[-empyre-] Bio-Fascism: Eclipse of the Social /Decline of Politics

[Bishnupriya Ghosh]

Hi everyone,



Thank you to Tim and Renate for inviting me (Bishnu) to this forum: I’ve
found the exchanges on both quarantine experiences as well as the virus and
its technical mediations over the last week compelling in more ways than
one. I teach global media at UC Santa Barbara, and California went to
shelter in place over a month ago; so, like many of you, there is little
choice but to reflect on viral transmissions, public health, and the
distributive logic of security. The global spectacle is horrifying: not
only is my elderly parent in Calcutta a continuous worry, but the human
tragedy of thousands of migrant laborers walking back to their villages
(400 km or more) in India’s ill-planned lockdown of 1.3 billion people is
truly paralyzing. I'm glad to be in a lengthy exchange that is at once
capaciously global and firmly focused on the media arts.



I shuttle beyond the common experience, and my research: for the last few
years, I have been writing a book (*The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic
Mediation*) which traverses some of the ground in the discussions so far.
COVID-19 is a black swan event that will interrupt the book which is on the
HIV/AIDS global pandemic. Unlike this pandemic, the HIV/AIDS pandemic is a
long-wave epidemic (four decades, 36 million deaths), but this is precisely
why it is an object lesson in the bitter task of learning to live with
viruses. It has taught us as much about coming viral storms from global
hotspots for spillover events (zoonotic viruses skipping into animal hosts)
as it has about the socioeconomic calculates and divides human populations
into those who receive therapeutic benefits and those in disposable
congeries (remember Reagan's failures in the early eighties?). One of the
aims of the book is to think ecological and public health mediations
*together*—interdisciplinary enclaves that are ill-fitting. Post-humanist
discourse regards the focus on the human survival inimical to epidemic
thought (the epidemic is “a condition against the demos”) as
anthropocentric; while social science on global health challenges the human
as a unitary subject. I attempt to bridge the chasm through the study of
epidemic mediation--not the classical contagion fare (so well documented in
Priscilla Wald's *Contagious, *2005*), *but technological interventions
such as blood tests or predictive surveillance media.



I read Jonathan’s history of the virus as an epistemic object, and Paul’s
elaboration of modeling and simulation with great appreciation. As they
suggest, invisible to the naked eye, the virus has always been a
biotechnical assemblage: as we know, from the first virus (the tobacco
mosaic virus was identified in 1892) subjected to scientific study, these
“filterable agents” 100 to 500 times smaller than bacteria were “seen”
under the gleam of the electron microscope as late as 1938 (just after the
first crystallization, as Jonathan notes). Mediatic processes—from the
preparation of lab samples to the optical image in the epistemic setting of
the lab—set in motion the possibility of altering or modifying biological
substrates of pathogenic viruses, especially during the crisis event of
epidemics. How many times is SARS-CoV-2 the “invisible” enemy? The scramble
for tests is precisely to make viral replication appear as numeric
thresholds: only then can we grasp otherwise indiscernible biological
processes. Epidemic mediation, then, involves the composition of the times,
spaces, and agencies of the virus-human interface. The media theorists I
engage for tracing the image, medium, and movement range from Sarah Kember
& Johanna Zylinska (*Life After New Media*), John Durham Peters (*Marvelous
Clouds*) and Hannah Landecker (*American Metabolism*) to Vilem Flusser
(*Universe
of Technical Images*), Cornelia Visemann (*Files*), and Alex Galloway (*The
Exploit)*.


The main point: Viral epidemics remind us there is no equivalent to
penicillin that can kill viruses; the only choice is to live *with* them,
as the bitter lesson of the HIV/AIDS epidemics taught us. Technical
mediations (optical and computational) play a key role in making
interventions in biological processes possible—everything from blocking
viral proteins or contact tracing surveillance. Media studies attentive to
the epistemic settings for processes of transcription are able to assess
and evaluate the historical implications of such mediation.

On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 8:44 PM akroker <akroker at uvic.ca> wrote:

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



-- 
Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh
Department of English and Global Studies
3431 South Hall
UC Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20200417/29980d85/attachment.html>