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

[Gloria Kim]

HI everyone - thanks to Renate for the opportunity and thanks to everyone
else for their contributions. Lots of exciting issues to pick up on, but
I'll offer just a couple things.

Jumping off of the discussion on models and simulations (esp what Paul said
about challenges exceeding our models), I tend to see modelling and
simulation in these contexts as extensions of a broader concern over
methods of apprehending unknowable events. For me, models and simulations
function in such fascinating ways in cultures of risk; among other things,
they are both icons of knowledge and radical contingency, and perform all
sorts of other weird kind of epistemological work. In 2016, I wrote an
article called "99.9% Effective: calculating credibility and consuming
trust in the antibacterial promise"  where I talk about how the phrase
"99.9% effective" (the antibacterial claim) functions like models and
simulations. For anyone who for whom this would be helpful, the link to the
full article is here
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10253866.2015.1085135>.

On an other note entirely: I'm part of  a working group on embodied
experiences of time and absence in quarantine and self-isolation. One thing
that has surfaced in our discussions is that we all had expressed
experiencing brief moments of alarm when, while watching TV/movies; we
would see scenes of crowds/people not social distancing and watch in
amazement and shock (before reminding ourselves that "our" time is not
"that" time). For me, the first time I noticed this was about three weeks
ago when I was watching the beginning of Sirk's Imitation of Life, which
opens with a scene on a crowded coney island. I think I audibly gasped.
Phenomenoloigcally, self-isolation.quarantine has been all so weird.
Actually, M Fisher descires the weird as "the presence of something where
there should be absence." he describes the "eerie" as "an absence where
there should be presence." So a better description of quarantine/ self-iso.
would be "eerie."One of the most notable parts of quarantine/self-iso. is
the loss/fear of touch. And the absence of touch for prolonged periods make
the body an eerie place. About week 2 or three into quarantine (I'm by
myself) I was watching Gerwig's little women again.  I physically
registered the scenes of the sisters' carelessly and boisterously physical
manner of being-together. Watching the unthinking contact of bodies in this
movie sent waves of what i can only best describe as phantom sensations
through my body. I'm thinking of theories of haunting as a way of
understanding of our embodied experiences of this moment.

Gloria

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim
Assistant Professor of Media and Culture
Department of Media and Culture
3137 INST CHASS South Building
University of California-Riverside
900 University Avenue
Riverside, CA 92521



On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 11:55 AM Cengiz Salman <csalman at umich.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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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> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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>
> _______________________________________________
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