Interchange – On Pandemics and Panopticons

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Today we look at the local effects of COVID-19 in and around the major cities of Italy and then we’ll widen our view to try to see the socio-political impacts of governmentality in the face of a crisis like a pandemic. Using both lenses we hope to find a focus that often escapes us when confronting the global and seemingly diffuse catastrophe of climate disruption in the capitalocene, out of which this novel coronavirus comes.

Last week we discussed positions on separation with philosopher Frédéric Neyrat: one can support social distancing while choosing to be against the separations brought by scapegoating others and deploying divisive politics. Neyrat suggests the most important separation can be the one we make from the current capitalist economic and ideological systems that have brought us this virus.

Today we consider a related notion – abandonment. This is another term freighted with contradictions. In the great essay Circles, Emerson tells us that “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves…and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle….The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”

Some of us have long been abandoned; new groups will now be abandoned. Some of us will choose abandonment. Some of us will find new and different chains around our necks and ankles. There is no going back. Let the golden age begin.

We begin with Andrea Ciccerelli on what’s happening in Italy by way of his home in Bloomington, Indiana via the social distancing option of internet communication tools.

GUESTS
Andrea Ciccarelli is Provost Professor of French and Italian at Indiana University. His work focuses on the concepts of migration, exile and borders in Italian literature and culture, as well as on the historical, artistic and cultural effects of 1968 on Italy. Ciccarelli is from Rome where his brother and his family live and he has relatives in the Milan area, two of whom are doctors who have been battling the disease.

Ian Alan Paul is an artist and theorist whose work examines instantiations of power and practices of resistance in global contexts. Their projects are formally diverse, often making use of text, photography, video, and code. Over the course of their life, Ian Paul has lived, taught, and worked for extended periods in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Egypt, and Palestine, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

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MUSIC
Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi – “Spring”
Ahmad Jamal – “I Remember Italy”
Tom Waits – “You Can Never Hold Back Spring”
Tom Waits – “All Stripped Down”
Winston “Mankunku” Ngozi – “Before the Rain and After”

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Editing Assistance: Sean Milligan
Executive Producer: Kade Young