CANCELLED: PSYCHOSONIC ACTION LAB 26 MARCH

It will come as no surprise to anyone that this event previously posted about and scheduled for next week has been cancelled, for all the obvious reasons.

I hope that you're all staying safe and well out there. These are unsetlling times; but they have been for quite a long while.

I just wanted to add a couple of thoughts whilst I am here:

This virus is frequently being described as an enemy. We are at war with it. This language has been used by members of the UK government as well as French and American ones. This is patently ridiculous and insulting. What we have is an enormous crisis in public health. There's been the “wars” on terror/drugs etc. for a very long time now; though, oddly, what happened to Iraq or Afghanistan in the earlier part of this century (still ongoing) was never declared, nor the obvious war on Libya more recently. Prosecuting a war on another human regime or nation is at least logically coherent. But nonetheless, it has to be a “war” on Covid, despite the fact that it has no uniforms, flags or territory beyond the individual human body, wherever that body might happen to be. It has to be this way because, in accordance with the emotional blackmail of the so-called “blitz spirit” in the UK, the total mobilisation of civil society, commercial interests and government in order to promote individual survival and the public good can only be understood via the metaphor of war. Peacetime is defined by individualism and endemic competition; solidarity is rare, or even regarded as unhelpful to economic growth or the nation “punching above its weight” in trade and other such banalities. 

Because our society is emphatically not predicated on mutual support and solidarity, protecting the vulnerable and promoting the public good in its “normal” operations, the extraordinary condition must be invoked: that of war with its connotations of existential struggle, sacrifice for the greater good etc.

It seems that the proof that this "enemy" is defeated would simply be getting back to screwing over the vulnerable and each other in a collective-yet-individualised frenzy of business-as-usual? That's something to exercise the virtues of public spirit and self-sacrifice for?

If this current situation is an unprecedented threat to our collective and individual well-being what can be said about what preceded it, the normal background against which this now stands in such supposedly stark contrast that it must be described as a "war"? That this virus is a serious threat to our collective life I do not for a moment deny. It is. I just want to point out that what passed for “collective life” prior to the outbreak - taken as a whole - was also a serious threat to our collective life.