liquid governance or, the droplet
March 2020
Social Contact / / / Social Distancing
It’s a simple procedure — remove one element from a complex machine and observe how the machine adapts, compensates, falters or malfunctions. In our present scenario, we have been instructed to remove this one element: social contact. In its absence, we are better able to understand in what it consists, what is its scope and quality. That is the aim of this essay.
We learn very quickly that contact inflects nearly every aspect of our daily lives, so much that we are left with nothing but to “stay home.” The assumption that everyone has a home to stay put in is not questioned. The assumption that one’s home is a safe space, indeed safer than risking coronavirus in public ignores realities of domestic violence, family trauma and emotional abuse. It is assumed that we can and will recoil peacefully into our domestic bubbles where we are safe from social contact. Meanwhile, whatever remainder of our social lives was not already mediated has been swiftly injected into the safe, sanitary virtual space of the Internet, where only memes go viral. It’s the perfect storm for data hungry media corporations, machine learning advertising and info-stalking surveillance firms. We can at least go for a walk (for now), as long as we keep six feet apart — the mandated minimum of “social distancing.”
We are reassured by our medical experts that the novel Covid-19 is not airborne, but transmits through droplets of mucus expelled by an infected carrier. These droplets are supposed to fall to the ground within the six feet of social distance. We know however that the distinction between an aerosol (a microbe that remains airborne for extended periods of time) and a droplet (a microbe that drops sooner than later) is an arbitrary and disputed distinction, as is the six feet minimum distance. It’s simply a matter of scale: a five micron diameter is the cutoff for aerosols, anything larger is considered a droplet. Technically speaking aerosols are simply small droplets, and innumerable factors impact whether and for how long a droplet will remain airborne, as well as how far it can travel. The point here is not whether coronavirus is or is not airborne, but that such social distancing measures reveal the stubborn fact that we were always already immersed in an imperceptible fog of relatively airborne mucus droplets. An invisible social ecology of shared fluids emerges in absentia. If this sounds unappealing, it is our notion of social contact that was always at a culturally sanctioned distance from its own reality. Social contact itself becomes a misnomer as it is revealed to be more of a stubborn, sticky social immersion. There is no outside to the epidemiological field.
The problem is not how to socially distance now. The problem is that we have always thought ourselves to be at a certain remove, from each other, from the environment, from the messy mesh of life and its contagious vitality.
It seems to me no coincidence that the mandated distance of six feet evokes the colloquial “six feet under” of the dead. Our social distancing discourse forebodes exactly that: “stay six feet apart or you might end up (or put someone else) six feet under.” The fear of mortality subtends the panic surrounding viral outbreaks. Death is airborne, so to speak. But as Slavoj Žižek points out,[3] quoting yourdictionary.com, a virus itself dwells in limbo between the living and dead, “considered as being non-living chemical units or sometimes as living organisms.” Much as national borders are easily traversed by the virus, the line separating life from death is crossed and blurred. The virus can be said to “live” insofar as it seeks to replicate itself and, in so doing, moves. The virus reminds us that movement is the basis of vitality: the crossing of boundaries, the parasitic passage between bodies, the invisible flight of a mobile microbe that cannot be integrated into the closed system but reveals instead how helplessly porous that system is. We are suddenly reminded of this as Covid-19 lands quietly on the moist bed of our open throats. It may sound counter intuitive from the vantage point of life under quarantine, but our survival depends precisely on the opposite of social distancing.
It would not be too farfetched to say that the extermination of mankind begins with the extermination of germs. Man, with his humours, his passions, his laughter, his genitalia, his secretions, is really nothing more than a filthy little germ disturbing the universe of transparency. Once everything will have been cleansed, once an end will have been put to all viral processes and to all social and bacillary contamination, then only the virus of sadness will remain.[4]
We won’t pity Richard Dawkins for his emo boy sadness, nor will we excuse him for using “mankind,” “man,” and “he/him” in 2006 as universal signifiers for human beings. What Dawkins does get right is the fact that these expulsions of the body, this filthy remainder figured by the droplet and mobilized by the virus, these are the very fabric of sociality and of life itself (and, it seems, of joy). Our social ecology is comprised of shifting configurations of mutual contamination on a microscopic scale. Bodies are linked through the passage of the droplet in the composition of life. The droplet demands a rethinking of the notion of the body itself, as well as of death. An ecological social body emerges, while death becomes the immobility of an aseptic distance. Death is the denial of the droplet and its imperceptible drift. In our self-imposed social distance, our cloistered cleanliness, we are more “dead-while-living” than the archetype of the living dead: the zombie.[5] If the virus does not kill us, we will have removed ourselves only further from the immersive field of life.
In this sense we should speak of “non-life” rather than death, as actual death is teemingly alive. The human ritual of burial, from the earliest times, aimed to separate the body from nature that would otherwise enfold and transform the living matter of our flesh through decay. Nowadays we embalm our dead, dress them up in Sunday’s best and seal them in a weatherproof box to guard them from the voracity of nature and, more urgently, to protect ourselves from the contagion of whatever violence had signaled their demise. But no matter how hard we try, we cannot deny our immersion in the humid, sticky mess of the living. It was St. Augustine of Hippo who pointed out that “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur” or, for those who don’t read Latin (me neither): “we are born amidst shit and piss.” How’s that for sanitary social distancing?
Let’s not get too graphic though. This rethinking of social contact is more palatably figured by the droplet. The droplet is our little social secret. It blurs the lines of the body, creating a social body of shared microscopic matter. Being imperceptible, its suppression requires impartial adoption of social distancing measures — a carrier may be asymptomatic. But social distancing is no more novel than the flu. Only its supposed impartiality is new. When social distancing is partial, it is called a taboo. A taboo concerns a social prohibition of contact. The untouchable thing or body is assumed to possess unknown and dangerous powers, to be avoided under the rubric of contagion. Examples include cadavers, waste, vermin, feces, blood (especially menstrual blood), detached body parts like finger nails or hair, and sexual acts, especially (for Freud) incest. Taboos also isolate groups and individuals that society is unable to assimilate: racialized minorities, immigrants, sex workers, mobs, the secret society, the thief, the homeless, the nomad, the insane, the ill, the witch, the queer, the mystic, the poet. These heterogeneous elements are unamenable to homogenous social life. The taboo provokes repulsion, even nausea and disgust. An insuperable gap is maintained by social conventions, cultural stereotyping, structures of segregation such as racist urban planning policy, educational barriers, economic oppression and state violence.
The city of Detroit offers a contemporary case study. June Manning Thomas’ 1997 report, Race, Racism, and Race Relations: Linkage with Urban and Regional Planning Literature, was the first to detail the complex history of racial discrimination in urban planning and its role in the city’s postindustrial decline. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, restrictive zoning covenants, limited access to banking, insurance and other social services created insurmountable structural barriers for black inner-city residents. The postwar decades saw the large scale migration of middle-class white families out of the city into the sprawling suburbs, known as “white flight,” a process that was observed in several other American cities, notably Cleveland, Kansas City and Oakland. Today a six-foot-high concrete wall constructed in 1941 still runs through the backyards of homeowners living off of 8 Mile Road. The wall was built to separate black families from their white neighbors, a violent, visible reminder that forms of social distancing in urban policy and housing continue today. For example, why does the recently built tramline that runs down Woodward Avenue stop right before the boarder of Royal Oak, a predominantly white suburb? Answer: Royal Oak residents lobbied to keep inner-city residents out of their neighborhood.
This is an important reminder that the sense of distance and precarity that we feel now, the sense of isolation and uncertainty, of a diffuse threat that lingers in the air around us — this is a new sensation only for people of incredible privilege who have lived their lives in the peaceful eye of the social storm, there at the untroubled center of the determination of value and the doling out of discriminate social distances. How strange, the educated trust-funded able-bodied cis-gendered white male ponders to himself (as he puffs on his cigarette), how STRANGE it is to see complete strangers swerve around me on the sidewalk to maintain six feet of distance! This is how it must feel for the outcasts, the filthy and homeless! The less obscenely privileged of us begin to suspect that social distancing under quarantine is only the recapitulation of a theme that has been ringing in our ears all along. The immigrant has always been treated like a virus who, unbidden, crosses the boundaries of the national body-politic. Unable to be integrated into the closed social system, the immigrant must be excised, either by political force — criminal detention, denial of status, the closing of borders — or by cultural force — stereotyping, segregation, taboo. The same logic leads to violent social distancing practices such as the mass incarceration of racialized communities and the serial murders of women, trans, indigenous and people of color. Those living in precarity know too well that procedures of social distancing have always been at play.
Liquid Governance
What provokes social distancing at the micro as well as the macro level is the fact of movement, the swarm of the droplet and its unruly, imperceptible drift. On the macro scale, the inevitability under conditions of globalization of a transnational social contamination provokes the intensification of control apparatuses, bureaucratic governments, law and order, borders and prisons, etc. The crucial point is to observe how these procedures function symbiotically, not merely coincidentally or in opposition. Movement and control need each other. They thrive together. We can observe this symbiotic relationship at the macro scale between globalized, neoliberal capitalism (which is nothing but a boundary-crossing circulation machine) and the reactionary doubling down of boundary policing by nationalist state power. The history of postmodernity is one of circulation and partitions, the unfettering of movement and the fortification of walls.
It is no mistake that online content is said to “go viral.” Contagion and its containment is the fundamental procedure of techno-capital. Information is the new currency in circulation; algorithms are the new protocol of control. In our hyper-mediated technosphere, algorithmic governance transforms the flux of online sociality into coded information: click, like, swipe. Viral flows of information, commodities and communication are captured, indexed and monetized by private, corporate networks. It is precisely through this interplay between the flows of info-capital and forms of governance that the body-politic is formed. This is liquid governance.[6]
My point here is to show how this logic of liquid governance is applied to the body-politic as well as to the human body — how in both cases movement provokes the production of closed subjective and political forms that appear inevitable but are in fact produced in order that they may be distanced, controlled and organized. The micro scale is concomitant with the macro. “Without a commitment to the ways in which bodies move, bodies become stabilized within national imaginaries in preordained categories, such as citizen, refugee, man, woman, homed, homeless,” Erin Manning writes in Politics of Touch. Under such conditions “the state can claim that its body-politic is unified.”[7] When we speak of the national “body-politic” then, it is not simply a metaphor. We have to ask, whose body is this? After whose image is it crafted? And what economic-political interests does it serve?
Going back to the Dawkins quote, we can imagine, for fun, that he was intentionally referring (with his “Mankind” and gendered pronouns) specifically to male bodied individuals — their humours, passions, laughter, genitalia, their secretions — and suddenly the quote makes a lot more sense. There is something specifically macho about the impulse to cleanse the organism of all excretion and microbial invasion, to close all borders, become impenetrable, firm, distinct, distanced. “A man must hold himself firm and upright, or be ‘sucked in’ by this impure sea…All that is rich and various must be smoothed over (to become like the blank facades of fascist architecture); all that is wet and luscious must be dammed up and contained; all that is ‘exotic’ (dark, Jewish) must be eliminated” Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her forward to Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies.[8] But the firmness of erection only attains through the circulation of blood. Every machine has a fluid that powers it, every motor a fuel that streams through it. The macho nationalism that has been taking office all around the world is not accidental to but is produced by the neoliberal logics of circulation. The streams of capital are the flux that fuels the reassertion of a firm, impenetrable (male) body-politic. Trump was already leading this global campaign. Now everyday a new country closes its borders to try and slow the inevitable spread of Covid-19. We can only expect that this nationalist recoiling will continue to intensify as the panic spreads. But Trump does not only represent the macho, neo-fascist recoiling of the body-politic. He represents the capitalist entrepreneurial production of flows of privatized wealth. Trump is the perfect symbol of the double-headed beast of unruly capitalism and macho nationalism, the very embodiment of liquid governance.
The Prime Minister of Italy: “We are fighting an invisible and insidious enemy that sneaks into our homes, forcing us to redefine our interpersonal relations, and to even be wary of our friends.”[9] This statement can be read in two ways. The first and intended reading is that the novel coronavirus is the invisible enemy that sneaks into our homes and, now under quarantine, forces us to redefine interpersonal relations, to even mistrust our potentially-contagious friends. The alternate reading would be to imagine that the invisible enemy is instead the logic of liquid governance that has long ago snuck into our homes, defined interpersonal relations and caused us to mistrust our friends. Franco “Bifo” Berardi warns:
When friendship dissolves, when solidarity is banned and individuals stay alone and face the darkness of matter in isolation, then reality turns back into chaos and the coherence of the social environment is reduced to the enforcement of the obsessional act of identification.[10]
The dissolution of friendship through procedures of social distancing accompanies the production of subjective forms and identities that permit us to decipher and accept the economic conditions of existence, which are presented as given. Rather than the droplet or even the virus, this production is the real invisible enemy. Colonialism produces the slave body, industrialization produces the proletariat body, globalization produces the immigrant body, techno-capitalism produces the precarious independent contractor, slouched over a laptop at a hip cafe coding backend for big tech. Flows of commodities, workers, money, information are channeled into private counting rooms. Capital surfs on the streams of sweat and blood of slave labor, wage labor, contract labor and debt. What can be said of a civilization in which oil spills yield a profit? What can be said of a world in which the response to dwindling fish stocks is bigger nets and bigger boats? It could be said that capitalism is nothing but one giant distancing machine that parses life and transforms social contact into a technique of death. We are witnessing the total submission of a vital sociality (that extends far beyond the “human”) to the firm regulation of cold financial calculation; this is the conversion of a liquid social body into the fixed national body-politic; this is liquid governance: the provocation of movement, circulation and flows, and the simultaneous intensification of modes of capture, control and management.
Sometimes these flows become unmanageable. Covid-19 traffics directly on the open channels of capital, forcing an unprecedented and complete shutdown of our economic system. “We must put Quebec on pause,” chimed Premier Legault, “for a possible restart on April 13.” The financial imperatives of rent, wages, tuition and debt are revealed in all of their arbitrary glory as they can all be simply deferred until… April 13? Capitalism starts to feel more and more like a rigged game of Monopoly. My goal in this essay is to stress that the formation of the body-politic and the production of our socially distanced individual bodies, these too are arbitrary, rigged and enforced. But this means too that they are amendable. Under normal conditions however, most people’s survival relies so heavily upon the smooth operation of the economic machine that they cannot risk, nor do they have the time or energy to spend imagining other possible worlds. We are now given this time. Time itself is freed from its usual accounting. Personifying the virus, collective Lundi Matin write in Monologue du Virus:
I have come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find. I have come in order to suspend the operation that held you hostage. I have come in order to demonstrate the aberration that “normality” constitutes
…
Thanks to me, for an indefinite time you will no longer work, your kids won’t go to school, and yet it will be the opposite of a vacation. Vacations are that space that must be filled up at all costs while waiting for the obligatory return to work. But now what is opening up in front of you, thanks to me, is not a delimited space but a gaping emptiness. I render you idle.
…
I place you in front of the bifurcation that was tacitly structuring your existences : the economy or life.[11]
Some of us flock to Netflix and Instagram. Others skype with friends and family. Some manage to work. Suddenly everyone is jogging. We are bored, a little aimless, and scared. This is understandable. In moments of fear and instability, desire clings to established forms, seeks familiar channels, invites escapist entertainment. “The greater the destabilization, the more vehemently subjectivity encloses itself in what is established or received, defending it tooth and nail, and may even deploy high levels of violence to ensure its permanence,” writes Suely Rolnik.[12] Modes of social distancing, of control and containment are not only imposed externally but are reproduced from within as we become the dictator of our own possible movement, channellers of desire, masters of the machine. The point to emphasize is this: we cannot escape the immersive field of life. There is no distance from the droplet, no matter how draconian our measures of quarantine become. Of course we must take care of ourselves and our communities by staying healthy and staying home as much as possible. But during this uncertain time it is crucial not to forget that capitalism is founded on the very illusion that our species is always at a certain remove from the vitality of nature, that its death is not also our death. Our current epidemic and its social distancing measures obscure the ongoing epistemic illusion of distance that is the very mandate of our economic way of life.
William S. Burroughs described language as a virus. For Burroughs, humans are infected by the word, the parsing of life into describable units. The only response is to “cut up” language itself, rearranging the fragments to create a new speech, free of control.[13] Similarly, Bifo posits poetry as a line of flight away from the capture of vitality, as poetry presents “what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.”[14] Marx hoped for “a fluidity of function, universal mobility for the worker”[15] in which labor would no longer be alienated from the means of production and surplus value would no longer be extracted from the toil of bodies. [INSERT FEASIBLE TECHNIQUES AND PLAUSIBLE VISIONS FOR OTHER POSSIBLE WORLDS]
Can we imagine a world in which the vital flows of life could be encountered in their shifting, immersive complexity? In which a messy, immersive sociality would be enhanced rather than parsed out, distanced and organized under regimes of control and domination? Can we reactivate the social body through modes of collective intuition, through as of yet unknown sixth senses, rediscovering the undeniable contact that inheres between us and other living beings, between the human species and the planet we inhabit? This historical event asks us not merely to reflect on the lives we live, but to examine the very bodies we inhabit, how they have been produced, with what boundaries and to what ends. It is time for us to mutate like a virus, to imagine mutant worlds of irresistible social contact.
[1] https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1679805/francois-legault-bilan-pandemie-quebec
[2] Tang JW, et al. PLoS One. 2011. JWTANG, A NICOLLE (NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL), J PANTELIC (NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE)
[3] http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/monitor-and-punish-yes-please/?fbclid=IwAR27FbatDyUevz7LanIwtl_U6xjv59QEphqu1pCbUEjoMYI81H1uj-KJqhM
[4] (Dawkins 2006: 131)
[5] The zombie is the quintessential figure of contagion in pop culture, and would be perfectly suited as well to represent the violent histories of social distancing and domination in the West were it not for the complete whitewashing of its roots in Haitian slave mythology. The zombie was the reincarnation of Guinean slaves who took their own lives, forced to remain enslaved even in life after death.
[6] Compare the concept of “crisis governance,” which refers to the promulgation in capitalism of a constant state of crisis in order to induce fear and justify a perpetual state of exception in which governments can exercise heightened measures of control. See To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee, 2014. Liquid governance, in my formulation, takes up concepts from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Paul Virilio, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Arakawa and Gins, among others.
[7] Manning, Politics of Touch,2007, xv.
[8] Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 1985.
[9] NPR News Now — 25 March 2020, 4pm ET
[10] Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Futurability, 2019.
[11] https://lundi.am/What-the-virus-said
[12] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/163107/the-spheres-of-insurrection-suggestions-for-combating-the-pimping-of-life/
[13] See Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 1962, and Ah Pook Is Here, 1979.
[14] The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, 2012.
[15] Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 487.