“When This is Over”: Utopian Longing and Post-Pandemic Politics

I have already written elsewhere how the current disciplinary moment of coronavirus imagines new modes of citizenship that would relegate all responsible citizens to the (dis)comforts of the indoors and far away from the realities and quotidian rituals of pre-pandemic life. In the chokehold of this new dichotomy — the “good” and the “bad” coronavirus citizen — and the moral and biological intensity of pandemic panic, little room is left to explore “safer” pandemic practices — to negotiate what the theorist Kane Race (Pleasure Consuming Medicine, 2009, p.2) has described as ways of “mediating between pleasure and safety…through the careful interaction of bodies.” Asceticism — the sacrifice of pleasure, a life stripped to its barest bones — is the current gold standard of disease prevention. Under this moral and biological regime, the boundaries of “necessary” and “essential” action are carefully policed and frivolity (always in the eye of the beholder) is circumscribed a public health menace. Sunbathers, for instance, now cast as morally bankrupt hedonists, are admonished or arrested for leaving cramped living conditions to experience a moment of life-enhancing sunshine, rather than aided in spending time outside safely and considerately.

While the extreme urgency of the situation — the threat of harm to the vulnerable and predictions of a staggering death toll bound to be felt universally — appears to demand similarly extreme interventions, inconsistencies abound. Front-line workers and the disproportionately non-white working class, through the continued demands of market capitalism, are placed in excessive proximity to risk — denied personal protective equipment, safe working conditions, and access to testing that might alleviate uncertainty. Asceticism is a rule heterogeneously applied across the contingent bounds of class and “necessary” work. Worse still, it is a rule that exacerbates the situation it sets out to mitigate, since in its ideological extremity it is bound to be broken, flouted, misunderstood, or ignored (and not, as I have argued elsewhere, merely because the rule-breaker is a reckless deviate but because the conditions to practice ‘good’ coronavirus citizenship are often diminished).

While asceticism prevails, the majority of us remain bound to our homes. We are left to experiment with a life stripped to its barest bones. In suggesting that our lives have been stripped back, I am not proposing that those fortunate enough to be able to stay at home (and reduce their own exposures to risk) occupy new positions of victimhood and suffering. No doubt, many of our societies’ poorest and the most disenfranchised were suffering worse prior to the emergence of coronavirus and are now suffering worse still. And, no doubt, many of society’s most well off may find little difficulty in adapting to the demands to “stay at home,” safely resting in their well-equipped, well-stocked, comfortable dwellings, saving money usually frittered on travel and social obligations, and with less, rather than more, work to do. (Despite this, the rich will still find ways of comparing self-isolation to incarceration and without a hint of irony). No doubt, however, the pandemic practices of social or physical distancing and self-isolation have stripped many of our lives of the qualities and activities that previously made them meaningful.

The forceful subtraction from our routines of the pleasures and displeasures that coloured life outside of our pandemic habits reveals the truth of the Gestalt quality of our existences. Our experiences are far greater than the sum of their parts. The sense of loss, then, is immeasurable. Worldwide, we find ourselves yearning for forms of connection, for familiar and stranger touch, for sites of mingling and close proximity — all denied to us by the threat of contagion. The virus paranoiacally infects our bodily interactions, wilting the branches and tendrils of sociality. So: sex, kinship, and friendship are desired with renewed intensity. If desire implies a lack, then where the lack that desire implies is enforced through denial, desire reaches fever-pitch (for those who are accustomed to satisfying these urges when they surface. The corollary: are those who are accustomed to experimenting with erotic denial especially equipped to #stayathome?).

Yet, it is not merely the expected forms of interrelation and touch that populate the daily fantasies of the nation’s coronavirus citizens. More mundane aspects of life have suddenly, in a landscape of denial, been cast into a spectacularly erotic spotlight. The crush of tube passengers, idling in supermarkets, the gym locker-room, the dentist’s waiting room, a patch of sun or a grassy knoll in a crowded park, the foyer of the cinema or kebab shop on a Friday night — whatever latent or overt eroticisms these sites of bodily encounter possessed are lovingly magnified under the lens of a pre-pandemic nostalgia. As one Twitter user writes, “my most erotic and forbidden fantasy… a nice meal in a restaurant with 6–8 friends… perhaps i am late because of a subway delay. perhaps the pasta is overcooked…. ah! i am getting ahead of myself.” Desire, then, is not merely a lack — a negative relation to the object — but a positive force: it can reshape our experiences of, relations to, and understanding of the object (present, absent, or longed for). The object and ourselves are changed and renewed in the light of desire.

In these desiring conditions, we find ourselves suspended in the liminal domain of the virtual and of distal connection. We commune online, on the phone, or perhaps six feet apart in not-quite proximity. Distally connected this way, the physical bonds of our networked selves driven further and further apart, we find ourselves longing for distant futures — in a desiring state. “When this is over” is a refrain of utopian longing heard around the world. On Zoom meetings with colleagues and friends, on chats with digital fuckbuddies, in DMs, texts, emails, and even the Queen’s address to the nation — “when this is over” harbours the promise of a post-pandemic world, filled with the pleasures missing from life in lockdown. “When this is over, I’m going to be a complete slut,” one stranger tells me on Grindr, “take load after load after load.” “When this is over, we’re going to go on a cheap holiday somewhere,” my partner tells me, “and drink beers in the park.” “When this is over, I want to dance for two days straight,” I tell my friends. “Which pub u all heading to when this is over?” a friend asks. “When this is over, I’m never going to complain about going to the gym, about strangers on public transport, about queuing at the bar, about Monday mornings, about crowds, about doing the shopping, about going out and not staying in, ” I think and I read again and again and again.

In “when this is over,” we mourn for things taken for granted and dream up a future based on memories of the past, populated by then- and newly-cherished objects. In Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed’s book If Memory Serves, the authors argue that memory and collective remembering ought to be the foundations of any future-oriented politics. They reject certain queer imaginations of utopia, arguing that scholars like José Esteban Muñoz (in Cruising Utopia) theorise utopia as quite unmoored from past realities of pre-AIDS queer community, which might serve as the foundations of a politics for radical change. Against the circulating neo-conservativism forwarded by gay commentators like Andrew Sullivan, who found in the HIV/AIDS crisis a morality tale about the need for state-sanctioned homosexual monogamy, Castiglia and Reed argue that recalling distant memories of pre-AIDS sexual cultures resists assimilationist tendencies by imagining already-extant possibilities of libidinal and promiscuous community. Thus, they propose that “memory is the basis for what we call ideality politics” (Castiglia and Reed, If Memory Serves, 2011, p. 177) — an optimistic politics that fondly recalls transformative, happy-making aspects of queer past as the stuff of queer futures. Such an optimism is evident in the sigh of “when this is over”– a future imagined through the memory of past pleasures. Clinging to these memories as they are — untampered, transgressive, spectacular — will be essential if we are to resist a post-pandemic politics that would leverage experiences of coronavirus as a motive for the policing of possible pleasures, transgressive behaviours or deviancy as recently remembered ‘public health risks’.

The optimism of the phrase is couched in the construction of the certainty of the statement: when this is over implies that this will be over. Such certainty provides a vehicle for collective hopefulness — not merely a distraction from the misery of the moment but for a mode of coming together, in solidarity. We can see this is in the hot cyber chat of shared sexual fantasy that, at least temporarily, is the safer sex practice du jour. “When this is over,” an online hookup tells someone, presumably or definitely masturbating over their words, “I’m going to worship that ass for hours.”

“When this is over,” their partner replies in kind, “I’m going to let you.”

So, for a moment, they come together over the imagined and certain future they share. For now, this shared optimism seems enough to hold steady even the most fearful and downtrodden among us. We would have cause for concern when “when this is over” is over, giving way to a tentative and hopeless question: “when is this over?” Thus, “when this is over” becomes what queer feminist and critical race theorist Sara Ahmed (“Happy Objects”, 2009, p.29) has described as a “happy object;” where “happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward certain objects”, we are collectively steered us to the promise of a happy post-pandemic future.

And perhaps it is this collective optimism about a post-pandemic future that might lay an effective foundation for equitable pandemic practice. For, while shame presides as the dominant affective tool to move people out of public spaces and indoors, if nothing else, shaming people into staying home is ineffectual. Shame, as the HIV/AIDS crisis makes evident, is a poor and punishing public health intervention. Shame tends to drive people into secrecy, avoidance, refusal, denial, to create states of exceptionalism for themselves, and so on. And it tends to coalesce around and stick to the most marginal of groups and individuals. We are not all shamed equally. Shame is, therefore, (counterintuitively) bad for disease prevention, despite its centrality to a disciplinary regime that makes certain people feel very good about themselves indeed. Perhaps a shared investment in the happiness of a post-pandemic future, oriented to the promise of “when this is over,” would be a less excoriating and more equitable way of encouraging curve-flattening behaviours.

Yet, the danger in such a collective project would be a failure to enumerate precisely what a “happy” future looks like and for whom. Indeed, Ahmed’s purview on the happiness promise is that the affective lure of the “happy object” creates imperatives about the “good life”: both what this looks like and that we should strive for it. In this sense, happiness retains the disciplinary character of shame. It creates necessary conditions of and for happiness and, moreover, its own corrective classes of deviants — those who refuse the conditions of happiness or that deviate from it. Ahmed’s figure of the unhappy queer, who refuses the heteronormative accoutrements of the good life (like marriage and reproductive kinship), and the feminist killjoy are examples of figures carved and cast out by the happiness promise. As with shame, happiness is not shared equally.

The ambivalence of happiness — that what is happy-making for some makes others unhappy — lurks troublingly beneath the optimism of Castiglia and Reed’s “ideality politics”. If memories of past pleasures can shore up visions of possible futures, the problem is that these pleasures cannot possibly be universally shared. The landscapes of past happinesses are heterogeneous, as exclusive as they are inclusive, and anticipate futures with similarly problematic affective terrains. We are all too familiar with and weary of a rising moral conservatism articulated through a politics of nostalgia: the promise to Make America Great Again or to Take Back Control. This kind of memorialisation could never appeal to those women, people of colour, and queers not cushioned by gender, racial or class privilege and for whom a recreation of the social conditions of the past implies a real and present danger. And this pandemic moment has ignited its own dangerous politics of nostalgia. Fondly summoning “blitz spirit” and the memory of a kingdom united by World War II paints rosily over the hardships of the period — a form of selective memory — and summons the kind of jingoism and nationalism precipitative of a xenophobic culture hostile to outsiders, ‘non-British’, non-white Others and, of course, “foreign pathogens” (a Sontag-esque metaphor that is almost painfully transparent).

If recalling myths and memories of days gone by as a way to tighten the grip of status quo seems like the preoccupation of only the most conservative right-wing forces, I would argue that the wistful longing for hegemony is, in fact, widely dispersed among the populus (although it goes unnoticed). As I have already suggested, conditions of social isolation and social distancing leave many of us yearning for things to go back to normal. Norms and normativity have always had their lures and forceful orientations but now, while we are starved of normality, they are especially eroticised. As such, where we dream up a world “when this is over” predicated on the norms of pre-pandemic life (of pre-pandemic life as normal), we risk recreating the unequal social conditions that are known to exacerbate the harms and pain of the current pandemic. A plea for a return to the newly cherished bosom of normality can also house a tacit plea for a return to precarity, vulnerability, deep grooves of racial and class inequality, failing and neglected public health systems — in other words, a return to the kind of conditions that got us into this mess in the first place.

In part, this profound lack of imagination is a product of a pervasive virological determinism. By virological determinism, I mean the reductive belief that a virus alone, rather than the politics, contexts, and social conditions it travels within, causes pandemic. Virological determinism is an epistemology that, at the level of governance, encourages highly technical and behavioural interventions as attempts to mitigate pandemic, while leaving unaddressed the social structures that undergird and exacerbate the spread and risks of disease. Moreover, this widespread epistemology mistakes the subject of “when this is over”– where “this” is taken to be the virus it limits the scope of our problems to the pathogen Covid-19. Post-pandemic future, under virological determinism, looks a lot or exactly like the pre-pandemic past where the foundations remain set for the devastation of a new novel coronavirus and its aftermaths.

Hegemony, its presence and its memory, is the cage that limits the growth and breadth of utopian imagination. In the queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, the author argues that forgetting can be a powerful tool against hegemony. “Forgetfulness,” he writes (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 2011, p.70), “becomes a rupture with the eternally self-generating present, a break with a self-authorizing past, and an opportunity for a non-hetero-reproductive future.” Forgetfulness can shatter links to ideologies and concepts that tether our world-making to the past and limit the possibility of nurturing radical alternatives. Halberstam argues that forgetting “the family”, for instance, is necessary if we are to access “other modes of relating, belonging, and caring” (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 2011, p.72). If we are to take Halberstam seriously, then we ought to regard the current pandemic and the desiring state we find ourselves in not as an opportunity to eroticise the recent past but to break with it. So much has already been uprooted by the pandemic and so much thought to be impossible has been made possible overnight. Rather than remember the financial and political conditions that have contributed to a devastating global homelessness crisis, that puts the poor and people of colour on the front-lines of disease risk, that will make the hardest hit the least able to access and afford testing and effective treatment, can we forget these structures entirely? Can we allow our present, afflicted and reshaped as we are by Covid-19, but where homelessness is ended in cities overnight and accessible, national health services have re-emerged as urgent priorities, to dictate our futures?

When this is over, I think we can. And, to correct the linguistic and epistemological mistakes of virological determinism, I think that “this” will only be over when we do.