1. Describe your experience of the coronavirus situation and how it has affected you.
Having left New York City where I live in early March for Japan where I often visit, the most immediate impact of the pandemic for me was the sudden closure of international borders. And then, with the virtual nature of the virus and the very different ways it seemed to be spreading between the US and Japan, my experience was deranged between a relatively normal everyday in Osaka and the terrible imaginary of NYC. While the threat of the virus never felt clear in Japan, at some point worries from the US caught up with me, and I panicked one day in the grocery store amidst the inevitable crowds of people, taken by the fear of bringing the virus back to the house where I was staying and infecting older friends there. It was a most unsettling feeling of making choices about life and death, without having any perceptible sense of the danger. Was it really up to me to prevent sickness and death to those I love? By figuring out ways to avoid human contact in this densely populated city? While everything outside my body grew more and more hostile, these questions kept me from sleeping until, frazzled one morning, I suddenly bought tickets to fly back ‘home’, to a place where I could avoid having to address them.
I went to the midwest of the US, where it is much more possible to simply separate from people, and it didn’t even feel that different, since everyone there is already, existentially, socially distanced. After a month of relative isolation, I am no less confused about what is real. But now, beyond the questions of what to do in response to the virus, below the confusion in answering them and the sad sense of their (im)possibility, I’ve started to feel that what is most upsetting about the coronavirus as a viral social phenomenon and the questions of individual responsibility that it has raised, is not answering them per se, so much as the way that their answerability presses me, insisting that beyond the immediate and inevitable material exigency of being in relation with everything outside of ‘me’, I must now act for the sake of others in relation to an idea of anti-virus responsibility. I think that what this whole situation has made me feel (largely unconsciously) is how little real ground is shareable, how abstracted all relations are, how distant from my own ‘life’: can I really ‘choose’ to be alone in the first place? How can one ‘live’ alone? To survive, I need to feel myself living in relation to more than my ideas.
2. Speaking from experience, things you’ve imagined, seen and heard, describe your impressions of society vis-a-vis the coronavirus situation.
On one level, and most immediately, it was images of total governance and micro-fascistic violence accumulating from different parts of the world, and an accompanying sense of the unfathomably intricate and endless history of suffering and cruelty. Hearing first from a friend in Beijing about the government’s control of movement + popular initiatives in xenophobic enclosure, then from a friend in Seoul about the overnight implementation of sophisticated technologies of biopolitical management, and then suddenly the pandemic was everywhere and every country had its stories – martial law, mob attacks, popular policing, mass hysteria, socially stratified deaths – all sedimented in the shocking realization that not only one country, but all countries’ borders could be suddenly and simply closed.
And then I think what got to me most was the complete derangement of my senses from mid-March to mid-April, between everyday experience in Osaka and imagined misery in the US. Overtop real alleys and kitchens and bars, cutting into the homeless encampments and old shrines and underground malls of Osaka, was this omnipresent sense of the American coronavirus landscape, equally sparse and oppressive. Its scant features were filled in each morning when I would call friends and family in the US (it was always night there): staying home all the time, doing nothing, worrying about health, reading over and over the same coronavirus news. Sometime during the first two or three week period, when the major TV channels were scrolling predictions for the future number of US deaths, I tried to interrupt my mom one day, saying yes but I don’t feel like we really know what’s going on, and her reaction has stayed with me, not exactly for its content but for the particular way it evoked the American coronavirus landscape: “well I know that in New York City they’ve got refrigerated semi-trucks for all the bodies”. I realized that what was saddest about this mediatized imaginary was that, while the same features were shared in imagination by millions and millions of people, the possibility of shared navigation had already been foreclosed upon, not only because everyone started spending even more time than usual staring at screens at home, but more fundamentally because, facing the future of their alienated lives, everyone had already felt themselves to be more or less alone.
It was to this paranoid vision that I returned when I left Osaka for ‘home’, not for NYC but for the suburbanized wilds of the American midwest, to one of the place-less places like every other place somewhere in the middle of that expansive territory whose placid continuity is secured by endless war, where the most violent existences are also the most emotionally vulnerable, with nothing but the self, nothing vital to relate to. Even with many of the stores closed the landscape felt the same, the grounds for the reproduction of sociality as consumptive and familial, stores upon stores upon roads upon roads upon houses upon houses working together fluidly and almost imperceptibly, turning the spoils of unending war into death-quickening trash. Gas was cheaper than it had been in twenty years. One day I wanted a lemon so the next my mom bought a bag of 24, because that was “all they had at Costco.”
What does it mean for a situation to be historical in light of history’s terrors? What constitutes global crisis in the context of the past century of the American empire’s global war? Maybe more than what reality the accumulated information adds up to, the question that matters is more like what does death mean? What does whose death mean to who, and when and where, and, most importantly, how?
I’ve started to think that what bothers me most in American society is the emotional degradation of consumption, especially now when most people spend their days looking at screens, their willingness to live in virtual realms of image and discourse connected to an ultimately willful ignorance of the complex and vital and material dimensions of existential interrelationality, especially those which are upsetting (and, in the American case, quite violent). The sick thing is that it’s like people want to think, exactly as the news daily confirms, that the world is about to end, as if to dull their senses of the unsettling interrelations encountered in any process of ending (/continuing), and to affirm instead the deadening feeling of total detachment vis-a-vis the inevitable end of the world. Have the stakes of survival degraded so far, that what drives us is the desire to achieve as fully as possible the experience of numbness itself, the greatest hope for one’s existence being relief from one’s feeling in living?
3. Reflecting on your experience up until now, through whatever histories you sense, what seems new and not new?
To be honest, at first nothing seemed new. But eventually some of my accumulated resentments loosened, so that I started to imagine more empathetically how the relation between virus and people goes deeper on a lived, micro-scale than social/state responses. As much as dangerous, this relation also just feels sad: at this particular historical social juncture, the nature of virus-human meeting and the realities of person-to-person transmission have inevitably put pressure on sensitive and caring people to somehow take individual responsibility. What is sad is what the conscious prioritization of that responsibility does in the context of our already alienated ways of relating, what the fear of transmission does to our sensibilities as we try to grapple with chaotic realities, already prone to moralism and voluntarisms and simplifications of all sorts, these harsh rationalisms only further alienating us as they embolden the lines of the self and blur other connectivities.
4. Has your imagination of your own life/struggle changed? Your fear or despair or hope for the future?
First I imagined having to leave NYC, sensing that the reason the virus would go on flourishing there was connected to my reason for wanting to live there, that is, the density of heterogeneous human contact which created a singular space for the possibilities of becoming in relation. It’s terrible to imagine the final death of that New York, that after so many decades of other deadening forces, the pandemic could become its final blow. But in a sense it was good for me to be forced to imagine leaving NYC sooner than expected, because I found myself facing questions which might have otherwise simply made me panic: how can I live with others? (in material everyday and metaphysical senses) How to create intergenerational community? While my mom is living in suburban hell? How to choose between the social vitality of NYC and the earth/life vitality away from the cities’ wreckage? It is not that I’ve felt I can answer such questions, but more that it has dawned on me that trying to answer them first in words has been a substantial part of my trouble, that however impossible it may ultimately be, the present is the best possible time to try to densify relational existence in the hope of living in common.
5. What is one question you’ve been asking yourself?
Why do I get angry every time I read or hear anything about the coronavirus?
Also, what the hell is going on?
6. Is there any question you would like to pose here for others, and/or respond to yourself?
From the sinking feeling that we are all totally disempowered if we are unable to localize / situate our thought and feeling, our relations, everything: though we can talk about the singularity of the local as an idea, in these terrible globalized realities, how could sensibilities of singularity emerge, through what experience, and how? How can we face those complex (nauseating) realities in which our lives are inextricablely caught up, in actual experience, with actual others, through actual everydays? (And I wonder if these questions resonate more with those belonging to certain classes of the globally dominant Western societies than with others…)
AU
June 2020