The haunting figure of the useless academic: Critical thinking in coronavirus time

I like to imagine that many intellectuals would agree that the last thing one needs during a pandemic are intellectuals, let alone ‘critical’ intellectuals. I am not thinking here of ‘experts’ who are always needed, of course, as long as their knowledge is considered of practical value. For, ‘saving humanity from a virus’ is a practical endeavour that leaves no room for annoying pontificators who, if anything, get in the way rather than help the collective effort to save as many lives as possible and preserve society’s capacity to re-emerge as efficiently as possible. These efforts are led, as they should be, by a politico-medico-policing assemblage aimed at organizing society in such a way as to stop the virus from spreading, and to ensure hospitals cope with the flow of affected people, while maintaining the reproduction of the core economic functions necessary for survival.

Practical urgency and intellectual reflexivity are not exactly compatible. Bourdieu’s critique of scholastic reason becomes more acutely necessary than ever here. He uses the example of the grammarian walking by the lake who sees someone shouting: ‘drowning … I am’ and declares to the people around him: ‘here we have an example of bad grammar’. Especially in times of crisis, there is something fundamentally unethical in treating reality as existing for the purpose of exemplifying our theories of capitalism, colonialism, biopolitics or whatever else.

But even if not scholastically inclined, a critical intellectual, a professional whose job is to observe, think, reflect and convey ideas, can be a serious nuisance in circumstances of practical urgency. This is because the temporality of critique and the temporality of urgent practices are generally incompatible. Imagine someone instructing the captain of the Titanic, as he is trying to save whatever passengers he can, that they need to understand that colonialism was a factor in the tragedy everyone is in. Better be an activist than an intellectual in such situations, alerting third-class passengers of possible class and racial biases in accessing lifeboats, for instance.

While people would be unreceptive to any critical intellectual labour in such circumstances, I would imagine that a ‘politically critical intellectual labour’ would be particularly unwelcome. Because it puts society before such gigantic and existential tasks, pandemics invite bi-partisan politics, and people who try to play politics with the struggle against the virus are not looked at kindly. Some do of course. But if they lack subtlety, they are quickly perceived as people who prioritize playing divisive politics in the midst of a war against an invading enemy: that they seem unwilling to share the generalized ‘now is the time to fight the enemy and nothing else’ imperative facilitates their portrayal and de-legitimisation as quasi-traitors for whoever wishes to do so.

Yet, needless to say, there is a lot to be intellectually critical about amid a pandemic. If the virus itself appears as something a-social, it is nonetheless experienced socially, and the struggle against it, whether in the form of prevention or medication, is still a social struggle. As such it is marked by all the biases and relations of power that mark any struggle: racism, colonialism, class-bias, sexism, heteronormative biases, all participate in shaping how a society deals with a virus. And precisely because pandemics invite war metaphors such as the above, they create spaces that are particularly welcoming to themes where reactionary politics thrives, themes such as ‘cohesion’, ‘unity’ and ‘common purpose’. These are particularly political precisely because those who call for them always do so by adding ‘now is not the time for politics’. Any critical imagination on hearing such words would immediately sense, like Pavlov’s dog, something to munch on. And yet, because, in the face of a pandemic, there is something true in the statement that ‘now is not the time for politics’, engaging in intellectual and political critique cannot and should not be treated as a facile endeavour. A lack of awareness that one is dwelling amid such a contradictory situation that is at once hyper- and a-political is bound to create that very annoying and useless pontificator we began with. I am assuming that a critical intellectual cares not only about being right but about being listened to. Strategic questions of tone, of timing, of what to say and not say, and of how much to insist, all become particularly important.

To be sure, pandemic or not, the nightmarish figure of the uselessly and continuously commenting person, endlessly being negative, endlessly chattering, but never having anything to say that would positively affect people’s lives, always haunts intellectuals. It haunts us because it sometimes captures accurately how some of those listening to us or reading us can, and some inevitably do, experience us. And as much as it pains us to admit it, it haunts us because it also captures what we sometimes can be, and what I have no doubt, we sometimes are.

Personally, I know that the above is something I need to continuously fight myself to not be. I can even say, without any exaggeration, that throughout my working life as an academic, as a teacher and as a writer, one of my foremost goals has been to try to avoid being that figure of the ‘endlessly chattering, useless, academic’. That is why people telling me how my teaching or my writing has positively affected their lives has been and continues to be immensely sustaining. And even though I have had enough experiences of students and readers who have given me positive feedback about my work to feel confident and good about its effect on people, I know that it is not beyond me to dwell in negative chatter. The figure of the useless academic continues to haunt me.

Nonetheless, and though I’ve never subjected my idea of what is useful to anything like what Sara Ahmed (2019) has recently done in her unique and wonderful book on ‘the uses of use’, I should make clear that I’ve never had a very narrow conception of what it means to be useful. And I’ve never submitted to a crude, conservative, over-pragmatic and anti-intellectual conception of usefulness. When I think of useful I always think of something that is participatory in a Levy-Bruhlian ¹ sense. Something that augments people’s lives. In that sense, a cuddle, music, the sound of birds, a beautiful landscape, a nice stimulating lecture, poetry, a good science fiction novel, all of these things I consider capable of being useful. If I am on board the Titanic, I’d rather aspire to say words that have the same effect as the music of that quasi-mythical ensemble that kept on playing until the very end.

I think all of the above has made me more disposed when thinking about COVID-19 to want to write away from the scene of political and existential urgency. I am more attracted to write about new situations the virus has given rise to and new modes of being that it has highlighted. This is not a normative suggestion. It is simply how I am trying to continue to work my brain in the midst of all these difficulties. So I will finish with two examples.

One thing that has attracted my attention as a possible object of study since the outbreak of the coronavirus is the experience of vulnerability. I have particularly been thinking about the relationship between vulnerability and anxiety. What became immediately clear from the very beginning in Wuhan is the differential vulnerability of age and health groups to the virus. People over the age of 70, people with diabetes, people with heart problems and respiratory problems were all considered as more vulnerable to the virus. More vulnerable did not mean more likely to catch the virus but more likely to be affected by it in a serious way, and indeed more likely to die from it. However, this was not an iron rule: there were enough cases of young people with no underlying health problems showing strong symptoms. This has meant that there was no hard-and-fast correlation between distribution of vulnerability (the objective likelihood of being affected by the virus) and the distribution of anxiety (i.e. the sense of vulnerability). The fact that I belong to a social category that is less likely to die from COVID-19 while my friend is an over-70 asthmatic person doesn’t mean that by next week I couldn’t be the one in intensive care while my friend is feeling fine. This made me think about the difference between statistical likelihoods and the experience of statistical likelihoods, and how this experience is shaped by class and gender, as well as racial and colonial factors. It also made me think about the different politics entailed by the management of differential vulnerability and the management of differential anxiety, and how this can complicate our inherited conceptions of ‘biopolitics’.

Another particularly interesting phenomena that has attracted my attention is that while the metaphors of war used to describe the way society is dealing with the virus are very conventional, the practices we are invited to engage in subvert conventional notions of what is passive and what is active resistance to an enemy. First, there is the idea of an enemy that can only be defeated not by confronting it heroically in the streets but by moving out of its way. Hiding in one’s house is in normal situations of confrontation what cowards and those who are unable to fight do. It’s opting for passivity in the face of the enemy. But here, against COVID-19, hiding out of the way is the most active thing one can do. It is the one who insists on staying in the street who is passively allowing the virus to win. We say ‘No Pasaran’ not by blocking the streets but by going home and washing our hands. By being a subversion of our dominant imaginary of what is passive and what is active resistance and as such being against our common sense of both, these are sometimes hard to internalize. If the virus is the enemy, the collaborators are the ones who, like the American libertarian rightists, want to confront it ‘head-on’. The resistance comes from those who know what is needed to stop it from circulating. They do so by simply removing themselves from out of its way. In this sense, the resistance to COVID-19 can sharpen for us different conceptions of what resistance entails. It invites us to think that such strategies, of refusing to be a conduit, of de-vectorizing ourselves, so to speak, can be usefully transposed to other spaces where they can be a suitable alternative to more confrontational strategies.

I for one can immediately think that such a refusal of being an agent of transmission is a far better strategy against Trump and Trumpism. Indeed the latter can be thought of as a social virus that thrives on circulating. It does not care if it is circulated by people who agree with it or people who are critical, as long as it is occupying more and more people, then it is doing well. Trumpism occupies you when it preoccupies you. That’s why it cannot be resisted with confrontation and critique but by a refusal to be its vector of transmission.