A pure being, in and of itself, comes into representable, comprehensible, signifiable existence when a form is given to which it is attached. The form and its being have no natural, intrinsic, a priori association but rather of an intentional choice externally packaged. Such a process of mediation, from which a structure is formed, is of the concern of the interplay of ontology and epistemology, of the relation between how a being is and how it appears to be . In the same vein, when a temporal dimension is added, a historical truth, or any truth in itself, comes into existence when a narrative is correspondingly employed. And this truth-giving process given by the emplotment of the story, which is of the concern of rhetoric , naturally becomes the site of contestation and violence. Epistemology, construed rhetorically, is not only of a theoretical importance that investigates how a being is statically represented, but of a practical one that tries to understand how the representation interacts with that which is represented. Epistemology, therefore, is politics.
The ways in which the world is known to us comprise several. In a Kantian sense, a complete process of cognition refers to first an enactment of our sensibility constitutive of our intuition of space and time, and second a categorization of sense-data into representable parts by our faculties of understanding. An epistemology is said to be social if it is a constitution of particular epistemologies of individual social beings. While the faculty of understanding enables the creation of the sphere of appearances, where Arendtian politics is based, sensibility is of Rancière’s concern, in which consensus is not made, but broken. Our investigation will take part in the second path, an investigation into the mode of existence of the very notion of politics, where formal, socio-cultural, and linguistic representations are no longer taken as the apparatuses, but the very objective of our inquiry.
On Oct.13, 2022, two banners opposing China's supreme leader, Xi Jinping, and pandemic policies appeared on a busy overpass in northwest Beijing. The protests came on the eve of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, when it was widely believed that Xi was about to be re-elected, which he did. The banner was taken down in minutes and social media were censored to stop the spread, but the chain effects rippled all over China and even beyond. It is indeed a pivotal turn in the years of the pandemic, during which countless forces and regulations have been enacted upon the people, bound up in the name of “Zero-COVID” which became the shared memory of the multitude. This event, later named “Si-Tong-Qiao,” was related by countless others in the state and thereupon a nationwide series of spontaneous protests were triggered, until an abrupt anticlimax at the beginning of December, the abolishment of the Zero-COVID policy, marked an end of the struggle testing the limit of CCP’s governmentality, a history that is yet to be finished.
When the timeline is traced all the way back, and pinned at the birth of 2020, the story goes, we find that humanity is once again in the fear of being dominated by pandemics which they have experienced countless times. It all started when a virus jumped from a bat to a pangolin, or a civet, or something else, before the host animal appeared in an uncensored marketplace in Wuhan city, and from where the virus finally started its journey into the human world. It is debated whether the virus constitutes a form of life, as the boundary lies between the dead and the alive has been infinitely blurred. Even if so, it is distinctively different from humans. The meaning of life belongs to those capable of self-reflection, of representation, of existence, while others, if any, are mere ontic species bound to the other camp of being governed by laws of nature. Revealing narratives and events, about humans and non-humans, in this era of the pandemic in China, this paper aims to identify and formulate an alternative rhetoric underwritten our normalizing logic between knowledge and power, theory and practice, art and politics, by a reconceptualization of the present.
State of Exception
Contrary to the famous example of interpellation from Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses , in which ideology, embodied by the police that hails on streets, “'acts' to 'recruit' subjects among individuals or 'transforms' individuals into subjects,” 1 Rancière’s construction of subjectivity reveres the process, which comes into being exactly when the police dissipate the people: The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one. Let us start with an empirical given: police interventions in public spaces consist primarily not in interpellating demonstrators, but in breaking up demonstrations. The police is not the law which interpellates individuals (as in Louis Althusser’s 'Hey, you there!'), not unless it is confused with religious subjection. It consists, before all else, in recalling the obviousness of what there is, or rather of what there is not, and its slogan is: 'Move along! There's nothing to see here!' The police is that which says that here, on this street, there's nothing to see and so nothing to do but move along. 2 The fundamental form of inequality, per Rancière, does not consist of traditional ways of oppression in which political struggle is revealed as subjugation and resistance among classes, but the ignorance and dis-appearance of the insensible deprived of identity and societal admittance. Rancière’s proletariat, for instance, is not a sociologically categorizable name, but an “outcast” in the normative order of capitalistic society. 3 Since they are virtually shareless of the wealth and properties in 3 Rancière, “Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization”, 61 2 Rancière, Dissensus , 37 1 Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism , 190 the world, the proletariats are forbidden to be constructed as subjects, despite of their presence or not.
The end of politics here symbolizes not the withdrawal of the participation of individuals in the formulation of the possibilities where their mutual existence lies, but the notion of politics as an exertion of power with an ever-new understanding of which is the abruption of the logic of power structure. 4 While police represents the exercise, reproduction and consolidation of power of the political order, politics stands contrary to the police and pronounces as the reconsideration of subjectivities, as the recalculation of the sensible against the normalizing constitution of the existing structure. Such practices never overlap with the ones conceptualized beforehand by the status quo. “There is never such a thing as a good regime, in fact, only regimes off course engaged in the perpetual work of self-correction.” 5 Rancière’s reformulation is a form of revolutionary politics that aims to break completely with the past, a trans formation instead of a re formation, which ordains a future not merely comparatively better than the present, but ones that transcend, ones that are qualitatively different, fundamentally reconstituted, and altogether new.
Different from contexts of traditional politics, in which the people are the totality and parts of which (the poor, for example) are the disadvantaged and therefore the site of proper Marxist struggle, Rancière’s biopolitics is, so to speak, microscopically contextualized, where the coded bodies of the proletariats are excluded from the category of the sensible, whose expressions are completely noised and exceeded the consideration of traditional politics. In the contemporary context of China, the zero-COVID policy has radically transformed the mode of existence — the possibilities in which interactions are occasioned, space existed, experiences lived, for 5 ibid, 42 4 Rancière, Shore of Politics , 61 both humans and objects, are impoverished. The ID-bound color codes on phones, for
example, are determinative of the allowed sphere of appearances. Related information
vaccinations, accredited COVID tests with time precise to minutes, travel history
precise to a kilometer – are automatically updated and arbitrate when, where, and what one can and cannot be . The ones tested positive, marginalized groups, in particular, are in this case the bodies deprived of expressivity. The increasingly stigmatized virus, caused by a demonization of its infectiousness and symptoms caused, as well as the ruthless governmental policies, demarcates the positive and the negative testers, as if the former were an absolute Other who are therefore degraded into something inhuman, whose language becomes unintelligible, mind irrational, bodies inexpressible. As if they are at the end of the world where zombies are infecting people to become zombies – to dehumanize – and the quarantine of whom are thus seen as an implicit form of “segregated but equal” policy protecting the uninfected.
In the re-iteration of the implementation of zero-COVID in different regions, a normalization of political order is at the same time occasioned. In the alternated ways of the practice of everyday life, what was used to be a “state of exception” had become the new, defaulted regularity. The quarantined individuals are deemed to operate under a normative logic other than human beings. When children are separated from their single mums, when elderlies are put into unaided living spaces, their voices are not only muted by censorships on media, but are unrecognized in the public space where individuals are taught to differentiate themselves from the positive testers. Their expressions are not taken as genuine interpretable words but noises comprised of incomprehensible exclamations, as if cows are mooing, birds chirping.
Zero-COVID exemplifies what Agamben calls the State of Exception , in which the state exercises power in ways that exceed the regularity of legal structures, but are justified due to unusual circumstances. A contingent, exceptional, local order is constructed under the specific “situational law.” 6 Such an order originated not from legality, but, quite the opposite, from the absence of legality. The legal power obtained by the state, in other words, is rooted fundamentally in the process of constructing situational order that is itself an illegal process, which entails the intrinsic paradoxicality of all political power. Agamben contents, in the process of this reconstitution of legality by an absence of legality, unlawful acts are legalized. When it comes to humans, it is a creation of uncategorizable and unnamable beings – Homo sacer of today. Their existences are both legal and illegal. Jews in Auschwitz are executed legally , in the concentration camps, a space under the state of exception. The execution is not killing but a simple termination of lives, in their words, undeserved to be lived. To purify a race is not deemed as a political process but merely a biological one, for the executed are devoid of rights, identity, race, gender, and the dignity of being human; they are, in Agamben’s words, nuda vita – naked life.
In November 2001, President Bush authorized his military to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists, a state of exception after the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Agamben sees this detention as a creation of space, in the Guantanamo military base, for the unnamable, detained beings, the Taliban captured in Afghanistan. 7 They are not charged crime by any law, and are neither “prisoners” nor “persons,” paraphrasing Agamben, but simply “detainees…objects of de facto rules entirely removed from law and judicial oversight” 8 These Taliban, together with Jaws in Auschwitz, are detained legally and illegally at the same time. The uncategorizable, situational exception 8 Ibid 7 Agamben, State of Exception , 4 6 Schmitt, Political Theology , 13 authorizes the dehumanization when U.S. soldiers torment, including peeing on the detainees, for they are not legal subjects during this illegal detention. “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule.” 9 If one is to be found test positive in 2020 China, when the pandemic is unknown and feared the most, being forced into a central quarantine camp called Fāng-cāng ( 方 艙 ) for two weeks is usually what is going to happen. Echoing the two cases mentioned, the quarantine people’s identity also disappeared. They are simply called Yáng ( 羊 ), denoting “sheep” in Chinese, since it pronounces identically with the first character of “test positive” in Chinese: Yáng-xìn ( 陽 性 ). The testing result, surpassing race, class, gender, and others, becomes the most essential identification that ordains their space of appearances. They will be taken to Fāng-cāng with no exception, disregarding any personal, social, and legal circumstances, with other individuals watching or altogether ignoring, as if it is solely a sheep being taken away.
Worse, people themselves are afraid of the infectiousness of the virus, and thus, without a second thought, hope the sheep to be taken from their living space no matter what will be done to the sheep.
To be is to be perceived, said Berkeley. Our ontological commitment here is prescribed to a certain relation. We exist not as concrete beings but as something immaterial, an idea. If we as humans are indeed something more than their biology, one might suggest it is given by our reflexivity, our ability to contemplate, to identify, to give meaning, and to do all of them consciously . In Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel claims a personal identity, a conception of self, is formed by re cognition from others; the spirit, that is to say, must encounter something heterogeneous to dialectically synthesize, to come back to itself. Marx’s claim – A being is the totality of its social 9 Agamben, Means without End , 39 relations – is only built on this, and our human existence, apart from biological ones, is, therefore, a relational one. Our being-in-the-world consists of mutual perception and recognition. This stop being the case when human exist not in this relational way, or rather, if we sustain the definition, they stop being human, comments Agamben: …identity was no longer a function of the social “persona” and its recognition by others but rather a function of biological data, which could bear no relation to it. Human beings removed the mask that for centuries had been the basis of their recognizability in order to consign their identity to something that belongs to them in an intimate and exclusive way but with which they can in no way identify. No longer do the “others,” my fellow men, my friends, or enemies, guarantee my recognition. Not even my ethical capacity to not coincide with the social mask that I have nevertheless taken on can guarantee such recognition. What now defines my identity and recognizability are the senseless arabesques that my inked-up thumb leaves on a card in some police station. This is something with which I have absolutely nothing to do, something with which and by which I cannot in any way identify myself or take distance from: naked life, a purely biological datum. 10 In modern life, suggests Agamben, our relation to others, and thus our existence, are reduced and substituted by biotechnology. We are recognized not by other humans, but machines. If naked lives have resulted from a mismatch between identity and human recognition, or representation, in some sense, our society is in fact already inflicted when our relation to others has been reduced and replaced by our relation to technology. Then, are naked lives resulted not from the state of exception now, or are we always already in states of exception, in the exceptional creation of our relation to technology?
During the pandemic, Chinese in their nation are recognized, as mentioned, by health app on phones which indicates their status by a color code. The information is centrally collected and restored for every citizen. Their “persona” is not the phenomenological encounters with other beings on the streets, but a series of biological, physical, and social information recorded and recognized by computers.
Life stops being complicated and becomes something reducible. When the way in 10 Agamben, Nudities , 50 which Jewish bodies in Auschwitz are “tattooed” with numbers to register and regulate has been universally applied, citizens in the nation are more or less dehumanized by the same logic. The danger lies behind this is the possibility of completely losing connection and recognition from others, and becomes non-existence in the social world. In Chinese rural areas where resources are rare, pandemic regulations are adapted with the sheep accommodating to given conditions.
Some are transported with trucks that are used to transport livestock and are quarantined in any poorly conditioned space imaginable. Under contemporary biopolitics a new form of dialectics appears, what used to be political is now biological, and what used to be biological, in turn, is now political.
While the first part of the pandemic chronology of China is full of repression and regulation, the second part, which constitutes only a few months, is comprised of struggle and resistance. When the city is locked down after another lockdown, when people are tired of the never-ending travel restriction, periodic COVID test, and, in general, the state of being suppressed, all sorts of means of expression of their dissatisfaction and anger are to be expected. In March 2022, the Shanghai lockdown, one of the largest lockdowns during the pandemic, started. In the following April, a video went viral but was banned by the government immediately. The Voice from
April was its name. 11 It’s a six minutes video composed of human voices in the
lockdown, including conversations, calls, protests, crying, and many others. It cannot be simpler if considered as an artwork; its effectiveness, however, is far beyond any text and written description. When Ranciere takes politics as a redistribution of the sensible, opposition to “police,” he means a process of voice -giving. An 11 Kevin in Shanghai, The Voice from April , Youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38_thLXNHY8 epistemological process consists of the mutual recognition of the subject and the object. While the object is taken as content, the subject provides its form. A failed cognition results from a mismatch between form and content, a differential mediation that fools the consciousness, therefore, an insensible unsensed. The Voice of April reauthorized and made sensible the muted and unheard voice from ordinary daily lives in the lockdown: In the video, we hear a conversation between a citizen and an officer from the Center of Disease Control (CDC), who informed that their region is severely short of available wards and ambulance, so their health code reflects as negative no matter the actual result. We hear a crying baby separated from his parents when quarantined in a hospital. We hear the supply driver calling at four a.m. complaining no one is taking the supply and that veggies are getting rotted. We hear dogs are killed by police after their owner was taken to quarantine. We hear complaints from a son of no hospital is willing to take his dying father during the lockdown. We hear protests requesting supplies. We hear apartment owners asking what would happen if the building is set on fire and the gate is locked… And the last conversation is one in 2022.4.12 when an old gentleman asked for medical assistance from the Residents' Committee: Gentleman: I've dialed 12345, I've dialed 110... Official: I know you've dialed. But are there expected results? Gentleman: Indeed, no results. Official: I don't even know what are they concerning about. Mr. Yu, I am genuinely helpless, I have no choice, no alternative... I'm even more heart-broken than you, because you're just in one family, and I have seen countless families facing the same problem. Gentleman: Ah, yeah. All that you said, I... really, totally understand. Official: I have reported your case officially and formally, have dialed for numerous times... Gentleman: Thank you. Official: Sorry, Mr. Yu. I can't help. Gentleman: Alas, that's...
Video as a medium, a movement-image that exists in both space and time, retains the complexity and irreducibility of the phenomenological experience of human consciousness, something unrepresentable by the script. It is tertiary retention, in Stiegler’s words, embodied as a temporal object that stores and transmits cultural knowledge, “reconstitutes our subjectivities,” and reshapes our understanding of the past. 12 In the battles of defining how a story should be told, representation is always political. Tertiary retention is not only an exteriorization of memory or organ ization of objects, but the divination of our vision of the order of past things. Creation of art is in this sense a resistance toward the diminution of memory, of which the battleground is not only in the street, but the imagination of individuals, and their conceivability of histories inscribed on bodies, as fortune as well as violence.
In combat with unlawful regulation empowered by the central government, one particular song was chosen by the protesters across the nation, as their call for solidarity – the national anthem March of the Volunteers . The song was originally written during the Second Sino-Japanese War, at which time Chinese nationalistic arts and literature were at their peak. The lyric of the anthem, consequently, depicts largely the struggle and bravery of the Chinese people in defending their land against invaders:
Arise! Ye who refuse to be slaves!
With our flesh and blood, let us build our new Great Wall!
The Chinese people face their greatest peril.
From each one the urgent call for action comes forth.
Arise! Arise! Arise!
Us millions with but one heart,
Braving the enemy's fire, march on!
12 Steigler, Technics and Time 3 , 33
Braving the enemy's fire, march on!
March on! March on, on! 13
While words in sentences are referential to a state of affairs, as early Wittgenstein might suggest, their potentiality is not entirely determined by the actuality under that specific historical constitution. In the protests, the lyrics are reterritorialized when words are taken as devices that are activated and reactivated in speech-acts when the protesters shout out in the face of police or in front of government buildings. The signification and representation of the anthem – the slaves, the new Great Wall, and the enemy’s fire… – are deliberated, reconstituted, and mobilized by the intentionality of the protesters whose shared request is in altering the existing regulation. The national anthem is not chosen on an arbitrary ground: not only its words are suggestive enough that their appeal can be delivered without distortion, but the semiotic structure of the anthem itself is by nature a patriotic one, one which represents the state itself. The acts of the protesters are believed to be justified as they ought to be protected by the anthem, and the anthem ought to be unbannable given its original historical importance. Acts of resistance, in the way of practicing the very notion of what they try to resist, imbued content into forms that are dialectically opposed. While the power of the state is expanded by means of state of exception, as concluded, legalizing the illegal, the power of the people is divined by appeals to the inviolable, reversing the arrow, illegalizing the legal.
In mid-April 2022, when the Shanghai lockdown was still in effect, the national anthem was banned across Chinese social media, including Weibo ( 微 博 ) and Douban ( 豆 瓣 ). The ban not only symbolizes a break of the PRC with its revolutionary past, but, in some sense, a negation of its communist ideal as the immanence of struggles, 13 Xue, Lyric of March of the Volunteers , Gov.cn albeit not as news. This ban grounded another later culminating event famously called the “blank paper movement,” before the final emancipation and abolition of zero-COVID. Again, taken semiotically, blank is simply an absence in the Symbolic Order, but with the creation of an Imaginary signifier. It is again up to the discretion of the interpreter by the context in which the act is performed. The meaning of signs defers infinitely. It is in the repetition of practices of signification that its virtuality is explored. But when all the means of mediation are taken away, what is left to the subject is a signifier represented by an absence of everything else. The insensible is what they represent, not some particular class but precisely the class of the classless, a universal and negative category undifferentiated, waiting to unleash its potential. The imaginary signifier is in the same sense universal and negative, that it is not anything else and represents nothing in particular. One might not wonder what a shareless, insensible class demands: since it has nothing, everything is demanded. When a voiceless voice is practiced, it is not difficult to guess that its expression is simply anything, and everything, imaginable.
The Order of Things
Two questions – how the state acts on people, and how the people reacted against the state – have been examined. The final part of this paper, which we shall now take the path, is to consider the logic behind the beginning of everything, to question the normativity of zero-COVID, or, more generally, how should we, as humans, react against the unpreventable crisis in the future Zero-COVID aims to prevent virus transmission by which ultimately eliminating the virus in the human world, the practices of which, as we already know, include lockdown, quarantine, contact tracing, routine testing, etc. all by means of exercising political power. We must remember, however, that virus is not in the realm of politics, at least as traditionally understood. The one, liberal politics, as we practice in everyday life, concerns the relationship between the government and the governed, the latter of which consists of individual subjects capable of reflection and communication, thereby entering into a social contract, creating a political realm in which they are not only governed by the laws of nature but of politics. The latter laws constitute our existence these days so much so the former has been more or less forgotten. Being political animals makes humans different from the rest of nature, but it does not make them unnatural. That human being inhabiting the Earth, is understood not as a state of affairs in which the human and the environment are in a certain static relation, but as interactions, with things, that are constantly in motion, in which things are conditioned and transformed by the human, while the human, in turn, is also conditioned and transformed by things. It is this constant process of invention and reinvention, of reconfiguration and realization of the way in which our mode of existence is bound to our surroundings, that our reflexivity and consciousness are produced, and we therefore exist.
In the history of human transformation of things surrounded, the conditions of generations of humans are “purified,” so to speak. When human goes from nomadic pastoralism to sedentism, to the industrial revolution and urbanization, their space and mode of interaction are constrained to a repetitive frame in which the social and the political are emphasized, while the natural is more or less ignored. Humans are ones capable of language and therefore formal, symbolic representation of things, and when they aggregate, the density of representation will explode to an infinite level, in which space signifiers are all that by which humans are conditioned. Even the most seemingly natural products are constructed socio-culturally when signifiers are pointed not to something Real, but another coded representation of things, that is to say, we are more or less living in simulations.
It is precisely under this condition that humans forget their original constitution. Here the argument is not suggesting a normative statement of deconstructing our current order of things but serves as a mere reminder of the way in which things have evolved to this point, a reminder of that nature is never excluded by our creation of socio-political sphere, of that the Real is always the one upon which the Symbolic is based. Viruses are governed by the laws of nature, they colonize, infect, mutate, evolve, and kill. Humans, as political animals, endowed with the imagination of the configuration of things, are able to try to prevent and eliminate a natural threat by political action. What was forgotten is the political animal is ultimately natural, in which realm the virus conditions not only the human but other natural beings — cells, plants, animals, political or not.
When we retrospect history, humans were infected by viruses that came from birds (avian flu), bats (SARS), pigs (swine flu), camels (MERS), and chimps (HIV).
Viruses always remind us of our animality, and our relation to the natural world.
Humans can create conditions in which they live, by quarantine, lockdown, and all other kinds of biopolitical action, as if an organism reorganizes itself or an immune system protecting the body. What immediately comes to mind is an image in which a person cuts off one of his arms to survive when the hand was attacked by a snake with critical poison. At some point, this might be necessary when the poison is deathly enough. In other cases, however, parts of the body would not be cut so easily under arbitrary circumstances. Similarly, the way in which the immune system works is by recognizing a self in some manner, in order to react to something foreign. 14 When a virus is recognized inside the human body, the B cell will produce antibodies to 14 Golub, Immunology , 484 neutralize the virus. However, it is exactly in defending the body that the immune system would evolve, and learn to produce the corresponding antibody effectively, which is how vaccination works. When the Hegelian Geist comes back to itself by encountering others, this coming back is not a mere repetition of the same, but becomes a self that is recognized, self-conscious, a repetition of difference. In the battles with viruses, our immune system, in a similar manner, will evolve and adapt to contingencies. Viruses have been an imminent component of human existence, not only it co-evolve with our defending mechanism, but when they do successfully hack into our control system, the next step for them is to hijack RNA or DNA to reproduce copies of themselves, causing the ways in which human develops and their modes of behavior to change. Movements only occur when something new is encountered. It is in constant mutation that species evolve. The human DNA consists of 8% of the ancient remnant of viruses, as embedded historicity literally inside our bodies, reminding us of our inseparable past with viruses which determines our nowadays existence.
The conception of self is not only a construct, but an ever-changing one, and in the process of which something new is produced. The virtuality of things, as Deleuze’s desiring-machines, lies in its nature to connect and reconnect with others so a new configuration of the future is realized, a new way of being is unfolded. Any political action taken to physically segregate the virus, the zero-COVID policy, in particular, constitutes a molar line that artificially separates something inseparable. It should be reminded that our interaction with nature was never paused, the virus could return after humans have achieved a zero COVID state, an imagined perpetual peace.
Any action in this way is by nature teleological, in which a conceptualized possibility is being actualized by a specific set of operations, an end achieved via some means.
Telos is a product of human consciousness, of our ability to generalize, conceptualize, and categorize the instrumentalities of objects in the world we inhabit. But we have to admit the possibilities of their configuration are not of a transcendental given, as if they were there and will always be there. It is in the interaction with the environment the possibilities of things, as means to ends, are captured, and it is in this sense we say the essence of technology is not their utilities, but revealing, of the possibilities of their utilities.
Any deployment of teleology, any conscious plan made and executed, is an actualization of already conceived instrumentalities of objects which reveals nothing.
All creation of the new comprises experimentation in which the most unexpected is expected. Zero-COVID exemplifies the extremity of how a grand teleology can be executed, as clear-cut, self-contained, masculine, actual, determinative, and instrumentalized as it could ever be. In contrast, the plane of immanence — appealing to a binary symbolism — is only touched and unfolded when the tolerance of indeterminacies, precarity, paradoxes, and inter-contamination is in service.
The totalizing control of a system that subjugates the present to a historical telos that dictates the bodies and their finalities, while a being of spontaneous action feeds back continuously and is always in the process of revealing and multiplying its possibilities with a telos that is constantly in the making. Latour writes: “Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies.” 15 Indeed, any movement constitutive of newly configurated states is attained not by pre-determined idealization, which consciously controls sets of elements to be self-contained and thus not transformed by the encounter. 16 If zero-COVID was enforced infinitely, species 16 Tsing, Mushroom , 28 15 Latour, Reassembling the Social , 59 would deccelerate progressing, immune system enhancing, and social structure emancipating, The world would be set into an eternal return, not a Nietzschean one, but one that always returns the same.
This paper is not conclusive, as it seeks to problematize. We have surveyed the (bio)political repression during pandemics in China that created a new modality of identity: The COVID tests result prioritized as the new identification and criteria of subject construction, while biotechnology disconnecting social encounters is at the same time an alienation and dehumanization of sensible political beings, and the caused reaction presents a wide spectrum of artistic phenomena in memorizing as well as destabilizing the police order and is fundamentally political. We reexamined the relationship between humans and nature complicated by the abrupt development in recent centuries, and how viruses and other ecological objects are imminent to our sociocultural world. When zero-COVID seeks to eliminate the constituted Outside by brutally blocking them, and at the same time police the people, both human and non-human are in effect being convoluted into an established, consolidating order of teleology. The final abolishment in early December marked the end of that. Now it is time to reconsider the relationship between the individual and the state; nature, and humans, between representation and things-in-themselves. Any cognition implied a teleological structure in which how a thing ought to be. The boundary between the descriptive and the normative is never as clear-cut as we want.
Rancière urges us to cease representing reality so fast as to take a stance in the conscious activity of epistemology: “It is the time after all stories, the time when one takes a direct interest in the sensible stuff in which these stories cleaved their shortcuts between projected and accomplished ends. It is not the time in which we craft beautiful phrases or shots to make up for the emptiness of all waiting. It is the time in which we take an interest in the wait itself.” 17 Similarly, Haraway writes: “[Staying] with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meaning.” 18 Indeed, actions are taken not as mere means to an end, but as an establishment of a space for reflection and revelation. Real resistance starts only with the rebellion against the tyranny of the future, with resisting a single-ended trajectory of meanings and mobilities; it departs precisely from the reestablished, alternative possibilities of consideration of the present.
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