*Describe your experience of the coronavirus situation and how it has affected you.
The pandemic situation exponentially intensified from February, March to April 2020 across the world, while my comrades and I were preparing gatherings in Seoul and Osaka. The aim of the project called Living Assembly was to convene individuals and groups who live and struggle in distant places but feel the need for mutual exchange. All foreigners bought roundtrip tickets between their countries and East Asia, out of their thin pockets, with much expectations for what we would share in proximity, until the last moment when all knew it became impossible. The border between two host countries, South Korea and Japan, was closed. International traveling was banned by one country after another: China, Hong Kong, France, the US, Canada, Mexico, … The pandemic situation thus halted the Living Assembly 2020.
We come to sense a strange concurrence having developed between Living Assembly and the pandemic. Both are forms of planetary permeation, cutting across national borders by being irrespective of the global order. By Living Assembly, we have been seeking to enrich connections among autonomous struggles based upon their affective interactions traversing the territories divided by capitalist-nation-states. Meanwhile Covid-19 emerged multiplying itself endlessly by taking over the bodies and minds of all nationals across the borders. Our planetarization was forestalled by that of the virus, which made nation-states reinforce their border control and forbid us from traveling and gathering.
Living Assembly has been relying on the smooth space of global traffic, which is lost now. We all know that capital’s globalization which facilitates it will be troubled more and more. We observe a big return of national enclosure, to last for an unknown length of time with unknown degrees. Having expected the troubles of capitalist globalization, we had questioned our dependence on global traffic at the last Living Assembly in 2018. Now we must recreate techniques of connectivity, exchange and mobility for the planetary reverberation of our struggles in the context of new enclosure under the influence of pandemic and all the other catastrophes we expect to come. At least, we are lucky for our existent relationships with friends across the planet — a solid ground to deal with the new situation.
*Speaking from experience, things you’ve imagined, seen and heard, describe your impressions of society vis-a-vis the coronavirus situation.
In mid-April, we finally gave up on the Living Assembly, and with tears I determined to leave Osaka and return to New York. The difference between the two cities was intense. It was a trip from a living to a dead city. In the empty streets of Manhattan, I envisioned a future Detroit, a desertification following concentrated development.
In Japan, the scare of pandemic was publicly circulated already in January, much earlier than in the US, so that the spread was much slower. But this doesn’t mean that the Japanese government can be credited with the prevention. It was not until mid-April that the policy of shutting-down was instigated by federal and municipal governments across Japan. Osaka was still active more or less when I left. And still today, the number of positive cases is significantly smaller as compared to the Western countries, especially the US. The reason for this is unknown, and I would not dare try to explain it. But there are stark differences in the social atmosphere I have perceived.
People in Osaka (or Japan in general) seemed to be more composed (regarding the threat) and less rigid (in terms of preventative measures) than people in New York. They appeared so, maybe because the majority of people had always worn masks as habitual precaution and kept a modest social distance as etiquette, even before the Coronavirus pandemic. People were still gathering with certain precautions. I felt they might have much more flexible and rich techniques, perhaps subconsciously, to manage proxemics (E.T. Hall) – or, the relationality according to closeness, distance and closure, in interaction with varied social situations – as compared to the rigid articulation of closeness or detachment in New York. Their composure may be thanks to the national health insurance that covers the majority, and possibly the experience of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster that could have taught them certain things: that the threat of virus (like radiation) is staged as an information war rather than a pure truth in and of itself and that the principle of life protection needs to be applied flexibly according to existential contexts, rather than homologically. Some people are thus aware that they need their own standpoint for analyzing information and sharing techniques for survival, outside the voices of authorities.
In Osaka I am associated with a community in Kamagasaki, the ghetto of day-laborers, that consists of a heterogeneous group of older day-laborers, younger precariat, homeless, and other underclass and social outcasts who coordinate the live-in occupation of streets. This is part of the struggle to recreate their living space, that was lost when they were evicted from a labor center by the municipal government preparing for a new development. In the tent village on the street, everyone was discussing measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19, but nobody – except for the government – was telling them that they should go to the homeless shelter for the sake of public safety.
Meanwhile, in the world, governments’ measures to the pandemic diverge, but in a rough picture embody a spectrum from extreme to loose control of social life. At opposite poles, we find two models: one is “control everyone” and another is “let them die.” It seems that the countries with more control have succeeded in confining the pandemic, as compared to the cold-blooded business centrism of the US government that has been letting people get sick and die more than any country in the world. If we compare Japan and the US, while Japanese society tends to sustain a certain equality (or homogeneity) with the risk of falling prey to a totalitarian conformism (as has happened in the past and will happen in the future), America proudly claims that it is a free society, which is however equal to just an agreement of minding only self-interest (of upper to middle class) at the expense of interests of others (minorities and indigenous people). This is a comparison between the totalitarianism implicated in a democratic society versus the fascism internalized in an individualistic society. Both are problematic. And yet I cannot help feeling that in the current pandemic, along with Brazil, America has embodied the worst condition for humans to survive.
* Reflecting on your experience up until now, through whatever histories you sense, what seems new and not new?
We are learning about the history of pandemics and their impacts over societies. But more immediately, we must contextualize the present epoch, i.e., beginning from the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, passing through the Covid-19 pandemic and expecting something far beyond. This is the historical present of the catastrophic world in which we live. The epochal meaning of the present is that it apocalyptically reveals the way the world has been made and thereby compels us to reconsider the ways by which we live and make it. In other words, such revelation affects our ideas of revolution (or changing the world) in confrontation with the capitalist-state mode of development.
What are commonalities between the nuclear disaster and the pandemic? Radiation in the Fukushima Disaster and Covid-19 in the pandemic are both byproducts of the indefinitely densifying interconnectivity between the human world and the planetary environment. They are different embodiments of the world expanding over the planetary body, by the unstoppable development of capitalist states. Both are instances that a contiguity opened a barrier or a seal from which mutant forces were released, spreading and exerting negative effects over humans and their societies. They mutate our DNA, one by radioactive attack and another by parasitic activity. Both endanger the vital activity of humans and disrupt social reproduction in a dramatic manner. Their impacts are spreading across the world. But their spreading patterns are invisible and hard to detect. The only way to grasp them is by extrapolation from combined data. In the space of uncertainty, information war arises. The discrepancy between and friction among the representations of information make us realize that, in our society, the event doesn’t exist in and of itself, outside of the information network that stages it.
What are differences between radiation and the Covid-19 virus? They permeate differently and effect differently: radiation travels through planetary movements and mutates the genetic activities of all vital activities, while Covid-19 spreads via the agent of living organs, exclusively those of mammals and humans. While radionuclides travel very far and for a long time, permeating the earth in nano-dimension, their genetic mutation is transferred through hereditary lineage. While the virus can travel only a short distance and for a short moment, the viral hostage of cells spreads coextensively to all mammals via dissemination of infectors’ body fluid by contact or evaporation in the air. While the effects of the former are machinic and spatio-temporally dispersed, those of the latter are organic, directly devastating social relations.
In terms of protective measure, the one against radiation is to seal all vital activities from it; it requires environmental operations; but the one against the virus is to isolate individuals from infected people or animals; it requires social operations. The immediate effects on the socius by the pandemic are much more intense, but the long time effects on the planetary environment by radiation are far more enduring and expansive.
What do they reveal? What do they tell us by the negative or what they destroy? Radiation teaches us the substance of the rapport between human and land, by destroying it. The pandemic shows us the necessity of physical interaction among bodies, after making it prohibited. (Let us note that we have nothing if not for the two: rapport between us and land and interaction among our bodies.) In either case, the difficulties of grasping spreading patterns and effects are opening up wider horizons wherein we must be engaged politically and socially. This is the crux of the apocalyptic revelation of the present: that the realm of what used to be considered as political (i.e., during the 60s) is just a tip of the iceberg now. Now we are facing the political ontology of not only socio-politico-economic crises but also info-radio-viral-environmental catastrophes. This is a planetary politics, in distinction from that of the world.
These are to say, what we are confronting today in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis is, to be precise, no longer one (viral) kind of disaster after another (radioactive), but a synergy of varying categories of disasters that affects us at once. On top of the crises in political, social and economic domains, we are confronted by accumulating layers of catastrophes derivative of frictions among all planetary forces.
In the catastrophic world, it seems to us that there must be at least three principles in our lives-as-struggle: (A) protection of life, (B) oppositional politics and (C) creation of autonomy as a joint of the two. At the moment, the priority is widely considered to be (A), but this does not mean that (B) and (C) can be omitted. Without (B) and (C), our lives-as-struggle for (A) are absorbed into governments’ population control. We should not forget our premise that if not for the attempt to decompose the powers of capitalist-nation-states that caused the disasters in the first place, our lives-as-struggle don’t have to even exist. We observe recently some important mutual aid projects that consist of (A) and (C), but (B) seems to be in repose in many places.
As the present epoch of catastrophe reveals, the more intensely people’s lives-as-struggle are engaged in the singularity of their existential territories, the more vividly they sense the fact that they are confronting not only the local and global powers of the capitalist-state mode of development, but also all planetary forces. No matter where we live, the causes of the crises and catastrophes from which we suffer are global and planetary. Therefore, no life-as-struggle can complete its goal within a single, isolated geopolitical territory. We are certain that the project to make reverberation among lives-as-struggle across the planet cannot be rendered as an internationalism based upon the geopolitical order of nation-states. Then, what? What we consider as planetary politics is still in the process of formation.
The starting point of this politics is the existential view of synergy between radiation and pandemic – what destroys human/land rapport and the socius – cutting across the world. This is a politics of flows rather than divisions, of energo-signaletic flows rather than the territorialization of space. On the one hand, we must confront the global flows of capital, information, commodities and labor power; on the other, we are inexorably affected by atmospheric and tectonic movements. Expecting endlessly intensifying crises and catastrophes, all the byproducts of the capitalist-state mode of development, we must make ourselves as flows of energy and signal in order to reverberate with the flows of lives-as-struggle across the planet in order to destroy this world. Tentatively, we would like to call this the politics of Qi.
* Has your imagination of your own life/struggle changed? Your fear or despair or hope for the future?
My fear has to do with the impossibility of traveling different places on the planet. Based upon already established associations and telecommunication, it might be possible to expand planetary connections, and yet my biggest desire is in physical traveling and encounter. My serious concern at the moment is about the future of the conditions of international traveling and border control.
* What is one question you’ve been asking yourself?
What does one think in an extreme crisis? I believe that most of us are concerned with the most traditional questions of life: meaning and power. What is the meaning of my life after all? What have I been able to do? What can I do in the rest of my life? Shall I give up and retire or try out one more challenge?
* Is there any question you would like to pose here for others, and/or respond to yourself?
What is the goal of your struggle? Is it revolution? If so, what is revolution? Some part of my response is in the above.
S
May 2020