The Wall is a Virus
I am writing this in the moment when the COVID-19 crisis is hitting hard in Germany. In Peru, Morocco, Denmark, Spain, Italy and many other places, the almost total lockdown of society has already taken place. A few days ago, France declared war against the virus. Most of the borders are closed for people considered migrants: if you are not from the country, you cannot go (back) in. Last year, Tlaxcala3 in Mexico and TIER in Berlin started a collaborative project titled Objects Before and After the Wall [1] with the intuition of putting forward the wall as a negative symbol connecting past and present conflicts; the wall is a device that defines which degree of being-human any person is. The much needed contingency plans spreading around and alongside the virus show us a lesson we will need to remind ourselves of in the future, that the very same countries that have been closing their frontiers to refugees are the very same ones talking about saving lives now.
Luckily, most countries are not following the example of the current UK Prime Minister, who years ago praised the town mayor in the film Jaws. In the film, the mayor insisted on keeping the beaches open for profit-making, regardless of people losing their lives [2]. The Prime Minister, very much aligned with this fictional mayor, said that people needed to simply keep swimming. Against the opinion of most citizens, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom followed his own joke from years ago. He proposed that very same strategy against the Coronavirus in an attempt at obtaining herd immunity: if we allow as many people as possible to get the disease, they would eventually develop the antibodies and firewalls against the virus. Needless to say, epidemiologists strongly advised against the strategy, and this brainless plan was in fact changed.
The pandemic needs close collaboration between citizens and governments. Mutual aid is fundamental, especially in giving psychological support. Many examples are already on view elsewhere: in Italy, neighbours give concerts on balconies; in Spain, general ovations for public health officials / workers take place everyday; distribution networks for those in need are being created in many cities; truck drivers reinforce their mutual support… Collaboration is the only way of overcoming this situation. So far, as of March 18th, media reports indicate that there are two successful models to address the pandemic—both closely connected to technological strategies. The first one to be looked at carefully, implemented by China, puts forward strict control measures over population. The second, in South Korea, is based on close collaboration between citizens and government. In either case, border restrictions strongly apply.
The new situation is also a massive social experiment of global control, the consequences of which will have a great impact on biopolitics. There are radical changes happening due to the crisis. As has occurred with any war or conflict—such as the September 11 attacks or any other terrorist menace (right-wing terrorism would not be included)—social organisation and mobility will dramatically provoke a paradigm shift.
Among others, there are four interwoven elements that would need to be looked at closely once the virus is contained. The credibility of left-wing parties already in government—or the progressive ones in their struggle for recognition—are going to be highly affected by how they deal with these topics. In response to it, social and cultural organisations must work towards rethinking these issues and must continue to come up with new ways of producing communities.
The first elements to be considered are racism and xenophobia. In recent years, we have witnessed how the governments of the West lost their sense of humanity; now they will probably think they have a free path towards anti-migrant discourse. One of the first comments by the President of the United States reinforced the idea that a wall at the Mexican border is even more necessary now. Fascist parties in Europe insist on the closure of borders for non-Europeans. Recently, we have seen the tremendous violence against war refugees on the Greek border with Turkey. In Lesbos, people are basically left to rely on luck to survive. This new situation exacerbates the never-ending refugee crisis and it wrongly insists on the idea of Europe as a fortress. The war against the virus, as declared by the President of France, cannot be a war against migrants as well. Finding strategies to maintain the diversity of communities would be key for reconstructing the social sphere after the pandemic ends, and a way to continue saving lives. A human is a human; there are no different levels of being human. If the COVID-19 crisis is about making a collective consciousness out of this, then it must be applied beyond borders. Borders and aid should remain open and by any means necessary in order to contain the disease, instead of people.
Secondly, the fear of new pandemics would set new control strategies over populations [3]. If after the September 11 attacks many people allowed a reduction of privacy in exchange for security, the technological protocols of both successful models of containment—China and South Korea—will be applied globally and at different levels. Let’s not forget that it was precisely when the September 11 attacks sadly took place, that the technological apparatus was intensively developed and the network came into being. Perhaps it may have been that the permissiveness of accessibility to our data by corporations was modulated in advance; however, it is clear that the impact of the control strategies applied in the 2000s and afterwards. The fact that we all allow tech companies to collect personal information, geo-location or even the desires we may have, would not have been possible a few decades ago.
Very much in connection with the development of the entanglement between state control and algorithmic technology, is the exploitative model that devastates lands and communities in the Global South, worsened the long trail left by the colonial enterprise. The activities of tech corporations have left a severe footprint in different territories across the globe, but mainly in countries of the South: the need for resources in terms of energy, water and rare minerals to fulfill their production needs has brought entire communities under conditions of mass impoverishment and violence, as one can see in Congo, or in Chile. These conditions have been brought on by very aggressive control measurements, in order to pursue the development of the fabrication of digital devices. The network in the cloud is actually quite material and terrestrial—it is brought about by radically worsening the lives of the South. Technologies of control and material exploitation of lands and workers come hand in hand. And so does climate and its consequences, as we can sadly see with the recent devastations in Mozambique and Puerto Rico.
The impact that corporations have on our lives is undoubtedly strong. We have witnessed how recent elections were affected by social media campaigns based on fake news. However, the influence goes even further in neoliberal modulations of micropolitics: beyond disciplinary systems of control, corporations have understood that the battlefield is also molecular, that they go beyond already-controlled state policies [4]. After the current pandemic is over, the control of individuals under the blending of state and technological corporations will be reinforced. The combination of these technologies with authoritative governments will be a disaster for democratic and autonomous thinking. The struggle in keeping privacy private, along with free opinion and free movement, will be a great one.
A third point to consider is the concept of social distancing. How can anyone imagine any recent demonstration under this notion? The very last case was the feminist 8M. Many friends were concerned with the virus after participating in the gathering. As we know with Glissant, Lorde, Preciado or Bifo, politics are not possible without a certain (or even great) degree of eroticism: the capacity of being together, feeling the bodies of others and producing a common consciousness. The challenge then is how to produce this being together: a feeling of touch or closeness while being far away. For many, it will take time and effort to lose their newfound fear of being close to others. We need to imagine new ways of being together beyond the physical restrictions of the virtual. Our political, social and cultural life depends on it.
Lastly, it will affect workers’ rights. In recent years, the struggle has been against the precariousness left by the last crisis in Western societies, but also, the long lasting exploitation of the rest of the world by Western economies. The general impoverishment of working conditions of workers’ lives of the last decade was made under the sign of the (false) recovery of the economy. What we’re seeing instead is how richness has been flowing from bottom to top (and from South to North) tirelessly, leaving the working class everywhere under increasingly worsening circumstances. The financial class has been sucking the blood of workers globally. For instance, a general model of working as freelancers instead of working under contracts is widespread. This means that things like health insurance are the responsibility of the individual, instead of the employers. Out of necessity, everybody has become a brand of oneself, and therefore common struggles are more difficult to organize. The idea of the union has to be recovered, rethought, and redrawn. Is it the time of organizing a new Internationale?
Paraphrasing William Burroughs, walls are a virus: always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts—this is done by dumping on the same planet life forms with incompatible conditions of existence. There is of course nothing “wrong” about any given life form since “wrong” only has reference to conflicts with other life forms. The struggle against the wall is still and will be even more of a pressing one. As cultural workers, we operate within the imaginary of a society. Providing images, platforms and strategies for tearing down any wall is a task also for us. COVID-19 will be probably one of the epic histories of our generation. The direction of the myth around it is still to be made.
Bibliography:
Thanks to Zöe Claire Miller, Eli Cortiñas, John Holten, Joaquín Jesús Sánchez, Sandra Nicoline Nielsen, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Chaveli Sifre and Fermín Jimenez Landa.
[1] See online at: http://theinstituteforendoticresearch.org/wp/projects-current/objects-before-and-after-the-wall/
[2] SÁENZ DE URIARTE, IÑIGO: “Boris Johnson, el alcalde de ’Tiburón’ y la arriesgada estrategia contra el coronavirus en Reino Unido”. See: https://www.eldiario.es/internacional/Coronavirus-Boris-Johnson_0_1006149762.html
[3] KLEIN, NAOMI: The Shock Doctrine, Allen Lane/Penguin Books, New York, 2007. See: https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/61852-focus-naomi-klein-coronavirus-is-the-perfect-disaster-for-disaster-capitalism?fbclid=IwAR0PU0gkMAHZLpF0-z9DR1GpsffrRmHdvghT0EA2C603KAR14IL_xM_iz-8
[4] SZTULWARK, DIEGO: La ofensiva sensible. Neoliberalismo, populismo y el reverso de lo político , Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2019.
