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.

The Us in Virus

How much of what we do in a day, week, month or year serves to distract us from the fact that our lifestyles are unsustainable, that whatever current ease we enjoy is purchased at the expense of invisible others, past, present and future? Even as the land called North America was stolen from peoples who had been living here for many thousands of years, so too have our cities been stolen from the toil of ordinary people, then sold back to us at exorbitant cost to the benefit of a few. Even so do the transportation networks and commodity chains that allow us to live in these cities suck the life possibilities from future generations who will have to contend with the biosphere we are in the process of transforming irrevocably.

No wonder we take refuge in distraction, even while that which we are distracting ourselves from grows ever more expansive in its ability to shape lives, cultures, and environments.

There is a gaping VOID around which modern culture is constructed, and it is growing bigger. Whether we realize it or not, our lives are increasingly organized around an absence: of values not grounded in service to economics; of relationships not structured by exploitation, coercion and abuse; of belief that the future could be different from the steady erosion of hope and possibility we have come to expect. And yet, most of us know or intuit, at some level, that if humankind is to continue its tenancy on the planet something’s gotta give and it better not be the planet.

So we must change, but we don’t know how. When an unexpected crisis of global proportions strikes, like the coronavirus, the whole system shudders. The VOID peeks out from a thousand cascading fissures in the edifice we have created to protect us from confronting the reality of our predicament. Institutions that purport to “serve community” are unable to recognize the most basic emotional needs of their workers, now sequestered at home, but required to “clock in” digitally, even while they are worried sick over the developing situation. Governments that have been decimating social infrastructure for half a century find themselves unable to care for the basic well being of the citizenry, even while readying massive transfers of wealth to the private sector in service of saving “the economy.” The price of gasoline plummets, the planet enjoys a rare moment of relief from accumulating atmospheric greenhouse gasses, and we are anxiously told this constitutes a dire crisis for the stock market.

What has so warped our understanding and hearts that we interpret one of the greatest windfalls our planetary home has encountered in modern times as an unprecedented calamity? But wait, is not the planet here to serve OUR needs? As raw materials to be shaped according to OUR designs? Is not the natural order one of WAR, between humans and the environment, humans and animals, humans and humans? To think otherwise is naive dreaming, tree-hugging idealism.

And yet, here is a tiny organism that, in two short weeks, learned how to transmit itself, first from animals to humans then from humans to humans, with alarming effectiveness. This same tiny, brainless creature has upturned, in a few short months, a globalized economy that took half a millennia to build. It has put entire modes of human life on lockdown and seemingly effortless achieved what decades of international negotiations about climate change have been unable to effect. Perhaps this is but a small taste, a friendly warning shot, of what nature might have in store if we continue to act as if WAR were the only mode of relationality with any true reality. 

The sudden interruption of our lives has caused a kind of tectonic sliding, whereby the institutions, ideologies, infrastructures and habits we rely upon are thrown out of joint with the affective realities they are designed to contain and manage. Management hierarchies that cover over their inequities with subtle strategies of interpersonal domination are suddenly revealed as inane and ineffectual: part of the ploy to keep everyone in their place. But that place is suddenly our homes. Private and public implodes. Whatever is left of the common spaces of our communities are eerily vacant, a moment perceptually conditioned by a thousand apocalyptic films and TV shows. We act as if it were the virus that has created these situations, when all it has done is reveal the vacancy at the heart of our societies, much as world wars did for past generations.

We talk about a return to “normal” when it is normal that is killing us.

Confronted by the VOID we, recoil back into the known, but the known has become pathological. We are the “us” in virus.  

Even as we suffer in isolation, uncertainty and illness, this virus offers us wisdom and hope. It allows us to see, if only for a few brief days or weeks, the insanity of the world we have constructed to protect us—from ourselves. It offers us the opportunity to deploy a right and ability that so much of contemporary culture has tried to seduce or coerce us into forgetting: the right of REFUSAL. We now have an excuse to say NO to insanity, to the daily, incremental erosion of our wills, hearts and dreams. And, in the interruption this crisis has created in our everyday lives, some of us might find a slim, precious space of reflection from which to demand and work towards something different.

This is the other “us” in virus: the “us” we have a chance to rediscover as we care for each other in the face of a series of interlocking systems that, it turns out, are simply incapable of providing a humane response to suffering and crisis, grounded as they are in the VOID at the heart of our society. And though we live amidst that void, if this virus is showing us anything it is that the VOID does not yet exhaustively define us. There remains something in us all that is wiser, smarter and more loving than the lies, economic systems and distractions that have blinded us to our shared vulnerability. And it is this “us” in virus that might yet bring us together in service of building something new.