To some degree, I agree with you, Jack.
But how many nuanced essays have you (or anyone left of Tucker fucking Carlson) contributed railing against the COVID-19 passports that we all know will surely mutate into a Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Brother, Big Bank centralized digital currency social credit system that most of the people we know wholly support just because they have been tribalized to hate the unclean unvaccinated and thus to accept any future loss of their own freedom just to punish the unclean unvaccinated today? There are so fucking few examples, and even when these timid, lonely voices try to sound the alarm, their hearts just aren't in it, just as yours isn't. Why not?
To me, the way you so righteously relish railing instead against the military-intelligence controlled and fomented January 6th "insurrection" is almost as noisome as commentary on AOC's haute fashion choices. Why does everybody have to take a Blue or Red side except for me and my monkey?
https://www.berfrois.com/2021/09/the-pe ... llectuals/...
But it was not over. Because I had contracted covid in March, 2020, when I was vaccinated over a year later the French policy was to treat me as if I had already had one dose, and so a single clinical dose was held by French standards to complete my vaccination regime, as attested in my Pass Sanitaire’s QR code. But the UK sees things differently, and so no matter my official status in France, I am considered not-fully-vaccinated in Britain. What were the implications for my trip? It meant that I would have to order not only a “Day 2 Home Test”, but also a “Day 8 Home Test”. But by Day 8 I will have been back in France for more than a week! I explained. It doesn’t matter, they told me, you have to order one in order to be let in.
So I went back to the private lab’s website, with my big thumbs on the small screen, and began again to enter my data. The delivery address could only be one in the UK, but I did not have a UK address. I asked the official what I should enter. He told me to enter just any UK address at all. “But I don’t know any UK addresses,” I said, “though I have noticed their postal codes are long alphanumeric sequences, often including several W’s and X’s.” “Then enter some of those,” he said. “What about the street address?” I asked. “Just pick anywhere,” he said. “Anywhere?” “Yes.” And so I began to type: “Buckingham Palace, London, WX1 W1X1”, and with that, plus another £88, I was admitted to the United Kingdom.
I hope I don’t need to provide any further argument that this, like being a “Husky Vendor” or like specifying my “Sleep Goals”, is a bunch of bullshit, and the somewhat recalcitrant behavior on my part is not so much a sign of immaturity, as humanity. It is the same humanity that often leaves me, within a few seconds of interacting with a customer-service bot on the telephone, inevitably telling me information I had just read moments before on the company’s website and deemed inadequate to my situation, saying: “Fuck you. Give me a live customer-service agent.” It’s not that I want to hurt the bot, not exactly, but that I know the bot can’t be hurt, and I need to affirm this, to remind myself and any human being who might eventually be listening to the recording (“for quality and training purposes”).
It is the same righteous instinct as the one that will soon have at least some brave rebels vandalizing and disabling robot police dogs.It seems to me moreover that the absurd, dehumanizing, automated management of human subjects has been given its own Great Leap Forward with the rise of the new covid hygiene regime.
Those of you who see covid as a culture-war issue will be relieved to find me adding that I am strongly in favor of mandatory vaccination. In fact I think much of the current theater, much of the current profiteering of the sort the private labs in London are now enjoying, and much of the aggressive implementation of new mechanisms of social control and surveillance, are the consequences, intended or unintended, of states being unwilling to infringe on their citizens’ supposed right to remain unvaccinated. The uncertain vaccination status of any particular person in a public space has enabled governments to treat each of us as if we were, individually, in need of constant monitoring and shakedowns of the sort I endured at the Gare du Nord. It has enabled states to implement an unprecedentedly vicious form of inequality, between the app-savvy and the preterites, between those who know how to flash a QR code like cosmopolitan pros, and those who lag behind, who can never quite get their papers in order (i.e., can never fill out all the fields on the screen correctly).(translation: Now that you all can rest easy that I am 100% of your tribe on the only issue of the day that
really matters ...)
I am for mandatory vaccination, and I am also continually alarmed by my bien-pensant, progressive, educated friends who seem to have abandoned altogether their appreciation for Michel Foucault over the past two years, and who take resistance to vaccination as nothing more than a marker of trashiness and despicable cretinism. It was not long ago at all that the same people raved about scholarly work such as Nadja Durbach’s excellent 2004 study, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907. Durbach compellingly portrays Victorian working-class opposition to the state-enforced violation of the skin with disease-laced needles as a form of righteous resistance against the state’s biopolitical overreach — quite apart from any consideration of the epidemiological soundness of vaccination policy. But this “quite apart” is the sort of critical move we are increasingly discouraged from making in public discourse. And the reason for this, in turn, is that what we call “public discourse” occurs almost entirely on social media, which in the end is really just a public-discourse-themed video game, underlain by algorithms that for their part are essentially of the same sort as those that yield up the steady stream of bullshit incitements to state my “sleep goals”, to update my “Husky Vendor” status, to have a “Day 8 Test” delivered within a kingdom I have long since quit.
Much that is happening in fact seems an evident postscript to certain central theses of Foucault, and if the progressive left relinquishes him to the right, or at least to the “post-left”, they are only depriving themselves of a valuable analytical lens for understanding our contemporary world. Consider the argument of 1975’s Discipline and Punish. In the early modern period, people still enjoyed seeing gruesome spectacles of execution, as when a would-be regicide was drawn and quartered (i.e., his two arms and two legs are tied to four separate horses, and they are made to run in opposite directions). Such spectacles fell out of fashion, and corporal punishment of any sort eventually came to seem unenlightened. Prisoners were moved into “correctional institutions”, out of public view. And now carceral regimes like the United States are able to inflict unceasing brutality on millions of their citizens, year after year, all while barely even touching them, and with nothing for the craven public to gawk at (though of course in certain regions, such as the US South, the public spectacle of punishment, including the punishment of innocent people belonging to persecuted minorities, survived long after it had died out in, say, Paris and London).
We may in turn be moving now into a new era of even further sublimation of the will-to-punish, which might on the face of it appear to be an era of decarceralization, but which will only have been made possible by the rise and proliferation of digital monitoring technologies. This is further confirmation of Foucault’s enduring relevance.
The modern state just keeps finding new ways to look nicer, just keeps rolling out snazzier apps with the help of its corporate partners, but behind this is an ongoing search for more effective, because more subtle, exercise of power. It seems to me plain, moreover, that it is in the nature of states to exploit crises of this sort in order to impose new regimes of control that subsequently have less and less to do with the initial circumstances that justified them. In this respect, the new covid theater really is much like the airport security theater that emerged after September 11, 2001. It is true that there is terrorism, but whether I remove my shoes or not has little to do with that truth. It is true that there is a pandemic, but my Day 8 test, which I will not take and which will go nowhere, has nothing to do with combating it.Stopping anywhere short of a mandate, I believe, serves the state’s interest in making the current theater into a perpetual regime, just as it has evidently done with the security theater of the post-9/11 era. This is a regime of social control through tech: we won’t require you to get vaccinated, but we will require you to have an app that monitors everything you do, and that could be adapted in the near future to serve as the basis of a system, explicit or euphemized, of social credit. And meanwhile so many of my friends and peers, heels dug in so deeply on the side of anti-anti-vaxx signaling, refuse to acknowledge anything worrisome about the new high-tech hygiene regime, about how hard it might be to dismantle it once it has outlived its purpose, about how it might sprout new purposes that are inimical to human thriving....
It is remarkable to me to see how neatly our social world is lining up: it is consistently the same people who think applying the Bechdel test to The Avengers counts as cultural criticism who also refuse to acknowledge anything worrisome about the new high-tech hygiene regime, about how hard it might be to dismantle once it has outlived its purpose, about how it might sprout new purposes that are inimical to human thriving. What is the difference of values that explains this rift? Is it perhaps only a difference of character? Some of the people who have ended up on the other side of the rift from me are people I admire very much, and I keep wondering what it is that they are seeing and I am missing, and vice versa. I keep waiting, only half in jest, for characterological diversity to make it onto the list of forms of difference for which we need to cultivate a greater understanding.
The best answer I have to these questions so far is that, in spite of surface differences, Awokening and STEMification are two horns of the same beast. It is the latter that threatens my well-being to a far greater degree. I see the logic of STEM-centric grant-seeking overtaking higher education, and I feel increasingly alienated from the institutions that seemed to hold out the promise to me a few decades ago, of maintaining and nourishing my career as a humanist. And I see young scholars in vestigially humanistic disciplines who are increasingly zealous in enforcing the new norms of a post-humanistic society, and who also seem perfectly at home in a university landscape where everything is conceived in terms of “outcomes”. For my part, when I am working on a grant application, and I am told to explain what my “data set” is, I want to cry, and I think to myself: Did Stanley Cavell have a “data set”? You can say perhaps that it was golden-age Hollywood remarriage films, but to call these “data” is a dishonor to the mode of engagement he brought to them.
Recently I was sent an article about “Glocalqueering in Singapore”, which had something to do with the ways in which queer communities in that strict city-state move in creative ways between the local and the global. The article struck me as ridiculous, and suitable for the mocking spirit in which it was sent to me. Yet when I think about the actual subject, I have to admit I find it interesting, and I want to know more. I find everything interesting, pretty much, including the queer communities of Singapore, and yet I find articles of this sort exasperating.
Why is that so? It seems to me that it is not the subject in question, but rather the rendering of the author’s observations of an entire form of life in the pseudoscientific terms of an “abstract” accompanied by “keywords”, reducing that form of life to data, that somehow makes the whole venture seem fraudulent to me. It’s the willingness to respond to the constant call —“If you could get us a title and an abstract when you get a chance, that’d be great, and maybe a couple of keywords”— that diminishes the humanistic project to the point where it becomes a mere counterfeit and rear-guard imitator of STEM. An even more austere reduction happens when you are dealing with an online grant-application portal, and punching your “data” into the various fields on the screen. Fat thumbs on small keys often yield the message that such and such field was completed incorrectly. Perhaps you have accidentally entered an unrecognized sign, and for reasons that can surely only be traced back to malice the online portal decides to make you begin again, erasing all the other information you had entered correctly. “Glocalqueering!” you write with your fat thumbs in the “keywords” field, and for that you are sent back to start.
Those who can tolerate this madness, who seem even to thrive in it, seem almost to a person to be the same who have volunteered their services as information-nodes and as enforcers for our new perpetual covid regime. This is anecdotal of course, and surely is open to counter-examples. But anecdotes are a preserve and a treasure of culture, as against society’s data, and I stand by them.
I suspect however that it could also be borne out with data, if we wanted to “go there”, and that what these data would show is nothing short of the total takeover of the intellectual class by STEM-style thinking. The ultimate rationale of this thinking, in turn, could easily be shown to be dictated by capital, which has the power to make the great majority of people, including our thinkers, turn on a dime....
Meanwhile, for better or worse the closest thing we have to an avant-garde at the moment is to be found in the memetic exuberance of the right and of the “post-left”, who have inherited the sacred duty, once thought to belong by definition to the left, of skewering the status quo. I am no more happy about this fact than I am about the unimportance of poetry. Yet as W.E.B. Du Bois said of prejudice, “we may decry [it], yet it remains a heavy fact.”
In 1920 Vladimir Mayakovsky was still able to operate in the same spirit of avant-garde exuberance as his Italian Futurist counterpart, the fascist Filippo Marinetti. By 1930 the Russian poet would be dead by his own hand, and the only art tolerated under the Soviet regime he helped to envision would be gleeful renderings of grain fields and electrical lines. Marinetti for his part was able to continue to work for some years longer. I reject most analogies facilely made between the early twentieth century and our present moment, but I do sincerely fear that the left has allowed itself no freedom for the cultivation of a properly critical avant-garde, and in following the path of Mayakovsky has ceded the real spirit and power of art and culture to the Marinettis of this world.
It is the duty of intellectuals and artists to reject enforced glee, to tell robot customer-service agents to fuck off, to carve out a preserve for the life of the soul as best they can, and to call madness by its name. Covid is real, vaccination is necessary. But the regime that covid has helped to install, though it may be traced back to this reality, is itself a great victory for madness. If you think that the life of the intellectual is constituted principally by such acts as sharing Delta-variant stats and studies on the efficacy of various kinds of mask, if you insist on pretending there is nothing lost when we can no longer see a stranger’s living smile, you are complicit in this madness. You are not providing what the world so desperately needs from you.