Telos 191 (Summer 2020): Going Viral is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
While “going viral” has taken on a new meaning by recuperating an old one, it is the virtual experience that seems to be more enduring. Not only has the pandemic sped up the shifting of human activity onto virtual platforms, but the viral dynamics of social media seem set to outlast the microbial versions: it has turned out to be easier to lock down the Wuhan virus than President Trump’s Twitter feed. Yet in both cases, it is unclear whether it is the actual spread or the fear that is the greater danger. For this fear leads to the call for more authoritarian measures, whether this means censoring Twitter posts or locking down the population. But if viral spread leads to the reassertion of sovereignty, we also come to realize that the freedoms we have taken for granted are in fact the result of a curated space, in which the rules for interaction have always formed the hidden framework within which our lives have unfolded. As these framing conditions come into focus during the crisis, we have the opportunity to reimagine them in such a way as to retrieve sovereignty not as a kind of authoritarian reaction but as an understanding of how our values must inform the boundaries we set. This issue of Telos considers how the experience of going viral has come to dominate our political life as well as how our reflection on this process can free us to consider the alternatives.
The viral character of social media has undermined the hope that the decline of mass media would usher in a new age of citizen participation in debate and deliberation. In the opening essay, Murray Skees analyzes how social media have shifted the way in which the public sphere functions. If the ideal of the public sphere is that of a space of debate in which claims are made and challenged using rational arguments, this model was based on mass media such as newspapers or television. Since newspaper readers formed an imagined community without any physical contact with each other, the complaint was always that the mass media created a passive audience. But passivity seems to have had its advantages—namely, that mass media debate was insulated from the sentiments of the spectators and such private sphere emotions consequently would not directly affect the public sphere. Social media have created new forms of interaction and an active audience, and this new public forum is no longer distinct from the private sphere of individual affect. Twitter and Facebook publics function according to a crowd dynamic oriented around emotions rather than with the deliberation of a newspaper dominated by arguments. Social media platforms do not constitute their publics through arguments. Instead, they foster connections between people with similar sentiments, leading to disruptions of dominant narratives through the introduction of previously underrepresented feelings and attitudes. Trump’s achievement did not consist in creating a new discursive community so much as in mobilizing previously neglected groups around the Trump “political brand.” This populist mobilization was in fact already fermenting within the social media incubator, just waiting for the proper host to mediate its outbreak into the wider public sphere.
If the viral character of social media is linked to the way in which its movements are driven by the immediacy of emotional response rather than the deliberative character of argument, the constant invitation to express emotions becomes the defining mode of our politics. The result, as Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie describe in their analysis of Byung-Chul Han’s philosophy, is not transformation but ennui. According to Han, today’s government and business authorities no longer enforce discipline. Instead, they use the “power of positive thinking” to incite individuals to express their desires and pursue constant and continuing achievement. However, the imperative to express and achieve lacks a sense of meaning that would provide the framework for such activity. Unable to create meaning through narrative and memory, modern individuals descend into depression, loneliness, and a pornographic attitude, problems that result from the managed character of our freedom and the increasingly sophisticated manipulation of our desires. Han argues that the antidote involves turning away from ourselves by focusing on love, beauty, and religious or mystical contemplation as ways of relating to something external, allowing us thereby to regain a sense for non-manipulated meaning. But if meaning arises from engagement with something other than the self and outside of its control, it may be that outside danger can also lead to a new sense of meaning.
We face such danger with every viral outbreak that underlines the unpredictability of our biological as well as digital lives. The flows of social media are nothing if not capricious, and Mark Kelly analyzes the politics of representation in the controversies about racism in the United States by developing Michel Foucault’s claim that language’s effects are unpredictable. Because both discriminatory language and the attempts to ban such language might have unintended consequences, battles between the right and left about representation and politically correct language do not lead in any clear directions. Though Trump uses a great deal of anti-immigrant rhetoric, the real policy effects have been minimal. Similarly, left-wing attempts to suppress discriminatory language and include more racial diversity in movies and television do not clearly improve the situation of the disadvantaged. The focus on representation may even provide a cover for the reproduction of existing power structures. As this issue of Telos goes to press, protests in reaction to George Floyd’s death continue to spread into an outbreak of rioting and looting, and Kelly’s analysis indicates that the use of violence to oppose hate speech may be counterproductive. As he suggests with regard to left-wing violence, “the danger lurks that it is precisely anti-fascism that is effectively tactically cohering with its supposed enemy in driving its growth as a kind of autoimmune response by the left.”
Such unpredictability of our actions leads Pierre-André Taguieff to argue with respect to the pandemic that we have now reached the end of a modern Prometheism that treats all problems as resolvable within a story of continuous human progress. In France, the latest version of the Enlightenment dream imagined a globalizing world that would create increasing wealth and an expanding European bureaucracy that would eliminate the divisions of national sovereignty. But the confusion and contradictory advice of scientists in the face of the pandemic underscored the failure of a government of experts in a world in which political decision-making requires a sense of values. Rather than globalization and scientifically established consensus, the future will bring a new sense for the importance of the “community of destiny and responsibility” that is the nation-state. Because this reorientation around the nation will replace expert knowledge with values as the basis for decisions, free trade and globalization will recede in favor of protectionism and reindustrialization. In spite of claims by multiculturalists, anarchists, and neoliberal cosmopolitans, state sovereignty is still necessary because the world is a dangerous place that requires the decisions that only sovereignty can bring. The enforcement of borders does not simply lead toward xenophobia but in fact is the precondition for the freedom of citizens, for strong democracies, and for a stable peace.
If social media have facilitated the volatility of movement populism, John Milbank indicates that the pandemic has revealed populism’s conservative and communitarian basis. Brexit already established new political fault lines in which the social democratic left had become as reviled as the neoliberal right by the laboring classes, leading to the populist reaction. If the traditional conservatives derive their privilege from wealth, the left maintains its status through educational achievement, and the new political alignment involves the opposition of working classes to this managerial elite. The way forward for Milbank does not consist in simply broadening education or redistributing wealth in a way that would support individual rights. The previous injustices of industrial society were in fact ameliorated not by state welfare or the expansion of individual rights but through a pluralist corporatism in which government officials, businesses, and union leaders, as well as a complex fabric of civil associations and churches, were able to develop equitable political and economic frameworks. Rather than focusing on individual rights and utility, Milbank suggests that populist grievances must be met through the reestablishment of corporatist structures through which economic, political, and cultural-religious leaders might “extend their beneficent influence.” On an international level, Milbank proposes a de-emphasis of national sovereignty in favor of supernational structures, such as the European Union or the British Commonwealth, which could limit the excesses of international finance and capitalism.
Such an approach envisages that moral and political decisions will define the bounds of economic activity, and Devin Singh develops the theoretical framework for such a linking of politics and economy. Sovereignty is inseparable from economy to the extent that the political decision that establishes sovereignty must also define the limits that are the prerequisite for any symbolic and economic exchange to occur. Thus, sovereignty establishes legal order by interpreting an act of violence so that it becomes integrated into a repetitive rule on the model of the lex talionis. That is, the violent gouging of an eye becomes part of a rule once we repeat the violence according to the logic of an eye for an eye. The unpredictability of violence is subordinated to the logic of debt and guilt, establishing the rules and repetitions of economic exchange. Because the source of life’s unpredictability can be natural forces as well as human ones, economic crises as well as political ones can lead to political declarations of the state of exception, and the measures taken to deal with economic states of exception can then establish the framework for internal order into the future. Because such a framework must include a metaphysical understanding of the character of order, the link between the political and the economic that sovereignty establishes also binds the economic into a moral framework that would establish the structural parameters for market exchange.
My essay takes up this challenge to integrate the economic into the political by arguing that work cannot be conceived simply as the exploitation of nature but rather in terms of the way it relates to nature as both predictable and unpredictable force. Since the relationship to nature cannot be defined as such but always through the perspective of human values, economic activity will develop within the framework provided by the interaction with nature, on the one hand, and by the moral and political imperatives that are given by a particular structure of sovereignty, on the other hand. Since the free market can only exist when its parameters are guaranteed by a structure of state sovereignty, economic questions are immediately both ecological ones and political ones. The pandemic brings to the fore a notion of ecological sovereignty through which our relationship to nature and thus economic life must be established through a close look at our values. At the same time, because we are dealing with natural processes, sovereign decisions must take into account what nature has to say, and this means that some decisions will have to be left up both to the market and to local communities, whose dynamics are driven by the mysterious pathways of love as much as rationality. The fulfillment of needs provides the basis for the love and respect that define human well-being, and our thinking about the structures within which economic life can develop should take into account the link between necessity and substantive values. The debate on universal basic income must consequently go beyond the goal of providing basic necessities. Instead, we must structure such a basic income in a way that would best promote local sovereignty and the stability of human meaning and values.
If we are to conceive economic policy as part of the promotion of human meaning, we need to reconcile the modern divide between work and leisure. Robert Miner argues that when work and play are clearly distinguished, both lose their meaningfulness. Work becomes a kind of drudgery, and play remains bereft of the consequences that would make it into something that goes beyond vacuous entertainment. Rather than separating utility from pleasure, the alternative is to experience life as a process in which all human activity becomes pleasurable through its fulfilling character. Adorno imagines the intellectual as someone who lives within such a unity, and Miner hopes that we might move away from purely vocational training in higher education in order to return to this conception of liberal education.
Similarly, Ethan Stoneman compares Ernst Jünger’s notion of work with Josef Pieper’s idea of leisure in order to show how they arrive at complementary diagnoses of the situation of a post-liberal modernity. Like Adorno, leisure for Pieper is not simple amusement but encompasses a contemplative attitude that is open to suprahuman forces. If Pieper attempts to retain an openness toward the world, he also admits that the modern world can no longer escape the subordination to utility in the world of work. Consequently, his notion of leisure complements Jünger’s idea that work has become an activity that functionalizes the individual within a totalizing social apparatus and no longer allows for an attitude of contemplation. Both Jünger and Pieper turn to death, love, and poetry as the means to escape the reification of humanity that is implied by the functionalization of individuals in the world of work.
The issue concludes with some conflicting accounts of pandemic politics. Russell Berman argues that while the clear villain in the Wuhan coronavirus saga has been the Chinese Communist Party, partisan politics in the United States has mistakenly shifted blame onto President Trump. He points out that the Trump administration’s response was in fact not at all belated when compared to other Western democracies and was in some ways prescient; that scientific authority, particularly when it has been so divided and uninformed in the case of this virus, cannot be held up as an alternative to political decision-making; and that the complaints about Trump’s refusal to expand federal authority seem disingenuous when compared with prior left-wing fears about Trump’s supposedly dictatorial tendencies. Jay Gupta argues that the initial response to the pandemic has been dominated by a moral purity about the need to shut down economic and civic life in order to save lives. Buttressed by a sense that the issue is not about values but about the supposed facts and the infallibility of scientific authority, the lockdowns sought to totally eliminate risk rather than reduce risk in calculated ways. Tim Luke argues that the political debate over the pandemic has revolved around the opposition between the Democrats, who have been using fear of sickness to justify more restrictive policies, and the Republicans, who have mobilized a fear of administration in order to resist government restrictions. He points out the way in which Trump’s response to the pandemic has been driven by political calculations about which moves would be most advantageous for his reelection bid, though it is not clear whether the economy or public health will be more important issues for determining his reelection prospects.
Finally, Adrian Pabst argues that the pandemic has revealed the failure of various utopian visions. The liberal hope that increasing technological progress along with globalization would bring an era of general prosperity and well-being has been undermined by the realization that true well-being requires the maintenance of the family and community bonds and virtues that have been foregrounded by the pandemic. At the same time, Pabst contends that the national-populist alternative has rarely managed to embrace the greater state activism and limits on immigration that would protect local values. Instead, populism has supported crony capitalism and the increasing oligarchic power of tech platforms and global finance. Most worrying, the Chinese model of authoritarian state control has established a system of biosurveillance run by technocratic planners and scientific elites, who manage humans as functionalized workers. Unfortunately, the pandemic has provided the Chinese Communist Party with an excuse to expand its totalitarian dystopia in alliance with a tech oligarchy. Their lockdown of social media has provided the tools for their lockdown of the coronavirus, indicating that, in some cases, going viral might be the utopian alternative.
