Daniel Clinci

Pandemix it up!

Dangerous fictions in the time of SARS-CoV-2

1. Mommy Nature

The first reflex of anyone that acknowledges the fact that the best possible world isn’t all that awesome would be to say: „Yes, Gaia is fighting back, Mother Nature enacts her vengeance upon those who have had non-consensual sex with her.” All too simple, and yet so complicated. „Mother Nature” or whatever is a fiction far too often used to justify forms of fascism, from Lavater’s physiognomies to Nazi politics & modern-day „Chinese viruses,” as one orange president keeps saying.

            Nature is never innocent; it is always a tool in the hands of potentially murderous ideologues. The Unabomber comes to mind in such circumstances.

            „News” on the sudden recovery of Nature in places like Venice, or wherever, spawning a specific kind of response, proves that there may well be a fascist posthumanism out there, waiting for the right time to step forward. „We are the virus,” they say. Sure, Nietzsche said it first: „the Earth is a skin and it has diseases; one of them is called man.” But Nietzsche’s „man” is that wonderfully insane concept of the „human,” the man of humanism, not the species we like to call homo sapiens. That „we” should trouble us greatly; whenever it is uttered with such conviction, it becomes a dangerous thing.

            Instead, I’d like to think about the great losers of the pandemic: that other „we,” the frail, almost inconspicuous & invisible, definitely endangered „we.” Obviously, these are also the losers of almost five centuries of capitalism. Take Syrians, for example. Or pangolins. Or cultural theorists, buskers, the homeless, dragonflies, dung beetles & any other nomads.

2. Heroes of the day

            Some future superhero movie is probably going to feature some guys in lab coats with antiviral-pandemix-healing superpowers. These days we are facing the dillema of the couch potato: are medical professionals true heroes? That’s because we really don’t have anything better to do now than invent figures to worship and monsters to despise, another symptom of the demise of God, and the Overhuman still lacking in the essential parts. Hippocratic texts are quoted (!!!), ethical debates are carried out, an entire hermeneutics of the quarantined is unfolding on social media. „Do no harm” is being invoked as a justification for those doctors that choose to run away in the face of an impending overcrowding of the hospitals. „Do no harm” is also being invoked as a sense of duty to the patients. The couch potato, arrested without a trial by the state in the name of public health, fails to see the hypocrisy in all this because they too are capitalist realists; they too believe this is the „normal” way to think and act. Nobody mentions neoliberal capitalism and its ever-convenient fetishes. Let’s face it, Hollywood told us there’s at least one hero for every problem. There is a fiction out there, a story about heroic doctors fighting the enemy in the worst of conditions, that makes me suspicious about the whole „modernity is over” gambit. Not to mention humanism!

3. The enemy within

            Such a complicated name for such a simple thing! Genetic information, the kind that has not yet become the intellectual property of some corporation, flows freely everywhere. SARS-CoV-2. The common speak uses words such as „war” to describe a very simple situation. An agent, a pathogen, infects some bodies. Why now? Well, maybe it got tired of hanging out with its usual companion-species in their ever-shrinking habitat. Maybe it wanted to try something new. Maybe it wanted to act globally. When animals, plants, and other species invade human territories & also humanism they are quickly dismissed as pests and summarily dealt with. Not this time. This thing, this snippet of information infects humanism & puts the final nail in the coffin of the „human.” Invented as an enemy against which war is being waged, the virus is already a fiction – the fiction of humanism.

            „The human” is a historical concept, itself only a fiction, just like „nature.” We’ll now have to see if „the human” will use all its theological might to stay in power, or if the pandemix will eventually bring about more mixing the game, and less fixing it.