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

by Belinda Kong

In the penultimate chapter to Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong (2020) pays belated homage to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. “For a while,” Hong writes of her own development as a poet, “I thought I had outgrown Cha. I’d cite modernist heavyweights like James Joyce and Wallace Stevens as influences instead of her. I took her for granted. Now, in writing about her death, I am, in my own way, trying to pay proper tribute” (171). In researching Cha’s life, Hong was perturbed by the silence around her death. Though Cha is a canonized figure within Asian American literature with much critical attention devoted to her experimental novel Dictee, Hong found to her surprise that “no one wrote anything about the crime” around Cha’s death (155). Cha was raped and murdered in November 1982, in the sub-basement of Manhattan’s historic Puck Building, newly acquired by Kushner Properties and undergoing renovations at the time. Her killer was a serial rapist who worked as a security guard there, hired simply because “he knew English.” Cha, on the other hand, was initially called “an Oriental Jane Doe” in the police report (164-65). This was a week after the publication of Dictee. Those who have written on Cha’s work but circumvented the subject of her death cited the desire to protect her family and to avoid reducing the significance of the former to the sensationalism of the latter. But what Hong discovered, when she contacted Cha’s relatives and friends, was that they were eager to talk. “Why hadn’t anyone reached out to Cha’s relatives earlier? Why hadn’t anyone looked at the court records?” she muses. “They’re not hard to find. In fact, they’re readily available online….” (172).

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In researching the 2003 SARS global epidemic and the cultures of epidemic life that sprang up at its epicenters, I found myself on a parallel path as Hong but walking it in reverse. I too began by looking at literature and culture, at novels and then, more adventurously, films and digital media, partly because those realms constitute my relative comfort zone as a literary scholar, but mostly because I assumed that the history and real-life stories would have been told by others before me. I first started researching SARS around 2014, over a decade after the epidemic’s end, so I took it on faith that the facts were well-documented in the voluminous body of writing already published on the topic, and that even early cases in mainland China and Hong Kong would have been properly archived by then. Moreover, since English, as the World Health Organization itself acknowledges, remains the dominant language of global public health information and “the lingua franca of scientists—including those working in public health” (Adams and Fleck 2015: 365), I also took it on faith that knowledge about specialized epidemiological matters such as index cases and early outbreak clusters would be firmly in place in the anglophone public record. In short, I took the epidemic’s first patients and their stories for granted, as things that were already told and known, things that I did not have to bother to investigate for myself. I was content to stay in my disciplinary lane and focus on fictional texts and fictional lives, venturing into historical and empirical sources only for context and self-education. It took several years of writing and reading, until the last chapter of my book project, for me to fully realize my misplaced faith.

What I discovered, when I started digging into accounts of the global index patient, was the opposite of what Hong observed with Cha: that much has been written on this Chinese patient’s death but not his life—even though he did not die. If the story of Cha’s death is full of gaps and silences, those of SARS’s first patient are chockfull of inaccuracies, distortions, and prejudices.

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If one were to do an internet search on SARS in English today, one of the top hits would likely be the Wikipedia entry on “Severe acute respiratory syndrome” (2020b). There, under the section “Epidemiology,” under the first subheading “Outbreak in South China,” the disease’s animal and human origins are narrated as follows:

The viral outbreak can be genetically traced to a colony of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in China’s Yunnan.

The SARS epidemic appears to have started in Guangdong, China, in November 2002 where the first case was reported that same month. The patient, a farmer from Shunde, Foshan, Guangdong, was treated in the First People’s Hospital of Foshan. The patient died soon after, and no definite diagnosis was made on his cause of death.

A separate Wikipedia entry on “2002-2004 SARS Outbreak” (2020a) offers this companion timeline and profile:

On 16 November 2002, an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) began in China’s Guangdong province, bordering Hong Kong. The first case of infection was traced to Foshan. This first outbreak affected people in the food industry, such as farmers, market vendors, and chefs. The outbreak spread to healthcare workers after people sought medical treatment for the disease.

Other websites on the anglophone internet, not surprisingly, have replicated this narrative over the past decade, sometimes verbatim (see Zolli 2012; WordPress 2013). In the months of COVID-19, anglophone news outlets spanning the US, the UK, Europe, and Asia have retrospected on SARS by repeating this very story of its first index case as an anonymous dead farmer from Foshan, Guangdong (see Martin 2020; Moura 2020; Ma 2020; Gopalan 2020; Nelson 2020; Stanley 2020). Given the widely accepted thesis on the zoonotic origins of SARS, readers are left to connect the dots between the coronavirus’s animal hosts and the rural farmer who first contaminated himself by living in proximity to them. In line with what anthropologist Mei Zhan (2005) highlighted in international media coverage of SARS in 2003, the dead farmer story subtly implies a “deadly filthiness” to Chinese “strange entanglements of human and animal bodies” (37).

Nor is this narrative restricted to online sources. Print references to SARS’s primal farmer have long appeared in English-language scientific and academic venues, from a 2005 Pediatric Annals article on animal viruses (Lee and Krilov 2005: 43-44) to a 2006 Urban Studies journal article on infectious disease and global cities (Ali and Keil 2006: 497) to a 2007 Lancet book review of a McGill-Queen’s University Press anthology on SARS (Bugl 2007: 710). By now, the notion that the world’s first SARS patient was a Foshan/Guangdong farmer has entered into anglophone pandemic lore, dispersed across, among other things, a virology textbook (M. Taylor 2014: 386), a guide on sustainability and corporate responsibility (Kao 2010: 113), a crisis management reference work (Penuel et al. 2013: 771), a mathematical engineering study (Hu et al. 2016: 1), a political science analysis (Wang 2018), as well as myriad mass market books on climate change, emerging viruses, and pandemic outbreaks (Marsa 2013: 46; Zimmer 2015: 85; Khan and Patrick 2016: 165). Even Ali Khan, the former director of the US CDC Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, affirmed this version of events in his book The Next Pandemic (2016):

The official narrative for the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that swept through Asia and grazed North America traces the first reported case to Guangdong Province, China. This was mid-November 2002, and the patient, a farmer, was treated in the First People’s Hospital of Foshan, and then promptly died. (165)

What further unites all these anglophone sources is the allegation, sometimes explicit, other times strongly insinuated, that the farmer not only infected himself and those around him but initiated a nuclear chain infection that ultimately culminated in a catastrophic global epidemic.

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The problem with this “official narrative,” however, is that it is replete with egregious errors and orientalist biases. In reality, SARS’s first known patient was not a peasant farmer, he was not at the center of an explosive outbreak cluster, he did not kill anyone, and above all, he did not die from the virus. In reality, he was an elected local official with an administrative office job, he directly infected only two family members but no healthcare workers, this was a contained cluster with five infections total and no fatalities, and he lived on to tell his tale even ten years later.

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His name is Pang Zuoyao. In November 2002, he was the deputy chief of Bitang Village. Though labeled a village, Bitang was in fact a thriving industrial town in the heart of Foshan, a city of three and a half million (approximately the size of Los Angeles). “The people in this village are quite wealthy,” according to migrant workers who came here looking for factory jobs, “and you can earn a lot just with annual bonuses” (quoted in Wu and Li 2013). Pang’s was an elected position, one that he would continue to hold for at least another decade. At the time, he was also assistant chair of the local shareholding economic cooperative (Wu and Li 2013). By the early 2000s, most local enterprises had been privatized, so Pang’s work consisted mainly of managing real estate and sometimes overseeing family planning issues (Hu and Ma 2006). He was relatively well-to-do, living with his wife and four children in a four-story house (Leu 2003a). His oldest son was applying for college that year, his daughter was about to enter high school, and his youngest child was a fifth-grader-to-be (Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003). By all indications, he was a low-level government cadre leading a comfortable middle-class life in China’s liberalizing economy.

It was also this set of personal circumstances that afforded Pang and his family access to advanced healthcare and that led to their surviving SARS. On November 16, Pang developed a high fever, headache, dry cough, and weakness and was rushed to the hospital closest to his house, the second-tier Shiwan People’s Hospital. After nine days, his fever persisted, so he was transferred to the top-tier Foshan No. 1 People’s Hospital. There, he was promptly admitted to the isolation ward and then transferred to the intensive care unit, where he was put on a ventilator—all treatment options available only to those with financial means (Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003; Hu and Ma 2006; Wu and Li 2013). Throughout that period, Pang’s family visited him at the hospital every day, and since no one knew to take precautions, he infected both his wife and his maternal aunt, and the latter in turn infected her husband and daughter. All five family members were hospitalized, but in the end, all recovered, and Pang himself was discharged on January 8, 2003 (Zhou et al. 2003: 599; Xu et al. 2004: 1033; Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003; Hu and Ma 2006). None of his children at home caught the virus, nor did any of his Bitang neighbors or any hospital worker who cared for the family. According to two early epidemiological studies on SARS, this Foshan outbreak, the first one known to us, was an intrafamilial cluster with only five patients, and the transmission chain ended there (Zhou et al. 2003: 598; Xu et al. 2004: 1033). So, despite being SARS’s first known cluster, it was not the spark that ignited a global infection chain. As one of Pang’s physicians commented afterward, this case could be considered a “miracle” (quoted in Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003).

Later on, Pang would be identified as the world’s first known SARS patient, the epidemic’s global index case. At the time, though, no one knew this was a new virus, least of all Pang himself. Even the ICU director at the Foshan hospital who oversaw Pang’s case remembered calling it simply a “respiratory infectious disease of unclear cause” (quoted in Hu and Ma 2006). Pang was never formally diagnosed with SARS, and in fact, according to his wife, the hospital’s initial diagnosis was food poisoning (Leu 2003a).

Pang’s own processing of the experience was protracted and traumatic. A few months after his discharge, after the coronavirus had been identified and as the epidemic raged worldwide, Pang and his family still found it hard to believe that what they had suffered was SARS. “I don’t even know if I am related to what happened elsewhere,” he told Ching-Ching Ni, a staff writer for Los Angeles Times, over the phone in April 2003. “The day I left the hospital, they said they didn’t know what I had” (quoted in Ni 2003). Likewise, Mrs. Pang told South China Morning Post journalist Leu Siew Ying in person that same month, “I find it baffling [that people say we had SARS] because no one in my family has the illness. My husband’s parents and his seven siblings and my parents and my own four siblings spent time with him during the day or visited him regularly. None of them fell sick.” Pointing to the town traffic, she speculated, “I think it is the air pollution that is making us ill” (quoted in Leu 2003a). To reporters from the province’s 21st Century Business Herald, Mrs. Pang pleaded, “[My husband] is very busy with work, and he has a stress prone personality … so please don’t bother us anymore” (quoted in Zheng, Wang, and Chen 2003). Another few months later, Pang himself remained terse with reporters both domestic and foreign. “I have completely recovered,” he declared to Leu on her follow-up visit, with an emphasis on recovery that had become a refrain for him. “If you are concerned about sick people go to the hospitals. You are wasting your time with me” (quoted in Leu 2003b). “Let the past be the past,” he implored the journalists from Guangzhou’s Southern Weekend who tracked him down in 2006. More resigned now to the SARS diagnosis, he told them, “I don’t want to think about it anymore. I myself have no idea why I caught SARS. When I got sick, there wasn’t yet the term ‘atypical pneumonia.’ Properly speaking, I was only retroactively labeled a SARS patient” (quoted in Hu and Ma 2006). One oft-cited comment by the respiratory specialist and “SARS hero” Zhong Nanshan is that 96% of mainland China’s SARS patients had no clear contact history, so for them, the whole episode was like “bafflingly having a nightmare” (quoted in Yang 2012). For Pang especially, the virus must have struck like something utterly out of the blue, supernatural and uncanny. And if the disease itself left, the stain of it lingered, branding him the world index case—a designation he had no power to reject. He had little time to narrate the experience for himself and to give it personal meaning before the external world descended to take over his story.

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For much of the decade after the epidemic, Pang kept a low profile, dodging all media attention (Wu and Li 2013). For a period that summer, his family even vacated their Bitang house and went into hiding (Blackwell 2003). What little we know of his actual post-SARS life comes from a handful of articles based on the few interviews he and his family granted over the years, primarily to reporters from southern China. One significant impact of the disease episode on him and his family, as he related to Southern Weekend, was economic. The medical bills for his family had come to 400,000 yuan (almost $60,000), a not insubstantial sum for a village-level official, even a well-off one like Pang. “At the time I thought, out of nowhere came this strange disease, and just like that, 400,000 yuan gone. What a waste,” he said. “But then I thought, if you lose your life, what’s the point of mourning the loss of money?” (quoted in Hu and Ma 2006).

Indeed, SARS had a deep and lasting impact on Pang’s lifestyle and value system. In the half-year following his hospitalization, he remained physically weak and would gasp for breath after climbing a few flights of stairs (Hu and Ma 2006). He became much more health conscious as a result, quitting smoking and giving up alcohol, taking up regular tai chi and long-distance jogging instead. He also stopped dining out, and every day at noon, he unfailingly drove home from work to eat a lunch prepared by his wife, meticulously washing his hands before every meal (Yang 2012). Ten years on, he kept up these habits. Now in his mid-fifties, he continued to serve as Bitang’s deputy chief. As he remarked to a reporter from Blog World in 2012, “I take my work seriously every single day, and I intend to work hard until my retirement. If there’s a change in me, it’s that I give greater importance to health and family now” (quoted in Yang 2012). SARS also made him more fastidious about hygiene. Two reporters from the Information Times noted in 2013 that, after receiving guests in his office, Pang would wash all the cups by hand and then sterilize them in a disinfecting cupboard next to the sofa (Wu and Li 2013). All these routines grew out of Pang’s brush with SARS, the small residual effects of his disease experience and the enduring transformations of his everyday life thereafter.

At the same time, these self-care practices may have embodied Pang’s coping mechanisms for the physical trauma of the ordeal and its various side effects. One Hong Kong study (Lee and Wing 2006) found that 45% of recovered SARS patients developed one or more mental illnesses within three weeks of discharge: 13% suffered from organic mood syndrome, 11% from major depression, 11% from adjustment disorders, 7% from PTSD, 5% from generalized anxiety disorder, and 2% from transient delirium or psychosis. Those who had been in ICU had a higher likelihood of developing one of these illnesses, and many survivors additionally “complained of profound lethargy and disturbing forgetfulness” (144). There is no public record of Pang ever seeking professional therapy, but the person who emerges from these published accounts fits the profile of someone struggling with posttraumatic stress.

In his case, disease survival was compounded by the stigma of being the world index case. When the WHO investigative team to Guangdong visited Pang’s house in April 2003, word got out and “it was clear to everyone in his neighborhood that it was him,” according to Robert Breiman, the leader of the WHO team. “He told me that this created many problems” (quoted in Ang 2003). As some of Pang’s neighbors admitted to reporters later that summer, “At first, we didn’t know who [the SARS patient among us] was. After we knew that he got SARS, we didn’t want to have any connection with him” (quoted in Blackwell 2003). Years later, the family still remembered how their neighbors gossiped and blamed Pang for unleashing a global plague. In one workplace dispute, Pang’s SARS record was brought up against him, an incident that put him on guard ever after for political rivals weaponizing his disease history against him (Yang 2012). In the post-SARS decade, then, Pang rarely spoke of his medical past and hid it from most coworkers, even deliberately distancing himself from the doctors and nurses who had treated him and his family. His attending physician at the time sympathized with this evasion: “Foshan people are very practical and low-key. Besides, this isn’t something anyone would want to grab the limelight for,” the doctor commiserated (quoted in Wu and Li 2013). Over time, to Pang’s longtime colleagues and relatives, it seemed as if SARS never happened, as if it had been wiped clean from his memory, whether by design or repression (Yang 2012). These, then, were also things that lived through SARS and trailed Pang for years: ostracism and stigma, uncertainty and suspicion, forgetting and self-silencing.

Perhaps what gnawed at Pang the most was the accusation, and the possibility, that his own dietary habits did in fact cause a new deadly human virus. Like many of his neighbors, Pang used to enjoy eating wild animals, or yewei. About a month or so prior to falling sick, he had traveled with a friend to Guangxi Province and brought home some game meat (Zhou et al. 2003: 598; Wu and Li 2013). And about a week before his hospitalization, he had dined on “wild cat meat” with a friend twice and again brought some home for his family (Zhou et al. 2003: 598; Hu and Ma 2006). During that period, he also prepared meat dishes at home, including “chicken, domestic cat, and snake” (Xu et al. 2004: 1033). But, significantly, none of those who shared these meals became infected. “My husband ate mutton and cat meat before he fell ill,” recalled Mrs. Pang. “He said cat meat was good for his backache, so sometimes he has cat meat outside and sometimes I cook it at home. Most people here eat cat meat, but nobody has SARS” (quoted in Leu 2003a).

What no media report mentions is the possible sociohistorical link between Pang’s generation and the contemporary trend of wildlife banqueting. Being forty-five in 2002, Pang would have been born around 1957, a year before the start of the 1958-61 Great Famine. Mrs. Pang was forty-two in 2002, so she would have been born in the middle of the famine years, around 1960. While we do not know whether they or their families suffered from starvation during those winters, a history of hunger and mass death defined much of the national landscape of their infancy, especially in rural areas. Without pathologizing either the Pangs or their generation, we can nonetheless conjecture, following Judith Farquhar’s (2002) “anthropology of the mundane,” that commonplace bodily appetites can register collective historical experiences and postmemorial traumas. In the case of postsocialist China, Farquhar suggests, acts of eating often operate within “a politics of restitution in which people are intent on ‘getting rich’ (facai zhifu) and ‘enjoying themselves’ (zhaole) as a way of making up for the poverty and misery many associate with their collective history” (129). Thus, consumption practices in the reform era, particularly by the rising urban middle class, often entail an ethical calculus tied to Maoist history, whereby eating itself becomes a set of economic and historical reckonings about “excess and deficiency”: “How much enjoyment or bulk is justifiable for the fortunate in a world where starvation is all too real for some of their neighbors? Is there value in ‘high’ civilization (gourmet food, for example) if many of the socially ‘low’ have no access to its sophisticated pleasures? Can past famine justify indulgence in present and future gluttony?” (122).

The Pangs and their appetites, too, would have emerged from this history, with SARS as the latest event in an ongoing national dialectical grappling with lack and surplus. Maybe, to some degree, the epidemic interrupted their psychohistorical reliance on that calculus and helped redefine well-being from endless consumption to equilibrium upkeep. In any event, the Pangs abandoned their wildlife diet after their infection, opting instead for healthy dishes such as plain steamed fish (Yang 2012). According to their daughter, though, Pang never accepted the zoonotic thesis about SARS, despite mounting scientific consensus. In the ten years after, he never ceased searching for an alternative cause for the coronavirus. Like his wife, he pointed to environmental factors such as industrial pollution as the root of his illness. He often suspected that the exhaust gas from a funeral parlor near his workplace was the true culprit, and he repeatedly campaigned to have the funeral parlor relocated, even enlisting for help the press he so avoided otherwise (Yang 2012). This, too, merits consideration as a small act of local eco-activism, as epidemic experience bred skepticism toward the state’s economic development goals and an awareness of the human reverberations of environmental contamination.

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I patch together this reconstruction of Pang Zuoyao’s story in order to highlight that, even for its global index patient, SARS infection and survival can be narrated in the terms, not of perpetual emergency and pandemic crisis, but of ordinary resilience. Medical authorities and experts might reach for the magical or the occult to explain the scientifically inexplicable aspects of SARS and Pang’s case—a “miracle,” a “nightmare”—but Pang himself seemed to want nothing more than a restoration of the normal and the prosaic. Elsewhere, I have analyzed Wuhan writer Hu Fayun’s 2004 novel Ruyan@sars.come (Such Is This World@sars.come) through a framework I call pandemic ordinariness (see Kong 2018). Not so unlike Hu’s eponymous protagonist Ru Yan, Pang lived beyond SARS by turning to aspects of his domestic life that allowed for small and everyday agency, such as quitting risk-raising old habits and initiating new self-nourishing routines. Indeed, his reformed lifestyle resonates with western biomedical paradigms that emphasize personal health regimens such as diet, nutrition, and exercise. In the process, he reoriented himself away from the raw accumulation of economic, political, and social capital toward bodily self-care and familial preservation. These mundane changes in Pang’s daily life did not carry any noticeable impact on the national or global stage, nor did they amount to any grand gestures of resistance. As a whole, Pang’s story does not lend itself so easily to either prefabricated cautionary tales of disastrous contagion or geopolitical critiques of communist totalitarian biopower. In a much quieter but not quietist way, his story bespeaks a rebuilding of personal world, a form of autopoetic resilience, where survival is not a passive condition but a process of corporeal emergence, to be continually enacted through everyday embodied practices. These in turn facilitate a transfer of sentimental attachment, an affective shift away from the rationales of both the communist party-state system and the postsocialist neoliberal market, toward a self-valuing ethics and deeper kinship intimacies.

Rather than interpret these living practices cynically, as a naïve buying into the false promises of the good life in an individualist capitalist society, or what Lauren Berlant (2011) would call the slow death of cruel optimism, we might see in Pang a conscious embrace of a nonelitist biopolitics of care, salvaged from the post-crisis space of epidemic illness. If Anna Tsing (2015) glosses “conditions of precarity” as “life without the promise of stability” (2), then a nonexceptionalist ethics and self-organizing biopolitics such as Pang’s testifies to a desire for postprecarity, a faith in the possibility of everyday life’s meaningful continuance, after disease catastrophe, through small acts of recreated stability. Moreover, similar to Ru Yan’s decision to not resume her internet writerly persona at the end of Hu’s novel, Pang’s post-SARS life was marked by his decision to eschew media attention, which was also an act of not relinquishing his right to live beyond his illness on his own terms, of not ceding his epidemic story over to those already endowed with an inordinate share of power in constructing macro pandemic narratives.

While numerous scholars have analyzed the racist and orientalist dimensions of global media representations of SARS (see Hung 2004; Zhan 2005; Keil and Ali 2008; J. Lee 2014; Lynteris 2018; Lynteris 2020), few have heeded the Chinese index patients themselves, particularly how surviving first patients such as Pang went on to embody new practices and reshape their own living relations to animals and consumption, thus modeling the transition to post-epidemic renewal at disease epicenters. These modifications in bodily conduct toward self and others, both human and nonhuman, deserve attention also as reemergent forms of life. Unlike Michael Fischer’s (2003) notion of “emergent forms of life” at the frontiers of cybernetics and biotechnology, here we observe precisely a retreat from translocal hybrid networks both human-social and human-animal. We observe a foregoing of participation in anthropocentric cultures of species extraction, displacement, and incorporation, and a deliberate return to smaller scales and more proximate relations of life. Even micro decisions and inner commitments—such as a determined letting go of one’s appetite for certain foods, or of one’s involvement in certain toxic networks of mediatized social community—can in themselves represent profound ethical responses to human-nonhuman pandemic assemblages and crises. Withdrawing from one’s neighboring regimes of ingestion and refocusing on the locality of one’s household, leaving be and dwelling alongside the creatures deemed ingestible, releasing the attachment to limitless wealth concentration and historically compensatory pleasure, and carving out the parameters of what one considers actually livable togetherness—these, too, constitute performances of Tsing’s “collaborative survival,” the ordinary and minute navigations of personal “living-space entanglements” (2, 5). In the wake of pandemic ruin, these too instantiate means of recovering life, of rethinking living.

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Perhaps most of all, I insist on reconstructing Pang’s life because it is startlingly absent in English. So far as I can tell, this narrative arc of Pang’s encounter with and survival of SARS—though fragmented and mediated, and slim by any serious biographer’s yardstick—is missing from the anglophone archive altogether. Of course, anglophone discourse is not homogenous, and I am not suggesting that no writer in English has given an accurate and good-faith rendition of Pang’s story. (In my book’s final chapter, I go into detail about the larger anglophone archive on three SARS index patients, including medical records and epidemiological studies as well as other popular writings both within and outside of China.) One might expect that, as the world index patient, Pang Zuoyao would be a familiar name in the annals of SARS, or in the very least, that the outlines of his experience would have been documented by someone, whether through direct investigation or translation, for an anglophone readership. Yet the exact opposite is true. On a most basic level, Pang’s name has largely vanished from the anglophone public record. This erasure may have come about through a well-intentioned assumption that anonymity protects the patient and his family, though in practice it has only enabled the replication and recirculation of false narratives about him. More insidiously, this erasure feeds contemporary orientalist assumptions about communist China and its totalitarian terror state. One bestselling and critically acclaimed mass market book (Quammen 2012) on animal infections and human pandemics, for example, intimates that “his name goes unmentioned” because of the Chinese government’s censorship of Pang’s story (170-71), when the sinophone sources I draw on are readily available on the Chinese internet. Indeed, in the months during and after SARS, in addition to the dead farmer template, a set of wildly erroneous and deeply orientalist stories emerged about Pang—including fabricated accounts of him as a businessman or salesman (see for example Grady 2003; Rosenthal et al. 2003; Ang 2003; Altman 2003; Abraham 2003; Chao 2003; C. Taylor 2003), a wild animal trader or dealer (see Luck 2003; Bradsher and Altman 2003; Zhan 2005: 37; Jackson 2008: 283), and an exotic game restaurant chef (see Chiu and Galbraith 2004: xv; Seno and Reyes 2004: 7; Goudsmit 2004: 141; Lee and Wing 2006: 135; J. Lee 2014: 18). These stories were told and retold—even by politically committed scholars who set out to critique the racism of SARS discourse—taking hold of the popular anglophone imagination until they bore almost no resemblance to the real Pang, who lived on as if in a parallel universe.

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Meditating on the possible reasons for the silences around Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s death, Cathy Park Hong (2020) ultimately turns the question on herself:

… But why hadn’t I bothered to find out about her homicide earlier? Didn’t I also type and then delete the word rape before murder when I wrote the review where I mentioned Cha? Rape burns a hole in the article and capsizes any argument. There is no way to continue on with your analysis, no way to make sense past it. You can only look at it or look away—and I looked away. But it’s not just because her death was so grim. I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don’t want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don’t want to care that no one else cares because I don’t want to be left stranded in my rage. (172-73)

Even more fundamental than the traumatic effect radiating out from Cha’s gruesome death, Hong suggests, is the racialized exhaustion of confronting, yet again, an instance of Asian suffering that goes unheeded, uncared for, the very invisibility or trivialization of which breeds a second-order inattention and indifference. It is not simply the underlying racial anger that one must then manage but the concomitant feeling of certain abandonment, of knowing that one will be “left stranded” in one’s rage by a white majoritarian society that continually challenges and undermines the legitimacy of Asian affect. Following Sianne Ngai’s argument in Ugly Feelings, Hong calls the racialized forms of these affects “minor feelings”: “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed” (55). The difficulty of looking at Cha’s killing is compounded by the gendered nature of the crime, and perhaps precisely so, she has come to be conceptually bracketed in yet another way, “as this tragic unknowable subaltern subject” that presumably no one can ethically write about (172). Minor feelings overlaid by poststructuralist schooling can “get in the way of documenting facts” (171).

In confronting the anglophone unwriting/rewriting of Pang Zuoyao, I found myself in a similar affective landscape. Like Hong, I wondered with incredulity and anger: Why hadn’t more writers in the anglophone world tried to spotlight Chinese index patients? Why hadn’t more researchers bothered to reconcile contradictory reports rather than simply echo one or two supposedly authoritative and sometimes obviously questionable accounts? Why didn’t more anglophone researchers and writers look into the medical records and epidemiological studies, some of which are in English and readily available online, or seek out translators for widely accessible Chinese-language sources? And most of all, why didn’t more people care about the actual patients themselves, rather than the big stories and big critiques that their small lives could be instrumentalized to stage? One staggering epiphany I came to was that, the more humanistic the anglophone piece—that is, the more an author explicitly set out to tell a story or analyze stories about SARS or pandemics—the more likely it was to recycle errors and slants, to retell the wrong and often offensive stories about first patients. Scientific studies and medical documents, by contrast, provided a trove of empirical tidbits from which to reconstruct index patients’ disease experiences and social lives.

In a core way, my book’s final chapter has become a reckoning on two levels. The first involves scrutinizing the global power of English as the language of public health knowledge production vis-à-vis pandemic narratives. In keeping with the larger thesis of my book, I believe we can gain positive models for thinking about pandemic experience by recovering, from a largely racist and orientalist archive, the ordinary dimensions of epidemic survival or nonsurvival by Chinese index patients. The second involves probing certain reflexive assumptions and pieties embedded in anglophone humanistic disciplines that are also entangled in the production of knowledge about global public health and global pandemics. In regarding ourselves as important, principled writers and scholars who make macro sociopolitical arguments and broad cultural critiques, perhaps also as savvy poststructuralist critics who are too sophisticated to be burdened by empirical truthseeking, do we end up reinforcing the marginalization of the marginal, the trivialization of the trivialized, and sanctioning the very ideological structures and effects we think we are tearing down?

For the anglophonization of SARS and SARS index cases has been largely a process of humanistic storytelling where real humans disappear, replaced by corpses and zombies. In belatedly arriving at these gaps and distortions, did I too look away, not only out of misguided faith but because I wanted someone else to pay attention instead, to free myself from the menial task of charting small stories and small lives so I could pursue higher-order intellectual critiques and stake the latest field-changing claims? As I finish writing my book’s final chapter, I am frequently aware of my own minor feelings of racialized dysphoria, disbelief, and fury at the anglophone archive with its silences, oversights, blunders, and disfigurements. And by chapter’s end, I too will be left wondering: Would I become isolated in these emotions, invalidated away by a language and a set of writings that have demonstrated over and over again their inattention and negligence toward Chinese subjects? Would writing that emerges from these emotions succeed in overcoming the affective fissures and engender care rather than alienation or defensiveness? However imperfect, this is an attempt to navigate the anglophone terrain amid those affects, and to make more possible alternative stories in which first SARS patients can finally be seen as neither orientalized infrahumans nor tragic unknowable subalterns but just ordinary people. In the time of COVID-19 and beyond, this task, this reorientation, seems more vital than ever.

I want to thank Elina Zhang for soliciting this piece, and for offering a sympatico model of engaged storytelling in her own writing.

 

Belinda Kong is associate professor of Asian Studies and English at Bowdoin College. Her research focuses on contemporary literature by Asian American and Asian diasporic writers, with focus on the Chinese diaspora. She is the author of Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture (Temple University Press 2012, Asian American History and Culture Series), and her work has appeared in Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Ariel, and Journal of Narrative Theory. Her current book project, What Lived Through SARS: Chronicles of Pandemic Resilience, explores cultural expressions of epidemic life at the epicenters of the 2003 SARS outbreak.

 

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by Colin Dayan

Police Power

When I grew up in Atlanta, the police were known as “the laws.” I grew up hearing about the “meat that takes directions from someone.” The laws were as terrifying and unknowable as evil spirits. They controlled and judged. I heard stories of the patrollers who could get you if you were found walking outside at night. But they could be anywhere. The laws. Driving down to Florida, you knew where not to stop, which gas station to avoid, when not to turn and look at a red light, how to get to where you were going.

Until I left the South, I never felt safe. And now that I’ve returned, I still see the men in trucks, driving down the street like they owned the world. They are smiling. It’s what my mother called “a shit-eating grin.” Some of my neighbors talk about what might happen after sunset. They’re not afraid of police. I keep quiet. I am afraid of them.

 

George Floyd is dead because Derek Chauvin killed him, in close collaboration with three of his police colleagues. Of this there is no doubt, and it will be confirmed as fact when they eventually go to trial and are convicted on charges that go little way to match even the illegality, to say nothing of the brutality and savagery, of their crimes. That will not be the end of the story, for they are white and Floyd was black. There will be propaganda from the policemen’s union. That has already begun, with the union leader spewing out bile designed to get his men off the hook. There will be appeals. The (now ex-) police officers will spend some time in prison. Then, on release, they will, given how these things work in the United States, find their way back into gainful employment. That will probably be in some form of policing. That is what happens in more than fifty percent of such cases; and this inevitability represents the racism and oppression based on color that structures this country.

What are the deeper and more structural aspects of this racism and oppression? No one, no American, no one armed with a big gun, no other American police officer except, just possibly, a direct superior of the four killers who was actually known to them, not the governor of the state, not even the president of the United States, could have stopped these police officers from killing George Floyd. Eight minutes is a long time, but it is short enough to kill a man, slowly. Physically intervening would have been dangerous, risking the life of anyone who tried.  It is risky to get involved when a heavily armed gang of four killers is busy killing someone, and when those gang members are policemen it is even riskier.

That makes this particular killing sound like another anonymous murder in the druglands of Mexico, or the favelas of Brazil, or the excesses of the military dictatorships of Latin America before democracy returned, or the terror of Duterte’s Philippines.  But while all those cases are painted bright in the colors of the American flag, this one is right here.  And while all those cases represent extra-judicial, illegal forms of action, the case of Derek Chauvin represents legality at its worst.

Legally intervening to save George Floyd’s life was impossible. Interfering with the actions of a police officer in the United States is legally a crime. There might be cracks on this round the edges, but the central fact, all over the United States, is that you cannot interfere with a policeman killing a black man—executing his duties, as he sees them—without risk to your own life and limb and freedom.

The real story here is about police power and its effects on the lives of Americans, white as well as black, and the character of the United States as a country that tells itself—no less than the rest of the world—lies about what it is, what it stands for and how it stands for it.

The ghost of slavery is built into our legal language and holds our prison system in its grip. To the extent that slaves were allowed personalities before the law, they were regarded chiefly—almost solely—as potential criminals. During the second session of the 39th Congress (December 12, 1866-January 8, 1867) debates raged on the meaning of the exemption in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. It abolished slavery “except as punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The parenthetical expression guaranteed enclosure, a bracketing of servitude that revived slavery under cover of removing it. Those who were once slaves were now criminals, and forced labor in the form of the convict lease system ensured continued degradation. As Charles Sumner warned, the locale for enslavement would move from the auction block to the courts of the United States.

 

Can’t Breathe

This piece was originally published in Transition (2015) in the issue “New African Fiction”: “I Can’t Breathe,” included with other responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police.

Hard to write what I want to say. Knowing that my words can’t even get close to righteous response. I remember Birmingham and Jackson and being a child in Atlanta in 1963. What is happening now is different. It might be more pernicious, more lasting, less easy to combat. No Civil Rights Act can stop it. Trying to put into words what these murders of blacks—by any white person, police or not—tell us, I sense a desire to repeat the racial tags of our American history, a litany of law that seems like a series of death announcements that always precede and continue to haunt the bodies left lying on the street losing blood unable to breathe talked over and done in.

But instead I can only say what I keep thinking about: How the most well-intentioned and reasonable folks end up abetting the state of fear and atrocity, terrifying because commonplace—easily as tactful as de Blasio’s call “for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in due time.”
I remember Nina Simone’s words in “Mississippi Goddam,” “Keep on saying ‘go slow.’ ” Who has to slow down? How long is due time? Real terror plucks us by the sleeve and comes along naturally, forever just occurring, always perceptible just at the edge of our vision. What terrorizes is this casual but calculated disregard. A terror relayed not by
the dogs, hoses, and bombs in the new South of the sixties, but by the near nonchalance of legal murder anywhere in the United States today: as if these living breathing black citizens, now dead, were not supposed to go about their lives, walk down the street, stand on a corner, put their hands in their pockets, take a toy gun to the park, go down the stairway of their own building—breathe.

 

Colin Dayan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. She has held Guggenheim as well as other distinguished fellowships.

by Anthony Bogues

We live in an extraordinary moment. One in which many cross currents tussle for sustained  dominance. A moment when armed white supremacy groups make attempts to take over state legislative offices in states like Michigan. One in which the science of contagion is in battle with a myopic individualism in which the wearing of a mask for medical protection becomes a signifier for a political symbolic battle around hegemony.  All of this occurs in a moment when there is a historic  pandemic, one which should make us as human species reflect on our contemporary ways of life. A pandemic which exposed the structures of the American health system where race and class determine those who will survive and live and those who disproportionately die. In the midst of this crisis, in which lockdowns and shelter in place were every day practices, we witnessed one of the most significant global protests that the world has seen for some time. The protests upended many commentators, shattered many conventional wisdoms about politics and at least for a time punctured the everyday normal many of us had become accustomed to. So what was at the root of this upsurge? And what are its significances? And, therefore, how might we understand it?

In the epigraph to the first chapter of Black Reconstruction (1935), WEB Du Bois writes about “How black men, coming to America … became a central thread to the history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and social development.” That challenge has historically been the touchstone for both American democracy and its civilization. Racial slavery was a cornerstone of capitalism. It is not that racial slavery laid the foundation for capitalism; rather racial slavery, the plantation slave economy, the African slave trade were themselves practices of capitalism. At the core of the inauguration of capitalism was not the factory system with its wage labor but the slave plantation, unfree labor and a network of credit and debt arrangements. In Debt: The First 5000 years (2011), David Graeber points out how the Atlantic slave trade depended upon a system of debts and credits. Within this system emerged various institutions we now associate with capitalism from bond markets to brokerage houses. There was also the emergence of major companies whose chief functions were linked to slave trade, financing plantations and other aspects of the European colonial project. Here one can refer amongst others to the Dutch West India Company, the French Société de Guinée, and of course, the Royal African Company of England. At the core of what historian Catherine Hall calls this “slavery business” was the African captive who became an enslaved person. The late African American theorist Cedric Robinson called this historical process “racial capitalism.”

The enslaved body as the Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia said was “property in person.” It was a body that produced commodities while it was commodified. The black female enslaved body reproduced this commodification process three times over, as a body producing commodity, while being a commodity and then through sexual violence a reproductive body of enslaved labor. The plantation was a site of generative violence of commodification. Capitalism was inaugurated through the various violences enacted upon the enslaved black body. Exploitation was established upon the foundation of unfree labor. That is the history of capitalism: not a stages theory of transition of societies from one mode of production to another, but rather a historical process of generative violence upon the bodies of the African enslaved. In such a history the body is not secondary, it is the source of the methods, the several ways, of practices which turn the human into an enslaved dehumanized thing. Creating such a historical process, the colonial and planter power needed to construct forms of life, ways of thinking, construct modes of being human that would at least for a time guarantee the full reproduction of a society. To put this another way: exploitation requires forms of domination and the latter requires ideas and practices which the dominant elite and others accepts. This is about the manufacturing of what Gramsci calls “commonsense,” a kind of naturalized underpinning of a society, an ideational glue which holds society together. In slave and colonial societies violence was regularized as a technique of rule because in such societies might was right. And while this was so these orders also ruled by a set of ideas and practices about who was human and who was not.

All nations we know are an “imagined community” and as such we search for what glues bind the nation together. In America, the glue that has bounded the society together is not the fiction of America as an idea, the exception of the “City on the Hill,” rather it has been anti-black racism. What Du Bois calls the “wages of whiteness” became the naturalized commonsense  which structured the everyday practices of living. Anti-black racism, has a long history founded within the matrices of the generative violence of the African slave trade; elaborated in plantation slavery through a complex system of customs and legal codes. It was codified in human systems of classification promulgated by European natural historians in the 17^th century, mapped by Christian doctrine whereby some human beings had souls and some not; and then, in the 19^th century, recodified through the so-called scientific studies of skulls–phrenology–a pseudo-science of the study of the mind in which it was said that Africans were inferior because of the size of their skulls since the brain was located in the skull. And when science made it clear that there was no scientific basis for anti-black racism then culture became a terrain to explain the supposed inferiority of blackness.

So blackness as visual marker produces within the dominant commonsense the death of the black person. Black life becomes disposable, is a lack, has no interiority, it is locked upon itself. As a visual marker, the black body has no escape. Its public presence is an affront, it must be tamed, put back in its place. It must be not allowed to breathe, because breath is life and for the black body to breathe means it has life. This is not primarily an American phenomenon. The history of racial slavery in America, the inauguration of Jim Crow and formal segregation, given the imperial power of America on the world stage created the illusion that there was a special American race problem. Of course, all societies have their own historical specificities, but anti-black racism was not an American feature alone. What Du Bois called the “color line” was embedded in the world because racial slavery and colonialism were parts of a global system which ruled much of the world from the 15^th century Columbian voyages onwards. The anti-black racism of European colonial powers drew from racial theories created in America, the Caribbean, the historical encounters between Europe and Africa. South African apartheid drew some of its resources from the structures and practices of American Jim Crow. In all this the black body was the disposable surplus; not the other but the irremediable non-other, that which could not be fully included into the body politic of the given nation. Such an irremediable body, always on the outside, challenges the very meaning of democracy itself. It is why struggles around anti-black racism shake the society, indeed call Western civilization into question.

If we agree historically that the foundation of the capitalist West was racial slavery and colonialism and the accompanying genocide and attempted genocide of the indigenous populations, then what we are witnessing today are the challenges to this foundation. Capitalism is not just an abstract economic system as Marx made clear long ago when he noted that economic relationships are always between people. To rule, to be able to reproduce itself, any social system creates ways of living, modes of being human as it is then understood. Historically and in the present, anti-black racism and the creation of whiteness, of white supremacy was both a way of life and a signifier of being human. It is not just an ideological belief but rather a naturalized commonsense which in many ways functions like a fantasy, one which has material life and consequences. Commonsense as well in part is constructed by the historical understandings of a society about itself. We are, as humans, historical beings that make sense of ourselves through memories of the past. We take from that past to make the self. In societies where the past has been a historical catastrophe, where regularized violence operated as “power in the flesh” making the “human superfluous,” that past becomes a critical way to establish the grounds for inhumane ways of life. America’s unwillingness to confront the fact that it was a slave society since its founding as a British colony; that practices of settler colonialism wreaked havoc on the indigenous population; Europe’s unwillingness to confront its own history as multiple colonial powers now provides a dominant commonsense which structures the present. Yet as the poet and thinker Aimé Césaire noted in 1955: “Between the colonizer and the colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops … no human contact, but relations of domination and submission.” This history is elided by European countries. It is a history made visible through the various pacification campaigns, the genocide of the Herero people in Namibia and regular cutting off of the hands of the Congolese people. A history codified through forms of rule which created the African subject into a native and turned various African social and political formations into tribes.  However, history lives in the present and becomes memorialized into the public landscapes of monuments. Monuments are an encoded system of public signs which enact meanings in the public domain. So when the Black Lives Matter Movement and those activated by it demand the removal of monuments, they are engaged in a move of symbolic insurgency to get rid of the public landscapes of the everyday historical monumentalization in the present. This happens in America, in South Africa, the UK. And continental Europe cannot escape the fire this time.

So here we are. For over a month there has been in America the single largest protests in America’s history. These protests were ignited by the public lynching of George Floyd who cried out “I can’t breathe,” before being murdered and then died with the words “Mama” on his lips. In that modern lynching scene, for nearly 9 minutes we witnessed the meaning of anti-black racism. Yes, it was the police man who kneeled down on his back and neck. Yes, the American police force were operating like modern day slave catchers. But there was something else and that something else was the casual nonchalance, the non-recognition that Floyd was human. It was the nonchalance that Floyd was just another disposable black body. The daily confrontation between black men and increasingly black women with the police is the nodal point where anti-black racism is most visible. In this nodal point there is no pretense. State authority expresses itself, that might be right, that black life does not matter. This is so in Brazil, in parts of Europe, the Caribbean, America or indeed in parts of Africa. Here ordinary black life does not matter.

After the death of Trayvon Martin, in 2013, a group of black feminists, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, formed the organization which became known as “Black Lives Matter.” Today the name of the organization has become a political banner igniting the political imagination of both black and white around the world. There is a rich historical current in which black revolts / uprisings have catalyzed various struggles around the world. In the 19^th century the dual Haitian revolution inspired Greek anti-colonial figures fighting against the Ottoman Empire when some of them wrote to the Haitian government requesting arms and political support. We recall how what was then called “Negro Revolt”, the black uprisings in the 1960’s, influenced feminist and the anti-war movements around the world. In all this the African American spiritual “We shall overcome” became a clarion political message of many movements. So why, might we ask, does Black Lives Matter at this moment become transformed into a catalytic political banner, one which has engaged the political imagination of thousands? I return to Du Bois.

Racial slavery was the foundation of America and, I would argue, of the making of the modern world. As a form of domination its very core was the double and triple commodification process I addressed earlier. It was about making non-human another human being. As a generative historical process, it lasted for centuries. That is a special form of domination which not only required violence but creating another kind of human being, one who would be surplus and disposable. It also created the conditions for Black struggle to be catalytic, a point the Caribbean historian and radical thinker CLR James made in 1948, when living underground in the USA in the 1940’s he noted in a seminal essay “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States that “this independent Negro Movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation.” Black Lives Matter became a political banner because it challenges continued racial domination, its deep rooted legacies and consequences. It says we are human. It demands that as human the society should be transformed to create new ways of living. It not only therefore exposes police brutality but calls to order the entire historical foundation on which Western civilization rests, which is why getting rid of the historical monuments which venerate the West has become so crucial. While being part of a historic black liberation tradition, BLM political organizational methods have enacted critiques about Black masculinity. Given all this, Black Lives Matter as a political banner is world historic. And here the reader might pause and wonder why? Let us return to the making of the modern world; to the ways in which anti-black racism continues in the after-lives of  racial slavery to dominate black life and has done so for centuries. So when there are sustained protests against the institutional and everyday forms of anti- black racism and this happens on the global stage. Is this not world historic? The current global protests are world historic because they confront the entire panoply and edifice that built the modern world. They are also world historic because they posit different methods of political organizing which breaks from previous forms of radical black movements. When the movement demands that monuments which invoke the past that undergirds the present must fall, it draws from the earlier struggles of South African students and the Rhodes Must Fall Movement. It demands abolition, making the word capacious, creating a new political language not just about abolishing prisons but demanding the opening of a new space, invoking the radical imagination to think of new ways of life. If many social and political radical movements have paid attention only to the state and the economy as structures of the present, Black Lives Matter is attentive to the history of the structures and their underlying assumptions and commonsense.

We are indeed in a new moment. Some say this moment feels different in part because the world wide protests have been multiracial, as the image of a lone white woman sitting on the sidewalk in a rural American town with a sign which reads “Black Lives Matter” illuminates. But perhaps what is most different about this moment is that for the first time in a world governed by neoliberalism, one in which as Stuart Hall and Alan O’ Shea put it, there is a neo-liberal commonsense, we are witnessing an uprising which challenges a foundational element   of that commonsense. A commonsense in which anti-black racism has been a glue for the American body politic. This is an uprising of the radical imagination which demands abolishing the reproductive structures of the making of the modern world. However, as Stuart Hall makes clear in his work,  commonsense is a contested terrain, In every major uprising where elements of the dominant order have been challenged, power when it cannot defeat immediately or ignore the uprising attempts to coopt, to integrate signs and symbols of the upsurge into the dominant thereby gutting them. So the response of many American corporations has been to proclaim support for Black Lives Matter, not the movement but to appropriate the banner turning it into a slogan. So when Amazon proclaimed on its website at the height of the protests that Black Lives Matter it was responding to a popular upsurge it could not ignore. Amazon’s practice was one of appropriation. One of the remarkable features of American power is its ability to quickly gobble up what begins outside of the body politic and then rework it into a hegemony without fundamental changes occurring. This is one aspect of the present moment.

We end where we began, with Du Bois and Black Reconstruction.

In 1935, Du Bois identified in Black Reconstruction a form of politics he called “abolition democracy.” It was, he argued, the necessary radical political framework if the transformation of America was going to occur after the civil war. For Du Bois, “abolition democracy” in his words “pushed towards the dictatorship of Labor”. By then Du Bois in the most radical phase of his intellectual / activist life. Eighty-five years later the black radical imagination has reworked abolition into a demand for new ways of life dismantling the structures which inaugurated the modern world. Fundamental change may not come and at the time of writing this piece, things can be said to be in flux and for sure a revolution is not around the corner. But historically, fundamental change requires the work of the radical imagination, the thinking that a new form of human life is possible. The global Black Lives Matter protests have opened that space. That is its remarkable significance for the current moment.

 

Anthony Bogues is Asa Messer Professor of Humanities at Brown university where he is the inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He is also a curator.

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.