I: The Diffuse Here and Now
Those of us living in quarantine are living in a place of no-place, a time of no-time, a purgatory. We chat with friends in other timezones, and collaborate in the disembodied digital space that has come to hold the majority of our social interactions. Our screens are windows, and we peer through them into a world from which we are physically, temporally and socially distanced.
Though it certainly doesn’t feel apt, the word “utopia,” which translates in latin to no-place, might be a literal way of naming the diffusion of “here” in which we are attempting to be with each other. At the beginning of the industrial revolution we saw technological innovations like trains and photography reconfigure “time” and “space” into the thoroughly modern concepts these words now reference. This drift in meaning has only accelerated along with technology in a set of phase shifts; changes whose magnitude were obscured by their gradual pace, and whose transformation is only now revealed to us in relief, against the background of a starkly altered “day to day” reality.
What I’m saying is that until now there has yet to be an opportunity to really grok the dissolution of “geography,” or the coincident fact of “globalization”. This global crisis is a novel experience of world, of we, which has never before existed. Yet we, as particles entangled, paradoxically experience these simultaneous treatments in apparently separate physical realities, connected by colonies of microbes, streams of electrons, and strings of bits.
But even as our institutions and traditions of individuation are made irrelevant by coronavirus, the psuedo-environments they constitute, and their methods of self-replication, are lit up like iodine-stained viruses under an electron microscope. I sense that this brief period of eclipse, in which our personal worlds overlapped with the world we share with everyone else, will soon come to a close (and perhaps already has for some). As each country comes back online asynchronously, the overlapping spheres of national psudeo-environments will cause ripples that break the surface of this sense of global presence. Looking towards that transition, I’m tempted to make some predictions about properties of this world that might linger in the post-quarantine world.
II: Forward-facing Archeology
Many of the predictions I’ve read fall into these categories: mid- to long-term time horizons, national and international scale, and almost always in the realm of complex systems (economics, global politics, climate systems). Most of them hint at (or openly announce) broad structural changes that would significantly alter the economic and political course that has transformed society since industrialization and shaped the so-called developed world. Political philosophers, economists, academics, politicians, activists, podcasters and the like have taken to their platforms, begging us to take advantage of the interruption of normal operations; whether by strategy or pure necessity, some of those interruptions are already in the works. For the first time we have access to big history as it’s happening, and it’s happening everywhere, in real time.
But the evidence of changes at this scale are not readily available to most of us outside of headlines. Instead, smaller adjustments accumulate and begin to run together, carving away at the familiar landscapes of domestic and public life, with a velocity that can only suggest the size and force of the changes upstream. We can understand these changes broadly as unintended side effects, a result of our reliance on the tactic of quarantine to slow the spread of the virus. I’m focusing on these kinds of changes in particular for a few reasons. Partly because there are a lot of people writing about the geopolitical and economic potential futures currently unfolding, and they have a lot more expertise to draw on than I do. Also because I predict that many of these changes will last well beyond the time we spend in quarantine (as proof for this claim I offer the example of taking your shoes off at the airport a parallel vestigial ritual from another recent crisis).
But this emphasis on the visceral signs of change is also my attempt to “do history” in the style of Walter Benjamin. He writes, in On the Concept of History, “To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.” I’m compelled to document and trace these moments of history as a forward-facing archaeologist, collecting the fragmentary artifacts of the future, intuiting their significance, piecing together a theory. Which of the adaptive technologies, customs and stories evolving now are the symbols, inflection points, and ghosts of things to come?
Some examples of future-fossils, in approximate order of descending impact: increase in virtual socializing and work; the availability of virtual classrooms and the problem of the digital learning gap; rise of mental health apps, chatbots, and telehealth services;expansion of absentee voting; decreased rates of visits to the doctor; increased use of apps that deliver food and other things directly to you (including deliveries by drone); increase in handwashing and public mask wearing; increase in people buying local produce and cooking for themselves (or what passes for cooking in America); increase in home exercise; elbow bumping rather than shaking hands.
III: The Magic Eye of History
The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s unfinished historical account of bourgeois life in 19th century Europe, is a historical object unto itself. It is a work of conceptual art as much as it is a book of history, a 1,000+ page “fragment,” a 13-year-long work-in-progress. Chapters with titles like “Modes of Lighting,” “Iron Construction,” and “The Streets of Paris,” collage (or “constellate”) chunks of written material taken from a massive array of historical sources and Benjamin’s own reflections. His theory of history, a post-modern admixture of critical theory, Marxism, Surrealism and Jewish Mysticism, advocated representing history by eliding it, through intertextual montages documenting the distinct material, affective and ideological particulars of a time and place. His book captures the details of life in Paris as the spoils of the industrial revolution began to proliferate for the pleasure of the middle class. His account of the many massively distributed technological developments filtering into society (“Mirrors,” “Photography”) and their impacts on culture, (“Boredom,” “Idleness,” “The Collector”) allow the era’s utopic idealism to materialize in the foreground, like the hidden image suddenly revealed in a magic eye.
Shaking hands, eating in restaurants, going out without obscuring part of your face behind a mask, freedom of movement; these are not insignificant features of modern life in a western liberal democracy, and the narrative of progress that is supposedly responsible for it. By design, these changes to daily life enforce increased physical and social disengagement. Though this is a time in which psychic and geographical distance are briefly decoupled by a global catastrophic risk and it’s real-time reflection in media and interpersonal communication, it may paradoxically prove to incubate a period of increased atomization and tribalism.
The embodied meaning embedded in our gestures of greeting, especially those that involve touch, make the absence of shaking hands a striking harbinger of the coming changes I have just described. The social function of shaking hands is at once a gesture of vulnerability, a way of investigating motive by picking up on cues of sympathetic nervous system activation like skin temperature, or simply guaranteeing that a stranger wasn’t hiding a weapon. Even a temporary change in this ritual feels forced and awkward; a permanent change could serve as a synecdoche, the tufted tail end of the elephant we are blindly feeling our way around.
The absence of masks or facial coverings in pre-covid US is indicative of a distinctly Western sensibility of freedom, openness and individuality. To think of yourself before thinking of the society, to be seen, the right to be authentically “yourself”, these are values that overrode the sensible ritual of wearing a mask in public when ill, that has long since been the norm in countries with more “collectivist” cultures. In fact, our suspicions of this ritual run so deep that we allowed our adjudication of muslim women covering their faces in public to run contrary to our deep support for religious freedom. Wearing a mask is illegal in 12 states and at least 14 countries; in some cases this is because of the proclivity of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan to cover their faces during terrorist activities. More recently, though, countries like Hong Kong have made it illegal in response to massive protests. I suspect that among the changes listed in the previous section, this one is likely to be the longest lasting.
IV: The Future of Utopia
At the center of the Arcades Project, in a sudden bout of exposition, Benjamin elaborates a critique of the teleological account of history, as exemplified in Hegel’s dialectical materialist theory. The reality of a historical period, he argues, can’t be reduced to a theme, or an ideological or materialist conflict. The 19th century was not “about” any single thing. To envision a utopia as the natural conclusion of the industrial revolution, or the “inevitable” revolution of the proletariat, was to overdetermine the path of history. It disincentivized revolutionary action (or any action) in the present by borrowing against the agency of the future. And, significantly to Benjamin, in preserving the coherence of the narrative of progress, it overlooked the subtle, the symbolic, and the surprising: the (potentially revolutionary!) details of quotidian life. Again, from On The Concept of History: “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.”
In many histories of oral tradition the beginning of a story is signaled by a phrase, rooting it in time. Native American myths often begin with the phrase, “Before the people came…” or “When Coyote was a man…” But the story of progress takes place in a featureless time, a time in which the populous and their ideology are the only actors, and are moving without agency towards a predestined conclusion. Benjamin’s resistance to monolithic history, his insistence on a history that reflected a sense of “time filled by the presence of the now,” can allow us to see the artifacts of the present as more than simply fashion, technology, and ritual.
The 19th century version of the narrative of progress made an implicit claim for the possibility of utopia. With the understanding of the changes we see in our daily lives as a series of boldly symbolic refutations of that narrative, we are left with the task of redefining the concept of utopia. And we must find a definition that is coherent with the changing narratives paving our way into the world on the other side of quarantine.
Evelyn C. McLean 