A global meltdown, a fortress of strife and of opportunism, defying time.

March 2020.

In her book Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway asks:

“How can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every fiber of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes and must somehow be engaged and re-patterned?”

The question of thinking in a time of urgency is with us now and is NOT different, it is merely posed with a new inflection and considered with a different momentum than when Haraway wrote it a few years ago. But then the urgency was unevenly felt: the urgency of ecological shifts and species loss and melting ice caps. It was an urgency of metrics by which humans understand the world we call nature. A formulation for how that world is changing, mattering differently to some humans than others. She wanted to reformulate, redistribute the mattering of that world — naturecultures — so that flourishing would mean something across political economies, to make a process have stakes. But the times have found us, said Nancy Pelosi the speaker of the House, quoting Thomas Paine, American revolutionary. The times here are times of disease incubation, times of delays and errors in testing. In Haraway’s terms, these are the times of urgencies. Especially now, in these urgent times, we must think without the myth of apocalypse, yet knowing we are “interlaced, even complicit” in the very plague that defines our time.

We all are embodying a demographic state. The quarantine is a national intimacy. Economy, ritual, affection, lust, all conform now to a mathematical model of disease spread. The liquid of human lives poured into a cast conjured by epidemiologists. Semiotics of social contact, physical contact, congregations, groupings, are remapped into a new matrix. They are covered, dampened by a thick film whose weight muffles their contours and enacts a new topography of public welfare, statistics of mortality. Our new social and political ontology is the ecology of infectious disease.

Today, yesterday, tomorrow, we all act and subject ourselves to this mode of being, not only as a collective of reality show consumers, shoppers, instagrammers, drunk bar patrons, but also as vectors for 30,000 letters written in RNA: the coronavirus genome. Reduce the air- and surface-borne rubbings from one mucus membrane epithelial tissue to another. Cut off the floating, swirling flecks of wet condensates of lipid, protein, nucleic acids, that erupt from each pair of lungs and settle around us. We are each a source, we are each a target. Like the efflorescence of sperm that waft gently from a sponge to ebb through their own embryonic fluid, the warm salt water in a coral reef. A swarm, a cloud of seeds that look for their host.

30,000 letters of RNA. A poem that multiplies with us. A tightening of breath. The putty of our social existence, the set of physical environments encountered and shared by each pair of lungs, is reshaped in face of this poem, this tendency towards respiratory failure. Lungs that fill with fluid. Lungs that no longer efficiently interface with oxygen concentrations, with carbon dioxide concentrations, we are all in a game to minimize them. We are measuring the derivative of the slope of this set of bodies inside other bodies. It is a game of rates, fluxes. It is graphed on a logarithmic scale. The “we” of the universal plural first person is now a curve. Which equation fits our curve is now a political imperative, a saddle point on the topography of living and dying, a slogan, a death threat.

Living through a plague is not apocalyptic, it is accelerated population change. It is violent and terrifying and destabilizing, but it is not itself apocalyptic. Apocalypse trades in romantic fallacies of humans as separate and special from Nature. We do not need apocalyptic thinking to venture through, and flourish following, this encounter with a novel virus. A virus does not need us (it has bats, ferrets, pangolins). We do not need the virus, but we all flourish together in this accidental meeting. Human choices put us all at stake, had always put us at stake, in pressing dense human dwellings closer and closer to ecologies where there live and die many viruses unknown to human immune systems. Human choices placed stakes astride dense ecologies in which viruses flourish. These flourishings of RNA may frequently intersect with human lungs. Culpability, however, and its saccharine and frantic moralities enact a set of stakes that ends up lifeless, that zips us out of embedded care and webs of empathy. Fixating on externalized causes — God, corporations, the WHO — will always risk levying blame, assigning guilt, extracting revenge that presumes some humans are separate, elect, outside of nature. It is the same failed metaphysical game of purity/sin. It is all crisis, all stasis. We don’t need it.

Meanwhile the grubs and the bugs and the phage and the ecologies inside and outside all hum along. Composting, as Haraway would put it. She continues, “You don’t have units plus relations. You just have relations. You have worlding.” As usual, we may instead to consider stakes that are orthogonal to the Nature/Culture axis. What stakes matter now, when the resources of the most powerful government in human history are focused onto one plane, one grid of interaction, one rate, one mathematical expression? What becomes of the rhetorical energy spent toward this spreading, twisting contact zone between one particular virus (among the thousands for whom we play host) and human bodies? What becomes of the material resources marshaled?

In the immediate: what is flourishing through an economy in freefall? What are the stakes for all kinds with capital decaying, circuits shorted, lichen growing across a microprocessor chip? Humans are refashioning how we thrive, even if only grudgingly, even if unknowingly. The question is newly posed but not new. It is a newly opened set of possibilities, as markers, waypoints, fluxes, food sources, reproductive patterns, information flows, all get shuffled and all will begin to settle upon new territory. Observes Haraway, “There are no guarantees, no arrow of time, no Law of History or Science or Nature in such struggles. There is only the relentlessly contingent SF worlding of living and dying, of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, of sympoiesis…”