The virus as evidence of Anthropocene 1

The virus as evidence of Anthropocene 1 Pietro Barbetta 2 Anthropocene, when knowledge takes the place of life. First self-recursive form Anthropocene is a term probably coined by the natural scientists Crutzen and Stoemer (2000); it means that we, who live on Earth, are in a geological era in which human activities (anthropoi) have an impact on the planet. I think it is clear what it means: global warming is not just "climate change," because it is caused by human activity; the decrease of the birth rate in the "performative" capitalist and postcommunist societies is connected to the physiological change and (the change) of mentality in these countries, it has to do with relationships of couples and with relationships between people; the return of authoritarianism and nationalism in politics is not a simple repetition of what happened in the past - all of this has to do with an anthropological change. The hypothesis I am proposing, with which I would not like to fall in love too much, otherwise I will be in trouble, is that Antopocene could mark the end of the Anthropogenic System, the condition that has allowed homo sapiens sapiens3 to be a guest of the Earth. Shanster (1973) had used the term "Anthropogenic System Period" to describe the hypothesis of when around the post-ice age, the life of large mammals became possible. So the Anthropogenic Era - described by Edgar Morin in the Le paradigm perdu, written in 1973 - and the Anthropocene Era, are not the same thing. The first marks human ontology: the condition that makes its existence on Earth possible; the second marks the end of human ontology: the condition of the impossibility of continuing its existence. The two suffixes are different: gene (from generate), cene (from kainos, or "new"). Anthropocene is, therefore, a new era, the epistemic era: when knowledge takes possession of life. 1 Editorial Comment: Many thanks to Pietro Barbetta for allowing this paper to be translated and uploaded simultaneously with CONNESSIONI. Many thanks to Connessioni also, for the continuation of the collaboration with Metalogos. Translation into Greek and English: Ioanna Karanikolaou. Editing: Pietro Barbetta, Fany Triantafillou. 2 Pietro Barbetta: Pietro Barbetta is Director of the Milanese Center for Family Therapy. He teaches Psychodynamic Theories at the University of Bergamo, member of the World Association for Cultural Psychiatry (WACP) and President of the Lombardy section of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approach to Psychosis (ISPS). He is responsible of the "clinical" section for the online magazine Doppiozero, recently wrote essays on Connessioni, Riflessioni Sistemiche (AIEMS), kasparhauser.net, http://tysm.org, Human Systems, Open Journal of Social Sciences, Trauma and Memory (http://www.eupsycho.com), Locus Solus. (https://www.cmtf.it/il-team/pietro-barbetta/) 3 Editorial Comment: Homo sapiens sapiens, in anthropology and paleontology, the subspecies of Homo sapiens that consists of the only living members of genus Homo modern human beings. Traditionally, this subspecies designation was used by paleontologists and anthropologists to separate modern human beings from more-archaic members of Homo sapiens. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Homo-sapiens-sapiens). Issue 37 http://metalogos-systemic-therapy-journal.eu 1 If we consider Anthropocene from the point of view of the unconscious, Anthropocene is not only the consequence of the "male" need for dominion over the world; if this were the case, a little more rationality would be enough to reduce this devastating impact of man on the environment. No, Anthropocene has a second connection that corresponds to the desire for death, something that human reason cannot grasp. Freud (1920) realized this later on in his work, when he introduced the death impulse in his explanatory model. It was then that Freud (1921) thought of the collective subject when Europe saw the war. There is a bizarre circuit between the need for exploitation of the land and the desire for death. It is within this circuit that the virus enters: a non-living substance - a portion of RNA or DNA - which enters in a living substance - the cell - to bring death. To understand this question, I will give a very simple example. Let's say that I go into a supermarket and fill the trolley with an excessive quantity of things, but then I realize that I cannot pay for all the supplies, moreover (too) exaggerated, that I have put in the cart. At this point, I try to get away with it, I try to escape from the supermarket without paying, but the weight of the supplies does not allow me to escape, so I am stopped and imprisoned. If this happens daily, I become pathologized. Well, human behaviour in front of the Earth is a pathology of epistemology. What price are we paying for robbing the planet? In systemic terms, Anthropocene seems to be the age in which the human being feeds back on the terrestrial system and creates the conditions for a catastrophic change. The theory of punctuated equilibria 4 teaches us that after long periods of relative stability, where changes are continuous, sudden mutations can occur. On the paleontological level, this theory now seems to be accredited by a vast amount of empirical observations (Eldredge, 1999; Gould, 2008). As psychotherapists, our specific contribution to this theory would be to ask: whether the desire for human destructiveness, identified by Freud during the First World War, is relevant in accelerating this process. Gregory Bateson (1968), in 1967, had warned humanity in a symposium, held in London, entitled Conscious purpose versus Nature. In his intervention, Bateson claims that the conscious purpose is anti-ecological. In short, Bateson's invitation is to explore Nature, to relate to it, before it's too late. Fifty years later, we observe this delay: a piece of Nature, viruses - I am not referring only to COVID-19, but also to the ever more frequent advent of new viruses - show us this severe delay. Human beings are still stuck in the search for new technical skills to manipulate the world: homo Faber, the animal that creates tools, in order to create tools, dominates humanity to develop tools in an indefinite repetition. It is a question of dominating time, of making it exploitable, usable. It is fragmented into parts; it is pre-formed: work, politics, mortgages, amortizations, etc., as moments of a continuous flow of money. Then wars, dictatorships, and, today, viruses as catastrophic changes, real mutations: to the blind impulse to dominate the Earth, is added the unconscious impulse to destroy the species. The systemic challenge that we are now dealing with is being able to double this first reflexivity. If homo faber builds tools to build tools, reflexively, to dominate the Earth, 4 Editorial Comment: Metalogos, issue 36, SISTEMICA 8, video, F. Triantafillou. Issue 37 http://metalogos-systemic-therapy-journal.eu 2 will homo socius be able to stop this process, retroacting in his turn on the machines to fold them and hold them in the generative fold? Not to make the world explode? Some argue that something has got out of hand, that the subject today is no longer the individual who freely chooses, but a network of which the individual is only a component, not even the most important. The first form of self-recursion is therefore given by the acquisition of a technology that changes the connotations of the subject. The subject is no longer a moral agent of him/herself but is immersed in a network that produces moral agency (decisions) independently of the individual. The subject is collective; the disposition of the network means that the individual subject cannot escape events that are always decided elsewhere (Latour, 2019). The example of Thebes and that of Athens. Second self-recursive form The ancient people knew it well and told it with their stories; they had the means to stop the unconscious historical code of humans. The ancients knew this selfdestructive code much better than the modern ones, and they tell it. In Genesis, the Lord recommends not eating from the tree of knowledge, but only from the tree of life; it is the moment of leaving Eden. The ancients, with wisdom, were able to slow down Anthropocene. To honour their submission to a higher power, however, conceived. We cannot say that the ancients had not feared and expected Anthropocene: here are two examples, the one told and the one from where it is told. Literary scholars distinguish the subject of the statement, what is being talked about, from the subject of the enunciation, who talks about it. Well, if Thebes is the subject of the utterance, Athens is the subject of the enunciation, Thebes is the place of Anthropocene, Athens that of self-reflection. My whole story begins long before the COVID, when its coming was still unimaginable, a kind of telesthesia. Before the tragedy of the virus, I had booked a seat at the Syracuse theatre to go and see The Bacchae by Euripides. It is worth making a brief story of the tragedy: god Dionysus goes to Thebes, presents himself as a god, but nobody believes him, in fact, Pentheus, who is his son, even if he does not know it, wants to imprison him. Finally, Dionysus invites him to see the Bacchae. Women out of their mind who, on the mountain, are the prey of terrible orgiastic rites, having lost their identity, committing cannibalistic acts and infanticides, just as if they were prey to a virus. When I found myself in the emergency room, I had the same feeling. The god had taken me, removed the possibility of control, for example, of my breathing and, consequently, of my proprioception, such as the possibility of being balanced on my legs, or to speak in my voice. My baritone voice had turned into a falsetto. I was alone, none of my acquaintances could come to visit me, but, at the same time, in the midst of a crowd. The emergency room community had become like Thebes, a place of plague. Like a Bacchus, I was under the spell of being inside an orgiastic ritual; I too lost my identity and became part of a multitude involved in a mortal ceremony. Here, as there, no compassion, no redemption possible, in Thebes as in Bergamo. But let's see if the comparison holds out to the end. Founded by Cadmus, Thebes was ruled by Labdacus and Laius, before the coming of Oedipus. It was the place Issue 37 http://metalogos-systemic-therapy-journal.eu 3 where Antigone, daughter, and sister of Oedipus, was buried alive, where two brothers Eteocles and Polynice killed each other; Thebes is the place of deception where the agreements are not respected. In this sense, Thebes resembles the virus, or rather, the behaviour that led us to the virus. It is the example of human stupidity. The place where the gods are not honoured, men do not respect each other, where bosses rule. - Not just the mobsters, also the prominent industrialists, who control the factories and the hospitals, who intimidate politicians. All these reasons bring catastrophic consequences to the community. Thebes is Bergamo, Madrid, London: the place where the powerful are aware and present themselves as carriers of progress. The ancients had a name for these people: spoudaioi, who had an enlightened mind. We take the figure of Oedipus, not to propose the psychoanalytic and family triangle mom-dad-son, but to understand what is the destiny. How does Sophocles' tragedy begin? Blindfolded priests go to the King, a just and honest, enlightened King, but the plague looming over Thebes does not stop, and the priests ask the King: what to do? Oedipus replies that he has sent Creon, with the clairvoyant Tiresias, to Delphi, and is waiting for his return from the oracle. Who is Creon for the King? In the awareness of each one, Creon is his brother-in-law, his wife's brother, Jocasta. In the unconscious, however, Creon is the maternal uncle, the brother of his mother, Jocasta. There is something wrong, but it is only an element of a chain, which arises from a curse received some time before by Laius. Then, it happens that Oedipus kills Laius, marries Jocasta, and has four children with her. When he discovers the tangle, he tears his eyes and banishes himself from the city, but it's too late. At that moment, a large blemish covers the city so wisely governed by its King. The virus reveals that the actions of past actions burden on the present, the things that we have done with our conscious purposes. The blemish, when revealed, shows that the things we have done with conscious purpose reveal the reasons for the plague - from the intensive breeding of animals (of which the Guardian speaks) to the underestimation of the extent of the epidemic, to get to the conversations on the human sacrifices of confident neoliberal economists. The same discourses have allowed compliant politicians to dismantle essential public health to produce the cathedrals in the desert of excellence in my region, Lombardy. Nonetheless, the tragedy shows all the catastrophes of Thebes and Anthropocene. Oedipus is a 'spoudaios', an excellent man. People are 'deina'5 (wonderful). Nonetheless, in the chorus, of another Theban tragedy, Antigone, the term deinon translates "wonderful" as long as Anthropos respects the laws and translates "uncanny," when “awareness” is transformed into “entanglement”. In Thebes, the arrogance of the man, who wants to dominate Nature, and the desire for destructiveness are secretly accompanied and hide a gap, which emerges in the form of a plague. What happens in Athens is the opposite. In Athens, the tragedy is a matter of reflection, of self-reflection, a second form of self-recursion, a maternal, hospitable 5 Editorial Comment: Δεινός (deinos) = very skillful, very clever, excellent = awesome, dreadful, terrible. Τα δεινά (deina / neuter, plural)= dangers, sufferings, ordeals (el.wiktionary.org). Issue 37 http://metalogos-systemic-therapy-journal.eu 4 self-recursion. Sophocles tells us about it when he presents the play of Oedipus in Colonus to the public of his fellow citizens: in Colonus (which is an area of Athens) the old Oedipus, accompanied by his sister/daughter Antigone, finds hospitality and a sacred place to be buried. Athens recounts Thebes and teaches, by inventing the tragedy, what should not be done. Not underestimating the unconscious means not being ruthless. If Thebes is the place where misfortunes occur - as we have written above: the subject of the utterance - Athens is the place where the tragedy becomes a work of art: therapy. Athens marks the difference between Oedipus and Sophocles, that between Dionysus and Euripides. Athens has an eponym; it has the name of a goddess, Athena: the feminine goddess, who helps Ulysses protect himself from devastations and shelter himself from the destructiveness of superhuman powers. As long as the man is faithful to the goddess, the man is versatile, one who travels a lot, a nomad, capable of multiple foldings. Thanks to Sophocles, we know what happened to Ajax, a warrior who has always refused the help of Athena during the battles for the siege of Troy. Ajax tried to massacre the other Atrides leaders who had preferred Ulysses to him (Starobinski, 2019). Athena is the daughter of Metis, and Metis in ancient Greek, in addition to being the mother of Athena, also assumes the meaning of practical intelligence, ambivalence, the virtue of knowing (how) to wait for the right moment to act in front of dangers. Ulysses is able to save his integrity and his own life in front of countless dangers thanks to the devotion to Athena and her help: he tells Polyphemus to call him Oudeis, Nobody, using the assonance between this word and Odysseus, avoiding the revenge of the Cyclops, binds himself to the mast of the ship to be able to hear the sirens singing without getting lost. In addition, Athena helps Ulysses disguise himself when he returns to Ithaca to take on the appearance of a beggar. Athena protects Ulysses because Ulysses has always been faithful and loyal to her. In the same way, the tragedy staged in Athens protects the Athenians from the catastrophes that happened in Thebes, it warns them to be respectful of the laws. What laws? Not those established by men to their advantage or from stupidity. Sophocles recounts the stupidity of Creon, who forbids burying the enemy in the consecrated territory. He recounts the courage of Antigone, who distinguishes the stupid law of the tyrant from the divine law, the law of the Earth, the law of Gaia. The tragedy in Athens is community therapy. Aristotle claims that it creates catharsis: the spectator who witnesses the tragedy goes through a purification of the affects, the cultural transmission in Athens passes through the feelings. Becoming a woman. Third self-recursive form It is interesting that the author in medical works, in particular concerning the female menstrual cycle, uses the word catharsis, used by Aristotle in Poetics. In Aristotle, we see the transposition of the notion of "catharsis" from something that happens to the female body into something that attaches to the human mind. In the catharsis of poetics, "catharsis" brings fear and compassion. Issue 37 http://metalogos-systemic-therapy-journal.eu 5 Menstrual cycle, fear, compassion. During the evolution of the species, women have inevitably been forced to be that part of humanity that takes care of another dimension of life, something that is beyond time: space. But a particular aspect of space (Cazzaniga, 2019): the place of the generation, what made human neoteny possible. This type of self-reflection is still different, more subtle, and articulated. Alongside the masculine domain, we have another type of reflexivity: the ethics of sexual difference (Irigaray, 1984). Human beings are not only destructive, but they also possess an erotic and generative power: the feminine part of humanity. Homo Faber and Homo Sapiens are also Social and Nomadic animals. They acquire the possibility of becoming nomadic when the laws of hospitality prevail over those of hostility. What condemned Antigone to be buried alive was Creon's dullness; on the opposite side to Creon, the animal becomes social when it understands its own finitude. After the ability to use fire as a protective tool - the domestic hearth - and after all the changes of the body that are preparing to appear, for example, the possibility of cooking food to make it tender, the consequent reduction of prognathism, the increase of the cranial space and the possibility of the formation of a large cortical area, the feeling of tenderness is created. Cruelty and tenderness derived from the way of feeding - raw and tender - are transformed into conflicting feelings. Thus, opposite figures are created: the hunter and the care-giver. But the hunter undergoes a mutation, his competence to reiterate his transformation accompanies the use of tools, from hunter to predator (Burkert, 1983): homo necans. Man is the only animal species that hunts itself. Intra-species violence produces human destructiveness. We have another chance to prolong the survival of the species on the planet. The virus, in all its natural power, is showing it to us. If the Anthropogenic system consists of creating conditions for human existence, it has also created species capable of psychic self-reflexivity. Let us try to decipher, or instead decrypt, the message of the virus: it is time to reassess the complexity of the unconscious system, we must go back to homo sapiens / demens, to analyse our demens part. If anthropos has the ability to overcome himself, what did Nietzsche mean when he wrote "Man is a cable stretched between the beast and the super-man, and beneath him, there is an abyss "? Well, today we know it; the super-man is becoming a woman (Deleuze and Guattari, 2017). Women are the part of humanity with a locus, the womb, which gives hospitality, which generates, which nourishes. I believe that the female body is constitutively inhabited by the place of places, the locus, the plastic vase that contains and gives birth to every other body (Irigaray, 1984; Kristeva, 1987). Now, we have an urgency; it is a question of whether the reflexivity of the feminine will be able to temper the side effects of the male competence to create tools indefinitely; if femina nomas (feminine nomad) will replace homo necans. The gods, (even for those who, like me, don't believe in them), have taught us not to go beyond this limit, the limit of exploitation and destructiveness. Now Nature is shaking us. Conclusion This essay is not against science; instead, it is a prayer returning to science. Science has always proceeded by hypothesis; it has never given certainties; science has Issue 37 http://metalogos-systemic-therapy-journal.eu 6 always been a comparison between different paradigms; it has never had any eternal truth claim. In recent years, science has become a new religion and scientists become producers of irrefutable truths. Why? Because it has been enslaved to the powers of those who finance it. So, psychiatric science is sold to the pharmaceutical industry and psychological science to the industry of test or small diagnostic technologies to evaluate ADHD, learning difficulties, diets for those suffering from eating disorders, and metacognitive protocols to remove phobias and obsessions. All drugs, tests, TCC interventions, infallible models to make people "heal". I am not against science; I fight for a science that is not at the service of human destructiveness, at the service of Big-Pharma, of multinationals, of the intensive breeding of animals in large agricultural companies, poisonous fertilizers, of extensive agriculture, etc. What happens with the virus? It happens that certainties have disappeared, that science is returning to being a learned ignorance, there have been proposed several hypotheses, and, beyond the certainty of what a virus is, it will take time to understand how this virus behaves. Many hypotheses are entirely plausible, even if still unlikely. For example, there is a cardiological hypothesis that supports how the immune reaction to the virus creates micro-clots in the lungs and results in a completely different disease, Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation. Empirical observations seem to make this hypothesis less probable, but it is a reasonable hypothesis. The New England Journal of Medicine has published an essay that claims that asymptomatic people are the "Achilles' heel" of the spread of the virus. It did so by studying mortality rates in residences for the elderly, a hypothesis which, if proven, would make ridiculous now to take measures to reopen companies, etc. In short, scientific research on the virus shows our ignorance through research and concrete clinical practices. Well, that's the duty/job of science. Science can also work in reverse, to stop this "progress". If a dissident fold is still possible, then it is possible to create an extension of human life on the planet, a life respectful of Nature. Is the virus the end? Will another ten times more devastating come? Will we be able to counteract the conscious finality that destroys Nature (Bateson, 1968)? Is it still vital to uphold the principle of hope? (Bloch, 2019). Finally, what are the psychological effects of the virus? I have been back for a couple of weeks since I started to feel well physically, to do online clinical meetings with some people, and just today, I have met a writer who has been attending our therapeutic meetings for a dozen years. Today, I have learned from her that if the virus has produced mental discomfort, it has also produced well-being conditions. She talked to me about her dog that has never been so happy to have her and her companion's company all day. She imagined the happiness of children, especially small children, to be with their parents for such a long time. "Working remotely is not bad at all," she said, and I think that, in many circumstances, remote work makes it even better than having to go to work. Issue 37 http://metalogos-systemic-therapy-journal.eu 7 Bibliography Bateson, G.: (1968). Conscious Purpose Versus Nature, in Cooper, D. The Dialectics of Liberation, London: Penguin. Bloch, E. (1995). The Principle of Hope, The MIT Press. Burkert, W. (1983). Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, Berkeley, University of California. Cazzaniga, E. (2019). I luoghi dello spazio. La terapia come eterotopia, in Barbetta, P., Telfener, U. (a cura). Complessità e psicoterapia, Milano, Raffaello Cortina. Crutzen, P. J, Stoemer, E.F. (2000). The Antropocene, in IGBP Newsletter, 41, May. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (2017) A Thousand Plateaux. New York: Columbia University Press. Eldredge, N. (1999). Ripensare Darwin, Torino, Einaudi. Freud, S. (1920 & 1921) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud – Vol. 18. London: The Hogarth Press. Gould, S.J. (2008). L'equilibrio punteggiato, Codice. Irigaray, L. (1984). Éthique de la difference sexuelle, Paris, Minuit. Kristeva, J. (1987). Tales of Love, New York, Columbia Univ. Press. Latour, B. (2019). Essere di questa terra, Torino, Rosemberg e Sellier. Morin, E. (1973). Le paradigme perdu: la nature humaine, Paris, Seuil. Shanster, E.V. (1973). The Anthropogenic System (Period), in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. Starobinski, J. (2019). Tre furori, Milano, SE. Issue 37 http://metalogos-systemic-therapy-journal.eu 8