Context: Written during the COVID-19 pandemic
Style: Essayistic 
Author: Ye Hwa (Raina) Lee
Bio: Ye Hwa Lee is pursuing a major in economics at New York University. 

Plato’s Theory of Forms asserts all that is present in the physical realm is a shadow of its true essence and reality. Thus, in the subsequent decades following Plato’s discovery of his theory, philosophers, scientists, politicians, among many others, have been asking variants of the question: “What is the essence of mankind?” There have been a multitude of proposed theories. Some say mankind is the rational animal; some propose the essence of mankind is his or her eternal spirit. However, none of the propositions provided me with a satisfying answer, and I am beginning to realize that this may be because we have been asking the wrong question.

The idea of the principle of mankind has an anthropocentric connotation and therefore is flawed. One cannot separate the individual from the ingroup, society, ecosystem, or planet he or she exists in. For instance, the second wave of feminism introduced the argument that “the personal is political.” The quote stems from the idea that the experience one thinks is personal is in reality shared by many others. This is because the individual experience cannot be separated from larger social and political structures. In the same sense, the idea of mankind is a social construct based on a hierarchical categorization of species. For as long as we are human, we are biased in our perceptions of humankind. We think of ourselves as the positive that opposes the Other’s negative; in doing so, we illusion ourselves as deserving of power and control. In reality, Homo sapiens only comprise 0.01% of the planet’s biomass and their existence depends on their relationship with all life on Earth (Ritchie). This has become more evident than ever in the year 2020 as mankind strives to find ways humanity can co-exist with the COVID-19 virus. The existence of mankind is threaded and woven into Earth’s tapestry. Where does our identity start and where does it end? Perhaps the answer to that question is that there is no such thing as a beginning nor end to our identity; the borders we draw to separate us from them are ingrained, and we simply cannot think of ourselves separate from all life despite life’s multifarious manifestations. Hence, our existence is life. Therefore, the question we must ask ourselves is not: “What is the essence of mankind?” rather, we must ask: “What is the essence of life?” When examining Earth’s history, billions of species have emerged and gone extinct; if we put time into perspective, the length of time we, Homo sapiens, have been around is substantially minuscule. However, ever since the emergence of the first forms of life, life has never stopped living. The observable fact that life has never ceased is very telling when we examine the question: “What is the principle of life?” This is because perhaps the principle of life is life itself. Perhaps the essence of life is to ensure the continuation and sustainment of life.

When observing a colony of ants, many people may find themselves pitying the worker ant; the worker ants devote their entire work, resources, and life to the queen ant. It was later in life where I learned that this system among the ants exists because the queen ant is the only ant that can reproduce. Worker ants who cannot reproduce are an evolutionary dead end; the only way the individual ants can ensure the continuation of their species and therefore life is by devoting themselves to protecting the queen ant. This gives insight into the essence of life: there is a difference between life and survival. If the essence of life was survival rather than life itself, it would be detrimental to the species as individual ants forget they require the life of the queen as well as the lives of other worker ants to sustain their own life as well as their species’ life in the future.

Another example of the principle of life at work can be seen when we examine the cells that we are built out of. We, as multicellular organisms, are systems built upon systems, and the most fundamental blocks that make up our biological structures are our cells. The colonial theory of multicellular life suggests that multicellular organisms, as opposed to single-celled organisms, require an excessive amount of ATP to sustain itself and thus are energetically expensive (Baranski). Therefore, to sustain its existence, the survival mechanism of multicellular organisms was to invest in complexity by creating multiple layers of symbiotic relationships with other multicellular life (Baranski). For example, the cells that make up our nervous system depend on the cells that make up our lungs to provide oxygen, and the lungs depend on the nervous system to command it to breathe. However, as a trade-off of taking advantage of the emergent properties of multicellular traits, all multicellular life does not come without the probability of becoming cancerous. Cancer is when an individual cell forgets that they need to cooperate with other cells to sustain their own life. A cancerous cell only cares about its own survival and neglects the fact that its larger purpose is to sustain life, and therefore, the cancerous organism is basing its principles on survival rather than life. This is disastrous to not only the whole biosystem the cancerous cell interacts with but also to the cancerous cell itself. The notion of cancer sheds light on the fragility of life: the principle of life is life; however, our existence lies in the physical realm, and the physical realm is subject to flaws. If we, human beings, lose sight of life’s essence and forget the fact that our existence is dependent on all life both from the past, present, and future, we risk the destruction of all life including our own.

Today, more than ever, we ask, “How can we live alongside nature? How can we live alongside each other?” In an effort in answering these questions, perhaps we should look towards the principle of life. The principle of life is life, and life is living proof that unity exists among us just as much as diversity does. Life reminds us, “I exist because of the life that has existed before me.” Life reminds us, “My well-being is for the well-being of others because the well-being of others is the reason for my own well-being.” If each and every one of us comes to the understanding that we all have the duty to sustain and protect “life,” our collective respect for one another may one day achieve an equal and just society.

CRITICAL RACE AND THE POSTHUMAN
The Global Posthuman Network joins the worldwide demonstrations against systemic racism, police brutality, and all forms of racial injustice, past and present. We are inviting blog entries on the topic of critical race and the posthuman, to address specifically anti-black racism. ​Entries can be short and long; original images and video links are also welcome (see specificities in the Disclaimer on the right side of this page). Please send your entry at NYposthuman[at]gmail.com Thanks for making a change in this world!

Context: Recorded in May 2020 in Israel, during the (prolonged) lockdown due to the Covid-19 Emergency
Style: This Video is part of the Youtube Channel "Posthumans Go Viral".
Author: Carmel Vaisman
Bio: Carmel Vaisman is a Digital Culture Researcher and Lecturer at the multidisciplinary Program in the Humanities and the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University.

Context: Written to reflect on a post-Coronavirus future
Style: Essayistic - Excerpt from the book, Brave New Human: Reflections on the Invisible, edited by Alexander Mouret 
Author: Mashya Boon
Bio: Mashya Boon is a Dutch international Ph.D. student in the department of English at Michigan State University, specializing in Film Studies. Her research interests lie at the intersection of film-philosophy, posthumanism, and the genres of SF and horror. 

In light of the global crisis caused by the Coronavirus, I think it is fruitful to reexamine our frames of reference concerning our notions of radical transformation as well as our perception on viruses. To help us reframe and perhaps even reinvigorate these concepts within these confusing times, I believe that one recent film can productively fracture conventional patterns of thought when it comes to reconfiguring our outlook on destruction and disease. The film in question envisions a life-altering alien force that crashed onto earth and devours the world as we knew it. While the title might suggest otherwise, Annihilation (Garland, 2018) is not about the nullification of life. Rather, it ferociously deals with a refractory re-creation of reality. 

The fashion in which Annihilation figures a novel kind of being human opens up avenues for exploring how ‘the posthuman’ is imagined within contemporary cinema while forwarding a salient stance about mutation and life. Posthuman literally means: an entity which is beyond the human as we know it. Posthuman theory in accordance generally questions the perception of human nature as universal and hegemonic, while overthrowing Enlightenment-legacies which ingrained a discourse of exceptionalism of the rational human subject into our society’s fabric of thought. This paper analyzes the ways in which Annihilation’s iridescent ‘Shimmer’ with its viral-like growths produces evocative instances of terrifying transformation, which seem painfully poignant in times of our current COVID-19 crisis. This film poses a philosophical thought-experiment by questioning “what counts as life?” By scrutinizing Annihilation’s viral tendrils in light of Karen Barad’s and Donna Haraway’s theories, this paper highlights how we might benefit from a transformation in anthropocentric thought. The film’s stance can be aligned with a new-materialist view of nature: a strange (re)turn to an otherworldly nature where the boundaries between technology and the organic are mixed on a cellular level, where hybridity and impurity prevail as the formerly discrete units of human life are scattered across a novel posthuman mosaic of convalescing mutation. 

“It wasn't destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new.”
​
This line, uttered by protagonist Lena (Natalie Portman) in a final scene, explicitly verbalizes that Annihilation is not about absolute destruction. In this scene, a military official interrogates Lena, after returning from the Shimmer. This alien environment came into existence after a meteor crashed onto a lighthouse at the southern coastline of Florida. The Shimmer expanded exponentially, threatening to take over the entire globe. The ‘infected’ area which it spread to, is designated as ‘Area X’. The military took great precaution to prevent the general public from knowing about it. Still, the military can only guess as to what the Shimmer’s nature entails: a religious event, an extraterrestrial event, a higher dimension? They have many theories, but few facts. 

The entire environment within the Shimmer has gone berserk: different species of plants intermix their usually distinctive structures into one new conglomerate whole. Not only plant life took on this hybridizing quality; also fungal, animal and even human lifeforms are affected by the Shimmer’s transmutations which produce stunning new composites of life. Faun-like deer with bark-like antlers endowed with fluorescent flowers and prehistoric bear-like monsters with exposed craniums who adopt their victim’s last cry populate Area X. The way the Shimmer operates is explained halfway by expounding that magnetic forces within this zone literally refract all particles present in the environment. Not only light gets deformed into fantastical rainbow hues that seep into mother nature, but also all previously discrete units of DNA of various species are scattered and remixed into new syntheses by the Shimmer’s prism. All matter becomes susceptible to radical change within its ontological core. Humanoid shaped ‘plants’ and crystalline ‘trees’ only seem to be the beginning of this planetary metamorphosis. All living species are refashioned, immanently altering the traditional categories of what life on earth entails.

Tracing the etymology of the word ‘annihilation’, it is composed of two parts which in a contradictory sense annul each other while fortifying the word's meaning too. Annihilation in its primary definition indeed means “to reduce to utter ruin or nonexistence”: to annihilate is to reduce something into nothing. However, although the main component of the word consists of the Latin word ‘nihil’, which denotes ‘nothing’, the prefix ‘an-’ designates that the word behind it is not (or is without) the thing that is stated behind it. So in fact, ‘an-nihil-ation’, literally means ‘not nothing’. The word seen in this way rather encompasses a lacking of nonexistence. It connotes something that is without emptiness. Therefore, in its origins, the process of annihilation entails more ‘a becoming of something’ than ‘a reduction to nothing’. Aphoristically speaking, within the mechanisms of destruction resides the potential for unbridled creation itself; the making of something radically new. 

​Yet the common connotation of ‘annihilation’ does signify the state of being annihilated, the utter extinction of absolutely everything. This linguistic and philosophical paradox that underpins the word ‘annihilation’, also lies at the heart of the film’s core concept. Annihilation intricately conceptualizes a more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, posthuman state of existence which relentlessly refracts each and every aspect of life and calls into question what it means to be human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate, dead or alive. The film savagely systematizes an almost cancerous and even viral structure of being which exudes a towering form of growth and mutation of everything that is present or that has a presence in our earthly existence. Within the Shimmer, the undiscriminating force projecting out of the lighthouse encapsulates all life with its megalomanic metamorphosis. It is this kind of extreme presence of a lacking of nonexistence which annihilates the rational world and our human selves. Yet this an–nihil–ating force does not reduce reality to sheer nothingness, it in reality entails a radical state of being immanently without emptiness. 

​Mashya Boon

In modern society, we are incessantly inundated with stimuli. Text messages, emails, advertisements, news stories, push notifications, television, podcasts, social media, and radio are but some of the distractions to which we have grown accustomed. This leaves little room for stillness in one’s daily routine. In fact, it appears that humans, in the midst of modern technological stimulation, have developed something akin to a fear of stillness. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, this fear of stillness and, more specifically, loneliness, has become more evident. As people are forced into social isolation, the pain of loneliness and boredom inevitably arise, necessitating a confrontation with stillness and the resulting discomfort. But why are we afraid of being alone with ourselves? Why must we seek constant stimulation and distraction as a form of “escape”?

This fear is indeed related to sitting alone with oneself. But meditation and stillness enable us to potentially look beyond the self. Much unhappiness and emotional distress can be attributed to an obsession with oneself. Humanity—myself included—is terribly egotistic. But by adopting methods to help us escape from a self-centered approach to life, we can learn to live happier, more fulfilling lives. Additionally, in doing so, we can improve the quality of life for other species, both plants and animals. Moving beyond a human-centered approach to life reflects posthuman philosophical beliefs, which discourage the strict, human-defined hierarchical designation of life on Earth, with humans conveniently placed at the top. 

Meditation and self-reflection may seem like indulgent practices, but they actually aid in emulating posthumanist values during one’s daily life. Mindfulness meditation allows one to examine their emotions and feelings in the present moment, allowing them to recognize what brings one joy, fear, or anxiety. 

On his Making Sense Podcast, Sam Harris recently interviewed Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist and professor at Yale University. Santos focuses on the science of happiness, and talks about the power of mindfulness as it relates to living a fulfilling life. She admits that most people eventually grow bored of their routines and possessions, promoting the desire to constantly acquire more possessions or partake in novel thrills. But with mindfulness, one is able to find joy and gratitude in the present moment. By fully immersing oneself in the here and now, boredom is rendered inert, and the full experience of living can be completely appreciated—even amidst a pandemic. Stillness cultivates awareness, and awareness brings with it the possibility to live more fully and to understand ourselves more completely. This too reflects posthumanist values because by relishing the present, we more readily recognize the beauty in nature, for instance. With greater appreciation comes the desire to treat all forms of life with respect. Gratitude drives us to look beyond our own species and instead learn to live in a way that benefits all forms of life.

Sam Harris himself also stresses the importance of meditation. In recent episodes, he highlights this importance during such unprecedented times as these. Harris acknowledges that anxiety can indeed be useful, as it prompts us to take certain steps to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and others, but when the majority of our thoughts are consumed by anxiety, it ceases to be a viable tool, only adding unnecessary suffering. But when we are able to be still, Harris explains, and notice the thoughts that arise, we can make rational, healthy decisions in the midst of this anxiety. 

Peter Attia, a well-known and well-respected doctor with his own podcast, The Drive, has also articulated meditation’s effect on his mental health. He describes the practice as offering a pause between an initial thought or emotion and his response. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we are most certainly inundated with uncomfortable and anxiety-provoking thoughts. We may also be experiencing more tension and anger if we are quarantined with our families, or if we are searching for someone to blame for the mishandling of the situation. Meditation, as Attia and Harris explain, creates distance between these negative emotions and the responses we have to them. It allows us to choose how to react in a measured, non-impulsive way. With meditation, especially during these difficult times, we can cultivate greater self-awareness and use COVID-19 as a unique exercise in becoming more self-reflective and thus a more empathetic and helpful member of society.

If you feel moved to try meditation, below is a 10-minute guided session. Please enjoy! ​

​10-minute_guided_meditation_.m4a

"Gift" from the book “Sociology and Anthropology”, to define the forms of interchanges, exchanges, or relationships between Melanesian groups, approaching our time lived in our current cultures.

As Mauss reveals, “it is clear that, in Maori rights, the bond of right, bond of things, is a soul-bond, because the thing has a soul by itself, it is the soul. Meaning that “to present something to someone is to present something about yourself” (Mauss, 2003, p.200). These forms are included in what he calls “total prestation”: “The system that we propose to call the system of total prestation, from clan to clan - the one in which individuals and groups exchange everything between themselves - constitutes the oldest system of economy and law that we can observe and conceive. It forms the fund on which it stands out the morality of the gift-exchange” (Mauss, 2003, p. 299).

The term reciprocity seems to be in evidence in this period of the Corona Virus Pandemic, in the sense of solidarity between people, nature, art, science, and technology. At the same time, we experience the uncertainty of ideological truth (or truths), in the sense of reciprocity in different senses of communication between people. The understanding of what is presented in terms of the production of scientific knowledge in relation to the public that receives it is being evidenced from a virus, which, just as it is promoting many deaths, suffering, and uncertainties, is bringing scientific knowledge in medicine, sociology, statistics, public health, and technology closer in the common world. The news around the world emphasizes that the everyday world needs researched and analyzed information to learn or relearn how to live.

What we are currently living in is founded on the reciprocity of scientific knowledge production that, before this virus, seemed to live for itself and in itself, removing the knowledge of the other - Nature/Culture. This knowledge remained for the Academy (in this text I do not intend to go into the economic aspect involved in scientific research and its possible problems), and especially for the medical sciences, which are our total support to live with the Coronavirus. We realize this in the current situation in which we find ourselves: we need scientific knowledge and the reciprocal is unequivocal. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves, What is the sense of reciprocity between Nature/Culture and scientific knowledge for the production of post-human knowledge?

In the research with the Kaingang Indians in Brazil, already in progress, it was revealed to us that the democratic and shared form has provided an integration between the “subjects” of the research. The non-hierarchical dialogue, reflected among the group's participants, has expanded itself among the research participants in the needed time. It is important to emphasize that the opening to dialogue is also a learning process among the research subjects because, for the indigenous people, their voices have always been the last to be considered. The voices of researchers and teachers, for the indigenous subjects participating in the research, represented the decisive voice, not always open to dialogue, historically speaking.

Therefore, I consider it necessary to think about post-humanism from Braidotti (2013) and her view that post-humanism means thinking about community and the interconnections between ethics, people, and the environment. In other words, to be posthuman does not mean to be indifferent to humans, or to be dehumanized: “On the contrary, it rather implies a new way of combining ethical values with the well-being of an enlarged sense of community, which includes one’s territorial or environmental inter-connections” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 190). Furthermore, “Becoming-posthuman consequently is a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space - urban, social, psychic, ecological, planetary as it may be. It expresses multiple ecologies of belonging while it enacts the transformation of one’s sensorial and perceptual coordinates in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self” (Braidotti, 2013, p.193)

I would like to expand the meaning, questioning the forms of reciprocity between Nature and Culture, which imply human, environment, science, technology, subjectivity (individual/conscious/unconscious/social/collective) and underline the collective aspect undertaken in the Shared Production of Knowledge (Bairon; Lazaneo; 2012). In the proposal of this methodology, subjects live together, donate knowledge to one another, and provide gifts, which I can call the joy of sharing, turning both the researcher into the subject and the subject into the researcher. It transforms the indigenous people since they perceive themselves as protagonists in their own culture when teaching the researcher to see and experience the indigenous cultural sense. Thus, the indigenous look does not need the researcher's filter; and, on the other hand, the researcher, using his tools of scientific knowledge, shows the possibilities of systematization and appropriation of traditional knowledge based on the actions of the indigenous people themselves, who are involved in this process of communication and sharing. In the moments shared on the Kaingang land in Palmas (PR), I understand the joy of this exchange of knowledge for the students and this researcher, without trying to explain this emotion scientifically. But I can connect this exchange from this experience with the indigenous people to the relationship that the philosopher Gadamer (1999) presents concerning the aesthetic experience the viewer undergoes when facing a piece of art: the joy of knowledge.

To what extent do we think of reciprocity in the production of knowledge, to go beyond Humanism?

In this sense, we are experiencing the concepts of the shared production of knowledge and post-humanist reflections, and, therefore, feeling, experiencing first-hand, that the dominant position of the white, European researcher - as cited by Braidotti (2013) and Ferrando (2012; 2016) - or the subject who has scientific knowledge - cited by Bairon (2019) and Lazaneo (2015) - is deeply rooted in the perception of the indigenous native. But I believe that it is possible to predict, with situated inclusivism (Ferrando, 2012), the opening of knowledge and revelations - reciprocity - in which we envision an experience between different cultures, between subjects that try to live according to “post” humanism.

Therefore, I propose thinking about scientific knowledge as a form of sharing, as a form of reciprocity between the ordinary world and the scientific world, providing such knowledge to the ordinary world, however, and acknowledging it. I believe it is a way of offering gifts, offering knowledge in a broad way to the built world and the given world, going beyond humanism and towards posthumanism.

Context: Recorded in May 2020 in Canada, during the (prolonged) lockdown due to the Covid-19 Emergency
Style: This Video is part of the Youtube Channel "Posthumans Go Viral".
Author: Christine Daigle, Director, Posthumanism Research Institute, Brock University

1. Luxurious Quarantine, Suffering Masses: Transhumanism as Oppressor and Liberator, in ‘Elysium’

IntroductionThe pandemic crisis of 2020 brings to mind multiple facets of the movie ‘Elysium’. Although the reviews of the movie were in the mid-range – neither gloriously celebratory nor atrociously bad – the present moment demands a relook at the multiple novel aspects of the future that the film imagined. For those who have not seen the film, or whose memory of it is hazy, let us start with a summary of the plot.

The Plot of Elysium

In the year 2154, planet Earth is nearly ruined and humanity is divided sharply – even more so than in 2020. The ultrarich live aboard a luxurious orbiting space station called Elysium, with amenities comparable to the most opulent gated communities of 2020. The vast majority, the rest, are reduced to a wretched humanity, living a hardscrabble existence in Earth's ruins.

The luxurious space station Elysium is technologically advanced. It has devices such as Med-Bays that can cure all diseases, reverse the aging process, and regenerate body parts. By contrast, the planet Earth, hundreds of miles below Elysium, is a writhing and smoldering cauldron of disease and deprivation. Suffering residents of planet Earth want Elysian technology to cure their illnesses. The curative-restorative technologies, however, are only available to citizens of Elysium. Jodie Foster, playing the role of Defense Secretary, the stern protector of the privileges of the residents of Elysium, takes all actions to guard the technologies of the space station, to preserve the pampered lifestyle of Elysium's citizens, and to prevent the leakage of the fantastic Elysian technologies to Earth.

Matt Damon, playing a brash character called Max, exposed to deadly massive radiation poisoning, and also moved by the disease and suffering of a friend’s daughter on Earth, agrees to undertake a dangerous mission that could access the medical technologies of Elysium and bring equality to the population of Earth. The mission is to jack into the central computer on Elysium, and reprogram it to recharacterize all the residents of Earth as citizens of Elysium.

There are many plot twists and turns, severe and savage battles, but ultimately Max manages to jack into the computer at Elysium, and reprograms it, even as this act kills him. The impact of reprogramming is instantaneous. The robotic entities, earlier used by their masters in Elysium to suppress and contain the population of Earth, now automatically turn into helpers and saviors of all – including residents of Earth, now granted Elysian citizenship and privileges. Hundreds of Med-Bays are dispatched to relieve the suffering on Earth.

Prescient Tropes?

We do not have to wait till 2154; many of the conditions of the movie Elysium started appearing in 2020, and accelerated suddenly with the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the luxurious space colony, separated and insulated from a wretched Earth, is still not a reality, major entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are working with technologies and systems that would create such escape abodes in outer space. In the meanwhile, luxury quarantine in 2020 takes the forms of private planes, private or access-controlled islands, fantastically equipped and opulent survival bunkers, and more.

The Med-Bays are not here yet, but the medical-technological research frameworks for reversing aging, restoring lost senses and organs, rebuilding body parts, sentient prosthetics, and other steps toward – Singularity? Convergence? Tran-Posthumans? – are already in place. We can expect to see major acceleration in these.

The robotic police is not here yet, but a robotic dog is patrolling the parks in Singapore, warning folks to keep the 6-feet/2-meter distance from each other. And of course, drones that could kill and contain troublemakers are ready – used to combat terrorism so far, but fully capable of doing anything that they are commanded to do. More mundanely, hypersurveillance – so far used to nudge customers to buy promoted brands (except in China and a few places, where it also assigns social scores and categorizes people) – is evolving rapidly into ways to classify and trace individuals and their contact networks.

There are discussions afoot on developing privilege and certification cards of various kinds: cured, immune, asymptomatic, symptomatic, vulnerable, indispensable, super-privileged, essential-and-protection-worthy, essential-but-disposable, etc.

The big political-philosophical questions that are emerging are obvious: Will we move toward a world that has privileged Elysians, with fantastic technologies and massive robotic power, escaping from and seeking to keep under control the seething, suffering masses? Or, will brave heroes emerge to jack into cyber-networks of privilege, and push the buttons to declare all of us as card-carrying folks with equal access to curative, restorative, salubrious, caring, income-providing transhuman technologies?

2. Post-Pandemic: "Screen New Deal" instead of "Green New Deal"?
​
Editorial Comment:
The critique Naomi Klein offers is insightful. What is needed, to go beyond critique, are ways to bring the entire technology cycle, from creation to deployment, under democratic cooperative control. Naomi Klein hints at this... A lot of intense work is needed.

Link:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomi-klein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic

Excerpts [of Naomi Klein essay]:
... pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fuelled future was being sold to us in the name of friction-free convenience and personalisation. But many of us had concerns... That was the ancient past, also known as February [2020]. Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe... At the heart of this vision is seamless integration of government with a handful of Silicon Valley giants – with public schools, hospitals, doctor’s offices, police and military all outsourcing (at a high cost) many of their core functions to private tech companies...
... we [are made to?] face real and hard choices between investing in humans and investing in technology. Because the brutal truth is that, as it stands, we are very unlikely to do both. The refusal to transfer anything like the needed resources to states and cities in successive federal bailouts means that the coronavirus health crisis is now slamming headlong into a manufactured austerity crisis. Public schools, universities, hospitals and transit are facing existential questions about their futures. If tech companies win their ferocious lobbying campaign for remote learning, telehealth, 5G and driverless vehicles – their Screen New Deal – there simply won’t be any money left over for urgent public priorities, never mind the Green New Deal that our planet urgently needs...
Tech provides us with powerful tools, but not every solution is technological. And the trouble with outsourcing key decisions about how to “reimagine” our states and cities to men such as Bill Gates and [Eric] Schmidt [ex-Google CEO] is that they have spent their lives demonstrating the belief that there is no problem that technology cannot fix.
For them, and many others in Silicon Valley, the pandemic is a golden opportunity to receive not just the gratitude, but the deference and power that they feel has been unjustly denied.
**********

Context: Recorded in 2020 in Canada, during the outbreak of the Coronavirus
Style: Video
Author: Dominique Leclerc

​Cytokine Storm

Treacherous flesh, cytokine flood,
I’d prefer to be a brain in a metal box,
Than choking on my defector blood.
How can you still defend the unity
Between the body and the mind?
Still believe in the system of immunity?
This fragile construct with all the stability
Of a homemade bomb, always ticking
And shuddering, with the possibility
Of imminent self-destruct, from a trace
Of inanimate proteins and basic code,
With somehow absolute power to erase,
Consciousness itself, most complex device,
By turning our flesh antagonist unto itself,
A substrate so unpredictable, imprecise.
You may find freedom in this fragility,
But for me this uncertainty is no liberation,
I will choose a vessel programmed with stability,
A synthetic fortress to shield my precious mind,
Under microscopic tyranny I will not be confined.

“You’d do well, dear humans, to stop your ridiculous calls for war. Lower the vengeful looks you’re aiming at me. Extinguish the halo of terror in which you’ve enveloped my name. Since the bacterial genesis of the world, we viruses are the true continuum of life on Earth. Without us, you would never have seen the light of day, any more than the first cell would have come to exist. 
​
We are your ancestors, just like the rocks and the seaweed, and much more than the apes. We are wherever you are and also where you aren’t. Too bad for you if you only see in the universe what is to your liking! But above all, quit saying that it is I who am killing you. You will not die from my action upon your tissues but from the lack of care of your fellow humans. If you had not been just as rapacious amongst yourselves as you were with all that lives on this planet, you would still have enough beds, nurses, and respirators to survive the damage I do in your lungs...”1 ​

SARS-CoV-2 Reference context

«There are seven types of coronaviruses that are contagious for humans. Four types (NL63, 229E, OC43 and HKU1) are responsible for 15 to 30% of the world’s common cold cases every year and are considered endemic. Two other types are considered epidemic: the Sars outbreak, which affected 26 countries and first infected humans in the Guangdong province of southern China in 2002, and Mers, which was first reported in 2012 and is prevalent in the Middle East.»2
Numerous studies have identified the origin of the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in bats that are supposed to be responsible of the current pandemic. It seems that their ability to host viruses without getting sick and the high tendency to socialize have made them one of the main reservoir species of zoonotic viruses. However, the causes that lead to the jump of species (spillover) and therefore to consequent epidemics, seem to lie above all in the reckless human exploitation of the territory and of the animal species that inhabit it.
The new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, like the previous SARS and MERS, takes his origins in bats. In fact, it shares 96% of the genome with a coronavirus, RaTG13, found in a bat (Rhinolophus affinis) in the province of Yunnan (China) in 2013. (3)
The virus found in bats (RaTG13) doesn’t seem capable to infect human cells, as its Spike protein is not suitable to bind ACE2, the membrane receptor used by SARS-CoV-2 during human cell infection.
Therefore it seems unlikely that the current pandemic was caused by a direct passage of the virus from a bat to humans; it is plausible instead that the intermediate passages have occurred in other animal species, as has already happened with SARS and MERS. Viruses with Spike proteins quite similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 have been found in pangolins.
Whatever the mechanism that gave rise to the direct ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, there seems to have been a single passage from the last animal reservoir/host to man and, since then, the virus has spread only from man to man. (4)
«Viruses exhibit some of the characteristics which are common to organic life, while they are missing others (for instance, metabolism, which is the reason why they depend on their host cell); viruses are thus considered neither inanimate nor living, challenging the biological concept of life itself»5, somehow overcoming the animate/inanimate and living/non-living dichotomy, severely testing the classic categories of thought redefining the very meaning of “life”. From an evolutionary point of view: these “Things” are very ancient, circulating for more than three billion years, and Homo sapiens are, in terms of biomass, an insignificant species. The 7.6 billion Homo sapiens who populate the planet, in fact, represent just 0.01 percent of all living beings. Yet our impact on other life forms is devastating and unprecedented: throughout our history, we have gradually emptied the planet of plants and wild animals to replace them with livestock.

First anthropo-decentralized considerations

In western culture, the millenary anthropocentric world view, has been put in crisis in particular by the discoveries of the so-called "hard sciences" (6): mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology and lately by the recent achievements of nanotechnology, biotechnology and life sciences. Anthropocentrism is a cultural and social paradigm, an overall vision of the world and reality, which supports the affirmation of the humankind according to a dictation, precisely the anthropocentric one, in which man is metaphorically placed at the center of the Universe and everything that is not human “orbits around him" (7). Posthumanism intercepts from a theoretical point of view the profound change of the paradigm in the relationship with technology and nature: biotechnology, the great digital revolution and the Darwinian revolution, which has overcome disjunctive anthropocentrism, showing how man is no longer a special entity, but it is strongly correlated with all the rest of nature. The post-humanistic perspective, on the other hand, is able to dismiss man from the position of "the only guardian of the Kingdom of beings" (8) («unico custode della casa dell’essere»), laying the foundations for an ethical framework that justifies a joint relationship with other living beings and inanimate objects. Posthumanist philosophies, although characterized by an extreme heterogeneity of points of views, can converge in supporting the need to rethink the western culture, starting from questioning the traditional concept of being human, as well as some dualisms, such as human-non-human, natural-cultural, biological-technological. If we try to see it from a less anthropocentric point of view, the Homo sapiens are billions of potential guests for SARS-CoV-2, scattered all over the world; we are also facilitating it with ever more massive and fast transport systems, by which we gather and live in cities and metropolises: we are a perfect definition of super-spreader. It seems that the most widespread "biological entity" on earth is the virus, the eighth kingdom including thousands of species, alternately narrated as bitter enemies of the sapiens.As a part of the vast virosphere still largely unknown, SARS-CoV-2 has broken into our lives. In Italy, but also elsewhere in the world, it has found a fertile ground in a public health system reduced to the bone by decades of neoliberalism. The intrusion of the virus, with its disruptive effects, once again, shows that humans are not the only ones who play a leading role. Unexpected actors such as oceans, bats and bacteria often make and undo history. Their action unfolds through completely asymmetrical relationships with other actors and other entity.
The great catastrophes of humanity, such as the plague of 1347 or that of 1629, the coronavirus of 2020 are showing that despite the progress of intelligence and the arrogance of the "Promethean syndrome", or maybe just for that, the human being is constantly in danger. Even if there could be an intimate relationship between pandemics, progress and modernity. I think it is fair to remember while the world mourns and worries about the coronavirus pandemic, it ignores-or pretends to ignore, that since the beginning of this year there has been a spread in Latin America of dengue, the tropical disease caused by a mosquito, thirty times higher than the serious epidemic of 2015; in 2019 dengue produced 3 million infections, with more than 1,500 deaths. Worldwide, the situation is not better: according to UNHCR, 8,500 children under the age of five die every day because of malnutrition; in addition, 6.3 million children under the age of fifteen died, in 2017 because of malnutrition or other causes. I think it is really necessary to change the point of view, in favor of a more anthropo-decentralized approach that is: less western, less patriarchal, less Caucasian-centric, less racist, less adult-centric, less masculine.We can also identify a technological approach to the containment of the virus. Tracking, and more generally geolocation, provide the most open manifestation of the space of the control society, a potentially unlimited space, not directly marked by barriers, but constantly coded, reported, monitored. The recent collaboration between two technology giants also gives us an indicator of the epochal situation we are experiencing in fact Google and Apple are announcing a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus, with user privacy and security central to the design (9).
We then move from supervising and punishing to supervising and rewarding. Thus the moral value of the choices is denied, because automatisms are at work that leverage immediate, unreflected pleasure, and do not value the slow apprenticeship, the variety of individual taste, the difference in character: straight to the bowels and that's it, a lot of sympathy and no critical distance, no deep and conscious empathy. On the other hand, these procedures imply a cognitive delegation which is always prodrome of social delegation: there is no way to get our hands in it, I can only join with enthusiasm, or desert, and suffer the social stigma.At the same time there is something tragicomic in finding that the geolocation of individuals assumes that they do not harbor the terrible and perverse idea of ​​simply leaving their smartphones on night tables.
Voluntary servitude is at its peak when the prisoner's electronic bracelet becomes a expensive i-phone.

This is not a black swan, surely

Traditional storytelling and institutional communication describe the pandemic as a “black swan,” a metaphor for an extremely rare event that is unforeseen and has an enormous impact. It was coined by economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2001. Self-justifying and somehow completely self-fulfilling. Some scientists had sounded an alarm about a possible epidemic and the spread of a new zoonotic virus, so it was very predictable. An essential connotation is missing - explains Taleb - unpredictability. It is valid for the disease itself because it has been years since the scientific community warned that a global epidemic would break out sooner or later. Already at the time of Ebola it was feared: it did not spread because it had developed in a place not too connected with the rest of the world, but now the epicenter was in the country interconnected par excellence. But true linguists say that the proper metaphor for the crisis is a “gray rhino” (10), which refers to highly probable but neglected threats that have an enormous impact.
The real name of the current epidemic should indicate that it depends, in a certain sense, on the contemporary "there is nothing new under the sun", Coronavirus 2 is a severe acute respiratory syndrome, abbreviated as SARS-CoV-2 (acronym from the English Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - Coronavirus - 2), previously named new coronavirus of 2019 (2019-nCoV, or even 2019 nCoV-ARD) a name that in fact includes a "later" identification, after the SARS 1 epidemic, which occurred in the world during the spring of 2003. This disease had been called, at the time, "the first unknown disease of the 21st century". Not even the dignity of coining an original name. It is therefore clear that the current epidemic is in no way the emergence of something radically new or unheard. Of its kind it is the second of the century, coming from bats. A serious criticism addressed today to the authorities regards the prevention policies, after SARS 1, they should have had seriously supported the research to make real effective means of action against SARS-CoV-2 available to the medical world.

Lockdown of the mind
In a matter of weeks (from February 21 to March 22), Italy went from the discovery of the first official SARS-CoV-2 case to a government decree that essentially prohibited all movements of people within the whole territory, and the closure of all non-essential business activities. After a first underestimation, each Region/municipality has ruled the issue in a very different way: controls by drones, heavy fines for those who leave the house, encouraging the social denunciation, to name but a few. The central government, such as the local one, passed the buck to the individual behavior instead of planning a clear prevention policy with a massive use of diagnostic tests, massive employ of technology in contact tracing, monitoring and isolating those tested positive. The repressive system is also confirmed by the special powers assigned to the prefects, who are allowed to use the army to guarantee the containment measures, by simply communicating the decision to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, effectively equating the army with the police. The health system has been weakened by the cuts to the public spending, imposed by the financial system. The number of general practitioners has decreased, at least in Italy. So now the problem is that there are not intensive care units. In conclusion unlike HIV, an enormously more insidious enemy that has killed ~ 35 million people in thirty years and still without a definitive cure or a vaccine, SARS-CoV-2 is a virus incapable of hiding (in technical terms: to integrate into the host genome) and not very good at changing, therefore remaining much more vulnerable to the host's immune response. So, if it is unfortunately inevitable that COVID-19 will still cause many deaths in the coming weeks and maybe months, it is even clearer that it will soon be DEFEATED. All supercomputing resources are committed to finding the antidote to the SARS-CoV-2. Dreaming of the final clash between biovirus and sequencer decoder algorithms. In any case, the human is already out, it seems to me.

1 What the virus said - paru dans lundimatin#, le 27 mars 2020, https://lundi.am/What-the-virus-said (visited 15/04/2020)
2 https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/3075382/decoding-coronavirus-covid-19/ (visited 13/04/2020)
3 Andersen, K. G., Rambaut, A., Lipkin, W. I., Holmes, E. C. & Garry, R. F. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med (2020) doi:10.1038/s41591-020-0820-9.
4 Phylodynamic Analysis | 176 genomes | 6 Mar 2020. Virological http://virological.org/t/phylodynamic-an... (visited 15/04/2020).
5 F. Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism, Bloomsbury, London, New York, 2019.
6 The term only recently came into use, when practically all disciplines began to bear the name "Sciences" (social sciences, communication sciences). To refer to what were originally called Sciences (such as Physics or Chemistry).
7 R. Marchesini, Il tramonto dell’uomo. La prospettiva post-umanista., Dedalo, Bari, 2009, p.89.
8 G. Leghissa, Ospiti di un mondo di cose. Per un rapporto postumano con la materialità, «Aut Aut - La condizione postumana», n. 361/2014, p.5.
9 Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing. Given the urgent need, the plan is to implement this solution in two steps while maintaining strong protections around user privacy.
10 M. Wucker, The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore. St. Martin's Press. 5 April 2016.

Note Context: Written in April 2020 in Germany, during the (prolonged) lockdown due to the Covid-19 Emergency
Bio: Stefano Rozzoni is a PhD Candidate in Transcultural Studies in Humanities at the University of Bergamo (Italy) and Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen (Germany). In his research project he wishes to engage with the study of pastoral poetry through the lens of (Critical) Posthumanism.
Style: (Unpretentiously) Creative
Fields: Media Studies, Ecocriticism, Ethics.
Author: Stefano Rozzoni 
Contact: rozzoni.stefano[at]gmail.com

Dolphins in Venice and Where to Find Them: Or, A Non-Linear Reflection on the Human/Nature Divide at the Time of the Coronavirus

There is no doubt that we-as-humans are now living in an extra-ordinary* time. If this conclusion was not already evident before the outbreak of Covid-19, the current (health, social, political, economic, existential…) crisis has made this awareness plain to – almost – anybod(ies). The combination of the increasing number of contagions and the decrease in freedom brought about by the lockdown has revealed unexpected nuances in relation to the ways in which the concept of “schizophrenia” serves for reflecting on the world we live in.
After almost a month of being confined in my apartment, determining what is now ordinary or extra-ordinary is challenging: the continuous twisting between these two poles has fostered the uncanny feeling(s) of venturing into uncharted territories, even though going outside is, at the moment, an a priori impossibility.
Posthuman studies have long discussed the contradictions and paradoxes of the present-day world, determining a wave of critical thinking that tackles the Humanistic axioms embedded in Western thought. But if, until a few weeks ago, this concern was mostly limited to a circle of inventive minds in academia, the urge to reflect on what it means to be human has now become a much more widespread intellectual effort.
It is now not so uncommon to come across media narratives urging readers to avail of the current crisis by “radical[ly] rethink[ing] […] how our societies work, the necessity of public health care, a necessity of slowness” (1). The present condition has already become established as a watershed between the past and the future (2), which may finally integrates forms of non-human- (significant)-others in a more equal Tomorrow (3). Posthumanists cannot but be more than excited observing the ultimate collective awakening for the paradigmatic shift that they have been advocating in the last few years. However, in any self-respecting schizophrenic world(s), this tendency matches an equally intense prolongation of some – apparently ineradicable – traditional Humanistic values.
Being overwhelmingly exposed to media information since the start of the quarantine, I have come across multiple articles showing these oxymora. My interest in Ecocriticism makes me particularly inclined to spot dualistic narratives that reinforce the human/nature divide while attempting to promote a more eco-logical sensibility. In this alignment, one particular report has grabbed my attention in the last few days: dolphins swimming in Venice due to boat-traffic-free canals (4). The argument is simple: while humanity is on lockdown, non-human(ity) takes advantage of the territories (literally “take[ing] Venice back”) (5) from which it was previously evicted. As much as the idea of the natural world reclaiming what has been subtracted by humans may appear as a pleasant feeling in the time of the #FridaysForFuture, this narrative hides much more complex and
anything-but-eco-dynamics.
First of all, as National Geographic reported soon after the dolphin-case gained popularity, fake news abounds in social media just like the coronavirus upends life (6). No dolphins were, in fact, actually spotted in Venice. Similarly, (many) other stories about animals entering cityscapes turned out to be fictional accounts, demonstrating how the country/city dualism still plays a relent role among the long-standing tropes entertaining Western culture. Beyond issues of veracity connected to this occurrence, or the fairness of the equation “less pollutants = more favorable conditions for (nonhuman) life”, it becomes essential to reflect on the fact that arguments such as “Nature has pushed up the reset button” (7) are twofold: they also implicitly perpetuate the traditional dichotomy of Man/Nature and stress the ontological separation of the human from the nonhuman. We-as-humans-who-have-read-(at)-(least)-Rosi-Braidotti (see note A) are all well-aware of the subtle implications of this ideal.
The endurance of “naturalizing” conceptual habits of non-human others is not difficult to perceive, as well as the emphasis on a sense of separateness of the human from the nonhuman, in a moment in which their inter/intra-connectedness has never been clearer.
One (or more) question(s) can be raised spontaneously: what does Nature refer to in current news reports? What are the effects of stressing a dualistic conceptualization of Nature? How and why can this term be used? As Timothy Clark famously affirmed: “I’ve seen penguins, plutonium, pollution and pollen. But I’ve never seen Nature” (see note B). However, it is evident how today’s media eco-narratives not only make Nature visible by depicting non-human entities through practices of Othering, but they also make dolphins visible too, where they presently are not.
When one realizes that he or she is spending more time watching a digital window rather than a brick-and-mortar one, it is clear how the changing perspective that we have undergone during quarantine is not a mere quirk of scholars in Philosophy Departments.
“We are in this together” has become an(other) popular motto since the outbreak of the pandemic. (8) However, as Braidotti would add, “(but)-we-are-not-one-and-the-same”. This IS the time for rethinking what it means to be humans. Yet, while doing this, pondering on the risks of perpetuating intellectual humanistic habits and the practice of binary thinking can become an(other) way of (re)imagining a more pluralistic future of co-existence between humans and significant-others. Starting from the virus. And including dolphins too.

*While I am writing this piece, my beloved hometown Bergamo is at the center of international news for being one of the hotspots of the contagion. The suffering and the pain that is touching my famil(ies) and friends, and the many who live in this area, as well as in the rest of the world, are not forgotten. My warmest thoughts are with you all. And this is my affirmative response to this difficult, extra-ordinary time.
​
Notes
A. For a further critique of binary thinking, see Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
B. Morton, Timothy, Realist Magic. Objects, Ontology, Causality. Open Humanities Press, 2013. 2013, p. 42.

E-Reader
You are me and I am you,
Hand in hand we go.
Step by step we travel,
A book and a worm are at level.
Your lips are so sweet when I kiss,
You are my pond and I am a fish.
Then the Third World War happened!
Against a Virus.
Relax darling, this is humane.
You are free, safe in my arms.
Cry cry, run run,
There is no fun.
Home stay is the safest stay,
Otherwise you have to pay.
Oh my All New Kindle;
I am not a fiddle.
I forget to bring you with me to the shore,
I’m not with you anymore.
Might be Crying for getting charged,
Your tummy might be hungry in a room dark.
Weeping I and weeping you,
I am disabled without you.
Waiting for a sunny day!

Dearest All, we hope this post finds you well. This time is so intense, but can also bring deep insights. Please, do not forget that you are not alone and that we are in this together. We can re-access our lives from this condition of interconnectedness and re-envision our posthuman condition. Aware of the fact that our existence is fragile, we need to focus on what really matters. This is why we are inviting anyone interested to send us reflections on the posthuman and the coronavirus for our blog: http://www.posthumans.org/blog We have started this blog in order to offer a place for critical and generative reflections on the posthuman that apply to this historical moment. ​Entries can be short and long (no more than 2.500 words); all writing styles are welcome (autobiographical, essayistic, creative and so on). Language should be non-offensive and respectful. If you are interested, please send us your entry at NYposthuman[at]gmail.com adding in the title of the email: "Entry - Blog". Our editors will revise your material and contact you in a timely manner.
On a connected note, we would like to remind everyone to be extremely cautious (i.e. avoiding close social contacts; washing your hands, nose, items etc.). In this challenging time, do not forget to take time to rest and calm your mind daily.
Sending You All So Much Energy, Healing and Appreciation

Context: Written in 2020 in NYC, during the outbreak of the Coronavirus
Style: Brief Commentary
Author: ​Francesca Ferrando
​
In this delicate, sensitive moment for us, humans, dealing with the emergent expansion of coronavirus in our planet, I would like to send my Love and Connection to All. Yesterday I woke up with this words in my mind: "Be the Bindi in the Cosmic Eye". It gave me some serenity; it was beautiful. ​Peace, Well Being and Appreciation to All, Francesca

Context: Written in 2020 in China, during the outbreak of the Coronavirus
Style: Autobiographical Writing
Fields: Health, Ethics, Memory, Philosophy, Nietzsche
Author: Professor Thomas Steinbuch
Bio: Professor Steinbuch is a Nietzschean philosopher and co-founder of the World Posthuman Society; he lives and teaches in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province, P.R. China. 

Outrunning COVID-19: The Race to Stay Human

We watched it closing in on us, Fistone and I, the day at the mall he helped me set up my new Huawei tablet. It was late January and COVID-19 was on the move. I was concerned that the battery on my older smartphone would fail and that I would be out of communication on WeChat and that I needed a more reliable device if we were entering a crisis. WeChat is a social media platform everyone uses, and we depend on our phones for everything. We transfer money with it and pay for things with an app called Alipay, which was introduced in Hangzhou by Alibaba, and now ATM’s that dispense hard currency are hard to find. Digital life is all well and good, but not in the case in which your phone dies and there are no shops open where you can replace it, and my OPPO is six years old and sometimes twitchy about recharging.

We were in a mall a few bus stops from the campus of our univeristy, since shuttered and to remain shuttered for the foreseeable as I write, and we watched as security guards put up tables at the entrance to take our temperature before letting us in. The whole temperature thing scared me to death, because what if you are just sweaty or have a slight cold? The temperature monitors are everywhere: what if I get turned back at the grocery store? Last year I had a bad flu and I did not take penicillin just in order to build up my immunity, so I was pretty confident that even if I caught a case of COVID-19 it would probably be a mild case. It was not the disease that scared me: that would just be a mano-e-mano situation, a fair fight. What scared me was getting tripped up in the prevention measures due to some misunderstanding and being reduced to the inhumanity of a suspected sack of viral infection. I came close.

It hit at the worst possible time. We were all caught flatfooted. Everything shuts down from the Lunar New Year, from January 15 to February 10 this year when the Lantern Boat Festival was scheduled. I am usually pretty well stocked up on the OTC meds I can get at the pharmacy but I was running out of something I use to control psoriasis. A serious psoriasis outbreak is nothing to be trifled with, and it is very unpredictable. Not to mention the possibility of psoriatic fever! Stress, change of diet, overall change of routine, lots of things seem to trigger it. Well, I was afraid the pharmacy would flat out close – it did, eventually -- but I got there on a day it was still open. It was a rainy day and I had a woolen cap on and a Safari hat over it just to be sure I did not catch chill, one to keep warm, one to keep dry. The pharmacist did not allow me in, so I just showed her the empty tube of what I needed. I took off my hat and cap to let her take my temperature with the digital thermometer, but my head must have been warm – which is the point of wearing two hats – and my temperature was 38.3C or something like that, too high. The pharmacist got very nervous and began to call for the volunteer guards at the end of the street. I think she was going to insist that I be taken hospital and tested for the virus. They did not hear her, for some blessed reason, and she went back into the store for my meds. When she came back she scanned me again and my temperature must have dropped in the few minutes I had my hat off and she let me go. When I got home I took my temperature with my trusty mercury thermometer: 37.2. Not a problem.

Fistone – a computer savvy kid from Zambia with excellent Chinese language skills – sent me a rogue video made by one of the citizen journalists who was documenting events and posting on WeChat. We read about two citizen journalists doing that; both have since vanished, fate unknown. The one Fistone sent showed people suspected of having symptoms being forcibly taken from their apartments. An entire family was being drug out and crammed into an airless stainless steel box on a flatbed ambulance truck – you could hear the little girl screaming – and hauled off to the hospital to be tested. That was in Wuhan. But then, what else was to be done? As I write, the number of reported infections in Hubei Province where Wuhan city is, is 75,000. Here in Hangzhou City we have had fewer than 200 infections. If there is a takeaway from this whole event that deserves our attention it is the sad fact that the people of Hubei Province were subjected to lockdown as the virus ravaged them from street to street, subjected to house by house calls to be screened for symptoms and possibly dragged from their homes. All so that the rest of us could be safe, so that the rest of us could outrun it, so that the rest of us could cling a little while longer to the fragile thing we call our humanity that we know now, if we did not before, can be stripped from us as quickly as taking a turn on a dime. I watched another video showing a women on the balcony of her high-rise apartment building, so typical in China, banging a pot with a wooden spoon for attention for which there were no ears in the deserted streets below as she wailed out a lament that her husband was lying in bed and could not breathe and she could not get help. “Fight me COVID-19, fight me, you don’t scare me one bit, I’ll break your back!” That I can do, win or lose, I have my dignity. What scares me, rather, is loss of my humanity, and that is right up close to me now and it seems to me that it has always stalked me, and I realize that I have never really known how to fight to keep it even in the best of times. There will be many, many deaths from the virus and much, much illness. Collaterally, all 60 million inhabitants of Hubei Province will be changed for good, and as we are learning from the study of epigenetics and the encoding of trauma and its trans-generational conservation, what they are enduring will leaves traces in their descendants. All that is baked in the cake, as they say. They surrendered up their humanity so that we could keep ours. The world should never forget the tremendous debt owed to them.

Later that day Fistone sent me another video, this time one of spraying the streets with disinfectant in a neighborhood about 10 minutes away from us. In my neighborhood, we were issued a pass that allows us to leave for two hours at a time to get groceries, but I have not gone out because the neighborhood where they were spraying is in that direction and I am still stocked up, so I decided to just wait. Fistone is a student and they are in lock-down in their dormitories and have to ask the dormitory monitor to order out for them. I go down to the gate at the bottom of the street every day and sit on a bench in the food court and report back to him on whatever I can observe that would give a clue when the students will be allowed out. I also report back every day to Xiao Ting who runs a coffee shop and bakery I used to go to every morning from 8AM until 1PM and sit and write. She is stranded in the country because she left Hangzhou for the Lunar New Year and now she cannot get back in the city. What a pleasure it was to sit at my usual table in Xiao Ting’s and have a latte café and scribble down the endless message being transmitted into my brain! Her baked goods are too sweet for my taste and I would never buy any and I would feel bad nursing an 18 Yuan cup of coffee for five hours, so I got into the habit of buying her chocolate eggs containing Walt Disney figures inside, Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, another with Mickey and Minnie, made for kids actually, but it brightened her day. That was our happy little interaction, now a distant precious memory. I am an eye for her too, and report on whether any of the businesses on her street have opened as she is running out of money and anxious to get back to work. As I said, I stocked up on food and water before we were quarantined, but no fresh fruit, so my landlord helps out by regularly handing me baskets of fruit. She is a hand for me. We are all living in pieces here.
​
First thing in the morning is not my best time of day, I am impatient and flit from one thing to the next and try to do too many things at once. I know this and so these days especially I was trying to be careful first thing in the morning, but my bad habit of impatience still caught up to me. I decided to take my temperature as soon as I go up just to be sure it was accurate last time and that I was not facing a psoriasis flare up. It was, 37.1, which is just ducky, but I thought, “wait, let me keep the thermometer in a while longer just in case”, and I went into the kitchen to boil some water and have orange peel tea with honey -- as I had fresh oranges, courtesy of my landlord. I poured the honey into my cup and scooped up a dollop that had run down the side of the jar with my finger and took the thermometer out with my other hand, and then, I don’t what happened, but as I repositioned the thermometer in my mouth with my now slippery fingers from the honey, out it flew onto my super hard kitchen floor typical in China and broke. I quickly donned my respirator which was on the kitchen table and looked for it, but I only found the stem, which I quickly deposited into an empty coke bottle and capped it, but, the mercury reservoir had broken and I could not find it. “Idiot, idiot, now you have a mercury release in your kitchen, tiny carcinogenetic droplets you can’t see are floating around in the air and now you are pushed into one remaining safe room. Bravo!” Toxicity seemed inescapable. Just like wearing two hats to the pharmacy against getting a chill in the rain got me into trouble, so did being scrupulous about taking my temperature. The protective routines I was developing were ending up having their own lethality. But I still won the race that day: I have a second thermometer.

Anti-American sentiment is running high, another way I feel my humanity slipping away. Some international papers ran stories about how COVID-19 was genetically engineered by US scientists to weaken China’s economy and earn money for pharmaceutical companies, and they got some attention here. The next wave of Anti-American sentiment came in the form of anger that the US was so slow in getting supplies here. It was not until February 20 that China received the 16 tons of masks and protective suits we promised them, and they still have not seen a nickel of the $100 million promised in aid. I was sent some very anti-American material on both occasions. But hold on a second! In late December I gave a presentation on the "Marx-Freud Synthesis and The Etiology of Fascism" at Zhejiang University, and I took the position that the rise of Donald Trump shows that liberal democracy cannot contain fascism and that Marxism is the only effective address to it. I, of all people, I felt, should not be lumped in with Americans who support Donald Trump: “Not my President” I bleated and bleated; “Judge me as an individual,” I implored. But to no avail. It is terrifying: first reduced to inhumanity by Nature, and now the echo of that reduction in and amongst ourselves as the challenge to individuality as inauthentic rears up, and indifferent alikeness in being American all that is allowed to be. The other dehumanizing pathogens that afflict us and that are held at bay in normal times are on scene and rallying around COVID-19 to flatten the landscape of being human even further.

The internet is pretty much inaccessible in China without a VPN, and I pay $99.00 annually for the service and it takes it mission seriously. But, China regularly escalates blocks that cause my VPN to crash. There were so many cycles of new blocks and issuances of updated apps beginning around National Holiday in October, but things started to stabilize around December and to my surprise, remained so even as the COVID-19 crisis unfolded. Well, Philosophy in Review contacted me because they wanted me to make a small change in my review of Francesca Ferrando's book Philosophical Posthumanism because it was due to come out. And I thought, "let me get to this right away," because I know I am tempting fate waiting on it since I cannot access the Philosophy in Review submissions form without my VPN. So I did the revision and everything went fine. Not twenty four hours later, my VPN crashed and it stayed down for week, past the date the review was scheduled to appear. Beat you by a day COVID-19! World still intact.
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There is concern that people will try to conceal symptoms and pharmacies are not allowed to sell cold or flu medications so that people will have themselves checked for COVID-19 at the hospital. Here in Hangzhou, we are not called upon door to door to check for symptoms, but whenever we go to buy something or pick up a package, our temperature is monitored, and sooner or later we all have to buy groceries. Same idea, just with a softer touch. Villages have lot of autonomy in how they choose to regulate who can come in and who can leave and for how long. One village is very strict and the gate is manned by armed men bearing a traditional Chinese weapon, a fierce halberd called a Guan Dao. The rule in that village is uncompromising: anyone caught deliberately spreading the virus will be shot. I am not sure that they could actually do that, but that is not my point. We do not do well in relating to Nature: that idea could be taken as the summa summarum of Nietzsche’s work. Unable to really understand how COVID-19 is spread and helpless to stop it, unable to endure helplessness in the face of it, we create the anodyne of finding something to blame. Because we don’t understand the agency of the virus, we imagine it is spread by something we can understand: it is spread by deliberateness, and deliberateness should be punished. Nietzsche said that without the narcotic of finding to blame we would soon go mad because it is the main relief value of the psychology of vengefulness, which we have yet to make any effort at all to control directly. This is why in his autobiography he says that in cases in which he is wronged whilst being in the right and so disposed to seek blame and punishment for the wrongdoer, he bites down hard on himself and strives for the discipline of blaming himself, although innocent, for the other’s wrongdoing, thus to elide the other’s wrongdoing from the world, and with it, anything to blame and punish. Blaming one's innocence is quite beyond metaphysical good and evil. As perfectly innocent, Christ is most liable to be wronged and so signifies finding to blame cocked back to a hair trigger. But a god come to earth, a Dionyisan god, should take upon himself the heaviest guilt as an act of self-mastery of the compulsion to blame and punish. But we are very far from that capability indeed, and while there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the measures being taken in China – it has been a fantastic success, they bought the world time, just as the WHO stated – we are taking these measures as human beings, and that means an overlay of the all-too human, an overlay of the authoritarian compulsion to monitor, control, make obey, and of the vengeful compulsion to blame and punish. It is hard to judge whether everything happening is objectively necessary or whether other things that have a strange provenance are also on hand, and it is these other things that frighten me so. I am obeying instructions, I am being responsible and not deliberately trying to spread a lethal virus certainly, but it spreads anyway. It is not spreading as disobedience to be brought under control, or as deliberate wrongdoing that deserves to be punished. It just is.

To be continued.

Context: Written in 2015 during the Syrian War and just after the November 2015 Paris attacks.
Style: Affective Writing
Fields: Politics, Praxis, Affect, Memory
Author: Dr. Francesca Ferrando

IF I DIE..

All day I am hearing military planes passing over our home in Queens, New York City (US). How can I write or think when the sound of war is so close.. Then I read about the two Moroccan cousins behind the Parisian attacks. She blew herself after saying: "He is not my boyfriend". Many memories of my youth in Italy, many friends from Morocco: they were kind, and wise, and wild, and had to live in a society in which biases against them were way too common. Then I remembered being in Paris after the revolt in the banlieue, feeling the tension in the air. This situation does not come out of the blue, it has been building for decades until it exploded. The answer is not violence, is not war. This is the ghost of anger, and it will come back again if we do not look at the whole picture..

IF DESTINY BRINGS ME TO A LOCATION WHERE SOMEONE PLACES A BOMB AND I DIE, PLEASE DO NOT USE MY NAME TO KILL OTHER PEOPLE, I DO NOT WANT ANY REVENGE. INSTEAD, KEEP BUILDING PEACE, DIALOGUE AND UNDERSTANDING. DO NOT LET ANYONE DOWN, TREAT EVERYONE WITH RESPECT. THIS IS MY WISH. THANKS.

I send my love to my French family, my Italian family, my European family, my American family, my Moroccan family, my Arab family, my Persian family, my Jewish family, my Hindu family, my Buddhist family, my Chinese family, my Earth family.. We are all wise people in wise places. We just need to start again. We need to trust again. We need to mourn together all these deaths in Syria, France, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, USA, Europe etc. We need to connect, to talk, to feel truly sorry that we let our species get to this point. No life is more important than others. Each human being has to be respected, each culture, each country. Only this way we can build trust, peace and our posthuman futures. Violence leads towards more violence, in a spiral with no survivors. We need to build trust, hope and empathy. All the great books of the past say that, all religions say that, all wise philosophers say that. We are wise and compassionate beings. Let's start.

TOGETHER. WITH HOPE. WITH TRUST. LET'S START. NOW, LET'S GET READY AND START.. THIS IS: OUR POSTHUMAN FUTURE.