SI: Cultural Commons

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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The haunting figure of the ! The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/1367549420926182
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Ghassan Hage
The University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract
A critical intellectual, someone whose job is to think, reflect and critique can be the
last thing one needs in times of practical urgency. If anything such people can be a
hindrance to the recovery effort. Pardoxically, in such times, critical intellectuals are
more necessary than ever. Pandemics, for instance, invite war metaphors, and
unleash reactionary themes of `cohesion’, `unity’ and `common purpose’ that require
being challenged. To be a critical intellectual in such times is to be aware of, and
learn how to negotiate, such a contradiction.

Keywords
Coronavirus, COVID-19, critical thinking, intellectual labour, use

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 think-
ing 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

Corresponding author:
Ghassan Hage, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia.
Email: ghage@unimelb.edu.au
2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 0(0)

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 some-
one instructing the captain of the Titanic, as he is trying to save whatever pas-
sengers 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 life-
boats, 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 exis-
tential 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 prior-
itize 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 expe-
rienced 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 par-
ticularly 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
Hage 3

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 con-
tinuously 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 any-
thing 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-
Bruhlian1 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 urgen-
cy. 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
4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 0(0)

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 trans-
mission 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
Hage 5

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.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

Note
1. Unlike the dominant Western conception of life as the attribute of distinct and auton-
omous beings, Levy-Bruhl (1985) argued, on the basis of Amazonian ethnographic data,
that people, as well as objects and animals, can participate in, and enhance, each others’
being. See also Hage (2017) for the relevance of this argument for thinking alternative
relations with nature in the face of global warming.

References
Ahmed S (2019) What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hage G (2017) Is Racism an Environmental Threat? New York: Polity Press.
Levy-Bruhl L (1985) How Natives Think. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Biographical note
Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of
Melbourne. His current research is on the different conceptions and imaginaries of what
constitutes a viable life. His publications include Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and
the Radical Imagination (2015).