/ 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.
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.
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
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
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/
Slavoj Žižek. “Communism or babarism, it’s that simple.” An interview with Renata Ávila.
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
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/
Susan Watkins. “The Political State of the Union.” New Left Review 90 (2014), pp. 5-6.
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