Against radicality: habit in care and crisis

by Allie Mularoni

The month of May in Ontario bears striking resemblance to any Great Lakes state transitioning from a frozen landscape to more hospitable weather conditions. Perennials begin to make their grand appearances while grains of pollen infuse the warming breeze and migrating birds interrupt the clarity of the blue sky. In the near distance, Lake Erie beckons the inhabitants of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and their neighbors to the north.

This spring, however, the air in Canada was distinctly less virulent than the gaseous mixture circulating in America. While the pandemic had already spread to virtually every surface of the Earth, Canada’s rural and suburban enclaves were, for a time, relatively safe from the contagion that effectively destroyed the global economy. Even Canada's more heavily populated areas braced themselves better than their American counterparts by that time. Moving into summer, the Trudeau government provided a fourth-month stimulus option accessible to all residents (even nonpermanent ones) and cooperated with provincial officials to begin early testing (Kertscher 2020).[1] Prior to the crisis, Canada’s public health model was already more prepared to grapple with the rapid spread of infectious disease than that of the U.S., where, on top of an already tenuous privatized medical system, the Trump administration had dismantled a National Security Council pandemic unit and made cuts to the Center for Disease Control budget (Morris 2020). The situation in Canada was thus different from that of the world’s capitalist epicenter, where the inhabitants of dense cities and small towns alike fell prey to what is proving to be an insurmountable health crisis. Despite President Trump’s consistent attempts to undermine local jurisdiction, New York, Michigan, California, and Hawaii were among the many states to heed experts’ advice by temporarily instituting mask requirements.[2] But many right-wing extremists viewed such “draconian” orders as a violation of their rights and vehemently refused to wear masks for the sake of public health.[3]

I began reflecting on the political differences between Canada and the United States in the early days of the pandemic while I was living in a quiet college town in Ontario. Without gratifying Canadian complacency – so often nourished by comparison with the U.S. – and recognizing the recent spike in Canadian coronavirus cases, the country’s response to the health crisis nevertheless has cast the epidemiological failure of American exceptionalism into high relief.[4]

As an international PhD student, I had access to Canada’s universal healthcare system. If I became ill, my university insurance would have covered most, if not all of the treatment cost. But it was my unique position as an expatriate that primarily averted me from harm. The same relative safety was not available for people in the U.S. – even in supposedly liberal pockets like New York City, where refrigerated trucks collected the dead bodies that morgues could no longer accommodate. For those who had neither a vacation home nor a parent’s basement to escape to, the Trump regime’s political incompetence was (and remains) potentially deadly, particularly when the president himself felt compelled to offer his own medical advice.[5] Even with a Biden-Harris administration on the horizon, the country’s transition toward a post-pandemic condition hangs in the balance.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Americans began organizing rent strikes and food delivery for the elderly while maintaining the recommended six feet of distance. Think pieces and critical analyses described efforts like these as “radical” in their para-institutional approach to care.[6] Yet such actions should be demonstrative of any functioning democratic society. Democracy hinges on a framework of care that is part and parcel of collective action, regardless of whether a crisis is present. Care is rooted in egalitarianism. We might think of the right to vote as a collective act of care, but when we consider the number of potential voters who are ineligible from this right and the power delegated to the Electoral College, we realize how very little democratic equality is actually in place.

Elaine Scarry has written extensively on the ethical dimensions of beauty and pain; her recent work focusing on governance in the age of the nuclear weapon. In her book, Thinking in an Emergency, Scarry considers the role of habit in our ability to bring about the end of an emergency. She cites CPR (Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation) training and regularly simulated emergencies as examples of habituation that allow for life-saving deliberation. For Scarry, these practices of care are maintained and enacted through repetitive, automatic response. Against the temptation to associate the habitual with “the suspension of thought”, Scarry argues that habit advances neuronal plasticity. That is, habit helps us to continue thinking even when we are tempted to abandon thought (as we often are when confronted with an emergency). Moreover, Scarry finds connections between animate creatures and inanimate objects insofar as they share a predisposition for habit. She draws on William James’s understanding of habit, observing that “[r]epeated actions performed by inanimate objects . . .  inscribe themselves into the material substance of the human being” (Scarry 2011, 110). Like the human heart that beats automatically, medical devices like pacemakers are predicated on nonconscious life-saving decision-making.

Informed by programmatic thinking, embodied experience has the potential to reverse systemic damage. Scarry writes, “[c]lassic CPR procedures consist of a rigid set of rules about counting” (2011, 33). Rebuking critiques that associate this rigidity with robotic thinking, she argues instead that these acts are thought-laden: “they are designed to carry out the actions of breathing, circulating, and thinking during the period while those three internal actions are in a state of suspension” (Scarry 2011, 34). The brain’s plasticity is on display in moments of desperation; the degree of neuronal flexibility, or the ability to stretch thinking beyond suspension, may amount to the difference between life and death. What makes CPR so effective is not only the action of resuscitation, but the socially ingrained impulse to act when witnessing an emergency.

Scarry underscores the role of “civic and moral engineering” in emergency measures like the Quills Plain contract in Canada, which combines local authorities and volunteers in emergency decision-making, and the Swiss shelter system, which exists primarily to ensure civilians’ safety in the event of nuclear war (2011, 73). Both systems emphasize the commitment to “equality of survival”, which extends to all inhabitants regardless of their citizenship (Scarry 2011, 72). This impulse has also been cultivated in Japan, “where 1.4 million people are trained in CPR every year” (Scarry 2011, 45). As a result of continued citizen training, the survival rate for cardiac arrest in the city of Osaka increased from 5% to 12%, a percentage that “contrast[s] the 1% survival figure in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles” (Scarry 2011, 45). Endowing citizens with the moral responsibility and necessary knowledge has quite literally formed collective life-saving habits.

What Scarry’s argument does not consider, however, is the problem of embedded bias in otherwise inanimate decision-making. The work of Ruha Benjamin and Safiya Noble reminds us that the algorithms used in content moderation, job recruitment, and predictive policing entrench already violent, racialized hierarchies.[7] Such systemic and automated injustice has to be fought, even while appreciating the entanglement of corporeal and incorporeal thinking that can be in play in emergency care. From external and implanted defibrillators to automated emergency braking systems, nonhuman processing has the potential to bring about the end of – or even prevent – an emergency. Today, formerly healthy people are now dying from both viral infection and police brutality. Both causes of death can be traced to the state’s incompetence and vehement refusal of egalitarianism. More than ever before, a significant portion of the body politic is invested in new models of aid and a wholesale reorganization of government.

Taking cues from Scarry, this essay recognizes the co-development of technological and social infrastructure while centering the value of habit in approaches to care. Specifically, it considers the kind of care born out of automatic decision-making. As critical acts of care like social movements and life-saving medical procedures increasingly rely on digital labor, how might we rethink the value of inanimate thought processing? While problematizing algorithmic bias, what this inquiry intends to show is that care shouldn’t be radical – it should be habitual and indeed often automated.

Power and virality in the network

Scarry devotes a number of pages to the examination of the second amendment in the United States Constitution, revealing how historical complications have led to its misinterpretation. For Scarry, what removes any potential for democracy is the existence of nuclear weapons, as it tips the scales of justice in favor of state power. As Scarry underscores, the right to bear arms was intended to endow citizens with the means for uprising should the state begin to veer in an authoritarian direction. By effectively nullifying citizens’ firepower, the state’s possession of nuclear weapons completely dismantles any potential for such opposition. In fact, because of the speed and centralization of decision-making that control of such weapons demands, it dismantles the potential for democracy altogether.

While there is some merit to Scarry’s argument, a Marxist critique, or an anti-colonial perspective, would locate the limits of democracy much earlier in the timeline. Capitalism has certainly advanced militarization with the development of nuclear arms, but it has also inhibited the substantive – rather than merely formal – sharing of power for nearly 500 years. The corporate deregulation and privatization that marks the current neoliberal era has effectively demolished any semblance of social infrastructure, which we will see is part and parcel of a politics of habitual care. The impulse to associate democracy with Westernization sheds light on the racialized politics embedded in illusions of freedom and sovereignty. Perhaps democratic society is a premodern dream rather than a withering construct.

Among the deluge of coronavirus hot-takes, the Twittersphere has observed the cognitive dissonance between the accepted logic of removing shoes as part of post-9/11 flight security measures and the refusal to wear masks during a pandemic. As of November 2020, the virus has claimed more than 250,000 lives in the U.S. alone.[8] Despite the obvious distinction between these two crises – one an act of terror, the other an infectious disease – there exists a connection in the political tendency to cast blame against a foreign enemy, fanning the flames of racial discrimination without acknowledging any personal liability. Even more, both events appear to share a common root. The comorbidity of neoliberalism and colonialism has effectively encouraged the spread of war and disease. While the virus apparently originated in China, it is the West’s reliance on globalization that ripens conditions for an outbreak. The Orientalizing of acts of terror and infectious disease demonstrates the entanglement of discursive and political power, concretizing the image of the Other as America’s whipping boy.

The virality of social and biological information is visceral in the age of social media, and it is a double-edged sword. Beginning as a hashtag in 2013, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement challenged law enforcement’s blatant anti-Black racism. Despite the number of documented instances in which Black lives have been taken at the hands of police, the BLM movement struggled to hold the media’s attention until George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. Protests against police brutality expanded globally and continued for several months, a feat that could no longer be ignored by mainstream news. Ignited by the President’s inflammatory “law and order” Tweets legitimizing militia vigilantism, the movement’s momentum has corresponded with the development of counter-movements. The political shroud covering white supremacy has been ripped away, revealing the magnitude of far-right extremism.

The pandemic has catalyzed movements on all sides, as austerity measures have exposed the richest nation’s crippled social infrastructure. The conditions of extreme political ineptitude have activated social struggle, and these sustained efforts evidence a new focus on collective responsibility. Zoé Samudzi (2017) identifies the differences in unity and solidarity, noting the former’s tendency to “[push] a violent doctrine of sameness”. If capitalism is antithetical to democracy, recovering the vestiges of democratic society requires solidarity as much as it requires allyship – perhaps even more so.

Such solidarity efforts have gained traction in recent months through digital communications systems. Like the immaterial network on which it operates, BLM is loose and nonhierarchical. New media theories have argued that control in the digital age operates protocologically, mapping outward and inward simultaneously.[9] But as a discursive framework and material force, the network remains contested. Imposing control through multiplicity, connectivity, and openness, it is at once a means for state surveillance and civilian “sousveillance”. This is particularly evident in the age of contagion, where every human is potentially a node for viral transmission. A manual process of tracking and reducing possible cases of disease, contact tracing relies on human “tracers” to identify and isolate potentially infected persons. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic has spurred efforts to digitize this process. According to Benjamin Bratton (2020), the rate at which the virus spreads requires a new framing of surveillance.[10] He argues for viral tracking via smartphones and biometric technology – both of which are bound to the political tenets and commercial interests of the private sector. Despite the technophilic tendency to associate surveillance with increased security and privacy, it is important to remember that surveillance (even seemingly benign forms) is predicated on the division between those who watch and those who are subject to the watchers’ gaze. Problematizing the power dynamics embedded in both biological and communications networks, Kevin Rogan (2020) observes that the shift toward digital contact tracing “views space as a pure, empty topological field where networks are ignored in favor of adjacency, and individuals are reduced to geotagged points of data”. Against Bratton’s optimistic (and perhaps even negligent) rendering of “quarantine urbanism”, Rogan identifies the outsourcing of human labor to algorithmic technology ­– which is already extensive and at best ineffective when applied to public health – as yet another corporatized disciplinary scheme rather than a move toward equilibrium.

With uncanny foresight, Scarry astutely reminds us that “[a] political leader who brings about chronic emergencies may have these same motives: to stun the mind, to immobilize, to bring about a genuine enslavement of attention” (2011, 26). Is it, then, necessarily politically regressive to adopt a cybernetic model of thinking that, for example, powers our breath when our bodies fail to do so – to restructure our human functioning around democratic feedback? Injecting class and race analysis into Scarry’s call for habit, how might we reimagine the political potential in programmatic thinking? In order to move in this direction, I argue for a discursive adjustment that recognizes attempts to recover democracy as careful rather than radical. My intention is to connect habit with care and to permit the germination of new forms of programmatic thinking. The beginning of this formulation is grounded in the politics of care and feminist readings of cybernetics.

Connective resistance and the problem of proximity

I encountered an emergency on a walk around my university’s campus in London, Ontario this past spring, at the time when coronavirus cases were peaking across the globe. Normally bustling with upwards of 35,000 students, the paved walkways connecting buildings were all but empty, save for an abundance of geese droppings. Crossing the bridge, I started on one such walkway at the bottom of a hill and ascended toward one of the formidable gothic structures. Out of the greenery, a young boy emerged on a bike, leaving voices trailing behind him. I stepped onto the grass to maintain the recommended six feet of physical distance, but the boy seemed transfixed by my presence, or perhaps confused by my cautious posture. Intaking my steady position, he continued at a fast clip and quickly lost control.

The sound of a body hitting concrete is hard to forget, but what is more difficult to reconcile was my inability to act once the boy contacted the ground. The sound of his screams pierced the air for what felt like a full minute. His mother, jogging behind, was still at the top of the hill. I stood where I was, hoping that simply my concerned presence would console him. Once his mother caught up to the scene, I asked if she would like me to call someone. She assured me that he was fine, and I continued on the grass, maintaining my distance. Regrettably, none of us were wearing masks at the time. I wonder how the chain of reaction might have played out if we had all been wearing protection.

At this time, there is no citizen protocol in place for emergency situations. This is particularly problematic, as it both intensifies what Scarry calls “the seduction to stop thinking” and neglects the fact that there are countless emergency scenarios unrelated to infectious disease (14). Even more worrisome is the fact that there is no precedent in the U.S. for collective emergency action, unlike Switzerland and Japan which require mutual responsibility in times of crisis. It is therefore unsurprising that both countries’ responses to the coronavirus has resulted in comparatively (and enviably) low death rates. Despite any misgivings about Japan’s reporting of cases and deaths, what is undeniable is its cultural emphasis on shared responsibility. In addition to the regular use of face masks since the Spanish flu, Japanese people generally comply with public service models that place health first (Wingfield-Hayes 2020). Identifying reasons for Japan’s low transmission rate, public health specialist Keiji Fukuda observes “a certain kind of response from the public, which [is not] so easily replicated in other countries” (Wingfield-Hayes 2020).

Although the global health crisis has illuminated the relation between proximity and transmission, it is important to remember how the distance between collective and individual responsibilities impacts our larger socio-political frameworks. Mia Mingus (2017) emphasizes interdependence in the movement toward a more just and accessible world. Despite the virtue of individualism promulgated by Western liberalism, living necessarily involves relying on others – this is perhaps most obvious, albeit ironically, in instances of nepotism. This brings to mind Lauren Berlant’s political formulation of relations; our connections have the power to both hurt and help us.[11] Undergirding both Mingus’s and Berlant’s thinking is both a political and physical proximity. As a system, capitalism appears distant, yet it is imbued in the quotidian. Our lives are structured by difference in access, which is largely determined by differences in identity. At the same time, our proximal material relations brush against us. When they comfort us or inflict pain, it is felt immediately. What would our relations look like if we programmed our biological and information networks to resuscitate justice?

This work is already being done in communities that rely on mutual aid for services that have historically been provided by the state. The mutual aid contracts examined by Scarry are supported by provincial governments in Canada and Switzerland, but even a brief historical analysis reveals the systemic discrimination against marginalized groups in America, specifically Black Americans and the working poor. Access to housing, medical care, education, and fair treatment by the criminal justice system has always privileged the white male phenotype, and it is important to note that differences in race, gender, and class have been magnified by neoliberalism. Further troubling the magnification of difference is the automation of welfare systems, or what little is left of them.

Virginia Eubanks reveals the extent to which human affairs are determined by algorithms, particularly in public services. From scraping healthcare and food stamp applications to decisions involving child welfare, Eubanks demonstrates how social and economic inequalities are reproduced by the state’s deployment of automated systems.[12] To combat the state’s incompetence, underserved communities have actively practiced mutual aid for hundreds of years. A notable example of para-state organization was the Black Panther Party’s “survival programs”, which provided nutritious food to school children, funded medical research, and housing assistance. Prior to the privatization of formerly public services, health care programs were not only prescribed by Western liberalism, they were also assumed indicative of rational thinking. The association of social health and national wealth was a widely held principle until the neoliberal era, which proved that privatization, automation, and globalization ­– over and against public health – was a better determinant of economic growth.

Given the rising death count across all demographics, which seem to have augmented decades-long health disparities, is it is not surprising that we are witnessing increasing interest in mutual aid. The pandemic has revealed the extent to which the neoliberalism prioritizes capital over its constituents. One’s survival is very much dependent on access to care. This access typically relies on closeness, as we have witnessed from the countless protests across the globe. What does mutual aid look like in a pandemic? Is the act of getting close contingent on the potential for transmitting infection?

Facelessness, or machinic ontologies

The pandemic situation has illuminated a logic of care motivated by collective action, specifically through the widespread use of face masks. As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the mask itself has become increasingly politicized. Emboldened by conspiracy theories, coronavirus-deniers have sent death threats to public health officials who have advocated mask-wearing (Calvin 2020). But the problem of proximity (particularly in the form of “super spreader events”) is undeniable as the death toll continues to rise. This problem has made clear that we need struggles for the mask, not against the mask. In addition to preventing possible contagion, wearing a mask effectively obfuscates socially coded identities, thereby extending potential in countervailing action. Nick Dyer-Witheford (2015) reveals the mask as a symbol of resistance: “There comes to be something profoundly disposable, fungible, and interchangeable in conditions of contemporary identity. The Anon mask can be taken as defiant adoption of this ‘facelessness’ of contemporary proletarianization as a marker of revolt” (164). At the same time, the necessity for masks reveals the state’s involvement in the collapse of civil society. Where there was a shortage of both ventilators for palliative care and personal protection equipment (PPE) to contain disease, there is a vast reserve of federal funds allocated to police riot gear and chemical weapons for the purpose of containing dissent. But the pandemic has also emphasized the political nuance in face coverings. Anyone who engages in acts of resistance still runs the risk of being arrested, tear gassed, or shot, but protesters who wear face coverings are less likely to be identified by disciplinary and carceral technologies.

As a motif in Black experience, the mask has been most notably examined by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Building on Fanon’s postcolonial framework, the contemporary moment has disrupted the myth of European universalism insofar as it is now medically necessary to cover one’s face, effectively dismantling the logic undergirding anti-Muslim discrimination (Soncul and Parikka 2020). Alongside the politics of immunity, Soncul and Parikka contend that the history of the mask also lies in network culture. Thinking protocologically, as a barrier between the skin and the “outside”, the mask engenders connectivity as much as it produces difference. In this way, the mask invokes a layer of networked subjectivity behind wholly human affairs. I’m reminded of the cruel irony emanating from the several marquees planted on the grounds of my university’s campus perimeter. Part of an initiative to reduce pollution and the effects of secondhand smoke, the large steel structures harken back to simpler times – or perhaps they are messengers from the future. The imposing façades read “Clear the Air”, as if to tell their breathing neighbors “we told you so”.

Beginning in June 2020, several tech companies agreed to halt production of facial recognition software. Similar gestures of atonement appeared to be ignited by a shift in collective consciousness, but the level of sincerity is questionable. But is one year without facial recognition technology enough to stymie a system of inequality? A pause on discriminatory practices does not necessarily indicate an interest in reconstruction. True reconstruction, as many have suggested, begins with abolition. Instead of halting the inevitable, how might we reimagine a social contract based on life-preserving habits? I find inspiration in new materialism and feminist readings of cybernetics. Recovering the computer’s forgotten history, Sadie Plant (1997) emphasizes the connection between human and nonhuman processing. She reminds us of the early work of Norbert Wiener, who “argued that organisms and nonorganic systems and machines ‘are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback.’ No matter how extreme, the differences between these systems were simply matters of degree” (Plant 1997, 162). As such, both humans and machines are bound by the habit of self-preservation. To refigure Bratton’s term, “resilience” is an automatic response, or a kind of habit exercised by both human and nonhuman processing.

Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory, Elise Thorburn finds connections between political theory and cybernetics. For Thorburn, assemblages evidence the efforts to “recuperate social reproduction through human-machinic convergences” (2015, 28). Specifically, assembly movements form “out of a provisional active unity developed by heterogeneous forces – bodies, technologies, politics, and affects” (Thorburn 2015, 30). The Arab Spring, the many iterations and offshoots of Occupy Wall Street, and the 2012 Quebec student strike demonstrate the extent to which the human body is organized and mobilized through digital networks. Highlighting the networking of human-machine relations, Thorburn suggests that assembly movements are motivated by “the affective dimensions of politics” (2015, 41). As the BLM movement continues to demonstrate, the objectives of class struggle are sustained through gestures of allyship and solidarity. Driven by class consciousness, assembly movements activate social ontologies predicated on relationality.

Connecting Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the assemblage with Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, Thorburn underscores the power of resistance; Haraway’s cyborg opposes naturalistic categories of the human while highlighting the entanglement of organic and inorganic labor (2015, 49). The shared ontological threads in humans and machines are at once limiting (insofar as they exist for the purpose of capital) and agentic, in the sense that they are constituted by the power to reproduce. Social reproduction is an inherently gendered project, as it involves biological reproduction. And even though procreation sustains labor power (in turn, sustaining capital), the combination of social reproduction and class struggle has advanced social infrastructure like healthcare and welfare programs (Thorburn 2015, 10). Moreover, social reproduction sustains life itself through the politics of care. The entanglement of feminism, networks, and class conflict reinforces the co-shaping of care and political resistance.

Robyn Maynard (2018) locates habitual resistance in Black existence, a condition she identifies as “beyond and outside the limits of the human” (32). Building on postcolonial theory, Maynard recognizes the racial hierarchy imbued in the project of Western European modernity (2018, 31). But as this project continues to foreclose Black futures, Maynard also identifies possibilities in cyborg modes of being. These subjectivities catalyze Afrofuturism, a philosophy invested in rewriting the past and laying claim to an alternate future.[13] Citing Christine Sharpe, Maynard understands the position of “no-citizen” as one possessing the capacity to reimagine the world (2018, 32). In this way, Blackness shares with habit the issue of “aliveness”, a term Scarry identifies in the arguments against supposedly thoughtless actions (2011, 109). But as we have seen, and to Scarry’s point, we can ascribe many life-saving procedures to habitual processing and automated resilience.

Black existence has made posthuman ontological formulations possible insofar as it has recuperated what Scarry calls the right of exit (2011, 87). Against all odds, Black life has endured centuries-long perilous political arrangements, transcending the anti-democratic conditions of racial capitalism. Maynard recasts the Black radical tradition through the lens of Afrofuturism to imagine a form of life beyond the given conceptions of humanity (2018, 34). “Radical” in this case is denoted by the reading of Marxist theory through the specifically Black experience of resistance, emphasizing the status of difference produced by racial capitalism.[14] For Maynard, what is equally compelling in the re-examination of history – and the subsequent potential to redirect futurity – is the Black “imagination that stages a refusal to submit” (2018, 36). Not unlike Thorburn’s materialist formulation of human-machinic assemblages, the constant reanimation of the “Black rebel cyborg” demonstrates an impulse to control entropy inasmuch as it demonstrates the value of plasticity. To resist and seek freedom are indicative of a collective project of equilibrium. Against the technocratic logics of automation, feminist and Afrofuturist interpretations reveal the potential for cybernetic care.

Toward a habitual framework of justice

The Trump administration’s decision to allocate exorbitant resources to major multinational corporations while providing comparatively little to constituents and medical services demonstrates the specific hypocrisy framed within a supposedly “anti-globalist” vision. This new mode of thinking is not interested in controlling entropy, but rather accelerating it. The habits of civil society display submission to a self-serving political agenda, rather than an interest in recovering democracy. Once again, state power seems to supersede any potential for public action. The state’s application of cybernetic surveillance in its current vision of security must be tempered by organized social movements – which is to say, we need to emphasize citizenry over Bratton’s technocratic framework. However, the network’s connective politics offer means for subversive political action while engaging a politics of habit in the preservation of civil society. Habitual resilience can become a site of resistance, as the model of mutual aid weaves into the fabric of social activism. While the weaving of resistance and para-state aid demonstrates a fissuring of trust in the so-called democratic establishment, it also demonstrates the power of habit in the mobilization of care in times of crisis. As Scarry remarks, “the question is not whether habit will surface in an emergency (it surely will) but instead which habit will emerge” (2011, 61, original emphasis). Ensuring “equality of survival” depends on a logic of care that is ingrained in human habit.

In a virtual discussion hosted by Dream Defenders (2020), Angela Davis observes the need for abolition to “avoid being trapped on a treadmill of reform” (00:37:00-00:44:00). To do so, she argues that we must enlarge our analytical framework to incorporate anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminism. Davis argues that this intersectional approach is radical insofar as it targets the root of systemic racism and injustice. Abolition allows us to reconstruct and reimagine a world unbridled by the conditions engendered by global capitalism. I agree with Davis in terms of marshaling abolitionist strategies. Yet, I wonder if transformation should be labeled as radical. Ruha Benjamin (2013) observes the incommensurability of the body’s predisposition to transformation and the fixity of the conditions to which it is bound (172). The natural processes of life, decay, and subsequent rebirth are not characterized as radical, yet we accept the stagnate political systems and abysmal attempts at institutional reform. Perhaps the reason we assign a radical labeling to maneuvers toward democracy is the fact that we have never truly achieved it.

We see evidence of democratic recuperation in sustained habits of care. Today, political attempts to deter people from mobilizing have faltered in the wake of the state’s undeniable violence and incompetence, resulting in continued demonstrations of solidarity. Despite epidemiological concern, BLM protests spread across the country as states tried (and ultimately failed) to “reopen”. But as many public health advocates have remarked, systemic racism is a public health crisis, and it is inextricably linked to the state’s inability to control the coronavirus. For this reason, and to echo the sentiments of Cornel West, we should not think of these actions as rebellious or radical; in fact, we should expect people to take to the streets in the event of horrific injustice.[15] The mere act of living should not be radical, but if it must be, then we must engage in automatic care—that is to say, care that is sometimes automated, and always habitual.

Many thanks to Nick Dyer-Witheford for his generous readings of this work and for providing valuable editorial advice.

References 

Benjamin, Ruha. People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, Stanford University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1273587.

Bratton, Benjamin. “18 Lessons of Quarantine Urbanism.” Strelka Mag, 3 March 2020, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/18-lessons-from-quarantine-urbanism. Accessed 23 Nov. 2020.

Calvin, Aaron. “Health officials face death threats from coronavirus deniers.” The Intercept, 1 Dec. 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/12/01/covid-health-officials-death-threats/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2020.

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Maynard, Robyn. "Reading Black Resistance through Afrofuturism: Notes on post-Apocalyptic Blackness and Black Rebel Cyborgs in Canada." TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 39, 2018, p. 29-47. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/706957.

Mingus, Mia. “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice.” Leaving Evidence, 27 Apr. 2018, leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/. Accessed 15 June 2020.

Morris, Chris. “Trump administration budget cuts could become a major problem as coronavirus spreads.” Fortune, 26 Feb. 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/02/26/coronavirus-covid-19-cdc-budget-cuts-us-trump/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2020.

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Thorburn, Elise D., "Human-Machinic Assemblages: Technologies, Bodies, and the Recuperation of Social Reproduction in the Crisis Era" (2015). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 2897.

Wingfield-Hayes, Rupert. “Coronavirus: Japan's mysteriously low virus death rate.” BBC News, 3 July 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53188847. Accessed 3 Nov. 2020.

Notes

[1] Anyone living in Canada with a valid Social Insurance Number was eligible for the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).

[2] “Facing Your Face Mask Duties – A List of Statewide Orders, as of June 21, 2020.” Littler Mendelson P.C. www.littler.com/publication-press/publication/facing-your-face-mask-duties-list-statewide-orders. Accessed 24 June 2020.

[3] Several members of the right-wing militia group “Boogaloo Bois” donned face coverings as they stormed the Michigan capitol building in April 2020.

[4] It should be noted that the number of COVID-19 cases has risen sharply in Quebec since the initial flattening of the curve.

[5] Although President Trump did not explicitly recommend that citizens inject themselves with disinfectant, his comments on the potential for disinfectant in curbing the spread of disease were so misinformed that public officials issued warnings against the ingestion of cleaning products.

[6] See Jia Tolentino, “What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic,” The New Yorker, 11 May 2020 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/what-mutual-aid-can-do-during-a-pandemic; Woodbine, “Mutual Aid, Social Distancing, and Dual Power in the State of Emergency,” e-flux, 23 Mar. 2020, https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/mutual-aid-social-distancing-and-dual-power-in-the-state-of-emergency/9686; Duke University, Social Text, Vol. 38, no. 1, https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/issue/38/1%20(142).

[7] Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology (Boston: Polity, 2019) and Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York: NYU Press, 2018).

[8] “United States COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by State,” Centers for Disease Control, 23 Nov. 2020, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days.

[9] Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

[10] Benjamin Bratton, “18 Lessons of Quarantine Urbanism.” Strelka Mag, 3 March 2020, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/18-lessons-from-quarantine-urbanism. Accessed 23 Nov. 2020.

[11] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

[12] Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).

[13] I’m grateful to Alison Hearn and Charlotte Panneton for their insightful readings of Afrofuturism.

[14] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

[15] Glen Coco, “We are witnessing America as a failed social experiment" - Dr Cornell [sic] West Full CNN Segment.” Youtube, uploaded by Glen Coco, 29 May 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=90G_QdxqqJs&feature=emb_logo.