<nettime> virus Covid-19 A politics of arrival

[Siraj Izhar | publiclife <s-i@publiclife.org>]

Listening to debates on the avoidability of the current grim state, if 
this piece on "A politics of arrival, Covid-19" contributes to an 
understanding on the timeline of the epidemic's arrival through other 
contentions, by all means share it on the list.
It's written in plain speak and the original of 29th March is at: 
http://amplife.org/blog/politics_of_arrival_covid_19

The arrival of the corona virus Covid-19 in Europe was staggered,
uneven, belated and sudden. The first reported case of infection may
have been on the 27th of January 2020 in Germany, but the virus as a
political body arrived in Europe sometime at the start of March. I
say political body to draw out a couple of things. The first is the
time lag, two months of inaction. We knew the virus was coming but it
barely caused a ripple. Life was business as usual. The second is of
course that a virus has no body but that it needs one, a surrogate
body in order to become a subject of regulation, of control. That
means by its regulation the virus itself becomes the subject of
completely different narratives on arrival at different places. The
virus of course is oblivious to them all.

We can look at both in a timespan between December and March. To start
at the beginning in Wuhan very early in December 2019 when the virus
made the jump to the human body. From that moment onwards the virus
was the subject of political manipulation. The doctor in Wuhan Li Wen
Liang who sounded the alarm of its existence to his fellow medics
on the 30th December 2019 was immediately detained by the Chinese
government charged with spreading false rumours. He died a month later
from the virus. The doctor's leak forced the Chinese state to formally
confirm the existence of the corona virus in a new strain. We could
say the virus arrived that day, the 7th February 2020. Or then maybe
a week later? - when the Chinese Health authorities released its gene
sequence to the world. But the space and time in the weeks before in
December and the way they served the Chinese state to keep a lid on
it still dogs the mind. Much happened in that time undisclosed before
Dr Li Wen Liang could come out. December returns again and again in
an ongoing struggle between the authorities own pronouncements and
China's citizen activists.

But what was taking place in Europe (in place of any preventative
thinking) is not an untypical example of a viral imagination to embody
things. Or how the corona virus dropped into our fake news times.
Climate change alarmists and deniers were pushed off the table by
corona virus alarmists and deniers. The action was online. Reading
social media I could separate out two strands of discussion on the
virus – one that began with Chinese eating habits and the other on
the advantages of Chinese authoritarian rule in the social control of
an epidemic.

As the first strand evolved, a telling feature was how the focus on
the Chinese broadened out uncritically to people and cultures in other
parts of the globe who still have a direct relationship with natural
habitats; in a lurid way as stories of bush meat merged with Oriental
wet markets in even the broadsheets. Senegal and Guinea became as much
the site of discussions as Wuhan. Vital differences, the implications
of these crossovers were unstated or lost in the spaces of measured
debate. The debate about industrial monoculture, its footprint, its
viruses and its extortion of Nature fell into the background. The
connection between our life style demands and the daily loss of forest
and natural habitat – 80,000 acres every day - and how that fuels an
illicit trade in wildlife was secondary to a modern demonology of the
primitive lumped onto others. The silent terror we inflict on Nature
that found a voice through the virus was silenced.

At the same time, we watched the images in Wuhan as the Chinese
tried to contain an epidemic now killing thousands. The lock down,
the round-up of infected suspects for quarantine, the sealing of
apartments. The jailing of whistle blowers and dissenters. This was
about China and its totalitarianism. So in our viral minds two strands
of controlling an epidemic and of social repression combined. But in
a space of the Other and not the us. The two months paradoxically
created the feeling of a safe sanitised distance. This was a politics
of non-arrival.

On the 11th of February 2020, the World Health Organisation officially
named this new corona virus Covid-19 and declared a global pandemic.
It was another moment of arrival, now of an Inauguration. Not that
it caused a stir but by the 1st of March it was clear that the
pandemic/epidemic had settled here in Europe, in the West. Covid-19
was now in territory with a mindset very different to that of the
Chinese state. Another post-imperial space but bound by liberal laws
in a belief system by which it could set itself apart. A belief system
naturalised into affirmations that encompassed Nature and Society,
that expected Nature to behave differently inside it as opposed to
outside.

We can see this in how its leaders chose to play with its name. What
mattered was the signposting to the population leveraged by its
political system as a vote bank. Most telling was Donald Trump's White
House with China virus and kung flu even as late as 18 March 2020. The
language had to be so clear to be effective - to assure the vote bank
that the virus was about the elsewhere. The virus was being placed in
another narrative as the condition of its arrival. The narrative of
an order that came with a fortress mentality – of walls, fences,
sanctions, pre-emptive wars. Its war on terror, the endless war that
buys protection, immunity from the Other. Terror as the means on which
its security is built.

All this was normalised - for what is used against Nature is used
against the Other. It is both how naturalised and normal terror
had necessarily become. But this the virus Covid-19 penetrated.
The psychoanalyst Sergio Benvenuto on the subject of the corona
virus (English version in Corona virus and Philosophers) wrote
of its disruptive potential whereby the norms of the us versus
them, me versus the other “collapse and we’re all equally
dangerous, the gipsy is no more dangerous than my own daughter, racist
categorizations lose all their mobilising charm at a stroke.” The
virus turns our understanding of terror back to front. It tells us:
We or You are all terrorists. Everyone becomes equally dangerous; a
bearer of terror without discrimination. Or as Benvenuto writes, “We
are not in danger, we are the danger”.

We are the danger. It's the force of routine which hides that but
the corona virus with its unprecedented assault on routine marked
another moment of arrival - when the foundational belief in "back to
business as usual" lost its surety. That now is both a compulsion and
a doubt. The one subject who recognises it well is the refugee because
the refugee is someone who can not go back. The virus in a way tells
us: We or You are all refugees. The refugee understands that in the
politics of arrival there are always many arrivals if unrecognised but
whereby each goes further from how it was, from the sureties of going
back.


Yet the overwhelming question is, what explains the capacity of
Covid-19 to bring us to this moment? To fracture the routine of human
life at every possible scale. Why the seismic difference from other
viruses, say the HIV virus of the 80s, or more recently the corona
SARS virus of 2003, or the Ebola virus of 2013. Because unlike these
viruses, Covid-19 for most part does not kill; if it did it would kill
its own space of transmission. Rather it exemplifies the rule of 'less
is more'; this virus optimises the time to remain without symptoms in
each transmitting body. And further, Covid-19's transmission from body
to body is almost perfectly non-discriminatory and through the contact
space of the everyday rituals of the normal. That is, the virus
depends on the very normality a social order embodies. It is an attack
on the normal; yet in far more senses than by its use of the normal to
kill the weak. Because it brings out the hidden terror in the normal
indiscriminately and in multiple ways. What that augers beyond arrival
is another story.

Back in early December at a certain time and place (of where it
matters less now), in a so-called Patient 0 the technical term for a
first infected human, virus Covid-19 would have arrived. The certainty
of that arrival as an original moment is lost. It has taken three
months and more but we have seen how its politics of arrival also
unravels through us.





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