The Impoverishment of the COVID Future

From Wikimedia Commons

 

As I complete this essay, the quarantine imposed on Baltimore stretches into its second month, and I continue teaching online amid terror and despair.  Blog posts and newspaper articles forecast a new era of education in the age of social distancing, a new kind of virtual conference in the absence of travel, and new research without the face-to-face interactions that have heretofore been the bread-and-butter of ethnographic fieldwork.  All of these may be prognostications, but they are not, I would submit, really about the future.  Instead, each “future” describes a present--online education, virtual meetings, digital anthropology.  None of them are really “new” at all.  Just the opposite, they are part of a process of what Escobar (echoing Tony Fry) describes as “the systematic destruction of possible futures by the structured unsustainability of modernity” (Escobar 2018: 117).  Here, the COVID pandemic ushers in a future, but it is not a real future.  Instead, a “de-future,” a truncated present where face-to-face relationships disappear and only online connections remain.  As Deleuze wrote in his essay on Bergson's duration, “The possible passes into the real through limitation, the culling of other possibilities” (Deleuze 1991: 187).  Shorn of alternatives, the COVID future ushers forth an impoverished dystopia of distant relations, multiplied inequalities, Mad-Max guerilla capitalism.  Prognostication in the age of the pandemic has been about the way our future will be an attenuated present: less social interaction, less economic well-being, less life.  It it was a tv miniseries, I don’t think I would want to see this future.  

Of course, it’s worth asking why it would matter if I would watch such a dystopia.  Isn’t this the way it is?  Yes, and no.  Yes-the disruption and loss of life have an undeniable, terrifying reality.  But at the same time, no: we can look to alternatives that acknowledge pandemic realities but also sketch alternatives to capitalism, to the bourgeois rentier class, to precarious employment (Wolff 2020). We can sketch alternatives to a digital divide education where people with a fast broadband and the latest laptop get access, and everyone else survives on asynchronous, canned powerpoints (Aschoff 2020).  Finally, COVID underlines the failures of neoliberalism at almost every level.  And, in that failure, raises alternatives that are already implicit in the practices and institutions of people in many of the places where anthropologists have worked: all kinds of cooperatives, land trusts, community health centers.  As anthropologists, we need to elaborate those alternative futures, to engage in a “futuring” that will spell the end of a fait accompli modernity.   

References

Deleuze, Gilles (1991).  Bergsonism.  NY: Zone Books.

Escobar, Arturo (2018).  Designs for the Pluriverse.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Networked, Not Virtual: ethnography when you can't go there

(from our storymap)

In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I've been doing a lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance.  At my uni, very few of us have experience teaching online.  The faculty (generally) aren't especially enthusiastic, and there hasn't really been a lot of institutional support.  So, I wasn't surprised when most of the questions I was fielding took the form of: "I do X in my class.  How can I do X online?"  Not surprised because that's the ideological frame distance education has relied upon: an exact homology between offline- and online teaching, with the physical classroom replaced by the discussion board, the lectures by videos.  But actual online courses (not our band aid efforts to stitch together something in a few days) are structured very differently than their physical counterparts.  The best classes maximize their digital affordances and don’t try to simply "reproduce" face-to-face education.

Something similar has happened with ethnography.  I have read dozens of semi-panicked posts: if I can't go into the field, perhaps I can go into the digital field?  Well - there have been several, thoughtful posts from digital anthropologists on this sentiment, including a recent one in GeekAnthropologist.  Reading these, though, I can't help but notice that these would-be digital anthropologists don't really want to be digital at all.  And they're not really proposing digital anthropology.  If you're studying the lives of people in their (physical) communities, can you really do digital anthropology?  In other words, if people are undertaking online/offline lives (whether under quarantine or not), are those lives best understood through digital anthropology?  Or are you talking about what my colleague, Matthew Durington, and I have called "networkedanthropology"?

In networked anthropology, we acknowledge the skein of digital and physical connections in people's lives, and we try to recognize and enable the capacities of people to represent those lives through networked, media platforms that make sense to them.

In a quarantined world, what's missing from the social scene?  With regards to the production of ethnography, at least one element is missing: the anthropologist.  But only that.  Even without the anthropologist, social and cultural life continue.  And more than that--the documentation and theorization of social and cultural life continues as people record and comment on the things that happen in their lives and in their communities.  In this sense, networked anthropology is about capitulation--perhaps we really weren't that important anyway?  But we can certainly help people in their own efforts to represent and communicate their identities and communities, and this is, I think, what (at least some) of our colleagues should be doing.

Last summer, we worked on a project in a small neighborhood in Baltimore undergoing rapid gentrification that was leading to the displacement of a long-standing community of African American residents.  Collaborating with children at a community center, we helped them (co)produce maps, photographs, video and audio interviews that we put together for an app tour, an exhibit and a performance.  It was a great project to work on, and the article that we are submitting on this includes all of them as co-authors.  In light of our present pandemic, and in the interest of protecting communities from us, it occurs to me that we (me and Matt Durington) didn't really need to be there at all.  Sure - we needed to talk to people and see what they were up to.  In the end, though, the images and interviews are produced by people in the community.   My point: if we never actually stepped foot in that neighborhood, that would not make it digital anthropology.  We would just be doing networked anthropology - anthropology with people who were physically (not virtually) in their communities.  

I don't know when the infection rates and death toll of the pandemic will subside.  But it seems likely that we will not be able to undertake our in situ research for some time.  Even if we can go into the field, it may be in fits and starts, with pandemic flare-ups mandating our social distancing once again.  But just because we are not in situ doesn't mean that people in the communities where we work aren’t in situ!  By now, we are all used to that peculiar hypocrisy in anthropology that decries colonization and its authorizing gaze, but that still seems to insist on presence in order to undertake anthropology.  Perhaps enough of that?