- Unevidenced vs conspiracy theory RE COVID-19 – grand theories proliferating in the absence of public spaces and forums – feeling exceeded
o
Walks,
parks, neighbours, preppers; the desire to find news; the inability to think
socially & politically; a lesson that everyone depends on everyone, a
widespread sense that things are wrong and need to change, and that lesson so
quickly snuffed; accusations of social murder and the summer of insurrections;
the pandemic shifted our sense of what the left is, its project; discussions
defined (constricted) by a binary of For/Against; log-jammed in an abstract
contradiction and an event that changes everything; feelings of confusion à confusion-ism as state strategy of control; national
differences, for example, in the UK a government that didn’t want to do
lockdowns really, in Greece a government who did… anti-NATO or anti-Russian cultural
attitudes; essential workers revealed as the bones of the economy or the state,
the bones of the state laid bare & undoing some bourgeois hierarchies about
which work matters (and connecting this to the cost of living crisis, the many ongoing
strikes); to whom were these bones laid bare, made visible?
o
Increased
rapacity, undisguised visions of fascism, solidarities failed to manifest –
between whom? Didn’t they manifest? Increased use of digital services/delivery
economies à also, there are labour shortages, people refusing to
go back to work. Anger amongst health workers, many of whom died at the start –
a desire to hear from them.
o
Humanism,
universals, dissonance in the left; universalism of rights destroyed (rights
not intrinsically bourgeois); states are weak, the government edicts came after
people were choosing to stay at home (i.e., not “obeyed”); the left pining for
a strong state to oppose, one that enforces or lifts a lockdown; people in the
UK may have a tendency to “trust” the state more in a crisis (the history here)
à the extent to which state provision can happen at all
in different nation-states as a factor in national differences/cultural
attitudes; nostalgia for lives unregimented by having to go to work (now);
vaccine and public health equated with the state, but capital conglomerates
around them (cronyism, development/distribution/hoarding), hedge funds moving
into health systems across Europe and North America – all health systems
labelled as fascistic, an unfortunate repercussion (“hippy fascism”), discussing
the vaccine (alongside the rush to be vaccinated and anti-vax discourses) maybe
stallsed certain discussions about the meat
industry, deforestation, agricultural concerns; people don’t get to choose
allies because wider culture only admits polarity – e.g., critics of state as
benevolent / its so-called civil liberties are equated with fascists.
o
Or
anarchists forced into alliances with the state (mutual aid, encouraging
vaccines, etc.).
o
Alliance
vs agreement – as if everything can be stacked up in columns and you can’t say
“no” and “no”, or “yes, and/but”… People with Y/N positions boiling down to
fascism or conspiracy thinking – state’s co-option of health experts, should we
believe experts, or is that elitist (a possible position) – constant slides
down and back.
o
Nothing
straightforward, simple, clear – not even the notion of wearing a mask as an
act of solidarity (in Athens, a slogan along the lines of “buy a mask, and get
a tank free”, i.e., shadows of military dictatorship loom). Pandemic used to
get rid of cash in the UK, a serious failing, to be resisted. Cashless means
more social control.
o Anti-vaxxers & TERFs, alliances against public health and trans healthcare
o Rob Wallace becoming a member of (or advocate for) Zero Covid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-COVID) – China and New Zealand as “good” examples – but these movements can’t contain the complexities, maximalist positions that allow a certain degree of satisfaction in disagreeing with the state.
- Desire for an immediate political position; concern about eugenicist strands at the start of the pandemic & official responses, notions of collateral damage; geopolitics decomplexifies, polarises, one-size-fits-all politics; a need for humility, flexibility, making mistakes, we can’t know what’s going on as it’s happening & as we’re in it. A politics that doesn’t require a position on everything à quasi-religious or mystical attitude about what’s going on (ignorance, tranquillity). Positions make us legible to one another, and then one position indicates another (or is assumed to, and we’re back to allegiances false and true).
Turning to the reading, Lisa Jeschke, ‘Anarcho-Boys* vs. Anachro-Cavalry’ and Émile P Torres, ‘Against Longtermism’:
· - The
Closet – a metaphor for enforced privacy (bedroom, bed tricks)
· - Inner
public space – dialogue, not position, multiplicity, and relation to the
outside; there can be concealed public spaces, concealment in crowds.
· - Groups
with unified identity of positions, sticky masses, cavalry and the boys
(countable) – linking to the article’s descriptions of humans and humanity.
· - Is
it a play? An academic article (see ‘Abstract’)?
· - Borrowing
of language from the right – lacerates the poets, the readers; cutting, but not
mean-spirited. Closets, camps, disintegration of interiority and internalisation
of poles. Everyone is welcome – into the closet – because we can’t breathe the
fresh air (masks, no parks) (beginning and ending with farting in the closet,
in the open field?).
· - Statistics,
men who cite numbers and graphs, and believe in their own correctness
(emasculation as progressive).
· - Longtermism
– I have the insight, have seen the light (now buy my books – making a career
as a former zealot turned critic, which relies on the movement being real,
being really powerful).
· - [This
piece as a lead into discussions of AI.]
· - Wealthy
white people reinvesting in themselves (e.g., more money invested in these
institutes than in malaria prevention). Futurity as extraction in the present.
Risk is profit in capital. E.g., when sea levels rise people speculate more
wildly; financial interests already discount destruction/loss. In that sense,
this is ordinary and easy to refute (in principle). The aesthetics of bourgeois
philanthropy – fucking revolting. An orienting towards a thought-world that’s
eugenicist if not genocidal. Utilitarianism rebranded. Extreme force of
empathy, death, pathological. Winning back our share of entropy from a universe
that will eventually disintegrate.
· - Hyper-rational – the appeal/allure in its aesthetics, fantasy of light cones and unconceivable numbers of people. Eugenic roots of transhumanism, and of “intelligence” (deeply racist); scaremongering about AI and technology, useful for certain groups.
- Aesthetics – Jeff Bezos funding The Foundation (tv series). Desire for a future without flesh – most efficient way to spread into the galaxy, as pure streams of information (intergalactic intelli-ejaculate).
· - Transcendence
– submission to capital requires transcendence of some kind.
· - Who’d
heard of longtermism before reading this article? (Hardly any of us?)
· - General
tendencies to displace decision making away from humans, to avoid being sued…
Interchangeability of AI and technology – “computer says no” – police defence
of killing someone based on an algorithm identifying a POI based on their
license plate (?).
· - How
to understand relationships between street and elite fascisms?
Suggested readings for subsequent meet:
·
Tobi
Haslett, ‘Magical Actions’: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/politics/magic-actions-2/
·
Chuǎng,
‘Social Contagion’: https://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/
· Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
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