There Is No Outside Read online

  There Is No Outside

  There Is No Outside

  Covid-19 Dispatches

  Edited by

  Jessie Kindig

  Mark Krotov

  Marco Roth

  The collection © n+1 2020

  The contributions © The contributors 2020

  The photographs © Jack Norton 2020

  All essays in this collection appeared, or will appear, on the n+1 website at nplusonemag.com; in the print edition of n+1, number thirty-seven; or the Verso Books blog, versobooks.com/blogs, with the exception of “Washington County, NY” by Jack Norton, which was commissioned for this publication.

  Cover design and illustration by Rachel Ossip.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London, W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books.

  ISBN-13, US and Canada: 9781839762307

  ISBN-13, UK and Republic of Wales: 9781839762291

  Contents

  Introduction

  1“Chinese Virus,” World Market | Andrew Liu

  The best safeguard against the novel coronavirus is the ability to voluntarily withdraw oneself from capitalism

  2Living Inside | Rachel Ossip

  The virus comes to visit

  3Coronavirus and Chronopolitics | Gabriel Winant

  What matters now is the balance of authority in everyday life—between young and old, worker and boss

  4Stop Making Points | Francesco Pacifico

  Rome coronavirus dispatch

  5Release Them All | Sarah Resnick

  New York State prisons during Covid-19

  6“It Takes More Than a Virus to Make Us Nervous” | Teresa Thornhill

  Covid-19 on Lesbos

  7Living as a Virus in Modi’s India | Shigraf Zahbi

  In less than a week, “the virus” became the “Muslim virus”

  8Technofascism in India | Debjani Bhattacharyya and Banu Subramaniam

  An ostensible public health tool is being used to create ghettos of the sick

  9Architecture Against Trump | Mark Krotov

  On Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020

  10There Is No Outside | Karim Sariahmed

  Health workers can respond to this crisis by taking up working-class struggles as our own

  11Stay at Home | Ana Cecilia Alvarez

  How can you shelter in place if you do not have shelter?

  12Washington County, NY | Jack Norton

  A photo essay from the once and current center of the world

  13Adrift at Sea | Laleh Khalili

  Sailors face Covid-19

  14Distance Must Be Maintained | Aaron Timms

  We walk to escape the trauma of the pandemic, only to relive it all over again by walking

  15Whores at the End of the World | Sonya Aragon

  “Don’t involve the police,” I say every time

  16I Must Leave My House | Sean Cooper

  Roaming through the Covid-19 surveillance state

  17Where Is Patricia Sigl? | Chloe Aridjis

  Was she one of the 686 who perished on April 12 or one of the 843 from April 25?

  18Quarantine Pastoral | Marco Roth

  Primed for story as we are, we feed our wishes with even meager leavings

  Our Contributors

  Notes

  Introduction

  There is always outside

  Jessie Kindig

  The title of this collection is something of a feint—there is always outside.

  Even during this quarantine period, from inside our homes—should we have them—we see the outside through windows. From mine, outside looks like birds, masked walkers, ambulances, leafing trees, the NYPD mobile command unit, neighbors arriving to mourn the dead, a small patch of sky. We also try to map the outside world through unemployment rates and death counts, social media posts and hearsay, reports of overwhelmed hospitals and domestic violence hotlines, the spaced-out line of people at the church food bank up the street. Outside glints and beckons. Outside people die.

  What these essays track, drawn from n+1’s website and print issue and Verso’s blog over the past weeks, is not the fact of no outside, but rather what it is to feel that there is no outside. Perhaps we work at one of the overwhelmed hospitals, or have been to one. As Karim Sariahmed reports, to experience the “ever-worsening status quo” of the ER is to know a crisis so severe and all-consuming that “there is no outside.” The pandemic has only further constricted the thin living space to be had at the extremes of these borders—for those in prison, on the inside, as Sarah Resnick relates; for the homeless, for whom there is only ever outside, as Ana Cecilia Alvarez notes from Los Angeles; for Muslims in India being further excluded from Hindu society and confined to the insides of ghettos, as Shigraf Zahbi reports from Delhi; and for those, as Teresa Thornhill describes, in Greece’s refugee camps, held in limbo between exile and belonging, outside and in.

  To be denied an outside is to be forced to mine the interior, to measure the weight of the social body once it has been hollowed out. So Francesco Pacifico recounts from Rome, and so Rachel Ossip describes in her account of the virus’s effect on a body. Mark Krotov grieves those who have died, and Chloe Aridjis keeps looking for the ones who have gone missing.

  There is, it seems to many of our authors, no outside to outside either. “I must leave my house,” Sean Cooper declares, yet finds himself entrapped within a Covid-19 landscape of surveillance apps and digitized contact tracing; in a different way, Aaron Timms and Marco Roth each find that the gardens and streets of Brooklyn remind them of the scale of loss that exists and the mammoth work of repair the future will require.

  •••

  Let me say this. I miss the outside, desperately, by which I mean: I miss the conditions of social life under which we might begin to practice repair. I miss the glinting world.

  In quarantine, I have been kept good company by Virginia Woolf’s late—last—masterpiece, The Waves. It’s a cacophony of a book, full of the mad lyricism of the young eager to eat the whole world, their voices interweaving. Everything, every moment and interaction, every falling leaf and failed kiss and butter-stained napkin means so, so much. Yet the novel is framed by the quiet, human-less beach—the sounds of birds swarming and waves beating and the mute hills, bristling—Woolf says—with trees. This is a book about what is bundled together and what is kept apart, and the necessary relationship between the two:

  In the garden the birds that had sung erratically and spasmodically in the dawn on that tree, on that bush, now sang together in chorus, shrill and sharp; now together, as if conscious of companionship, now alone as if to the pale blue sky … Fear was in their song, and apprehension of pain, and joy to be snatched quickly now at this instant.

  What makes the world, Woolf reminds, is not the mere fact of it but the waves of relations into which it plunges you. Jack Norton’s photo essay from the deindustrialized towns of northern New York reminds us of the same. Everywhere, even—especially—spaces gutted by capital, is the center of the universe. Even on an empty beach, the waves still beat.

  •••

  We are in a moment when outside the crisis and outside the quarantine seems a utopia as unattainable as the diorama in a snow globe. These essays each argue that the global crisis of Covid-19 is intricately connected to the unfolding devastation of neoliberalism and racism, environmental destruction and precarity, mass incarceration and the rise of emboldened authoritarian states. Across India, for example, as Debjani Bhattacharyya and Banu Subramaniam show, the crisis
has only served to highlight the “spreading virus” of Hindu fascism.

  Andrew Liu notes in his incisive essay on Wuhan and global capitalism that tracking the spread of the virus illustrates “contemporary global interchange at its most prosaic,” as the novel coronavirus transmission pathway has followed the circuits of twenty-first century markets.

  In so doing, the pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities of these nodes, prime among them the precarious workers who exist in the shadow of recognized labor markets. Laleh Khalili surveys the position of seafarers during the epidemic, the workers responsible for global shipping and tourism, without which capitalism in its current form could not function. These sailors, most on short-term contracts with little or no access to health care on board their ships and most from the global south, have been quarantined at sea, adrift and neglected. The pandemic has also left sex workers exposed and adrift. Sonya Aragon’s personal account reveals how the intimate and proximate labor many sex workers provide is no longer possible during the pandemic, and how criminalization makes any hope of a safety net, unemployment insurance, or health care impossible. Capitalism has made most of us, in Aragon’s apt phrase, “whores at the end of the world.”

  But here at the end of the world, in this place of no outside, something important is proved. For all the complexity, the just-in-time production, the digital age, global capitalism remains a predominantly social and political endeavor. When consumers stop consuming in public, when workers can no longer go to work or refuse to work in unsafe conditions, when we stay home and the social sphere collapses—it is made clear how it is still, and always, the fact of people acting in the world that is the decisive thing.

  Gabriel Winant contends that we are watching the pandemic highlight the “cruel inequities” of capitalism, in race and income, of course, but also generationally. A twentieth-century capitalism based on amassing wealth away from the young is now breaking, perhaps irreparably. What we need, though, is one another: the old and the young, the whores and the unemployed, the sailors adrift and the prisoners struggling to contact loved ones, the neighbors looking for each other, the pangolins of the market and the birds of the gardens, the doctors and nurses on twelve-hour shifts and the postal workers and the tellers of stories.

  •••

  We will go outside. The pandemic will fade, for now. The future will come, imperfect but alive. But what will be left in the sand when this tide has ebbed? We can hope it might be robust mutual aid networks, a renewed commitment to the commons, a fighting movement for Medicare for All. Even should this be true, there will also be mass unemployment, hundreds of thousands of deaths, gutted social infrastructures, global supply chains on the verge of collapse, and a devastated planet. To ask what the outside might be when we are still inside is, as Marco Roth notes, to “feed our wishes with even meager leavings.”

  Let these essays bear witness. But let them also grant us leavings, however meager. Outside, after all, is still there, glinting, waiting for us to give it meaning.

  Brooklyn, NY

  May 13, 2020

  1

  “Chinese Virus,” World Market

  The best safeguard against the novel coronavirus is the ability to voluntarily withdraw oneself from capitalism

  Andrew Liu

  March 20, 2020

  1. “Wuhan Virus”?

  The city of Wuhan, China is rich with historical significance, but for much of the world before this year it was hardly a household name. A portmanteau of three historical cities at the mouth of the Yangzi and Han Rivers—Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang—Wuhan served as the site of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, which ended the last Chinese Dynasty, and in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government temporarily made the city its national capital, as the military fled from Japanese forces along the eastern coast. In recent years, passengers boarding one of the hundreds of ferries that glide through the city center every day would have seen soaring glass and concrete skyscrapers adorned with the names of hotel chains and national banks—an intimidating skyline, but one increasingly common across Asia. Beyond this photogenic core is the familiar combination of new architectural projects, historical landmarks, residential university neighborhoods, and designated free-trade zones for industrial export processing. It is a massive and sprawling metropolis of over eleven million people, more populous than New York City, but by the high standards of contemporary China, and in the unsentimental parlance of the Chinese media, it is a solid “second-tier city.”

  But these days, of course, Wuhan is at once more internationally infamous than ever and associated only with one thing: the global spread of the disease now known as Covid-19. During the first weeks of December, several individuals began to report to hospitals in the Wuhan area with severe flu-like symptoms, including fever, dry coughing, fatigue, body aches, and pneumonia-like symptoms. Only later did doctors recognize that many patients either worked at, or were connected to, the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in the city center. The symptoms soon worsened, paralyzing older patients and killing many. On December 30, lab results finally confirmed that the source was a novel coronavirus strain that shared traits with the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak that claimed over eight hundred people worldwide and the MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) virus that emerged in 2012 and has killed nearly a thousand since. The virus has now ballooned into a pandemic with cases in 183 countries. As of this writing, 11,147 people have died from 265,495 cases. In China alone, 3,248 of 80,967 cases have died, almost all based in Wuhan.

  For weeks, American news services referred to the disease as the “Wuhan virus.” Last month, the World Health Organization renamed the virus “Covid-19” (Coronavirus disease of 2019) with the explicit goal of minimizing the social stigma of a name that referred to a specific place—and, by extension, a specific people. Not ones to pay heed to international norms, conservative politicians in the US have continued to insist on the phrase “Wuhan virus,” or “Chinese coronavirus,” in a transparent effort to scapegoat and distract from their own catastrophic mismanagement of the worst public health crisis in recent American history. On Monday, a White House official reportedly described the virus as the “Kung Flu.” The following day Donald Trump defended using the term “Chinese virus,” explaining, “’cause it comes from China. It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate.” Less equivocal, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton paired a tweet last week about the “Wuhan coronavirus” with a suggestion that China would have to “pay” for what it had done to America.

  There is no question that such terminology is racist and xenophobic. Yet the fact that this global pandemic started in Wuhan, and not elsewhere in China, should not be simply overlooked, either. In recent decades, Wuhan has been caught up in the latest stage of globalization, in which international capital continues to extend further inland in pursuit of cheaper land and labor markets, spawning international links for goods such as steel and automobile parts, which remain hidden to the average consumer. It is a major Chinese city, yet outside the core of glittering metropolises along the nation’s coast. It is precisely the unexceptional status of Wuhan as a second-tier Chinese city that is notable. What the global spread of the novel coronavirus from Wuhan suggests is that the culprit here is not the unique circumstances of a particular place, but rather the now-extensive commercial connections that bring ever more of these kinds of places closer and closer together, into a larger and larger whole. In recounting the story of the novel coronavirus, it becomes increasingly clear that its movements have thus far mimicked the pathways of the 21st-century global market.

  •••

  The specific origins of the coronavirus within Wuhan remain unclear. In February, researchers announced that the virus could be traced back to a wild pangolin sold in the Huanan market, and that it had originally been transmitted from a bat. This is currently just a working hypothesis. But if true, it would square with t
he theory that SARS and MERS also originated in bats and were passed on to humans by way of wild animals—civet cats and camels, respectively.

  The pangolin is a small, anteater-like mammal found across Asia and Africa. Its hard scales, which make up 20 percent of its body weight, have been digested in China for centuries, with overall consumption soaring in recent decades. According to customers and vendors, pangolin scales and meat can be used as a form of medicine to cure a variety of ailments (it is said to nourish the kidneys), but primarily to invigorate men’s sexual performance and bolster female beauty. The exotic nature of the pangolin—and the illegal trading that is central to its distribution—has an obvious analogy in the masked palm civet cat, a small mammal native to India and Southeast Asia served as a delicacy in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, usually prepared with chrysanthemum petals and shreds of snake.

  During the 2003 SARS outbreak, investigators in Guangzhou, Guangdong’s massive provincial capital, raided restaurants and discovered bear parts, salamanders, and owls sitting in freezers in the kitchens. These dietary habits are typically described in the media as a branch of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM): practices, herbs, and medicinal cures that have been used for thousands of years in China. So is the novel coronavirus, like SARS, a tragic consequence of a national fondness for TCM? Was the consumption of pangolin a residue of unchanging, primitive Chinese custom? Could it be blamed on “local culture,” as the SARS virus was blamed on the exotic and peculiar tastes so dominant in Cantonese cuisine?1 If so, would we have to concede that the novel coronavirus is indeed a peculiarly Chinese disease?

  Of course not. TCM, in fact, is not a particularly coherent or uncontroversial field. For most people, the term simply refers to acupuncture, or a harmless mixture of ginseng, ginger, goji berries, and jujube in teas and hot broths. While these remedies have existed in Asia for centuries, market prices and cross-border activity have transformed modest practices and local tastes into big business. Beginning in the 1980s, market liberalization opened opportunities for illicit trade and also made many in China rich. The rich were more than willing to seek new culinary adventures by way of that trade, as conspicuous consumption became the ultimate marker of class advancement. In interviews, customers have explained that they seek out rare wildlife delicacies not for their health benefits, but because they’re eager to impress important guests they’re entertaining—or because they’ve had a good day at the stock market. The pangolin trade owes more to the Chinese economic miracle than it does to some archaic superstitious culture.