[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on -empyre_

[Elizabeth Wijaya]

Thank you, Cengiz for sharing your op-ed on lean production with Anna
Watkins Fisher. I'm  particularly struck by this line: "This crisis is
making visible the fragile social relations that have until now invisibly
underwritten the new American way of life." I have been thinking about how
the invisibility to the eye of the virus, and the uncertainty of its
mechanism since it is novel, has the effect of rendering hyper-visible, or
magnifying, existing structural contradictions that have held together
capitalist regimes. As Sorelle writes of the "vast inequalities between
people that have come to light"— it is perhaps not so much that these
inequalities were hidden in the first place but it is harder now to avert
our collective eyes from these inequalities. In the Singapore example
Sorelle gave, the predatory treatment and othering of the mostly South
Asian laborers in the construction and shipping industries have been both
omnipresent, criticized for decades, and larger ignored but now that the
status quo is threatening the health and economic wellbeing of its internal
others, and the optics of Singapore's attempt to be a model example of
handling the virus, temporary measures have been put in place, such as
shifting workers out of perennially overcrowded dorms, etc. It remains to
be seen, after the end of this long pandemic moment, what of the temporary
and emergency measures that are being enacted within different states will
remain permanent, at whose benefit. In Jonathan's formulation, "what makes
us vulnerable to the worst is also what grants us the possibility of the
best." If this global viral situation reveals us as intertwined lives that
cannot be enclosed by borders, I wonder what renewed, hopeful logics can
emerge in this crisis and its aftermath.
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