an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 18, Summer 2021, ISSN 1552-5112
The Metaphysics of COVID-19
Space and time were virtually turned by
Newton into God's right hand (oddly enough, the position made vacant when he
expelled the Son of God from there).[1]
Wolfgang Pauli to Carl
Jung in 1947
What is happening today on a global scale is
certainly the end of a world.[2]
(Ciò che sta oggi
avvenendo su scala planetaria è certamente la fine di un mondo.)
Giorgio Agamben
We cannot project into the world more order
or disorder than there is.[3]
(Nous ne pouvons
projeter dans le monde plus de ordre ou désordre qu'il n'y en a.)
Jean Baudrillard
An excerpt from the forthcoming
book, Baudrillard’s Castle: Notes from
the Hinterland.
The
metaphysics of COVID-19 was always going to be about the Code.
By
now we are all familiar with the extreme phenomena of signs and so forth, for
we are a species of extremes, as has been noticed before by all manners of
critical thought: we’ve noticed the last hundred years’ modern media
trafficking of Euro-American World Wars, Cold Wars, Asian and Middle Eastern
Wars; the NYC World Trade Center terror attack, mass shootings and the like –
but Evil has doubled down, called our ethical bluff, revealing a new era of
creative destruction including: global marketing of disease, mass dissemination
of pathogenic ideation, a novel atmosphere of wind and satellite-driven media
breathlessness, a radiologic aerosolization of transmissive physical and
emotional contagion, directed squarely at the program of life itself, its
genetic embodiment and information; an editorial hacking of biological
evolution and instructions, a severance of organic protocols of control, and
where, if possible or desirable, a virtual transcendence, or at least, a
sincere deviation of its a priori substance. Is this terror or is it
health? The enlargement of terror, its growth as a pubescent form, or the
terror of health as a public service? One simply cannot say.
Source: Google feed from Twitter for the
account of Joe Biden, 46th President of the United States. Retrieved
on 9/11/2021.
Ours
is the era of masking, veiling, testing and injecting. But what is its quality?
Is it voluntary? Or something else? Forceful or coercive hiding/masking of the
face? Forceful or coercive biochemical injections? Threats of unemployment?
Forceful or coercive disclosure of private, protected patient records and
medical test results? Incredible it is, such an anniversary decree, for the
approximate 20th anniversary of terror (i.e., September 11, 2001).
Leotards and mayhem characterize today’s market of heroes, villains and terror,
all while the legal definition of racketeering being the extortion of advantage
or capital by threat or by force.[4]
Another
akrasiatic question of realism, that of a ‘new’ reality against one’s will, the
structure of which Canetti advises, “one senses what the answer to that will
be; but first let us consider what has become of that past reality.”[5]
Well, America has long assumed a legal posture regarding the structural
‘governance of ideas’ – an ambient phrase that points out something of interest
to all: the administrative design of ideas as objects that may be aligned for
purposes of treatment equity or discrimination, inclusion or exclusion,
diversity or homogeneity, justice or injustice and the like.
Alternatively,
we may be treated instead to a reverse retrofitting of the social sphere. That
is, to a time before civil rights, for example. Another time and place, no?
Now, one wonders to whom the American Dream really applies? Who is the Dreamer
now? The People? The Congress? The President? The Woke? While the Dream may
apply equally to all four, the practice of forceful or coercive behaviors and
social postures, be they biochemical injections (or hiding/masking of the
face), or something else, may be more selective, offering exemptions without
reason or justification. For example, Newsweek reports that members of
Congress and staff are exempt from forceful or coercive injections.[6]
In
that regard, who would question that today COVID-19 is the most conspicuous object in the
living room?
Only the most bovine would suggest
that on balance, governmental, non-governmental, corporate and entertainment
actors refrain from coordinate performances, wherein actors perform as in a
theater of objects according to a script. Citizen actors and the masses,
radically objectified, then perform according to the same script. Such
improprieties began with the system of consumer objects, long ago. Baudrillard
writes in 1968 : Obscène aussi tout le gestuel de travail, aujourd'hui
miniaturisé et abstrait dans le gestuel de contrôle. Théâtre de la cruauté et
de la pulsion, le monde des objets anciens, en regard de la neutralité
formelle, de la «blancheur» prophylactique et de la perfection des objets
fonctionnels.[7]
What Baudrillard is getting at here is the obscene transformation of our
longstanding, traditional, provincial and wholly necessary, gesture of work
toward self-sustenance - to a subconscious, internalized, miniaturized and
deadeningly thoughtless protocol of work functioning as an operation of control.
The old system of course still had its cruelties, but in comparison, today’s
perfunctory working stiff is of another order entirely: such a person becomes
sterile, infertile, barrenly neutral and of no avail other than to be utilized
and discarded in this new theater of a bleached sanitary world of perfect work
and perfect living. Despite this perfect
crime, what we can count on is that the real never performs like a functional
object according to a manipulable script for long, which places COVID-19 on
notice: in time the real jettisons ruses without regard for players of the
game. It is all obscene. However, perhaps the most charming of the obscenities
is the endless positivity and false enthusiasm of functional object-actors,
who, being led around by the nose, have in turn led us all to another scene of
America’s experimental series, so prophetically, where someone has suggested
ordered arrests of the maskless at the U.S. Capitol.[8] And elsewhere[9], while “hundreds of protestors
gathered to march and burn masks in opposition to the mask mandates due to
COVID-19 during the USA 'Million Maskless March' Lauderdale Beach in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida.”[10] It may be again,
like Baudrillard wrote in 2001:
Et le
pire dans cette obscénité, dans cette impudeur, c'est le partage forcé, c'est
cette complicité automatique du spectateur, qui est l'effet d'un véritable
chantage. C'est là l'objectif le plus clair de l'opération: la servilité des
victimes, mais la servilité volontaire, celle des victimes jouisseuses du mal
qu'on leur fait, de la honte qu'on leur impose. Le partage par toute une
société de son mécanisme fondamental: l'exclusion interactive, c'est le comble![11]
Source:
'Million Maskless March' Lauderdale Beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Miami
Herald[12]
Such a thing may only be what
Baudrillard before his death described as an agony of power: the ‘will of the
people’ become “hostages and accomplices of global power.”[13] We all experience such agony faced as
we are with everlasting disappearance after death’s order takes us in: its
hostage and accomplice. However, the moral order – its global citizen-object
actors through their representative bodies, are no exception, and they
absolutely have not refused to dominate others, the world and reality;
in turn, the real requires that these citizen-objects too, join the domination
scheme: another development of le système des objets where all are
imbricated in the royalist scam of oppressive enterprise.[14]
And so the diagnostic odyssey here is not clinical or
even symptomatic, but is rather a continuation of this ongoing journey of
prophylaxis. Already familiar with prophylaxis, we know full well how it
functions in the agora, there is no need to cry epistemological or operational
foul, because the actors have already been cast, and they recite their lines
with relative ease – knowledge or understanding of the real is not required.
Baudrillard wrote about this social prophylaxis in 1995 and described how it
mauls the real with prescriptions, treatments, regulations and judgments:
Rédemption,
expiation, blanchissement, prophylaxie, promotion et réhabilitation - on ne
sait comment nommer toutes les nuances de cette pitié générale qui résulte
d'une profonde indifférence et se double d'une stratégie féroce de récupération
politique de toutes ces passions négatives. C'est du « politiquement correct »
dans tous ces effets, entreprise de blanchissement et de prophylaxie mental, à
commencer par celle du langage. Le Noir, le handicapé, l'aveugle et la
prostituée deviennent ‘colour people,’ ‘disabled,’ des malvoyant et ‘sex
worker’: il faut qu'il soit blanchis comme de l'argent sale. Il faut que tout
destin négatif soit ravalé par un truquage plus obscène encore que ce qu'il
veut cacher.
Le
langage euphémisant, la lutte contre le harcèlement sexuel, toute cette
mascarade protectrice et protectionniste est du même ordre que l'usage du
préservatif. L'usage mental du préservatif bien sûr, c'est-à-dire l'usage
prophylactique des idées et des concepts. On ne pensera bientôt plus que gainé
de latex. Et la combinaison digitale de la Virtual Reality s'enfile déjà comme
une condom.[15]
And so, let’s hope not that “soon we’ll think only when sheathed in
latex.” But, all of this can only enact a reciprocity of mayhem. And it’s a
strange love that exists between what amounts to roughly two groups of stage
objects. One group gives pain, the other receives it; pain is returned to the
sender, if only by resistance to the other’s hyperbolic decrees. In this way,
‘objective’ governance proceeds in agony, staged in stone-faced proceedings,
received in empty stadiums by LED light. It’s reminiscent of the album cover
for the 1987 release, Music for the Masses. There’s even a song on that
record that’s timely and prescient regarding this strange love affair, it is
called “Strangelove”:
Source:
Music for the Masses (1987), album by Depeche Mode; video single
“Strangelove” on Youtube.
The creative work of the arts and
sciences, and their variant sites of both logical and irrational
contestation, reveal that the metaphysics of COVID-19 reopens the question of
the lingering failure of the Logos to maintain its hypnosis upon the psyche of the
human animal. No bedrock has been found, no Logic established after all:
science, equal to a tool; the Logos, equal to another myth; and finally,
another destiny, the strategy of the object and the script, “l'adhésion à un
scénario, quel qu'il soit, politique, ou publicitaire.”[16] The ‘strange highs and lows’ of reality today reflect a fanatical
imbalance that has to do with the livability of a world where pain is less
shared or reciprocated where, like the song reminds, there will be pain.
The pain of the vaccinated vs. the pain of the unvaccinated; the pain of the
masked vs. the pain of the unmasked; the pain of the virtual vs. the pain of
the real. Instead, pain has been delivered in a unilateral fashion and the
social equilibrium of shared suffering has been lost.
Objects of royalty, objects of
serfdom; unconvincing is the idea that the fast and loose civicism of corporate
social responsibility and benevolent dictatorship may cozily administer the
world cure.[17] Mutual restraint is advocated, but
only one side appears to be restraining themselves; the other side relishes and
indulges in an orgy of puissance. The social contract fails to bind all
parties.
Hence there is a pressure, like that
of terrestrial water storage upon the poles of the Earth caused by melting
glaciers and anthropogenic groundwater depletion[18]: a parallel force of depletion of
human culture and intelligence. Where the Earth’s geospatial and magnetic poles
may reach cataclysmic repositionings, humanity’s cognitive and ethical principalities
or poles too may be deviated to cataclysmic moral ends. The myelin sheath of
culture and discernment is unraveling before our eyes.
As Elias Canetti once said, the old
methods are not working any longer and news ones have not been put to use.[19]
This newly weaponized concept of
contagion passes easily through the formalities of disease into the theater of
an arms race. The masses are being assaulted on a scale never seen before in
our written and oral histories. Only a Flood would be more dramatic. Hyperbolically
and alternatively protected, threatened, saved and shunned by cool political
prescriptions amidst a fray of media storms that pass like atmospheric
disturbances each night and morning, overland and sea. But no one feels relief
under the metaphysics of COVID-19; no patient may ever be, discharged of fear.
No resolution of therapeutic efficacy and good health in sight.
No containment strategy may secure the
dogs of contagion, crows of therapy and vultures of enormity that stalk us now
that the geospatial noose tightens around the globe, no pixel nor particle
screen will shield us from the universalized scale of stellar unrest. Motion
pictures capture this tension, e.g., Greenland (2020) - but the premise
is lost when ideas are consumed so easily. What literature may provoke though
never capture is the future, prophecy notwithstanding, because even in that
special case of forward perception, the phenomenology of space-time precludes
it. The future is never quite what one expects.
The terror of signs was the last gasp
of the crowds, now reigns the terror of the Code: viral terror, masking terror,
biochemical injection terror, all amidst solar terror, sea-rise terror and the
terror of race, division and anthropological ineptitude, but, as Canetti says,
“one has to lie down among the animals to be redeemed.”[20]
Souls have and will continue to be
sold, according to Newsweek magazine, where in September of 2021 they described
the most heinous and deadly game-playing between scientists, viral Code and
Mother Nature:
…documents
were obtained and released by The Intercept on Tuesday after it launched an
FOIA lawsuit…Richard Ebright,
board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers
University and laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology,
told Newsweek these documents show "unequivocally" that NIH grants
were used to fund controversial gain-of-function (GOF) research at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology in China—something U.S. infectious disease expert Dr.
Anthony Fauci has denied….Ebright said these sections of the documents show
that NIH grants supported the construction of mutant SARS-related coronaviruses
that involved blending different types together. The result was a lab-generated
virus that could infect human cells, he said, adding that at least three of the
lab-generated viruses "exhibited >10x to >100x higher viral loads in
humanized mice."[21]
For the sleepy, increasingly inoculated
and willingly medicated masses, this discovery is little retort for having been
abused, abandoned and then censored by a bureaucratic history. Can all be well
in Mother and Father’s symbolic garden like this? Can we all be happy-go-lucky
and enthused only to be of service as the dull, but exuberant executors of
world fashion virulence?[22] In the future, the cultural and aesthetic
fields may change the harness – but the bridle reigns the same. For now, the
stage is set with viral and environmental pageantry as we review crises of the
past and imagine them for the future. It’s quite clear that the past has
contained cataclysm and scientists envision that “the current rapid movement of
the magnetic North Pole, has increased speculation that a field reversal may be
imminent,” where “major environmental changes, extinction events, and
transformation” will result.[23]
A bleak prognosis for our future of
disappearance. Baudrillard saw it this way, too.
However, it is the remainder of the
crowds that may rejoice at the end of each succession, honored by vulgate
testament to their good fortune, management, compliance, vitality, wisdom and
overall entitlement to whatever the spoils of debasement in degeneracy.
We are left without a veil, and but a
mask.
It is now remembrance and omen: we can
never go back to the ‘before now’. For this is seduction in reverse, today’s
signal process of forgetting what preceded it: transparent, faceless, sexless,
a hysterectomy of history and historical conscience. The last euphemism, the
last unmasked face, the last unmasked sex, the last biochemical injection…
well, perhaps this is the world’s Terracina, Italy moment, where Ceronetti
wondered in 1987 if he would enjoy the last natural strawberry, as opposed to
all others that would now be genetically modified:
A
Terracina, furono le ultime fragole della mia vita, perché erano ‘vere
fragole’; ce le portava la padrona della casa ogni mattina, in grande quantità.
Era il 1976: una crepa nell'anima, una nascita non carnale, una morte, e quelle
fragole. Questo è nuovo, di questa fine di secolo, dire le ‘ultime’ fragole, le
ultime vere, le ultime non avvelenate, non radioattive. È nata così una nuova
popolazione di ricordi; questo, per me, è legato a Terracina, e senza le
fragole il ricordo di Terracina sarebbe molto meno vivo, adesso. A rifletterci,
sono ricordi di condannato a vita: fu quella l'ultima volta che... Dopo le fragole, le muraglie, le porte
blindate...[24]
At the last a veil, now a mask – at
the last once unveiled, unmasked, seduction was a forward move, an advance.
Today we recede into repression, not so much a temporary thing, like a
recession they love to discus in the media, but instead we have an endless
regression: a masked seduction without discretion and priceless no matter the
status, no matter what lies beneath its unknown waters: femininity,
masculinity, childhood, adulthood, health, sickness or immunity, non-immunity,
natural immunity – all inconsequential, all detached from reference or
exchange, all without progress, a permanent developmental delay of our world
spectrum.
Only masking without referent is of
value in this place.
Such an image represents a reversal of
seduction as commonly understood. Marni Kessler described it this way in 2006:
If Jean Baudrillard is right when he
concludes that seduction occurs outside vision, then the veil, since it
simultaneously hides and reveals, is the appropriate motif for producing the effects
of mystery and temptation. He writes, “The fury to unveil the truth, to get at
the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the
obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of
ever achieving this…But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the
eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.” The desire to
know what is behind the veil, according to Baudrillard, stages an elaborate but
impossible seduction. The veil then, is a device of masochistic pleasure for
the viewer: the need to see behind it is perpetually thwarted.[25]
Seductive masochism in terms of seeing and not seeing, veiling and
unveiling, masking and unmasking, revealing and not revealing the face, the
flesh, the truth of all things – characterizes the veil which is now passé.
In its place today, to mask in perpetuity characterizes instead ‘no fury
to unveil the truth’ or to ‘uncover the secret’, and rather the reverse: to
veil the truth and to cover the secret. The fury today is to hide everything,
including the masses, away, forever: to never see, unveil, unmask, or reveal
anything: like ancient constellations that may have been seen by human eyes;
stars that have emerged over millennia, only to obsolesce in just the same
manner, until finally they disappear, as if they never existed at all. Put
another way, something is leaving us in the dark of the real, and we may agree
with the New York Times who said in August of 2021 that “the politics of the
pandemic expose a deeper ethical, social and even metaphysical erosion.”[26]
Source:
“Nurses practiced social distancing while protesting for better working
conditions following the coronavirus pandemic in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo square,
in June (2020).”[27] Photo Credit...Alessandra Tarantino/Associated
Press
There is
something in the air.
Something, again,
“has made itself felt not just in Italy but in all Western societies in recent
months, perhaps in the United States most of all.”[28]
Something
like the metaphysics of COVID-19, where the substance of the real itself is
forced into a parodic semblance of itself: where human matters cannot be
properly counted, due to the ventriloquism of other darker matters they contend
with; where the voice of the few is thrown, to become the voice of the many;
where the good is mystified, so evil is clarified again, something amongst us
now that Baudrillard described just before his death as the ventriloquy of
Evil:
Et quand la puissance du négatif se perd, quand les
interdits, les contrôles, les inégalités, les différences disparaissent un à
un, pour mieux s'intérioriser dans la sphère mentale, c'est alors que le Mal,
interdit de séjour, devient ventriloque.[29]
When Evil
speaks in Good’s name, the poles of the real have been shifted in as
cataclysmic a way, as if the magnetic poles of the planet themselves have realigned
all continents. In this sense, we might say the future is already here.
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 18, Summer 2021, ISSN 1552-5112
Notes