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!
