there is a different kind of ignorance that sustains the imposition of severe lockdown measures. It’s not as simple as the state power exploiting the pandemic to impose total control—increasingly, I think that there is a kind of superstitious symbolic act at work here: a logic that says that if we make a strong enough gesture of sacrifice that brings our entire social life to a standstill, then maybe we can expect mercy. The surprising fact is how little we (and I include here the scientists) seem to know about how the pandemic works. Quite often we receive contradictory advice from the authorities. We get strict instructions to self-isolate in order to avoid viral contamination, but when the infection numbers start falling the fear arises that our actions are only making us more vulnerable to the anticipated “second wave” of the viral attack. Or are we counting on the hope that a vaccine will be found before the next wave? And as there are already different variations of the virus, will one vaccine cover them all? All the hopes for a quick exit (summer heat, herd immunity, a vaccine.) are fading away.
One often hears that the pandemic will compel us in the West to change the way we relate to death, to accept our mortality and the fragility of our existence—a virus comes out of nowhere and life as we know it is over. This is why, so we are told, people in the Far East are much better able to come to terms with the pandemic—for them, death is just a part of life, of the way things are. We in the West less and less accept death as part of life, we see it as an intrusion of something foreign that can be indefinitely postponed if you lead a healthy life, exercise, follow a diet, avoid trauma. I never trusted this story. In some sense, death is not a part of life, it is something unimaginable, something that shouldn’t happen to me. I am never really ready to die, except to escape unbearable suffering. That’s why these days many of us focus obsessively on the same magic numbers: how many new infections, how many full recoveries, how many new deaths. But, horrible as these numbers are, does our exclusive focus on them not make us ignore a much greater number of people dying of other causes like cancer or a heart attack? Outside the virus there is not just life; there is also plenty of dying and death. Perhaps it would be better to look at death rates comparatively: today, this many people died from Covid-19 while this many succumbed to cancer.
We should change our imaginary here and stop expecting one big clear peak after which things will gradually return to normal. What makes the pandemic so unbearable is that even if the full Catastrophe fails to appear, things just drag on—we are informed that we have reached the plateau, then things improve a little bit, but the crisis continues. As Alenka Zupančič put it, the problem with the idea of the end of the world is the same as with Fukuyama’s end of history: the end itself doesn’t end, we just get stuck in a weird immobility. The secret wish of us all, what we think about all the time, is only one thing: when will it end? But it will not end: it is reasonable to see the ongoing pandemic as announcing a new era of ecological troubles. Back in 2017, the BBC portrayed what awaits us as a result of the ways we intervene in nature, reporting that “Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life.”2
Viruses are undead, always ready to spring back to life, and the irony is that their “immortality” echoes the immortality promised by the latest developments in brain science. The pandemic occurred at a time when pop-scientific media outlets are obsessed with two aspects of the digitalization of our lives. On the one hand, much is being written about so-called “surveillance capitalism,” a new phase of capitalism wherein total digital control is exerted over our existence by state agencies and private corporations. On the other hand, the media is fascinated by the topic of a direct brain–machine interface, or “wired brain.” With this, when my brain is connected to digital machines, I can cause things to happen in the outside world just by thinking about them; and, further, when my brain is directly connected to another brain, another individual can directly share my experience. Extrapolated to its extreme, the wired brain concept opens up the prospect of what Ray Kurzweil called Singularity, the divine-like space of shared global awareness. Whatever the (dubious, for the time being) scientific status of this idea, it is clear that its realization will affect the basic features of humans as thinking/speaking beings. The eventual rise of Singularity will be apocalyptic in the complex meaning of the term: it will imply the encounter with a truth hidden in our ordinary human existence, i.e., the entrance into a new post-human dimension.
It is interesting to note that the extensive use of surveillance has been quietly accepted in many parts of the world: drones were used to tackle the pandemic not only in China but also in Italy and Spain. As for the spiritual vision of Singularity, the new unity of the human and the divine, a bliss in which we leave behind the limits of our corporeal existence, could well turn out to be an unimaginable nightmare. From a critical standpoint, it is difficult to decide which is a greater threat to humanity: the viral devastation of our lives or the loss of our individuality in Singularity. The pandemic reminds us that we remain firmly rooted in bodily existence with all dangers that this implies.
Does this mean our situation is hopeless? Absolutely not. There are immense, almost unimaginable troubles ahead. There will be over a billion newly jobless people. A new way of life will have to be invented. One thing is clear: in a complete lockdown, we have to live off the old stocks of food and other provisions, so the difficult task now is to step out of the lockdown and invent a new life under viral conditions. Just think about the ways in which what is fiction and what is reality will change. Movies and TV series that take place in our ordinary reality, with people freely strolling along streets, shaking hands, and embracing, will become nostalgic images of a long forgotten past, while our real life will look like a variation of Samuel Beckett’s late drama Play, in which three identical gray urns appear on the stage and from each a head protrudes, the neck held fast in the urn’s mouth.
However, if one takes a naïve look at things (which is here the most difficult thing to do), it is clear that our global society has enough resources to coordinate our survival and organize a more modest way of life, with local food shortages compensated by global cooperation, and with global healthcare better prepared for the next onslaught. Will we be able to do this? Or will we enter a new barbarian age in which our attention to the health crisis will only enable conflicts like the reignited Cold War between the US and China, or the hot wars in Syria and Afghanistan, to continue out of sight of the global public? These conflicts operate in the same way as a virus: they drag on interminably. (Note how Macron’s call for a world-wide truce during the pandemic was flatly ignored.) This decision as to which route we will take concerns neither science nor medicine, it is a properly political one.
2 2. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up
2. THE FIRST OF MAY IN THE VIRAL WORLD
Maybe, on the first of May, the moment has come to take a step back from our exclusive focus on the pandemic and consider what it and its devastating effects disclose about our social reality.
The first thing that strikes me is that, contra to the cheap motto “we are now all in the same boat,” class divisions have exploded. At the very bottom of the hierarchy, there are those (refugees, people caught in war zones) whose lives are so destitute that Covid-19 is for them not the main problem. While they are still mostly ignored by our media, we are bombarded by sentimental celebrations of nurses on the frontline of our struggle against the virus—the Royal Air Force even organized a flypast in their honor. But nurses are only the most visible part of a whole class of caretakers who are exploited, although not in the way the old working class of the Marxist imaginary is exploited; as David Harvey puts it, they form a “new working class”:
The workforce
