Corona

-by Richard Randell, Webster University Geneva and Critical Automobility Studies Lab, IHS

I have been reading Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. We need, Latour suggests, to stop thinking about ourselves—“ourselves” being us “humans”—as beings that are special and separate from all the other living entities on our planet: we are all terrestrials. But we (which is not all of us) have inherited a metaphysics wherein all that is not human is categorized as “nature” and is assumed to be available to humans for exploitation. We inhabit a metaphysics of a duality between all of nature (a category, Latour points out, that includes everything from rocks, plants, earthworms, to distant galaxies, black holes…and viruses)… and humans: “Nature stupid, nature brute; only human intelligent.” It is a metaphysic nowhere better articulated, as many have pointed out, than in Genesis: “God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created them…. God blessed them, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all the living creatures that move on the earth.’ God also said, ‘Look, to you I give all the seed bearing plants everywhere on the surface of the earth, and all the trees with seed-bearing fruit; this will be your food.’ And so it was.”

If we entertain the Gaia principle, even if only for the time it takes to read this blog entry, the Earth (the entirety of the terrestrial that is our planet of which we are a part)—terrestrial earth as Gaia—could have hardly come up with a better intervention in the crisis of our planet (of which the climate is only one dimension of the planetary wide environmental crisis) than the coronavirus. It is not the crude intervention of just killing lots of humans as a solution, which many (amongst which I don’t include myself) wish for, but an intervention that has disrupted the entire planetary economy. It has grounded air transport, reduced maritime transportation, slowed automobile production, all significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. It looks almost like foresight, even intelligence, because one of the extraordinary facets of what is happening across our whole planet, the shutting down of the global economy, was not a given. We live in a world where the requirements of capital almost invariably prevail. It is not in the interests of Boeing, Airbus, British Airways, Volkswagen and General Motors, shipping and cruise companies, and numerous other industries, to restrict entire populations to their homes. Yet it has happened; this is extraordinary.

Gaia reminds me of a memorandum dated 1705 by David Gregory, a colleague of Isaac Newton. “The plain truth,” Gregory wrote in disbelief regarding the heterodox religious views of Newton, “is, that [Newton] believes God to be omnipresent in the literal sense; And that as we are sensible of Objects when their images are brought home within the brain, so God must be sensible of everything, being intimately present with every thing: for he [Newton] supposes that as God is present in space where there is no body, he is present in space where a body is also present.”^[1] If we shift this sideways a little from Newton’s Christian (albeit heterodox) cosmology, it looks a lot like Gaia.

Whether we entertain the Gaia thesis or not doesn’t really matter. Whether or not there is a teacher, the lessons to be learnt are the same. One is that it is possible, in the area of fossil fuel-based mobility systems, to prohibit their use when there is a crisis that threatens our existence. The climate crisis, as Mimi reminds us in her blog post a few days ago, is such a crisis, but knowledge of that crisis did not initiate the measures that are being taken now because of the coronavirus. In the third thesis on Feuerbach, Marx observed that “the educator must himself be educated.” The educator in this case is the coronavirus.

As usual, it will be the poor, minorities, inhabitants of the global south, who will be most affected by the coronavirus, and we can expect the coronavirus to underscore that. But it will be not only them. The virus, to paraphrase Nietzsche, is beyond good and evil; its specific victims are not chosen (were it an intelligence that chose its victims, it would inhabit the realm of ethics). And so the other lesson will have to be how to equitably reorganize a decarbonized world in which the mobilities that many take to be an inalienable right are reduced. That world will have to be a very different world than the world we inhabit now.

The coronavirus has opened up what social movement scholars call political opportunity structures. Those political opportunities can, are, and will be exploited by nationalists who, in respect to mobility, are all in favor of carbon-based mobility, but against movements across their borders. Many people will get sick from this virus, some will die, those left behind will grieve, others will suffer from loves and friendships cut short because they have to go “home”; home having become a location within a closed nation state space. For those of us who are trying to get us to some other world that is not the world of fossil fuel based authoritarian nationalism, we need to recognize that whatever we learn from the coronavirus, it will be knowledge gained at the cost of much suffering. That other world must at a minimum be, to quote Hannah Arendt, “a planet fit for human habitation.”^[2]

[1] W. G. Hiscock. (ed.). 1937. David Gregory, Isaac Newton and their circle, extracts from David Gregory’s memoranda 1677-1708. Oxford, p. 30.

[2] Arendt, Hannah. 1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 233.

-by Catarina Sales Oliveira, University of Beira Interior, Portugal

Portugal also has declared emergency state. Until now we’ve been in alert with universities and schools closed and people advised to only do the strictly necessary dislocations. Flights to and from Europe are forbidden and the border with Spain has closed. In the islands, Madeira is fighting Lisbon’ decision of closing the airport.

At a first glance we can say that the two main restrictions are mobility and social proximity. But social proximity is still happening: family confinement increases physical proximity (bringing several problems); virtual connections are increasing with everybody using social networks and new phenomena as online classes and medical appointments.

Differently with mobility, there is no way of really substituting it. We are now much more immobile and, what is really odd in a society where mobility was mainly represented as good (Sales Oliveira, 2015), suddenly mobility is not desirable. This represents a huge and impressive change in an Europe were mobilities (Urry, 2007) were exalted and expected in almost its forms – from job mobility and students exchange to tourism – although definitely not for refugees and migrants (Czymara and Schmidt-Catran, 2017)

Cycling with my son yesterday we cross with some people in the streets also cycling or walking. We looked at each other recognizing the same will of moving while it is still possible, taking some fresh air and exercising. But at same time we all had some level of uncertain and perhaps guilt: this soft mobility is still a good mobility (Endres, Manderscheid and Mincke, 2016), healthy and sustainable as it was a month ago?

Bodies and minds are being forced to immobility, each day more at same the proportion the level of infected people is growing. Empty streets and buses. But looking to the national roads here in the inner country (Fundão, Portugal) at the end of the day you won’t notice, nothing different from weeks ago: people coming back home from their jobs.

So public transports are to avoid and we don’t dare and are forbidden of sharing space and to be in public and collective places. But to move by car is still allowed and felt as secure as inside you are protected from contamination. We can still drive.

“By car we can go out!” Automobility as the only access to freedom of movements, to mobility in this time of war as some politicians are putting the question. So, for this very specific moment in Portugal automobility regained field and is curiously legitimated.

References:

Czymara, C and Schmidt-Catran, A (2017) Refugees Unwelcome? Changes in the Public Acceptance of Immigrants and Refugees in Germany in the Course of Europe’s ‘Immigration Crisis’, European Sociological Review, 33: 735–751

Endres M, Manderscheid K and Mincke C (eds) (2016) The mobilities paradigm: Discourses and ideologies. Routledge

Sales Oliveira C (2015) (Auto) mobilities and social identities in Portugal. Sociologia: Problemas e Pra´ticas 77: 137–151.

Urry J (2007) Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.

-by Vít Masare, Co-speaker Greens Prague

Borders

Schengen space is gone. Closed borders. Tens of kilometers of trucks waiting to be checked on the way between two tiny countries. Rotting food, suffering livestock, delayed deliveries, exhausted drivers, jammed border regions, disappearing collective consumers (restaurants, hotels, eateries, leisure industry…)

The days when automotive industry left us and plans for air transportation boom turned an outlived theory

Automobile industry shutting down its factories. Its suppliers, already short on labor, entirely dependant on the mother factory’s reopening. Will it be the same after reopening? When?

Who knows what will follow? 

Airlines cutting down operation, airports shutting down, countries investing billions to save them. Do you remember the plans for 100% growth in 20 years despite any climate talk a week ago from now? What will be the cost to keep this bussiness alive? 

… when delivery-transportation jobs saved many of us

Thousands of people have already lost their job. The leisure industry is either gone, severly choked or on a long break. But the delivery of basic goods and supplies is still there, long time short on labor. Will it still have enough customers or will it shrink too? 

Kids on the carfree downtown streets

The downtown areas however, are suddenly freed of cars. We can fully realize how few people remain living in the city centres and how many cars they really need for their lives. 

The kids of the coronavirus times will once again experience their great grandparents stories of playing on the streets during economic crisis. 

-by Dhan Zunino Singh, CONICET, National University of Quilmes, Argentina

In Buenos Aires, a metropolitan area of 12 million people, due to the coronavirus the use of public transport has been discouraged and limited (only seated passengers) while private transport has been encouraged -all of this, of course, for those who cannot work from home. The rate of car use has increased. Streets are congested, but drivers in private vehicles feel safer and the public policy of reducing mass transport use seems to be successful.

The cocoon effect of the car increases the feeling of safety. Cars provide mobile form of isolation. Drivers are able to engage in social distancing while in motion, neither others infecting nor being infected. Yet automobility is a system -more than the car. Every car moves the driver and passengers inside, but others outside are also mobilized in the process. People who work maintaining and repairing traffic signals and infrastructure, at car parks, gas stations or car washes, make automobility possible. Indeed, car washing is crucial for (avoiding) infection! As a driver, should I clean my vehicle myself instead of exposing others to a possible infection? Washing, after all, is probably one of the few moments when others, total strangers, enter your car.

Those who make automobility possible are workers, mostly public transport commuters, whose mobility has been restricted. Car drivers’ safety, in other words, is based on other people’s risks. The coronavirus thus highlights what we already know but tend to overlook: mobility, even in its most seemingly autonomous form, is relational.    

-by Aharon Kellerman, University of Haifa

One way of looking at mobilities during these challenging Corona days, is noting the sharp decline in mechanized physical mobilities. This refers to terrestrial mobilities, including mainly trains, cars and buses, as well as to global ones, performed mainly through planes. During pre-modern eruptions of widely spread plagues, such slowdowns or almost full halts of physical mobilities amounted to a temporary suspension of mobilities at large. The current global epidemics is identified by a stopping of human physical mobilities, but this occurs side by side with continued open doors for the flows of commodities and information, both of which flowing at the domestic and international levels alike. The continued flows of commodities and information amount to continued domestic and global mobilities at the present, despite of the stopping of human physical mobilities. These mobilities will further serve as the basis for renewed human physical mobilities, once the plague will be over. The mechanized means for physical human mobilities exist, so that one can assume renewed wide physical mobilities following the end of the Corona crisis. However, it might well be that border crossing may involve new restrictions, such as temperature checking (as China used to require several years ago). The major difference between historical wide-ranging plagues and the current one is the wide availability of telecommunicated media for virtual mobilities. Mass communications media, notably radio and TV, permit authorities to distribute warnings, orders and guidelines to large populations, and this may turn out to constitute a major element in the fight against the continued spread of the Corona virus. Even more significant is the contemporary ability of people, who are forced to stay at home, to continue their work and stay in touch with their social contacts through the Internet, which further permits the reaching of endless sources for entertainment, news and knowledge. Obviously, if these media would not have existed, the behavior of populations during the virus crisis would have been completely different, possibly bringing about additional sick and dead people. Autonomous automobility, notably through shared autonomous vehicles, if available already now, could assist in the maintenance of healthier mobility, by the provision of a possible automatic cleaning and sterilization of cars after each ride. However, the very availability of autonomous vehicles would not make a difference, as compared to driven cars, since there are no destinations to go to, when everything is shut down…

-by Johannes Starkbaum, CAS, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna

Official curfew is on in Vienna. People are told to keep distance, especially the elderly. The streets in the periphery neighborhoods have been quite empty already during the last days. People go out for walking and running, yet not as many as usual for these spring days. The situation might be different in the inner parts of Vienna. I read a lot about current developments in newspapers and through micro-blogging. Several people go out for work or shopping, others seem to enjoy the fresh air. Social distancing does not comply well with public transport. In Social Media bubbles, biking is discussed as safe and sustainable way for arranging mobility. At the same time, I imagine other bubbles discussing the car as safe haven, where the driver and its companions are shielded inside. Either way, people seek distance.Solidarity is discussed as a key component of the current policies for reducing an exponential growth of infections. The younger population usually shows mild symptoms whereas older people and those with preconditions suffer far often from complications. People online tell each other to #staythefuckathome no matter if she/he is part of an at-risk group in order to reduce infections and thus to avoid a collapse of the health system. Solidarity is a concept also used in bioethics debates on data sharing for medical research, where larger populations give data for the benefits of others or future generations, stored in large and increasingly connected repositories called biobanks (Prainsack and Buyx 2012). Finally, today, newspapers announced that Austria’s major telecom company, A1, unleashed anonymous mobility data of citizens in order to track infection routes. Extraordinary events have caused such secondary use of data in the past – also in the field of biobanks. We have seen this in cases of serial crimes and in the 2004 Tsunami in the Indian ocean. Such extraordinary events trigger change and enable things that would have been impossible a few weeks before – ranging from people stop shaking hands to new types of data usage. I am wondering how the current situation will impact our mobility practices and our social life beyond this recent crisis. 

Prainsack, Barbara, and Alena Buyx. “Solidarity in contemporary bioethics–towards a new approach.”Bioethics 26.7 (2012): 343-350.

-by Gert Schmidt, University Nuremberg-Erlangen

I doubt that my contribution is going to fit with exposing another critical reflection as a critic of automobilism. Let me say this: right now (facing corona) I am glad having a car as it is not very clever to use subway, trains, and buses for getting my everyday things done – buying food, visiting my dentist and close friends, etc. Living in Munich very near to a subway-station, I normally use public transportation — but today, and for next couple of months I will enjoy having my little Smart for all the necessary, and not so necessary activities of physical mobility … I suppose that many other people having internalized the fashionable attitude ‘be critical regarding automobility’ will have similar experiences.

-by Ole B. Jensen, Aalborg University

Last night I took the car from my house on the city edge to the centre. My daughter lives there, and as a senior medicine student she is getting ready to join the Corona crew at the local hospital. I brought her some food and freshly baked bread, and a few other things. She is not isolated, but needs to minimize social contact in order to be ready for ‘the call’.

As I drove through the city, I clearly sensed the lack of traffic compared to an ordinary evening. I also noticed the lights in the flats – many more people seemed to be at home. When I reached her street, she came down and picked up the things from the trunk of the car. This way she would not get into contact. We briefly chatted at a safe distance through the window, and I returned to my house.

This trip made me think of the old debate about the car. Is it really a cocoon or an ‘iron cage’ of modern mobility as John Urry (2004) claimed? I often refused this interpretation in my advocacy of seeing the car as ‘filtering’ rather than ‘isolating’ (Jensen 2013). We are sensing-through the car as it mediates the ‘I-World relation’ (Ihde 2009). Speed, street surfaces, lights, and smells are not ‘gone’ but rather transformed and mediated. However driving through Corona City seems to suggest that there is an element of cocooning as well.

I felt rather protected and safe in this iron box (and I do not drive a ‘Hummer’). However, I still prefer to think of the relationship as one of human/non-human hybridity, where the car mediates my senses through a filtering process of ‘osmosis’ (Jensen 2016). We might want to think about it with Sloterdijk’s metaphor of ‘foam’ (2016) pointing to the interconnectedness and the porous relationship between inside and outside, between cell and cell within a foam structure. This is echoing Latour’s point that ‘we are enveloped’ (2008), and my car is such an envelope.

The trip re-enacted an understanding of the embodied and emotive attachments to the car, what Sheller describes as ‘automotive emotions’ (Sheller 2004). As I realized during the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull back in 2010 (Jensen 2011), extreme disruptions are windows into the psycho-practical bonding between mobility technology and humans, and between humans and the infrastructure/city. To move towards a ‘critical automobility perspective’, we need to appreciate this affective dimension. My trip through Corona City was moreover a reminder that disruptive events may work to ‘think with’, and ‘thinking with Corona’ opens up to understand how car-drivers are attached to the car by this strange effect of protection, mobility, and mediation.

References

Ihde, D. (2009) Post-phenomenology and Technology. The Peking University Lectures, New York: SUNY Press

Jensen, O. B. (2011) Emotional Eruptions, Volcanic Activity and Global Mobilities – a Field Account from a European in the US During the Eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, Mobilities, Vol. 6, No. 1, February 2011, pp. 67-75

Jensen, O. B. (2013) Staging Mobilities, London: Routledge

Jensen, O. B. (2016) Of ‘other’ materialities: why (mobilities) design is central to the future of mobilities research, Mobilities, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 587-597

Latour, B. (2008) A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), Keynote lecture for the ‘Networks of Design’ meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, 3^rd September 2008

Sheller, M. (2004) Autoemotive emotions: Feeling the car, Theory, Culture & Society, 21 (4/5), 221-242

Sloterdijk, P. (2016) Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology, South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)

Urry, J. (2004) The ‘system’ of automobility, Theory, Culture & Society, 21 (4/5), 25-39

-by Robert Braun, CAS, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna

First day of effective curfew – basically government ordered ’stay home’ immobility in Vienna. Trying to settle in to the new temporary life: somewhat longer sleep, breakfast together with family and then starting work. Two online meetings – not unusual for international projects, but strange for our office jour fixe. I am looking at the video-feed, a somewhat strange intrusion into my colleague’s privacy, a voyeur’s peep into everybody’s home. Only those switch off video, who log on via phone – closing down is opening up in other ways. Later a walk to the local shop to get essentials: no cars; silence of the street, some people pass by. The sounds, or rather the no sound is eerie and uplifting. Families with children taking a walk, most of them letting their kids – small ones – run around; no fears of fast cars passing. People keep a distance when passing each other on the narrow pavement, but nobody steps off onto ’car territory’ yet.  

No passer by is rushing, people seem to walk slower. There are no meetings to be missed, people are not in a hurry. They also look at each other with worry – there is a sense of distrust, as the sickness is invisible. I pass an older lady with a dog, our dogs sniff each other, we both try to step back a little but the leashes hold us together; for a brief moment we are entangled, as always, but this time we do not want to get nearer to let the dogs befriend, but withdraw to our own; Harvey’s time-space compression^[1] seems to aquire a new meaning. As labor, circulation, capital as well as movement and human spacetime is rearranged by a virus, time and space are both compressed and decompressed; commodities are behind closed doors; capital flows are blocked and mechanized movement is almost stopped.

Virus time and virus space is on. A beginning of an end. Of what is not yet known.

^[1] David Harvey (1990) Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination, Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 80, No. 3. pp. 428-434.