The Revenge of the Real

Politics for a Post-Pandemic World

Benjamin Bratton

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839762581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognises that how populations govern themselves is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas - climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society - all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? If so, what models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that, instead of thinking of technology as something that happens to society, we must see how it can form the basis of a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. He urges us to reconsider questions of "surveillance" in the face of necessary testing and care. He asks what did the "mask wars" reveal about the destructive nature of individualism as the basis of sovereignty? The book proposes that it is time to transform how we live, work and thrive. Rethinking governance means rethinking how we interact with each other as a global population, and how we ensure our obligations to each other. For this, we should build a society based in a new rationality of inclusion, care and foresight.

1

THE REVENGE OF THE REAL

It is difficult, if not impossible, to offer commentary on a quickly shifting situation. One can assume what the outcome may be but, as ever, the most likely outcome is almost never what actually happens. Allow me then to provide a little context with reference to the current signposts.

Today, Western countries are in various stages of lock-down, catastrophe, and contradiction, while China is tentatively opening up again after months of hardship. In the United States, where I am holed up, the government fumbles between incoherent phases of bluster and hedging. Friends who should know better are turning into the conspiracist Jude Law plays in the 2011 film Contagion. Spanning the globe, the Kübler-Ross stages of grief are the new national horoscope: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. To say that the United States is ten days behind Italy is not only an epidemiological analysis; it is a psychiatric diagnosis.

We are looking at months more of extreme weirdness and grief and then things will return to a state that will feel more normal, but forever not the same normal. Right now, that is the optimistic scenario. Afterward, many ways of doing things, ways of thinking, ways of getting things going may just not come back. Some will be missed, others not even noticed. What are the important lessons to be learned before the normality that caused so much mayhem returns? Yet another “second wave” of the virus would be catastrophic, but so would another wave of its underlying causes.

The sense of emergency is palpable and real. But instead of naming this moment a “state of exception,” we should see it more as revealing pre-existing conditions. The consequences of poor planning (or no planning), broken social systems, and isolationist reflexes are explicit. Vigilance should not be maintained against the “emergency” on behalf of familiar norms, but against those dysfunctional norms returning after the coast is declared clear. We must keep attention trained on the pathologies revealed, and in doing so willfully inhabit a changed world and its many challenges.

For post-pandemic politics, this should be a deathblow to the reactionary forms of political populism of recent years, which were built on simple, cathartic stories of resentment and recrimination. But will that be the case? It is not remotely certain. The pandemic (and climate change and many other things besides) makes clear that the present anarchic state of geopolitics must give way to forms of governance that are equitable, effective, rational and therefore realist. If nothing else, this book is a call for a new realist form of planetary politics as an antidote to the populist incoherency of recent years that is clearly not up to the task. “Populism” is herein defined not as the political and/or cultural project of the working class, but by its more specific connotations of demagoguery, folksy scapegoating, simplistic emotional appeals, fearmongering and boundary policing, empty theatrics and sham symbolism, charisma-driven grifts, and so on.

This mode of populism, which has successfully led candidates into executive and legislative power over the past several years, despises expertise and fetishizes metaphors. To address the pandemic, however, people require competence. At this moment, when those who said the virus was a hoax now suggest it should simply run its inevitable course, a dry, well-planned, trustworthy, available, adaptable, responsive, forward-looking approach seems like the program of the most idealistic politics imaginable. Yet the human ability to bend facts to favored narratives remains incredible. The varied responses to the global contagion by different societies have exposed many ideologies and traditions as ineffective, fraudulent, and suicidal.

In some countries, we see extreme examples where the speech of the sovereign executive is taken as the literal last word on whether the virus exists, what it means, who started it, what should be administered in response, all adding up to not just a politics of loyalty but a high-resolution alternate reality. This populism is symptomatic of a generational dismantling of public systems and international cooperation. In the name of markets or bottom-up cooperation, societies have been left with little but increasingly pathologic forms of “emergence.” As the spine breaks, the general response is to attack the very idea of governance on behalf of a yet more emphatic spontaneity. This is not unexpected. Populism thrives because of a sense that the system is broken, and to be sure, it is, but not in the ways that populists believe it is and not in the ways that demagogues preach it.

In this light, populism is a form of anti-governance. It sees not only that the levers of power are corrupt or incompetent in specific ways, but that they are illegitimate in vague and general ways, and so its response is also vague and general, as well as immediate, visceral, and uncomplicated. As a basis for any possible biopolitics, it eschews direct pragmatic engagement with reality because it is a prisoner of its emotional investments. This is how statues of war heroes can command more earnest defense than the bodies of living people, how viral memes of celebrity bodies can break the internet, and how spin and disinformation are able to create culturally complete artificial worlds that people endow with their hope, fear, and rage. That is, populism subordinates the repairing of broken systems to a virtual contest of semiotic brinkmanship.

In the same way that Institutional Critique is actually the last vestige of faith in the authority of art institutions, the aestheticized politics of populism can wrap itself so tightly in the rituals and ornaments of power and resistance to power that power itself can watch from a safe distance. Finally, the populist politics that set the stage for the West’s inadequate response to the virus remains stuck in a world where politics means to oppose, change, police, or defend the representation of the real, often with contempt for the very idea that the underlying reality may be utterly indifferent.

This is why the COVID-19 pandemic is a revenge of the real making itself known. Its unresponsiveness to the endemic Canutism upon which our current politics depends is the crucial lesson around which post-pandemic politics must be formed. Just as King Canute is said to have stood before the waves and commanded them to stop, today’s populists are beholden to a faith in the power of their own gestures. But the pandemic is an irruptive revelation of the complex biological reality of the planet with which we are entangled, and that underlying reality is apathetic to the plotlines and mythic lessons we may try to project upon it. This does not mean we cannot know it, grasp it, make sense of it, model and respond to it, and change it as it is. We can. In the most fundamental sense, this is the definition of the governance that should have animated pandemic politics and should guarantee post-pandemic politics.

It should also animate post-pandemic philosophy. This, too, failed the moment, sometimes with willful ignorance, incoherent expressions of powerlessness, and sometimes outright intellectual fraud. It is a shame because many of the necessary and needed concepts are already at hand. We know more than we realize, and so in this way the revenge of the real is also a return of the repressed. Repressed are the biological realities of human society’s co-evolution with viruses, the epidemiological reality of populations, the real calculus of positive and negative freedom all on behalf of various placebos—chief among them, as I will argue, are myths of individual autonomy.

Perhaps the most important reality once repressed and now returning is that of a social realm neglected after years of the dismantling of all forms of public governance—all except for police functions, that is. This reality, along with the thermal pressure of a widespread lockdown, led to protests and a social explosion, one that demystified illusions about who is and is not fully part of society and in what ways. A series of regularized biological and social deaths became turning points, and with them a return of the principle of breakdown. The question is, what comes next?

As said, the book’s argument is on behalf a “positive biopolitics” that may form the basis of viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf of “the political” in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can deliberately compose itself. If contemporary philosophy’s often reactionary suspicions have backed it into the corner where it can conceive of “biopolitics” only as a totalitarian oppression in need of endless critique and constant dismantling, then it needs a refresher course and a gut check. Waves of Boomers, myself included, grew up in a world in which the bad establishment was (supposedly) hierarchical and rationalist and, therefore, individualism and autonomy and spontaneous irrationality were (supposedly) a position of resistance, but we all find ourselves awake in a world where that opposition appears severely bent if not wholly inverted. Today our hospitals and morgues are full because of the horizontal, spontaneous, individualist irrationality of the status quo.

Why is the West’s response shambolic, and what is the positive biopolitical alternative? The touchpoints that comprise the argument are varied. They involve the right to be counted and the role of sensing to ensure the likelihood of equitable models of ourselves. Those models are understood as the basis of a recursive self-composition of society, not just surveillant policing representations. The problem of over-individuation, then, is the crux of my critique of surveillance culture but also of the overinflation of the term “surveillance” to dismiss all modes of social sensing as pernicious violations.

Furthermore, what is truly “essential” about certain kinds of work and workers? How does urban-scale automation and its relays of people, software, and goods enable both social cohesion across great chains of mediation and social occlusion of its actual, underlying mechanisms? Considering the masks on our faces, how is Ethics overly dependent upon notions of subjective intention when the real collective risk has little to do with intent of harm or goodwill but with physical proximity? Why has the philosophy of biopolitics so vociferously limited its engagement with scientific biology to the realms of “discourse” and seen it primarily as a tool of control, and how did that cripple its ability to offer enough useful ideas during the pandemic? Finally, what constitutes the forms of planetary competency through which we might support ourselves?

Mid-pandemic, it could not be more excruciatingly clear that a biopolitics of population-scale self-composition and realist care must be constructed at the scale of the planetary population itself. Through this, we, the Homo sapiens in biological aggregate, might remake our settlements in the image of our interdependencies and aspirations. “Medicare for All” is a creakingly quaint vision compared to what is possible.

Lastly, post-pandemic politics is not a simple set of programmatic beliefs. It is not explainable by a colored pill (red pill, blue pill, black pill, and so on), that is, a complete master narrative and source of identity in the discrete form of a virtual pharmaceutical pellet. What is required is instead an acceptance of how the rapid intrusion of an indifferent reality can make wholly symbolic resistance worse than futile. There is no simple formula that will work. We have to build a politics capable of engagement with the full complexity of reality. The pre-existing conditions that have now been exposed clarify the need for a geopolitics based not on self-undermining, prisoner’s dilemma tactics in the face of common risks, but on a deliberate plan for the coordination of the planet we occupy and make and re-make over again. Otherwise, this moment will be an unnecessarily permanent emergency.

But first, what happened?

2

THE BIG FILTERING

All of you have spent the pandemic in different places, to various degrees locked down. Among the issues that post-pandemic politics must account for is what states did during the crisis, how the virus moved from city to city, country to country, population to population, and specifically what the pandemic did with and to the idea of citizenship.

Where did everyone go? Among the most decisive and disturbing realities of the pandemic was a big filtering whereby whole populations of people, otherwise mobile and intermingling, were re-sorted back into their countries of passport, often with only a few days’ notice.

The re-filtering and re-sorting of people into constituent national categories of citizenship is a primary sociological fact of this pandemic: Americans have been filtered back into the United States, Indians filtered back into India, South Koreans filtered back into South Korea, Brazilians filtered back into Brazil. The physical organization of people according to formal citizenship (or legal residence) and their place within the post-colonial national political order is something we observe with trepidation in light of what it ultimately implies about our ability to address shared problems.

It serves to put us each in place, one where we are bound not only to our own personal experiences of this moment, but also to the official political response to the crisis by our country of passport. Access to important resources is therefore conditional or arbitrary and depends on where you happen to be standing when the music stops. Those sent back to Florida face a very different biopolitical reality than, for example, those sent back to Singapore or New Zealand.

The big filtering also leads to many seemingly unlikely episodes and exceptions. By late spring, people were trying to get back into China by any means necessary to escape the virus and the incompetent responses of particular Western countries. New Zealand’s status as the preferred backup plan of the “doomsday prepper” class was validated and affirmed. Mexico closed its borders with the United States to disallow the contagious Americans from infecting them. Barbados is still offering a special pandemic visa for those willing and able to wait it out on the beaches.

As the global population was sorted this way because no other option seemed available, the weaknesses and capacities of nationalism in the broadest sense were apparent. What else could have been? Fixing the right of entry and movement to a state identity certificate is a historically recent development, one based on the separation of migrants from natives and the establishment of exclusive citizenship as a condition of movement. There is nothing necessary or obvious about this as our default setting. That there was no other apparent option is an indictment of our collective capacity of governing in mutual interest and cooperation, not to mention our imagination as to who or what constitutes a person or population in need of care. Given the planetary scope of the pandemic, there must be other ways of organizing a response besides those based on the deeply fraught condition of “citizenship.”

The virus migrated too. It had its own career, and few locations provided refuge from it. It moved in waves from “first-tier” to “second-tier” cities and into more rural areas. Along the way it drew its own map of human society. Many of us with family, friends, and colleagues in China stayed in close contact with them while the outbreak grew, and then watched in disbelief as our own countries sat on their hands, wallowing in an unjustified psychological distance from the rest of the world. It provided for a kind of Cassandra complex, of knowing exactly what was going to happen because you had seen it happen elsewhere at a distance, but could not convince people of what was coming their way. But the wave was real.

Foresight aside, in many places access to medical care is highly conditional. Even as populations continue the long historical arcs of intermingling, crisis responsibility for the care and supervision of any one person is retained by a state that may be on the other side of the world, and which can only provide care if that person returns to their birthing grounds. Even then, access is not certain. For other migrants, therefore, a forced return is what prevents access to care.

Alternatives exist to the artificial segmentation of the human population into discrete tracts of the planet’s surface. Best-practice medical care can, in principle, be provided anywhere. In contrast with autochthonous fallacies, it is possible for humanity to be amalgamated and disentangled, gathered and dispersed, self-sorted and self-assembled based on all sorts of different spatial logics. As the license of “citizen” is simultaneously reinforced and undermined by contemporary geopolitics, and as other credentials assume its place, or multiply it, a range of possible post-pandemic positions is already being innovated, for better and worse.

The question is not a matter of whether the world should never be sorted, but how else it could be sorted in a way that is more viable because less punitive and restrictive. Given that cloud platforms can provide state-scale services regardless of location, and given that state services increasingly rely on the cloud, perhaps they too will come to be available beyond normal borders. On the other hand, not all migration is as voluntary or as coerced as the great pandemic filtering—not by far. The future of climate migration, for example, and what proactive and reactionary measures are taken to deal with it, threatens to be among the most fraught demographic issues of the century. Will policies that allow the migration toward or away from countries of passport bring about a foundational economy for states directly selling admission? As with Barbados, will the benefits of exit outweigh the costs, including the literal price of entrance?

The precedents and possibilities cut several ways. The mobilization toward a feasible “post-Anthropocene” world, conducted at the required planetary scale, will demand an extraordinary choreography, a broad and deep commitment to public and private reason, including unfamiliar forms of sacrifice and behavior change, a pragmatic vision for what is and is not “essential,” and a focusing of technical systems on equity and efficiency. One upside of the big filtering and of the uneven mass mobilizations of the pandemic is that this seems perhaps more possible, even likely, compared to just a year ago.

For all these reasons, those who suspect the “plandemic” as a trial run for planetary governance of climate change–related emergencies are hopefully not wrong in every regard. Let us allow that in coming years the valence and connotations of the term “New World Order” will shift in interesting ways, more as a foundational geopolitical and geoeconomic realignment than as an elite conspiracy based on the symbology of “666.”

As for how the Westphalian format of state “citizenship” is redesigned, the reorganization of geopolitics may include rights of exit and entrance, likely even in forms that are incompatible with one another. These may open some borders while multiplying others, fortifying historical public states and proliferating privatized urban fields, platforms, and networks. These may be admirable or not: an open planetary surface dotted with private enclaves, or, vice versa, a largely private surface with public enclaves, each with different conditions of membership. The inquiries on behalf of these and other geopolities are not against governmentality, but are on behalf of its reimagining—not the end of history, but something like a long-delayed next beginning.

3

COMPARATIVE GOVERNANCE

Having been filtered and sorted back into countries of passport, the global population participated in what future political science may look back upon as the largest control experiment in comparative governance in history, with the virus as the control variable and hundreds of d...