This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by Arne De Boever. 

by Mikkel Krause Frantzen

1/ The future is already lost, the loss is just unevenly distributed. This altered version of sci-fi author William Gibson’s famous one-liner captures our age nicely: there is, on the one hand, the permeating sense that the future has no future, that the future has slipped away before our eyes. On the other, this doesn’t mean ‘we’ are all in the same proverbial boat, that ‘we’ are suffering in the same way. It is also important to realize that this loss of futurity is not an abstract loss. When you are in debt and have pawned away your future, more precisely your future labor, in order to pay back a debt that can never be paid, it is not abstract. When you live in the Arctic and the ice is melting due to global warming and you can foresee that you cannot sustain your way of life, or you live in Australia and endless draught has made it impossible keep living on the land that you and your family have lived on for generations, it is not abstract. The loss is concrete and it has economic and ecological implications. To quote from Joshua Clover’s poetry collection Red Epic, “because reasons”: because capitalism and its genocidal and ecocidal machine.

2/ It wasn’t depression, it was capitalism. As I have written elsewhere (in the book Going Nowhere, Slow and also in The Los Angeles Review of Books), the loss of futurity is one of the symptom(s) of depression, if not its primary symptom. Since the 1970s, depression has gradually become the paradigmatic psychopathology of capitalist societies. Alan Horwitz has detailed how by 1975, the 18 million diagnoses of depression had surpassed the 13 million diagnoses of anxiety, and in 1980 the third edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) saw the light of day, a pivotal event within the field of psychiatry: “Although biological psychiatry and its central vehicle of depression were gaining ground during the 1970s, the implementation of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III), which the APA issued in 1980, was the central turning point leading to the transition from anxiety to depression.” That the history and rise of depression runs parallel with the history and rise of neoliberalism should cause us no surprise. When no such thing as society exists, when all forms of collectivity have been utterly destroyed, all there is left is the individual. If you are depressed, it is your own fault. Like in the diagnostic manuals, no context is needed. If you feel like shit, you alone are to blame. It is your own personal problem and responsibility. 

3/ Capitalism kills love, but it kills more than that. There is an artwork by the artist duo Claire Fontaine, whose work often engages the relation between depression and the political economy: it’s a neon sign that says “Capitalism kills love.” But capitalism kills more than that. Capitalism, some times in the guise of neoliberal austerity measures, forces people to kill themselves. The examples are legion: Dimitris Christoulas in Greece, who put a gun to his head in front of the Greek parliament, declaring “I am not committing suicide, they are killing me”; Jerome Rodgers in England, who died by suicide aged twenty after two unpaid £65 fines spiraled to over £1000; Daniel Desnoyers in the US, who “committed suicide after he lost his insurance and access to his psychiatric medication because he was $20 short on the monthly premium.” Or a 22-year-old-student in Lyon, France, who set himself on fire in front of a university restaurant due to financial difficulties and a desperate, precarious situation. Quickly the hashtag “#laprécaritétue” spread: Insecurity, precarity, kills. Let’s also not forget the waves of suicides at the Foxconn factory in China around 2010, with one worker, Xu (not to be confused with the poet Xu Lizhi who killed himself at this exact place in 2013) telling The Guardian some years later: “It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying […] Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.” This is capitalist normality: Suicide, death. You die before you should have, it’s a normal thing. All of this to say that the current crisis, or crises, is also a mental health crisis. Across the globe people (students, workers, the unemployed) seem to be getting more and more unhappy, desperate and depressed. It is a common, yet uneven condition. Some tragic cases (like those just described) make it into the news; many others do not.

4/ What COVID-19 intensifies is an already generalized condition.  And then COVID-19 happened. At the time of this writing, the virus has led to more than half a million dead across the globe. Since the outbreak of the pandemic 40 million Americans have lost their jobs, supply chains have broken down, consumption has plummeted, oil prices have been negative and the global levels of debt, already sky-high, have reached stratospheric heights. On March 16, when the VIX opened at 57,83 and closed at 82,69, the Dow Jones Index fell nearly 3,000 points, “the worst trading day in percentage terms since the ‘Black Monday’ crash of 1987 when the Dow got a 22 percent haircut.” And then, magically and absurdly, the markets recovered: In the beginning of July, The Economist reported that “American stock markets recorded their best quarter in at least two decades. From April to June the S&P i500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by around 25%, and the Nasdaq by over a third.” Once again, the Fed came to the rescue, this time even keeping the junk bond-market afloat, while the average American was left to drown in a sea of debt, joblessness and little to no health care. Once again, the final reckoning was postponed and another veil was cast over the stark economic reality. This is the current predicament, a situation which COVID-19 has intensified, but in no way initiated. It is a crisis that is intimately and inherently connected not only to the economic crisis, but also and above all to the ongoing ecological one: the loss of biodiversity, deforestation, the food industry, agricultural capitalism, the destruction of ecosystems and wildlife habitats—all of these events (and many more) are contributing factors in the outburst and dispersion of SARS-CoV-2. “Forget the butterfly effect,” Adam Tooze argues: “this is the bat effect – our stranglehold on nature has unleashed the coronavirus outbreak. And the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how to run our networked world.” As is the case with the climate crisis, the corona crisis is no natural disaster. It is yet another example of what Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, referred to as “the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Yet another example of nature getting even. And ‘we’, the humans living in and through the crisis, have to ask the question that Mike Davis—who wrote about the avian flu in The Monster at our Door (2005)—articulated lately: has capitalist globalization become biologically unsustainable?

5/ Zoom is shit. Meanwhile (and as several texts included in this dossier have already described), the lockdown continued, university teaching took place online, and students were forced to sit at home, each in front of their own screen, isolated and alienated. Of course, many students around the world were already indebted and feeling lost, and without any future whatsoever. A futureless and fucked-up generation indeed. In Fall 2019, a Danish report was published, documenting that approximately 10% of all students in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, are struggling with mental health issues. This number only corroborates a general tendency in Danish society and the 18,4% increase in diagnoses of depression during the last decade. Other data even suggest that almost half of the students at the university of Copenhagen (48%) have experienced physical stress symptoms. For these reasons, and before COVID-19, I decided to engage some of the students at Department of Arts and Cultural Studies in a series of conversations/interviews in the Spring semester of 2020. The picture that took shape is not pretty. One interviewee, a second year-student with multiple diagnoses, told me: “All of us students are feeling like shit and yet everyone is alone in their own misery.” It did not get any better after the lockdown, quite the opposite. While some students may have thrived in the interregnum—with less obligations, less stress, less social interactions, less speed—it was certainly not the case with the eight students that I talked to. One student with social anxiety was adamant that Zoom was only accelerating her anxiety, especially but not only when it came down to the so-called “breakout rooms.” All of the interviewees emphasized that they were feeling more isolated, anxious, precarious and/or depressed. Or as an MA-student diagnosed with depression wrote to me: “I will definitely say that this [the lockdown and the transformation of classes from physical to virtual settings] is far, far worse than being at KUA [the campus for the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen],” only to add, more emphatically: “tl:dr: online teaching sucks”.

6/ Capitalism has become psychologically unsustainable. How to collectivize these experiences of mental illness, within the university and beyond? How to mobilize the students and how also to eliminate their suffering and the conditions that make them suffer? How to create infrastructures of care that don’t produce patients nor handle health as a business or a commodity; how to treat people who are sick in ways and in environments that are not themselves sick; how to deal with depression, and mental illnesses in general, outside the norm of returning people to normality, getting them (back) to being good, happy and productive workers? Or, more crudely, how to reclaim the future? The solutions offered by neoliberal ideology are clearly not helping. Notions of manning up, courses in positive psychology, self-help gurus and other forms of individualized therapy: they are not really helping. (The question of medication, antidepressants, and Big Pharma is a topic too large to deal with here.) At the University of Copenhagen—a full-blown neoliberal and financialized institution—a stress think tank has been launched recently and already it is evident that it too focuses on subjective and individual changes (releasing a mindfulness-app for instance), not structural and institutional ones. This isn’t helping either. But what then? The psychopathological problems of the present need to be taken seriously, but it would be exaggerated and maybe even counterproductive to speak of a mental health epidemic, as Nikolas Rose in a podcast has pointed out. A lot of the problems that are being framed as mental health problems are in fact social, political, economic and/or ecological problems (Nona Fernández reminds us: “No era depresíon era capitalismo”). Thus, it is important not to indulge in the tendency to privatize, psychologize and pathologize suffering, important not to reinforce the tendency to over-diagnose mental illnesses such as depression. That said, the problem of mental health is, unquestioningly, an acute problem, and one that has only been escalating since COVID-19. Not only among students, obviously. There has been a rise in suicides: “Deaths in mental health hospitals have doubled compared with last year – with 54 fatalities linked to since March began.” Several epidemiological studies have, unsurprisingly, found heightened rates of depression, anxiety and stress during the pandemic–from Colorado to China. Here, it bears repeating that ‘we’ are not all in the same boat. Just like COVID-19, and any other illness for that matter, mental health problems are distributed differentially, hitting disproportionately hard among communities who are struggling and vulnerable to begin with. To the question of mental illness belong questions of race, class and gender that cannot be ignored. Overall, then, COVID-19 poses a wide range of public and mental health questions, and not just to the disciplines of psychiatry or psychology. There is still a lot to think about, numerous questions left unexplained and unanswered. Yet there is little doubt that capitalism, at this point, simply seems to have become—always already was—psychologically unsustainable.

 

Thank you to Arne De Boever and to all my students, especially the ones who agreed to share their stories and experiences with me during Spring semester of 2020.

 

Mikkel Krause Frantzen (b. 1983), PhD, postdoc at the Department the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where he works on finance, fiction and the psychopathologies of the present. He is the author of Going Nowhere, Slow – The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (Zero Books 2019), his work has appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Austrian Studies, Studies in American Fiction, boundary2, SubStance, Los Angeles Review of Books and Theory, Culture and Society.

 

 

This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by Arne De Boever. 

by Chad Kautzer

“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

– President Donald J. Trump, July 24, 2018

 

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we have witnessed how autocrats can effortlessly dismiss dire public health news, regardless of its factual basis, and disparage its messengers or even smear them as treasonous without reservation. Such reactions undermine public health and threaten the researchers and practitioners generating knowledge in its service. Yet, however demoralizing it may be to witness the present disregard for public health as well as the belittlement and even endangerment of public health advocates, there are lessons to be learned about authoritarianism and the ways we can oppose it.[1]

Trust in public health researchers and practitioners derives not from their supposed objectivity or claims to certainty, but from a commitment to transparency, an openness to critique and revision, and the promotion of health equity in the face of economic and sociodemographic disparities. As producers of credible knowledge in the lab or in the field, they earn a form of authority we call epistemic. To autocrats, who consider their own political authority to be subject to neither critique nor limit—Trump, for example, recently claimed that his authority is “total”—epistemic authority represents an unwelcome check, because it can raise legitimate questions about their policies and assertions. Attacks on journalists, academics, and civil and human rights organizations are similarly motivated by the autocrat’s desire to undermine or appropriate their various kinds of authority. To this end, these groups are often described as “elites” or “enemies of the people” to separate them from the “real people” whom the autocrat is said to personify.

Autocratic regimes do, of course, rely on expert knowledge, but vigorously police them to ensure that such expertise does not contradict the leader or erode trust in the authoritarian relations, and alternate epistemic universe, they cultivate. This task becomes difficult in times of crisis, when autocrats feel compelled to demonstrate absolute authority, yet solutions to complex problems call for input from a plurality of voices (including those most impacted), open and critical deliberation, and public trust.[2] Autocrats are therefore engaged in a battle on multiple fronts: confronting public crises, while simultaneously assailing non-political forms of authority that could challenge them.

Autocratic Tactics Against Public Health Advocates

When the crisis is a public health emergency, it is public health researchers and practitioners who gain public prominence and in turn the autocrat’s covetous wrath. The autocrat employs three identifiable tactics in his campaign against the epistemic authority of others, namely, those of delegitimizing, silencing, and usurping.[3] The tactic of delegitimizing public health advocates is pursued through spurious accusations and public denigration. It is often combined with, and said to justify, the second tactic, namely, silencing through threats, removal, incarceration, or even death.

At the beginning of the pandemic, indeed, before the novel coronavirus had a name or was deemed to have caused a pandemic, there was the tragic case of Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan. It was early January of this year when the Chinese government attempted to delegitimate and silence Dr. Wenliang, a 33-year-old ophthalmologist. Late last year, Dr. Wenliang alerted fellow doctors about several patients with coronavirus infections, although the virus strain was unclear. He recommended his colleagues and their families take precautions.

Within days, Dr. Wenliang was publicly accused of spreading rumors, detained, and threatened with prosecution. Police from the Wuhan Public Security Bureau made him sign a letter stating that he made “false comments,” had “severely disturbed the social order,” and must promise to never do it again. He returned to work and contracted the virus, but days before he died on February 3, he publicly shared the letter they made him sign, sparking national outrage. In an interview before his death, Dr. Wenliang said “I think there should be more than one voice in a healthy society, and I don’t approve of using public power for excessive interference.”[4]

For the past several years, Turkey’s autocratic President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has used delegitimizing and silencing tactics against tens of thousands of academics, scientists, journalists, doctors, artists, and activists, labeling them terrorists or terrorist sympathizers with the help of  anti-terrorism legislation Amnesty International calls “vague and widely abused in trumped up cases.”[5] Individuals have lost their jobs, their public platforms, and their personal freedom.[6]

Dr. Bülent Şık, for example, was a deputy director at the Food Safety and Agricultural Research Center at Akdeniz University, but fired from his position and indicted for participating in terrorist propaganda by signing an Academics for Peace petition. He had recently completed years of research for the Ministry of Health measuring environmental pollutants in several regions of Turkey and found widespread and serious risks to public health. When he attempted to alert the public to the danger in a series of newspaper articles, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison. During the coronavirus pandemic, doctors Güle Çınar and Yusuf Savran were detained and made to issue public apologies after their statements about the coronavirus were deemed inconsistent with the official state line.[7] Most recently, public health specialist and member of the Turkish Medical Association COVID-19 Monitoring Group, Prof. Kayıhan Pala, is under investigation for stating that the number of infections and fatalities in the Turkish city of Bursa is higher than publicly reported.[8]

Brazil’s neofascist president, Jair Bolsonaro, has employed all three tactics against health care officials at a time when the country has the second highest number of coronavirus infections and deaths in the world. He has ridiculed warnings by medical experts, calling them “hysterical”; removed officials who advocated for evidence-based policies that contradicted his political imperatives; and recommended unproven remedies such as hydroxychloroquine as if he possessed specialized knowledge on the subject. “The virus is out there and we will have to face it, but like men, damn it, not kids,” he said at a public event, where he flouted the social distancing rules set by his then health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, a medical doctor.

It was Mandetta’s social distancing policy and lack of support for Bolsonaro’s hydroxychloroquine remedy that led to the minister’s ouster.[9] In his farewell press conference, Mandetta urged Ministry of Health employees to not be afraid and to vigorously defend science. “Science is light,” he said, “and it is through science that we will find a way out of this.”[10] Mandetta’s replacement, Nelson Teich, also a physician, quit as health minister weeks later after opposing Bolsonaro’s continued push for hydroxychloroquine and his failure to consult with the Ministry of Health before reopening businesses.[11] Bolsonaro tested positive for COVID-19 in early July.

In Russia, which now has the third highest number of infections, police arrested Anastasia Vasilieva, a physician and head of the Alliance of Doctors, for speaking out about the government’s undercounting of coronavirus cases and the lack of personal protective equipment for health-care workers.[12] In Leningradskaya, Dr. Natalia Trofimova was fired after warning that a new ward for Covid-19 patients was not safe,[13] and in St. Petersburg journalist Tatiana Voltskaya was criminally charged for publishing an interview with a doctor about the lack of ventilators under a new law that forbids spreading “false information” about the coronavirus.[14] According to Sarah Clarke from the rights group Article 19, Russia’s new law “makes it easy for the authorities to suppress any data deviating from the official narrative and punish journalists and ordinary citizens for openly questioning the efficacy of official responses.”[15]

The authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, was granted dictatorial powers under the auspices of fighting the pandemic in March of this year. As with Russia’s law against spreading “false information,” the law granting Orbán dictatorial power makes similar acts punishable by up to five years in prison. Political science professor László Bruszt aptly described it as “a real sword hanging over the head of doctors and journalists alike.”[16]

We recognize a similar autocratic playbook in Trump’s response to public health officials during the coronavirus pandemic, and in previous encounters with authoritative knowledge concerning economic, military, intelligence, and environmental issues. Trump began by controlling or silencing the message from physicians and scientists at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), insisting all public messaging be done through the Coronavirus Task Force press briefings. He then replaced the head of the task force, HHS Secretary Alex Azar, with Vice President Mike Pence, a sycophant who famously stays on message.[17] Having consolidated the public communications from relevant government agencies and scientists in the task force, Trump then took over its press briefings. He saturated them with self-congratulatory monologues, enemy lists, false claims, and untested cures as well as real-time spin of task force member statements that contradicted his own.[18]

Trump has also employed delegitimizing and silencing tactics against doctors and public health officials beyond the task force. After Christi A. Grimm, an inspector general at HHS, released a report on the shortages of testing and safety equipment at hospitals, Trump called the report “fake,” characterized her as an oppositional political operative, and is in the process of removing her.[19] Also removed was Dr. Rick Bright, director of HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, for, he says, limiting “the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit.” In order to combat the virus, he said, “science—not politics or cronyism—has to lead the way.” [20] Trump sought to undermine Dr. Bright’s credibility by describing him as “a disgruntled guy” and added that he “hadn’t heard great things about him either.”[21] The Food and Drug Administration has since issued a warning against the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine and the United States Office of Special Counsel has determined that Dr. Bright’s removal likely violated the Whistleblower Protection Act.[22] In early July, Trump also began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO, which he claims “China has total control over.”[23]

The most sensational tactic Trump employs against public health researchers and practitioners is usurpation or the appropriation of their epistemic authority for himself. There is seemingly no end to the issues Trump, with his “very good brain” and familial relation to a “great super genius” MIT professor, claims to be the expert about. It has become the pastime of journalists to compile lists of them. While recently touring CDC headquarters in March, Trump told reporters “I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”[24] It was this perceived ability that informed his repeated claims that hydroxychloroquine is a risk-free cure for Covid-19 as well as his musings about the benefits of injecting disinfectants and “very powerful light” into the body.[25] While it is tempting to dismiss such hubris as simply the clownish flouting of convention, these are the typical antics of an autocrat.[26]

Tragically, an autocrat’s absurd proclamations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. As Catherine MacKinnon observes in Feminism Unmodified, “the beliefs of the powerful become proof, in part because the world actually arranges itself to affirm what the powerful want to see.”[27] This happens in part through an actual changing of the world. Hours after Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner publicly mischaracterized the National Strategic Stockpile of medical supplies for health emergencies as “our stockpile,” i.e. for the federal government and not the states, the official mission statement on the website of the National Strategic Stockpile was edited to turn Kushner’s lie into the truth.[28] And it happens in part through changing the appearance of the world, as when Trump altered a National Weather Service map with a marker to lazily substantiate his misstatement about the path of a hurricane.[29] “Populists are not greatly concerned with the subtleties of empirical observation,” writes Federico Finchelstein in From Fascism to Populism in History, “but instead direct their attention toward reworking, even reinventing, reality in accordance with their varied ideological imperatives.”[30]

Epistemic Authoritarianism

The autocrat’s desire to undermine and appropriate the epistemic authority of others is more than a defensive posture. Delegitimizing, silencing, and usurping tactics are not merely deployed to disarm particular threats. The tendency is rather to develop what we might call an epistemic authoritarianism in which “truth” and “reality” are, to the greatest extent possible, authored by the autocrat and their surrogates. The autocrat encourages their supporters, who now constitute “the people,” to not only reject particular facts and theories, but to challenge the very processes of rational reflection and deliberation as well. This creates an epistemic vacuum that is filled by the will and myths of the autocrat, and increases the chances that followers will engage in unreflective or spontaneous acts of violence.[31]

In their 1949 study of fascist tendencies in the U.S., Prophets of Deceit, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman describe the fascist leader as seeking to “increase his audience’s disorientation by destroying all rational guideposts.”[32] This allows more emotive and irrational forces to reign and “truth” to operate as something more akin to loyalty. Or as Finchelstein writes, truth is “reformulated as a matter of ideological, often visceral, faith, rather than as a function of observation, rational discernment, and corroboration.”[33] Autocrats achieve this by mobilizing long present authoritarian values and structures that already constrain who may be publicly recognized as credible. They foment distrust through a deluge of outlandish lies and conspiracy theories, particularly those attributing sinister motives to scientists, academics, and journalists, that play on anti-Semitic, racist, and nativist tropes.

Eventually, the sheer quantity of delusional nonsense produces a qualitative shift: a generalized suspicion of all potential bearers of epistemic authority. “The credibility of any source, indeed the very idea of verified knowledge itself is thus thrown into question,” writes Sophia Rosenfeld in Democracy and Truth.[34] The exception is, of course, the autocrat himself, whose self-proclaimed unique insight is incorruptible and thus becomes the only remaining means for the people to access reality itself.[35] This hegemony silences the plurality of voices and the processes of critique and revision. “He warns his audience,” write Löwenthal and Guterman, “that it needs his guidance in the bewildering situation in which it finds itself.”

Out of this fog a narrative emerges: Conditions, we are told, were awful before the autocrat came to power, i.e. the people were victimized and humiliated by their enemies both foreign and domestic, but now everything is better than it has ever been.[36] The autocrat is unsparing in the Pollyannaish, self-congratulatory assessments of their own performance. Like a children’s game, enemies are conjured up and swiftly defeated before dinner without the pretense of evidence. The autocrat claims they are relentlessly persecuted by shadowy forces and political enemies because they fight for “the people,” yet the autocrat always triumphs in the end and thus so too do the people, at least vicariously.[37]

The power of these fictions does not depend on the intended audience mistaking them for empirical truths or even sincere assertions. These are no longer conditions for belief within epistemic authoritarianism.[38] The autocrat divides the world into friends and enemies, leans heavily on ritualistic performances, and titillates followers by transgressing social norms they consider oppressive, such as prohibitions on racism, sexism, and religious bigotry.[39] Innuendo and empty signifiers (e.g. “Just look at what’s happening”) permit followers to fill in the blanks with their white supremacist, anti-Semitic, and misogynist fantasies. Resentment over the unfulfilled promises of an economic system that leaves needs unfulfilled and renders life more precarious is channeled into a rejection of democracy. “Because it does not fulfill what it promises,” writes Theodor Adorno in The Authoritarian Personality, “they regard it as a ‘swindle’ and are ready to exchange it for a system which sacrifices all claims to human dignity and justice.”[40] The autocrat’s categorical assertions about the inherently corrupt nature of political opponents, scientists, doctors, journalists, and activists, permit followers to reject outright even the most mundane (a posteriori) claims, from weather reports to infection rates. This active ignorance is difficult to overcome, writes José Medina in The Epistemology of Resistance, for people “would have to change so much of themselves and their communities before they can start seeing things differently.”[41]

Followers prefer the gratification of the fiction: the sense of belonging; the relief and self-righteousness of a “Truth” not subject to revision; the confirmation of their victim status; the clear identification of enemies; and the euphoric release of aggression and self-control when the autocrat actually or symbolically brutalizes these enemies in their name and encourages them to do the same.[42] This is the deeply seductive dimension of epistemic authoritarianism and why empirical evidence and reasonable critiques prove ineffective at generating skepticism among adherents.[43] In this way it resembles religious faith, which is why the autocrat can so easily appropriate religious symbolism and in turn divine authority. This was recently and poignantly demonstrated by the violent removal of peaceful protestors near the White House to enable Trump’s walk with an all-white entourage of military, cabinet, and family members to St. John’s Episcopal Church where he raised a bible overhead for the cameras. He made no statements and read no scripture. It was pure symbolism: the wedding of lawless state violence and white Christianity in the autocrat leader.

Resistance and Solidarity

We are often shocked by the brazen lies and then confounded and demoralized that the autocrat pays no political price for them. “The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting,” writes Masha Gessen in Surviving Autocracy, “and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies.”[44] This feeling of helplessness is understandable. However, if we remember that epistemic authoritarianism offers not only “alternative facts,” as Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway called them, but an alluring sense of belonging, vindication, and superiority, then we can manage our expectations and identify forms of resistance.

A first step is understanding the threat and formulating a critique. Epistemic authoritarianism is, we know, characterized by an actively desired fiction manifest in the social practices and identities of the autocrat’s followers. An important means of actualizing this fiction in a group, and thus constituting the identity of the group itself, is the performance of rituals at, for example, political rallies where attendees experience what Adorno describes as the “loosening of self-control, the merging of one’s impulses with a ritual scheme.”[45] These rituals function to elicit and direct hostility toward enemies said to threaten “the people” in one way or another. Finally, we recognize the autocrat’s tactics of delegitimizing, silencing, and usurping, which are used against those whose epistemic authority represents a threat to the autocrat’s power.

A second important step is considering the extent to which existing forms of knowledge production are amenable or antagonistic to authoritarianism. When Trump told a group of veterans “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,”[46] we were reminded of Winston in George Orwell’s book 1984, who was faced with a regime telling him “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Winston ultimately concluded that the most basic freedom is “the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” There is wisdom and benefit in this, for ourselves at least, despite neither mathematical truths nor empirical fact-checking being effective tools against committed authoritarians. Knowledge production is, however, made more resilient to authoritarian (and technocratic) encroachment to the degree it relies on critical, reflexive, and democratic methods of inquiry and problem-solving, which are also more successful in addressing health and other social inequities.[47]

Most urgently, however, is the need for us to defend the researchers and practitioners currently being targeted because their work undermines the narratives, myths, and potentially the authority of autocrats. Recent examples include the widespread outrage in China over the targeting of Dr. Li Wenliang, which rattled its authoritarian government as calls for justice rose in defiance of state censors. The government was forced to investigate the accusations against Dr. Wenliang and quickly concluded a mistake was made. A rare apology was issued and the officers involved in silencing Dr. Wenliang have themselves been reprimanded. In Turkey, Dr. Bülent Şık was originally indicted for several crimes, including supporting terrorism, but public opposition led to the most serious charges being dropped. He was convicted of one charge, but has since appealed his 15-month prison sentence. International solidarity campaigns are calling for the Turkish Court of Appeals to overturn it.[48]

These and similar campaigns can be replicated, expanded, and integrated to make the defense of public health advocates, not to mention academics, journalists, writers, and artists, a central commitment within a political culture of epistemic resistance. Existing international organizations, which have experience providing legal support and organizing solidarity campaigns, need financial support and assistance in amplifying their efforts. Unions, professional organizations, colleges, and universities can use their resources to support those whose careers or lives are threatened as well as suspend any relations they have with the responsible institutions or regimes. We can also use the public platforms available to us to network, organize, and promote political actions. To be sure, these efforts alone will not defeat epistemic authoritarianism, but building a culture of epistemic resistance with solidarity at its core would contribute to this ultimate goal while also serving as a desirable example of a possible future.

 

Chad Kautzer is associate professor of philosophy at Lehigh University. He is the author of Radical Philosophy: An Introduction (Routledge), coeditor of Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire (Indiana), and is currently writing a book about race, political violence, and community defense. You can find more of his publications here. Kautzer works on academic solidarity campaigns and administers the page International Solidarity with Academics in Turkey.

 

[1] I’d like to thank Jenny Weyel, Nitzan Lebovic, Daniel Loick, Eric Schliesser, Eylem Delikanlı, Steve Vogel, and Sirry Alang for their feedback on an earlier version of this essay.

[2] The authors of a post-SARS study for the World Health Organization conclude “most measures for managing public health emergencies rely on public compliance for effectiveness. This requires that the public trust not only the information they are receiving, but also the authorities who are the source of this information, and their decision-making processes.” P. O’Malley, J. Rainford, and A. Thompson, “Transparency during public health emergencies: from rhetoric to reality,” Bull World Health Organ 87 (2009): 615.

[3] “Post-truth is, at heart,” writes Sophia Rosenfeld, “a struggle over people as holders of epistemic authority and over their different methods of inquiry and proof in an intensely partisan era.” Sophia Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 37.

[4] https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-02-06/after-being-punished-by-local-police-coronavirus-whistleblower-vindicated-by-top-court-101509986.html

[5] “Turkey: Imprisoned journalists, human rights defenders and others, now at risk of Covid-19, must be urgently released,” Amnesty International, March 30, 2020 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/03/turkey-imprisoned-journalists-human-rights-defenders-and-others-now-at-risk-of-covid-19-must-be-urgently-released/

[6] With the coronavirus spreading rapidly in Turkey’s prisons, Erdoğan is now engaging in a cynical form of necropolitics, which subjects those who represent checks on his authority to an increased chance of life-threatening infection. On April 13, Erdoğan released nearly one-third of Turkey’s prison population to minimize their chances of contracting the virus, yet political prisoners, including doctors, journalists, and academics, were excluded.

[7] Isaac Chotiner, “The Coronavirus Meets Authoritarianism in Turkey,” The New Yorker, April 3, 2020 https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-coronavirus-meets-authoritarianism-in-turkey; “Turkish doctors issue apologies for coronavirus statements,” Ahval, March 30, 2020, https://ahvalnews.com/turkey-coronavirus/turkish-doctors-issue-apologies-coronavirus-statements

[8] http://m.bianet.org/english/health/226705-uludag-university-launches-investigation-against-prof-kayihan-pala

[9] “The ‘Ostrich Alliance’: the leaders denying the coronavirus threat,” Financial Times, April 16, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/974dc9d2-77c1-4381-adcd-2f755333a36b

[10] Dom Phillips, “Bolsonaro fires popular health minister after dispute over coronavirus response,” The Guardian, April 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/16/bolsonaro-brazil-president-luiz-mandetta-health-minister

[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/world/americas/brazil-health-minister-bolsonaro.html

[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/world/europe/russian-virus-doctor-detained.html

[13] https://www.npr.org/2020/05/01/848932901/health-care-workers-in-russia-pay-deadly-price-fighting-covid-19

[14] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/free-speech-russia-coronavirus/

[15] https://www.article19.org/resources/russia-stop-restrictions-on-media-and-independent-journalists-under-the-cover-of-coronavirus/

[16] László Bruszt, “Hungary’s Disease Dictator,” Project Syndicate, April 16, 2020, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/hungary-covid19-viktor-orban-pandemic-dictatorship-by-laszlo-bruszt-2020-04

[17] Pence’s appointment on February 26 was a response to public comments made by Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, at a CDC press briefing the day before. “Disruption to everyday life might be severe,” she told reporters. “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses.”  The statement was accurate, but incongruent with Trump’s fantastical, upbeat assessments. Dr. Messonnier did not appear in public again and the CDC press briefings were subsequently shut down in early March.

[18] In one memorable exchange, Trump claimed that CDC director Robert Redfield was “misquoted” when he told a reporter “There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.” Trump called the reporting “fake news” and insisted Redfield explain what he really said. “I’m accurately quoted,” Redfield responded, and then tried drawing a distinction between “more difficult” and “worse,” the word used in the article’s title. Redfield came under fire in July for promising to change the CDC guidelines for reopening schools hours after public criticism from President Trump that existing guidelines were too stringent.

[19] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-replaces-hhs-watchdog-who-found-severe-shortages-at-hospitals-combating-coronavirus/2020/05/02/6e274372-8c87-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html

[20] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/22/politics/read-whistleblower-vaccine-development/index.html

[21] https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/05/08/us/politics/ap-us-virus-outbreak-whistleblower.html

[22] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/us/coronavirus-updates.html

[23] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-actions-china/

[24] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-tour-centers-disease-control-prevention-atlanta-ga/

[25] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-31/

[26] Autocrats are “taken seriously” writes Adorno, precisely “because they risk making fools of themselves.” Theodor Adorno, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda” (1946), in The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited by Stephen Crook (New York: Routledge, 1994), 166.

[27] Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 164.

[28] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stockpile-website-change-kushner/

[29] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757586936/trump-displays-altered-map-of-hurricane-dorians-path-to-include-alabama

[30] Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), xxxvii.

[31] “In fascism,” writes Finchelstein, “the ultimate form of truth required no corroboration with empirical evidence: rather, it emanated from an intuitive affirmation of notions that were supposed to be expressions of transhistorical myths. The leader embodied these myths.” Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 26.

[32] Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 6.

[33] Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History, 250.

[34] Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth, 16-17.

[35] “No absolute ruler can be satisfied today with dominion over political life alone,” writes Michael Polanyi. “Dictatorship can become real today only by eradicating the whole autonomous cultural life with all its widespread popular roots” Michael Polanyi, “The Growth of Thought in Society,” Economica, Vol. 8, No. 32 (Nov., 1941): 443. I thank Eric Schliesser for pointing me toward Polanyi’s critique of authoritarianism.

[36] Jean-Paul Sartre famously used Orbán’s Stalinist predecessor in Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi, to illustrate how terror arises from the “everything was always going well” ideology of an autocrat. Prime Minister Rákosi had ordered the construction of a subway in Budapest in the 1950s. When, writes Sartre, “the engineers came to explain to Rakosi, after a few months’ work, that the subsoil of Budapest was not suitable for the construction of a metro, he had them thrown into prison.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 2, edited by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre and translated by Quinton Hoare (New York: Verso, 1991), 173.

[37] Löwenthal and Guterman describe the fascist agitator as “a bullet-proof martyr who despite his extraordinary sufferings always emerges victorious over his enemies” Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit,119.

[38] “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is… people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1973), 474.

[39] “They function vicariously for their inarticulate listeners by doing and saying what the latter would like to, but either cannot or dare not.” Adorno, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” 166.

[40] Theodor W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950), 678.

[41] José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57-58

[42] Fascist truth, writes Robert Paxton, “was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.” Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004), 16.

[43] “Fascism was not a simple and hypocritical lie,” writes Finchelstein, “but a lived and believed experience both from above and from below. The creation of a fascist self through the internalization of fascist themes had multiple meanings, official ones as well as spontaneous instances of fascist perception…. In fascism, fiction displaced reality and became a reality.” Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies, 21.

[44] Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020), 164.

[45] Adorno, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” 167. See Adorno: “It is not simply a reversion to older, primitive emotions but rather the reversion toward a ritualistic attitude in which the expression of emotions is sanctioned by an agency of social control.” Ibid.

[46] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-veterans-foreign-wars-united-states-national-convention-kansas-city-mo/

[47] Rosenfeld, like Karl Popper, argues that the advantage of democratic methods is not that they produce better “empirical outcomes,” but that they allow for continual revision in a world without certainty. Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth, 293.

[48] An open letter accepting signatures in support of Dr. Bülent Şık

The lecture below was initially presented at the “Algorithms, Infrastructures, Art, Curation” conference, organized by Arne De Boever and Dany Naierman, and hosted by the MA Aesthetics and Politics program (School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts) and the West Hollywood Public Library. The lecture is published here as part of a dossier including Stephen Wright’s response to the lecture.

All images included in the lecture are from the slideshow that Brian Holmes delivered at the lecture. The slide called “Information’s Metropolis” includes images by Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann.

–Arne De Boever

 

by Brian Holmes

Can a device create a world? Can it destroy one? Are these still the right questions to be asking?

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis I carried out two parallel research programs. They dealt with container ports, on the one hand, and financial algorithms, on the other. Both projects began with essays about socio-technical apparatuses or devices, in the sense of the French word dispositif.[1] Both explored the role of these devices in contemporary world-making. Both grew into localized artistic collaborations with experiential and documentary dimensions. I want to share these experiences, to talk about the creation and the destruction of the neoliberal world. The aim is to answer the question, “What comes after neoliberalism?” But the results of the inquiry showed that if globalism is ever to end, the question has to be asked in a regional frame. So I will be talking about what comes after Chimerica.

The first investigation was launched with a theoretical essay entitled “Do Containers Dream of Electric People?”[2] That text retraced the historical process whereby the invention of the shipping container intersected with the upsurge of manufacturing in Asia, to create the new economic paradigm of just-in-time production and distribution, coordinated across the world by networked logistics. I explored the roots of contemporary logistics in the cybernetic engineering of a man named Jay Wright Forrester; yet history was not the main point of this work. To get into “the social form of just-in-time production” as it is today, I followed the artist and activist Rozalinda Borcila on the exploration of a series of intermodal railyards located along a centuries-old transportation corridor heading southwest out of Chicago. The title for our shared project was Southwest Corridor Northwest Passage, because we realized that the old colonial dream of a frictionless passage across North America had been fulfilled by the container connection to Asia.[3]

We were galvanized by a precarious workers’ strike at a pair of gigantic warehouses out on the far end of that historical corridor. We wanted to know how the warehouses, the Wal-Marts they supplied and the abysmal wages they paid were related to the nearby railyards, the containers they handled and the distant ports from which the commodities came. An extremely simple device served to focus our thoughts, namely the twist lock, which binds containers together on a ship, a truck, or a railroad car. We wanted to show people, as concretely as possible, how the larger architecture of containerized commodity transport binds our daily lives in Chicago to the manufacturing centers of Asia, via the transcontinental rail links of the BNSF and Union Pacific lines, plus the deepwater ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach. It was about the social tie in motion. We were saying that each twist of that locking device serves to create and maintain the dynamic structure of the neoliberal world.

Much of our art exhibition involved taking people on walks to historical and contemporary sites along the Southwest Corridor. But the associated research extended far beyond Chicago, to Kansas City, to the deepwater port of Lázaro Cardenas in southern Mexico, and to the Panama Canal. Ultimately, for reasons a bit too complicated to explain, I found myself in South Korea with the artist Steve Rowell, exploring the huge intermodal ports of Busan, which function as hubs linking long-haul freighters to smaller ships serving dozens of industrial centers in Japan, China and the rest of Asia. After getting our fill of ocean-going boats and big steel boxes swinging through the air, we drove over a series of gleaming bridges and fenced-off causeways to squint through the rain at the Triple-E class container ships being built by the Daewoo conglomerate for the big European cargo handler, Moller-Maersk. When you see the scale of these operations in Asia, and when you breathe the pollution they release, then you can really feel how we’ve been locked into climate change, which is now opening a literal Northwest Passage through the melting ice of the Arctic.

The second research process began with another essay: “Is It Written in the Stars?”[4] This text used an  artwork called Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, as a way to understand how financial derivatives shape human destinies. The investigation turned into a documentary project with the Chicago-based photographers Geissler and Sann, leading to a book entitled Volatile Smile.[5] The idea was to bring together three series of images: one showing innumerable Chicago-area homes and apartments left empty by the 2008 real-estate crisis; the second showing the empty desks of algo-traders on a trading floor inside Willis Tower; and the third, a series of portraits showing the strange rictus of satisfaction and exultant pleasure that momentarily appears on the lips of video-gamers in first-person shooter contests, at the moment of the fictional kill. Could we make the case that an agent (the traders) and an instrument (the algorithms) had given rise to the vast material despoilment of the housing crisis?

In the essay for the book, entitled “Information’s Metropolis,” I argued that what Geissler and Sann’s work depicted was a global social relation that had emerged from the use of computerized trading strategies on Chicago’s futures and options markets.[6] In other words, our shared world is constituted by “capitalism with derivatives.”[7] To make the case I retraced the process whereby a new generation of Chicago traders encountered a mathematical device known as the Black-Scholes formula, used for the pricing of options. The equation brings together all the variables involved in the sale of an option to buy a stock for a fixed price at a future date. By making these variables calculable, the formula allows the trader who sells the option to cover his exposure by a practice of dynamic hedging, which entails buying and selling a basket of other stocks to continuously even out the fluctuating risk that was incurred by selling the option. Now, that’s not a big deal when we’re talking about the possible future price of a fixed quantity of butter, eggs or pork bellies, which were the historical mainstays of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But in 1971 the Mercantile Exchange opened the first formal market for the trading of currency futures, with a little help from a local guy named Milton Friedman. Access to this market meant that a businessman who wanted to build a factory in Hong Kong could now eliminate the tremendous danger of fluctuating currency rates by purchasing contracts to guarantee the future cost of a certain quantity of Hong Kong dollars. If the currency value suddenly shoots up, you just exercise your option. It allows you to buy a predetermined quantity of foreign money at a fixed price, so your operating expenses are covered at the expected rates. Currency risk, which had been a tremendous obstacle to international business operations, was basically eliminated. And with that, the doors of globalization were thrown open.

It’s clear that it took two other things – the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, then the first Gulf War in 1990 – to really throw those doors wide open. But such political and military considerations only show how integral the transformation was. In addition to constituting a gigantic, algorithmically powered casino, the global derivatives exchanges have served as insurance brokerages facilitating the otherwise impossibly risky business of investing capital around the world. Currency futures and a bewildering range of options, swaps, swaptions, caps, collars, etc., have made it financially possible to shift manufacturing equipment and almost any kind of labor to whatever country might offer the lowest price. And in practice, for the period from 1990 to 2008 and up to today, that has been the “China price”: the lowest number on the planet for any given category of basic manufactured goods. When you watch the containers swinging off the ship in Los Angeles, or off the trains in Chicago, you should squint to see the otherwise invisible derivative halo that surrounds them, protecting their flight through the air and cushioning their landing. If the system of derivatives breaks down, as it did in 2008, then material relations break down too, like the China trade and the US housing markets did for a few years. The system of derivatives upholds the market relations of an entire world.

Just before the crash, two economists came up with a name for that world. They called it “Chimerica” – an improbable bicontinent created by foreign capital investment, knitted together by container transport, guaranteed by derivative contracts and maintained by China’s reinvestment of its manufacturing profits in US Treasury bonds, which since the end of the Bretton Woods gold standard have been the ultimate store of value, the global reserve that props up wealth creation in the US and keeps those containers coming.[8] As you can imagine I’ve been obsessed by Chimerica since I first read about it. Rozalinda and I included it in our glossary of concepts for Southwest Corridor Northwest Passage:

Chimerica

“Term coined by the economists Ferguson and Schularick (2007). Refers to the ultimate feedback device: the capital circuit linking Chinese production to American consumption by way of global supply chains and sovereign finance. US consumption allows China to develop its factories and provide a job for millions leaving rural life, who would otherwise revolt. Chinese production, distributed cheap by big-box retailers, allows elites to compress the wages of US workers, who would otherwise revolt. US Treasury bonds allow China to keep its currency value down by exporting trade dollars back to the States to help pay for Chinese products. Is it all a mere illusion – or a two-headed monster?”

Today, we can finally answer. It’s both. On the one hand, Chimerica is an illusion: neither American wealth, nor China’s export-led growth, can be maintained by the river of cheap commodities that continues to flow into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. You’ve seen the political revolt that the collapse of manufacturing has set off in the US, and you’ve probably heard the recent talk in US policy circles about a “New Cold War” with China. If you’re a little more curious about it, then you know that China itself has developed a replacement strategy, named “One Belt, One Road,” which consists in an effort to create its own logistical supply chains backed up by military expansionism, and thereby establish a global economic empire comparable to the one that the US set up after World War II. The current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, describes this new growth strategy as the “China Dream,” directly repeating the old American rhetoric of the Fordist era.  It’s in this sense that the illusion of Chimerica remains a two-headed monster, because it has led to the replication of the American imperial pattern, albeit with Chinese characteristics. Outliving its origins, Chimerica has resulted in a global fact of first importance: China is now the largest CO2 emitter in the world by total volume, though it still lags far behind the US in per-capita terms. It took two industrial powerhouses to melt the Arctic ice and open up the Northwest Passage.

Thus it appears that a device – the double device of containerized transport and financial derivatives – can create and destroy a world. That’s no longer the question. The question is what to do at the end of the world, now that the Chimerican industrial and financial construct which sustained such tremendous wealth creation between 1990 and 2008 is finally breaking down, revealing itself for the monster that it really is. The existential question at the end of that world is where to go now, what to aspire to, how to orient yourself, how to act, after Chimerica.

I’m making a massive claim here, which will sound overblown if it’s not held up by a powerful reference. So I’ll evoke a figure who, whatever you may have thought of him in the past, has become increasingly persuasive over the last five years. This is the anthropologist Bruno Latour, who has just published a book entitled Down to Earth.[9] What he’s asking is, Where do we touch down? Where do we land? How do we orient ourselves politically, after globalization?

Latour thinks the classic right-left divide has always been underwritten by a distinction of a very different order. He plots the distinction as a vector between two poles of attraction, the Local and the Global. Between them he places a “modernization front,” which looks forward to the full global development of capitalist industry while gesturing backward toward the straggling localities that have not yet achieved modernization. In this classic Cold War schema, the Local represents the lack of science, progress and development, or worse, it embodies a closed and defensive space of ignorance, regression, and fascism – even though it may be seen by its inhabitants as a refuge, a safe haven, a site of identity and authenticity. I think we’ve all heard localism, nativism, and identitarianism described in highly positive and highly negative ways, sometimes by the same people. The upshot is that Latour does not try to hide the fact that there’s something wrong with this picture. Instead his whole point is that the Local/Global schema is obsolete, because it has now been supplanted by another one, which grows directly out of the twin crisis of inequality and climate change.

Down to Earth presents a radical hypothesis, which Latour calls a “political fiction.” By the early 1990s the consequences of fossil-fuel development along the Local/Global axis were perfectly clear to the US ruling classes. They chose climate-change denial in full awareness that a single Earth would not be enough for their form of industrial development. By withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol and later from the Paris accords, they chose a post-truth world, which would then become an option for all other ruling classes. More importantly, they postulated the existence of an alternative reality, which they would build using the massive profits of an oligarchical economy whose spoils could be reserved for a tiny fraction of the population. So doing, they created a new attractor, a place entirely “Out of this World,” which broke the old Local/Global divide and opened up a horizon of infinite exploitation. Through this radical shift in orientation, they struck unspeakable fear into the hearts of populations. For some, it’s the fear of unchecked global warming. For others, it’s the fear that environmentalists will deny you the fruits of industry. For almost everyone, it’s the fear that the elites will grab all the fruits for themselves. The stage has been set for a massive clash of opposing fears, stoked by social-media manipulation under a cloak of denial and unconsciousness. That’s the core of contemporary politics.

Latour credits Trump with making the choice of the new attractor brutally obvious to everyone. What’s more, he says, this brutal choice revealed the existence of a second new pole, tentatively called the Terrestrial. The second pole of attraction recovers all the positive and protective attributes of the Local, but without any closure to the outside. So it’s totally different. The Terrestrial is not a world of production, but instead, of engenderment. It’s an interdependent world where life forms create conditions of possibility or impossibility for other life forms. An awareness of this world, and of the decision taken to destroy it, suddenly makes it possible – not inevitable, but possible – for the descendants of colonizers to realize what it must have been like for the colonized, when their land was suddenly ripped away from them. Your land is suddenly being fracked, fenced, polluted, and sold to the highest bidder. “The new universality,” writes Latour, “consists in feeling that the ground is in the process of giving way.”

But the point is not to go back to the Local. Instead, the Terrestrial is the place where a new ground can be disclosed – on the condition of realizing that the viability of any territory is engendered by, and depends upon, a full set of ecological relations, extending all the way to the biogeochemical cycles that maintain the balance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Down to Earth is a compelling read, even if it’s a “political fiction.” My own theoretical fictions point in the exact same directions. The study of containerization revealed the existence of Foreign Trade Zones scattered across the continental United States. These zones are considered offshore sites for fiscal purposes, so they’re extraterritorial, and they use that offshore status to incentivize the development of new intermodal ports. As for the derivatives exchanges, in “Information’s Metropolis” I describe them as space cruisers filled with cyborg agents seeking an extraterrestrial realm for their activities. The images come directly from a science-fiction book, The Tenth Planet, written by the head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Leo Melamed. The book has a weird tagline on the back: “When human equals alien.” Yet as CO2 levels continued rising, the feeling of the ground slipping away beneath my own feet was more alienating than any science fiction could be. Because it was so much more intimate.

In 2015 I decided to start acting as an artist. I began a series of visual works and collaborations, combining multimedia cartography and critical writing in larger thematic shows with other artists. The first of these was about a local conflict: the pollution of Southeast Chicago neighborhoods by huge piles of petcoke, which is a byproduct of heavy oil refining. I joined this fight along with a whole group of friends and colleagues, for an activist exhibition entitled Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy.[10] After working with local people and exploring the oil geography by foot as well as satellite, I retraced the pipeline network that runs from Chicago to the Alberta Tar Sands. Far in the Canadian North, the oil boom set off in the early 2000s by Bush and Cheney is in the process of destroying the Athabasca River watershed. It’s extreme exploitation: mining the Earth until it looks like the Moon. I stared into my computer screen with horror as the whole forested area around the Tar Sands caught fire in August of 2016, forcing the evacuation of Fort McMurray and the man camps serving the extraction sites. It became clear that petcoke itself is a kind of cinder resulting from the intense heat of oil refining. Yet this production of cinders is the very fuel of desire, it’s the way we take flight. I gave the map the title Petropolis, City of Desire, City of Ashes – naming the universal urban condition of the climate-change era.[11]

I found it impossible to continue with the critical approach of Petropolis, which focuses entirely on energy infrastructures. Of course I included many protest figures in the map – the seeds of what has become a wildly successful resistance against oil ports and pipelines. Yet the climate-change resistance is still dwarfed by the petroleum norm. I wanted to reach beyond my activist connections, toward the mainstream. In 2016, I and ten other Chicagoans put together two collectively designed seminars for the Anthropocene Campus program of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. On our return we formed a group called “Deep Time Chicago.”[12] Our intent was to bring the ideas we had discussed in Berlin back home, by identifying and expressing the ways in which our city sustains the central institutions and cultural traits of the Anthropocene. At the same time, we wanted a different, disalienating contact with the local territory. The group’s initial outreach to the public has taken place through a series of events called “Walk About It,” which brings together speakers and texts for excursions to specific sites in the metropolitan area. Destinations have included a former nuclear pile, the site of an historic lumber mill, a still-functioning oil refinery, a prairie restoration project and an exquisite downtown park redesigned for the needs of urban wildlife as well as human beings. A major contribution to the group’s aesthetic was made by volunteer stewards practicing forest restoration in the tradition of the Chicago Wilderness, which has slowly grown into a federation of hundreds of organizations both public and private, devoted to the eco-regions along the southern and western shores of Lake Michigan.

My next mapping project, done with the Argentinean artist and community activist Alejandro Meitin, is entitled Living Rivers/Ríos Vivos.[13] Each of us tried to sketch out the issues of political ecology facing humans and other species in our home watersheds, the Mississippi and Great Lakes Basins for me, the Paraná-Paraguay Basin for Alejandro. We contributed that work to The Earth Will Not Abide, a critical exhibition about industrial agriculture in the Americas.[14] What we dramatize in this exhibition are the threatened destinies of the symbiotic community of soil, when it’s exposed to the bad infinity of extractivist agriculture. The show has been restaged in Argentina in an augmented form, featuring the work of five different groups who have been exploring the islands of the Paraná River Delta.[15] The idea is to help pass a national wetlands law (“Ley de Humedales”) while at the same time inscribing territorial art as an active agency within a transnational campaign aiming to stop the entire Paraná-Paraguay wetlands system from being dried by upstream dams and drained by downstream navigation channels. Further shows are planned upriver.

Latour argues that after the failure of globalization, what matters is the defense of one’s own territory. But the defense should paradoxically be carried out in a way that opens up the territory to the relations of co-dependence that form a shared world. This requires the recognition of multiple entities as legitimate partners in a process of negotiation: species, soils, rivers, technological systems, human groups, etc. How can that negotiation be opened up on one’s own territory? That’s the real question of the present. It’s not about creating a new world, it’s about perceiving an existing one. So perception itself becomes urgent – urgent for defense. Because on the one hand, the failure of the liberal or Chimerican world order can always lead back to a zombie politics, a poisoned opposition between the Local and the Global. And on the other, even if we get over Trump, Bolsonaro, Brexit, etc., capitalism will continue bank on the infinite exploitation of a finite earth, probably through renewed economic collaboration with China.

Like others, I’ve become convinced that the times require an engagement with the entangled fates of multiple species. Yet such an engagement must remain open to the full complexity of twenty-first century society. It’s about the political ecology of a bioregion, conceived as a matter of governance. To put it short, it’s about a bioregional state. There’s only one place in North America where this type of engagement is being developed at scale, within a territory conceived by many as a transnational home, where plant and animal species are widely understood to share human destinies. The place is known as the Pacific Northwest, but it’s also known to inhabitants as Cascadia. So in 2018 I began a mapping project about the bioregional state, under the title Learning from Cascadia.[16]

The project has been carried out with curator Mack McFarland and many local partners. So far it has three major aims. The first is to analyze and express the Anthropocene components of the Cascadian megaregion. These include its racial hierarchies, its urban development, its energy grid and its agricultural systems. The challenge is to describe what normally remains unconscious, and in that way to develop an implicate critique, recognizing one’s own dependency on such infrastructures. There’s a big advantage to doing that – it gives you some respect for the people who built them. When I talk about ecology, I try to do it in respect of massive generational efforts to create the good life, because that’s a basic fact of social interdependence.

The second aim is direct involvement with energy politics. We’ve done this by taking a stance in support of an activist group, Columbia Riverkeeper.[17] They’ve been fighting the installation of fossil-fuel terminals on the river, pursuing court battles to improve water conditions for returning salmon and contributing to the citizen oversight of the cleanup process at the Hanford Nuclear reservation, where plutonium was made for the US nuclear weapons program. What all this boils down to is a struggle against the most damaging legacies of the modernization front. The signature achievement of modernism in the Pacific Northwest is the region’s network of hydroelectric dams, which produce clean power at the price of destroying the riverine ecology. The struggle against them is carried out under the leadership of Indigenous tribes, who continually foreground their own relationships of co-dependence with other species. In this way a hybrid agency emerges, straddling territory and technology, sovereignty and the rights of multiple species. As you can read in that section of the map: “By helping to develop original forms of scientific expertise both within mainstream civil society and among the tribes, an expanded environmental movement could gain fresh sources of agency within the legal and administrative arenas opened up by the Endangered Species Act. The latter had the force of law, transforming citizens’ convictions and scientists’ biological opinions into instruments of tangible change… What has emerged over the last two decades, within and against the rigid machinery of the dams, are the lineaments of a new kind of governance—the upturned foundations of a future bioregional state.”

This is the key. A bioregional state is emergent whenever the survival and flourishing of non-human actors becomes an issue in formal political negotiations over land-use within a given territory. This already happens throughout the United States, but it’s an especially frequent event in the Pacific Northwest, especially under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. That’s why one of the manifest objectives of the American ruling classes represented by Trump is to destroy the ESA. The response from the grassroots is to use it even more. In September of 2018, Columbia Riverkeeper won a crucial case at the US District Court in Seattle, where the judge mandated that the water temperatures of the Columbia and Snake rivers had to come down to ensure the survival of the salmon.[18] If the legal process is not blocked by the federal government, one likely conclusion would be the dismantling of four navigational and hydropower dams on the Lower Snake River. The constitutional machinery of law is now engaged against the legacy of modernization. If what one is after is not a utopia, but the defense of a territory, then what matters is the emergence of a bioregional state.

Now I can conclude. A bioregional state can only grow out of a broader and more diffuse culture. One of the most important things that artists and intellectuals can do is to express and analyze the constituents, forms, desires and aims of a bioregional culture. If you take this path and become part of such a culture you will have to fight for it in many ways, while remaining oriented to the possibility of a shareable world, rather than yet another civil war. The difficult thing is to fight for interdependence.

The third part of the map starts with the countercultural theory and practice of bioregionalism in the Seventies and Eighties, when founding figures like Peter Berg were on the scene. But the crucial thing is to move toward the bioregion as it is today, and to encounter its inhabitants. What comes forward are the how questions: how salmon strive to make it home and spawn; how ranchers try to ranch differently; how agriculturalists try to clean up their act; how state administrators learn to restore streams instead of damming them, and so on. One of the interviews I did was with a rancher woman, Liza Jane McAlister, whose main point is that the people living on the land care about it and for it, on the basis of long experience: their knowledge and concerns need to be included in any plan for its transformation. This means there is no formulaic device for positive territorial change: recognition and respect for singularities are the main things.

I’m also fortunate to have spent some time with the Indigenous artist Sara Siestreem, a member of the Hanis Coos band and an impressive abstract painter. In recent years she has taken up gathering and weaving as part of an effort to restore certain cultural traditions, specifically by making woven dance caps for ceremonial use. What’s challenging is the range of alliances, treaties and tribal policies that are involved: complex political arrangements for the defense of everyday life on very particular territories. It’s challenging because you have to learn to back way from what is sacred: mainstream society has no role to play in questions of ceremonial or of Indigenous sovereignty. Yet Sara does address herself to the general public. Here is what she says in the context of the show on which we collaborated, where she exhibited the plant materials she had been gathering throughout the previous year: “The next time you see these plants they will be baskets woven by Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people,” she writes. “The education that you have gained through visiting with these plants will be embedded into those baskets. They will remember you and this time in your life. Through your witness and education, this will be a cross cultural victory over genocide.”[19]

The heart of this discussion is not a map, or a concept, or a color or a political sign. What matters in the City of Ashes is discovering how 7.6 billion people, and counting, can learn to live with each other and the rest of the Earth.

 

Thanks to all the collaborators named here, as well as Arne De Boever and Sebastian Olma who hosted searching public presentations of this text. While walking we ask questions.

[1]    See http://southwestcorridornorthwestpassage.org/devices/definitions.

[2]    Brian Holmes, “Do Containers Dream of Electric People?” in Open 21 (2011), available at www.tacticalmediafiles.net/mmbase/attachments/37547/Open21_ImMobility.pdf.

[3]    See http://southwestcorridornorthwestpassage.org

[4]    See https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/is-it-written-in-the-stars

[5]    Geissler/Sann and Holmes, Volatile Smile (Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2014).

[6]    The text is available at http://threecrises.org/informations-metropolis.

[7]    Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

[8]    Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, “‘Chimerica’ and the Global Asset Market Boom,” International Finance 10/3 (December 2007).

[9]    Bruno Latour, Down to Earth (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).

[10]  See http://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2016/07/petcoke-project.php.

[11]  See http://environmentalobservatory.net/Petropolis/map.html.

[12]  See http://deeptimechicago.org.

[13]  See http://ecotopia.today/livingrivers/map.html and http://ecotopia.today/riosvivos/mapa.html.

[14]  See http://www.regionalrelationships.org/tewna.

[15]  See my short review at https://www.casarioarteyambiente.org/2019/03/12/the-earth-will-not-abide-collaborative-territories.

[16]  See https://cascadia.ecotopia.today.

[17]See https://www.columbiariverkeeper.org.

[18]See two articles from the Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/federal-judge-orders-epa-to-protect-salmon-in-columbia-river-basin and https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/washington-state-to-regulate-federal-dams-on-columbia-snake-to-cool-hot-water-check-pollution.

[19]  See https://cascadia.ecotopia.today/#/bioregion/dancing.

This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by Arne De Boever. 

By Scott Ferguson, Benjamin Wilson, William Saas, and Maxximilian Seijo

As an interminable spring gave way to an uncertain summer, the stewards of higher education at last stepped up efforts to mitigate the financial fallout from the COVID-19 health emergency. As long suspected, their remedy is austerian shock therapy.

Dredging up higher ed’s playbook from the Great Financial Crisis, university executives allege that only sweeping layoffs, freezes, and closures can salvage their institutions from the incursion of collapsing state budgets, unprecedented revenue loss, and inadequate Federal aid.

The reality, of course, is that such remedies are themselves unmitigatedly toxic. Austerity threatens to not only harm countless faculty, staff, and students during a time of need, but also strangle productive activity well beyond campus boundaries. In fact, contrary to the prevailing managerial wisdom, mass disinvestment in higher ed will by definition exacerbate, not ameliorate, the coronavirus depression.

A growing chorus of critics has arisen to contest the counterintuitive logics behind these lethal measures. François Furstenberg, for instance, has raised a red flag about newly announced cutbacks at Johns Hopkins University: “How does a university with a $6-billion endowment and $10 billion in assets suddenly find itself in a solvency crisis?”

Critics like Furstenberg are right to lambast contemporary higher ed’s casino-like investment strategies. Predicated upon risky and often-illiquid assets, universities’ tax-sheltered investment portfolios favor speculation and elites over education and community. What is more, they render powerhouse institutions such as Hopkins suddenly ineffectual under severe financial strain.

Still, regardless of whether any hands are legitimately tied, if U.S. higher education is to overcome the COVID-19 catastrophe, critics will need to advance beyond autopsies of portfolio capitalism and wholly rethink university finance from the ground up. More important, the exigency of the present situation requires proceeding in the spirit of John Dewey and American pragmatism. We must learn by doing.

Our proposal is this: Universities can immediately circumvent feckless state & federal legislatures and finance themselves directly by issuing their own credit called “Unis” supported by the Federal Reserve.

As outlined by Modern Money Network Research Director, Nathan Tankus, Unis shall be issued as “University Payment Anticipation Notes.” Modeled on the better-known “Tax Anticipation Note,” the Uni will attain value as circulating money as a result of a university’s capacity to redeem them in future payments. Finally, the Federal Reserve needs to assist universities by extending its purchasing support for municipal debts, or “Munis,” to Unis, ensuring that Unis, too, are trustworthy and widely receivable.

The Uni, we submit, is no technocratic stop-gap meant merely to keep universities afloat during a pandemic. The Uni, rather, represents a thorough-going democratic challenge to the financial ideology that got the American university into the present crisis.

Choreographers of Credit 

The Uni’s technical specifications may seem complicated. Beneath the specialized language, however, the Uni teaches a very basic, yet essential lesson about the nature of credit creation and what a university can genuinely afford.

According to the anemic microeconomics that have come to define university finance, credit is a private and scarce resource that permits a firm or institution to obtain money it otherwise lacks. An elusive “price mechanism” regulates credit’s supply, delimited by market investors’ willingness to lend. Financial viability, meanwhile, hinges upon balancing income against expenditures and debts. When revenue collapses in this sink-or-swim regime, reserves drain out and credit dries up. Barring government intervention, the result can destroy countless productive enterprises until markets mysteriously self-correct.

From this dismal view, today’s variously defunded and revenue-threatened universities stand no chance against a pandemic liquidity crunch. Fortunately, however, credit is in reality neither conditioned by such zero-sum premises nor doomed to their dire consequences.

In truth, modern credit allocation derives from a public finance franchise which, according to Cornell Law School’s Robert C. Hockett and Saule T. Omavora, is legally constructed, nominally inexhaustible, and readily transformable. “Contrary to contemporary orthodoxy,” they explain, “modern finance is not primarily scarce, privately provided, and intermediated, but is, in its most consequential respects, indefinitely extensible, publicly supplied, and publicly disseminated.”

The counterintuitive consequences of this analysis become clear when considering the operations of traditional private banks. In opposition to conventional misconceptions, banks do not act as intermediators for pre-accumulated capital, recycling private dollars by lending out deposits at a markup. Instead, as finance franchisees, banks command new production when lending by creating fresh, federally insured-credit on behalf of the U.S. government. Insofar as credit issuance is nominally inexhaustible, moreover, a bank’s financial viability is contingent, not upon some irreversible income-to-expenditure tipping point, but rather upon the embedded rules and values that shape the institution’s legal construction. For this reason, a bank could very well operate beyond the balance sheet, if it were, for example, legally licensed to prioritize communal and environmental investment over revenue generation and so-called “sound finance.”

Per Hockett & Omarova, “Reconfiguring our basic understanding of the financial system in this way is a necessary first step toward making finance work in a manner that aids, rather than hinders, inclusive and stable economic development. It underwrites explicit recognition that the public must take an active role in modulating and allocating credit aggregates across the economy. It also offers a bolder, more creative approach to designing new means of doing so.”

The Uni draws on this public capacity and exposes the untapped and frequently misdirected powers of banks in order to reclaim the American university for people and planet.

Universities and colleges—and particularly large public university systems—are tremendous provisioning authorities. Their ongoing investments anchor regional and state economies in far-reaching ways. Many are classified as political subdivisions, with powers of tax, police and eminent domain. Myriad universities administer chartered credit unions. Yet all higher ed institutions maintain elaborate payment systems, levying regular, non-reciprocal obligations in the form of tuition, rents, meal cards, fees, and fines.

Thus, aside from their hazardous dealings on Wall Street, universities and colleges already function as preeminent choreographers of credit. The problem is that a punishingly private vision of finance has long concealed higher education’s real capacities and potentials.

By issuing Unis, universities assert and expand their rights as allocators of credit in their communities. They take responsibility for social and ecological wellbeing in the face of negligent legislators. Most important, they withdraw from capitalist speculation and refuse to place arbitrary fiscal strictures before education, health, and prosperity.

Likewise, the Uni must serve as an intersectional rallying cry, inviting fresh opportunities to remediate seemingly disparate and long-standing injustices. The Uni ought to foment democratic governance and participation from campus to surrounding neighborhoods. It needs to ensure generous and equitable support for students, staff and faculty. Above all, it demands diversifying the meaning of public service and education in ways that make Black and other marginalized lives truly matter.

Storming the Fed 

Now is the time to demand full accommodation from a paradigm-smashing Fed.

While Congress sits on their hands, a learning-by-doing experiment is already underway at the Federal Reserve. With more than 40 million Americans out of work, the Fed appears ready to fulfill its congressional mandate to both maximize employment and promote stable prices. Indeed, the strongest signal that this time things can be different is the opening of the Fed’s new Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF), which promises to buy both existing and future state and municipal debt.

The significance of this facility for universities will be determined largely by their ability to be as politically effective as banks, insurance companies, and the fossil fuel industry at adjusting the Fed’s terms and conditions to meet their own needs. First, university leadership must pressure state governors and legislators to use the MLF to stabilize local balance sheets, saving local economies and eliminating justifications for draconian cuts. Second, they need to petition the Fed to guarantee Uni liquidity.

To be sure, jump-starting the Uni does not necessarily require Fed accommodation. Universities can at once embrace their experimental ethos and fashion context-specific systems keyed to institutional mission statements and the goods and services they generate.

However, Fed accommodation remains our endgame. The combined severity of the crisis and Washington’s heedlessness make Federal Reserve assistance indispensable to stem cascading austerity, let alone to address systemic ills. It also reveals the Fed to be a central site of contestation.

So far, the first to seek Fed assistance include the State of Illinois, Port Authorities in New York and New Jersey, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the New York subway, busses, and commuter rails. If the Fed stands ready to save the New York subway, then we have pushed well beyond normative pearl-clutching about Fed neutrality as well as ideologically-laden claims that higher ed’s critical infrastructures are somehow undeserving.

When it comes to extending permanent purchasing support for the Uni, of course, the Fed is unlikely to comply without complaints, hearings and even trials. Yet politically speaking, motivating university leadership to adopt the Uni is by far the heavier lift. To do so necessitates mass mobilization and solidarity between faculty, students, staff and community members across many systems and campuses.

At the same time, however, systemic transformation demands organizers appeal to pragmatic concerns they share with university leadership, despite historic differences. After all, as Minnesota Fed chair, Neel Kashkari, now openly declares, “There’s an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve.” This renders austerity not merely impractical, but also suicidal.

 

Scott Ferguson is associate professor film & media studies in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida.

Benjamin Wilson is associate professor of economics at the State University of New York at Cortland.

William Saas is assistant professor of rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University.

Maxximilian Seijo is a Ph. D. student in comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

This essay is a part of the COVID-19 dossier, edited by Arne De Boever. 

By Muneeb Hafiz

In the UK, Black people across England and Wales are more than four times as likely to die from Covid-19 as white people; Bangladeshi and Pakistani people around three and a half times more likely; and those of Indian origin two and a half times as likely. Two thirds of British Bangladeshi men over the age of sixty have a long-term health condition that puts them at particular risk from infection, while underlying health conditions are also especially prevalent among older people of a Pakistani or Black Caribbean background. “Minority” groups are over-represented by as much as 27% in the overall Covid-19 death toll and 63% of the first 106 health and social care staff known to have died from the virus were Black or Asian. Around a third of all working-age people from Black African backgrounds, and over a fifth from Indian backgrounds are employed in “key worker” roles (Office for National Statistics, 2020; Siddique, 2020).

Body-Capital-Breath

Across the long night of capitalism, embodiment – skin, flesh, colour, labour – and the struggle to breathe have constituted its fundamental questions (Alcoff, 1999; Weheliye, 2014). Is it not true that in one way or another, in the end, everything brings us back to the body? That whatever our descriptive statement of the human (Wynter, 2003), whatever substance or hue is its form, the absorption of oxygen and release of carbon dioxide, the resuscitation of muscle and tissue, the creation of energy (to live and, more importantly, to work) through a series of dynamic exchanges, is what it all comes down to? Is life not at least in part an essential question of embodiment, and embodiment a question of what constitutes proper life? (Spillers, 2003).

And, thus, does its opposite, death, not become both an immanent question of how to dispose of the body that has ceased to breathe, and a transcendental question of what happens to the body in the time after it is no longer kept alive? Surely any assault on the body – saying nothing of the many wars on life which plague, and have constituted our modern moment – must have breath as both its affect and effect. Pain, grief, loss, anxiety, exhaustion, disease each having discernible if shifting consequences for one’s breathing.

What has capitalism – work and its faceless workers, labour and its mystification, multiplying services and its veiled supply chains – been founded upon if not the attempt to master the breath of countless hordes, to mobilise the metabolic and reproductive energies produced, and life sustained by their exhalation? (Hartman, 1997). Taking the long view, with the advent of the New World and the constitutive excrement of its discoveries – genocide, (trans)plantations, ecological catastrophe, disease, psychic, spiritual and familial alienation, human-wood, human-metal – to the appearance of the so-called “industrialised races” (of Europe) some several centuries later, the struggle to breathe of some, and the will to suffocate of others has been a world-founding dialectic (Wallerstein, 2011).

Capital’s Other

This back and forth between breath and its suffocation, between beings and those who would spit at them, between peoples simultaneously denied their humanity and put to work precisely on the basis of human creativity, has cleared the terrain, both physical and symbolic, for the assembly-line Products of “Liberty,” “Welfare” and the “Rights of Man” (Lowe, 2015). These gifts of progress are weighed down with the unanswered, unaccounted – though never completely invisible – subjects of the marked; the breath stifled, the beings told that they are not. For the conditions of their possibility (or, production) at home, among those who delegated to themselves sovereign will and the space to breathe, have required whole economies of silhouetted peoples denied their own, and industries of death elsewhere that have been modern Capital’s nuclear power plant.

There were always Others with whom nothing could be shared or owed, peoples turned into ghosts of an inaudible, imperceptible, delimited condition, despite the essential relation of dependence – or indebtedness – others have to them, and through whom their own lives are sustained. These people have been made to work for another who refuses to see her as such, who, in truth, could never allow cognition of the uneliminable fact of their shared embodiment. While both, ‘human’ (Man) and ‘labourer’ (ghost), require the space to exert energy and breathe, the spectre of the Other becomes also a vehicle for contamination who everywhere – in schools, in hospitals, in custody – challenges the sacred, but always already provincial, boundary of proper life due a share of the world, of the genre of the human constituted under regimes of capital. It is only he who is truly of here that becomes signatory to a contract of care and (re)cognition as an entity owed certain obligations. Those unfortunate Wretcheds over there, or indeed here, that is, the half-subjects of Capital’s bloody service supply chain, whose existence is registered as mere happenstance or as singular function, must instead be spoken for and kept clocking in (Fanon, 2001).

Despite the work they do and the forms they must fill, with bodies that move and hands that write and feel as well as work, these transients are the subjects par excellence of the application clause, or its internal logic of the exception: If you insist on being here then you must not be seen. If you insist on being seen then you must not be heard. If you insist on being heard then it must be in a tongue and with sentences of our choosing. And if you do indeed pick up this new language of ours then you would do well to forget your mother’s.

Dark mortalities

Our moment of mass death and the makeshift morgue, more corpses than we are willing to bring ourselves to count, drives home the inescapable limit of the body and breath. This despite the principle of unequal shares through which certain lives become disproportionately superfluous or at risk, and others naturally secured. To be sure, this virus has brought with it notions of a great levelling (Alexander, 2020). The reality that anyone, anywhere is vulnerable and, thus, its attack on our shared embodiment speaks to a planetary predicament in which each and every human is caught It is this reason that today death is measured as being in excess.

But just as the breathing or gasping body lives and labours in the midst of certain historical, social, political and economic tendencies, this levelling, which has brought on an hour of autophagy – bodies devouring themselves of the capacity to draw breath and live on – also shares in those tendencies. “Disease is never neutral,” Anne Boyer (2019) has told us, “treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics.” This longstanding politics of mortality, which draws a great separation between the visible person and invisible worker, and has been instituted through industrial progress, its colony, outpost, and tax haven, is the systematic legislation of death and an all-out war on life. The freedom to live and breathe is made possible by many more who cannot.

It is not clear that this fundamental relation of my life to the death or murder of an Other has left us (Mbembe, 2003). Before the arrival of this virus, humanity – as both physical subject and ethical concept – was already threatened with suffocation (Mbembe, 2020). Entire segments of the earth’s population, entire races caught and mobilised in an intense struggle to breathe when others would have them disappear, or more fittingly under the reign of capitalism, die at work.

The sharing of tendencies between virus and the worldly context of its transmission, a world not so much of a great levelling but one built on a great separation (Fanon, 1967); of my body, breath and labour kept a world- and time-apart from the Other’s, thus speaks to and amidst certain regimes of erasure. Because of the industries of strangulation upon which the modern world was founded and continues to proceed, that the makeshift morgue has already been a central logic of capitalism, we were always already haunted by the supposed excess (death) of the Other long before this virus’s eruption.

This disproportionate risk, exposure and perishing to the virus is among peoples already marked, as Black, brown, poor, jobless, homeless, unsettled, resident with no recourse to public funds. That is, names which sanction the deaths of Others whose work sustains life elsewhere, a haunted exchange that should be set in the larger contexts of, and intimacies between, breathing, labouring bodies across time and space.

The relation of my life to the disproportionate death of an Other, a worker whose ‘key’ status is contingent on his/her ability to labour but whose humanness as worthy of protection has long been in question, speaks to a profound emergency that could never be recognised as such. This is a loss not merely of Black and brown life, of the marked person’s ability to breathe freely. It rather amounts to an exit from a confrontation with the scale of mass death, mapped yesterday onto faraway frontiers and processes of extraction, accumulation, settlement and repopulation, with all the skeletal and geologic spikes that were their castoff, and that today is right here, seeking answers.

A day after

The body of the Other has long been drawn as a vehicle for contamination, a haunting figure, who is there but not, who must be kept at bay, locked down but productive, one whose own suffocation or deportation allegedly spells safety for those unmarked. In this negative relation of my body to the breath of the Other, we have never learned how to die, never mind how to live, in a world that was always and remains the only one we have, and which we must share with everything that breathes.

The contingency of my breathing freely on the stifling of an Other (what is that if not at core a definition of freedom as it arose from colony), bespeaks the pathogenic quality of capitalism. The great levelling of this new virus that is transmitted and kills indiscriminately does its work in a world of deep discrimination. The profound unmooring of untimely death and grief drift through an earthly condition in which the premature death of its simultaneously marked (hypervisible) and neglected (masked) peoples is proposed as the natural order of things.

It is not a question, then, of pre- and post-COVID. There must be a more expansive notion of the day after. It must be one in which to have a body – at the level of species-being – is to be owed the space to breathe. The delimiting terms of the political sphere, of law and state, capital and its endless abstractions will no longer suffice if we are to learn how to live and die in-common, as occupants of ultimately transitory but visible life (Glissant, 1997). These are questions biospheric in nature and planetary in scale. We are from the very beginning “given over” (Butler, 2004) to the world of an Other – human and natural, this distinction can no longer be allowed to hold – however much their presence is denied. Each of us must now answer to our own names, and are to be held responsible for an Other’s share, for their right to breathe clean air, if this earth is to survive.

Now it is true that the day after may herald an even greater separation than before, that the relation of the body who lives and breathes to the many more who suffocate and die is deepened as a logic of our world, and given renewed legitimacy through euphemisms of economic recovery, (bio)political security and national integrity.

Living and dying together, breath and its expiration, however, is an, if not the unassailable surplus of being. Hard as some might try to graft the ephemeral and elementally vulnerable nature of our embodiment to the machine – the birth of the new synthetic-body or object-body or digital-body – living and dying together will remain our lot as beings on this earth-not-of-our-making. At least for now.

A proper day after will only come through today’s and yesterday’s reckoning, of both its light and dark faces, its breathing and gasping bodies. Until we bring ourselves to confront premature death’s relation to the manmade, though no less extrahuman, factors of race, gender, labour, wealth, citizenship and much more, our existence will be forever haunted by the lives and death of Others; our own bodies weighed down by the breathless who may well be gone but whose body-the-same-as-mine can never truly be denied.

 

Muneeb Hafiz is an Associate Lecturer in International Relations at Lancaster University, UK. His current research concerns the intersections between race, subjectivity and ecology.

 

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