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

Cengiz Salman csalman at umich.edu
Sun Apr 12 04:10:57 AEST 2020


Hey all,

Just wanted to comment on Elizabeth and Paul’s respective posts as they seem very related to the work that Anna and I did in that quick op-ed for Medium. 

I think you are absolutely correct in pointing out that what we suggested about the invisibility of structures of oppression might actually be more about our inability to ignore these structures given the current crisis. I have always been a little skeptical about the term invisibility, particularly when we are talking bout the kinds of systemic racism that seem so incredibly tied to the hyper-visibility of flesh. Like Paul mentioned, and like Anna and I discuss in our piece, the disproportionate affects of covid-19 on communities of color and already precarious lives in the US actually is very continuous with previous environmental and public health catastrophes. Katrina and Maria are the examples Paul points to, but we could also add to this list examples that are more close to home for me, e.g. the Flint water crisis and water shutoffs in Detroit. 

Really interesting conversation so far. I need to read about your conversations about porous borders and viruses a little more closely before I can comment. I am really interested in Jonathan’s discussion about viruses being a sort of mediator or liminal point between life and non-life, Sorelle’s discussion of Derrida an autoimmunity, and Paul’s discussion of how viruses like covid-19 and HIV challenges the very ontological models that we have used to draw distinctions between what life is and is not.

Cheers and hope you are all staying well. Looking forward to more discussion.

Cengiz

> On Apr 10, 2020, at 2:06 PM, Elizabeth Wijaya <elizabeth.wijaya at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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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