Re: <nettime> Bifo: Beyond the Breakdown. Three Meditations on a,

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

I certainly agree with Frederic that the coronavirus is not a
non-human agent. Endless studies of zoonosis show that virus spillover
from animals to humans occurs either through poaching and consumption
of wild meat, through domestic proximity as population expands (often
along roads built into new extraction zones), and finally - worst of
all though not implicated in the current outbreak - through massive
Confined Animal Feeding Operations which are now huge reservoirs for
constantly mutating viruses, to which impoverished and under-equipped
workers are exposed on a daily basis. Practically every virologist
was expecting the Next Big One to be an exceptionally virulent strain
of Influenza A virus coming straight out of a CAFO. Instead it just
happened to be another coronavirus, likely arising from the widespread
conditions of wild animal poaching, handling and sale that produced
SARS (the last big-but-not-so-big coronavirus outbreak).

If what I am saying is incomprehensible, check this:
http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-pandemic-coming

The virus gets under our skin because we chased it there. There
would not be such a huge "Wild Taste" craze in Southern China, with
businesspeople and government officials paying outrageous sums to dine
on things like pangolin and civet cat, if there had not been such
gigantic foreign direct investment in Guandong province from the 1980s
onward, laying the groundwork for today's China-centric just-in-time
production and distribution system. Look again at the Covid case-maps:
they look exactly like flight-hub maps, because that's what they are
(and by the way, the US got it mainly from Europe for exactly that
reason, air-traffic density). Yes, the virus is a "revenge of Gaia,"
but it doesn't happen through some holisitic mythological force: it
happens through singular events of species interaction in a world of
threatened wildlife, where the only population-sizes close to that
of humans are domesticated animals, cattle-pigs-chickens especially,
which are the big drivers of forest and wetland loss (the Americas
are covered in corn and soybeans that get turned into animal feed).
As we come closer to the virus reservoirs - well, we turn into virus
reservoirs.

As for the racialized injustice that the virus reveals, it's an
enraging and tragic reality that unfortunately will become even
more visible at global scale, as less-developed countries begin
to succumb (yes, this has already begun but it's likely to grow
dreadfully worse). All we middle-class folks are simultaneously
stunned by the events and fascinated with our Zoom get-togethers,
yet our nervous-but-cozy retreats are about to be jostled by massive
political forces, arising from precarious workers like Alex pointed
out, and from marginalized people living off the informal economy in
both North and South. Not to mention backlashing national populists
who will try to deny and interdict what they simultaneously cause and
exacerbate.

This is nothing against Bifo who has contributed more insight and
critique and poetry than anyone I know. This is an old capitalist
reality that has spilled over into the forefront of common experience.

sorry, Brian


On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 2:18 AM Frédéric Neyrat <fneyrat@gmail.com> wrote:

> One thing for me seems pretty clear: the agent of the current collapse is
> not a non-human agent as such! Arguing that Covid-19 is a powerful critter
> that, on its own, waking up one morning and after having taken a look on
> its immunological agenda, decided to kill human beings, is meaningless.
> It's easy to find articles about Covid-19 as a "zoonosis"/"zoonotic
> disease" and zoonosis are produced because of the Plantacionocene (see the
> crucial work of Anna Tsing on that topic). And the Plantacioniocene is not
> the effect of a non-human agent. And if Black people die *more* than white
> people (
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/its-a-racial-justice-issue-black-americans-are-dying-in-greater-numbers-from-covid-19
> )
> it's also not because of Covid-19 *as such*, right?

<...>



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