Bodies, Affects, Politics. Steve Pile

      Chih Yuan Woon, National University of Singapore

       RGS‐IBG Book Series Editors

      David Featherstone, University of Glasgow, UK

       RGS‐IBG Book Series Editor (2015–2019)

Preface

      Today, London is quieter than I have ever known it to be. The skies above are undisturbed by the noise of planes, no white vapour trails scratching the brilliant blue. The East Coast mainline normally rumbles with heavy goods trains punctuated by the shattering sound of fast inter‐city services, but not for the last two weeks. Normally, the day is interrupted by at least one low‐level fly‐over by a police helicopter, but not recently. The hum of traffic is notably subdued, as when snow falls, muffling sound, preventing vehicles from moving around the city. This quieting, however, is not a sign that the city is calmer, rested, at peace. Instead, the quiet feels more like frustration, determination and a low‐level anxiety that threatens to break cover.

      As I wait patiently in the queue at my local supermarket, I am paying attention to who is – and who is not – wearing face coverings, but especially noting the facemasks. Facemasks are as sure a measure of the level of anxiety and fear in the city as the intensification of the policing of bodies (which is not only conducted by the police). I know I am 2 metres back from the person in front of me and that the person behind me is 2 metres away from me. I know because the pavement has suddenly become covered in sticky tape that tells bodies where they should be. Sometimes, there are big stickers with footprints; ‘stand here’ they instruct. I am self‐policing. I stand where I should, as do most people. Some people do not. They are policed: the supermarket has employed a company that, judging by their jackets, normally stewards entertainment events. A woman in a high vis jacket, continually adjusting her ill‐fitting facemask, waves us forward, then halts us, with only the use of her right arm. The queue dutifully obeys these wordless commands.

I reach the point where the orderly queue awkwardly passes the store’s exit. At first I do not notice the man leaving the supermarket, but then I realise he’s walking backwards. A tall security guard is escorting him out. ‘Don’t touch me’! the man shouts. ‘Don’t fucking touch me! Don’t fucking touch me! Don’t fucking touch me’! he screams. The security guard puts his hands up, as if to nudge the man out of the exit. The man jumps back, and yells some more. The security guard says nothing; he does not touch the man; but, he keeps moving half steps forward, shepherding the man out. Now, another security guard appears. And some supermarket employees. They say little, but make ‘calm down’ gestures with their hands. The man yells: ‘You’ve got anger issues, you. You’ve got fucking anger issues. Fucking anger issues, you’! The second security guard intervenes, says something in the ear of the first security guard, who then starts to leave. ‘I’ll fucking have you’, the man yells after him. ‘Come and have some of this’! he shouts as he also starts to leave. We, in the queue, who witness this look at each other, over the top of our facemasks: we have not yet learned to communicate with just our eyes, but they all seem to be rolling. Our eyes seem to be saying: ‘We live in mad times’. And, I think to myself, the proper response to living in mad times is to be mad. In a short few months, we will learn that security guards are amongst the most vulnerable occupations to COVID‐19 – and that black and minority ethnic people are overrepresented in these occupations. It matters that the woman security guard is Black and the men from the store are Turkish and Asian.

      Inside the supermarket, there’s clear evidence of fear. Vast swathes of the shelves are empty: there’s no toilet paper, pasta, tinned foods, surface cleaners of any kind, eggs, flour or paracetamol. People wander slowly past the shelves because this is something to see: it is a sign of the times, so worth looking at. People mutter about ‘panic buying’, but, of course, the panic buyers are the sensible buyers as they are the ones who anticipated the panic buying. Panic has been normalised. As I leave, a man outside is yelling ‘This is Great Britain! Tell the truth! Tell the Truth’! He is holding a black leather‐bound book, with gold lettering that I make no effort to read. ‘We tell the truth in Great Britain’, he screams at no one in particular. I avoid eye contact as he passes. ‘Tell the truth’! I hear him shouting as I disappear across the road. As I walk, I listen, but there’s no clue to what truth he means. Part of me would like to know, but a larger part is afraid to find out.

I write (and rewrite) in a moment of indeterminacy; we do not know when the COVID‐19 crisis will end, nor what it will have done to bodies, affects or politics. People want it over. They want to know when it will end and what the plan is. There is a lot of talk of curves, peaks and plateaus, and second waves; each day, there’s an accountancy of the dead, with bar graphs and imagined bell curves. The virus has not told us what its plan is: we cannot reason with it, so it feels like the disaster is the fault of the virus, as if it were a terrorist or a mugger. Yet, it is a mistake to think that the coronavirus is a natural disaster or to anthropomorphise it. That said, we do not yet know what kind of disaster it is. Indeed, it seems to be a disaster many times over. Every death is an individual, a person dying unforgivingly, causing inexpressible loss and grief for untold families, friends, colleagues. So many are dying, so few stories make the news. Yet, we are also told it is an economic disaster. We are told it will change everything. A disaster impacting every corner of our lives. (Although, apparently, it’s been good for the planet. And some are profiting beyond their wildest dreams.) The coronavirus is accreting ever more meanings, as its impacts multiply and intensify. We do not know which of its many meanings will persist and which will not. We do not know how the necropolitics to follow after the coronavirus will play out. We live, right now, not knowing. I am guessing, perhaps hoping, none of the above surprises you.

      The coronavirus will teach us many things. Like as not, virology aside, it will mostly teach us what we already know. And I am no different. The coronavirus teaches me that we live in a precarious world, made scary and infuriating by the (extra)ordinary politics of the body and of bodies (from facemasks to lockdowns). But, the world was already fractious and precarious, people already living everyday with crisis after crisis (from floods to droughts, species extinction to financial collapse, from sexual abuse to police brutality), living with deep anxiety and apprehension alongside the propensity for great kindness and generosity. And, I guess, in some small way, this book is a response to the already existing and long‐standing ‘unsettlingness’ of modern life, an ordinary indeterminacy that runs through bodies, through affects and through politics.

This book has been in process for a long time, longer even than the torturous process of writing. There are three things to say about this. First, it is normal to thank specific people when writing academic works. Part of the argument of this book is that it is never that clear where ideas (or feelings) come from. So, I want to thank everyone I have talked to about the matters contained in this book. You have all made some difference to what is here. I admit, in ways that I am probably unaware, and more profoundly I am sure than I know. So, thank you. Second, to contradict myself, I need to thank three people without whom this book would not appear in the world: David Featherstone, whose insights have been incalculable; Jacqueline Scott, whose patience I have sorely tested; and Nadia Bartolini, who has had to endure far too much. Third, I need to acknowledge the source material for certain chapters. Chapter 2 reworks ‘Skin, Race and Space: The Clash of Bodily Schemas’ in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and Nella Larsen’s Passing, which was published in Cultural Geographies in 2011 (pp. 25–41). Chapter 3 draws on ‘Spatialities of Skin: The Chafing of Skin, Ego and Second Skins’ in T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was published in Body & Society, also in 2011 (pp. 57–81). Chapter 4 recasts ‘Beastly Minds: A Topological Twist in the Rethinking of the Human in Nonhuman Geographies Using Two of Freud’s Case Studies’ by Emmy von N. and the Wolfman, which was published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in 2014 (pp. 224–236).