Emily Gettis
GEOG390: Professor Simpson
Reading Response 4
9.22.2020
The Social Contagion article looks into how the virus Covid-19 in China is less of a random, catastrophe that infiltrated and warped essentially every aspect of the country, and more of an expected (and repeatable) link in the effects chain of capitalism production and development that reach global scales. The Chuang blog post explains that the contradictions and levels of exploitation which are required in capitalist production to foster an environment primed for a plague to exist are a collapsing of non-human spaces (“natural”) and human spaces in full capitalist production style. The stage of capitalist production is maintained by industrial environments. Here, wilderness is no longer present but warped into ‘hinterland,’ and the circuit belt for virus distribution among our global products to sustain—and placate—us is facilitated and executed.
Throughout this piece, we see the tug of war between striving for maximum production of goods by laborers against the urgency to protect those laborers and civilians from the virus. The Chinese government’s “clamp-down” or stay at home orders does not seem to come in the form of simply protection from the virus, but as an oppressive social control mobilized through the vessel of crisis response. This gives insight to the flexibility and ease with which Western ideologies calibrate to confirm negative narratives about the Chinese government. Here in the U.S, we can see those ideologies manifest themselves creating a positive feedback loop of perspectives about the Chinese government. We see capitalism exploit and magnify the crises around us and intensify social control.
In this thread, mechanisms of control that Foucault demonstrated last week can be pinpointed. The mechanism of discipline via the “clamp down” designs current beliefs and social systems as we slip into a changed way of how we view and experience the world. This article claims that we should expect those circuits to accelerate and all the while “…capitalism takes on a seemingly non-economic character, new epidemics, famines, floods and other “natural” disasters will be used as a justification for the extension of state control, and the response to these crises will increasingly function as an opportunity to exercise new and untested tools for counterinsurgency” (pp. 25). Similarly, in the article “The Pandemic is a Portal,” we see how the lock down in India shed light on the gravity of inequalities present there. Roy states “the lock down worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things,” and I believe this is an example of how Foucault’s claims’ position themselves.
Capitalism may play a part here but I feel governments world wide capitalist or no, have been problematic with the exception of many European governments which have already gone back to work. Greed in general plays a huge part in the problem with resolving this pandemic.
ReplyDeleteYour comment about the collapsing of non-human spaces and human spaces in capitalistic style sums up the Social Contagion extremely well. It helps me tie that together with Wallace's article. The dissolving of the distance between the non-human and human is scary in this context, but ideally the non-human world is the human world and this dichotomy is obsolete.
ReplyDeleteExcellent grasp of the way in which the lived experience of the pandemic, its political/ideological governance, and global modes of production are linked in the Chuang article. The significance of this connection in our time means "the end of wilderness" from a critical perspective, and yet we see the the "wild" as a concept surge as a tool for control. Your connection to Foucault here is perfect and allows us to identify new ways in which the state reasserts its dominance in an era in which nationalism was thought to be waning as a result of the rise of corporations. With COVID we can identify the consolidation of the state's use of bio-power and the bio-political: two terms that Foucault coined shortly after writing Discipline and Punish. For an overview of the definition of those terms, see https://criticallegalthinking.com/2017/05/10/michel-foucault-biopolitics-biopower/
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