It is likely to be disconcerting that a story presented as a “mass public-health problem” (like covid-19) is in practice far more and far more significant… And that, consequently, the violent restructuring of bodies and social relations through the “pandemic” so that they become more “receptive” to the demands of the 4th industrial revolution is a multidimensional development, involving not only public-order tactics and strategies (: the police-ification and digital-isation of healthism) but also actions that intensify intra-capitalist competition (: its militarisation). Unfortunately there is no way (or the unstoppable machine knows of none) to correct intellectual myopia, the empiricist view of reality, or even ideological opportunism. The phrase Il n’y a pas de politique qui ne soit pas une politique des corps (“there is no politics that is not a politics of bodies”) was once part of the fire of social (and labour) contestation… Once… Once the sweetest kiss was on the barricades… Now that phrase is one of those tedious riddles best avoided by the lazy (and by various sly fools…).
How much of a health problem is covid-19, really? The “impartial” governor of New York, Cuomo, stated yesterday that after a random-sample survey, it turned out that the city’s fatality rate (the ratio of those who die to those who are infected) is (after all) “lower than they thought”… It is somewhere around 0.5%… The more systematic studies on the matter (one became more famous than the others because it was carried out by Ioannidis’ team in Santa Clara) show, however, that this percentage is even smaller. About 0.15%. Ioannidis (and an ever-growing number of perhaps “heretical” experts…) argues (he says it in the interview we posted the day before yesterday…) that the probability of death after being infected with covid-19 (this 0.15%) is the same as the probability of death while driving a car from home to work and back: the latter is definitely NOT considered a “serious health problem”… Nevertheless, everyone must be careful not only for themselves but also for others…
The lazy reader will see “numbers” above and, having swallowed the fairy tale, will get angry because we are showing… disrespect to people! The comparison, however, is not a numerical trick. It is a comparison of political perceptions about what is what. In exactly the same sense that “sensitivity for a little dog that got hurt” is a political perception, alongside the simultaneous cynicism toward the thousands murdered in the Middle East or the systematic killings of Palestinians (with the indirect participation of the Greek state as well).
And because what is happening is the organized dissemination (and incorporation) not of covid-19 but of a certain and very specific set of ideas that have made it their “banner”, it is precisely for this reason that we can “expose” a particular political authority. (At this point, the lazy ones grow even angrier and start typing or muttering various things…).
In an interesting recent analysis by Paul B. Preciado (translated from the blog Sphinx and Other Chimeras in Difficult Times) one can read, among other things, the following:
…Let us consider, for example, syphilis. The epidemic first struck the city of Naples in 1494. The European colonial enterprise had only just begun. Syphilis was like the starting gun for colonial devastation and the racial politics that would come with it. The English called it “the French disease,” the French said it was “the Neapolitan evil,” and the Neapolitans claimed it had come from America: they said it had been brought by colonists who had been infected by the indigenous people… The virus, as Derrida taught us, is by definition the foreigner, the other, the stranger. A sexually transmitted infection, syphilis inscribed in the bodies of the 16th to the 19th centuries the forms of oppression and social exclusion that dominated patriarchal-colonial modernity: the obsession with racial purity, the prohibition of so-called “mixed marriages” between people of different class and “race,” and the multiple restrictions that weighed on sexual and extramarital relations.
The utopia of community and the syphilis immunity model is that of the urban white body, sexually confined to married life as the core of national-body reproduction. Therefore, the prostitute turned into the living body that condensed all the atrocious political meanings during the epidemic: a working woman and often a subject of racism, a body outside domestic rules and marriage, who converted her sexuality into a means of production; the sex worker became visible, controlled, and stigmatized as the main carrier of viral spread. Yet it was neither the repression of prostitution nor the confinement of sex workers to national brothels (as imagined by Restif de la Bretonne) that cured syphilis. Quite the opposite. The isolation of prostitutes only made them more vulnerable to the disease. What cured syphilis was the discovery of antibiotics—especially penicillin in 1928—precisely at a moment of profound transformations in sexual politics in Europe, with the first decolonization movements, white women’s access to the vote, the first decriminalizations of homosexuality, and a relative liberation of heterosexual marriage morality…
A 0.15% mortality rate means that if 10,000 people are infected with covid-19, about 15 are likely to die. However, this “average” is somewhat misleading. We have known (and this has been known since last January, when covid-19 was for Westerners an “exotic bad news that will bring China to its knees”) that complications from the infection mainly kill elderly people (i.e., over 65 years old) who already have serious health problems. The 15 (out of 10,000) who will die are not “evenly distributed” across all age groups and both sexes. At least 14.5, maybe even more, are already sick elderly people. The further down one goes from age 65 and the fewer or no health problems one has, the “lethality” of covid-19 tends (and reaches) almost 0%.
In other words, and with no intention whatsoever of devaluing anyone’s life: if covid-19 is judged by its fatality rate, it is fundamentally a geriatric disease. Nobody says it, but that’s what it is. This is in contrast to the common, seasonal flu, which sometimes causes serious (even fatal) complications in children as well, and whose mortality, although far higher in elderly patients, is also spread across other age groups. It is not strange for a geriatric disease to exist. There are also childhood diseases – and calling them that is not an “invidious distinction”!
How is a threat so “targeted” from the perspective of age and biological/organic condition confronted? Here the current policy as a “technique of power” overflows everywhere. So the sluggard and the “disciplined soldier” would have to be stone-blind not to see even an inch beyond their noses.
If we were told: You know what? There is a contagious son who can kill 15 people out of every 10,000, mainly the elderly and those in poor health, apart from the fact that healthcare should be intensely focused on those who are actually at risk, the main social reaction, both individual and collective, would be to identify with the remaining 9,985 (out of 10,000) who will find themselves, perhaps, on a spectrum from no symptoms to mild symptoms. It is not at all irrational: no one leaves the house to go to work having made their will; even if 15 out of 10,000 happen to be killed in a traffic accident….
However, the big mouths of the state and the bosses did NOT tell us THIS! They told us something completely different. They told us: none of you is healthy, you are all potentially ill / carriers, and – at the end of the day – you will infect some elderly person, who will die; in other words, you will kill him!!! That’s why we will lock you up in your homes and you will only come out with our permission! (Can you imagine anything similar for traffic “accidents”? A general ban on circulation, house confinement, etc etc?)
So, what did they tell us? They told us (and this was accepted by every kind of “disciplined soldier”) that social relations are contagious and deadly! They must be restructured “for public health reasons”!! THIS IS A POLICY OF POWER (that is why, after all, both the police and the army take charge of its practical enforcement – the bosses are never wrong about the mechanisms they use!). THIS IS A POLICY FOR BODIES (AND FOR THE SPIRIT, WHICH IS MOST EMBODIED) in a very specific historical period of radical capitalist changes that are directly related both to the body and to the spirit! Even if everyone understood what it is about and accepted it, even if everyone liked this policy, it would not change one iota of reality: covid-19 is being used as a “battering ram” against society as we know it; the barracks are right behind it…
In the same text, Paul B. Preciado notes:
…The different strategies adopted by various countries in response to the spread of Covid-19 reveal two completely different types of biopolitical technologies. The first, mainly in operation in Italy, Spain, and France, applies strictly disciplinary measures that in many ways are not very different from those used against the plague. It is the confinement of the entire population at home. It is worth rereading the chapter on the management of the plague in Europe in Discipline and Punish to realize that the French policies for managing Covid-19 have not changed much since then…
…The second strategy, which began in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Israel, presupposes a shift from modern disciplinary techniques and architectural control methods to pharma-pornographic techniques of bio-surveillance: here the emphasis is on the individual pinpointing of the virus through the multiplication of testing and the continuous and strict digital monitoring of patients via their portable information devices. Mobile phones and credit cards are turned into surveillance tools that track the movements of each body. We do not need biometric bracelets: the smartphone has become the best bracelet; no one parts with it, not even to sleep. A GPS app informs the police of the movements of any suspected body. The temperature and motion of a specific body are monitored through mobile technologies and observed in real time by the digital eye of a cyber-authoritarian State for which community is a community of cyberspace users and sovereignty is above all digital transparency and open-data management… Covid-19 has legitimised and extended these state practices of bio-surveillance and digital control, normalising them and making them “necessary” in order to maintain a certain idea of immunity…
And below:
The political management of Covid-19 as a way of managing life and death outlines the contours of a new subjectivity. What will have been invented after the crisis is a new utopia of the ascent community and a new form of body control. The subject of neoliberal techno-patriarchy that Covid-19 constructs has no skin, you cannot touch it, it has no hands. It does not exchange physical goods, nor does it touch coins; it pays by credit card. It has no lips, it has no tongue. It does not speak directly; it leaves a voice message. It does not meet others, nor does it collectivize. It is radically individual. It has no face; it has a mask. Its organic body is hidden so that it can exist after an indefinite series of techno-semiotic mediations, a series of governmental prosthetic interventions that serve as masks: the mask of the email address, the mask of the Facebook account, the mask of Instagram. It is not a natural agent, but a digital consumer, a tele-producer; it is a code, a pixel, a bank account, a door with a name, an address to which Amazon can send its orders.
One of the central changes in the bio-political pharma-pornographic techniques that characterize the Covid-19 crisis is that the private residence – rather than the traditional institutions of confinement and normalization (hospital, factory, prison, school) – now appears as the new center of production, consumption, and bio-political control. It is no longer just the house as a space of bodily confinement, as occurred in the management of the plague. The private residence has now become the center of the economy of tele-consumption and tele-production. The domestic space now exists as a point within a digitally controlled space, a place identifiable on a Google map, a box recognizable by a drone…
We would argue that all of the above is commonplace; if indeed there had been a (significant…) minority aware of it, and not just aware but aware as it was unfolding for quite a few years, that is before they were blackmailed into fear in the way and to the extent dictated by the bosses…
However, the “strategic difference” that Preciado identifies is not of that kind! It is a difference of historical phase in the trajectory of the respective nation-state capitalisms / societies toward the specifications and norms of the 4th industrial revolution. The specific Asian states (including the Chinese one they forgot to mention) plus the First-World racist / apartheid Israel are not only technologically but also “bio-politically” further ahead… Especially Tel Aviv has extensive experience as a jailer, with old and new forms of violence…
This critical “developmental” phase difference (in capitalist terminology) delineates the field of the “collective body” of our species along the lines of intra-capitalist planetary competition. Up to now, perhaps for a little while longer, the reality of the 4th world war has been unfolding through proxies, through “contractors.” Yet from these very pages we have warned that this period is reaching (or has already reached) its end. And that the moment when the imperialisms confront one another directly will not be long in coming.
Thus, under the banner of covid-19, the control of the social factory is not being reorganized merely for the “authoritarian joy of control”! It is being reorganized both for productive / consumptive purposes and for warlike ones…
(We thank the “critical thinking” team for the video).