Stolen

Simon Orpana · Stolen

Murder Genres

Ideal Glass

Such a state would exhibit “long-range amorphous order,” where each molecule feels and affects the position of every other, so that in order to move, they must move as one.

                                                                   -Natalie Wolchover, Quantamagazine, March 11, 2020

A phase state of matter, akin

to liquid or crystal, theorized

to exist but never seen. Durations

too long to witness, slow cooling

of eons, thermometer of infinity.

The lock and key of molecules

fixed between flux and totality.

vanishing point of entropy,

sinkhole of radiation,

stability redoubled

by everyday wormholes

surfing room temperature.

When nothing moves but the whole

nothing moves. Yet randomness

survives just this side of Plato’s dreams,

a morass of desire floundering

on its conceptual architecture,

divisiveness the guarantor

of unborn potential.

May we never gaze upon this glass

from which all entropy is banned,

neither here nor on it’s other side

whose shadows we may prove to be

though not yet embalmed by history

nor bled of dimensionality.

& now this

& now this drowning
in flags and whiteness
in sunlight and resentment
coagulating into vehemence

& now this jangle
of keys and bracelets
this smile of sunglasses
and sickly confidence

& now this fear contagious
this loss of driveways
creaturely pleasures
cementing kinship

& now this impoverished
infamy gloating
unabashed, emboldened
disgrace applauding itself

& now the land erased
by exponential amnesia
predictability's outposts
murdering horizons

& now every base inclination
amplified and licensed
chaos summoning chaos
the white seed finds purchase

& now this emergency
at the heart of difference
tearing itself apart
and every face compromised

& now the act
where moralizing falters
announcing limits
thought gleefully abandoned

& now this
& now this breaking
& breaking
until every heart
                              listens

Reckoning

Something unsustainable has obscured sustenance

and something ungovernable holds hostage governance.

Something uncontestable has stifled protestation

and something un-transmittable has hijacked every station.

Something lacking gratitude has grounded every grievance

while maverick maliciousness metastasized malfeasance.

Something so ungenerous feeds disparity

while something mean and pitiless preens precarity.

Sequestered in our silos, who dares to venture out

to where a neighbour might need help to irrigate the drought?

Something so unheeding it can watch the planet die

and believe itself immune to all the poisons in the sky.

Something uncontainable constrains every thought,

paving all alternatives beneath a parking lot.

Weed and feed the fantasy of sweet suburban home;

a little patch of nowhere that you can call your own.

With separation reinforced by an image stream

that fills in all the margins and overwrites your dreams.

The status of the symbol is now the referent.

The death of common culture is now the main event.

Epidemic formalizes what we have become:

the privileges of distance from factory and slum.

The continental hierarchies to fix the poor in place

while corridors of merchandise circulate through space.

From the parcel at your doorstep to the ghetto in the south;

from the monocrop plantations to the morsel in your mouth;

from the homelessness of millions in the flood and hurricane

to exhaust from the tail pipes we’re reluctant to contain,

a web of compromises silences dissent

by claiming we’re all implicated in the discontent.

Erasing differentials, enriching dividends

in a haze of risk assessments is how this world ends.

The box stores and the cinemas, the freeways and the cars

are like spatial amnesia to who we really are.

Beholden to the virtual that steers reality

with algorithms calculated by the bourgeoisie,

how much have we forgotten that past generations knew

of how to pull together to help each other through?

Something so predictable poaches novelty;

it’s not unprecedented, we just lost the memory.

When those devoid of decency deepen their disdain

harbouring resentments that lost their former names:

revolution, wildcat strike, shared triumphs and defeats,

replaced by driving round and round these same old dirty streets;

Replaced by sales on furniture, replaced by screens ablaze

with visions of apocalypse that reinforce malaise.

Revelations limited to whatever amuses,

obscuring larger systems of calamitous abuses

made seemingly so seamless through violence and art,

some never thought to see the day it starts to fall apart.

Until the silence breaks anew and suffocation speaks

and desolation grows new ears, and protest grows new feet.

Shaking codes of privilege with exponential force

that can’t be tamed by slander or stifled by remorse.

Unsettling complacency, the comfortless afflicted

set alight the parliaments from which they’ve been evicted.

These nights when sleep is difficult and troubled by strange visions,

when pressures from behind your mind erupt into collisions

of past and future, good and bad, rust and ruination

and lovers that you never knew offering salvation.

You wake up shaken, tired and sore, with joints all fused together.

It’s summer and beyond your door the trees sway with the weather.

Long familiar traffic noise is laced with a new sound,

a frequency you can’t ignore that moves beneath the ground.

All the wells of apathy and all sophistication

that tame the unpredictable with sly equivocation

are stunned, amazed and humbled by the mounting symphony

that organizes novel threads of possibility.

Like regaining a memory from years and years gone by,

Like the first time that an infant tries to understand the sky,

Like an unexpected letter, like a fresh beginner’s mind

or a door you never noticed in a fence you never climbed—

All at once the world has changed as if by happenstance

and all the struggles of the past resolve into a dance

where you and I were always free, and difference is the proof,

and us and them no longer holds the slightest bit of truth;

and everyone who ever lived is reborn in the clouds,

united by a promise where the future steers the now.

It all seems pretty meaningless and easily dismissed

until the day that Reckoning arrives in someone’s kiss.

© Simon Orpana 2020

Jacques Cousteau in the Negative Zone #1

When I made this collage, five years ago, I never dreamed it would capture the feeling of going to the grocery store in 2020. As a person with a history of lung ailments, bi-weekly trips to the grocery store put two of my basic, human drives at odds with each other: the need to eat versus the need to continue breathing. The anxiety over this conflict, alone, produces shortness of breath. Then, there is the added knowledge that so many workers are asked daily to spend eight-hour shifts in the same environment that causes me strife after ten minutes or so.

Do workers go home feeling, as I do, shaken, worried, anxious? Do they do this day in, day out, instead of every two weeks, like me? And what does this daily exposure to risk and anxiety do to them? My own anxiety is thus mixed with a deep feeling of humility, guilt and gratitude. Why do I get to stay home and they don't? My lizard brain encourages me not to ask these questions--attend to my organism's own survival needs. But my organism is part of a larger one, which it can't do without. Is my relationship to the larger whole a parasitic one? What are the systemic elements that might make it so, or that might, rather, mitigate and correct the kinds of parasitic relationships that keep contemporary, Canadian society running?

The severity of COVID-19's effects on a person are likely related, not just to the binary of exposure/non-exposure, but to the daily, recurring amount of exposures. It depends on viral load. But, workers in retail, health care, and other services deemed essential are daily exposed, not just to greater risks and levels of infection, but to greater doses of negative affect: anxiety, anger, resentment, fear. When I visit the grocery store, I afterwards enjoy a two-week interval during which my emotional health can regain equilibrium. Not so for front-line workers who, after a stressful shift, must wake up the next morning, or a day or two later, and go back to that place that I have come to dread. What are the protracted effects of the negative affective loads that workers are being exposed to? Does the celebratory culture that has sprung up, recognizing such workers as "heroes" compensate for the increased emotional load they must assume, or does it make it worse by covering over the realities of the experiences and systems of exploitation with which they must grapple?

Taking refuge in abstractions is a kind of comfort. Another comfort comes from cleaning the kitchen, sterilizing the access points between my apartment and the outside world: the doorknobs, the handrails, my clothing. Do these things reduce my chances of getting sick, of losing the ability to breathe? Maybe. Or maybe they help me feel better, and breath more easily, in the now.

But what would allow us all, collectively, to breathe a little easier? What kind of minimum distance from necessity is required so that grocery store and health care workers feel less disposable? The feel-good, "we're all in this together" commercials that sprung up, seemingly overnight just make me feel more upset, angry and nauseous. We are not all in this together. Our society is not designed that way. It is designed so that the comfort of one group is purchased at the expense of the lives and safety of others. This was going on long before COVID-19 hit, but the situation has exacerbated the fault lines, making them more immediately visible. The stridently saccharine TV ads from Apple and Tim Hortons are a response to these amplified signals, and an attempt to dampen them, so that a system of exploitation and inequity can persist a little longer.

So, rather than take refuge in empty affective platitudes, I try to embrace and nourish my anxiety, my guilt, indignation and my privatized and shared compensations, in the form of cleaning, blogging, making art. And breathing. I would like to live in a world where we could truly breath together, where the convenience and comfort of some do not steal away the ability to breath of others. As the nice spring weather hit, I started smelling a gas smell in my house. At first, I thought it was some weird haunting. Perhaps a can of WD40 I had just used to fix a door was leaking. At day two, I worried that the stale, feint gas smell was an early sign of COVID contraction, but I didn't want to feed this anxiety, so I resisted looking up the symptom on the Internet. If it was COVID, I would know soon enough.

Then, a few days later, as I sat on the porch watching the increased traffic go by, I realized I was just smelling the cars on Main Street. Two events had coincided: first, the nice weather, with a kind of Dionysian, spring euphoria had coaxed people out of isolation, virus be damned! This caused an increase in road traffic since, as my girlfriend pointed out, driving around is really the only collective activity we are currently allowed in public space. The second event is the beginning of the warm season, where air pollution is trapped ground-ward to a greater degree than in the winter, when the cool air allows it to disperse into the larger atmosphere faster.

Thus, what I initially misidentified, in my anxiety, as a possible sign of the respiratory disease COVID-19 was actually the parasitic, background pollution of a car culture that has made so many of us that much more susceptible to respiratory ailments. My misidentification of the symptom had a kind of deeper truth to it. Through social distancing, self-isolation, and the exposure of essential workers to the risks that the rest of us would like to avoid, we are managing to clear the air of a dangerous virus. But the larger, parasitic culture that has made us collectively susceptible to that virus remains, and is just beginning to kick into summer gear, with unpredictable results...

On the topic of parasites...

Some new music I've been working on...

The Virus and The Parasite

We are in the grips of a virus that has transformed life for people around the world. In a very brief time, facts that used to be abstract have become concrete and palpable: that we are intimately connected with distant lives and processes; that our casual, habitual actions can have serious, unexpected repercussions, from the local to the global level; that our lifestyles are fragile and unsustainable; that there is no “normal” to return to. Sites of everyday life have become charged with anxiety and tension, and relationships of care, support and exploitation that were formerly backstage have become foregrounded.

In the midst of destabilizing realizations and adjustments, as we struggle to keep our balance on a weekly, daily and hourly basis, we should remain focused on the knowledge that the current crisis has been developing for a long time—long before a virus migrated from bats to humans in the markets of Wuhan.  As we wait for a vaccine to return our sense of confidence in public space and sociality, we need to reflect upon the fact that the current crisis has not been caused by a virus, but by a virus coupled with a parasite.

The virus has put our lives on hold, made us fearful, anxious and possibly hopeful for a better world to emerge from the crisis. But this better world only has a chance if we focus attention on the parasite that has delivered us, collectively, to a place where a microorganism could wreak such havoc with our lives and societies.

Like the virus, the parasite is a-moral: it is indifferent to human values, except to the extent that they advance or hinder the parasite’s own survival. The parasite survives by draining our resources. It weakens us by pitting us against each other, and against the world that sustains us. For several decades, it has been steadily devouring the collective resources and institutions that people struggled, for many generations, to secure. Prolonged hosting of the parasite has left us collectively weakened, individually isolated, and forgetful of the values and skills that allowed us to work together in the past, towards a common good.

In our weakened and fearful state, the parasite has encouraged us to turn against each other and take refuge in whatever fantasies of exceptionalism offer some promise of survival. Yet the virus that has followed the parasite has shown us that such forms of tribalism are limited, that we are all vulnerable, and that we have lost the spaces that allowed us to come together and struggle for a better, more egalitarian and sustainable world. We lost these spaces first as an effect of the parasite, which hollowed them out, and then by the virus, which literally sequestered us in our homes.

The parasite and the virus are similar in that they both need to constantly expand to survive, but they are different in that our defensive response to the virus has gotten in the way of the parasites’ growth imperative. The virus is temporarily starving the parasite. And, while we are trapped in uncomfortable isolation, the virus is teaching us how to think and act collectively, once again. In a crafty and inexplicable way, the virus is encouraging us to remember skills the parasite would like us to forget.

Drawing by Junji Ito

We are remembering that ordinary, everyday workers are the backbone of society, even though they are the worst paid. We are remembering the amount of unpaid, care giving and support that women and minorities are most often made to provide to keep everyday life going. We are remembering the amount of unpaid personal work that goes into reproducing our ability to show up for work. We are remembering the kinds of exploitation that a managerial class exerts through forms of discourse and motivation that are now laid bare as control structures. We are remembering the aggressive individualization of risk that austerity forces upon us, even while collective resources are expropriated and privatized. We are remembering the amount of affluence and waste that our economic systems generates for a privileged few, even while the majority of us struggle with insecurity and need. We are remembering the way the poor and the old, the sick and injured, dedicated workers and the environment itself are equally treated as expendable by employers the moment it becomes advantageous for them to do so.  We are remembering the way a prolonged state of anxiety has become accepted as “normal,” making us ill in ways that have become simply a part of living. We are remembering the way our hope and belief that life could be different have become paralyzed by decades of rhetoric, disappointment and propaganda. And we are remembering that we can live and feel differently.

The virus has caused the most damage in the country where the parasite has the deepest hold, which also happens to be the wealthiest country in the world. There, the parasite has so weakened collective institutions and leadership that effectively responding to the virus has been very difficult, to devastating and tragic results.  Immunologist Anthony Fauci has pointed out that, to effectively respond to modern viruses we need, not merely vaccines that react to immediate threats, but a universal vaccine distributed to everyone in the world, that provides baseline immunity to whole families of disease. This is the kind of thinking that can address the underlying parasite, as well. Our recovery demands we begin exercising long-atrophied muscles, and to re-learn how to think in ways that have been systematically discredited, to the advantage of the parasite. The virus is simply a catalyst, a warning and a motivation.

Just like a universal vaccine would provide us, collectively and globally, with the kind of protection we need to stave off viruses, so too would institutions like socialized healthcare, a universal, guaranteed income, and truly collective management of energy and resources generate the kind of stamina and strength we need to tackle the challenges that face us as a species on planet Earth. Only global, socialized responses to inequality and need have the hope of rekindling our societies in a way that will allow us to respond more effectively the kinds of global crises that characterize our times. If we begin to cultivate and nourish these skills, institutions and relationships, we have a chance of surviving the coming challenges. If, however, we continue to allow the parasite to weaken our individual and collective resources, social systems and cultures, the next global crisis will arrive to find us that much less able to respond. I don’t think we can afford that risk. Do you?

Lost My Voice

I lost my voice

I searched the world

I saw how dreams are made

I earned some money, found my niche

It wasn’t a fair trade

My faith was just a bit too strong

To truly be secure

I had to lose it too, a while

To find it here and there

I had to lose my job, my mind,

My will to make it through

I had to lose my one true love

Before I could find you

There was so much I had to lose

To find out who I am—

I’m all the things you cannot touch

You’re all the things I can

But when you touch me, I forget

The calculated cost

And touch itself becomes the thing

That shares what we have lost

I search now out of habit

I search from sea to sea

For nothing in particular

And sing myself to sleep

I'm such a fool for searching

There isn’t much to see

I found what I was looking for

The day that you found me

© Simon Orpana 2020

Static/Signal

Static on my forehead
Clutter in my home
Still, I’d rather live this way
If I’m going to live alone

People’s homes are boring
Without chaos without books
You put some words in order
And they give you funny looks

You put some words in order
Leave the rest to seed
And if no one else reads them
There must not be a need

There’s static on the roadway
And static in your car
The static in your pocket
Goes wherever you are

Some carries a signal
But most of it is noise
I’ll put my words in order
Just to rearrange the void

Return of the Zombie Imaginary

My last post outlined the way late, neoliberal capitalism (or whatever you call our current economic system in crisis) reinforces a generalized state of austerity to which zombie films and other apocalyptic narratives respond: the nightmare of a Hobbesian struggle of all against all for limited resources, and the need to create scapegoats to divert attention away from the systemic dimensions of our predicament and onto disposable populations. Ruling elites, and the politicians who support them, encourage this world-view when they identify some particular group as the alleged barrier to the flourishing of the nation or collective. Michel Foucault identified this tendency as a central characteristic of modern, “biopolitical” societies which, in assuming responsibility for the well-being of entire populations, covers over the essentially arbitrary decision over who gets excluded from the life-support systems of the state, through discourses of racism.

An exclusionary view of Canadian national belonging summoned
by threats to the lifeblood of modern, capitalist economies. 

Capitalism is a system that purports to turn competition into collective benefit, but the reality is very different. Giovanni Arrighi follows Marx in pointing out how generative and healthy competition amongst producers is transformed, under capitalism’s imperative to constantly grow privatized profits, from a positive-sum game to a cutthroat, zero-sum game (48). As this tendency progresses, the effects of this brutal competition amongst the capitalist class is downloaded onto labourers in the form of intensified competition amongst the underclasses. When competition amongst capitalists cuts into their profits, the squeeze is passed on to the workers, fracturing them along lines that are usually biopolitically structured. In the twilight of global capitalism, we can see how this top-down flow of competition is being refracted, in a biopolitical way, onto racialized minorities (when people complain of immigrants stealing their jobs), onto women and gendered minorities (in complaints about “affirmative action”), or onto foreigners (in fears of migration).

British protesters of Theresa May's government, from 2017. 

The global capitalist class has become practiced at working with governments to deploy this divide-and-conquer strategy, which seems to offer a quick-fix solution to social ills: strengthen boarders, build more prisons, protect “your own.” Politicians who do not take explicitly this route find themselves in a tough spot: they have to both pander to the interests of cutthroat capitalists while still pretending that the system can truly work to the benefit of all. When the electorate of modern democratic countries get frustrated with the hypocrisies and failures of this “third way” politics, they might turn to seemingly more “honest,” right-wing demagogues who are willing to make the “tough decisions” of which groups of people are going to be left to join the ranks of what Eric Cazdyn calls “the already dead.” Though such leaders actually work to the detriment of many of the people who elected them, they only reveal, in amplified form, the tendencies that the more “progressive” governments already harbor. Such a move can be a strange kind of “death wish”: they reveal a desperate desire for change, even if things have to get worse before they get better. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has activated a global, humanitarian response, while at the same time exacerbating and exposing the biopolitical fractures, fault-lines and weaknesses that have resulted from several decades of downloading competition from capitalists onto workers, while simultaneously uploading unprecedented profits through the appropriation of formerly socialized forms of wealth in such fields as housing, insurance, education and health care. The resulting crisis has the potential to generate a collective response that could possibly reverse the systemic tendencies described above, but it will require that we find collective ways of resisting the fantasy construction I described in my last post as the zombie imaginary.

I suggest that the zombie imaginary, as it plays out in countless films, TV shows, comic books, and political careers, is actually a wish-fulfillment disguised as a nightmare. The wish is biopotlical in that it indulges a fantasy that the barrier to one’s flourishing is other people, and that one’s problems would be alleviated if only there were less of us around. Strangely enough, such a wish sometimes informs even the work progressives and leftists. Both Donna Haraway and Timothy Morton, for instance, have offered versions of the biopolitical argument that humans are not really suited to living in such large, impersonal collectives as cities or nations, and that the solution to our economic and ecological troubles is to have a smaller global population living in smaller groups. Such arguments risk encouraging the view that pandemics like COVID-19 are ultimately beneficial, not because they summon dissent over faltering political-economic systems that can’t deliver on their fundamental premises, but because they are vehicles for the biopolitical management (ie culling) of populations. Even when such writers do the important work of challenging accepted ideologies in other ways, it is difficult not to view such ideas as social-Darwinism disguised as critical theory.  

In the realm of fantasy, Zombie films and other pandemic-narratives, including many environmental thrillers, are good vehicles for this wish because the agent that is killing people (or turning them undead) in these stories is impersonal: it is democratic in that it can affect anyone. Up until a couple years ago, it was not really permissible to openly share racist and intolerant sentiments, and while this has recently shifted for the worse, many people still remember the biopolitical nightmares of the twentieth century, and wish to avoid them. Zombie films provide the extraordinary circumstances that allow us to indulge antisocial fantasies about the culling of whole populations, while also providing a container for the guilt that (hopefully) accompanies such indulgences. The best of these stories simultaneously critique the tendency they are illustrating, leading us to question which the greater monsters are: the zombies or the survivors. The worst of these stories uncritically justify and even gloat in the killing of whole populations, making them akin to a modern form of eugenicist propaganda. This, incidentally, is a premise structuring Quentin Terantino’s Inglorious Bastards, which situates us, the audience, as akin to the spectators of a Nazi propaganda film: enjoying the violence that the film also shamelessly indulges, in order to sell tickets.

Some films criticize spectacular violence while simultaneously
indulging it, as if tacitly mocking their own audiences. 

So, if progressive social change is to result from the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, we need to be wary of this tendency of the zombie imaginary, and the novel possible forms it might take. Akin to the coronoavirus, we might consider the biopolitical logic addressed (and sometimes critiqued) by the zombie imaginary to be a kind of narrative virus, one that has been multiplying, mutating and circulating through our collective imaginations, predisposing us to respond to crisis and anxiety in ways that the capitalist system would very much appreciate. As such, it is likely to seek out and most strongly effect the weakest amongst us, though in unusual ways. While COVID is most likely to harm the elderly and those with compromised respiratory and immunes systems, I would anticipate the reactionary, system-reinforcing strains of the zombie imaginary seeking out a different demographic: the young. Though physically hale and resistant to the more serious effects of the coronavirus, a large, population of youth has been excluded from the dreams of prosperity and upward mobility that informed the lives and careers of many of the people who are currently most at risk in the pandemic. This is a systems failure, from top to bottom, but it is tempting to believe that an older generation, lumped together as “baby boomers,” is the barrier to the flourishing of young people currently struggling to gain a foothold in the increasingly slippery terrain of contemporary, Western countries.

In the Canadian film Fido, zombies provide
a convenient working class.  

There is a subversive, revanchist glee that informs some of the best zombie films, and many commentators have pointed out that the zombie is the proletarian monster par excellence: a surging mass that expands beyond the capacities of the establishment—military, governments, media, scientists, corporations—to contain. When social order is suspended or in crisis, the suppressed voices of oppressed groups can find new ears, while people in positions of power struggle to maintain the fragile and necessary fictions that hold civil society together. 

However, if we look to comparable moments in the past, we should be careful not to underestimate capitalism’s slippery power to coopt, contain and dissipate dissenting energies. It happened after World War Two, when workers’ ambitions to socialize major industries were mollified by suburban homes and vacations. And it happened at the end of the 1960s, when those excluded from the post-war compromise—women, service workers, racialized people and youth—believed their various, collective protests would humanize, if not dissolve, the rigid, paternalistic structures of the Fordist era. In response to this and other resistances, and like a crafty virus, capitalism mutated, finding new ways to purchase our consent while further exacerbating the fracture lines that divide us.

Parisian students in 1968 passing cobble stones to defend a
street barricade. Photo by Bruno Barney.

Our current predicament could be viewed as the end result of these previous struggles, pushed sideways by the headwinds of relentless competition: a world of dramatic inequalities, threadbare social structures, and the mounting unrest of those excluded from fantasies of prosperity that are proving unsustainable and destructive for the planet. But, rather than blaming an older generation for this impasse, and imagining that they have enjoyed lives free of struggle, regret, suffering and hope, we need to direct our criticisms squarely at a global system of managed inequality whose hour of reckoning is surely imminent, if not with the current crises, then with the next one.

Stay tuned for: Beyond the Zombie Imaginary...

Surviving the Zombie Imaginary

It has been observed, though I can’t remember where, that in times of great social upheaval and uncertainty, some mentally ill people actually seem to recover, even while people who are normally stolidly adjusted might be experiencing greater levels of anxiety and depression. This is the premise of Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia. In the first part of the film, Kristen Dunce’s character, Justine, suffers a paralyzing mental breakdown that leaves her unable to look after herself. Though she appears to have everything going for her: a handsome new husband, good job, affluent family; she simple drops out, unable to bear the suffocating dimensions of her allegedly ideal bourgeois life.

In the second half of the film, however, she makes a steady and surprising recovery, even though a large, newly discovered planet is poised to collide with the earth. By the end of the film, it is Justine’s normally rational, composed and competent sister, Claire, who is unable to function. Once her positivistic ideologies of science and progress are unable to shield her from the truth that the world is about to end, she breaks down. In the final scenes, it is Justine who, calm and composed, is able to confront the reality of the situation and provide comfort to those around her as the planet begins its collision.

A similar device informs the plot of George A. Romero’s classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. Here, the temporary suspension of the social order due to a zombie apocalypse allows a member of a suppressed minority, a black man in 1968 America, to enjoy a position of leadership normally structurally denied him. Trapped inside a farmhouse by the legions of undead, the protagonist Ben (Duane Jones) keeps a cool head and tries to help his fellows survive, while representatives of middle-class white society succumb to hysteria, panic and discord. In both cases, the overlooked, oppressed and excluded, what Jacques Ranciere calls “the part that has no part,” are revealed to be more sane and competent than the so-called mainstream, which is revealed for all its fractures, contradictions and weaknesses due to the extraordinary circumstances of the crisis.

Though our world is assuredly not ending, the COVID-19 virus has produced some comparable effects to those described above. The true heroes of the pandemic are those professions which, in the normal running of things, are low on social hierarchy: delivery people, fast-food service industry workers, truckers, grocery clerks, care providers, homeless shelters. Many people with allegedly “important” jobs, on the other hand, find themselves working remotely from home and spending their days monitoring streams of inane texts and emails, performing tasks that now seem oddly trivial. This re-contextualizing of the office casts all the small, disciplinary measures that ensure workers remain resignedly “in their place” in a new light. Protocols and activities that might have seemed normal just a week or two ago suddenly come across as a form of callous managerialism, both ridiculous and out of touch with the emotional demands and realities of a rapidly changing set of circumstances.  With the sudden disruption of the everyday divisions of social space, one begins to realize just how much of one’s life is organized around working, with home life being merely that portion of time that allows us to recover our energies enough that employers might utilize them again tomorrow. Somehow many of us  have ended up like Victorians, back before there were limits on the extent to which our time can be monopolized by work, with the difference that the Victorians still believed that things could be different, and fought for it.

Such a moment constitutes a crisis for those who benefit from the steady appropriation of our time and energy, as it gives people new norms and freedoms from which to compare the patterns of servitude and exploitation to which we have become habituated. Most frequently, these kinds of suspensions of the social order occur during times of war, where governments can mobilize the politics of fear focused on a common enemy. But, despite attempts to brand the coronavirus an “enemy of humanity” (please see my last post for more on this), the affective landscape of the current crisis is essentially different from wartime. What makes the current, humanitarian world crisis so concerning to those in power, is that it risks revealing the bankruptcy of a system where the imperatives of privatization and profit have hollowed out the common, shared resources and energies that allow us to survive on this planet.  And, without fear of a spectacular terrorist or foreign enemy to cow people into submission, there will be no one left to blame but the establishment if things get much worse. 

The seeming benevolence of banks and (some) governments in the midst of the crisis speaks to just how dangerous a time this is for an already strained and tottering social order. It also reveals the increased leverage that ordinary people suddenly have: to a certain, liberating extent, we can suddenly simply say “no” to the finely woven control structures that keep us accepting the increasing concessions and erosions of our shared world. Further, we are being forced, collectively, to do the things that we absolutely have to do if we want to stave off an actual apocalypse on the scale of Melancholia or Night of the Living Dead: stay home, drive less, consume less, cooperate with our neighbours, make peace with each other, be decent people again, give people and the earth time to recover. Not that we were necessarily bad people two weeks ago and have suddenly become saints. But very few us generally have the time to look after each other properly, let alone to look after ourselves. If this crisis goes on much longer, we might be poised to enjoy a renaissance of caring, compassionate, creative behaviours the likes of which have not been seen for several decades, if not longer.

The question is: how can we sustain this kind of momentum without the pressure and tragedies of the virus forcing banks, employers and governments to cut us a little more slack? Why shouldn’t we be able to live lives that are not a little more easy, a little more sane, a little less destructive, a little more sustainable? Why not try something that every study and test run has proven highly beneficial and successful, like guaranteed basic income?  For a good long time, we have been like lobsters in a pot, the water growing increasingly warmer, but not fast enough that we might leap out and upturn the dinner. A sudden interruption of service has offered us a temporary reprieve from impending doom, but the reprieve has taken the strange and bitter form of impending doom.

I believe there is still a little bit of grace in this strange calamity. For decades we have consoled ourselves with a popular culture that plays the nightmarish breakdown of the world as we know it, over and over again in myriad forms. Or are these really wish fulfillments disguised as nightmares? Perhaps we seek release from a system and culture which is supposed to cater to our every manufactured desire, but can’t ever really deliver the goods because it is actually designed for a different end altogether. What I call “the zombie imaginary” is really a coping strategy for a seemingly insolvable conundrum: we thirst for a better world, but we have been told it simply isn’t possible—this is as good as it gets! If that is the case, and yet I still must struggle so hard and feel so bad, there must be some reason, and some release. What zombie films and other catastrophe narratives offer is an indulgence of one of our most antisocial fantasies: the idea that life would be better if there were just less people around. This is the fantasy summoned—and then skillfully critiqued—by such canonical zombie films as Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, where the protagonists take refuge in a shopping mall. It is the fantasy behind the atrocious film version of World War Z, which tries to reassure us that the white nuclear family can survive any global pandemic just so long as we let enough of the "right" kind of Middle Eastern people perish. Shifting from movies to the political theatre, it is precisely this fantasy that politicians mobilize when they try to convince us that the barrier to our flourishing is some other group of people: foreigners, lazy “welfare bums,” immigrants, or “baby boomers,” to give just a few examples. 

One of the most disturbing new mutations of the zombie imaginary is the meme of some cynical younger people calling the coronavirus the “boomer killer.” This is what austerity, when narrativized by the zombie imaginary, does to us: it divides society from within, along new and old fracture lines, encouraging us to dehumanize  and fight with each other rather than to change a system that really only benefits a select minority. 

Many of us have been exposed to these stories for so long that they have become second nature. While they offer temporary relief, they never actually address the true source of the problem, which lies in economic and political systems, and how these structures limit and condition our everyday lives. The best of these films do offer intelligent and biting critiques of social ills, but even these narratives are tinged with a cynical vision of human nature that conceals, usually unintentionally, an ideological overgeneralization. This is, to a large extent, a limit of the genre itself: intelligent apocalyptic films provide critiques of human behavior that is conditioned by particular historical, economic and political circumstances. But they often present these images of ourselves as if they were reflections of an immutable, inescapable human nature. This is part of the nihilistic thrill of pursuing these films: they appeal to our Hobbesian suspicions that humans are terrible, monstrous creatures who, without the counter-pressure of social violence and coercion, would simple resort to cannibalistic atrocities. Of course such a world deserves to end! It is a relief when the last victim has been devoured and the credits role.

But what these films actually describe are the affective realities, the dark, and nowadays not so well disguised undercurrents of an economic system based on the constant expansion and privatized appropriation of collectively produced wealth. They are the fantasies specific to late, world-devouring capitalism, and they are fantasies that will end when this same system ends, to be replaced with newly interesting forms of cultural production. This is not the place to go further down a Marxian rabbit hole, except to say that the other reason zombie films take the form they do is because the deeply antisocial, aggressively competitive and a-moral tendencies of capitalism are, in our time, enwrapped in what could be called a “biopolitical” imperative to at least pretend that the system is designed to care about the well being of the populations that serve it. This makes viruses form the penultimate boogeyman of the current system: it is the Achilles' heal, so to speak, that has the power to reveal the monster behind the curtain: of a system that only cares about people so far as they are able to produce value for a rich minority.

The film Melancholia is very smart about signposting the limits of the apocalyptic genre that it explores. You might remember the scenes were the two sisters go for a horse ride, but the horse stops short and refuses to cross a small bridge over a creek on the path that leads to the town. Throughout the film, in fact, the protagonists are never shown outside of the lavish estate; only the servants are able to pass through the seemingly magical and increasingly claustrophobic force field that encircles the family in their comfortable but ultimately barren lifestyles. This tells us, the viewers, that perhaps the world is not really ending; perhaps it is only the bourgeois world of the protagonists that the planet Melancholia is set to destroy.  For all we know, the servants could be in the town, enjoying a pint at the local pub while the harrowing eschatology unfolds at the estate. Melancholia, in other words, is in the eye--or telescope--of the beholder. 

Because they reflect our late capitalist predicament back to ourselves, zombie and apocalypse films have to end badly, devouring their own worlds and characters in one way or another. Our real, human societies do not have to share this fate, though the current global climate change crisis might indicate otherwise. But if these past few weeks have shown us anything, it is that people are still very capable of being kind and decent, on a large scale, and under difficult circumstances. If we were following the cynical, familiar scripts of popular culture, we should all be stockpiling ammunition, food, and toilet paper for the immanent war of all against all. But this isn’t the generalized case (except perhaps for the toilet paper part). Just as Greek tragedies were therapeutic rituals in which a society faced its deepest fears and anxieties, to prove that it is possible to travel, together, to the other side of calamity and survive, so too does the present crisis have the potential to demonstrate to ourselves that we are actually still capable of being kind, compassionate and generous.

We are surviving a zombie apocalypse! But what if, by the end of it, there weren’t any zombies to be found, not because they had all been incinerated by Brad Pitt and the World Health Organization, but because we decided, together, that nobody should have to be dehumanized and disposed of, cast beyond the pale and scapegoated, just to serve our own, unattainable and unsustainable fantasies of progress and prosperity? We actually deserve to be happy and healthy, and not worked into the ground, not cowed by debt, anxiety, guilt and depression. We deserve employment that feels good, and that makes us feel good, rather than feeling exploited, unimportant, overworked, secretly ashamed for our privilege yet unable to enjoy it. We deserve these things, and could have them--for real and for generations--if we decided, together, to live differently, under a different game than winner takes all. It would be better for all of us. We can do it!

An Alternative Virus Story

When the Director-General of the World Health Organization called the coronavirus “an enemy against humanity” at a press conference yesterday, he coupled this with the observation that the crisis also has the ability to bring humans together “against a common enemy.” This discourse of war is useful for mobilizing the kind of collective response that is needed to counter the global pandemic, but, like all militaristic rhetoric, it lacks nuance. Perhaps we need this kind of “US versus THEM” narrative to reach the most number of people. Perhaps this is what we best understand. And yet, is it not a sad testimonial that, at this late hour of modern civilization, the only discourse that can offer an alternative to our normally individualistic, monadic mindset is one of war?

Viewing the virus as an “enemy” is on a continuum with the modern outlook that sees the planet as an inert backdrop to human activity: a set of resources to be utilized and exploited. It reinforces thinking that divides “humanity” from “nature” and places the later as an alien object to be mastered and overcome by human intelligence and ingenuity. As Michel Serres points out, this largely Western division of “culture” from “nature” is actually the name for a protracted WAR. As in most wars, it is necessary to diminish one’s adversary conceptually, to reduce the enemy to something not worthy of compassion or respect. We can see this in the way the names of the animals we have domesticated are used as terms of abuse: to call someone a “cow,” “sheep,” “chicken” or “pig” is a great insult. And yet, these are the creatures we rely upon for sustenance! In the narrative of protracted war, we humans are the vehicles of will, consciousness, intelligence and reflection, while “nature” is always-already an object, devoid of intelligence or plan. It is precisely this kind of thinking that novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh, in his book about climate change and narrative, calls The Great Derangement.

Here is an alternative narrative: towards the end of the twentieth century, humans discovered that the fuel source powering their world was also disrupting the biosphere, rapidly creating conditions that only existed on Earth millions of years before humans showed up, and that would almost certainly spell hardship and doom for billions of people. And yet, the economic, cultural and institutional structures of the day allowed people to suppress this information for several decades. When it was no longer possible to suppress, they attempted to obscure it by flooding the culture with misinformation, to confuse people and dissuade them from making the necessary changes.

This was all part and parcel of the long war that was being waged against an enemy, “nature,” that wasn’t really separate from the humans themselves. In fact, a primary tactic of the war was to distract the majority of people from realizing that the seeming division between US and NATURE was really covering over an internal division, within human societies, between those who had easy lives and those who didn’t. For this reason, humans were suffering and dying.

However, like most wars, there were excessive, unanticipated effects: knowledge and technologies were created that had applications far beyond their limited wartime uses. Though the war prevented many of these uses and potentials from being realized, it couldn’t prevent the accumulation of knowledge from contradicting the premises upon which the war was being waged: the natural world is not separate from us, a mere repository of resources. Nor are humans mere labour machines, producing ease for a lucky minority.

Once knowledge of the collective predicament became impossible to ignore or bury, the governments of the world did start to hold meetings where they agreed upon what needed to be done, but they were unable to follow through with these plans. A sense of dread and finality began to build, and popular culture became increasing apocalyptic, with people taking refuge in fantasies of societal collapse, or nostalgic visions of the past, or both. It became increasingly clear that human society was unable to steer itself from the path of destruction upon which it was fixed. It seemed as though, in a few short centuries, jellyfish would inherit the earth.

Then, a miracle occurred. A tiny microorganism that had been replicating itself in animals for unknown generations learned, in a few short weeks, how to transmit itself from animals to humans, and then from humans to humans. This had been a difficult and risky move for the creature, with a great chance of failure. But it worked. The creatures began flourishing in the lungs of humans. Perhaps the creatures were aided by the fact that the lungs of humans were already weakened from breathing in the same pollution that was transforming the environment: about four million humans were already dying from these pollutions each year.

The problem was, the people whose lives were easy could largely distance themselves from the destructive realities of the war. They didn’t see the millions of deaths as related to them. The deaths caused by the creature were different: they could effect almost anybody. After only a few months, the creature had caused ten thousand deaths across the globe. This sparked a panic. The creature’s successful reproduction in the lungs of humans shut down a great deal of the economies and institutions of countries around the world. The price of the fuel source that was destroying the planet became alarmingly low, and the poisonous gasses that were being poured into the atmosphere were dramatically reduced.

In a few short months, the creature accomplished what the governments, companies and leaders of the world had failed to do for almost half a century. But there was no celebration of the creature’s work. Instead, it was called “an enemy of humanity.” A vaccine was eventually developed, for which the humans greatly congratulated themselves: once again their ingenuity and science had prevailed over stupid, dangerous and hostile nature. The economy gradually began improving. Stock market portfolios began returning dividends again. The price of gasoline went back to its usual levels, and everyone began getting back to the “normal” work of wrecking the planet for future generations.

EXCEPT, the long, anxious months when things were not NORMAL awakened old, dormant memories, networks, hopes, fears and capacities amongst the humans. Just like in other wars, when governments would tell everyone they suddenly had to stop being selfish and work for the greater good, there was an excessive, unanticipated outcome. A large number of people remembered that the world could be changed, and that, just like the tiny creatures that had threatened us, we were more than just isolated individuals. These collective energies started a movement, and all the governments, corporations, billionaires and their cronies were unable to suppress it. A new world equation was formulated, and the greedy, self-serving and self-destructive energies of humanity were put back into their cages—at least for a while.

Just like the creature made the jump from other animals to humans by small slippages in the replication of its RNA, all of which eventually amounted to a decisive, qualitative change in its mode of reproduction, so too did human civilization, which was seemingly stuck in a repetitive holding pattern, make a great advance thanks to the creatures' exploitation of a series of accumulated vulnerabilities in human society. These "vulnerabilities" were not the people who got sick or died, but rather the weakened social structures that a culture based on protracted WAR had created for itself. With uncanny precision, the creature somehow knew just where to strike in order to help its human hosts better address some of their problems.

Looking back, the Great Virus of 2020 became known as the tipping point that brought about a new era of human flourishing and hope. The strange parasite that seemed to have threatened an entire civilization turned out to be a vehicle of transformation. Old ways of thought that reduced “nature” to a set of inert resources and dangerous potentials still persisted, but they were largely eclipsed by a way of thought that recognized a mysterious and powerful wisdom to the natural world. It required attentive ears, inquisitive, open minds, compassionate hearts and a capacity for complex, shifting relationships to each other and the land, but it lead to an understanding that the old, “modern” world was a kind of sad, dismal place to live, by comparison. And, as it turned out, this “new” way of being was not really new at all—it was continuous with ways of life that has sustained humanity for most of its long history on planet Earth.