revenge of real

AN ESSAY ON DESIRE PRODUCTION AND THE CHANGES WE KEEP

If we take it for a given that intense moments in history like the one we find ourselves in will leave deep marks in the ways we relate to each other and ourselves, it becomes ever more important to question what the changes we will keep will be.

9/11 and its consequences are a good example for how perceived global risk situations motivated security culture and surveillance capitalism to permanently implement harsher measures of control. The dangers of a similar commodification of fear and racism in the case of this pandemic are obvious to me. I want to make clear that that is my main concern when it comes to systemic change caused by the pandemic. However, in this essay I want to think about what else might be changing about our social consciousness.

For me this begins with questioning the way in wich desires to communicate and interact change with us. If our desires are informed by our circumstances and our circumstances are created from our desires than this leaves us not just with a risk of loosing democratic rights, hardening boarders or increased digital surveillance but also with the agency and responsibility to look for potentially positive changes to our societies like a new sense of global solidarity, mutual aid between neighbours or cool new handshakes.

Building the future is always a collective undertaking and this moment more than any other shows us that right now, our governmental structures and parliamentary democracies are not capable of handling emergency situations like this.

It almost feels as if the Pandemic acts like the drug that pushes us out of the fever dream of Capitalist Realism. Suddenly confronted with a reality so solid and irefutable. A “revenge of the real” is how Benjamin Bratton put it. A brutal confrontation with the complete ambivalence of nature and the consequences the pandemic has on how we relate to questions of knowledge, agency and desire.
Two things became clearer to me than ever before:
Firstly, never before did the moral distinction between the natural and the artificial seem more arbitrary to me. This was a traumatic realisation for me when I first had it but it completely changed my views on agency. Suddenly, what is good is up to our own values. Something we have to create.
Secondly (and a little more tangible), the functionality of our global community, states, capital and militaries included tumble out of a sky of pretending, showing their real faces now. Nobody can tell me that the measures we are deploying right now cannot also be used to tackle problems we collectively had for ever. Homelessness, hunger, poverty, we could have ended them long ago, the resources are already there. As extreme as the resources beeing moved to save the economy now seem, can you think of any reason not to immediately do the same thing to end the artificial scarcity that kills so many people every day. We just decided not to do it.

And now?
Trillion dollar help plans in one week?
No problem.
Giving empty buildings to people to live in?
Suddenly doable.
Building a functioning Hospital in a handful of days?
Here we go.
All of the fear mongering about the essentiality of a free market and the scarcity of resources like food or shelter, none of it makes any sense anymore.
We caught the hegemony with their pants down, the spectacle dissolving into nothing but unhindered class protectiveness, pharma-nationalisms and prisoner’s dilemma tactics.

This is a time of clarity and uncertainty at the same time and I believe there’s a little gap there. A small space to fill with new desires, with feelings of solidarity and mutual aid, so that when we look back at 2020 in the future we can remember not just the ways in which states fucked us over once again but maybe also how you met your neighbours for the first time, how it was empty at the beach, or your daily video calls with your friends on the other side of the globe.