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 23rd 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”.
