A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns. This is the second part of a two-part essay. You can find the first installation here. In episode one, we introduced the notion of bioterity to point to a new regime of austerity based on governing the emergency of the Covid pandemic.
We talked about the immanence of a profound alteration in the terms of everyday social life and livelihood, which, due to its biological groundings, has the potential to last well beyond the emergency.
Episode two concerns the waning of the sensuousness of the street as a locus of circulation—of knowledge, affect, and capacity—and the performance of solidarity. At the moment of writing, very encouraging signs emerge from Wuhan province and other parts of China. If such wanting appears to buttress the imaginary of an all-knowing surveillant state, or to offer up essential individual and collective responsibilities to technological apparatuses outside of common design or control, it does reflect a distrust in the capacities of a general public to act in its best interest.
For is such a public a simple collation of existences long encouraged to curate themselves as exaggerations of a purported human autonomy, or does it reflect some critical mass of mutual recognition, of complementary alignment among divergent experiences and assessments? In public, whose interests do we really have in mind? These questions allow us to further unpack the groundings of the emerging bio-led austerity regime.
The want for surveillance, for restrictions from possible contaminating contact, for a statistical representation of the intersection of lives, partly stems from a downward spiral of the capacity of individuals to remain attuned to their surrounds. These are circulatory regimes from which individuals are largely and strategically removed, therefore leaving the operationalization of these spaces up for grabs.
