Alexandra Juhasz
A corner of the workshop
The Technological Pandemic: Continuing to Build a Critical Inquiry Framework
It has been five months since I had the profound pleasure of participating in the Technological Pandemic Workshop with twenty or more colleagues and new friends in the thriving Jordan neighborhood of Hong Kong. I look online at the large collection of documentation—scores of digital photos and videos of our two intense days together at the gorgeous and hip Eaton House. I am moved again by the energy and honesty I experienced with people at this encounter.
I wonder, how much of the powerful affective charges of our face-to-face interactions are legible to viewers who were not there with us in the cold conference room: all together and feeling our delight in being one of so many queer and feminist changemakers when most of us were still doing our work alone; all together and feeling our fear and hope in revisiting the ongoing COVID pandemic and its particular lockdowns, in public and out loud, there in community re-emerging some emotions and practices we might have needed to repress?
I wonder, how are the deeply personal and nuanced narratives that grew from talking and listening together in Hong Kong (me, so far from home), that were then summarized or consolidated by words on a wall—POWER, EMOTIONS, FREEDOM, EXPLORATION—resonant without the lived context of our workshop’s two days of sharing space, story, and sympathy? The felt fulfillment of fancy box lunches enjoyed in community? The warmth and jolt of our many tea (and coffee) breaks? The haunting memories heard of this city’s interminable lockdowns, protecting Hong Kong people from illness while stymying protest.
POWER, EMOTIONS, FREEDOM, EXPLORATION
My opening questions center how certain media technologies—the digital camera, the online photo repository, and now this webpage holding text and image—can serve as pandemic technologies: moving experiences of COVID in place and time so that they can be used now. One aim of our workshops, here I too consider what pandemic technologies do for us, how they help, how they can be hardly seen but active even so. As the COVID pandemic continues—ever less visible, noted, remembered—its technologies of control or care beat on.
In his introductory blog post, my friend and colleague Nishant defines technology in an exciting way: a means of converging and separating different alive and life-making units for transformation of an identified current state into another. This is technology as connector or separator, as means toward ends. We agree. I build on his definition by understanding technologies as goal driven processes that connect and/or rupture something(s) across time and place. While Nishant’s suggestion feels almost medieval in how it registers the power of the alchemic, mine lingers in the metaphors of modernity, accruing some of the magic of what was once known and loved as cinema. In both cases, we define and theorize with aims of producing new ways of doing. So, defining as a technology! We both suggest that we use technologies to move something (material or immaterial, embodied or affective) from one time/place to another so that we can get something done now: remember, heal, communicate, feel (control, surveil, silence, scare).
Pandemic technologies are used to manage the specific, lived consequence set into motion by an amoral, unthinking biological agent—in this case the SARS-CoV-2 virus—that is powerfully transformative and disruptive in its own right. Nishant introduces us to us the pandemic as a transformative context: a bodily, local, or larger stage where humans invest and activate meaning, power, fear, and love by way of the brutally biological.
On and from this stage and state, pandemic technologies focus, drive, expand, or distort the meaning, impact, and movement of any virus, an unknowing agent already churning on its path toward replication using humans as its medium. As Nishant notes, while some pandemic technologies address the biological nature of the virus itself, or how this agent disrupts the biological processes of humans’ immune systems and our daily lives (by creating vaccines or viral testing, for instance), others are used to administer thoughts, feelings, power, or control (imagine, if you will, the ubiquitous QR code or a Zoom call and it protocols of entry, behavior, and state of mind).
A pandemic technology can assist or hinder us when we encounter an agent of ill-health. Aided and abetted, we seek change right here and now, when we are sick, or afraid, or lonely, by mobilizing anew something (or someone) from another place or time. A room, some words and stories and stick figures, cardboard, a wall, a photo, this blog post: a pandemic technology of recollection, or empowerment, or endurance.
Honour, creativity, understanding, local/overseas connection, live stream
Our workshops are keen to surface the technologies that were and stayed ever more deeply rooted as part of our changing attempts at survival and health across the ongoing COVID pandemic—with a particular attention to the period(s) of lockdown, itself a pandemic technology employed with specificity across different places and times.
Many of these technologies felt like they were given to us, or they happened to us, or they were imposed on us by hostile, or uncaring, or controlling agents with the pandemic as justification. But just as many pandemic technologies are processes that we found, hacked, repurposed or used to heal, feel, share, love, hope, rest, scream, and resist. To understand, to support, to honour.
Our workshops are attendant to how pandemic technologies—digital, financial, governmental, educational, material, affective—engage the unhappy context of large and small scale illness to bring us together and separate us.
As an AIDS activist for almost forty years, since I first became involved with that virus and its linked movements for resistance, health, and community in the mid-1980s, I attest that HIV’s harms are always matched with its transformative potentials. I will attest that HIV is still a pandemic, as is COVID, and neither will not “be over,” even when we eradicate any virus’s replication. Our memories, the technologies that we used to responde, the love we held and hold for those we lost, our own experiences of infection and repair stay, and are shared (or repressed, still there even so!). For, we invent, muster, and rely on our pandemic technologies to connect: to the lost and the alive, to the analyses and actions we invent to live well in crisis.
My feet to the left
Just so, when I had COVID for the second time, about a month ago, I embraced a new technology. Sick while on vacation in Morocco, I was changed by the sea breeze. Lying on a rooftop terrace, the Atlantic close but only slightly visible, for two weeks a gentle, soft, active, salty energy soothed and cossetted my foggy brain and sloggy body. While this technology is certainly of nature, it was equally emotional and social: encompassing my body with the earth’s, and this specific region’s generative, gentle ongoingness and vibrant but soft pulse. This technology was one of soothing hope in the face of human impermanence.
I captured my state with my phone so I could remember. I share and also augment that now with words: one pandemic technology bent on sharing what was with the aim of reminding that COVID is not over, and that it always occurs in context: Morocco, my second bout, new symptoms, fear of relapsing into Long COVID, the care of my family below, the fresh air you will never see, and then again, nor did I. I share that breeze as a pandemic technology even so. With another pandemic technology, a blog post, I remind myself, and us, that the world held me then, and holds us again, for now.
Pandemics happen in people, in places, in times, in nations, on computers, in our memories and images. They are biological and metaphorical. They are experienced as illness and also anger.
Pandemics happen in the world, and they are transformed by all the forces and technologies that coexist: laws, platforms, belief systems, economies, health care and kindness.
Pandemics can be syndemic. In our workshops, we are keen to understand what other diseases or health conditions burden some of us multiply.
Syndemics occur when two or more diseases or health conditions cluster and interact within a population because of social and structural factors and inequities, leading to an excess burden of disease and continuing health disparities. Syndemics arise when:
- Two (or more) diseases or health conditions cluster and interact within a population;
- Social and structural factors and inequities allow for diseases or health conditions to cluster; and
- The clustering of disease or health conditions results in disease interaction, either biologic or social or behavioral, leading to an excess burden of disease and continuing health disparities.
Our workshops bring us together, in different local situations (Hong Kong and next, Delhi), to attend to the technologies we have and can continue to muster especially when we are unduly burdened by the many conditions—viral and structural, human and ideological—that exacerbate ill health. Pandemics are global and local. The technologies that adhere are specific and multinational, corporate and handmade.
Nishant reminds us that technologies separate and connect I, you and us; I suggest, as well, that they are time and travel machines arming us with what and where was before us and what and where we will be. Our workshops elevate the power of our local communities and daily experience withing syndemic conditions, and our linked but often unheralded histories of struggle and survival, as well as our plans for the future. Sure, global tech and fascist rulers own and operate pandemic technologies of oppression; but always also we mobilize our methods of life support.