Disintegrating forces
Most Americans seem to agree that it is a bad wager to risk their lives for an opportunity to go to the mall or eat in a Burger King. As Atlantic science reporter Ed Yong points out in an article called “Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing?”: “The rise of small anti-lockdown protests overlooks the fact that most Republicans and Democrats agree that social distancing should continue ‘for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus.’”
This important piece of perspective comes, however, in a paragraph where he makes the claim that “the coronavirus not only co-opts our cells, but exploits our cognitive biases.” I can see what he’s trying to get at here and in the article in general, which helpfully consolidates information on the status of research into the coronavirus and Covid-19 with narratives of how the pandemic has unfolded: Our thinking is affected by the social disruption and the chronic uncertainties that accompany a pandemic. But the phrasing makes it sound as if the virus itself is exploiting us, which masks the identity of the actual exploiters. The follow-up sentence seems to correct course: “Humans construct stories to wrangle meaning from uncertainty and purpose from chaos.” But this still seems to lay blame on human nature itself rather than those constructing the dominant stories — those in a position to use their access to power and media leverage to manipulate, mislead, and endanger some people so that others may feel safer.
If anything, the coronavirus appears to be making more Americans agree about what threats they face as a society, yet politicians, corporate shills, and media companies are incentivized to foment a sense of growing despair about American dissensus. This makes everyone feel like they are in the pandemic predicament alone, required to fend for themselves. Part of this is to preserve the hegemony of the hard-won neoliberal view that “there is no such thing as society.” There are only individuals and families taking responsibility for themselves, even when the problems far exceed their capacity to confront them meaningfully. This leaves a margin for blaming the victims for structural problems in how society is organized and administered, and the inequalities deliberately reproduced.
Constructing the impression that there is a populist groundswell for “reopening the economy” helps bring into focus an idea that the “social” was the pre-pandemic economy of “experiences” that we’ve now been forced to the abandon. It posits a return where there can’t be one, setting up the lost status quo as an ideal. It conflates social distancing with a dismantling of the “social,” even as it recasts the desire for “society” as a nostalgia for a particular and limited form of individual economic agency. How can we be social if we can’t even shop when we want?
The “social,” of course, is not limited to public space, physical space, or economic activity. It’s not simply another term for the service economy. It’s not a space at all but a way of conceiving experience, “who” it is happening to and how. “Social space” is more of a business model, describing the tech sector that is devising means of instrumentalizing interpersonal interaction and capturing it for profit. For the right-wing donors sponsoring the protests against social distancing, the danger is that we will actually begin to think in terms of “society,” as a collective with a collective sense of responsibility, rather than in terms of a zero-sum war of all against all.
As Wendy Brown defines it in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, the “social” is necessary for conceiving political equality and making democracy function. “Democracy requires explicit efforts to bring into being a people capable of engaging in modest self-rule, efforts that address ways that social and economic inequalities compromise political equality,” she argues. The “social” is a concept that allows people to talk about structural harms and to see forces at work that transcend the horizons of the individual. It is “where we are politically enfranchised and gathered (not merely cared for) through provision of public goods and where historically produced inequalities are made manifest as differentiated political access, voice, and treatment, as well as where these inequalities may be partially addressed.”
Neoliberalism, Brown contends, seeks to invalidate this conception of the “social” and insist on the individual as the only meaningful unit for assessing reality, and that market forces and a traditional morality focused on rules for conduct rather than outcomes is the only legitimate way to assure that people are “free.” Summing up the neoliberal perspective, Brown writes, "Freedom rests in demonizing and ultimately vanquishing the social.” I think about this when I see a bunch of guys in Wawa not wearing masks.
Brown suggests neoliberalism’s aggressive dismantling of the social safety net and “responsibilization” of individual families to take care of themselves and grow their human capital “rescued both the subject and the family from the disintegrating forces of late modernity,” effecting a “recuperation of both the individual and the family at the very moment of their seeming extinction.” That is, neoliberalism allowed individuals to have a concept of personal freedom, of autonomy, of agency in a “late modern” world characterized by large impersonal forces, expert systems, globalization, technological disruption, and media saturation overwhelming people with conflicting points of view and contexts that can’t be made to otherwise cohere. This is no small thing.
That seems to be the stakes behind raising the profile of the “reopen the economy” protests, which reassert a neoliberal understanding of full personal responsibility for one’s condition (as a demonstration of “freedom”) rather than admit a social dimension that structures our horizons. Neoliberalism is philosophically opposed to the efficacy of social distancing, because that suggests that a collective subject can exist, can achieve something constructive that is not understood as simply coercive. Hence the top-down organization of protests against social distancing, through the efforts of various right-wing institutions and donors. Hence also the tendency of neoliberal ideologues to concern troll and cast doubt on the possibility of maintaining social distancing, insisting it’s “unrealistic,” as if collective action were inherently a form of fantasia. (Society is fake, only individuals are real.)
To the extent they are not astroturfed, the protests are paradoxical collective actions against the idea of collective responsibility. They make recourse to conspiratorial thinking to discredit the medical and epidemiological research that points to the necessity of coordinated social action to prevent the coronavirus’s spread. They regard the efficacy of social distancing as a more dangerous threat than the virus itself, as it proves that the idea of “society” is, in fact, gaining legitimacy, and this, according to Hayek anyway, is the “road to serfdom.”
The rejection of “society” in favor of purely individualistic, market-anchored ideas of “freedom” is closely aligned with consumerism, which puts forward “freedom of choice” as the core of personal liberty. Shopping supports the experience of circumscribed personal freedom that neoliberalism endorses, in a realm designed to seem nonpolitical. Thus the “reopen the economy” protesters frame their political concerns in terms that seem ludicrous from an outside point of view. They are telling workers to go die so that they can get haircuts or manicures. But within the neoliberal frame, those frivolities are expressions of liberty, which is defined as against the “social” and what “society” forces people to do.
The “reopen the economy” protesters aren’t demanding that we restart society, despite the way their concerns are sometimes characterized. They are doing the opposite: they are demanding that we restart the consumerist sphere, the antisocial space of neoliberalism. That space is required to organize and sustain neoliberalism as a way of making meaning of one’s isolated, individualistic life in the absence of the capability of seeing solidarity and mutuality as legitimate expressions of being.
Brown cites Karl Schmitt’s idea that “every ordering of human affairs also materializes in an ordering of space. Consequently, revolutions of human societies always also involve alteration of our conception of space.” We’re living through such an alteration now, but it remains to be see to what degree that will entail any lasting revolution in how we order human relations — most of all our relation to ourselves, and what we think makes us free.