SNAPSHOTS OF A PANDEMIC. LOOK IN A REGIME OF CONFINEMENT
Abstract
In this essay, we reflectively propose what a new social technology called a confinement regime is like, and that has been used during the current pandemic. Through an autoethnographic and self-referential story, presented in the form of snapshots in the life of a woman who is locked up in a city in Argentina today. Thus, we recall life in the domestic, ideas of gender, work, age in the everyday. The relationship with the media, on social networks and with new forms of biopolitic is revealed. This work accounts for a moment when everything is suspended and, consequently, gives time to see what the world we live in, what our inner life is like and its economic-political relationship with the outside. A privileged moment to think and ask ourselves.
En este texto de ensayo y de manera reflexiva planteamos cómo es una nueva tecnología social que denominamos Régimen de confinamiento, y que se ha usado durante la actual pandemia. A través de un relato autoetnográfico y autoreferencial, planteado en forma de instantáneas en la vida de una mujer encerrada en una ciudad de la argentina actual. Así desgranamos la vida en lo doméstico, las ideas de género, de trabajo, de edad en lo cotidiano. Se revela la relación con los medios, en las redes sociales y con las nuevas formas de biopolítica. Este trabajo da cuenta de un momento en que todo queda en suspenso y da tiempo, consiguientemente, a ver en qué mundo vivimos, cómo es nuestra vida interior y su relación económico-política con el afuera. Un momento privilegiado para pensar y preguntarnos.
Keywords
pandemic, Confinement regime, selfreferential, Argentina, biopolitics, social technology, neocolonization
The possibility of looking
This text shows the synergy of several different propositions, in its form and content, of the authors who signed the paper: we wonder how the idea of confinement has worked, how is that social technology used as a socio-sanitary and containment methodology in the face of the covid pandemic worldwide, that which in another work we have called confinement regime (Anta-Félez, 2020). Because covid is no longer just a disease, it is a metaphor of a world, a world event that occurred in 2020. We find ourselves, consequently, with the application of a concrete social technology, confinement, which has not only generated many doubts and problems, but also raises, first, what social model we are in; second, how are the enormous possibilities of observing and taking ourselves as a strange, complex and interesting social laboratory; and third, what is the interpellation to a myriad of possibilities of interpreting what happened in the framework of experimentation of a new world economy and a political journey towards other new truths. We try not only to answer these questions, but also to generate new ones from a perspective of what is close to us. The social actors have lived all this confinement in a level of enormous paradox and bewilderment, and obviously this has given rise to new questions about the everyday and the way in which we have been facing the closest and apparently more familiar events.
We have to confirm two evidences: first, that the relationship between the account of what has been experienced in the confinement, which is radically different from that of the views of governments, international agencies and various political institutions. And secondly, that the various practical actions and orders that have led people to confinement show a casually complex social process, which has had very surprising, disturbing and polysemic effects. These two premises will allow us to minimally understand a context where, on the one hand, a series of elements are enabled that comply with the idea that the population is controlled by means of a disciplining technology, and on the other hand, that the discursive mechanisms cannot hide behind the screen of the natural and its scientific explanation. And in the middle of this enormous web of discourses, social technologies and political, economic and cultural opportunities, the most classic media (television, press and radio), as well as the new content supports, social networks and communication applications, try at all times to situate, fix and establish a discourse that, by its own, denies or affirms, in equal parts, the value and meaning of confinement.
For the two social scientists who signed this paper, covid has been a great opportunity to think about many elements that were there (Segata, 2020), but that because of its integrationist and normalizing nature were difficult to see, study and think about. The confinement by covid, as in American situation comedies, is based on confining the characters in very small spaces, usually in the living rooms of their homes, and making everything happen there in front of them. This allows us to understand that confinement is not just inhabiting a space for a time, but that what happens there is limited and closed, self-referential and therefore a spectacle. Confinement is an opportunity because it shows, for a short time, in an exaggerated and dramatic way, how life is inside, how to live in a space that does not allow more decision making than what we have as essential, it is the enclosure on the performance of living this capitalism where we give words meanings in the form of action (Austin, 1982). In a space thus defined, bodies become docile to the extent that they enter into a logic of transformation and perfection that rests on submission, thus, paraphrasing Michel Foucault, it is undoubtedly not the first time that the body constitutes the object of such imperious and pressing interests. In any society, the body is caught in the interior of very tight powers, which impose coercions, interdictions or obligations on it (Foucault, 2003, p. 83).
But, on the other hand, it is a common experience, surely the most resounding and differential shared fact since the fall of the Berlin Wall three decades ago, and which somehow proposes the emergence of a subjectivity that breaks down borders and walls, to become, in its own nature, a Pangaea. Everything that serves as a shared experience is, at the same time, a closing of categories around the proper, the unique and the closed and limited social relationship. It sounds strange that a shared experience at the world level is based on the closure of everything. And that is the first sense of a work like this: the experience of enclosure is the idea that it has been made by creating walls. Therein lies the paradox. The experience is that we live in isolated and to some extent incommunicado cells that make sense in the idea that we participate in a spectacle. That is the origin of the snapshots, quick images, almost out of focus, slightly saturated and unrepeatable, but which give an account of the fact.
Snapshot 1: Loss of Control
In mid-March, uncertainties were general: the first planes that did not arrive in Argentina, the desperation of people who wanted to repatriate and did not know the fate of the official decisions, the difficulty of budgeting abroad because, as it is known, the Argentine peso is worth almost 100 times less than the euro. Chaos. Little by little, free circulation and friends' gatherings were restricted; in Argentina this caused great discomfort because we are friends, a form of relationship of getting together with others to share whatever we have. At my son's school they announced that on Monday, March 16 there would be no classes due to disinfection: in fact, what was really worrying was a bee that stung a girl and not the coronavirus; that sanitation was an anticipation. That same day the preventive and mandatory social isolation began: stay at home (Social Sciences Commission of the Coronavirus Unit COVID-19, 2020). A virtual hysteria began -which still continues- in which each and every one of us wondered what to do, how to do, where to do. We sensed that no one knew anything, neither the subjects nor the institutions; what we did foresee was a new system of social permissions and prohibitions. Another intuition: we were on the way to a technopsychotic mutation (Berardi, 2020) without solution of continuity.
Snapshot 2: Remote psychology
We Argentines cannot live without therapy: it is the South American way that helps us to exist as South Americans; if we do not talk to someone about the coordinates of our life in these latitudes, we cannot survive. And that makes us look at the sociocultural colonization we live in a friendlier way. Every 15 days I check my home banking to make sure I have the money to transfer to my psychologist at the end of the consultation: pacts are pacts. The strange thing was to see her on the screen with her usual collaborative air; the virtuality of the meeting made us go deeper into its benefits: to be quiet at home, to talk while drinking mate, and to unroll fearful aspects of the virus that would have been, in person, not commented. As the days went by, I learned about the existence of networks of organized therapists who help alone, solas and soles to live in confinement. There is not much mention of the coercion of locked bodies, nor of the gradual weakening of ties with otherness. I have never, until now, mentioned that my subjectivity is repressed, alibied, enclosed. The frenzy to meet it and to speak, just to speak, is enough for me. In this sense, I believe that I place myself right in the eye of the storm that forces me to rethink myself in this space of the neutral (Barthes 2002) where the possibility of self-referentiality is lost and even the withdrawal of the social bond is noticed. In this sense ¨the individual ceases to recognize himself and reciprocity with others, even with the most loved ones, is broken. The rupture may come, for example, from a dramatic social event. The individual is then forced to redefine himself¨. (Le Breton, 2016, p. 183).
Snapshot 3: distance education
R, the girl who cleans at home once a week, is barely literate and lived - until she came to the big city - in the remote hot lands of Santiago del Estero, where in summer it is over 45° and the temperature rises to 55°. She has a cell phone but does not know how to use the PC because she never had access to the device, but she has a son, who is a potential millennial and to whom they send homework to do in the virtual classroom; at home there is no computer, no internet and they are not digitally literate. I suggest, to help them, the father to bring the boy home but they are afraid: they took away the truck he was working with from a friend and put him in jail for two days. It makes no sense to move, education can wait: obviously, it is not worth spending a few days in jail, paying a fine and, on top of that, exposing oneself to a safe way of infection such as prisons in Argentina. Because in Argentina, prisons are South American prisons. The mother, frustrated, cries on her cell phone and tells me "I don't understand anything", I don't know anything about internet or social networks and I can't find the maps of Bolivia that they ask the baby for; she doesn't know what to do and buys data little by little from the telephone company that swindles her with its multinational maw. In addition to the precariousness, they have no "data", what a horror. Faced with this situation I thought: this pandemic is of class, age, race. Somehow, it is economic, maximizing and minimizing, resources and distribution. With these operations, other operations linked to the desolidification of interpersonal relationships are driven (Bauman, 2006): the youngster and the mother are entangled in a plot in which the logic of the absolute fluidity of human bonds is privileged; they only seek to connect with the educational apparatus in the immediacy and transience proposed by the virtual device.
At the university where I work, institutional terrorism started: in Argentina we are accomplices of these practices; I never knew how to work online, but I devised a good remote work plan for the subject I am in charge of; my colleagues told me so. I am responsible for more than 300 people: enthusiastic people, plaintiffs and defendants. We decorated the virtual classroom: it has lectures, photos, chats, videos, podcasts and a host of new resources available. An aesthetic fetish. I spend thousands of hours in front of the computer and I fidget nervously when my family interrupts me. The new normality forced me to define doses of bibliography for the students, to propose typologies for the approach of activities, and even to mark the times of entry and exit of the virtual classroom. A cycle of repetition of exchanges began, based on regularity: another pattern to fertilize the docility of bodies and their movements (Foucault, 2003).
I think about the limits of my pedagogical practices. I realize that education is a commodity: it continues to circulate, like everything else during the pandemic except for the subjects; the capitalist stamp of all this is based on the permission to circulate whatever goods as long as we do not let anyone in or out of the house. In the middle of this task that is "what I am paid for" (because I am a subject / object of capitalist exploitation in a South American kingdom) my 5 year old son receives things to solve from his school. In addition to generating tasks for others, I have to help him with the mediocre little games they send him: draw the coronavirus, pronounce covid-19 in English, doodle the doctor who takes care of him, make a collage of the policeman who controls him, in short. Apart from that, he practices letters and I ask him "what do you want to learn to write?", he tells me "coronavirus mom", and he practices and practices the word very happily.
The online task of the day stops when a sommelier friend asks me about Rayuela by Cortázar, "throw me some reading tips -he tells me- because I don't understand it". I share with him some half-distant memory and I think: what a good dynamic for this guy to start reading that at this moment, of course: he chooses his own adventure. "Imagination is the renewable and unprejudiced energy" (Berardi, 2020). Will we be able to preserve it or will the regime sweep it away as well? Will we go through the phase of ¨blancura¨ of which Le Breton speaks to enable the emergence of ¨another modality of existence that is woven in discretion, slowness, humility¨ (Le Breton, 2016, p. 187) of this new regime? Or will it be only the fiction that allows us to maintain that meaning is not extinguished but, temporarily, suspended?
Snapshot 4: Mappings
The streets of my proletarian neighborhood are silent: the Chinese man serves me through a slot, the butcher minces meat dressed as a strange astronaut, and the kiosker has a thick and huge mouthpiece that does not allow me to hear what he says. I don't go out to walk much: in South American neighborhoods the police circulate in quarantine, and if they catch you, you're gone. Neighborhood terrorism. The state of fear is the pretext for social control (Amadeo, 2020) that produces a process of very deep passivity of movements: I realize that I walk as if someone suspected me. The streets of my city, the only more vital and democratic place I had left (Amadeo, 2020), is now impassable. I am a suspect among my neighbors. Neighborhood discipline ordered individuals in space based on a principle of ¨localization by zones¨ (Foucault, 2003, p. 85): we are all scattered, orderly, in the intradomestic space that even articulates doses of micro-enclosure: we cross each other in the tiny corridors of the house with destination to the place where we settle down to do gymnastics, work, eat or sleep. Large enclosures in a few square meters.
"If this is not crazy, José, tell me what it is" I ask my anthropologist friend via whatsapp while a helicopter flies over my house and they watch me from above, I don't know who is watching me, but I feel spied on even though there is a roof: it is a naked situation. The baby cries: he says he wants to go out to ride his bike and he cannot. Social, family and sexual impotence because among so many viruses, even personal fluids instill fear. All the lividness I had withdrew from my body to settle on the technological world: as I do not see anyone, I am not, so I connect and I am: ¨television, internet, chats and forums, or the cell phone are ways of being without being and of freeing oneself from a relationship just by turning off the screen¨ (Le Breton, 2016: p. 13-14).
Snapshot 5: devices
The covid has energized a new control technology: I am suffering from what many people are suffering from, questions. The biotechnique of alcohol gel is destroying my hands and bleach, the second component of the chain that repels evil, is killing my husband who is allergic. This organized business, designed to preserve health, leads me to think that the only ones who have salvation in their hands are doctors: this is the biopolitical phase of things (Zizek, 2020); there are no more rulers, there are no more doctors, there is no more government, no more ideology, there is evidence and experiments. There are no longer policies, there are gels, barbijos, vaccines, gloves, gloves which is nothing but the evidence of the emergence of ¨a political anatomy of detail¨ or ¨discipline of the minuscule¨ (Foucault, 2003, p. 83) insofar as it is a matter of "small tricks endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle conditioning, of innocent appearance, but extremely suspicious, devices that obey unmentionable economies, or that pursue coercion" (Foucault, 2003, p. 84).
I count the cookies we eat and the ones my sons eat too: I don't care that he is a child, he must restrict his intake; there are things missing in the supermarket and I want to stretch as much as I can the purchase I made a few days ago because inflation is eating us alive: in South America soaring prices are commonplace. My father tells me to loosen the restrictions, but I am like that: another vector of biotechnics is the dosage, like a dropper, I distribute the benefit. I open the house, ventilate and clean every day: let the air flow to scare away the lurking bug; I have everyone scrubbing for a while and I only need to clean the dogs' paws with bleach, give them a rash and not be able to go to the vet because his place is closed. That would not be an impediment, my vet, a very nice Jew, would come to my home. I look at my cell phone every now and then while I shoot a 70% alcohol and 30% water solution into the air: I don't even trust my own hands; I wait for the yoga class that arrives via whatsapp as well as the links to follow zumba, bachata and cha-cha-cha classes. I love South American rhythms.
Snapshot 6: senior citizenship
My old lady is far away, about 400 km from my house, she is 65 years old and alone. I am here with chat, telephone and video call: I am afraid for her because she is a risk patient; she is as if nothing: quiet, locked up, knitting, with her yard and her plants and that's it; she says she has food and goes to the supermarket the day there are discounts for retired people because they open earlier and there are only old people inside. I find that unpleasant: a gerontomachic concentration camp (Amadeo, 2020); we gather the most vulnerable in the same place at the same time. They concentrate the immunological deficit. Capital does not stop. What I wonder about this virus has to do with this weakness that it has for the elderly: it has been raging with our old people and their memory, because we all know that in the old people is a large part of the memory collection that a community keeps. It calls my attention to abolish the old and that with him dies a segment of what can be said (in another context, Martinez and Melendez, 2020). I am even more struck by the fact that we are now dealing with him. Here, in this Latin American confinement, we never did it.
Snapshot 7: double threat, dengue fever
Let us not forget about dengue: this South American part of the world has installed some risks. In Bolivia there is cholera, tuberculosis and cancer, and people have already energized their practices to face them (Amadeo, 2020); in relation to dengue, zika and chikungunya, in my city its objectification as a disease is quite new because, as far as I remember, there have always been serious cases due to bites and deaths, too. I clean flowerpots every day, I put repellent on my family to such an extent that we sneeze in unison, but well, I intend to stop some of all the threats that surround me. Everything in check: the control of the controlled body (double control, exponential control), the control of the virtualized mind and a perverse device that sends me to keep within the walls of my house, my own walls, so that the limits become apparent, so that my freedom is eroded little by little. And dengue fever, which, if I pay more attention to it, would force me into a double confinement: not to show my nose even in the courtyard.
Snapshot 8: domestic soma
I woke up one day and asked: what day is it? My companion, very wise, answered: Saturday. I realize that I lost, little by little, the notion of days. I am a foreigner in the coordinates of time. I had a flash of consciousness while looking at my dogs in the yard: the technology of body control is an imperative that is eating away at me. I think and repeatGoffman (1972) while sipping mate in the sun. I look far away, which is not so far because what I am looking at is my neighbor's broken wall: she, Monica, went to buy me onions because, as I was going out, we save risks and we stock up, in solidarity, on perishable goods. I let everything take its course because the road to madness is imminent: I think of nothing but my immunological threshold and not to lose the internet connection. I am almost used to my own confinement. I want to take back the reins of my subjectivity so as not to feel like a foreigner in myself. I put on a youtube to do gymnastics and feel that the container is still mine.
Today, Sunday, March 22, I realized that my body was more possessed than ever: I felt swollen and numb; I took courage and in the middle of the afternoon, I did gymnastics. I had never given so much importance to my yard and its dimensions, the greenery of my lawn and the still good weather. I found myself repeating exercises as the stiffening subsided. I wondered about those who have no space to walk: what would their spatial monotonies be like? How would one inhabit the usual space now crowned with uncertainties, fears and negative information? The question of the habitability of internal and external space is on my mind because my register is not peaceful, it is rusting, rusting as the days go by. I feel alien in my own body inhabited by networks, messages, esoteric elucidations and school and university assignments. I conceive the possibility of repatriating myself and bringing it back here, to this exact moment in which I write and put words to this process I am going through; I make of the act of naming a sorcery that allows me to exorcise this ¨politics of coercions that constitute a work on the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviors¨ (Foucault, 2003, p. 83), in short, I want to objectify this political anatomy that forces bodies to discipline themselves.
I wonder about the ways in which my mind has been colonized these days and it scares me to think that this may continue. If so, what will be my shortcuts, what welcomes can I give and to whom? I am a psychic host (Berardi, 2020) of a mechanism of appropriation of subjectivity devised by others.
What we can know
Portrayed in our daily life, forced and full of fears, the media constantly launch messages on how to fight the fear that they themselves build, because the language has clearly been that of a war that places us in the center of a scene that is the perfect target for the sniper. And then everything is a unique experience, but also a technology of being enclosed, of being disciplined and living all control as a medically prescribed pill to make reality habitable. All the media told the same story over and over again: "people are locked up, but they are not alone, we are with them". The "stay at home" message became a life-saving idea, not because it complied with the golden rule of the social that says that it is by sharing that we become contaminated, but because it appeals to the idea that there is a house being guarded. Worse, not everyone had a house, nor was the house the same in all cases and even the height of all spectacularity is in the recommendations of celebrities who from their mansions told us to take shelter, or in the images that infinitely ran through social networks in the form of jokes, memes and short messages where shamelessly showed the nothingness of everyday life. Pills of reality, snapshots of partial truths.
Somehow this confinement raises a lot of questions regarding the abnormal life (without norm) that we lived before all this happened. Our relationships, forms of consumption and decision making, and of course, the normal functioning of traditional institutions, which somehow have shown their ideological background, if not directly their uselessness. I was thinking, for example, of soccer, although it could very well be the automobile as a total space for the veneration of contemporary capitalism, as a mass spectacle, now relieved as a memory of an almost distant past; and of course it will return, but only as a mirage of the uselessness of certain truths when they have been appropriated from reality to make them purely a spectacle. And, above all this, the school, an indisputable reality that has revealed to us that it is only a disciplinary space, far removed from educational and cultural contents. We do with the children dictations and tasks of basic education that only serve to position us in the center of family and domestic life. It is evident that confinement tests the dimensions of what are the spaces of a house, as well as the times and how, to a certain extent, the ideas of the family imaginary are opposed to the reality of coexistence in a common space of different personalities, ages and ways of facing the world. Never so much as now the proposal of Michel Serres (2012), in Thumbelina, that it is time for young people to invent the world, institutions and forms of relationship.
Indeed, under the guise of civic responsibility lies a state of social, moralizing and police oppression. The social field (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1995) of this confinement is one of clearly police action and the structuring of a policy of control and government of bodies. That is why even when my neighbors have a party it bothers me, it is obvious that the idea of assuming a state of control operates in me, the field of action is subjectivity, it is clear to me, confinement generates a subjectivity delegated to the interests of the State and its post-capitalist structure. Key to all this is the approach of Cornelius Castoriadis insofar as dispute, autonomy and elucidation lose meaning in confinement. The bid for an autonomous and participating civil society is pushed aside by urgency, and states of happiness become somewhat strange, since they no longer respond to the estrangement from work but to the falsehood that there is something outside of it:
Everywhere in the world, workers wait impatiently all week for Sunday to arrive. They feel the urgent need to escape from the physical and mental slavery of the working week. They wait impatiently for the moment when they will be masters of their time. And they discover that capitalist society imposes itself on them during these moments (Castoriadis, 2013) 1 .
In fact, the idea of limitation becomes the trap of possible liberation, we are told that we are being saved from something and we are locked into a pedagogy. There is a closure, a (self-) limitation that should encourage us, but it gives way in the attempt. To paraphrase Castoriadis himself, we have entered an era of the absence of limits in all aspects, and this is why we feel the desire for infinity. This liberation is, in a sense, a great conquest. We must learn to put on ways of care, individually and collectively. The capitalist society is a society that runs towards the abyss, from all points of view, because it is not capable of self-limitation (Santos, 2020). And this is important to put it on the political agenda, because in the confinement we do not limit ourselves, on the contrary, we overreach with others, with the social, we realize the space in front of the ethics of the common: now a virus that kills, but abusing the health system and without stopping to buy in the large virtual distribution platforms. And this is part of what bothers me about the party next door, that they are not thinking of their enclosure as something that has to enable the limit, but, on the contrary, what they do is presented rather as an expansion of their family, their friendship, their festivity as consumption. In this confinement there is clearly an idea of confrontation, of an attack on everyday life that does not end up fitting in, being at home and being informed of what is happening outside does not allow us to approach a rhythm. But maybe the house and the everyday were an enormous myth that operated to the same extent that romantic love did for certain parts of the social group. We thought of the everyday without realizing that it was nothing more than an enormous set in which the idea of the market was presented to us.
The mobility regime has also generated new and intense forms of what we could call postureo, the letting oneself be seen in some way in a fabricated and virtual pose of a truth that is not entirely true (Corona Research Group, 2020). Postureo is the new personal/social dimension that allows life in the confinement of the covid. As the experience is universal it only remains to tell it from an exaggerated and valuative point of view. And there is the whole population playing at being a baker, recovering mom's lentils and tidying the room in a nineteenth century manual hygienism. Seeing reality from a spectacle point of view, the confinement becomes the clothes fitting room of the department store, we try again and again a series of elements that we observe in the mirror of a unique and partial reality.
This pandemic is polysemic, as any phenomenon of social health -the disease and its metaphor-, medical evidence (Elbe et al., 2013, Leach et al., 2010, Vázquez and Cambero, 2020); we can also call it neocolonization: we are all receiving the same guidelines on what to consume (not all food is available), where to shop (there are stores that are closed), which hospital to go to (some no longer have public attention for ailments other than coronavirus), how much to meet each other (zoom proposes only 40 minutes), etc. We have a restricted universe of possibilities that are even dosed. Undoubtedly, the signs are everywhere, as revealed by the mechanism of neoconquest (Ulloa, 2017), which is shown when we notice that we are dictated who has been able to work and who has not, who to isolate and who not, who enjoyed social assistance and who not, who has a mask in one way or another, even those who do not wear it, and even, what to remember and what to forget (Yerushalmi, Loraux, Mommsen, Milner, & Vattimo, 2006). The list could go on. That is why this neo-colonization must be registered as an improvement at the level of its devices: this is a new version of capitalist extractivism that proposes to supply itself with the vital energy of all to the detriment of dialogue, sharing, the construction of dissidence.
The interdictions that covid leaves us are the impossibility of encountering otherness and the prohibition of collective enunciation (Bourdieu, 1985), in fact, there is no alternative word in circulation. What is forbidden is dialogism: the possibility of speaking with another as the only shortcut to resilience. This is the true "happening" (Badiou, 1999) understood as a disruption of the given, as a crack and cracking of the established ways of living and doing of the subjects, what we have agreed to name, tacitly, as the new normality. We have been moved as a society to an enclosure that postpones life in a world where truth and reality are disconnected, politics is no longer the art of governing, but the fact of establishing the application of obedience. Being enclosed is also the possibility of knowing another nature, since we do not only live under the idea of the artificial, where animals and plants become something distant and distant, something that does not have a correlate in reality but in an image, in an option in our life subsumed to the spectacle of the internet. And so we can say that this confinement regime has taught us all something: we are purely artificial, so the only thing that can redeem us from confinement is a collective destiny where truth is negotiated again.