#where does the carceral state spring from

[knowlesian]

“why do i believe this” and “who benefits from me believing it” are the first steps to decolonization and we should all be doing this more

[ill-will-editions]

FEVER DREAMING IN THE NEW GENERAL ANTAGONISM 

Neal Miller 

March 22, 2020

We are living in the political fever dreams of COVID-19. Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited quip – “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” – is obsolete.[1]  Having spread across the globe, the coronavirus has become the background phenomenon and concern of every passing moment. And along with it has come the imagination of an end of capitalism. However contagious and deadly COVID-19 is as a virus, its existence as the virtual object of the world’s attention and inattention has proven far more viral in its capacity to change society – mostly by cancelling our sensibility for realism. The dull weight of the everyday has lifted to unleash nightmares and dreamscapes that have magnetized the attention of our species with a measure of universality thought to be obsolete in our post-hegemonic world.

The continuous streams of news and commentary can hardly keep up with the latest collapse of everyday life. They give us the mise en scène in which to play the endangered protagonist of a canned Hollywood disaster flic and yet we’re told to stay home, keep calm, and practice good hygiene. Stories like the one about the recent missile strikes in Iraq are quickly phone-scrolled into oblivion by the latest notifications about the disease. And so we find ourselves reawakening with disbelief to the same new reality each day. 

Following Michel Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, one might say that we live our reality as though caught between two fever dreams, which alternate depending on the nature of the immune response to the virtual presence of the virus. On the one hand, there is the suffocating nightmare of the global “plague city,” of governments securing human “life” by identifying all bodily movement and contact with disorder and death. The dream of governments today is to “return” us to a new normal in which they have won surpluses of legitimacy and control. The other dream is a dream of upheaval that won’t let go of all the vital signs of freedom amidst the pandemic. It wants to make irreversible all of the revived forms of class war, mutual aid, and social welfare, along with all of the autonomous means of survival not yet invented. 

The general antagonism today is the war on COVID-19. And whether we like it or not, we have been enlisted to the immune systems of global humanity. Yet the politics of today concerns the decision before us. Will our collective immune response intensify our cynicism about our dependency on governments? Or will we experiment with novel forms of relief and this newfound disbelief in the black magic of the economy? Will we dare to play in the festival-dream of new forms of collective life and reliance upon one another? 

The Nightmare of Governmental Realism

Today, quarantine lockdown extends from the “non-essential” flows of commuters to the fluids and gestures of our bodies, which have become paranoid colonial-style occupations of themselves. My body experiences itself as if on the other side of a gulf of unhygienic habits cracked open by the virtual omnipresence of COVID-19: I catch myself touching my face, I catalog the surfaces I’ve recently touched, and my proximity to others spontaneously triggers a quantitative calculation (“was it a distance of six feet or ten that was recommended?”). The new universal phenomenon is the object of a panicked consciousness immersed in a world that has been reduced to the medium for a disease vector. 

As for the engineers of the new order, China and Israel represent the nightmare line toward the most grim extreme of plague politics. Both have employed the metadata of people’s smart-phones to track their movements and all points of social contact. Each new case is a profile whose recent social history is rounded up for quarantine. The horizon here would be something like Chris Marker’s film La jetée (or Terry Gilliam’s remake, 12 Monkeys): humanity survives, but at the cost of complete imprisonment and dependency upon a specialized medical government.

We glimpse this suffocating nightmare in the undecidable decision facing governments with respect to their incarcerated populations: do they relieve themselves of having to manage and care for their masses of concentrated and confined bodies? Or, do they give the prison guards and wardens a blank check to administer order by any means necessary? Whereas Iran temporarily released 54,000 prisoners on March 4th, two weeks later Massachusetts prisoners lost the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment when a moratorium was announced on all disciplinary measures for prison staff. The undecidability here is no doubt due to the intensification of what Foucault called the carceral continuum, or the fact that the “inside” of the prison extends “outside” into the racialized ghettos of urban metropolises. The quarantine regime of social distancing and “shelter in place” lockdowns has turned the “outside” into a vast space of confinement, however gilded. 

The Festival Dream of Relief

Against this new confinement, efforts at self-organization are cropping up all over in food distribution networks, rent strikes, requisitions of abandoned housing, and calls for debt jubilees. Such earnest efforts at organized care finds its parodic inversion in the devil-may-care attitudes of Spring Breakers migrating South, as well as paranoid social media speculation about riots breaking out amidst mass hoarding. All of it tracks with what Foucault called the “whole literary fiction of the festival [that] grew up around the plague.”[2] 

Things we struggled for only weeks ago have been given outright – and much more besides. In the U.S., conservative food stamp policies have been lifted, unemployment safety nets reinforced, moratoriums on various costs of living instituted, and political parties are fighting not over whether to give UBI, but how much. Those immunized in their home-bubbles are offered an increasing amount of freely circulating intellectual property, while, in Chicago, parking has been made free, evictions courts are on hold, and utility companies are giving away electricity.

The black magic of the economy has revealed itself in its very withdrawal from our lives, tempering our panic and fear with a small modicum of relief. As Dan Kois recently argued, this relief has shown just how much of American society and its ‘death on the installment plan’ is a sham.[3] The mask has come off and the wand behind the conjurations now appears in the simple arbitrariness of its operations. Why don’t all of the other ways we get sick, fear hunger, or struggle to stay afloat count as reasons for having free access to high-quality food, health-care, and shelter? If all it took was a wand waving to put a stop to bills, evictions, and the like, does this not make all of our sufferings and hardships under normal circumstances seem meaningless?  

Just as we let out our sighs, however, the nightmare visions from abroad come closer and remind us that the only continuity between what was once normal and the current state of exception is the power of governments based on our dependency. We feel this dependency whether we panic or not, whether we trust their assurances and injunctions not to hoard or whether the sight of emptied shelves floods our heads with visions of the broken supply chains and interrupted logistics that we rely on to eat. As Chuang rightly noted, the arrival of COVID-19 in Wuhan induced a paradoxical form of general strike: there is a profound work stoppage, but it is hollowed out and devoid of any subject of history. The subject of history: not even the coronavirus can assume this mantle. Our continued dependency makes the strike false.

Yet one cannot help but read the ‘New Deal’ on offer as a symptom of faltering government legitimacy and the fits of market confidence. In the U.S., the government is betting that an avalanche of compromises with Democrats will cover over the truther-response of the Trump administration and the stock sell-offs of Senate Republicans. As belief in the forces of order goes into convulsions, one thinks, ‘If they cannot guarantee our survival, all bets are off.’ As we take all these “gifts” coming down from on high, we ought to remember that the social welfare state of the 1930s New Deal was a warfare state. And what will become of our newfound alleviation without the invisible enemy that has, with its own magic, cancelled society?

A New Universal? 

On the brighter side of things, it’s worth observing that we have been given a hint to the riddle handed down from the failures of 20th century revolutionaries. For one fundamental limit of all struggles since the 1960s has been their scale. It has been a very long time since we’ve been able to think what might connect struggles happening all across the world. Despite being geographically dislocated from one another, the revolts of 2019 showed promise simply in their synchronic co-existence and their ability to repeat each others’ tactics under the maxim “Be water.” Yet not only were the problems at the heart of these struggles locally particular (despite their many commonalities), they were never able to flow together in a global strategy.

Against such a backdrop, COVID-19 portends a new universal frame of war. For however uneven the experience of vulnerability may be, the global spread of the coronavirus amounts to the generalization of the new antagonism. When was the last time we were able to share our experience of dependency on the world of governments as a crisis? The multi-generational time-scale of the climate catastrophe has so far prevented it from mobilizing all of the humanity that it dooms. Yet whether it is glowing from our screens or hanging in the ambient disquiet while we distract ourselves in quarantine, the new reality for everyone is that reality has fallen apart. 

In these fever dreams where trust in the authorities is in shorter supply than food and the means of punishment alternate between melting into air and locking down hard, it is perhaps possible to take the wand from the magician and begin conjuring a reality of our own. What is frightening about COVID-19 is how little we know about it. But just as uncertain is how governments will react to us amidst this legitimacy crisis and how peoples will respond when the repression of governments comes down too hard. 

How can we flee our dependency on the old world while “sheltering in place”? If the world is cancelled, what are all these bills, digital parking meters, and universities but the fossils and tombs of a dead world? What new uses can we still invent for what stands idle and unused around us – what role can they play in the new dream? How can we breathe new life into existing spaces of immunity, like vehicles and homes? And what new immunity spaces remain to be invented? What new forms of action at a distance are called for? We are already venturing tentative answers to these questions. We try to flow like water where we still can. However, against a virus that fills our lungs with fluid and against governments seeking to return us to the earth of realism, perhaps we should consider the element of breath, levity, relief, and jubilation: air. 

[1] Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review, 21, May-June 2003, 65-79.

[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1995, 197.

[3] Kois, Dan. “America Is a Sham.” Slate, March 14, 2020. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/coronavirus-tsa-liquid-purell-paid-leave-rules.html  

[seymour-butz-stuff]

A fertile ground for organizing around justice and equity, rural communities are shifting the range of possibilities. Often positioned as exclusively white and conservative, rural communities have a deep history of organizing ranging across issues such as racial justice, voting rights, labor organizing, immigration justice, and criminal justice.

While organizing efforts in urban communities tend to dominate national headlines—to the extent they ever appear—rural communities have been engaged in some of the most transformative work.

“I think that, contrary to the myths of rural voters and rural communities in urban places, the reality is that most of us want the same things,” said Esperanza Tervalon-Garrett, campaign director for We Count Oregon. “Organizing looks different here and it's really interpersonal.”

Leveraging the census for representation and community-building

A women of color-led census campaign focused on hard-to-count populations, the We Count Oregon campaign has prioritized connecting with diverse communities in the state with campaign materials in 22 languages. Both Raíces—a Latino-led grassroots organization based out of Umatilla County, Oregon—and Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) joined the We Count Oregon campaign to make sure Latino communities get the representation they deserve.

“Our goal mainly was to make sure that we're getting represented the way that we need to right now [as] there isn't a lot of Latino representation,” said Zaira Sanchez, census equity coordinator for Raíces. Sanchez said the limitations on face-to-face organizing during the pandemic have been difficult in a community that does not have reliable internet access. Also, not everyone in the community has the basic computer skills or backgrounds to engage in a primarily digital environment.

“It feels unfair because we know that we're not going to reach everyone we want to reach and honestly, who is most important to reach ... but we're having deeper discussions as to how we make sure we reach these folk.” Sanchez said they have been able to work with local radio stations to get out information and obtained a regular spot on one station for a call-in to answer questions about the census.

As an advocacy organization and union, PCUN has served Oregon farmworkers and Latino families and communities since 1985. “We've evolved into an advocacy and political organization working to elect people of color that look like us working for policies with the lens of the farmworkers and also building healthier communities within our own community,” said Enrique Ruiz, the field and data manager for PCUN.

Using Warm Springs, a city in central Oregon, as an example, Ruiz said that rural communities have more people of color than most people realize. For Ruiz, it’s also about breaking through the perception of Oregon as a white-dominated state dating back to the founding and prohibition of people of color living in the state.

“I think that's what’s really hard to battle because the culture in Oregon is white dominated ...  and so when it comes to organizing it presents a lot of challenges because a lot of the concerns the Latinx folks bring are not heard,” said Ruiz.

“But you know we can make a huge difference, especially with OSHA, making sure that a lot of our community becomes citizens and through the legislature and having power and a presence there.”

Organizing against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi

In Mississippi, organizers partnered with university students and faculty from across the country to form Mississippi Freedom Winter in response to ongoing human rights abuses in incarceration and immigrant detention in the state. This culminated in the Making and Unmaking Mass Incarceration conference, a three-day national conference about prison abolition in Oxford, Mississippi.

“This last year was really intense [in] Mississippi in terms of carceral violence,” said Cam Calisch, a community organizer with Study and Struggle, the first phase of an ongoing project addressing incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi. “I think it's 50 people who died in prison across the state. And last August there was the largest ICE raid outside of Jackson.”  

The Immigrations Customs and Enforcement (ICE) raid referenced by Calisch took place in seven poultry processing plants in six rural towns. Close to 700 undocumented people were detained, many of whom were parents to young children. Some of those detained returned to work in the poultry plants, which have been strained by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“With COVID, a lot of people are living in even more desperate situations,” said Calisch. “It’s a great time to grow our souls and find our community and learn and struggle together to provide a framework that will ultimately contribute to liberation.”

Calisch framed the current moment as an outgrowth of the conference and local organizing.

“One [part] of the coming together has been bringing a translation team together, making sure that the information that we publish and that we put out as curriculum is accessible in both English and Spanish,” said Jarvis Benson, a member of the political education curriculum committee for Study and Struggle.

Benson said that while building out organizing efforts in rural communities can be tough, particularly when coupled with the issues of mass incarceration and immigration, it’s just about building relationships with people and connecting them to the issues.

“I think making those connections seems more complex, but it also can be easier and makes it easier to organize,” said Benson. “So when you have a conversation with somebody, you can connect abolition and care or abolition and ICE raids or the need for ending of punishment and crime and the idea of innocence in order to make us all free and to make a better world.”

Justice and equity are priorities from the ‘Hood to the Holler’

Groups like Rednecks for Black Lives and Hillbillies Against Hate have formed in the wake of the recent protests and uprisings as a way of showing solidarity, but also pushing rural communities to fight for racial justice. Based in Albany, Kentucky, Hillbillies Against Hate organized a “No Hate in Our Holler” march in July after seeing local youth wanting to travel to Louisville to join protests. “No Hate in Our Holler” is a phrase and T-shirt design credited to eastern Kentucky artist Lacey Hale, who created the phrase in response to a neo-Nazi rally in Pikeville, Kentucky. After receiving feedback from people in the community, organizers with Hillbillies Against Hate decided to continue organizing so that people in the community had a space to have their voices heard.  

“People were sending me stories through Facebook Messenger and saying, ‘Thank you so much for doing this,’” said LeMegan Shelton, co-founder of Hillbillies Against Hate. While Shelton was the subject of attacks and threats locally for her role in organizing the march, she says that white communities have a “moral obligation” to organize.  

“I think it's important that we get the message across that racism and classism are very closely linked,” said Shelton. “If we as poor working class white people are not also anti racist, then we are keeping ourselves oppressed as Appalachians.”

Pointing to the energy and enthusiasm of Charles Booker's campaign for the U.S. Senate, State Rep. Attica Scott said there needs to be a recommitment to democracy that works for everyone as well as a recognition of the hopes, dreams, and concerns of young people, Black and Latino people, other people of color, and rural communities in Appalachia and western Kenucky.

“It matters that we connect across our differences, but also find those places where we have similarities,” said Scott. “We all want to make a living wage out the gate. We all want to make sure that there is justice for our neighbors and for our friends.” Scott saw the conversations happening around Black Lives Matter as a continuation of work that has been ongoing in Kentucky. Last year, Scott led a dismantling racism workshop in Corbin, Kentucky, sponsored by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Corbin was the site of a race riot in 1919.

Scott said that she is encouraged by what she has seen take root across the state. “What I'm seeing and what I'm looking forward to seeing more of is that people are really organizing around [the questions of] how do we build community and how do we build power.”

This story is part of a joint series by The Forge and Prism. Read the rest of the series—Organizing, Innovation, and Upheaval—here.