The Pandemic on Reflection: Grasping the Epoch

 

The following is an introduction written in the summer of 2022 for the collection of writing I produced during the pandemic, published on the Battleground website and also here on this blog. My intention in compiling these pieces wasn’t to attempt to get them published as a book but rather to put something of a full stop on that period and to move on. I had already written an addendum to the collection and so an introduction seemed both appropriate and an opportunity for me to reflect on that time and my reasons for writing. Reading over this again it strikes me as a useful index for how events unfolded and the work I produced in response, so I’m making it available here with links to the relevant articles. I’ve also added a couple of paragraphs bringing my personal situation up to date, since I truly believe if it weren’t for the pandemic I would likely not be living as I am now.

 

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"Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos".

Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn

 

The texts included here were written between April 2020 and May 2022. They encompass the period of time when the SARS-CoV2 pandemic was at its height, roughly between the first lockdown in the UK, which began on the 23^rd of March 2020, and the removal of significant restrictions in the late Spring and early summer of 2021. By this chronology the pandemic would have lasted between 14 to 16 months. In practice the long night of pandemic restrictions and the uncertainty they caused lasted through to the end of 2021 and well into the following year. There was also a strange period of existential foreboding which preceded the shutdown, which I find evidence of bubbling to the surface in my choice of subject for a blog entry in February 2020 on Thomas Ligotti’s book ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’. The opening paragraph of that essay, which critiques Ligotti’s quasi-apology for his vision of philosophical pessimism, looks from the distance of two and half years like a premonition:

 

“How to live well in a world that is dying? Increasingly this question preoccupies me. It is a question that is directed in the most radical way at what is most our own, our sense of historicality, of being part of a continuity that exists beyond any one individual, or even perhaps any single community or nation. The significance of the dying world is not immediately ethical but ontological. It disrupts at the base of things, the base on which most, if not all, our commonplace notions about what it is to live are grounded. Finitude, for instance, is hard enough to appropriate to oneself in the context of an otherwise cosy continuity of things. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? It all seems so endless, but in truth the number is perhaps quite small. How then to reconcile such a "personal" relationship to the finite with finitude on the scale of All Things?  Let us then call radical finitude the subjective disposition that identifies one's own finitude with the finitude of the world, and does so by forging a form-of-life appropriate to it. This form-of-life born from out of the wreckage of "last days capitalism" and ecological collapse is the task for anyone who accepts the veracity of the doom of our time and chooses to stay alive amid the gathering ruins”.

 

The question 'how many more times will you watch the full moon rise?' is from Paul Bowles, who I had not read prior to the pandemic. I knew of that quote from a recording of his voice sampled by the US band Neurosis. I've always liked it since I first heard it as a teenager. On the subject of ruins, though, I could never have predicted just how ruinous we were to become over the next twelve months. Giorgio Agamben (a near constant intellectual companion during this period) eloquently captured this feeling of nascent collapsology in what was probably the most philosophical of his pandemic interventions:

 

“‘Everything I do makes no sense if the house burns.’ Yet even as the house is burning, it is necessary to continue as always, to do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more studiously — even if no one should notice. It may be that life disappears from the earth, that no memory remains of what has been done, for better or for worse. But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no more time”.

 

And indeed, things do endure. Life - of a sort - goes on, and small pleasures are taken where once there was only tension, dread, and helpless frustration. Nevertheless, this premonition has come to be the guiding light for my own post-pandemic world. It is summed up in a single word: decline. Decline is the interpretive lens through which everything can and must now be viewed. Not because Decline has suddenly come to define our epoch, implying that there was perhaps once a period where Decline was not active in our world, but only because the present is utterly unintelligible without it. It is too late. There is no time.

 

If the texts presented here are a record of anything then it’s the coming to consciousness of this fact, which until now I have only partially grasped and never fully bound myself to. That separation, which would distinguish my fate from the fate of the world is now utterly untenable, and the task now is to develop a form-of-life appropriate to our collective fate; a Being-towards-Decline if you like.

 

For me personally a sense of the pandemic being less of an all-consuming event only came into view when international travel became more predictable and I was finally able, after a period of almost 30 months, to travel abroad. That trip - which was to Copenhagen - and a subsequent trip to Prague in March of 2022, gave me the confidence to draw a line under these writings and to end them with an essay centred around the Francis Bacon exhibition ‘Man and Beast’ held at the Royal Academy of Arts after a long pandemic induced delay. I also wrote the addendum ‘Hurtling Back to Earth’ in the same month.

 

When I look back at these writings it’s clear that I, like so many others, were trying desperately to find mental space in a world turned completely upside down. The two part ‘Plague Power’ (One, Two)  drew on the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to analyse the pandemic response as an expression of what the former termed (and the latter further developed) as Biopower. These were essentially theoretical analyses of the political implications of the emergency powers used to enforce lockdowns and take a somewhat distanced, if rather polemical, tone. This was not the case for other writing I produced that year. By the end of May it was clear that the pandemic would not be a short-lived event, and my ‘Pandemic Musings’ of that month addressed the changed reality with a much more personal approach.

 

By that point the “enforced nihilism” of the restrictions and the constant fear porn being pumped out by government and compliant media had left London a lonely and alienating place. Although masks had yet to become the ubiquitous medical sacrament they are now, there was still enough anxiety and social distancing around to make venturing into the metropolis a jarring experience. The sun was out, and so was I. During May I cycled constantly, clocking up over 600km around the centre of the city and the Western outskirts. My workplace had never closed and throughout the lockdowns I attended site, working on projects with cancer charities and contributing to the tentative moves my employer made to get in on the various vaccine projects that were then underway. All that was good, and I think without work to distract me and the weather to lure me outside, those first few months of the pandemic would have been far harder, as they undoubtedly were for others.

 

I never succumbed to fear. Nothing about the SARS-CoV2 virus led me to believe that it harboured a serious risk to me. But, as we all know, personal risk was only one side, and a fairly minor one at that, to the psychological warfare practiced upon populations of the most developed economies at this time. Very quickly the emphasis shifted from stay home to “flatten the curve” to a potentially endless task of protecting some nameless vulnerable other by avoiding “unnecessary” social behaviours. The legal contortions and bizarre range of restrictions that were imposed during the late summer and Autumn of 2020 must count as one of the most chaotic periods in British legal history.  The practice of regional lockdowns was imported from China, but unlike in China they were only imposed after rounds of horse-trading with local government officials who were keen to protect their local industries from damaging stay-at-home or compulsory closure orders.

 

What resulted was an epidemiologically absurd mishmash of differing guidance and legal restrictions, where gyms in Blackburn were allowed to stay open, while those in Manchester had to close, and where hairdressers in London could open with social distancing and masks, while those in Leicester had to shut up shop completely. Then there was the arbitrary distinction between essential and non-essential shops which like so many of the restrictions privileged large retailers over small businesses; a fact that no doubt drove many a struggling entrepreneur into the arms of conspiracy theorists. And I won't even touch on the nonsense which led to the debate over whether a scotch egg constituted a 'substantial meal'. None of this was alleviated in early Winter when the no less arbitrary tiers system was brought in and government was accused of keeping London open at the expense of the North of England.

 

This is just a flavour of the chaos which was a near permanent presence during the later months of 2020. In an attempt to make sense of what was happening I had done extensive research into the history of the development of Pandemic Preparedness, tracking its emergence from out of Cold War planning for a nuclear attack, its convergence with theories of the precautionary principle and radicalisation during the years of the War on Terror, and then finally its institutionalisation at the global level under the auspices of the World Health Organisation and their international health regulations. All this helped flesh out what was now commonly being referred to as the Biosecurity Regime. Among the many authors and researchers whose work aided my understanding at this time I’d single out books by Carlo Caduff and Andrew Lakoff, as well as the real time analysis of Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing. There has been, understandably, a veritable tsunami of words written about the meaning of the last two years, and I claim no special status for my own contribution to this field. But the voices that have provided real guidance have generally been few and far between.

 

Understanding, however, does not afford oneself the capacity to abstract completely from the reality of the crisis. After the government u-turned on its pledge not to impose new restrictions over the 2020 Christmas period I found myself less inclined to understand and more determined to resist. After this point the tone of my writing became darker and more serious. The theme of Ends and Decline making themselves felt more strongly.

 

Going back to that Ligotti review in February 2020, there is another premonition which became central to my thoughts about life and death under biosecurity. Against the admonishment to “Live your best life!” I contended;

 

“Some of us would be satisfied with a passably happy death, or if not happy, then at least not scrabbling around in our own shit gasping for breath as the experts circle and the Muzak drones on”.

 

How many countless thousands were forced to face such a death owing to the pandemic restrictions which barred them from their loves ones, or from even seeing the unmasked face of another human being in their last moments? I continue to hold that the duties we owe to the dead and dying are what distinguish us from beasts. Fail to live up to them and we are no longer human. It’s with these unfortunates in my thoughts that I wrote in the addendum:

 

“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”.

 

Over the extended lockdown covering the first months of 2021 I produced more focussed and overtly political takes on the crisis. I particularly railed against the imposition of vaccine passports either for international travel or access to facilities at home. I also covered some of the artistic responses to the pandemic from the film makers John Smith and the collage artist Cold War Steve. My most polemical piece was written for my blog and contrasted the reduction of pandemic deaths to mute statistics with the outpouring of grief and solidarity in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard. The police response to the vigil held for Sarah on Clapham Common further reinforced my increasingly militant opposition to State imposed pandemic restrictions. I watched the police break up this gathering of grieving women with incandescent rage.

 

As Summer turned to Autumn and things in London began to look vaguely like they used to, my attention turned to the broader implications of the pandemic and in particular the penetration and radicalisation of digital control technologies into daily life. Digital health surveillance technologies in their manifold forms had throughout the pandemic frequently been compared by their opponents to China’s so-called Social Credit System. The three pieces of writing I produced at the end of 2021 cover the reality of that system and the anxieties around a possible post-political society controlled by Algorithmic Governance. My research also took me towards theorists most attuned to the post-political management of populations and the continuing effects of digital technologies on forms of subjectivity. The writing of Ignas Kalpokas, in particular his Algorithmic Governance: Politics and Law in the Post-Human Era, were highly instructive, as have been my continued reading of the work of Bernard Stiegler and Byung-Chul Han.

 

On a personal level the pandemic was a watershed for me. Tracing the origins of formative thought in one’s life is always a little futile and there is a tendency to narrativize what is often random unconnected events and decisions, but I do think that the December evening of 2020, when Boris Johnson announced another nationwide lockdown, set in motion the ideas, or at least the subjective break that has led me both to leave London and find myself planning a life with my soon-to-be wife in near total opposition to what I had previously taken to be essential. Even live music, the absence of which in the two blog articles titled ‘The Sounds ofSilence’ I lamented, has faded as a motivation for remaining in the Capital. By the end of 2022 I was in no doubt that everything had changed, even if it was in ways that were scarcely perceptible and difficult to describe. Nevertheless, I no longer felt at home. I don’t know the future, but I am pretty certain it is not in the cities.

 

The world is changed, but there is nothing new under the sun and we will make ugly ruins; which according to a certain - notably illiberal - strain of thought, means we have failed to build a worthwhile civilization. The pandemic is not over, nor will it ever be, since like the truly epochal events of the previous century - the great depression, the world wars, the war on terror - it's not that history moves on, but rather that the event is integrated into our sense of being historical, and thus we carry the wreckage with us into the next crisis. This is another way of conceiving Decline; a gradual, inescapable build-up of weight upon the back of the present, until time itself collapses. Grasping the Epoch is grasping the time of the Now, when no other future is thinkable.

 

"But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no more time”.

 

Enough Rainbow Flogging!

 

Just as the pandemic was getting started in 2020 I wrote a long essay about the contentious issue of whether biological sex was binary or existed as a spectrum. This was a response to a lot of noise around this subject that I’d been seeing on the fringes of what we now know as the gender, or trans wars. Part of that piece included an analysis of the meaning of spectrum as it appears in the rhetorical and sign strategies of LGBT activism. The rainbow - I argued - was the paradigmatic spectrum and the most readily identifiable symbol of LGBT discourse, whether as a flag carried by participants on a Pride march or used as a marker on products, literature or anything else. Describing biological sex as a spectrum was then a sort of territorial claim packaged with a cluster of associations which disrupted normative thinking around sexual dimorphism and the idea of the typical case, in a similar way that the expanding list of labels for sexuality and gender identity disrupt normative understanding of those categories.

I think an addendum to this analysis is in order on account of the way in which the use of the rainbow symbol has metastasised over the last three years. Very few people in the Anglophone world (as always it's worth noting that these phenomena reach their greatest intensity in those countries - at the vanguard of Decline) could fail to have noticed the massive expansion of the rainbow symbol beyond its common association with LGBT activism. We've come to a point where it's now hard to avoid encountering it in any number of incongruous locations. For example one might traverse a rainbow painted road crossing (displacing the traditional 'Zebra' black and white design) in Chiswick or Ealing. Are these places especially in need of ostentatious symbols of inclusivity?  Do they have a known lack of diversity or history of discrimination against LGBT identifying people? The intention is opaque. If you visit a hospital or other NHS facility you're positively rainbow bombed by murals, information leaflets, signage and the now ubiquitous - and slightly threatening - rainbow adjacent imperative BE KIND. In addition to these publically funded examples you're also likely to come across private businesses making a strong show of their 'allyship' or status as a Stonewall accredited LGBT employer, replete with bright and shiny rainbow graphics. So, why all the rainbow flogging?

In my analysis in 2020 I drew attention to the use within LGBT activist discourse of the concept of "spectrum" and of the rainbow as the paradigmatic spectrum. On the one hand the rainbow with its multiple colours highlights diversity and inclusivity. All are welcome under its umbrella, and - as the concept of spectrum indicates - the symbol is able to accommodate an infinite multitude of non-conforming and emergent identities. In addition to diversity and inclusion the rainbow also symbolises equity, that all members within the spectrum are equal and there is no place for normative categories of any kind. No-one has the right to claim normative supremacy against which the others are but lesser variations. Everyone is a winner, everyone should be celebrated. Taken as a whole the rainbow stakes a claim for a form of totality - albeit of a rather circular kind. It is a circle of mutual celebration and normative dissolution where the members are considered equal but without singular consequence. It is a flag under which you can be whoever you want to be, but all you will ever amount to is an equal in an otherwise free-floating and boundless community. The burning of a thousand minor stars is blinding.

There are I think at least two main highways through which the rainbow has come to symbolise this new totality. The first should be familiar. During the pandemic the child-like painted rainbow became the symbol not only of collective support for health workers, but of collective conformity with government restrictions. During my many long walks in 2020 I would see this rainbow in windows beyond which lived people terrified to leave their homes. I saw it marked in chalk on pavements next to spray painted signs to KEEP YOUR DISTANCE installed by local councils. I saw it in the gaudy lights of giant advertising boards in Piccadilly circus, on the sides of busses and in stations. The rainbow came to mark a boundary and a sign of allegiance. You were either compliant and clapped the good people of the NHS and the government trying to protect the vulnerable, or you were with the MAGA conspiracists, the death cultists, the anti-vax 5G proto-fascists. Quite a dichotomy set up there, but it was one fuelled by politicians for over two years, and that particular piece of divide and rule has only continued into the latest round of crises. And herein lies the crux of the matter.

 

The NHS is collapsing. In some respects we no longer have accessible public healthcare in the UK. Certainly many people, myself included, no longer bother trying to access it unless it's a question of life and death. Over 10% of the UK population is currently waiting for NHS treatment and the average waiting time for an ambulance is such that if you were to suffer a stroke, heart attack, or be involved in serious car accident you are most likely to die on the street. As I have written before, comprehensive public health was abandoned during the pandemic in favour of a war economy aimed at one eminently survivable disease. The damage caused has been vast and will only worsen, since not only have many NHS services never returned to pre-pandemic levels, we now have a population wracked by physical and metal ill health, the direct consequence of being confined to their homes and having their social existence decimated by wrongheaded and entirely short-sighted authoritarian policies. We  now also have rampant inflation, the combined result of disrupted supply chains (again due to the pandemic response) and the decision of European nations to shoot themselves in the foot by weaponising energy supplies in their now open conflict with Russia in Ukraine.

The second highway towards total-rainbow has been the mainstreaming of the gender wars at the same time gender activism has been making major inroads into State and third sector institutions. The main protagonists of the latter in the UK have been transgender organisations Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence, and the establishment LGBT+ organisation Stonewall, whose Diversity Champions Program and associated Workplace Equality Indices have come under scrutiny for among other things misrepresenting the UK Equality Act. There are however a whole host of advocacy/activist and associated gender-conventicles working across the economy, all using similar rhetoric and symbolism, including variations on the ubiquitous rainbow.

At a time of such self evident decline it's hardly surprising that the rainbow sticking plaster, with its infantile imperative BE KIND has conquered all before it. People have every reason to be angry; they are being taxed for services they cannot access and are freezing and starving to death in order to maintain American global hegemony. Western Governments have done little else over the past few years but sell out to big tech and big pharma, while at the same time annihilating the societal base upon which their populations may have been able to self organise and resist. We are angry, disenchanted and atomised. Our politicians have no answers to the grand problems facing post-industrial societies in climate collapse.

The rainbow provides a convenient image with built in semiotic slippage. Its ability both to totalise and to divide inside from outside make it invaluable - as it was during the pandemic - to rally people behind its nebulous cause, and stifle opposition. When after waiting weeks for a doctor's appointment you finally get to the overcrowded surgery only to find your appointment has been cancelled owing to staff shortages your understandable frustration is confronted by the sign fixed to the plastic screen (another retain from pandemic days) in front of the reception desk. It tells you 'We take a zero tolerance approach to any abuse of our staff". The words are ringed by a rainbow above which reads BE KIND. The reality being presented to you here is clear; you're either with the good guys, the cult of permanent celebration, that waits quietly masked up for treatment that'll never arrive, or you're the proto-fascist horde, the anti-vax thug, the deplorable superspreader event with bells on that deserves nothing from our entirely faultless and virtuous welfare system.

Pull back and apply the same logic to other situations where the rainbow appears like a warning. Whether you're an employee uncomfortable about being told to add your pronouns to your email signature, or a teacher unwilling to teach children about the existence of hundreds of gender identities, or just anyone going about your business only to be confronted by this new creed, this unspoken symbol of your compelled compliance, the rainbow makes clear you are either with us or against us. The rainbow has been radicalised and now represents a boundary permitting the distinction between insiders and outsiders. In a collapsing civilisation diversity, equity and inclusion becomes just another cudgel, another way to govern the ungovernable.

Interestingly, the emergence of the rainbow as a symbol of political kitsch coincides with its collapse as a symbol of unity in LGBT politics. The rise over the last two years of alternative activist frameworks which diverge from Stonewall's monopolistic approach is a sign that the reality of conflict between interests and the limits of facile liberal universalism are beginning to be felt. The Progress Pride flag is perhaps the strongest visual symbol of this conflict. It features the traditional horizontal bars of the rainbow flag but now it is bisected from the left by additional colours meant to represent  marginalized people of colour, trans people, and those living with HIV/AIDS. The point of the triangle cleaves into the rainbow at a 45^o angle as if it were trying to split it in two, the formal arrangement of which brings to mind El Lissitzky's Soviet era constructivist image 'Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge' 1919. In Lissitzky's picture, the Bolshevik red wedge is shown symbolically dividing the mass of the anti-revolutionary white army.

 

The progress pride flag, and all the many variations of it testify to a fundamental failure of the LGBT movement and of the liberal identarian dream more generally. If the rainbow flag, which by its own definition is the most inclusive flag imaginable, is not sufficient to hold the demands of your ever expanding list of constituents, then this might point to the insufficiency of personal identity and self-expression for founding a stable political community, or to escape conflicts over competing Rights claims.   

The modern "prosumer" (producer/consumer) of digital capitalism will not settle for being integrated anonymously into a abstract concept like the all-inclusive rainbow spectrum. Visibility, a latecomer to the activist arsenal works like an agent-provocateur setting all against all in the battle to be seen. This should not come as a surprise, since in an attention economy like ours, governed by the extreme narcissism of contemporary liberal individualism, being seen, being noticed, might be the difference between sink or swim; at least according to the market based value system that contaminates all Western culture. It is clear that self-actualisation is rarely achieved without standing on the shoulders of others.

By the same token, the attempt to mollify and capture a declining civilisation under the same empty totality will fail. What is described as the woke capture of the institutions is actually this attempt, which aims to mitigate the negative externalities of our digitally dysphoric and ever more fragmented world by bureaucratic means. But DEI policies and disciplinary procedures are no substitute for values nurtured within real historical communities and real-world practices. Ultimately the rainbow stands for everything and thus stands for nothing. LGBT activism has been thoroughly co-opted by corporate interests and subsumed into the prevailing culture of marketing and rat-race self promotion. While at the same time its colourful imagery has been generalised into a society-wide palliative and encomium to quiet compliance with the ruling orthodoxy of managed decline. The rainbow symbol's only function now is as a brightly coloured boundary running through everything. Vaccinated,/unvaccinated, Brexiteer/Remainer, Fascist/anti-fascist, inside/outside, with us/against us. These absolutes are a selection from a far longer list which now serve to divide the modern West into opposing and utterly implacable camps.

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!