[Video recording] Inside the shelter

This video was taken in a square cabin in Putuo District, Shanghai after I was infected in mid-April. It is outdated to talk about the square cabin now, but since it has been filmed, I will post it. Maybe some friends want to see it, and it will be used as a memory material.

(I wanted to publish it on the intranet and wrote the following text, but it has been self-censored, and it is somewhat impotent.)

After entering the cabin, communicate with his friend Xiao R. I say this music (Eyes Pop-Skin Explodes-Everybody Dead) matches what I'm feeling right now: a pre-modern cramped feeling that's hitting me hard. He objected that the shelter system and its management methods are not pre-modern, but very post-modern. I remained silent, acknowledging his point of view. That's right, how could this highly organized control system, this ode to rational spirit, be a product of pre-modernity?

But it actually produces a pre-modern experience—naked. "Postmodernity" is no longer about identity politics and pluralism without a fuss, and it is also farther away from the security of the body and the liberalism of the spirit. The other side of its essence gradually emerges before our eyes - it is with the sophistication of management technology that the nakedness of our lives is possible.

As a phenomenon, "nakedness" provides a good entry point, and it is a clue to return to Agamben and Foucault's discussion of biopolitics. It should be noted that the category of biopolitics is within politics, or “politics is reduced to biopolitics”. According to Foucault, the state uses enabling technologies to produce "docile bodies". The "docile body" is accomplished by disciplinary machines such as factories, schools, and armies, and exists in the form of demographic values such as birth and death rates, but its fundamental purpose is to support life. Agamben pointed out that the product of biopolitics is not the "docile body" in the long-term state, but the "naked life" in the exceptional state. The "post" modern state has the power to define exceptional states, so that "naked life" is not a temporary, forgettable, irrelevant state. Exceptions become essential when preparations are made for the next state of exception that follows. Life will structurally become "naked life", an animal-like fragile state that we cannot ignore.

Agamben's critical definition of the state of exception is fine, but on the other hand, it can be emotional if immersed in this self-pity narrative. We can use the class nature of the epidemic to defend the shelter system. For adult patients without underlying diseases, centralized management also means the concentration of medical resources. I get "Lianhua Qingwen" every day, it's free. And free for the laborers and patients who are citizens, it should be valuable.

Just their own feelings, the price paid for concentration and free, the pros and cons are balanced or not, I missed the opportunity to ask. Not only them, but every patient who is deeply trapped in the cabin, what is your feeling, and what judgment do you give?