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

[Vanouse, Paul]

Picking up on Cengiz and Gloria’s great comments…

Thanks Gloria for your topical reference to Mark Fisher’s Weird and the Eerie and for noting that,  "One of the most notable parts of quarantine/self-iso. is the loss/fear of touch”.

Just prior to social distancing in my university (before the end of regular classes) I noticed the scent of garlic on someone's breath in a laboratory class I was teaching. It was the first moment where it really struck me the incredible proximity of daily life that would probably change.  A day later I first read suggestions that if you’re close enough to smell someone’s breath, you are too close, as you could easily be inhaling airborne viral particles. The fear of scent seems particularly profound, because unlike a touch, an accidental proximity can’t be erased with Purelle.  We can only imagine with the scent of another, what other chemicals/molecules may be entering our lungs. We are reminded of the interesting description viral ontology (by Cornell scientist, Gary Whittaker in the Washington Post recently) as something between the realms of Chemistry and Biology.

The connection between smells and disease recalls the Victorian beliefs, generally connected to classism and racism, that Cholera and other contagions were spread through the air.  Latour also discusses these ideas in “The Pasteurization of France”…  Its unfortunate that contagions seldom seem to make us more tolerant.

I’ve been working with smell for the past six years, on a project called Labor--which is a multi-sensory, bio-media installation that endeavours to re-create the scent of human exertion. There are, however, no people involved in making the smell--it is created by bacteria propagating in the three bioreactors in the artwork. Each bioreactor incubates a species of human skin bacteria responsible for the primary scent of sweating bodies (http://www.paulvanouse.com/labor.html).

Since beginning the Labor project, I’ve become pretty fixated upon the metabolic processes involved in creating “human" aromas as well as the varied aesthetic qualities of each.  I’m finding the lack of the scent of humans rather eerie as we all keep our safe distances.  And to complicate this, of course one symptom of this flu is the loss of sense of smell, which must further a feeling of isolation.

Paul



On Apr 11, 2020, at 6:39 PM, Gloria Kim <gloriakim.cs at gmail.com<mailto:gloriakim.cs at gmail.com>> wrote:

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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<mailto:csalman at umich.edu>> wrote:
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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<mailto:elizabeth.wijaya at gmail.com>> wrote:

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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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