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<p>The moderators suggested that guests for the 3d week introduce themselves by briefly speaking at first of their own experience of the pandemic. So then, a brief autobiography of (my) life in a time of viral contagion and a brief political biography of its likely consequences from my perspective.</p>
<p>Like everyone, I am sheltering in place at home on Vancouver Island, literally an island of attentive solitude in the global stream of viral contagion. Here, the pandemic has been controlled by means of a strong public health system and political leadership deferring to medical expertise, relying on a widely shared sense of civic responsibility and general care for the community in responding to the virus. Now more than ever in this time of viral delirium, I think of Vancouver Island as a rare, magical intersection of the four meridians of air, earth, fire and water, an undeclared republic tilting towards social justice just off the western continental mass of North America. Social solidarity in the face of viral contagion. </p>
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<p>Ironically, the winter months preceding the pandemic were just the opposite of isolation and social distancing. As part of a collective political struggle during the winter months, many of us were involved in an active alliance between youth and elders involved in indigenous resurgence and environmental activists in protesting the armed occupation of indigenous territories by Canadian federal police in support of aggressive pipeline expansion. Like an epochal rip in the fabric of normal time and space, the Legislature Building here was surrounded by a large encampment of indigenous youth with the lighting of sacred fires, drumming, inspiring speeches, and a field of red dresses symbolizing murdered and missing indigenous women, all of this with a spirit of love, not violence, and very courageous, very determined resolve on the part of indigenous youth and elders. I may have been teaching a seminar on the politics of race and power by day with that haunting trilogy of Black Skin/White Masks, Red Skin/White Masks and Brown Skin/White Masks, but by night many students were at the encampment in active solidarity with indigenous youth, with others responding to frequent appeals during the nighttime hours to come to the Legislature to help protect indigenous youth from possible police violence. What I witnessed over the winter was a glimpse into the possibility of a more just future traced out in all its social creativity, political courage and profound ecological understanding by indigenous thought and practice and by strong alliances between indigenous youth and many other young people conscious of the historical injustices of settler colonialism.</p>
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<p>Then, the pandemic, with all its globalized panic fear and political cynicism. The darkness of this spring just the opposite of the lightness of winter politics. Watching Trump's daily televised orgies of unconstrained narcissism and spasms of self-pity interspersed with viscous scapegoating and cynical lies, all applauded by an enormous popular following howling the rage of their discontents, I was reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's description of the continuing power of appeals to the "inner fascist." Here the political virus of right-wing populism, fueled by panic fear and very real anxiety over the loss of jobs in the very real life context for many people of work or starve. seeks to attach itself to the host cell of the television audience, releasing its genetic instructions, and then waiting as the host cell reproduces the virus, whether expressed in the form of angry white male hysteria, scapegoating of Asians, border violence against asylum seekers, or studied popular silence concerning the cynical hijacking of relief funds by large corporations in the United States and by carbon-heavy energy companies in Canada. The immediate consequences of viral contagion: the eclipse of the social/the death of politics. And something else as well. Something now present as a faint intimation of things to come on the horizon of perception, but then quickly inflating into a really existent reality. And that reality is bio-fascism. The signs are everywhere. A friend from New York texts me to express her concern about how quickly people are eager to surrender civil liberties in the face of the pandemic. She points to the WSJ with its recent article on the alliance between Apple and Google in perfecting contact tracing. Definitely a useful medical tool at the present moment, but after the pandemic a vast extension of the power of corporate surveillance over individual privacy for purposes of targeted relational advertising and, for the national security state, an emblematic breakthrough in power over the bodies of its citizens. Moralized first in the name of public health but later likely to be made permanent in the name of national security and virtual capitalism, contact tracing could well turn out to be a leading talisman of bio-fascism with the workplace future likely to an experiment in bio-politics--segregation of the population, temperature taking, sudden quarantines, rule by emergency decree. All of this while the virtual capitalism of the ruling financial corporations views this as a convenient moment to actualize what has already taken place—the shedding of unnecessary living labor once commerce has fully transitioned to remote labor in the age of the gig economy. Here, surging gun sales and panic hoarding are only symptomatic signs of the death of the social and the eclipse of politics, and all of this to the background music of the coming of age of Bob Dylan's dirge, "Murder Most Fowl."</p>
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