Posing with the flag

In “Social Contagion,” an essay about the coronavirus published a few weeks ago by the Chinese Marxist journal Chuang, the authors link to a video (originally posted in this tweet) shot from an apartment window in Wuhan during the lockdown. In their view, it symbolized “the basic character of the state’s response” in China.

Essentially, it shows a number of people who appear to be doctors or first-responders of some sort outfitted in full protective gear taking a picture with the Chinese flag. The person shooting the video explains that they’re outside that building every day for various photo ops. The video then follows the men as they take off the protective gear and stand around chatting and smoking, even using one of the suits to clean off their car. Before driving off, one of the men unceremoniously dumps the protective suit into a nearby trash can, not even bothering to stuff it to the bottom where it won’t be seen. Videos such as this one have spread rapidly before being censored—small tears in the thin veil of the state-sanctioned spectacle.

As the crisis has hit the U.S., I’ve been thinking about this video and the sorts of spectacles being crafted here, and the angles from which you can believe you are seeing them for what they are. Part of this has involved suddenly seeing how much of what had seemed "realistic" and "just the way things are" be revealed to be eminently suspendable when necessary. Francis Tseng started this thread collecting a list of "everything that is normally disallowed (paid sick leave, access to water, no arrests) but clearly feasible based on the coronavirus response." But mainly it's been impossible not to see how different media entities (i.e. everything) have quickly pivoted to virus and created spectacles of their connection to this new zeitgeist. The ones on TV are the most obvious, of course, with the usual ghouls taking up their established positions to perform their concerns and try to assuage viewers’ fears between blocks of commercials. There has been the usual special show of concern for the lives of celebrities, who make it seem more real somehow, even slightly aspirational, something that's trickling down to us. There are have been a lot of viral basketball players, mainly because they have been prioritize for testing. Before all sports were canceled, VIRUS appeared on the ESPN chyron as though it were a league of its own. It had been safely assimilated, as though to demonstrate that real-time updates would go on as inexorably as usual.
 
There was a similar feeling to the emails I’ve received from banks, retailers, car dealerships, various cultural institutions, charities, and the like assuring me about their concern for my welfare and my ability to continue to be served by them without interruption. They also feel obviously performative, if not as outright scammy as some of the ads popping up on the fringes of articles online and in the interstices of social media for masks and vitamins, and immune boosters and so on. All these companies want to pose with the coronavirus flag while it is the only thing that can capture consumers’ attention. They don’t seem as blatantly cynical as the person cleaning their car with the presumably fake hazmat suit; it’s more that they are desperately trying to reassert capitalist normalcy in the face of total disruption. No, really, you can still spend money to feel safe! You are still free to choose us! Even in a crisis, the conflation of care with commerce feels inescapable. Already it is threatening to become nostalgic.
 
Since last week, whenever I've look at Twitter, I've worried about how I too would be posing with the flag if I posted anything. That’s not necessarily because I might weigh in with some superfluous hand-washing tips (sing a happy song!) or some complaints about government officials sending mixed messages or some heartwarming links to TikTok content to keep us preoccupied during this period when it has become unethical to consider leaving the house. It’s because the coronavirus flag is currently draped over everything. Anything you hear anyone say anywhere is de facto about the virus, even if it isn’t. One upsetting, context-free thing I overheard someone say in a gas station last week: “That’s why they’re running out of bullets.”
 
With panic palpable in the air, it feels like a decidedly bad time for paranoid reading. It seems trivial to expose acts of concern as mere performances, as if they weren’t always at least that. It would be easy to seize upon the virus as an epistemic opportunity, as the one real thing that can be used to measure the degree of bullshit involved with everything else, but it’s not clear that this would help keep anyone from dying in the short term. (It's also a fantasy; the virus is not "real" for everybody in the same way.) Getting people to adhere to difficult and inconvenient protocols for longer and longer periods of time will involve more and not less ideology. This will certainly redistribute suffering and death, and maybe it will even reduce it some.
 
In the face of a seemingly insurmountable challenge in which a degree of failure is inevitable, everything can feel retrospectively pointless. I can always construe my life as a series of individualistic gestures, futile in their scope, probably not even effective at protecting myself let alone helping anyone else. It feels as though everything I do is merely symbolic, photo ops for structuring my own unfolding story, but there is no way to tell for sure. There is no unilateral move that would make a difference, and no view from above where you can always tell who is merely posing with the flag and who is really part of a team of responders. I don’t even have that sort of perspective on myself.
 
In enforced isolation, one has to simulate the sensation of being on any kind of team, but the fact is that one is already part of a collective action, vast and subjectless, but visible in the scenes of empty restaurants and streets. It has been organized by the state and imposed as obedience and not resistance. Up until yesterday, I’d been walking around the city performing my social distancing, ostentatiously using my sleeve to open doors and doing everything I can to refrain from committing any acts of public coughing. It wouldn’t be entirely wrong to call this a “state-sanctioned spectacle.” It felt as though I was pledging allegiance.