The last sparks
Ivan Isaev
7th April 2020
“Finally a family of five got out of a Datsun Maxima. They wore life jackets and carried flares. Small crowds collected around certain men. Here were the sources of information and rumor. One person worked in a chemical plant, another had overheard a remark, a third was related to a clerk in a state agency. True, false and other kinds of news radiated through the dormitory from these dense clusters.
It was said that we would be allowed to go home first thing in the morning; that the government was engaged in a cover-up; that a helicopter had entered the toxic cloud and never reappeared; that the dogs had arrived from New Mexico, parachuting into a meadow in a daring night drop; that the town of Farmington would be uninhabitable for forty years.
Remarks existed in a state of permanent flotation. No one thing was either more or less plausible than any other thing. As people jolted out of reality, we were released from the need to distinguish.”
Excerpt From: Don DeLillo White Noise
Don DeLillo published the novel White Noise, a story about the daily lives of Everyman existing under the permanent threat of catastrophe (the prototype of state of emergency), in 1985. This happened a year prior to the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (the Airborne Toxic Event, a massive cloud over the city, poetically is a precise incarnation of the existent nuclear energy that spun out of control), way before the state of emergency described by Giorgio Agamben has come to define the order of control in different countries, and 35 years before the concept of the state of emergency truly gained a singular character tying together the entire planet in attempts to conceal the coronavirus pandemic. Suddenly, we find ourselves trapped in a movie with unpredictable plot twists, where events and associated restrictions that appeared to be only possible as elements of cinematic suspense stormed into our lives and at once determined its course. I would like to start my set of recommendations for those who solidified with self-isolation by referring to DeLillo’s novel - read the accurate description of the ensuing “future of volatile catastrophism” - to later turn from the (self-fulfilling?) prophecy to the way how contemporary culture responds to evolving pandemics and how social order is changing in practice.
The social isolation in scope has become a rare example of human cooperation. Using a simple mathematical model, The Washington Post has demonstrated why social isolation is the most important way of joint actions to cope with the virus outspread. However, it is crucial for us to remember that this is in many ways a class phenomenon: not everyone can afford to self-isolate (you need to have at least a home and food supply for several weeks or months even). Anastasia Kalk, a researcher in feminist philosophy and theory, on her telegram channel, emphasizes why it is crucial to demand the right to a basic income - this is the moment when the matter of survival forces governments to abstain from the market-driven logic and decision making, and when in the state of rising uncertainty and instability the political reasoning starts to exceed economic one. Several days later the Moscow cultural community likewise issued an open letter.
Yet, it is not that simple.
Unlike the social isolation, the isolation among nations is an act contrary to cooperation, rather an embodiment of extreme selfishness and survivalism - their actions remind one of the predators, it is every man for himself. Artist Mika Plutitskaya observed that the postmodernist issue of a global migrating pandemic is being ‘treated’ with modernist practices. All resources remain within their borders and are aimed at helping certain passport holders. The singularity of the state of emergency turned out to be deceptive and fragmented; the quintessential absurdity of such an approach was Trump’s suggestion to buy out the exclusive distribution rights in the United States from a German firm developing a possible coronavirus vaccine. Inhuman conditions in the refugee camps (for instance, in Turkey and Greece), making them particularly vulnerable to the pandemic, attract much less attention from the authorities as well as the media - the segregation of human lives into worthy of attention and care, and those who are not, happens long before the dilemma of who will be attached to the ventilator on a hospital bed.
Judith Butler writes about this in her article. ‘The virus alone does not discriminate’, it puts us equally at risk of falling ill, death or losing someone close. The virus does not recognize the national borders, it is extremely democratic! It is us, people, who make these borders and constantly segregate human communities into those whose lives worthy of grief and those whose lives could be neglected; the lives of those who should be protected against death at all costs and who ‘are considered not worth safeguarding’; under the private healthcare system - erecting the impenetrable walls between the insured, the uninsured, and the uninsurable.
Boundaries and walls, its dialectics of permeability and transparency, and paradoxes, divisions, conflicts, and affects around those phenomena, are consistent in the brilliant video by Lawrence Abu Hamdan. In my opinion, Walled Unwalled is one of the most remarkable works of the past year.
Another striking and relevant short video concerning “coronavirus capitalism” reminds us that seemingly impossible ideas suddenly become possible. But whose ideas? Naomi Klein, an author of the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, points out that after a shocking event (a war, terrorist attack, market crash, or environmental disaster) the right-wing governments affiliated with corporate interests exploit the public’s disorientation to further suspend democracy and push through radical uncontrollable policies of so-called ‘Darwinist market’ (yes-yes, there is no contradiction here) enriching the entitled 1 per cent at the expense of the rest 99 per cent. The United States has demonstrated the way fight against coronavirus is being handled, where the lives of people are left in the hands of the insurance companies while the country is leading in the numbers of officially confirmed cases (and yes, the 99 per cent of the infected population has no choice for self-isolation, they have to work in order to survive). The attempts to take advantage of a disaster arises wherever a group of people has too much power in its hands. For instance, the city authorities of Moscow used quarantine as an excuse to start the construction of the highway on top of a former nuclear waste dump.
The self-isolation as a form of cooperation in the wake of the pandemic is not sufficient. People should cooperate in their political demands - including demands in equal access to safe, secure existence reinforced with an unconditional basic income and fundamental rights and freedoms. The times of crisis are characterized by increasing volatility, so why not turn this around for the sake of our own benefit as happened back in the 1930s after the Great Depression when the American population achieved implementation of main social security policies?
The various strategies of cooperation among players amidst disorderly increasing volatility were explored in the game Fireworks and Gunpowder by Kirill Savchenkov. This work was shown at the exhibition Bureau Des Transmissions at the Garage Museum one year before the current crisis - and it is definitely time to recall it. The artist’s work is another example of how events imagined just prior to the crisis later transformed into reality.
I’d like to end this text with a reference to an old article by John Russell - on accelerationism and accelerated repetitionism. Alain Badiou notes in his lines that in fact, the current crisis is not particularly exceptional. We find ourselves in the situation of humanitarian problems and epidemics, which actually occurred back in the 20th century, and even the 21st - moreover, the very “true” labelling of coronavirus before it was given name COVID-19 is Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-2; therefore, even the syndrome that alarmed the whole planet has nothing unique about it - the only key difference is in the epicentre that is shifting to the Western world.
The generous scatter of links shared here is merely a pinch of information currently being published online by the institutions. You, visitors who suddenly come to be readers, have been swept by the number of allocated materials by cultural institutions in the rush to move online like a crowd rushing toward only fire exit from the explosions and cracking ceiling at the trade centre. As if the publications are sending a message to their audience that the institution is still alive and has not been struck by coronavirus yet, functions normally and is capable of producing the same amount of content ‘as before’. Yet what is this humming noise of many voices? It consonants to the acceleration of ongoing production which even when has good intentions leads to apocalyptic repetitionism as suggested by Russell. This is particularly ironic in times of cataclysm that can be minimized by a collective pause. The simple pause to the greatest extent possible. Essentially, terminating or delaying all the unnecessary productions and processes. Fully abolishing any kind of rental payments for the duration of the quarantine. Disbursing funds and resources for people all over the globe allowing them to get through these times of pandemic (which in the case of compliance with quarantine rules will not last for longer than two months). Perhaps, it is finally worth truly decelerating? Or do we dread being alone with our thoughts and our own?
Coronavirus brings us curious statistics. According to conservative assessments, the suspension of hazardous industrial operations for two months and a decrease in toxic emissions saved the lives of more than 77 thousand people in China alone. However, these tens of thousands of lives are not the ones we usually draw attention to in our society. Three thousand deaths caused by the virus in China triggered an informational earthquake incomparably larger unlike the number of deaths caused by respiratory illnesses owing to air pollution there annually.
Lastly, I want to include the soundtrack to go along with this post. Idioteque from Radiohead perfectly fits the feeling of contemporary catastrophism.
I'll laugh until my head comes off
I'll swallow till I burst
Ivan Isaev is an independent curator, based in Moscow. He curated platform Start, Winzavod, season 2014-15, and “Leaving Tomorrow” exhibition (2015, Moscow), participated at Infra-Curatorial Platform at 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016). He is a co-founder of «Triangle» curatorial studio (Moscow, 2014-2016) and later initiated platform blind_spot. Ivan Isaev is now a curator of Garage Studios program at Garage MCA, Moscow and sends his kind regards from his cosy self-isolation spot in the Abramtsevo village.
Translated by Tamara Khasanova, edited by Ira Konyuhova
The Russian version of this text is published at Arts of the Working Class newspaper.