I wanted to write something about 2020 that wasn't an essay or a biographical form of writing. Something that would allow me to expand on a few of the themes I've written about this year and bring together other random thoughts. So I've decided to use this conversational form as a device for doing that. There's nothing more to it than adding a degree of movement or dialectic to what would otherwise be straight prose. As usual it's turned out to be longer than expected so I've split it into two parts. Quotes are for orientation and ornamentation.
"Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos". (Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn)
TX - This year has obviously been defined by the pandemic, which for many people seemed to have struck from out of a clear blue sky, without warning; though we also know that the progress of the virus across the globe had been given much attention in the news media during the early weeks of the year. Even so when the shutdown hit it was still a surprise, and since then it has dominated everything. Nothing has been left untouched, from the most everyday encounters with people, to the fundamental structures of our lives. The changes have been so all encompassing that at times it’s a struggle to think back before the catastrophe or imagine a future that's different from this awful present. What was the situation at the beginning of the year?
XT - There was a sense of foreboding around in late January, as cases started mounting around Europe and some phenomena like stockpiling food and a sudden drop in tourist numbers in London signalled the coming storm. In the UK at least I felt the nation's collective mental state was like that of a boxer after ten hard rounds; sitting dazed in the corner, unsure whether to come out for the 11th. Brexit had taken its toll, and from the perspective of the Left the general election result of December 2019 had been a kick in the teeth. But you’re right, it was still a shock when the pandemic hit. Perhaps this points to a limitation in the cognitive capacity to think the worst case, to really anticipate it, despite all the information being readily available. I don’t believe the logic of worst case thinking comes readily to people, not even the pessimists – among who I count myself. If life in one’s immediate environment is still functioning, if the shops are open, the streets are busy, and the natural sociality of people has yet to be undermined, then the storm can seem to always be moving across the horizon in some other direction. Nevertheless, when I read my journal entries from the start of the year I do note a fatalistic tone, more than usual, and also I made reference in a book review I wrote about what I believe is the distillation of our current ethical/political situation; how to live well in a world that is dying.
TX - By world I assume you mean more than just the natural environment, the world of seas, of biodiversity and climate variation; all that which the natural sciences make visible to us and on the behalf of which scientist sound the alarm? There is genuine concern that any progress that has been made towards addressing climate change will be lost in the post-pandemic period. There is a perception that the choice facing us is a trade-off between societal damage and environmental damage, as if the destructive faculty of human existence must be directed somewhere. This strikes me as misguided. Can we imagine a situation where the natural world remains intact but the world of the human is devastated?
XT - Our own propensity towards self-destruction is inextricably linked to the destruction of our environment. They cannot be separated. The forms of social organisation which for centuries have led us to our current predicament were also always destructive of the human qua human, not solely the human qua naturae. This is also the case according to specialists for novel pathogens like coronavirus. Laurie Garrett’s book ‘The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance’, was something of a best-seller when it was published in the mid-90s. But perhaps amid all the pre-millennial tension the lesson was not taken as seriously as it should have been. It's a commonplace sentiment that the present – whether we want to conceive that as a world, a political form, or economic system – is dying, but its replacement cannot be born. I’m not supportive of this “obstetric motif” which has its origins in secularised theological notions of renewal, bequeathed to us from the Enlightenment. Its strongest formulation is of course in Marx. I find the whole ontology associated with it misguided and limiting in grasping what is going on in the present. Not to mention it encourages an attachment to this world which is fundamentally anti-messianic.
TX - There has been some writing - buried perhaps behind the human stories - of how capitalist society bears responsibility for the emergence of the novel coronavirus. Whether or not this is true it surely cannot account for the form that the global response has taken and the public reaction to it. How striking that tens of millions of people simply abandoned their former lives as if they meant nothing to them. A switch was flipped and society was for the most part deactivated. Can we put this all down to the power of fear?
XT - I don't believe so, though fear was there and has increasingly been leveraged for the sake of compliance as the crisis has deepened. It's a truism that nothing renders a population more susceptible to coercive power than fear. Truly though we were fearful before, and let's be blunt about this, if in the West so many people just walked away from their lives, then that was at least in part because there was so little to defend. Community, belonging, the capacity to live a meaningful life, all these things have been progressively decimated by Neoliberalism. They hated their lives, they saw no value in them, and so were grateful to be given permission to walk away. So yes I think we can to some degree attribute what has happened to capitalism. What I find more disturbing is the void that has been created and what else has disappeared into that void, chiefly our obligations to the dead and dying have vanished beneath an insidious ethic of superlative good citizenship which holds indeterminate risk assessed obligations to an imagined collective good to be of absolute value, even to the point of dissolving the duties we have to those closest to us.
TX - Defending life by destroying society. Technocratic governance knows little else than bodies to be managed. If it can be said that these things, these obligation, are what separate us from the beasts, then can we really still call ourselves human under these conditions?
XT - I find it increasingly difficult to make this claim with a straight face. It's hardly news that the figure of humanity we are familiar with is threatened with being washed away. Haven't we been told frequently that we are entering the post-human age? It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who can read the signs of the times that a post-human society isn't one where technology cures us of our collective failings and ushers in a reign of peace, but is actually the forcible destruction of the human as what Aristotle called the zoon politikón, the political animal. And it's important to be clear here that politikón doesn't refer only to parliaments, senates, or the other accoutrements of democratically constituted power, all of which can be stage-managed to appear operative and relevant. At base politikón refers to contestation within a community between different forms-of-life. It refers to values and the immediate experience of human being-together, which also unavoidably brings into play the problem of power. All of this - which elsewhere has been described as a particular "destiny" of our species - is under increasing threat.
TX - From a historical perspective then the upheavals of 2020 should not be seen as such a major departure from the past few decades, which have been little else but a permanent storm of crisis upon crisis. It has also been said that nothing new will come from out of the pandemic, though we should perhaps not be so reassured by this. Since as you say there was plenty already in play to threaten the human. The pandemic has felt different though, in its suddenness and in the way it has transformed our everyday experience of each other. If nothing else, it clearly represents a rupture into a new social and political configuration, even if what goes into making up that configuration were already in play to different degrees.
"If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let's at least decorate it, even if only with the shadows of our dreams, their colourful lines engraving our oblivion on the statically enclosing walls". (Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet)
XT - I recently read a article in the mainstream news media that displayed an unusual degree of sensitivity to the everyday realities of the pandemic. I was particularly touched by the expression that there was no “new normal, only an evolving estrangement”. The author went on to talk about opportunities for belonging being replaced by a permanent feeling of rejection. Strangers step into the road to avoid you, hospitality staff cover their faces and keep their distance, and of course there is the loss of all those everyday intimacies which we take for granted. Even when we are not actually behind a screen we are screened off from each other. The author suggested this represented a loss of ritual from our lives, echoing a recent text on this subject by Byung-Chul Han. Accepting that there is any such ritual element left in Western societies, I think this is mistaken. We have substituted rituals which mark time for the sake of belonging with others, for rituals of estrangement. Displays of affection have been replaced by the rituals of "Hands, Face, Space". Perhaps this is one way of understanding how our sense of time itself has been changed. Time is now empty of belonging, empty of the possibility of an encounter with others. Spontaneity has also been largely been abolished. If our sense of time passing has been disrupted by this estrangement from others, then we should acknowledge the deep connection between community and the feeling of 'being at home in one’s time'.
TX - That in itself would be something of a revolution. Though whether such a community must depend on rituals, especially those around notions of the sacred, I'm unsure. It's significant that you found the article's candour unusual. Who hasn't spoken about these things with their friends and family? Yet in public there is a taboo which has been established. Publicly acknowledging that there are other things of value than bare biological life, something specifically human which has been decimated by the pandemic response, still risks censure. Like everything nowadays the possibility of speaking truthfully is hamstrung by polarisation. You either sing the praises of the shutdown or at the very least keep quiet, or you stand with the Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers; agents of the enemy according to this kind of thinking. This is the epistemology commonly found in wartime; “Loose talk cost lives”.
XT - Another well known phrase associated with that epistemology is “the first casualty of war is the truth”. At the risk of evoking conspiratorial motifs there is something Orwellian about being told that covering ones face and avoiding contact with others is a sign of love. Love always involves risk and that is precisely the thing we are not permitted.
TX - Despite all that has been written and said about the pandemic, its effect on our lives, about the virus itself, all those press conferences and political addresses to the peoples of the world, I feel we are still fundamentally in the dark. Uncertainty rules and that has elicited an unprecedented political reaction.
XT - Power acts to cover over uncertainty, and this really has little to do with science. One basic way to understand ideology is that it converts contingency into political necessity. The fulcrum here is authority, understood not as a political but an epistemological category. This is the role of authority in forming the conditions of possibility for knowledge and action. Actions like government interventions but also the actions of individuals. What is reasonable for me to do? What authority can I draw on besides simply obeying the word of the masters, something few of us would openly admit to doing. Law plays its part too, as both a coercive instrument and as something which is supposed to have its own kind of authority, independent from the government that makes it.
TX - Ah! The much vaunted "respect for the Law". And yet for some individuals there is simply no level of government restrictions to satisfy them. They lash out at their friends and neighbours even when they're acting within the law! The English have a peculiar fetish for rules, which I think is why so much of their sexual deviancy revolves around discipline. With so many outlets for libidinal investment closed off it strikes me that a minor culture of covid related S&M is breaking out. There are the sadists who cope by beating others for daring to believe in something beyond four walls and Ocado deliveries, and on the other hand there are those who turn inward; perfectly healthy young people refusing to leave their homes and demanding ever stricter measures. Punish me more master! All this I suppose is also a way of dealing with uncertainty. Besides, who really believes in politicians?
XT - Governing an emergency situation in such thoroughly disenchanted times provides the backdrop to the response. Science has supplanted religion as a means to dispel the demons of uncertainty inherent in human life, and the public use of science during the pandemic is symbolic of that. Being led by the science amounts to saying 'this is what I believe I believe, and you should believe it too'.
TX - Which - we should be clear - is not the same thing as claiming the scientists involved in the response are false or intentionally misleading the public. We should be opposed to the conspiratorial position, which is also a method for dispelling uncertainty, and in a form that bears resemblance to self-harm. The good old hermeneutics of suspicion remains our best defence.
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