, is constructed through the Japanese colonialism and the Cold War. During those periods, anti-communist dictatorship brought the capitalist mode of production into the country. The authoritarian submission to the state power as the legacy of anti-communism is well equipped with neo-liberalism today. In this sense, the primary aspect of the South Korean economic system can be called authoritarian capitalism, in that the central government is in the driver’s seat to rein the market. However, this authoritarian appearance does not mean that South Korea is a totalitarian country. The right question here might be as to why such authoritarian collectivism has been in harmony with global capitalism. Of course, this question is not for only South Korea, but also all other Asian countries, including Japan. 

Han’s critique of Žižek’s communism is also obsessed with his preconception of totalitarianism. What Žižek tries to say by the notion seems not to justify any totalitarian regimes, but remind us of social mutualism, not in Proudhon’s sense, but Fourier’s sense. Fourier’s “mutualisme” is the utopian cosmology of communism, not limited to economic theory. In my opinion, communism is the transcendental use of utopianism and today’s urgent demand is to re-invent or repeat, in Gilles Deleuze’s sense, its pure mutualism. The paradise of global capitalism, i.e., capitalism without the working class, means that anything can go except communism. However, what if anyone attempts to exercise pure mutualism, the idea of free associations with all life, against global capitalism? Global pandemic urges us to build international cooperations beyond the nation-states and think about a new internationalism in the ruins of today’s political failures. 

As Han concludes, it is not the virus which brings forth the radical change of global capitalism, but the political subjectivity of the mutual associations, the associations in which everyone equal to every other one, i.e., who is not merely the human as a reasoning animal, but a bearer to negotiate the condition of reason with the transcendental idea of the present dystopia. It is neither the virus nor reason but the idea that leads us to re-thinking the world after this global pandemic. 

Alex Taek-Gwang LEE is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and a visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in India. He is a member of the advisory board for The International Deleuze Studies in Asia and one of the founding members of Asia Theory Network (ATN). He has written extensively on French and German philosophy and its non-Western reception, Korean cinema, popular culture, art, and politics. He has also organized a radical reading group, “Kyungsung Com,” and recently launched the Global Network of Critical Postmedia Studies. In 2013, he held The Idea of Communism Conference in Seoul with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek and edited the volume of The Idea of Communism 3. 

1. Qun Li, et al. “Early Transmission Dynamics in Wuhan, China, of Novel Coronavirus–Infected Pneumonia.” The New England Journal of Medicine. Vol. 382. No. 13. 2020. 

2.  Shengjie Lai, et al. “Effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions for containing the COVID-19 outbreak in China.” MedRxiv.org. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20029843v3.full.pdf

3.  See, “Why Wuhan is so important to China’s economy and the potential impact of the coronavirus.” 24.01.2020. South China Moring Post. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3047426/explained-why-wuhan-so-important-chinas-economy-and-potential

4.  Slavoj Žižek. “Coronavirus is ‘Kill Bill’-esque blow to capitalism and could lead to reinvention of communism.” 27.02.2020. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/481831-coronavirus-kill-bill-capitalism-communism/

5.  Slavoj Žižek. “Communism or babarism, it’s that simple.” An interview with Renata Ávila.

    DiEM25 TV. https://dialektika.org/en/2020/04/01/slavoj-zizek-on-coronavirus-communism-or-barbarism-that-simple-video/

6.  Byung-Chul Han. “La emergencia viral y el mundo de mañana.” 23.03.2020. El País. https://elpais.com/ideas/2020-03-21/la-emergencia-viral-y-el-mundo-de-manana-byung-chul-han-el-filosofo-surcoreano-que-piensa-desde-berlin.html

7.  Roberot Esposito. “Biopolitics and Coronavirus: A View from Italy.” 31.03.2020. The Philosophical Salon. http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/biopolitics-and-coronavirus-a-view-from-italy/

8.  Susan Watkins. “The Political State of the Union.” New Left Review 90 (2014), pp. 5-6. 

Zairong Xiang / COVID-19: Sobre la condición epistémica

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Zairong Xiang

During the Coronavirus outbreak, very few vehicles on Wuhan's roads, and on the iconic Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, January 29, 2020. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.

ARTÍCULO ESPECIAL EN ESPAÑOL / Derechos otorgados por el autor para la traducción del artículo originalmente publicado por Open Democracy. (English version)

Las cosmologías indígenas siempre han sostenido que debemos tratar al mundo como un organismo vivo interconectado con una complejidad suprema, una frágil resistencia y—en efecto—una mística.

Hace unos días, mi amigo Cosmin Costinas me envió un párrafo en Facebook y me preguntó "¿adivina quién escribió esto?", probablemente porque recientemente me di a la tarea de traducir un pasaje bastante exótico de dos virólogos - el Dr. Kwok-Yung Yuen y el Dr. David Lung de la Universidad de Hong Kong (el Dr. Yuen es un virólogo importante, a menudo llamado el Hong Kong Zhong Nanshan o el Hong Kong Christian Drosten, dependiendo de con quién esté familiarizado). Escribieron un texto para el influyente periódico Ming Pao, en el que afirman: "La verdadera fuente de este veneno viral [el coronavirus] son las costumbres degeneradas y la raíz inferior del pueblo chino"[1].

El párrafo decía lo siguiente:

Por ejemplo, es muy probable que el punto de partida de la actual epidemia se encuentre en los mercados de la provincia de Wuhan. Los mercados chinos son conocidos por su peligrosa suciedad y por su irrefrenable gusto por la venta al aire libre de todo tipo de animales vivos, apilados unos sobre otros. De ahí que el hecho de que en un momento dado, el virus se encontrara presente en una forma animal heredada de los murciélagos, en un medio popular muy denso, y en condiciones de higiene rudimentarias[2].

Como he estado viviendo durante la última década en la burbuja de la teoría postcolonial-progresista de la izquierda occidental, me engañé a mí mismo para no creer que un escrito tan descaradamente racista y colonialista pudiera ser todavía posible.

Como esto coincidió con el hecho de que Donald Trump empezara a referirse al Covid-19 como el "virus chino" o incluso la "gripe Kung"—un raro momento de talento lingüístico, aunque en su propio idioma, por parte del presidente de los Estados Unidos-—no me molesté en adivinar o comprobar quién escribió el pasaje que Cosmin me había enviado y me respondió: "jajajaja toda persona mala ha podido haber dicho esto ya."

Sólo unas horas más tarde, cuando otro amigo de Facebook publicó un enlace al artículo del blog de Verso, me di cuenta de que el texto fue escrito por uno de los pensadores más conocidos de nuestro tiempo—tan eminente, de hecho, que la traducción china del texto estaba lista de la noche a la mañana y en circulación un día después. Fue el 23 de marzo cuando el texto "Sobre la condición epidémica" de Alain Badiou fue publicado en el blog Verso, exactamente dos meses después del cierre total de la ciudad de Wuhan y prácticamente de todo el país.[3]

Como un sombrero para el pueblo Wuhan y los miles de trabajadores médicos, de la construcción, de logística y otros que se encontraban en la ciudad, Badiou escribió el párrafo que mi amigo me llamó la atención.

La ciudad de Wuhan

En la versión china, el traductor corrigió amablemente el error de Monsieur Badiou de llamar a Wuhan provincia, algo que un traductor normalmente no haría. Esta ciudad "anónima", tal vez desconocida para el Sr. Badiou, no lo es para mucha gente, incluyendo para los que murieron y los que tienen seres queridos, familiares, amigos, colegas, y simplemente cohabitantes o compañeros de trabajo que murieron debido al nuevo coronavirus (Covid-19) que apareció por primera vez allí. Este error es tan pequeño como revelador, no sólo porque Joe Biden tampoco se molestó en aprender el nombre de la ciudad.[4]

Como maoísta, se espera que el Sr. Badiou conozca un poco mejor de la geografía china. Wuhan no es, después de todo, una ciudad pequeña, sino una que desempeñó un papel importante en la historia moderna de China, donde tuvo lugar el Levantamiento Wucang anti dinástico Qing (1911), que inició el cambio fundamental del sistema político chino. Mao tenía exactamente 18 años ese año y fue profundamente influenciado por la Revolución Xinhai que propició el Levantamiento.

E incluso si el señor Badiou sólo se preocupara por la "teoría pura", ¿no podría molestarse en leer algunas noticias en las que, durante al menos dos meses, la ciudad de Wuhan en la provincia de Hubei se había vuelto viral? ¿No habían salido artículos sobre el virus y por lo tanto Wuhan había inundado los medios de comunicación social que tanto detesta él? ¿Cómo es que una de las mejores mentes de nuestro tiempo y de la izquierda no ha podido mostrar la más mínima simpatía por los sufrimientos del pueblo de Wuhan, especialmente por el desfavorecido social y económicamente, la trabajadora inmigrante que encontró un trabajo en el mercado húmedo porque no había otros trabajos más "higiénicos" disponibles para ella?

Razón cartesiana

¿No debería sospechar que los chinos, además de su irrefrenable gusto por la venta de animales vivos al aire libre, son también capaces de pensar y producir, quizás, epistemológicamente, diferentes formas de conocimiento para tratar el virus que quizás podrían permitir "incluso a los países europeos"[5] manejarlo más rápidamente? ¿No se ha dado cuenta de que fueron los trabajadores migrantes—hombres y mujeres repartidores—quienes sostuvieron la vida de millones de personas en esa ciudad completamente cerrada? ¿Y qué hay de Corea del Sur, Taiwán, Hong Kong y Singapur, sus diferentes e innovadoras formas de hacer frente al virus? Pero no, mirando a ninguna parte, nuestros expertos recurren a la Razón, a la Razón Cartesiana.

El párrafo citado, impregnado de inexactitud y exotismo por no decir otra cosa—de hecho, exactamente el tipo de "fábulas racistas en línea" que con razón crítica en el párrafo que sigue inmediatamente—, forma parte del análisis "cartesiano" que en este momento, el Sr. Badiou consideró más útil poner en primer plano para abordar los desafíos que plantea la pandemia. Nuestro filósofo observa que "la actividad intrínseca de la Razón" ha sido disipada por los medios de comunicación social, lo que ha obligado "a los sujetos a volver a esos tristes efectos—misticismo, fabulación, oración, profecía y maldición".

El mundo se divide de nuevo entre la Razón y lo irracional, y en la evaluación de Monsieur Badiou: entre lo "antiguo" y lo "moderno". El hombre cartesiano se sienta con la mayúscula Razón para entender por qué "Ni siquiera los países europeos logran ajustar rápidamente sus políticas frente al virus". ¿La cartesiana? Aquello que corta una estricta separación entre "naturaleza" y "sociedad", y los otros dualismos eurocéntricos que han patrocinado el colonialismo y la explotación capitalista de la "naturaleza"—incluyendo a los indígenas no occidentales como materias primas o meros trabajadores apropiados para el proyecto de progreso capitalista y de la supremacía de la Razón eurocéntrica?

No, las "ideas simples" cartesianas no resolverán el problema. Si hemos de entender el Covid-19 como surgido de una compleja, planetariamente enmarañada y profunda crisis ecológica causada y exacerbada por el capitalismo colonial, la Razón cartesiana se encuentra en su centro epistémico: no sólo como la base filosófica del colonialismo y el capitalismo, sino también como encarnada en la comprensión misma del hombre cartesiano cuya metonimia insiste en que Occidente es impenetrable, impenetrable no sólo a cualquier virus del "Otro" (el virus chino, la gripe Wuhan) sino también a las ideas. La pregunta de Ian Johnson: "¿Por qué tantos países vieron la epidemia desarrollarse durante semanas como si no fuera de su incumbencia?" podría estar en esa pequeña palabra: "incluso". Esta falsa idea de impenetrabilidad y arrogancia eurocéntrica han desperdiciado el tiempo que el "Otro" euroamericano compró para ellos. 

El mercado húmedo

Un punto central de disputa parece ser el "mercado húmedo" que nuestro filósofo relega al territorio de "lo arcaico". En un pasaje en el que discute el llamado "punto de articulación entre las determinaciones naturales y sociales", China se somete a la forma más desnuda de observación colonial: una especie de "eslabón perdido" entre las determinaciones arcaicas/salvajes/naturales y las modernas/civilizadas/sociales:

China es pues, un lugar en el que se puede observar el vínculo—primero por una razón arcaica, luego moderna—entre una intersección naturaleza-sociedad en mercados mal mantenidos que seguían costumbres antiguas por una parte, y una difusión planetaria de este punto de origen soportada por el mercado mundial capitalista y su dependencia de la movilidad rápida e incesante por la otra[6].

Crecí con esos mercados húmedos y nunca se me ocurrió que vivía en algún residuo temporal de salvajismo arcaico, hasta que observé de cerca el pasaje de arriba. Cuando era adolescente, mi madre tenía un pequeño restaurante. Iba todos los días al mercado local a comprar verduras y carne. Yo iba con ella de vez en cuando, y odiaba el olor del mercado, esa mezcla de mierda de pollo y pescado podrido. Eran tiempos difíciles, especialmente en invierno. Aquellas manos rojas de los vendedores durante muchos años perduraron en mi memoria, recordándome la lucha y las penurias de los trabajadores mientras me acostumbraba a los supermercados de Europa, brillantes, higiénicos y con iluminación sexy, que también se encuentran en las principales ciudades de China.

La existencia de esas "condiciones de higiene rudimentaria" de estos mercados no se debe a algún "irrefrenable gusto" o "costumbre antigua". Es ante todo, una condición económica, la del extremo centro, no en la periferia del capitalismo global. Wuhan es una de las tierras interiores "recién descubiertas" de la cadena de producción global, ya que las costas chinas se han vuelto más caras. Mi propia ciudad, que es aún más pequeña e históricamente menos significativa que Wuhan, se ha convertido en los últimos años en uno de estos nuevos territorios del capitalismo global. Las principales empresas digitales, nada menos que Apple, Huawei y similares, se han trasladado recientemente a edificios de oficinas brillantes, higiénicos y con iluminación sexy en esta desconocida capital de montaña de una de las provincias más pobres de China. Le llaman Big Data, el desarrollo más vanguardista de la Razón. El capitalismo global ha conectado mórbidamente el mercado húmedo de Huanan con el mercado de valores de Wall Street. Así que no se sorprendan si un virus que surge de esas ciudades y regiones "desconocidas" se convierte en una pandemia mundial en un futuro próximo.

Malas noticias. Esto no es un desafío sólo a la "ciencia" y a la "razón". Sí, la medicina moderna y de hecho, los grandes datos (como se ve en Asia Oriental) están a la vanguardia de la lucha contra la pandemia actual. Pero si queremos comprender lo que salió mal y por lo tanto, estar preparados para hacer lo que podría ser correcto, esto no es sólo una condición de la epidemia sino también, lo que es más importante, un desafío epistémico.

Ver la epidemia—ahora pandemia—como "compleja por el hecho de que siempre es un punto de articulación entre las determinaciones naturales y sociales" es una maldición cartesiana más que una medicación. Estas dos llamadas "determinaciones" siempre están articuladas, son inseparables y se contagian mutuamente, por si en caso olvidemos que el cambio climático, un fenómeno natural, es ante todo un fenómeno provocado por el hombre, hasta el punto de que algunos pensadores han glorificado al antropo en la nueva era geológica conocida como el antropoceno.

Y para estar preparados a largo plazo, además de una crítica marxista al capitalismo global y a la devastación ecológica del planeta, rechacemos recuperar parte de esta Razón arrogante; desconfiemos de las ideas simples, de los aparentemente higiénicos paquetes de plástico de los animales sacrificados en masa ordenados amablemente en cuarentena temporal en refrigeradores asépticos; recordemos primero varias estrofas como "nada nuevo bajo el sol" (Ecc 1: 9) que el propio señor Badiou invocó, en Eclesiastés 1:4 "Una generación pasa, y otra generación viene; pero la tierra permanece para siempre.” Ni la oración ni la razón por sí solas pueden prepararnos para lo peor que vendrá.

Por suerte, además de las "ideas simples cartesianas", la humanidad tiene una enorme reserva de ricas imaginaciones y filosofías, especialmente aquellas epistemologías que la Razón ha considerado durante mucho tiempo no científicas: las cosmologías indígenas siempre han sostenido que debemos entender y tratar al mundo como un organismo vivo interconectado de suprema complejidad, de frágil resiliencia y de hecho mística.

Afortunadamente, existen los medios de comunicación social, a través de los cuales las personas se organizan más allá de la imaginación extremadamente empobrecida del Estado, que sigue basándose en el mito del Estado nación con su frontera asesina; a través de los cuales los que han sido llevados voluntaria o mediante la fuerza lejos de su hogar, pueden conectarse con sus seres queridos.

Así que no perdamos nuestro compromiso con la diversidad y la multiplicidad cuando nos enfrentemos a una emergencia planetaria como la de Covid-19. No consintamos en una sola narración y a una solución simple. Mientras tanto que necesitamos mantener nuestras manos limpias durante tiempos de infección, seamos epistémicamente antihigiénicos.

Zairong Xiang es investigador del Grupo de Formación de Investigadores de la DFG cosmopolitas menores en la Universidad de Potsdam. Es autor del libro "Queer Ancient Way": A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books, 2018) y tiene un doctorado en Literatura Comparada (Tübingen, Perpignan). Fue investigador en el Instituto de Investigación Cultural ICI-Berlín (2014 - 2016). Es el curador en jefe del "fin de semana cosmopolita menor" en la HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2018), y editor de su catálogo cosmopolita menor: Thinking Art, Politics and the Universe Together Otherwise (Diaphanes, 2020). Ha co-editado el número especial "The Ontology of the Couple" (2019) en GLQ - A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, y el número especial "Hyperimage" para la revista New Art 新美術 (2018). Está trabajando en dos proyectos, que tratan respectivamente de los conceptos de "transdualismo" y "falsificación". 

1. Cito esta traducción inglesa de Jon Solomon que escribió en una petición una crítica elaborada del racismo colonial que los dos virólogos han perpetuado.

2. Alain Badiou "Sobre la situación de la epidemia" (23 de marzo de 2020)

3. La versión francesa del texto, presumiblemente original, se publicó tres días después de la inglesa traducida por Alberto Toscano el 26 de marzo de 2020 en el Quartier Général, donde no se encuentran descripciones sensacionales como "suciedad peligrosa y sabor irreprimible", sino que un marcador temporal "encore aujourd'hui [todavía hoy]" sugiere un prejuicio similar: "Los mercaderes chinos están aún hoy en día connus por lo que se expone, en particular el gusto de la venta en todo el aire de todas las especies de animales vivos entusiastas." Alain Badiou "Sur la situation épidémique" (26 de marzo de 2020)

4. El vicepresidente de los EE.UU. Joe Biden llamó al Covid-19 "el virus Luhan" el 28 de marzo.

5. Alain Badiou "Sobre la situación de la epidemia" (23 de marzo de 2020)

6. Alain Badiou "Sobre la situación de la epidemia" (23 de marzo de 2020)

Tony D. Sampson + Jussi Parikka / How to Live a Sensible Life in the Wake of Covid-19?

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Tony D. Sampson + Jussi Parikka

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In a recent article published in the French journal AOC, we make some observations about what we call ‘the viral patterning of Covid-19’.[1]  Our approach is supported by a concept we call the universal media virus. This concept brings into relation a plurality of contagious patternings and viral loops, traversing biological, economic, cultural, technological, social and political contexts. In this edited version of that article, we focus on a few of our concluding remarks that seem pertinent to considering what it means, in the wake of Covid-19, to live a sensible life. As this special edition posits, the ‘architecture of the Lockdown’ has dramatically increased our dependence on digital virtuality. There is a possibility that the felt corporeality of our bodies will become alienated as our sensibilities shift to online worlds and soulless platforms like Zoom. In many ways, then, it might also be suggested that these architectures of spatial quarantine and confinement have made us ever more prone to threats posed by virtual contagions. Many of us would have already seen those catching Instagram images of empty supermarket shelves. Likewise, digital virtuality seems to be the perfect medium for spreading conspiracy theories, like those seemingly insane rumours that blame the Covid-19 virus on the rollout of 5G networks. 

Before Covid-19, the universality of contagion was often grasped as an analogue of the biological virus. However, after Covid-19, it’s difficult to imagine living life through mere metaphors or indeed via representations of any kind of alien biological context. The virus itself has indeed had a negative influence on the desire for a sensible life, insofar as Covid-19 apparently infects the olfactory gland, resulting in a lockdown of a person’s sense of smell and taste. Life is certainly not, at this moment, simply like a virus. On the contrary, Covid-19 presents us with a series of nested viral loops in which to live, wherein the biological becomes interwoven with the algorithmic churn of panic buying, conspiracy theory and financial meltdown. These viral loops are furtheriian nested in the politics of epidemiological science; in between community herding, lockdown, confinement, the distancing of bodies, testing, immunity passports and desires for inoculation. In short, however much we might try to imagine what a sensible life will be like in these soulless virtual spaces, right now, all we can really do is live this viral life.

As a conceptual tool to understand our new reality, the universal media virus breaks from established media theory analysis of contagion couched in metaphorical, figurative and analogical modes of the imagination. These modes have misleadingly gifted us two kinds of media virus. The first provides a celebration of participatory media culture based on a notion of information as analogous to a biological virus. The second is the Neo-Darwinist meme, founded on the popular meme/gene analogy. On one hand, then, the universal virus challenges an early metaphorical model of media contagion dating back to the 1990s. The information-virus thesis proposes that digital media can be harnessed and manipulated by a newly empowered user. Alongside the comparable concept of spreadable media, the information-virus perceptively tested the assumed entrenchments of the old ideological state apparatus model of media, pointing toward a novel McLuhanesque participatory culture. However, we can, perhaps, in retrospect, trace the celebratory nature of this viral logics all the way to the fantasy of revolutionary social media contagions during the Arab Spring. On the other hand, the universal virus intervenes in a second media virus concept that appeared in the early noughties. The memetic virus was extracted from a few loose remarks made in the latter pages of Richard Dawkins’s neo-Darwinian Selfish Gene thesis of 1976. In Susan Blackmore’s neo-Darwinian Meme Machine, for example, we find a media virus which functions analogically according to an evolutionary algorithm. The logics of the neo-Darwinian meme emerged in various millennial discourses, mostly those associated with the rhetoric of viral marketing and the computer viruses/antivirus arms race. As some overenthusiastic viral marketers claimed, contagion may seem accidental, but the pass-on-power of a media message could be memetically encoded (and harnessed) to spread as determined.

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The universal virus rejects biological or technological determinism in favour of a transversal contagion. In short, no one mechanism determines contagion since the relationality and accidentality of the viral event supersedes deterministic thinking. Contagious behaviours are not solely predetermined by an informational or evolutionary code, as such. The universal virus relates instead to a complex array of unknown unknowns triggered by environmental interactions. Indeed, the vectors of contagion, and any subsequent security response to these environmental conditions, will prove to be effective only after the fact. These are paradoxical viral environments in which the mode of future predictions, based on existing models and reliant on historical data and assumptions, becomes at odds with the necessary open-ended nature of a shared communication network. 

Of course, the story of contagion modelling – either as epidemiological modelling or as conceptualising theoretical models – is not reducible to contemporary network culture. To better grasp the bizarre nature of the kinds of contagious loops we are experiencing with Covid-19, the universal virus makes further significant references to nineteenth century contagion theory. Most notably the concept borrows from Gabriel Tarde’s society of imitation thesis, which, like Paul Virilio, focuses on the accidents of mechanism, rather than a mechanism’s logic. Moreover, Tarde’s imitative social subjects are not the victims, but rather the products of contagion. It is, indeed, in the accidental relations of contagion, that Tarde’s subjects are continuously made and remade. 

Like the inexplicable behaviours of crazed shoppers panic buying toilet rolls in recent weeks, the subjectivities that are produced in Tarde’s society of imitation are conspicuously rendered docile sleepwalkers. His thesis followed a general trend in crowd theories of the time that judged individuals as logical beings, until that is, they become immersed in the illogical mentality of the mob. However, Tarde’s many references to social somnambulism must not be misconstrued as an understanding of society founded entirely on collective stupidity. His work is more nuanced than say Gustave Le Bon’s cruder popular psychology of the crowd. Importantly, Tarde’s references to sleepwalking were informed by the absence of a distinction he made between a biological nonconscious inclination and sociocultural tendencies to imitate. In other words, Tarde’s social subjects, including those that were supposed to be making rational economic judgements, are never self-contained. They are both, simultaneously, etched by the affect of others and leaking their own infectious affects. Again, following the logic of the universal virus, recent outbreaks of panic buying, crazy rumours and seemingly irrational market trading, are examples of further unpredictable automations of bodies and habits that can occur online.

Furthermore, universal viruses are not myths that cover up an underlying ideological reality. Following the Covid-19 outbreak, the universal virus can certainly no longer be considered as a conjured-up fantasy, projection, or for that matter, in the current context, a crude biopolitical invention strategically placed to justify measures of containment. Although, for sure, there are multiple levels of political aims at play, not least in terms of the recurring question of immunological borders, the logic of this virus is now, for the time being, the overriding power dynamic. Far from providing a convenient allegory for action, the very real viral event of Covid-19 is currently producing its own reality according to which our habits and worlds must bend and adapt.

Universal viruses are nonrepresentational in the sense that they make their own physical and metaphysical infrastructures of connectivity, while exposing the underlying social strata upon which – as epi–demos – they function. Along these lines, the legal theorist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos contends that Covid-19 presents a Spinozian contagion in terms of how bodies relate to each other and their environment. The “challenge of Covid” is, he argues, “monumentally ethical.” This is because the virus “demands of us to accept a quintessentially Spinozan ethics of positioning, of emplacing one’s body in a geography of awareness of how affects circulate between us and others.”[2] This viral patterning of habit and behaviour is no longer merely a question of homophilic identification (connecting to friends, friends of friends, parents, etc.), but radically expands to modes of connection and disconnection co-determined by collective bodies that are being positioned in relation to each other, to space, to borders, to containment, etc.

COVID-19 virus. Image: CDC

The viral patterning of Covid-19 will continue to spur a range of actions, habits, behaviours and affects that might take a hold of bodies in more predictable or previously unimagined ways. Certainly, some of the pegs that fix the future of biopolitical movements of people and messages will no doubt produce more docile sleepwalkers. It is not surprising that the UK government initially opted for a neoliberal version of herd immunity in which collective obligation was pitched alongside business as usual. Even now, in its current state of belated lockdown, the UK’s unequal distribution of Covid testing sees leading political figures and royal family members prioritized over frontline health workers. In the US too, Trump’s reluctance to accept Covid-19’s utter disregard for capitalism seems to be making his country a deadly hub for infection. Indeed, what seems to unify the far-right at this moment is its propensity toward Covid-denial, exemplified by Trump and Bolsonaro’s regime in Brazil. Apparently, sales of guns and ammunition are soaring across the US as fears of Covid-19 prompt bunker mentality and self-protection. It is also the case that the reported spread of the virus has been coupled to an intensification and extension of population racism. In the UK, again, the spread of so-called maskaphobia has led to many Chinese students having to opt between what sociologist Yinxuan Huang calls “two bad choices - insecurity (for coronavirus) and fear (for racism).”[3] Ultimately, urban spaces may well be redefined by state controlled measures of social distancing, on one hand, or these kinds of fear-driven detachments, on the other; both of which clearly contrast with the themes of the classical sociology of cities, which grasped urban spaces as locales of dynamic collective density. 

The logic of the universal virus might also produce novel spatiotemporal realities for collective grassroots systems of care. In the wake of Covid-19, we are already witnessing more than the spontaneous emergence of songs of solidarity. Spain is currently nationalizing private hospitals and introducing a national minimum wage; Iran is releasing political prisoners from jails. These are new spatiotemporal realities produced by Covid-19 that could counter the broader context of what Achille Mbembe has referred to as necropolitics. After the dark refrains of Trump, Brexit and subsequent intensifications of population racism, for example, the deadly horror of Covid-19 might actually clear the way for some kind of large-scale radical reaction that addresses these recent corruptions of the global political scene and its role in quickening climate change and the biodiversity crisis. After the applauding of brave health workers and songs of the shutdown subside, painful social, economic and political struggles will inevitably follow the virus. How these struggles manifest against the shifting backdrop of disciplinary confinement and control by way of statistical inoculation and the abandonment of eradication are yet to be seen.[4] New political assemblages might be triggered, at least temporarily. The question we need to ask now is: what are you doing after the lockdown? We do not mean this to be a catchy social media meme, or indeed a misquotation of Baudrillard, but instead we propose it to be the looming political question we must all face.[5]

1. This text is based on an original article, Les logiques nouvelles des médias viraux, published by Analysis, Opinion, Critique (AOC) on Wednesday 8th April (https://aoc.media/) and in English (The New Logics of Viral Media) on Friday 10th April on Duke University’s Boundary 2 website.

2.  Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos “Covid: The Ethical Disease”. Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, 13 March 2020: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/13/covid-the-ethical-disease/

3.  Sally Weale “Chinese students flee UK after 'maskaphobia' triggered racist attacks: Many say China feels safer than Britain amid coronavirus crisis and increasing abuse”. The Guardian, 17 Mar 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/mar/17/chinese-students-flee-uk-after-maskaphobia-triggered-racist-attacks 

4.  Philipp Sarasin “Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault?” Foucault Blog, March 31, 2020: https://www.fsw.uzh.ch/foucaultblog/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault?fbclid=IwAR0t0C9bY3D-j-gyjtxj1f6CDz-0kY0KtgnCUhj9LAuOwMc4r7CC0BxAjSc 

5.  See also Tuomas Nevanlinna “Poikkeustilan julistaminen on äärimmäistä vallankäyttöä, mutta ratkaiseva hetki koittaa kun se lakkautetaan (Declaring a state of emergency is an extreme exercise of power, but the crucial moment comes when it is lifted)”. Kulttuuricocktail, 26 March 2020: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2020/03/28/tuomas-nevanlinna-poikkeustilan-julistaminen-on-aarimmaista-vallankayttoa-mutta 

Tony D. Sampson is a critical theorist with an interest in digital media cultures. His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (Hampton Press, 2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, coedited with Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). His next book - A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media - will be published by Polity in July 2020. Sampson also hosts the Affect and Social Media international conferences in east London and is co-founder of the community engagement initiative the Cultural Engine Research Group. He works as a reader in digital media cultures and communication at the University of East London. Sampson’s research blog is here: https://viralcontagion.blog/.

Jussi Parikka is Professor at University of Southampton (Winchester School of Art) and Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague where he leads the project on Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023). In 2019-2020, he is also Visiting Chair of Media Archaeology at University of Udine, Italy.  His work has touched on questions of virality and computer accidents in the book Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2nd. updated edition 2016, Peter Lang Publishing) and he has touched on questions of ecology and media in books such as Insect Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and A Geology of Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). The French translation Qu'est-ce que l'archéologie des media? came out in 2018 with UGA Editions. Parikka’s blogsite is at http://jussiparikka.net and you can find him on twitter as @juspar (https://twitter.com/juspar)

Benjamin H. Bratton / 18 Lecciones de urbanismo de cuarentena

/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Benjamin H. Bratton

ARTÍCULO ESPECIAL EN ESPAÑOL / Derechos otorgados por el autor para la traducción del artículo originalmente publicado por Strelka Magazine (English version).

Es difícil, si no imposible, ofrecer comentarios sobre una situación que cambia rápidamente en función de lo que se supone que es el resultado, porque eso casi nunca es lo que sucede. Permítanme entonces marcar la hora de mis comentarios de acuerdo a los indicadores conocidos. Hoy en día, los países occidentales se encuentran en varias etapas de bloqueo, catástrofe y contradicción, mientras que China está tentativamente abriéndose de nuevo después de meses de dificultades. En los Estados Unidos, donde estoy encerrado, el gobierno se debate entre fases incoherentes de bravuconería y cobertura de apuestas. Los amigos que deberían saberlo se están convirtiendo en el personaje de Jude Law de Contagion. En todo el mundo, las etapas de dolor de Kübler-Ross son el nuevo horóscopo nacional: negación, ira, negociación, depresión, aceptación. Decir que Estados Unidos está diez días por detrás de Italia no es sólo un análisis epidemiológico, es un diagnóstico psiquiátrico. 

En este punto, estamos viendo meses de extrema rareza y dolor, luego las cosas volverán a un estado que se sentirá más normal, pero no necesariamente la misma normalidad. Ahora mismo, ese es el escenario optimista. Después, muchas formas de hacer las cosas, formas de pensar, formas de poner las cosas en marcha y ofrecer críticas, pueden no volver. Algunas se echarán de menos, otras ni siquiera se notarán. ¿Cuáles son las lecciones importantes que hay que aprender antes de que vuelva la normalidad que causó el caos? Una segunda ola del virus sería catastrófica, pero también lo sería otra ola de sus causas subyacentes.

CONDICIONES PREEXISTENTES

La sensación de emergencia es palpable y real. Pero en lugar de nombrar este momento como un "estado de excepción", lo vemos más como una revelación de "condiciones preexistentes". Las consecuencias de una mala planificación (o de la falta de planificación), de sistemas sociales rotos y de reflejos aislacionistas son explícitas. Se debe vigilar no la "excepción" en nombre de normas familiares, sino el retorno a esas normas disfuncionales después de que se declare la costa despejada. Debemos mantener el enfoque entrenado en las patologías reveladas y al hacerlo, habitar voluntariamente las difíciles ramificaciones del cambio. 

LA VISIÓN EPIDEMIOLÓGICA DE LA SOCIEDAD 

Entre ellas se encuentra una visión epidemiológica de la sociedad, que se centra menos en el individuo versus la sociedad, sino en el conjunto enmarañado a través del cual cada uno de nosotros vive. Cada organismo es un medio de transmisión de información—desde las ideas hasta los virus—y se define por quién y qué está conectado o desconectado a cada uno de ellos. Con COVID-19, el contagio viral es peligroso, pero el riesgo no es sólo individual. Es un riesgo colectivo. La visión epidemiológica debería cambiar nuestro sentido de la subjetividad desde la individuación privada hacia la transmisibilidad pública. El énfasis se aleja desde la experiencia personal y se dirige hacia las responsabilidades expresadas en las realidades biológicas y químicas subyacentes que nos unen. Las interfaces del tablero y los modelos estadísticos de contagio se han convertido en el perfil visual del evento. La imagen de nuestro conjunto interconectado que se ve en estas reflexiones, debería permanecer con nosotros mucho después de que pase la crisis.

iStock / caoyu36

UN EXPERIMENTO DE AVANCE RÁPIDO EN LA GOBERNANZA COMPARATIVA

En estos meses estamos siendo testigos del mayor experimento de gobierno comparativo que probablemente veamos en nuestras vidas. El virus es la variable de control. La forma en que los diferentes sistemas respondan cambiará la forma en que las culturas políticas evalúan sus tradiciones. Brasil está fracasando, Singapur está teniendo éxito, Irán está fracasando, Hong Kong está teniendo éxito. Algunos aspectos del mando y control central han funcionado, otros no, algunas fortalezas del liberalismo occidental han funcionado en respuesta al virus, mientras que otros aspectos están dejando a sus sociedades en un aturdimiento entumecido e incoherente. Cada sistema se enfrenta a la misma prueba simultáneamente. Los resultados son evidentes. 

SIMULACIONES DE MODELOS GOBERNANTES

En cada caso, los gobiernos municipales o nacionales intervienen en función de la información que tienen o no, o simplemente la ignoran. Los más exitosos cuentan con sólidas simulaciones de modelos empíricos y predictivos de la situación, utilizándola como herramienta para la acción. Otros trabajan con datos demasiado escasos o poco fiables como para saber lo que realmente está sucediendo y por lo tanto, qué hacer. La lección es que la función de los modelos ampliamente recopilados, rigurosos y estadísticamente válidos como medio clave de gobierno público, debe persistir mucho tiempo después del virus. Tenemos los medios, pero hemos estado utilizando las tecnologías para cosas menos importantes (publicidad, argumentación, apariencia, etc.). 

LA CAPA DE DETECCIÓN SE ROMPE

Las pruebas son la "capa de detección" de los modelos epidemiológicos gobernantes. Sin ellos, los modelos son conjeturas pero ¿los vemos de esta manera?. Los infomerciales de Smart City nos han enseñado a pensar en los sensores como chips exóticos y caros, y la política socialdemócrata a pensar en la salud pública en términos de cuidados terapéuticos no tecnológicos. Cada uno se pierde una parte significativa de la imagen. Las pruebas y los sensores son la misma cosa. Más pruebas es mejor detección, lo que significa mejores modelos y una mejor respuesta de la salud pública. Una planificación y provisión inadecuadas de pruebas es una modelización inadecuada, lo que constituye una gobernanza inadecuada. Las ciudades que han pasado esta prueba son las que han aplanado la curva de manera efectiva. Las ciudades que han fallado en la prueba de la capa de detección, están convirtiendo las salas de reuniones públicas en morgues improvisadas. 

iStock / chinaphotographer

"MONITOREO" NO ES LA PALABRA CORRECTA

La forma en que definimos, interpretamos, discutimos, desplegamos y resistimos al "monitoreo" ha cambiado de manera decisiva. Hace un par de semanas, otro académico me argumentó que la gente debería resistirse a las pruebas de detección del virus porque el consentimiento sólo fomentaba "la gran data biopolítica". Incluso le dijo a sus estudiantes que se negaran a hacerse pruebas y aún mantiene esta posición. El año pasado tuvo una mayor audiencia para esta línea de pensamiento, pero pocos lo verían de esa manera ahora. La gente está viendo el potencial suprimido de tales tecnologías de nuevo. Reconstruir la infección mediante el rastreo de teléfonos puede ser una herramienta importante, a pesar de la confrontación directa con los principios del anonimato libertario. La visión epidemiológica de la sociedad está cambiando la conversación sobre estos asuntos. El debate no se facilita, pero se abre de manera importante. Es un error interpretar reflexivamente todas las formas de detección y modelización como "monitoreo", y todas las formas de gobierno activo como "control social". Necesitamos un vocabulario diferente y más matizado. 

AUTÓMATA RESISILENTE

Primero en China y ahora en todas las ciudades, en la medida en que puede soportar, los sistemas de entrega de plataformas mantienen intacto el tejido social estresado. En respuesta al virus, las tiendas están cerradas, las calles están vacías, y aún así la vida continúa. Cientos de millones de personas cerradas persisten en el encapsulamiento privado, comprando en sus teléfonos y comiendo lo que la persona + fábrica de alimentos al final de la aplicación trae a la puerta. Con los relés de orden automatizados, oleadas de administradores de sistemas y mensajeros mantienen el mundo en movimiento cuando el gobierno no puede. Al hacerlo, las cadenas de automatización se han convertido en una esfera pública de emergencia. A veces la automatización no es la frágil capa virtual en la parte superior de la robusta ciudad, sino más bien lo contrario. 

ESENCIALISMO ESTRATÉGICO

Cuando las ciudades se cierran, sólo las partes consideradas esenciales permanecen abiertas para permitir esos relevos de subsistencia. Nuestras sociedades se reducen a las funciones básicas de alimentos, medicinas y comunicaciones, no muy diferente a las bases lunares. Los centros de las ciudades se han convertido en zonas de exclusión de los humanos, entregados a un abandono sereno. Mientras tanto en línea, las organizaciones continúan como versiones virtuales improvisadas de sí mismas: telemedicina, deportes simulados, intimidades meta-versos, educación y conferencias en línea, etc. Se interroga a las cadenas de suministro por haber dejado vulnerables las necesidades esenciales sin respaldo.  El modo de bloqueo del urbanismo planetario es una compresión desigual de los aspectos más esenciales de sus interconexiones industriales: señal, transmisión, metabolismo. 

UNA CUARENTENA DE LUJO TOTALMENTE AUTOMATIZADA CONTRA EL CONFINAMIENTO SOLITARIO

Nos estamos adaptando incómodamente a las psicografías del aislamiento. En el curso aprendemos nuevo vocabulario, como "diseño de edificios que cumplen con el distanciamiento social". "Cuarentena" significa una especie de estado indeterminado suspendido. Es un limbo. Los días se convierten en semanas. La sospecha oficial de que una persona puede ser un riesgo para el resto continuará incluso después de que se relajen las reglas de cierre. Mientras tanto, nuestros hábitats inmediatos están definidos por nuevas relaciones paranoicas entre el interior y el exterior. Si la cuarentena general dura mucho tiempo, algunas de ellas se volverán permanentes.  A medida que los servicios que antes se conocían como lugares en la ciudad se transforman ahora en aplicaciones y aparatos dentro del hogar, el espacio público es evacuado y la esfera "doméstica" se convierte en su propio horizonte.

LA VACILACIÓN DEL CAMPAMENTO/BÚNKER

A nuestro alrededor vemos el campamento y el búnker cambiando de lugar. ¿La valla te mantiene dentro o fuera? La barrera que mantiene el peligro percibido contenido (campamento) frente a la que lo mantiene fuera (búnker) pueden parecer formas arquitectónicas idénticas. El mismo día, vemos a los viajeros que llegan al aeropuerto O'Hare de Chicago hacinados en un pasillo esperando ser revisados para su reingreso en los Estados Unidos, probablemente infectándose unos a otros. También vemos imágenes de clubes de Londres llenos con multitudes de juerguistas visualmente similares, que definitivamente se infectan entre sí. El primero es un cuello de botella de infraestructura mientras que el segundo es una experiencia cultural costosa, pero al virus no le importa. Se replica igual de bien en uno que en el otro. En casa, las habitaciones se convierten en hábitats de astronautas y las interfaces con el mundo exterior se desplazan a formas de "entrega sin contacto". Montamos nuestros propios dramas de campamento contra el búnker como el guión de la vida cotidiana. 

Prospect, 2018 (still image)

PROTOCOLOS DE APRETÓN DE MANOS

Las formas básicas de intimidad social y confianza, como los apretones de manos, se congelan y renegocian. El vínculo del apretón de manos una vez significó la confianza personal a través del tacto, pero ahora si un extraño le ofrece su mano expuesta, usted lo encontrará profundamente poco confiable. Aquellos que se niegan a aceptar el cambio (en nombre de "preservar la vida" o "rechazar la xenofobia") anuncian y exponen en voz alta su falta de confianza. En pandemias anteriores, como el VIH, los profilácticos se convirtieron en una parte importante de la política de contacto. Cómo preservamos la intimidad mientras estamos informados por la realidad viral será un desafío definitorio para las culturas que resurjan del aislamiento en los meses venideros. 

LA BIOMETRÍA A MANO

La forma en que nos relacionamos es parte del cómo lo hacemos con la ciudad y lo hemos hecho durante mucho tiempo, a través de capas de pieles artificiales y prótesis (también conocidas como ropa y teléfonos). Los puntos de contacto biométricos son otra forma en que la ciudad decide quién va a dónde y hoy en día algunos se están expandiendo, mientras que otros se están cerrando. De las tecnologías biométricas, los termómetros están en ascenso pero los escáneres de huellas dactilares se han apagado. El seguimiento de la ubicación de los teléfonos está en alza, pero el reconocimiento facial está en pausa ya que el uso de máscaras en público ha pasado de ser un acto de desafío a una precaución obligatoria. 

NUEVAS MÁSCARAS

Hablando de máscaras, ellas se encuentran entre las formas de arte más antiguas y consumadas de la humanidad, pero en tiempos de plaga o guerra también sirven como máquinas para filtrar el aire y asegurar una atmósfera artificial habitable. Hoy en día, la escasez de máscaras disponibles, es una señal visceral de fragilidad sistémica. A largo plazo, la oferta satisfará la demanda y el deseo de usar máscaras a medida que nos aventamos a volver al público. El propósito de las máscaras, no sólo será el distanciamiento social de nosotros mismos de las partículas virales del ambiente, sino también comunicar a los demás los términos del compromiso personal. Las máscaras son y serán tanto expresivas como funcionales; no sólo asegurarán la filtración, sino que también señalarán nuestras personalidades y comunicarán la solidaridad con el patrimonio epidemiológico e inmunológico.

faceidmasks.com

CASCADAS TRÓFICAS

La conciencia de la realidad social epidemiológica se extiende a toda la biósfera. A medida que el código de ARN de COVID-19 hackea nuestras células, comienza un efecto dominó de consecuencias, alterando no sólo el movimiento de las personas, sino también afectando los ciclos planetarios de energía, materialización, gasto y desperdicio. Este es el principio ecológico de la cascada trófica, por el cual la agencia de una forma de vida pone en marcha los cambios con un efecto de gran tamaño. La conclusión que se puede sacar no es que la interconexión global sea una mala idea (o una buena idea), sino que es intrínseca y va más allá de lo que se realiza convencionalmente. El metabolismo planetario ha sido distorsionado por la exuberante liberación de carbono y calor. La composición de las alternativas necesarias no puede depender de girar una sola perilla maestra en la dirección correcta, como el crecimiento versus el decrecimiento. Nuestro pensamiento y nuestras intervenciones deben basarse en una comprensión de mayor resolución de las interrelaciones cíclicas y las economías físicas, desde las escalas de infección viral hasta la circulación intercontinental y viceversa. 

NUEVOS ACUERDOS MÁS ECOLÓGICOS

Es imposible para cualquier persona seria no ver paralelos entre las respuestas inadecuadas de los gobernantes tanto a la crisis del coronavirus como al cambio climático. Donde debería residir la planificación y el gobierno efectivos a escala planetaria, hay en cambio un vacío chirriante. Los diversos Nuevos Acuerdos Verdes nacionales y regionales implican un cambio en el papel de la gobernanza. En lugar de reflejar únicamente la voluntad general, la gobernanza es ahora también la gestión directa de los ecosistemas (incluida la sociedad humana). Sin embargo, puede que esto no sea suficiente. La ausencia de una planificación sólida, desalienta la inversión en infraestructuras basadas en ciclos de recuperación a largo plazo de los flujos de energía y materiales. Un Nuevo Acuerdo Verde a escala planetaria también se basaría en el vínculo dolorosamente obvio entre los sistemas de salud pública robustos y la viabilidad económica y ecológica. El mismo, renunciaría al nacionalismo en nombre de la coordinación, a la investigación básica en primer plano y desvincularía el romanticismo de la guerra cultural de la administración de los ecosistemas. Mientras todos miramos fijamente nuestras aplicaciones para el tablero de contagio, deberíamos mirar más de cerca las simulaciones de modelos como un medio de gobierno ecológico.

"GEOINGENIERÍA COTIDIANA"

Estos planes deberían tomar la realidad intrínsecamente "artificial" de nuestra condición planetaria como punto de partida. El rechazo a comprometerse y abrazar esa artificialidad, en nombre de un retorno a la "naturaleza", ha llevado a una catastrófica negación y abandono. Conceptos como la "geoingeniería" deben ser redefinidos para implicar efectos de diseño a escala planetaria, no sólo intervenciones tecnológicas específicas. Regímenes reguladores como un impuesto mundial de emisiones de carbono, así como la conservación de los depósitos naturales de carbono y biodiversidad, son también de esta manera, formas de "geoingeniería". Al mismo tiempo, el despliegue de nuevas tecnologías a escala masiva no es opcional porque la descarbonización debe ir "más allá de cero". Necesitamos no sólo reducir radicalmente las emisiones de carbono, sino también restar y secuestrar los muchos miles de millones de toneladas de carbono que ya están en la atmósfera. Sin embargo, las tecnologías de emisiones negativas están desterradas de la mayoría de los nuevos acuerdos ecológicos propuestos. El ambientalismo dominante seguirá a la ciencia, pero no cuando contradiga la tecnofobia profundamente arraigada. En cambio, el pragmatismo extremo es el camino hacia la verdadera creatividad.

wiki.commons

MOVILIZACIÓN E IMPLEMENTACIÓN

¿Pero cómo es posible construir tales cosas? ¿Cómo pueden aplicarse las intervenciones disruptivas basadas en modelos climáticos? Entre las cuestiones más divisivas y decisivas de la década de 2020 no estará el si, sino el cómo se despliegan los ejércitos nacionales y transnacionales para la protección de los bienes comunes ecológicos, la vigilancia de la mitigación, la gestión preventiva de la tierra y el desarrollo de tecnologías de intervención climática. La noción es claramente incómoda, pero ¿cuáles son las alternativas realistas que renuncian a la movilización y la aplicación en gran escala? ¿Es posible incluso que los cambios fundamentales de nuestra crisis climática se defiendan sólo mediante un consenso deliberativo? Incluso si así fuera, ¿cómo lo haría sin la posterior aplicación a la misma escala que el problema? En la próxima temporada de incendios, ¿se enviarán tropas internacionales para proteger el Amazonas? Si no, enumeremos las razones por las que no y asegurémonos de que siguen siendo buenas.

LA VENGANZA DE LO REAL

¿Y ahora qué? Este momento debería ser un golpe mortal para la ola populista de los últimos años, ¿pero lo será? El populismo desprecia a los expertos y a la pericia, pero ahora mismo la gente desea competencia. En este momento, la previsión y la eficacia tecnocráticas secas, preparadas, dignas de confianza, disponibles, adaptables y receptivas parecen la política más idealista imaginable. Sin embargo, la capacidad humana de exagerar los hechos para favorecer las narrativas sigue siendo increíble. El contagio mundial y las variadas respuestas de las diferentes sociedades han expuesto las ideologías y tradiciones como ineficaces, fraudulentas y suicidas. Lo que se requiere no es tanto una nueva narrativa o un nuevo arte, sino la aceptación de cómo la rápida intrusión de una realidad indiferente, puede hacer inútil la resistencia simbólica. Las condiciones preexistentes ahora expuestas, cristalizan la necesidad de una geopolítica basada no en las tácticas de dilema del prisionero autodestructivo ante los riesgos comunes, sino en un plan deliberado para la coordinación del planeta que ocupamos, que hacemos y que rehacemos de nuevo. De lo contrario, este momento será realmente una emergencia permanente.

Benjamin H. Bratton es el director de programa The Terraforming en el Instituto Strelka. Es profesor de Artes Visuales en la Universidad de California, San Diego, profesor en European Graduate School, profesor visitante en la Universidad de Nueva York en Shanghai y en el Instituto de Arquitectura del Sur de California.