With the omnipresence of the term “symptom” these days, it seems that a plausible escape from the deep horror of this pandemic would be to conduct a symptomatic reading of it. Attributed to Louis Althusser, this method of reading literary and historical texts focuses not on what a text evidently expresses, but on what it is unable to. For Althusser, fundamental ideological presuppositions in the socio-historical context in which a text is realized repress certain facts from representation. To make these repressed facts explicit, symptomatic reading identifies “the invisible problematic contained in the paradox of an answer which does not correspond to any question posed.”11Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1975).

Reading our situation in a symptomatic mode requires conceiving of all pandemic-related news as a whole, and as a text—albeit a hysterical one—and then attempting to identify what this text does not say. Before anything else, a symptomatic reading of the pandemic demands the isolation of affects produced by the multiplicity of news sources (media reports, state addresses, medical advice, and economic analyses), so that something at the level of thought, and not fear and panic, can emerge. In a lecture given two days after Donald Trump was elected president, Alain Badiou reminded us of the detriment of affects:

Under “normal” circumstances, we might tend to attribute negative affect to individual inadequacies. In the time of collective horror, however, it should be much less difficult (yet more urgent) to remember that “thinking” would be impossible without conceiving of affect as the concealment of the true reason behind the horror.

From this vantage point, we can regard “thought” as something like a break—something that is not always with us but may only contingently befall us. If we consider all that we encounter (through our hearing and seeing) relating to the pandemic as what constitutes the doxa of this situation (that is, public opinion and common belief), thinking would therefore only be possible in our search for the paradoxes of our situation. Paradox comes from the Greek roots para (a modifying prefix meaning beside, beyond and contrary) and doxa (accepted opinion, from dokein, “to seem, appear and accept”). We can then consider a paradox as that which confronts public opinion, insofar as it counters and goes beyond a situation’s doxa. In other words, a real paradox is a break in the chain of significations governing a situation.

Since the global outbreak of COVID-19, we have witnessed a radical manifestation of a particular form of unilateral state-citizen relationship. This relationship is being built on a very specific form of language-use and rhetoric, an assemblage whose determination is to produce an affect and a doxa. On the one hand, the products of this assemblage aim to build trust in people who are dependent—now more than ever—on the voice of the state; and, on the other hand, they repress the representation of the absolute contradictions within the system. State orders to stay at home as much as possible—producing affects such as “feeling safe,” and rhetoric such as “things are in our control” and “now, time to get back to work”—are all indicative of the state’s desire to maintain the subjugation of social life and the preservation of work conditions.

Other instances of such language-use fall within the activities of the media vector within the ideological state apparatus: spanning from reports of states ambivalently assuring bailout packages to the obscure-yet-charming analyses excusing states for prioritizing the market. Demonstrating this obfuscation is the poor media coverage of science papers. Many of these papers reproach the prioritization of the market by states, which has resulted in slower responses and inefficient mitigation strategies instead of more severe policies such as on-time lockdown, and thus increased the potential of future crises.33For a comprehensive elaboration on state reluctance to enforce on time sever strategies, see Tomas Pueyo, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Medium, March 19, 2020, https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56.

From the point of view of the corporate-driven global economy, this language-use has to absolutely refuse to represent the underlying paradoxes of the market-driven system (the true driver behind the crisis).44David Harvey recently elaborated on some of these systemic contradictions: “Capital modifies the environmental conditions of its own reproduction but does so in a context of unintended consequences [...] Forty years of neoliberalism across North and South America and Europe had left the public totally exposed and ill-prepared to face a public health crisis of this sort [...] In many parts of the supposed ‘civilized’ world, local governments and regional/state authorities, which invariably form the front line of defense in public health and safety emergencies of this kind, had been starved of funding thanks to a policy of austerity designed to fund tax cuts and subsidies to the corporations and the rich.” See David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of Covid-19,” Jacobin, March 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-economy-disruptions. Given the withering away of state-owned businesses and the financial precarity imposed through neoliberal hegemony, a massive precarious workforce (including migrant workers, retail employees, sessional instructors, artists, and others) that cannot afford to “stay home” is actually the group to whom the state directs its call to “get back to work.” This is despite their return being tantamount to their subjection to contamination. Trump’s voice echoes here: “Our people want to work. They want to go back. They have to go back.”55Libby Cathey, “Coronavirus government response updates: Trump envisions county-by-county risk assessments in new guidelines,” ABC News, March 26, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/coronavirus-government-response-updates-mnuchin-jobless-claims-report/story?id=69811625. So too do comments from Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who, in an embodiment of the Freudian slip of the system, proclaimed, “Older people would rather die than let COVID-19 harm the US economy.”66Lois Beckett, “Older people would rather die than let Covid-19 harm US economy – Texas official,” The Guardian, March 24, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/older-people-would-rather-die-than-let-covid-19-lockdown-harm-us-economy-texas-official-dan-patrick.This infantilizing language-use is a determined tactic to keep this precarious workforce acquiescent to the emerging increase in the surveillance of citizens and control of “the social.” States will also take advantage of the declared “state of emergency” to elevate this tactic to the level of strategy—that is, to subdue any potential organizing activity (such as a general strike) by this group. The sovereigns employ such rhetoric with the cognizance that a colossal workforce with a disrupted social consciousness and understanding of work-concept are an immediate threat to the global work-subjectivity governing them.

I propose we can, through a symptomatic approach, begin to see a metabolic relationship between COVID-19 and the hegemonic global neoliberal economy. If it is true that the genome of COVID-19 has the chance of undergoing a mutation with every body it interacts with, why not speculate the same is the case with the vertical genome of the neoliberal socio-economic apparatus? Can we speculate that, on an economic level, this pandemic is suggesting a transformation in “reproduction of the relations of production”?77Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (New York: Verso Books, 2014).

We can perhaps think of instances of such reproduction of the relations of production through the rapid shifts now taking place within the entrepreneurial, educational, and even cultural sectors as they transition to online and remote work. These sectors are proud of how quickly they absorbed the transition, given that these creative tactics prevent disruption of the provision of “public service.” Yet beneath the surface, what is happening could also be thought of as a manoeuvre to exercise the economic efficacy of this online transition, and examine the subjective capacity for both employees and consumers to sustain this paradigm.

Another instance of this transformation engages the public dissemination of art. Many exhibitions are postponed, while many others consider online platforms to present their products. On the commercial level, Art Basel Hong Kong launched their fair online, and many others may follow. Digitally produced, digitally seen, digitally sold artworks may see greater market demand, for they are more compatible with the online mode of cultural merchandising—that is, turning cultural capital into monetary value through digital vectors.88With such potential transformations, we can also think of McKenzie Wark’s theory of “digital provenance and the artwork as derivative” coming to full realization. One would even argue that such theory can even fall short of encapsulating a potential paradigm shift in artistic production, wherein the market demands artworks whose provenance and derivative are digital. See McKenzie Wark, “Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative,” e-flux journal 77 (November 2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/77374/digital-provenance-and-the-artwork-as-derivative/.

Similar speculative questions could be posed to educational services. Is online teaching here to stay, or will it at least contribute strongly to the educational economy in the near future? What might be the economic repercussions associated with this transition? Can we think of it in terms of a devaluation of the workforce and the elimination of many side jobs that were once needed for a single class to take place offline? Or can we consider it in terms of the growth of consumption and increasing of surplus value through the scaling-up of online classrooms, while the sessional instructor’s wage remains unraised?

We don’t know how long these exercises for reproduction of the relations of production will last. We may not have definitive answers for these questions. But it is imperative to not allow the affect of the pandemic to prevent us from our critical speculations.

This pandemic does seem to offer some promising traits. It is clear that “capitalist time” has been disrupted—albeit temporarily. Governments’ anxious use of rhetoric promising the return to “normal” can be understood as an effort to restore this very capitalist time. We know that such a disruption not only engages the human/labour time—necessary for on-time production and circulation so that value will be safeguarded—but it also consists of engaging the capitalist notion of “futurity.”

What could be more threatening and devaluating to capital than a different notion of time, which the pandemic might now enable us to imagine? In this imagining, we have an opportunity to disrupt some of the notions that play a key role in the constitution of capitalist time, including the crucial notion of the Other.

By now, it’s been an essential and longstanding characteristic of the neoliberal economy to assign the Other a central role in the production of subjectivities that accelerate both the distribution of the global workforce and the construction of a specific notion of futurity for those within it. This notion of futurity involves the production of a desire for the subjects (members of the workforce) by which they become attuned with the working condition. This desire is dispensed through a discourse that advertises the notion of “progress” and the possibility of “job promotion.”

What is it that we actually desire when we desire to make progress or to get promoted? Desire must correspond to an object that exists for that desire, an object that constantly exacts full recognition from the subject. Our masters are exemplary instances of such objects: the boss, the promoted colleague, the tenured faculty member, the internationally acknowledged artist, and in one word, the Other. We must therefore understand that desiring the Other in this sense—that is, wanting to become the Other—means desiring a possibility for the self in the “future” and the reality of my Other in their “present.” It is at the intersection of these present and future temporalities that the capitalist notion of futurity is produced.

With the pandemic time unsettling such a notion of futurity, and with its imposition of uncertainty on people, this dialectic of desiring of the Other and struggling for recognition seems to have been adjourned. With both the material and mental circumstances ushered in by the pandemic, can we seize on this situation as a singular chance to reflect on the Other through the existence of the same (a precarious “lack of infection”), rather than through the economy of differences so upheld by neoliberalism and cloaked in the rhetoric of multiculturalism?

Is the pandemic not a time to think of the Other, otherwise? Through relinquishing the discourse of “difference,” can we grasp what we are all being made to serve, and discover methods for organizing ourselves to disrupt this service?

I think we can do this by avoiding the voice of our masters, by evading the true virus that is language, by abandoning our habitual online “drifting” on the products of the media assemblage, and, instead, by thinking of the underlying paradoxes of this situation infecting us in the same way. We can do this because there are so many of us sitting inside and imagining the possibility of a different time and action.