The Neoliberal Social Contract Pt.2
Part 2 in a multi-series. Part 1 is available to read here.
The First Lockdown, 2020Walk outside the gaff – emptiness in the city centre. Suffocating grey sky, high pressure. Like a breath being held. The odd car, a Deliveroo cyclist, a seagull poking at a refuse sack of a private waste-disposal company. A face mask lies discarded in the gutter. A newly built student hotel, words tattooed all over the facade, it sits and bides its time. Lights are on but nobody's home.
I walk to the only place I can: the supermarket. Nervous atmosphere all around. A bit spooked myself.
Spat back outside, carrying the messages. Security guard mans the doors and regulates entry. The eeriness of it all sits on a knife-edge. Only last week teeth were gritting at the revellers, the excess of a Saturday night in Dublin given to ‘fun’ and ‘freedom’. Libertinism, although not the radical, tragic, and beautiful kind of libertinism. The loud, colourful, riotous waste that is Dublin on a weekend. A great forgetting, a swell which ignores any notion of crisis. What could sustain such a parade, such a bonfire of vanities? Surely something must give.
Now, the spectre of the spectacle has departed, and the buildings lie dead and inanimate. It is as though we are witnessing their true face, what the spectre of activity was trying its hardest to conceal. The extended departure and eventual return of a demiurge known as Capital. Free-flowing, racing, raucous. The speed and the colour now faded, if they ever really existed? Now we are left with our most immediate selves, that feeling one has when the lights go down and everyone is told ‘safe home, we hope you enjoyed the show’.
But the show still goes on, in the darkened corners of economic landscapes, not perceptible to the human eye but in bits and data. It requires an iodine solution, a UV filter to see it truly. You will not see it before you like Fellini's cow — it is cyber, liquid, vaporous. It is the firing of electrons straight to a hard drive in a supercomputer which will spew out numbers and numbers and numbers... It is the flow of invisible subterraneous rivers, the dark money which is lighter than air but marches like hell’s army underfoot.
I look in my bank account, a deposit. More money than I ever worked for, granted unto me because forbidden from work. I was just getting into the swing of things at the café. I wonder how the guys are doing. Some will stay, others will return home. Walk past the shuttered pubs, I was only sitting inside sipping a pint the other week. Mass is called off. As are visits to family. I have not seen my grandparents in a while, nor many of my friends.
If you had told me last week I would have said “impossible”. Such dead weight, such an uneasy certainty about that word...
The pandemic upturned everything I thought I knew about Neoliberalism. For those who like to spend their time considering such things, Covid-19 presented something new, a layer hitherto unseen in the matrix. Everything written above has now been suspended, or at least, left in a state of strange uncertainty. Because a rupture of sorts has occurred, a strange miracle of the most banal kind. We are witnessing a development, the way a child reveals a certain aspect of themselves hitherto unknown to the parents once it begins to speak.
Covid's appearance on the scene revealed something new. For the first time in the history of Neoliberalism, the governments of the world enforced something inconceivable: lockdown. Enshrined civil liberties and rights were (and still are as of the time of writing) entirely restricted. Talking points normally levelled against the regimes of Russia and China could now be levelled against the West. Business, unbelievably, were shut. The current which pointed to commercial liberalisation, where the market was to be protected at all costs, was redirected. You could no longer leave a radius of several kilometres. Checkpoints were set up. Many were interrogated, cautioned, fined, even arrested. Protests for the most part were outlawed, except for the BLM protest in the summer of 2020.
Neoliberalism had, for the first time, developed a puritan streak. For the first time in its history it acknowledged and forbade the excessive character it had been exhibiting since its inception. This puritanism grew out of a more general theology of course: one where new gods were established, like in the defeat of Kronos by Zeus. Shamelessness gave way to a particular kind of shame. If one is found breaking regulations, the opprobrium one receives is unrelenting. Free-spirited abandon was proscribed, playgrounds shut as they would do in Belfast. For the first time, guilt grew into an emotion of the everyday, firmly replanted itself into the national psyche. The mask became a signal of piety for an impious age. All talk of liberation and freedom was for the moment curtailed.
The eeriness of the first pandemic made the ghostly apparition of Capitalism all the more apparent. The urban environment is the site of the most explicit change since pandemic-mode became operative. Its essence itself has changed many times. The absence of tourists paying to stay in former council-owned buildings, the lack of money and desire openly flowing in the streets and in the bars and in the clubs, lent Dublin a strange bareness, like a dead tree which once produced synthetic leaves. Its appendages were stripped away, leaving only what was always-already hidden behind it: buildings devoid of their commercial purpose, just their matter and form, simply structures as such. The streets became a different sort of vector: one whose directionality now turned away from the open flow of desire, of the spectacle of enjoyment, ruthless and varied commerce, to the ‘essentials’: supermarkets.
Economically, this shift made itself known. All those areas which Western governments had been openly supporting: self-started independent business, the push to make an entrepreneur out of everyone, market expansion without contraction, all of this was sequestered. Take the way in which independent businesses are currently receiving little by way of financial supports, and that they were even forced to close in the first place. We are occasionally reminded that many pubs, cafés and restaurants will never reopen. Yet the profit margins of billionaires continue to rise.
The pandemic, as a crisis, came about when crises rarely ever change the structure and functioning of Capitalism. One would be tempted to think of Neoliberalism as itself a crisis, or as a crisis in stasis. Other notions of crisis (moral, ecological, economic, political, social) generally find themselves resolved or continued without either recognition or repercussion at the level of profit. The crisis of 2008 and its lack of arrests, coupled with the buoyancy of financial bodies, their CEOs and their board members in their own personal fortunes, and in their reputations more generally, attests to the way in which hiccups do not prove fatal, provided that the price of austerity can be paid. Under normal conditions, the tendency of Neoliberalism to integrate and subsume everything (including, most importantly, dissent) was done with much efficiency and never at the expense of profit. The ongoing moral crisis which has occurred through the loss of religious community is something which would never be deserving of a national lockdown. Why is this, one might ask oneself?
Consequently, contra-Thatcher, a notion of ‘society’ has reemerged, in the form of the pandemic ‘national effort’ against Covid-19. An ‘effort’ which asks of one to do precisely nothing. A societal effort to suspend society. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can not-do for your country”, to quote a friend of mine. One rarely hears of a problem that is solved by doing nothing, yet our officials happily inform us that sitting at home and doing nothing will ‘save lives’. Just not those lives lost as a result of lockdown, mind you.
What does the pandemic ultimately tell us about Neoliberalism, in reference to the social contract which it once held as implicit? One thing is that we are witnessing a development of a kind, and that we can rule nothing out. What is clear is that Neoliberalism is many things, and not one thing alone. It can be internally conflicted, and still be the only game in town. It contains competing tensions: at one point, it wishes to dissolve national borders and identities, at another it invokes a national effort. I have declined to speak of vaccines, health-passports, the medical industry, and the litany of other forces at play in the pandemic and in Neoliberal society as such. I have declined to speak of an entirely new cultural fetish which has been created around the case numbers, the death tolls and the vaccine roll-out. I have declined to speak of many things, for there is simply too much to say. But I would implore the reader to not let what is happening pass over in silence.
The pandemic has told Ireland something about itself, and not something pretty. It shows that the potential for something called ‘society’ might be patiently waiting to reveal itself in a moment of crisis. This particular crisis however, just isn't it. If Thatcher is to be truly repudiated, the lockdown is not the path towards achieving such a goal. One can only hope that, sooner rather than later, such a path might be found, or created.
Walk along the riverbank. The sun streams through the trees, groups are outside drinking. The guards will come by to disperse them soon, back into houses where they have spent the last year, away from life, outside of any time which does not simply regulate their own body's decay. There is less explicit fear in the faces of people, even if the eyes are all that masks make visible on peoples' faces.
Desperately craving a pint. I would like to see my family without the afterthought that I might be breaking the law. Cultural life has ended. Zoom calls have replaced parties. True romance continues to be commercialised, banalised, forgotten.
I would rather be called selfish than continue living like this. We are so concerned with the rate of mortality, but what is this life if not its own form of death? How would one go about articulating the type of death the lockdown has ushered in?
The lockdown has dragged on for over a year now. We are told there is hope, light at the end of the tunnel. But will we truly be saved?
The warm rays of sun cause the water lilies to dazzle in the sunlight, as the river flows onward into a future uncertain...