The shattering of the glass panes of the greenhouse of insolent wealth
Richard Forster1
Ricardo Forster continues in this text the reflections begun in an article published in Página/12 (https://www.clacso.org/entre-el-peligro-y-la-oportunidad/), on the social, cultural, and economic effects that the emergence of COVID-19 is producing worldwide, revealing the reality of a collapsed system that has derailed the train of a humanity lost in its anthropocentric dreams. But also the advent of an opportunity offered to us without guarantees, in the form of a stubborn insistence on abandoning the path of economizing life until life itself is left with nothing.
The total lockdown has begun. What until a few days ago seemed like a somewhat exaggerated script from a Netflix dystopia is becoming everyday experience. The invisible lurks, penetrating every corner of our disturbed, restless, worried lives, desperate for information that will offer us some guidance in the midst of a pandemic that is no longer just about the coronavirus but extends to all social networks and threatens to make our brains, bloated by billions of bits of information, explode. We know everything and we know nothing. We speak the language of the expert amidst a profound ignorance that knows nothing of the implications of this plague that overwhelms us. Conspiracy theories, irresponsible manipulation by top-secret laboratories teetering on the edge of what shouldn't be touched, horrific overcrowding of animals for human consumption, proliferation of genetically modified organisms that end up feeding humans and animals that we then consume without knowing the consequences for our bodies, unaware of what they can unleash (does anyone remember the "mad cow" disease? Do you remember what caused it?). Nietzsche left us with a phrase that is absolutely relevant today: "We moderns have touched everything with our dirty hands." We penetrate the inner workings of life, decipher its code, reconstruct the DNA chain, and feel like gods playing the game of creation. Until a virus spreads from distant China, crosses all real and artificial borders, and unleashes panic and uncertainty. We are told it will take more than a year to develop a life-saving vaccine. We stare at each other in bewilderment, unable to accept the immensity of a time that, given the breakneck speed at which our lives unfold in hyper-consumerist capitalism, seems like an eternity. Accustomed to living in the moment and its fleeting nature, we suddenly discover that everything stops and that today becomes an indecipherable expanse as we remain in our homes awaiting a miracle. Decades of urban overcrowding and congestion, increasingly marked by inequality and gentrification, of bodies circulating without even a glance, of rushing to nowhere, of endless workdays that returned us to our homes exhausted and transformed into zombies. Suddenly, we find ourselves inside a time that expands, envelops us, and unfolds with a slowness we never knew existed. Even what seemed natural becomes a novel experience. All around us, and beyond the silence that pervades our cities, everything is in motion and changing. Speed and slowness intertwine, disrupting our perception of a world we thought we knew, a world that now feels alien and dangerous. Or perhaps it becomes unexpectedly closer to us as we relearn another way of relating to it.
We move between bewilderment and anguish, between the unusual nature of the situation and the rediscovery of distant experiences that take us back to other periods of our lives. The brutal halt to our daily acceleration dismantles our associations and habits, dislodges the autopilot we used to manage our lives until yesterday, and offers us a strange opportunity. Life, we are discovering with dismay, was somewhere else. We had lost it. It had slipped away when time was captured by the productivism of capital, the unbridled consumerism of automatons, and the solipsism of individuals transformed into subjects of a bulletproof narcissism that, nevertheless, has been brutally shaken by the phantasmagorical spread of the virus. We begin to see differently what we no longer saw. We rediscovered the art of conversation with those closest to us, who had become distant specters even though they were right beside us. We returned to our usual readings, knowing that they hold much of what we will need to continue thinking about. We once again felt the passage of time, letting boredom do its work alongside the search for activities to keep us occupied. Surprised and lost, yearning and confused, information maniacs, and simultaneously undergoing a kind of detox from the very thing that invades and moves us. While one part of us wants to cling to the customs and habits that were suspended by the quarantine, the other part is dazzled by the beam of a new light that illuminates our surroundings in a different way. Between the allure of the unknown and the perception of something new opening up to us in the midst of the pandemic, it's as if it were a rare privilege to be on the edge of the precipice. Perhaps an opportunity to pull the emergency brake on the locomotive of progress, as Walter Benjamin wrote at the end of his life? Maybe that disruptive event that interrupts the linear march of a society unaware of its destructive potential? The plague as a real and painful metaphor for the collapse of practices and certainties that no longer serve us to get through these dark days?
Unique moments that carry both danger and opportunity, opening a door for us to escape the trap we're in or simply continuing to lead us toward disaster. A harsh realization that there are no guarantees or safeguards capable of eliminating the dangers that stalk our small and insignificant lives from the perspective of a pandemic that feeds on our own shortcomings and negligence. Surprised, we realize we're running a race with no advantage, that our science and technology offer us little hope of preventing the virus's spread. We revert to old forms of care, employing age-old practices, sheltering in the privacy of our homes as a last resort to flatten—or so the experts tell us—the rising curve of the pandemic, preventing, if we succeed, the collapse of our healthcare systems. In a global economic system that convinced us it was all-powerful, capable of solving all our problems by minimizing risks (and that if something were to happen, insurance companies would step in to protect our assets), we discovered, perplexed and terrified, that we live in danger. Our lives are riddled with the same risk that propaganda portrays. naive It attempted to clear away the cushions of our existence (while a vast portion of humanity lives permanently at risk of illness, hunger, homelessness, lack of clean water and decent housing, violence, and exploitation). The greenhouse no longer protects us and makes humanity a little more equal, fragmented and divided by lines that trace the overwhelming differences between the lesser—the rich and privileged—and the greater—the poor and unprotected. Some, bewildered—for the first time in their lives—discover that there is a socially distant other who can accompany them on a journey to nowhere and with no return. But there are also those who marvel at the emergence of a new spirit of community that manages to overcome the mandatory confinement, which, far from separating, reunites what was previously disconnected. There are days when pessimism prevails, knowing we live in a deranged and suicidal society, and other days when we regain hope that we are experiencing a historical turning point, one that offers us the possibility of rebuilding our battered societies, dreaming of leaving behind the pandemic of capitalism. We teeter between the precipice and solid ground.
We lived through the last few decades as if we sensed that this was going to happen. We were waiting for Godot and we knew that he was already with us, passing through us without us paying him the attention he demanded. Indifference. Complicity. Stupidity. Abuse. Ignorance. Selfishness. Whichever of these attitudes defines us, today we can no longer pretend we don't know anything. The pandemic shattered into a thousand pieces the already long-withered illusion of globalization. His promises have become our polluted and brutally unequal present. A world-economy developed from the matrix of capitalism that exacerbated its most unrestrained and murderous logic is shown in its nakedness, as if all the hinges of all the doors that led us to a fantasy world dominated by the call to enjoyment were jumping at the same time. In our homes, comfortable for some, disastrous and unlivable for many, we move between the certainty of crossing a border into an unknown country and the persistence of all the reflections that come from the world in which we lived until yesterday. Anxious about the possibility of “losing” our privileges born from the blindness of a self-devouring system and excited by the possibility that, we suspect, opens up if we were able to take advantage, in the form of a critical learning of ourselves, of the terrible test to which we are being subjected by life itself. Or do we believe that the pandemic is simply due to the randomness of a virus escaping from some animal to humans, and that we will be able to defeat it thanks to science and technology so we can continue living as if nothing had happened? It is possible that we will overcome this terrifying pandemic, that we will try to return to life as it was before its sudden and devastating arrival; but we also feel that something else, still confusing, yet to be invented and discovered, is waiting for us as a corollary to a crisis that will call everything into question. It is difficult, if not impossible and absurd, for things to resume their normal rhythm as if the shadow had not loomed over society to the point of preventing it from continuing with its maddening blindness. The plague, once again, revealed the reality of a social world sick to the core, of narcissistic individuals capable of drowning themselves in the pursuit of the infinite reproduction of their own image. Selfishness and destruction. The marks of a collapsed system that has derailed the train of a humanity lost in its anthropocentric dreams. But also the advent of an opportunity that is offered to us without guarantees, in the form of a stubborn insistence on abandoning the path of economizing life until life itself is left with nothing. Enthusiasm amidst the threat and the perplexity. We feel that our lives will no longer be the same, but we don't quite understand where we are headed, what the consequences of the pandemic will be. Between fear and expectation, between wanting to return to the day before we knew we were vulnerable and beginning to imagine the possibility of a great transformation that seems to be starting to emerge when truths and certainties are collapsing around us, automated mechanical actions within societies incapable of looking inward to seek other paths.
Surely the system—and its direct beneficiaries—will seek to maintain and expand its power, wanting to exploit the terror gripping us to ensnare us even further within its machinery. It will try to convince us that victory is the result of its marvelous laboratories working tirelessly for the good of humanity. It will tell us to calmly return to the streets of consumption, to consume more than ever to revive the economy and thus grow again. It will ask us to leave the past and its horrors behind and to let ourselves be guided by the demiurges of a world fully domesticated by science and digital technologies, a world where restless and disruptive questions abound, questions that multiplied when the pandemic shattered what was known and accepted. Just as the productivist and economic speed devoured the time of living, which now returns to us under the paradox of quarantine, we will see, if we break free from its bear hug, how calls for the mystification of everything that led us headlong into disaster proliferate once more. They will want us to forget the bonds of solidarity we learned to forge amidst the plague; they will try to make us abandon the illusions of states capable of upholding the rights of their citizens to live with dignity and without having to endure the privatizing depredation of healthcare systems; they will try to convince us that the only way out is to let ourselves be rescued by science, technology, and the market, dismantling the lessons learned in these months in which we began to recover some of our lost memory. As if it were a Chinese curse, “we will not cease to live in interesting times.”
From ancient times we have known, or sensed, that suffering opens our eyes and exposes our shortcomings and our forgetfulness. That “happiness leaves blank pages in history,” as Hegel said, with an excess of realism but by no means of naiveté. We begin to learn when the truth of the world shatters, when what pleased us falls apart, in that very archaic moment when our fusion with the totality of natural life was torn apart for us and cast us into the open air, the mother of all questions and of our human journey. In recent decades, amidst the unchecked expansion of capitalism in its neoliberal phase, questions were silenced as the masses rushed toward artificial paradises, driven by a call to pleasure that, as could be expected in unequal societies, only reached a small portion of a humanity increasingly trapped in the imaginary world of consumerism and forgetting the art of questioning, of being unsettled, and of marveling at the course of existence. Guaranteed satisfaction for those inside the greenhouse, frustrated illusion for those irremediably left on the other side of the wall. COVID-19 shattered the greenhouse windows, making the entire edifice of insolent wealth creak. Contagion does not discriminate; it strikes those who thought they were safe because they had the money to pay for private healthcare, and also those who celebrated the end of the "paternalistic state," a black hole through which "unbearable" taxes disappeared, preventing markets from becoming even more liberalized. It exposes the consequences of murderous policies that operated to the tune of financial speculation and market deregulation while rejoicing in the dismantling of state instruments intended to protect the majorities abandoned to their fate.
But it is also evidence of anesthetized and profoundly desocialized individuals, lacking those indispensable and ancient mechanisms that shaped human societies. As if the virus were revealing what we left behind on the path to the chimera of shopping center And of technological devices capable of solving all our problems. To question ourselves again, to examine what is happening to us, to ask ourselves about the frenzied march of a world captured by the thirst for immeasurable profits. Questions that, in turn, delve into paths we no longer travel and that confront us with the enormity of our forgetfulness or our existential and spiritual emptiness. Once launched, there is no way to stop the shockwave of questioning.
There are voices that rise up imagining that the global pandemic will put capitalism in check (Žižek, for example); other voices that imagine a Chinese solution, articulated as an authoritarian-police state and dominated by the Big Data as the key instrument that has allowed countries like South Korea, Singapore, Japan, and China to more successfully combat the spread of COVID-19; an alternative focused on the greater willingness of these societies to engage in collective action and accept the controls and direction of a unified power (Byung-Chul Han and, in part, Naomi Klein support this conclusion). We are witnessing the brutal crisis of the “Western model of individual and public freedoms,” which has proven incapable of confronting the challenge of the virus. However, Han argues, we should not expect a future beyond capitalism from this crisis, but rather a way out in the form of a marriage between more market economy and more social surveillance. Even the decisions to intensify quarantines and, therefore, to extend social isolation, ultimately represent a further expansion of the vices of the solipsistic individual who only has the time and inclination to think about himself while remaining chained to the prison of his own self-exploitation through teleworking, which, we are told, is here to stay and one of the consequences of the plague. The sharp and corrosive skepticism that typically runs through the work of the Korean-German philosopher becomes even more explicit in the face of the pandemic. For him, only an abstract rethinking of the modes of production, consumption, and life can help us cope with the consequences of a system that is ruining the planet and us along with it. He tends to think that, once again, capitalism emerges from crises strengthened in its tendency toward concentration and the social imposition of its organizational premises.
But the truth is, whether we subscribe to Žižek's thesis of a future beyond capitalism or to Byung-Chul Han's view of an authoritarian and vigilant intensification of that same capitalism, we are at a point of no return, at the heart of a catastrophe magnified by an economic-productive system that has followed the path of depleting natural resources, blindly advancing toward the increasing damage of the biosphere, while simultaneously decimating all forms of life not reducible to profitability. The virus, with its capacity to spread globally, only serves to highlight the self-destructive nature of capitalism, its persistent negotiation with the limitless that has led it to transgress absolutely everything without even considering the consequences of its actions. Just as COVID-19 has the capacity to multiply infinitely unless something stops it, capitalism has revealed itself as a system that reproduces itself without being able to stop on its own, making this unstoppable expansion its very essence. Is COVID-19 the reality of capitalism? Are we witnessing the irrelevance of a system that has reproduced itself using the mechanisms of artificiality and fiction? We have gone from the saturation of the irrelevant in the form of the perpetual call to consumerist enjoyment to discovering that in an instant, the significant becomes insignificant. Does this stark emergence of the system's reality imply that, once the pandemic has passed, and beyond the damage it will cause, we will be able to do something with the experience we have lived through? Will we be able, contradicting Giorgio Agamben, to "experience" in a world where experience is no longer created by people but by the media that narrates what individuals are no longer capable of transforming into their own experience? Can we learn from a journey on the edge of death, one that leaves us naked? Can we be like King Lear, who understands only when he finds himself naked and in the midst of the storm? If anything characterizes the economization of all spheres of life and its corresponding dominance of abstraction and the logic of value, it is its capacity to produce an automatic subject, lacking critical reflection and simply swept along by the winds of productive-consumerist pragmatism. Will the pandemic perhaps have the power to awaken us from the Hollywood dream and its artificial paradises constructed in the form of commodities? Will this be our turning point, the advent of the unexpected that shatters the linear continuity of bourgeois time? Questions pile up as the deafening silence of the quarantined city reminds me of the exceptional nature of this journey without a guiding compass.
Buenos Aires, March 23, 2020.
1- Argentine philosopher, professor, and essayist. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the National University of Córdoba. He is part of the team of academics and intellectuals appointed by the national government as advisors to President Alberto Fernández. Note published in La tecl@ eñe
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[+] Thinking about the pandemic
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