Tag Archives: Covid

Moscow’s pandemic in the not-so-smart city. Part 2: Social monitoring and prostheses of control

Leave a reply

In the second part of our book chapter, on which these posts are based, we turn to a description of the steps the Moscow government made at the beginning of the pandemic. The Russian pandemic ‘began’ in Moscow. Perhaps out of admission of the Russian state’s low capacity, perhaps out of cynicism, the federal centre ‘delegated’ to the regions responsibility for measures against Covid. Certainly part of the logic was to preserve the austerity politics the centre has pursued for some time; from the perspective of today, Russian fiscal expansion to cope with Covid has been among the smallest proportions of GDP in the developed world.  For example, one of the early ‘responses’ was a capped 8% loan to a limited groups of SMEs – hardly comparable to the significant support in some other complex and service-orientated economies. Now problems are emerging with a promised 3% loan cap for small businesses. The GDP deficit never even reached 5% during the pandemic and is now back in surplus (compare this to the immediate fiscal response in Anglo-Saxon countries that was nearly 10% of GDP). The refusal to make use of fiscal ‘space’ by the government in 2020-21 is not only criminal, but economically illiterate. Poverty rates have risen by around 10%. For the first time I’ve encountered beggars in even the smallest towns.

The implementation of QR codes made Moscow’s response in 2020 famous, but the first use of these was actually in Kazan. From 15 April 2020, QR codes in Moscow were required for internal movement. In reality though, the limits on mobility without the use of codes was hazy – taking out rubbish, walking pets 100m from residence all allowed Muscovites to test the practical limits. Of note is the enrolment as ‘police’ of Moscow’s taxi drivers – now required to check QR codes of their passengers, as were turnstile controllers employed by Moscow Transit Authority. By the end of April, a ‘social monitoring’ app was imposed on the infected to enforce ‘home quarantine’.  The ‘mask-glove regime’ was introduced in May 2020 and is absurdly still in force as of November 2021, although since summer 2021 I have rarely seen anyone in transit wearing gloves. Interestingly, the full regime seems to be only enforced in one of the higher-end shopping chains.

In the chapter version of our research, we reflect on the Moscow authorities’ attempt to emulate China’s fangkong system of public health surveillance. We also contrast the Russian ‘Social Monitoring’ system with Singapore’s horizontal TraceTogether system, and Seoul’s use of mobile and banking app data to track individuals. Arguably, Moscow’s system was most similar to China’s Alipay Health Code, although the latter was both more sophisticated and less transparent in operation. The Moscow Social Monitoring app was plagued by bugs and ‘dirty’ code, seemingly slapped together in just a few weeks and was a far cry from the initial promises by City Hall that a system like Seoul’s personal data aggregation was planned.

What can we learn from re-reading Deleuze’s 1990 ‘Control Society’ essay? This is a post-institutional look at control. Deleuze pessimistically sees Foucault’s governmentalizing (the ‘sovereign’ person learns to love the policing of herself) as transient. Using the metaphor of a corporation, Deleuze foresees control as continual adjustment via the codifed ‘dividualization’ of information about people (did he read Marilyn Strathern on the quiet?). Deleuze anticipates how technology can create a kind of double of an individual based on her data trail – and that this trail can enable control mechanisms via real-time exploitation of data – what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘universal modulation’. Presciently, Deleuze also sees this logic as destroying the rationale for traditional state institutions (why do we need a hospital or public health system based on evaluation of evidence and research, when an algorithm can be pre-programmed to optimise health outcomes on the basis of a simple risk calculation? Do you take a particular diabetes or asthma drug, asks the algo? Then your mobility card is automatically blocked when R-reproduction reaches a certain point). Judgement is suspended on the basis of simple big-data calculations of relative risk.

But what does the imperfect implementation of this logic look like in the case of Moscow in 2020? On 15th April, QR codes for essential journeys were supposed to be available for download from the City Hall website, but immediately the site was shown to crash repeatedly under the demand. The embedding of QR codes into the existing digital infrastructure of ride-hailing apps also failed ‘due to the providers not yet having found a way of doing this’. What we observe is an interesting example of improvisation based on using old tech for new purposes – a 2015 app from the Transit Authority was repurposed for use in hand-held tablets by law-enforcement personnel. Enormous queues at Metro stations formed, giving a fundamental insight into technology-led surveillance policy, one that is not so different from elsewhere: almost no ‘real-world’ contingencies were really considered. For example, what was the lone Rosguard officer supposed to do with someone whose code didn’t work? It became clear that only the first link in the chain was considered. The sight of law enforcement telephoning for advice and their superiors having no response was repeated over and over.

In late April 2020 the QR was finally linked to individualized travel cards (noting that these are a small minority of cards in use – the majority being anonymous cards that you can load with credit). Despite this advance, police did not change their protocol – they still required a barcode or QR and did not have the capacity to read the travel card’s Covid validity. The much admired private sector was no better. The Yandex taxi app is a sophisticated piece of flexible software allowing you to tell the aggregator whether your driver is wearing a seatbelt, has good taste in music, etc, and allows you to leave a tip or not. In our chapter, we discuss the potential for this IT giant to have assisted City Hall’s control society. It did aggregate its own data about Covid risk using geolocation data and published it publicly. But this was not integrated into the City’s response and clearly City Hall feared the dilution of central control.  In the next part of our chapter and in the next blog post tomorrow, we discuss the relevance of theories of ‘surveillant assemblage’.

Moscow’s pandemic in the not-so-smart city. Part 1

4 Replies

As I promised, here is the first of four posts that summarise in English the Russian-language chapter Galina Orlova and I wrote for this book. A draft of the chapter in Russian can be downloaded here. This post also picks up the story after the series of posts I wrote last year about Covid in Moscow and Russia.

Сети города: Люди. Технологии. Власти: Под редакцией Екатерины Лапиной-Кратасюк, Оксаны Запорожец, Андрея Возьянова

…In spring 2020 Moscow implemented a ‘regime of heightened readiness’ – a heterogeneous approach to the pandemic which combined partial quarantine (karantin) with self-isolation regimes and targeted state financial support that conformed largely to a neoliberal logic of delegated responsibility.  We also pay attention to the technocratic ‘fix’ attempted which was highly ambitious and at first disastrous.

One aspect worth highlighting is that electronic ‘nadzor’ – ‘surveillance’ was built into the Moscow-city government’s response from the start. Over 65-year-olds’ transport cards were blocked and individual housing blocks were assigned set times for exercise.

At the same time we trace the evolution of Moscow’s Smart City 2030 plan. This plan was fundamentally affected by Covid and the previous version removed from еру web in May 2020 (prompting various characteristic of Covid conspiracy theories). In our book chapter we discuss the glaring disparity between the smart city goals about ‘quality of life’ and the Covid reality, which was about enrolling new agents (human and otherwise) of police control via the smart city. Similarly, the low quality of so-called ‘algorithmic’ solutions was laid bare for all to see. Our chapter is called the ‘not-so-smart city’ in English, which loses the pun of the Russian title – (bez)umnyi gorod: the ‘(de)mented city’. Crazy/mad/demented as a noun is derived from the root word ‘mind’, or ‘clever’.

So how did the Mayoralty change their plan for smartification? If anything they doubled down with the help of the decree signed by the president in June 2020: Moscow becomes an experimental juridical regime where aggregated use of personal data is no longer constrained by law. More prosaic is the full commitment to fully digitize city-citizen services. Of note are experiments with automating 5G cleaning vehicles and – now the stuff of internet memes – ‘smart’ face-recognition door locks to communal entry-ways. Even without drunk old men headbutting HAL-like video-locks that refuse them access to their own homes, the naïve technoutopianism is evident in proposals like those to replace wheelchairs with smart exoskeletons (yes this is a real proposal) in a country whose hostility to the disabled is literally built into urban design.

Now, that’s not to say that Moscow isn’t already a leader in smart-city affordances for its exclusive citizenry. There are well developed projects for a single electronic system for doctor’s appointments, school timetabling and public Wi-Fi coverage that put many European and N. American cities to shame. Smart City 2030 is only one of three stages, two of which are already complete. For this stage, the blockchain, AI, and the internet of things are highlighted areas. The Muscovite (Social Services) Card has been around a while (2001). This is a combined bank, travel, cultural services, and medical services plastic contactless chip card. In a city that continues to provide very generous social benefits to large numbers of residents this card is highly valuable. This is evidenced by the city government wanting to making it a criminal offence for a person other than the owner to make use of the card. The card – characteristically – is also vulnerable to hacking, and contains sensitive personal data beyond that which is necessary for its use. In 2018 there were 5 million cards in use.

Annalisa Cocchia has made a systematic literature review of the differences in understanding the use of the words: ‘digital’ and ‘smart’ cities. She finds the latter to focus on a move away from technological determinism and towards decentralization. In practice we can’t really talk about even an ‘actually-existing’ smart city. There are plenty of examples of reality falling far short of rhetoric, from Songdo in Korea, to Toronto in Canada. Nonetheless, Moscow really is a leader – top in the world for carsharing apps, top-10 for internet speed, a UN-recognised leader in electronic services, and top for video surveillance for a city outside China. Characteristic of Moscow is the retention of techno-deterministic aspects and a centralizing logic and this is in contrast to the original ‘electronic Moscow’ plans from the early 2000s. There’s definite echoes detectable in the plan of Soviet ‘atomic powered communist’ technoutopianism (see Josephson 1996). 2030 is envisioned as a ‘city governed by data’, where aggregated biometric data is fed to AI, even via clothing to monitor the habits of its owner that can then be used by insurance companies. Automation of decision makers will obviate the need for citizen involvement. The thing is, there are always real choices to make in which systems to expand: free Wi-Fi, or face-recognition? Access, or Control. Covid accelerates the choice for the latter. Free Wi-Fi hotspots appeared in Moscow in 2012. I well remember getting high-speed free Wi-Fi for a while even in my apartment there! There is free Wi-Fi of varying quality in the Metro and buses. There are over 150,000 security cameras and 175,000 devices feed data to a ‘unified centre’).

In 2020 the Tholons city-rating of ‘smartness’ saw Moscow make massive gains against other world cities. Moscow scored very high, but only thanks to a change in weighting that emphasised digitization over liveability and intellectual development. In our book chapter we ask the question – is Moscow anticipating an ‘anti-humanist’ trend away from smartness as emphasising human development and towards control? Find out in the next post.

Russia’s Covid civil disobedience

Leave a reply
‘How many have to die before you get vaccinated? Vaccinate!’. Central Moscow mid-2021.

Last week, András Tóth-Czifra wrote a nice post summarising the weaknesses of Russia’s emerging digital authoritarianism. I have a lot more to say on that topic next week at a roundtable on a book that is coming out – Networks of the City: People, Technology and Power. [upcoming blogposts will summarise]

In the meantime, András inspired me to revisit the political angle of Covid in Russia. His post looks at the small scale protests against QR codes and the potential for further ‘contagion’, populist moves like those of Bondarenko in Saratov last week, the large trade in fake certificates, etc. I want to come at this with a different take – on what all this tells us about ‘politics from below’ – a recurring theme in these blog posts.

It starts with a provocation. Why aren’t the usual suspects (the cold-warriors 2.0 and democracy bros) celebrating the mass civil disobedience going on in Russia? I mean, sure it’s prolonging mass suffering and death, but it’s not as if they care about that kind of thing. ‘No, no. Not that kind of civil disobedience! Give us more kids on snowy Moscow streets getting beaten in the head. Not your nurses, conniving with people to pour vaccines down the drain.’

Kimberley Brownlee, a legal philosopher, wrote a book in 2012 called Conscience and Conviction, making a case for civil disobedience. However, she takes the perspective of people living in pluralistic democratic states. There are two elements she emphasises – non-evasion and dialogue. A person who has a conscientious moral conviction has to be willing to articulate it to others openly and accept the costs of it. Disobedience needs to be visible in the public sphere to qualify for Brownlee and cannot be ‘evasive’. This is partly based on Rawlsian civility (non-violence, acceptance of consequences, publicity). ‘Conscientious conviction’ is contrasted with conscience as a moral and possibly private quality. Brownlee attempts to recover civil disobedience from stand liberal views that see its costs as not worth bearing and that there is not a moral right to public and ‘communicative’ civil disobedience – witness the current broad rejection of climate protestors in the UK. Their disruption of transport is viewed through a liberal prism as unacceptable and their arrest on criminal charges and lengthy jail sentences justified. Brownlee’s view is that civil disobedience is more conscientious than personal disobedience. She bases this argument on a conception of ‘moral rights’ to engage in constrained communicative breaches of law in defence of causes.

Now this argument might fly in 2012 when her book was published, but even in ‘democratic’ countries we have witnessed the criminalisation of protests and formerly civilly-disobedient actions – notoriously in the UK’s case the proposal to criminalise protests that are a ‘nuisance’. Brownlee says that civil disobedience is about preparing to risk punishment.  Because that in itself is part of the communicative process: that one has moral convictions and commitments. This runs into even more problems in a punitive authoritarian state that uses harsh punishment against even wholly peaceful protest, and even short of that – expressions of dissent, such as the poor souls punished for making posts online in Russia.

***

As Galina Orlova and I argue in our book chapter (I will blog about this in English next week), Russia is rapidly developing a model ‘European’ version of digital authoritarianism and people are resisting it any way they can.  The QR battle is unfolding right before us and may follow the less visible battle – now lost by the government – for vaccination. People will go to extraordinary lengths to resist? So is this not disobedience? Yes, it is. Is it not conscientious? Not in Brownlee’s terms, because it is semi-hidden. But it’s not ‘passive’, and it’s not completely individualized. András is one of few who notes the ‘ideological’ objection to vaccination and QR codes, and shows that people can think of the Covid measures in a wider political context. Even a lot of Russian analysis in Russia cannot grasp this, in a now classic denial of complexity and of the possibility of ‘révoltes logiques’ in ordinary people’s reflection (Jacques Rancière’s term). This article, for example  https://holod.media/2021/11/25/immune-response/ talks about an ‘disproportionate’ enraged protest response and spends a long time linking the Covid protestors with homophobia and the so-called ‘family rights’ movement (about which I’ve written at length here), only at the very end covering the ‘civil society’ angle. (The organisers of the Immune Response protests, call themselves civil society activists). For my part I’d emphasise the not disproportionate rage, but the calculating connective capacities and reflective–affective discontent in Russia that acts as a motor for activating the ‘political’.

Again, I use Rancière’s term: the political is a ‘deviation from the normal order of things’ as a precondition for the appearance of a (political) subject. Unlike András though, I would emphasise the social indignity aspect of the political here, rather than just the civil liberty objections of Russians. Surprisingly, I find support in some unusual places, Ekaterina Shulman’s coverage of Covid has been very good – having herself fallen foul of targeted repression via ‘digital authoritarianism’ last year. Shulman talks about Covid-measures ‘fatigue’, but also disgust and an alarming fall in trust in the president since 2018. She uses other affective terms like ‘alienation’ from the authorities not seen since 1990. She cites the latest ‘Russians’ Fears’ poll, that shows that 58% people are afraid of the ‘lawlessness’ of the state. (The polls also show high levels of fear of ‘a return to repression’ but a more mixed picture for the question: ‘tightening of the political regime’). Finally, she also notes the ‘quiet sabotage’ of the vaccine/QR measures by their ‘enforcers’. But sabotage implies complicity and conspiracy. I wrote about vaccine hesitancy in an earlier post, and there gave the floor to my research participants. With the QR code fiasco unfolding, the Russian state decides once again that it is the ‘sole European’ (Pushkin’s famous phrase) in a country where the people need a firm hand and an internal passport. Do we want to hear what the subaltern has to say? I again let my research participants speak for themselves.

“It’s not resistance to the vaccine. My wife was informed with no warning that from 15th November she couldn’t go to work until she got jabbed. But now she has to sit at home until vaccine becomes available in Gosuslugi [unified citizen portal]. As you know in early 2021, we were ill and have antibodies – we paid to get tested. There’s no sense in getting a vaccine. Why such a pressure [nazhim] from every side… And then there’s statistics about how even with the vaccine things didn’t turn out well when people got the disease later. Sure, it’s not a large risk but even in our circle of acquaintances it’s enough to see the problems of after-effects. This is based on our personal experience. Another not insignificant fact is the split in opinion among medical professionals. And there are people there who are not necessarily anti-vax, but are loyal to the idea of personal choice and freedom and so that’s why we travelled to X and we asked the doctor ‘do the vaccine, but don’t do it and pour it down the drain’. And the sum is not fixed – you give them what you want. The Doctors’ support it and not because of money.

We’re not Moscow or even Kaluga, QR doesn’t scare us. Apart from masks in the shops you don’t need anything. We need to look at the root of this, at the general tendency, where it’s going. This is about the digitization of the population and that’s always about control. And control of movement which takes us back to the USSR. A huge degree of distrust towards the authorities is what we’ve got. The more the media ramp up the necessity to ‘protect’ by getting vaccinated the more people are suspicious and know that that is not true because it’s the people who actually got ill who have the antibodies, not the vaccinated in many cases. This is really the meaning of protest – it’s a rational response. If you want to get vaxed no one’s stopping you. The President on TV said that it’s ‘by choice’, but that’s just not true. There’s no ‘by choice’ now. This is what makes us indignant [vozmushaet].

We have to recognise reality – in my age group – (30-40) fifty percent got the vaccine and 50% bought certificates, paying from 3-7 thousand roubles for them. Another interesting fact – while I was at the hospital in X in the queue for the vaccine –  that I didn’t take. And the people I talked to in the queue who were genuinely intending to get the vaccine, and I mean they’d come there with that intention, they are very clear that they ‘consciously’ [soznatelno] don’t want Sputnik V and instead do CoviVac, but when they get to the hospital there’s a shortage of the latter and lots of Sputnik V. And there were a lot of Muscovites there in this small provincial hospital for some reason and they all were waiting for CoviVac and we knew that the doctors were throwing away a lot of the Sputnik because there’s simply no demand for it.

But there’s a different problem. Lots of people get sick with Covid and then do a PCR and get a negative result. A friend of my mother (65) did three tests when she got sick and only the third was positive. And this was when she got to hospital after spending some time with symptoms at home. And she couldn’t get the right treatment because of the initial two negative tests. And then I’ve got a comrade in Moscow who’s been sick for three weeks already and got a negative result. What to do in this situation is really unclear.

And then there’s something else I really want to say: there’s a huge quantity of disinformation, as ‘information’ and as ‘disinformation’. TV, internet, all these scientific experts, but one set say one things and the others another. We don’t know who to pay attention to, where the truth is. And even the same people contradicting themselves. There’s no authoritativeness, or authoritative person whom one could believe. A load of doctors lie with statistics… and the pieces of the puzzle just don’t fit together. But every family has been touched by Covid by now in one way or another. And so there’s a negative pattern – someone’s relative died, someone got seriously ill, or had a reaction to the vaccine. And this is two years now that it’s, well, really screwed up.”

Russian vaccine hesitancy and the paradox of state-society relations

1 Reply
Vaccine poster in a Moscow citizen service centre – ‘The Risk of Infection Remains: make an informed decision and get vaccinated’

Russia will likely maintain its statistically dubious plateau of around 800 deaths a day for some time. This will mean that Russia will become the world ‘leader’ in deaths per million people (around six). The other leaders are Mexico and South Africa with similar figures. The USA is rapidly increasing from over three deaths per million at the moment. Most large European countries have fewer than two deaths per million at the moment. Germany and Denmark have 0.2 deaths/million. It might even be much worse – Demographer Raksha – said at the beginning of August that perhaps 2400 people a day were dying of Covid in Russia.

I’ve been meaning to come back to the topic of Covid for some time. I wrote two posts on it early on in 2020. One asking whether social solidarity and state mobilization would help ameliorate the pandemic in Russia.  And another in May 2020 about the need to avoid over-simplifying public attitudes and ‘lay normativity’. I didn’t mention vaccine hesitancy there, but it’s clearly the major issue now in terms of public health in Russia. [See also this great BBC article for an anthropological take on distrust]

Here’s my quick take based on two months of being around people – both vaccinated and unvaccinated – in Moscow and Kaluga region.

  1. Russians are no different from anyone else: hesitancy ‘decays’ once people encounter others (usually family, friends and colleagues) who don’t turn zombie/alien/corpses/infertile after getting a jab. However, because of lower generalized social trust in Russia, this decay might be slower than elsewhere.
  2. Unlike elsewhere, there is an occupational and employment vaccine ‘divide’ in Russia – many people in jobs that don’t force them to get a jab continue to resist – a lot of the time as much due to ‘principle’ than fear (more on that below). These are homemakers (women score higher on hesitancy), pensioners, people working in the informal economy, but also workers in smaller companies – many of which are afraid of using duress on employees.
  3. Getting a high threshold of vaccinated people will be hard because of both 1 and 2. That, and the dominance of Delta variant in Russia and the coming ‘fourth wave’, means the demographic hit will continue: more than half a million people will have died of Covid by the end of 2021 in Russia. Many others will have died because of a lack of access to medical care for other conditions (I personally know of two people in this category in 2021 already). As Nick Trickett points out, demographic effects have economic and social implications.

While I telegraphed in earlier posts that the main thing in Russia was the (in)coherence of the state’s response to Covid, what I failed to account for was the very thing I’m working on in a side project: the complex nature of trust and distrust among Russians towards the state. Now, as I said, hesitancy is decaying strongly everywhere, and Russia is like in France in that respect – high initial hesitancy now falling. However, when people tell me they won’t get jabbed, they all say different things, but digging down and pressing them, they all express a desire to make their own choices, avoid being forced into doing something that might be risky/unnecessary/a hassle.

I quote (nenormativnaia leksika!):

‘The Russian state gives me nothing. If it suddenly wants me to do something: fuck them on principle!’

‘The state cannot organise an adequate response to basic things like potholes and recycling. Suddenly in a short time they made a safe vaccine? There must be something dodgy about the jab.’

‘I don’t want any shit in my arm that comes from god-knows-where – some shithole [mukhosransk] beyond the Urals and tested in a hurry on monkeys.’

‘You know, when I try to get something simple done like a passport renew it’s such a pain in the arse. Just the thought of interacting with a vaccine centre reminds me of all the crap one has to go through with our state. I don’t want to do it. Why should I have to! I don’t want to have anything to do with them if I can help it’

‘The boss wants us all to get it, but he’s afraid of us quiting. I’m not going to do it. We all got sick last winter and have anti-bodies. Why the hell should I do something that’s unnecessary like that?’

I know I am like a stuck record on this, but vaccine hesitancy at least partly reflects one of my core themes – the paradox of Russians’ view of the state: on the one hand, many want a socially interventionist state that protects them from harm (and protects them from the more coercive parts of the state itself!). On the other, they know its limitations, and moreover, they know too well the potential dangers of interacting with what is a fickle and rather callous bureaucratic machine (perhaps no more so than many Western states, if we’re honest).

To wrap up, here’s an interesting study that among other things compares hesitancy between the USA and Russia. Some things of note: hesitancy was higher in Russia (to January 2021) than the USA, and higher than in some other middle-income countries. Russian women especially were hesitant in comparison with US women (so were Russian men, but the baseline hesitancy for women was worse). Educated Russians were just as hesitant as others, whereas in the US there’s a pronounced difference depending on education.

Perhaps even more interestingly, when we get to survey data explaining the hesitancy, it’s noticeable that there is a lack of data in the data about ‘why’ people are hesitant. In contrast to the USA, where side effects are feared, Russians fail to give an unequivocal ‘why’ response. As readers will know, I would argue this is an artefact of the methodological shortcomings of surveys themselves. But it’s also about how rejection (not hesitancy) of the vaccine reflects complex feelings and rationalisations that are hard to articulate and which have multiple causes.  Even for the US, rejection in 50% of cases is due to ‘other issues’. On the other hand, for Russians, “family and friends” are key positive motivators for moving from rejection to acceptance.

What’s not captured in this survey data is the problem of hesitancy among health workers being transmitted to lay persons – a clear problem in Russia. High uptake requires the continual maintenance of ‘social proof’ of vaccine safety and efficacy. At the moment, some health workers as well as the ordinary ‘rejecters’ make the achievement of a high threshold of take-up a far from foregone conclusion.  

Covid field tales – Part Five: The Political Economy of Reopening and Mapping Disorientation

1 Reply

7

Interfaces of Moscow reopening. Part 1. https://www.sobyanin.ru/otmena-samoizolyatsii-i-propuskov

This is the fifth and final post of a series of Covid tales, made possible by collaboration with Galina Orlova of HSE Moscow. Each post is about different aspects of lockdown and postlockdown Moscow. These are based on one long text that appeared in the journal City and Society. That journal, thanks to my colleague Derek Pardue, who is editor, has published some amazing Covid dispatches – they are open access –  so please check it out.

The last post discussed care and disposal and sanitary propaganda in the city.

When Le Village magazine asked sergeant Kurakin, who was checking QR codes at the metro, why people disobeyed quarantine – the answer was ‘to work’. Closure and opening of quarantine both draw a labor division. Mobilized doctors, taxi drivers, grocery and utility workers, couriers, bus drivers – these high-risk occupations deemed essential, were never locked down. ‘Partisan’ hairdressers worked clandestinely. Switching to ‘distance working’, people were faced with the hardships of endless digital labor and its invasion of privacy, small and medium business – with the need to pay salaries in the absence of revenue and state support.

Moscow closed more comprehensively than other Russian cities. Reopening, formally based on the topological ‘safety’ ranking of occupations, was multi-step. 12 May – the same time as mandating obligatory masks in shops – construction sites and industry restarted. May 26 government service centres (by appointment) and car-sharing services (partially) returned. Other services were divided into three stages in June, visualized in infographics: first hairdressers and cemeteries, then café verandas and dental clinics, and finally, kindergartens, fitness clubs and restaurants. The city reopening was asynchronous and incomplete, in turn affecting the political and economic in complex and unpredictable ways.

The Moscow government justified priority reopening of industry as ‘least dangerous’ because of the absence of direct contact between producers and consumers. However, no one hid that the resumption of construction work – masked, with a reduction in shift and brigade work – was due to the shared economic interest of lobbying developers and City Hall, and the problems of labour migrants. According to mobile operator data, up to 2.5 million people from Russian regions left Moscow during quarantine. But citizens from the CIS countries, mainly engaged in construction, were locked up in the capital without a livelihood. Moscow officials saw criminal risk in migrants without work, reifying care about them as an interface of profit and biopolitical inequalities.

If the resumption of construction strengthened socio-economic marginalizations existing before quarantine, the partial opening of car sharing produced new inequalities. At the end of May, the renewed service only allowed five-day-plus leases, unaffordable to most. As for mandatory disinfection of the cabin before returning the car, this was another materialization of sharing as a “new dangerous”.

Mapping disorientation

Several years ago, ‘Le Monde Diplomatique’ published an imaginary Palestine map. The occupied territories were represented as the sea; the Authority-controlled ones – as islands of an archipelago. Numerous maps of the pandemic, regularly described in military metaphors, depict the Covid-19 occupation in a different way – not framed through absent space but as more or less filling it, and pushing out of frame alternatives of resistance, coping and co-existence. From maps of pandemic Moscow we can see how the concentration of the virus shifts from the prosperous centre and South-West, where the epidemic began, to the northern, eastern and south-eastern suburbs where those who served the metropolis during self-isolation live (Panin 2020). But we learn nothing from them about changes in the life of the city or its inhabitants.

To think of a large city in quarantine as archipelago is to problematize the qualitative changes in urban life during self-isolation, mapping the diffusion of sociality and following heterogeneities of (non)actualized presence. The implosion of urban imagination, the narrowing of vision and atrophied habitus – all of what creates so much discomfort and inconvenience for city-dwellers – can open new analytical perspectives in how to deal with impoverished forms of dwelling and not be afraid of attending to its fragmentation.

8

Fig. 8. My own lockdown archipelago. 1. Island of habitation. My home, where you can find Care in the postbox and meet disinfectors. The playground taped off. Footpaths along which friends walk their puppy. I wave to them from my balcony. Rubbish containers next to the dovecote “Love and doves” that emptied during quarantine. 2. Wine Island, where the store consultant week to week talks about wine from more and more distance. 3. The Island of a closed house museum of Pushkin’s uncle and food, delivered from May with no charge by taxi firm. 4. Island with more cheap food, water and hardcore disinfection. Here I bought my second pack of masks (the first were from the internet at a crazy price). Here my friends live. All springtime we would have drinks and read poetry on Fridays in Whatsapp.5. The far post-office island, 600 meters from home. I went there a couple of times at the end of self-isolation. 6. The far bank island at a distance of 1km from home. 7. The phantom island of work. Humanities campus of “Vyshka”, where I have not been since the middle of March, working at a distance.  Colleagues in fb don’t believe in its existence. I see the building every day from my window and do not believe either. 8. Billboards from our photos. 9. The island-building of ailments, visible from my window, where all April ambulances – the dominant vehicle in the empty city – came time after time. 10. Moscow City, a group of skyscrapers on the horizon, visible with unprecedented sharpness. Usually – and now once again – they are smoggy. Image by Galina Orlova.

Covid field tales – Part Four: ‘Care’ and Disposal, Billboard Afterlifes

2 Replies

5

“A special attitude at a special moment”. Pandemic enters the postbox. Image by Galina Orlova.

This is the fourth of a series of Covid tales, made possible by collaboration with Galina Orlova of HSE Moscow. Each post is about different aspects of lockdown and postlockdown Moscow. These are based on one long text that appeared in the journal City and Society. That journal, thanks to my colleague Derek Pardue, who is editor, has published some amazing Covid dispatches – they are open access –  so please check it out.

The last post discussed disinfection and the not-so-smart city.

‘Care’ and Disposal    

A booklet from Ritual, the Moscow funeral service and operator of Moscow cemeteries, dropped into our postboxes on the eve of self-isolation for 65+ (26 March – it lasted until 9 June). The use by a commercial firm of the state services’ design suggests a newly cozy relationship between the traditionally shady funeral business and Russian stateness. Last summer, this convergence took the form of a corruption scandal, linked to the high-profile case of journalist Ivan Golunov, framed for his investigation of murky dealings between Moscow undertakers and state security organs. This spring Ritual prepared inhabitants for death and loss, warned against contacts with “black agents”, informed about prices and social subsidies. What was also on offer was something that in the extreme circumstances of pandemic ordinary people expected but did not receive from the state – care. Care, which remains for Russians one of the most important regimes of affective expectations in political communication with authorities, masks hierarchies and injustice – of deservingness of ‘weak’ objects, of paternal relations (Bogdanova 2005). Elena Bogdanova writing on the Soviet period but extrapolating historically to the present, draws attention to – in the absence of a clear recourse to legal means – the practice of complaints and appeals to ‘care’ and references to promises by the state.

Care certificates from Ritual guarantee the owners, if they died within a year of purchase, burial at the operator’s expense. This offer had the side effect of interpellating tenants as potential victims of the virus.

Yandex informed Muscovites about the preparedness of Ritual, that “will come in handy”, for the pandemic: protective equipment and coffins in ready supply. The Ministry of Health published temporary recommendations – later rescinded – including a prescription to bury infected bodies in sealed coffins. WHO and Russian virologists confirmed that the virus is not transmitted from the dead to the living. Funeral services are not under the authority of the Health Ministry. Nonetheless, the protocol was entrenched: coronavirus victims are sealed in bags, and not released to relatives. Ritual posted a “viral” Instagram burial video: a hazmatsuited funeral team, disinfectant poured into the grave, a clutch of relatives frozen in the distance, the pit fill with fir branches as a natural disinfectant and only completed. The union of ritual workers has spoken out against the use of garbage bags as destructive to the social order and turns funerals from care into disposal.

Billboard afterlifes

Refusing large-scale support for population and business, the authorities compiled lists for selective state aid. The presidential one featured a child allowance. Moscow – supported the newly unemployed. The government made two lists – for 642 system-critical firms (including bookmakers!) along with a dozen industries extremely vulnerable to the effects of the epidemic. The Chair of the Chamber of Commerce proposed including outdoor ads, which would lose up to 70% of revenue in deserted cities, in the second list. Simultaneously, he emphasised the critical role of billboards in informing people about virus protection, the WWII anniversary, and the upcoming plebiscite. Was this transition from the affected to having critical significance a transition from commercial advertising to propaganda? Did this discursive merging tell us more about saving the industry at the expense of state orders? Even in the small section of my self-isolation route, billboard changes perform the symbolic dynamics of quarantine.

At the end of March, the dismantling of outdoor ads from the frozen centre of Moscow gave way to mobilization. From billboards, placed every 15-20 meters, well-known Moscow doctors urged Muscovites to stay home, wear masks and not touch their faces. After April, this template was adapted to enhance affective solidarity and the formation of quarantine communities. Doctors are no longer given voice, they are thanked. And young people are hailed as volunteers. Closer to the Garden Ring sanitary enlightenment is interspersed with posters for Victory Day. In early summer, commercial advertising has returned as a (post)quarantine hybrid – McDonald’s with both hands voting for hand washing. The epidemiological safety and the upcoming voting in this austere carnival of signs do not leave room for Bigmacs yet.

Final post follows.

 

Lockdown propaganda comes into being. 03-06.2020. Images by Galina Orlova.

 

Covid field tales – Part Three: Disinfection and the Smart City

2 Replies

Disinfection

This is the third of a series of Covid tales, made possible by collaboration with Galina Orlova of HSE Moscow. Each post is about different aspects of lockdown and postlockdown Moscow. These are based on one long text that appeared in the journal City and Society. That journal, thanks to my colleague Derek Pardue, who is editor, has published some amazing Covid despatches – they are open access –  so please check it out. Space in those dispatches is very limited, so here on the blog I will take a little bit more of a circuitous route.

The last post discussed the political economy of lockdown, how City Hall dealt with it and in particular what this reveals about ‘State Capitalism’.

Operation ‘Disinfection’

After the virus transformed the city into a host of hostile surfaces, the Sanitary Service enlightened Muscovites that the infection “can stay in the air for 3 hours, on copper – for 4 hours, up to 24 hours on pulp and paper surfaces (documents, envelopes, folders), for 3-4 days on plastic and metal.” The developing corona-market offers a “cold fog” method of disinfection from 8 roubles per m2. An invitation to the wake of a neighbour dead from Covid, now includes: “Everything is disinfected.”

Public spaces – sidewalks, underpasses, entry-ways – are treated at city expense. The deputy mayor first earmarked 3,500 units of tractor-street sprayers, deploys 4,500. The air hangs with a bleach smell from the long-forgotten Soviet sanitary aromascape while the yellow sanitisers in the metro whiff of the society of consumption and bananas. Muscovites happily use them and discuss whether the big disinfection is comparable to urban beautification programs famous for exorbitant expenses and corruption. And if there isn’t much point in treating open surfaces, as epidemiologists say, should this be recognized as an urban antiviral ritual?

Our entrance-way, which according sanitary doctors remains the most “forgotten place in terms of anti-epidemic measures”, is disinfected twice daily. Bumping into disinfectors in chemical protection suits with spray guns and getting coated by a dose, you realise the danger, and no longer go out without a mask. Someone repeatedly adds in pencil: “unsatisfactory” to the assessment in the disinfection schedule posted by the elevator. The repairman – tired, in a cotton mask slipping down – is also unhappy: the chemicals have damaged electrical contacts, and now the elevator serves only four floors out of twelve. This metonymizes the city in quarantine as an assemblage of relative safety, partial functionality, attempts to reprogram and restore lost connectivity.

4

“Unsatisfactory”. Not in focus. Image by Galina Orlova

Not such a smart lockdown  

Maintaining Moscow’s reputation as a ‘smart city’, City Hall placed its bets on the rapid development of digital control over self-isolation. From April any non-hospitalized infected were obliged to stay at home and install a special mobile app – Social monitoring, developed by the city IT Department. From April 15, Muscovites needed sixteen-digit QR codes to make daily work trips, single emergency trips, and twice-weekly trips for personal and private needs. Police, taxi-drivers and transit workers mobilized to check codes using the Transit Department’s Moscow Assistant app. Regimented timetables of walks were dictated via infographics interfaces. Drones and quadcopters for tracking social distancing in re-opened restaurants were Moscow’s moment to jump the shark.

Jung Won Sonn and colleagues, analyzing the effective use of technology to reduce the risks of a pandemic in South Korea with smart city technologies, conclude that Covid-19 is the first epidemic in history for which humanity living in cities has come up with a ready-made response system.  Aggregating mobile operator data, geolocations of bank transactions and transport cards allows the precise contact tracing, avoiding major quarantine. The researchers regret that countries with developed digital infrastructure – with the exception of South Korea and Taiwan – have not made use of this advantage. (Sonn et al. 2020).

Russia, where during crisis the development of a new platform and apps was preferred, entailing large upfront costs, is a special case. While Yandex – Russia’s Google and the co-owner of popular taxi, delivery and mapping apps, – published a “self-isolation index” using its own digital infrastructure and aggregating big data, City Hall chose to develop apps from scratch. Work requiring months was implemented in weeks with many bugs and inefficient decisions. Lacking auto-verification, QR codes turned Moscow assistants into nurses for an infirm technology. Massive queues formed at metro entrances as policemen were forced to manually input codes to their devices. Technical faults were accompanied by social de(trans)formations, compensatory improvisations, and abuses. When Moscow Assistant could not cope with the flood of requests, QR encounters simulated governing. The cancelling of drivers’ codes without explanation led to the use of “service position” and informal connections to obtain permissions. Ordinary Muscovites with Covid-19 paid for geolocation failures, non-stop selfie requirements, multiple disconnections of the Social Monitoring, developed from fragments of code written in ten days for a pilot project to monitor the transport of domestic waste. Heavy fines, the denial of technical errors by City Hall forced the victims of smart lockdown to unite in the FB-community Fined for getting sick and to complain about the app in court and to Google Play.

Techno-political failures of Moscow lockdown are full of heterogeneities. Repressive Social monitoring is the first manifestation of a biosecurity regime replacing biopolitics. While biopolitics featured authorities’ concern with the life of population, biosecurity is built on the responsibility – including legal – of citizens for their health (Agamben 2020). For Muscovites, fined for getting sick, buggy mobile apps became the real punishment. The incoherence of urban mobility monitoring destroyed the technological continuity of the society of control (Deleuze 1992). To check a QR-code through Moscow Assistant, you need a policeman or a taxi driver in person with a mobile citizen. Taxi drivers tell of the discomfort that arose performing these police duties. The mayor’s office sees voluntary assistance and civic duty in them, but just in case, offers numerous sanctions for those who refuse to help. In a country where civil society is supposedly weak, the prosthetics of digital technologies during lockdown risk not so much strengthening the police state but accelerating the emergence of a “police society”.

In our next post we will move on to ‘Care and Disposal’ and the ‘afterlife’ of the consumption city.

Covid field tales – Part Two: Unmasking State Capitalism or Capitalist Realism?

4 Replies

inx960x640

A pharmacy in Omsk with the sign ‘We have no masks or antiseptic gel in stock’.

This is the second of a series of Covid tales, made possible by collaboration with Galina Orlova of HSE Moscow. There will be 3-4 texts  on different aspects of lockdown and postlockdown Moscow. These will be based on one long text that will appear shortly in the journal City and Society. That journal, thanks to my colleague Derek Pardue, who is editor, has published some amazing Covid despatches – they are open access –  so please check it out. Space in those dispatches is very limited, so here on the blog I will take a little bit more of a circuitous route.

The last post chronicled the rise of Moscow as the focal point of the disease and its spread in Russia, not we move on to how City Hall has dealt with lock down and in particular what this reveals about ‘State Capitalism’.

To avoid an official ‘state of emergency’ which would have meant taking on a massive financial burden, City Hall adopted various heuristics to manage quarantine. From March 5, the Moscow had a high-alert mode, from the 26th – self-isolation for those 65+, from the 30th – self-isolation for all. The delegation of responsibility for their own health and well-being to citizens, after recent restrictions on freedoms, looked neoliberal. At the same time, the scope of quarantine education addressed to ignorant citizens and belief in its effectiveness, suggested the return of Soviet sanitary propaganda (Shok, Beliakova, 2020). In conditions of lockdown uncertainty, the boundaries of self-isolation were delineated by rituals of taking out garbage, buying food and medicine, dog walking. From April 1, fines of 4,000-5,000 rubles were imposed for each violation. On April 15, quarantine met the control society with digital codes for trips around the city. Since May 12, wearing masks and gloves became mandatory in stores.

When the president empowered regions as responsible for fighting the disease, and the prime minister asked the Moscow mayor “organizationally and methodically” to help colleagues “on the ground”, Sobyanin became the face of the ”virus federalism” and the capital’s protocol “counteracting the spread of coronavirus infection” became a model to follow.

Unmasking state capitalism or capitalist realism?

While the self-isolation regime is gone, the ”glove-mask system” remains. Entering public transport or shops without PPE is prohibited – although it looks like the mask requirement will soon be dropped.  Disposable masks – medical blue, three-layered – are found far beyond pharmacies: at newspaper stands, at the ice cream kiosks, in cheap and expensive grocery chains. At the reopened farmfoods store, half-empty due to supply disruptions, masks are at a discount. In May, they cost from 29 to 70 rubles, in March-April – up to an exorbitant 150 and you could buy them only on the Internet from resellers, thirty-times more expensive than in 2019. Prices began to rise in February. At the peak, the government tried to mandate them, but immediately abandoned this measure. The rhythm of the pandemic in Moscow was not only the appearance or absence of masks, but their price in(de)flation.

In the Russia that imported the bulk of masks from China before Covid-19 there were three domestic manufacturers. City Hall not only took ownership of the largest factory but removed its facilities from the city of Vladimir to the capital, turning the pandemic into a “Moscow state business”. Two thirds of masks from the Moscow government (about 4 million items a week) were sold at cost to hospitals and communal services, 500,000 – for a “standardised price” of 30 rubles in the metro. The rest were put into a city administration reserve.

Compared to the free distribution of mask not only in the Paris metro, but on buses in Russia’s Far East, Moscow’s choices provoked discussion of the political economy of PPE. Vladimirites were disgusted by the capital’s betrayal leaving them not only without protection, but one profitable business less. Their objections to internal colonialism were tempered with racist suggestions that the masks from Moscow – now produced by “immigrants from disadvantaged countries of the near abroad” – were now “less hygienic”. Muscovites discussed the superprofit extracted by City Hall, and supposed that “since they bought the plant, the mask-regime will never end.” Stuck between epidemiological citizenship and city-state paternalism, they claimed that the government had no moral right to demand wearing masks without free distribution. Citizens made a hopeless diagnosis – “it’s all capitalism and they don’t give a shit” – and continued to buy masks.

The nature of state-capital conjunctions in the Russian capital has long been a bone of contention. The question of who can sell masks and gloves and who profits from their production is at the heart of thinking about the paradox of Russia’s political economy Ilya Matveev calls ‘dirigisme and neoliberalism at the same time’ to financially benefit insiders. Matveev has been criticised for this argument – with the riposte mainly about the piecemeal nature of actual liberalising reform since 2000. However in many ways that critique (from 2016) was misplaced, and I think the virus response illustrates Matveev’s view well – state capture by interests does not exclude the market ‘for thee, but not for me’. 

Appropriating profitable PPE businesses, strategically significant in an epidemic, City Hall enters the order of state capitalism. Obliging citizens to wear masks and offering them at commercial prices, they interpret civic responsibility in a neoliberal mode as a personal transaction according to the logic of capitalist realism that anathemizes any alternative to marketised relations (Fisher 2009).

Nonetheless the virus’ acceleration of neoliberalism does not completely destroy the legacy of the Soviet social state, instead weakening and transforming it beyond recognition. By sending masks to hospitals at cost price, Moscow combines the logic of minimal profitability and sluggish paternalism. Opting to create a reserve fund instead of free distribution of masks, it reproduces a pattern of deformed care without expenditure, developed by the federal government via the Russian Reserve Fund. State capital accumulation has a perverse obsession with curtailing the circulation – of money, of civic potential, – we call this the political economy of “the untouchable reserve”.

Emergency Reserve

‘Emergency reserve’. The untouchable reserve relates more to a strategic reserve of collected stock for emergency use.

In the next post we will discuss ‘disinfection’ and the ‘smart city’.

Covid field tales – Part One: Moscow ends lockdown, and fragrant flashbacks

2 Replies

1

 (Post)lockdown cityscape. Image by Galina Orlova

This is the first of a series of Covid tales, made possible by collaboration with Galina Orlova of HSE Moscow. There will be 3-4 texts  on different aspects of lockdown and postlockdown Moscow. These will be based on one long text that will appear shortly in the journal City and Society. That journal, thanks to my colleague Derek Pardue, who is editor, has published some amazing Covid despatches – they are openaccess –  so please check it out. Space in those despatches is very limited, so here on the blog I will take a little bit more of a circuitous route.

***

On June 8, Moscow’s Mayor announced the early cancellation of self-isolation. It had featured digital passes and “Moscow walks” by strict schedule according to address. Transport cards for the risk group 65+ were unblocked. Traffic jams, urban noise, and children’s voices returned. Taxi drivers no longer asked for QR codes from passengers. Hairdressers re-opened, benches and playgrounds were freed from striped tape, a visible materialization of the lockdown city-scape.

Online, people have responded to the “fall of self-isolation” sarcastically, with an untranslatable pun on the words ‘get well’ (after the coronavirus) and ‘amend’ (the Russian Constitution): (“Strana poshla na popravki”). Public health concerns have been replaced by a grim focus on the political regime’s diseased mutation. The fact is, Moscow’s hybrid practices of biopolitical care – the domestication of “the great imprisonment”, with biosecurity testing, buggy digital technologies augmented by direct police control, and interventions into urban rationalities in the spirit of Soviet nonconformist art – were abruptly and prematurely curtailed by the Leader’s whim for his plebecite.  Epidemiologists and political experts agree that the end of self-isolation in Moscow was due to Vladimir Putin’s desire to push ahead a national vote on July 1. Nonetheless, this ‘successful’ roadtesting of biosecurity control tells us a lot about the tendencies of late Putinism moving forward; after all, it was called an ‘experimental regime’.

2

 ‘ Walking regime for our building’. Instructions for an experiment in governing everyday routines from Moscow City Hall. Image by Galina Orlova

The capital of the epidemic

Many have paid attention to the urbanness of patterns of infection in different places.  In a metropolis where around 10% of the population lives, by the end of self-isolation, 40% of Russians who had been infected were in Moscow. Whereas people arriving in the capital from at-risk countries faced 14-day quarantine, in the Russian regions those who arrived from Moscow were put in isolation. An open secret of the spread of the disease has been the exodus of Muscovites to dachas in all directions from Moscow out to a distance of 200km. Right now this is still a hot topic. Every few days on my Facebook feed I see pictures of get-togethers of many people at their country cottages. Sure most are outside, but they are not social distancing. In addition, to get there, you have to travel for perhaps hours in enclosed transport. Amazingly I see desperate acquaintances hire taxis for 4-hours journeys. Also, many old people are shipped out for the summer to these places, so they are relatively full of higher-risk groups. I think it is worth talking about the false sense of security the ‘country cottage’ summer life presents to people. My main group of research participants are people living in a small, relatively isolated town 200km from Moscow. They complained a lot in June of the Muscovite invasion to the cottages. The influx to them is noticeable because the ‘tourists’ travel by car to the supermarkets in the small town. To underline the potential of tourism in Russia and the still underdeveloped infrastructure, I have received fantastical offers of money from enterprising individuals to rent to them my empty little shack there: in face for twice the rentable value of my house in England (that’s taking into account the devalued ruble). Many of the vacant plots that had gone unsold for years were snapped up – even though they lack planning permission. The local chalet owner has upped his prices by 300%. Some data here on the early peak in demand for summer houses. More here about the wider implications on the housing market but focussing on St Petersburg area.

The next post will be about the hybrid ‘Soviet Sanitary’ and ‘neoliberal’ responses by the city authorities. Does every country have a memory-triggering ‘sanitary aromascape’? Personally I get fragrant flashbacks more for cleaning products than for biscuits (or should that be cakes?). Later I will post about the ‘not-so smart’ city that Moscow is, and the politics of reopening.

Covid and ‘lay normativity’

1 Reply

medrabotnik slays the covid beast

spotted on a Moscow wall – the medrabotnik slays the covid beast

A major problem in my writing about Russia is trying to communicate the idea of ordinary Russian people as politically sophisticated. Related to that is the attempt to show that most people are more sensitively reflexive to the meaning of language than we give credit for. If given the chance, people show an understanding of the framing of the political – albeit this is almost always dependent on their preconceptions and more or less consistent ideas about the world.

I’ve tried to do that in writing about the Ukraine conflict, and more recently in writing (an unpublished article) about homophobia. The point is not to romanticise what the sociologist Andrew Sayer calls ‘lay normativity’. When I talk to people about Ukraine and about homophobia they more often than not take up the framings presented to them by the media, and in turn the Russian political elite. However, they very quickly move beyond these impoverished framings, and often end up endorsing far more ‘contingent’ (it depends) and often sociological perspectives (that things have complex causes and that judgement might be reserved).

This post is prompted by what Covid shows about the mismatch between what elites expect of most people – based on those elites’ internalisation of narrow and stunted ideas about rational actions of others. This happens because they themselves are (often) utility maximisers, instrumentalist in their dealings with most others, focused on gain and loss materially in their choices, lacking empathy or a wider ‘sociological imagination’ about the places they live. I know people will object to this, but I like to call this ‘living neoliberalism’.

Covid illustrates how elites and particularly their courtier journalists are usually behind the curve and not ahead of it. Thus with typical hubris, we see it too right now in the UK with the ‘lag’ in the response of journalists – cocooned in their WhatApp bubbles. The majority of people self-isolated here before the government advised them too and despite the media/govt attempts to frame the social response to the virus as ‘keep calm and carry on’, otherwise known as ‘let the old and weak die to save our inequitable way of life’.

Now my thinking is focused on the UK because that’s where I’m currently stuck. But this all reminded me of how much I was struck with Andrew Sayer’s work when I first encountered it and how much – in one way or another – it has stuck with me. Sayer is interested in rescuing Bourdieu – allowing for the ‘habitus’ to generate action – particularly for the most insulted an injured in society. Sayer draws attention to how sociology seems to ‘deny the life of the mind in working class’ people. He tries to strike a balance between resistance and compliance by using the term ‘longing’. In doing this he starts developing the idea of lay normativity as a set of discriminative values people have about flourishing and suffering – in a ‘practically-adequate way’. From there he talks about ‘ethical dispositions’ and their potential for activation. I would say we see this quite significantly with a disease mainly affecting the weak and vulnerable – that pretty quickly the balanced favoured a general recognition that one’s own needs were outweighed by the needs of others – however grudgingly and difficult this was to bear (and only made possible thanks to belated financial concessions by a callous government).

What I like about the potential of ‘lay normativity’ is that it both allows for a rationality that escapes rational interest calculations of ‘homo economicus’, AND allows for the kind of ‘moral economy’ approach now current in anthropology that sees people as more than individuals – caught up, for better or worse in chains of sociality as ethical beings. For Sayer this is a double-layered form of interpreting the world – both ‘sociological’ – looking for structural causes, but tempered by normative ethical reasonings that cannot be reduced to habitual action or internalisation of discourses. It’s focused on emancipatory potential within ourselves for sure, but what else should sociology be ‘for’? Sayer comes back at the end of his book to the question of ‘whose normativity’, acknowledging that ethics can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’. His attempt around this is to focus on the issues of suffering and flourishing – and that the Foucauldian ‘everything is dangerous’ response to the social is a misguided evasion of the inevitable need for the normative.  He also builds on Nancy Fraser’s perspective that equality means not just redistribution but also recognition as social participants. A lot of the pot banging going on at the moment (the local public vocal displays of support for healthcare workers) reflects a wish for lay normativity to be heard – it’s not just performative virtue.

Anyway, to bring this back to Russia, I just want to share a few of the ways I’ve been influenced by these ideas in my writing. I’m writing about suffering and recognition at the moment for my future book, but now I’ll look back to ways I’ve developed these ideas:

Most recently on homophobia [draft article] I found it useful to problematize a view that homophobia is weaponized in a ‘culture war’ against the West by drawing on how fear of difference reveals more about social trauma, the distrust and loss of the social state and attitudes about ‘moral education’, as it does about the successful inculcation of the idea of the ‘decadent west’.

When I wrote about the meaning of working-class craft in Russia I was very influenced by the idea of recognition and practices involving shared values which escape, more or less, the circuits of commodification, consumption and value  as wage-labour. Here I also used Sayer to prompt me to explore Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘virtue ethics’ – I still think anthropology is really missing a connection to this.

Around the same time I wrote about ‘lay reasoning’ in relation to memory of the socialist past – to show that people had significant mnemonic resources that were not constrained to ‘public memory’ of socialism (good or bad), nor were they nostalgic in the restorative or reflective senses popularised via Boym. They were however, morally normative in that they often activated political thoughts about social justice.

Finally in my book from 2016 I revisited some of the memory materials to explore how those activated reasonings about loss and trauma from the transition period play out – in practical but ethically based actions to further the ideas of autonomy and recognition – if only in the socially local.