"When thought and language are divided,
we believe that we can speak while forgetting we are speaking. Poetry and
philosophy, when they speak, do not forget that they are speaking, they
remember language. If we remember language, if we do not forget that we can
speak, then we become more free, we are not bound to things and rules. Language
is not a tool, it is our face, the openness in which we are". (Giorgio
Agamben - Quando la casa brucia (When the House is Burning))
XT - People
who have been caught on the wrong side of the distinction between conspiracy
and critical thought have paid a price. Giorgio Agamben has written more about
the deep history and implications of emergency situations than most, yet the
reaction to his numerous interventions on the pandemic have been to treat them
as the ravings of a madman or conspiracy theorist.
TX - Isn't
there always a danger for philosophers when they, so to speak, take up the role
of activist for public thought? I note that Slavoj Zizek managed to publish a
short book on the pandemic during the Spring. Isn't it a cliché that the work
of thought only really gets going after the event? This has a certain tragic
quality to it, one that many thinkers have nevertheless tried to overcome. Is
not every philosophical intervention into the white heat of history bound to
fail?
XT - The
first thing to say is that nothing in Agamben's numerous interventions
presented on the website of his Italian publisher Quodlibet depart from the
extensive researches in his Homo Sacer series or elsewhere. That is what
immediately struck me about the reaction, how it appeared almost like a
betrayal; as if for some on the Left it's fine to make these claims about
ancient history, or the Second World War, or even the United States during the
Bush/Cheney administration, but to invite us here and now to recognise
ourselves as subject to a potentially totalitarian regime, taking advantage of
an emergency situation, that is too much! Apparently the entire literature on
biopolitics and power built up over the past four decades amounts to nought
once the crisis really strikes. I feel a lot of people have been caught out as
lacking the intellectual and moral calibre to face this crisis.
TX - This is
where the danger is, when you intervene at a point when the stakes are so high,
and without recourse to the arsenal of researches and the defensive walls of
citation. Popular writing cannot afford to demand too much from the public, as
patronising as that may sound.
XT -
Agamben's early interventions did not contain much theory, and I'll concede
that their language could easily be misconstrued as denial of the seriousness
of the situation. The first was after all provocatively titled "The invention of an epidemic"
and referred to the response in Italy as frenetiche,
irrazionali e del tutto immotivate misure di emergenza (frenetic,
irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures). But in his
"clarifications" issued in March he identifies his object more clearly. "The problem is
not to give opinions on the gravity of the disease, but to ask about the
ethical and political consequences of the epidemic". A key question he raised was "what is a
society that has no value other than survival?". No other value apart from
survival amounts to only valuing bare biological life. This is the perspective
that I drew on in my writing during April, touching on the famous frontispiece
of Hobbes Leviathan which as Agamben has pointed out depicts an empty city over
which the giant figure of Leviathan towers. The only human figures visible in
the city are soldiers and what Agamben claims are plague doctors. Thus this
canonical image of Western politics pre-figured the very real situation in
cities around the globe during the early months of the pandemic. It also struck
me that the way society was being mobilised, or rather demobilised, reflected
some of Ernst Jünger's
writing on modern warfare and what he termed "total mobilisation".
TX - The
object of political calculation here is thus life, or life force, would that be
better? Life is split into that part which gives force to the war effort and
that which is expendable, i.e. the social life of the population. Everything
becomes focussed on mere survival, survival of the organism, not of the
form-of-life particular to human beings. It is then also worth remembering that
the body politic and the individual bodies of the citizenry are not one and the
same (this is another Hobbesian point). The State in wartime is gilded by a
glorious logic of sacrifice, meaning the sacrifice of individuals to ensure the
survival of the State.
XT - Yes,
and that point has been absolutely borne out over the course of the pandemic.
Everything is expendable apart from bare life, "productive" life, termite
life. But even so, bare life can also be expended if the survival of the State
requires it. Governments around the world have executed the pandemic response
according to a logic of national security which is utterly caustic to the very
thing in which name they are supposed to be acting, the democratic society of
values and forms-of-life. Agamben recognised that the rationality of total
mobilisation and the Security State, which we should remember has been with us
for many years now in the post 9/11 world, takes on an even darker form in the
case of a pandemic. He notes in one of his interventions that in Homer polemos epidemios
is the term for civil war. It's an apt point since in what other way could we
construe a national security response to an enemy that could be harbouring
inside any person than as a kind of civil war?
TX
- In Hobbes, the state of civil conflict is the commonwealth dissolved, is it
not? Our obligations to the State are contingent on the sovereign power securing our safety and common
defence. When that fails the State fails. It's hard to deny that despite all
we've been through this year the virus is still rampant and people are getting
fatigued with the government response. Does this hint at some hope?
XT
- If we reject the form of social transformation assumed by the obstetric motif,
which claims the seeds of a better future are cultivated in the conditions of
the present, then some kind of general conflagration and collapse would appear
necessary. I'm not sure I would want to call that hope, and sincerely I find
hope to be a hindrance in considering the possibilities of a radical renewal of
our species. Hope also binds people to the present arrangement of things, since
hope in a practical sense is always hope in something. It might be more
honest to concede that there is hope, just not for us.
"Not awaiting either a new god or a new
man, we should seek, here and now, and in the ruins that surround us, a humble,
simpler form of life — one that isn’t a mirage, because we have memory and
experience of it, even if adverse forces within us and outside us repel it in
forgetfulness". (Giorgio Agamben - Sul tempo che viene (The Times
Ahead))
TX
- Agamben's later publications on the pandemic have taken a starkly defeatist
turn, a sense of tragedy run through them. Even his considerations on something
such as face coverings take on a metaphysical quality. This is perhaps
understandable for a thinker who has written on the face from a distinctly
Levinasian position. This is the face as the call to ethics, as the seat of
both singularity and the possibility of community; "The
epiphany of the face is ethical". Epiphany means manifestation
which derives from the Latin manifestare, to make public. Having a public face is the possibility of belonging to
a community.
XT - That makes it very clear. Agamben's
criticism of face coverings is not from
some silly US style libertarian position, but from the fear it will accelerate
the dissolution of community. The references he made to biosecurity as a new
political rationality also address this fear. He wrote in May
that "advantage will
be taken of this distancing to replace human relationships in their
physicality, relations which have become suspect as sources of contagion
(meaning political contagion, of course) with digital technological devices
everywhere. University lectures, as the MIUR [the Italian Ministry of
Education, Universities and Research] has already recommended, will be stably
online from next year on, we will no longer recognise each other by looking at
each other’s face, which can be covered by a health mask, but through digital
apparatuses that will recognise biological data that is compulsorily collected
and any “gathering”, whether for political reasons or simply for reasons of
friendship, will continue to be prohibited".
TX -
Agamben's style always contains some degree of hyperbole, nevertheless is this
not a little extreme? Where is the consideration of political economy for
instance. No-one can deny that the pandemic response has been hugely damaging
to Capital, and even if that was necessary to govern the emergency and secure
the legitimacy of the ruling power, it can't surely go on forever?
XT - It is
hyperbolic, but the basic points I think will be proved correct. Social
distancing creates gaps between people, gaps which can be filled with digital
technologies that will monetise what would otherwise have been physical
personal relations. There is a huge amount of money to be made by capturing
human interactions within a digital web. Advertising revenue for platforms and
also all the opportunities afforded through data harvesting, not least
opportunities to manipulate public opinion. This doesn't necessarily entail
legislation or police enforcement, only the removal of certain opportunities
and increasing the costs of others. Nudge economics is the predominant
disciplinary apparatus of our time. Also
it's become clear that some kind of health passport will be needed to
participate in society after the pandemic. This will remove the protections
against sharing of health data and will ultimately lead to the empowering of
insurance companies to grade individuals according to their health prospects,
potentially leaving some "genetically compromised" people without
access to certain services or life insurance. A sign of what's to come can be
seen in Singapore where the government there has collaborated with Apple to
produce an app called LumiHealth, a personalized program to encourage
healthy activity and behaviours. One doesn't need to have a dystopian
imagination to see how such technologies can be used by states and corporations
for nefarious means, and at the very least such partnerships instantiate what
I've called "one-world governance" which sees the distinction between
public and private, government and industry break down. Big data is the area
where this is occurring with greatest intensity.
TX - This concept of biosecurity needs more
theoretical work in order to distinguish it from previous iterations of a
similar kind, but it seems clear that the foundations for it were already here
in the margins of other public policy strategies, notably national security, and
disaster preparedness. There is a large body of literature on the confluence of
different strategies and rationalities in these domains and how they have come
together in response to real world events. The work of Andrew Lakoff, Carlo
Caduff and Lee Clarke has been really useful in helping understand how the
concept of biosecurity has been formed and migrated from infra-politics to the
central domain of governance over the last 30 years or so. I note how the
practice of risk analysis and worst cases has been central to the pandemic
response world-wide, and how these approaches to knowledge were gestated in
areas such as environmental protection, where they have generally been a
success.
XT - Generalisation, that's a big part of
the problem, where these technical approaches are used indiscriminately without
taking account of other values, or indeed any values at all. The core tenet of
technocratic governance is that it can rule without the need for values, and
certainly without democratic contestation between values. It is a thoroughly
anti-political project which drastically reduces the possibility of living
according to a form-of-life. That for me is the big fear, and I share Giorgio
Agamben's bleak assessment of the future. A society governed under a permanent
state of emergency according to a risk assessed and health obsessed idea of
humanity cannot be anything else but an ant hill.
"Sovereignty, the freedom unto death,
is threatening to a society that is organised around work and production, that
tries to increase human capital by biopolitical means. That utopia is anarchist
insofar as it represents a radical break with a form of life that declares pure
life, continued existence, sacred. Suicide is the most radical rejection
imaginable of the society of production". (Byung-Chul Han - The
Disappearance of Rituals)
XT - Anselm
Keifer's exhibition Superstrings, Runes,
The Norns, Gordian Knot at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey was the
standout art show of the year for me, not that I saw too many thanks to our
mutual friend Rona. The vastness of those canvasses, the depth and creativity
of the composition, it was really breathtaking. It was also undeniably dark, a
darkness which in hindsight now appears prophetic. All of those huge canvasses
depicting barren landscapes, seemingly bombed out, decimated by some unseen
power, and then the connection the artist makes between runic language and modern
string theory; all this implies a cosmic scope. One picture which really stood
out for me was Die Lebenden und die Toten.
It depicts the curved forms of what is clearly meant to be a parliament chamber
set into a charred landscape. It even seems like the building itself is on
fire, with plumes of black smoke billowing out of its centre. The viewpoint is
from a distance, as if we the viewer have approached from over a ridge to be
confronted with this scene of devastation. It's monumental in scale, 470 x 560
cm according to the catalogue which notes the image is suggestive of
"panoptic power structures" in reference to Michel Foucault's work on
early modern disciplinary power and Bentham's prison design.
TX - Perhaps
then we should read the fact that the parliament, this place of law making, is
on fire as reflecting Foucault's claim that in biopolitics there is an
increasing weight placed on the action of the norm at the expense of the
juridical power of Law. The Law here is made superfluous, it reigns over an
empty landscape. I suppose it could also point symbolically to the overthrow of
democratic law making, the coming of dictatorship or something like Cicero's
famous remark silent enim lēgēs inter
arma (In war the Law is silent). As
you say the backdrop appears like a scene of devastation, like those
photographs of No Mans Land on the Western front during the Great War.
XT - The
wartime analogy would certainly be prophetic wouldn't it, considering where we
are now. What has happened to legislatures the world over in response to the
coronavirus pandemic? Are they not also burning, though we can't actually see
it? Has it not been the case that rule by emergency powers and by ministerial
decree has been the style in which this crisis has been governed?
TX - Burning
is a rather forceful image, suggesting more than just a temporary state of
affairs. And the destruction of the surroundings signifies that the war does
not go well. Unless this was an act of arson. Did we burn the land and the
parliament? Was there no-one else involved? No external enemy to blame for this
outrage? What then might be the significance of the title Die Lebenden und die Toten (The Living and the Dead)?
XT - The Ius
gladii, the supreme power, is the
right over life and death, the right to absolve or condemn, but not a
right over the dead themselves. Laws are made by the living for the sake of the
living. If the parliament is destroyed then it's not a question of Law in the
sense of the Rule of Law. We are looking at a destructive premonition of anti-politics, a world governed according
to technocratic management and algorithms. The fact that the landscape looks
like a WW1 battlefield isn't a coincidence. It was during that conflict that
destructive technology, technology created solely for the purpose of delivering
mass death appeared. Machine guns, tanks, fighter aircraft, chemical weapons,
long range artillery; the mechanised slaughter of the Great War was the death
knell of the old world of bourgeois values. Destructive technology meant mass
death, anonymous death, death as a statistic, as an unmarked grave. We don't
see any bodies scattered across the scorched earth in Keifer's pictures.
It's as if the technologies of mass killing have erased all trace of the
corpses which would bear witness to the fact that it is individual persons who
die, with names and faces, not mere termite life.
TX - Technologically
dominated anti-politics means not only the potential for anonymous mass
slaughter in war but what?...the abolition of death itself?, the erasure of the
distinction between the living and the dead into one impersonal calculation?
XT - For me that is what the picture ultimately points to and
which only really came into stark relief months later. The pandemic really has
highlighted how adrift we are, both collectively and individually in terms of
our relationship to death. We seem only able to consider our finitude from a
technocratic, statistical perspective, which is to say a non-political
perspective. There was a headline on the Guardian website around mid-November
which said the death rate in the UK was the highest it had been in ten years.
That's 2010, not 1910. I don't recall much campaigning in 2010 about our
unacceptably high death rate. And besides, what is an acceptable death rate?
Which deaths are considered avoidable and which are not? Is only immortality
acceptable? Are not all those additional deaths caused by the shutdown of
routine medical treatments, cancer screening and cardiac care this year also avoidable?
Where is the official mourning for them, who had the bad luck to get ill this
year rather than last?
TN - The State maintains a monopoly over which lives are
considered grievable. The history of modern warfare and in particular the War
on Terror shows us that. Fallen Western soldiers are the glorious dead, whereas
whole communities obliterated in the Middle East by missiles fired from a safe
distance are just nameless "collateral".
XT - Indeed, and where are the worst-case predictions and badly
labelled graphs for excess suicides during the current pandemic? Isn't it odd
that in the presence of a pathogen for which there is no cure the media establishment
carries on as if any additional deaths from coronavirus are a surprise. The
very fact of death is a kind of scandal, the recording of which is perfunctory.
Death is the nearest thing to us and yet we could not be more alienated from
it. The "mortal" was one way in which the ancient Greeks understood
the essential quality of human existence. Martin Heidegger wrote in 1939 that "Mortals
are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals
cannot speak either". Reducing the person to a mute statistic robs them of
their death. All of this is a familiar theme of modernity. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote
of death as like the core of a fruit which every person carries with them. He
laments the alienation of death in modernity which "hangs green, devoid of
sweetness". Sweet death is a death in dignity, in silent pride; which is
not the same thing as being rendered mute by being reduced to data. Such a
lofty idea is completely absent from the image of anti-political, technological
death, which is increasingly defined according to our ability to suspend or
defer it. Death is considered a failure, a breakdown of productive capacity. At
the extreme end of this logic is the non-death of mechanised slaughter in the
concentration camps and modern asymmetric warfare; the fabrication of corpses.
TN - A society founded only on maximising production and
optimising performance, governed
according to the logic of big data and algorithms is one in which it is not
only impossible to live according to a form-of-life
but increasingly impossible to have a
death. That is the darkest horizon towards which biosecurity points?
XT - I believe so. That being said it's important to note that in
thinking about these things we are abstracting towards ideal forms, logics and
political technologies, based on what can be observed and thought in the present.
None of this is written in stone and with the coming storm of climate change
and other social and economic pressures it's likely that history will have a
few surprises for us and those who presume to govern us towards catastrophe.
TX - That sounds almost optimistic.
XT - I wouldn't go that far. But, human life takes the form of
history in which contingency and potentiality can never be extinguished.
Sometimes -and try not to laugh at me here - good things happen! I like Francis
Bacon's description of his attitude towards the fate of our species,
exhilarated despair.
TX - Can we have a slogan for this attitude? Something to paint
on the external walls of our burning homes?
XT - Why not! How about Reject Fear. Cultivate Love. Embrace
Death.
