미생물의 폭풍 가운데 블루멘베르크와 함께 좌초되기_니콜라스 랑리츠_2020

 

 

 

It was a beautiful spring day when The New School decided to close its New York campus amid a microbial tsunami. Right in time, my family had escaped from Brooklyn, which emerged as the epicenter of the epicenter of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the United States, to a leafy New Jersey suburb where our fellow white-collar workers celebrated the fact that they no longer had to commute to the city by taking a walk in the park. The scene made me think of the early days of World War I when many Europeans enthusiastically embraced the looming disaster: "Finally, something happens!" -- only that, in the commuter belt of the city that never sleeps, this holiday mood felt more like: "Finally, nothing happens!"

 

Of course, the calm before the storm didn't last long. As Brooklyn's Prospect Park turned into a field hospital and the Bronx dug out mass graves, I put aside the New York Times and re-read Hans Blumenberg's Shipwreck with Spectator. This booklet, first published in 1979, traces the metaphor of shipwreck through the history of philosophy. It contributed to the author's project of what he calls a “metaphorology,” examining the non-conceptual underbelly of philosophical thought. But I returned to it because of the metaphor of the shipwreck itself: I had also become a spectator who observes the distress of those at sea from the safety of dry land. This was precisely the place of theoria in ancient Greek philosophy. I didn't lack compassion for those drowning in their own body fluids in a cytokine storm, but, like Montaigne, I felt pleasure that one of my useless qualities, the ability to be a spectator of an event I could not prevent, helped me and my family to survive (p. 17).

 

Having survived the Holocaust as what the Nazis called a Half-Jew, Blumenberg was no stranger to the pleasures of self-preservation. At a time when his colleagues almost unanimously agreed that the subject–object dichotomy was among the great evils of modernity, he defended the existential importance of detachment. In recent years, the tendency to emphasize our interconnectedness with the microbial world has endowed parts of science studies with an almost mystical quality. Shipwreck with Spectator offers an untimely perspective on the difference the present introduces with regard to the past. In antiquity, seafaring symbolized a transgression of natural boundaries that invited disaster. By contrast, anthropologist Tobias Rees (2020), among others, has articulated a new cosmology in which a multispecies configuration of viruses, animal hosts, and humans will no longer seem like an illegitimate transgression as humans come to realize that they have always been part of the outside. With a PDF of Blumenberg on my iPad (the hardcopy could not be retrieved from my closed Manhattan office), I preferred biosocial distancing to a swim in the churned-up ocean of viruses.

 

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for other uses of the shipwreck metaphor to resonate as well. Within a week of its closure, the university ran into heavy seas and as department chair I could not observe the spectacle from the shore but had to participate in an onslaught of emergency Zoom meetings. Our faculty salaries were cut, pension contributions eliminated, and this was only the first ballast that the administration shed as it began to reconstruct the ship on the open sea to prevent it from sinking. Considering that the COVID pandemic has become a moment of truth, not only for higher education, future-oriented readers might want to note Blumenberg's short book, and read about modern uses of a metaphor that would eventually abandon imagery of dry land and safe harbors, to prepare us for "living with shipwreck" indefinitely (p. 73).

 

 

 

Blumenberg, H. (1997/1979) Shipwreck with Spectator. Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Rees, T. (2020) From The Anthropocene To The Microbiocene. Noēma (1), https://www.noemamag.com/from-the-anthropocene-to-the-microbiocene/.

Nicolas Langlitz is an Associate Professor at The New School for Social Research in New York