I’ve had time to reconsider my previous post. You might have guessed I would. After all, I was just scratching the surface… to see what might come out…
It was not what I intended to say. I had in fact wanted to suggest that the virtual amplification of the virus involves its own scratchiness, an internal irritant: think of it like a large bubble or boil, the anthroposphere. Now think of the increasing pressure, which is not that on corporate-run health and transportation infrastructures–the failures of which we are seeing, we see at once–but is built and building from the accelerated communication of misinformation and information about COVID 19, from the intensification of news, from daily iterations and narrations, and the political management, at once of both viruses, the one afflicting bodies and the one online, constantly online. Both can be said to affect bodies, but the infection pressurising what is done and seen is that from what is said, is in the constancy and insistency of what is said, of it being said. And the irritant internal to this globally resonant bubble or boil is no more immediate than the saying but is less news, is subsumed or drowned under the news, lost in sputum. It is the organic therefore virtual threat to bodies rubbing from the inside at the insides of the anthroposphere which could burst at any point… in the falldown of infrastructures is bursting… but currently at the rate of no more than a trickle, compared to the deluge of information.
Think then how tenuous is the infrastructure supporting the flood and how unaccountable the corporations responsible for its upkeep. Bodies will fail. We take that as given. Political bodies. Bodies of knowledge, cultural and community bodies. Our own.
But the relations which are elemental to the sustenance of bodies, both social and individual: the means of distribution that we call supply chains, for some reason to these we attribute rights rather than duties: it is not the duty of those responsible for these to keep them running: their strength or weakness is displaced onto the means of symbolic distribution for safekeeping. It is delegated to the markets for goods to be distributed.
The distribution through supply chains of the elements to sustain bodies is put upon, as a right-to-provide, the means of symbolic exchange we have described to be the relations enabling communication. It is not a duty-to-provide, can’t be. (The market like the communicative sphere cannot be told, even what is true, it cannot be told.) To the communicative sphere then is given the role of public welfare. To it is granted an intransigence which is entirely illusory. It has become something like the spirit, spirit of the anthroposphere, which unlike the bodies irritant within its bubble or boil, will not, cannot fail.
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