On Askesis and Form-of-Life

 

1.

Whenever I start a new journal, I always open the first entry in the same way, with a reflection on the act of journal writing and its importance. I’ve decided something like that is in order here; firstly, as my use of this blog has taken a downturn over the last two years and as such is in need of reviving. But also because some recent AI assisted self-analysis has pointed out the broader importance of this activity.

My employer recently saw fit to grant me access to the latest iteration of Claude, no doubt in the hope of accelerating our products to market, or perhaps at least accelerating myself into redundancy. The long-term effects remain to be seen, but in the meantime, I’ve also been using it as an interlocutor for my writing. Perhaps a slight indulgence, but I’ve been impressed at its ability to synthesise different themes across articles and essays that cover a range of divergent topics. I suppose if generative AI is meant to be good at anything then it’s this kind of pattern recognition. But what was fascinating was that it highlighted several core concerns and approaches that I was unaware of or had perhaps forgotten. Particularly interesting was its insistence that the concepts of Askesis – as expressed through practices of writing, reading and listening -   and of Form-of-Life, were the key to pretty much everything I’ve done. Now, I’m a little suspicious of this ‘revelatory’ function, which has the effect of imposing a unity and purpose to a collection of writings compiled over many years and produced for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, after asking it to speculate as to why the blog is called Askesis, it came up with this:

A major thread in his work is the erosion of autonomy under modern regimes of governance. He worries that identity is increasingly shaped by systems of classification, visibility, recognition and administration. Against that background, askēsis suggests the cultivation of a self capable of resisting automatic adaptation to the system. The title may imply that autonomy is not simply given. It has to be practiced. One has to train oneself to perceive the forces shaping one’s desires, identities and assumptions. So, calling the blog Áskēsis may indicate a counter-practice: a disciplined attempt to resist being passively formed by modern systems.

That’s not bad, though the part that I hadn’t considered was the function of askesis as a kind of dissident practice, a way to personally resist the forces in contemporary culture that chip away at our autonomy rather than just analyse them. In my first post in 2013 I’d made it clear that the notion of askesis I was invoking was derived from the late work of Michel Foucault. As I said back then: I’m using the word in its older archaic meaning which denotes not so much a rejection of worldly pleasures aimed at a regime of self renunciation, but rather a practice or exercise of self on self; in this case using writing as its means. I added a little joke regarding the etymology of the word and what a blog centred on a monkish ascetic life might consist of: perhaps a litany of temptations refused, or worldly pleasures forsaken in pursuit of a transcendent holy life or profound inner peace? That was a joke then, but over time I think my intellectual practice has turned out to aim at something very much like that, though not in an obvious way.

Another thing Claude did was to claim to have detected a darkening of my outlook and a sharper ethical focus on technocracy and ‘civilizational issues’ during and in the wake of the pandemic which reflected a general radicalisation of my worldview, where what was previously analysed at a distance was now being played out in real time. This is a sound observation, one also made by my real-life non-AI friends. It’s also significant as the pandemic was the moment when I couldn’t help but see myself and my future implicated in what was occurring. I described that moment, when Boris Johnson announced the second full lockdown in December 2020, in an essay a couple of years later:

…something snapped, and I recall the apoplexy I felt at the prospect of another interminable period of lockdown and isolation. Up until that point I had approached the pandemic with as cool and analytical an eye as possible. Neither weep nor laugh but understand. Spinoza’s well known encomium to enlightened enquiry was a straightforward response to an otherwise chaotic and unforeseen situation. But in truth, this rational attempt to grasp what was happening was always destined to have its limits. When the world is changed we cannot avoid being changed along with it, and as the Winter dragged on I found myself turning towards thoughts of a pessimistic and atavistic kind.

In hindsight I’ve come to realise that evening was the subjective break which began the process of transition from one form-of-life towards another; from my life in London, with certain well trodden routines, honed over at least a decade and a half, to another quite different life outside the city.

2.

Some clarification is in order when talking about these ideas, since it’s easy to mistake form-of-life with lifestyle or some other more obviously chosen aspect of human existence that we create primarily by our own sustained volition through time. As a starting point it’s worth going back to Giorgio Agamben’s clearest definition of the term from his short book Means Without Ends; “By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.” Within Agamben’s philosophical project, this basic definition is ranged against its opposite, bare (naked) life; the administered, visible and governable lowest common denominator of human existence abstracted from any particular form and which is the object of sovereign power. In the same passage Agamben emphasises that the specific ways of a form-of-life are never reducible to a set of facts, but instead are always possibilities of life, of potentiality itself. A form-of-life is thus not a life that happens to have a particular set of characteristics; being a father, being a worker, being gay. Its basic characteristic is precisely that its way of living remains a possibility. Or, in a line that echoes Heidegger’s famous description of Dasein as the being for whom Being is in question, Agamben writes that “a life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself”.

This idea can on face value appear a little circular. What is the relationship between form-of-life and ways of life? And how can we ever attain a stable form-of-life if the potential inherent in all that life’s characteristics exist as permanent and open possibilities? What is clear is that for Agamben a form-of-life cannot be chosen or at least chosen in advance. If it could, the concept wouldn’t have the foundational ontological status that Agamben affords it. Instead, it would be something like an addendum to our own volition, which would be the ultimate seat of potential – which is essentially the notion of freedom articulated by Sartre.

In contrast, for Wittgenstein - from who the concept originates - form of life (Lebensform) denotes the practical, embodied, social background within which concepts, language and practices gain their sense, notably in his example of language games. The idea, as expressed sparingly in his Philosophical Investigations, is less the kind of ontological-political concept found in Agamben’s writing than a description of the background conditions of possibility that allow language to mean anything at all. Hence his famous comment that if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t be able to understand him because we do not share the same fundamental experiential ground.

Nevertheless, form-of-life for both thinkers is a fundamental mode of existence and as such not something that is easily transformed (especially so when it comes to being a lion!) One of Wittgenstein’s most successful interpreters, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, has developed the concept in a way that plots a course between the other two. For him, form of life (no hyphens) isn’t just the ground which gives language meaning, but is also what makes possible shared human responses, attunement to one another and the ground for acknowledgment (we might say recognition nowadays); these are things we inherit, participate in and can at least go some way to changing. As he writes in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome; “The only thing natural to the human being is its capacity to change its nature, to take on certain forms of social, linguistic life … as natural and to cast them off in favour of others, e.g. when they come to seem unnatural, chafing, confining”. I find the reference here to social forms that appear chafing and confining especially attractive as it suggests that our form of life can become burdensome and that a key characteristic of human beings is their willingness to transcend these burdens to forge something new.

Similarly, Cavell’s emphasis on forms of life constituting the basis for mutual recognition also resonates for me, as one of the factors ante pandemic that led me to move out of London was the sense that part of the substance for functioning social life had been lost there, to be replaced with impersonal systems, screens and apps. This change, which had been coming for a long time, was drastically accelerated during the pandemic. As a result, I increasingly found myself alienated from people and places where I had previously felt at home. Even innocuous exchanges – or lack thereof – in retail environments had developed the character of an encounter with indifferent or hostile aliens. And when negotiating public space, most of all public transport, I couldn’t help but notice how, by their behaviour, that everyone seemed to occupy their own private social world. Even the great British pub, once a global symbol of conviviality (I exaggerate) has been reduced post-pandemic to another overpriced and underwhelming experience in managed decline, itself a victim of the social atomisation it was once a bulwark against. One could argue that big cities have always had this character compared to rural communities and there’s obviously some truth to that. But from my experience, having lived 42 years in London, the precipitous collapse of anything like a shared set of social conventions in the past decade has been jarring. To borrow Cavell’s word for it; living there had really begun to chafe, so it was clear to me that taking practical steps to change this situation was needed.

In this impulse, and Cavell’s treatment of it, we can perhaps glimpse the conceptual link Agamben insists on between form-of-life and a possibility for living that is never exhausted, and which neatly brings us to Claude’s unexpected interpretation on the value of askesis for resisting co-option into modern regimes of governance that diminish autonomy. For without the nurturing and safeguarding of autonomy, which is nothing more than our capacity to give oneself the rule - to use a rather Kantian expression - our possibility for living is greatly diminished.

3.

Glossing these interpretations somewhat, the importance then of askesis, as a work of self on self, is its relationship to the cultivation of autonomy in the face of forces which seek to undermine it, thus coopting us to sovereign power. For me, this practice has been aimed more often than not at those systems and forms of thought which reduce human beings to profiles, data-points, consumers, officially recognised identities and consequently into administrable subjects. This became particularly acute during the pandemic but it’s also what I was doing earlier by analysing contemporary social phenomena like consent classes, activist discourse around intersex conditions/DSDs, the problems of modern personhood and of course bureaucracy. The fruit of this counter-practice (as Claude called it) is autonomy of thought and action, sufficient perhaps to open the door to new ways of living and a form-of-life. Or as Agamben puts it, thought becomes “an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence.” Thought, thus conceived, isn’t merely something that happens inside an individual subject; thought is the experience of one's own potentiality, the awareness that one's life is not exhausted by its currently actualised form. Experimentum is then the appropriate term, since like all true experiments, those conducted in thought and action are a form of test, the ultimate outcome of which is not decided in advance and the failure of which would not extinguish the possibility of future experiments.

I would also contend that the aim of askesis is not only to maintain and build on our intellectual autonomy but also to influence what Martin Heidegger calls our Alltäglichkeit, usually translated in his works as ordinary-everydayness. This is the primary, unreflective way that humans practically inhabit the world. If this pre-reflective dwelling can be habituated with the character of inextinguishable potentiality then we might be a little closer to the more difficult ontological understanding of form-of-life pointed to by Agamben – though at this stage I’m inclined to view his version of the concept as a regulating ideal of political ontology rather than a design for life.

If for me the cultivation of autonomy has gone hand in hand with a critique of bureaucratic systems, that is because they have become the principle and near exclusive means by which power dominates our lives in late Modernity. Indeed, that domination is now so pervasive that it has come to define the language and concepts by which many people seek recognition and find orientation in society. Worst of all, because bureaucratic power presents itself as both technically necessary and politically neutral, it is rarely perceived as oppressive. Bureaucratic rule doesn’t work primarily through dramatic acts of sovereign power but through becoming part of our everydayness itself, shaping habits, categories, routines, and expectations until they appear natural and self-evident. When this insight is set alongside the decline of civil society which has accompanied successive waves of disenchantment in the modern West, then we can begin to see how the critique of bureaucratic rationality is all the more urgent, since there is precious little left outside that rationality to counter it.

There is therefore an unspoken but nevertheless clear normative distinction running through my writing between what I consider healthy and damaged forms-of-life. For instance, a healthy form-of-life must include practices of mourning and memory, as the act of working through the past in this fashion helps preserve autonomy against reduction into the abstract and alienating systems that govern us. en memoria mía is not the melancholy and demoralised yearning for times lost but a constant process of using nostalgia as a form of cultural archaeology and potential for renewal. Thus questions over heritage are always ultimately questions about the possibility of use in the present rather than fidelity to the past.

This is by design an emotional register that refutes any cheerful surrender to the so-called Eternal Now of Capitalist Realism, which is perhaps why I’ve moved away from the ideas of Hauntology towards a more anthropological understanding of cultural memory. Most recently I’ve been attracted to the what the German sociology Hartmut Rosa has described as the accelerated time regime of late modernity, which I agree with him is the seat of so much modern disaffection and alienation. Resistance to this time regime through practices of lingering, ritual, deep literacy and memorialising are approaches to living that open breathing room for possibility.

Conversely, I remain highly critical of those social movements that seek recognition and affirmation via the never-ending expansion of administrative, regulatory and procedural dispensations as if they were the benign hand of an imminent and caring God. It never ceases to amaze me how otherwise intelligent people surrender their autonomy and adopt the latest set of approved categories with which they are expected to make sense of their lives in the dying world. This is perhaps a more complicated story, and I hope to be able to give a less one-sided account of it at some point in the near future.

Finaly, if I was going to condense the role of askesis in shaping our possibilities for living into a simple definition, I might say that askesis denotes a disciplined practice of thought and action that is both a grounding and the holding of one’s ground from out of which a form-of-life might be cultivated. The ‘might be’ is essential here, since if we are talking about a true experimentum in living, then the possibility towards which the hypothesis points must also include its opposite, its possibility for failure. Nevertheless, no failure can extinguish the potential for living which ultimately defines the human being. 

The Weinstein and Westminster Scandals Should Make us Reflect on the Connection Between Power and Sexual Violence (2022 Redux)

 

2022 Introduction:

Not the snappiest of titles. This is the third in a series of "redux" posts republishing material which originally appeared on the Spectre-Online zine. This one from 2017 responds to the series of sexual abuse scandals, which in that darkest of years were seemingly ever-present in the news. What this essay argues for is a sort of political ontology of abuse, which tracks mass instances of sexual violence to institutional and cultural arrangements where relations of domination are prevalent. I begin with the news stories around Harvey Weinstein and other recent sexual abuse scandals before jumping to the historical example of slavery and the long shadow that institution casts over our understanding of domination and systemic violence. Then, in a form of argument one could call the Great in the Small I try to show how our commonplace thinking  about slavery (and by implication freedom too) masks what would be a more profound understanding of how power and domination function in the era of global governance.

Giorgio Agamben's writing on the significance of economy (the Oikos or household government) becoming the principle form of Western power, guides much of this analysis, as does my reading of nominally less radical thinkers like Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. The latter's concept of Neo-Roman freedom (or freedom as non-domination), which builds from an analysis of liberty and slavery in the ancient world, is I think a very useful one. At the time I was reading their work alongside the later Foucault, with all its fascinating takes on the government of self and others in Greco-Roman culture. But alongside the minutiae of Greek political education or Roman household management I was also - and still am - trying to think about these problems of social and political ontology from the perspective of globalised humanity.

The term one-world governance (not government!) is one I began using around this time. There is something of the provocation in it, insofar as it bears more than a passing resemblance to a common trope in conspiracy theories. The point of using it is to make a claim for a kind of negative universality, where the pure relation of domination (between parent and child) is potentially generalised by the total depoliticisation and economisation of humanity. That's the apocalyptic bit. What we are increasingly witnessing now as that system of governance  continues its collapse, is the full actualisation of the global civil war which has been gnawing at the margins of our world for decades. What will become of the eternal problem of domination and violence in human life when the institutions of the West ,which have now lost all legitimacy, collapse into the void which they have created?

 

(2017 text)

1). What started in October with the rapid fall of a once untouchable movie mogul has grown in the intervening weeks into a full blown crisis for institutions across Britain and the US. The British Prime minister has had to hastily convene cross party meetings and cobble together a semblance of an HR system at Westminster after a series of accusations against MPs and ministers from both sides of the house. Her defence secretary has had to resign after revelations of inappropriate advances toward journalists and lewd comments to one of his own female MPs. Her first secretary of state is also under investigation. While in the US, allegations against Harvey Weinstein ranging from aggressive propositioning to rape continue to accumulate.

The actress and producer Brit Marling wrote a powerful account in The Atlantic of her experiences with the mogul: "I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me"? The scandal across the pond has now claimed the career of Kevin Spacey and has expanded to encompass predictable questioning over the peculiarities of the film industry; its glamour, its shallowness, its obsession with young female flesh, often paired with less than youthful male co-stars. The same form of questioning was heard after the abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Savile was exposed in the UK, and has often been raised regarding the abuse carried out by religious institutions and care homes like Haut de la Garenne.

Given the breadth of institutions involved,  terms like sleaze or sex scandals that have in the past been used to refer to such revelations hardly seem appropriate. It's also worth remembering that this is only the latest salvo in the now permanent crisis of British institutions embroiled in accusations of systematic sexual abuse and cover-ups. The expression 'Sexual Abuse Scandal 'might as well be built in as an autofill for newspaper headline writers. And yet despite the near ubiquity of abuse revelations on the contemporary social landscape little is done to try and draw the commonalities together. We walk dumbfounded from one crisis another, each time raising up the same sense of shock and surprise. Perhaps the subject is just too large, and the issue of sexual violence too ingrained in the dark corners of human societies to be worth treating at a general level.

Certainly it seems that way in the case of the UK government's unwieldy public enquiry into historic sexual abuse allegations, which has had a turnover of leadership comparable to many Premier League football clubs. Framed in the way it has been, there is something almost inevitably self-defeating about its scope. How can an enquiry, which in its range and manpower becomes an institution in its own right, be able to investigate, appraise and recommend remedy for abuses committed in seemingly every type of institution in the land? Since the scandals in Westminster and Hollywood have predominantly involved the abuse of adult women the focus has understandably been on the issue of sexism and misogyny; just as in the case of Savile and child abuse in the Church the focus has been on paedophilia. I wonder though if there's not a more general way of capturing an important aspect of all these cases from Weinstein to Westminster, from the Catholic Church to care homes. Why not talk about relations of domination and their direct link with sexual abuse?

2). Our understanding of domination is strongly conditioned by the historical legacy of slavery. A dominated person is someone in chains, forced to work under threat of death. Their status is that of property, owned by a master and disposed of as they see fit. Slavery is also a complex institution requiring the collaboration and complicity of wide sections of the society in which it exists. Its eventual abolition across much of the developed world in the 18th and 19th centuries was due to multiple factors, only a few of which involved what we might now call "changes in attitudes". Since we tend to associate relations of domination with historical slavery and its outward appearance it has taken a long time for the issue of modern slavery to be taken seriously. Only in 2015 did the UK bring in the Modern Slavery Act which while being a step in the right direction of recognising modern relations of domination, in practice merely reiterates the common understanding of domination as "servitude and forced labour". It does little to break down precisely what constitutes a basic condition of servitude.  I'm bringing up slavery as it represents the most extreme example of a relation of domination. However unless we have an account of precisely what a relation of domination actually is in itself we won't be able to recognise less extreme forms, which I suggest are much more prevalent.

The Canadian philosopher Philip Pettit, drawing on the ancient (specifically Roman) understanding of domination cited three criteria for a person to be in such a relation. A person dominates another if:

-They have the capacity to interfere.

-On an arbitrary basis.

-In certain choices that the other is in a position to make.

This is a useful albeit somewhat formal definition, not least as it doesn't depend on the slave/freeman distinction. It also emphasises that it is the capacity to interfere, not actually occurring interference that is the dominating condition. By this account a person could be in a relation of domination relative to one person or group but not to another, and perhaps only within a particular field of choices. Think about Weinstein and Brit Marling again. As an aspiring actress and screenwriter her field of possibility crossed over with his field of influence. Relative to her he was "...this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me". The language here is not an accident. The power to anoint or destroy, to bind or loose, is symbolic of power at its most dominating. Think too about the power Jimmy Savile held over the children he abused and to an extent over the staff at the BBC, who, relative to him - the big star - were mere flunkies.

Another element of dominating relations which Pettit discusses is the absence of contestation. Put broadly, contestation is the ability of a person to find redress for an abuse, either through the courts, or through extra-legal means such as disciplinary proceedings or even local forms of community or family resolution. The capacity for contestation is a brake on the ability of the master to do what he wants with impunity (his arbitrium in the Latin understanding). Absence of contestation is a major contributing factor to the ability of a person to interfere with another on an arbitrary basis. There is after all nothing to stop them. Even in the presence of nominal procedures for redress, the ability of a person to challenge abusive behaviour can be thwarted by prejudice, the reluctance of others to assist owing to the influence of the perpetrator, or structural reasons which shield powerful people from the consequences of their actions.

These facts serve to remind us that relations of domination do not exist in isolation. Like the historical institution of slavery they require the active collaboration and complicity of a host of others. Think about how many people turned a blind eye to the behaviour of Weinstein. Think about the cover-ups and the advice given to women not to pursue complaints against high value stars and officials, or of the care home staff and police who refused to the believe the testimony of victims. And think also of the capacity rich and powerful people have to pay off complainants, to keep their abuse out of the public domain. Where money and influence are involved the network of power extends to the potential legal repercussions against those who speak out. And in a world where the media walk in step with politicians and the superrich, the threat of having one's life torn apart by their attack dogs is all too real.

There are often too many parties interested in seeing the structures of power which allow sexual abuse to remain undisturbed. For instance, to question how Savile was able to operate with impunity is to question the nature of celebrity and the role a monolithic institution like the BBC or Fox News (which has also been mired in scandal) has in raising them up. To question the power of politicians to abuse their staff similarly puts the whole form of parliamentary power under the microscope. At least it should, if the journalists involved were not also polluted by the same toxic material. A few individuals might quickly be made example of, if only to appease the sense of outrage and give the establishment time to reorientate itself; to put in more procedures and ensure the machine keeps on turning. Risk management, not justice, is the order of the day.

          3). The Romans had two ways of conceiving relations of domination. Where the power in question related to public power, such as the State or its institutions, they used the term Imperium, from which we receive the words empire and emperor. Where the power in question was private such as the family, or in the modern world a private corporation, the term used would be dominium, which relates to the domus, the home and consequently to notions of household management and property. It is the latter term from which we get our modern lexical understanding of slavery as related to private ownership and property rights more generally. This is not the place to elaborate on the complex genealogy of these concepts and how they have impacted on modern Law and our experience of power in social life. What seems clear, however, is that in the contemporary era the distinction between private and public power seems less and less tenable. The state and the non-state are no longer divided down lines which would be recognisable even to people living a century ago. The influence of transnational forms of governance such as the EU, IMF, the World Bank and huge communications and media corporations like Google, Facebook and News International threatens the centrality of the nation state as the key operator in political life.

           Another problem is that liberalism has tended to focus on the threat of state interference (imperium) at the expense of seeing how private domination, particularly that of large corporations has grown exponentially in the post-war era, given impetus by the developments in communications technologies and the internet. The global dominance of economy in human affairs means that one single form of governance, originating in notions of household management (combining the Roman domus with the Greek oikos) now holds sway. No longer does the State attempt to hold back the violence of the market, and no longer is private economy a bulwark against interference by the State. Under global capitalism State and market, public and private, operate as two elements of the same power. More and more of us today are subject to dominating relations produced by this total global economy, which sees everything and everyone in terms of measurable, calculable units.

Slavery, the most extreme form of domination has since the beginning been associated with sexual violence. It flows directly from the status of a person as the property of another to be enjoyed as they see fit. Sexual violence was routinely deployed against slaves of both sexes by colonialists in the Caribbean and slave owners in the United States. In the ancient world the master's sexual use of his slaves was a natural consequence of their thing-like status. Where restrictions on the sexual abuse of dominated persons have historically existed they have tended to take the form of appeals to the moral character of the master rather than the humanity of the victim. Codes of chivalry, notions of nobility or virtu, religious commitments and other such regimes have often been the sole restraint to unfettered rapine in peacetime as much as war.

In the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, a compendium of dream interpretations written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, it is considered a positive portent if the master dreams of sexually using his slaves, since it shows him deriving satisfaction from his property. Wherever relations of domination exist we find sexual violence, not because the absence of restraint allows pre-existing violent desires to go unchecked, but because such relations in themselves produce that violence. In a condition of domination my will is absent, completely or partially consumed by the other. What I want or don't want is irrelevant.  As Brit Marling wrote: "Consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it". Dominating power by contrast, whether by an individual, a bureaucracy or a State, is ultimately domination over the ability to refuse, to say no. Under domination one cannot refuse to comply. And under such conditions my body and person are available for use by the one who wields power.

                It's clear that the position of Brit Marling and of Westminster staffers, or even the victims of Savile was not that of slaves, but they were within relations of domination to varying degrees; limited, but enough to allow abuse to occur under certain circumstances. If this is the case we should then acknowledge that domination exists on a spectrum that correlates with an increased risk of abuse.  The thing-like quality of a person tracks with perfect symmetry this spectrum of relations of domination. The more dominated a person is - the more thing-like they become - the more their body is rendered as something for the master to take pleasure from as they desire. Sexual possession of the dominated body is not a pathology external to power, it is its most visceral sign. In an era when the household, the domus, the oikos, has become the model for globalised humanity, it is worth remembering that it is in the house that we find the most common and most acute relation of domination; that between parent and child. And it is also worthwhile remembering that of all human institutions it is within the household that most sexual violence takes place. Only in a return to politics, in opposition to globally triumphant neoliberalism, might humanity start to take the problem of domination in wider society seriously again; to see in every accumulation of power the real possibility of violence and to cut it off at the root, before the victims pile up.

Addendum to Pandemic Writing 2020-2022: Hurtling Back to Earth

 

The break for me was in December of 2020, when Boris Johnson announced a U-turn on his previous commitment not to tighten restrictions over the Christmas and New year period. Not that I was relying on that sinister clown for deliverance or anything. I had long since abandoned  even the most minimal belief that the UK government - indeed any government - knew what it was doing with its pandemic response. Nevertheless, something snapped, and I recall the apoplexy I felt at the prospect of another interminable period of lockdown and isolation. Up until that point I had approached the pandemic with as cool and analytical an eye as possible. Neither weep nor laugh, but understand. Spinoza’s well known encomium to enlightened enquiry was a straightforward response to an otherwise chaotic and unforeseen situation. But in truth, this rational attempt to grasp what was happening was always destined to have its limits. When the world is changed we cannot avoid being changed along with it, and as the Winter dragged on I found myself turning towards thoughts of a pessimistic and atavistic kind.

The history of the development of pandemic response from out of all-hazards planning and cold war paranoia is highly instructive, but fails to capture some essential features of the way States and populations responded in practice. My own position on the role of the government and of the media has shifted over the course of the pandemic, from broadly supporting the containment measures (while acknowledging their biopolitical consequences) and batting away anything that vaguely smacked of conspiracy, to seeing with ever greater clarity the toxic mix of factors within Western societies which reveals the pandemic ultimately to be a judgement on our entire civilization. Radical? Overly dramatic? Of course! But to quote Lenin, one must always strive to be as radical as reality itself. And I continue to maintain that the ultimate form of the new reality ushered in by the pandemic is still unclear. 

What is clear to me is that the pandemic has created nothing new under the sun, and certainly nothing like the “return to real life” some naïve commentators hoped for in the early months of 2020. What I do see is an acceleration of existing movements towards harnessing the power of networked (or reticulated, to use Bernard Stiegler’s term) society in the interest of Capital, and away from rooted, self-determining individuals and groups (I would say communities, but does that word even have any meaning anymore?). It goes without saying that these shifts in the way Western societies are run are profoundly anti-democratic, and amplify to unprecedented levels the exploitation of human capacities (most notably cognitive capacity and attention) for the benefit of an increasingly tiny and authoritarian elite. Another concept of Stiegler's, Absolute Proletarianization, captures well the now indiscriminate impoverishment of human life that follows the cybernetic and computational turn. The most egregious injuries are the ones done to the spirit.

That’s at the top level. But what do we see – we who still have enough self-regard to look reality in the face - when we step outside our homes?

Firstly, pandemic response, and the accompanying deluge of fear-porn pumped out by governments and the media, have left a significant proportion of the population for whom a state of permanent terror functions something like a life support machine, without which they could scarcely get out of bed. These are people who still clamour after daily infection rates (always still too high) and wring their hands at the uptake of booster jabs (3rd, 4th? doesn't matter, but they're never high enough). Then there are those who talk earnestly about their daily hygiene routines and commitment to social distancing, all resolutely honed to prevent transmission of both microorganisms and any sense of fraternity. These people can be found across society, but it strikes me that they are disproportionately represented by that wellspring of neuroses and civilizational ennui, the white professional middle classes. Which is to say the class of which I am a part.

We need a deeper understanding of the forms of subjectivity engendered by the pandemic. Thinking of how so many people continue to live in a state of epidemiological anxiety and fear, it’s as if bureaucratic risk management strategies characteristic of reflexive modernity have become personalised into a terror inducing hermeneutic of the self. Or to put it another way, risk has metastasized into a general concept of near religious significance, which at all times must be attended to with unswerving vigilance and adherence to rules made by an expanding class of technocratic administrators. What are we to do with these people and their priests, who exist as a standing army for the next wave of restrictions?

I don’t mean to suggest that the pandemic will return, but what is clear is that the model of response, which in practice deviated dramatically from the field of pandemic preparedness developed over the past thirty years, will set the framework for how State and non-State institutions handle future crises. It is appropriate to talk of 'Before Covid' and 'After Covid'; this being a reflection of the epochal shift in the world-picture, comparable to the shock of the Great War.

 Of paramount importance will be the consequences of redrawing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable government restrictions of fundamental rights. A new interpretation of the Social Contract is rising that drastically shifts the State’s responsibility away from the defence of rights and freedoms and towards a permanent war economy of bare survival in the face of inescapable decline. Such an apocalyptic form of politics can in no way be described as Liberal. Liberalism is dead. It was on a ventilator before the pandemic, and little SARS-CoV-2 has pulled the plug for good.

Giorgio Agamben has been off the mark about many things over the last two years, but his most recent comments, which revisit reflections on global civil war, accurately describe the way in which governments across the world have set up a series of fundamental divisions within society as a means to govern the emergency; vaccinated/unvaccinated, infected/uninfected (note this has no relation to any intuitive understanding of health!), Covid-Pass/No Covid-pass. These divisions continue to haunt us despite their legal force having been almost entirely removed, a fact which points to their power to normalise the State of Exception well after the Law has departed the scene. It is the remnants of these divisions which rise up as anxiety and animus when we warring citizens of the post-Covid world encounter each other.

What, then, should we make of the Italian philosopher's comments at the end of 2020, from his elegiac prose poem 'When the House Burns'?:

"Whoever realises that the house is burning can be tempted to look with disdain and contempt at his fellow men, who appear not to notice the flames. Yet is it not these men, who do not see and do not think, that will be the lemures to whom you will have to give an account on the final day? Realising that the house is on fire does not raise you above the others; on the contrary, it is with them that you will have to exchange a last look as the flames get closer. What can you say to justify your claims of conscience to these men who are so unaware that they seem almost innocent?"

His use of lemures (typical for Agamben) is ambiguous. Lemures, the etymology of which runs through larvae, meaning a frightening mask, and the Greek monster Lamia, were the unhappy spirits of archaic Roman religion. The aesthetic of ephemeral, miserable persons, wandering the night is perhaps what Agamben wants us to imagine, but he could also be referring to the idea in Ovid that the lemures were vagrant spirits, vengeful, for having not been afforded proper funeral rites. This interpretation is given credence owing to Agamben's previous statements on the scandal of those who were buried or burned during the lockdowns without proper ceremony. Perhaps, then, he is warning us that even those who do not see the devastation, perhaps even enable it, still deserve to be treated with the full ceremony befitting a human being.  It's also possible, since Agamben presumably does not think we'll be communing with ghosts, the term could be a veiled hint towards the stupefied, zombie like state of some people who drifted unthinkingly through the pandemic, conforming to every demand.

There is something seductive about Giorgio Agamben's use of these overburdened words from antiquity, just as so much of his pandemic writing was heavy on portent, but light on real analysis. I really hope that he writes a considered and extended theoretical account of the pandemic, drawing on his past work, and treating the events of the last two years with some minimal distance, enough at least to shake off the conspiratorial and at times just plain cranky tone of some of his interventions.

There are clues to what may be coming, out there amid the fevered anxieties and depressive hedonism of the lemures. Against Agamben I see more that is undead in the airbrushed face of a YouTube influencer than I do in the average Covid fanatic. People, like civilisations, rot from the inside, even while the surface appears as pristine as polished marble. If the true state of our inner putrefaction could be brought to the senses, the stench would empty the heavens.

Let us then point to the spectre of Climate Lockdown, a "conspiracy theory", all too conspicuous for its general plausibility, which the mainstream media have pre-emptively lumped in with the 5G paranoiacs and white supremacists. The basic premise is simple and emerges directly from the experience of the last two years. No "time and propinquity" nonsense is needed. It asks, under conditions of climate emergency, what is the more likely path governments around the world are going to take?

1. a massive intervention into the economy to shift production away from polluting and destructive forms of enterprise, and towards a sustainable and equitable distribution of resources. This would entail the wholesale tearing down of environmentally destructive capital accumulation; the abolition of the economy of Western overconsumption; a geopolitical consensus moving away from "strategic competition" towards rapid decarbonisation, and the relegation of the Arab petrostates back to the level of Bedouin backwaters.

Or

2. Will they keep the capitalist shitshow running, but with increasingly desperate authoritarian interventions into society for the purpose of maintaining the exploitative framework in the face of general collapse. One could gloss this scenario as technocratically managed decline. Climate lockdown is then a shorthand for those interventions which aim to address the climate crisis for the benefit of the minority, while the majority of the populations of advanced economies languish in a cage of digitally augmented vampire capitalism and permanent psychological warfare. You could call it Ecofascism for the few. 

I once put this line of reasoning to an Extinction Rebellion activist during their occupation of Waterloo Bridge in the Spring of 2019. During that action - which was a very seasonal and pleasant alternative to the hazy London traffic - one of their key demands was for so-called Citizen's Assemblies to be formed which would have the role of leading the government in their response to the climate emergency. This participatory democratic mechanism struck me as intuitively superfluous. After all, if you know enough to declare an emergency, and know broadly what has to be done to reduce carbon emissions, then surely it's a super strong executive rather than a flabby deliberative body that is needed? The activist I spoke to made a reference to the democratic deficit, but I failed to see how that connected to the need for action right there in the present. As we saw only a few month later during the pandemic, when the crisis actually hits, democracy becomes a luxury we can do without.     

It's no longer possible to deny that the conditions for these speculative futures already exist. Just as it is no longer possible to believe that mass slaughter and mechanised warfare are a relic of the 20th century. We are still the same wolf in sheep's clothing; homo homini lupus, a creature - who in the words of Schopenhauer - discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand. Centrist Dads may cheer the West's new-found military unity, but the expansion of Nato further into Northern Europe will only push the hands of the Doomsday clock closer to midnight. We'd largely forgotten about that clock, but its infernal machinery has never ceased to tick on through the long night of the Nuclear Age. A night without dawn, that was the result of our best science; a culmination of human endeavour that gave to us the God-like power of total self-annihilation. Though, in truth I believe the theologians of the Middle Ages concluded that God was incapable of suicide.

How then is it possible - returning to a question I initially formulated in February 2020 - to live well in a world that is dying?

A mass politics of palliative care is a remote possibility, though that's not far off what I think is needed. If decline is the unavoidable horizon against which every future must be set, then I for one would prefer a government of end-of-life nurses over Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's attempts to abolish death. No, if an adjustment to the New Normal (or should that be post-normal?) is at all possible, it won't come by the way of mass political mobilisation.

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.

Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let's choose executors and talk of wills.

And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

Richard II, Act 3 Scene 2

To be a witness to the emptiness, the illegitimacy and vainglorious impotence of Western institutions, at the moment of their eclipse; is this all that is left to do? Can even this be done with some measure of dignity? Decline and Fall may be the interpretative key for the present, but the ethos of the witness, that anarch who remains in place while others scatter, can only be one of exhilarated despair. There's no contradiction here. The person who embraces radical finitude in the spirit of exhilarated despair is the diametrical opposite of the depressive hedonist, whose insatiable pleasure seeking is analogous to the somnambulant march of the un-dead, who twitch and fret their way towards the abyss. In contrast, exhilarated despair is a cleared eyed expression of the reality principle, which recognises in the promise of radical finitude (that is, finitude at the civilizational level) the possibility, if not of happiness, then at least something approaching contentment. To be released from the demands of the society of production, of unceasing optimisation of the self, of the death march of progress; to escape all this and to be able to turn one's face to the warmth of the sun, that is to live well in a world which is dying.

Exhilaration as a mode of despair is the sine qua non for riding the Western rollercoaster as it reaches the top of the incline. Slowing to a crawl, the passenger brave enough to look around is afforded a spectacular view of all that has occurred up to this point. The car tips forward, and the feeling wells up from the pit of your stomach as you hurtle back down to Earth.

wheeeeeeeeeee!