On Finding Ourselves in a State of Exception (Part 2)

Cover of the Spanish edition 

(Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2020) [a]

We will have to ask ourselves the only serious question that truly matters: where are we now? 

And it is a question we should answer not just with our words, but with our lives too.

 

 

VI. 

 

Another of the great zombie-mantras of the pandemic - again, here in the UK at least - was: Protect the NHS. Indeed, we were expected not only to protect the National Health Service, but love it and elevate it to the status of a religion. 

 

And so Agamben is right to define medicine as the victorious faith of the 21st-century; a cultic practice that posits health (by which it means bare life) above everything else, turning it into a moral obligation: Thou shalt not be sick!

 

But the funny thing is, "the medical religion offers no prospect of salvation [...] the recovery to which it aspires can only be temporary, given that the malignant god - the virus - cannot be annihilated once and for all" [53], mutating into variants as it does. 

 

It is thus the task of philosophers to again enter into conflict with religion: 

 

"I do not know if the stakes will be reignited or if there will be a list of prohibited books, but certainly the thought of those who keep seeking the truth and rejecting the dominant lie will [...] be excluded and accused of disseminating fake news [...] As in all moments of real or simulated emergency, we will again see philosopers be slandered by the ignorant, and scoundrels trying to profit from disasters that they themselves have instigated." [54] 

 

Ecrasez l'infâme! 

 

 

VII. 

 

As readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, I hate Zoom [click here] and I despise the way in which many who should know better - university lecturers, for example - have willingly embraced its use and thus allowed the pandemic to serve as a "pretext for an increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies" [72]. 

 

This has not simply transformed teaching, but effectively negated student life as a form of existence that had evolved over centuries: 

 

"Being a student was, first and foremost, a form of life, one to which studying and listening to lectures were certainly fundamental, but to which encountering and constantly exchanging ideas with other scholarii [...] was no less important." [73] 

 

I agree with that. 

 

And I agree with this: those academics who consent to hold all their classes remotely and comply with the new online order, are the "exact equivalent of those university professors who, in 1931, pledged allegiance to the Fascist regime" [74]. 

 

Those students who really love student life, will oppose the new techno-barbarism and establish their own circles of learning and friendship. 

 

 

VIII. 

 

I also agree with Agamben when he writes that the phrase conspiracy theorist - used to discredit those who refuse to accept the official government narrative repeated by the manistream media - "demonstrates a genuinely surprising historical ignorance" [75]. 

 

Not everything happens randomly or by chance; sometimes events are planned and coordinated by powerful organisations, groups, or individuals. Dismissing anyone who seeks to explain the pandemic by making reference, for example, to the Wuhan Institute, the World Health Organisation, and the pharmaceutical industry, as a conspiracy theorist, is a sign of idiocy. 

 

But where I don't agree with Agamben - even though I hate the thought of mandatory masks - is on the question of the face, which he thinks a uniquely human site of truth: "It is in their faces that humans unwillingly drop their guard; it is the face [...] that they express and reveal themselves." [86] 

 

It is precisely this (metaphysical) privileging of the face that I challenge in a post published way back in 2013: click here. 

 

If I refuse to wear a mask across my mouth and nose, it's because, quite simply, I don't wish to restrict my own breathing - and nor do I want to signal my political conformity (and virtue) via a piece of ridiculous theatre. 

 

But it's not because I have a profound human need to recognise myself and be recognised by others - or a desire to communicate my openness. 

 

 

IX. 

 

In Yōko Ogawa's 1994 sci-fi novel The Memory Police [b], the world is increasingly emptied out as things disappear - including body parts, until, finally, as Byung-Chul Han notes, "there are just disembodied voices aimlessly floating in the air" [c]. 

 

I thought of this as I read the following paragraph in Agamben's book, in a section on the importance of physical contact: 

 

"If, as is perversely being attempted today, all contact could be abolished, if everything and everyone could be held at a distance, we would lose not only the experience of other bodies but also, and above all, any immediate experience of ourselves. We would, purely and simply, lose our own flesh." [101] 

 

But then for those who love to Zoom, that's the ideal is it not; to become ghosts in the machine ...? 

 

X. 

 

Last word to Agamben ...

 

In the Age of Coronavirus, when fear seems to have gripped the hearts of everyone, remember:

 

"No need to lose our heads, no need to let anyone exercise power on the basis of fear or, by transforming an emergency into a permanent state, to rewrite the rules that guarantee our freedom and determine what we can and cannot do." [95]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I'm using the English edition of Agamben's Where Are We Now?, trans. Valeria Dani, (ERIS, 2021). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.

 

[b] Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police, trans. Stephen Snyder, (Vintage, 2020). 

 

[c] Byung-Chul Han, Preface to Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022), p. viii.

 

 

To go to Part 1 of this post, click here.  

On Finding Ourselves in a State of Exception (Part 1)

Giorgio Agamben

 

We will have to ask ourselves the only serious question that truly matters: where are we now? 

And it is a question we should answer not just with our words, but with our lives too.

 

 

I.

 

A state of exception is one which grants the powers that be the right to suspend parliamentary procedure and transcend the rule of law in the name of the greater good - or, as in the case of the coronavirus pandemic, public health.

Although the idea that a ruler or government may need to take extraordinary measures in order to deal with an emergency of some kind is nothing new, the concept of Ausnahmezustand was introduced into modern political philosophy by Carl Schmitt (someone who, as a prominent member of the Nazi Party, knew a thing or two about creating and exploiting a crisis situation in order to consolidate and extend power).     

 

The concept was then further developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who, in his book State of Exception (2005), argues that rule by decree has become an increasingly common phenomenon in all modern states. To illustrate this, he traces out the manner in which the September 11 attacks mutated into a war on terror; something which involved invading Afghanistan and bombing Baghdad, but also justified the creation of a surveillance system (in the name of homeland security) which placed everyone under suspicion. 

 

The key thing is: temporary measures have a way of becoming permanent once they are put in place; i.e., the exception becomes the rule ...

 

 

II.  

 

And so, here we are in 2022 ... 

 

But, asks Agamben, where are we now as we enter a post-pandemic world? 

 

To try and answer this question, Agamben has collected 25 short texts written during the state of exception triggered by Covid-19 [a]. Reflecting upon the Great Reset affecting Western democracies, he observes with astonishment as a majority of citizens not only accept but demand unprecedented limitations on their freedom.

 

Agamben took a lot of criticism for these short texts, including from fellow intellectuals who, rather than think through the political and ethical consequences of the measures taken during the pandemic, gleefully supported mask mandates, lockdowns, social distancing rules, and programmes of mass vaccination.

 

But he should, rather, have been commended for his courage in speaking up and speaking out when so many remained silent or simply echoed the official line that biosecurity (and protecting the state health system) is all that matters.  

 

 

III.

 

Agamben cerainly doesn't mince his words: he explicitly states at the outset, for example, that, in his view, "the dominant powers of today have decided to pitilessly abandon the paradigm of bourgeois democracy - with its rights, its parliaments, and its constitutions" [8] and replace it with a new order that smells suspiciously despotic. 

 

We've not seen anything like this in Europe since 1933, "when the new Chancellor Adolf Hitler, without formally abolishing the Weimar Constitution, declared a state of exception that [...] effectively invalidated the constitutional propositions that were ostensibly still in force" [8] [b].

 

New governing techniques - sold to us via a compliant media and our favourite online networks - combine ideals of wokeness and wellness into a kind of zen fascism. But, rather touchingly, Agamben remains optimistic; he can still envision new forms of resistance "and those who can still envision a politics to come should be unhesitatingly committed to them" [10] [c]. 

 

I'm not quite sure I understand precisely what he means by this politics to come, but he insists it will "not have the obsolete shape of bourgeois democracy, nor the form of the techonological-sanitationist despotism that is replacing it" [10] [d].

 

Hmmm ...

 

 

IV. 

 

The coronavirus pandemic was one thing: the climate of panic cultivated by the media and authorities in order to establish a state of exception was something else. Who now would disagree with that? With the fact that the response to Covid-19 was disproportionate to say the very least. 

 

But then it provided the ideal pretext for imposing exceptional measures and increasing the level of fear that has been "systematically cultivated in people's minds" [13] in recent years; fear which makes us regard everyone as a vector of infection. 

 

Even those individuals who appear perfectly fit and well may be asymptomatic plague-spreaders. In fact, the apparently healthy are more dangerous than the obviously sick - so it becomes necessary to lock everyone up (or down) just to be on the safe side. 

 

And if this results - as it must - in the deterioration of human relationships, well, too bad; "even loved ones must not be approached or touched" [15]. Bare life is better than risking even the tiniest chance that one might get seriousy ill and die. 

 

But, unfortunately, bare life and the fear of losing it, "is not something that unites people; rather, it blinds and separates them" [18]. A society that values survival at all costs (which is even prepared to sacrifice freedom) ultimately isn't a society at all. 

 

And it certainly isn't a dwelling place; a Heideggerian word that Agamben seems to cherish, much like Byung-Chul Han, who in his most recent work insists mankind no longer knows how to dwell on the earth and under the sky [e]. It's certainly hard to dwell when you are socially distanced from other mortals and think that communicating on Zoom is preferable to meeting face-to-face. 

 

Like Agamben, I don't believe you can sustain or create a community based on new digital technology alone. In the end, hell is not other people, but the suspension of real friendships and physical contact with others.     

 

 

V.  

   

One of the great zombie-mantras of the pandemic - certainly here, in the UK - was: Follow the science [f].

 

But perhaps instead we - particularly journalists - ought to have interrogated the scientists. Because it is often mistaken - and often dangerous - to entrust everything to those in white coats:

 

"Rightly or not, scientists pursue in good faith the interests of science and, as history can teach us, they are willing to sacrifice any moral concern in this pursuit. No one will need reminding that, under Nazism, many esteemed scientists executed eugenic policies, never hestitating to take advantage of the camps for the performance of lethal experiments they considered useful for the progress of science [...]" [44-45]      

  

Experimental vaccines anyone ...?

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani (ERIS, 2021). 

      This work was originally published in Italy as A che punto siamo? L'epidemia come politica, (Quodlibet, 2020). 

      All page numbers in the post refer to the updated English edition which has added chapters.

 

[b] Some readers will baulk at this hypothesis and find it silly (or offensive) to compare what is happening in Europe now with what happened in the 1930s. But Agamben insists that the liberal democratic order is "being replaced by a new despotism that, with the pervasiveness of its controls and with its suspension of all political activity, will be worse than the totalitarianisms we have known thus far" [42]. 

 

[c] Agamben would hate my description of his thinking as optimistic. As he tells one interviewer (Dimitria Pouliopoulou): "Pessimism and optimism are psychological states that have nothing to do with political analyses: those who use these terms only demonstrate their inability to think." [64]

 

[d] Speaking with Dimitria Pouliopoulou, Agamben says this about his idea of a politics to come: "For a careful observer it is difficult to decide whether we live today, in Europe, in a democracy that sees increasingly despotic forms of control, or in a totalitarian state disguised as a democracy. It is beyond both that a new, future politics will have to appear." [69]

 

[e] See Byung-Chul Han, Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022). I reflect on this book in a post that to be published shortly. 

[f] Whilst Agamben hints at a zombie-like aspect of the pandemic when he refers to human bodies "suspended indefinitely between life and death" in a twilight zone, unable to escape "its strictly medical boundaries" [64], I can't help thinking first and foremost of the ever-brilliant Mark Steyn whenever I hear someone utter the phrase follow the science: click here. 

 

To go to Part 2 of this post, click here.

Advance Australia (into Darkness)

The original 1912 drawing for the Australian coat of arms

 

 

Covid mania has sent the entire world crazy in the last two years and many governments have reacted in a senseless and shameful manner. But nowhere is this fascist hysteria in the face of a virus that has killed less than 2,500 of its citizens - the average age of whom is 83 - more astonishing than in Australia ... [a]

 

Astonishing - and depressing - but not surprising to readers familiar with D. H. Lawrence's novel Kangaroo (1923) [b], which offers a brilliant meditation not only on the queer spirit of place Down Under, but the political psychology of the typical Aussie in times of crisis (be it post-War or mid-pandemic).

 

According to Lawrence, whilst the Australian bush is beautiful and endlessly fascinating, so too does it possess something threatening about it [c]. Likewise, whilst Australians seem to be some of the friendliest, most easy-going people on earth - free from much of the formality and uptightness that is said to characterise the British - there's a unique mix of resentment and aggressive familiarity behind their superficial charm.

 

Their fraternal idealism or mateyness is, therefore, something about which one should remain profoundly cautious and in Kangaroo Lawrence "creates and magnifies a sense of subterranean violence ready to burst through the carefree surface of Australian life" [d] that still resonates today as we watch the authorities in God's own country indulge in draconian stupidity with excessive enthusiasm (and popular support).     

 

Who would have thought that a coat of arms bearing a red kangaroo and an emu would one day seem as menacing as one with a lion and a unicorn, or an imperial eagle? 

 

Welcome to 2022 ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Readers who are interested in the official Coronavirus case numbers and statistics for Australia can visit their Department of Health website for daily information: click here.

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994). All page references are to this edition of the work that Lawrence wrote (in six weeks) during his hundred day stay in Australia (4 May - 11 August 1922). 

      Interestingly, when Lawrence arrived Down Under: "It was a period when Sydney was again suffering from a bubonic plague scare: a very mild scare, some fifteen cases to a million people, according to the newspapers.* But the town was placarded with notices 'Keep your town clean', and there was a stall in Martin Place where you could write your name down and become a member of a cleaning league, or something to that effect." [48] 

      *The May 3rd edition of the Daily Telegraph, for example, reported twenty-seven cases of plague; seven of which were fatal. 

 

[c] Lawrence tells us that the "vast, uninhabited land" [13] frightened the book's protagonist Richard Somers: 

      "It seemed so hoary and lost, so unapproachable. The sky was pure, crystal pure and blue, of a lovely pale blue colour: the air was wonderful, new and unbreathed: and there were great distances. But the bush, the grey, charred bush. It scared him. As a poet, he felt himself entitled to all kinds of emotions and sensations which an ordinary man would have repudiated. Therefore he let himself feel all sorts of things about the bush. It was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires: and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting - the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting. And he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn't get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for? 

      And then one night at the time of the full moon he walked alone into the bush. A huge electric moon, huge, and the tree-trunks like naked pale aborigines among the dark-soaked foliage, in the moonlight. And not a sign of life - not a vestige. 

      Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall, nude dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the terror of the bush overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees, and his began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a presence. He looked at the weird, white dead trees, and into the hollow distances of the bush. Nothing! Nothing at all. He turned to go home. And then immediately the hair on his scalp stirred and went icy cold with terror. What of? He knew quite well it was nothing. [...]

      But the horrid thing in the bush! He laboured as to what it could be. It must be the spirit of place. Something fully evoked tonight, perhaps provoked, by that unnatural West-Australian moon. Provoked by the moon, the roused spirit of the bush. He felt it was watching, and waiting. Following with certainty, just behind his back." [14]

      I quote this from chapter one at length as a treat for readers unfamiliar with Lawrence's work. Here, he writes in a manner that some might call Lovecraftian. In the final chapter of his novel (XVIII), Lawrence provides another beautiful description of the Australian bush, this time without the sense of horror underneath: see pp. 342 and 353-355.  

 

[d] Bruce Steele, Introduction to Kangaroo, p. xxxii. 

      This becomes clear when, for example, we witness the pleasure that Jack Callcott gets from breaking the heads of his political opponents with an iron bar and boasting of it afterwards to Somers, with "the strangest grin in the world" on his face and "indescribable gloating joy in his tones" [319]. 

 

 

This post is for Novak Djokovic.     

 

  

Beijing Über Alles: On the Western World's Becoming-Chinese in the Age of Coronavirus

Xi Jinping: General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party

President of the People's Republic of China

世界皇帝   

 

 

I.

 

However you wish to term it, Sinofication - i.e., the insidious process by which non-Chinese societies come under the influence of China (be it economically, politically, or culturally) - is an issue of real concern today here in the West [1].

 

Shamefully, however, it is European leaders themselves who - in the name of public safety and protecting their creaking healthcare systems - are actively dismantling liberal democracy and replacing it with an authoritarian model of society obsessed with bio-surveillance inspired by the People's Republic of China: Build Back Better, as they like to say.

 

Thus, for example, the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, has recently called for appropriate discussions concerning the compulsory vaccination of all EU citizens against Covid-19 (or what Donald Trump still insists on calling - with some justification considering where it originated - the Chinese virus). 

 

This comes after incoming chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, announced he too was in favour of mandatory vaccinations and extending use of digital health passes and face coverings, and following Austria's decision to implement forced Covid vaccination from February next year. In Greece, meanwhile, according to Athens-based commentator Maria Thanassa, monthly fines of  €100 will be issued to all over-60s who remain unvaccinated after the end of this month.

 

I mean, this isn't even something we might smile at any longer, is it? Byung-Chul Han is absolutely spot on to warn: "The last man does not necessarily prefer the liberal system. He is, for instance, quite happy to live under a totalitarian regime." [2]

 

The idea that, as a fateful consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, the West is drifting towards a Chinese-style regime of biopolitical sureveillance is one that Han develops in a recent essay entitled 'The End of Liberalism' that I would like to discuss below ... 

 

 

II. 

 

One of the many things I admire about Han is that he doesn't sit on the fence. Thus, he opens his essay by bluntly - and I think accurately - declaring:

 

"It is almost a matter of the inexorable logic of the pandemic that society will be transformed into a permanent security zone, into a quarantine station in which everyone is treated as though they are infected." [3] 

 

And that effectively spells the end of Western liberalism based on the freedom (and right to privacy) of the individual. It's not the past lockdowns that should trouble us, but the "truly fateful insight [...] that only a biopolitics that allows for unlimited access to the individual" [4] can prevent future lockdowns and economic collapse.

 

Today, it's not California über alles which threatens, but Beijing's 21st-century model of disciplinary society that makes possible "the complete biopolitical surveillance and control of the population" [5]. 

 

Who knows the truth of how Covid-19 became a global pandemic, but the virus has entirely transformed the rules of the game and in the name of survival we will willingly sacrifice "everything that makes life worth living: sociability, community and proximity" [6].   

  

 

Notes

 

 [1] It might be noted that European humanity's becoming more Chinese was something that Nietzsche had already identified as a danger in the 1880s; see section 12 of the first essay in the Genealogy, for example. 

      One hundred years later, and it was Prince Philip expressing his concern that Westerners might become slitty-eyed if they succumb to too much Chinese influence.  

 

[2] Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 56. 

      As Han goes on to write: "As a survival society, the palliative society does not necessarily depend on liberal democracy. In the face of the pandemic, we are drifting towards a regime of biopolitical surveillance." [57]   

 

[3] Byung-Chul Han, 'The End of Liberalism: The Coronavirus Pandemic and Its Consequences', in Capitalism and the Death Drive, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021), p. 85. 

[4] Ibid., p. 86. 

[5] Ibid., p. 87. 

      Of course, those zen fascist hippies in Silicon Valley will happily support the Sinofication of society; for them it's a kind of digital utopia that allows for total transparency and demands the level of absolute obedience to authority (as mandated by heaven) that Confucius advocated in his political philosophy.    

[6] Byung-Chul Han, 'COVID-19 Has Reduced Us to a "Society of Survival"', a conversation with Carmen Sigüenza and Esther Rebollo of EFE, the Spanish International News Agency, in Capitalism and the Death Drive, p. 120. 

Survival in the Age of Coronavirus

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I. 

 

I'm pleased to see that the philosopher and cultural critic Byung-Chul Han addresses the coronavirus pandemic within the context of his work on what he terms the palliative society (i.e., society characterised by a generalised fear of pain - or, indeed, any form of negativity that might possibly cause suffering or distress) [a].   

 

Pleased, not only because I think what he says is insightful, but because I think it important that heretics [b] speak up and challenge the prevailing Covid orthodoxy which governments, medical bodies, and the mainstream media are all promoting in order to justify the destruction of individual rights and liberties in the name of public health. 

 

 

II.

 

According to Han, Covid-19 reveals what kind of society we belong to; one in which survival has become an absolute value and where all forces are marshalled "for the prolongation of life" [14] at any cost. 

 

He writes:

 

"In the pandemic, the bitter fight for survival is subjected to a viral intensification. The virus enters the palliative zone of well-being and turns it into a quarantine zone in which life is completely paralysed into survival. The more life becomes survival, the greater the fear of death. Algophobia is utimately thantophobia. The pandemic makes death, which we had carefully repressed and set aside, visible again. The prominence of death in the mass media makes people nervous." [14]

 

That's true: there are people who terrify themselves reading the latest daily updates on infection levels, hospitalisations, and deaths; not just in their local area, but nationally and even globally. They seem to have lost all sense of perspective or context and treat even a tiny rise in the number of people dying with (and not necessarily of) coronavirus as if it were the end of the world, rather than the end of a few individual lives (mostly aged over 80 and very often with serious pre-existing health conditions).  

Han writes:

 

"The society of survival has no sense of the good life. Even enjoyment is sacrificed in the pursuit of health as an end in itself. [...] We are prepared to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living for the sake of survival. In the face of the pandemic, even the restriction of fundamental rights has been accepted without so much as a question being asked. We comply willingly with the state of exception that reduces life to bare life." [14-15]     

 

Bare life: i.e., a socially distanced existence in which we lock ourselves up at home or creep about in masks, regard strangers (and even our own relatives) as potential vectors of disease, and constantly self-test for signs of infection. It is a life divested not only of pleasure, but of all meaning (i.e., lacking in any meta-physical dimension). 

 

We become, in effect, zombies: "A society that is gripped by the mania for survival is a society of the undead [...] too alive to die, and too dead to live" [17].   

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2021). All page numbers given in the post refer to this work.  

      Byung-Chul Han, of course, is not the first author to inveigh against this will to survive. Nietzsche was keen to stress that the will to power was more than merely a will to life and could, in fact, have aims contrary to the wellbeing and survival of the organism. D. H. Lawrence also wrote at length against the unappeased rage of self-preservation; see, for example, his 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 3-128.  

[b] For a recent post on heresy (as/and philosophical idiotism), click here. Like Han, I conceive of the heretic as a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus and the commonly accepted values of their era.