Mike sent me this from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Thanks!
So…
…at least it’s…
AIDS / HIV is said to have claimed 25 – 35 million victims since 1981
no recent pandemic compares, except the Spanish flu
the giant remains the bubonic plague
but there’s something quick, nasty and disingenuous in comparing death tolls
better to consider the management of diseases afflicting populations:
Not forgetting the Plague of Fascism, COVID 19 the sideshow:
Nuclear war – global warming – death of democracy – and the interconnectedness of it all:
“2 billion are at home” … “if they are lucky enough to have a home” … “what does this discourse about war tell us?” with COVID 19 as an “enemy”
Chomsky: to manage the crisis we have to move to something like wartime mobilisation…
…Chomsky in part blames the collapse of institutional structures for the severity of what we are experiencing now with, from COVID 19…
and he gives voice to the options being “highly authoritarian borderless states to radical reconstruction” and transformation to the question: How do we want to live?
Of course this question is not so much about natural life or lifespan or individual health as it is about social or public life: but since Thatcher and Co. killed it, what weight or importance does the question of society carry?
since the health of the nation is pegged on economic health: 2 trillion Federal Reserve dollars are not for medical but financial aid.
…then there is the 1971 interview in which Foucault and Chomsky face off:
Foucault concedes that he allows very little to individual creativity.
It will be a matter of epistemic change. And we cannot know the factors beforehand which will drive it.
As Deleuze might say, we need to keep a look out.
Restraining the discussion of COVID 19 to that about the unity of a National Subject–as its transcendental condition and at the same time naturalising historic Nationalism to procure immunity–when that immunity is from the dissensus of individual dissent as from consensus, because it cannot be a crisis of the social order, and its acts will not be claimed by government: whose acts are more in line with a kind of autoimmunity to its own authoritarian moves (insisting on voluntarism in self isolation and social distancing)–or restraining the discussion to one about how we effectively mobilise, well these of course are not about creative dimensions pointing towards anything but more of the same.
And it may be a good long time of counting the death toll before we tend to count the toll taken on the social or the public realm. Politics have long since ceased to be representative of this realm.
That is public passions run contrary to politics as they are currently practiced.
the question will not be what to do?
but how to do it together, as Srećko Horvat points out
then how to free doing it together from the communicative realm, which also no longer coincides with the social or with social passions, as even Chomsky can see
social distancing is a fact of social media
self isolation is a fact of communicative networks
What to look out for then are breaks in the continuities
the major continuities of our generally backward-looking ways of talking about what’s going on, our memorial approaches,
what to look out for then are changes of habit, cracks that tend to deepen
and jump from one area of public discourse to another
electricity.
Leave a Reply